For many weeks the Maritza restaurant had been watched. A police spy suspected Theodore; and one afternoon gendarmes surrounded his house, while others entered and searched every room. Very unfortunately for Yeats-Brown, whose hiding-place lay elsewhere, he was visiting Fulton and Stone at the time. All three were captured.
A queer procession passed through the winding alleys of Stamboul to the Ministry of War Prison. First went Theodore, blinking nervously behind his blue-glassed spectacles. Then came Yeats-Brown, in his brand-new disguise of a Hungarian mechanic. Fulton and Stone were behind him, wearing only shirts, pants, and socks; for they had been half dressed when captured, and the police refused permission to put on coats and trousers. Theodore's two sisters and his old mother brought up the rear.
When the police surrounded Theodore's house Miss Whittaker was on her way to visit Fulton and Stone. Seeing gendarmes before the door she passed on, and returned to her home in Pera; but for long afterward she was conscious of being spied upon and followed. It was for this reason that she had to abandon her intention of bringing to the Batoum the money which White and I were to receive from Mr. S.
The prison beneath the Ministry of War now contained an extraordinary gathering of characters in the melodrama of escape and capture. Paul was joined by Yeats-Brown, Fulton, and Stone; John Willie, the Bosnian, was in another cell, with some political prisoners; Theodore, weakened by lack of food, fell ill in a dreadful dungeon, and nearly died. A trial, he knew, could only have one result for him—sentence of hanging. His mother and his two sisters received rather better treatment, and were soon released.
The four Britishers lived through many strange days in the prison where they consorted with a variety of captives that included Greeks, Armenians, Turkish officers, two Mohammedan notabilities from Cairo, a young Turkish prince who had been imprisoned for brawling in the Sultan's palace, and the prince's eunuch. Yeats-Brown and Paul, meantime, planned to escape from the famous old jail, a feat which no captive had yet performed since it was built, six hundred years ago.
While walking in the garden one evening they slipped away from their guards, and mingled with a crowd of officials who were crossing the courtyard outside the Ministry of War. Swerving aside before they reached the sentried gate, the pair climbed over some railings—and were free once more. They walked across the Golden Horn Bridge, and so to Pera. There, once again, Miss Whittaker and her friends found them a place of concealment, near the deserted British Embassy.
Then began for the escaped couple a period of flitting from one excitement to another. They became involved in a succession of underground activities; and, with the help of Greeks and the clever coöperation of Miss Whittaker, they spread around the city reports, beliefs, hopes, and arguments likely to influence citizens in favour of the Allies and against the Germans and Young Turks. They buried their identities under darkened hair, false moustaches, fezzes, and forged vecikas.
Yeats-Brown's propaganda work brought him into contact with a small group of politicians and malcontents who were plotting a coup d'état against the Young Turks. Although the miserable, exploited populace had no popular leader to voice its discontent there came a moment—while the Bulgars were at the gates of Adrianople, communications with Germany were cut, the Allied Fleet threatened Dedeagatch and the citizens of Aleppo were preparing to surrender to Allenby's victorious cavalry—when everyone in Constantinople knew that Turkey was beaten. Open rebellion which was to have hanged Talaat, Enver, and Djemal Pashas high in the square of the Seraskarat then threatened.
But the rising was still-born, owing to treachery. The Prefect of Police suddenly quadrupled his patrols, a few Turkish officers were arrested, a few more civilians were hanged, a few conspirators disappeared into the submerged world where men walked cautiously and in the shadow, a few machine guns were placed so as to command a Greek cathedral, a couple of aged senators were executed for having "intrigued for a political resolution hostile to the Government"; and life went on as before—upon the surface….
But escaped prisoners did not live upon the surface. They were in touch with seditious elements beneath it. Once when Yeats-Brown was in a certain café with some Greeks, and the talk was becoming wild as the árak bottle passed, there entered a detective known to everybody, even to the British officer, who was the youngest initiate in "crime" present. And without a whisper or a wink the talk swung, easily and naturally, from the rankest sedition to the most harmless commonplace.