At dusk, when we left the wireless cabin and paced the shadowed portion of the deck for exercise, we often saw a rowing boat creeping toward whichever side of the Batoum happened not to face the shore. Somebody in it would exchange low whistlings with somebody on deck—the somebody often being Titoff. When the boat had been made fast to the bottom of the gangway, a figure, or two figures, would climb to the deck and disappear. Sometimes they brought and left a package; sometimes it was a visitor himself—or herself—who did not depart with the rowing boat.
Besides the mystery traffic from shore to ship there was also a certain amount from ship to shore. For this the steward—a Russian Jew—was responsible. A Turkish merchant had chartered the Batoum for the coming voyage, and since our many delays in sailing were the result of his haggling with government officials over the amount of baksheesh to be paid for permission to export, he undertook to feed the officers and crew for as long as they remained at Constantinople. Incidentally, he unknowingly fed White and myself, besides the other stowaways and the escaped Russian soldiers. The steward ordered more provisions than were needed; and a few hours after the delivery of each consignment a boatload would be sent back to the quay and carted to the bazaars. Titoff, who organized the sale, shared the proceeds with the steward.
Titoff's methods of graft took him into many dubious by-paths, notably those around the offices of a Greek coal dealer. After preliminary plottings, with Viktor as interpreter, he ordered a hundred tons. The coal dealer delivered ninety, the bill for a hundred was presented to the Turkish merchant, and Titoff and the Greek split the value of the missing ten tons. It was easy enough for the chief engineer to make good the deficit by burning ten tons more on paper than in the furnaces.
With all this illicit traffic in men and goods there were some restless half hours during the last few days of our stay in the Bosphorus. Trouble was caused by the bo'sun's woman-thief, whose presence among us the Pera police suspected. Five times they searched for her. The bo'sun detailed a man to watch the shore, and whenever a police launch appeared this look-out would blow a whistle. All the stowaways then scurried to their various hiding-places.
White and I, being the most dangerous cargo, were given the safest—and certainly the dirtiest—hiding-place of all. This was in the ballast-tanks, at the very bottom of the ship, underneath the propeller shaft. The entrance to them was through a narrow manhole, covered by a cast-iron lid, about twenty yards down a dark passage leading from the engine-room to the propeller.
The alarm having been given, Feodor, the second engineer, would lead us along the passage by the light of a taper, remove some boards, raise the lid, and help us to wriggle into the black cavity below. Our feet would be covered by six inches of bilge-water while we crouched down, so as to leave him room enough to replace the iron cover and re-lay the wooden boards that hid it. Then, one at a time and with our knees squelching in the water, we crawled from tank to tank.
Half-way along the line of tanks were two that contained small mattresses, which the second engineer had placed in position for us. After the first day they were sodden with the bilge-water; but at any rate it was better to sit on them than in the water itself. The limited space, however, made it impossible for us to be seated in any but a very cramped position, with hunched-up shoulders rubbing against the slime that coated the sides of each tank. Standing was impossible, and lying down meant leaning one's head on the wet mattress and soaking one's feet in the drain of bilge that swished backward and forward with every motion of the ship.
Complete blackness surrounded us. The air was dank and musty, so that matches sputtered only feebly when struck, and the light from a taper was hardly strong enough to chase the darkness from the half of each small tank.
When, after each search, the police returned to their launch we would hear the heavy boots of the second engineer tramping along the passage overhead. As we listened to the nerve-edging noise that accompanied the removal of the boards and the iron lid we crouched into the best-hidden corners of our respective tanks, not knowing whether a friend or a policeman was at the entrance. We scarcely breathed until there came, booming and echoing through the hollow compartments, the word "Signor!"—the second engineer's password denoting that all was clear, and that we might return to the engine-room.
The twenty-second of August was the final date fixed for the departure. By late afternoon of the twenty-first all the Turkish merchant's cargo, legitimate and otherwise, had been brought from the quay by lighters, and thence transferred by winches to the Batoum's hatches. The export officials had been squared, the ship's papers were passed and stamped, the bunkers were fully loaded with inferior coal. All on board, from the captain to the least-considered stowaway, were content, although nervous of what might happen during the next twenty-four hours.