Kulman, who was at the tiller, gave an order to the sailor at the oars. We swung round a bend of the shore, and lost sight of the Austrians. Close ahead was another landing-stage. We moored beside it. Without waiting a second, but also without showing haste, we stepped from the boat and climbed the steps—Kulman and I first, and then Josef and White.
Two Austrian sentries and some Russian officials stood at the top of the steps. They looked hard at us, but, satisfied by the uniforms of Kulman and Josef, merely nodded a greeting as we passed toward the dock gates and comparative freedom.
CHAPTER XVI
A RUSSIAN INTERLUDE
Odessa, like the rest of the Ukraine, had exchanged Bolshevism for Austro-German domination and confiscation. Already, when we passed through the docks, it was easy to see who were the masters. Austrian customs officers controlled the quays; Austrian and German soldiers guarded the storehouses; Austrian sentries stood at the dock gates and sometimes demanded to see civilians' passports. Had we not been vouched for by the uniforms of the Batoum's third engineer and third mate, the sentries might well have stopped White and me.
Once outside the gates we hired a cab, and drove to an address given us by Mr. S.—that of the sister and the mother of a Russian professor at Robert College, Constantinople. Arrived there, we left Josef and Kulman, with very sincere expressions of goodwill.
The professor's sister received us cordially but calmly, as if it were an everyday event for two down-at-heel British officers to drop on her from the skies with a letter of introduction but without the least warning.
"Why, only three days ago," she related, "two officers of the Russian Imperial Army arrived here under like circumstances. They made their way from Petrograd, through the Soviet territory. They now occupy the room below ours."
Once again Providence seemed to have played into our hands; for when these ex-officers were asked how best we could live in the German-occupied city, they produced the two false passports by means of which they had travelled through Bolshevist Russia. They now lived in the Ukraine under their own names and with their own identity papers; and the false passports, no longer necessary to them, they handed to White and me.