For the rest, I can offer happy endings as conventionally apposite as those of the worst "best-seller" of any lady novelist.
Miss Whittaker, the noble girl who played in Constantinople the heroic part of an Edith Cavell, is now Lady Paul. Less than a month ago an American warship took her from Constantinople to Beyrout, where she married Captain Sir Robert Paul, one of the British officers whom she had helped to escape. She now lives in Aleppo, where Paul commands the Arab gendarmerie. In this crowded narrative I have failed to do justice to the brave and gifted woman who many times risked liberty and life in aiding unfortunate countrymen; but only because the last thing she would desire is advertisement have I refrained from writing the eulogy she deserves.
Another happy ending, almost too good to be true, was the recent wedding of Colonel Newcombe and Mlle. "X", the girl who arranged his escape from Broussa and concealed him in Constantinople while he worked for a withdrawal of Turkey from the war.
Mr. S., the British merchant who jeopardized his neck in helping no less than seven British officers to liberty, has returned to England, and should be conscious of much merit.
The Turkish armistice happened a few days before Theodore was to have been hanged. Fulton and Stone were released from the Ministry of War Prison, and twenty-four hours later, by means of threats, they obtained reprieve and freedom for the Greek waiter who had hidden them. He was then half dead, as a result of insufficient food, and of the dreadful, disease-ridden, insanitary, crowded state of his dungeon; but he recovered under careful nursing, and returned to his mother and sisters, in the house where the gendarmes had captured Yeats-Brown, Fulton, and Stone.
The Maritza restaurant, near Stamboul station, still flourishes; but Theodore is no longer there. With the money gained by acting as conspirator-in-chief for British prisoners, he talks of coming to London and opening a small restaurant of his own. If this happens, he can count on regular customers from among those who saw him, with his bent shoulders and blue-glassed spectacles, flicking a secret letter on to the tablecloth, under cover of a menu-card.
Those of us who schemed, escaped, hoped, feared, wore disguises and whiskers, assumed illnesses and insanities, suffered, and amused ourselves generally are dispersed over five continents. Fulton and Stone are still in Constantinople, but as responsible officials instead of under-dogs of war. White is a quiet-living manufacturer in Melbourne. Hill and Jones, the madmen of Yózgad, Haidar Pasha, and Gumuch Souyou have gone their demobilized ways in sanity and content, one to Sydney, the other to Glasgow. Paul is in Syria, Colonel Newcombe in Egypt. Yeats-Brown, ex-Mlle. Josephine Albert, is in London, with an eyeglass which he kept intact through three years of adventurous captivity, from the day when he was taken prisoner near Bagdad to the day when, from the verandah of his hiding-place opposite the deserted British Embassy in Constantinople, he looked along the Grande Rue de Pera and learned, from the fluttering Allied flags, that the Turkish armistice had been signed. Last and least, I am now in civilian blessedness and America.
Often I have left the satisfying solidity of London, the restful beauty of a Thames backwater, the comforting hospitality of New York, the wealth-conscious heartiness of Chicago, to hear the chanted summons to prayer from the minaret that faced my prison in Damascus, watched the intrigues that coloured Constantinople during the twilight of the Turkish Empire, discuss Bolshevism and the price of revolvers with Vladimir Franzovitch, as he sits on a camp bed in his tiny room at Odessa.
And Time, the greatest of romantics, has nearly persuaded me to disregard memory and believe that I enjoyed it all.
THE END