"Architecte naturel," suggested the urbane Philip, and the governor's secretary assented. Slow Dimitri might be, but once he grasped an idea, no power could drag it from him. When one asked him where he learned to build houses of a certain style, he always replied that so they were built by Pappadopoulos—Pappadopoulos being dead these twenty or thirty years. Dimitri, the secretary ventured, had been architect of the mosque on the water-front, and when he found that we were pleased with this idea, everything else in Gallipoli became Dimitri's. The lighthouse, the hospital, the three white houses by the quay—we had but to mention a building and he would promptly murmur, in his dreamy, half-quizzical way;
"Oui-i-i … c'est Dimitri!"
Early next morning, just after we had discovered that under the cliff was water like liquid lapis lazuli and flat-topped rocks rising just above it on which you would not have been in the least surprised to find mermaids combing their hair, or sirens sitting, and that it was a simple matter to climb down and be mermen, the clergyman-volunteer arrived with reports of the first night. It had been dismal, there were one or two intransigent kickers, and the aesthetic young Frenchman who spent his idle time drawing pictures of fashion-plate young ladies, had become so unstrung that he had regularly "thrown a fit" and been unconscious for half an hour until they could massage him back to life again. Humor was quite gone out of them, and when the clergyman suggested that it was a compliment to be sent out to be shot at—flattering, at any rate, to the prowess of the Allies—a Frenchman emphatically denied it. "Pas du tout!" he exploded. While we talked there was a knock at the front door, and through the grating we saw the red fez and vaguely smiling visage of the mutessarif's secretary. It was the first of a series of visits, which, before we left Gallipoli, were renewed almost every hour, of dialogues deserving a better immortalization than can be given here.
You must imagine, on one side of the dining-room table, the plump little bey, with his fez and glasses, quick little salutes each time he took a match or cigarette; facing him the tall, urbane Philip, in ineffable flannels or riding-clothes—for the embassy secretary is one of those who believe that clothes should express rather than blot out the inner man. Cigarettes—coffee—assurances to his excellency that the house is his, to Monsieur Le Directeur of our pleasure and profound consideration. Minutes pass, an hour—the bey knows no such thing as time, the other is as unhurried as he. The talk, in somewhat halting French, is of war, weather, French culture, marriage, those dreadful Russians, punctuated by delicate but persistently recurring references, on one side, to mattresses and food for the hostages, by the little bey's deep sighs and his "Mais … que fairef"
That "But what can be done?" like the Mexican's "Who knows?" fell like a curtain on every pause, it was the bey's answer to all life's riddles— the plight of the hostages, the horrors of war, his own dream of being governor of a province close to Constantinople. One can hear him now through that cloud of cigarette smoke, "Mais—" with a pause and scarcely perceptible lifting of the shoulders—"que faire…"
We went across to Lapsaki again that day to get blankets and buy or order mattresses, and found it much what Gallipoli must have been a few days before—sunshine and soldiers, camels loaded with stretchers and Red Cross supplies, the hot little twisting streets, noisy with traders and refugees.
You can imagine the excitement over this mysterious stranger with an unlimited supply of gold lire and big silver medjidies, asking not what kind of blankets, but how many did they have, how long would it take them to make not one, but fifty mattresses! Greek traders, Jews from the Dardanelles, one or two hybrid youths in fez and American clothes, with recommendations from American Y. M. C. A.'s—it was a great afternoon for Lapsaki!
A round-faced, jolly German nurse, dropped all alone in the little town by the chance of war, met us in the street, and later we went to her hospital. It had been started only a fortnight before, there were no beds, and the wounded lay on narrow mattresses on the floor. One man, whose face was a mere eyes and nose poking through patches of plaster, had been burned at Gallipoli. Another, up from the Dardanelles, had a hideous wound in his cheek, discharging constantly into his mouth. In spite of it he took Philip's cigarette and smoked it. He was dead when we came back three days later. On another mattress was a poor little brown bundle, a boy of twelve or thirteen, hit in the spine and paralyzed by a fragment of shell at Gallipoli and now delirious. Philip later took him back to Constantinople, to the X-ray and care that might save his life.
It was sundown when we got back to the hostages with our spoils. The thing had begun to get on their nerves. The English said little, determined evidently to remain Britons to the last, but some of the Levantines let themselves go completely. A pale gentleman with a poetic beard, a barber by profession, was among the most eloquent. It was not a jail, it was a mad-house, he cried. Another declared that without bedding, doctor, or medicines, shut up here until the end of the war, probably, they must at least have food—that was a need "primordial!"
Another stood apart, whacking his chest and addressing the empty air, "C'est moi, c'est moi, qui n'a pas d'argent!"—it was he who had no money and nothing to cover him, and what did they want him to do? If he had come down to be shot at, well and good, but if he was to be frozen and starved by inches…