"If you please…" insisted the imperturbable bey. "It is yours!" Scarcely had we returned, indeed, before another patient hamal knocked, lugging the hapless bird.
The hostages, not to be outdone, invited Philip, the bey, and ourselves to lunch. There was chicken soup and chicken, and salad and native wine, and, for the corner of the improvised table, where the guests were seated, the hospitable young men had actually procured several bottles of Gallipoli champagne. The barber with the poetic beard leaped to his feet, as fluent in welcoming us as he had been in protestations a few evenings before, while the aesthetic young man smiled pensively down at a long-stemmed fleur-de-lis which he slowly twirled in his fingers. The cashier of a Constantinople department store sang from "Tosca."
With him as leader they all sang—a song of the Pyrenees mountaineers, then a waltz from the cafes chantants: "Bien gentiment l'on se balade. C'est la premiere promenade—"
In another week we should have had a Gallipoli Glee Club.
And so ended the adventure of the fifty hostages, who went out to be shot at—the end of the comedy, which had its climax at the beginning. The next morning we were up at daylight, and after several hours' delay the mutessarif and his lieutenant came down to permit us to leave. There were cigarettes and salutes, the secretary scribbled in Turkish characters on his knee, the governor signed the permit, and we said good-by to Gallipoli. Next morning we again threaded the shipping in the Golden Horn.
The ten policemen who had looked so formidable a week before, expressed a wish for what was left of the tinned corned beef. And with hackmen yelling from the street and caique men shouting from the water, the fifty hostages were swallowed up in the sunshine and smells and clatter of Constantinople.
Chapter XI
With The Turks At The Dardanelles
The little side-wheeler—she had been built in Glasgow in 1892, and done duty as a Bosporus ferry-boat until the war began—was supposed to sail at four, but night shut down and she still lay at the wharf in Stamboul. We contrived to get some black bread, hard-boiled eggs, oranges, and helva from one of the little hole-in-the-wall shops near by, watched Pera and its ascending roofs turn to purple, and the purple to gray and black, until Constantinople was but a string of lights across Galata Bridge, and a lamp here and there on the hills. Then, toward midnight, with lights doused and life-belts strung along the rail—for English submarines were in the Marmora—we churned quietly round the corner of Stamboul and into the cool sea.
The side-wheeler was bound for the Dardanelles with provisions for the army—bread in bags, big hampers of green beans, and cigarettes—and among them we were admitted by grace of the minister of war, and papers covered with seals and Turkish characters, which neither of us could read. We tried to curl up on top of the beans (for the Marmora is cold at night, and the beans still held some of the warmth of the fields), but in the end took to blankets and the bare decks.