Something must be done, and, as usual, my good angel did it for me. . . . She bought me a small upturned moustache, spectacles, hair-dye, a second-hand suit, a stained white waistcoat which I ornamented with a large nickel gilt watch chain, a pair of old elastic-sided boots (price £7), an ebony cane with a silver top, and a bowler hat which I perched rakishly askew. I was a Hungarian mechanic, out of a job. I had lost my place at the munition factory near San Stefano. But I was not down-hearted. My nails were oily and my antecedents doubtful, but I drank my beer and smoked my cigars and looked on life brightly through my spectacles.
I did not avoid the Boche—in fact, I frequently drank beer with him. The non-Latin races are not inquisitive as a rule. They cared little whether I was Swiss or Dutch or Hungarian, and I frequently claimed all three nationalities. They did not even think it odd when, on one occasion, I said that I had been born in Scandinavia and later that I was a naturalised Hungarian, and later again (when a Jewish gentleman with military boots joined us, whom I recognised to be a Government informer, paid to pick up information) that I was really of Russian parentage and that I had a passport to this effect (which I showed to the company present) signed by Djevad Bey, the military commandant of Constantinople, permitting me to proceed to Russia and ordering that every facility should be given to me at the custom-house.
This forged passport was a source of perplexity to me at the time, and later it was to be the cause of great discomfort. I had bought it for ten pounds from the gentleman whose pumicestone engraving die reposed at the bottom of the cistern. It was an ornate affair, duly stamped, and sealed, and signed with a Turkish flourish. But I could not bring myself to believe that it would get me through the passport office, the douane, and the medical station at the entrance to the Bosphorus. Some hitch would certainly have occurred.
However, it impressed the company in the café. People generally take one at one's own valuation, and the few secret agents to whom I spoke obviously considered that I was not a likely person to be blackmailed. With the Greeks I was certainly popular. The seedy-smart polyglot youth who was so liberal with his cigars (which were rather a rarity then) and so fond of talking politics and drinking beer was a persona grata in the circles he frequented. We talked much of revolution.
"We will crucify the Young Turks," said a Greek to me one day, "and then eat them in little bits. We will——" His expressive hands suddenly paused in mid-gesture, and his mouth dropped open, but only for an instant. He had seen a detective enter. "We will continue to preserve our dignity and remain calm whatever happens," he concluded neatly.
But calm the Greeks certainly were not.
In the cellar of a German hotel in Pera the Greek proprietor displayed one night a collection of rusty swords and old revolvers which were the nucleus of the New Age of brotherly love, when the streets were to run with Turkish blood, and the Cross replace the Crescent in San Sophia. I was privileged to be present at this conclave of desperadoes. After swearing each other to eternal secrecy we sampled some of the contents of our host's cellar, and talked very big about what we were going to do. But our host, beyond dancing a hornpipe and declaring that he was going to murder everybody in the hotel (after they had paid their bills), propounded no very definite scheme.
Out of this atmosphere of melodrama one emerged into the sombre, silent streets and went rather furtively home, feeling that there was something to be said for the Turks after all. But I need hardly say that no influential Greeks had a share in these proceedings: they were always on the side of moderation. One had been a fool to consort with fools.
Behind the lattices of the harems it was said that Enver Pasha's day was done. The new Sultan had thrown him out of the palace, neck and crop. There was to be an inquiry into the means by which he had acquired huge farms round Constantinople—farms which were supposed to be purchased from the proceeds of a corner in milk that had killed many children. The Custodians of the Harem (and in Turkey these tall flat-chested individuals have positions of great power; the Chief of the White Custodians, for instance, is one of the high dignitaries of the Empire, and ranks with a Lord Chamberlain) had long been intriguing against the Committee and especially against the German element with Enver at its head. . . . The Sultan was high in popular favour, and a dramatic suicide in the main street of Pera, which lifted a corner of the curtain hiding the unrest behind the scenes at the Imperial Palace, became a nine days' wonder, and gave rise to extraordinary rumours. A Turkish officer in full uniform had been seen running for dear life down the Grand Rue de Pera, pursued by policemen. The officer took refuge in the Turkish club, but he was refused asylum there. The policemen crowded into the entrance hall to arrest him, while the fugitive dashed upstairs to the card-room. Finding, however, that he could not avoid arrest, he threw himself out of the window, and was instantly killed on the pavement below. For some time, the corpse, dressed in the uniform of the Yildiz Guards, blocked the traffic of the city.
A few days later a British air-raid gave the Constantinopolitans something new to think about. It was a stifling night, and I was dozing and listening to the mosquitoes that buzzed round me, when their drone seemed to grow louder and louder. I lay quite still, thinking that another raid would be too good to be true. But presently there was no doubt about it. Invisible, but very audible, the British squadron was sailing overhead. I jumped up and at that moment the Turks put up their barrage. Bang! Boom! Whizz! Kk—kk—kk! All the little voices of civilisation were speaking.