“Very well,” I replied, “I shall wait until 6.15. If Sir Edwin is not restored to his family by that time, I shall go to the Police Headquarters and get him.”
As I returned to the Embassy I stopped at the Pears residence and attempted to soothe Lady Pears and her daughter.
“If your father is not here at 6.15,” I told Miss Pears, “please let me know immediately.”
Promptly at that time my telephone rang. It was Miss Pears, who informed me that Sir Edwin had just reached home.
The next day Sir Edwin called at the Embassy to thank me for my efforts in his behalf. He told me that the German Ambassador had also worked for his release. This latter statement somewhat surprised me, as I knew no one else had had a chance to make a move, since everything transpired while I had been in Talaat’s office. Half an hour afterward I met Wangenheim himself; he dropped in at Mrs. Morgenthau’s reception. I referred to the Pears case and asked him whether he had used any influence in obtaining his freedom. My question astonished him greatly.
“What?” he said. “I helped you to secure that man’s release! Der alte Gauner! (The old rascal.) Why, I was the man who had him arrested!”
“What have you got against him?” I asked.
“In 1876,” Wangenheim replied, “that man was pro-Russian and against Turkey!”
Such are the long memories of the Germans! In 1876, Sir Edwin wrote several articles for the London Daily News, describing the Bulgarian massacres. At that time the reports of these fiendish atrocities were generally disbelieved and Sir Edwin’s letters placed all the incontrovertible facts before the English-speaking peoples, and had much to do with the emancipation of Bulgaria from Turkish rule. This act of humanity and journalistic statesmanship had brought Sir Edwin much fame and now, after forty years, Germany proposed to punish him by casting him into a Turkish prison! Again the Turks proved more considerate than their German allies, for they not only gave Sir Edwin his liberty and his papers, but permitted him to return to London.
Bedri, however, was a little mortified at my successful intervention in this instance and decided to even up the score. Next to Sir Edwin Pears, the most prominent English-speaking barrister in Constantinople was Dr. Mizzi, a Maltese, 70 years old. The ruling powers had a grudge against him, for he was the proprietor of the Levant Herald, a paper which had published articles criticizing the Union and Progress Committee. On the very night of the Pears episode, Bedri went to Dr. Mizzi’s house at eleven o’clock, routed the old gentleman out of bed, arrested him, and placed him on a train for Angora, in Asia Minor. As a terrible epidemic of typhus was raging in Angora, this was not a desirable place of residence for a man of Dr. Mizzi’s years. The next morning, when I heard of it for the first time, Dr. Mizzi was well on the way to his place of exile.