After I had listened to his account of Leo I told him to get the interpreter of the hotel and go out and find the first boat sailing for Odessa. Also to look up the latest arrivals from there, and see what the captain and crew had to relate on the situation in Russia. In the meantime I made the usual rounds where one is apt to pick up information,—the American and other legations and consulates. I did not get beyond the first, however. Mr. Leishman, to whom I presented my letters of introduction from the state department, shook his head.
“My boy,” he said, “I am sorry to disappoint you, but I really can’t advise your going to Russia just now. Honestly, I don’t think it is safe.”
This was rather amusing, and I told him I was obliged to go, whatever the situation might be. He smiled and said that he “guessed not. The boats had stopped, the trains weren’t operating and the cables were cut.” For half an hour we chatted, and he told me all that he knew about affairs Russian, and then very kindly gave me letters to the various members of the diplomatic and consular service whom he thought could help me.
In a few hours I found that nobody in Constantinople knew anything definitely. This, however, as I soon learned, was the chronic state of affairs in the Turkish capital. The papers are so vigorously censored that nothing of local importance ever by any chance filters through. The natives themselves know nothing about outside politics, and care less, while the foreign residents must rely for all their news on the papers that come from the outside. Books pertaining to Levantine politics or history are almost as hard to get over the frontier as are fire-arms, but even here in suppressed Turkey rumors of everything were rife. From the talk, I was more than ever convinced that Russia was the place for me, and at once. For two weeks refugees had been pouring in from Odessa and Crimea and the Caucasus. The Russian consul-general thought at least 50,000 people had left Odessa. Conditions in the agrarian districts, it was reported, were at a crisis. There had been a fearful spasm at Moscow, a free-for-all fight in the streets, and anywhere from five to twenty-five thousand people were said to be killed, the reports differing according to the ideas of the narrator as to the number of dead required to make a good story. The fleet in Sebastopol had mutinied and there had been a fight, and the town, so it was said, had been bombarded and destroyed, and heaven only knew how many people were killed. As to the Caucasus, well, no one could ever guess at the dreadful state of affairs there. As a matter of fact, no one knew anything. Everyone suspected everything. The last steamer from Odessa had come in ten days before, and the captain painted a lurid picture of what he expected to happen. No, he was jolly well sure he wasn’t going back to Odessa. Any man who went there was an ass. He thought that by this time the place was in ashes and every ship in the harbor burned, and those of the foreigners who were still alive weren’t worth reckoning. Being the last one in, he had the field all to himself, and his story had grown more lurid day by day, so I took little stock in his report. In a word, Constantinople was stiff with the most promising rumors that ever gladdened the ear of a war correspondent.
At two o’clock that afternoon I returned to the Pera-Palace Hotel and went to my room, where I found Morris disconsolately gazing out over the terraced expanse of the Bosphorus.
“Well,” I said, “what do you know?”
“Nothing doing,” he replied, and then told of his trip up and down the water front and his talk with various captains. He was heart-broken at the discovery that steamers were no longer running to Odessa, or any other point of interest.
“Why, sir,” he said, “I regard this, sir, as one of the most promising situations in the world, sir, for people in our line of business, sir. Here is Russia all going to the devil, sir. Odessa, sir, is, no doubt, razed to the ground. Yes, sir, I believe it, reduced to ashes. Why, a day in Odessa, and what a story. I repeat, sir, what a story! And what is our position? Not a boat going there, not a train to Russia, not a cable available. I am discouraged, sir; yes, sir, I admit it, discouraged!” And he turned back to gaze again over the strip of water that lay below. Morris regarded my business as his always. It was never what I was going to do, but always what “we” were doing.
