Part 13 (1/2)
And now, with that curious subsequentness with which things sometimes happen in Turkey, the mutesarif discovered half a dozen mattresses himself, and announced that to-morrow there would be enough for all.
Nay, more--the government would allow each hostage four piasters a day for food, a cook would be brought down from Constantinople and meals served in a restaurant, that they might be saved, as his secretary observed, from the unlovely ”odeurs de'cuisine.”
Then it was discovered that the men might stroll about town, provided they were in groups. They went to the beach and discussed the feasibility of swimming, they even demurred against the Constantinople cook as limiting their means of amusing themselves; the aesthetic young man recovered now, polished his shoes and put a lavender handkerchief in his breast pocket. The hostages were in a fair way to annex the deserted village, when a bombsh.e.l.l burst in the shape of a despatch from the American amba.s.sador that permission had been obtained for all to come home.
The changing wind now swung full upon us. Scarcely had the message arrived ere the mutessarifs secretary followed it, lamenting that we must go. A peac.o.c.k reposing majestically in the arms of a patient hamal appeared at the front door, a souvenir for ”his excellency.”
Appeared also, out of thin air, a neat little horse and phaeton, and a trooper perched on a high Turkish saddle, with a rifle slung rakishly across his back, and the bey himself, gla.s.ses, fez, and all, astride an Arab steed. We were to be taken for a drive. Toward the end of it we reached the flour-mill, the only modern edifice in this ancient town, and were ushered into the office to sit in a constrained circle, with the slightly ironical-looking young proprietor--accustomed, perhaps, to such visits--and his a.s.sociates, while coffee and cigarettes were brought.
The engineer, an Italian, welcomed us in French; the proprietor, who spoke nothing but Turkish, smiled inscrutably, and overhead, in several bra.s.s cages, canaries sang.
Philip, gazing upward, admired their song, whereat the bey at once announced that they were his. The American protested that, much as the gift delighted his taste and roused his grat.i.tude, it was impossible to think of carrying a canary back to Constantinople.
”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 cas.h.i.+er 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 s.h.i.+pping 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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.
All night we went chunking southward--it is well over a hundred miles from Constantinople to the upper entrance to the straits--and shook ourselves out of our blankets and the cinders into another of those blue-and-gold mornings which belong to this part of the world. You must imagine it behind all this strange fighting at the Dardanelles--suns.h.i.+ne and blue water, a glare which makes the Westerner squint; moons that s.h.i.+ne like those in the tropics. One cannot send a photograph of it home any more than I could photograph the view from my hotel window here on Pera Hill of Stamboul and the Golden Horn. You would have the silhouette, but you could not see the suns.h.i.+ne blazing on white mosques and minarets, the white mosques blazing against terra-cotta roofs and dusty green cedars and cypresses, the cypresses lifting dark and pensive shafts against the blue--all that splendid, exquisite radiance which bursts through one's window shutters every morning and makes it seem enough to look and a waste of time to try to think.
It is the air the G.o.ds and heroes used to breathe; they fought and played, indeed, over these very waters and wind-swept hills. Leander swam the Dardanelles (or h.e.l.lespont) close to where the Irresistible and Bouvet were sunk; the wind that blew in our faces that morning was the same that rippled the drapery of the Winged Victory. As we went chunking southward with our beans and cigarettes, we could see the snows of Olympus--the Mysian Olympus, at any rate, if not the one where Jove, the cloud-compelling, used to live, and white-armed Juno, and Pallas, Blue-Eyed Maid. If only our pa.s.sports had taken us to Troy we could have looked down the plains of Ilium to the English and French s.h.i.+ps, and Australian and French colonials fighting up the hillside across the bay. We got tea from the galley, and-with bread and helva (an insinuating combination of sugar and oil of sesame, which tastes of peanuts and is at once a candy and a sort of subst.i.tute for b.u.t.ter or meat) made out a breakfast.
A Turkish soldier, the only other occupant of the deck, surveyed these preparations impa.s.sively; then, taking off his boots, climbed on a settee and stood there in his big bare feet, with folded hands, facing, as he thought, toward Mecca. The boat was headed southwest, and he looked to starboard, so that he faced, as a matter of fact, nearly due west. He had knelt and touched his forehead twice to the bench, and was going on with the Mussulman prayer when the captain, a rather elegant young man who had served in the navy, murmured something as he pa.s.sed.
The soldier looked round thoughtfully; without embarra.s.sment, surprise, or hurry stepped from the settee, pointed it toward the Asiatic sh.o.r.e, and, stepping up again, resumed his devotions.
Five times that day, as the faithful are commanded, he said his prayer-- a sight that followed us everywhere that week. One evening after dusk, on another boat, a fireman came up from below, climbed on a settee, and began his prayer. Several pa.s.sengers, who had not seen him in the dark, walked in front of him. He broke off, reviled them in true fire-room style, then with a wide gesture, as though sweeping the air clear ahead of him all the way to the holy city, began at the beginning again.
Soldiers up in the Gallipoli hills, the captain on the bridge, a stevedore working on a lighter in the blaze of noon with the winch engines squealing round him--you turn round to find a man, busy the moment before, standing like a statue, hands folded in front of him, facing the east. Nothing stops him; no one seems to see him; he stands invisible in the visible world--in a world apart, 'indeed, to which the curious, self-conscious Westerner is not admitted, where, doubtless, he is no more than the dust which the other shakes from his feet before he is fit to address his G.o.d.
The Marmora narrowed, we pa.s.sed Gallipoli on the European side, where the English and French hostages had had their curious adventure the week before, and on into the Dardanelles proper and the zone of war. It was some forty miles down this salt-water river (four miles wide at its widest, and between the forts of Chanak Kale and Kilid Bahr, near its lower end, a fraction over a mile) from the Marmora gateway to the Aegean. On the left were Lapsaki and the green hills of Asia, cultivated to their very tops; on the right Europe and the brown hills of the peninsula, now filled with guns and horses and men.