Part 26 (1/2)

Our princ.i.p.al interest was now in the news from Bulgaria, for on it hinged our future movements. We visited Hatton each day to obtain translations from the local press. These I supplemented from the two-day-old newspapers of Lemberg and Vienna, bought at the kiosk.

The Bulgarian armistice was an accomplished fact, but the German troops had been given a month to leave Bulgaria. Our problem was whether to remain in Odessa until the end of this month and then try to make for Bulgaria, or to leave for Siberia at once.

Wilkowsky all but tipped the scales in favour of Siberia. He arrived suddenly from Constantinople, having hidden on a steamer that weighed anchor a few days after the _Batoum's_ departure. From being a penniless prisoner, without even the means of corresponding with his family, he was now prosperous and comfortable; for his father was a wealthy lawyer living in Odessa, and his uncle Minister of Justice in Skoropadsky's Ukrainian Cabinet.

Among his friends was the local commissary of General Denikin, whose volunteer army, composed of Kuban Cossacks and ex-officers of the Imperial Army, was preparing to advance against the Bolshevist forces in the Caucasus. Every few days the commissary sent a party of ex-officers, by way of Novorosisk, to the volunteer Army Headquarters at Ekaterinodar. General Denikin was hoping for aid from the Allies; so that the commissary was delighted at the chance of enlisting two British aviators. His offer was that we should fly with Denikin's army for a few weeks and help to organize the Flying Corps, after which we could proceed by aeroplane to some Allied detachment in Siberia.

The adventure seemed attractive, and we hesitated over it. But illness took the decision from our hands. I was laid low by yellow jaundice, and unable to travel with the next party that left for Novorosisk.

Weakened as I was by various forms of hards.h.i.+p, several days pa.s.sed before I recovered, under the kind-hearted ministrations of Elena Stepanovna, Hatton's Russian wife.

The aftermath of jaundice once brought us what we least desired--conspicuousness. In hot weather the Russians living around the Black Sea bathe from the beach in the altogether. There, men's bathing costumes attract almost as much attention as would a lack of them at Brighton or Atlantic City. Hatton, White, and I formed a bathing party soon after I felt better. Until we were crossing the beach below the public gardens none of us realized that the colour of my skin was still a warm yellow. The spectacle of a yellow man in all his nakedness drew many sightseers from the gardens, including Austrian soldiers. I dressed under cover of a rock, and lost no time in leaving the gardens.

No sooner was I free from jaundice than fate sent another setback.

White and I succ.u.mbed to the plague of influenza which swept across Europe from west to east, and which in one week killed forty thousand inhabitants of Odessa. For three days we lay in Vladimir Franzovitch's little room, weak, feverish, miserable, and at times light-headed, while his mistress fed us with milk and heaped every kind of clothing over us for warmth.

Recovery was hastened by the best possible tonic--news that the way to Varna, on the Bulgarian coast, was open to us. Thanks were due to several good friends for this means to freedom. Hatton had introduced us to a cosmopolitan Britisher named Waite, who enlisted the help of Louis Demy, a Russian sea-captain. Demy spoke of us to Commodore Wolkenau, the Ukrainian officer who, under the Austrians, controlled the s.h.i.+pping at Odessa. Wolkenau, having been an officer of the Russian Imperial Navy, was a good friend of the British. Moreover, the daily bulletins made it apparent that the Allies were winning the war, so that he was glad of an opportunity to prove his sympathies by helping British officers. He arranged for our pa.s.sage on a Red Cross s.h.i.+p which was to repatriate Russian prisoners from Austria, now waiting at Varna.

Meantime, there was an interval of ten days' waiting before the boat would sail. These we pa.s.sed in moving about the city, in consorting with Ukrainian officers and officials introduced by Wilkowsky, and in collecting information likely to be of use to the British Intelligence Department.

Our usual companion was one Pat O'Flaherty, an Irishman on the staff of the Eastern Telegraph Company, who had stayed in Odessa during the Bolshevist and Austro-German occupations. Entering a cafe with O'Flaherty was like a blindfold draw in a sweepstake of ident.i.ties.

Always he met friends; but until the moment of introduction neither we nor he knew how or as what we were to be presented. To one man we were merchants from Nikolaieff; to another, motor-car agents from Moscow; to a third oil experts returned from Baku.

”Signor Califatti,” said O'Flaherty on one occasion, presenting me to a wealthy Jewish speculator.

”When he was at Nijni Novgorod Fair,” he continued in all seriousness, ”Signor Califatti bought a beautiful fur overcoat. He now wants to sell it. Perhaps you would like to buy it.”

The Jew offered a thousand roubles for the mythical overcoat, provided it conformed to the Irishman's declaration that it was of first-cla.s.s astrakhan, in four skins; while White and I remained speechless with astonishment, embarra.s.sment, and the desire to grin.

In those days the Bolsheviki of Odessa, after months of suppression by the German Military Command, were beginning to raise their heads again.

There was much talk of a withdrawal of German and Austrian troops from the Ukraine, to reinforce the French and Italian fronts. The Bolsheviki were ready, if this happened, to rise up and capture the city.

The possession of arms by civilians was strictly forbidden, and any man found in the streets with a revolver was liable to be shot offhand by Austrian soldiers or Ukrainian gendarmes. But the Bolsheviki laughed at the many proclamations anent the handing over of firearms. They hid rifles, revolvers, and ammunition in cellars and attics, or buried them in the ground.

Many of our neighbours in the working-cla.s.s quarter were Bolsheviki.

Often they scowled at and threatened Vladimir Franzovitch, as he pa.s.sed them in his uniform of a lieutenant of the Ukrainian artillery; and it was evident that when the Austrians withdrew our room would be rather more dangerous as a home than a powder factory threatened by fire.

The consul of Soviet Russia was preparing lists of men willing to serve in the corps of Red Guards that had been planned, and was spending hundreds of thousands of roubles in propaganda. An immediate rising was threatened; whereupon Austrian and Ukrainian military police surrounded the consulate, captured the lists, and arrested and imprisoned the consul and two hundred Bolsheviki who had given their names as prospective Red Guards. Sixty of them were shot.

Even that lesson failed to frighten the half-starved men who lurked in the poorer quarters. Often, in the evening, they haunted the streets in small gangs that held up pa.s.sers-by and stripped them of their pocket-books and watches, and sometimes of their clothes.

The ugliest aspect of an ugly situation was that many soldiers of the Austrian forces, particularly the Magyars and the Poles, sympathized with the Bolsheviki, and were ready to join them, exchanging uniform for looted civilian suits if the troops were withdrawn. The sudden realization that Austria was beaten, coupled with hatred of Austrian Imperialism, went to their heads like new wine. They foresaw an era in which the working man and the private soldier would grab whatever they wanted. Bands of Hungarian privates proved their belief in this millennium by sacking the warehouses in the docks under cover of night.

Odessa was overfull of members of the bourgeoisie who had flocked to what they regarded as the last refuge against Bolshevism in European Russia. Refugees had swelled the population from six hundred thousand to a million and a half. The middle cla.s.ses--professional men, merchants, traders, and speculators--knew they were living on the edge of a volcano, and tried to drown the knowledge in reckless revelry.

Each evening parties costing thousands of roubles were given in the restaurants. Wine and vodka, as aids to forgetfulness of the fear that hovered over every feast, were well worth their sixty roubles a bottle.

Their orgy of speculation in inflated prices and their mock merriment left the bourgeoisie neither time nor energy to take action against the horrors that threatened them. In general they adopted a pose of fatalistic apathy, and tried hard to soothe themselves into the belief that the Allies would save them, since they would not save themselves.