II. CONSTANT’ JULY 1921
1. Pera Palace
Under my window a dusty rutted road with here and there a solitary pavingstone over which carts jolt and jingle continually, climbing jerkily to Pera, rumbling down towards the old bridge, all day long from dawn to dusk; beyond, tall houses closer-packed than New York houses even, a flat roof where a barelegged girl hangs out laundry, and across red tiles the dusty cypresses of a cemetery, masts, and the Golden Horn, steel-colored, with steamers at anchor; and, further, against the cloudy sky, Stamboul, domes, brown-black houses, bright minarets set about everywhere like the little ivory men on a cribbage board. Up the road where it curves round the cemetery of the Petits Champs—more dusty cypresses, stone posts with turbans carved on them tilting this way and that—carts are dumping rubbish down the hill, ashes, rags, papers, things that glitter in the sunlight; as fast as they are dumped women with sacks on their backs, scrambling and elbowing each other, pick among the refuse with lean hands. A faint rasping of querulous voices drifts up from them amid the cries of vegetable-sellers and the indeterminate swarming rumor of many lives packed into narrow streets.
Thum-rum-tum: thum-rum-tum on an enormous tambourine and the conquering whine of a bagpipe. Two tall men with gaudy turbans round their fezzes come out of a lane leading a monkey. The thumping, wheezing tune is the very soul of the monkey’s listless irregular walk. Carters stop their carts. Beggars jump up from where they had been crouching by the shady wall. The ragpickers try to straighten their bent backs and shade their eyes against the sun to see. Waiters in dress-suits hang out from the windows of the hotel. Taking advantage of the crowd, two men carrying a phonograph with a white enamelled horn on a sort of a table with handles, set it down and start it playing an amazing tune like a leaky water-faucet. The tall men with the monkey thump their tambourine in derision and swagger away.
Downstairs in the red plush lobby of the Pera Palace there is scuttling and confusion. They are carrying out a man in a frock coat who wears on his head a black astrakhan cap. There’s blood in the red plush armchair; there’s blood on the mosaic floor. The manager walks back and forth with sweat standing out on his brow; they can mop up the floor but the chair is ruined. French, Greek and Italian gendarmes swagger about talking all together each in his own language. The poor bloke’s dead, sir, says the British M.P. to the colonel who doesn’t know whether to finish his cocktail or not. Azerbaidjan. Azerbaidjan. He was the envoy from Azerbaidjan. An Armenian, a man with a beard, stood in the doorway and shot him. A man with glasses and a smooth chin, a Bolshevik spy, walked right up to him and shot him. The waiter who brings drinks from the bar is in despair. The drinkers have all left without paying.
2. Jardin de Taxim
A table under a striped umbrella at the edge of the terrace of the restaurant at Taxim Garden (Entrée 5 piastres, libre aux militaires). Dardenella from a Russian orchestra. On the slope below a fence made of hammered-out Standard Oil tins encloses a mud hut beside which a donkey grazes. Two men squat placidly on the slope at the gate and look out, across some tacky little villas, like villas at Nice, and a gas tank streaked red with fresh paint, at the Bosphorus and the Asian hills. It is nearly dark. The Bosphorus shines about the string of grey battleships at anchor. Between the brown hills in the foreground and the blue hills in the distance curls up a thick pillar of smoke. One thinks of villages burning, but this is too far to the north, and they have a habit at this season in the back country of burning off the hills to smoke out brigands. The orchestra is resting for a moment. From the yellow barracks to the left comes a tune on a hurdygurdy and a quavering voice singing.
Then the rim of an enormous bloodorange moon rolls up out of Asia.
Presently when one has eaten caviar and pilaf and sword-fish from the Black Sea washed down by Nectar beer, made at the edge of town in the brewery of a certain gentleman of immeasurable wealth named Bomonti, the show begins on the stage among the trees. International vaudeville. First a Russian lady waves a green handkerchief in a peasant dance with a certain timid grace one feels sure was learned at some fashionable dancing academy in Moscow. Then two extraordinarily tough English girls in socks and jumpers, perhaps ex of the pony ballet at the Folies Bergères. One of them croons in a curious bored and jerky manner as they go through the steps and kicking that shocked country parsons at the Gaiety when Queen Victoria was a girl. Then come Greek acrobats, a comic Russian lady understood only by her compatriots, a Frenchwoman in black with operatic arms and a conservatoire manner who sings the mad scene from “Lucia” several times to huge applause, a pitiful little woman in pink tulle dancing the Moment Musicale with that peculiar inanity of gesture encouraged by dancing instructresses in American state capitals, and so on endlessly.
Meanwhile people move about the gardens among the locusttrees; jokes are passed, drinks poured. There are flirtations, pairings off. Three girls arm in arm dart into a side path followed by three Italian sailors, brown sinewy youngsters in white suits. A party of Greek officers are very gay. Their army has taken Eski Chehir. The Kemalists are about to leave Ismid. Tino is a great king after all. Opposite them two elderly Turkish gentlemen in frock coats and white vests pull impassively on their narghiles. Further back seven gobs are getting noisily drunk at a round table. Toward the gate stands an Italian gendarme, imported all complete from the buttons on his coattails to his shiny tricorne, and a British M.P. with A.P.C. (standing for Allied Police Commission) in handsome letters on his sleeve.
Why do you want to learn Turkish? a Greek girl asks me, a look of puzzled irritation on her face. You must side with the Greeks; you mustn’t learn Turkish.
Flits through my head a memory of the little yellow tables and chairs under the great planetree beside the mosque of Bayazid over in Stamboul, the pigeons, and the old men with beards as white as their white cotton turbans who sat there gravely nodding their heads in endless slow discussions; and how a beggar inconceivably old, yellow like frayed damask, gnarled like a dying plumtree, had asked for a light from my cigarette and then smiling had pointed to the glass of water that stood beside my little coffeecup, and how when I had handed him the water, he had had to crouch low to the ground to drink it, his back was so bent; and the gesture full of sceptered kings with which he had put back the glass and thanked me with a wave of a skinny corded hand. There was something in that wave of the hand of the soaring of minarets and the cry of muezzins and the impassive eyes of the elderly Turkish gentlemen in white vests sitting so quiet beside rejoicing Greeks in the Jardin de Taxim. There are reasons for learning Turkish.
Then when one has seen all one can stand of international vaudeville, of Russian ladies trying to earn a few pennies for the hard bread of exile, of Levantine dancers and beached European singers, one walks home along the Grande Rue de Pera. Along the curbs are more Russian refugees, soldiers in varied worn uniforms that once were Wrangel’s army, selling everything imaginable out of little trays slung about their necks—paper flowers and kewpie dolls, shoelaces and jumping jacks and little colored silhouettes under glass of mosques and cypresses, and cakes round and square and lifepreserver-shaped. They are men of all ages and conditions, mostly with dense white northern skins and fair close-cropped hair, all with a drawn hungry look about the cheekbones and a veiled shudder of pain in their eyes. In the restaurants one can see through the open windows pale girls with veils bound tight about their hair. On the arms of two stout Armenians two rouged and densely powdered ladies in twin dresses of flounced pink ride out of an alleyway on the jingling waves that spurt from a mechanical piano.
Further along a onelegged Russian soldier stands against a lamppost, big red hands covering his face, and sobs out loud.
3. Massacre
The red plush salon of the Pera Palace Hotel. The archbishop, a tall man in flowing black with a beautiful curly chestnut-colored beard and gimlet eyes, is pouring out an impetuous torrent of Greek. Listening to him a Greek lady elaborately dressed in rose satin, an American naval officer, a journalist, some miscellaneous frock-coated people. Clink of ice in highballs being brought to two British majors across the room. The archbishop lifts a slender Byzantine hand and orders coffee. Then he changes to French, lisping a little his long balanced phrases, in which predominate the words horreur, atrocité, œuvre humanitaire, civilisation mondiale. The Turks in Samsoun, the Kemalists, who some weeks since deported the men of orthodox faith, have now posted an order to deport the women and children. Three days’ notice. Of course that means … Massacre, says someone hastily.
The archbishop’s full lips are at the rim of his tiny coffeecup. He drinks quickly and meticulously. In one’s mind beyond the red plush a vision of dark crowds crawling inland over sunshrivelled hills. The women were crying and wailing in the streets of Samsoun, says the officer. The news must be sent out, continues the archbishop; the world must know the barbarity of the Turks; America must know. A telegram to the President of the United States must be sent off. Again in one’s mind beyond red plush salons, and the polished phrases of official telegrams, the roads at night under the terrible bloodorange moon of Asia, and the wind of the defiles blowing dust among huddled women, stinging the dark attentive eyes of children, and far off on the heat-baked hills a sound of horsemen.
In a big armchair beside the window a Turk with grizzled eyebrows and with eyes as soft and as brown as the archbishop’s beard looks unmovedly at nothing. One by one the oval amber beads of a conversation chaplet drop through his inscrutably slow white fingers.
4. Assassination
Extracts from a letter published under “Tribune Libre” in the Presse du Soir that comes out in Pera every evening with two pages of French and four of Russian:
The eighteenth of June my husband, Bekhboud Djevanchir Khan, was murdered.
I the undersigned, his wife, of Russian origin, trust to your kindness for the publication of certain facts which will put an end I hope to the false rumors that are attainting the dead man’s good name.
I have never been separated from my husband and God has made me witness of all the horror of these last years.
March 1918. The wreck of the Russian army crawling back from the Turkish front. At Baku the power is in the hands of Armenians who have adopted the Bolshevist platform. By order of no one knows who, according to a prearranged plan, there is organized a massacre of the Muslim population.
Never till my last breath shall I forget those terrible days. They were tracking my husband; his name was on the list of the proscribed. By a miracle he escaped. We fled the town and after unbelievable privations, succeeded in getting to Elisabethpol.
Months passed. Power changed hands, and my husband was called to the post of Minister of the Interior in the first Azerbaidjan cabinet. Turkish detachments draw near to Baku and again, before they reach the town, the bloody happenings of September are unrolled. It was the terrible reply of the Muslims to the March massacres.
My husband hastens to Baku to put an end to these riots, but by the time he arrives the wave of national hatred has subsided. National hate gives way to class hate; the Bolsheviki aspire towards power and the local population, tired of national and religious strife, see in the Reds a neutral force.
In the beginning of 1920, the Bolsheviki have control and start settling their scores with the representatives of the national parties. We are driven out of our house; everything we have is taken from us. My husband is arrested by the extraordinary commission and sentenced to death. But the particular conditions in Baku and his great influence oblige the Soviet powers to free him. In spite of his reiterated solicitations they refuse to let him leave the country, knowing that he is a mining engineer and one of the best specialists on the naphtha industry. Fate itself reserves for him the rôle of “spec.” He is offered a post in the commissariat of foreign affairs which offers possibilities of a foreign mission.
My husband accepts and some time afterwards we leave for Constantinople. Here death awaited him: an assassin’s hand ended the life of my husband whose only crime was to love above all things his people and his country, to which he had consecrated his studies, his work and all his life.
Two words more on the subject of the rumors that my husband had betrayed his companions of the “Moussavat” party, and that for this they had condemned him to death. In the eyes of those who have even slightly known the defunct, these rumors are so absurd that they are not worth the trouble of denying. Such gossip will not be able to tarnish, in the hearts of those who intimately knew him, the glorious memory of the defunct.
I am, yours etc.
5. The Crescent
They sell amber beads and the notaries and scribes have their little tables and stools in the court of the mosque of Bayazid. Charitable people have left foundations for the feeding of the pigeons that circle among the dappled branches of its planes and perch, drinking, beaks tilted up, throats shimmering with each swallow, on the marble verge of its washing fountain. One flaring noon I stood against the cold granite of a column watching a Bedoueen in a stiff bournous of white wool dictate a letter to a scribe with the gestures of an emperor composing an edict to a conquered city, when I noticed that a constant string of people was going in under the high portal of the mosque. Adventuring inquisitively near, I was beckoned in by a young man who dangled a green silk tassel at the end of his string of amber beads. An old man obsequiously pushed big slippers over my shoes, and I stepped over the high threshold. The huge red-carpeted floor under the dome and the dais along the sides were full of men, beggars and porters and artisans in leather aprons and small boys with fezzes too large for their bullet heads and stately gentlemen in frock coats and white vests with festooned watch chains and gravebearded theological students in neatly wound white cotton turbans, all squatting close together with their shoes beside them. A yellowbright beam of sunlight striking across the pearly shimmer of the dome gave full on the bronze face and shining beard of the mollah who was reading the Koran and brought fierce magenta flame into the silk hanging that fell from the front of the pulpit platform. He read in a wooden staccato voice, swaying slightly with the rhythm, and in the pause at the end of each verse a soft Ameen growled through the crowd.
—It is for the fall of Adrianople, this day every year, the young man with the green tassel on his beads whispered in French in my ear—Many of these people come from Adrianople, fled from the Greeks.… Commemoration.
The man who had been reading climbed down clumsily across the magenta silk hanging and a taller man with full lips and dark cheeks flushed under hollow eyes took his place.
—Now he will pray for the army in Anatolia.
His body erect, his eyes staring straight into the sunlight, his hands raised level with his beard in the attitude of prayer, the new mollah shouted a prayer full of harsh ringing consonants and brazen upward cadences. His voice was like warhorns and kettledrums. And all through the mosque under the faintly blue dome men looked beyond the palms of their raised hands at the flaming magenta silk and the priest praying in the yellow shaft of sunlight, and the Ameen at every pause rose from a growl to a roar, grew fierce and breathless till the little glass lamps tinkled in the huge flat chandeliers above the turbans and the fezzes, rolled up the stucco walls, shook the great dome as the domes of the churches must have shaken with the shout of the fighting-men of Islam the day Constantine’s city was carried by assault and the last Constantine killed in his purple boots.
At the door as they left everyone was presented with a card on which was a cut of the great mosque of Adrianople, and with a small tissuepaper bag of candies.
6. Douzico
A fragile savor comes from the tiny rounded leaves of the basil in a pot on the edge of the café table. Behind on a little platform fenced with red baize, musicians keep up a reiterant humming and twanging out of which a theme in minor climbs and skids in an endless arabesque. There is a kind of lute, a zither, a violin and a woman who sings. In the midst is a stool with coffeecups and a bottle of mastic. The zither is played by a grizzled man with a bottlenose and spectacles who occasionally throws his head back and opens his mouth wide and lets out happily a great Gregorian yodel which the other voices follow and lead back with difficulty into the web of sound. At the tables packed under the locusttree where they will get shade in the afternoon sit people with narghiles or cigarettes or German pipes or American cigars drinking mastic and beer and coffee and even vodka. There is a smell of tobacco and charcoal and anis from the mastic and douzico and grilled meat from the skewers of chiche kebab, and a discordance of many hostile languages and a shuffle of feet from the street under the terrace.
Leaning my chin on my hands and looking down at the strip of cracked and dusty pavement between the bare feet of the boys who sell cakes and pistachio nuts and flyspotted candy along the terrace wall, and the row of autos for hire, of which the drivers, mostly Russians in various patched uniforms, loll and sleep and chat, waiting for a fare through the long afternoon hours.… Across that space shoes, feet, shambling legs, crossed arms, arms swinging vacantly, stoop shoulders, strongly moulded backs under thin cotton, chests brown, sweatbeaded, shawls, black veils of women, yakmaks, faces. All life is sucked into the expressiveness of faces. A boy, skin the color of an earthen pot, eyes and lips of a drunken Bacchus, swaggers by jauntily, on his head a tray of roasted yellow corn. A girl patters along, mouse-like, features droop white as a freesia behind a thin black veil. A whitebearded man in a blue gown, redrimmed eyes as bleared as moonstones, being led by a tiny brown boy. Two hammals, each strong enough to carry a piano alone, with deeplymarked mindless features, and the black beards of Assyrian bowmen. Three Russians, blond, thick-chested of the same height, white canvas tunics pulled down tight under their belts, blue eyes, with a freshwashed look and their hair parted and slicked like children dressed for a party. A stout Greek businessman in a Palm Beach suit. Tommies very pink and stiff. Aggressive thickjawed gobs playing with small maggotlike beggar-children. Pale-faced Levantines with slinking eyes and hooked noses. Armenians with querulous mouths and great gold brown eyes. In the bright sun and the violent shadows faces blur and merge as they pass. Faces are smooth and yellow like melons, steely like axes; faces are like winter squashes, like death’s heads and jack o’lanterns and cocoanuts and sprouting potatoes. They merge slowly in the cruel white sunlight, brown faces under fezzes, yellow faces under straw-hats, pale northern faces under khaki caps—into one face, brows sullen and contracted, eyes black with suffering, skin taut over the cheekbones, hungry lines about the corners of the mouth, lips restless, envious, angry, lustful. The face of a man not quite starved out.
They are the notes, these faces, twanged on the trembling strings of this skein of frustrate lives that is Pera. So many threads out of the labyrinth. If one could only follow back into the steep dilapidated streets where the black wooden houses overhang, and women with thick ankles look down with kohl-smeared eyes at the porters who stumble under their huge loads up the uneven steps, sweating so that the red out of their fezzes runs in streaks down their knobbed and shaggy cheeks; through the sudden plane-shaded lanes that snatch occasional unbelievable blue distances of sea or umber distances of hills seen through the tilting and delicately-carved tombposts of Turkish cemeteries, and lead out into the pathless heaps of masonry of burnt-over places, where gapes an occasional caving dome with beside it a gnawed minaret, where sneakthieves and homeless people live in the remnants of houses or in shattered cisterns; or down through the waterfront streets of Galata with their fruitstands and their Greek women jiggling in doorways and their sailors’ cafés full of the jingle of mechanical pianos or the brassy trombone music of an orchestra, where the dancing of ill-assorted closehugged couples has a sway of the sea to it; or through the cool bazaars of Stamboul where in the half darkness under the azure-decorated vault Persian and Greek and Jewish and Armenian merchants spread out print cloths and Manchester goods which an occasional beam of dusty sunlight sets into a flame of colors; or into the ruined palaces along the Bosphorus where refugees from one place or another live in dazed and closepacked squalor; or into the gorgeous tinsel-furnished apartments where Greek millionaires and Syrian war-profiteers give continual parties just off the Grande Rue de Pera; or to the yards and doorways where the Russians sleep huddled like sheep in a snowstorm: somewhere some day one might find the core, the key to decipher this intricate arabesque scrawled carelessly on a ground of sheer pain.
Teheran: The Bath of the Lion
This afternoon I can only sit sipping douzico made opal white with water, ears drowsy with the strangely satisfying monotony of the Turkish orchestra’s unending complaint. The cool north wind off the Black Sea has come up and is making dust and papers dance in whirlwinds across Taxim Square.
Along the line of taxis, abolishing them, abolishing the red trolleycars and the victorious puttees of Greek officers, his head in embroidered cap bowed against the wind, his almond eyes closed to black slits against the dust, taking little steps in his black embroidered slippers, the great sleeves of his flowing crimson silk gown flapping in the wind, walks a mandarin of China.
Cathay!
7. Constantine and the Classics
Little Mr. Moscoupoulos threw up pudgy hands.
—But the Turks have not studied the Greek classics. They are ignorant. They do not know Aristophanes or Homer or Demosthenes, not even the deputies. Et sans connaître les classiques grecs on ne peut être ni politicien, ni orateur, ni diplomate. Turkey does not exist. I assure you, sir, it is a mere question of brigandage. And this city—we peered out of the window of the Pera Palace at a passing Allied staffcar—you know the legend. A Constantine built it, a Constantine lost it, and a Constantine shall regain it.…
Overhead bunches of green grapes hang down from the dense thatch of vineleaves and twined stems. A café outside one of the gates in the great wall of Heraclius. The dusty road dips into a low gateway that seems too small for the heavy dust-raising carts that clatter through it. On either side grey square towers timecrumbled at the top. Endlessly in either direction, grey walls occasionally splotched with the bright green of a figtree, and grey square towers. Towards the east a patch of the luminous aquamarine blue of the Sea of Marmora; westward bare umber-colored hills. In the purplish shadow of the vine arbor little tables and stools of unpainted wood and on each table a pot of rosemary or basil or thyme or a geranium in flower. In a group in one corner old men with grave gestures discuss some problem with quietly modulated voices. Their white turbans are almost motionless; now and then there is a flash of white when a head nods in a patch of sun, or a hand, lean and brown, is lifted to a grey beard. Beside me three young men in fezzes of new bright red are exchanging witticisms. An old gentleman with a puffy red face, dressed in the eternal white vest and broadtailed frock coat, listens, looks across his narghile with eyes sparkling and occasionally throws his head back and roars with laughter. A yellow slender man with green carpet slippers beside him is looking into vacancy with large yellowbrown eyes, in his hand a long amber cigarette-holder that is bright gold when the sun strikes it.
Sans connaître les classiques on ne peut être ni diplomate, ni politicien, ni orateur.… But one can sit in the shade where the cool wind rustles the vineleaves, letting the days slip through the fingers smooth and decorously shaped as the lumps of amber of the conversation beads with which one hand or the other constantly plays.
Out of the gate snorting and grinding in low gear comes a staffcar full of Allied officers, glint of gold braid and a chattering of voices. A cloud of dust hides it as it crawls up the uneven road.
A flock of sheep forms bleating out of the dust, followed by two shepherds who shout and throw stones and beat with their sticks until the sheep begin to flow through the narrow gate like water through the outlet in a trough.
Sans connaître les classiques.… A party of the Inter-Allied policeforce has come up and they stare searchingly in the faces of the Turks in the café. There are two Italian gendarmes with shiny threecornered hats and buttons on their coattails, some British M.P.s with hard red necks, French flics with the whiskers familiar to Paris cartoonists. They are all redfaced and sweaty from their rounds and there is dust on their highly polished shoes. When they have stared their fill at the people in the café they turn and go through the gate into town. Under the vines no one has noticed them. The voices of the old men continue, and the slow movement of a hand stroking a beard. In the upper bowl of the narghiles there is a little red glow at long intervals when the smoker pulls deeply. Above the grey towers and the wall, kites with black curved wings and hawk-beaks circle in the porcelain-blue sky.
8. Alexanders
Going down to Therapia they pointed out the place where two nights before a French truck with a regimental fanfare in it had gone over the khud. Ah, monsieur, nous avons vécu des journées atroces, said the tall Greek lady beside me with a dangerous roll of her black eyes. At the next curve the car gave a terrible lurch to avoid an old man with a mule—Four of them were killed outright. They say they were dead drunk anyway. They never found the truck or the bodies … le Bosphore, vous comprenez. She smiled coyly with her large lips on which the rouge was restricted to a careful Cupid’s bow.
At Therapia we sat on the terrace with the green swift Bosphorus in front of us and watched Englishmen in white flannels play tennis. A hot stagnant afternoon. Locusts whirred madly among the dusty cypresses. People in frock coats sat whispering round the little tables. Mr. Deinos who was starting a steamship line to run from Constantinople to New York, sat in a lavender grey linen suit between the two tall ladies with lurching eyes and Cupid’s-bow mouths coyly puckered.… Greece, he began, is going to fulfil her historic mission.…
I slipped away and strayed into the bar. A British major with a face like the harvest moon was shaking up Alexanders. A man in a frock coat was trying to catch in his mouth olives that an American relief worker was tossing in the air. The talk in the bar was English, Oxford drawl, Chicago burr, Yankee twang, English and American as spoken by Greeks, Armenians, Frenchmen, Italians. Only the soberer people in the corners spoke French.
—Intelligence service cleaned up another Bolo plot … yessiree. Collected all the Bolos in town and towed them up into the Black Sea in a leaky scow and left ’em there—Best place for them. Ungrateful beggars, these Russians.… Here we evacuate them from Odessa and Sebastopol and now they go turning red on us. The leader was a woman.… Picked her out of a room at the Tokatlian. When the A.P.C. knocked at the door she took off all her clothes and went to bed. Thought they’d be too gentlemanly to break in. Well they just wrapped her up in a blanket and carried her off the way she was.
—Well, sir, I was the last white man outa Sebastopol.… Agricultural machinery’s my line.
—Turkish bandits carried off six Greeks last night from that village opposite.…
—Did you hear the one about young Stafford was walking with a Red Cross nurse out on the road near the Sweet Waters and bandits held them up? They didn’t touch the girl but they stripped him down to the skin.… The girl made them give him back his drawers for decency.
—And the General said: There’s not enough light, we want a flambeau in each of the windows. People tried to point out that the lace curtains might catch, but the General had had beaucoup champagne and kept calling for his flambeaux; well, they brought his flambeaux and the curtains did catch and now the Sultan has one less palace.… It was a great sight.
—This is extremely confidential, what I’m telling you now. This man we were talking about. His name begins with a Z.… You know the Vickers man.… You ask me some time about Vickers and the Ismid Roads. It seems that he’s not a Jew at all but a Constantinople Greek. Everybody knew him around Pera, some little clothing business or other. Then one day he disappeared with the contents of a safe and turns up a couple of years later as a millionaire silk buyer in Lyon, and benefactor of the French Republic and all that sort of thing.
—No, this chap was a colonel on Wrangel’s staff. They were starving and one day he found out that his wife and daughter had been … you know … for money and he shot ’em both dead and disappeared. Last night some charcoal burners found his body out in the hills.…
—Yessir I was the last white man outa Sebastopol … strange things you see in the Black Sea.… Agricultural machinery’s my line. Last time I was out in Batum I seen upwards of six hundred women in swimmin’ an’ not one of ’em had a stitch on, in their birthday suits every one of ’em.
—Well, Major, how about another shakerful of Alexanders? They’re mild and they hit the right spot.
—Kemal! He’s finished.… Like hell he is. There’s a lot of legendary stuff about him going round. How at Eski Chehir the Turkish army sank into the ground and came up behind the Greek lines. That’s the kind of stuff that makes a hero in the east.
—They say that three divisions of Bolos are going in through Armenia and that he’s promised ’em Constantinople in return for their help.
—Let ’em try and get it.
—They will get it some day.
—Nonsense the Greeks’ll have it—The British—The French—The Bulgarians …—The League of Nations,—The Turks—I suggest it be made neutral and presented to Switzerland, that’s the only solution.
Outside on the terrace Mr. Deinos and the two tall Greek ladies with Cupid’s-bow mouths were eating pistachio nuts and drinking douzico in the amethyst twilight—Greece, continued Mr. Deinos, has always been the bulwark of civilization against the barbarians. Inspired by Marathon and Salamis and I hope by the help and sympathy of America, Greece is once more going to take up her historic mission.…