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That English officer, Oliver Alden, who had met Miss Browne on the quayside of Sebastopol, and who had been impressed by her refusal to get ruffled even in those dangerous hours, was stationed with his ship, the Lion, at Constantinople. He was not, as he told Miss Browne, much of a naval officer. Although he had the rank of lieutenant, it was rather an honorary rank and not taken seriously by regular naval men who had read some of his parodies in Punch before the War and were amused to find him as a messmate. He was attached to Naval Intelligence because, perhaps, he knew a little ancient Greek—though not much—spoke French and German quite nicely, and had been saved from the trenches by a good-humoured Admiral who liked his books and once had been in love with his mother. Things were done like that in the World War. Attached to the Naval Intelligence, Lieutenant Alden had been seasick on many types of craft in the North Sea, and air sick in many naval aeroplanes.

He had spent several months at Athens in counter-espionage work, which was utterly useless but very amusing. After the Armistice on the Western Front he had had strange and unbelievable adventures with General Ironside in Siberia, where a small force of British troops and marines had encountered the Bolsheviks. After that he had been in the Black Sea with British forces holding a line in the Caucasus and carrying supplies for Wrangel’s army, which never reached the front lines, partly because there was no front line and partly because Russian staff officers were very Russian. The best work he had done in the Great War was to rescue a large number of refugees, among whom were Miss Browne’s lot, who otherwise would have had an uncertain fate—perhaps even a certain fate—at the hands of the Reds who had a grudge against White officers, Russian aristocrats, and women of the old régime. Now he was attached to H.M.S. Lion, lying in the Bosphorus off Constantinople, which he found a city crowded with human interest of the strangest types. Having plenty of time on his hands and very little to do of any importance to a world in transition, he was able to study life as it passed in Constantinople at that period of history.

Life passed over the Galata Bridge, which seemed a bridge across two worlds where East met West. All day long it passed unceasingly, though held up for a moment at either end by toll-men who demanded small coins from every individual. Kurdish porters passed, carrying enormous burdens on wooden supports strapped to their shoulders. Negroes with black glistening faces under red fezes passed this way. Turkish peasants came with their donkeys, which they straddled with dangling legs. Oriental gipsies with gay-coloured clothes in rags and tatters, strode alongside their caravans. Crowds of Turkish women, veiled below the eyes, came to do their shopping in the bazaars on the other side of the bridge from Stamboul, or to listen to a French military band in the public gardens, where they sat in a wide circle with their veils covering their faces and their little feet tip-tapping to the music.

Up the steps from the Galata Bridge there was always a coming and going, as there is over the bridge in Venice between the Danieli and the Grand Hotel. Little ragamuffin Turks pattered about in bare feet and offered to act as guides to French, British, Italian, Russian, or American officers, all of whose languages they spoke well enough to beg for coppers.

“Un p’tit sou, monsieur! One penny, sir! Due lire, signore! Give me a nickel, Mr. American! Vous voulez voir les jolies femmes? Pretty girls, gents! Me good guide!”

Up and down the steps came ex-officers of Russia, ex-princes and princesses, ex-bankers, ex-merchants, ex-millionaires, ex-shopkeepers, ex-poets, and ex-peasants. Some of them had been up these steps and down these steps for more than a year, until their boots had worn out and their spirit had worn out. Oliver Alden, naval man and novelist, looked into faces which gave him an inward spasm of pity because of their misery. There was one young man he saw several times who affected him like that. He had a handsome Russian face, but it was the face of a starving, diseased, and despair-haunted man. He looked desperately ill, and once, as Alden passed, leaned against a wall and wiped his forehead which was wet with sweat.

Alden stopped and spoke to him in Russian.

“Can I do anything for you?”

The Russian answered in excellent English.

“No, thanks! It’s most kind of you, but there’s nothing anybody can do for me. I am dying, thank God! My wife died last week. There is nothing for which I wish to live. Life, my dear sir, is worse than death for us Russians.”

“I’m sorry,” said Alden. “If a few Turkish pounds ...”

The young Russian made a polite refusal by a gesture of his hand, and Alden left him and did not see him again.

There were strange contrasts of misery and gaiety. Misery beyond all words dwelt under some arches where the poorest of the Russian exiles had found shelter. There were 40,000 of them in Constantinople. They lived and slept there, huddled together in family groups, in filth and a fetid atmosphere. Typhus chose its victims among them. It was like a pest house. As a contrast there was the scene in the Pera Palace Hotel, where an orchestra played jazz music for young ‘snotties’ from the British Fleet, who danced with Greek girls, and Russian girls, and girls of uncertain nationality and still less certain virtue, but dangerously attractive to young naval men who had been long starved of feminine charm. Elderly Turks and young Turks sat about the lounge, gazing at this life which had invaded their old city; the red tarboosh of Islam glowed through the haze of cigarette smoke and the glamour of rose-shaded lights. There was an American Fleet lying in the waters of the Golden Horn. American naval officers had come ashore and were watching life over fat cigars and little cocktail glasses. They were great dancers and had no difficulty in getting something feminine to hold in their arms.

Italian and French officers of a city under international control kept to their own groups. The Italians gesticulated freely and on their lips was the word Fiume, which at that time seemed to agitate the soul of Italy. Two words broke always through the dialogue of Frenchmen: ‘Sales Boches!’: varied now and then by other words of contempt and anger: ‘Perfide Albion!’ They agreed with Napoleon that England was a nation of shopkeepers. They accused England of betraying them in Syria. They had a particular hatred and contempt for a man named Lloyd George, whom they accused of treachery to France. The French, it seemed to Lieutenant Oliver Alden, listening to snatches of conversation like that, were not pleased with England, though nearly a million British dead lay in the soil of France, on whose battlefields they had fought in a war to end war, as they were told.

In a small room outside the dining-room of the Pera Palace Hotel were two Greeks who were business men. Their business was to exchange Turkish pounds, reluctantly, for diamonds and other jewels brought over in the boots or underclothing of Russian refugees, or any trinkets which might be worth the price of a meal in the caravanserai where people of all nations had gathered in a world turned upside down by war and revolution.

Oliver Alden, temporarily on shore leave, watched his fellow men unobtrusively and saw these little transactions now and then.

Some of these Russians on the edge of ruin—with ruin behind them and in front of them—gave gay parties to their friends after cashing a jewel or two. Wine flowed at their table. There was much laughter after much kissing of hands.

One evening, at a table next to Alden’s, who was dining with an officer from H.M.S. Lion, a Georgian prince entertained a few friends. They drank sweet champagne. The Georgian prince—a handsome fellow with a dashing style—was charming as host. There were pretty women at his table with black hair smoothed back from their foreheads and looped over their ears. Presently the Prince had a short colloquy with the head waiter, who seemed a trifle anxious.

“Pardon me, my love,” he said in Russian to his lady wife.

Very carelessly he took her fur cloak from the back of her chair and handed it to the waiter.

“Bring me the change,” he said in French.

“These Russians,” said the young naval officer who was dining with Oliver Alden, “are all bandits. They’ve no morality. I prefer Lenin and his hairy Bolsheviks. I loathe the lot of them. Did you see what happened then?”

Oliver Alden nodded and laughed quietly.

“As a student of human nature I rather admire that. At least it gives me a thrill. It’s a defiance of fate. A beau geste. Tomorrow they may have to starve, but tonight, while there is still something to exchange, they laugh and drink good wine, and flirt with pretty women and get the best out of life as it comes. I see something splendid in that. I see courage.”

“I see damned idiocy in it,” said his fellow officer. “But, then, I’m a Scot from Aberdeen.”

Not far from the Tokatlin—another hotel with a reputation for good food and clean beds—was a place of amusement called the Petits Champs, to which Oliver Alden went with a friend now and then. One of his friends was a newspaper man—John Paulett—who had drifted this way in search of history in the making.

“This place is a house of sin,” said Paulett, “but it amuses me a good deal.”

“We’re lookers-on at life,” said Alden. “You and I, my dear Paulett, are always in search of drama, and you see more than you ever write for your disgraceful rag.”

Paulett smiled behind his horners.

“I write the news. I keep the private drama to myself. But you see that little girl just coming on to the stage. I happen to know her. She’s the daughter of a Russian general. Now she dances, with very little on, before the lascivious eyes of fat Turks, Greek money-lenders, Armenian traders, Levantine Jews, and petty-officers of the British Fleet. I’m sorry for her. She’s a sweet thing and dances like a sylph. Her name is Vera Sokolova. She’s worth watching.”

Oliver Alden watched her. She was dressed in a tiger skin as a bacchante. Her white limbs were beautiful and she had the grace of a Greek girl in the Golden Age.

“A cuddlesome lass,” remarked an English petty-officer sitting at the table next to Alden and Paulett.

“Not so good as a wench I know in Clacton,” said a Jack Tar sitting next to him, and a little drunk. “You should see my Liza when she’s stripped.”

A Russian orchestra played wild music. It was always the same music, night after night, and the rhythm of it beat into Alden’s brain, so that whenever he thought back to those days in Constantinople he heard the echo of that beat of drums and the sudden quickening of this wild rhythm.

Paulett stared over to the orchestra.

“Those fellows were all with Denikin’s Army. I can never find out what happened. None of these Russians ever tell one. Why were they beaten when they had the game in their hands and the Reds were fingering their throats with imminent apprehension? I suspect a yellow streak in them.”

Other girls came on to the stage of the Petits Champs. Some of them were obviously amateur, and very much so. They floated around without a pretence of dancing. They were showing themselves in fancy frocks or next to nothing.

“It’s a hard life for these young women,” said Paulett. “Some of them sell themselves to Turks or Greeks to support their families or keep themselves alive.”

“Tragic,” said Alden. “Frightful.”

He groaned over a glass of English beer.

The seaman who had drunk too much was letting his watch into his glass of beer by the end of a silver chain.

“What are you doing there, mate?” asked the petty officer.

“Giving it a swim,” said the seaman who was a little drunk. “What I say is it’s a mad world. So let’s all go mad.”

He seemed to find considerable amusement in seeing his watch in a glass of beer. Presently he desired to throw both the watch and the beer into the face of a young Turk near by, but was forcibly restrained by his petty officer.

“Let’s go and see the nightly battle,” suggested Paulett. “This place has a most unhealthy atmosphere.”

The nightly battle was between British and American sailors from their respective fleets. Both parties on shore leave for the evening had a habit of drinking too much cheap spirit in too quick a time. They attacked each other on sight, and it was fortunate for the British that the Americans, who were younger men, drank rather quicker than they did. The military police laid them out like ninepins with perfect impartiality, though it sometimes happened that the United States and Great Britain combined against the Red-caps. Then whistles blew, Italian and French police came to the rescue, and naval officers intervened to quell a general affray and conduct their men back to their ships in some kind of order.

“I’ve just come back from a trip to Smyrna,” said Paulett thoughtfully, as he and his friend went down to the Galata Bridge. “The Greeks are holding a line against the Turks which doesn’t seem to be very sound from a strategic point of view. There’s a long-headed Turk named Mustapha Kemal who is raising levies of men who fought us on Gallipoli. One day they’ll come riding into Smyrna. Meanwhile our Welsh Bard, Lloyd George, is encouraging the Greeks to believe that Great Britain is behind them. He can’t resist the charm of Venizelos, that smooth-tongued bandit.”

“Aren’t we behind them?” asked Oliver Alden, who was looking across to the minarets of Stamboul, touched by moonlight beneath a starlit sky in which there was still a depth of blue.

“Not on your life!” answered Paulett. “There are three million unemployed ex-servicemen in Great Britain, and income tax is destroying the landed gentry. The widows and orphans are mourning their dead. What price glory? We’re not going to fight again to give Greece an empire which she can’t hold.”

Alden spoke after a thoughtful silence.

“This city is seething with conspiracy and plots. As a naval intelligence officer I’m supposed to keep an eye on that side of things. Every Turk in this city is a spy for Mustapha Kemal, whom you mentioned just now. There’s a lot of gun-running under the very noses of the international police.”

“It’s all very amusing,” observed Paulett, stopping to light another cigarette—his sixtieth that day.

Oliver Alden agreed, but thought the amusement had lasted long enough and cost too much in human tragedy.

Paulett laughed and put his hand on Alden’s shoulder.

“You’re a sentimentalist, Alden. You’re too damn’ sensitive to human tragedy. You were born with an incurable pity for other people’s misfortunes.”

Oliver Alden smiled in the darkness of a starlit night, and then groaned a little.

“It’s a form of selfishness,” he said in self-defence. “I can’t be happy when I think of all those refugees, and those pretty girls selling themselves for the support of their families, and all the agony of Red Russia, and all the hunger, disease, and despair, and ruin caused by a world war which killed two of my brothers and ten million more. Is that being a sentimentalist? If so, I’m that.”

“Let’s look in at the Armstrongs’. It’s just about the time that lovely lady turns on the gramophone and dances on the roof of her little summer-house.”

Alden looked at his wrist-watch. It was only ten o’clock.

“The husband of that lovely lady,” he said, as he kept pace with his friend’s stride, “is not too happy in his married life. I think he expects the worst. One day the beautiful Beatrice will go off with a good-looking boy in naval uniform.”

“What makes you think that?” asked Paulett in a startled voice.