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We caught the steamer the dear, clean, lovely Nickolai II., with the stewardess a Greek named Aspasia, and I persisted in calling the steward Pericles, just to have things match. Then we crunched our way out of the harbor through the ice into the Black Sea, and sailed away for Constantinople. Constantinople had three different effects upon me.
An officer who was in Archangel during the summer on Graves Commission service after the American units had been withdrawn, reports that speculators for a song bought up great bales of the old Kerensky and Nickolai currency supposed to be cancelled, dead, defunct stuff, and when there was a considerable evacuation of central Russians who had been for months refugees in Archangel, this currency came out of hiding, and its traffickers realized a handsome profiteerski by selling it to the returning people at sixty to the pound sterling, for in interior Russia the old stuff was still in circulation.
Needless to say there was a great speculation in money and exchange. Nickolai and Kerensky and Archangel and British guaranteed roubles tumbled over one another in the market. Of course trafficking in money was taboo but was brisk. Early the Yankee got on to this game. His American money was even more prized than the English or French.
In August they reached the edge of the pack, when the sleighs were abandoned, and the dogs killed, as no room could be spared. The boats then crossed open water to Novaya Zemlya, and at the end of three months from leaving the ship sighted a Russian vessel. The Nickolai brought them to Vardoe in Norway, where the voyagers landed in September, 1874.
Inconsistently enough they still prized the old Nickolai rouble notes as the very best paper currency in the land, and loud was the outcry at giving forty-eight Nickolais for forty English-printed and guaranteed roubles of their own new Archangel government.
"Karl is a good fellow," he said, seating himself next to her. "And if it happens he is employed by Noske and Nickolai it doesn't alter my opinion of him." "He is a scoundrel," she answered quietly. "That is impossible," Dorn smiled. "He is merely a man without convictions and therefore free to follow his impulses and his employers. I thank God for von Stinnes. He has made Europe possible.
The hour of our arrival in Constantinople was an accident. The steamer Nickolai II. was late, and as no one may land there after sunset, we were forced to lie in the Bosphorus all night. It was dark when we sighted the city, but it was one of those clear darks where without any apparent light you can see everything. Surely no other city in the world has so beautiful an approach!
Herr Nickolai was captured by blacks and his clothes torn from his body and numerous knife wounds inflicted on his body. The natives took him to an English steamer whose captain paid them twenty shillings. Yet another, Herr Fischer, was surprised while taking a meal, bound hand and foot, beaten and then handed over to the English."
I am, she will inform you, a secret agent of Colonel Nickolai, and Colonel Nickolai is the head of the anti-bolshevist pro-royalist propaganda in Prussia." He paused and smiled. "I will meet you in the lobby when you come down." He walked toward the door, halting before the excited face of the girl. "Ah, Matty, Matty," he murmured, "you will not in your zeal forget that I love you?"
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