“Que pense le Premier Ministre?  On n’sait pas—­”

("What thinks the Prime Minister?  Nobody knows—­“)

“Is he for the Germans?  Has he made a convention With perfidious Albion?  Nobody knows...”

The Gate to Constantinople

Only the Danube separates Rumania from Bulgaria, yet the people—­of the two capitals, at least—­are as different as the French and Scotch.  The train leaves Bucarest after breakfast; you are ferried over the river at Rustchuk at noon, and, after trailing over the shoulders of long, rolling plateaus, are up in the mountains in Sofia that evening.  The change is almost as sharp as that between Ostend and Folkestone.

You leave French, or the half-Latin Rumanian language, for a Slavic speech, and the Cyrillic, or Russian, alphabet; names ending in “sco” or “ano” (Ionesco, Filipesco, Bratiano) for names ending in “off” (Radoslavoff, Malinoff, Ghenadieff, Antinoff, and the like), and all the show and vivacity, the cafes and cocottes of Bucarest, for a clean little mountain capital as determined and serious as some new town out West.

It seemed, though of course such impressions are mostly chance, that the difference began at the border.  In Rumania, at the Hungarian border, they took away my passport, which in times like these is like taking away one’s clothes, and, though I assured the customs inspector that I was on my way to Constantinople, and in a hurry, it required four days’ wait in Bucarest, and innumerable visits to the police before the paper was returned.  Every one, apparently, on the train had the same experience—­the Austrian drummers looked wise and muttered “baksheesh,” and in Bucarest an evil-eyed hotel porter kept pulling me into corners, saying that this taking of passports was a regular “commerce,” and that for five francs he would have it back again.

There is a popular legend that the clerks in Bucarest hotels are supposed to offer incoming guests all the choices of a Mohammedan paradise, and the occasional misogynist, who prefers a room to himself, is received with sympathy, and the wish politely expressed that monsieur will soon be himself again.  My own experience was less ornate, but prices were absurdly high, the waiter’s check frequently needed revision, and one had a vague but more or less continual sense of swimming among sharks.

These symptoms were absent in Bulgaria.  The border officials seemed sensible men who would “listen to reason”; the porters, coachmen, waiters, and the like, crude rather than cleverly depraved, and the air of Sofia clear and clean, in more senses than one.

Modern Bulgaria is only a couple of generations old, and though all this part of the world has been invaded and reinvaded and fought over since the beginning of things, the little kingdom (it seems more like a republic) has the air of a new country.