And the Germans—how were they? They had no complaints to make, the girl said; the Germans were well behaved—"tres correct." Possibly, then—it was our young Italian who put the question—the Belgians would just as soon… I did not catch the whole sentence, but all at once something flashed behind that non-committal cafe proprietress's mask. "Moi, je suis fiere d'etre Belge!" said the girl, and as she spoke you could see the color slowly burning through her pale face and neck—she was proud to be a Belgian—they hoped, that one could keep, and there would come a day, we could be sure of that—"un jour de revanche!"
But business is business, and people who run cafes must, as every one knows, not long indulge in the luxury of personal feelings. The officers turned up their fur collars, and we buttoned up our coats, and she was sitting behind the counter, the usual little woman in black at the cafe desk, as we filed out. Our captain paused as we passed, gave a stiff little bow from the waist, touched his cap gallantly, and said: "Bon jour, mademoiselle!" And the girl nodded politely, as café proprietresses should, and murmured, blank as the walls in the Antwerp streets: "Bon jour, monsieur!"
Chapter IX
The Road To Constantinople
Rumania and Bulgaria
The express left Budapest in the evening, all night and all next day rolled eastward across the Hungarian plain, and toward dusk climbed up through the cool Carpathian pines and over the pass into Rumania.
Vienna and the waltzes they still were playing there, Berlin and its iron exaltation, slow-rumbling London—all the West and the war as we had thought of it for months was, so to speak, on the other side of the earth. We were on the edge of the East now, rolling down into the Balkans, into that tangle of races and revenges out of which the first spark of the war was flung.
Since coffee that morning the lonely train had offered nothing more nourishing than the endless Hungarian wheat-fields, with their rows of peasants, men and women, working comfortably together, and rows of ploughs creeping with almost incredible leisure behind black water-buffalo cattle; but as we rolled down into Predeal through the rain, there, at last, in the dim station lamps, glittered the brass letters and brown paint of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons Lits—and something to eat.
The cars of this beneficent institution—survivors of a Europe that once seemed divided between tourists and hotel-keepers—outdash the most dashing war correspondents, insinuate themselves wherever civilians are found at all, and once aboard you carry your oasis with you as you do in a Pullman through our own alkali and sage-brush. The steward (his culture is intensive, though it may not extend beyond the telegraph- poles, and includes the words for food in every dialect between Ostend and the Golden Horn) had just brought soup and a bottle of thin Hungarian claret, when the other three chairs at my table were taken by a Rumanian family returning from a holiday in Budapest—an urbane gentleman of middle age, a shy little daughter, and a dark-eyed wife, glittering with diamonds, who looked a little like Nazimova.
"Monsieur is a stranger?" said the Rumanian presently, speaking in French as Rumanians are likely to do, and we began to talk war. I asked—a question the papers had been asking for weeks—if Rumania would be drawn into it.