Here it is, this little nation, only a trifle larger than the State of Pennsylvania, a half-Latin island in an ocean of Magyars and Slavs. On the north is Russia, on the south the grave and stubborn Bulgars (Slav at any rate in speech), on the west Hungary, and here, between the Carpathians and the Black Sea, this Frenchified remnant of the empire of ancient Rome. Their speech when it is not French is full of Latin echoes, and a Rumanian, however mixed his blood, is as fond of thinking himself a lineal and literal descendant of the Roman colonists as a New Englander is of ancestors in the Mayflower. At the Alhambra in Bucarest next evening, after the cosmopolite artistes had done then-perfunctory turns and returned to their street clothes and the audience, to begin the more serious business of the evening, the movie man in the gallery threw on the screen—no, not some military hero nor the beautiful Queen whose photograph you will remember, but the head of the Roman Emperor Trajan! And the listless crowd, drowsing cynically in its tobacco smoke, broke into obedient applause, just as they would at home at the sight of the flag or a picture of the President.
Bucarest, like all the capitals of Spanish America, is another "little Paris," but the Rumanians, possibly because unhampered by sombre Spanish tradition or perhaps any traditions at all, succeed more completely in borrowing the vices and escaping the virtues of the great capital they are supposed to imitate. It would be more to the point to call Bucarest a little Buenos Aires. There is much the same showiness; a similar curious mixture of crudeness and luxury. But Buenos Aires is one of the world's great cities, and always just beyond the asphalt you can somehow feel the pampa and its endless cattle and wheat. The Rumanian capital is a town of some three hundred thousand people in a country you could lose in the Argentine, and there is nothing, comparatively speaking, to offset its light-mindedness, to suggest realities behind all this life of patisserie.
You should see the Calea Vittorei on one of these warm summer evenings between five and eight. It is a narrow strip of asphalt winding through the centre of the town, with a tree-shaded drive at one end, and the hotels, sidewalk cafes, and fashionable shops at the other, and up and down this narrow street, in motors, in open victorias driven by Russian coachmen in dark-blue velvet gowns reaching to their heels, all Bucarest crowds to gossip, flirt, and see.
Down the centre in the open carriages flows a stream of women—and many look like Nazimova—social distinctions so ironed out with enamel, paint, and powder that almost all might be café chantant singers or dressmakers' marionettes. Some cities have eagles on their crests, and some volcanoes. If you were going to design a postage-stamp for Bucarest, it struck me that the natural thing would be a woman in the corner of an open victoria—after seeing scores of them all alike, you feel as though you could do it in a minute: one slashing line for the hat, two coal-black holes, and a dash of carmine in a patch of marble white, and a pair of silk-covered ankles crossed and pointed in a way that seems Parisian enough after one has become used to the curious boxes in which women enclose their feet in Berlin. Coming up from Bulgaria, which is not unlike coming from Idaho or Montana; or from Turkey, where women as something to be seen of men in public do not exist; or even across from the simple plains of Hungary, these enamelled orchids flowing forever down the asphalt seem at the moment to sum up the place—they are Bucarest.
Officers in light blue, in mauve and maroon—mincing butterflies, who look as if an hour's march in the sun would send them to the hospital, ogle them from the sidewalk. Along with them are many young bloods out of uniform, barbered and powdered like chorus men made up for their work. You will see few young men in Europe with whom the notion of general conscription and the horrors of war can be associated with less regret.
Streams of more frugal nymphs, without victorias but with the same rakish air, push along with the sidewalk crowd, hats pinned like a wafer over one ear, coiffures drawn trimly up from powdered necks. Waiters scurry about; the café tables, crowded in these days with politicians, amateur diplomats, spies, ammunition agents, Heaven knows what, push out on the sidewalk. The people on the sidewalk are crowded into the street, motors honk, hoofs clatter, the air is filled with automobile smoke, the smoke carries the smell of cigarettes and coffee and women's perfumes—it is "Bucarest joyeux!"
Some French music-hall singer—when I came through it was Miss Nita-Jo— will tell you all about it at one of the open-air theatres in the evening. All about the people you bump into in this sunset promenade—
"Des gens d'la haute, des petits crevés, Des snobs, des sportsmans, des coquets, Les noctambules, les vieux noceurs, Les grandes cocottes—oui! tous en choeur…"—all about Capsa's, which, though but a little pastry shop and tea-room, is as seriously regarded in Bucarest as Delmonico's or the Blackstone, which is, of course, with dreadful seriousness (to see one of the gilded youths of Bucarest enter Capsa's at five-thirty, solemnly devour a large chocolate eclair, and as solemnly stalk out again, is an experience itself), and all about the politicians and the men who are running things. Everything is in miniature, you see, in a little nation like this, which, although only as large as one of our smaller States, has a King and court, diplomats, and army, and foreign policy. All in the family, so to speak, and the chanteuse will sing amusing verses about the prime minister as if she really knew what he was going to do, and, curiously enough—for things are sometimes very much in the family, indeed, in these little capitals—maybe she does know!
Of course the Calea Vittorei is not Rumania, though a good deal more so than Fifth Avenue is America; nor are the officers posing there those who would have much to do with directing the army if Rumania went to war. Ten minutes away from the city limits and you might be riding through the richest farming country in Wisconsin or Illinois: hour after hour of corn and wheat, orchards, hops, and vineyards, cultivated by peasants who, though most of them have no land and little education, at least look care-free, and dress themselves in exceedingly pleasing homespun linen, hand-embroidered clothes. Then higher land, and hills as thick with the towers of oil-wells as western Pennsylvania, and, just before you cross into Hungary, the cool pines of the Carpathians and the villas of Sinaia, the summer home of the court, the diplomats, and the people one does not see very often, perhaps, in the afternoon parade.
It is a pleasant and a rich little country. You can easily understand why its ruling class should love it, and, set apart from their Slav and Magyar neighbors by speech and temperament, want to gather all Rumanians under one flag and push that, too, into its place in the sun.