"You here? I thought you were at Bralatz," she cried.
She was thinking that Philidor's presence was of good omen to her journey; and as they walked together down to the quay she was glad that her last memory of Rumania should be of this tall figure in his light-blue cloak appearing indeed of heroic mold in the transuming fog of the Danube that enmeshed them.
"You've left it very late," he said. "We expect every hour the Bulgarian declaration of war upon the Entente. Ah, this disastrous summer! The failure at the Dardanelles! The failure of the Russians! And now I doubt if we shall do anything but cluster here upon the frontier like birds gathering to go south."
"I am going south," Sylvia murmured.
"I wish that I were," he sighed. "Now is the moment to strike. When I think of the Bulgarians on the other side of the river, and of my troop—such splendid fellows—waiting and waiting! Sylvia, I am filled with intuitions of my country's fate. Wherever I look the clouds are black. If when you are back in England you read one day that Rumania is fighting with you, do not remember the tawdry side of her, but think of us waiting here in the fog, waiting and waiting. If—and God forbid that you should read this—if you read that Rumania is fighting against you, think that one insignificant lieutenant of cavalry will hope to fall very early upon a Russian bayonet."
He held her for a moment in the folds of his bedewed cloak, while they listened to the slow lapping of the river; then she mounted the gangway, and the ferry glided into the fog.
There was a very long wait at Rustchuk; but Sylvia did not find the Bulgarian officials discourteous; in fact, for the representatives of a country upon the verge of going to war with her own, they were pleasant and obliging. It was after midnight before the train left Rustchuk, and some time before dawn that it reached Gorna Orechovitza, where it seemed likely to wait forever. A chill wind was blowing down from the Balkans, which had swept the junction clear of everybody except a squat Bulgarian soldier who marched up and down in his dark-green overcoat, stamping his feet; so little prospect was there of the train starting again, that all the station officials were dozing round a stove in the buffet, and the passengers had gone back to their couchettes. To Sylvia the desolation was exhilarating with a sense of adventure. Rumania had already receded far away—at any rate, the tawdry side of it—and the only picture that remained was of Philidor upon the bank of that misty river. It seemed to her now that the whole of the past eighteen months had been a morbid night, such a new and biting sense of reality was blown down from the mountains upon this windy October dawn, such magical horizons were being written across this crimson sky.
The train did not reach Sofia until the afternoon; the station was murmurous with excitement on account of the rumor of an ultimatum presented that morning by the Russian Minister; Sylvia, as an Englishwoman, became the object of a contemplative stare of curiosity, in which was nothing insolent or hostile, but which gave her the sensation of being just a material aid to dim unskilful meditations, like a rosary in the hands of a converted savage. There was not such a long wait at Sofia as she had expected, and toward dusk, after changing trains, they reached Plevna; but at Zaribrod, the last station before crossing the Serbian frontier, the train pulled up and showed no sign of proceeding. The platform was thronged with Bulgarian troops, the sound of whom, all talking excitedly, was like a prolonged sneeze.
At Plevna a tall, fair man had got into Sylvia's compartment. In excellent French he told her that his name was Rakoff and that he was a rose-grower. Sylvia expressed her astonishment that a Bulgarian rose-grower should travel to Serbia at such a time, but he laughed at the notion of war between Bulgaria and the Entente, avowed that the agrarian party to which he belonged was unanimously against such a disastrous step, and spoke cheerfully of doing good business in Salonika. At Zaribrod he went off to make inquiries about the chance of getting on that night, but he could obtain no information, and invited Sylvia to dine with him at the station buffet. He also helped her to change her lei and lewa into Serbian money and generally made himself useful in matters of detail, such as putting her clock back an hour to mid-European time. Upon these slight courtesies Sylvia and he built up, as travelers are wont, one of those brief and violent friendships that color the memory of a voyage like brilliant fugacious blooms. Rakoff expressed loudly his disgust at seeing the soldiers swarming upon the frontier; they had quite enough of war in Bulgaria two years ago, and it was madness to think of losing the advantages of neutrality, especially on behalf of the Germans. He talked of his acres of roses, of the scent of them in the early morning, of the color of them at noon, and gave Sylvia a small bottle of attar that drenched with its stored-up sweetness even the smell of the massed soldiery. Sylvia, in her turn, talked to him of her life on the stage, described her success in London, and even confided in him her reason for abandoning it all.
"One has these impulses," he agreed. "But it is better not to give way to them. That is the advantage of my life as a rose-grower. There is always something to do. It is a tranquil and beautiful existence. One becomes almost a rose oneself. I hate to leave my fields, but my brother was killed in the last war, and I have to travel occasionally since his death. Ah, war! It is the sport of kings; yet our King Ferdinand is a great gardener. He is only happy with his plants. It is terrible that a small group of arrivistes should deflect the whole course of our national life, for I'm sure that a gardener must loathe war."