Guarded by our soldiers—they were really a simple and sturdy little crowd of good-natured peasants—we were taken across a railway line to a dark train. Our guards laughed, shook hands, pushed us gently into the train, and said, “Dobra den, Gospodin!”
Then we had a surprise. The train was pitch dark, but not empty. It was filled with correspondents of all nationalities, who, like ourselves, had been expelled! They were without food or drink or light; they had been there for half a day and part of a night; and they were furious.
That journey was a comedy and a tragedy. The train moved away some time in the night, and crawled forward that day and night toward “Cascara Sagrada,” as Nodeau called that town of filth. We starved, parched with thirst, cramped together. But we laughed until we cried over the absurdity of our situation and a thousand jests.
Marinetti, the arch Futurist, was there, and after making impassioned love to a Bulgarian lady who could not understand his Italian or French, he recited his great Futurist poem, “L’Automobile,” very softly at first, then with his voice rising higher, as the “automobile” gained speed, until it was like the bellow of a bull. In a wayside station, soldiers came running toward our carriage, with their bayonets handy, thinking some horrible atrocity was in progress. Marinetti was delighted with the success of Futurist poetry in Bulgaria!
At Stara Zagora I found wires were being pulled in London and Sofia, on my behalf, through the means of S. J. Pryor, who was a loyal friend, and one of the dearest men in the world. (He is my “Bellamy” in The Street of Adventure.) In a few days, Grant, Console, and I, alone among the expelled crowd, received permits to return to the Bulgarian headquarters, where our reappearance created consternation among the staff officers and censors, who thought they were well rid of us.
XVI
In 1912, to which year I have now come in these anecdotes of journalistic life, England was not without troubles at home and abroad, but nothing had happened, or seemed likely to happen (except in the imagination of a few anxious and farseeing people), to touch more than the surface of her tranquillity, to undermine the foundations of her wealth, or to menace her security as a great imperial Power.
It was a very pleasant place for pleasant people, if they had a social status above that of casual, or sweated, labor. The aristocracy of wealth still went through the social ritual of the year, in country houses and town houses, from the London season to Cowes, from the grouse moors to the Riviera, agreeably bored, and finding life, on the whole, a good game, unless private passion wrecked it.