"In my opinion also—it may happen. The fall of Russia is just a forewarning—it will all go down."
Once more the favourite theme of conversation.
Going home at midnight, one sees the miscellaneous crowd still on the street. From an open café window a gramaphone bleats out the strains of "Pagliacci" into the street, as if "Pagliacci" also were a refugee and was on the streets. Listening to it there came the thought that our whole modern way of life, of which that opera is sufficiently characteristic, was being chased from its home, chased out into an unkind elemental world to beg its way. Then on a corner of a street a hoarse woman calling repeatedly her price like a hawker at a market, "Chetiresta! Chetiresta!" Quite a decent lady in Russia, the wife of a bank-clerk or petty official, but now up against it, the great it of revolution. Four crooked lanes go down to Petits Champs, all a-jingle with Greek music and tinkling glasses and women's laughter. The great glass-house cabaret below is refulgent with electric light, and you see the figures swirl in a "Grande Danse Moscouvite." You climb the mounting street to where dusky but handsome Punjabi soldiers stand in front of the British Embassy, looking with sinless gaze on sin passing by, and then to the hotel. You sleep in the office of the hotel, between two safes, because there is no room to be had anywhere. Your curtainless windows are right on the street, and the endless razzle-dazzle of night-life goes on. In the disturbed after-hours of midnight or early hours of morning you may see a dozen or so drunken sailors pulling cabs and cabhorses on to the pavement, two sailors on each horse, cuffing its flanks with their hats, shouting and screeching, and evidently dreaming of the Wild West whence they come, the Turkish cab-drivers absolutely placid and passive, however, and the Turkish gendarmes unalarmed, whilst strapping fellows of the American Naval Police with white bonnets on their heads, and neat blue jerkins, rush in and literally fell the sailors one by one with their truncheons, and fling them sprawling to the side-walk.
Next morning it is brilliantly and cruelly sunny, and on the way out of the city the eyes rest on a young woman dressed in the fashions of 1917, but with burst boots and darned "tango" stockings, and rent, shabby dress. The strong light betrays the disguises of a long-lived hat and shines garishly on the powder and paint of a young-old face. So Constantinople goes on.
What a contrast when you return to Sofia! It is a day's journey in the express—a very short time, far too short to efface the vivid impression on the senses made by Constantinople. Perhaps in one respect Sofia resembles the great city, in that it is overcrowded. Arriving at night, you are lucky to share a room with a Bulgarian officer. The latter is lying in bed, and does not seem perturbed at a civilian being put into his room. Perhaps he has been staying a long time without paying, and the management is retaliating. There is a bed which has sheets which may have been laid fresh for a German officer in 1915, and you wisely follow the custom of the country and sleep with your clothes on.
Next day, when you step out on to the streets of the Bulgarian capital, your eyes almost refuse to take in the change. You have such a strong expectation of the moving picture of the Constantinople street that you feel, as it were, robbed and astonished, as by a spell cast over your world. You have been transported by enchantment to an entirely different scene. Here is a strange quiet. A peasant population has come to town in heavy clothes and heavy faces. Despite the war and all the trouble it has meant, there is a feeling that all able-bodied men and women are provided for. Here is none of the elegance and indolence of Athens, or of the ingenuity and cleverness of Constantinople, but a steadiness and drabness of a peasant clumsiness mark the new Sofia. It is neither so pleasant nor so promising a place as it was in 1915. The soil of the black years is upon it.
Sofia was a peasant city without much fashion or style then, and this aspect has intensified itself. The peasant is the born enemy of the town, and whilst he may be perfect in the country he is a boorish and non-comprehending fellow when he comes to the capital to rule. The peasant in power has very little use for the brighter side of civilization. The more the latter is cut down the better for him. He has, unfortunately, grasped the truism that "without the peasant nothing can exist," and he is much disposed therefore to take more of the profit of living for himself and cut down the expenses of civilization.
In Bulgaria we have the curious anomaly of peasant communists in political power and a king. Monarchy and a sort of Bolshevism.
"So you are all Bolsheviks here?"
"No, only peasant-communists."