He shrugged his shoulders, shook his head, and exhibited his palms in perfect ignorance. This rendered me furious.
Within my official-looking despatch-box were a number of valuable little objects, which I wished to keep from prying eyes my passport and a quantity of papers of highest importance. No doubt some clever railway thief had made off with the whole!
For a full ten minutes I was beside myself in frantic anger; but judge my amazement when presently I found the whole of my things piled up outside the station in the village street! They had been placed there by a half-drunken porter, who believed that I intended to descend.
Fortunately no one understood German or English, for the language I used was rather hem-stitched. My annoyance was increased on learning that there was not another train to Rustchuk—where I had to cross the Danube—for twenty-four hours, and, further, that the nearest hotel was at Tirnovo, eighteen miles distant by a branch line.
I was therefore compelled to accept the inevitable, and in the dirty, evil-smelling inn at Tirnovo—about on a par with a Russian post-house—I met, on the following day, Madame Demidoff, the queer-looking old lady with the yellow teeth, who, strangely enough, came from London.
She had with her a rather attractive young girl of about twenty, Mademoiselle Elise, her niece, and she told me that they were travelling in the Balkans for pleasure, in order to ascertain what that unbroken ground was like.
The first hour I was in Tirnovo and its rat-eaten “hotel” I longed to be away from the place; but next morning, when I explored its quaint terrace-like streets, built high upon a sleep cliff where the river below takes a sweep almost at right angles, and where dense woods rise on the opposite bank, I found it to be a town full of interest, its old white mosques and other traces of Turkish occupation still remaining.
To the stranger, Tirnovo is but a name on the map of the Balkans, but for beauty of situation and quaint interest it is surely one of the strangest towns in Europe.
The discomforts of our hotel caused me to first address the ugly old lady in black, and after luncheon she and her niece Elise strolled out upon the high bridge with me, and through the Turkish town, where the little girls, in their baggy trousers, were playing in the streets, and where grave-faced men in fezzes squatted and smoked.
Madame and her niece were a decidedly quaint pair. The first-named knew her London well, for when she spoke English it was with a distinctly Cockney accent. She said “Yers” for “Yes,” and “’Emmersmith” for “Hammersmith.” Mademoiselle was, however, of a type, purely Parisienne—thin, dark-haired, narrow-featured, with bright, luminous, brown eyes, a mouth slightly large, and a sense of humour that attracted me.