How my cosmopolitan friend, the Prince, was tricked by a woman, and how
he was, entirely against his inclination, forced to run the gauntlet of
the police at Bow Street at imminent risk of identification as Tremlett,
form an interesting narrative which is perhaps best told in his own
words, as he recounted it to me the other day in the noisy Continental
city where he is at this moment in hiding.
An untoward incident, he said one afternoon as we sat together in the
"sixty" on our way out into the country for a run, occurred to me while
travelling from Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, to Bucharest, by way of
Rustchuk. If you have ever been over that wonderfully-engineered line,
which runs up the Isker defile and over the high Balkans to the Danube,
you will recollect, Diprose, how grand is the scenery, and how full of
interest is the journey across the battlefields of Plevna and the
fertile, picturesque lands of Northern Bulgaria.
It is a corner of Europe practically unknown.
At Gornia, a small wayside station approaching the Danube, the train
halts to take up water, and it was there that the mishap occurred to me.
I had descended to stretch my legs, and had walked up and down the
platform for ten minutes or so. Then, the signal being given to start
again, I entered my compartment, only to discover that my suit-case,
despatch-box, coat, and other impedimenta were missing!
The train was already moving out of the station, but, in an instant, my
mind was made up, and, opening the door, I dropped out. My Bulgarian is
not very fluent, as may be supposed, but I managed to make the dull
station-master understand my loss.
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.
Both of them had travelled very extensively, and their knowledge of the
Continent was practically as wide as my own. Both were, of course, much
impressed by my princely position. It is marvellous what a title does,
and how snobbish is the world in every quarter of the globe.
So interesting did I find the pair that I spent another day in Tirnovo,
where, in the summer sunset, we were idling after dinner on the balcony
overhanging the steep cliff above the river. Our _salle-a-manger_ was
half filled by rough, chattering peasants in their white linen clothes
embroidered in red, and round pork-pie hats of fur, while our fare that
night had been of the very plainest--and not over fresh at that.
But it was a distinctly curious incident to find, in that remotest
corner of the Balkans, a lady whose residence was in the West End of
London, and who, though a foreigner by birth, had evidently been
educated "within the sound of Bow Bells."
"I love Bulgaria," the old lady had said to me as we had walked together
down by the river bank that afternoon. "I bring Elise here every
summer. Last June we were at Kazanlik, among the rose-fields, where
they make the otto of rose. It was delightful."