SLEEPING WATERS
Oh Angel of the East one, one gold look
Across the waters to this twilight nook,
The far sad waters, Angel, to this nook!
ROBT. BROWNING.
Before Rumania became a kingdom, and while Wallachia and Moldavia were
separate Principalities, under the suzerainty of Turkish Sultans, a
Russian Army occupied the land, the pretext for its presence being
the maintenance of law and order. The Russian Government appointed as
Pro-Consul a certain General Kissileff, who planted trees and laid out
roads and proved himself a wise administrator; the good he did survives
him, one of the roads he planned and built commemorates his name.
The Chaussée Kissileff, or for short _The_ Chaussée, is an avenue of
lime trees, which forms the first stage of Rumania’s “Great North
Road.” Four lines of trees border two side tracks and the Central
Chaussée. During the winter months, their spreading branches afford
protection from the wind and rain, in spring and summer, they fill the
air with fragrance and cast a grateful shade. This thoroughfare is
a boon to Bucharest, it is at once an artery and a lung. Here, when
Rumania was a neutral, courted State, beauty encountered valour, while
nursemaids, children, dogs and diplomats, of every breed and nation,
walked, toddled, gambolled, barked, or passed on scandal, according to
their nature and their age.
Beyond the race course the Chaussée bifurcates. One branch I have
already called Rumania’s “Great North Road,” it leads, as its name
implies, due north to the oilfields and the mountains; the other is
a humbler route, trending westward across a stretch of open country
towards a wooded, dim horizon. It I will name Rumania’s “Pilgrim’s Way.”
When I was a dweller in the plain, few houses, large or small, stood on
“The Pilgrim’s Way,” which, after dipping to a stream, curved to the
west and followed the northern bank, its bourne some feathery treetops,
its only guardians cohorts of unseen frogs, whose multitudinous voices
rose in chorus, ranging the diapason of croaking, guttural sounds. This
was no intermediate zone athwart the road to Hades, but the frontier
of a region known to some as “Sleeping Waters,” whose chief city was a
garden on the stream’s bank and beyond the distant trees.
The votaries of wealth and recreation followed the “Great North
Road,” seeking Ploesti’s oily treasures or villas and a casino at
Sinaia, where the gay world of Bucharest breathed mountain air in the
Carpathian foothills, and summer heat was tempered amid perennial pines.
“The Pilgrim’s Way” was less frequented, but the pilgrims, though not
numerous, were, not the less select. Among them were the Monarch and
his Queen, the Prime Minister, the representatives of several foreign
Powers, and men and women bearing names which rang like echoes of
Rumania’s history when Princes ruled the land.
If asked why they made their pilgrimage so often, the pilgrims would
have answered with a half-truth: “We seek serenity in a garden fair,
and shade and quiet after the city’s heat and noise”--they certainly
did not go to meet each other, nor did they, like Chaucer’s characters,
tell tales and gossip as they fared along the road--they went to the
same shrine, but went separately, they made their vows to the same
Deity, but they made them one by one.
Two landmarks lay beside the road, serving as measures of the Pilgrim’s
Progress, both were pathetic and symbolical--one was a broken bridge,
which was always being repaired in slow and dilatory fashion, the other
a mill, which never appeared to work.
Bratiano himself had built bridges in his youth, and, speaking both as
expert and Prime Minister, he declared one day that when the bridge
would be completely mended Rumania would forswear neutrality and
join the Allied Cause. A whimsical conceit indeed, but illustrative
of its author’s mood. When Italy, a Latin and a sister State, bound,
like Rumania, by a Treaty to both the Central Powers, had taken the
irrevocable step, work was resumed upon the bridge with greater energy;
but soon it languished, and blocks of rough-hewn stone encumbered the
wayside, mute symbols of the hesitation which was still torturing a
cautious statesman’s mind.
The mill stands at the western end of a broad reach of the same stream
which traverses the realm of frogs; the waters, held up by a dam, are
as still and motionless as a standing pond, and yet they once had
turned the mill wheel, although, no doubt, they had always seemed to
sleep. A village begins here where the waters broaden; three years
ago it was a straggling street of squalid houses, where peasants
dwelt in the intervals of laborious days. Rumanian peasants, at this
period, lived under laws which left them little liberty, and gave them
few delights. Their toil accumulated riches for their masters, the
hereditary owners of the soil, while they eked out a scanty livelihood,
and though in name free men, in fact they were half slaves.
Peasants when slaves are seldom rebels. Spartacus has won a place in
history by being the exception to the rule, a rule well known to men
who never read a book, but feel instinctively that they themselves
are helpless to redress their wrongs. Such is the bitter truth, and
those who should know better often presume on it, until their victims,
exasperated by neglect and insolence, lose for a while the habit of
forbearance, flame into sudden anger, indulge in fierce reprisals, and
when exhaustion follows relapse into dull despair. Wrongs unredressed
resemble pent-up waters, which seek an outlet, useful or wasteful as
the case may be, and finding none, in time they sweep away the stoutest
dam, causing widespread destruction by their dissipated force.
In 1907 a large number of Rumanian peasants had revolted. Order,
so-called, had been restored by employing other peasants, clothed in
uniforms, to shoot their fellow-sufferers down. The tragedy of violence
and repression was of but short duration; once more the peasants
resigned themselves to fate, once more their smouldering passions were
pent up by a dam of military force.
Bratiano, as leader of the Liberal Party, became Prime Minister at
the end of 1913; he realized more clearly than his predecessors that
Rumania’s peasant population was one of the country’s greatest assets,
and that, under the then existing conditions, this asset was not being
fully utilized. His Government was pledged to a scheme of agrarian
reform, and began its task with a characteristic act--money was needed,
but increased taxation meant loss of popularity, and so the Army vote
was drawn upon, and the equipment of the troops neglected. Like many
others, Bratiano had refused to believe that the German people would so
abase themselves before the Junkers as to permit the latter to provoke
a European war; he had been mistaken, he had erred by rating common
sense too high. When Germany’s criminal folly became an accomplished
fact, it found the Rumanian Army unprepared, and shattered Bratiano’s
plans. Rumania, though a neutral State, lived in the shadow of the
cataclysm, perpetually a prey to excursions and alarms; reforms in such
an atmosphere were impossible, the old abuses lingered, the middle
classes reaped a golden harvest, and further claims were made on the
patience of the poor.
Mad misdirection and abuse of human effort were disintegrating Central
Europe, and had paralysed progressive legislation in every neighbouring
State. During his frequent pilgrimages, a disappointed statesman had
time for sombre meditations, he may have seen a symbol of them in a
wide stretch of sleeping waters stagnating round a disused mill.
An avenue of elm trees leads westward from the mill, skirting the
water’s edge; it runs in a straight line on level ground, and so, a
pilgrim entering by the gate could see at the far end, although it was
a kilometre distant, a walnut tree against a white background. When
blazing sunlight beat down on the fields and swirls of dust choked
travellers on the road, this avenue was always cool and green and, like
a vast cathedral’s nave, soothed anxious, troubled spirits and rested
dazzled eyes. At all seasons of the year, an innumerable host of rooks
circled above the elms, and from a choir in the clouds bird-voices
pealed in deep-toned rapturous crescendos, lulling the memories of
petty strife and discord brought from the city in the plain.
Three years ago, a low two-storied building, in colour mainly white,
with wide verandahs embowered in creepers, stood out against the sky
beyond the walnut tree. The house faced south, on both sides and behind
it were open spaces flanked by greenhouses and walled gardens, through
which there ran an avenue of Italian poplars, linking the village with
a private chapel; in front, the “sleeping waters” spread out in their
full glory, a broad and placid surface fringed with willows, which
leaned away from the supporting banks as though they sought their own
reflection. Between the waters and the house a palace stood, empty but
not a ruin, a monumental relic of a bygone reign and period; standing
four square, crowned and protected by a roof of slate. Such buildings
can be seen in Venice and Ragusa, with fluted columns poised on
balustrades of rich and fanciful design, composing graceful loggias.
More than two centuries have passed since Bassarab Brancovan, a ruling
prince, first brought Italian craftsmen to Wallachia. The tokens of
these exiles’ art are numerous, but nowhere do they find such perfect
and complete expression as in this palace, built for the prince
himself, whose pale, brick walls, with fretted cornices and sculptured
Gothic windows, are mirrored in a glassy surface and framed by willow
trees.
Within the dwelling-house, the rooms looked larger than they were,
an optical illusion being produced by shadows on floor and ceiling
and corners obscured in gloom. The curtains hung upon the walls like
draperies, and chairs and tables were disposed in groups, with an
unerring instinct for achieving harmony between utility and taste.
Flowers were never absent from these rooms, and made the house a floral
temple, whose forecourt was alternately the greenhouse and the garden,
the former produced in January what the latter gave in June.
Such was the shrine--the presiding Deity was a lady still young in
years, but learned in history and the arts, beyond the compass of most
men. With her there lived her daughter and an English governess, a
peacock in the garden and a mouse-coloured Persian cat.
Here, men whose lives were darkened by suspicion found a rare
atmosphere, where mystery was physical, and did not hide the truth;
here, could be learned the story of a race from one whose memory was
saturated with traditions, who faced the future calmly, knowing its
perils, sustained by hope and faith; here could be heard the twin
voices of sanity and reason, expounding not what Rumania was supposed
to think, but what Rumania thought.
In Bucharest, a very different tone prevailed--sentimentality, not
wholly free from interest, combined with unscrupulous propaganda to
misrepresent the issues before the Rumanian people and the Government.
Even official representatives of the Allied Powers joined in the
conspiracy of deception. In the month of April, 1915, the French
Military Attaché announced, with all the authority conferred by his
position and access to secret sources of information, that the Germans
could not continue the war for more than two months from the date on
which he spoke, as their stocks of copper were exhausted; the argument
based on this astounding statement was that Rumania should intervene
at once, and lay hands on Transylvania before it would be too late. In
private life a man who tried to gain advancement by such methods would
be locked up for fraud.
In England and France the ignorance about Rumania, even in official
circles, was amazing; for knowledge ready substitutes were found in
prejudices and preconceived ideas. These ideas were based on reports
furnished by Secret Service agents of the most obvious description,
whose exemplars were the villains in the novels of Le Queux, and who
were regarded with amusement and contempt by people on the spot. The
information thus obtained consisted of echoes from the cafés and
excerpts from the gutter press. It was sensational enough, though
mischievous and misleading, and gave satisfaction to officials who
never faced realities, unless they suited their desires.
By certain circles at Bucharest, the foibles of the Allied Governments
were systematically exploited: politicians emerged from the shades of
opposition into a meretricious limelight; bankers and business men made
deals which opened up an El Dorado, and social grudges were revived
under the cloak of patriotic zeal. While Rumania remained a neutral
State, Bucharest was a city divided against itself. Two camps were
formed, a war of words was waged; slander and calumny were the weapons,
and were wielded by both men and women with venom and impunity.
To minds possessed and poisoned by this ignoble strife, the calm
serenity of “the sleeping waters” was anathema; the extremists and
their partisans viewed with suspicion a detachment which was as natural
as it was sincere. They could not understand, far less forgive, an
attitude of aloofness to their cliques and combinations; they were
enraged by such neglect, since, with some reason, they took it for
disdain. Thoughtless themselves, and caught up in a vortex of mental
confusion and unreason, they poured the vials of their jealousy and
hate upon a head as innocent as fair, because it dared to think.
* * * * *
By a strange turn of fate, I meditate this fragment of past memories
down by the waters of Old Nile. Behind me rise the columns of a temple,
whose capitals portray the Lotus and Papyrus, signs of the River God.
Before me lies the tank, where the god lived three thousand years ago.
By the same path on which I stand were hurried shrieking victims, as
sacrifices to a crocodile, an animal so dangerous to river folk that
they worshipped it, and sought to propitiate the object of their fear
with their own flesh and blood.
Man’s nature has changed little since those days; his cruelty takes
more subtle forms, but is not a whit less harsh. His god is Mammon, and
his victims the poor and weak, or those who, by innate superiority,
are an unconscious menace and reproach. The sacrificial act does not
consist in killing--to Mammon, oblations must be made in such a way as
not to roughly kill the victims but first to spoil their lives.