The driver replied that he was indeed a kind man and fed his horse nearly every day. Waving his rosetted whip in self-congratulation, he turned out of the uproar of the rank and sped away up the Chaussée to where the air was still and the sleigh made no sound. In this crystalline world all was silent but the sleigh-bells.
On either side of the road the spangled skeletons of the trees flashed against a sky dark with unfallen snow. Across the snow-fields, that in summer were the gradinas, the wind leapt hard and bitter upon the sleigh. Its occupants shrank down among old blankets into a smell of straw and horse-dung, and peered out at the great plain of snow stretching to the lake and the Snagov woods.
They passed the Arc de Triomphe and came, at the furthest end of the Chaussée, upon an immense fountain that stood transfixed, like a glass chandelier, among mosaics of red, blue and gold.
As they reached the Golf Club, the driver shouted back at them.
‘He says,’ said Clarence, ‘he’ll drive us across the lake. I doubt whether it’s safe.’
Excitedly, Harriet said: ‘We must cross the lake.’
They slid down the bank to the lake, that was a plate of ice sunk into the billowing fields, and the wind howled over their heads.
‘Lovely, lovely,’ Harriet tried to shout, but she was scarcely able to breathe. Her ears sang, her eyes streamed, her hands and feet ached. Her cheeks were turned to ice.
The ice creaked beneath the sleigh and they were relieved to mount the farther bank and find themselves safely on solid ground. They had reached one of the peasant suburbs. The houses were one-roomed wooden shacks, painted with pitch, patched with flattened petrol cans, the doorways curtained with rags. Despite the antiseptic cold the air here was heavy with the stench of refuse. Women stood cooking in the open air. They waved to the sleigh, but the driver, unwilling that foreigners should observe this squalor, pointed his passengers to the cloudy whiteness of the woods and said: ‘Snagov. Frumosa.’
They came out to the highway at the royal railway station, which stood by the roadside, painted white and gold, like a booth at an exhibition. The road turned back to the town, so now the wind was behind the sleigh. The singing died in their ears. The horse was allowed to relax and they returned at a slow trot to their starting point.
When they reached the rank, Harriet noticed a young man, too large for a Rumanian, standing head and shoulders above the crowd and observing with an amused air the excitement about him.
Guy cried: ‘It’s David!’ and, jumping down from the sleigh, made for the young man with outstretched arms. The young man did not move, but his small mouth stretched slightly more to one side as he smiled and said: ‘Oh, hello.’
‘When did you arrive?’ Guy called to him.
‘Last night.’
Harriet asked Clarence who this new arrival was.
‘It’s David Boyd,’ said Clarence, rather grudgingly.
‘But you know him, don’t you?’
‘Well, yes. But I expect he has forgotten me.’
Guy swung round and commanded Clarence forward: ‘Clarence. You remember David?’
Clarence admitted that he did.
‘He’s been sent out by the Foreign Office,’ said Guy, ‘the best thing they’ve ever done. At least there’s someone to counteract the imbecilities of the Legation.’
Harriet had heard that Guy and David Boyd looked remarkably alike, but their difference was apparent to her at once. They were large young men, identical in build, short-nosed, bespectacled and curly-haired – but David’s mouth was smaller than Guy’s, his chin larger. He wore a pointed sheepskin hat that had settled down on to the rim of his glasses so that the upper half of his face was snuffed out while the lower looked larger than it probably was.
‘Were you thinking of taking a sleigh-ride?’ Harriet asked him.
‘No.’ Looking at her from under his eyelids, he explained that Albu, the barman, had heard Domnul Pringle and Domnul Lawson enquiring if the sleighs were out. Guy was delighted by this intimation that his friend had actually been searching for him. He said: ‘Let’s all go and have lunch somewhere.’
‘I’ve arranged to meet a man …’ began David.
Guy interrupted gleefully: ‘We’ll all go and meet him.’
David looked doubtful and Clarence, taking this fact to himself, said: ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m going to a party being given by the Polish officers.’
Guy swept on ahead with David while Harriet followed behind with Clarence. As they crossed the square, the two men in front, looking over-large in their winter wrappings, talked with an intimate animation. Guy was wanting to know what David had been sent out to do.
‘Anything I can to help.’ Now that this first shyness had passed, David was voluble. His voice, rich, elderly and precise, the voice of a much earlier generation, came back to Harriet and Clarence in the rear: ‘I saw Foxy Leverett this morning – that fellow with the big red moustache. I said: “When’s this war going to begin?” And what do you think he said? “Oh, things’ll hot up soon. We’ll give the Huns a biff. We’ll give ’em a bloody nose.”’
Guy was stopped in his tracks by his own laughter. Harriet and Clarence, who had to step aside to skirt him, now walked ahead. When they reached the Calea Victoriei, the talk of the other two was lost in the noise of the traffic.
David was meeting his friend in an old eating-house in a back street. When they reached the corner of this street, Clarence said: ‘I go straight on,’ and paused with Harriet, waiting for the others.
A barrel-organ stood at the street corner. A white-bearded peasant, bundled up in a sheepskin, was turning the handle, producing a Rumanian popular tune of the past, haunting and sad. Harriet had heard the same organ playing this tune several times before and no one had been able to tell her what it was called. Now, as they stood in a doorway sheltering from the cold she asked Clarence if he knew.
He shook his head. ‘I’m tone deaf,’ he said.
Harriet said: ‘That’s the last barrel-organ in Bucharest. When the old man dies and there’s no one to play it, that tune will be lost for ever.’
Clarence stood silent, apparently reflecting, as Guy would never reflect, on the passing of things. ‘Yes,’ he said and as he smiled down on her his rare and beautiful smile, they touched, it seemed, a moment of complete understanding.
David and Guy came up, both talking together, exuding an air of engrossment in larger issues. David’s voice rose above Guy’s voice as he firmly said: ‘Although Rumania is a maize-eating country, it grows only half as much maize as Hungary. So we have here the usual vicious circle – the peasants are indolent because they’re half-fed: they’re half-fed because they’re indolent. If the Germans do get here, believe me, they’ll make these people work as they’ve never worked before.’
‘Clarence is going a different way,’ said Harriet when she got a chance.
‘No!’ Guy protested, not having grasped that Clarence was bidden elsewhere. He caught Clarence’s arm, unwilling to let anyone pass from his sphere of influence. When Clarence explained where he was going, Guy demanded: ‘How long will your party go on for? Where will you be afterwards? We must meet again this evening.’
Clarence, not yet recovered from the defensive disapproval with which he faced each new situation, murmured: ‘Well, it’s a luncheon party. I don’t know … I can’t say,’ but before he left them he agreed to come to the Pringles’ flat that evening.
Now Harriet had joined Guy and David, their conversation halted and started again on a more personal plane. David began asking about the people he had known when he was last in Bucharest. He spoke of each with an uncritical, indulgent humour, as though all human beings were for him more or less of a joke. Guy, not given to gossip, had not much to tell. Harriet was silent, as she tended to be with strangers.