“Please, sir. I can only give things. The other I have nothing to do with.”
“Am I a prince?” he asked suddenly. “Is there a plan, Khardov? A prince, Khardov? Am I a boy of the bulrushes?” He spoke feverishly, excitedly, his voice shrill and unseemly in the little room.
“The world has tired of princes,” Khardov said sadly. He pointed in the direction of the watches, rioting, noisy and disorderly in his shop. “Listen. Listen, sir. Sundials on a green lawn were once enough. To know the hour, to distinguish, if need be, between morning and afternoon. That was all.”
“I know all that. What have I to do with that?”
“The world has thrown away its princes. It ships them downstream in baskets. The gypsies hide them.”
“Khardov, please,” he said impatiently. He looked at the obedient old man, so different from himself. Then he had an insight which seemed to explain everything. “Is this my country?” he asked. Somehow it had never occurred to him that he might not be in his own country. “Is this my country?” he repeated.
“This is no man’s country,” Khardov said. Again he pointed to the watches. “It is their country,” he said contemptuously. “This is no prince’s country.”
“Ah,” he said. “Khardov, no more mystery, please. We are tired of mystery.” He took Khardov’s hand and brought it, unresisting, to his breast. “The medallion,” he said. He released the hand. It fell swiftly, almost smartly, to Khardov’s side and came to rest ritualistically against the seams of his trousers. “Often I feel its weight,” he said. “That it will crush me.” He smoothed his shirt where Khardov’s hand had pressed against it. “At night,” he said slowly, “when I am sick with wonder about myself, I can sometimes feel a throbbing, and I don’t know if it is my heart or the medallion itself.” He heard, unpleasantly, the excitement in his voice and was oddly conscious of his body. Queerly detached, he sensed that his pupils were dilating and the eyes faintly, redly filming. His breathing, under his words, was choppy and passionate, indelicate as a lover’s. “I can’t stay on here,” he said, his voice rising. “I have my country to discover.”
“Things happen as they will,” Khardov said.
That night Khardov came to him in his room. He was not asleep. All the countries of the world jostled each other in his mind, their borders elastic, shifting endlessly, the continents tumbling from the globe like waxed fruits spilling from a basket. He was a conqueror, untried but powerful, seeing it all from the dizzying slopes of hope and expectation. Khardov stood patiently by the foot of the bed until he was noticed.
“Yes, Khardov, what is it?”
“For your journey,” Khardov said, extending an envelope. “Some money for you, sir. You will need money.”
He took the envelope and tore it open quickly. There was more money than Khardov could possibly have saved. The box, he thought, it wasn’t all used up. He held this in reserve.
“Thank you, Khardov,” he said. He watched the humble man still standing tentatively at the foot of his bed. Suddenly expansive, he got out of the bed and embraced Khardov warmly. “Thank you for many things,” he said. “You are a loyal man. We’ll not forget you.”
In a month he had left Khardov and the country he had always lived in but had never known. He was outward bound, determined to choose his destinations as one picks one grape from a cluster rather than another. For a year, while his money held out, he reeled across the world, his itinerary open, himself uncommitted to plans, his own vague ideas of destination easily deflected by any chance overheard conversation of cabin boys, travel buffs, monied widows on journeys of solace. He steamed into strange ports, many of them merely names to him, but each time the tugs pulled the great lumbering vessel into the narrow slip, he found himself on the deck beside the other travelers, those coming home indistinguishable from those, like himself, who were only tourists. For him, however, there was the excited hope that this time perhaps he had come home, and with the others he stared down into the upturned faces of the waving, cheering crowds gathered at the pier to meet the boat. At these times his joy was uncontrollable. His neck prickling, he grinned and laughed at the brassy anthems. It was a year of splendid arrivals.
Once on land he did what the other tourists did. Although he found it necessary to engage his rooms in increasingly less expensive hotels, he shuffled with them through the public buildings and sat beside them in the restaurants, picking experimentally at the strange food. Frequently, however, he traveled alone into the interior, stopping at the homes of farmers who eagerly rented their spare rooms to him, or finding a place in languishing rural inns. He accustomed himself to the sounds of many languages and was surprised at his facility of soon picking up enough of the local speech to hold reasonably complex conversations in almost any place he found himself. Soon, though, he began to feel a jarring uneasiness. It was not boredom, for he found that he could respond to everything that each country held out to him; it was rather a gradual conviction that his very freedom hindered him, that other places held what he mistakenly looked for in the country he was in. When this happened an old wild nervousness mounted in him again, and soon he was aboard another vessel, outward bound another time.
It was an exciting year, and he learned many things he had never known at home with Khardov. The dark back rooms he had grown up in came increasingly to seem more dingy, and he had despondent visions of himself lying alone in his room, naked, turning dissatisfied in the troubled bed, one hand clutching the medallion like a hope.
The more he traveled the more he came to resent Khardov’s sly patronage. It was not enough to make seductive hints, carefully couched allusions, circumspectly to unreel information to him as one feeds slack to a fish. The old man’s air, he realized now, had been meretricious, yet oddly professional, his casualness carefully arranged, like a dressing gown around a whore. He was sure now that the medallion was the truth about himself. Khardov should not have made him wait so long. He felt that it was this, his difference from others, that counted. Even in the foreign countries he visited he could feel the difference. He looked at other young men, men his own age, who held down their jobs, dissatisfied, restless, the average ones dulled, jaded, surrender glowing dully in their eyes like the rheum of age, the smarter ones impatient, somewhat too loud, too forward, just looking for the chance to break free, and who would find the chance, he knew, only on violent roads, in gas stations held up, houses broken into, in the freely flowing blood of old men hit on their heads with heavy instruments, the blood staining the crowns of their Panama hats. He had seen them cruising on Saturday nights in their open cars, shouting at girls or staggering from bars, their arms around each other in a foolish, wasted camaraderie. Sometimes, he had to admit, they frightened him, their aims so different from his own, their faces clouded with a dissatisfaction they could not explain, which perhaps they even felt was a part of the way things were supposed to be. At these times he took a fierce pride in his medallion, felt it as a surety of what he had learned from the old romances: that blood, blood itself was the talisman, that it wheeled, despite submersion and the tricks played upon it by villains, steady as a star toward its ultimate fate.
He walked alone into quarters of the cities where other tourists did not dare to go, down narrow streets that twisted in a kind of chaos, the buildings mismated, humped together like a string of freight cars of different shapes winding about a curve in the tracks. He stared at the bitter, wizened people he found there and sensed the hardness of their lives. They wore despair like open, unbandaged wounds upon their faces. But even as he nodded to them, smiling patiently at their bewildered responses to his unexpected greetings, he felt ashamed. He knew he cheated them. He was like a general from far behind the lines come forward to review his troops during a lull in the fighting. It was safety he felt like a sheet of thick armor, even its clumsy heaviness comfortable with use. It was immunity he experienced. He might embrace them, roll with them in the gutters, kiss their leprous sores, but their diseases would be hel
pless against him.
Once he was stopped by four young men. He recognized the fierceness in their eyes.
The leader grabbed his arm, sheathed in the heavy wool. He looked at it sneeringly, as if it were the flag of an enemy country. The others ringed themselves about him.
“What hour is it?” the leader asked.
He told him.
“That is late to be about these streets.”
The one standing behind him said, “There are gangs. Don’t you read the papers?” He felt the words, forced contemptuously from the fellow’s chest, stir the hairs on the back of his neck.
“I fear no gangs,” he said. “It is not late for me.”
“A foreigner,” the leader said, discovering the alien in the sound of his voice. “I’ve never killed a foreigner,” he said seriously. “Have you boys ever killed a foreigner?”
The others laughed easily.
“Give us your money, foreigner,” the leader said.
“I have no money,” he said.
They came forward and were about to begin the gentle nudgings, the subtle insult of elbow and knee that would gain momentum slowly as they gathered courage until at last they would all be upon him, flailing him, caution abandoned, soiling him with their anger and hate. As the leader moved toward him he did not step back. “I am the prince of my country,” he said distinctly, feeling a proud joy as he said the words.
The leader hesitated. “What’s that?” he said.
He told him again. The leader looked to the others, questioning them. Already they stood uneasily, ready to run.
“You lie,” the leader said.
With quick movements he pulled the medallion from beneath his shirt. Holding it in one hand, as far forward as the chain would allow it to reach, he thrust it toward the leader’s face. With his heel and toes he made a series of quick right faces, pausing before each of the men positioned about him, letting them see. Again he faced the leader who now backed away from him deferentially. “Forgive us, your honor,” he said. “We didn’t know. Forgive us, your honor.” He broke and ran. Instantly the others were with him.
He could not, of course, miss the ludicrous aspect of this encounter, but ludicrous or not, they had accepted his claim. It had been easy. The medallion had clinched things, but the assertion itself had been almost enough. Something he had missed before now occurred to him: there was a reputation to be made among the people. The implications startled him. There was a reputation to be made among them. What the boys felt, others could be made to feel. The simplicity of the truth amazed him. He had it in him to be a conqueror. It was not impossible, but he would not do it; he would not usurp where he felt he had no rights.
But the incident forced him into making a decision. He had been in the world a year. His money was almost gone, but he was still no closer to the truth about himself than he had been at home with Khardov. He could waste no more time. He had to invent some system less unwieldy than the random, capricious one he now followed.
The next day he purchased a large folding map of the world and a cheap, second-hand history book, outdated but for his purposes still usable. He sat on the bed in his room and systematically eliminated those countries which he knew would be valueless to him: the perpetual republics; nations which had long since abandoned royalty and where the traces of descendent kings were by this time so adulterated by alliances with ignoble stock that almost any man might claim some sort of tenuous kinship with authority; countries which though still living under the monarchical forms were made up of people obviously alien to his own racial strains. When he had done this he was surprised at the number of countries which had disqualified themselves; as he penciled through each eliminated possibility, he felt that even here, in the small, cramped room, he was somehow coming closer, making his presence felt, bringing about a restoration which would change things in the world.
He made a list of the countries left to him and was pleased at its wieldiness. Of course there were still problems. What would he do for money? He took stock of his resources and realized that he still had more than enough money for one more passage. The countries on his list were either on the continent or near it. Once he had established himself on the continent it would not be difficult to find jobs that would support him while he searched. And he did not need much. He had his medallion, his clothes; he had lived before in small, dark bedrooms. He had only to discover some procedure, some technique of pursuing seriously what before he had actually expected to come to him gratuitously.
He did not know how the occasion would arise, but he had suspected that when recognition came, it would come suddenly, unanticipated, except in the broadest sense: the result, perhaps, of his casual sunbathing on a public beach, the duke’s yacht anchored a quarter mile off shore, the duke himself on deck scanning the beach with a high-power telescope, bored, absently lowering the glass to his chest, checking its magnification against what his own eye could see, lifting it slowly to his eye again—appearing to one beside him almost to fit it to his skull—once more swinging it slowly across the beach, the long tube suddenly catching the dazzle of the medallion; the duke momentarily blinded, muttering, “I say, what’s that damned thing that lad’s got about his neck?” as he slides the telescope back into position for another look, catching again the sudden flare of the medallion intensified in the long glass, stopping, refocusing on the medallion itself now—which to the duke seems ludicrously like a chunk of brilliant fire burning impossibly at the end of a golden chain—waiting patiently until a shadow can bring it to heel, rewarded suddenly by an unplanned sigh from the boy on the beach, who stretches expansively and leans forward as far as he can, placing one palm on the sand beside each ankle, the chest’s forward arch angling the medallion into shadow; the duke excited now, remembering something he had seen once a long time ago, calling anxiously to the regal-looking woman in the deck chair, “Martha, look at this a moment, will you? I’ve the strangest thing trapped in my glass….”
So he crossed the sea again, like a lost Columbus retracing his steps, for the first time aware (since for the first time he understood that whatever it was he expected would have to come through his own efforts) of the possibility of failure. Certain resources were available to him, of course: the facilities of museums and great libraries in whose dark carrels he checked heraldic and armorial records and illustrations against the frieze figures of the medallion laid covertly on the corner of the study table toward the window. He found that the figures on his medallion—the lion, the knight, the eagle and the crown—were standard symbols on royal coats-of-arms; it was the combination which was unique and which he could find no duplicate for in the heavy, ancient books.
For a year his money had been gone. Finding that he was no longer able to present himself as a tourist to the countries he visited, he discovered that at some time during the year that had passed he had inexplicably become an immigrant while he was not looking. It was because he no longer had money, but he supposed that there was something else. The officials who met him now at the dock no longer smiled so warmly at him. That pleasure was gone from his traveling they somehow sensed immediately. Once necessity had been introduced into it, everything changed. Like the men checking his passport more carefully than they had ever done when he was still merely a tourist, he was now involved once more with the world, with the business of making a living, and men did not give their smiles so freely to such people. Even his health was now a matter of suspicion to the officials who peered closely at papers for subtle omissions which they, sneering when they found them, did not accept as accidents. Coming to live and work in countries where once he had come to play, he found himself quarantined for reasons which were never fully explained to him. Even to strangers it was somehow obvious that he was no tourist. They no longer took the time to explain expansively when he asked some question of them regarding a public building, its long history or some unusual feature of its construction, or to walk with him part of the way, talking happi
ly to him, holding his arm, to the street he had asked about. Now when he asked a direction of them they mumbled it hurriedly and walked on. He was sensible for the first time that others were suspicious of his accent.
Many things had changed for him. He needed work. In a new country he no longer walked at leisure through the unfamiliar streets. Indeed, he seemed scarcely to notice that they were unfamiliar and fell into step quickly with those who had lived their lives there.
Usually he found work on the docks—heavy immigrant work. He took jobs as soon as they were offered, never promising to come back the next day, never telling some vague lie about a man he had to see that afternoon, careful always to avoid raising the suspicion in hiring agents that he shared the peculiar irresponsibility of the poor. Seasonal, subject to wildfire strikes, dependent even upon economic conditions elsewhere, his jobs had a temporary quality about them, a provisional aspect which he insisted upon. Otherwise, he demanded very little of a job, and even found a sort of satisfaction in dealing with time clocks, in seeing the purple, indelible evidence of his labors accumulate on the lined white cards.
He did his work steadily, but when the slack time came, he was laid off with the others. He even knew when it would come. He would feel a sudden chill in the air and he knew that in distant, northern countries the rivers and seas were blocked with ice. Nothing would get through. The men grumbled and slowed down, dragging out for as long as they could the little work that was left, but he continued to work steadily in a kind of desperate, clipped hurry. Often when the time came for him to be laid off, the foreman distributing the pay would hand him his and smile at him, and sometimes even put his arm about his shoulder, as if to say, “It’s a tough thing, but what can we do? You’re a good man.” It was recognition he was neither grateful for nor understood. He always left quickly, and within a few days would find another job.
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