Once, after disembarking, he saw a sign advertising for men to unload cargo. He left his luggage in customs and went off to find the foreman. The foreman looked suspiciously at his fine clothes. “Look,” he said. “I’m very strong. I’m a good worker and I’m used to the work.” He called off the names of ports where he had worked. “Please,” he said. “I need the job.” For a moment he hesitated. He had heard the desperation in his voice and recognized that it was strained, forced, not accurately the fact of his condition. Why did he insist upon a helplessness so self-conscious? A despair which set aside in the very waver of his voice all the things he had before insisted to be true about himself? With a sense of all the wasted miles he had already come, he feared that perhaps relinquishment had become a new cause with him. No, he thought, interregnum is not exile. “I can do the work. It’s nothing for a guy like me,” he said more firmly. “Come on now, fellow. Use me or not. Don’t keep me waiting.”
The foreman suspected that the man before him in the fine clothes was some sort of rascal on a lark, a rich man’s son, probably. He laughed and set him to work unloading the very ship he had a few moments before stepped down from himself.
There were some on the docks like himself, young men in whom he recognized a terrible transience. But most were older men, hard from heavy work, their movements cautious, almost stolid, as if they feared to rekindle the ache of old ruptures. Their faces were lined with the wounds of their expressions. Confused, they seemed trying to understand what had happened to them, like men stunned in awful automobile accidents. Endlessly they struggled with boxes too big for them, with crates marked “Fragile” which they came to hate for the cynical reminder of the fragility which somewhere they had lost. He remembered a man who one day had stumbled against such a crate, kicking it with his heavy shoes. Recovering, the man had taken his hammer and torn the nails from the thin wood wildly, like one pulling burs from his own flesh. From the open crate he had pulled handfuls of excelsior like the grotesque hair of a dowager, and ripping the green, tissuey paper had come at last to the bowl inside. He held it for a moment in his hands, examining it closely. Disappointed, he spit into it from deep in his chest and put it back.
He avoided such men. Their despair was earned too slowly; their dreams died daily, and one day’s loss meant nothing, even to themselves. What he feared, of course, was that he might lose his own dream. It, more than the possibility that the dream was wild, irresponsible—which he recognized as more than possibility—was what tormented him, drove him to do anything, accept every job. He worked only at night, or, forced to it, in the afternoon and evening. These were the vulnerable shifts, he knew, but he had to keep the mornings open for his search, even though much of the time he was exhausted, could do nothing but strain to reach the bed in his small room, to fall upon it like a man impaling himself upon some terrible destruction.
At night, drugged with the endless labor of loading and unloading, it was not so bad. He’d sometimes stop, straining at a cigarette, and look at the boats, the light from the portholes outlining the ships. When he squinted his eyes, the lights seemed to come across the water like Japanese lanterns strung for some incredible entertainment. He would look up at the decks looming large and dark above him and see here and there members of the crew seated on chairs, a cook still in his white pants and jacket looking ghostly in the light from the dim stars, like someone dressed in silver, seeming to loll there in remarkable peace, at ease in deck chairs that he himself had paid to rest in and then known only the stare of the sun, or the air’s sudden chill, or the sickening roll of the decks beneath him until he thought that he must surely slide into the sea. But the ship was truly the sailors’ home. Perched so high above him, caught in the light from areaways left casually open, they seemed gigantic, like gods, diminished not at all by their distance from him or by a night which hid even the sea.
But once he had gone across the street from the piers into a shop for merchant seamen, a great bare wooden-floored room with open card tables on which were thrown together glass jewelry, shiny plaster-of-Paris souvenirs, bottles of cheap wine, the liquid bright purple or red as artificial cherry candy in the clear bottles. On one table were scattered bundles of back-issue magazines tied with thin white strings, the faded pictures of burlesque dancers, insane, overdeveloped girls from the country, in obscene poses on the torn covers, their flesh bright pink, like a baby’s, glittering silver stars on their nipples. Men from the docked ships crowded sullenly at the counter, turning the pages of a few loose issues torn from the bundles, one hand in the pockets of their raincoats holding down their erections, their faces set carefully without expression. He had stood in the doorway and known at once their longing and their sense of loss, intuited their overwhelming homelessness, like a great hole torn in their bodies. He had gone quickly back to his work, saddened, troubled for all who sailed at sea.
At night, under the heavy senseless strain of weights too great to be borne, he forgot the vision he’d had in the shop and thought bitterly of Khardov’s box, grinding out wealth for him, but now perpetually stilled, more fragile than anything in the cargo he helped to unload.
He no longer wore his precious clothes, realizing that if something happened to change his fortune it would not do to have them look too threadbare. At work he thought of ways to preserve them, steps he could take to restore them to their former handsomeness. Surely, he would think, moving a large crate into place on a platform, things which cost so much money must still have much of their usefulness left in them. He remembered the location of weavers’ shops he had seen on his walks through the city, and tried to estimate the cost of resurrection to his clothing.
He had come to a country where the tradition of a ruling family stretched backward to the beginning of its history. In the low hills tribes and clans had made their camps, and in each had emerged, by dint of intelligence or force of arms or God’s fiat, one who had been leader, king. It excited him to think about it. Barbarian, horn-helmeted, clothed in skin of tiger or of bear, he had yet embodied even in the placating gesture of hands that calmed the watchers of the lightning, the hearers of the thunder, some major principle of civilization.
The nation was still a provenance of empire, albeit a waning one (each year another governor was recalled). Because its long history had been neither placid nor uninterrupted, there seemed still to drift in the atmosphere claims and counter-claims, whispered conspiracy of pretender and fool. In towns near the capital each old inn had housed its would-be king. Ambition had even become a major theme in the national literature.
Here, he felt, if anywhere, something would turn up. On his free mornings he haunted the palace grounds. A custom made things easier for him. By tradition petitioners of the royal family were allowed to mill about outside the gates to await the arrival of the king’s carriage. At the king’s discretion he might extend one royal glove and the coachman would stop. Then the petitioners would come forward individually (in an order agreed upon among themselves) and standing, eyes lowered, beneath the high gilt sides of the carriage, address the king. He did not stop every day. There was no pattern. Everything was left to royal whim.
He had no desire himself to address the king and was, of course; suspicious of appeals made in this way. The hangers-on about the palace gates were almost always old people, or young hoodlums who came to tease them.
He had stood close enough to hear one old man’s strange request: “Your Highness, I should like to propose myself for a postal stamp. I’ve a remarkable good-looking face. All think so. I’ve been to the authorities but they say it’s your decision, sire, who gets on the postal stamps.”
And the king’s amused reply: “Oh, we’ve postage stamps enough, I think. And an endless supply of faces for them, what with the queen and the children and the war heroes. Wouldn’t a statue suit you better? Think about it and let us know.”
He didn’t really know why he came to these audiences, unless it was because he felt that even
this easily shared proximity to royalty somehow advanced his cause. At any rate, he continued to gather with the others outside the gates despite his own awareness of the king’s disdain and scornful patronage of the mob he was a part of, and he was disappointed on those mornings when the carriage did not stop. Gradually he became familiar with the public habits of the royal family. There was the trip at the beginning of each week to open the parliament, and when it was warm the morning ride in the public park, or the shopping tour of the princess. He could even predict with some accuracy those periods in which the king’s benevolence was running at full tide and he would be sure to stop.
One day he saw a new face in the royal carriage. He was so excited that he had to ask one of the regulars next to him who it was.
“Cousin of the queen. Duke somebody or other.”
He thought he had seen a resemblance between himself and the duke. It was only a remote possibility but he had to follow it up.
“Excuse me, but would you say I look something like the duke? It seems a foolish thing, but as he rode by I thought I saw a resemblance.”
The man looked at him carefully. “Oh, he’s much older than you are.”
“Older, of course, but is there a resemblance?”
“Well, that beard he’s got. That covers him up pretty well. I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I didn’t get a very good look at him. He’s not here often.”
“Yes, of course,” he said, feeling foolish.
“You’ve the same builds now,” the man said. “And maybe around the eyes, though I didn’t get a good look.”
The next morning he came again to the palace gates. In a short while he heard the clatter of the horses pulling the royal carriage. In a moment trumpets blew and the gates were pushed open smartly by the palace guard. The carriage lumbered through and he saw the royal hand go up. In the white glove it seemed flaccid, contemptuous of the crowd it had given the signal to stop for. He heard the wheels skid noisily as the coachman applied the brakes. The king smiled and whispered to the duke beside him, the white glove shielding the side of the king’s mouth. Of course, he thought. He’s mocking us.
He stared steadily at the duke, who was smiling, obviously enjoying himself. He was certain now he had not imagined the resemblance between them. It’s real, he thought, I do look like him.
The man he had spoken to the day before came up beside him. “It’s amazing,” he whispered. “He could almost be your father.”
“I know, I know,” he said hoarsely.
An old woman curtsied at the side of the carriage, her ancient body shaking in the awkward position. She spoke rapidly and he could not hear what she said. At last he heard the king thank her and watched as, still bent in the stiff curtsy, she backed away from the carriage. When she stood, turning to face the crowd, he saw that her face and neck were flushed. Several in the crowd had gathered around her and were demanding in excited voices that she tell them what had been said.
Just then he saw a very tall, white-haired man begin to move forward slowly, approaching the carriage. Before he realized what he was doing he found himself pushing through the crowd urgently, roughly. Walking quickly, he was soon abreast and then ahead of the tall man, who, startled by his brusqueness and misinterpreting what had happened, thinking somehow he had made a mistake and had disgraced himself before his king, stepped back to lose himself in the crowd.
In the meantime he continued to advance, head downward, to the side of the carriage. He stopped when he saw before him, at the level of his chest, the high top of a yellow wheel. He was conscious of the odor of dung and felt a random, irrelevant anger. He stood by the side of the carriage, his eyes inadvertently falling on the small pile of manure flattened precisely at its center where the rim of the wheel pressed on it. He had no idea what he would say, nor why he had so precipitately come forward. His mind burned. He stood there for at least a minute, his head bowed, trying desperately to think of something to say. Finally he heard the king’s voice above him. “Yes?” it said. He could think of nothing. He had no sensation, except for the consciousness of the medallion which hung from his bowed neck like a heavy weight. He could feel the sharp point of the shield shape prick uncomfortably against his flesh. He thought of the terrified eagle, impudent usurper, on its surface, and as he pressed his chin still tighter against his chest it seemed that surely the point of the shield would pierce the skin, as if the talons of the eagle itself might dig themselves into his bunched flesh. Again he heard the voice above him. “Yes? What is it you want?” it asked impatiently. He looked up quickly, jerking his neck, and saw the king’s face looking down into his own. The quickness of the movement had startled the king, but he did not look away. Neither did he avert his own gaze, but stared directly into the king’s face, the frightened eyes. His own eyes strained desperately, as though he were forcing them to see a great distance. He seemed to search for something in the king’s face; he did not himself know what. It was as though he were trying to recognize something there, the horn-helmeted strength perhaps, or the ferocity he had predicated as a premise for kings. At last the king, his outrage mitigated by embarrassment at this stranger’s stare, looked away; his eyes darted nervously to the guards, who came forward quickly. He shot his white glove toward the driver and the carriage lurched away.
A guard came up to him. “Here now, what’s all this?” he said.
He looked at the guard absently for a moment and then began to walk away.
“Wait a minute,” the guard yelled, rushing after him. “Hold on, now. I asked you a question. What’s all this about?”
“He’s all right, Guardsman,” the man said who had spoken to him before. He touched his temple familiarly, obscenely, and winked at the guard. The guard stopped, looked at the man, grinned and made no effort to go after him as he walked off.
During the long day, and then in the evening on the docks, his excitement did not wane. It was self-assertive, something true about himself, like the color of his hair. He went over each detail of his encounter, and though he could not forget that he had behaved stupidly, had stood, hulking and dumb, a great gaping baby, the odor of dung corrosive in the wings of his nose, he did not forget either that it had been the king who had finally averted his eyes. Thinking about the king, he saw him in a new light—pale, delicate, watery, committed not to the obligations of kingship, but merely to its ceremonies, dressed not in the skins of animals he felt he would himself have worn, but in a neat blue uniform, vaguely naval—a king of peace and quiet in a country that kept the armistice, whose borders were historical and as fixed and final as a canceled stamp. He imagined lawn parties and the king—excusing himself, too tired to dance—in the static blue uniform, a banker’s image of a king, the uniform merely a cloth against which one hung red and yellow ribbons, symbols of imaginary campaigns. For himself he eschewed even armor. Kings should ride forth naked into battle, panoplied only by their anger. They should still be what they had been once: leaders, recruiters for the kingdom who, sitting their horse in an open field, could tease a hero from each coward, could shout, “The day is ours.”
But this king had seen him that morning as a kind of enemy, had looked at him through those conceited eyes as he must have looked at all his subjects—as slightly mad. Yet there was a difference. He had elicited fear, had come forward to thrust an assassin’s eyes into his face until, in confusion and terror, the king had been forced to look away. His presence had disturbed the bored placidity of even those hands, white-gloved agents of the royal will, had stiffened them in unfamiliar urgency and made them a real king’s hands, if only for a moment, and if only a frightened king’s. But it would not do, he thought angrily, to be remembered as a madman, and it would not do—he recalled the gesture of the man he had spoken to at the palace gates—to be dismissed as harmless. He was not harmless. If his claims were at all valid (and as yet he had made no claims) their validity was a threat. Made to wait so many years, thrust aside with only the medallion as a
warrant for an insight into his condition, restoration would harm them all.
What he must do now, he thought, was to contact the duke. He did not know his name, nor even his formal title, but that was no real problem. There would be pictures in the newspapers and in the magazines. He even imagined one: a photograph of a man reclining in a lawn chair, the face in profile, the beard heaped in an awkward mound upon the neck.
Nevertheless it took him two weeks to find out the duke’s name, and another week to get his address from the registry. On approaching a clerk in the registry office, he had been so secretive, not realizing that his was a normal request, that the clerk had hesitated, and then, sensing that he was dealing with a man merely unfamiliar with the procedures, had deliberately made him believe that his request had been quite out of the way, hinting to him that certain risks were involved, that he was only a clerk, that he was taking upon himself a terrible responsibility. It had ended by the clerk’s extorting from him a small sum of money that it had not been necessary for him to pay at all.
He wrote a note, composing it several times in order to achieve the properly urgent tone, and sent it to the duke’s home by messenger.
Sir, may I speak with you? It is impossible to reveal anything in a note like this, but I have business which is of extreme importance to the State. You can arrange with the messenger a suitable time for our meeting.
He signed only his first name.
The messenger returned empty-handed.
“Didn’t he get my message?” he asked him, bewildered.
“There was a man at the gate. He said he’d see that the duke got it. I told him there was supposed to be an answer and that I’d wait, but when he came back in a few minutes he tells me, ‘Look, you, don’t you pester your betters with a lot of foolishness.’ ”
He felt rage mount quickly in him. “All right,” he said. “I want you to take another message tomorrow.”
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