It was, of course, natural that he should think of going to America. Two vague aunts with whom his mother had quarreled many years ago still lived there in comparative affluence. But the idea was repugnant to the prejudices his mother had implanted in him, and besides he hadn’t sufficient money left to pay for his passage over. Until a possible counter-revolution should restore to him the Rostoff properties in Russia he must somehow keep alive in France.
So he went to the little city he knew best of all. He went to Cannes. His last two hundred francs bought him a third-class ticket and when he arrived he gave his dress-suit to an obliging party who dealt in such things and received in return money for food and bed. He was sorry afterward that he had sold the dress-suit, because it might have helped him to a position as a waiter. But he obtained work as a taxi-driver instead and was quite as happy, or rather quite as miserable, at that.
Sometimes he carried Americans to look at villas for rent, and when the front glass of the automobile was up, curious fragments of conversation drifted out to him from within.
“——heard this fellow was a Russian prince.” … “Sh!” … “No, this one right here.” … “Be quiet, Esther!”—followed by subdued laughter.
When the car stopped, his passengers would edge around to have a look at him. At first he was desperately unhappy when girls did this; after awhile he didn’t mind anymore. Once a cheerfully intoxicated American asked him if it were true and invited him to lunch, and another time an elderly woman seized his hand as she got out of the taxi, shook it violently and then pressed a hundred-franc note into his hand.
“Well, Florence, now I can tell ’em back home I shook hands with a Russian prince.”
The inebriated American who had invited him to lunch thought at first that Val was a son of the czar, and it had to be explained to him that a prince in Russia was simply the equivalent of a British courtesy lord. But he was puzzled that a man of Val’s personality didn’t go out and make some real money.
“This is Europe,” said Val gravely. “Here money is not made. It is inherited or else it is slowly saved over a period of many years and maybe in three generations a family moves up into a higher class.”
“Think of something people want—like we do.”
“That is because there is more money to want with in America. Everything that people want here has been thought of long ago.”
But after a year and with the help of a young Englishman he had played tennis with before the war, Val managed to get into the Cannes branch of an English bank. He forwarded mail and bought railroad tickets and arranged tours for impatient sight-seers. Sometimes a familiar face came to his window; if Val was recognized he shook hands; if not he kept silence. After two years he was no longer pointed out as a former prince, for the Russians were an old story now—the splendor of the Rostoffs and their friends was forgotten.
He mixed with people very little. In the evenings he walked for awhile on the promenade, took a slow glass of beer in a café, and went early to bed. He was seldom invited anywhere because people thought that his sad, intent face was depressing—and he never accepted anyhow. He wore cheap French clothes now instead of the rich tweeds and flannels that had been ordered with his father’s from England. As for women, he knew none at all. Of the many things he had been certain about at seventeen, he had been most certain about this—that his life would be full of romance. Now after eight years he knew that it was not to be. Somehow he had never had time for love—the war, the revolution and now his poverty had conspired against his expectant heart. The springs of his emotion which had first poured forth one April night had dried up immediately and only a faint trickle remained.
His happy youth had ended almost before it began. He saw himself growing older and more shabby, and living always more and more in the memories of his gorgeous boyhood. Eventually he would become absurd, pulling out an old heirloom of a watch and showing it to amused young fellow clerks who would listen with winks to his tales of the Rostoff name.
He was thinking these gloomy thoughts one April evening in 1922 as he walked beside the sea and watched the never-changing magic of the awakening lights. It was no longer for his benefit, that magic, but it went on, and he was somehow glad. Tomorrow he was going away on his vacation, to a cheap hotel farther down the shore where he could bathe and rest and read; then he would come back and work some more. Every year for three years he had taken his vacation during the last two weeks in April, perhaps because it was then that he felt the most need for remembering. It was in April that what was destined to be the best part of his life had come to a culmination under a romantic moonlight. It was sacred to him—for what he had thought of as an initiation and a beginning had turned out to be the end.
He paused now in front of the Café des Étrangers and after a moment crossed the street on an impulse and sauntered down to the shore. A dozen yachts, already turned to a beautiful silver color, rode at anchor in the bay. He had seen them that afternoon, and read the names painted on their bows—but only from habit. He had done it for three years now, and it was almost a natural function of his eye.
“Un beau soir ,” remarked a French voice at his elbow. It was a boatman who had often seen Val here before. “Monsieur finds the sea beautiful?”
“Very beautiful.”
“I too. But a bad living except in the season. Next week, though, I earn something special. I am paid well for simply waiting here and doing nothing more from eight o’clock until midnight.”
“That’s very nice,” said Val politely.
“A widowed lady, very beautiful, from America, whose yacht always anchors in the harbor for the last two weeks in April. If the Privateer comes tomorrow it will make three years.”
V
All night Val didn’t sleep—not because there was any question in his mind as to what he should do, but because his long stupefied emotions were suddenly awake and alive. Of course he must not see her—not he, a poor failure with a name that was now only a shadow—but it would make him a little happier always to know that she remembered. It gave his own memory another dimension, raised it like those stereopticon glasses that bring out a picture from the flat paper. It made him sure that he had not deceived himself—he had been charming once upon a time to a lovely woman, and she did not forget.
An hour before train time next day he was at the railway station with his grip, so as to avoid any chance encounter in the street. He found himself a place in a third-class carriage of the waiting train.
Somehow as he sat there he felt differently about life—a sort of hope, faint and illusory, that he hadn’t felt twenty-four hours before. Perhaps there was some way in these next few years in which he could make it possible to meet her once again—if he worked hard, threw himself passionately into whatever was at hand. He knew of at least two Russians in Cannes who had started over again with nothing except good manners and ingenuity and were now doing surprisingly well. The blood of Morris Hasylton began to throb a little in Val’s temples and made him remember something he had never before cared to remember—that Morris Hasylton, who had built his daughter a palace in St. Petersburg, had also started from nothing at all.
Simultaneously another emotion possessed him, less strange, less dynamic but equally American—the emotion of curiosity. In case he did—well, in case life should ever make it possible for him to seek her out, he should at least know her name.
He jumped to his feet, fumbled excitedly at the carriage handle and jumped from the train. Tossing his valise into the check room he started at a run for the American consulate.
“A yacht came in this morning,” he said hurriedly to a clerk, “an American yacht—the Privateer. I want to know who owns it.”
“Just a minute,” said the clerk, looking at him oddly. “I’ll try to find out.”
After what seemed to Val an interminable time he returned.
“Why, just a minute,” he repeated hesitantly. “We’re—it seems we’re finding out.”