Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

ON A FIELD, RAMPANT

Long before he began to wonder about it in any important way, he felt the weight of it, the familiar tug of it against his chest as he moved forward, its heavy, gentle arc as it swung, pendent, from the golden chain about his throat. In bed he felt it like a warm hand pressing against his heart.

What surprised him later was that he had never questioned it, that it had always seemed a quite natural extension of his own body. It had not occurred to him to take it off even in the bath. He could recall lying back in the warm water, somnolent and comfortable, just conscious of its dull glint beneath the surface. Though he enjoyed the subtle shift of its weight in the water, its slow, careful displacements as he moved in the bath, he didn’t really think about it, even as a toy. When he stood and reached for the towel hanging from the curtainless rod above the tub, the medallion, like a metal moon, would catch the light of the electric bulb, and sifting it in its complex corrugated surfaces, throw off thick rings of bright yellow which seemed to sear themselves into his outstretched, upraised hands.

He could not remember when it was he had first looked at it as a thing apart, having properties of its own. Once, as a child in the gymnasium, a classmate had grabbed it as they were running in a game and had held him by it. He felt the pressure of the golden links on the back of his neck. The boy pulled steadily on the medallion and he lurched forward clumsily. Then the boy, grasping the chain in his fists, drew him toward him, hand over hand, as one might draw a rope up a well. When he could feel the other’s face, abrasive against his own, the boy released him suddenly and backed away, pointing at the spinning medallion unsnarling on his chest.

The figures on the medallion were as familiar to him as the features on his face, but for this reason he had been strangely unconscious of them, accepting them through long accommodation, nothing else. One night, shortly after the scene in the gymnasium, he took the medallion from beneath his pajama shirt, and holding it underneath the lamp by his bed, studied it. His finger traced the medallion’s outline, a shield large as a man’s hand. It was made of a thick, crusted gold, almost the color of leather, and its surface bristled with figures in sharp relief. At one edge an animal — perhaps a lion — reared, its body rampant, its front legs pawing the air fiercely, its head angry and turned strangely on its body in vicious confrontation. At the medallion’s center a knight sat stiffly, canted crazily on a horse’s back, and reached a mailed fist toward the thick-feathered legs of an eagle just above his head. The eagle’s head, in profile, hung at a queer angle from the long, naked neck, distended in fright. Its wings seemed to beat the heavy air in a clumsy desperation. Its eye, almost human, and in proportion larger than anything else on the shield, seemed, unlike the dangerously clawed, enraged lion, or the thick-walled mail of the stiff, awkward knight, vulnerable, open to unendurable pain and fright. Its talons clutched a crown shape which somehow in its anguish the eagle appeared to have forgotten it held, as though it protected itself from its attackers absent-mindedly, still clutching some irrelevant baggage. The figures emerged from a field of gradually diminishing darkness, the background, a deep gold the color of old brass, finally exploding in a sunburst of yellow in the eagle’s golden eye.

He had replaced it carefully inside his pajamas and from that time thought of it no longer as a part of his own body but rather as something merged with it, yet isolate: not part of him, but his, like a glass eye or an ivory limb.

He decided to ask his father about it. He and Khardov lived together at the back of Khardov’s shop. He had been a craftsman in precious metals, but the wars and revolutions had ruined his trade and now he repaired watches. In the dark back room where Khardov ate his lunch, even there not out of earshot of the noisy watches, the old man chewed on the raw, doughy bread and spoke to him.

“Time,” he said hoarsely. “Time, time, time,” he said, shrugging, jerking his thumb in the direction of the watches.

The boy looked uneasily at the dark curtain that separated their apartment from the shop.

“Listen to them chattering.” He drew the back of his hand across his cheek where a piece of moist bread had stuck to it. “Even the wars, even the wars, once leisurely and provisional with the news of battle a hard ride three days off, the capital always the last place to fall. Even the wars,” he said, his voice trailing off. He looked at the boy. “Where are your sieges today?” he asked him. “Where are your pitched tents, your massive bivouacs like queer cities of the poor outside the walls? The terrible armies and the gentle, gentle soldiers? Who storms a summer palace now? Isn’t that right, sir? Doesn’t that strike you as right?”

The boy nodded, confused.

“It is to be understood then, sir, that the new national product is the pocket watch. A cheap, sturdy symbol of the times, isn’t that right? And a practical symbol, too. More than the old icons, or the glazed four-color pictures of the dead presidents from the papers.” As Khardov spoke he held in his lap a carved, heavy casket in which were still the last precious shavings from the great times. He had pushed back the lid which slid on smooth wooden rails and let one hand loll idly in the dark box, as a man in a boat trails his hand in cool water. The boy could not see it but he knew that in Khardov’s fingers were the shapeless golden chips, the fragments of platinum and chunks of splintered silver, like the pebbled residuum of some lavish flood.

Khardov had almost finished eating and the boy still had not asked him about the medallion. “Khardov,” he said — he had been told to call him Khardov, not Father—“Khardov, why do I have this?” He pointed to his shirt under which the flat, cool part of the medallion lay against his chest.

He thought for a moment that Khardov might not understand him. He could have been pointing at his heart.

“You have it because it is yours, sir,” Khardov said softly.

This had been (though he could not understand now how naïve he had been; there should have been dozens of times when the subject of the medallion would have come up) the first time he could remember speaking to Khardov about it. Strangely, he had experienced a deep satisfaction in Khardov’s answer. It seemed an absolute confirmation of his own discovery the night before when he had taken the medallion, like the heart from his chest, to examine it beneath the lamp.

Until then, like all children, he’d had no real sense of his own being. His self he had simply accepted with the other natural facts of the world, something which had always existed. But his father’s answer, that he had the medallion because it was his, provided him with an insight into his own uniqueness. It was as if the center of the universe had suddenly and inexplicably shifted. No longer a part of it, he sensed irreconcilable differences between himself and it, but like a castaway who suddenly finds himself on an island to which he is bound only by the physics of geography, he felt an amused tolerance of customs and conditions arrived at through no consultation with himself, and for which he could never be made to answer. Relieved somehow of burdens he had been made to feel only when they had been lifted from him, he experienced a heady freedom. Of course. It was his. He was himself.

One afternoon, not long after his interview with Khardov, he returned from his classes to find a package on his bed. Inside were the richest, finest clothes he had ever seen. There were trousers of so deep a blue that they appeared black. Along the seams stitches were so closely set against each other that they seemed a single fat, stranded thread. “Tailors have gone blind making these,” Khardov boasted to him. There were jackets with wool so thick he could not bunch it in his fist, and high black stockings with silk so sheer that his legs looked gray in them. The heavy shoes he found beneath the bed were of a rich, pungent leather, the color of horses’ saddles on state occasions. He did not wonder where the clothes had come from, or even if they were for him. He put them on quickly and went to stand before the shard of mirror in the kitchen. By standing back far enough he could see, except for his face, his whole reflection. Pleased, he thought of the medallion settled comfortably, with himself inside the heavy clothes.

Behind him Khardov came up and placed himself against the kitchen door with his hands at his sides and his head slightly forward on his neck. “Do I look well, Khardov?” he asked without turning around.

“Yes, sir,” the man replied. “You look splendid.”

His awareness of himself was confused now with a new deep consciousness of the medallion he wore. It seemed to him that the medallion, even more than himself, had achieved an insular security beneath the fine clothes. It had become inviolate, immured, like the precious metal in Khardov’s casket, not so much by the thickness of the covering as by the implicit delicacy of its surroundings. One ripped valuables from a paper bag, but did not touch the pearl at the throat of the great lady fallen in the street.

He discovered later that the packages he frequently found on his bed were paid for by the steady depletion of the gold and silver in Khardov’s box. It was almost as if it, rather than Khardov, were his benefactor (as a young boy he thought of the power of the metals to transform themselves into visible symbols he could wear as somehow self-generative, an implicit condition built comfortably into the very premise of wealth), for as he grew and his needs multiplied, it was, as he by that time knew, only at the expense of the wealth that glittered beneath the ornate surfaces of the carved casket that they were met. Khardov no longer sat in the dark back room solacing his fingers in the rich depths of the box, stirring the opulent shards as he ate his lunch. One day, of course, their little treasury was empty and there were no more packages. As a child he had thought of the metals as fragments broken by main force from heavy sheets of silver and gold, and it saddened him to realize that even these were susceptible of a further and final depletion. He had become used to the silky luxury of the gifts and it was a disappointment to him that they should stop; but in a way, forced as he was to wear clothing that was still fine though no longer new, he was made aware of a subtle shift in his status which was not at all unpleasant to him. With use, the clothing, too substantial ever to become threadbare, gradually lost its gloss, its stiff novelty. An aura of respectable solidity settled over it. The jackets and suits were not old, but aged, and had about them now an aspect of classic and somewhat ancient fashionableness, and although Khardov still managed to find money for fresh and expensive linen — this, somehow, was perishable, like the brittle and yellowing paper notes Khardov traded to obtain it — its silken crispness seemed only to deepen the musty gentility of the rest of his clothing.

Thinking now of the clothes always in relation to the thick casket and its contents, he began to view his life as a syllogism proceeding with a calm deliberateness from the premise of the medallion. From the first the medallion had seemed to hint at some mystery about himself which sooner or later he would have to solve. Even the handsome clothes which had drained the box had gone, not so much to dress him, as to set off the medallion, as though all arrangements in his life were controlled finally by the eccentric object which hung about his neck. There was something curiously effeminate about his position, ludicrously not unlike a woman’s commitment to a strangely colored handbag which, accessory to nothing, makes ceaseless demands on her wardrobe. He told Khardov about his feelings, and although the old man laughed he had seemed angry. Later Khardov came to him. “You were right, sir,” he said. “It was perceptive in you to see that. The poor man’s rags are given outright, but golden raiments are always lent. They are a responsibility. If this seems to diminish you, remember they are a responsibility only the very few can have.”

Increasingly he enjoyed going out among the few people he knew. It may have seemed to others that he glided too smoothly among them. Like a man on ice skates nodding to friends who stand by less sure of themselves, he went from one to the other, asking of this one’s health, desiring to be remembered to that one’s family. He sensed that others hung back from him and assumed at first that it was his dress, so different from their own, which had made him seem somehow too forbidding and caused their caution, forcing them apart from him, as one steps aside for a man in a uniform one has never worn. He understood later, however, that his interest must have seemed patronizing to them, and he was hurt that they should misinterpret his sincere affection. Gradually, though, he concluded that their suspicion of him was not entirely unjustified, that he had held something of himself in reserve. It was, he decided, a flaw in his character. He resolved to correct it. But once, after he was a grown man, a mistress of his, having had too much to drink, refused to use his name in talking to him. Instead, she kept on calling him “Jehovah.” Finally, in some anger, he asked her why she did this. “Because,” she said, “you show me only your behind.”

In the evenings, even from the first, he read a good deal. Khardov brought him the books — elaborate, heavy treatises on government; heroic, copious histories of an older world; statements of political philosophy; royalist tracts; the diaries and secret papers of personages in famous courts; and novels, many novels. It was the novels which he read with an increasing absorption. Gradually he began to return more and more of the other books unread and to demand of Khardov that he bring him still more novels. These were always romances, books with involved, old-fashioned plots. He had no illusions about their art, but he experienced a never diminishing satisfaction and excitement in the stories of depressed but golden lovers whose difficulties were invariably that they lived in worlds of frozen status. He read with a double tension. Delighted with the tales of the sons of struggling merchants, of traveling circus performers, and the strong, tanned boys of gamekeepers, he sensed in them, in their careful language, in their unaccountable benevolence in worlds fraught with evil and terror, in their almost jejune resistance to temptation, what their petite, soprano-throated girl friends sensed in them — a quality, an essence which would not submerge, which popped like a cork to the surface in even the wildest storms and displacements of their condition. For him it was not the wart or mole or scarlet pimpernel which in the last act of their drama finally brought recognition even from the enemy who stood to lose because the prince was found. It was not the superficial deformity, scar of quality so important to others that was important to him. It was rather a concept, the validity of which he came increasingly to recognize as he raced through the novels — a concept of blood itself. He knew his man long before the dullard others did, spotting them their familiarity with the telltale wound inflicted on the inner thigh by ruffians at birth. A man’s blood was his character, he knew. At the same time he experienced a real anxiety that for once the heroine would not find out in time, that the gypsy would be killed before things could work themselves out. But it was not the hero’s marriage which he longed for; he did not yearn for the pale and distant princess. He wanted one thing for the hero, one thing only. He wanted restoration. To him it was a daring and delicious word. He said it under his breath.

It was a pleasant life, but he knew, even from the beginning, that the sense of special condition he felt so deeply was not forever to be enjoyed passively. All right, he reasoned. I have known for a long time that I am different. But I know no more about myself than does a small child. I have no facts.

Instead of gratitude to Khardov he felt a growing resentment. The quality, the essence he could identify so easily in the heroes he read about, he recognized in himself. He was something—a prince of the blood — something other than what he seemed. To be grateful for a few fine clothes, for Khardov’s open deference, for the leisure he enjoyed, for the promise swinging on his chest, was foolish. Like feeling gratitude toward the clerk who hands out the money when one makes a withdrawal from the bank. What he wanted now, needed, was not the small change of personal assurance, nor Khardov’s blank checks on his specialness — conspiratorial drafts on a vague but somehow splendid future. He needed only what his blood demanded: restoration. If one wanted it for stranger/heroes in foolish romances, one insisted upon it for oneself.

Toward his twentieth year he went to Khardov.

“Look here, Khardov,” he said. “You’ve been hinting at things long enough. What is it you know?”

“Don’t be angry, sir. Please.”

“Angry? Of course I’m angry. You act more like a family retainer than a father. The things you know. Who are you? What am I to you?”

“Haven’t I provided? I’m not rich, you know that. But I have provided. You’ve never wanted.”

“I know that. I know all that. You’ve been very kind. But there are too many things I don’t understand. Please, Khardov. What do you know about me?”

“I know that you are worthy to be who you are.”

“Who is that?”

“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 helpless 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 happily 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.

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.”

“Sir,” the messenger said, “do you think I’d better? These are important people.”

“I pay you, don’t I?” he said angrily. “You’ll take the message all right.”

The messenger, aware of his own innocence, of his status as a go-between — he had not even read the first note — allowed himself to be coaxed by the promise of more money. He watched as the crazy fellow before him quickly scribbled a second note.

Sir, evidently you did not trust my first communication to you. I appreciate that we are strangers to each other and that my advances are unorthodox, but I assure you that my business is real. Please advise my messenger when we may meet.

But when the messenger returned, again he had brought no answer.

He decided to go himself, and the next morning, dressed in the finest of the clothes remaining to him but conscious that his work on the docks had thickened his chest and arms so that the garments no longer hung loosely on him, he followed the messenger’s complicated directions and appeared before the duke’s estate. He went up to an old stone sentry box that stood beside the locked gate.

“Yes, sir?” a voice said within the dark box.

He peered inside but could not see the man who had spoken. “I’m to see the duke,” he said finally, apparently to the low sloping eaves of the box.

“Have you an appointment, sir?”

He thought for a moment of lying, but realized that the fellow would probably ask his name and then call the house to check.

“I’ve sent messages.”

“Oh, so you’re the one,” the voice said as a large, florid man stepped quickly from the recesses of the box. “Persistent, ain’t you? Where’s the little fellow?”

“I’ve come myself.”

“His Grace thought you might show up today. It’s the police for you, boy-o!”

“Give this message to the duke. He’ll see me.” He handed the man a note he had written that morning.

Sir, I have twice sent communications petitioning for a meeting between us, and twice my messenger has been rebuffed. I am not at all sure you have seen my notes. Until I have some definite word from your Grace that you do not wish to meet with me, I’m afraid I must continue to harass you in this way. Today I have come myself and await an answer by your front gate.”

“No more messages, lad. No more messages.”

“All right,” he shouted. “That’s enough.” He produced the medallion from beneath his shirt. “Now you go in there immediately and take this message to the duke. If he doesn’t want to see me, let him write the word ‘No’ on the back of my note.”

The gateman hesitated and looked closely at the man before him. He hadn’t really noticed the clothes before; they were peculiar, foreign like, but he could tell they were expensive. And that badge he’d flashed. He reached his hand toward the folded note and took it quietly.

“Wait here, please,” he said. “I’ll find his Grace.”

The gateman retreated into the sentry box, opened a door at its rear, flooding it with light, and emerged on the other side of the gate. Turning, he carefully closed the door and locked it from the outside. Instantly the box was black again. He watched the gateman mount a motorcycle with a wide sidecar attached to it and ride off in the direction of the main house.

He was elated. The day was bright and very clear; the air, for all the hard, sharp sunlight, was cool and smelled of the sea wide and clear and deep behind him. It was good to be in the handsome clothes again. His shoes, carefully polished that morning, glowed richly through a thin layer of dust from the road, but this came off easily as he buffed each shoe against a silken sock. Adjusting his clothing, he noticed that the medallion still hung outside his jacket. It was rich and golden against the brown background of the jacket, and for a moment he considered allowing it to remain there, exposed, mounted handsomely, a rich trophy of his identity. He was pleased that it had lost none of its power and remembered the other times it had served as his calling card, instantly melting the recalcitrance and resistance with which people chose to oppose him.

If the duke were to see him, he thought, he would come directly to the point. It would be good to have it all over with. This was a good country; he would not begin again in another.

A man went by him pushing a bicycle. He nodded warmly at the fellow and watched, amused, as the cyclist finally managed a shy reply to his greeting.

He returned his gaze to the house, one wing of which he could see through the tall leafy trees which guarded it. He stood very still, conscious again of the dead weight of the medallion, which he had carefully replaced inside his shirt, as one slips valuables inside an envelope.

In a moment he heard the guttural approach of the motorcycle and saw it emerge from the trees as the driveway curved into the gate by which he stood. He could see that someone sat in the sidecar, but annoyed that he should be seen staring through the bars like a curious child, he turned his back and looked out over the sea, tapping his foot like a busy man waiting for a door to open. He heard the motor stop and the gateman address the man in the sidecar. “He’s right there, sir. I’ll get him for you.” It was probably the duke, then, whom the gateman had brought.

He turned casually, feigning surprise as the guard approached him from the other side of the gate. “I’ve brought someone to see you, sir,” the man announced.

He looked past the gateman to the motorcycle and was surprised to see that it had been parked behind thick, high bushes about fifteen feet from him and to the side of the driveway. The motorcycle’s front end canted around the bush, its large headlamp and wide handlebars incongruously resembling a quizzical animal looking out at him. If the man in the sidecar did not stand up it would be impossible to see him. “Is it the duke?” he asked the gateman, who by this time had disappeared too, retreating inside the sentry box. He remained at the gate, trying to see through the dappled shadows of the trees and the deceptive openings in the bushes. At last a voice, queerly muffled, addressed him. “Yes?” it said.

“Good morning,” he said, his eyes fixed on the motorcycle’s front tire.

“All that’s all right,” the voice said. “What do you want here?”

He heard a low laugh from inside the sentry box. He regarded it angrily for a moment and then looked back in the direction of the motorcycle. The leaves, stirred by a low wind, twinkled brightly. “Are you the duke, sir? My business is with the duke.”

“Oh,” the voice said, “your business again. We’ve heard a precious lot about your business lately. You write a rude, anarchist’s prose, do you know that? And you’ve a good deal to learn about the art of the ultimatum.” The man made a clicking sound with his tongue.

“You’re here,” he said slyly.

The man in the sidecar laughed, and the sound was echoed by a low chuckle from the sentry box. He walked to the box quickly and peered into the blackness. The gateman disparaged him with the same clicking sounds the man in the sidecar had made. “Here now. Here now. You’ve no business with me.”

He went back to the gate and placed his hands, wide apart, on two of the iron bars. “Please,” he said gently, “could you stand up a moment? I must be sure you’re the duke.”

“Oh, so that’s it. You are an anarchist. Probably want to get a shot at me. Let me warn you, the gateman is armed. Now, what is it you want?”

He hesitated.

“All right. All right. I’m the duke. Isn’t that right, gateman?”

“That’s right, sir,” said the gateman sepulchrally inside the dark sentry box.

“There. You see? Now go ahead with your business. I’ve got business too, you know.”

It was ridiculous. If they chose to play with him he would be helpless. They would not care enough about his claims even to reject them. This was no disinterested duke on a yacht. Sick at heart, he thought wearily of the man who wanted to have his face on postage stamps.

“What is it, please?” the man in the sidecar said.

All he could do was to tell his story and hope it was the duke to whom he was talking. “Very well,” he said. “I can only assume that so wise a man as the duke would not send a servant to hear business as urgent as my own.” Again the gateman laughed, though this time the sound was muffled, as though he had put his wrist in his mouth.

It would be best to begin quickly, he thought. Addressing himself to the concealed man, he told him first of the medallion, then of Khardov’s oblique hints, and finally of his own great expectations. Spoken aloud, it did not sound like very good evidence even to himself, but the man in the sidecar did not interrupt him and he hoped that he had struck some responsive chord. He finished by adding that he was satisfied that he had no legitimate claims in any of the other countries he had visited; it seemed to him that this added somehow to the force of his claim in this country. “There’s one other thing,” he said. “You see, there’s a strong resemblance between myself and the duke.” He waited for some response from the man in the sidecar. Finally there was a long, loud laugh. He stood in terrible confusion as the laughter of the man in the sidecar mingled with the laughter of the gateman. Soon both were laughing and coughing uncontrollably.

He turned to go. As he walked off, the laughter stopped and a voice called out clearly behind him. “No, no. Don’t go. Let’s have a look at you.” He turned around. The man had stepped from the sidecar and come out into the open. He had a full beard.

The duke came up to the gate and stood there looking at him. “Well, well,” he said finally. “There is a resemblance. Not as striking as all that, of course, but we’ll see, we’ll see. Let’s have a look at that medallion.”

He waited to see if it was a trick.

“Come on, come on,” the duke urged.

He walked back to the gate and again took the medallion from beneath his shirt. He did not remove it, but standing very close to the gate and turning the medallion sideways, handed it through the bars to the duke. The duke held it in his palm, studying it, turning it over to look at its back. Finally he let it go and the medallion swung back, clanging against the bars. He slipped it back inside his clothes and buttoned his shirt wordlessly, finally adjusting his tie.

“This is marvelous,” the duke said. “A pretender. Why, we haven’t had a pretender in the family for over two hundred years. I wonder if we still know how to deal with them. We used to be very good, you know, very efficient in a crude sort of way. Stabbings, hangings, forest ambushes, that sort of thing. That will all have changed by now, of course, but we’ll work something out. A pretender. I’m delighted, sir.” The duke thrust his hand between the gateposts. He hesitated, then shook the outstretched hand. “Well, now,” the duke said, “come inside. Gateman. We’ve much to talk about. This Khardov is quite a man.”

He got into the sidecar with the duke and was driven by the gateman back to the main house, the duke talking animatedly to him all the way.

“Let’s see now,” the duke said when they were sitting together in the book-walled study, “you’ll have to decide whose son you are. Have you thought much about that? Rupert’s? Edward’s? Eleanor’s? My own, perhaps, had not an unfortunate hunting accident disqualified me from kingmaking. It’s a delicate point in your scheme. You see, it would not have been worthwhile for anyone outside the immediate family to have done you in. A prince’s boy, that would be the very thing. Earls have more children, of course, but standing so far down in the line of succession, they’re rarely in anyone’s way. We’re all quite comfortable with earls, really. They make splendid, non-competitive cousins.”

“I was wrong to come,” he said. “I’m sorry to have troubled you.”

“Not at all. I perfectly understand. You want to be a king. Or a prince. Or even a duke, eh? I know. It’s very important. Blood is the one absolute left us.”

“Please,” he said.

“The World’s Last Pretender. That’s quite a title in itself. The one man so thoroughly detached from the way things are that he still aspires to a way of life which everyone else long ago dismissed as legitimately desirable. That’s refreshing. Why, it’s more — it’s flattering. Thank you. Thank you very much.”

“All right,” he said. “I’m sorry to have troubled you.”

He returned to the docks. It was not clear to him why he felt as he did but he was surprised to realize that he was not angry. He felt only weariness and a wish to be done with things. He had banked all these years neither on evidence, nor on manufacturing a case, nor on logic; blood itself was his case, the medallion its only sign. Nothing else had mattered. He had banked on recognition, had trusted in a consummation which would come about simply because there were no alternatives. His physiognomy was his scarlet pimpernel, his strawberry of quality on rosy backside. If there were to be resistance he would no longer put forward his claims. It was strange, but in all this time the duke’s laughter had been the only valid argument against those claims. Had he been what he thought he was, there would have been no laughter; there would have been only the meeting of eyes, the swift joy of reclamation.

That evening a man asked to see him. He went wearily to the foreman’s office, and as he stepped into the dim room he made out the forms of several men sitting around a cold and ancient stove. They spoke to each other in low tones. Seeing him, one looked up.

“Come over here, fellow, would you? There’s a man,” he said.

“Yes?” he asked.

“What’s the story?” another said quietly. “You got anything on the duke?”

“What’s that?”

“We’ve heard,” someone else said.

“Let’s have a look at that badge. How about it?”

“Who are you men?” he asked.

“Journalists.”

“Reporters, fellow. Now what’s it all about? You’ve got claims against the Crown? What’s there to it?”

“ ‘DOCKER WOULD BE KING,’ ” a man said, reading an imaginary headline. “ ‘IMMIGRANT CARGO HANDLER SAYS HE’S NATION’S RIGHTFUL MAJESTY!’ ”

“ ‘PRETENDER HAS MEDALLION WHICH TRACES LINEAGE TO ANCIENT DAYS OF KINGDOM.’ ”

“‘ “AMAZING RESEMBLANCE TO DUKE” SAYS DUKE’S OWN GATEMAN.’ ”

“ ‘DOCKMAN DEFIES DUKE.’ ”

“ ‘DOCKMAN DEFIES DUKE, DARES DUKE TO DUEL!’ ”

“ ‘MAKE-BELIEVE MONARCH.’ ”

“ ‘CARGO CON MAN CLAIMS KINGDOM!’ ”

“ ‘KHARDOV CREATES KINGDOM FOR CARGO KING.’ ”

“ ‘WHO IS KHARDOV?’ ”

“What is this?” he asked again. “How do you know about me?”

“Are you going all the way with this, mister, or did you just want some quick publicity?”

“Who are your backers?”

“Any influence with the people?”

Suddenly a bulb exploded in his face. It pierced the room with a bright, blue-white light, and he thrust his hands to his eyes defensively.

“Not used to having your picture taken, right, fellow?”

“The gateman said he keeps that medallion inside his shirt.”

“Let’s have a look at it, mister.”

“No. Get out of here. Please.”

“Come on, a shot of the medallion.”

“It’ll be good for your campaign.”

“There’s no campaign,” he said. “Please. There’s no campaign.”

“Come on now, one shot and we’ll get out of here.”

“Grab his arms, someone.”

“Come on. The shirt, the shirt. I’ve got him.”

There were half a dozen pairs of hands on him. They closed about his mouth, his eyes. Someone held him by his throat. He felt hard fingers jabbing at his chest. Someone was trying to unbutton his shirt.

“Rip it off,” somebody said. “We can’t hold him all night.”

He heard the anguished ripping of material like a quick, low scream. He struggled with somebody’s hands, forcing his own hands toward his chest, trying to protect his medallion. His fingers closed around a loose button on his shirt. It came off convulsively and he felt it, something alien, in his hand. “Please,” he screamed. “Please.” There was another sudden brightness flaring in the darkness and he struck out at the reporters. Strangely saddened, conscious of a peculiar loss, he dropped the button.

“I could use a few more shots but you’d better let him go.”

“ ‘PRESS PUMMELS PRETENDER PRINCE,’ ” a man said, giggling nervously.

“ ‘MONARCH’S MEDAL MEDDLED!’ ”

Then, suddenly, he was free. They let him go and he stumbled backward, clumsily slumping into a chair. Someone took another photograph. Dazed, he thought of heat lightning on a summer night.

The photographers gathered in front of him in a half circle. On their knees they aimed their cameras at him as he sat, stunned and dulled, in the chair. One man, stooping slightly and holding his camera balanced carefully before him, backed away from him slowly. A final explosion of light filled the room. It was as though they had been striking matches under his eyes. “That’s it,” one called. “Let’s get out of here.” He could not see them clearly. They moved, blocks of greater and lesser darknesses, like huge, dimly seen, milky chunks of ice retreating slowly in some northern ocean.

“Wait,” he called, not sure they were still in the room, “I have no claims.” There was no answer. “I have no claims,” he shouted. They had not heard him. They would print their story and their pictures and he would appear, tattered and brawling, in their papers, like one deranged, his claims distorted, insisted upon. He would never be able to explain that it was all a harmless hunch that he had acted upon but once. He rubbed his eyes. Gradually he was conscious of the medallion which hung exposed, obscenely visible through the torn shirt, like the phallus of a careless old man.

For three days he lay on the cot in his work clothes, sick in his shabby room. He knew he was feverish. The medallion felt cold against his skin, and once he took it off. He removed the chain from his neck and wrapped it about the medallion; it was very heavy in his hand. He would have liked to throw it away, but at the last minute he found that he could not do it. He had had it too long — all his life. Even its shape, he thought. His very heart must have taken its shape by now. He thought of his heart, shield-shaped beneath his rib cage. He put the chain back around his throat, and again the medallion lay against his skin, a dead weight, useless and cold.

He wondered if Khardov was still alive. My father, he thought. My kingmaker. What a joke he had played. What a joke!

He would have liked to write him. It would be a very long letter. It was too bad he had no strength. The founder of kingdoms would have liked it. He could tell him how he had wasted his life, how it had been dissipated…

How had it? In disappointment? It was strange, but he knew that disappointment was not among the ruins of feelings lying about him like collapsed, dropped pants. Nor was failure. Nor frustration. Nor pity for his cause. Yet he knew a sense of dreadful, terrible waste. Nothing could be reclaimed, nothing, and he gnashed his teeth and ground his fist into his palm. That was it, he thought. It had been thrown away, dissipated in anger, in outrage at imagined affronts, his energy destroyed by a dubious righteousness. It was as though his life had been sliced thin by a daily, steady outrage, as real as pain. He took the medallion in his hands and looked at it. He had often wondered which of the figures was meant to represent himself. The knight, militant astride the horse, pledged to some unknown cause, his fury, like his loyalty, merely a technique? The lion, defiant, all its weight in the vicious arching outrage of its paws? The eagle, its legs and feet in queer, attenuated taper, as nude as spikes, its talons curved about the crown shape in the act of usurpation, fantastically appearing to perch on it in mid-air, like any canary on its toy swing?

He looked more closely at the figures. The hauberked knight was protected by his armor. He would not feel the blows of enemies. His cause was borrowed anyway, something not his own. The eagle, intimidated, bewildered in his adventitious majesty, had not meant to grasp the crown. The eagle bespoke accident. It was the lion then, rampant, the claws bursting from the furred paws, its rage, like his own, concentrated on no object, irrelevant but steady, just steady, spraying the air like spit. It was the lion, then, at the edge of the shield as at the edge of the jungle — loose, lost, peripheral, partner to nothing.

But there was something more than outrage. From the very beginning there was the hope, not tarnished even now, on the cot in the shabby room, in the broken house, in the wounded neighborhood, in the strange city, in the alien country, in the unfamiliar hemisphere, in, at last, the unresponsive world — the hope, conviction even, that in a real way he had been a prince. A real one. There had been no sports cars climbing the sides of hills along the Mediterranean, nor racquets stitched crisscross on a jacket, nor education at an American university, nor hilarious incognito revels, nor grandly formal balls where stag lines of princesses waited for him to choose among them for a dance. Although he had known none of the conditions of the prince, he had felt like one. He still did; he could feel it now. Precious. His identity. He would have to tell Khardov that too.

There was the question, of course, of what he was to do with his life now. He had not anticipated failure — his dream had been too wild. Yet failure had changed everything. It was one thing for the king, biding his time, awaiting his chance, to seek anonymity, to float on the oceans of the world, to hide behind the cargoes piled high on those oceans’ docks; it was quite another thing for himself, the man of no hope, in whose heart no conviction burned steady as a painted flame. But he saw that it made no difference to him. His failure had been of gross proportions. To mitigate it, to settle for less, and so much less — to bargain, as it were, with his fate — would hardly do. He would not settle for less, but for least. He determined that when his fever went down he would return to the docks.

In three days he was well. It was painful for him to think of what the newspapers must have printed about him. Now there would be strange looks, perhaps words, from the other workers. He could imagine himself as he must seem to them. Quiet, sober, steady, the very man to nurse some wild, impossible dream. The gentle husband who one day slays his wife and small son, who rapes children, whose love nest is discovered. “Those quiet guys,” they would say, “they’re the ones to watch.” “Still waters,” they would say.

He dressed slowly. As he was tucking the medallion into his shirt he paused. There would be trouble. They would ask to see it. If he wore it exposed they would not say anything. It would shame them and they would avoid him. It was only the appearance of sanity that would drive them to ferret out the gauche detail, the unhealthy fact. Exposed, they would look away from it, or through it, pretending it was not there, as one looks away from a spastic in the street. He left the medallion on the dark denim shirt. It flared there like the sun in a night sky.

He returned to the docks. In the locker room the foreman looked at him peculiarly but said nothing. As he started outside the man called after him. “Hey,” he said.

He turned slowly. “Yes?”

“Next time you’re going to be out for a few days you’d better call in.”

“I will,” he said. “I certainly will.”

“That was some story about you in the papers,” the foreman said. “Well, just do your work and I got no complaint.”

“I will,” he said.

He worked quickly. From time to time he noticed some of the men watching him, but no one bothered him. The man he worked with worked as steadily as himself. At midnight it was time to quit. He heard the long, low whistle. “I guess that’s it,” he said to the man who worked beside him.

“That’s right,” the man said quietly.

He returned his gear to the locker room and went upstairs, coming out at the foot of an old wooden pier. A merchant vessel, its portholes blazing, was anchored at the pier. He looked up and saw some of the crew leaning against the railing. They were staring in his direction. As he walked along he was conscious of unusual activity on the dock. The shifts have changed, he thought. Women passed, looking at him. He saw small children huddled along the wharf. They looked like orphans. He walked on uneasily, tired.

Across the street, in front of a sailors’ bar, a group of cripples had convened quietly. Standing there, maimed, their canes and crutches a complex of tangled wood, they looked strangely like a team of athletes before the beginning of a game. Next to them was a group of beggars. They held boxes of pencils and faded paper flowers in their caps. One extended a torn jeweler’s card on which were mounted two red-glass earrings. A night clerk from one of the flophouses stared sullenly from beneath his green eye shade, a gaudy elastic sleeve band on each arm. A cook from the steamy kitchen of some restaurant, his apron stained with orange blood, leaned against a wall, smoking.

As he watched, the bars seemed to empty, the patrons — old sailors, whores, bums — filing silently into the street. They lined up in front of store fronts all the way down the block. They looked like people preparing to watch a parade. Here and there a tourist stood among them adjusting his camera lens, his empty case swinging at the ends of leather straps.

He heard a cry, triumphant, strong — clear and urgent in the silent street as a call for help. “There he is,” it shouted. He heard it again and saw an old woman, lame, her neck and face covered with running sores, push herself with her crutch away from the group of cripples, as one in a rowboat shoves away from the shore with an oar. “There he is,” she screamed again. The cry was amazingly strong in the old, wounded throat. It was delirious, transfixed. Others took it up and in their frenzy began to stumble forward, blindly shouldering each other out of the way.

It was him they meant.

They crowded toward him, one wave after another coming down toward him from the high curb. He stood in the cobbled street wondering if he dared to run. He looked about him. Others were coming from behind. He stood very still and raised his arms defensively, thinking they would fall upon him. His movement checked them. The ones in front stopped where they were and petitioned silence from the ones behind who had not seen his gesture. He heard their warnings for silence retreating into the deep fringes of the crowd ringed about him.

He stood now, immobile, directly in their center. He thought they meant to kill him. “What do you want?” he asked finally.

No one answered. They stared stupidly. One pointed to the medallion about his throat and the others looked in the direction of the pointing finger. He heard them gasp, shocked, thrilled.

“What do you want?” he repeated, raising his voice.

“We believe you,” the old crippled woman in the vanguard of the crowd called out.

“You’re what you say you are,” another said fiercely.

“You’re one of us. Tell them. Tell them. Tell them,” cried an old man.

“Tell them about us,” a whore said ecstatically.

“It don’t have to be this way. It don’t have to be this way,” a drunk was crying.

“Please, sir,” a beggar urged.

“Prince,” a cripple murmured.

“King,” another whined.

“Lord!” a young woman, pregnant, drunk, whispered hoarsely.

He stared at them unbelievingly. Their broken faces, beatific, rapturous, were soft and stained with grief and love. They fixed their looks of patient ecstasy upon him, their weak sad freight of disease and despair and hope and love. He could feel their senseless love mounting steadily, building, bursting in upon him like waters that have split their banks. Feeling it, he knew that he would never be the same. It poisoned him, staining him like dirty, broken furniture in a room from which flood waters have retreated.

Suddenly an old man stepped tentatively forward. There was something familiar about his patient shuffle. It was the man he had stood next to outside the palace gates, the one who had wanted his face on the postage stamps. “Sir….” he began.

The rage, unfeigned, pure as poison, rattled in him. Instantly the chain of the medallion was in his hand and he was beating the man across his face, cutting him with the sharp shield shape. The man fell fragilely, sprawling at his feet in some final, terrible parody of petition. Helplessly he dropped the medallion, hearing the links and shield collapse goldenly in the silent street.

The mob seemed to undulate, to sway transfixed. Now they would kill him — now. Someone pressed forward. He heard the serene, leathery creak of wooden crutches. Now they would kill him. He waited, thinking irrelevantly of the fine wool woven from the precious shards in Khardov’s box, of his heavy leather shoes, untenanted, gathering dust in the closet in his shabby room, of the places he had seen, of tips left on glass tables under beach umbrellas on golden shores, of dusty carrels in quiet libraries, big, heavy books open on the ancient desks, the faded colored pictures of escutcheons across the huge pages like panels in a comic strip.

“Please, sir. Please, sir.” He looked down. The old woman, bent beneath him on her ruined legs, extended the medallion toward him.

He felt his rage, final, immense, filling him like fragments from a dropped glass spreading widely across a bare floor.

“Bastards. Bastards. You bastards,” he roared.

On the medallion the lion; on the cobbled street himself: rampant, inflamed, enraged, furious with their golden hate.