. . . but there he deserted her—he must press on toward the Isles of Greece, the cloudy waters of unfamiliar ports, the lost girl on shore, the moon of popular songs. A part of Dick’s mind was made up of the tawdry souvenirs of his boyhood. Yet in that somewhat littered Five-and-Ten, he had managed to keep alive the low painful fire of intelligence.
XVII
Tommy Barban was a ruler, Tommy was a hero—Dick happened upon him in the Marienplatz in Munich, in one of those cafés, where small gamblers diced on “tapestry” mats. The air was full of politics, and the slap of cards.
Tommy was at a table laughing his martial laugh: “Um-buh—ha-ha! Um-buh—ha-ha!” As a rule, he drank little; courage was his game and his companions were always a little afraid of him. Recently an eighth of the area of his skull had been removed by a Warsaw surgeon and was knitting under his hair, and the weakest person in the café could have killed him with a flip of a knotted napkin.
“—this is Prince Chillicheff—” A battered, powder-gray Russian of fifty, “—and Mr. McKibben—and Mr. Hannan—” the latter was a lively ball of black eyes and hair, a clown; and he said immediately to Dick:
“The first thing before we shake hands—what do you mean by fooling around with my aunt?”
“Why, I—”
“You heard me. What are you doing here in Munich anyhow?”
“Um-bah—ha-ha!” laughed Tommy.
“Haven’t you got aunts of your own? Why don’t you fool with them?”
Dick laughed, whereupon the man shifted his attack:
“Now let’s not have any more talk about aunts. How do I know you didn’t make up the whole thing? Here you are a complete stranger with an acquaintance of less than half an hour, and you come up to me with a cock-and-bull story about your aunts. How do I know what you have concealed about you?”
Tommy laughed again, then he said good-naturedly, but firmly, “That’s enough, Carly. Sit down, Dick—how’re you? How’s Nicole?”
He did not like any man very much nor feel their presence with much intensity—he was all relaxed for combat; as a fine athlete playing secondary defense in any sport is really resting much of the time, while a lesser man only pretends to rest and is at a continual and self-destroying nervous tension.
Hannan, not entirely suppressed, moved to an adjoining piano, and with recurring resentment on his face whenever he looked at Dick, played chords, from time to time muttering, “Your aunts,” and, in a dying cadence, “I didn’t say aunts anyhow. I said pants.”
“Well, how’re you?” repeated Tommy. “You don’t look so—” he fought for a word, “—so jaunty as you used to, so spruce, you know what I mean.”
The remark sounded too much like one of those irritating accusations of waning vitality and Dick was about to retort by commenting on the extraordinary suits worn by Tommy and Prince Chillicheff, suits of a cut and pattern fantastic enough to have sauntered down Beale Street on a Sunday—when an explanation was forthcoming.
“I see you are regarding our clothes,” said the Prince. “We have just come out of Russia.”
“These were made in Poland by the court tailor,” said Tommy. “That’s a fact—Pilsudski’s own tailor.”
“You’ve been touring?” Dick asked.
They laughed, the Prince inordinately meanwhile clapping Tommy on the back.
“Yes, we have been touring. That’s it, touring. We have made the grand Tour of all the Russias. In state.”
Dick waited for an explanation. It came from Mr. McKibben in two words.
“They escaped.”
“Have you been prisoners in Russia?”
“It was I,” explained Prince Chillicheff, his dead yellow eyes staring at Dick. “Not a prisoner but in hiding.”
“Did you have much trouble getting out?”
“Some trouble. We left three Red Guards dead at the border. Tommy left two—” He held up two fingers like a Frenchman—“I left one.”
“That’s the part I don’t understand,” said Mr. McKibben. “Why they should have objected to your leaving.”
Hannan turned from the piano and said, winking at the others: “Mac thinks a Marxian is somebody who went to St. Mark’s school.”
It was an escape story in the best tradition—an aristocrat hiding nine years with a former servant and working in a government bakery; the eighteen-year-old daughter in Paris who knew Tommy Barban. . . . During the narrative Dick decided that this parched papier mâché relic of the past was scarcely worth the lives of three young men. The question arose as to whether Tommy and Chillicheff had been frightened.
“When I was cold,” Tommy said. “I always get scared when I’m cold. During the war I was always frightened when I was cold.”
McKibben stood up.
“I must leave. To-morrow morning I’m going to Innsbruck by car with my wife and children—and the governess.”
“I’m going there to-morrow, too,” said Dick.
“Oh, are you?” exclaimed McKibben. “Why not come with us? It’s a big Packard and there’s only my wife and my children and myself— and the governess—”
“I can’t possibly—”
“Of course she’s not really a governess,” McKibben concluded, looking rather pathetically at Dick. “As a matter of fact my wife knows your sister-in-law, Baby Warren.”