SUNDAY REVIEW / LOVE IN THE NIGHT / F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Project Gutenberg Australia presents a novella by F. Scott Fitzgerald  (1896-1940); first published by the Saturday Evening Post in its March 14, 1925 edition.

***

The words thrilled Val.  They had come into his mind sometime

during the fresh gold April afternoon and he kept repeating them to

himself over and over:  "Love in the night; love in the night."  He

tried them in three languages--Russian, French and English--and

decided that they were best in English.  In each language they

meant a different sort of love and a different sort of night--the

English night seemed the warmest and softest with a thinnest and

most crystalline sprinkling of stars.  The English love seemed the

most fragile and romantic--a white dress and a dim face above it

and eyes that were pools of light.  And when I add that it was a

French night he was thinking about, after all, I see I must go back

and begin over.

“Owl and Rabbit” Giclee Print by Paul Bransom, 1925.

Val was half Russian and half American.  His mother was the

daughter of that Morris Hasylton who helped finance the Chicago

World's Fair in 1892, and his father was--see the Almanach de

Gotha, issue of 1910--Prince Paul Serge Boris Rostoff, son of

Prince Vladimir Rostoff, grandson of a grand duke--'Jimber-jawed

Serge'--and third-cousin-once-removed to the czar.  It was all very

impressive, you see, on that side--house in St. Petersburg,

shooting lodge near Riga, and swollen villa, more like a palace,

overlooking the Mediterranean.  It was at this villa in Cannes that

the Rostoffs passed the winter--and it wasn't at all the thing to

remind Princess Rostoff that this Riviera villa, from the marble

fountain--after Bernini--to the gold cordial glasses--after dinner--

was paid for with American gold.

The Russians, of course, were gay people on the Continent in the

gala days before the war.  Of the three nationalities that used Southern

France for a pleasure ground they were easily the most adept at the

grand manner.  The English were too practical, and the Americans,

though they spent freely, had no tradition of romantic conduct.

But the Russians--there was a people as gallant as the Latins, and

rich besides!  When the Rostoffs arrived at Cannes late in January

the restaurateurs telegraphed north for the Prince's favorite

labels to paste on their champagne, and the jewelers put incredibly

gorgeous articles aside to show to him--but not to the princess--

and the Russian Church was swept and garnished for the season that

the Prince might beg orthodox forgiveness for his sins.  Even the

Mediterranean turned obligingly to a deep wine color in the spring

evenings, and fishing boats with robin-breasted sails loitered

exquisitely offshore.

In a vague way young Val realized that this was all for the benefit

of him and his family.  It was a privileged paradise, this white

little city on the water, in which he was free to do what he liked

because he was rich and young and the blood of Peter the Great ran

indigo in his veins.  He was only seventeen in 1914, when this

history begins, but he had already fought a duel with a young man

four years his senior, and he had a small hairless scar to show for

it on top of his handsome head.

But the question of love in the night was the thing nearest his

heart.  It was a vague pleasant dream he had, something that was

going to happen to him some day that would be unique and

incomparable.  He could have told no more about it than that there

was a lovely unknown girl concerned in it, and that it ought to

take place beneath the Riviera moon.

The odd thing about all this was not that he had this excited and

yet almost spiritual hope of romance, for all boys of any

imagination have just such hopes, but that it actually came true.

And when it happened, it happened so unexpectedly; it was such a

jumble of impressions and emotions, of curious phrases that sprang

to his lips, of sights and sounds and moments that were here, were

lost, were past, that he scarcely understood it at all.  Perhaps

its very vagueness preserved it in his heart and made him forever

unable to forget.

There was an atmosphere of love all about him that spring--his

father's loves, for instance, which were many and indiscreet, and

which Val became aware of gradually from overhearing the gossip of

servants, and definitely from coming on his American mother

unexpectedly one afternoon, to find her storming hysterically at

his father's picture on the salon wall.  In the picture his father

wore a white uniform with a furred dolman and looked back

impassively at his wife as if to say "Were you under the

impression, my dear, that you were marrying into a family of

clergymen?"

Val tiptoed away, surprised, confused--and excited.  It didn't

shock him as it would have shocked an American boy of his age.  He

had known for years what life was among the Continental rich, and

he condemned his father only for making his mother cry.

Love went on around him--reproachless love and illicit love alike.

As he strolled along the seaside promenade at nine o'clock, when

the stars were bright enough to compete with the bright lamps, he

was aware of love on every side.  From the open-air cafés, vivid

with dresses just down from Paris, came a sweet pungent odor of

flowers and chartreuse and fresh black coffee and cigarettes--and

mingled with them all he caught another scent, the mysterious

thrilling scent of love.  Hands touched jewel-sparkling hands upon

the white tables. 

Eternal Cannes

Gay dresses and white shirt fronts swayedtogether, and matches were held, trembling a little, for slow-lighting cigarettes.  On the other side of the boulevard lovers less fashionable, young Frenchmen who worked in the stores of Cannes, sauntered with their fiancées under the dim trees, but

Val's young eyes seldom turned that way.  The luxury of music and

bright colors and low voices--they were all part of his dream.

They were the essential trappings of Love in the night.

But assume as he might the rather fierce expression that was

expected from a young Russian gentleman who walked the streets

alone, Val was beginning to be unhappy.  April twilight had

succeeded March twilight, the season was almost over, and he had

found no use to make of the warm spring evenings.  The girls of

sixteen and seventeen whom he knew, were chaperoned with care

between dusk and bedtime--this, remember, was before the war--and

the others who might gladly have walked beside him were an affront

to his romantic desire.  So April passed by--one week, two weeks,

three weeks--

He had played tennis until seven and loitered at the courts for

another hour, so it was half-past eight when a tired cab horse

accomplished the hill on which gleamed the façade of the Rostoff

villa.  The lights of his mother's limousine were yellow in the

drive, and the princess, buttoning her gloves, was just coming out

the glowing door.  Val tossed two francs to the cabman and went to

kiss her on the cheek.

"Don't touch me," she said quickly.  "You've been handling money."

"But not in my mouth, mother," he protested humorously.

The princess looked at him impatiently.

"I'm angry," she said.  "Why must you be so late tonight?  We're

dining on a yacht and you were to have come along too."

"What yacht?"

"Americans."  There was always a faint irony in her voice when she

mentioned the land of her nativity.  Her America was the Chicago of

the nineties which she still thought of as the vast upstairs to a

butcher shop.  Even the irregularities of Prince Paul were not too

high a price to have paid for her escape.

"Two yachts," she continued; "in fact we don't know which one.  The

note was very indefinite.  Very careless indeed."

Americans.  Val's mother had taught him to look down on Americans,

but she hadn't succeeded in making him dislike them.  American men

noticed you, even if you were seventeen.  He liked Americans.

Although he was thoroughly Russian he wasn't immaculately so--the

exact proportion, like that of a celebrated soap, was about ninety-

nine and three-quarters per cent.

"I want to come," he said, "I'll hurry up, mother.  I'll--"

"We're late now."  The princess turned as her husband appeared in

the door.  "Now Val says he wants to come."

"He can't," said Prince Paul shortly.  "He's too outrageously

late."

Val nodded.  Russian aristocrats, however indulgent about

themselves, were always admirably Spartan with their children.

There were no arguments.

"I'm sorry," he said.

Prince Paul grunted.  The footman, in red and silver livery, opened

the limousine door.  But the grunt decided the matter for Val,

because Princess Rostoff at that day and hour had certain

grievances against her husband which gave her command of the

domestic situation.

"On second thought you'd better come, Val," she announced coolly.

"It's too late now, but come after dinner.  The yacht is either the

Minnehaha or the Privateer."  She got into the limousine.  "The one

to come to will be the gayer one, I suppose--the Jacksons' yacht--"

"Find got sense," muttered the Prince cryptically, conveying that

Val would find it if he had any sense.  "Have my man take a look at

you 'fore you start.  Wear tie of mine 'stead of that outrageous

string you affected in Vienna.  Grow up.  High time."

As the limousine crawled crackling down the pebbled drive Val's

face was burning.

II.

It was dark in Cannes harbor, rather it seemed dark after the

brightness of the promenade that Val had just left behind.  Three

frail dock lights glittered dimly upon innumerable fishing boats

heaped like shells along the beach.  Farther out in the water there

were other lights where a fleet of slender yachts rode the tide

with slow dignity, and farther still a full ripe moon made the

water bosom into a polished dancing floor.  Occasionally there was

a swish! creak! drip! as a rowboat moved about in the shallows, and

its blurred shape threaded the labyrinth of hobbled fishing skiffs

and launches.  Val, descending the velvet slope of sand, stumbled

over a sleeping boatman and caught the rank savor of garlic and

plain wine.  Taking the man by the shoulders he shook open his

startled eyes.

"Do you know where the Minnehaha is anchored, and the Privateer?"

As they slid out into the bay he lay back in the stern and stared

with vague discontent at the Riviera moon.  That was the right

moon, all right.  Frequently, five nights out of seven, there was

the right moon.  And here was the soft air, aching with

enchantment, and here was the music, many strains of music from

many orchestras, drifting out from the shore.  Eastward lay the

dark Cape of Antibes, and then Nice, and beyond that Monte Carlo,

where the night rang chinking full of gold.  Some day he would

enjoy all that, too, know its every pleasure and success--when he

was too old and wise to care.

But tonight--tonight, that stream of silver that waved like a wide

strand of curly hair toward the moon; those soft romantic lights of

Cannes behind him, the irresistible ineffable love in this air--

that was to be wasted forever.

"Which one?" asked the boatman suddenly.

"Which what?" demanded Val, sitting up.

"Which boat?"

He pointed.  Val turned; above hovered the gray, sword-like prow of

a yacht.  During the sustained longing of his wish they had covered

half a mile.

He read the brass letters over his head.  It was the Privateer, but

there were only dim lights on board, and no music and no voices,

only a murmurous k-plash at intervals as the small waves leaped at

the sides.

"The other one," said Val; "the Minnehaha."

"Don't go yet."

Val started.  The voice, low and soft, had dropped down from the

darkness overhead.

"What's the hurry?" said the soft voice.  "Thought maybe somebody

was coming to see me, and have suffered terrible disappointment."

The boatman lifted his oars and looked hesitatingly at Val.  But

Val was silent, so the man let the blades fall into the water and

swept the boat out into the moonlight.

"Wait a minute!" cried Val sharply.

"Good-by," said the voice.  "Come again when you can stay longer."

"But I am going to stay now," he answered breathlessly.

He gave the necessary order and the rowboat swung back to the foot

of the small companionway.  Someone young, someone in a misty white

dress, someone with a lovely low voice, had actually called to him

out of the velvet dark.  "If she has eyes!" Val murmured to

himself.  He liked the romantic sound of it and repeated it under

his breath--"If she has eyes."

"What are you?"  She was directly above him now; she was looking

down and he was looking up as he climbed the ladder, and as their

eyes met they both began to laugh.

She was very young, slim, almost frail, with a dress that

accentuated her youth by its blanched simplicity.  Two wan dark

spots on her cheeks marked where the color was by day.

"What are you?" she repeated, moving back and laughing again as his

head appeared on the level of the deck.  "I'm frightened now and I

want to know."

"I am a gentleman," said Val, bowing.

Winter in Paris was high season in Cannes, Antibes and the Riviera

"What sort of a gentleman?  There are all sorts of gentlemen.

There was a--there was a colored gentleman at the table next to

ours in Paris, and so--"  She broke off.  "You're not American, are

you?"

"I'm Russian," he said, as he might have announced himself to be an

archangel.  He thought quickly and then added, "And I am the most

fortunate of Russians.  All this day, all this spring I have

dreamed of falling in love on such a night, and now I see that

heaven has sent me to you."

"Just one moment!" she said, with a little gasp.  "I'm sure now

that this visit is a mistake.  I don't go in for anything like

that.  Please!"

"I beg your pardon."  He looked at her in bewilderment, unaware

that he had taken too much for granted.  Then he drew himself up

formally.

"I have made an error.  If you will excuse me I will say good

night."

He turned away.  His hand was on the rail.

"Don't go," she said, pushing a strand of indefinite hair out of

her eyes.  "On second thoughts you can talk any nonsense you like

if you'll only not go.  I'm miserable and I don't want to be left

alone."

Val hesitated; there was some element in this that he failed to

understand.  He had taken it for granted that a girl who called to

a strange man at night, even from the deck of a yacht, was

certainly in a mood for romance.  And he wanted intensely to stay.

Then he remembered that this was one of the two yachts he had been

seeking.

"I imagine that the dinner's on the other boat," he said.

"The dinner?  Oh, yes, it's on the Minnehaha.  Were you going

there?"

"I was going there--a long time ago."

"What's your name?"

He was on the point of telling her when something made him ask a

question instead.

"And you?  Why are you not at the party?"

"Because I preferred to stay here.  Mrs. Jackson said there would

be some Russians there--I suppose that's you."  She looked at him

with interest.  "You're a very young man, aren't you?"

"I am much older than I look," said Val stiffly.  "People always

comment on it.  It's considered rather a remarkable thing."

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-one," he lied.

She laughed.

"What nonsense!  You're not more than nineteen."

His annoyance was so perceptible that she hastened to reassure him.

"Cheer up!  I'm only seventeen myself.  I might have gone to the

party if I'd thought there'd be anyone under fifty there."

He welcomed the change of subject.

"You preferred to sit and dream here beneath the moon."

"I've been thinking of mistakes."  They sat down side by side in

two canvas deck chairs.  "It's a most engrossing subject--the

subject of mistakes.  Women very seldom brood about mistakes--

they're much more willing to forget than men are.  But when they do

brood--"

"You have made a mistake?" inquired Val.

She nodded.

"Is it something that cannot be repaired?"

"I think so," she answered.  "I can't be sure.  That's what I was

considering when you came along."

"Perhaps I can help in some way," said Val.  "Perhaps your mistake

is not irreparable, after all."

"You can't," she said unhappily.  "So let's not think about it.

I'm very tired of my mistake and I'd much rather you'd tell me

about all the gay, cheerful things that are going on in Cannes

tonight."

They glanced shoreward at the line of mysterious and alluring

lights, the big toy banks with candles inside that were really the

great fashionable hotels, the lighted clock in the old town, the

blurred glow of the Café de Paris, the pricked-out points of villa

windows rising on slow hills toward the dark sky.

"What is everyone doing there?" she whispered.  "It looks as though

something gorgeous was going on, but what it is I can't quite

tell."

"Everyone there is making love," said Val quietly.

"Is that it?"  She looked for a long time, with a strange

expression in her eyes.  "Then I want to go home to America," she

said.  "There is too much love here.  I want to go home tomorrow."

"You are afraid of being in love then?"

She shook her head.

"It isn't that.  It's just because--there is no love here for me."

"Or for me either," added Val quietly.  "It is sad that we two

should be at such a lovely place on such a lovely night and have--

nothing."

He was leaning toward her intently, with a sort of inspired and

chaste romance in his eyes--and she drew back.

"Tell me more about yourself," she inquired quickly.  "If you are

Russian where did you learn to speak such excellent English?"

"My mother was American," he admitted.  "My grandfather was

American also, so she had no choice in the matter."

"Then you're American too!"

"I am Russian," said Val with dignity.

She looked at him closely, smiled and decided not to argue.  "Well

then," she said diplomatically, "I suppose you must have a Russian

name."

But he had no intention now of telling her his name.  A name, even

the Rostoff name, would be a desecration of the night.  They were

their own low voices, their two white faces--and that was enough.

He was sure, without any reason for being sure but with a sort of

instinct that sang triumphantly through his mind, that in a little

while, a minute or an hour, he was going to undergo an initiation

into the life of romance.  His name had no reality beside what was

stirring in his heart.

"You are beautiful," he said suddenly.

"How do you know?"

"Because for women moonlight is the hardest light of all."

"Am I nice in the moonlight?"

"You are the loveliest thing that I have ever known."

"Oh."  She thought this over.  "Of course I had no business to let

you come on board.  I might have known what we'd talk about--in

this moon.  But I can't sit here and look at the shore--forever.

I'm too young for that.  Don't you think I'm too young for that?"

"Much too young," he agreed solemnly.

Suddenly they both became aware of new music that was close at

hand, music that seemed to come out of the water not a hundred

yards away.

"Listen!" she cried.  "It's from the Minnehaha.  They've finished

dinner."

For a moment they listened in silence.

"Thank you," said Val suddenly.

"For what?"

He hardly knew he had spoken.  He was thanking the deep low horns

for singing in the breeze, the sea for its warm murmurous complaint

against the bow, the milk of the stars for washing over them until

he felt buoyed up in a substance more taut than air.

"So lovely," she whispered.

"What are we going to do about it?"

"Do we have to do something about it?  I thought we could just sit

and enjoy--"

"You didn't think that," he interrupted quietly.  "You know that we

must do something about it.  I am going to make love to you--and

you are going to be glad."

"I can't," she said very low.  She wanted to laugh now, to make

some light cool remark that would bring the situation back into the

safe waters of a casual flirtation.  But it was too late now.  Val

knew that the music had completed what the moon had begun.

"I will tell you the truth," he said.  "You are my first love.  I

am seventeen--the same age as you, no more."

There was something utterly disarming about the fact that they were

the same age.  It made her helpless before the fate that had thrown

them together.  The deck chairs creaked and he was conscious of a

faint illusive perfume as they swayed suddenly and childishly

together.

III.

Whether he kissed her once or several times he could not afterward

remember, though it must have been an hour that they sat there

close together and he held her hand.  What surprised him most about

making love was that it seemed to have no element of wild passion--

regret, desire, despair--but a delirious promise of such happiness

in the world, in living, as he had never known.  First love--this

was only first love!  What must love itself in its fullness, its

perfection be.  He did not know that what he was experiencing then,

that unreal, undesirous medley of ecstasy and peace, would be

unrecapturable forever.

The music had ceased for some time when presently the murmurous

silence was broken by the sound of a rowboat disturbing the quiet

waves.  She sprang suddenly to her feet and her eyes strained out

over the bay.

"Listen!" she said quickly.  "I want you to tell me your name."

"No."

"Please," she begged him.  "I'm going away tomorrow."

He didn't answer.

"I don't want you to forget me," she said.  "My name is--"

"I won't forget you.  I will promise to remember you always.

Whoever I may love I will always compare her to you, my first love.

So long as I live you will always have that much freshness in my

heart."

"I want you to remember," she murmured brokenly.  "Oh, this has

meant more to me than it has to you--much more."

She was standing so close to him that he felt her warm young breath

on his face.  Once again they swayed together.  He pressed her

hands and wrists between his as it seemed right to do, and kissed

her lips.  It was the right kiss, he thought, the romantic kiss--

not too little or too much.  Yet there was a sort of promise in it

of other kisses he might have had, and it was with a slight sinking

of his heart that he heard the rowboat close to the yacht and

realized that her family had returned.  The evening was over.

"And this is only the beginning," he told himself.  "All my life

will be like this night."

She was saying something in a low quick voice and he was listening

tensely.

"You must know one thing--I am married.  Three months ago.  That

was the mistake that I was thinking about when the moon brought you

out here.  In a moment you will understand."

She broke off as the boat swung against the companionway and a

man's voice floated up out of the darkness.

"Is that you, my dear?"

"Yes."

"What is this other rowboat waiting?"

"One of Mrs. Jackson's guests came here by mistake and I made him

stay and amuse me for an hour."

A moment later the thin white hair and weary face of a man of sixty

appeared above the level of the deck.  And then Val saw and

realized too late how much he cared.

IV.

When the Riviera season ended in May the Rostoffs and all the other

Russians closed their villas and went north for the summer.  The

Russian Orthodox Church was locked up and so were the bins of rarer

wine, and the fashionable spring moonlight was put away, so to

speak, to wait for their return.

"We'll be back next season," they said as a matter of course.

But this was premature, for they were never coming back any more.

Those few who straggled south again after five tragic years were

glad to get work as chambermaids or valets de chambre in the great

hotels where they had once dined.  Many of them, of course, were

killed in the war or in the revolution; many of them faded out as

spongers and small cheats in the big capitals, and not a few ended

their lives in a sort of stupefied despair.

When the Kerensky government collapsed in 1917, Val was a

lieutenant on the eastern front, trying desperately to enforce

authority in his company long after any vestige of it remained.  He

was still trying when Prince Paul Rostoff and his wife gave up

their lives one rainy morning to atone for the blunders of the

Romanoffs--and the enviable career of Morris Hasylton's daughter

ended in a city that bore even more resemblance to a butcher shop

than had Chicago in 1892.

After that Val fought with Denikin's army for a while until he

realized that he was participating in a hollow farce and the glory

of Imperial Russia was over.  Then he went to France and was

suddenly confronted with the astounding problem of keeping his body

and soul together.

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 a while he didn't mind any more.  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.

Fitzgerald haunt hotel Eden-Roc

He mixed with people very little.  In the evenings he walked for a

while 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 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 those 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."

"Did the yacht come?"

"Oh, yes--it's here all right.  At least I think so.  If you'll

just wait in that chair."

After another ten minutes Val looked impatiently at his watch.  If

they didn't hurry he'd probably miss his train.  He made a nervous

movement as if to get up from his chair.

"Please sit still," said the clerk, glancing at him quickly from

his desk.  "I ask you.  Just sit down in that chair."

Val stared at him.  How could it possibly matter to the clerk

whether or not he waited?

"I'll miss my train," he said impatiently.  "I'm sorry to have

given you all this bother--"

"Please sit still!  We're glad to get it off our hands.  You see,

we've been waiting for your inquiry for--ah--three years."

Val jumped to his feet and jammed his hat on his head.

"Why didn't you tell me that?" he demanded angrily.

"Because we had to get word to our--our client.  Please don't go!

It's--ah, it's too late."

Val turned.  Someone slim and radiant with dark frightened eyes was

standing behind him, framed against the sunshine of the doorway.

"Why--"

Val's lips parted, but no words came through.  She took a step

toward him.

"I--"  She looked at him helplessly, her eyes filling with tears.

"I just wanted to say hello," she murmured.  "I've come back for

three years just because I wanted to say hello."

Still Val was silent.

"You might answer," she said impatiently.  "You might answer when

I'd--when I'd just about begun to think you'd been killed in the

war."  She turned to the clerk.  "Please introduce us!" she cried.

"You see, I can't say hello to him when we don't even know each

other's names."

It's the thing to distrust these international marriages, of

course.  It's an American tradition that they always turn out

badly, and we are accustomed to such headlines as:  "Would Trade

Coronet for True American Love, Says Duchess," and "Claims Count

Mendicant Tortured Toledo Wife."  The other sort of headlines are

never printed, for who would want to read:  "Castle is Love Nest,

Asserts Former Georgia Belle," or "Duke and Packer's Daughter

Celebrate Golden Honeymoon."

So far there have been no headlines at all about the young

Rostoffs.  Prince Val is much too absorbed in that string of

moonlight-blue taxicabs which he manipulates with such unusual

efficiency, to give out interviews.  He and his wife only leave New

York once a year--but there is still a boatman who rejoices when

the Privateer steams into Cannes harbor on a mid-April night.

THE END

From the public domain via Project Gutenberg Australia.