The Vagrant Duke | Page 8

not a prince could
not also be a man.
To the Princess Anastasie he gave little thought. That their common
exile and the chance encounter under such circumstances had aroused
no return of an entente toward what had once been a half-sentimental
attachment convinced him of how little it had meant to him. There were
no royal prohibitions upon him now. To marry the Princess Anastasie
and settle in London, living upon the proceeds of her wealthy father's
American and British securities, was of course the easiest solution of
his difficulties. A life of ease, music, good sportsmanship, the comfort
that only England knows.... She was comely too--blond, petite, and
smoked her cigarette very prettily. Their marriage had once been
discussed. She wanted it still, perhaps. Something of all this may have
Been somewhere in the back of Prince Galitzin's ambitious mind. The
one course would be so easy, the other----
Peter Nicholaevitch rose and carefully flicked his cigarette through the
open port. No. One does not pass twice through such moments of
struggle and self-communion as he had had in those long nights of his

escape along the Dnieper. He had chosen. Peter Nichols! The name
amused him. If Captain Blasliford was a man of his word to-night
would be the end of the Grand Duke Peter Nicholaevitch, and the
Princess Anastasie might find some more ardent suitor to her grace and
beauty.
She did not seek him out. Perhaps the hint to Galitzin had been
sufficient and the Grand Duke from his hiding place saw her pretty
figure set ashore among the miscellany of martyred "r'yalty." He turned
away from his port-hole with a catch of his breath as the last vestige of
his old life passed from sight. And then quietly took up a fresh cigarette
and awaited the Captain.
The details were easily arranged. Blashford was a man of resource and
at night returned from a visit to the Captain of the Bermudian with
word that all was well. He had been obliged to relate the facts but
Captain Armitage could keep a secret and promised the refugee a job
under his steward who was short-handed. And so the next morning,
after shaving and dressing himself in borrowed clothes, Peter Nichols
shook Captain Blashford warmly by the hand and went aboard his new
ship.
Peter Nichols' new job was that of a waiter at the tables in the dining
saloon. He was a very good waiter, supplying, from the wealth of a
Continental experience, the deficiencies of other waiters he had known.
He wore a black shell jacket and a white shirt front which remained
innocent of gravy spots. The food was not very good nor very plentiful,
but he served it with an air of such importance that it gained flavor and
substance by the reflection of his deference. There were English
officers bound for Malta, Frenchmen for Marseilles and Americans of
the Red Cross without number bound for New York. Girls, too,
clear-eyed, bronzed and hearty, who talked war and politics beneath his
very nose, challenging his own theories. They noticed him too and
whispered among themselves, but true to his ambition to do every task
at the best of his bent, he preserved an immobile countenance and
pocketed his fees, which would be useful ere long, with the grateful
appreciation of one to whom shillings and franc pieces come as the

gifts of God. Many were the attempts to draw him into a conversation,
but where the queries could not be answered by a laconic "Yes, sir," or
"No, sir," this paragon of waiters maintained a smiling silence.
"I'm sure he's a prince or something," he heard one young girl of a
hospital unit say to a young medico of the outfit. "Did you ever see
such a nose and brows in your life? And his hands----! You can never
mistake hands. I would swear those hands had never done menial work
for a thousand years."
All of which was quite true, but it made the waiter Peter uncomfortably
careful. There were no women in the kitchen, but there was an amatory
stewardess, fat and forty, upon whom the factitious technique of the
saloon fell with singular insipidity. He fled from her. Peter, the waiter,
was already a good democrat but he was not ready to spread his
philosophy out so thin.
He slept forward, messed abaft the galley, enriched his vocabulary and
broadened his point of view. There is no leveler like a ship's fo'c'sle, no
better school of philosophy than that of men upon their "beam ends."
There were many such--Poles, Slovaks, Roumanians, an Armenian or
two, refugees, adventurers from America, old, young, dissolute, making
a necessity of virtue under that successful oligarchy, the ship's bridge.
In the Americans Peter was interested with