Fathers and sons -- Fiction; People with disabilities -- Fiction; Princes -- Fiction; Refugees -- Fiction
"From this hour," he said, "you and I are comrades at arms."
And from that day to the one on which he stood beside the broken iron
railings of No. 7 Philibert Place, Marco had not forgotten for one hour.
II
A YOUNG CITIZEN OF THE WORLD
He had been in London more than once before, but not to the lodgings in
Philibert Place. When he was brought a second or third time to a town
or city, he always knew that the house he was taken to would be in a
quarter new to him, and he should not see again the people he had seen
before. Such slight links of acquaintance as sometimes formed themselves
between him and other children as shabby and poor as himself were easily
broken. His father, however, had never forbidden him to make chance
acquaintances. He had, in fact, told him that he had reasons for not
wishing him to hold himself aloof from other boys. The only barrier
which must exist between them must be the barrier of silence concerning
his wanderings from country to country. Other boys as poor as he was did
not make constant journeys, therefore they would miss nothing from his
boyish talk when he omitted all mention of his. When he was in Russia,
he must speak only of Russian places and Russian people and customs.
When he was in France, Germany, Austria, or England, he must do the same
thing. When he had learned English, French, German, Italian, and Russian
he did not know. He had seemed to grow up in the midst of changing
tongues which all seemed familiar to him, as languages are familiar to
children who have lived with them until one scarcely seems less familiar
than another. He did remember, however, that his father had always been
unswerving in his attention to his pronunciation and method of speaking
the language of any country they chanced to be living in.
"You must not seem a foreigner in any country," he had said to him. "It
is necessary that you should not. But when you are in England, you must
not know French, or German, or anything but English."
Once, when he was seven or eight years old, a boy had asked him what his
father's work was.
"His own father is a carpenter, and he asked me if my father was one,"
Marco brought the story to Loristan. "I said you were not. Then he asked
if you were a shoemaker, and another one said you might be a bricklayer
or a tailor--and I didn't know what to tell them." He had been out
playing in a London street, and he put a grubby little hand on his
father's arm, and clutched and almost fiercely shook it. "I wanted to
say that you were not like their fathers, not at all. I knew you were
not, though you were quite as poor. You are not a bricklayer or a
shoemaker, but a patriot--you could not be only a bricklayer--you!" He
said it grandly and with a queer indignation, his black head held up and
his eyes angry.
Loristan laid his hand against his mouth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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