Fathers and sons -- Fiction; People with disabilities -- Fiction; Princes -- Fiction; Refugees -- Fiction
"I want to learn to remember things. I'd like to train myself in that
way too," The Rat answered. "I'd give anything to know some of the
things your father taught you. I've got a good memory. I remember a lot
of things I don't want to remember. Will you go this morning?"
That morning they went, and Loristan was told the reason for their walk.
But though he knew one reason, he did not know all about it. When The
Rat was allowed his "turn" of the boot-brushing, he told more to
Lazarus.
"What I want to do," he said, "is not only walk as fast as other people
do, but faster. Acrobats train themselves to do anything. It's training
that does it. There might come a time when he might need some one to go
on an errand quickly, and I'm going to be ready. I'm going to train
myself until he needn't think of me as if I were only a cripple who
can't do things and has to be taken care of. I want him to know that I'm
really as strong as Marco, and where Marco can go I can go."
"He" was what he always said, and Lazarus always understood without
explanation.
"'The Master' is your name for him," he had explained at the beginning.
"And I can't call him just 'Mister' Loristan. It sounds like cheek. If
he was called 'General' or 'Colonel' I could stand it--though it
wouldn't be quite right. Some day I shall find a name. When I speak to
him, I say 'Sir.'"
The walks were taken every day, and each day were longer. Marco found
himself silently watching The Rat with amazement at his determination
and endurance. He knew that he must not speak of what he could not fail
to see as they walked. He must not tell him that he looked tired and
pale and sometimes desperately fatigued. He had inherited from his
father the tact which sees what people do not wish to be reminded of. He
knew that for some reason of his own The Rat had determined to do this
thing at any cost to himself. Sometimes his face grew white and worn and
he breathed hard, but he never rested more than a few minutes, and never
turned back or shortened a walk they had planned.
"Tell me something about Samavia, something to remember," he would say,
when he looked his worst. "When I begin to try to remember, I
forget--other things."
So, as they went on their way, they talked, and The Rat committed things
to memory. He was quick at it, and grew quicker every day. They invented
a game of remembering faces they passed. Both would learn them by heart,
and on their return home Marco would draw them. They went to the museums
and galleries and learned things there, making from memory lists and
descriptions which at night they showed to Loristan, when he was not too
busy to talk to them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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