“Who is he?”
“A Captain Sengoun, one of our attachés. It’s likely you’ll find a congenial soul in this same Cossack whom we all call Alak.” She added maliciously: “His only logic is the impulse of the moment, and he is known as Prince Erlik among his familiars. Erlik was the Devil, you know––”
He was announced at that moment, and came marching in—a dark, handsome, wiry young man with winning black eyes and a little black moustache just shadowing his short upper lip—and a head shaped to contain the devil himself—the most reckless looking head, Neeland thought, that he ever had beheld in all his life.
But the young fellow’s frank smile was utterly irresistible, and his straight manner of facing one, and of looking directly into the eyes of the person he addressed in his almost too perfect English, won any listener immediately.
He bowed formally over Princess Naïa’s hand, turned squarely on Neeland when he was named to the American, and exchanged a firm clasp with him. Then, to the Princess:
“I am late? No? Fancy, Princess—that great booby, Izzet Bey, must stop me at the club, and I exceedingly pressed to dress and entirely out of humour with all Turks. ‘Eh bien, mon vieux!’ said he in his mincing manner of a nervous pelican, ‘they’re warming up the Balkan boilers with Austrian pine. But I hear 328 they’re full of snow.’ And I said to him: ‘Snow boils very nicely if the fire is sufficiently persistent!’ And I think Izzet Bey will find it so!”—with a quick laugh of explanation to Neeland: “He meant Russian snow, you see; and that boils beautifully if they keep on stoking the boiler with Austrian fuel.”
The Princess shrugged:
“What schoolboy repartée! Why did you answer him at all, Alak?”
“Well,” explained the attaché, “as I was due here at eight I hadn’t time to take him by the nose, had I?”
Rue Carew entered and went to the Princess to make amends: