6.—The Last Man out of Europe
He came into the club and shook hands with me as if he hadn’t seen me for a year. In reality I had seen him only eleven months ago, and hadn’t thought of him since.
“How are you, Parkins?” I said in a guarded tone, for I saw at once that there was something special in his manner.
“Have a cig?” he said as he sat down on the edge of an arm-chair, dangling his little boot.
Any young man who calls a cigarette a “cig” I despise. “No, thanks,” I said.
“Try one,” he went on, “they’re Hungarian. They’re some I managed to bring through with me out of the war zone.”
As he said “war zone,” his face twisted up into a sort of scowl of self-importance.
I looked at Parkins more closely and I noticed that he had on some sort of foolish little coat, short in the back, and the kind of bow-tie that they wear in the Hungarian bands of the Sixth Avenue restaurants.
Then I knew what the trouble was. He was the last man out of Europe, that is to say, the latest last man. There had been about fourteen others in the club that same afternoon. In fact they were sitting all over it in Italian suits and Viennese overcoats, striking German matches on the soles of Dutch boots. These were the “war zone” men and they had just got out “in the clothes they stood up in.” Naturally they hated to change.
So I knew all that this young man, Parkins, was going to say, and all about his adventures before he began.