Knight's Gambit (21 page)

The Cayley girl blew her nose into the handkerchief. ‘Yes sir,’ she said.

‘Then you’ll have to drive her home,’ his uncle said to him, not looking back. ‘They both cant—’

But the Cayley girl was all right now. She gave her nose a good hard wipe right and then left and started to hand the handkerchief back to his uncle and then stopped, letting the hand drop at her side.

‘I’ll go back with her,’ she said. ‘I’m not afraid of her. It wont be but two miles home even if she wont take me any further than her gate.’

‘All right,’ his uncle said. ‘Here’: holding out the ring. It was a big diamond; it was all right too. The Cayley girl didn’t hardly look at it.

‘I dont want it,’ she said.

‘I wouldn’t either,’ his uncle said. ‘But you owe yourself the decency of letting your own hand be the returner.’

So she took the ring and then the Harriss girl returned and the Cayley girl went to bathe her face, still carrying the handkerchief. The Harriss girl looked all right again, with a glazed swipe of styptic on the scratch; and she had the platinum-and-jewel box now, but it was powder and such. She didn’t look at either of them. She looked into the mirror in the box’s lid, finishing her face.

‘I should apologise, I suppose,’ she said. ‘But I imagine lawyers see all sorts of things in their trade.’

‘We try to avoid bloodshed,’ his uncle said.

‘Bloodshed,’ she said. She forgot her face then and the platinum-and-jewel box too and the flipness and the hardness both went and when she looked at his uncle, the terror and dread were in her eyes again; and he knew that, whatever he and his uncle might think about what her brother could or would or might do, at least she didn’t have any doubts. ‘You’ve got to do something,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to. If I had known anybody else to go to, I wouldn’t have bothered you. But I—’

‘You told me he made a pact with you to do nothing for twenty-four hours,’ his uncle said. ‘Do you think he will hold himself still bound to it, or will he do what you did—make an effort of his own behind your back too?’

‘I dont know,’ she said. ‘If you could just lock him up until I—’

‘Which I cant do, any more than I can have the other one deported before breakfast. Why dont you deport him yourself? You said that you—’

Now there was terror and despair both in her face.

‘I cant. I tried. Maybe Mother is a better man than I am, after all. I even tried to tell him. But he’s like you: he doesn’t believe either that Max is dangerous. He says it would be running from a child.’

‘That’s just exactly what it would be,’ his uncle said. ‘That’s just exactly why.’

‘Exactly why what?’

‘Nothing,’ his uncle said. Then his uncle was not looking at her, not looking at any of them, not at anything as far as he could tell, just standing there rubbing the ball of his thumb against the bowl of the cob pipe. Then she said,

‘Can I have another cigarette?’

‘Why not?’ his uncle said. She took the cigarette from the box and this time he lit it for her, passing his uncle to the smoking stand, stepping carefully among the scattered chessmen to strike the match as the Cayley girl came in, not looking at anybody either, saying to his uncle:

‘It’s on the mirror.’

‘What?’ his uncle said.

‘Your handkerchief,’ the Cayley girl said. ‘I washed it.’

‘Oh,’ his uncle said, and the Harriss girl said,

‘Just talking to him wont do any good either. You tried that once, you know.’

‘I dont remember,’ his uncle said. ‘I dont recall hearing anything but him. But you are right about the talking. I have an idea this whole business started because somebody has already talked too much.’

But she wasn’t even listening. ‘And we’ll never get him in here again either. So you’ll have to come out there—’

‘Good night,’ his uncle said.

She was not listening at all. ‘—in the morning before he can get out of bed and go somewhere. I’ll telephone you in the morning when will be the best time—’

‘Good night,’ his uncle said again.

Then they were gone: through the sittingroom door, leaving it open of course; that is, the Harriss girl did, though when he went to close it the Cayley girl had turned back to do it until she saw he was already there. But when he started to shut it, his uncle said, ‘Wait’ so he stood holding it and they heard the hard brittle girl-heels in the hall and then, sure enough, the front door too.

‘That’s what we thought the other time,’ his uncle said. ‘Go and make sure.’

But they were gone. Standing in the open front door in the vivid chill windless December dark, he heard the over-revved engine and watched the big supercharged roadster lurch almost into full speed with a whine a squeal of tires on pavement, then around the next corner, the tail-lights sucking from view too fast there too, so that long after it must have crossed the Square, it seemed to him that he could still smell the outraged rubber.

Then he went back to the sittingroom where his uncle now sat among the scattered chessmen, filling the pipe. He went on without stopping and picked up the chessboard and set it back on the table. Luckily all the fighting had taken place in the other direction, so none of the pieces had been stepped on. He gathered them up from around his uncle’s feet and set them back in place on the board again, even advancing the white queen’s pawn in the orthodox opening which his uncle insisted on. His uncle was still filling the pipe.

‘So they were right about Captain Gualdres after all,’ he said. ‘It was a girl.’

‘What girl?’ his uncle said. ‘Didn’t one of them drive six miles twice tonight just to make sure we understood that she wanted her name coupled with Captain Gualdres’, no matter what the conditions; and the other one not only resorted to fisticuffs to refute the aspersion, she cant even spell his name?’

‘Oh,’ he said. Then he didn’t say it. He drew his chair up and sat down again. His uncle watched him.

‘You had a nice sleep?’ his uncle said.

He was a little slow on that one too. But all he had to do was to wait, because the only time when his uncle absolutely refused to diagram his wit was when it was really witty, really brilliant: never when it merely had an edge.

‘Thirty minutes ago you were on your way to bed. I couldn’t even stop you.’

‘And I almost missed something,’ he said. ‘I dont intend to this time.’

‘There will be no more to miss tonight.’

‘I thought that too,’ he said. ‘That Cayley girl—’

‘—is safe at home,’ his uncle said. ‘Where, I hope and trust, she will stay. And the other one too. Move then.’

‘I already have,’ he said.

‘Then move again,’ his uncle said, matching the white pawn. ‘And watch what you are doing this time.’

He thought he did, was, had, always had every time. But all watching what he was doing seemed to accomplish was to show him a little sooner than ordinary that this one too was going to end just like the other did: until suddenly his uncle swept the board clean and set up a single problem with the horses and rooks and two pawns.

‘It stops being a game then,’ he said.

‘Nothing by which all human passion and hope and folly can be mirrored and then proved, ever was just a game,’ his uncle said. ‘Move.’

And this time it was the telephone, and this time he knew it was going to be the telephone and he even knew what the telephone was going to say, not even really having to listen to the one audible side of it: nor did that take his uncle long:

‘Yes? Speaking … When?… I see. When you got home they just told you he had packed his bag and taken his car and said he was going to Memphis.… No no, never prescribe for a physician nor invite a postman to a walk’: and put the receiver back into the cradle and sat there with his hand still on it, not moving, not even breathing apparently, not even rubbing the thumb against the bowl of the pipe; sitting there so long that he was getting ready to speak, when his uncle raised the receiver and asked for the number, nor did this take long either: to Mr Robert Markey in Memphis, a lawyer and in city politics too, who had been at Heidelberg with his uncle:

‘No no, not the police; they couldn’t hold him. I dont want him held anyway; I just want him watched, so he cant leave Memphis without me knowing it. A good private man, just to keep an eye on him without him knowing it—unless he tries to leave Memphis.… What? I never really authorise actual bloodshed, at least not with witnesses.… Yes, until I come up and put my own hand on him, tomorrow or next day … At the hotel … There’s only one: the Greenbury. Did you ever hear of a Mississippian who has learned yet there is another one? (Which was true enough; there was a saying in North Mississippi that the state began in the lobby of the Greenbury hotel).… Assumed name? Him? The last thing he is running from is notoriety. He will probably call all the newspapers to be sure they have his name and location right, and that they record it.… No no, just wire me in the morning that you have him safely under surveillance and keep him so until you hear from me again’: and put the telephone down and got up, but not to return to the chessboard but instead went to the door and opened it and stood holding the knob, until finally he did catch up. He got up and picked up the book he had started upstairs with three hours ago. But this time he spoke, and this time his uncle answered him:

‘But what do you want with him?’

‘I dont,’ his uncle said. ‘I just want to know he’s in Memphis, and that he stays there. Which he will do; he will want me and the rest of the world too to be convinced he is safely and harmlessly in Memphis, or anywhere else except Jefferson, Mississippi, ten times more than I want to know it.’

But he was slow on that too; he had to ask that too.

‘His alibi,’ his uncle said.

And that too.

‘For whatever he is planning to do—whatever trick he has invented to frighten his mother’s fiancé into leaving the country.’

‘Trick?’ he said. ‘What trick?’

‘How do I know?’ his uncle said. ‘Ask yourself; you’re eighteen, or so near it doesn’t matter; you know what a child of nineteen will do: a Black Hand letter maybe, or even a reasonably careful shot fired through the bedroom window at him. I’m fifty; all I know is that people nineteen years old will do anything, and that the only thing which makes the adult world at all safe from them is the fact that they are so preconvinced of success that the simple desire and will are the finished accomplishment, that they pay no attention to mere dull mechanical details.’

‘Then if the trick’s not going to work, you dont need to worry,’ he said.

‘I’m not worrying,’ his uncle said. ‘I’m being worried. Worse; annoyed. I just want to keep my—or Mr Markey’s—finger on him until I can telephone his sister tomorrow and she—or their mother, or anyone else in the family who have or hope to have any control over him or either or both of them—can go up there and get him and do whatever they want to with him; I would suggest that they tie him up in one of the stalls and let his prospective father (this might even be enough reason to Captain Gualdres for him to give over his maiden hesitancy and consent to an immediate marriage) work on him with his riding-crop.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with that Cayley girl. Maybe if he’d just been here tonight and seen her when his sister——’

‘Nobody ever believed there was, except his sister,’ his uncle said. ‘She was the one who ever convinced him in the first place that there was, started this whole thing. To get her own man. Maybe she thought that, as soon as her brother reached for that foil again, Gualdres would leave the country. Or maybe she hoped that simple discretion and good sense would be enough to move him; in either case, all she would have to do would be to follow him, to some or any other place in the United States or even back to the Argentine (where of course there are no other women) and, by surprise envelopement or perhaps simple compromise, gain the victory, render him at least monogamous. But she underestimated him; she aspersed his character with the crime of maturity too.’

His uncle held the door open, looking at him.

‘There’s nothing actually wrong with any of them except youth. Only—as I believe I mentioned a moment ago—the possession of youth is a good deal like the possession of smallpox or bubonic plague.’

‘Oh,’ he said again. ‘Maybe that’s what’s the matter with Captain Gualdres too. We were wrong about him. I thought he was about forty. But she said he’s not but eight or ten years older than she is.’

‘Which means she believes he is about fifteen years older,’ his uncle said. ‘Which means he is probably about twenty-five older.’

‘Twenty-five?’ he said. ‘That would put him right back where he used to be.’

‘Had he ever left it?’ his uncle said. His uncle held the door open. ‘Well? What are you waiting for?’

‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘Then good night too,’ his uncle said. ‘You go home too. This kindergarten is closed for the day.’

So that was that. He went upstairs to his room. He went to bed too, taking off the uniform, ‘shedding the brown’ as the Corps called it. Because this was Thursday, and the battalion always drilled on Thursday. And he was not only cadet lieutenant colonel this year, but nobody ever missed drill because, although the Academy was only a prep school, it had one of the highest R.O.T.C. ratings in the country; at the last review, the inspector-general himself told them that when war came, every one of them who could prove he was eighteen years old would be almost automatically eligible for officer-candidate school.

Which included him too, since he was already so near eighteen that you could put the difference in your eye. Except that it wouldn’t matter now whether he was eighteen or eight or eighty; he would be too late even if he were going to wake up eighteen tomorrow morning. It would be over and people would already have begun to be able to start forgetting about it before he could even reach officers’ school, let alone finish the course.

It was already over even now as far as the United States was concerned: the British, the handful of boys, some no older than he and some probably not even as old, who flew the Royal Air Force’s fighter command, had stopped them on the west and so now there was nothing left for that whole irresistible tide of victory and destruction to do but vanish away into the plumbless depths of Russia like the mop-thrust push of dirty water across a kitchen floor: so that each time during the fifteen months since that fall of 1940 that he took the uniform down or hung it back up in the closet—the khaki serge true enough such as real officers wore but without even the honest stripes of N.C.O.’s but instead, the light-blue tabs and facings of R.O.T.C. like the lapel badges of fraternity pledges, and the innocent pastless metal lozenges such as you might see on the shoulders of a swank hotel doorman or the leader of a circus band, to divorce it still further from the realm of valor and risk, the heart’s thirst for glory and renown;—each time he looked at it, in the eyes of that heart’s thirst (if that’s what it was), certainly in the irremediable regret which had been his these last months after he realised that it was too late, that he had procrastinated, deferred too long, lacking not only the courage but even the will and the desire and the thirst, the khaki altered transmogrified dissolved like the moving-picture shot, to the blue of Britain and the hooked wings of a diving falcon and the modest braid of rank: but above all the blue, the color the shade which the handful of Anglo Saxon young men had established and decreed as such visual synonym of glory that only last spring an association of American haberdashers or gents’ outfitters had adopted it as a trade slogan, so that every lucky male resident of the United States who had the price could walk into church that Easter morning in the authentic aura of valor yet at the same time safe from the badges of responsibility and the candy-stripes of risk.