The Chequer Board (37 page)

He travelled down to Penzance by train, staring out the window at the little fertile fields, immersed in memories of his previous journeys in troop trains about this country. At Penzance he parked the suitcase which held all his
property in the station cloak room, and went and asked a policeman where he could spend the night; he spent it in a common lodging house.

In the morning he walked out to Trenarth. It was September, and the weather was fine and warm. He had a good suit in his bag, but he wore his seaman’s clothes-blue linen slacks, a khaki shirt, and a windcheater. On his head he wore an old soft hat. He turned up in the bar of the White Hart at opening time, and the first person he saw was Bessie Frobisher, behind the bar.

She greeted him warmly. “We’ve wondered ever so many times if any of you boys would come back here and see us,” she said. “We hear of some of them. Sam Lorimer, he wrote at Christmas; ever so nice it was to hear from him. He’s married now and living at a place called Detroit, where they make motor cars or something.” She smiled at him. “You married yet?”

He shook his head, “No ma’am!”

She laughed. “Won’t nobody have you?”

She asked him what he had been doing, and heard all about his wandering. “Fancy!” she said. Then she went to the parlour door and called her father. “Dad, here’s Dave Lesurier come back!” And he had to tell his story all over again. And then Mr Penlee, the farmer, came in, and he had to tell it a third time.

Mr Frobisher took him into the back parlour and gave him dinner, while Bessie served the bar; she had had her meal before opening time. After the pudding, Dave gave his host a cigarette, and said:

“It’s been mighty nice of you to give me dinner, Mr
Frobisher.” He hesitated. “If I wanted to stop over for the night, would you have a bed? I’ve got money to pay for it.”

“Aye,” said the landlord, “I can fix you up somehow. You staying for a few days?”

“I dunno, Mr Frobisher.” The Negro hesitated. “There was quite a mite of trouble last time I was here,” he said at last. “Would folks remember that around these parts?”

“Aye,” said Mr Frobisher, “they remember it all right. Proper rumpus that set up, that did.”

“If that’s the way it is,” said Lesurier, “maybe I better move along.”

“Not unless you want to,” said the landlord. “The feeling here was you’d been treated pretty bad.”

“There wouldn’t be no more trouble if folks saw me here, on account of what I did?”

“I shouldn’t think so,” said the landlord slowly. “Not unless Grace Trefusis or her mother cut up nasty, and I don’t see why they should.”

Lesurier asked, “Is Miss Grace still here?”

“Aye,” said the landlord. “She works up at Robertson’s just the same. Been there all the time.”

There was a long, slow pause.

“Well, thanks a lot,” the Negro said at last. “I’ll be back around five or six tonight, Mr Frobisher, ’n let you know if I’ll be wanting to stay.”

“Aye,” said the landlord, “please yourself. The bed’s there if you want it.”

Dave Lesurier went out and stood on the street corner, smoking, till the church clock struck two. Then he turned, and walked slowly up the road to Robertson’s grocery
shop, and went in, and walked straight up to Grace Trefusis behind the counter, and said quietly, “Ten Players, please, ma’am.”

She looked up quickly, and met his eyes. Between them, for an instant, the world stood still. She was three years older now, nearly twenty. Her figure had filled out, making her more mature and prettier than the frightened adolescent he had known before. She was more knowledgeable about men, too; she had been to the pictures many times and with a number of young men, and had been kissed by several in a dark corner since the Negro had initiated her into that deplorable pastime. She met his eyes, and the old fear flickered in her own for an instant, but then she smiled.

“Oh …” she said, “it’s you!”

In that instant all his old shyness swept back over him. He coloured hotly, and wished desperately for eloquence, that he might make some flip and smart rejoinder, but no inspiration came. Instead, there was an awkward pause, and all he could find to say to her at last was to repeat, “Ten Players, please, ma’am.”

The last trace of fear of him left her forever. In her more adult experience she knew that she would never be in any danger from this shy young man, coloured though he might be. The words of an American officer came to her mind, secretly treasured and remembered for three years—“If he kind of admired you, Miss Trefusis, well, there’s nothing wrong with that.” That admiration had brought nothing to him but attempted suicide, hospital, and disgrace; and now, after three years, he had come back for more. She reached mechanically to the shelf for
a packet of cigarettes, and said gently, “Are you out of the Army, now?”

He swallowed, and said, “Yes, ma’am.”

She had the packet in her hand, but she did not give it to him. “What are you doing then?” she enquired.

He raised his head, and looked at her, and she was smiling at him in the way that she always had smiled at him when she gave him cigarettes, but she was prettier than he had ever remembered her. Courage came back to him, and he said, “I got a job on a freighter, with the steward, and we docked in at Avonmouth. I thought as it was pretty close, I’d kind of come along down here.” He met her eyes again. “I thought I’d kind of like to see if you was anywhere around here still, and tell you I’ve been mighty sorry about that time.”

She coloured and laughed awkwardly. “Oh, that’s all right.” And then she asked curiously, “Did you come all the way from Avonmouth just to say that?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said simply.

She had once been as far as Exeter, nearly a hundred miles away, but Avonmouth, she knew, was much farther than that, and it seemed a very long way to her. She said weakly, “Fancy …” And then she said, “You didn’t have to come all that way, just to say that.” She did not know that he had come from the United States to say it, in eleven months. “There was an officer here once, about that time,” she said. “He said you didn’t mean nothing by it.”

“That’s right,” he said. He looked at her, and she was smiling, and a slow smile spread across his own face. “I reckon it just kind of happened.”

“Well,” she said, “you just look out it doesn’t happen again.” But she was still smiling as she said it, and he took more courage from her smile.

“I was wondering—” he said, and stopped. “I got a lot I’d like to tell you about that time—” he said, and stopped again. And then he managed to get it out, after three years. “If I stopped over for the night,” he said, “I was wondering if you’d care to take a little walk with me this evening.”

She said gently, “That’s what you wanted to ask me before, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Just for an hour?”

He nodded.

She smiled at him. “I don’t mind if I do. Six o’clock, by the gate into the churchyard?”

“I’ll be waiting for you, Miss Grace.”

She laughed. “None of your tricks, now.”

He said in horror, “No
ma’am!
”

“All right,” she said. “See you then.” And as he turned to go, “You’re forgetting your cigarettes!”

Dave Lesurier did not go down the street turning cartwheels, but he felt like it. He went and waited for the bus, went into Penzance and got his bag, and took it back to the White Hart Hotel, and spent the rest of the afternoon dressing for the party. When he walked out of the White Hart that evening for his date he wore a blue suit that was a little too blue, with a very marked waist, and pointed light-brown shoes rather too tight for his feet, and a bright yellow tie with spots on it, and a green silk shirt and collar, and a magenta handkerchief. Grace Trefusis,
when she saw him coming, thought he looked ever so smart, and wished she’d put on her best frock instead of the one she’d been wearing for three days.

He had bought a large bunch of violets for her in Penzance, and he gave her these when he met her by the churchyard gate. “They looked so pretty, right there in the shop,” he said diffidently, “I thought maybe you’d like them.”

She buried her face in the little blossoms. “Oh, they’re ever so nice. Just take a smell!” He sniffed them, laughing, and they turned and walked past the churchyard wall together, out towards the hill, and old Mrs Polread, the sexton’s wife, who had seen the whole thing from her cottage window, had a fine tale to tell Mrs Penlee when they met an hour later.

“That black boy that assaulted Grace Trefusis when the Americans were here, you know, the one that there was all that trouble over? Believe it or not, he’s back here, and she’s walking out with him this very minute! And he give her a bunch of violets, too, big as a plate!”

Most of that first walk they spent in talking of his plans.

“I kind of thought maybe there’d be a chance of something over here,” he said. “Drafting, or that. It’s not so easy for a colored boy to get a chance at drafting in my country.” She did not really know what drafting was, but she was impressed by his sincerity of purpose. “I thought maybe I’d take a look round a little before I get to looking for another ship. I don’t want to go on as mess boy.”

He brought her back to the churchyard gate exactly at seven o’clock; she had never been treated with such courtesy and such consideration by any other young man.

“How long are you stopping here?” she asked.

“I d’know,” he said. “Tomorrow, maybe.”

She said with studied carelessness, “I got a half-day Saturday, but I suppose you’ll be gone by then.”

He said, “I might not be, Miss Grace. If I was still here, would you like to go to a movie in Penzance, or something?”

She said, “There’s ever such a good one on. Ginger Rogers, all in Technicolour. I do think she’s ever so nice, don’t you?”

He had seen Ginger Rogers all in Technicolour before he left New York; what he wanted to see now was Grace Trefusis. He said, “I think she’s swell, Miss Grace. I’d be real honored if you’d let me take you.”

She said, “Well, look in at the shop tomorrow and say if you’ll be staying over the week-end. I’d like to see that picture ever so.”

“Okay, Miss Grace.”

He lifted his hat, showing his short, kinky hair, and stood bareheaded while she walked away from him towards her home, to make what explanation of her conduct that she could before her parents.

In the White Hart that evening Dave Lesurier consulted Mr Frobisher about work as a draftsman. Mr Frobisher knew something about draftsmen, only he called them “draughtsmen.” His late wife’s brother had been one. Habitually, too, he kept his ear close to the ground and gathered all the gossip of the district. “I did hear that Jones and Porter, over Camborne way, were taking on draughtsmen,” he said thoughtfully. “That was some time back. You might try there, perhaps.”

“What kind of work would that be, Mr Frobisher?”

“Electric switches, mostly—time switches and that, special ones to shut off under water, ’n that sort of thing. They got a lot of draughtsmen working there, that I do know.”

Lesurier did not let the opportunity pass by. Next morning at eleven o’clock he was at the office of a Mr Horrocks, chief draughtsman of Jones and Porter Ltd., outside Camborne. Mr Horrocks was a thin, dark man, a little at a loss with the young Negro before him. He wanted junior draughtsmen and he was naturally inclined to take a man who came after a job, but he had never engaged a Negro, and Dave’s ability was difficult to assess. On his own confession the young man had had no experience in draughtsmanship except his course at school, which might mean nothing at all.

Mr Horrocks picked a bolt up from his desk and gave it to the Negro. “What thread is that?” he asked.

Lesurier took it with a sinking heart, and turned it over in his fingers. “It’s a quarter bolt, of course,” he said at last, “but what the thread is I don’t rightly know. It’s a British thread,” he explained. “Back home a standard fine thread on a quarter bolt would be twenty-eight to the inch, but this looks coarser to me.” He said, “I’m real sorry, sir, but I don’t know the British standards. But I’d soon pick them up.”

Mr Horrocks took the bolt back. “That’s a B.S.F.,” he said. “Twenty-six to the inch.” He stood for a moment in thought; the young man’s answer had not been unintelligent. “Tell you what I’ll do,” he said. “You can start on Monday for a week on trial, if you like, at two pounds
ten. At the end of the week I’ll have another talk with you.”

Lesurier said, “I certainly will do my best to please you, sir.” He hesitated, and then said, “There wouldn’t be any trouble with the other men?”

“Trouble? What about?”

“On account of the color.”

“Colour?” The chief draughtsman was puzzled for an instant. “Oh, I see what you mean. No, of course there won’t be any trouble. I’d like to see them try it on.” He made a note of Lesurier’s name and temporary address. “Are you a British subject?”

“No, sir. I’m a citizen of the United States.”

“Oh well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Monday, nine o’clock.”

Dave Lesurier walked back to the station bursting with pride and apprehension, pride for having got a job as a draughtsman, and apprehension that he would not be able to hold it. He went past Trenarth in the train and on to Penzance. There he bought a British engineer’s pocket book, a fat little volume, full of concentrated information, and a few drawing instruments, and an elementary book on electricity. He had learned the rudiments of electricity at the James Hollis School for Colored Boys back in Nashville; enough to warn him that his knowledge was lamentably deficient for the work he had to do, or thought he had to do. It never struck him that Mr Horrocks did not really think that he was getting an experienced electrical engineer for two pounds ten a week.

He walked rather shyly into Robertson’s that afternoon and waited while Grace served another customer. Then
he said, “Ten Players, please, ma’am.” It had become almost a joke between them by that time. She reached for the packet, and said, “You staying tomorrow, or have you got to go?”

He said, “I’d be real honored if you’d let me take you to the movies, Miss Grace. I’ve got something to celebrate. I’ve got a job. A job as draftsman.”