Knight's Gambit

  They came in and stood, rosy, young, delicate and expensive-looking, flushed from the December night. His uncle rose. ‘Miss Harriss, Mr Harriss,’ he said. ‘But you are already in, so I cant—’

  But the boy didn’t wait for that either. Then he saw that the boy held his sister, not by the arm or elbow, but by the forearm above the wrist like in the old lithographs of the policeman with his cringing captive or the victory-flushed soldier with his shrinking Sabine prey. And that was when he saw the girl’s face.

  ‘You’re Stevens,’ the boy said. He didn’t even demand it. He stated it.

  ‘That’s partly correct,’ his uncle said. ‘But let it pass. What can I—’

  Nor did the boy wait for that. He turned to the girl. ‘That’s Stevens,’ he said. ‘Tell him.’

  But she didn’t speak. She just stood there, in the evening dress and a fur coat which had cost a good deal more than any other girl (or woman either) in Jefferson or Yoknapatawpha County had to spend for such, staring at his uncle with that frozen sickness of dread or terror or whatever it was on her face, while the knuckles of the boy’s hand grew whiter and whiter on her wrist. ‘Tell him,’ the boy said.

  Then she spoke. You could hardly hear her. ‘Captain Gualdres. At our house—’

  His uncle had taken a few steps toward them. Now he stopped too, standing in the middle of the floor, looking at her. ‘Yes,’ his uncle said. ‘Tell me.’

  But it seemed as if that one expiring rush was all of it. She just stood there, trying to tell his uncle something, whatever it was, with her eyes; trying to tell both of them for that matter, since he was there too. But they found out quickly enough what it was, or at least what it was the boy wanted her to say, had dragged her in to town by the arm to say. Or at least what he thought it was she wanted to say. Because he should have known then that his uncle probably knew already more than the boy or the girl either intended to say yet; perhaps, even then, all of it. But it would be a little while yet before he would realise that last. And the reason he was so slow about it was his uncle himself.

  ‘Yes,’ the boy said, in exactly the same tone and voice which had declined to address the older man by any title of courtesy or deference to age; he—Charles—watched the boy staring at his uncle too—the same delicate face which the sister had, but with nothing delicate about the eyes. They—the eyes—stared at his uncle without even bothering to be hard: they just waited. ‘Captain Gualdres, our so-called houseguest. We want him out of our house and out of Jefferson too.’

  ‘I see,’ his uncle said. He said, ‘I’m on the draft board here. I dont remember your name in the registration.’

  But the boy’s stare didn’t change at all. It was not even contemptuous. It just waited.

  Then his uncle was looking at the sister; his voice was quite different now. ‘Is that what it is?’ his uncle said.

  But she didn’t answer. She just stared at his uncle with that urgent desperation, her arm hanging at her side and her brother’s knuckles white around her wrist. Now his uncle was speaking to the boy too though he still watched the girl and his voice was even still gentle too or at least quiet:

  ‘Why did you come to me? What makes you think I can help you? That I should?’

  ‘You’re the Law here, aren’t you?’ the boy said.

  His uncle still watched the sister. ‘I’m the County Attorney.’ He was still talking to her too. ‘But even if I could help you, why should I?’

  But again it was the boy: ‘Because I dont intend that a fortune-hunting Spick shall marry my mother.’

  Now it seemed to him that his uncle really looked at the boy for the first time. ‘I see,’ his uncle said. Now his uncle’s voice was different. It was no louder, there was just no more gentleness in it, as though for the first time his uncle could (or anyway had) stop speaking to the sister: ‘That’s your affair and your right. I ask you again: why should I do anything about it, even if I could?’ And now the two of them—his uncle and the boy—spoke crisply and rapidly; it was almost as though they stood toe to toe, slapping each other:

  ‘He was engaged to marry my sister. When he found out that the money would still be our mother’s as long as she lived, he ratted.’

  ‘I see. You wish to employ the deportation laws of the Federal government to avenge your sister on her jilter.’

  This time even the boy didn’t answer. He just stared at the older man with such cold, controlled, mature malevolence that he—Charles—watched his uncle actually pause for a moment before turning back to the girl, speaking—his uncle—again in the gentle voice, though even then his uncle had to repeat the question before she answered:

  ‘Is this true?’

  ‘Not engaged,’ she whispered.

  ‘But you love him?’

  But the boy didn’t even give her time, didn’t give anybody time. ‘What does she know about love?’ he said. ‘Will you take the case, or do I report you to your superiors too?’

  ‘Can you risk being away from home that long?’ his uncle said in the mild voice which he—Charles—knew anyway and, if it had been addressed to him, would have leaped at once to hold his hat. But the boy didn’t even pause.

  ‘Say it in English if you can,’ he said.

  ‘I wont take your case,’ his uncle said.

  For a moment still the boy stared at his uncle, holding the girl by the wrist. Then he—Charles—thought the boy was going to jerk, fling her bodily through the door ahead of him. But he even released her, himself (not the host, the owner of the door which he had already passed through once without even waiting for permission, let alone invitation) opening the door, then standing aside for the girl to precede him through it—a gesture, a pantomime of courtesy and deference even when automatic from habit and early training, as his was: automatic: and from long habit and the best of training under the best masters and tutors and preceptors in what the ladies of Yoknapatawpha County anyway would call the best of company. But there was no difference in it now: only arrogance: swaggering, insulting not just to whom offered but to everyone watching it too, not even looking at the sister for whom he held the door but still staring at the man twice his age whose domicile he had now violated twice.

  ‘All right,’ the boy said. ‘Dont say you were not warned.’

  Then they were gone. His uncle closed the door. But for a second his uncle didn’t move. It was a pause, a check, an almost infinitesimal instant of immobility so quick and infinitesimal that probably nobody but he, Charles, would have remarked it. And he noticed it only because he had never before seen his uncle, that quick and nervous man garrulous in speech and movement both, falter or check in either once he had begun them. Then his uncle turned and came back toward where he, Charles, still sat at his side of the chessboard, not even realising yet, so rapid and staccato the whole thing had been, that he not only hadn’t risen himself, he would hardly have had time to even if he had thought about it. And maybe his mouth was open a little too (he was not quite eighteen yet and even at eighteen there were still a few situations which even a man of his uncle’s capacity for alarms would have to admit you might not be able to assimilate at the drop of a hat or the slam of a door, or at least hadn’t needed to yet), sitting at his side of the half-played game watching his uncle come back to his chair and begin to sit back down and reach for the overturned cob pipe on the smoking stand all in the same motion.

  ‘Warned?’ he said.

  ‘So he called it,’ his uncle said, finishing the sitting down and approaching the bit of the pipe to his mouth and already taking a match from the box on the smoking stand, so that the actual relighting of the pipe would be merely a continuation of the coming back from the door: ‘I’d call it a threat, myself.’

  And he repeated that too, with his mouth still open probably.

  ‘All right,’ his uncle said. ‘What would you call it then?’—striking the match and in the same sweep of the arm bringing the flame to the cold ash in the pipe, and still talking
around the stem into the vain shape of the invisible puffing so that it would be a second or two yet before he would realise that all he had to smoke now was the match.

  Then his uncle dropped the match into the ashtray and with the other hand made the move which without doubt he had already planned out long before the knock came on the door which he had been too late or at least too slow to answer or even say ‘Come in.’ He made the move without even looking, moving the pawn which exposed his, Charles’s, castle to the rook which his uncle had probably been convinced even longer back than the plan that he, Charles, had forgotten to watch, and then sat there with his thin quick face and his shock of premature white hair and his Phi Beta Kappa key and the dime corncob pipe and the suit which looked as if he had slept in it every night since the day he bought it, and said, ‘Move.’

  But he, Charles, wasn’t that stupid even if his mouth was open a little. In fact, he wasn’t really surprised, after the first shock of that entrance, that abrupt and that informal, at this hour, this late at night and this cold: the boy without doubt dragging the girl by the arm right on through the front door without bothering to ring or knock there at all, on down the strange hall which, if he had never seen before, would have been seventeen or eighteen years ago as an infant at nurse, to a strange door and knocking this time true enough but not waiting for any response, and so into a room where for all he knew (or cared) his, Charles’s, mother might have been undressing for bed.

  What surprised him was his uncle: that glib and talkative man who talked so much and so glibly, particularly about things which had absolutely no concern with him, that his was indeed a split personality: the one, the lawyer, the county attorney who walked and breathed and displaced air; the other, the garrulous facile voice so garrulous and facile that it seemed to have no connection with reality at all and presently hearing it was like listening not even to fiction but to literature.

  Yet two strangers had burst not only into his home but into his private sitting room, and delivered first a peremptory command and then a threat and then burst out again, and his uncle had sat calmly back to an interrupted chess game and an interrupted pipe and completed a planned move as though he had not only not noticed any interruption but hadn’t actually been interrupted. This, in the face of what should have supplied his uncle with food and scope for garrulity for the rest of the night, since of all possible things which might have entered this room from the whole county’s remotest environs, this one concerned him least: the domestic entanglements or impasses or embroilments of a family a household six miles from town whose four members or at least inhabitants not a dozen people in the county knew more than merely to speak to on the street—the wealthy widow (millionairess, the county stipulated it), the softly fading still softly pretty woman in the late thirties, and the two spoiled children a year apart somewhere under twenty-one, and the Argentine army captain house-guest, the four of them like the stock characters in the slick magazine serial, even to the foreign fortune-hunter.

  For which reason (and maybe that was why, though it would take a good deal more than even his uncle’s incredible taciturnity to convince him, Charles, of this) his uncle didn’t really need to talk about it. Because for twenty years now, long before there were any children even, let alone anything to draw the foreign fortune-hunter, the county had been watching it unfold as the subscribers read and wait and watch for the serial’s next installment.

  Which—the twenty years—was before his, Charles’s, time too. But it was his nevertheless; he had inherited it, heired it in his turn as he would heir in his turn from his mother and father who had heired them in their turn, the library shelf in the room just across the hall from this one where he and his uncle sat, containing not the books which his grandfather had chosen or heired in his turn from his father, but the ones which his grandmother had chosen and bought on the semi-yearly trips to Memphis—the sombre tomes before the day of gaudy dust-jackets, the fly leaves bearing his grandmother’s name and address and even that of the store or shop where she purchased them and the date in the nineties and the early nineteen hundreds in her fading young women’s seminary script, the volumes to be exchanged and lent and returned to be the subject of the leading papers at the next meeting of the literary clubs, the yellowed pages bearing even forty and fifty years later the imprint of pressed and vanished flowers and through which moved with the formal gestures of shades the men and women who were to christian-name a whole generation: the Clarissas and Judiths and Marguerites, the St Elmos and Rolands and Lothairs: women who were always ladies and men who were always brave, moving in a sort of immortal moonlight without anguish and with no pain from birth without foulment to death without carrion, so that you too could weep with them without having to suffer or grieve, exult with them without having to conquer or triumph.

  So the legend was his too. He had even got some of it direct from his grandmother by means of childhood’s simple inevitable listening, by-passing his own mother, who in a sense had had a part in it. And until tonight it had even remained as harmless and unreal as the old yellowed volumes: the old plantation six miles from town which had been an old place even in his grandmother’s time, not so big in acreage but of good land properly cared for and worked, with the house on it which was not large either but was just a house, a domicile, more spartan even than comfortable, even in those days when people wanted needed comfort in their homes for the reason that they spent some of their time there; and the widower-owner who stayed at home and farmed his heritage and, with a constant tumbler of thin whiskey-and-water at his elbow and an aged setter bitch dozing at his feet, sat through the long summer afternoons in a home-made chair on the front gallery, reading in Latin the Roman poets; and the child, the daughter, the motherless girl who grew up in that almost conventual seclusion without companions or playmates, with nobody in fact except a few Negro servants and the middle-aged father who paid (again by the town’s and the county’s postulation) little or no attention to her and who therefore, without ever once saying so to anyone of course, certainly not to the child, perhaps never even to himself, still charged against the life of the daughter, the death of the wife who apparently had been his own life’s one monogamous love; and who (the child) at seventeen and without warning to anyone, not to the county anyway, married a man whom nobody in that part of Mississippi had ever heard of before.

  And there was something else: an appendix or anyway appendage; a legend to or within or behind the actual or original or initial legend; apocryphal’s apocrypha. He not only couldn’t remember whether it was from his mother or his grandmother that he had heard it, he couldn’t even remember whether his mother or grandmother had actually seen it, known it at first hand, or had themselves heard it from someone else. It was something about a previous involvement, prior to the marriage: an engagement, a betrothal in form in fact, with (so the legend said) the father’s formal consent, then broken, ruptured, voided—something—before the man she did marry ever appeared on the scene;—a betrothal in form according to the legend, yet so nebulous that even twenty years after, with twenty years of front gallery gossip for what his uncle called the Yoknapatawpha County spinster aunts of both sexes to have cast that romantic mantle over the shoulders of every male under sixty who had ever taken a drink or bought a bale of cotton from her father, the other party to it had not only no name but no face too—which at least the other man had, the stranger, for all that he appeared without warning out of nowhere and (as it were) married her all in one burst, one breath, without any space between for anything called by so leisurely a name as betrothal, let alone courtship. So it—the first, the other one, the true betrothal, worthy of the word for the simple reason that nothing came of it but apocrypha’s ephemeral footnote, already fading: a scent, a shadow, a whisper; a young girl’s trembling Yes in an old garden at dusk, a flower exchanged or kept; and nothing remained unless perhaps the flower, the rose pressed between the pages of a book as the successors to his grandmother’s g
eneration occasionally did—was probably, without doubt, it had to be, the aftermath of some boy-and-girl business of her schooldays. But indubitably it was to someone in Jefferson or at least in the county. Because until now she had never been anywhere else to have involved or pledged her inclinations and then lost them.

  But the man (or the boy) had no face, no name. He had no substance at all, in fact. He had no past, no yesterday; protagonist of a young girl’s ephemeris: a shade, a shadow; himself virgin as the untried passions of that cloistered and nunlike maiden. Not even the five or six girls (his, Charles’s, mother was one of them) who had been the nearest thing she had to friends during the three or four years she attended the female half of the Academy, even knew for certain that an engagement really existed, let alone the mortal partner in it. Because she never spoke of it herself, and even the rumor, legend’s baseless legend, was born rather of a chance remark of her father’s one day, and now its own part of the legend, to the effect that for a girl of sixteen to be partner in a betrothal was like a blind man being a partner in the ownership of an original Horatian manuscript.

  But at least his uncle had a reason for not talking about this part of it because his uncle didn’t even know about the first engagement except by second hand two or three years later. Because he—his uncle—was not there then; that was 1919 and once more Europe—Germany—was open to students and tourists too with student visas, and his uncle had already gone back to Heidelberg to finish his Ph.D., and when he returned five years later, she was already married to the other man, the one who did have a name and a face even if nobody in the town or the county had heard the one nor seen the other until they came up the church aisle almost, and had borne the two children and then herself departed with them for Europe and the old other thing which had never been more than a shadow anyway, had been forgotten even in Jefferson, unless maybe on fading occasions over cups of coffee or tea or ladies’ punch (and then more fading still over their own bassinets) by the six girls who had been her only friends.