Knight's Gambit

  Though in this case (the man and the horse) the thing was in obverse. It was as if the man knew that he himself was invulnerable and unbreakable, and of their two, only the horse could fail, and that the man had laid out the course and built the jumps just to see where the horse must ultimately falter. Which, by all the tenets of that agrarian and equestrian land, was exactly right; that was exactly the way to ride a horse; Rafe McCallum, one of his constant watchers, who had bred and raised and trained and sold horses all his life and who knew more about horses probably than any man in the country, said so: that when it was in the stall, treat it like it cost a thousand dollars; but when you were using it for something you had, or you and it both liked, to do, treat it like you could have bought ten like it for that many cents.

  And one thing more happened or at least began about three months ago now, which the whole county had had to know about, or at least form an opinion about, for the very reason that this was the only phase or side of Captain Gualdres’ Mississippi life which he ever tried to keep, if not secret, at least private.

  It had a horse in it of course because it had Captain Gualdres in it too. In fact, the county even knew specifically what horse. It was the one animal—or creature, including Captain Gualdres—in all those broad paneled manicured acres which didn’t belong even titularly to the Harrisses.

  Because this one belonged to Captain Gualdres himself. He had bought it on his own selection and with his own money—or what he used for his own money: and the fact that he bought a horse with what the county believed was his mistress’s money was one of the best, perhaps the best North American stroke Captain Gualdres ever made or could have made. If he had used Mrs Harriss’s money to buy himself a girl, which, being younger than Mrs Harriss, they had expected all the time that sooner or later he would, the county’s contempt and disgust for him would have been exceeded only by their contempt and shame for Mrs Harriss. While, having decently spent her money for a horse, the county absolved him in advance by accepting the prima facie; he had gained a kind of male respectability by honorableness in adultery, fidelity and continence in pimphood; continuing (Captain Gualdres) to enjoy it for almost six weeks in fact, going himself all the way to St Louis and buying the horse and coming back in the truck with it.

  It was a mare, a filly, sired by a famous imported steeplechaser and going blind from trauma, purchased of course, the county believed, to be a brood mare (which was proof to them that Captain Gualdres anyway considered his tenure on North Mississippi worth a year’s purchase at least) since there was obviously nothing else that anyone could do with a mare, no matter what the breeding, which in another year would be totally blind. Which the county continued to believe for the next six weeks, even after they discovered that he was doing something with the mare besides simply waiting on nature, discovering this—not what he was doing with the mare, but that he was doing something with it—for that same reason that this was the first one of his horse activities which he ever tried to keep private.

  Because there were no watchers, spectators this time, not only because whatever it was Captain Gualdres was doing with the mare took place at night and usually late, but because Captain Gualdres himself asked them not to come out and watch, asking them with that Latin passion for decorum and courtesy become instinctive from dealing with its own hair-triggered race, which shone even through the linguistic paucity:

  ‘You will not come out to see because, my honor, there is nothing now to see.’

  So they didn’t. They deferred, not to his Latin honor perhaps, but they deferred. Perhaps there really was nothing to see, since there couldn’t have been very much out there at that hour worth going that distance to see; only occasionally someone, a neighbor on his way home, passing the place in the late silence, would hear hooves in one of the paddocks beyond the stables at some distance from the road—a single horse, at trot then canter then for a few beats at dead run, the sound stopping short off into complete silence while the listener could have counted two or perhaps three, then beginning once more in the middle of the dead run, already slowing back to canter and trot as if Captain Gualdres had snatched, jerked, wrenched the animal from full speed into immobility in one stride and held it so for the two or three beats, then flung it bodily into full run again,—teaching it what, nobody knew, unless as a barber-shop wit said, since it was going to be blind, how to dodge traffic on the way to town to collect its pension.

  ‘Maybe he’s learning it to jump,’ the barber said—a neat dapper man with a weary satiated face and skin the color of a mushroom’s belly, on whom the sun shone at least once every day because at noon he would have to cross the open street to get from the barbershop to the Allnite Inn and eat his dinner, who if he had ever been on a horse, it was in his defenseless childhood before he could protect himself.

  ‘At night?’ the client said. ‘In the dark?’

  ‘If the horse is going blind, how does it know it’s night?’ the barber said.

  ‘But why jump a horse at night?’ the client said.

  ‘Why jump a horse?’ the barber said, slapping the brush around the foaming mug. ‘Why a horse?’

  But that was all. It didn’t make sense. And if, in the county’s opinion, Captain Gualdres was anything, he was sensible. Which—the sensibleness or at least practicalness—even proved itself by the very action which smirched his image in another phase of the county’s respect. Because they knew the answer now, to the mare, the blind mare and the night. He, the matchless horseman, was using a horse not as a horse but as a disguise; he, the amoral preyer on aging widows, was betraying the integrity of his amorality.

  Not his morals: his morality. They had never had any illusions about his—a foreigner and a Latin—morals, so they had accepted his lack of them already in advance before he could have demanded, requested it even. But they themselves had foisted on, invested him with a morality, a code which he had proved now was not his either, and they would never forgive him.

  It was a woman, another woman; they were forced at last to the acceptance of that which, they realised now, they had always expected of a foreigner and a Latin, knowing now at last why the horse, that horse, a horse going blind, the sound and reason for the sound of whose feet late at night nobody would understand probably, but at least nobody would bother enough about to investigate. It was a Trojan horse; the foreigner who as yet barely spoke English, had gone all the way to St Louis to find and buy with his own money, one meeting the requirements: blindness to establish an acceptable reason for the night absences, a horse already trained or that he himself could train to make on signal—perhaps an electrical sound every ten or fifteen minutes operated from a clock (by this time the county’s imagination had soared to heights which even horse-traders didn’t reach, let alone mere horse-trainers)—those spurts of galloping around an empty paddock, until he got back from the assignation and threw a switch and put the horse up and rewarded it with sugar or oats.

  It would be a younger woman of course, perhaps even a young girl; probably was a young girl, since there was a hard ruthless unimaginative maleness to him which wore and even became the Latin formality like a young man’s white tie and tails became him and stood him in good stead, with no real effort on his part at all. But this didn’t matter. In fact, only the concupiscent wondered who the partner might be. To the others, the rest, the most of them, the new victim was no more important than Mrs Harriss. They turned the stern face of repudiation not on a seducer, but simply on another buck of the woods running the land, as though the native domestic supply were not enough. When they remembered Mrs Harriss, it was as the peers and even superiors of her million dollars. They thought, not ‘Poor woman’ but ‘Poor fool.’

  And for a while, during the first months of that first year after they all came home from South America, the boy would ride with Captain Gualdres. And he, Charles, had already known that the boy could ride, and the boy did ride; it was when you watched him trying to follow Captain Gualdres over t
he steeplechase course that you actually realised what riding was. And he, Charles, thought that, with a Spanish-blooded guest in the house, maybe the boy would have someone to fence with. But whether they did or not, nobody ever knew, and after a while the boy even stopped riding with his mother’s guest or lover or his own prospective stepfather or whatever, and when the town saw the boy at all, it would be passing through the Square in the supercharged sports car with the top back and the rumble full of luggage, either going somewhere or just coming back. And after the six months, when he did see the boy close enough to look at his eyes, he would think: Even if there were just two horses in the world and he owned both of them, I would have to want to ride one mighty bad before I would ride with him, even if my name was Captain Gualdres.

  2

  Yet these were the people—the puppets, the paper dolls; the situation, impasse, morality play, medicine show, whichever you liked best—dropped out of a clear sky into his uncle’s lap at ten oclock on a cold night four weeks before Christmas, and all his uncle saw fit or felt inclined or even needful to do, was to come back to the board and move the pawn and say ‘Move’ as though it had never happened, never been; not only dismissed but repudiated, refused.

  But he didn’t move yet. And this time he repeated himself, stubbornly:

  ‘It’s the money.’

  And this time his uncle repeated himself too, still abrupt, short, even harsh: ‘Money? What does that boy care about money? He probably hates it, is put into a rage each time he has to carry a wad of it around with him simply because he wants to buy something or go somewhere. If it was just the money, I’d never have heard about it. He wouldn’t have had to come here bursting in on me at ten oclock at night, first with a royal ukase then with a lie then with a threat, just to keep his mother from marrying a man who has no money. Not even if the man had no money at all, which in Captain Gualdres’ case may not even be the fact.’

  ‘All right,’ he said, quite stubbornly. ‘He doesn’t want his mother or sister either to marry that foreigner. Just not liking Captain Gualdres is plenty enough for that.’

  Now his uncle really had finished talking, sitting opposite him across the chessboard, waiting. Then he discovered that his uncle was looking at him, steady and speculative and quite hard.

  ‘Well well,’ his uncle said. ‘Well well well:’—looking at him while he found out that he hadn’t forgot how to blush either. But he should have been used to that by now—or at least to the fact that his uncle would still remember it, whether it had slipped his mind or not. But at least he stuck to his guns, holding his head up, hot suffusion and all, staring as steadily back as his uncle stared, answering that too:

  ‘Not to mention dragging his sister along to make her tell the lie.’

  His uncle was looking at him, not quizzical now, not even staring: just looking.

  ‘Why is it,’ his uncle said, ‘that people of seventeen—’

  ‘Eighteen,’ he said. ‘Or almost.’

  ‘All right,’ his uncle said. ‘Eighteen or almost—are so convinced that octogenarians like me are incapable of accepting or respecting or even remembering what the young ones consider passion and love?’

  ‘Maybe it’s because the old ones can no longer tell the difference between that and simple decency, like not dragging your sister six miles at ten oclock on a cold December night to make her tell a lie.’

  ‘All right,’ his uncle said. ‘Touché then. Will that do? Because I know one octogenarian of fifty who will put nothing past seventeen and eighteen and nineteen—and for that matter, sixteen too—, least of all, passion and love or decency or dragging your sister six or twenty-six miles at night to make her tell a lie or break a safe or commit a murder either—if he had to drag her. She didn’t have to come; at least, I saw no shackles.’

  ‘But she came,’ he said. ‘And she told the lie. She denied she and Captain Gualdres were ever engaged. But when you asked her right out if she loved him, she said Yes.’

  ‘And got dismissed from the room for saying it,’ his uncle said. ‘That was when she told the truth—which incidentally I dont put past seventeen and eighteen and nineteen either when there is a practical reason for it. She came in here, the two of them did, with the lie all rehearsed to tell me. But she lost her nerve. So they were each trying to use the other to accomplish a purpose. Only it’s not the same purpose.’

  ‘But at least they both quit when they saw it had failed. He quit pretty quick. He quit almost as hard as he started. I thought for a minute he was going to throw her out into the hall like she might have been a rag doll.’

  ‘Yes,’ his uncle said. ‘Too quick. He quit that plan to try something else as soon as he found out he couldn’t depend on her. And she had already quit before then. She quit as soon as she began to believe, either that he was getting out of hand, or that I was not going to swallow it and so maybe I would get out of hand too. So they have both already decided to try something else, and I dont like it. Because they are dangerous. Dangerous not because they are stupid; stupidity (your pardon, sir) is to be expected at that age. But because they have never had anybody to tell them they are young and stupid whom they had enough respect for or fear of to believe.—Move.’

  And that seemed to be all of it as far as his uncle was concerned; at least on this subject he was going to get no more change from him apparently.

  It seemed to be all of it indeed. He moved. He had planned it a long time back too, a longer time back than his uncle, counting as airmen do by contiguous and not elapsed time, because he had not had to make a landing long enough to repel an invading force and then get airborne again, as his uncle had. He checked his uncle’s queen and her castle both with the horse. Then his uncle fed him the pawn which only he, Charles, seemed to have believed that nobody had forgotten about, and he moved and then his uncle moved and then as usual it was all over.

  ‘Maybe I should have taken the queen twenty minutes ago when I could, and let the castle go,’ he said.

  ‘Always,’ his uncle said, starting to separate the white and the black pieces as he, Charles, reached for the box on the lower shelf of the smoking stand. ‘You couldn’t have taken them both without two moves. And a knight can move two squares at once and even in two directions at once. But he cant move twice’—shoving the black pieces across the board toward him. ‘I’ll take the white this time and you can try it.’

  ‘It’s after ten,’ he said. ‘It’s almost ten thirty.’

  ‘So it is,’ his uncle said, setting up the black pieces. ‘It often is.’

  ‘I thought maybe I ought to be going to bed,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe you ought,’ his uncle said, still absolutely immediate and absolutely bland. ‘You dont mind if I stay up, do you?’

  ‘Maybe you would have a better game then,’ he said. ‘Playing against yourself, at least you’d have the novelty of being surprised at your opponent’s blunders.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ his uncle said. ‘Didn’t I say touché? At least put the pieces back on the board whether you use them or not.’

  That was all he knew then. He didn’t even suspect any more. But he learned fast—or caught on fast. This time they heard the feet first—the light sharp brittle staccato clapping that girls make, coming up the hall. He had already learned, from the time he had spent in his uncle’s quarters, that you really never actually hear the sound of feet in any house or building containing at least two more or less separate establishments. So he realised in the same moment (which was before she even knocked, even before his uncle said, ‘Now it’s your time to be too late to open it’) that not only had his uncle known all the time that she would come back, but that he must have known it too. Only he thought at first that the boy had sent her back; it wasn’t until afterward that he thought to wonder how she had managed to get away from him that quick.

  She looked as if she had been running ever since, anyway, standing in the door for a moment after he opened it, holding the
fur coat together at her throat with one hand and the long white dress flowing away from beneath it. And maybe the terror was still in her face, but there wasn’t any thing dazed about her eyes. And she even looked at him this time, good, when on the other one, as near as he could tell, she never had seen that he was in the room.

  Then she quit looking at him. She came in and crossed the room fast to where his uncle (this time) stood beside the chessboard.

  ‘I must see you alone,’ she said.

  ‘You are,’ his uncle said. ‘This is Charles Mallison, my nephew.’ His uncle turned one of the chairs away from the chessboard. ‘Sit down.’

  But she didn’t move.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Alone.’

  ‘If you cant tell me the truth with three here, you probably wont with just two,’ his uncle said. ‘Sit down.’

  Still she didn’t move for a space. He, Charles, couldn’t see her face because her back was toward him. But her voice had changed completely.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She turned toward the chair. Then she stopped again, already bending to sit down, half-turned and looking at the door as if she not only expected to hear the brother’s feet coming up the hall, but as if she were on the point of running back to the front door to look up and down the street for him.

  But it was hardly a pause, because she sat down, collapsing on down into the chair in that rapid swirling of skirts and legs both, as girls do, as if their very joints were hinged differently and at different places from men’s.

  ‘Can I smoke?’ she said.