by Nevil Shute
Mr Trefusis, signalman on the railway, had already gone to work. Mrs Trefusis opened the door to them, full of feminine indignation. Gracie had come in crying shortly after ten o’clock and had been closely questioned by her mother. She had told her mother that she had been grabbed and kissed by a Negro soldier, and that she had screamed, and a sergeant of the U. S. Military Police had come running up and saved her. In her confusion and distress she thought that this was true.
“And let me tell you,” said Mrs Trefusis, arms akimbo, “if you think you can bring them black savages into a decent town like this and let them run amuck, you’re very much mistaken. It’s just the mercy of Providence the poor girl isn’t lying in her grave this very minute, and a lot any of you would care about it. But you ain’t heard the last of this, you mark my word. Fine goings on, when decent girls can’t go out after dark ’n come home safe! Fine goings on!”
Lieutenant Anderson’s spirits rose; this was just what he wanted. If there was any difficulty about the charge or the shooting he could bring the Colonel down and let him listen to the mother of the victim. “I guess we’re all real sorry this has happened, lady,” he said meekly.
“And well you might be, young man,” she replied indignantly. “This is a decent town; we don’t have them goings on here, you know, however you may carry on at home where you come from. We don’t want any o’ your Wild West manners here. What do we have to do? Keep our girls in of an evening ’cause the niggers get them? I never did hear such! The poor child hasn’t slept a wink all night and didn’t eat no breakfast, and now late at the shop and all. I told Mr Trefusis, I did, I said we ought to have a doctor to her, that we did. That’s what I told him. But he didn’t pay no attention to me.”
She stopped for breath.
The lieutenant said, “You don’t have to worry any more. We got the nigger, and you can depend upon it there won’t be no more trouble of that sort, no ma’am. He’ll be up for court-martial, that nigger will. He’ll get sent up for about ten years. As for your daughter, ma’am, I’m here to tell you that we’re real sorry in the U. S. Army this thing had to happen. I guess there’s nothing we can do will ease the little lady’s feelings, but if there’s anything she needs, or anything that we can get her that’d take her mind off it, I’d be real glad if you’d tell me.”
Mrs Trefusis said, “I dunno. If you’ve got him and he’s going to be court-martialled …”
The lieutenant laughed shortly. “Don’t you worry about that. We’re going to make an example of that nigger. This isn’t going to happen again.” He hesitated. “Could I see the little lady for a minute? I’d like to know if she can identify him.”
“Come in.” She showed them into the parlour, and went to find her daughter, who was hurrying to go to work.
“There’s a couple of American officers come in about last night, dearie,” she said. “Ever so nice they are. Come on in for just a minute and talk to them.”
The girl said, “I don’t want to see them, Ma.”
“Come on, dearie—they won’t hurt you. It won’t take you long. They just want to know if you can identify the nigger that they’ve caught.”
“I don’t want to identify anybody. Why can’t they leave it be?”
Her mother said firmly, “The guilty have to take their punishment. Now come along. It won’t take but a minute.”
“Oh, Ma!”
When she appeared behind her mother in the parlour she was practically inarticulate with embarrassment and fright. The lieutenant glanced at her, pretty and blushing and very young, and a momentary wave of fellow feeling with Lesurier swept over him; she certainly was a lovely little piece of work. This conviction was succeeded by a virtuous resolution to make very sure the Negro got the limit.
He said, “I’m here for the U. S. Army, Miss Trefusis, to apologize for what happened last night. We’re all real sorry about it, and we hope you won’t think too badly of us over it.”
The girl blushed, and was silent. Her mother said kindly, “She don’t bear no ill will, do you, Gracie?”
The girl whispered, “No.”
The lieutenant said kindly, “Did you ever see this man before, Miss Trefusis?”
Her mother said, “Speak up, Gracie, and tell the gentleman.”
She whispered, “I see him in the shop.”
“Did you ever go out walking with him, Miss Trefusis?”
She shook her head. Her mother said, “She don’t go out with boys. Gracie’s always been a very good girl, Captain.”
*
The lieutenant thought, but a darn sight more backward than some. I could teach her plenty.
Aloud, he said, “Do you know his name, Miss Trefusis?”
She shook her head, and whispered, “I heard someone call him Dave once, in the shop.”
Sergeant Burton said, “That’s right, Lieutenant—Dave Lesurier.”
“You’re quite sure it was the same one that troubled you last night?” the lieutenant asked.
She nodded.
“Did you ever speak to him outside the shop?” he asked.
She shook her head.
Her mother said, “Speak up, Gracie, and answer the gentleman when he speaks to you.” To the lieutenant she said fondly, “She’s lost her tongue.”
The girl cleared her throat and said, “He used to come in and buy Players. I never spoke to him except for that.”
The lieutenant said, “Just tell me in your own words what happened, Miss Trefusis.”
She said, “I come out of the Hall and went along the pavement, and he was there, all alone. There was no one else about, ’n he said something, I forget what he said. And then he put his arms round me and kissed me.”
Lieutenant Anderson asked, “Did you know he was going to do that?”
“Oh no, sir.”
“What did you do?”
“I struggled to make him let go, and cried out. And then—” she indicated the sergeant—“he come running up and the nigger let go, and I ran away.”
The sergeant was about to say something, but the lieutenant checked him. “You never gave this nigger any ėncouragement?” he asked.
“Oh no, sir. I only see him in the shop.”
Lieutenant Anderson began to take his leave, well satisfied that he had got a cast-iron case to give the Colonel.
In the jeep as he drove off, the sergeant said, “There’s just one thing about all that, Lieutenant. I heard her cry out to let go when I was round the corner, and the next I knew she come running flat out into me. She got away from the nigger before ever he saw me.”
“Shucks,” said Lieutenant Anderson. “He’d have caught her again, easy enough, if you hadn’t been there. Good thing for her you was.” They drove back to the camp.
The identity of the victim percolated through the village in the course of the morning. Bessie Frobisher, who went out every morning to do the shopping for the White Hart, came back and reported to her father that Gracie did not look very much the worse for her assault. “Doing up the rations like she does every day,” she said. “She hasn’t got no bruises on her face, or anything.”
Jerry Bowman came at midday with a load of beer. He parked the lorry and rolled down the casks, with Mr Frobisher to help him, and came into the bar for a plate of bread and cheese and a pint of his own cargo.
“Had some trouble here last night, they tell me,” he said affably.
“Aye,” said Mr Frobisher. “Just outside here by the gate into the back yard, round the corner. They got the nigger, did they? In Penzance?”
“They’ve got him in the hospital,” said Mr Bowman. “You know he cut ’is throat?”
Mr Frobisher stared at him. “No!”
Mr Bowman told him what he had learned at the Sun in Penzance, which was not a lot. Private Dave Lesurier had got through the night with the help of a transfusion, and would live; he had not at that time developed septicaemia. In the White Hart at dinnertime the case made a first-class sensation; i
t made a bigger one that evening when the Negroes came down after work.
Sergeant Lorimer was worried and distressed. He leaned over the bar, his great black hands clasped round a tankard, talking to Mr Frobisher and Bessie. “It don’t seem to make sense, anyway you look at it,” he said. “If it was some of these sharecropper boys, now, it’d be different because some of them might not know better. Even so, colored boys have been treated real nice in this place; I don’t think even the sharecropper boys’d do a thing like that. But Dave’s got education; he’s a mighty nice sort of boy, is Dave. I can’t see that he’d ever do a thing like that, no, sir.”
Mr Frobisher said, “Well, what did he do, anyway? I haven’t heard that yet.”
“They say up at the camp he’s being charged with an attempt at rape. That’s a mighty serious offense to charge a decent boy with, Mr Frobisher.”
Bessie said, “It must have been something pretty serious, Sam, or he’d never have cut his throat. A boy don’t go and do that for nothing.”
“I dunno. That boy acted mighty high-strung now and then. He’s got education.”
“Well, anyway,” said Mr Frobisher, “I’d like to know just what it was he did.”
He thought about it for an hour or two while he served beer across the bar and listened to the Negroes as they discussed it. He found that, one and all, they took it cynically. They linked it with the conduct of the Military Police.
“They been waiting for a case they could go to court-martial on,” one said. “They hate like hell to see us walking with white girls. Now they got one, and they’ll make it plenty tough for that nigger. Yes, sir, they been out to get a colored boy on a color charge for a court-martial, ’n now they’ve got one. That boy’s certainly going up for a long stretch.” There was sullen agreement in the bar with this view.
They displayed complete revulsion from the war. When the nine o’clock news came on the radio, one said. “Aw, turn the blame thing off. Let the white men get on with the white man’s war ’n leave us be.” Nobody wanted to hear the news, and after an uncertain pause Mr Frobisher turned the knob to the light programme and got dance music for them.
The landlord’s mind worked rather slowly, but along fairly straight lines. This thing concerned the village, and anything that concerned the village concerned him. At nine o’clock he said to Bessie, “Slip up and see Ted Trefusis, ’n ask him if he’d care to step over for a pint in the back parlour.”
Mr Trefusis came, a lean, grey-haired man, responsible and serious as a signalman must be. Mr Frobisher took him into the back parlour and brought a jug of mild in from the bar. Mr Trefusis said, “Glad to get out of the house, straight I am. The way the wife’s been going on you’d think the end of the world was come.”
Mr Frobisher said, “Aye?” And then he said, “Well, I dunno that it’s what one would choose to have happen in the family.”
Mr Trefusis lit a cigarette. “No,” he said, “but it might ha’ been worse. After all, there’s no harm done.”
Mr Frobisher cocked an eye at him. “Gracie all right?”
“Be all right if her mother’d stop putting a lot of fool notions in her head. After all, many a girl’s been kissed in a dark corner before now, and will be again.”
“Aye,” said Mr Frobisher. “That all that happened?”
“Aye. Chap come up ’n said something to her, ’n put his arms round her, ’n give her a hug and a kiss. Then when she started struggling, he let her go.”
“That’s right, is it?” said Mr Frobisher. “He let her go?”
“Aye, and she run round the corner and bumped into an American policeman. ’Course a young girl gets a bit upset about a thing like that, specially when it’s a black man. But some of these things, least said soonest mended. I told her mother, I said—after all, it’s not as if she come to any harm.”
“Seems to me,” said Mr Frobisher slowly, “the man’s come to more harm than Gracie has.”
“Is that right what someone told me, that he cut his throat?”
“Aye,” said Mr Frobisher, “that’s right enough. They got him in the hospital.”
“Whatever did he want to do a thing like that for?”
Mr Frobisher told him what he knew, and they discussed it for some time. “He’s for court-martial soon as he comes out o’ hospital,” he said.
“What’s he charged with, then?” asked Mr Trefusis.
“Attempted rape.”
“O’ my Gracie?”
“That’s it.”
“But that ain’t right. He let her go.”
“That’s what he’s to be charged with, all the same.”
Mr Trefusis sat silent for a minute or two, smoking and thoughtful. At last he said, “There was a couple of Americans come to the house soon after I went to work this morning, an officer and a sergeant. God knows what the wife told them.” There was another long silence. At last the railwayman said, “They’re kind of hard on these black fellows, aren’t they?”
Mr Frobisher drew thoughtfully at his pipe. “Well, it does seem like it,” he said at last. “’Course, we dunno what they may be like in their own place back in the States. They may have a lot of trouble with them that we don’t know about. But I must say, at times it seems as if nothing they can do is right.”
Mr Trefusis said, “D’you know the one they’ve caught, the one that cut his throat?”
“Aye, he comes in here. Decent enough sort of lad, he seemed to be, like most of them are. Always willing to lend a hand with shifting casks, or that. His sergeant was in here just this evening, speaking up for him.”
They could reach no conclusion in the matter; indeed, it seemed to be clean out of their hands.
Next day it became known in the village that Dave Lesurier was being held under guard in hospital and was to come before court-martial on a charge of attempted rape as soon as he was well enough. In the streets the military police redoubled their vigilance; every Negro seen to be walking with a white girl was followed by an armed military policeman, to the sullen fury of the Negro and the blazing indignation of the girl. The Negroes took to walking in the streets in bands of ten or fifteen, looking for trouble, and fights with similar bands of white American troops took place on two occasions. One night Jim Dakers was set on by a gang of Negro soldiers and cruelly beaten up.
Mr Frobisher watched these developments with grave concern, and discussed them discreetly with the traveller from his brewery, with the Vicar, and with various men of Trenarth in the forces, home on leave from various parts of the country. He learned of pitched battles with firearms between American white troops and American Negroes at Leicester and at Lancaster, reports of which were censored from the newspapers. He thought about these stories gravely while he stood behind the bar, or tapped new casks down in the cellar, or sat and smoked in his back parlour when the bar was closed. He did not think quickly, and it took him a week or two to decide upon a course of action; but when he did make up his mind on the line that he was going to take, it was not a bad one.
He sat down in his shirt sleeves one Sunday afternoon after dinner and, breathing heavily with every word, he wrote a letter to General Eisenhower. It ran:
White Hart Hotel,
Trenarth,
Nr Penzance,
Cornwall.
DEAR SIR,
I take up my pen to tell you things are not as they ought to be here in Trenarth on account of there being trouble between your coloured soldiers and your white soldiers. It is not my place to say which is right but if things are not put right I think there will be shooting here like other places because there are fights and things are getting very bad. We don’t want that to happen in Trenarth because in all the twenty-seven years I have held this licence we have had nothing worse than an affiliation order.
I think if you could see your way to do something about Pte David Lesurier, coloured, now being held on a charge of attempted rape of one of our young ladies it would assist and stop things g
etting worse because the black fellows are very sore about this charge and we think it is a bit of humbug too because the young lady struggled and he let her go at once. It is very kind of Colonel McCulloch to see that men who interfere with our young ladies get punished as they should be, but between you and me the young lady come to no harm and it would be better to forget about it because the black fellows say this is a trumped up charge.
Pardon me writing when you will be very busy, but we don’t want things to be let go and get so bad that there is shooting here like other places.
Yours respectfully,
JAMES FROBISHER, Landlord
He sealed this in an envelope and addressed it to General Eisenhower, Headquarters of the U. S. Army, care of G.P.O., London, and posted it.
Three days later Major Mark T. Curtis arrived in Trenarth from the office of the Staff Judge-Advocate. He came nominally in connection with the application for court-martial filed by Colonel McCulloch, and announced that he had come for a preliminary examination of the evidence. According to the book this seemed irregular to the Colonel, but he was not one to question any officer from the Staff Judge-Advocate, and laid the whole matter before Major Curtis.
“You see the way it is,” he said at last, “these colored boys have been alone here too long, and they’ve got uppity.”
“Yeah,” said the Major. “Had any other trouble of this sort here, Colonel?”
“No,” said Colonel McCulloch. “They haven’t needed to go raping. I don’t know what to make of these darned English girls. You just can’t keep them away from the niggers. I tell you, in this place the girls seem to prefer going with a colored man to one of our white boys. The whole place is plumb color crazy. The landlord of the pub down in the village here, he’d rather have the niggers than the white boys in his bar. Can you beat that?”
Major Curtis said casually, “Does he stir up trouble?”
“I wouldn’t say that,” said the Colonel. “He’s made a packet of trouble for me because he won’t have the white boys and I’ve had to find alternative accommodation for them. But I don’t think he makes any trouble between whites and colored.”