The Chequer Board

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The Chequer Board Page 24

by Nevil Shute


  He went into the shop. Most of it was given over to groceries, but there was a sub post office in one corner, behind a wire grille. At the grocery counter there were a middle-aged woman and two girls, all dressed in rather soiled white overalls, serving two or three customers. Behind the post office grille was a middle-aged man.

  The officer went up to the grille. “Mr Robertson?” he asked.

  The man looked up. “That’s me.”

  “I’m looking for a young lady, Miss Trefusis,” the Major said quietly. “Is she here?”

  The man nodded with understanding. “That’s her at the end,” he said in a low tone. The Major turned and saw a very pretty, dark-haired girl at the other counter.

  He said, “I want to have a talk with her about this trouble that she’s had. Could I do that here?”

  “Well, if you like,” the man said. “I’m just shutting up. It’ll be quiet in here in a few minutes, if you like to wait.”

  Major Curtis waited. Mr Robertson came out of the post office section and closed the street door. One by one the customers were shown out. He saw the shopkeeper go to his wife and say a word to her quietly; they glanced at him and at the girl. He crossed over to the counter and said to her, “Miss Trefusis? Could I have a word or two with you?”

  She said nervously, “With me?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I guess you know what it’s about. I’ve been sent down from Headquarters over this court-martial there’s to be about your trouble. Would you tell me a few things?”

  She said, “I telled one officer about it the day after, when he came. I don’t want to talk about it any more.”

  “I know that,” he said. “I don’t like worrying you, Miss Trefusis. But that colored boy, he’s in a very serious position. He can go to prison for five years or more on a charge like this. Well, that’s fair enough and quite right if he did what he’s charged with, but we want to be sure there isn’t any doubt about the matter. Five to ten years in prison is a mighty long time if there was any mistake.”

  She was silent.

  “We all want to do what’s proper and what’s right,” he said. “We’ve got to stop things like this happening, so that you girls can go about your own streets safe at nights. But we’ve got to be fair all round, fair to you and fair to him. There are just one or two things I want to ask you, to check up with his own story. Will you tell me?”

  She said, “All right.”

  He smiled at her. “How long have you worked here, Miss Trefusis?”

  She looked up at him in surprise. “Here? I come here about three years ago, after school.”

  “Live in Trenarth all your life?”

  She shook her head. “We lived at Wadebridge first of all; my Dad, he works on the railway. He got moved here when I was about seven.”

  Major Curtis nodded. He knew Wadebridge, another little town in Cornwall, not much bigger than Trenarth. “That about ten years back?”

  “That’s right.”

  He glanced down at the little packages she had been making up, of butter and of cheese. “Are they the day’s rations?” he enquired. “Do you spend all your time doing up those things?”

  She stared at him. “Week, you mean. We don’t make up rations by the day.” She took one up. “That’s butter for a week, that is.”

  “Gee,” he said. “It doesn’t look like much.”

  “It’s not much,” she retorted. “Two ounces.”

  “Do you get bored with it?” he asked. “Making up those little packets all the time?”

  “Well, I dunno,” she said. “You’ve got to do something.”

  He leaned casually against the counter; she was beginning to talk freely. “Do you get many of our soldiers in here?” he enquired. “Americans, I mean?”

  She said, “Not very many—just a few. I don’t think there’s much for them here. They aren’t allowed to buy the rationed foods. Some of them come in to the post office.”

  He asked, “Do any of them get fresh?”

  She tossed her head. “Some of the white ones try and be funny. I think they’re awfully silly.”

  “Don’t the black ones ever get that way?”

  She said, “Oh no. They’ve got ever such good manners.”

  Major Mark T. Curtis laughed within himself and thought, that’s one for you. Aloud, he said:

  “Tell me, you knew this boy you had your trouble with a little bit, didn’t you?”

  She said, “I wouldn’t call it knowing him. He used to come in here for cigarettes.”

  “Did you wait on him?”

  “If I was about. I do the cigarettes and Maggie does the sweets. It’s easier for one person to remember all the different prices of them things.”

  “What did he usually buy?”

  “Players.”

  “How many? Fifty or a hundred?”

  “Oh no. We couldn’t sell that many to one customer. He used to buy ten.”

  “Just a little packet of ten Players?”

  “That’s right.”

  “They couldn’t have lasted him long.”

  “They didn’t. He was in here almost every day.”

  “How long did he keep on coming in like that?”

  “Oh, a long time. Nigh on to three weeks, maybe.”

  “He didn’t get fresh?”

  “Oh no, sir—the black ones never do. I was telling you.” Major Curtis said, “Ever strike you, Miss Trefusis, that he came in to see you?”

  She dropped her eyes. “I dunno.”

  The officer said, “Be fair to him. He’s in a great deal of trouble over this. If he kind of admired you, Miss Trefusis, well, there’s nothing wrong with that.” He stopped rather suddenly, in mid oration. He had been about to say that a cat could look at a king, but it occurred to him that that might not apply to a Negro and a white girl.

  She said in a low tone, “Well, it did seem sort of funny that he came here so often.”

  The Major veered off on another tack, fearing to dwell too long upon a delicate point. “Do you go to the movies much?” he asked.

  She looked up, surprised. “Oh yes, I think they’re ever so nice. We close Saturday afternoons, and we go then.”

  “To Penzance?”

  She nodded. “There’s two lovely picture houses there, the Empire and the Regal. They get ever such good pictures.”

  “Whom do you go with?”

  She said, “Nellie Hunter, or Jane Penlee, mostly. Sometimes I go with Ma.”

  “Are those girls that you mentioned school friends?”

  “That’s right.”

  He smiled at her. “Ever go with a boy?”

  She shook her head. “Not alone.”

  He smiled more broadly. “Ever been asked?”

  She laughed shyly. “Not yet.”

  “Oh well,” he said, “I guess there’s plenty of time.” And still smiling at her, he asked, “Suppose this colored boy had asked you to go to the movies with him, would you have gone?”

  The smile died from her face. “I dunno. You mean, before he done what he did?”

  “That’s right, Miss Trefusis. Suppose he’d brought a colored friend along with him and suggested that you bring one of your friends, and you all make a party and go to the movies together, would you have gone?”

  She said, “I wouldn’t now, not after seeing how he could behave. I might have done before, when I didn’t know.”

  “You weren’t afraid of him before this happened?”

  She shook her head. The golliwog was forgotten.

  “Was it a great surprise to you when he behaved so badly?”

  The girl said, “Well, yes, it was. I’d never have expected him to do a thing like that. He always seemed so quiet.”

  The Major said, “I had a talk in hospital with him this afternoon. He told me he wanted to ask you something that night, but things kind of went wrong. Would you like to know what it was he wanted to ask you?”

  She nodded.

  “He
wanted to ask you if you’d like to take a little walk with him one evening. He was very lonely, and he wanted somebody to talk to. He didn’t like to ask you in the shop, because he didn’t want to embarrass you in front of other people. So he waited for you outside. He began waiting at six o’clock that evening, hoping he’d meet you alone and be able to ask you without other people hearing. He didn’t get his chance till ten o’clock at night, and he thought it was too late to ask you. I guess he got kind of confused then, and just naturally kissed you. He’s mighty sorry now.”

  “So he should be,” the girl said indignantly, “doing a thing like that!” And then she said, “Why ever didn’t he say if he wanted me to go for a walk with him? I wouldn’t have been cross.”

  Major Curtis said, “It must be very difficult for a colored boy to ask a white girl that. He wouldn’t dare to do it back in his home town.”

  “Because of his colour?”

  “That’s right. That’s one of the things that got him all confused.”

  The girl said thoughtfully, “I wouldn’t have minded. I might not have gone with him, but I wouldn’t have minded him asking.”

  The Major said, “There’s just one thing, Miss Trefusis, where his account doesn’t check up with what Lieutenant Anderson says you told him. What happened when you started struggling? Did he let you go, or did he hang on?”

  She said, “I was ever so frightened. I don’t really know.” She thought for a minute. “I ran round the corner and bumped right into another man, that fat policeman.”

  “That’s not what the lieutenant put in his report. He said that the Negro didn’t let you go until the policeman came. It makes a big difference,” he explained, “whether he let you go at once or not until the policeman came.”

  She said, “I think he must have let go. I think he must have done. He wasn’t all that bad.”

  “It’s not quite what you told Lieutenant Anderson.”

  She said, “I don’t remember what I did say. Ma did most of the talking.”

  “The boy himself says he let go at once.”

  “I was ever so frightened,” she repeated. “I think maybe he did. It’s kind of silly to be frightened of things, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know about that,” the Major said. “What he did was quite enough to frighten anyone. He acted very wrongly. But he’s taken a good deal of punishment, one way and another. Do you want us to go on with this court-martial, Miss Trefusis?”

  She looked up at him. “I never asked you to start no court-martial,” she said. “You did that yourselves. No one ever asked me anything about it.”

  He smiled. “I guess that’s so. Would you be content if we just drop the charge against him and let the matter be?”

  “I don’t want you to charge him with anything,” she said. The mother flared up in her. “If ever I see him again I’ll give him a piece of my mind, acting like he did. But you don’t have to send him to prison, not on my account.”

  The Major said, “I think that’s very generous of you, Miss Trefusis. It’s in your hands. We’re over here and in your country, and we want to do right by you Britishers. If you say charge him, then he’ll go for a court-martial, and he’ll get what he’d get if he behaved that way back in his own State, and that’s plenty! If you say let him off, why then we’ll feel that he’s had sufficient punishment for discipline already, and just let the matter rest.”

  The girl said, “Well, I’d say let him off.”

  He said, “Well, that’s what I think, too.” He felt mentally refreshed by the mere fact that he himself had been talking to a girl for the last twenty minutes; it was a long time since he had done that. “These boys when they’re a long way from home, they get so darned lonely, Miss Trefusis, they’d give just anything to sit and talk a little with a girl. Maybe you wouldn’t know about that, but it’s true. You don’t want to be too hard on them when these things happen.”

  She said, “It must be terrible to be so far away from everything you know.”

  The Major put his thumbs in his belt, and straightened up to go. “Well, that’s the way things are in wartime, and we can’t change it.” He paused for a minute. “There was just one thing,” he said. “Lesurier said to tell you he was very sorry he did that to you. He didn’t mean to frighten you. It just kind of happened.”

  She said, “Did he say that? I’m sorry I got frightened.” And then she hesitated, and said, “Will he be coming back here, after he comes out of hospital?”

  The Major shook his head. “Not after this. He’ll be drafted to another theater of war altogether probably.”

  He said good-bye to her and walked out and down the street to where the jeep was waiting for him in front of the White Hart. He looked in to see Mr Frobisher, and found the landlord at his tea. He refused an invitation to join the meal. “I just looked in to say it’s all okay about that court-martial,” he said. “I had a talk with Miss Trefusis. She doesn’t want us to go on with it. I’ll have to make out my report in those terms for the Staff Judge-Advocate. I’d say he’ll wash it out.”

  “Aye?” said Mr Frobisher. “Well, that’s a good thing, to my way of thinking.”

  “And to mine,” the Major said. “I just stepped in to let you know.”

  He got into the jeep, and drove up to the camp. Mr Frobisher went back to his tea, gratified with the success he had achieved, and told his daughter Bessie about it. Half an hour later Bessie was telling Sergeant Lorimer; an hour later it was all around the village.

  Up in the camp Major Mark T. Curtis sat with Colonel McCulloch, facing him across the office desk. “I guess we’ll have to drop the whole thing, Colonel,” he was saying. “We haven’t got a case.”

  “Not got a case against a goddam nigger when he catches a white girl in a dark street and kisses her against her will?” the Colonel asked indignantly.

  “No, sir. If she’d been six months older, she wouldn’t have taken it so seriously. As things are, she won’t give evidence against him.”

  Colonel McCulloch started in and told the Major just exactly what he thought of British girls. It lasted for ten minutes, till the Major had to leave to catch his train.

  Down in the White Hart the Negroes were jubilant and, curiously, much more interested in the war; they listened to the nine o’clock news in almost complete silence. During the evening a Negro hand pulled the cardboard placard out of the window. With furtive laughter they added three words to it, and put it back again. It stayed there all next day till somebody called Mr Frobisher’s attention to it, reading:

  THIS HOUSE IS FOR ENGLISHMEN AND

  COLOURED AMERICAN TROOPS ONLY

  AND GENERAL EISENHOWER

  Mr Frobisher took it out of the window and stuck it down beside his chair in the back parlour. It seemed to him that it had served its turn.

  Next evening when the Negroes came down to the White Hart, they came with long faces. They had spent all day packing up; they had received surprise orders for a move to some new and unknown location. In any case, their work was practically finished; they would move along and make another airfield somewhere else.

  They brought a present of a ham and a box of cigars for Mr Frobisher, and a huge box of candy and a dozen pairs of sheer silk stockings for Bessie. “We been treated mighty nice since we been here,” said Sergeant Lorimer. “The boys all say they never liked a place so much as this.”

  At closing time they left for the last time. Exhausted with all the leavetaking and handshaking, Mr Frobisher stood with his daughter waving to the last of them as they went up the street towards the camp. They vanished out of sight, and Mr Frobisher moved slowly to shoot the bolts of the street door.

  “Eh, well,” he said, straightening up, “that’s the end o’ that.”

  His daughter said, a little wistfully, “Do you think well ever see any of them again?”

  Her father shook his head. “Soldiers come and go in times like these,” he said. “We’ll never see them no more.�
��

  Morgan finished and no one spoke for a long time.

  CHAPTER NINE

  MR TURNER slept quietly and well that night, his last night in Mandinaung. Morgan had sent a boy running to Danubyu with a telegram reserving for him a passage on a plane for England. Mr Turner slept in the knowledge that in a week or so he would be back home in Watford telling Mollie all about it. He felt that he would like to do that. He had parted from his wife on different terms from those which were his custom; he wanted to get back to her, to see her again and tell her all that he had done. And he was very anxious to get home to Watford before he had another fall. He knew that would happen sometime. He wanted to be with someone who would look after him when it did happen.

  He woke at dawn, turned back his net, rested and at ease, and lay and watched the light creep up over the wide river. The white cat, Maung Payah, walked in at the doorless entrance to his room, jumped up on to his bed, and lay down beside him. Mr Turner said, “Hullo, puss,” and lay stroking its head and tickling its ear. He was a little saddened at the thought that he was leaving Burma so soon after his arrival; he would have liked to stay longer, to see more. Nay Htohn had pointed out the ridge of the Pegu Yoma on the far horizon and told him it was lovely there; she had urged him to stay a little longer and get up into the hills of the Shan States. Others would see these places, but not he. Burma for Mr Turner was a thought of loveliness. He had seen a fringe of it and knew that it was there; he would carry that knowledge back with him to Watford, enlarged and enriched by it, content if not satisfied.

 

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