by Nevil Shute
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.”
She stared at him. “Not already? Wherever to?”
“Jones and Porter Limited, at a place called Camborne, up the line a ways. I got taken on this morning; start on Monday.”
Another customer was waiting to be served. She said, “Oh, I am glad!” She shoved the cigarettes into his hand. “I can’t stop now. See you tomorrow, two o’clock, at the bus stop outside the church?”
He said, “Okay, Miss Grace. I’ll be there.”
He was there a quarter of an hour early, having spent the morning studying the comprehendible hardware detailed in his engineer’s pocket book, and the incomprehendible abstractions of his electrical textbook. She thought again as she walked up the road towards the bus stop that he looked ever so distinguished; his brown skin and his bright blue suit and his green shirt and collar made a colour scheme that she admired very much. Whatever people might say about going out with a coloured boy, she thought, there were very few men in Trenarth who wore clothes like he did—and in that she was about right.
He was carrying a little parcel unobtrusively, and when they got into the pictures, in the friendly darkness, he offered it to her shyly, and it was a pound box of chocolates, which she called sweets and he called candy. None of her other swains had ever bought her chocolates in a beautiful box like that, all cellophane and green ribbon, and she knew that he could ill afford it, and that made the little present valuable to her. She said, “It’s ever so kind of you to think—they’re lovely. Here, have one.” A woman behind leaned over and asked if she would mind not talking.
They had tea in a café after the picture, and went back to Trenarth in the bus. And at the bus stop in Trenarth he raised his hat to her, and said, “I better say good-night, Miss Grace. It certainly has been one swell day for me.”
She said, “Oh no. Come on, ’n see me home. I want you to meet Dad and Ma.”
He hesitated. “Maybe they wouldn’t care so much about that, Miss Grace.”
She said, “They got to meet you some time, if you’re only going to be up at Camborne. Come on, just for a minute.” She smiled at him. “They won’t eat you.”
He laughed. “I d’know about that, Miss Grace. Maybe they will.” But he went with her to the cottage where she and her parents lived, and to which Lieutenant Anderson had come three years before.
Grace Trefusis had inherited all the vigour of her mother. She took him in an
d said, “Ma, this is Mr Lesurier that I was telling you about. Dad, this is Dave.”
Mr Trefusis got up and said, “How d’you do?”
Mrs Trefusis said, “Well!”
Grace Trefusis said, “Now don’t you start that, Ma. If Dave and I can let bygones be bygones, so can you. We’ve been in to see Ginger Rogers at the Regal. Ever so lovely, it was.”
Her mother said with an effort, “How long are you staying for, Mr Lesurier?”
“I got a job here, ma’am,” he said shyly. “At Jones and Porter, up at Camborne. I got taken on for a draftsman, starting Monday.”
Mr Trefusis said, “A draughtsman?” He looked at the young Negro with a new interest. To the signalman there was some social standing in a draughtsman’s job; it was an office job that might lead to management. It was true that most draughtsmen of his acquaintance had ended up in a little sweet and tobacco shop, but some had not. “I didn’t know you was a draughtsman,” he said.
Lesurier smiled. “I d’know as I am, sir,” he said candidly. “I guess I’ll need to work plenty hard to hold it down. But it’s something to have got a start.”
“Sit down,” said the railwayman. He offered a cigarette out of a packet. “Where d’you say you come from now?”
Lesurier left them an hour later, having promised to go back to tea next day. The Trefusis family were very thoughtful when he left them on Sunday. By that time they had grown accustomed to the milk-chocolate colour of his skin, which was not unhandsome when you got accustomed to it. He was more widely travelled and better educated than any of the young men Grace had brought to the house before, for in Trenarth there was not a wide choice for her. He seemed to be infinitely considerate and kind, and they remembered this as characteristic of Negroes in the mass three years before. Moreover, Mr Trefusis, when Lesurier went away on Sunday, had a shrewd idea that he would hold his job.
Mr Horrocks began to have the same idea on Tuesday afternoon, five minutes before the drawing office knocked off, when Lesurier came to him. The drawing office was on normal hours of work, but the shop was working overtime till eight o’clock at night.
“I took a little walk around the shop last night, sir, after hours,” Dave said. “There’s a whole raft of things here that I have never seen before. Would I be able to work down on the bench for the overtime hours, sir, on the assembly of the switches? I wouldn’t want no money. I reckon it would make things easier to see the way the drawings go if I knew more about the job down on the bench.”
Mr Horrocks thought this was a very reasonable proposal. “You can’t go down tonight,” he said. “There’s the union to be considered.” He made a note on his pad. “I’ll see the shop steward in the morning about it, Lesurier. I think that’s a very good idea.”
Lesurier started work down on the bench on Wednesday evening and found to his surprise and pleasure that the shop steward had insisted that he should be paid, which put another twenty-seven shillings in his pay packet at the week’s end. He moved into very cheap lodgings in Camborne, and got down to his work in earnest.
He did not find the office work particularly exacting. He was put under an old grey-haired draughtsman called Mr King. His work consisted principally of copying drawings that had become torn and dirty in the print room. Mr King said severely on the first morning, “Are your hands clean?”
The Negro replied meekly, “Yes, sir. This don’t come off.” The little joke went round the drawing office, directed against Mr King, who was felt to be a fussy old man, and it spread down into the shop, where Mr King was regarded as an impractical obstructionist and the arch enemy of production. He may have been both of these, but he could teach Lesurier a great deal, and the Negro was wise enough to realise it. Under the stern eye of the old man Dave developed a neatness of drawing and a classic style of printing which was fully up to standard, and with this he began to have some inkling of what the many drawings were about, and why the radiuses and gauge thicknesses were made so.
He became quite popular in the office. His diversity of experience made him interesting to talk to, and he was always willing to help in tiresome jobs like entering in the part number book or checking details. He gave a cosmopolitan air to this small Cornish drawing office which the draughtsmen rather liked, and which was certainly no hindrance to the management.
This was apparent one day when the Managing Director, showing a buying delegation from the Turkish Government around the works and walking them through the drawing office, was asked, “You use Africans for draughting in this country?” He replied grandly, “We use anybody in this company who has the brains we want, white or black. As a matter of fact, that man is an American. He’s a very clever young designer.”
It was not, o£ course, because of this that Jones and Porter got an order for three thousand time switches from the Turkish delegation, but Mr Porter felt that his reply had been, perhaps, a small contributory factor.
Gradually, Dave Lesurier became absorbed into the life of the community in which he moved. He spent much of his spare time with Grace Trefusis, and generally had tea with her family on Sunday afternoons. They very soon discovered that he could play the flute, and in the overfurnished little parlour of the Trefusis home he would play hymn tunes for them on Sunday evening. On wet days they sometimes got him to go to church with them, on Sunday mornings, but he was no great churchgoer and preferred to take his exercise at that time. He bought a bicycle, and put it on a Jones and Porter truck that was going up to London, one Saturday, and drove to Plymouth in the truck. He spent two hours there going round the drapers’ shops with a snippet of the dress that Mrs Trefusis wore on Sundays, to find a scarf that matched it, for a birthday present for her, and rode home in the evening, fifty-five miles, on his bicycle. He was always doing things like that.
Before spring Dave Lesurier and Grace Trefusis decided to get married; it was a point of dispute afterwards between them which asked which. They did it on the sea front at Penzance after a British Legion dance. Lesurier felt secure in his job with Jones and Porter by that time; he had been advanced to the full rate for his age, four pounds ten a week, and he had joined the Draughtsmen’s Association. He felt that he was in control of his job, able to do the work expected of him, and a bit more. Practically the whole of his spare time had been spent with the Trefusis family while he had been in England; they had lost all sense of strangeness at his colour, and thought of him only as a very courteous and pleasant young American with whom Grace went out every Saturday.
The two walked out of the dance hall arm in arm at midnight, reluctant to break away to fetch their bicycles and ride home. They stood on the sea front looking out over the moonlit seascape. Presently the Negro said:
“You know, it still seems darned funny to me folks don’t get interfering when they see you and me dancing together.”
The girl said, “Why should they? It’s got nothing to do with them what either of us do. You got this colour business on the brain, Dave.”
“Maybe,” he replied. “It’s how you’ve been brought up. I know we couldn’t go on like this back home.”
“Well, this is my home, and we can,” she said. She pressed a little closer to him. “You’d better make it yours, ’n give up worrying.”
“You mean, stay here for good?”
“That’s right. You like it here, don’t you?”
“I like it fine,” he said. “I’d like nothing better than to stay right here for good.” And then he hesitated. “But I guess there’re other things to think about as well.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Place of your own,” he said quietly. “Being married, and having kids, and that. You’ve got to settle where you can do that.”
She said softly, “Well, what’s wrong with doing that here, Dave?”
He stared out over the sea. “I guess no English girl would want to marry a black man.”
She said, “You haven’t asked one, Dave.”
They were
standing arm in arm in their heavy coats; he took her other hand and drew her closer to him. “Do you reckon you could ever get around to thinking that you’d like to marry me?” he asked.
She did not answer, but he knew her silences. “I know it’s mighty difficult for a white girl to say yes to that,” he said quietly. “Color’s color, and nobody can get away from it. When you marry I guess you’ll want babies, or you wouldn’t be you. And if you marry me, they’ll be black ones; not quite so black as me, perhaps, but mighty black, all the same.”
She said gently, “You aren’t all that black, Dave. You don’t want to go exaggerating things.”
He said, “I don’t reckon that I’d pass for white, though, even in the dark.” There was a rueful hint of laughter in his voice. “I guess you know the way I feel about you, ever since those first times we met, in the store. There’s never been another girl for me, not after that. I got enough now with this last raise to ask you, Gracie. If you kind of feel that you can’t fancy it, I wouldn’t blame you. Back home in some States, even saying this to you would likely get me in trouble.”
She asked, “Do you think I’d have come out with you all these times if I cared about things like that?”
“I d’know,” he said. “I never did know rightly what girls care about, Gracie. But getting married to a nigger is a mighty big thing for a white girl, seems to me.”
She said quietly, “Getting married is a mighty big thing anyway, Dave. There’s such a sight of things that can go wrong in a marriage, ’n I don’t think colour’s as important as some others—getting on all right, and respecting one another, and that. You wouldn’t have asked me if you didn’t think them things were right. And I think they’re right, too.”
His grasp tightened on her hand. “You mean that?”
“O’ course I do. I’ll marry you, Dave, if you want me.”
“Do I want you?” And then he said, “You do know what it means? We’ll be all right in England, maybe, but it could be mighty awkward for you if we ever had to go to the United States.”