Knight's Gambit

by William Faulkner

  ‘Nothing,’ his uncle said. Then his uncle was not looking at her, not looking at any of them, not at anything as far as he could tell, just standing there rubbing the ball of his thumb against the bowl of the cob pipe. Then she said,

  ‘Can I have another cigarette?’

  ‘Why not?’ his uncle said. She took the cigarette from the box and this time he lit it for her, passing his uncle to the smoking stand, stepping carefully among the scattered chessmen to strike the match as the Cayley girl came in, not looking at anybody either, saying to his uncle:

  ‘It’s on the mirror.’

  ‘What?’ his uncle said.

  ‘Your handkerchief,’ the Cayley girl said. ‘I washed it.’

  ‘Oh,’ his uncle said, and the Harriss girl said,

  ‘Just talking to him wont do any good either. You tried that once, you know.’

  ‘I dont remember,’ his uncle said. ‘I dont recall hearing anything but him. But you are right about the talking. I have an idea this whole business started because somebody has already talked too much.’

  But she wasn’t even listening. ‘And we’ll never get him in here again either. So you’ll have to come out there—’

  ‘Good night,’ his uncle said.

  She was not listening at all. ‘—in the morning before he can get out of bed and go somewhere. I’ll telephone you in the morning when will be the best time—’

  ‘Good night,’ his uncle said again.

  Then they were gone: through the sittingroom door, leaving it open of course; that is, the Harriss girl did, though when he went to close it the Cayley girl had turned back to do it until she saw he was already there. But when he started to shut it, his uncle said, ‘Wait’ so he stood holding it and they heard the hard brittle girl-heels in the hall and then, sure enough, the front door too.

  ‘That’s what we thought the other time,’ his uncle said. ‘Go and make sure.’

  But they were gone. Standing in the open front door in the vivid chill windless December dark, he heard the over-revved engine and watched the big supercharged roadster lurch almost into full speed with a whine a squeal of tires on pavement, then around the next corner, the tail-lights sucking from view too fast there too, so that long after it must have crossed the Square, it seemed to him that he could still smell the outraged rubber.

  Then he went back to the sittingroom where his uncle now sat among the scattered chessmen, filling the pipe. He went on without stopping and picked up the chessboard and set it back on the table. Luckily all the fighting had taken place in the other direction, so none of the pieces had been stepped on. He gathered them up from around his uncle’s feet and set them back in place on the board again, even advancing the white queen’s pawn in the orthodox opening which his uncle insisted on. His uncle was still filling the pipe.

  ‘So they were right about Captain Gualdres after all,’ he said. ‘It was a girl.’

  ‘What girl?’ his uncle said. ‘Didn’t one of them drive six miles twice tonight just to make sure we understood that she wanted her name coupled with Captain Gualdres’, no matter what the conditions; and the other one not only resorted to fisticuffs to refute the aspersion, she cant even spell his name?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. Then he didn’t say it. He drew his chair up and sat down again. His uncle watched him.

  ‘You had a nice sleep?’ his uncle said.

  He was a little slow on that one too. But all he had to do was to wait, because the only time when his uncle absolutely refused to diagram his wit was when it was really witty, really brilliant: never when it merely had an edge.

  ‘Thirty minutes ago you were on your way to bed. I couldn’t even stop you.’

  ‘And I almost missed something,’ he said. ‘I dont intend to this time.’

  ‘There will be no more to miss tonight.’

  ‘I thought that too,’ he said. ‘That Cayley girl—’

  ‘—is safe at home,’ his uncle said. ‘Where, I hope and trust, she will stay. And the other one too. Move then.’

  ‘I already have,’ he said.

  ‘Then move again,’ his uncle said, matching the white pawn. ‘And watch what you are doing this time.’

  He thought he did, was, had, always had every time. But all watching what he was doing seemed to accomplish was to show him a little sooner than ordinary that this one too was going to end just like the other did: until suddenly his uncle swept the board clean and set up a single problem with the horses and rooks and two pawns.

  ‘It stops being a game then,’ he said.

  ‘Nothing by which all human passion and hope and folly can be mirrored and then proved, ever was just a game,’ his uncle said. ‘Move.’

  And this time it was the telephone, and this time he knew it was going to be the telephone and he even knew what the telephone was going to say, not even really having to listen to the one audible side of it: nor did that take his uncle long:

  ‘Yes? Speaking … When?… I see. When you got home they just told you he had packed his bag and taken his car and said he was going to Memphis.… No no, never prescribe for a physician nor invite a postman to a walk’: and put the receiver back into the cradle and sat there with his hand still on it, not moving, not even breathing apparently, not even rubbing the thumb against the bowl of the pipe; sitting there so long that he was getting ready to speak, when his uncle raised the receiver and asked for the number, nor did this take long either: to Mr Robert Markey in Memphis, a lawyer and in city politics too, who had been at Heidelberg with his uncle:

  ‘No no, not the police; they couldn’t hold him. I dont want him held anyway; I just want him watched, so he cant leave Memphis without me knowing it. A good private man, just to keep an eye on him without him knowing it—unless he tries to leave Memphis.… What? I never really authorise actual bloodshed, at least not with witnesses.… Yes, until I come up and put my own hand on him, tomorrow or next day … At the hotel … There’s only one: the Greenbury. Did you ever hear of a Mississippian who has learned yet there is another one? (Which was true enough; there was a saying in North Mississippi that the state began in the lobby of the Greenbury hotel).… Assumed name? Him? The last thing he is running from is notoriety. He will probably call all the newspapers to be sure they have his name and location right, and that they record it.… No no, just wire me in the morning that you have him safely under surveillance and keep him so until you hear from me again’: and put the telephone down and got up, but not to return to the chessboard but instead went to the door and opened it and stood holding the knob, until finally he did catch up. He got up and picked up the book he had started upstairs with three hours ago. But this time he spoke, and this time his uncle answered him:

  ‘But what do you want with him?’

  ‘I dont,’ his uncle said. ‘I just want to know he’s in Memphis, and that he stays there. Which he will do; he will want me and the rest of the world too to be convinced he is safely and harmlessly in Memphis, or anywhere else except Jefferson, Mississippi, ten times more than I want to know it.’

  But he was slow on that too; he had to ask that too.

  ‘His alibi,’ his uncle said.

  And that too.

  ‘For whatever he is planning to do—whatever trick he has invented to frighten his mother’s fiancé into leaving the country.’

  ‘Trick?’ he said. ‘What trick?’

  ‘How do I know?’ his uncle said. ‘Ask yourself; you’re eighteen, or so near it doesn’t matter; you know what a child of nineteen will do: a Black Hand letter maybe, or even a reasonably careful shot fired through the bedroom window at him. I’m fifty; all I know is that people nineteen years old will do anything, and that the only thing which makes the adult world at all safe from them is the fact that they are so preconvinced of success that the simple desire and will are the finished accomplishment, that they pay no attention to mere dull mechanical details.’

  ‘Then if the trick’s not going to work, you dont need
to worry,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not worrying,’ his uncle said. ‘I’m being worried. Worse; annoyed. I just want to keep my—or Mr Markey’s—finger on him until I can telephone his sister tomorrow and she—or their mother, or anyone else in the family who have or hope to have any control over him or either or both of them—can go up there and get him and do whatever they want to with him; I would suggest that they tie him up in one of the stalls and let his prospective father (this might even be enough reason to Captain Gualdres for him to give over his maiden hesitancy and consent to an immediate marriage) work on him with his riding-crop.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with that Cayley girl. Maybe if he’d just been here tonight and seen her when his sister——’

  ‘Nobody ever believed there was, except his sister,’ his uncle said. ‘She was the one who ever convinced him in the first place that there was, started this whole thing. To get her own man. Maybe she thought that, as soon as her brother reached for that foil again, Gualdres would leave the country. Or maybe she hoped that simple discretion and good sense would be enough to move him; in either case, all she would have to do would be to follow him, to some or any other place in the United States or even back to the Argentine (where of course there are no other women) and, by surprise envelopement or perhaps simple compromise, gain the victory, render him at least monogamous. But she underestimated him; she aspersed his character with the crime of maturity too.’

  His uncle held the door open, looking at him.

  ‘There’s nothing actually wrong with any of them except youth. Only—as I believe I mentioned a moment ago—the possession of youth is a good deal like the possession of smallpox or bubonic plague.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said again. ‘Maybe that’s what’s the matter with Captain Gualdres too. We were wrong about him. I thought he was about forty. But she said he’s not but eight or ten years older than she is.’

  ‘Which means she believes he is about fifteen years older,’ his uncle said. ‘Which means he is probably about twenty-five older.’

  ‘Twenty-five?’ he said. ‘That would put him right back where he used to be.’

  ‘Had he ever left it?’ his uncle said. His uncle held the door open. ‘Well? What are you waiting for?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Then good night too,’ his uncle said. ‘You go home too. This kindergarten is closed for the day.’

  3

  So that was that. He went upstairs to his room. He went to bed too, taking off the uniform, ‘shedding the brown’ as the Corps called it. Because this was Thursday, and the battalion always drilled on Thursday. And he was not only cadet lieutenant colonel this year, but nobody ever missed drill because, although the Academy was only a prep school, it had one of the highest R.O.T.C. ratings in the country; at the last review, the inspector-general himself told them that when war came, every one of them who could prove he was eighteen years old would be almost automatically eligible for officer-candidate school.

  Which included him too, since he was already so near eighteen that you could put the difference in your eye. Except that it wouldn’t matter now whether he was eighteen or eight or eighty; he would be too late even if he were going to wake up eighteen tomorrow morning. It would be over and people would already have begun to be able to start forgetting about it before he could even reach officers’ school, let alone finish the course.

  It was already over even now as far as the United States was concerned: the British, the handful of boys, some no older than he and some probably not even as old, who flew the Royal Air Force’s fighter command, had stopped them on the west and so now there was nothing left for that whole irresistible tide of victory and destruction to do but vanish away into the plumbless depths of Russia like the mop-thrust push of dirty water across a kitchen floor: so that each time during the fifteen months since that fall of 1940 that he took the uniform down or hung it back up in the closet—the khaki serge true enough such as real officers wore but without even the honest stripes of N.C.O.’s but instead, the light-blue tabs and facings of R.O.T.C. like the lapel badges of fraternity pledges, and the innocent pastless metal lozenges such as you might see on the shoulders of a swank hotel doorman or the leader of a circus band, to divorce it still further from the realm of valor and risk, the heart’s thirst for glory and renown;—each time he looked at it, in the eyes of that heart’s thirst (if that’s what it was), certainly in the irremediable regret which had been his these last months after he realised that it was too late, that he had procrastinated, deferred too long, lacking not only the courage but even the will and the desire and the thirst, the khaki altered transmogrified dissolved like the moving-picture shot, to the blue of Britain and the hooked wings of a diving falcon and the modest braid of rank: but above all the blue, the color the shade which the handful of Anglo Saxon young men had established and decreed as such visual synonym of glory that only last spring an association of American haberdashers or gents’ outfitters had adopted it as a trade slogan, so that every lucky male resident of the United States who had the price could walk into church that Easter morning in the authentic aura of valor yet at the same time safe from the badges of responsibility and the candy-stripes of risk.

  Yet he had made a little something resembling an attempt (and he thought a little better of it for the very fact that remembering he had done so gave him no comfort). There was Captain Warren, a farmer a few miles from town, who had been a flight commander in the old Royal Flying Corps before it became the RAF; he had gone to see him that day going on two years ago now when he was only just past sixteen.

  ‘If I could get to England some way, they would take me, wouldn’t they?’ he said.

  ‘Sixteen’s a little young. And getting to England’s a little hard to do too now.’

  ‘But they would take me if I could get there, wouldn’t they?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Captain Warren said. Then Captain Warren said, ‘Look. There’s plenty of time. There’ll be plenty and more for all of us before it’s over. Why not wait?’

  So he did. He waited too long. He could tell himself that he had done that at the advice of a hero, which at least did this much for the heart’s thirst: having accepted and followed it from a hero would forever prevent his forgetting that, no matter how deficient he might be in courage, at least he wasn’t in shame.

  Because it was too late now. In fact, as far as the United States was concerned, it had never begun at all and so all it would cost the United States was just money: which, his uncle said, was the cheapest thing you could spend or lose: which was why civilization invented it: to be the one substance man could shop with and have a bargain in whatever he bought.

  So apparently the whole purpose of the draft had been merely to establish a means for his uncle to identify Max Harriss, and since the identification of Max Harriss had accomplished no more than the interruption of a chess-game and a sixty-cent telephone toll to Memphis, even that was not worth its cost.

  So he went to bed and to sleep; tomorrow was Friday so he would not have to put on the pseudo khaki in order to shed the brown and, for another week, the heart’s thirst, if that’s what it was. And he ate breakfast; his uncle had already eaten and gone, and he stopped at his uncle’s office on the way to school to pick up the notebook he had left yesterday, and Max Harriss wasn’t in Memphis; the wire came from Mr Markey while he was still in the office:

  Missing prince missing here too now what

  and he was still there while his uncle told the boy to wait and wrote the answer:

  No what just thanks

  and so that was that too; he thought that was all; when he came back at noon to where his uncle waited on the corner to walk home to dinner, he didn’t even think to ask; it was his uncle who voluntarily told him how Mr Markey had even telephoned and said how Harriss seemed to be well known not only to all the clerks and telephone girls and the Negro doormen and bellboys and waiters in the Greenbury
, but to all the liquor stores and taxi-drivers in that part of town too, and that he, Mr Markey, had even tried the other hotels just on the impossible supposition that there was one Mississippian who had heard there were others in Memphis.

  So he said, like Mr Markey: ‘Now what?’

  ‘I dont know,’ his uncle said. ‘I would like to believe that he had dusted the whole lot of them from his feet and was a good five hundred miles away by now, and still travelling, except that I wouldn’t asperse him either behind his back with an accusation of judgment.’

  ‘Maybe he has,’ he said.

  His uncle stopped walking.

  ‘What?’ his uncle said.

  ‘You just said last night that people nineteen years old are capable of anything.’

  ‘Oh,’ his uncle said. ‘Yes,’ his uncle said. ‘Of course,’ his uncle said, walking on again. ‘Maybe he has.’

  And that was all: eating his dinner: walking back with his uncle as far as the office corner: in school that afternoon, through the history class which Miss Melissa Hogganbeck now called World Affairs with capitals on both, which, coming twice a week, should have been worse for the heart’s thirst than the inevitable next Thursdays when he would have to tote the brown again—the sabre and the pastless shoulder-pips—and posture through the spurious the straight-faced the make-believe of command, but which was not at all: the tireless cultured educated ‘lady’s’ voice talking with a kind of frantic fanaticism of peace and security: of how we were safe because the old worn-out nations of Europe had learned their lesson too well in 1918; they not only did not dare outrage us, they couldn’t even afford to, until the world’s whole staggering and savage mass was reduced to that weightless interminable murmuring not even echoed within the isolate insulate dusty walls of a prep-school classroom and having a hundred times less connection with any reality than even the sword and the pips. Because at least the sabre and pips were a make-believe of what they parodied, while to Miss Hogganbeck the whole establishment of national R.O.T.C. was an inescapable inexplicable phenomenon of the edifice of education, like the necessity for having children in the junior courses.