by Nevil Shute
“Aye,” said Mr Frobisher, “they remember it all right. Proper rumpus that set up, that did.”
“If that’s the way it is,” said Lesurier, “maybe I better move along.”
“Not unless you want to,” said the landlord. “The feeling here was you’d been treated pretty bad.”
“There wouldn’t be no trouble if folks saw me here, on account of what I did?”
“I shouldn’t think so,” said the landlord slowly. “Not unless Grace Trefusis or her mother cut up nasty, and I don’t see why they should.”
Lesurier asked: “Is Miss Grace still here?”
“Aye,” said the landlord. “She works up at Robertson’s just the same. Been there all the time.”
There was a long, slow pause.
“Well, thanks a lot,” the Negro said at last. “I’ll be back around five or six tonight, Mr Frobisher, ‘n let you know if I’ll be wanting to stay.”
“Aye,” said the landlord, “please yourself. The bed’s there if you want it.”
Dave Lesurier went out and stood on the street corner, smoking, till the church clock struck two. Then he turned, and walked slowly up the road to Robertson’s grocery shop, and went in, and walked straight up to Grace Trefusis behind the counter, and said quietly: “Ten Player’s, please.”
She looked up quickly and saw who it was, and met his eyes. Between them, for an instant, the world stood still. She was three years older now, nearly twenty; her figure had filled out, making her more mature and prettier than the frightened adolescent he had known before. She was more knowledgeable about men, too; she had been to the pictures many times and with a number of young men, and had been kissed by several in a dark corner since the Negro had initiated her into that deplorable pastime. She met his eyes, and the old fear flickered in her own for an instant, but then she smiled.
“Oh . . .” she said. “It’s you.”
In that instant all his old shyness swept back over him. He coloured hotly, and wished desperately for eloquence that he might make some flip and smart rejoinder, but no inspiration came. Instead, there was an awkward pause, and all that he could find to say to her at last was to repeat: “Ten Player’s, please.”
The last trace of fear of him left her for ever; in her more adult experience she knew that she would never be in any danger from this shy young man, coloured though he might be. The words of an American officer came into her mind, secretly treasured and remembered for three years— ‘If he kind of admired you, Miss Trefusis, well there’s nothing wrong with that.’ That admiration had brought nothing to him but attempted suicide, hospital, and disgrace, and now, after three years, he had come back for more. She reached mechanically to the shelf for a packet of cigarettes, and said gently: “Are you out of the Army, now?”
He swallowed, and said: “Yes, ma’am.”
She had the packet in her hand, but she did not give it to him. “What are you doing then?” she inquired.
He raised his head, and looked at her, and she was smiling at him in the way that she always had smiled at him when she gave him cigarettes, but she was prettier than he had ever remembered her. Courage came back to him, and he said: “I got a job on a freighter, with the steward, ‘n we docked in at Avonmouth. I thought as it was pretty close, I’d kind of come along down here.” He met her eyes again. “I thought I’d kind of like to see if you were anywhere around here still, and tell you I been mighty sorry about that time.”
She coloured and laughed awkwardly. “Oh, that’s all right.” And then she asked curiously: “Did you come all the way from Avonmouth just to say that?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said simply.
She had once been as far as Exeter, nearly a hundred miles away, but Avonmouth, she knew, was much farther than that, and it seemed a very long way to her. She said weakly: “Fancy . . .” And then she said: “You didn’t have to come all that way, just to say that.” She did not know that he had come from the United States to say it, in eleven months. “There was an officer here once, about that time,” she said. “He said you didn’t mean nothing by it.”
“That’s right,” he said. He looked at her, and she was smiling, and a slow smile spread across his own face. “I reckon it just kind of happened.”
“Well,” she said, “you just look out it doesn’t happen again.” But she was still smiling as she said it, and he took more courage from her smile.
“I was wondering,” he said, and stopped. “I got a lot I’d like to tell you about that time,” he said, and stopped again. And he managed to get it out, after three years. “If I stopped over for the night,” he said, “I was wondering if you’d care to take a lil’ walk with me this evening.”
She said gently: “That’s what you wanted to ask me before, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Just for an hour?”
He nodded.
She smiled at him. “I don’t mind if I do. Six o’clock, by the gate into the churchyard?”
“I’ll be waiting for you, Miss Grace.”
She laughed. “None of your tricks, now.”
He said in horror: “No, ma’am!”
“All right,” she said. “See you then.” And, as he turned to go: “You’re forgetting your cigarettes!”
Dave Lesurier did not go down the street turning cartwheels, but he felt like it. He went and waited for the bus, and went into Penzance and got his bag, and took it back to the White Hart hotel and spent the rest of the afternoon dressing for the party. When he walked out of the White Hart that evening for his date he wore a blue suit that was a little too blue with a very marked waist, and pointed light brown shoes rather too tight for his feet, and a bright yellow tie with spots on it, and a green silk shirt and collar, and a magenta handkerchief. Grace Trefusis, when she saw him coming, thought he looked ever so smart, and wished she’d put on her best frock instead of the one that she’d been wearing for three days.
He had bought a large bunch of violets for her in Penzance, and he gave her these when he met her by the churchyard gate. “They looked so pretty, right there in the shop,” he said diffidently, “I thought maybe you’d like them.”
She buried her face in the little blossoms. “Oh, they’re ever so nice. Just take a smell!” He sniffed them, laughing, and they turned and walked past the churchyard wall together out towards the hill, and old Mrs Polread the sexton’s wife, who had seen the whole thing from her cottage window, had a fine tale to tell Mrs Penlee when they met an hour later. “That black boy that assaulted Grace Trefusis when the Americans were here, you know, the one that there was all that trouble over. Believe it or not, he’s back here, and she’s walking out with him this very minute! And he give her a bunch of violets, too, big as a plate!”
Most of that first walk they spent in talking of his plans for the future. “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 the States.” She did not really know what draughting was, but she was impressed by his sincerity of purpose. “I thought maybe I’d take a look round a lil’ bit 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 dunno,” 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 do 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 th
ink 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 weekend. I’d like to see that, 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 draughtsman. Mr Frobisher knew something about 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, 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 his ability was difficult to assess. On his own confession the young man had no experience in draughtsmanship except his course at school, which might mean nothing at all.
He 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 BSF,” he said. “Twenty-six to the inch.” He stood for a moment in thought; the boy’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 no 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 pocketbook, 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 coloured 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, and said: “Ten Player’s, please.” 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 got something to celebrate. I 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 took 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 comprehensible hardware detailed in his engineer’s pocketbook, and the incomprehensible abstractions of his electrical text book. 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 candies. 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 in the bus. And at the bus stop in Trenarth he raised his hat to her, and said: “I better say goodnight, 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 dunno about that, Miss Grace. Maybe they will.” But he went with her to her parents’ cottage, where she lived, and where Lieutenant Anderson had come three years before.
Grace Trefusis had inherited all the vigour of her mother. She took him in and 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 by 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 took 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 dunno 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 v
ery 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 lil’ walk around the shop last night, sir, after hours,” he said. “There’s a whole raft o’ things here that I 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 upon 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 in 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 spread down into the shop, where Mr King was regarded as an impractical obstructionist and the arch enemy of production. He may have been, but he could teach Lesurier a great deal and the Negro was wise enough to realize it. Under the stern eye of the old man he 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.