Knight's Gambit (23 page)

So he went to the show. And if he hadn’t gone to the show, he wouldn’t have been passing the Allnite Inn where he could see, recognise the empty horse-van at the curb before it with the empty chains and shackles looped through the side-planks, and, turning his head toward the window, Mr McCallum himself at the counter, eating, the heavy white-oak cudgel he always carried around strange horses and mules, leaning against the counter beside him. And if he hadn’t had fourteen minutes yet before the week-night hour (except Saturday or unless there was a party) when he was supposed to be back home and indoors, he wouldn’t have entered the Inn and asked Mr McCallum who had bought the horse.

The moon was up now. Once the lighted Square was behind him, he could watch the chopping shadows of his legs chopping off the shadows of the leafless branches and then finally of the fence pickets too, though not for long because he climbed the fence at the corner of the yard and so saved the distance between there and the gate. And now he could see the shaded down-glow of the desk lamp beyond the sitting-room window and, himself not walking hurrying but rather being swept along on the still-pristine cresting of the astonishment and puzzlement and (most of all, though he didn’t know why) haste, his instinct was to stop, avoid evade—anything rather than violate that interdiction, that hour, that ritual of the Translation which the whole family referred to with a capital T—the rendering of the Old Testament back into the classic Greek into which it had been translated from its lost Hebrew infancy—which his uncle had been engaged on for twenty years now, a few days over two years longer than he, Charles, had lived, retiring to the sittingroom once a week always (and sometimes two and three times provided that many things happened to displease or affront him), shutting the door behind him: nor man woman nor child, client well-wisher or friend, to touch even the knob until his uncle turned it from inside.

And he, Charles, thought how if he had been eight instead of almost eighteen, he wouldn’t have paid any attention even to that student lamp and that shut door; or how if he had been twenty-four instead of eighteen, he wouldn’t have been here at all just because another boy nineteen years old bought a horse. Then he thought how maybe that was backward; that he would have been hurrying faster than ever at twenty-four and at eight he wouldn’t have come at all since at eighteen all he knew to do was just the hurrying, the haste, the astonishment, since, his uncle to the contrary or not, his was one eighteen anyway which couldn’t begin to anticipate how Max Harriss’s nineteen hoped to circumvent or retaliate on anybody with even that horse.

But then he didn’t need to; his uncle would attend to that. All required of him was the hurry, the speed. And he had supplied that, holding the steady half-walk half-trot from that first step through the Inn door where he could turn the corner, to the yard and across it and up the steps into the hall and down the hall to the closed door, not pausing at all, his hand already reaching for the knob, then into the sittingroom where his uncle sat in shirtsleeves and an eyeshade at the desk beneath the lamp, not even looking up, the Bible propped open in front of him and the Greek dictionary and the cob pipe at his elbow and the better part of a ream of yellow copy paper strewn about the floor at his feet.

‘He bought the horse,’ he said. ‘What can he do with the horse?’

Nor did his uncle look up yet nor even move. ‘Ride it, I hope,’ his uncle said. Then his uncle looked up, reaching for the pipe. ‘I thought it was understood—’

His uncle stopped, the pipe too, the stem already turned to approach his uncle’s mouth, the hand holding it just clear of the desk, motionless. And he had seen this before and it seemed for a moment that he was watching it now: the instant during which his uncle’s eyes no longer saw him, while behind them shaped the flick and click of the terse glib succinct sentence sometimes less than two words long, which would blast him back out of the room.

‘All right,’ his uncle said. ‘What horse?’

He answered, succinct too. ‘McCallum’s. That stallion.’

‘All right,’ his uncle said again.

And this time he was not slow; he didn’t need the diagram.

‘I just left him at the Inn, eating supper. He took it out there this afternoon. I saw the truck in the alley on the way from school this afternoon, but I didn’t—’

His uncle was not seeing him at all; the eyes were as empty as the Harriss girl’s had been when she came through the door the first time last night. Then his uncle said something. It was in Greek, the old Greek, as his uncle was back there in the old time when the Old Testament had first been translated or even written. Sometimes his uncle would do that: say something for him in English that neither of them would have intended for his, Charles’s, mother to hear, then again in the old Greek, and even to him who couldn’t understand the Greek, it sounded a lot stronger, a lot more like whoever was saying it meant exactly that, even to the ones who couldn’t understand it or at least hadn’t understood it until now. And this was one of them and neither did this sound like anything that anybody had got out of the Bible, at least since the Anglo-Saxon puritans had got hold of it. His uncle was up now too, snatching off the eyeshade and flinging it away, and kicked the chair backward and snatched his coat and vest from the other chair.

‘My overcoat and hat,’ his uncle said. ‘On the bed. Jump.’

And he jumped. They went out of the room exactly like an automobile with a scrap of paper being sucked along behind it, up the hall with his uncle in front in the flapping coat and vest now and still holding his arms extended back for the overcoat, and he, Charles, still trying to gain enough to shove the overcoat sleeves over his uncle’s hands.

Then across the moonlit yard to the car, he still carrying the hat, and into the car; and without warming the engine at all, his uncle rushed it backward on the choke at about thirty miles an hour, out of the drive into the street and dragged the tires and whirled it around and went up the street still on the choke and took the corner on the wrong side, crossing the Square almost as fast as Max Harriss had done, and slammed in beside Mr McCallum’s truck in front of the Inn and jumped out.

‘You wait,’ his uncle said, running on across the pavement into the Inn, where through the window he watched Mr McCallum still sitting at the counter drinking coffee with the stick still leaning beside him until his uncle ran up and snatched it up and turned without even stopping, sucking Mr McCallum along behind and out of there just as he had sucked him, Charles, out of the sitting room two minutes ago, back to the car where his uncle jerked the door open and told him, Charles, to move over and drive and flung the stick in and shoved Mr McCallum in and got in himself and slammed the door.

Which was all right with him, because his uncle was worse even than Max Harriss, even when he wasn’t in a hurry or going anywhere. That is, the speedometer only showed about half as much, but Max Harriss had an idea he was driving fast, while his uncle knew he wasn’t.

‘Step on it,’ his uncle said. ‘It’s ten minutes to ten. But the rich eat late so maybe we’ll still be in time.’

So he did. Soon they were out of town and he could let the car out some even though the road was just gravel; building himself a concrete driveway six miles in to town was the only thing Baron Harriss had forgot to do or anyway died too quick to do. But they went pretty fast, his uncle perched forward on the edge of the seat and watching the speedometer needle as if the first time it flickered he intended to jump out and run ahead.

‘Howdy Gavin, hell,’ his uncle said to Mr McCallum. ‘Wait and howdy me after I indict you as an accessory.’

‘He knew the horse,’ Mr McCallum said. ‘He came all the way out home and insisted he wanted to buy it. He was there at sunup, asleep in the car at the front gate, with four or five hundred dollars loose in his overcoat pocket like a handful of leaves. Why? Does he claim to be a minor?’

‘He dont claim either,’ his uncle said. ‘He seems to hold the entire subject of his age interdict from anybody’s meddling—even his uncle in Washington. But never mind that. What did you do with the horse?’

‘I put him in the stable, the stall,’ Mr McCallum said. ‘But it was all right. It was the little stable, with just one stall in it, with nothing else in it. He told me I wouldn’t need to worry, because there wouldn’t be anything else in it. He had it already picked out and ready when I got there. But I looked, myself, at the doors and fences both. The stable was all right. If it hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have left the horse, no matter how much he paid me for it.’

‘I know that,’ his uncle said. ‘What little stable?’

‘The one that’s off to itself, that he built last summer, behind some trees, away from the other stables and the paddocks too. With a paddock of its own, and nothing else in the stable but the one big stall and a tack room and I looked in the tack room too: just a saddle and bridle and blankets and a curry-comb and brush and some feed. And he said that anybody that touched that saddle and bridle or the feed either, was going to already know about the horse and I told them they had certainly better, because if anybody walked into that lot and opened that stall door expecting to find just an ordinary horse behind it, it would not only be a considerable worry to the one that did the walking and the opening, but to the one that owned the horse too. And he said that at least that let me out, because I was just the one that sold it. But the stable was all right. There was even an outside window where a man could climb into the loft and throw down feed until the horse got used to him.’

‘And when would that be?’ his uncle said.

‘I learned how to do it,’ Mr McCallum said.

‘Then maybe in a minute now we can watch you,’ his uncle said.

Because they were almost there. They hadn’t gone out as quick as Max Harriss had come in, but already they were running between the white fences which, in the moonlight, didn’t look any more substantial than cake-icing, with the broad moon-filled pastures beyond them where his uncle could probably remember cotton growing—or at least his uncle would probably claim he did—while the old owner sat in his home-made chair on the gallery, to look out over them for a while, then turn back to his book and his toddy again.

Then they turned through the gates, with his uncle and Mr McCallum both sitting on the edge of the seat now, and ran fast up the drive between the combed and curried lawns, the bushes and shrubs and trees as neat as laid-by cotton, until they could see what had been the old owner’s house too: the tremendous sprawl of columns and wings and balconies that must have covered half an acre.

And they were in time. Captain Gualdres must have come out the side door just in time to see their lights in the drive. Anyway, he was already standing there in the moonlight when they saw him and he was still standing there when the three of them got out of the car and approached, bareheaded, in a short leather jacket and boots and a light crop dangling from his wrist.

It began in Spanish. Three years ago he had reached optional Spanish in high school and he didn’t remember now, in fact he never had really understood, how or why he started taking it; just exactly what his uncle had done, as a result of which he, Charles, found himself committed to taking the Spanish which he had never really intended to commit himself to. It wasn’t persuasion and it wasn’t a bribe, because his uncle said you didn’t need to be bribed to do something you wanted to do, needed to do, whether you knew at the time you needed it, would ever need it, or not. Perhaps his mistake was in dealing with a lawyer. Anyway, he was still taking Spanish and he had read
Don Quixote
and he could keep up with most Mexican and South American newspapers and he had started the
Cid
only that was last year and last year was 1940 and his uncle said, ‘But why? It should be easier than
Quixote
because the
Cid
is about heroes.’ But he couldn’t have explained, to anyone, least of all a man fifty years old, even his uncle, how to assuage the heart’s thirst with the dusty chronicle of the past when not fifteen hundred miles away in England men not much older than he was were daily writing with their lives his own time’s deathless footnote.

So most of the time he could understand them; only a little of the Spanish went too fast for him. But then, some of the English was too fast for Captain Gualdres too, and at one time he was even about to believe there were two of them who were not keeping up with his uncle’s Spanish too.

‘You go to ride,’ his uncle said. ‘In the moonlight.’

‘But certainly,’ Captain Gualdres said, still courteous, still only a little startled, his black eyebrows up only a little—so courteous that the voice never showed the surprise at all and not even the tone of it was actually saying, in whatever way a Spaniard would say it,
So what?

‘I’m Stevens,’ his uncle said, in that same rapid voice—which to Captain Gualdres, he realised, was much worse than just rapid since to a Spaniard the rapidity and abrupt ness would be the worst crime of all; which (the Spanish), realised also, was the trouble: there had not been time; his uncle had not had time to do anything but just talk in it. ‘This is Mr McCallum. And this is my sister’s son, Charles Mallison.’

‘Mr McCallum I know well,’ Captain Gualdres said in English, turning; they could see his teeth for a second too. ‘He has one much horse too. A pity.’ He shook hands with Mr McCallum, sudden and brief and hard. But even doing that he still looked like bronze, for all his soft worn moon-gleamed leather and brilliantined hair, as if he had been cast from metal, hair boots jacket and all, in one jointless piece. ‘The young gentleman, not so well.’ He shook hands with him, Charles, quick and brief and hard too. Then he stepped back. And this time he didn’t shake hands. ‘And Mr Stevens, not so well. A pity too, perhaps.’ And still even the tone of the voice didn’t say,
You may now present the apologies for consideration
. It didn’t even say,
yes, gentlemen?
Only the voice itself said, perfectly courteous, perfectly heatless, with no inflection whatever: