‘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 girlheels 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 overrevved 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 be. I couldn’t even stop you.’
‘And I almost missed something,’ he said. ‘I don’t intend to this time.’
There will he 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 he 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 don’t 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 he 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 hut 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 don’t,’ 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 don’t 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
