Knight's Gambit (Vintage) by William Faulkner

Author:William Faulkner [Faulkner, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307792433
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

2

Yet these were the people—the puppets, the paper dolls; the situation, impasse, morality play, medicine show, whichever you liked best—dropped out of a clear sky into his uncle’s lap at ten oclock on a cold night four weeks before Christmas, and all his uncle saw fit or felt inclined or even needful to do, was to come back to the board and move the pawn and say ‘Move’ as though it had never happened, never been; not only dismissed but repudiated, refused.

But he didn’t move yet. And this time he repeated himself, stubbornly:

‘It’s the money.’

And this time his uncle repeated himself too, still abrupt, short, even harsh: ‘Money? What does that boy care about money? He probably hates it, is put into a rage each time he has to carry a wad of it around with him simply because he wants to buy something or go somewhere. If it was just the money, I’d never have heard about it. He wouldn’t have had to come here bursting in on me at ten oclock at night, first with a royal ukase then with a lie then with a threat, just to keep his mother from marrying a man who has no money. Not even if the man had no money at all, which in Captain Gualdres’ case may not even be the fact.’

‘All right,’ he said, quite stubbornly. ‘He doesn’t want his mother or sister either to marry that foreigner. Just not liking Captain Gualdres is plenty enough for that.’

Now his uncle really had finished talking, sitting opposite him across the chessboard, waiting. Then he discovered that his uncle was looking at him, steady and speculative and quite hard.

‘Well well,’ his uncle said. ‘Well well well:’—looking at him while he found out that he hadn’t forgot how to blush either. But he should have been used to that by now—or at least to the fact that his uncle would still remember it, whether it had slipped his mind or not. But at least he stuck to his guns, holding his head up, hot suffusion and all, staring as steadily back as his uncle stared, answering that too:

‘Not to mention dragging his sister along to make her tell the lie.’

His uncle was looking at him, not quizzical now, not even staring: just looking.

‘Why is it,’ his uncle said, ‘that people of seventeen—’

‘Eighteen,’ he said. ‘Or almost.’

‘All right,’ his uncle said. ‘Eighteen or almost—are so convinced that octogenarians like me are incapable of accepting or respecting or even remembering what the young ones consider passion and love?’

‘Maybe it’s because the old ones can no longer tell the difference between that and simple decency, like not dragging your sister six miles at ten oclock on a cold December night to make her tell a lie.’

‘All right,’ his uncle said. ‘Touché then. Will that do? Because I know one octogenarian of fifty who will put nothing past seventeen and eighteen and nineteen—and for that matter, sixteen too—, least of all, passion and love or decency

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