The Specialty of the House Read online

  He was jarred from his train of thought by White’s moving a piece. ‘Your move,’ said White carelessly, ‘that is, if you want to continue the game.’

  George looked at the board and found his position still secure. ‘Why shouldn’t I want to continue the game? Our positions …’

  ‘For the moment are equal,’ White interposed promptly. ‘What you fail to consider is the long view: I am playing to win; you are playing only to keep from losing.’

  ‘It seems very much the same thing,’ argued George.

  ‘But it is not,’ said White, ‘and the proof of that lies in the fact that I shall win this game, and every other game we ever play.’

  The effrontery of this staggered George. ‘Maroczy was a master who relied a good deal on defensive strategy,’ he protested, ‘and if you are familiar with his games …’

  ‘I am exactly as well acquainted with Maroczy’s games as you are,’ White observed, ‘and I do not hesitate to say that had we ever played, I should have beaten him every game as well.’

  George reddened. ‘You think very well of yourself, don’t you,’ he said, and was surprised to see that instead of taking offense White was regarding him with a look of infinite pity.

  ‘No,’ White said at last, ‘it is you who think well of me,’ and then as if he had just managed to see and avoid a neatly baited trap, he shook his head and drew his lips into a faintly sardonic grimace. ‘Your move,’ he said.

  With an effort George put aside the vaguely troubling thoughts that clustered in his mind, and made the move. He made only a few after that when he saw clearly that he was hopelessly and ignominiously beaten. He was beaten a second game, and then another after that, and then in the fourth game, he made a despairing effort to change his tactics. On his eleventh move he saw a devastating opportunity to go on the offensive, hesitated, refused it, and was lost again. At that George grimly set about placing the pieces back in their case.

  ‘You’ll be back tomorrow?’ he said, thoroughly put out at White’s obvious amusement.

  ‘If nothing prevents me.’

  George suddenly felt cold with fear. ‘What could prevent you?’ he managed to say.

  White picked up the white queen and revolved it slowly between his fingers. ‘Louise, perhaps. What if she decided not to let you indulge yourself in this fashion?’

  ‘But why? Why should she? She’s never minded up to now!’

  ‘Louise, my good man, is an extremely stupid and petulant woman …’

  ‘Now, that’s uncalled for!’ George said, stung to the quick.

  ‘And,’ White continued as if he had not been interrupted at all, ‘she is the master here. Such people now and then like to affirm their mastery seemingly for no reason at all. Actually, such gestures are a sop to their vanity – as necessary to them as the air they breathe.’

  George mustered up all the courage and indignation at his command. ‘If those are your honest opinions,’ he said bravely, ‘I don’t think you have the right to come to this house ever again.’

  On the heels of his words Louise stirred in her armchair and turned toward him. ‘George,’ she said briskly, ‘that’s quite enough of that game for the evening. Don’t you have anything better to do with your time?’

  ‘I’m putting everything away now,’ George answered hastily, but when he reached for the chessman still gripped between his opponent’s fingers, he saw White studying Louise with a look that made him quail. White turned to him then, and his eyes were like pieces of dark glass through which one can see the almost unbearable light of a searing flame.

  ‘Yes,’ White said slowly. ‘For what she is and what she has done to you I hate her with a consuming hate. Knowing that, do you wish me to return?’

  The eyes were not unkind when they looked at him now, George saw, and the feel of the chessman which White thrust into his hand was warm and reassuring. He hesitated, cleared his throat, then, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he said at last.

  White’s lips drew into that familiar sardonic grimace. ‘Tomorrow, the next day, any time you want me,’ he said. ‘But it will always be the same. You will never beat me.’

  Time proved that White had not underestimated himself. And time itself, as George learned, was something far better measured by an infinite series of chess games, by the moves within a chess game, than by any such device as a calendar or clock. The discovery was a delightful one; even more delightful was the realization that the world around him, when viewed clearly, had come to resemble nothing so much as an object seen through the wrong end of a binocular. All those people who pushed and prodded and poked and demanded countless explanations and apologies could be seen as sharp and clear as ever but nicely reduced in perspective, so that it was obvious that no matter how close they came, they could never really touch one.

  There was a single exception to this: Louise. Every evening the world would close in around the chessboard and the figure of White lounging in the chair on the other side of it. But in a corner of the room sat Louise over her knitting, and the air around her was charged with a mounting resentment which would now and then eddy around George in the form of querulous complaints and demands from which there was no escape.

  ‘How can you spend every minute at that idiotic game!’ she demanded. ‘Don’t you have anything to talk to me about?’ And, in fact, he did not, any more than he had since the very first years of his marriage when he had been taught that he had neither voice nor vote in running his home, that she did not care to hear about the people he worked with in his office, and that he could best keep to himself any reflections he had on some subject which was, by her own word, Highbrow.

  ‘And how right she is,’ White had once taken pains to explain derisively. ‘If you had furnished your home it would be uncluttered and graceful, and Louise would feel awkward and out of place in it. If she comes to know the people you work with too well, she might have to befriend them, entertain them, set her blatant ignorance before them for judgment. No, far better under the circumstances that she dwells in her vacuum, away from unhappy judgments.’

  As it always could, White’s manner drove George to furious resentment. ‘For a set of opinions pulled out of a cocked hat that sounds very plausible,’ he burst out. ‘Tell me, how do you happen to know so much about Louise?’

  White looked at him through veiled eyes. ‘I know only what you know,’ he said. ‘No more and no less.’

  Such passages left George sore and wounded, but for the sake of the game he endured them. When Louise was silent all the world retreated into unreality. Then the reality was the chessboard with White’s hand hovering over it, mounting the attack, sweeping everything before it with a reckless brilliance that could only leave George admiring and dismayed.

  In fact, if White had any weakness, George reflected mournfully, it was certainly not in his game, but rather in his deft and unpleasant way of turning each game into the occasion for a little discourse on the science of chess, a discourse which always wound up with some remarkably perverse and impudent reflections on George’s personal affairs.

  ‘You know that the way a man plays chess demonstrates that man’s whole nature,’ White once remarked. ‘Knowing this, does it not strike you as significant that you always choose to play the defensive – and always lose?’

  That sort of thing was bad enough, but White was at his most savage those times when Louise would intrude in a game: make some demand on George or openly insist that he put away the board. Then White’s jaw would set, and his eyes would flare with that terrible hate that always seemed to be smoldering in them when he regarded the woman.

  Once when Louise had gone so far as to actually pick up a piece from the board and bang it back into the case, White came to his feet so swiftly and menacingly that George leaped up to forestall some rash action. Louise glared at him for that.

  ‘You don’t have to jump like that,’ she snapped. ‘I didn’t break anything. But I can tell you, George Huneker: if yo
u don’t stop this nonsense I’ll do it for you. I’ll break every one of these things to bits if that’s what it takes to make you act like a human being again!’

  ‘Answer her!’ said White. ‘Go ahead, why don’t you answer her!’ And caught between these two fires George could do no more than stand there and shake his head helplessly.

  It was this episode, however, which marked a new turn in White’s manner: the entrance of a sinister purposefulness thinly concealed in each word and phrase.

  ‘If she knew how to play the game,’ he said, ‘she might respect it, and you would have nothing to fear.’

  ‘It so happens,’ George replied defensively, ‘that Louise is too busy for chess.’

  White turned in his chair to look at her and then turned back with a grim smile. ‘She is knitting. And, it seems to me, she is always knitting. Would you call that being busy?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘No,’ said White, ‘I wouldn’t. Penelope spent her years at the loom to keep off importunate suitors until her husband returned. Louise spends her years at knitting to keep off life until death comes. She takes no joy in what she does; one can see that with half an eye. But each stitch dropping off the end of those needles brings her one instant nearer death, and, although she does not know it, she rejoices in it.’

  ‘And you make all that out of the mere fact that she won’t play at chess?’ cried George incredulously.

  ‘Not alone chess,’ said White. ‘Life.’

  ‘And what do you mean by that word life, the way you use it?’

  ‘Many things,’ said White. ‘The hunger to learn, the desire to create, the ability to feel vast emotions. Oh, many things.’

  ‘Many things, indeed,’ George scoffed. ‘Big words, that’s all they are.’ But White only drew his lips into that sardonic grimace and said, ‘Very big. Far too big for Louise, I’m afraid,’ and then by moving a piece forced George to redirect his attention to the board.

  It was as if White had discovered George’s weak spot, and took a sadistic pleasure in returning to probe it again and again. And he played his conversational gambits as he made his moves at chess: cruelly, unerringly, always moving forward to the inescapable conclusion with a sort of flashing audacity. There were times when George, writhing helplessly, thought of asking him to drop the subject of Louise once and for all, but he could never bring himself to do so. Something in the recesses of George’s mind warned him that these conversational fancies were as much a part of White as his capacity for chess, and that if George wanted him at all it would have to be on his own terms.

  And George did want him, wanted him desperately, the more so on such an evening as that dreadful one when he came home to tell Louise that he would not be returning to his office for a while. He had not been discharged, of course, but there had been something about his taking a rest until he felt in shape again. Although, he hastily added in alarm as he saw Louise’s face go slack and pale, he never felt better in his life.

  In the scene that followed, with Louise standing before him and passionately telling him things about himself that left him sick and shaken, he found White’s words pouring through his mind in a bitter torrent. It was only when Louise was sitting exhausted in her armchair, her eyes fixed blankly on the wall before her, her knitting in her lap to console her, and he was at his table setting up the pieces, that he could feel the brackish tide of his pain receding.

  ‘And yet there is a solution for all this,’ White said softly, and turned his eyes toward Louise. ‘A remarkably simple solution when one comes to think of it.’

  George felt a chill run through him. ‘I don’t care to hear about it,’ he said hoarsely.

  ‘Have you ever noticed, George,’ White persisted, ‘that that piddling, hackneyed picture on the wall, set in that baroque monstrosity of a frame that Louise admires so much, is exactly like a pathetic little fife trying to make itself heard over an orchestra that is playing its loudest?’

  George indicated the chessboard. ‘You have the first move,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, the game,’ White said. ‘The game can wait, George. For the moment I’d much prefer to think what this room – this whole fine house, in fact – could be if it were all yours, George. Yours alone.’

  ‘I’d rather get on with the game,’ George pleaded.

  ‘There’s another thing, George,’ White said slowly, and when he leaned forward George saw his own image again staring at him strangely from those eyes, ‘another fine thing to think of. If you were all alone in this room, in this house, why, there wouldn’t be anyone to tell you when to stop playing chess. You could play morning, noon, and night, and all around to the next morning if you cared to!

  ‘And that’s not all, George. You can throw that picture out the window and hang something respectable on the wall: a few good prints, perhaps – nothing extravagant, mind you – but a few good ones that stir you a bit the first time you come into the room each day and see them.

  ‘And recordings! I understand they’re doing marvelous things with recordings today, George. Think of a whole room filled with them: opera, symphony, concerto, quartet – just take your pick and play them to your heart’s content!’

  The sight of his image in those eyes always coming nearer, the jubilant flow of words, the terrible meaning of those words set George’s head reeling. He clapped his hands over his ears and shook his head frantically.

  ‘You’re mad!’ he cried. ‘Stop it!’ And then he discovered to his horror that even with his hands covering his ears he could hear White’s voice as clearly and distinctly as ever.

  ‘Is it the loneliness you’re afraid of, George? But that’s foolish. There are so many people who would be glad to be your friends, to talk to you, and, what’s better, to listen to you. There are some who would even love you, if you chose.’

  ‘Loneliness?’ George said unbelievingly. ‘Do you think it’s loneliness I’m afraid of?’

  ‘Then what is it?’

  ‘You know as well as I,’ George said in a shaking voice, ‘what you’re trying to lead me to. How could you expect me, expect any decent man, to be that cruel!’

  White bared his teeth disdainfully. ‘Can you tell me anything more cruel than a weak and stupid woman whose only ambition in life was to marry a man infinitely superior to her and then cut him down to her level so that her weakness and stupidity could always be concealed?’

  ‘You’ve got no right to talk about Louise like that!’

  ‘I have every right,’ said White grimly, and somehow George knew in his heart that this was the dreadful truth. With a rising panic he clutched the edge of the table.

  ‘I won’t do it!’ he said distractedly. ‘I’ll never do it, do you understand!’

  ‘But it will be done!’ White said, and his voice was so naked with terrible decision that George looked up to see Louise coming toward the table with her sharp little footsteps. She stood over it, her mouth working angrily, and then through the confusion of his thoughts he heard her voice echoing the same words again and again. ‘You fool!’ she was saying wildly. ‘It’s this chess! I’ve had enough of it!’ And suddenly she swept her hand over the board and dashed the pieces from it.

  ‘No!’ cried George, not at Louise’s gesture, but at the sight of White standing before her, the heavy poker raised in his hand. ‘No!’ George shouted again, and started up to block the fall of the poker, but knew even as he did so that it was too late.

  Louise might have been dismayed at the untidy way her remains were deposited in the official basket; she would certainly have cried aloud (had she been in a position to do so) at the unsightly scar on the polished woodwork made by the basket as it was dragged along the floor and borne out of the front door. Inspector Lund, however, merely closed the door casually behind the little cortege and turned back to the living room.

  Obviously the Lieutenant had completed his interrogation of the quiet little man seated in the chair next to the chess table, and obvi
ously the Lieutenant was not happy. He paced the center of the floor, studying his notes with a furrowed brow, while the little man watched him, silent and motionless.

  ‘Well?’ said Inspector Lund.

  ‘Well,’ said the Lieutenant, ‘there’s just one thing that doesn’t tie in. From what I put together, here’s a guy who’s living his life all right, getting along fine, and all of a sudden he finds he’s got another self, another personality. He’s like a man split into two parts, you might say.’

  ‘Schizoid,’ remarked Inspector Lund. ‘That’s not unusual.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ said the Lieutenant. ‘Anyhow, this other self is no good at all, and sure enough it winds up doing this killing.’

  ‘That all seems to tie in.’ said Inspector Lund. ‘What’s the hitch?’

  ‘Just one thing,’ the Lieutenant stated: ‘a matter of identity.’ He frowned at his notebook, and then turned to the little man in the chair next to the chess table. ‘What did you say your name was?’ he demanded.

  The little man drew his lips into a faintly sardonic grimace of rebuke. ‘Why, I’ve told you that so many times before, Lieutenant, surely you couldn’t have forgotten it again.’ The little man smiled pleasantly. ‘My name is White.’

  The Best of Everything

  In Arthur’s eyes they were all seemingly cut from one pattern. They were uniformly tall and well-built. They had regular features set into nicely tanned faces and capped by crew cuts. Their clothing was expensively staid; their manners were impeccable. They came from impressive Families and impressive Schools; and they regarded all these things casually. Among the bees that swarmed through the midtown hive, through Gothic piles redolent with the pleasant scent of gilt-edged securities, through glass pinnacles like futuristic fish bowls, they were not the most obtrusive, yet they were not lost.