"I've never played, but I should like to learn. Only I really don't know where the men are. Nobody plays here, you see, and they get lost or hidden in cupboards." Thus Judith in the second hour of a steady downpour to Mr. Challis's inquiry, for he was always ready for a game at chess, without being keen about it.
"You are not getting on with your book, anyhow!" said he. "Can't I hunt about for the chessmen till I find them?" The book was one he had recommended at the first coming of the rain, and it was when it was closed in despair that Challis asked his question.
"I think we must ask Elphinstone. Would you ring?" Challis rang, and a sub. who appeared was instructed to consult Mr. Elphinstone. Judith continued: "No!—I hate sinners who are touched by the Dies Iræ in a cathedral and repent; especially when they've got too old to do any real mischief. I would sooner they went to the Devil honestly...." And so the chat ran on, Challis cordially concurring, and not hinting at any joy whatever over the sinner that repenteth, until the young man Samuel came back with chessmen. There was another set, of ivory, it appeared, but Mr. Elphinstone had desired Samuel to say that a prawn was defective, and one of the bishops was out of his socket, and couldn't be got to screw in. Samuel had been put to it to charge his memory with this obscure message; he was confident about the prawn, but had misgiving about the bishop—feared it was disrespectful to the Church perhaps; but went away relieved when nothing explosive came of it. His situation was safe.
Many of us know that teaching chess is no sinecure. The alumnus who refuses to accept the rules as they stand; who wants to know why the pawns may not move backwards; why the pieces may not jump over, like in draughts; why the queen should have such absurd latitude; who thinks all the black pieces should remain on the black squares, and per contra—how well we know him! And the difficulty a peculiar class of intellect has in mastering the knight's move, condemning it on its merits, as too much like squinting, or italics! And another yet, which, on being shown how to make a particular move, makes it, and says contentiously: "Well!—I don't see anything so very clever in that."
Miss Arkroyd did not quite do any of these things, but she was nearly as bad. She remembered the moves, in the abstract, but forgot which of the pieces made them; and this answered as well as forgetting the moves for all purposes of confusion. With so beautiful a hand it couldn't matter how much she fingered the pieces. And Mr. Challis seemed very contented. The instruction was a farce, but it served its turn, and a sort of appearance of a game developed while the rain outside came steadily down, and checkmated everyone in the house. Desultory chat, in which the question, "Whose move is it?" frequently occurred, helped Challis to a further insight into family conditions and local history. En revanche the young lady added to her impressions of Challis's own domestic circumstances and his literary career, and found that an image was forming in her mind of Mrs. Challis. It wasn't a beautiful image, but it was worthy. It was that of a good soul. But not a good sort of body—nothing so bad as that! She felt glad, for Challis's sake. A good soul and the best of wives; that kind of thing! You couldn't expect education of very finished achievement in those sort of people, in the class she came from. For Miss Arkroyd had got somehow a perfectly clear impression of a class undefinable, but homogeneous and recognizable by symptoms. A class that didn't dress for dinner, a class that liked potatoes in their skins as a palliative to cold moist roast mutton d' obbligo; and did not condemn, but merely looked coldly on, at menu's and finger-glasses. A class whose males smoked pipes and whose females refused cigarettes; which, though its young learned French at school, condemned France as the most salient foreign incident on an incorrigibly foreign Continent, and a perfect moral plague-spot of unfaithful wives and husbands.
But however good a soul this man's wife was, Judith caught herself being sorry for him. Yesterday evening, when she went good-naturedly to him, as to her mother's latest discovery, just to say a few words and prevent his getting left out in the cold, he had seemed to her only moderately interesting, and far from handsome. Now she began with a discriminating eye to see that, though he was far from handsome, he was just as far from ugly. Still, she perceived that it did credit to her discriminating eye to find this out. She hadn't noticed it so much when he turned up unexpectedly in the garden in the morning—unexpectedly, because she was really unconscious of having said in his hearing that she was going across the lawn to feed her birds. But now, in a lucky half-light in the red drawing-room, with his eyes dropped on the chess-board, his forehead and eye-framing had a look about them that was certainly interesting, if not a good substitute for beauty. Judith would have preferred the beauty, certainly; but she could look contentedly at the good soul's property, and go on wondering what she was like, while he considered knotty points connected with the game.
"You've put your king in check, Miss Arkroyd. You mustn't do that." He looked up suddenly and caught her eyes. Her rapport with the game saved him from his vanity by good luck. "I see you thought you had caught me," was his interpretation of her gaze. It was in token of a supposed triumph, so he thought. Whatever it was, it became disconcerted.
"Oh!—mustn't I do that? I think it oughtn't to count, when one does it oneself. Don't you?" Challis said to himself that this woman was rather a goose. Why he felt a little disappointed at her being rather a goose he could not have said off-hand. He apologized for the stupidity of the laws of games generally; said they were clearly wrong all round. But it would make such a lot of fuss to alter them now that he doubted if it was worth it.
"You're not in earnest, Mr. Challis?" So the lady spoke, and Challis said to himself that Marianne would never have found that out. "Sharp, by comparison!" was his comment to himself; and then aloud: "But I can't have you bored, Miss Arkroyd. You don't care about this." To which Judith replied: "It's not exciting, so far;" and both laughed. The discovery that each had been thinking the same thing was full of conductivities. It improved their footing.
"It can't be, you know, when you come to think of it," said he, pushing his chair expressively three inches back—an expression of renunciation—with a slight boredom-admitting stretch. "Chess requires apprenticeship before it can be enjoyed, like smoking."