At the Greenbury hotel in "Knight's Gambit," Max Harriss is well known "to all the clerks and telephone girls and the Negro doormen and bellboys and waiters" (208).
When Charles Mallison explains Gualdres' reason for enlisting in the fight against Nazi Germany in "Knight's Gambit," he includes among the possible reasons the fact that the Germans "were rendering a whole race into fertilizer and lubricating oil" - an odd and perhaps callous way to refer to the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe (255). (Gualdres' actual reason, according to Charles, is that the Germans "had abolished horses from civilized cavalry," 255).
Passing through Jefferson on his way from pre-flight to basic training in "Knight's Gambit," Charles Mallison sees "the wagons and pick-ups of the hill farmers" who are making one of their weekly visits to town (251). By 'hill farmers,' the narrative means the families that farm on the poorer land in the hilly parts of Yoknapatawpha county.
These are the "five or six girls" in "Knight's Gambit" who "attended the female half of the Academy" with Mrs. Harriss and "who had been the nearest thing she had to friends" (152). These girlhood friends are the women who would receive seasonal cards from Mrs. Harriss "postmarked from Rome or London or Paris or Vienna or Cairo" (166). Maggie Mallison is one of these women, but none of the others are named.
This character 'appears' in "Knight's Gambit" by way of one of Faulkner's typical negative formulations, in the middle of a sentence that develops the idea that Sebastian Gualdres is a "stranger" in Yoknapatawpha by noting that, when locals visit him at the Backus-Harriss Plantation, they are "guests not of the woman who owned the place and whose family name they had known all her life and her father's and grandfather's too" - that is, they are his guests (174). But the point here is that this woman - Mrs.
In "Knight's Gambit," this "caretaker" at the Harriss estate is "not the old one, the first renter" - a man from Memphis who manages the farming part of the estate - but "a fat Italian or Greek" from New Orleans, "who lives in the house all the time," even when it is otherwise empty (162). Harriss calls him "his butler"; when guests arrive he waits on them wearing "a four-in-hand tie of soft scarlet silk" and carrying "a pistol loose in his hip pocket" (162).
In "Knight's Gambit" Harriss rents the plantation he inherits from his father-in-law to this "caretaker," a man who "didn’t even live in the county" but commutes from Memphis except during planting and harvest season, when he camps out in one the abandoned Negro cabins (159-60).
In "Knight's Gambit" Charles Mallison thinks of "the British, the handful of boys, some no older than he and some probably not even as old, who flew the Royal Air Force’s fighter command" against the German air campaign during the Battle of Britain in 1940 (205). The valor of these R.A.F. pilots was widely celebrated during and after World War II.
During the chess game with Uncle Gavin, the narrator in "Knight's Gambit" compares his thinking to that of "airmen," who measure duration "by contiguous and not elapsed time" (184).
The "first American Expeditionary Force" that Gavin Stevens refers to in "Knight's Gambit" are the more than one million U.S. troops who landed in France in 1917 and 1918 to join England and France in the fight against the Germany (256).
