Her door was open and he went in. He had been there earlier in the afternoon, when Mrs. Agnew had told him Peggy was on the day shift. While he waited he paced up and down making eloquent speeches to her. Pausing, he listened; he went to the window and watched the lighted street. He sat down slowly on the bed, his thoughts racing wildly.
Then the street door opened and he heard broken steps in the hall and voices low and faltering. As he stood up, apprehensive, the door burst open; there was a whiff of the cheap factory perfume, and Peggy lurched in with Walter Malone, the big grey-haired editorial writer, just behind, his big hand jerking at the bandanna handkerchief on her head. Her white stricken face frightened him. Malone’s grey face, ugly and contorted, loomed up behind her. They both saw him.
“What is this?” he said. Malone’s mouth gaped open and the bandanna handkerchief fluttered from his fingers. Peggy stood there, too surprised to move toward him. And Malone, with time to control himself, grinned, the vicious hardness still in his eyes. “I see the professor gets around,” he sneered. “How should I know you had moved in?” As he turned to go McAlpine said, “Take your time,” and took a step after him.
“No, let him go, Jim,” Peggy whispered. She sat down on the bed and tried to smile.
Malone’s angry footsteps receded down the hall and Jim closed the door.
“What happened? What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Where did you come from, Jim?”
“I’ve been waiting here. What went on with Malone?”
“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s nothing.” But her nerves were tightened up and she couldn’t sit still; and as she stood up and walked around, her arms folded, she looked at him again and again. Finally she burst out, “Oh, the smug complacent fool! That phoney understanding. That stupid, stupid vanity. I feel dirty all over. His wretched arrogance! Big-hearted enough to come my way, and not mind! And not mind, do you see, Jim?”
“You haven’t told me what happened,” he said soothingly. “Take it easy, Peggy.”
“You’re right. Why should I let that embittered failure frighten me? Why should I be surprised at anything he does?” She sat down and tried to relax and took the cigarette he offered her. She rubbed her left shoulder. In a few minutes she was calmer. “I was coming home from work with Willie Foy, the shipper. Remember him? The boy who taught me how to work the crimping machine? Only eighteen and he wants me to go out with him. It was fun tramping through the snow with him.” Her tone changed as she remembered, and she smiled.
“Yes, I remember Willie,” he said, marvelling that her recollection of the boy could free her so quickly from her anger.
“Willie wanted me to go to a dance with him and we were kidding each other,” she said. “The cold air, you know, heightens the smell of the cheap perfume that’s all over us, and I said we were like two winter flowers, and he was saying I wouldn’t know him when he took a bath and put on his new drapes. This was on Dorchester Street. Malone must have been standing there by the restaurant. I didn’t see him till he stopped us. It was easy for him to scare Willie away. I mean he overawed him with his grey hair and his expensive overcoat, and then he took me by the arm to walk me the rest of the way.”
Her changing face made him want to put his arms around her. The break in her calmness had brought her wonderfully close to him. “I sort of knew what was coming,” she said. “He was kidding me about working in the factory, but with that awful sleazy understanding of his. I’d stay there two weeks, he said. “Then a new experience, always the new experience. The charm of novelty. He had known women like me in France!
Throwing that stupid tolerance of his around me like a big moth-eaten coat. France! France! Ah, the life he had led in France! In France a woman could have Negro lovers. Anything for a kick! And he was about the only man in Montreal who could understand and be sympathetic with my little sophistications. I wasn’t arguing with him. What do I care about his stupid sympathies? I wanted to get home and get rid of him. Well, he insisted on coming in, and in the hall, then – Well,” she went on unevenly, “he tried to kiss me and I guess he saw I hated it, and then – then it happened.”
“What happened?”
“Just – just what I saw in him.”
Her eyes were stricken again, and McAlpine, waiting, was sure what he had dreaded had touched her at last. “Maybe I pushed him away,” she went on shakily. “It’s dark in the hall with only that small light. He had pulled me against him. My face was against his coat. ‘You go for those jigs,’ he said. ‘They can touch you, but when I try and touch you— Am I such scum?’ It was the way his head shot back in the light, and the glazed sparkle in his eyes, sort of crazy white and wild, crazy with humiliation as if – as if I had left him nothing, nothing in the world to be superior to, and he was like a savage, and he raised his hand to – to – well, to beat something out of me, to beat me until I was dirtier than he was and he could feel big and proud again. Do you see?”
“Sure,” he said, his own heart beating unevenly.
“I had never seen anything like it in a man’s face. Never in my life, Jim.”
“He’s sick – defeated,” he said, soothing her. “Maybe he can no longer bear any kind of a rejection.”
While the snow from her boots melted on the floor she dwelt on the brutality of Malone’s resentment. Normally, he was too lazy and indolent a man to go berserk, she said. But he had it in his mind that she had friends down on St. Antoine, which was all right with him, providing – well, if she had friends down on St. Antoine it should have made her feel he was superior and desirable – willing to give her a break. “Yes, you’re right, I think,” she said, meditating. “When he felt himself rejected, the last remnant of his pride was rejected, and he couldn’t stand it. If he couldn’t retain his belief in his superiority over a few Negroes, then he would go wild with hate, and rape and destroy everything.” She offered these explanations tentatively. What had really terrified her, she said, was her belief for the moment that she was being overwhelmed by vindictiveness from everyone Malone had ever known or admired. “I think that was what was so horrible,” she said, looking up.
“Sure. He turned into a thug. You’re lucky you didn’t get beaten up,” he said. “I could see it coming.”
“See what coming?”
“This trouble. It’s better it should come from Malone in your own hall.”
“Who else would bother me?”
“It could happen down in St. Antoine, couldn’t it? If Malone can get violent and become a thug because you’re a white woman, maybe there’s more violence coming your way from some of those Negroes, who can be thugs, too.”
“You don’t know anything about those people down there and I do. You don’t know how they feel about anything.”
“I only know the gossip I picked up.”
“Gossip about me, of course. Oh, it’s a laugh!” she said vehemently, and she did not laugh; she was too exasperated. “If people can’t destroy you one way they try another.” Her cheeks reddened, and her eyes were angry. “Try doing something in your own way sometime, Jim. Try having your own notion of your own integrity, and see what happens. Everybody takes a turn cracking at you. They’ll break their backs trying to bring you in line again, and if you won’t see things the way everybody else does, you’re crazy or perverse or pig-headed or stupid. Everybody’s willing to give you a hand if you’ll only string along and quit. And if you won’t quit— Why don’t I feel sour about people?” she asked bitterly. “All that’s the matter with me is that I’m what I choose to be. Does anyone think of trying to help me? Oh, Lord, no! Everybody wants to put a hole in my head. Look at you. You’ve heard some gossip and you’re wondering if I don’t attract corruption. How do you know I don’t attract what’s corrupt in you?”
“That should put me in my place,” he said, but after an embarrassed moment he went on doggedly. “But if the trumpet player is actually more violent than Malone—”
“Who says so, Jim?”
“Rogers. He says Wilson has a police record down in Memphis.”
“That Memphis business,” she said. “It was some trouble over a crap game, wasn’t it? You don’t understand such people, Jim. They’re not like Malone.”
“Peggy, you’re not in love with Wilson, are you?”
“Oh, dear! There you go!” she said wearily. “You mean, do I sleep with him? The one important question!”
“I only asked if—”
“Why don’t you ask if I sleep with Wagstaffe? Or Joe Thomas? Joe’s a pullman porter, the most eloquent man I’ve ever met. You haven’t heard them talk about these things down around St. Antoine,” she said, contemplating one worn spot on the floor where the paint had been scraped off, and her smile was as serene as a nun’s, rebuking him for his lack of charity. “I’ve sat in dirty little back rooms down there; men and women, all poor, just neighbours, patient and troubled, listening to Joe Thomas, and trying to understand this very same thing that bothers you. You ought to see those Negroes just sitting around together, listening and wondering while Joe tried to explain how a good-natured human being like himself can suddenly go berserk. Just listening was wonderful. I loved the way he put it. It went something like this: ‘If a white man, even a bad one, is getting kicked around, he knows he can call a policeman. It’s a feeling deep inside him. From the time he was a kid the authorities have pounded it into him. His authorities! Justice will always have one eye open for him. But when a Negro has a crazy, angry moment he wants to close his eyes, he wants to go blind, he doesn’t want to see the face of justice. It’ll be a white face, so he’s alone with nothing to fall back on but his own blind anger and he has to make a crazy violent protest before he opens his eyes. He knows he’ll hate what he sees when he opens his eyes, and so he likes the angry darkness. Then, of course, he comes to himself, and he’s frightened and on the run, which is no news for him because all his life in one way or another he’s been on the run in a white world. See, Jim?”
“Yes, I see.” But he pondered, then asked, “Peggy – all this stuff— What are you trying to do with yourself?”
“With myself?”
“Yes. What are you up to?”
“Look, Jim, who’s being inhuman? The supercilious people who have charge of this world, or me? In one way or another there are a lot of people on the run from what’s inhuman. If they rap on my door – well—”
“Yes, I see.” He wanted to say, “Black or white, a thug is a thug,” but he was helpless when she sounded so sweetly compassionate. Even if the man was a thug it was right that at some ultimate moment in a thug’s life someone should find something good to say for him. “Who knows?” he asked with a sigh. “There might come a time in my own life when I’d need someone like you to put in a good word for me. I think I’d be satisfied if I could hear you.” Then he smiled. “Well, you’d better take those snow boots off. Here. Let me help you.”
She thrust out her feet and he knelt down, avoiding the little pool of water, and pulled off the boots one at a time, his hands getting wet from the soles.
“How are they standing up?” he asked, inspecting one of the boots.
“I think I’ll have to stuff a little paper in the toes.”
“If they’re too long why not put in an insole?”
“An insole? Why, of course,” she said. “My slippers are over there by the bed.”
When he had brought the slippers and was putting them on she said, “You worry a lot about me, don’t you, Jim?”
“I suppose I do.”
“I know you do. I’m all right, Jim. I’m fine. I think you worry about me too much,” she added, going to the closet to get her dress. “I don’t want you to worry about me.” With a black dress over her arm, she returned to the bureau and knelt down, pulling out the lower drawer. “I’m going out for dinner with Henry Jackson,” she said apologetically. “Do you want to wait here till I get dressed?”
“Why, sure,” he said, his pleasure so plain she smiled to herself. She took stockings and underclothes from the drawer and laid them over her arm. She took a few steps toward the door and then, compelled, she turned and looked at him and frowned. His white cuffs shone below the sleeves of his expensive blue suit; the light gleamed on the toes of his well polished good shoes.
“Why did I turn and look at you?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I think I wanted you to stay.”
“Did you?”
“You look so reliable and secure. I feel – well, as if it might be nice to stay and relax with you.”
“Why not?” he asked, for he knew she had felt herself being taken in another direction than the one she had been following in dirty factories, narrow dark halls, and shabby rooms. She was making a pattern with her toe on the floor.
“Well?” he said.
“Well what?”
“Were you going to say something?”
“No, nothing. But when I picked up this dress—”
“Yes? Go on.”
“Why did I remember another dress I wore one summer in my second year at college? It was a lovely dress, pale Nile green. I had a rakish green straw hat, too. I wore the hat and the dress one day in the park with a student. I remember how we stood on a little bridge and I was looking at our reflections in the stream and I thought he was, too, and then I looked up and he was watching me, and I felt beautiful. Why did you make me remember such things?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s odd, isn’t it?” she asked solemnly. Again she made that pattern with her toe; then she opened the door and shuffled along the hall in her slippers.
His heart took a heavy, slow, painful beat, and he stared at that spot on the floor; he understood what she had wanted to say: she had a doubt about the life she was leading. It didn’t matter whether he himself or Malone had put that doubt in her mind. It was there, it was what he wanted, and he could afford to be happy. Her acceptance of his presence in the room when she came home meant she felt committed to him and knew he loved her. His surprise and his joy blinded him. And he did not realize she had kept her own opinion of the trumpet player.
When she returned in a simple black dress, her hair combed and twisted into a smooth knot on her neck, he nodded and smiled. “Why, you look beautiful,” he said. Now he knew she had always belonged in his own world. She looked like an exquisite little figurine done with a delicate grace and belonging in some china cabinet. “Those overalls, that bandanna handkerchief you’ve been wearing. Why, it’s all masquerade!” His laugh was so boyish she put her head back and laughed, too. She looked proud; it was the first time he had ever seen her show any pride in her beauty.
“Oh, by the way,” she said, going to the dresser and opening one of the drawers. “Have you a lighter?”
“Why, yes.”
“Here’s a couple of tins of lighter fluid from the factory. The foreman told me to take it any time I needed it.”
“Thanks. Thanks, Peggy,” he said.
It was an odd little gesture; she was offering him a gift as he had offered her the snow boots.
“You can walk me down to the corner anyway,” she said. “I was thinking you might like to meet Henry later in the evening. If you’re around the Chalet about eleven or later we’ll probably drop in there.”
“I’ll be there,” he said.