McAlpine slept until ten and had to send a boy down to the St. Antoine for his coat and hat. When the boy returned a half-hour later McAlpine made a joke about the necessity of avoiding places that had to be deserted too quickly. He hurried out, and in the good strong sunlight on Sherbrooke he thought, It’ll be all right. It was just that for a few moments I lost faith in her. She may not have noticed it. I won’t even tell her. It got away from me. But only for a little while.
Coming down Crescent, he glanced at his watch. It was a few minutes after eleven, just the right time to go down to the La Salle and have an early lunch and make their plans. When he was still some distance from Mrs. Agnew’s house, he saw the small crowd gathered around the entrance; he thought there might have been a fire, but he couldn’t see any smoke or any firemen; then he saw a policeman circling around the fringe of the crowd and he started to run.
Everyone in the crowd was watching the basement door, where a policeman blocked the way. No one paid any attention to McAlpine as he pushed his way through. “Excuse me, excuse me, I’m going in there,” he said. “What happened?” he asked a solemn middle-aged man who was whispering to a woman, a neighbour, who had her coat draped on her shoulders. They gave him the blank, slightly hostile look fascinated spectators give a newcomer who wants to break into a discussion. It was provoking. He was still filled with that confidence he had felt coming out into the sunlight.
“What happened?” he insisted, looking around impatiently. The door had opened and a thin-faced detective with a little moustache and fur-collared coat came out, whispered to the policeman, then shrugged and lit a cigarette and made his way through the crowd. “What happened?” McAlpine asked as the detective passed him. The man ignored him. A tall delivery boy with a bag slung over his shoulders, nodding at the detective, whispered with a knowing, satisfied, sophisticated air to a smaller delivery boy, “That was Bouchard. I’ve seen him around,” he added.
“Bouchard – I don’t know any Bouchard,” said the smaller delivery boy.
“You dope! The one who made the gambling raids.”
“Oh, the one who lost his job.”
“No, the one who got kicked around.”
“Son,” McAlpine said to the older boy, who wouldn’t turn while he could watch Bouchard getting into an automobile. Little snatches of conversation came to McAlpine. “A brute. An incredible brute,” a woman’s voice said. “It’s actually warm today. I hardly need this coat.” “These things go on,” a man said. “After all, it didn’t happen on the street.” “You don’t know who you’re with these days.” “It’s getting worse. It hardly ever used to happen.” McAlpine grabbed the tall delivery boy by the arm. “What happened, son?” he asked.
“The girl in there,” the boy said impatiently. “She was killed.”
“Yeah, raped and killed,” whispered the smaller boy. “And left naked, they say. Gee whiz! A girl named—Was it Salmon-son?”
“Naw, more like Sanderman.”
“Yeah, worked in a factory.”
Raising their awed faces, the boys blinked their eyes in the sunlight. A stout woman in a green coat who had listened to the boys turned to McAlpine, expecting more information from him. He lurched against her. He was trembling; there was no strength in his arms or legs. He believed he was walking out of the crowd, but he was only turning around slowly with no words, no thoughts, just the physical tremor he could not control, which made them all stare at him. “Excuse me,” he said, putting out his hand and shoving the delivery boy gently out of his way. He began to go slowly down the street.
As he approached the corner everything he saw began to hurt him: the corner store, the passing streetcar, the melting snow, the sound of the traffic, the width of St. Catherine Street; it was a pain like the physical wrenching away of a part of his body. “Oh, my God!” he groaned. “Oh, Peggy – oh, my God, no!” All that was the matter, he thought, was that he had been a little late; she had to be still there to talk to.
And that corner – there was something wrong with that corner. In a nervous tremor he looked around and it came to him, the sudden recollection of having stood up the street a piece looking down at this corner in the snow, watching that one furtive figure vanishing among the snow-covered, ghostly figures who had drifted like evil spirits roaming the streets; and Peggy, herself, had come out and faded into that cold pallid world behind the curtain of snow. Filled with a fantastic primitive terror, he whispered crazily, “They got her. They got her.” And he trembled all over.
He went away from the corner, going on mechanically to the La Salle Hotel, where he had planned to go for lunch with Peggy, and he ordered a drink, spilling a little of it because his hand trembled, then ordering another one, whispering, “If I had only stayed with her all night, to the end of the night.”
In a little while he realized that he had been intending to sit in this place at this hour with her but she would never sit there again; and he got up, tossed a bill on the table, and fled. He went across the street to the basement bar on the corner. There the young sandy-haired bartender couldn’t help watching him. Every time he took a drink he leaned back on the stool, his head tilting back, his chin coming up, his eyes always closed. “Do you want another one?” the worried bartender asked. McAlpine opened his eyes, and they were so lonely and desolate that the bartender stared at him. Why does he stare at me? McAlpine thought. He was afraid the bartender was going to ask, “Why didn’t you stay with her last night?”
In the darkness of his mind he reached out after her; he sought her in the darkness with a mumbled prayer. My God, no, I won’t take it! he thought. He tried to send his spirit winging after her across the world of the dead so he could take her by the hand, confront her guardian angel and shout, “Where were you last night? To let this happen! – I left her with love. You know I did, out of respect, out of a feeling for what was good. To let what was good be the cause of her death… Where were you? Where were you!”
While he could keep on protesting, he could hide from his loneliness. But the sandy-haired bartender, who had been watching his head go back a little farther each time he drank, said, “Anything the matter, pal?”
“What?”
“Aren’t you feeling well?”
“Nothing’s the matter with me,” McAlpine said. He didn’t like the bartender’s accusing glance, and he paid for his drink and left, but the glance of the bartender followed him into the street. He wandered around, but he was always on a street or corner where he had been with Peggy; it became unbearably painful, and he wanted to run from those streets. He went back to the Ritz, and for a long time he sat by the window in a stupor. When the telephone rang he went to it; someone spoke to him, but he put it down, not hearing anything. Later the phone rang again. It was Foley complaining, “What’s the matter with you, Jim? You hung up on me. Take it easy. I’ve seen the papers. It’s splashed all over the front page. Now listen to me…” It was important, he said, that McAlpine shouldn’t get mixed up in Peggy’s story and get his name in the papers while the police were hunting for the killer; he shouldn’t be around for people to question him; he should get out of the hotel. He made him promise to check out and go to his own apartment on University Avenue and wait there for him. The janitor would let him in, he said.
McAlpine packed his bag, his movements all detached and mechanical. Forgetting to phone the porter’s desk he carried the bag down to the lobby. The charming desk clerk looked up in surprise. “Leaving us, Mr. McAlpine?”
“A message from home,” McAlpine said, and he waited for the cashier to make out his bill.
“Not bad news, I hope.”
“Yeah,” McAlpine said vaguely.
“We are always pleased to have you here, Mr. McAlpine,” the clerk said, and he put out his hand. McAlpine had to shake hands, and the clerk held his hand too long. Why was he trying to keep him? A taxi was at the entrance.
In ten minutes he was in Foley’s apartment, where he lay down on the bed. Closing his eyes, he wanted to weep, but the tears wouldn’t come. Underneath the steady throbbing of his heart was a great emptiness, and he whispered, “Oh, my God, Peggy! Oh, my darling, where are you?” and he knew he could not stay there. Getting up, he went out and began to walk the streets. He walked in the bright, hard sunlight along St. Catherine. It was only two o’clock and the girls flowed past with their coats open, their bright scarves fluttering, enjoying the liberating warmth of the noonday sun, and he looked at each one, feeling lonely. The sidewalks were wet and steaming. At Peel and St. Catherine he stopped uneasily, for in the face of each passing young girl, in each fresh face, he saw Peggy’s; all the young girls drifted by in a long noonday procession, and he had to wheel away, shaken, feeling they were all staring at him with the same mournful reproach.