If he hadn’t been upset by the humiliated fat boy and his suspicion that Mr. Carver was using Horton to conceal his own doubt about him, he wouldn’t have been on the corner; but there he was, the snow whitening his shoulders and forming a halo on his Homburg. A recollection of Foley and himself standing on that same corner, quietly at peace after the half hour with the girl, came stealing into his mind. It was the way he should have been feeling now after lunching with Carver, he thought. All of a sudden he understood why he hadn’t mentioned the girl to Catherine; he hadn’t understood the emotion she had aroused in him and Foley, and he wouldn’t have been able to explain it to Catherine. Yet what was the nature of the girl’s repose, and how had she been able to communicate it? If it was simply her childlike suggestion of innocence there was nothing much to it – innocence would vanish quickly; but if it were something in her nature like an act of peace anyone who had been touched by it would have a vast curiosity to learn something about her life.
The power of his curiosity surprised him. Had he really found her so attractive? But he brushed the question aside, telling himself she presented only an amusing problem, an idle intellectual diversion.
A big red-faced grinning cop in white gloves and white shoulder straps directed the traffic with charming gallantry. A pretty girl was snowbound at the curb. The cop, waving to her, blew his whistle, stopped streetcars and taxis, suspended the whole flow of winter traffic, and personally conducted her across the road.
Then Peggy Sanderson came out of the restaurant. She had on the same light belted coat and was still hatless. Waiting until she had gone a little way along the street, he crossed the road and caught up to her.
“Where did you come from, Mr. McAlpine?”
“St. James Street. I’m going to work for Carver, on The Sun.”
“Really? I thought you were a professor.”
“Oh, I’ll still be doing the same kind of work. Am I going your way?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m only amusing myself. All by myself. What are you doing?”
“Nothing at all. I’m free.”
“I’m walking along a few blocks. There’s a leopard I want to see.”
“A leopard? In a zoo?”
“No, in a department store over by Phillips Square. It’s a carving. Do you want to see it?”
“Well,” he said, hesitating and glancing down at her rubbers. “Hadn’t we better take a taxi? You’ll get your feet wet, Peggy.”
“It’s lovely out. I like it like this,” she said. With a slow smile she regarded him steadily. “Are you sure you want to come?”
“Yes, yes. Of course, I do,” he insisted, a little catch in his voice. Why the simple grave question and his own answer became so mysteriously impressive, he did not know.
“All right,” she said. “Come on.”
She took his hand and walked him along, unaware that he felt self-conscious. An elderly man who was passing looked back at them and smiled. But McAlpine didn’t drop her hand, for almost magically that loneliness which had been mixed up with his resentment of Carver left him.
In Montreal a great many of the English were acquainted and someone he knew might see them walking hand in hand; but he didn’t care. He began a conversation about their university, intending to find out all about her. It became important.
“I never tire of the snow,” she said. “When I’m old I may hate the winters and want to go south, but now it’s still like it was when I was a kid. Don’t you remember how gleeful you were at the first snowfall?”
“No, it was ice we wanted. Ice to skate on. We didn’t care about the snow.”
“I didn’t care about ice. I still don’t,” she said. “But I used to love getting up in the morning and looking at the first blanket of snow on the fields. It was a completion of something, a beginning of a great winter stillness.”
“There’s usually lots of snow in Montreal.”
“I like Montreal,” she said. “I think I’ve been happier here than I’ve ever been. It’s an old city and yet it’s new; and it’s a seaport, and the different races get used to each other. All the church bells wake me up too early in the morning, but I’m at home here.”
“You’re lucky, Peggy. Some people are never at home.”
“I’m lucky knowing when I am,” she said.
They went into the department store and up to the fourth floor, where there was a wood carving of a leopard about three feet long in a glass case, crouching, ready to spring.
She studied the leopard, and he watched her grave face and steady eyes and wondered why it had such importance for her. The light overhead shone on her wet fair hair, and it was like standing with a child whom he had brought to the toy department.
“It looks unbelievably fierce and powerful, doesn’t it?” she asked.
“It’s really very good,” he agreed. “Quite a suggestion of power, of lurking violence. How did you know it was here, Peggy?”
“Oh, I heard about it. Does it make you feel uncertain and watchful, too?” she asked in a whisper. “It’s fascinating, isn’t it?”
“In a way, yes.” He was surprised by her rapt attention.
“It all depends on what it suggests,” she said. But she did not turn; maybe she could not turn from her contemplation of the leopard’s jungle violence; she was rapt and still, waiting for the beast to spring at her, and his hand went to her arm to pull her away just in time. She turned. “Well, if you’ve had enough, there’s something else I intended to look at this afternoon.”
“Another carving?”
“No, an old church with very good lines. Do you want to come? It’s only about twenty minutes away.”
“Of course I’ll come,” he said, indulging her.
Outside, a bluish light was on the snow, the glint of winter twilight. He didn’t know where he was going and he didn’t care. It was just an idle, gentle interlude, and his vast tranquillity amused him. They were crossing Phillips Square, where lights were on in all the office windows and the bluish winter light deepened and the snow slanted across the statue of King Edward VII. A flat little snow crown reposed on the king’s head.
From then on McAlpine didn’t notice where he was going; he went down two blocks and turned east, but he got mixed up because he was making lazy bantering conversation, sauntering along.
“Here it is,” she said, and he was looking at a little old church, half Gothic and half Romanesque, but light and simple in balance. “Isn’t it beautiful? I’ve known it was here, but I never took the time to come and look at it.”
“What an odd little church!” he said.
The church hung there in the snow; it could sail away lightly like a ship in the snow. Then he turned and looked at Peggy’s lifted face, on which the snowflakes glistened and melted, making her blink her eyes. He looked again at the church and then at her face. Her shoulders were white, his own arms were white, and the slanting snow whirled around them. Feeling wonderfully lighthearted he started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“I don’t know. A leopard and a church. On the one day.”
“That I should want to see both?”
“That’s it.”
“A leopard and a church. Don’t they go together?”
“From now on they do for me,” he said.
On the way back, he realized he hadn’t satisfied his curiosity about her at all. Nor had he mentioned the Negro writers. He asked now, instead, about other books she had read. Her comments when she offered them were intelligent enough, but her irritating serenity made him feel he wasn’t really interesting her. People had always told him he talked beautifully. Everybody said so.
“You’re neither arguing with me nor agreeing with me,” he said with a sigh.
“I’m listening to you, Jim.”
“Not really.”
“Yes, I like listening to you and, whether you realize it or not, you’re walking me home. I live over on Crescent.”
They had passed Peel and Stanley and were now at Drummond, and in the window of the corner grocery store were pyramids of Malaga grapes. “Just a minute,” he said. Going into the store, he bought two pounds of the grapes and came out smiling. “They don’t go with the snow,” he admitted, “but when you get home you can eat them and look out your window.”
She lived a little way up Crescent Street in a three-storied stone house in a long row on the slope up to Sherbrooke. The main door at the top of a long flight of steps looked like a centre window with an overhanging balcony, and the other entrance on the street level opened into the ground floor. Some of these old places had had the stone scraped clean. Many doctors had their metal plates at the main doors. Peggy lived in one of the shabbier buildings, and she led him to the basement under the main steps.
A plump woman of fifty in a green coat and a shapeless green hat had also turned in and was climbing the stairs to the main entrance. Snow that she kicked off the steps on her way up fell on McAlpine’s hat. He shook it off and looked up. “Hello, Miss Sanderson,” the woman called, leaning over the stoop. “In early, I see.” She had a soft red face with lonely eyes.
“Hello, Mrs. Agnew,” Peggy called through the steps.
Mrs. Agnew leaned over the rail, peering at McAlpine, the door light catching one side of her aging face. She was half Scotch, half French. Her husband, who had been dead for ten years, had left her the house, in which all the apartments were rented. She gave them a wide, friendly, understanding grin. “The snow gets in my eyes,” she said, brushing her hand across her face. “Having company, eh? Lots of company, eh, Miss Sanderson? Well, it’s a good thing. Lots and lots of company is always a good thing.”
“Oh, you’re not so lonely yourself, Mrs. Agnew,” Peggy said, pulling McAlpine back into the shelter as some more snow fell from the banister. Looking up, they could see only the toes of her galoshes sticking out over the edge of the step.
“Not at my age,” Mrs. Agnew said. “And it’s a very sad thing, Miss Sanderson – I mean for me. I’m at the state where I get all wistful if a man just smiles at me. And why not? It may be the last time,” she added with a deep chuckle. “Some day you’ll understand, Miss Sanderson. Not now, with all your company, but some day – yes.” And with another scrape of her foot that sent more snow tumbling down on McAlpine, she went in.
They went along a badly lighted corridor to a door at the end. “Here’s where I live, and I like it, sir,” she said, with a little bow. “Enter.”
It was a small plain room with a window looking out on a back fence. A ridge of snow was on the fence. The room, like a monastic cell, had only a few sticks of furniture, an iron bed, a little shelf with an oil cloth curtain on which she kept some dishes, a small electric heater for light cooking, two ladder-backed chairs, and a worn thin rug on a painted floor. On the bare walls were yellow moisture stains. The whole room was bare, but not with a monastic spotless bareness; it was hardly tidy. As she picked up a magazine from the bed and put it with some books on a little side table, she looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “How do you like it?” she asked, her mouth twitching.
“It’s like a jail cell,” he said. He looked so shocked that she couldn’t help smiling broadly. Knowing that she must earn a decent salary, he resented the room; she didn’t belong there.
“Take off your coat if you want to,” she said. When she had removed her own coat and rubbers she lay down on the bed, crossed her legs at the ankles, watched him with amusement as he fumbled with his scarf, and waited for him to ask himself, What in the world am I doing in this hole in the wall?
Like a doctor attending a patient, he sat down by the bed, and then he felt so awkward he got up and began to walk round the room.
“Why don’t you offer me some grapes?”
“Why, of course.”
“There’s a plate there on the shelf.”
“Nice-looking grapes,” he said, putting them on the plate and passing them to her.
“All right now. Why are you here?” she asked. “What’s your interest in me?”
“I don’t know,” he said simply.
“Please come and sit down. You bother me walking around so restlessly.”
“All right.” He sat down on the bed beside her. “And why have you let me come?”
“I like you,” she said. “I think you’re essentially kind-hearted and generous. Some people wouldn’t take the time to find it out.”
“And when did you find out?”
“That I liked you?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, something you said last night.”
“That I said? When?”
“Talking about the digest I had in my pocket.”
“What did I say?”
“It was what you didn’t say.”
“All right. What didn’t I say?”
“You didn’t say, ‘nigger.’ You said ‘Negro.’”