The Loved and the Lost Page 11

  So Peggy came along. She came along that first night when he had walked up the street with her and they had gone bowling and then sat talking in her room. That night he knew she wasn’t like any of these other white girls he had been talking about. “The way I felt that night was something for the book,” he said quietly. “There she was, sweet and gentle and offering something. It gave me a wallop – like a surprise. It was for me; she was offering it to me, and it was like being hopped up and yet peaceful, and I didn’t have to watch myself and be scared of that bad break coming. It was there for me. I could keep it and nurse it along and have it when I wanted it all for myself. Yes, just for me. Just for me,” he said softly. “Only I made a little mistake,” he said, not complaining, not sad, just trying to be truthful. “Soon I see her floating around the neighbourhood. I see her coming around the other joints, sitting around the little taverns where we sit sometimes, or I see her stopping on the street with some of my boys, or some kid, or some porter or some little old guy, and she’s giving them the treatment. Maybe I mean they’re getting the treatment – in the way she offers herself. So they’re taking it, or figuring when they’ll move in and take it. So I’d say to myself maybe she was just a friend like Rogers here is a friend. Maybe it’s the big church glow she’s giving, so I try to talk to her about the problems, the Negro in the White world, the big intellectual talk, the brotherhood talk, the routine, but she won’t listen. She don’t give the slightest damn for it. She won’t think about it. She makes me feel that thinking about it is bad. She don’t believe in it. It hits me then that she don’t believe in anything. But there she is – offering something.

  “The trouble starts somewhere in there,” he said, pushing his glass across the table and concentrating on his clenched hands. “I mean the resentment. You think she offers it just for you, and then you see it’s no more for you than the next guy. A bum is a bum in my race as well as yours. A girl ought to have some discrimination, not make it cheap, not for every bum; you can’t just throw that stuff around. Sure, you ought to be able to. That easy affection with that wonderful respect reminding you – well, like kids in the sun – the days when – well, before we all got wised up, eh? So you see her standing on the street giving some no-good lavatory attendant the same glow she gave you, and you want to push him in the mouth because you know he don’t rate it. So she sets you against the little guys and maybe the little guys against you. That’s bad. If we could all agree to respect her? Okay. But you know human nature as well as I do. Guys white or coloured are wise to each other and don’t have that much respect for each other. We don’t trust each other, do we? Well, it hits you she’s like she is because she’s full of love. So that old devil inside you gets to work. If she’s full of this quiet love you figure maybe somebody’s filling her. Maybe it’s Ziggy Wallace, maybe it’s Joe Thomas getting it from her good because they knew how to take it and you, like a chump, maybe the only chump, sat around respecting her. So you start watching, suspicious and watching, all the boys suspicious of each other and ready to pop, because if it’s going around each guy wants if all for himself.

  “Maybe she’s innocent, like you say. Well, if we were all kids— But she’s a woman. I can’t look at her like I did when I was a kid. Is she so innocent though? Tell me, please. Look deep in her eyes. Something hidden there, eh? But maybe not hidden for some guy you know. So you want to bust loose with her, but you can’t do it; you want to get drunk with her and sleep all day, but you can’t do it. I figure it like this. She’s against something. Yeah, she’s maybe against everything in the rule book; she’s throwing her stuff at the rule book, but maybe that’s not so good. Everything busts wide open when there’s no rule book.

  “And maybe it’s the women around here that know this best. Don’t get it wrong. She’s the same with the women of my race as she is with the men, only it works out different. You know what women are like. Six out of ten get tired and sour. It’s all poor and cheap living for them around here. The Negro women around here can’t get no dough anyway; and maybe they get fat too quick and, just like the white women, five out of ten don’t do so well with their husbands and get sour and not nice with them any more, and they’re tired. Then they see their husbands talking or sitting or chewing the fat or getting a skinful of little Peggy, the husband there all loosened up and soft and taking easy what’s bright and hard to get, and so a wife hates Peggy’s guts. They think they know. Being women, I mean, they know what’s going on, they think – and they hate her guts; what comes from Peggy doesn’t come from them no more.

  “Now don’t get it too wrong. I’m not saying it’s the same with all women. There’s right girls with right guys, right girls sure of their own stuff and bright and happy in the world, and they don’t mind Peggy at all. Peggy’s okay with them while there’s no sourness in them.

  “But you see the situation, eh? These other wives turning sour sit around resentful-like, wanting to beat Peggy’s brains out. It’s no good I tell you. It means trouble.

  “And the boys sit around watching each other and suspicious and sore; watching each other. Maybe each guy by himself would leave her alone, or believe it was beautiful having her with us just the way she is; but he don’t trust the next guy. The figure they know each other. Maybe Wilson watches me, and I watch Ziggy, and I know I had it in my hand and I didn’t keep it. Mind you, I ain’t saying I laid her. Only I’m sure I could have laid her. Let me make up my mind tonight, and I could find her and lay her. If it would do any good. I’d want to own it, have it for myself. I guess other boys feel the same way, and you get a little tired waiting for the nod from her, and that’s the trouble; and that’s where there could be big trouble, and that’s why I say it’s no good having her around here, being against something so much, and with the boys suspicious of each other, and some of those wives knowing how to use a beer bottle.”

  “These women,” McAlpine said uneasily. “Are any of them around tonight?”

  “Let’s see,” Wagstaffe said, glancing around. “Well, look over there.” He nodded in the direction of the bandstand at a table to the left. “That’s Lily. She happens to be Wilson’s wife. There he is sitting with her.”

  Lily Wilson, a heavy Negress in a copper-tinted satin dress, was sitting with the trumpet player and a young Negress with patent leather hair. Lily had a sullen, unhappy face. She was utterly motionless with a stillness that had silenced her husband. They were a man and wife being together only because they were man and wife and could no longer find the words to pretend they were close together and so were afraid of the stillness between them.

  “You could go over to her, Mr. McAlpine,” Wagstaffe drawled, “and tell her Miss Peggy is a real friend of our race. I wouldn’t bother myself, because – well, like the others, she thinks I’ve had a skinful of sleeping with Peggy myself, and she’d tell you she knows her husband better than you do, and he wants his skinful, too. Let’s see what other boys are with their wives,” he said, looking around again.

  “Never mind,” McAlpine said.

  “I’ve been levelling with you, Mr. McAlpine, about the way I see Peggy now, understand?”

  McAlpine, who had slumped in his chair, didn’t answer; his eyes were melancholy. In the chatter of a hundred voices his silence was painful.

  “I’m only trying to picture the situation,” Wagstaffe apologized. “You see, there’s another angle, Mr. McAlpine. By this time all the customers, the regulars, know Peggy. She sits there, as I say, dainty and alone in her little white blouse, making the boys come tumbling at her, and sort of queening it over the customers, see? I think by this time some of them hate her guts, too. The womenfolk figure she’s moving in on them, operating. I like this town, Mr. McAlpine, and this spot here is a good one, not a hell of a lot of money in it, mind you, but the band’s a cooperative set-up and it’s a living, and so I wouldn’t want any trouble.”

  “No trouble. No,” McAlpine said. Every word had hurt and humiliated him, and h
e looked around the café. “The Johnson family,” he said half to himself with a sardonic smile. “The great big happy Johnson family.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. A private joke,” he said, smiling mechanically. “I get the point,” he went on. “I know why you’re talking to me. I’d like to oblige you, but it’s too difficult.”

  “Not if you’re her friend, Mr. McAlpine.”

  “But if I tell her to keep away from here, well, you know what will happen, Mr. Wagstaffe. Her chin will come out and she’ll say I’m prejudiced. She’ll say I’m cheapening your good feeling and hers, too. What shall I say to that, Mr. Wagstaffe?”

  “Now don’t get me wrong, friend,” Wagstaffe protested.

  “Then why not tell her yourself to keep away?”

  “Because I can’t bear to insult her,” the band leader admitted reluctantly. “It would hurt me inside to insult a white friend when I’ve got nothing on her.”

  “Isn’t it wonderful!” McAlpine said with a bitter laugh that startled Wagstaffe. “A girl who can’t help being the same with everybody. It’s fantastic, isn’t it, Mr. Wagstaffe?” he asked softly. “People who think one way have an itch to spoil her because she stands for something else. And what’s really comical is that we aren’t hating people around here for being as vicious as they are, we’re resenting her for being what she is. It is comical, isn’t it, Mr. Wagstaffe?”

  “So it is. So it is,” the band leader admitted uneasily. “But look, if you speak to her, give me a little break, will you, Mr. McAlpine? Don’t say I said anything. Believe me, I’m not stupid. You and she can make me feel I’m prejudiced. Good God, it leaves me trying to keep my race segregated. That’s why I haven’t got the guts to insult her. I’d end up hating myself. And believe me there’s enough hate as it is jumping around this joint.” Leaning back, he smiled. “Well, it’s time to play again. Anything you boys would like to hear?”

  “Play ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’,” Rogers said with a neat touch of irony.

  “Okay. ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’ it is,” the band leader said as he shook hands warmly with McAlpine. “Understand, I don’t like talking that way about a friend,” he said. And he left them and circled the dance floor to the bandstand.

  “Well, there you have it, McAlpine,” Rogers said.

  “Other white girls come down here,” McAlpine protested. “I’ve seen them here alone.”

  “Sure. Tramps. Obvious tramps.”

  “Well—”

  “But Peggy isn’t an obvious tramp, McAlpine.”

  “There’s the root of the matter,” McAlpine said. “Why is everybody so damned eager to prove she’s a tramp? So everybody can feel more comfortable and forget their own stinking trampishness? And aren’t you overlooking something? Don’t you notice that Wagstaffe admits he didn’t sleep with her? He thinks he could do it. Well, I know what he means. He thinks she wouldn’t resist, and yet he had to leave her as she was. He’s black and I’m white, but we were brothers in wanting to let her stay as she is. But we all suspect each other. And Wagstaffe is suspecting the trumpet player.”

  “I don’t know,” Rogers answered. “I knew one little white girl around here who was a first-class tramp with these boys and nobody held it against her. But they know Peggy has no right to be a tramp. Say, listen to that band tonight. Good old Elton. I’ve never heard them as good.”

  His face brightened with delight, he forgot all about Peggy Sanderson and raised his heels off the floor and swayed his knees, keeping time to the music. But McAlpine turned and sought for one face among all the black and white faces in that smoke-filled room that would express kindliness and generosity and concern for a girl like Peggy. But by this time many of the patrons were drunk and noisy. The women, black and white, were loosened up and excited, and the men watched and made their little plans.

  All these faces blurred into the sullen dark face of the trumpet player’s wife. McAlpine forgot his own sensible unprejudiced attitude toward all coloured people and his rational good will; he forgot that they were working people out for an evening and no more malevolent than any white group in the other cheap cafés in other sections of the town. He dreaded what might happen to Peggy if ever there was any trouble over her. His heart began to pound, and when he reached for his glass his hand trembled. He avoided Rogers’ eyes. He was afraid of having him discover his inexplicable unhappiness.

  He became a prey to a mysterious sense of urgency. He could see all these people who disliked her circling around her in a primitive dance, hemming her in, making it impossible for her to draw back while they waited to destroy her. But he could prevent it, he thought with a strange exaltation. He was called upon to be always at Peggy’s side, persuading her, then taking her by the hand and leading her out of these places where she did not belong and into the places where she would glow with a singleness of love which would bring her happiness and not destruction; and in the places where he would lead her they would share more of the innocent lazy happiness he had caught a glimpse of the day he had walked with her through the snow to see the old church.

  “Well, that’s about all, Jim. Have you had enough?” Rogers asked. “I’m kind of sleepy myself.”

  “So am I. Let’s go,” McAlpine said, though he was not sleepy at all.

  Outside, the wind came driving down through the underpass in a monstrous funnelled blast; as they huddled together in the doorway the hard snow bit into their necks and faces. There were no gaily swooping snow ploughs down there around dimly lighted St. Antoine. A taxi came along, and Rogers offered to drop McAlpine off at the Ritz. Rogers lay back in the taxi. With a yawn he invited McAlpine to come up to his place and have dinner some night. Soon they were at the corner of Sherbrooke and the entrance to the Ritz, where the snow swirled in gusts against the closed storm doors. When McAlpine was getting out of the taxi, Rogers said, “Oh, by the way, I intended to tell you, McAlpine. That trumpet player, Wilson, isn’t exactly an Uncle Tom, you know.”

  “No? What do you mean?” McAlpine asked, one foot still on the running board.

  “They tell me when he gets high he’s a violent guy. Dangerous with a knife. Hanging around here because he can’t go back to Memphis. Cut up someone down there.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. And if Peggy keeps on refusing to concentrate on him—”

  Too shocked to speak, McAlpine grabbed at the rim of his Homburg as the wind whipped at it, and the snow blowing in the open taxi door began to powder Roger’s knee.

  “But, for that matter, that very dear friend of hers she likes to brag about is no Uncle Tom either – I mean the golden-voiced Joe Thomas.”

  “Joe Thomas?”

  “Oh, she’d have to take you by the hand to meet him. Her very special stuff. Say,” Rogers said with a laugh, “I’m freezing to death. So long.”

  “So long,” McAlpine said, and he entered the hotel.

  In the lobby, the charwoman was swabbing a spot on the floor near the elevator, while the night clerk, with his elbows on the desk, his eyes full of sleep, watched her. McAlpine had to tap on the desk and point to his box, which contained a letter. The clerk gave him his key and the letter. He stood there tapping the letter against the palm of his left hand, thinking: Spending her time alone with violent guys who use knives – counting on them being gentle and not touching her. And then the charwoman looked up. Their eyes met. She was a middle-aged woman with stringy colourless hair. Her red spongy hands were like handles on her astonishingly white flabby arms. Her unprotesting eyes showed a flicker of interest that she tried to hide with an abashed sinking of her head in her wisdom of ten years of patient charring. Her drooping head distressed McAlpine. “Good evening,” he said, startling her; she moistened her lips. But the elevator door opened. The squat elevator man in his blue uniform offered no greeting; he had hard, disapproving eyes. At the fourth floor, after walking ten paces, McAlpine turned, and there was the elevator man, his arms folded, watching him go
along the corridor. Not everybody around here approves of you, Mr. McAlpine, his eyes said. Where are you coming from at this hour?

  In his own room McAlpine took off his overcoat and hat, but forgot to take off his galoshes. Big wet marks appeared on the red carpet. He looked at the letter he still held in his hand: it was from his father. He opened it.

  His father, who had not approved of his leaving the university, was worried about not having heard from him and wanted some assurance that the job on The Sun was materializing. Closing his eyes, McAlpine sighed; he could see himself talking to his father and explaining what he had been doing in Montreal. “Jim, Jim, is this you?” his father would ask anxiously. “A scholar, a man of training…”

  “It’s just that Rogers tells me about those people at the last minute, after holding it back,” he muttered, as if explaining something to this father. Then he saw the blotches made by his wet galoshes. Kicking them off, he began to undress. Stripped to his undershirt he went into the bathroom and began to wash his hands and face, scrubbing with the face cloth to wipe away the touch of a sordid life around that café. But gradually his motions lost their vigour. It’s not her fault Wagstaffe thinks he could sleep with her, he thought. It’s only his own vanity. And as for those other characters – their whole attention might be on her for the one reason, but it doesn’t mean her attention is on them for the same reason. It’s the way they live. They’re men. We all have a low opinion of each other. And as for the women – what can you do about women who are frustrated and envious and embittered? If they weren’t concentrating on Peggy they’d be concentrating on somebody else. Anyway, all this is Peggy as Rogers and Wagstaffe see her, forgetting she could be generous enough to think they’re all her good friends and will go on respecting her gentleness and her good will. But just how do I see her?

  If some of her friends were thugs who used knives, she was intelligent enough to have found out about them. And it hadn’t destroyed their appeal. No, it might even add to it, which would mean, of course, that she had a taste for violence. His perceptions quickening, he realized he had at last put into words the emotion that had bothered him the day in the department store when he had watched her staring at the carving of the crouching leopard. She had been held in the spell of all the fierce jungle wildness the cat suggested. She had waited, rapt and still, for the beast to spring at her and devour her. He must have suspected then that her gentle innocence was attracted perversely to violence, like a temperament seeking its opposite. In fact there was some proof now that this was so.