With each big slow step he thought, All I want is that things be left just the way they are. It’s very little to ask. I have a right to ask that much. His mind was in turmoil.
As he turned up Crescent Street he thought of his boyhood and a white horse he had loved. At the Crescent Street house he began to climb the flight of stairs to the main door, then remembered that Henry Jackson had told him to enter by the basement door, and he went along the hall to Peggy’s room and knocked.
McAlpine in his shirt sleeves opened the door. He had been sitting at the bureau making some notes in a big flat notebook.
“Oh!” he said, looking startled.
“Mr. McAlpine!”
“Why, hello, Wolgast.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I was just going to ask you the same thing, Wolgast.”
“I wanted to see this Peggy. I didn’t know that…”
“I’ve been waiting here for her myself,” McAlpine said, blushing. “As a matter of fact I was just going,” he added quickly. “I don’t think she’s going to show up.”
“Oh, she’ll show up,” Wolgast said with a knowing smile as he watched McAlpine tuck his books in his briefcase, and tried to appraise his importance in Peggy’s life. “I should have seen you were thick with her. It’s a good thing though, a very good thing.” And he sounded relieved. “Walking down my way, Mr. McAlpine?” he asked mildly.
“Why, sure. Let’s go. Wait. I’ll put out the light.”
Again Wolgast smiled faintly, recognizing in the gesture the act of a man who had been in the room many times.
On the street it became embarrassing, for McAlpine wanted to ask why Wolgast was looking for Peggy and Wolgast himself wanted to talk about her; but as soon as they fell in step they realized that they did not know each other. They had never met outside Wolgast’s bar, and now they were two strangers from different cities trying to capture a hearty intimate relationship they were supposed to enjoy.
A fierce wind blew down from the mountain and the thin snow on the wind stung their ears. The temperature was dropping rapidly.
“Looks like the coldest night we’ve had so far,” Wolgast said. “If I had whiskers I could knock them off like icicles. I wouldn’t need to shave.”
“They say it’s ten below right now.”
“Twelve below. Which way are you walking? Why don’t we have a cup of coffee somewhere?”
“I don’t mind,” McAlpine said. “I’m walking over to Peel.” But he wondered why he didn’t ask Wolgast to walk up to the Ritz with him; it was where he was going, and he tried to assure himself it was because Wolgast would not feel comfortable in the Ritz; for that reason he was walking all the way over to Peel.
“Fine.” Wolgast said. “Why don’t you turn up your collar?”
“It’s a good idea. Your chin down and your hat down and your collar up. That’s right.”
“Funny things pop into a guy’s head when he’s going along with his head tucked down like this and his eyes half closed against the wind. Ever notice, Mr. McAlpine?”
“Yes. Yes, I have.”
“On the way up here I got thinking of a big white horse I used to ride when I was a kid. Cockeyed, eh?”
“You on a horse! I imagined you were always a city man.”
“I was a kid once – just like you,” Wolgast said mildly. “How about this place?” he said after they had walked along silently for a couple of blocks and were at the soda fountain near the corner of Peel.
“What’s on your mind, Wolgast?” McAlpine asked when they were sitting at the counter.
“It’s a little hard to explain, Mr. McAlpine. You’ve got more education than I have. But you and Foley aren’t like some educated drips I know. I’d do anything for Foley. And I think you’d get my point of view, too. You see, I like Montreal very much, Mr. McAlpine.”
“It’s a fine city.”
“A big town, a good town. Lots of different kinds of people. A man has a chance to make a buck for himself and mind his own business. Yeah,” he went on profoundly, “I like it better than Brooklyn or New York or Chicago. Got more real character than those towns. And, besides, it’s now my home.”
He was taking his time, undisturbed by McAlpine’s puzzled expression. Wolgast had always been proud of the way he could keep his voice down and take his time. They looked out at the hard snow streaming across the window, and both thought about Montreal. For Wolgast it was the city where his life could be easy and enlarge a little more every day in an atmosphere of pleasant tolerance. But for McAlpine it was a place that had always beguiled him; a rock of riches with poverty sprawling around the rock, and now a place that had inexplicably brought turmoil to his heart. They were both moved by their own thoughts, and Wolgast stirred his coffee methodically.
“A little while ago I said I was a kid once just like you. Remember?”
“Sure. Why?”
“That was wrong. I wasn’t a kid like you were.”
“Well,” McAlpine began, grinning, “I never owned a big white horse.”
“Well, neither did I,” Wolgast whispered. “It was a funny thing, though, remembering that white horse. Maybe it explains the way I feel now. How would you like if I told you about it?” And when McAlpine, baffled and curious, nodded, he said that he had been born in Poland in a village on a wide flat stretch of land near the Russian border, a forlorn little village of about a hundred homes where everything and everybody belonged to the landowner, who had a fine big house about a mile away. The village houses were windswept and bare. They had old barns and lean-tos, and in the winter the village was bleak and lonely. It was hard to be a Jew in that village. But there were good times in the summer, especially when soldiers were on army manoeuvres. They spent money and the girls danced and got pregnant, and young husbands were often ashamed of their wives; but the kids all had fun with the soldiers.
His father lived in an old shack that had one big room, the kitchen where they lived, and two little rooms where the children slept. In the winter they lived their life in the kitchen around the big stove. It was a hard life. His father, a short powerful man, strong as a giant, was stern and fierce with his wife and children. His mother was a meek woman who never dreamed of having a better life than she had in the village. It was the kind of life her people had known for five hundred years. They were little better than serfs. Everything they got out of life, the money, the suffering, the poverty and a few hopes, they got from the landlord and the big house where his father worked around the stables. He had always been afraid of his father, who scowled and scolded and grumbled and slapped him; yet somewhere, maybe around the big house, the father had learned to read; his son had to learn, too, and sometimes at night he would bring home a discarded book from the big house and toss it at his son and make him read it before he went to sleep. It didn’t matter what the book was about. He read by candlelight, his eyes always ached in the flickering light. He had to stop reading because they said he was losing his sight.
In the summer he worked with his father around the landlord’s house and in the fields, working from dawn to dark, helping around the stables, feeling happier when working alone because his father scolded him and bossed him. He liked the stables, he liked the warm smell of the horses in the winter and hitching the horses to the sleighs for the long journey along the lonely roads. Sometimes a horse and sleigh would get snowed in on one of those roads. People from the village had been frozen to death travelling from one village to another in a snow-storm.
A few miles away from the landowner’s village was a town where his father had to go once a week to haul home supplies for the landlord. On this journey he always accompanied his father. It was his job to hitch up the same white horse to the wagon. It was a fine proud white horse, not a show horse, and not a heavy work horse, just a beautiful white horse for pulling a boy on a wagon. The journeys to town became the happiest part of his life. After they had gone a piece along the winding dirt road wi
th the deep ruts twisting into the sunlight his father would solemnly hand over the reins while he lit his pipe, and then forget to take them back; and he would doze in the sunlight, breathing heavily with his cap pulled down over his eyes. The white horse knew who had taken the reins; it would swish its tail a little and trot along briskly all the way to town. He wouldn’t wake up his father until he had driven down the main street because he wanted everybody on the street to see him on the driver’s seat with the reins in his hands.
They would spend three or four hours in town going from store to store, and those hours were an exciting part of the ride, for his father was more like a human being, chatting with the shopkeepers and the street loafers. Not that he paid much attention to his son, but he would laugh and make jokes with men in the stores as if he owned those few hours in his life. Nor did he look so much like a big-shouldered, slow-moving, bearded serf. At nightfall, when they drove back to the big house, he let his son look after the horse, feeding it and bedding it down. In the poverty-stricken life of a small boy, that white horse was a magic horse, able to carry him to places that were gay and free. It was like nothing else he had ever known. It got so that he was the only one who ever looked after the white horse. He came to believe it belonged to him.
One day they drove into town to the livery stable where his father met a merchant from another town, and this well dressed merchant inspected the horse and the wagon. The merchant and his father had an important conversation; he didn’t listen to it. Then his father took him by the arm and walked him out of the livery stable and told him they were walking the five miles home; the horse and wagon had been sold.
Not until they were out of town and going along the road together did he understand that he would not see the white horse again. He began to cry and yell that it was his horse. He turned and started to run back to town. His father had to chase him and catch him. The landlord had ordered him to sell the horse, he said gruffly. They started back along the road again. It was the hot part of the afternoon and his father, holding him by the arm, walked fast. There were no trees along the road, and in the sunlight big beads of perspiration began to roll down his father’s face. He noticed the red sweating face even while he trotted along trying to keep up, bawling at the top of his voice, stumbling in the ruts and pleading with his father to go back and get their horse and not let anybody take it from them. While he cried and pleaded his father never answered, just kept plodding along looking straight ahead. So he dropped on the road, howling and refusing to get up; then his father wheeled around, jerked him up, and began to pound him. After he had hit him the first time he couldn’t stop. He was like a crazy man. Grabbing a stick from the roadside he beat him furiously, his eyes blazing, the hatred in his eyes terrifying, and the little stick broke, and then he looked at the stick, bewildered, and tossed it away. Without saying a word he went on down the road alone.
He always remembered the figure of his father plodding on down the road, big-shouldered, stooping a little and never looking back, his big hands hanging loosely at his sides. He wanted to call to him to come back and pick him up but was afraid of what he might see in his face if he turned.
The rest of the summer and into the autumn, whenever he went into town on another wagon and with another horse, he looked for the white horse. He dreamed of going into the nearby town when he grew older and finding the horse, but he never mentioned this dream to his father. The cold weather came and he did not go into town. His father was helping some workmen build a stone barn on the estate. He himself was lending a hand. On the first really cold day, when the ground was frozen and there was a little snow and the masons were trying to get the job finished, his father, the most powerful man on the estate, was carrying stones from a stone pile to the masons working on the walls. All day, like a beast of burden he carried these big stones, two at a time, one under each arm, from the stone pile to the scaffolding, and it was getting dark and they wanted to finish and he hurried. Then his knees wobbled, he dropped one of the stones and looked surprised; then the other big stone fell from his hands. He sat down slowly, then rolled on his back, both his hands over his heart. His eyes were closed but he said to the workmen who ran to him, “My son. Where is my son?”
For a little boy it was awful listening to his father gasping for breath, and remembering at the same time that he had always
been afraid of him. His father, opening his eyes, smiled at him. It was the first gentle smile he had ever seen on the big bearded face; the effort to make the smile gentle was there in spite of his pain. “I’m sorry about that white horse, my son,” he whispered. “Try and own a white horse of your own some day, son. Try hard.” And he died.
Wolgast turned and watched the snow drifting across the window. “Did I say it happened the day of the first snowfall in our village?” he asked mildly.
“I think you did.”
“Today’s the coldest day of the year, too. Not much snow either. Maybe it reminded me of all this.” He offered McAlpine a cigar. He took one himself but didn’t light it. “We had an uncle in Brooklyn who got me and my mother and sister out of Poland,” he went on. “My mother died in Brooklyn. Well, I’ve been awfully poor, but there’s nothing I haven’t done, Mr. McAlpine. I learned how to look after myself, and most of the time I was in a cheap business that wasn’t legitimate; but I always wanted to get on the legit… I carried water pails for crooked fight managers, I was a lavatory attendant, I was a doorman in a whorehouse in Buffalo. But you know something? I always remembered that white horse and the way my father smiled at me and what he said. I think that’s why I always wanted to go legitimate. To get something of my own – on the legit. Well, Montreal has been my dish. I got a nice class of customer now. For the first time in my life I’m legit. I got friends. I got influence. I got wholesale connections. I can borrow a buck or loan a buck; yes, up to twenty thousand any time I want to. It’s a grand town. Even when it’s twenty below I say it’s a grand town. You should move here, Mr. McAlpine.”
“It’s been in my mind.”
“Sure. Well, as I say, I like it the way it is for me. I want everything to stay just the way it is,” he added slowly and carefully as he made his most important point, his pale blue eyes on McAlpine’s. “I’d get sore if someone spoiled it for me. Wouldn’t you?”
“I think I would.”
“I’m a little sore right now, Mr. McAlpine. I’m a little sore at your friend Peggy.”
“Peggy? Why?”
“You see, she came into my spot with a jig this afternoon.”
“Oh! Oh, I see.”
“It’s a fact, she did. Now look, Mr. McAlpine,” Wolgast went on softly. “Your friend’s an educated girl. She knows what she’s doing. She makes up her mind to select a spot away from St. Antoine where she can drink with a jig. Why did she pick on my place first?” When McAlpine only sighed, he repeated angrily, “Why did she pick on me? Go on, why don’t you answer? Do you understand my question, Mr. McAlpine? All right, then answer me.”
“But you think you have the answer, Wolgast.”
“I want to hear you say it.”
“No,” McAlpine said wearily. “It would be too heartbreaking.”
“Heartbreaking?”
“Yes. The way you feel, you couldn’t believe she went into your place with this Negro because she knows you and likes you and thinks you have no prejudices. Maybe it was her tribute to you as a human being. Do you see, Wolgast?” Wolgast did not interrupt because he knew McAlpine was not reproaching him; his tone was too sympathetic and understanding, and he knew he had been harmed. “But what may have been a tribute to you has to be taken inevitably – oh, the whole of history compels you to take it – as an insult. I agree, Wolgast,” he said. “She has no tact. If she only had a little prudence—” He leaned back and sighed. “What bothers me is that this lack of prudence of hers always brings out the worst instincts in us, the stuff we try and hide, the stuff that’s inhuman.”
He
was so troubled that Wolgast too, for a moment, was disturbed, appreciating as he did McAlpine’s sympathetic understanding of his position.
“I like you, Mr. McAlpine,” he said finally.
“Me?” McAlpine asked, surprised.
“You’re a good guy. But I understand a dame like that better than you do,” Wolgast went on grimly. “She wants to move out of St. Antoine with her jigs, and we both know why she picked on me. Well, I’ve got nothing against the jigs. So let’s say she brings one, then another and another, counting on getting away with it with me. So what? So soon I’m running a nigger joint and I lose my fine class of customer and I’m through. Am I right?”
“I suppose it’s the way it would work out,” McAlpine agreed unhappily.
“I don’t want any trouble. I like it the way it is, Mr. McAlpine,” Wolgast said. His smile was almost kindly, but his whispering gentle tone and his pale hard eyes made him sound frighteningly persuasive. “If little Peggy walks in on me again with a jig I won’t say anything to the jig, understand? I won’t insult the jig, because the jig won’t be belittling me. But I’ll hit your friend over the head with a gin bottle. Better still, I’ll break the bottle and cut her with the jagged edge, and not even a jig will ever go for her again. You’ll tell her that, won’t you, Mr. McAlpine?”
“Oh, I’ll speak to her,” McAlpine said hastily. “Don’t worry about it, Wolgast.”
“Just keep her out of my joint. I like it the way it is, a friendly place,” Wolgast said, and he smiled gratefully when McAlpine nodded.
They finished their coffee, got up and went out, and stood on the corner feeling embarrassed. They clutched at their coat collars and shifted on their feet and shoved their hands in their pockets. At that hour on Peel and St. Catherine the lights had come on and women flitted by with their faces hidden, their shoes squeaking on the snow. But the window of the newsstand was open; the four touts were in their places, shifting around to keep warm. A scrawny horse pulling a sleigh clopped by. A little man in a big overcoat dashed across the road from the cigar store to take his place among the touts on the corner. “I couldn’t get in a phone booth,” he complained. “It was a hot tip and I almost didn’t make it.” Across Dominion Square the Sun Life Building loomed up against the darkening sky.
The Loved and the Lost Page 17
