It was easy to find out if the girl had left. In two minutes she could tell if she had taken her things. She wouldn’t leave in her overalls, and her dresses and things should be in her room. So she went along the hall and down the back stairs and tapped on Peggy’s door. “Peggy, Peggy,” she called, not expecting an answer, but protecting herself in case the girl was home, sick. There was no answer, and she opened the door.
The strong morning sunlight was all on the front of the house, and it had not yet reached the window of Peggy’s room. Anyway, the curtain was drawn and the light was burning.
“Oh, there you are, Peggy,” she said when she saw one bare foot dangling over the edge of the bed. “Are you asleep, dearie? You had two callers, Peggy. I should have made sure you weren’t at work. I say, dearie, wake up.”
Taking a few steps toward the bed she raised both her hands and opened her mouth wide to scream; but her throat was paralyzed. She couldn’t call out; she couldn’t run. The girl lay naked on the bed. Her torn white blouse had been thrown on the floor. Her black skirt was on the floor, and sticking out from under it was a drawing of a girl in overalls; and the skirt could have been poured on the drawing. Peggy’s wide-open eyes stared horribly at the ceiling and her mouth gaped. Around her throat were big bluish welts, and on her left breast was a heavy dark bruise. Her head was twisted a little to one side, her arms straight at her sides, the palms open and twisted back. She looked small, round, and white. Only her hair had any life in it, for the ceiling light touched the side of her head and there were gleams of gold in the fair hair.
The strangling tightness around Mrs. Agnew’s own throat made her own eyes bulge as horribly as Peggy’s; then it snapped and she cried, “Murder! Murder! Help!” She ran out of the room, turned back idiotically to slam the door after her, and staggered frantically up the stairs, still screaming.
TWENTY-SIX
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.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Catherine had been out shopping and came in just before dinner. Laying her parcels on the hall table, she knocked off the evening newspaper. She picked it up and read the headlines about the death of Peggy Sanderson.
There was a picture of Peggy on the front page. With great enterprise, the city editors had got hold of copies of Peggy’s college graduating class. There she was, an innocent looking school-girl; the long story and the interviews they wrote didn’t seem to be quite right for the picture; they told of the brawl in the St. Antoine Café, and how she had been found in the morning in her room, stripped naked and raped, her assailant’s marks on her throat. Beyond a doubt she was a questionable character who led a peculiar life. Catherine gathered that those from St. Antoine who were questioned about her were worried and cautious, for what was there to say about such a perverse white girl who was pretty and attractive? Yet they grudgingly declared that they liked her, and because they had liked her they resented her provoking solitude. The trouble was that too many of them liked her. When a young pretty girl was liked by so many it meant trouble. Only a Mrs. Agnew spoke well of Peggy. This Mrs. Agnew said it didn’t matter to her whom Peggy had brought to the house; she had always been quiet and ladylike about it and had asked nothing from anyone.
The firmness of the alibis established by some of the St. Antoine people was satisfactory to the police, Catherine read. When the café had closed for the evening Wilson, the trumpet player, had gone to Wagstaffe’s apartment, where they had a sharp and at times heated discussion that had lasted until dawn. As for Wilson’s wife, three of her neighbours who had been with her in her apartment had been trying to soothe her, they said, because she hadn’t known where her husband had gone.
A prominent newspaperman, Walter Malone, had talked freely to the police. “That old drunk,” Catherine said to herself. Of course he had to talk freely, for he had been involved in the café brawl. But he had left with Wolgast, who affirmed that Malone had sat in his bar until he had fallen asleep. Such awful people would hang around that Chalet Restaurant, she thought.
It had been established that the girl had been strangled at about three o’clock in the morning. Mrs. Agnew had declared that she had heard someone moving around the girl’s apartment shortly before that time, and later had heard someone with a slow heavy step going along the hall. She had looked out the window; a heavy-set man had gone down the street. He didn’t walk like a Negro, he didn’t look like a Negro. As far as she was concerned he certainly wasn’t a Negro.
And alongside the girl’s picture they printed the drawing of her in overalls with its title, “Peggy the Crimper,” which had been found beside the bed. Who drew this picture? they asked. Whoever drew it or whoever had been looking at it with her was the one, no doubt, who had lulled her into feeling secure and had then attacked her.
When Catherine first glanced at the drawing it had no meaning for her. A curtain was deliberately lowered across her mind. The story of the girl’s wandering around St. Antoine was disgusting. “Ugh!” She made a face and tossed away the paper. Yet the fact that the names of Wolgast, Gagnon, and Malone had been mentioned pleased her. Surely Jim would be revolted now by the company he and Foley kept around that slum of a bar in the Chalet Restaurant.
At dinner with her father the girl’s death was mentioned; one word led to another, and soon they were having an exasperating argument. Mr. Carver was appalled to think that a girl who had had a university education could become so depraved in her tastes and habits. It was a reflection on the whole trend of modern education. Teachers were no longer concerned with the development of moral character; but it was not to be wondered at, for look at the kind of men who were permitted to mould the minds of the young; look at a scamp like young Sloane, he said, growing eloquent and willing to put the blame for the girl’s death squarely on the shoulders of young Sloane. As she tried to argue with him she became unreasonably resentful. The girl was obviously cheap and loose by nature, she insisted. A little pervert. There were such women, and men recognized them instinctively. It was utterly irrational to blame university professors because he disliked young Sloane, she said vehemently.
“I’m getting at the cause of the thing,” he insisted.
“Oh, rubbish!” she cried. “You ride that poor horse to death.” Words wouldn’t come to her, she was so excited. She made awkward motions with her hands, glaring at her father. “Your mind is always on the one track, Daddy,” she cried, banging down her coffee cup. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, stop, stop! Please stop. I’m tired of this silly argument. What do we care about the girl?” And she strode out of the dining room, leaving her father looking helplessly at Jacques, who offered him a consoling shrug.
What had really been exasperating her, she told herself, was not having heard from McAlpine. It made her feel restless and vague about everything she was doing, and even now, when she started to go to her bedroom, she turned absent-mindedly and went back to the drawing room where her father had been sitting before dinner, and where, on the little green lacquer table by the chair, lay the newspaper he had been reading.
Glancing at it idly, she picked it up. She wanted to take another look at the girl’s picture. Instead she found herself studying the drawing of “Peggy the Crimper.” Then she wandere
d into her own bedroom. But even there everything, even her actions, became unfamiliar. From her clothes closet she took out two dresses, a blue one and a brown one, and laid them on the bed, wondering which one would make her look more desirable to McAlpine. She had seldom worn the brown one for him, and, if she had, why, things might have been different, for a dress of the right colour, the little extra touch, the right tone, might have surprised him. But when she had taken off her suit and was in her white slip, she forgot about the dress.
Going to her dressing table, she sat down and looked at herself in the mirror, pushing her hair back slowly with her right hand. Her shoulders and arms were bare, the curve of her breasts deep; she was assessing the fairness of her own image, longing for a splendid objective judgment of her attractiveness. The clock by her bed ticked loudly. The grandfather clock in the hall chimed the hour of nine. And still she was alone. An unfamiliar sense of dread and anxiety bewildered her. In a dream she felt herself being compelled to do something she had been trying not to do; she got up slowly, dreading each step, yet going on with a strange apprehensive expression.
The maid in the hall, seeing her emerge in her white slip, coughed, because Catherine never wandered around the apartment half-dressed, and Jacques, who had come out of the dining room, stepped back against the wall. She didn’t notice him. Like a sleep walker she entered the drawing room where her father was sitting with his whisky and soda, reading the financial page. She simply reached for the paper, drew it out of his hands, and as he stood up, incredulous, she walked back to her bedroom.
The Loved and the Lost Page 23
