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By Root 2862 0

walked her to her door. On a Saturday when they had forgotten the time and stayed together later than usual, he left at her door at two o’clock in the morning. They said good night hurriedly, for she was afraid of trouble when she got upstairs—though, in fact, Madame Williams seemed astonishingly indifferent to the hours Elizabeth kept—and he wanted to hurry back home and go to bed. Yet, as he hurried off down the dark, murmuring street, she had a sudden impulse to call him back, to ask him to take her with him and never let her go again. She hurried up the steps, smiling a little at this fancy: it was because he looked so young and defenceless as he walked away, and yet so jaunty and strong.

He was to come the next evening at supper-time, to make at last, at Elizabeth’s urging, the acquaintance of Madame Williams. But he did not come. She drove Madame Williams wild with her sudden sensitivity to footsteps on the stairs. Having told Madame Williams that a gentleman was coming to visit her, she did not dare, of course, to leave the house and go out looking for him, thus giving Madame Williams the impression that she dragged men in off the streets. At ten o’clock, having eaten no supper, a detail unnoticed by her hostess, she went to bed, her head aching and her heart sick with fear; fear over what had happened to Richard, who had never kept her waiting before; and fear involving all that was beginning to happen in her body.

And on Monday morning he was not at work. She left during the lunch hour to go to his room. He was not there. His landlady said that he had not been there all week-end. While Elizabeth stood trembling and indecisive in the hall, two white policemen entered.

She knew the moment she saw them, and before they mentioned his name, that something terrible had happened to Richard. Her heart, as on that bright summer day when he had first spoken to her, gave a terrible bound and then was still, with an awful, wounded stillness. She put out one hand to touch the wall in order to keep standing.

‘This here young lady was just looking for him,’ she heard the landlady say.

They all looked at her.

‘You this girl?’ one of the policemen asked.

She looked up at his sweating face, on which a lascivious smile had immediately appeared, and straightened, trying to control her trembling.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Where is he?’

‘He’s in jail, honey,’ the other policeman said.

‘What for?’

‘For robbing a white man’s store, black girl. That’s what for.’

She found, and thanked Heaven for it, that a cold, stony rage had entered her. She would, otherwise, certainly have fallen down, or began to weep. She looked at the smiling policeman.

‘Richard ain’t robbed no store,’ she said. ‘Tell me where he is.’

‘And I tell you,’ he said, not smiling, ‘that your boyfriend robbed a store and he’s in jail for it. He’s going to stay there, too—now, what you got to say to that?’

‘And he probably did it for you, too,’ the other policeman said. ‘You look like a girl a man could rob a store for.’

She said nothing; she was thinking how to get to see him, how to get him out.

One of them, the smiler, turned now to the landlady and said: ‘Let’s have the key to his room. How long’s he been living here?’

‘About a year,’ the landlady said. She looked unhappily at Elizabeth. ‘He seemed like a real nice boy.’

‘Ah, yes,’ he said, mounting the steps, ‘they all seem like real nice boys when they pay their rent.’

‘You going to take me to see him?’ she asked of the remaining policeman. She found herself fascinated by the gun in the holster, the club at his side. She wanted to take that pistol and empty it into his round, red face; to take that club and strike with all her strength against the base of his skull where his cap ended, until the ugly, silky, white man’s hair was matted with blood and brains.

‘Sure, girl,’ he said, ‘you’re coming right along with us. The man at the station-house wants to ask you some questions.’

The smiling policeman came down again. ‘Ain’t nothing up there,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

She moved between them, out into the sun.