He was sitting in his splint chair in the doorway, the open book upon his knees. When she approached she saw that it was the Bible. But she just noticed this, as she might have noticed a fly upon his leg. “You hate him too,” she said “You’ve been watching him too. I’ve seen you. Don’t say you don’t.” He looked up at her face, the spectacles propped now above his brows. He was not an old man. In his present occupation he was an incongruity. He was a hard man, in his prime; a man who should have been living a hard and active life, and whom time, circumstance, something, had betrayed, sweeping the hale body and thinking of a man of forty-five into a backwater suitable for a man of sixty or sixty-five. “You know,” she said. “You knew before the other children started calling him Nigger. You came out here at the same time. You weren’t working here a month before that Christmas night when Charley found him on the doorstep yonder. Tell me.” The janitor’s face was round, a little flabby, quite dirty, with a dirty stubble. His eyes were quite clear, quite gray, quite cold. They were quite mad too. But the woman did not notice that. Or perhaps they did not look mad to her. So they faced one another in the coalgrimed doorway, mad eyes looking into mad eyes, mad voice talking to mad voice as calm and quiet and terse as two conspirators. “I’ve watched you for five years.” She believed that she was telling the truth. “Sitting here in this very chair, watching him. You never sit here except when the children are outdoors. But as soon as they come out, you bring this chair here to the door and sit in it where you can watch them. Watching him and hearing the other children calling him Nigger. That’s what you are doing. I know. You came here just to do that, to watch him and hate him. You were here ready when he came. Maybe you brought him and left him on the step yonder yourself. But anyway you know. And I’ve got to know. When he tells I will be fired. And Charley may—will—Tell me. Tell me, now.”
“Ah,” the janitor said. “I knowed he would be there to catch you when God’s time came. I knowed. I know who set him there, a sign and a damnation for bitchery.”
“Yes. He was right behind the curtain. As close as you are. You tell me, now. I’ve seen your eyes when you look at him. Watched you. For five years.”
“I know,” he said. “I know evil. Ain’t I made evil to get up and walk God’s world? A walking pollution in God’s own face I made it. Out of the mouths of little children He never concealed it. You have heard them. I never told them to say it, to call him in his rightful nature, by the name of his damnation. I never told them. They knowed. They was told, but it wasn’t by me. I just waited, on His own good time, when He would see fitten to reveal it to His living world. And it’s come now. This is the sign, wrote again in womansinning and bitchery.”
“Yes. But what must I do? Tell me.”
“Wait. Like I waited. Five years I waited for the Lord to move and show His will. And He done it. You wait too. When He is ready for it He will show His will to them that have the say-so.”
“Yes. The say-so.” They glared at one another, still, breathing quietly.
“The madam. When He is ready, He will reveal it to her.”
“You mean, if the madam knows, she will send him away? Yes. But I can’t wait.”
“No more can you hurry the Lord God. Ain’t I waited five years?”
She began to beat her hands lightly together. “But don’t you see? This may be the Lord’s way. For you to tell me. Because you know. Maybe it’s His way for you to tell me and me to tell the madam.” Her mad eyes were quite calm, her mad voice patient and calm: it was only her light unceasing hands.
“You’ll wait, the same as I waited,” he said. “You have felt the weight of the Lord’s remorseful hand for maybe three days. I have lived under it for five years, watching and waiting for His own good time, because my sin is greater than your sin.” Though he was looking directly at her face he did not seem to see her at all, his eyes did not. They looked like they were blind, wide open, icecold, fanatical. “To what I done and what I suffered to expiate it, what you done and are womansuffering ain’t no more than a handful of rotten dirt. I done bore mine five years; who are you to hurry Almighty God with your little womanfilth?”
She turned, at once. “Well. You don’t have to tell me. I know, anyway. I’ve known it all the time that he’s part nigger.” She returned to the house. She did not walk fast now and she yawned, terrifically. ‘All I have to do is to think of some way to make the madam believe it. He won’t tell her, back me up.’ She yawned again, tremendously, her face emptied now of everything save yawning and then emptied even of yawning. She had just thought of something else. She had not thought of it before, but she believed that she had, had known it all the while, because it seemed so right: he would not only be removed; he would be punished for having given her terror and worry. ‘They’ll send him to the nigger orphanage,’ she thought ‘Of course. They will have to.’
She did not even go to the matron at once. She had started there, but instead of turning toward the office door she saw herself passing it, going on toward the stairs and mounting. It was as though she followed herself to see where she was going. In the corridor, quiet and empty now, she yawned again, with utter relaxation. She entered her room and locked the door and took off her clothes and got into bed. The shades were drawn and she lay still, in the more than halfdark, on her back. Her eyes were closed and her face was empty and smooth. After a while she began to open her legs and close them slowly, feeling the sheets flow cool and smooth over them and then flow warm and smooth again. Thinking seemed to hang suspended between the sleep which she had not had now in three nights and the sleep which she was about to receive, her body open to accept sleep as though sleep were a man. ‘All I need do is to make the madam believe,’ she thought. And then she thought, He will look just like a pea in a pan full of coffee beans.
That was in the afternoon. At nine that evening she was undressing again when she heard the janitor come up the corridor, toward her door. She did not, could not, know who it was, then somehow she did know, hearing the steady feet and then a knock at the door which already began to open before she could spring to it. She didn’t call; she sprang to the door, putting her weight against it, holding it to. “I’m undressing!” she said in a thin, agonised voice, knowing who it was. He didn’t answer, his weight firm and steady against the crawling door, beyond the crawling gap. “You can’t come in here!” she cried, hardly louder than a whisper. “Don’t you know they …” Her voice was panting, fainting, and desperate. He did not answer. She tried to halt and hold the slow inward crawling of the door. “Let me get some clothes on, and I’ll come out there. Will you do that?” She spoke in that fainting whisper, her tone light, inconsequential, like that of one speaking to an unpredictable child or a maniac: soothing, cajoling: “You wait, now. Do you hear? Will you wait, now?” He did not answer. The slow and irresistible crawling of the door did not cease. Leaning against it, wearing nothing save her undergarment, she was like a puppet in some burlesque of rapine and despair. Leaning, downlooking, immobile, she appeared to be in deepest thought, as if the puppet in the midst of the scene had gone astray within itself. Then she turned, releasing the door, and sprang back to the bed, whipping up without looking at it a garment and whirling to face the door, clutching the garment at her breast, huddling. He had already entered; apparently he had been watching her and waiting during the whole blind interval of fumbling and interminable haste.
He still wore the overalls and he now wore his hat. He did not remove it. Again his cold mad gray eyes did not seem to see her, to look at her at all. “If the Lord Himself come into the room of one of you,” he said, “you would believe He come in bitchery.” He said, “Have you told her?”