He believed that if Brown learned the one, he must inevitably learn the other.
So he would reach the cabin at last, after the lying and the hurry, and as he put his hand on the door, remembering the haste and thinking that in a moment he would find that it had not been necessary at all and yet to neglect which precaution he dared not, he would hate her with a fierce revulsion of dread and impotent rage.
Then one evening he opened the door and found the note on the cot.
He saw it as soon as he entered, lying square and white and profoundly inscrutable against the dark blanket.
He did even stop to think that he believed he knew what the message would be, would promise.
He felt no eagerness; he felt relief.
‘It’s over now,’ he thought, not yet taking up the folded paper. ‘It will be like it was before now.
No more talking about niggers and babies.
She has come around.
She has worn the other out, seen that she was getting nowhere.
She sees now that what she wants, needs, is a man.
She wants a man by night; what he does by daylight does not matter.
He should have realised then the reason why he had not gone away.
He should have seen that he was bound just as tightly by that small square of still undivulging paper as though it were a lock and chain.
He did not think of that.
He saw only himself once again on the verge of promise and delight.
It would be quieter though, now.
They would both want it so; besides the whiphand which he would now have.
‘All that foolishness,’ he thought, holding the yet unopened paper in his hands; ‘all that damn foolishness. She is still she and I am still I.
And now, after all this damn foolishness’; thinking how they would both laugh over it tonight, later, afterward, when the time for quiet talking and quiet laughing came: at the whole thing, at one another, at themselves.
He did not open the note at all.
He put it away and washed and shaved and changed his clothes, whistling while he did so.
He had not finished when Brown came in.
“Well, well, well,” Brown said.
Christmas said nothing.
He was facing the shard of mirror nailed to the wall, knotting his tie.
Brown had stopped in the center of the floor: a tall, lean, young man in dirty overalls, with a dark, weakly handsome face and curious eyes.
Beside his mouth there was a narrow scar as white as a thread of spittle.
After a while Brown said: “Looks like you are going somewhere.”
“Does it?” Christmas said.
He did not look around.
He whistled monotonously but truly: something in minor, plaintive and negroid.
“I reckon I won’t bother to clean up none,” Brown said, “seeing as you are almost ready.”
Christmas looked back at him.
“Ready for what?”
“Ain’t you going to town?”
“Did I ever say I was?” Christmas said. He turned back to the glass.
“Oh,” Brown said.
He watched the back of Christmas’s head. “Well, I reckon from that that you’re going on private business.” He watched Christmas. “This here’s a cold night to be laying around on the wet ground without nothing under you but a thin gal.”
“Ain’t it, though?” Christmas said, whistling, preoccupied and unhurried.
He turned and picked up his coat and put it on, Brown still watching him.
He went to the door. “See you in the morning,” he said.
The door did not close behind him.
He knew that Brown was standing in it, looking after him.
But he did not attempt to conceal his purpose.
He went on toward the house.
‘Let him watch,’ he thought. ‘Let him follow me if he wants to.’
The table was set for him in the kitchen.
Before sitting down he took the unopened note from his pocket and laid it beside his plate.
It was not enclosed, not sealed; it sprang open of its own accord, as though inviting him, insisting.