But he did not look at it.
He began to eat.
He ate without haste.
He had almost finished when he raised his head suddenly, listening.
Then he rose and went to the door through which he had entered, with the noiselessness of a cat, and jerked the door open suddenly.
Brown stood just outside, his face leaned to the door, or where the door had been.
The light fell upon his face and upon it was an expression of intent and infantile interest which became surprise while Christmas looked at it, then it recovered, falling back a little.
Brown’s voice was gleeful though quiet, cautious, conspiratorial, as if he had already established his alliance and sympathy with Christmas, unasked, and without waiting to know what was going on, out of loyalty to his partner or perhaps to abstract man as opposed to all woman.
“Well, well, well,” he said. “So this is where you tomcat to every night.
Right at our front door, you might say—”
Without saying a word Christmas struck him.
The blow did not fall hard, because Brown was already in innocent and gleeful backmotion, in midsnicker as it were.
The blow cut his voice short off; moving, springing backward, he vanished from the fall of light, into the darkness, from which his voice came, still not loud, as if even now he would not jeopardise his partner’s business, but tense now with alarm, astonishment:
“Don’t you hit me!”
He was the taller of the two: a gangling shape already in a ludicrous diffusion of escape as if he were on the point of clattering to earth in complete disintegration as he stumbled backward before the steady and still silent advance of the other.
Again Brown’s voice came, high, full of alarm and spurious threat:
“Don’t you hit me!”
This time the blow struck his shoulder as he turned.
He was running now.
He ran for a hundred yards before he slowed, looking back.
Then he stopped and turned.
“You durn yellowbellied wop,” he said, in a tentative tone, jerking his head immediately, as if his voice had made more noise, sounded louder, than he had intended.
There was no sound from the house; the kitchen door was dark again, closed again.
He raised his voice a little:
“You durn yellowbellied wop!
I’ll learn you who you are monkeying with.”
There came no sound anywhere.
It was chilly.
He turned and went back to the cabin, mumbling to himself.
When Christmas reentered the kitchen he did not even look back at the table on which lay the note which he had not yet read.
He went on through the door which led into the house and on to the stairs.
He began to mount, not fast. He mounted steadily; he could now see the bedroom door, a crack of light, firelight, beneath it.
He went steadily on and put his hand upon the door.
Then he opened it and he stopped dead still.
She was sitting at a table, beneath the lamp. He saw a figure that he knew, in a severe garment that he knew—a garment that looked as if it had been made for and worn by a careless man.
Above it he saw a head with hair just beginning to gray drawn gauntly back to a knot as savage and ugly as a wart on a diseased bough.
Then she looked up at him and he saw that she wore steelrimmed spectacles which he had never seen before.
He stood in the door, his hand still on the knob, quite motionless.
It seemed to him that he could actually hear the words inside him: You should have read that note.
You should have read that note thinking,
‘I am going to do something.
Going to do something.’
He was still hearing that while he stood beside the table on which papers were scattered and from which she had not risen, and listened to the calm enormity which her cold, still voice unfolded, his mouth repeating the words after her while he looked down at the scattered and enigmatic papers and documents and thinking fled smooth and idle, wondering what this paper meant and what that paper meant.
“To school,” his mouth said.
“Yes,” she said. “They will take you.
Any of them will.
On my account.
You can choose any one you want among them.
We won’t even have to pay.”
“To school,” his mouth said. “A nigger school.