As upon another life he looked back upon that first hard and manlike surrender, that surrender terrific and hard, like the breaking down of a spiritual skeleton the very sound of whose snapping fibers could be heard almost by the physical ear, so that the act of capitulation was anticlimax, as when a defeated general on the day after the last battle, shaved overnight and with his boots cleaned of the mud of combat, surrenders his sword to a committee.
The sewer ran only by night.
The days were the same as they had ever been.
He went to work at half past six in the morning.
He would leave the cabin without looking toward the house at all.
At six in the evening he returned, again without even looking toward the house.
He washed and changed to the white shirt and the dark creased trousers and went to the kitchen and found his supper waiting on the table and he sat and ate it, still without having seen her at all.
But he knew that she was in the house and that the coming of dark within the old walls was breaking down something and leaving it corrupt with waiting.
He knew how she had spent the day; that her days also were no different from what they had always been, as if in her case too another person had lived them.
All day long he would imagine her, going about her housework, sitting for that unvarying period at the scarred desk, or talking, listening, to the negro women who came to the house from both directions up and down the road, following paths which had been years in the wearing and which radiated from the house like wheelspokes.
What they talked about to her he did not know, though he had watched them approaching the house in a manner not exactly secret, yet purposeful, entering usually singly though sometimes in twos and threes, in their aprons and headrags and now and then with a man’s coat thrown about their shoulders, emerging again and returning down the radiating paths not fast and yet not loitering.
They would be brief in his mind, thinking Now she is doing this.
Now she is doing that not thinking much about her.
He believed that during the day she thought no more about him than he did about her, too.
Even when at night, in her dark bedroom, she insisted on telling him in tedious detail the trivial matters of her day and insisted on his telling her of his day in turn, it was in the fashion of lovers: that imperious and insatiable demand that the trivial details of both days be put into words, without any need to listen to the telling.
Then he would finish his supper and go to her where she waited.
Often he would not hurry.
As time went on and the novelty of the second phase began to wear off and become habit, he would stand in the kitchen door and look out across the dusk and see, perhaps with foreboding and premonition, the savage and lonely street which he had chosen of his own will, waiting for him, thinking This is not my life.
I don’t belong here.
At first it shocked him: the abject fury of the New England glacier exposed suddenly to the fire of the New England biblical hell.
Perhaps he was aware of the abnegation in it: the imperious and fierce urgency that concealed an actual despair at frustrate and irrevocable years, which she appeared to attempt to compensate each night as if she believed that it would be the last night on earth by damning herself forever to the hell of her forefathers, by living not alone in sin but in filth.
She had an avidity for the forbidden wordsymbols; an insatiable appetite for the sound of them on his tongue and on her own.
She revealed the terrible and impersonal curiosity of a child about forbidden subjects and objects; that rapt and tireless and detached interest of a surgeon in the physical body and its possibilities.
And by day he would see the calm, coldfaced, almost manlike, almost middleaged woman who had lived for twenty years alone, without any feminine fears at all, in a lonely house in a neighborhood populated, when at all, by negroes, who spent a certain portion of each day sitting tranquilly at a desk and writing tranquilly for the eyes of both youth and age the practical advice of a combined priest and banker and trained nurse.
During that period (it could not be called a honeymoon) Christmas watched her pass through every avatar of a woman in love.
Soon she more than shocked him: she astonished and bewildered him.
She surprised and took him unawares with fits of jealous rage.
She could have had no such experience at all, and there was neither reason for the scene nor any possible protagonist: he knew that she knew that.
It was as if she had invented the whole thing deliberately, for the purpose of playing it out like a play.
Yet she did it with such fury, with such convincingness and such conviction, that on the first occasion he thought that she was under a delusion and the third time he thought that she was mad.
She revealed an unexpected and infallible instinct for intrigue.
She insisted on a place for concealing notes, letters.
It was in a hollow fence post below the rotting stable.
He never saw her put a note there, yet she insisted on his visiting it daily; when he did so, the letter would be there.
When he did not and lied to her, he would find that she had already set traps to catch him in the lie; she cried, wept.
Sometimes the notes would tell him not to come until a certain hour, to that house which no white person save himself had entered in years and in which for twenty years now she had been all night alone; for a whole week she forced him to climb into a window to come to her.
He would do so and sometimes he would have to seek her about the dark house until he found her, hidden, in closets, in empty rooms, waiting, panting, her eyes in the dark glowing like the eyes of cats.
Now and then she appointed trysts beneath certain shrubs about the grounds, where he would find her naked, or with her clothing half torn to ribbons upon her, in the wild throes of nymphomania, her body gleaming in the slow shifting from one to another of such formally erotic attitudes and gestures as a Beardsley of the time of Petronius might have drawn.
She would be wild then, in the close, breathing halfdark without walls, with her wild hair, each strand of which would seem to come alive like octopus tentacles, and her wild hands and her breathing:
“Negro!
Negro!
Negro!”
Within six months she was completely corrupted.
It could not be said that he corrupted her.
His own life, for all its anonymous promiscuity, had been conventional enough, as a life of healthy and normal sin usually is.
The corruption came from a source even more inexplicable to him than to her.
In fact, it was as though with the corruption which she seemed to gather from the air itself, she began to corrupt him.
He began to be afraid.
He could not have said of what.
But he began to see himself as from a distance, like a man being sucked down into a bottomless morass.