At the center of the tablecloth’s lace spiderweb lived the white spider named Hungry, who also waited; whenever the man tired and lowered his head, or found himself allured by one of the lovely white links of spider-chain, then, no matter how fiercely he struggled, bit by bit Hungry pulled his gaze inward. To a heartless stranger their contest might have appeared playful, for the man’s head spiralled round and round. When Hungry had finally dragged him to the center, so that he must look upon his enemy, the battle was done; and the great spider, which had disguised itself as a many-whorled lace flower, rose up, leaped upon the man’s face, and sucked all the life out of his eyes. Hungry was greedy, but not impatient, so it took longer than one might imagine before the last desiccated sinew of hand or foot had been reeled in through the eyesockets of the miserable skeleton that sat there. Even then, Hungry hesitated to go away, for his victim’s brain endured within. But against the skull’s forehead a magic jewel had been strapped — the gift of the woman called White Arms. Hungry could drink; any flesh he could suck until it liquefied, and retracted into his star-shaped mouth; and he could sting, but he could not bite, and so the jewel and the leather circlet which held it, being grooved into the bone itself, remained impervious to him. Thus after awhile Hungry grew sleepy, returned to the center of the tablecloth, and closed his red eyes. Then, slowly and wearily, stalks of nerve, meat and vein began to grow down from the man’s brain, until he was whole again. As soon as he was able, he jerked his head up from the tablecloth. Hungry still slept, and therefore could not keep him. Because his heart regenerated last, the man was spared from his anguish until he sat upright. But even when he could not feel, he remained condemned to think. He thought considerably about Hungry, as one might imagine; and doubtless Hungry thought about him. They were neighbors, like those two women whom every day he saw chatting with a white picket fence between them.
A redhaired woman opened the white picket-gate, reached up, dreamily caressed a leaf from the maple at the side of her house, strode into her back garden where he could no longer see her, then presently emerged, lowering her head against the wind as she unlatched her picket-gate. Suddenly she raised her head and peeped into his window, the instant enduring more than long enough for him to read the horror on her face. To her, he was a skeleton hedged with fire. She strode quickly away, down the cobblestoned lane toward the harbor and the seagulls which he could never see. He owned one window at the lefthand edge of his vision, whose curtain’s lace flowers and diamonds dulled down the white light. Waiting, sitting, he hoped that in the instant of framing herself there she would look back at him, even in horror. She did not, and never returned home.
Humiliated, he told himself: I hate the others who are not as I.
Sitting in the darkness, the hanging lamp now resembling a polished tuber or a skull in chains, he inhaled the ancient smell of the house, although his chest never moved, and he gazed out through the windows into the sloping, streetlit lane called Bergsmauet, whose cobblestones he could see only by day and only through the righthand window, his room leaking darkness through the triangular wounds between curtains; there the greenish light held its own. He studied the faint shining of streetlight and moonlight on the tablecloth. Just inward of the wave-patterned edge ran a zone of doubled columns adorned with berries and connected to each other by many thin cross-lacings; then came the girdle of wheel-flowers beyond which it was not safe to look; when he tired, and his head began to sink, he counted the horizontal stitches between the double columns; there were sixteen, and when he obtained a different number he knew that he was worn out, and then Hungry might get him. Heartsick, he sat among pallid self-assertions of the unlit candles, the lampshade, the well-mated borders of old prints in their dark frames on the wall, and the scaly, glistening anomaly of the one lace curtain which received the most streetlight; he awaited his lady with the white arms.
His white-armed lady had departed him at dusk, their shadows large against the pine wall upstairs when they stood kissing. Called away by a spell, she pulled off her black nightdress and stepped into her long blue dress. She promised to return whensoever she could, while for his part he swore to wait for her. Her shadow withdrew from his; and he followed her down the steep narrow stairs, bending his head. She undid her jewel and fastened it around his forehead. She unlocked the door. She was the one with white arms, the woman in the long narrow blue dress. She descended the three slate steps, the point of her fringed cape hanging down her back. He locked the door. He stood by the window watching her stride out of sight. Then he sat down at the table. On the instant of her arrival within the many-toothed gate fashioned by those who hate the light, he found himself fettered. She had been his bride. He awaited her, remembering the time when they used to make a shadow together.
Again the chain-hung lamp was shining, for it was day. He sat there, a skeleton at the table in the white house, never denying that his death was of his own making, but wearying of the eternal misery of his loneliness in that narrow white grave. The red gaze of Hungry burned his breast invisibly. White Arms did not come. Casting his heavy eyes upward, he felt newly shocked at the way that his face oozed and snarled in the glass of the antique mirror. Behind the picket fence, the neighbor’s maples, still green in defiance of the season, began to sway. Hungry awaited him as patiently as ever a woman wefted her warp. He resisted. His neck could not endure his head’s weight much longer. Bitterly he glared around the walls at the faded oval portraits, the life bleached out of those fog-white unsmiling faces. He closed his eyes, then quickly opened them. Already his head was tilting down, and the girdle of wheel-flowers ranged across the world. In terrified defiance he craned his head back up, barely in time, and stared out the window, awaiting his bride of the white arms. Had he been capable of locking his elbows on the table and cradling his chin in his interlocked hands, he could have held out longer. The misery grew up into his chest like cancer.
Among other women, whose hair was the color of sunset, of copper, of yellow butter, white butter or honey, or even as orange as egg yolk, White Arms was the rarest, for her hair was as gently white as the winter sun. When they went up the steep stairs, her breath tasted of sweet butter. The one window was on her side of the bed. His side was by the stairs; he gave her the window, because her arm grew utterly white where the autumn sun fell on it. By night the pallid extremities of the bed remained barely visible even to a long-accustomed gaze, the weak projection of the windowpanes on the wall no more than patterned deficiencies of the darkness, while some narrowly clotted form stood on the verge of stirring in the mirror’s greyish obscurity, beside the black rectangular tombstone of the doorway to the bedroom which would have been their child’s. Sometimes there was moonlight to brighten her arms while she lay beside him. Then the moon departed them, and they listened to the rain-wind plucking at the windows.
His head could no longer stay upright. He had already passed beyond the tablecloth’s wave-patterned edge. Seeking to delay his inevitable progress through the zone of doubled columns by counting the fifteen or seventeen horizontal stitches between them, his glassy gaze nonetheless devolved through the girdle of wheel-flowers; and although he struggled to regain the front windows through which he might even then see White Arms returning to him, although he wished that it were day, for then the dull glare of the hanging lamp stimulated his consciousness by stinging his eyes, his wishes and intentions could not save him from meeting the stitch-bristling lacy white arms of Hungry, which rose up at once to grip his face.