The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers [125]
The music stopped. ‘Why, Mr. Blount, I thought you knowed he was gone. While you were sitting at the table with your peach puff he come to the doorway and held out his watch to show it were time for him to go. You looked straight at him and shaken your head. I thought you knowed that.’
‘Maybe I was thinking about something else.’ He turned to Willie and said angrily to him: ‘I never did even get to tell you what I come here for, I didn’t come to ask you to do anything.
All I wanted--all I wanted was this. You and the other boys were to testify what happened and I was to explain why. Why is the only important thing--not what. I would have pushed you all around in a wagon and you would have told your story and afterward I would have explained why. And maybe it might have meant something.
Maybe it--’ He felt they were laughing at him. Confusion caused him to forget what he had meant to say. The room was full of dark, strange faces and the air was too thick to breathe. He saw a door and staggered across to it. He was in a dark closet smelling of medicine. Then his hand was turning another doorknob.
He stood on the threshold of a small white room furnished only with an iron bed, a cabinet, and two chairs. On the bed lay the terrible Negro he had met on the stairs at Singer’s house. His face was very black against the white, stiff pillows.
The dark eyes were hot with hatred but the heavy, bluish lips were composed. His face was motionless as a black mask except for the slow, wide flutters of his nostrils with each breath.
‘Get out,’ the Negro said.
‘Wait--’ Jake said helplessly. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘This is my house.’
Jake could not draw his eyes away from the Negro’s terrible face. ‘But why?’
‘You are a white man and a stranger.’
Jake did not leave. He walked with cumbersome caution to one of the straight white chairs and seated himself. The Negro moved his hands on the counterpane. His black eyes glittered with fever. Jake watched him. They waited. In the room there was a feeling tense as conspiracy or as the deadly quiet before an explosion.
It was long past midnight. The warm, dark air of the spring morning swirled the blue layers of smoke in the room. On the floor were crumpled balls of paper and a half-empty bottle of gin. Scattered ashes were gray on the counterpane. Doctor Copeland pressed his head tensely into the pillow. He had removed his dressing-gown and the sleeves of his white cotton nightshirt were rolled to the elbow. Jake leaned forward in his chair. His tie was loosened and the collar of his shirt had wilted with sweat Through the hours there had grown between them a long, exhausting dialogue. And now a pause had come.
‘So the time is ready for--’ Jake began. But Doctor Copeland interrupted him. ‘Now it is perhaps necessary that we--’ he murmured huskily. They halted. Each looked into the eyes of the other and waited. ‘I beg your pardon,’ Doctor Copeland said.
‘Sorry,’ said Jake. ‘Go on.’
‘No, you continue.’
‘Well--’ Jake said. ‘I won’t say what I started to say.
Instead we’ll have one last word about the South. The strangled South. The wasted South, The slavish South.’
‘And the Negro people.’
To steady himself Jake swallowed a long, burning draught from the bottle on the floor beside him. Then deliberately he walked to the cabinet and picked up a small, cheap globe of the world that served as a paperweight. Slowly he turned the sphere in his hands. ‘All I can say is this: The world is full of meanness and evil. Huh! Three fourths of this globe is in a state of war or oppression. The liars and fiends are united and the men who know are isolated and without defense. But! But if you was to ask me to point out the most uncivilized area on the face of this globe I would point here--’
‘Watch sharp,’ said Doctor Copeland. ‘You’re out in the ocean.’
Jake turned the globe again and pressed his blunt, grimy thumb on a carefully selected spot. ‘Here. These thirteen states. I know what I’m talking about. I read books and I go around. I been in every damn one of these thirteen states. I