The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers [22]
After about an hour there was the sound of a doorknob being turned on the landing above. Mick looked up quickly and it was Mister Singer. He stood in the hall for a few minutes and his face was sad and calm. Then he went across to the bathroom. His company did not come out with him. From where she was sitting she could see part of the room, and the company was asleep on the bed with a sheet pulled over him.
She waited for Mister Singer to come out of the bathroom.
Her cheeks were very hot and she felt them with her hands.
Maybe it was true that she came up on these top steps sometimes so she could see Mister Singer while she was listening to Miss Brown’s radio on the floor below. She wondered what kind of music he heard in his mind that his ears couldn’t hear. Nobody knew. And what kind of things he would say if he could talk.
Nobody knew that either.
Mick waited, and after a while he came out into the hall again.
She hoped he would look down and smile at her. And then when he got to his door he did glance down and nod his head.
Mick’s grin was wide and trembling. He went into his room and shut the door. It might have been he meant to invite her in to see him. Mick wanted suddenly to go into his room.
Sometime soon when he didn’t have company she would really go in and see Mister Singer. She really would do that.
The hot afternoon passed slowly and Mick still sat on the steps by herself. The fellow Motsart’s music was in her mind again. It was funny, but Mister Singer reminded her of this music. She wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud. Some kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram full of people. It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house. Mick tried to think of some good private place where she could go and be by herself and study about this music. But though she thought about this a long time she knew in the beginning that there was no good place.
4
LATE IN THE afternoon Jake Blount awoke with the feeling that he had slept enough. The room hi which he lay was small and neat, furnished with a bureau, a table, a bed, and a few chairs. On the bureau an electric fan turned its face slowly from one wall to another, and as the breeze from it passed Jake’s face he thought of cool water. By the window a man sat before the table and stared down at a chess game laid out before him. In the daylight the room was not familiar to Jake, but he recognized the man’s face instantly and it was as though he had known him a very long time.
Many memories were confused in Jake’s mind. He lay motionless with his eyes open and his hands turned palm upward. His hands were huge and very brown against the white sheet. When he held them up to his face he saw that they were scratched and bruised--and the veins were swollen as though he had been grasping hard at something for a long time. His face looked tired and unkempt. His brown hair fell down over his forehead and his mustache was awry.
Even his wing-shaped eyebrows were rough and tousled. As he lay there his lips moved once or twice and his mustache jerked with a nervous quiver.
After a while he sat up and gave himself a thump on the side of his head with one of his big fists to straighten himself out. When he moved, the man playing chess looked up quickly and smiled at him.
‘God, I’m thirsty,’ Jake said. ‘I feel like the whole Russian army marched through my mouth in its stocking feet.’ The man looked at him, still smiling, and then suddenly he reached down on the other side of the table and brought up a frosted pitcher of ice water and a glass. Jake drank in great panting gulps--standing half-naked in the middle of the room, his head thrown back and one of his hands closed in a tense fist.
He finished four glasses before he took a deep breath and relaxed a little.
Instantly certain recollections came to him. He couldn’t remember coming home with this man, but things that had happened later were clearer now. He had waked up soaking in a tub of cold water, and afterward they drank coffee and talked. He had got a lot of things off his chest and the man had listened. He had talked himself hoarse, but he could remember the expressions on the man