The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers [29]
Dialectic materialism--Jesuitical prevarication’--Jake rolled the syllables in his mouth with loving solemnity--’teleological propensity.’
The mute wiped his forehead with a neatly folded handkerchief.
‘But what I’m getting at is this. When a person knows and can’t make the others understand, what does he do?’
Singer reached for a wineglass, filled it to the brim, and put it firmly into Jake’s bruised hand. ‘Get drunk, huh?’ Jake said with a jerk of his arm that spilled drops of wine on his white trousers. ‘But listen! Wherever you look there’s meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss. A fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness.
Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear--and nobody seems to know.
Everybody is blind, dumb, and blunt-headed--stupid and mean.’
Jake pressed his fists to his temples. His thoughts had careened in several directions and he could not get control of them. He wanted to go berserk. He wanted to get out and fight violently with someone in a crowded street.
Still looking at him with patient interest, the mute took out his silver pencil. He wrote very carefully on a slip of paper, Are you Democrat or Republican? and passed the paper across the table. Jake crumpled it in his hand. The room had begun to turn around him again and he could not even read.
He kept his eyes on the mute’s face to steady himself. Singer’s eyes were the only things in the room that did not seem to move. They were varied in color, flecked with amber, gray, and a soft brown. He stared at them so long that he almost hypnotized himself. He lost the urge to be riotous and felt calm again. The eyes seemed to understand all that he had meant to say and to hold some message for him. After a while the room was steady again.
‘You get it,’ he said in a blurred voice. ‘You know what I mean.’
From afar off there was the soft, silver ring of church bells.
The moonlight was white on the roof next door and the sky was a gentle summer blue. It was agreed without words that Jake would stay with Singer a few days until he found a room.
When the wine was finished the mute put a mattress on the floor beside the bed. Without removing any of his clothes Jake lay down and was instantly asleep.
5
FAR FROM THE main street, in one of the Negro sections of the town, Doctor Benedict Mady Copeland sat in his dark kitchen alone. It was past nine o’clock and the Sunday bells were silent now. Although the night was very hot, there was a small fire in the round-bellied wood stove. Doctor Copeland sat close to it, leaning forward in a straight-backed kitchen chair with his head cupped in his long, slender hands. The red glow from the chinks of the stove shone on his face--in this light his heavy lips looked almost purple against his black skin, and his gray hair, tight against his skull like a cap of lamb’s wool, took on a bluish color also. He sat motionless in this position for a long time. Even his eyes, which stared from behind the silver rims of his spectacles, did not change their fixed, somber gaze. Then he cleared his throat harshly, and picked up a book from the floor beside his chair. All around him the room was very dark, and he had to hold the book close to the stove to make out the print. Tonight he read Spinoza. He did not wholly understand the intricate play of ideas and the complex phrases, but as he read he sensed a strong, true purpose behind the words and he felt that he almost understood.
Often at night the sharp jangle of the doorbell would rouse him from his silence, and in the front room he would find a patient with a broken bone or with a razor wound. But this evening he was not disturbed. And after the solitary hours spent sitting in the dark kitchen it happened that he began swaying slowly from side to side and from his throat there came a sound like a kind of singing moan. He was making this sound when Portia came.
Doctor Copeland knew of her arrival in advance. From the street outside he caught the sound of an harmonica playing a blues song and he knew that the music was played by William, his son. Without turning on the light he went through the hall and opened the front door. He did not step out on the porch, but stood in the dark behind the screen. The moonlight was bright and the shadows of Portia and William and Highboy lay black and solid on the dusty street. The houses in the neighborhood had a miserable look. Doctor Copeland