Collected Stories of Carson McCullers Read Online Free PDF

of. I was too busy to make any friends down at school and I had never been so much alone.
    Late at night I would sit by the window and read. A friend of mine back home would sometimes send me three or four dollars to get certain books in secondhand book stores here that he can't get in the library. He would write for all sorts of things—books like "A Critique of Pure Reason," or "Tertium Organum," and authors like Marx and Strachey and George Soule. He has to stay back home now and help out his family because his Dad is unemployed. He has a job as a garage mechanic. He could get some sort of office work, but a mechanic's wages are better and, lying under an automobile with his back to the ground, he has a chance to think things out and make plans. Before mailing him the books I would study them myself, and although we had talked about many of the things in them in simpler words there would sometimes be a line or two that would make a dozen things I'd half known definite and sure.
    Often such sentences as these would make me resdess and I'd stare out the window a long time. It seems strange now to think of me standing there alone and this man asleep in his room on the other side and me not knowing anything about him and caring less. The court would be dark for the night, with the snow on the roof of the first floor down below, like a soundless pit that would never awaken.
    Then gradually the spring began to come. I cannot understand why I was so unconscious of the way in which things began to change, of the milder air and the sun that began to grow stronger and light up the court and all the rooms around it. The thin, sooty-gray patches of snow disappeared and the sky was bright azure at noon. I noticed that I could wear my sweater instead of my coat, that sounds from outside were beginning to get so clear that they bothered me when reading, that every morning the sun was bright on the wall of the opposite building. But I was busy with the job I had and school and the restlessness that these books I read in my spare time made me feel. It was not until one morning when I found the heat in our building turned off and stood looking out through the open window that I realized the great change that had come about. Oddly enough, too, it was then when I saw the man with the red hair plainly for the first time.
    He was standing just as I was, his hands on the window sill, looking out. The early sun shone straight in his face and I was surprised at his nearness to me and at the clarity with which I could see him. His hair, bright in the sunlight, came up from his forehead red and coarse as a sponge. I saw that his mouth was blunt at the corners, his shoulders straight and muscular under his blue pajama jacket. His eyelids drooped slighdy and for some reason this gave him a look of wisdom and deliberateness. As I watched him he went inside a moment and returned with a couple of potted plants and set them on the window sill in the sun. The distance between us was so little that I could plainly see his neat blunt hands as they fondled the plants, carefully touching the roots and the soil. He was humming three notes over and over—a little pattern that was more an expression of well-being than a tunc. Something about the man made me feel that I could stand there watching him all morning. After a while he looked up once more at the sky, took a deep breath and went inside again.
    The warmer it got the more things changed. AH of us around the court began to pin back our curtains to let the air into our small rooms and move our beds close to the windows. When you can see people sleep and dress and eat you get to feel that you understand them—even if you don't know their names. Besides the man with the red hair there were others whom I began to notice now and then.
    There was the cellist whose room was at a right angle with mine and the young couple living above her. Because I was at my window so much I could not help but see