Collected Stories of Carson McCullers Read Online Free PDF Page B

nearly everything that happened to them. I knew the young couple were going to have a baby soon and that, although she didn't look so well, they were very happy. I knew about the cellist's ups and downs too.
    At night when I wasn't reading I would write to this friend of mine back home or type out things that happened to come into my head on the typewriter he got me when I left for New York. (He knew I would have to type out assignments at school.) The things I'd put down weren't of any importance—just thoughts that it did me good to try to get out of my mind. There would be a lot of x marks on the paper and maybe a few sentences such as:
fascism and
war cannot exist for long because they are death and death is the only evil in the world,
or
it is not right that the boy next to me in Economics should have had to wear newspapers under his sweater all winter because he didn't have any overcoat,
or
what are the things that I ^now and can always believe?
While I would sit writing like this I would often sec the man across from me and it would be as if he were somehow bound up in what I was thinking—as if he knew, maybe, the answers to the things that bothered me. He seemed so calm and sure. When the trouble we began to have in the court started I could not help but feel he was the one person able to straighten it out.
    The cellist's practicing annoyed everybody, especially the girl living directly above her who was pregnant. The girl was very nervous and seemed to be having a hard time. Her face was meager above her swollen body, her little hands delicate as a sparrow's claws. The way she had her hair skinned back tightly to her head made her look like a child. Sometimes when the practicing was particularly loud she would lean down toward the cellist's room with an exasperated expression and look as though she might call out to her to stop awhile. Her husband seemed as young as she did and you could tell they were happy. Their bed was close to the window and they would often sit on it Turkish fashion, facing each other, talking and laughing. Once they were sitting that way eating some oranges and throwing the peels out the window. The wind blew a bit of a peel into the cellist's room and she screamed up to them to quit littering everyone else with their trash. The young man laughed, loud so the cellist could hear him, and the girl laid down her half finished orange and wouldn't eat anymore.
    The man with the red hair was there the evening that happened. He heard the cellist and looked a long time at her and at the young couple. He had been sitting as he often did, at the chair by the window—in his pajamas, relaxed and doing nothing at all. (After he came in from work he rarely went out again.) There was something contented and kind about his face and it seemed to me he wanted to stop the tension between the rooms. He just looked, and did not even get up from his chair, but that is the feeling I had. It makes me restless to hear people scream at each other and that night I felt tired and jittery for some reason. I put the Marx book I was reading down on the table and just looked at this man and imagined about him.
    I think the cellist moved in about the first of May, because during the winter I don't remember hearing her practice. The sun streamed in on her room in the late afternoon, showing up a collection of what looked to be photographs tacked on the wall. She went out often and sometimes she had a certain man in to see her. Late in the day she would sit facing the court with her cello, her knees spread wide apart to straddle the instrument, her skirts pulled up to the thighs so as not to strain the seams. Her music was raw toned and lazily played. She seemed to go into a sort of coma when she worked and her face took on a cowish look. Nearly always she had stockings drying in the window (I could see them so plainly that I could tell she sometimes only washed the feet to save wear and trouble) and some mornings