Free Collected Stories of Carson McCullers by Carson Mccullers Page A

them was shot through at the corner with fragile fibers of pink, giving him somehow the guileless expression of an Easter bunny. So much younger than twenty, he always looked—With his head thrown back on her knees so that his neck was arched above his rolled collar and tender seeming with the soft outline of the cords and cartilages. With his dark hair springing from the pallor of his face.
    "Vacant majesty—"
    As he spoke his eyelids drooped until the eyes beneath had been narrowed to a slit that seemed to sneer at her. And she knew with a sudden start that he was not as drunk as he pretended to be.
    "You needn't hold forth any longer," she said. "Phillip's gone home and there's just me."
    "It's in the na-a-ature of things—that such a viewpoint—view—"
    "He's gone home," she repeated. "You talked him out." She had a fleet picture of Phillip bending to pick up the cigarette butts—his agile, blond little body and his calm eyes—"He washed up the dishes we messed and even wanted to sweep the floor, but I made him leave it."
    "He's a—" started Marshall.
    "Seeing
you
—and how tired I was—he even offered to pull out the couch and get you to bed."
    "A cute procedure—" he mouthed.
    "I made him run along." She remembered for a moment his face as she shut the door between them, the sound of his footsteps going down stairs, and the feeling—half of pity for loneliness, half of warmth—that she always felt when she listened to the sounds of others going out into the night away from them.
    "To listen to him—one would think his reading were rigidly narrowed to—to G. K. Chesterton and George Moore," he said, giving a drunken lilt to the words. "Who won at chess—me or him?"
    "You," she said. "But you did your best work before you got so drunk."
    "Drunk—" he murmured, moving his long body laxly, changing the position of his head. "God! your knees are bony. Bo-ony!"
    "But I thought sure you'd give him the game when you made that idiotic move with your queen's pawn." She thought of their fingers hovering over the carved precision of their pieces, brows frowned, the glow of the light on the bottle beside them.
    His eyes were closed again and his hand had crumpled down on his chest. "Lousy simile—" he mumbled. "Granted about the mountain. Joyce climbed laboriously—O-O-OK—but when he reached the top—top reached—"
    "You can't stand this drinking, darling—" Her hands moved over the soft angle of his chin and rested there.
    "He wouldn't say the world was
fla-at.
All along that's what they said. Besides the villagers could walk around—around with their jackasses and see that for themselves. With their asses."
    "Hush," she said. "You've talked about that long enough. You get on one subject and go on and on ad infinitum. And don't land anywhere."
    "A crater—" he breathed huskily. "And at least after the immensity of his climb he could have expected—some lovely leaps of Hell fire—some—"
    Her hand clenched on his chin and shook it. "Shut up," she said. "1 heard you when you improvised on that so brilliantly before Phillip left. You were obscene. And I'd almost forgotten."
    A smile crept out across his face and his blue fringed eyes looked up at her. "Obscene—? Why should you put yourself in place of those symbols—sym—"
    "If it were with anyone but Phillip that you talk like that I'd—I'd leave you."
    "Immense va-cuity," he said, closing his eyes again. "Dead hollowness. Hollowness, I say. With maybe in the ashes at the bottom a—"
    "Shut up."
    "A squirming, fatbellied cretin."
    It came to her that she must have drunk more than she realized, for the objects in the room seemed to take on a strange look of suffering. The butts of the cigarettes looked overmouthed and limp. The rug, almost brand new, seemed trampled and choked in design by the ashes. Even the last of the whiskey lay pale and quiet in the