man can get into by talking too much, Quietly? Among men, the less you say, the better. Human beings have, among their other diseases, a crazy desire to explain things, each in his own way. If a man knows little about you, he will fill in the details to suit himself. If you tell him all the details, the chances are that he will not believe you. Let him, and all his brethren, draw his own conclusions about you, and neither confirm nor deny anything. Then he may compliment himself on his insight, and you may be assured of your privacy. The most fortunate humans are those who, by preoccupation or through illness, find themselves deaf and dumb.”
All language has its labeling nuances, its idiom, its little signposts of accent and emphasis. Quietly knew that her progress among people would be faster if she could start at the level of her first associates. If to say little was good, to say nothing would be even better. So, in answer to Clara’s questions, she simply smiled.
“What’s the matter; can’t you talk?”
Quietly shook her head.
“You can hear me all right, though.”
Quietly nodded.
Clara left her standing there and went to the group around Beatrice. There was a rapid and exclamatory conference and some pointing and gaping.
The Music
H OSPITAL …
They wouldn’t let me go, even when the clatter of dishes and the meaningless talk and complaining annoyed me. They knew it annoyed me; they must have. Starch and boredom and the flat-white dead smell. They knew it. They knew I hated it, so every night was the same.
I could go out. Not really; not all the way out, to the places where people were not dressed in gray robes and long itchy flannel. But I could go outside where I could see the sky and smell the river smell and smoke a cigarette. If I closed the door tight and moved all the way over to the rail, and watched and smelled very carefully, sometimes I could forget the things inside the building and those inside me, too.
I liked the night. I lit my cigarette and I looked at the sky. Clotted, it was, and clean between clouds. The air was cold and warmed me, and down on the river a long golden ribbon was tied to a light on the other side, and lay across the water. My music came to me again, faintly, tuning up. I was very proud of my music because it was mine. It was a thing that belonged to me, and not to the hospital like the itchy flannel and the gray robe. The hospital had old red buildings and fences and a great many nurses who knew briskly of bedpans, but it had no music about it, anywhere, anywhere.
A light mist lay just above the ground because there were garbage cans in a battered row, and the mist was very clean and would not go among them. Entrance music played gently for the cat.
It was a black and white mangy cat. It padded out of the shadow into the clearing before the cans and stood with its head on one side, waving its tail. It was lean and moved like a beautiful thing.
Then there was the rat, the fat little brown bundle with its longworm of a tail. The rat glided out from between the cans, froze, and dropped on its belly. The music fell in pitch to meet the rise in volume, and the cat tensed. There was a pain about me somewhere and I realized distantly that my fingernails were biting into my tongue.
My
rat,
my
cat,
my
music. The cat sprang, and the rat drew first blood and squealed and died out there in the open where it could see its own blood. The cat licked its wound and yowled and tore at the quivering thing. There was blood on the rat and on the cat and on my tongue.
I turned away, shaken and exultant, as the music repeated its death-motif in echo. She was coming out of the building. Inside she was Miss Starchy but now she was a brown bundle—a little fat brown bundle. I was lean and moved like a beautiful thing … she smiled at me and turned to the steps. I was very happy and I moved along beside her, looking down at her soft throat. We went out into the mist together. In