The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (83 page)

"Where you won't be able to buy drink for three miles out!" cried the new passenger. Up to now he had been simply drawing quick breaths. He had a neat, short, tender, slightly alarmed profile—dark, straight hair cut not ten minutes ago, a slight cut over the ear. But this still-bleeding customer, a Connemara man as he was now announcing himself, always did everything last-minute, because that was the way he was made.

There was a feel of the train's being about to leave. Then the guard was shouting.

The round man and the lady in the raincoat rose and moved in step to the door together, all four hands enjoined. She bent her head. Hers was a hat of drapes and shapes. There in the rainy light it showed a chaos of blue veil falling behind, and when it sadly turned, shining directly over the eyes was a gold pin in the shape of a pair of links, like those you are supposed to separate in amateur-magician sets. Her raincoat gave off a peppermint smell that might have been stored up for this moment.

"You won't need to get out of the carriage at all," he said. She put her head on one side. Their cheeks glittered as did their eyes. They embraced, parted; the man from Connemara watched him out the door. Then the pair clasped hands through the window. She might have been standing in a tower and he elevated to her level as far as possible by ladder or rope, in the rain.

There was a great rush of people. At the very last minute four of them stormed this compartment. A little boy flung in over his own bags, whistling wildly, paying no attention to being seen off, no attention to feet inside, consenting to let a young woman who had followed him in put a small bag of his in the rack and save him a seat. She was being pelted with thanks for this by young men and girls crowding at the door; she smiled calmly back at them; even in this she was showing pregnancy, as she showed it under her calm blue coat. A pair of lovers slid in last of all, like a shadow, and filled two seats by the corridor door, trapping into the middle the man from Connemara and somewhat crowding the American girl into her corner. They were just not twining, touching, just not angry, just not too late. Without the ghost of impatience or struggle, without shifting about once, they were settled in speechlessness—two profiles, his dark and cleared of temper, hers young, with straight cut hair.

"Four o'clock."

The lady in the raincoat made the announcement in a hollow tone; everybody in the compartment hushed as though almost taken by surprise. She and the wistful round man still clasped hands through the window and continued to shine in the face like lighthouses smiling. The outside doors were banged shut in a long retreat in both directions, and the train moved. Those outside appeared running beside the train, then waving handkerchiefs, the young men shouting questions and envious things, the girls—they were certainly all Irish, wildly pretty—wildly retreating, their hair whipped forward in long bright and dark pennants by the sucking of the train. The round little man was there one moment and, panting, vanished the next.

The lady, still standing, was all at once very noticeable. Her body might have solidified to the floor under that buttoned cover. (What she had on under her raincoat was her own business and remained so.) The next moment she put out her tongue, at everything just left behind.

"
Oh
my God!" The man from Connemara did explode; it sounded like relief.

Then they were underway fast; the lady, having seated herself, smoothed down the raincoat with rattles like the reckless slamming of bureau drawers, and took from her purse a box of Players. She extracted a cigarette already partly burned down, and requested a light. The lover was so quick he almost anticipated her. When the butt glowed, her hand dropped like a shot bird from the flame he rather blindly stuck out. Between draws she held her cigarette below her knees and turned inward to her palm—her hand making a cauldron into which the little boy stared.

The American girl opened a book, but closed it. Every time the lady in the raincoat walked out over their feet—she immediately, after her cigarette, made several excursions—she would fling them a look. It was like "Don't say a word, start anything, fall into each other's arms, read, or fight, until I get back to you." She might both inspire and tantalize them with her glare. And she was so unpretty she ought to be funny, like somebody on the stage; perhaps she would be funny later.

The little boy whistled "
Funiculi, Funicula
" in notes almost too high for the ear to hear. On the windows it poured, poured rain. The black of London swam like a cinder in the eye and did not go away. The young wife, leaning back and letting her eyes fall a little while on the child, gave him dim, languorous looks, not quite shaking her head at him. He stopped whistling, but at the same time it could be felt how she was not his mother; her face showed degrees of maternity as other faces show degrees of love or anger; she was only acting his mother for the journey.

It was nice of her then to begin to sing "
Funiculi, Funicula,
" and the others joined, the little boy very seriously, as if he now hated the song. Then they sang something more Irish, about the sea and coming back. But the throb of the rails made the song oddly Spanish and hopelessly desirous; they were near the end of the car, where the beat was single and strong.

After the lady in the raincoat undid her top button and suggested "Wild Colonial Boy," her hatted head kept time, started to lead them—perhaps she kept a pub. The little boy, giving the ladies a meeting look, brought out a fiercely shining harmonica, as he would a pistol, and almost drowned them out. The American girl looked as if she did not know the words, but the lovers now sang, with faces strangely brave.

At some small, forgotten station a schoolgirl got on, took the vacant seat in this compartment, and opened a novel to
[>]
. They quieted. By the look of her it seemed they must be in Wales. They had scarcely got a word at the child before she began reading. She sat by the young wife; especially from her, the school hat hid the bent head like a candle snuffer; of her features only the little mouth, slightly open and working, stayed visible. Even her upper lip was darkly freckled, even the finger that lifted and turned the page.

The little boy sped his breath up the harmonica scale; the young wife said "Victor!" and they all felt sorry for him and had his name.

"Air," she suddenly said, as if she felt their look. The man from Connemara hurled himself at the window and slid the pane, then at the corridor door, and opened it wide onto a woman passing with an eight-or nine-months-old baby. It was a red-haired boy with queenly jowls, squinting in at the world as if to say, "Will what has just been said be very kindly repeated?"

"Oh, isn't he
beautiful!
" the young wife cried reproachfully through the door. She would have put out her hands.

There was no response. On they went.

"An English nurse traveling with an Irish child, look at that, he's so grand, and such style, that dress, that petticoat, do you think she's kidnaped the lad?" suggested the lady in the raincoat, puffing.

"
Oh
my God," said the man from Connemara.

For a moment the schoolgirl made the only sounds—catching her breath and sobbing over her book.

"Kidnaping's farfetched," said the man from Connemara. "Maybe the woman's deaf and dumb."

"I couldn't sleep this night thinking such wickedness was traveling on the train and on the boat with me." The young wife's skin flooded to her temples.

"It's not
your
fault."

The schoolgirl bent lower still and, still reading, opened a canvas satchel at her feet, in which—all looked—were a thermos, a lunchbox under lock and key, a banana, and a Bible. She selected the banana by feel, and brought it up and ate it as she read.

"If it's kidnaping, it'll be in the Cork paper Sunday morning," said the lady in the raincoat with confidence. "Railway trains are great systems for goings on of all kinds. You'll never take me by surprise."

"But this is
our
train," said the young wife. "Women alone, sometimes exceptions, but often on the long journey alone or with children."

"There's evil where you'd least expect it," the man from Connemara said, somehow as if he didn't care for children. "There's one thing and another, so forth and so on, run your finger down the alphabet and see where it stops."

"I'll never see the Cork paper," replied the young wife. "But oh, I tell you I would rather do without air to breathe than see that poor baby pass again and put out his little arms to me."

"Ah, then. Shut the door," the man from Connemara said, and pointed it out to the lover, who after all sat nearer.

"Excuse me," the young man whispered to the girl, and shut the door at her knee and near where her small open hand rested.

"But why would she be kidnaping the baby
into
Ireland?" cried the young wife suddenly.

"Yes—you've been riding backwards: if we were going the other way, 'twould be a different story." And the lady in the raincoat looked at her wisely.

The train was grinding to a stop at a large station in Wales. The schoolgirl, after one paralyzed moment, rose and got off through the corridor in a dream; the book she closed was seen to be
Black Stallion of the Downs.
A big tall man climbed on and took her place. It was this station, it was felt, where they actually ceased leaving a place and from now on were arriving at one.

The tall Welshman drove into the compartment through any remarks that were going on and with great strength like a curse heaved his bag on top of several of theirs in the rack, where it had been thought there was no more room, and took the one seat without question. With serious sets of his shoulders he settled down in the middle of them, between Victor and the lady in the raincoat, facing the man from Connemara. His hair was in two corner bushes, and he had a full eye—like that of the horse in the storm in old chromos in the West of America—the kind of eye supposed to attract lightning. In the silence of the dreary stop, he slapped all his pockets—not having forgotten anything, only making sure. His hands were powdered over with something fairly black.

"Well! How far do
you
go?" he put to the man from Connemara and then to them in turn, and each time the answer came, "Ireland." He seemed unduly astonished.

He lighted a pipe, and pointed it toward the little boy. "What have you been doing in England, eh?"

Victor writhed forward and set his teeth into the strap of the outer door.

"He's been to a wedding," said the young wife, as though she and Victor were saying the same thing in two different ways, and smiled on him fully for the first time.

"Who got married?"

"Me brother," Victor said in a strangled voice, still holding on recklessly while the train, starting with a jerk, rocked him to the side.

"Big wedding?"

Two greyhounds in plaid blankets, like dangerously ecstatic old ladies hoping no one would see them, rushed into, out of, then past the corridor door which the incoming Welshman had failed to shut behind him. The glare in the eye of the man who followed, with his belt flying about him as he pulled back on the dogs, was wild, too.

"Big wedding?"

"Me family was all over the place if that's what you mean." Victor wildly chewed; there was a smell of leather.

"Ah, it has driven his poor mother to her bed, it was that grand a wedding," said the young wife. "That's why she's in England, and Victor here on his own."

"You must have missed school. What school do you go to—you
go
to school?" By the power of his eye, the Welshman got Victor to let go the strap and answer yes or no.

"School, yes."

"You study French and so on?"

"Ah, them languages is no good. What good is Irish?" said Victor passionately, and somebody said, "Now what does your mother tell you?"

"What ails your mother?" said the Welshman.

"Ah, it's her old trouble. Ask
her.
But there's two of me brothers at one end and five at the other."

"You're divided."

The young wife let Victor stand on the seat and haul her paper parcel off the rack so she could give him an orange. She drew out as well a piece of needlepoint, square and tarnished, which she spread over her pretty arm and hung before their eyes.

"Beautiful!"

"'A Wee Cottage' is the name it has."

"I see the cottage. 'Tis very wee, and so's every bit about it."

"'Twould blind you: 'tis a work of art."

"The little rabbit peeping out!"

"Makes you wish you had your gun," said the Welshman to Victor.

The young wife said, "Me grandmother. At eighty she died, very sudden, on a visit to England. God rest her soul. Now I'm bringing this masterpiece home to Ireland."

"Who could blame you."

"Well you should bring it away, all those little stitches she put in."

She wrapped it away, just as anyone could see her—as she might for the moment see herself—folding a blanket down into the crib and tucking the ends. Victor, now stained and fragrant with orange, leapt like a tiger to pop the parcel back overhead.

"No, I shouldn't think learning Irish would do you much good," said the Welshman. "No real language."

"Why not?" said the lady in the raincoat instantly. "I've a brother who is a very fluent Irish speaker and a popular man. You cannot doubt yourself that when the English hear you speaking a tongue they cannot follow, in the course of time they are due to start holding respect for you."

"From London you are." The Welshman bit down on his pipe and smoked.

"
Oh
my God." The man from Connemara struck his head. "I have an English wife. How would she like that, I wouldn't like to know? If all at once I begun on her in Irish! How would you like it if your husband would only speak to you in Irish? Or Welsh, my God?" He searched the eyes of all the women, and last of the young Irish sweetheart—who did not seem to grasp the question. "Aha ha ha!" he cried urgently and despairingly at her, asking her only to laugh with him.