The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

by Eudora Welty

  A Negro, his fan of hair so coarse as to look grainy, immediately rammed his head between Eugene's and the Spaniard's. His pop-eyes watched. The streetcar climbed, rolled, and descended, rocking through warming and ever-crowding streets, and finally turned straight into the West. Eugene, with his head turned away from the Negro's, tried to close his ears against the cries of the children, and read the tattered street signs to himself as they passed.

  The conductor was a big fat Negro woman who yelled out all the street names with joy. "Divisadero! I say Divisadero!" At The Bug Used Records and Shoe Massage Parlor, and from the steep, fancy-fronted, engraved-looking houses with all the paint worn away—like the solitary houses over railroad cuts seen once—the conductor's friends hollered at her as they went by. Swinging out of the car she often called back. "Off at two A.M.!" "See you at the Cat!"

  The Negro head between Eugene and the Spaniard rolled its eyes. Once Eugene caught a glimpse of the Spaniard smiling as he traveled. Negroes would think he comprehended all their nigger-business—that he himself might be at the Cat at two. The basket of children swarmed over.

  Eugene managed to reach the bell. He got the Spaniard off the streetcar, actually having to pull him by the waist to extricate him backwards.

  It was too much. They continued their direction on foot, still into the sun and still up into the last rim of hills.

  It was by rights a sleepy hour, for people who didn't have to work. The city was so ugly at close quarters and so beautiful down its long distances. The hills, hills after hills that they walked over, the increasing freshness of the air, the warmth of the nearer sun, all made Eugene feel as if he were falling asleep. Because the very silence between the men was—at last—replete and dreamlike, the hills were to Eugene increasingly like those stairs he climbed in dreams.

  The hills with their uniform, unseparated houses repeated over and over again his hill on Jones Street; the houses occurred over and over—all built on the same day, all one age. There was all one destiny. Suppose another Fire were to rack San Francisco and topple it and he, Eugene MacLain out of Mississippi, had to put it all back together again. His eyes half closed upon the mountains of houses not wall-like, as houses were in other places, but swollen like bee-hives, and one hive succeeding another, mounting into tremendous steps of stairs—and alive inside, inwardly contriving. How could he put a watch back together?

  Here came the old woman down the hill—there was always one. In tippets and tapping their canes they slowly came down to meet you. Sometimes it seemed to Eugene that all the women in San Francisco were walking those hills all their lives, with canes before they knew it, and when they got old, instead of dying they used two canes, or crutches. Emma's feet were dainty, but the round flesh came all the way down her legs like pantalettes. She said it had only been there since the birth of the child: she blamed little Fan with it. Out of the middle of her grief she could rise and put her unanswerable pink finger on Woman's Sacrifice.

  "Your little girl," Eugene remarked aloud, "said, 'Mama, my throat hurts me,' and she was dead in three days. You expected her mother would watch a fever, while you were at the office, not go talk to Mrs. Herring. But you never spoke of it, did you. Never did."

  Each rounded house contained a stair. Every form had its spiral or its tendril, outward or concealed. Outside were fire-escapes. He gazed up at the intricacies of those things; sea gulls were sitting at their heads. How could he make a fire-escape if he were required to? The laddered, tricky fire-escapes, the mesh of unguarded traffic, coiling springs, women's lace, the nests in their purses—he thought how the making and doing of daily life mazed a man about, eyes, legs, ladders, feet, fingers, like a vine. It twined a man in, the very doing and dying and daring of the world, the citified world. He could not set about making a fire-escape to his flat in Jones Street, given all the parts and the whole day off and the right instruments, if Mr. Bertsinger and Emma too told him to go ahead, and that his life depended on it. Should he be ashamed?

  "Open the door, Richard. Ouvrez la fenêtre, Paul ou Jacques," the demoniac voice of the comedian sang on the record, and Eugene waited to hear it again. He remembered away back: there was an old Negro and everybody in Morgana knew when he was in trouble at home; he walked into the store and asked them to play him a record—"Rocks in My Bed Number Two," by Blind Boy Fuller. Through a basement window he saw an upright piano and a big colored woman plying the keys. She looked like a long way from home. He could not hear her, and realized that there was much noise outside here, in the streets.

  "I don't get the sun in my eyes," said a little boy, looking up at Eugene, who was holding one hand slanted before his face.

  "You don't, sonnie?" said Eugene gently. With one hand he took away the other, as if the little boy had asked him to stop using it. The boy gave him a sweet, cocksure smile, which jumped with many suns in Eugene's vision.

  They were on a numbered avenue not far, now, from the ocean. Seasoned with light like old invalids the young bungalows looked into the West. The Spaniard rather unexpectedly lunged forward, swung his big body around, and gazed for himself at the world behind and below where they had come. He tenderly swept an arm. The whole arena was alight with a fairness and blueness at this hour of afternoon; all the gray was blue and the white was blue—the laid-out city looked soft, brushed over with some sky-feather. Then he dropped his hand, as though the city might retire; and lifted it again, as though to bring it back for a second time. He was really wonderful, with his arm raised.

  They walked on, until the sky ahead was brilliant enough to keep the eyes dazzled. On the next hill two nuns in a sea of wind looked destructible as smokestacks on a flaming roof.

  "Chances are"—Eugene had begun speaking again—"you didn't know you had it in you—to strike a woman. Did you?"

  The Spaniard threw him a dark glance. But it was as if Eugene had said, "You are a guitar player" or "This is Presidio Avenue." Calmly he set his steps over a sprawled old winehead sleeping up here far away from his kind. Quite unheeding of legs overhead, the sleeper was stretched out of a little garden with his head in the anemones and the gray beard shining like spittle on his face.

  "You wouldn't mind finding yourself like that," Eugene said, walking in the Spaniard's exact steps over the fallen legs.

  And Eugene felt all at once an emotion that visited him inexplicably at times—the overwhelming, secret tenderness toward his twin, Ran MacLain, whom he had not seen for half his life, that he might have felt toward a lover. Was all well with Ran? How little we know! For considering that he might have done some reprehensible thing, then he would need the gravest and tenderest handling. Eugene's eyes nearly closed and he half fainted upon the body of the city, the old veins, the mottled skin of pavement. Perhaps the soft grass in which little daisies opened would hold his temples and put its eyes to his. He heard the murmuring slit of the cable track.

  The Spaniard was holding him by the arm. His large face overhead flowed over with commiseration and pleasure. As if he were saying, "Why, of course. This is what we came for!" Eugene was half-lifted across the street. Then the Spaniard, still with a look of interest, made a gesture of examining him, patted him and straightened him up, gave him a little finishing shake, a cuff.

  And rain fell on them. In the air a fine, caressing "precipitation" was shining. An open-eyed baby in his cart extended his little hands and held his thumbs and forefingers tight-shut: a hold on the bright mist. On the hill a cable car slid to a perch on the crest and sat there, homelike as a lawn swing, gay with girls' and boys' legs. Above, over cleared ground where a tree-cutting and excavation went on in the old graveyard—the Spanish tombs—two home-made kites in the sky jumped at each other and nodded like gossips. A sea wind blew the scent of alyssum from all the waste spaces. It waved the wispy white beard of an old Chinese gentleman who was running with the abandon of a school child for the car, which waited on him. This hilltop wind passed over Eugene with the refreshment that sometimes c
omes of a gentle sloughing off of a daydream or desire which takes even its memory with it. He looked up at his Spaniard and drew an expansive breath, like a demonstration. The Spaniard drew a breath also, perhaps not really a sympathetic one, but he seemed to increase in size. Eugene watched his great fatherly barrel of chest move, and had a momentary glimpse of his suspenders, which were pink trimmed in silver with little bearded animal faces on the buckles.

  His face with its expression that might be solicitude still—and at the same time, meditation, amusement, sleepiness, or implacability when the whole was seen at such close quarters with the black circles, the shell rims, around the eyes—was directed for a round moment on Eugene. Then his head swung and with the long black hair bobbing behind, nodded a fraction at something. It struck Eugene that he looked like that Doctor Caligari in the old silent movie days, ringing his bell on the sideshow platform.

  For he had nodded up at the undestroyed part of the embankment, where some of the old graves, still to be ransacked by the shovels, stood here and there under the olive trees. In the foreground was a cat. In the deep grass she held a motionless and time-honored pose.

  Her head was three-quarters turned toward them where they stood. It seemed to have womanly eyebrows. Her gaze came out of her face with the whole of animal comprehension; whether it was menace or alarm in the full-open eyes, her face made a burning-glass of looking. Her eyes seemed after so long a time to be holding her herself in their power. She crouched rigid with the devotion and intensity of her vision, and if she had caught fire there, still she could not, Eugene felt, have stirred out of the seizure. She would have been consumed twice over before she disregarded either what she was looking at or her own frenzy.

  On the untidy embankment something else—the object of the gaze—presently showed itself by a motion in the grass. As if the sight pricked him to move, Eugene darted for a heavy pine twig with cones and threw it at the cat; it struck her side. She seemed not to feel it, since she did not waver.

  He exclaimed. And all the while the Spaniard was standing there in a relaxed posture looking on—he might have been over in Paris, looking at the Seine! And yet that detachment, Eugene was not unaware, and it gave him some bitterness, had been the outer semblance of what passion in his music last night! Eugene watched stubbornly, and even felt his excitement grow as the whirring of a wing or the pulsing of a tongue, whatever it was, came at less frequent intervals. It was still too rapid for the eye to tell what made it. Which was happening: was the whirring spending itself out, or was the lure, on its side, becoming an old thing, taken for granted? This had a beginning and end.

  "What's in the grass, a bird or a snake? What do you bet?" Eugene said softly.

  But the Spaniard stood patiently planted there, while the terrible gaze ran fast as a humming wire between the cat and the other creature. Didn't it matter which poor, avid life took the gaze and which gave it? The cat's eyes big as watches shone fearlessly. Eugene thought all at once, It's all the same—it's a bestial thing, all of it, I don't care to know, thank you.

  But he waited. The next minute he threw a stone, this time in the direction of the trembling in the grass. And of course it was just a cat. It was just the other cat.

  The Spaniard, when Eugene looked to him, was simply making a face over the lighting of another cigarette. The muscles of his face grouped themselves in hideous luxuriousness, rippled once, then all cleared. His lips were grape-colored, and the smoke smelled sweet.

  "Come on," Eugene said to him, and took his arm and pulled. "Come on, you Dago."

  VI

  They had come down at the end to the beach: great emptiness. At first it seemed no one was there, so late on this uncertain day. Then crossing the middle distance toward the sea appeared a student with his pants rolled up, reading as he walked, and a man, who looked like a hermit, rather gracefully shouldering wood. Farther away still in the pale expanse two middle-aged ladies in steadily threatened hats materialized; they looked at their watches: waiting for sunset. One battered, sand-colored auto was in sight; it had been left by the sea wall gate, one door open, a horse's bleached skull hanging on the face of the radiator. A little dog sat inside. Black smoke moved on the air, fading; the day's casual fires along the beach had gone out, and a ship was disclosed at sea. Some sea gulls perched on the roller-coaster humps, some stood short-necked and unmoving in front of the shuttered-down food stands, and the blackbirds like little ladies walked about at their feet, keeping busy.

  How could it have seemed so silent, because it was deserted? Just the way it had seemed deserted, at first, because the noise hadn't been taken in. There was actually a steady tinkling where the carousel went around, with no child riding, and there was the excited and unrelieved sound of laughter filling the midway. Eugene knew its source and pointed it out to the Spaniard, who swayed each way and smiled faintly. The shouting mechanical dummy of a woman, larger than life, dressed up and with a feather in her hat, stood beckoning on the upper gallery of the House of Mirth and producing her wound-up laughter. In every way she called for the attention; the motions of her head with its feather, and of her arms and hips, were as raucous and hilarious as the sound that was played in her insides. The boom of the ocean seemed to be bearing that small sound, too, on its back, supporting this one extra little chip.

  Eugene walked down to the sands where the wind beat the laughter to pieces and the ripping sound of his own hat filled his ears. The Spaniard was already at the shore, facing the waves, and so immovably established that the esthetic ladies had withdrawn. Only a pair of lovers lay close by the wall—motionless also. His solid tracks in the sand were the only straight line on the beach, butting through wood gatherers', students', ladies', lovers', and all the vanished children's and dogs'. Eugene's now went around his, light and toeing out. Sea onions littered the beach; what night had the storm been? Now and then the crashing reach of water came to the European points of the other man's shoes, advancing at the last instant with pure little tongues, that minutely kissed and withdrew.

  Eugene gently pulled the Spaniard's arm, and pointed up the beach to the cliffs there. "Land's End!" he shouted, while the waves' sound drowned him out. He pulled gently.

  The Spaniard looked affirmative, but first disengaged himself and made water toward the sea, throwing up a rampart, a regular castle, in the sand.

  So they turned and their walk could still go on along shore, past the black pits of fires and the ubiquitous, ugly, naked sea onions, until they reached rocks; then it led up to the overlooking wall. A little boy up there on a velocipede with his yellow hair blown in points came riding dreamily between the men, even he with a tied-on sea onion tail dragging six feet behind him. The Spaniard soberly bent over and gave the tail a carefree, lariatlike swing. The little boy looked back, eyes and mouth all round, and the next instant screamed with delighted outrage, as if he saw himself mocked. Beyond the car barn was a black scraggly wood, and then there was something of a road that followed along the cliff interminably, or once there had been.

  For there had been an occasion when Eugene and Emma had come this far, and picnicked here. They had drunk several bottles of red wine and gone to sleep in the hot sun on the rocks, lying on their backs, knees up, heads tipped together. Emma's fair skin had turned pink as a rose. Where was little Fan then? That hadn't bothered them that day.

  The men walked and climbed along this road with the sea exploding straight under them at times—no beach now, only the brown rocks. From time to time another rock would move a little, or there would be a little rain of pebbly sound somewhere. Occasional paths wandered off down the sharp slopes through grass or over the bare rock to the boulders at the water's edge. The little bushes whipped, and the Spaniard's black coat leaped and danced. Eugene felt the Pacific wind like a fortification, he could storm it or lean onto it, just the same; it could stop his breath and keep him from falling too.

  It blew the sea gulls back. A flock of them, collected points of light
halfway up the sky, made a turn all at one time, and showed the facets of their flight clear as a diamond. Eugene sucked in the air—now it was rapture. He watched the birds fly out, blow back.

  "Will you go in front, or behind?" he asked, but the Spaniard was already going in front.

  "You know what you did," Eugene said. "You assaulted your wife. Do you say you didn't know you had it in you?"

  The Spaniard up ahead made his way forward without turning around. By now the path had grown wild and narrow; it made slow going, or rather, the Spaniard's leisurely gaining of the cliff set the pace, not Eugene's backslidings and precarious scramblings.

  All the while, as if they were borne independently of legs of any kind beneath, the heads of the two men kept turning calmly outward, eyes traveling over the view. But as if to mock that too, once the Spaniard's hands met on top of his head to clamp his hat, his elbows bent outward. It was the lumpy pose of a woman, a "nude reclining."

  The deepening sky was divided in half as it often was at this hour, by a kind of spinal cloud. Ahead, the north was clear and the south behind was thickened with white. Under the clear portion of sky the sea rushed in dark to greenness and blackness, the lips of the waves livid. ("Flounder, flounder in the sea," he heard his mother read.) Under the cloudy portion the sea burned silver and at moments entirely white, and the waves coming in held their form until the last minute and appeared still and limitless as snow. The beach and the city where they had walked were crossed with dust and mist, the scene flickered like the banners and flying sand of distant battle or a tumult in the past. Ahead, the extending rocks were unqualifiedly clear, hard, and azure.