by Eudora Welty
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.
But the young man's arm was thrust along the seat and she was sitting under its arch as if it were the entrance to a cave, which surely they all must see.
"Will you eat a biscuit now?" the young wife gently asked the man from Connemara. He took one wordlessly; for the moment he had n
o English or Irish. So she broke open another paper parcel beside her. "I have oceans," she said.
"Oh, you wait," said the lady in the raincoat, rising. And she opened a parcel as big as a barrel and it was full of everything to eat that anybody could come out of England with alive.
She offered candy, jam roll, biscuits, bananas, nuts, sections of bursting orange, and bread and butter, and they all in the flush of the hospitality and heat sat eating. Everybody partook but the Welshman, who had presumably had a dinner in Wales. It was more than ever like a little party, all the finer somehow, sadly enough, for the nose against the windowpane. They poured out tea from a couple of steaming thermoses; the black windows—for the sun was down now, never having been out of the fogs and rains all day—coated warmly over between them and what flew by out there.
"Could you tell me the name of a place to stay in Cork?" The American girl spoke up to the man from Connemara as he gave her a biscuit.
"In Cork? Ah, but you don't want to be stopping in Cork. Killarney is where you would do well to go, if you're wanting to see the wonders of Ireland. The lakes and the hills! Blue as blue skies, the lakes. That's where you want to go, Killarney."
"She wants to climb the Hill of Tara, you mean," said the guard, who with a burst of cold wind had entered to punch their tickets again. "All the way up, and into the raths, too, to lay her eyes by the light of candles on something she's never seen before; if that's what she's after. Have you never climbed the Hill and never crept into those, lady? Maybe 'twould take a little boost from behind, I don't know your size; but I think 'twould not be difficult getting you through." He gave her ticket its punch, with a keen blue glance at her, and banged out.
"Well, I'm going to the sitting in the dining car now." The lady in the raincoat stood up under the dim little lights in the ceiling that shone on her shoulders. Then down her long nose she suggested to them each to come, too. Did she really mean to eat still, and after all that largess? They laughed, as if to urge her by their shock to go on, and the American girl witlessly murmured, "No, I have a letter to write."
Off she went, that long coat shimmering and rattling. The little boy looked after her, the first sea wind blew in at the opened door, and his cowlick nodded like a dark flower.
"Very grand," said the Connemara man. "Very high and mighty she is, indeed."
Out there, nuns, swept by untoward blasts of wind, shrieked soundlessly as in nightmares in the corridors. It must be like the Tunnel of Love for them—the thought drifted into the young sweetheart's head.
She was so stiff! She struggled up, staggered a little as she left the compartment. All alone she stood in the corridor. A young man went past, soft fair mustache, soft fair hair, combing the hair—oh, delicious. Here came a hat like old Cromwell's on a lady, who had also a fur cape, a stick, flat turning-out shoes, and a heavy book with a pencil in it. The old lady beat her stick on the floor and made a sweet old man in gaiters and ribbon-tied hat back up into a doorway to let her by. All these people were going into the dining cars. She hung her head out the open corridor window into the Welsh night, which, seen from inside itself—her head in its mouth—could look not black but pale. Wales was formidable, barrier-like. What contours which she could not see were raised out there, dense and heraldic? Once there was a gleam from their lights on the walls of a tunnel, from the everlasting springs that the tunnelers had cut. Should they ever have started, those tunnelers? Sometimes there were sparks. She hung out into the wounded night a minute: let him wish her back.
"What do you do with yourself in England, keep busy?" said the man from Wales, pointing the stem of his pipe at the man from Connemara.
"I do, I raise birds in Sussex, if you're asking my hobby."
"A terrific din, I daresay. Birds keep you awake all night?"
"On the contrary. Never notice it for a minute. Of course there are the birds that engage in conversation rather than sing. I might be listening to the conversation."
"Parrots, you mean. You have parrots? You teach them to talk?"
"Budgies, man. Oh, I did have one that was a lovely talker, but curious, very strange and curious, in his habits of feeding."
"What was it he ate? How much would you ask for a bird like that?"
"Like what?"
"Parrot that could talk but didn't eat well, that you were just mentioning you had."
"That bird was an exception. Not for sale."
"Are you responsible for your birds?"
They all sat waiting while a tunnel banged.
"What do you mean responsible?"
"Responsible: you sell me a bird. Presently he doesn't talk or sing. Gin I bring it back?"
"You cannot. That's God-given, lads."
"How old is the bird now? Good health?"
"Owing to conditions in England I could not get him the specialties he liked, and came in one morning to find the bird stiff. Still it's a nice hobby. Very interesting."
"Would you have got five pounds for this bird if you had found a customer for her? What was it the bird craved so?"
"'Twas a male, not on the market, and if there had been another man, that would sell him to you, 'twould have cost you eight pounds."
"Ah. He ate inappropriate food?"
"You might say he could not get inappropriate food. He was destroyed by a mortal appetite for food you'd call it unlikely for a bird to desire at all. Myself, I never raised a bird that thrived so, learned faster, and had more to say."
"You never tried to sell him."
"For one thing I could not afford to turn him loose in Sussex. I told my wife not to be dusting his cage without due caution, not to be talking to him so much herself, the way she did."
The Welshman looked at him. He said, "Well, he died."
"Pass by my house!" cried the man from Connemara. "And look in the window, as you'll likely do, and you'll see the bird—stuffed. You'll think he's alive at first. Open beak! Talking up to the last, like you or I that have souls to be saved."
"Souls: Is the leading church in Ireland Catholic, would you call Ireland a Catholic country?" The Welshman settled himself anew.
"I would, yes."
"Is there a Catholic church where you live, in your town?"
"There is."
"And you go?"
"I do."
"Suppose you miss. If you miss going to church, does the priest fine you for it?"
"Of course he does not! Father Lavery! What do you mean?"
"Suppose it's Sunday—tomorrow's Sunday—and you don't go to church. Would you have to pay a fine to the priest?"
The man from Connemara lowered his dark head; he glared at the lovers—for she had returned to her place. "Of course I would not!" Still he looked at the girl.
"Ah, in the windows black as they are, we do look almost like ghosts riding by," she breathed, looking past him.
He said at once, "A castle I know, you see them on the wall."
"What castle?" said the sweetheart.
"You mean what ghosts. First she comes, then he comes."
"In Connemara?"
"Ah, you've never been there. Late tomorrow night I'll be there. She comes first because she's mad, and he slow—got the dagger stuck in him, you see? Destroyed by her. She walks along, carries herself grand, not shy. Then he comes, unwilling, not touching with his feet—pulled through the air. By the dagger, you might say, like a hooked fish. Because they're a pair, himself and herself, sure as they was joined together—and while you look go leaping in the bright air, moonlight as may be, and sailing off together cozy as a couple of kites to start it again."
That girl's straight hair, cut like a little train to a point at the nape of her neck, her little pointed nose that came down in the one unindented line which began at her hair, her swimming, imagining eyes, held them all, like her lover, perfectly still. Love was amazement now. The lovers did not touch, for a thousand reasons, but that was one.
"Start what again?" said the Welshman. "Have you per
sonally seen them?"
"I have, I'm no exception."
"Can you say who they might be?"
"Visit the neighborhood for yourself and there'll be those who can acquaint you with the gory details. Myself I'm acquainted with only the general idea of their character and disposition, formed after putting two and two together. Have you never seen a ghost, then?"
The Welshman gave a look as if he'd been unfairly struck, as if a question coming at him now in here was carrying things too far. But he only said, "Heard them."
"Ah, do keep it to yourself then, for the duration of the journey, and not go bragging, will you?" the young wife cried at him. "Irish ghosts are enough for some of us for the one night without mixing them up with the Welsh and them shrieking things, and just before all of us are going on the water except yourself."
"You don't mind the Lord and Lady Beagle now, do you? They shouldn't frighten you, they're lovely and married. Married still. Why, their names just come to me, did you hear that? Lord and Lady Beagle—like they sent in a card. Ha! Ha!" Again the man from Connemara tried to bring that singing laugh out of the frightened sweetheart, from whom he had not yet taken his glances away.
"Don't," the young wife begged him, forcing her eyes to his salver-like palm. "Those are wild, crazy names for ghosts."
"Well, what kind of ghosts do you think they ever are!" Their glances met through their laughter and remorse. She tossed her head.
"There ain't no ghosts," said Victor.
"Now suck this good orange," she whispered to him, as if he were being jealous.
"Here comes the bride," announced the Welshman.
"Oh my God." But what business was she of the Welshman's?
In came the lady in the raincoat beaming from her dinner, but he talked right around her hip. "Do you have to confess?" he said. "Regularly? Suppose you make a confession—swear words, lewd thoughts, or the like: then does the priest make you pay a fine?"