The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

by Eudora Welty

  The photograph showed Emma as wearing lace panties, and opposite it a real pair of panties—faded red with no lace—was exhibited hung up by clothespins, vast and sagging, limp with dust and travel. In his childhood, Eugene recalled, there was a Thelma that he had paid his Sunday School collection money to see. Thelma was an optical illusion, a woman's head on top of a stepladder; and she had been golden-haired and young, and had smiled invitingly.

  Eugene all at once felt himself the host. Should he invite the Spaniard to take a look at Emma, inside? It gave him an appalling moment.

  But the Spaniard, cocking his head at Emma's full-sailed manifestation, simply pointed to his own breadth and opened his eyes on Eugene with one warm, brimming question of his own.

  It was midday. The street beggars knew it, they sat light-drenched, the blind accordion player with his eyes wide open and his lips formed in a kiss.

  "Come on. I'm inviting you, all right. We'll eat," Eugene said, and tipping his finger to his companion's elbow turned him right around.

  IV

  Eugene thought—as if in the nick of time—that only a good restaurant would do. Besides, though the cafeteria was economical and healthy, just now it had begun to be infested by those wiry, but unlucky, old men forever reading racing forms as they drank coffee; one particularly, in a belligerent pea-green sweater with yellow bands, seemed to change the whole tone of the place simply by always occupying the table anybody else would want. With a suitable indication of where they were going, perhaps, in his smile, Eugene pulled open the door to a restaurant in Maiden Lane.

  The Spaniard, with the merest lift of his black brows, walked in shaking the floor around him and proceeded up the staircase, shaking it, to the little upper dining room, where Eugene, as a matter of fact, had never been in his life.

  This Spaniard everywhere seemed to be too much at home. He placed his hat, a big floppy black one, carefully on the radiator in the upper hall, not only as if he was perfectly aware without testing it that there was no heat in the pipes, but also as if the radiator existed not to heat others but to hold his hat.

  The head waiter couldn't have seated them more showily. They were given a table by the curtained window; its own lamp was instantly flicked on. Huge menus were set up like tents on a camp field between them.

  To Eugene the room was somehow old-fashioned and boxy, like a scene in some old silent movie. The gesturing people, who seemed actually to be turning artificial smiles upon them, were enclosed by walls papered in an intrusive design of balls and bubbles, lights behind poppy shades. Filipinos wearing their boys' belts ran around in a constant, silent double-time looking like twins-on-twins themselves, clearing tables, laying cloths, smiling.

  The guitar player, with something like a false expression of grief on his face, meditated upon what he would, or would not, eat. With his finger he caressed the air; he decided; and it was probably in French that he responded (like a worshiper in the Catholic Church) to the waiter.

  When the food was brought, and then still brought, Eugene sat up straight, still pleased but shocked to some extent at all the Spanish guest had commanded. Was he so great? How great was he, how great did he think he was? How well did he think he played the guitar? These things, in fact, made real mysteries.

  Eugene, who got veal, began to count up mentally the money in his billfold, only to lose track, start over, and get lost again. He chewed steadily on his veal in another wonder where he lost himself still further.

  Last night, he had not been able to keep from wondering at moments all through the music: what would the artist be doing if he weren't performing? After the songs were finished, then would he be alone, for instance? Those things were not such idle questions.... The fact was, Eugene thought now, he had had speculations about a man on the stage exactly as if he had known he would meet him in closer fashion afterward. As if he had known that by morning he himself would have struck his wife that blow and found out something new, something entirely different about life.

  Eugene had been easily satisfied of one thing—the formidable artist was free. There was no one he loved, to tell him anything,.to lay down the law.

  The Spaniard tossed a clam shell out of his plate and Eugene at once bent expectantly toward him. He was glad to feel himself in the role of companion and advisor to the artist—just as he had felt, in that prophetic way, his only audience last night. Now he would undertake to put forward an idea or two—suggest something they might do together.

  Eugene lifted one hand, vaguely caressing the air in front of the Spaniard. He tried to bring up a woman before him. Perhaps the Spaniard could produce a beautiful mistress he had somewhere, one he enjoyed and always went straight to, while in San Francisco: the strangely marked Negress, wouldn't she exactly do? And Eugene envisioned some silent (and this time, foreign) movie with that never spoken-in-love word, "enjoy," dancing for an instant upon the bouquet of flowers he'd be taking her. His own hand held an invisible bouquet, but the Spaniard looked right through it.

  Eugene sank his cheek on his hand and looked across at his guest, who was good-humoredly spitting out a bone. It was more probable that the artist remained alone at night, aware of being too hard to please—and practicing on his guitar.

  Yet these moments seemed so precious!

  Why waste them? Why not visit a gambling house? A game of chance would be very interesting. With those red-nailed fingers (only—and Eugene's hope fell—they were not red now) the Spaniard would be able to place their chips on lucky numbers, and with his sharp and shaming ear listen to the delicate, cheating click of the ball in the wheel. Eugene usually only pressed his lips together—to part them—at the idea of such places, but with the Spaniard along—! For them, as for young, unattached, dashing boys, or renegade old men far gone, the roulette wheel all evening in some smoke-filled but ascetic room ... how would it be?

  Suppose he, Eugene, found himself in San Francisco for only a day and a night, say, and not for the rest of his life? Suppose he was still in the process of leaving Mississippi—not stopped here, but simply an artist, touring through. Or, if he chanced not to play the guitar or something, simply out looking: not for anyone in particular; on the track, say, of his old man? (God forbid he'd find him! Old Papa King MacLain was an old goat, a black name he had.)

  From right here, himself stopped in San Francisco, Eugene could have told the artist something. This city ... often it looked open and free, down through its long-sighted streets, all in the bright, washing light. But hill and hill, cloud and cloud, all shimmering one back of the other like purities or transparencies of clear idleness and blue smoke, lifting and going down like the fire-sirens that forever curved through the place, and traveling water-bright one upon the other—they were any man's walls still.

  And at the same time it would be terrifying if walls, even the walls of Emma's and his room, the walls of whatever room it was that closed a person in in the evening, would go soft as curtains and begin to tremble. If like the curtains of the aurora borealis the walls of rooms would give even the illusion of lifting—if they would threaten to go up. That would be repeating the Fire—of course. That could happen any time to San Francisco. It was a special threat out here. But the thing he thought of wasn't really physical....

  Eugene slowly buttered the last crust of bread. There was nothing to change his mind about the Spaniard—to make him think that this sedate man, installed on the lighted stage with his foot on a rest the way he liked to present himself, hadn't a secret practice of going out to a dark and shady place on his own, and wouldn't seek out as a further preoccupation in his life some stranger's disgrace or necessity, some marked, designated house. For it was natural to suppose, supposed Eugene, that the solidest of artists were chameleons.

  What mightn't this Spaniard be capable of?

  Eugene felt untoward visions churning, the Spaniard with his great knees bent and his black slippers turning as if on a wheel's rim, dancing in a red smoky place with a lead-he
avy alligator. The Spaniard turning his back, with his voluminous coat-tails sailing, and his feet off the ground, floating bird-like up into the pin-point distance. The Spaniard with his finger on the page of a book, looking over his shoulder, as did the framed Sibyl on the wall in his father's study—no! then, it was old Miss Eckhart's "studio"—where he was muscular, but in a storylike way womanly. And the Spaniard with horns on his head—waiting—or advancing! And always the one, dark face, though momently fire from his nostrils brimmed over, with that veritable waste of life!

  Eugene, unaccustomed to visions of people as they were not, as unaccustomed as he was to the presence of the Spaniard as he was, choked abruptly on his crust. He had even forgotten all about old Miss Eckhart in Mississippi, and the lessons he and not Ran had had on her piano, though perhaps it was natural that he should remember her now, within the aura of music. Experimentally he let down one by one the touchy, nimble fingers of his left hand on the table, then little finger and thumb seesawed. The Spaniard as if through a curtain still seemed about to breathe fire. Across the table his incessant cigarette smoke came out of his nostrils in a double spout. It was this that was smelling so sweet.... Eugene seemed to hear the extending cadence of "The Stubborn Rocking Horse," a piece of his he always liked, and could play very well. He saw the window and the yard, with the very tree. The thousands of mimosa flowers, little puffs, blue at the base like flames, seemed not to hold quite steady in this heat and light. His "Stubborn Rocking Horse" was transformed into drops of light, plopping one, two, three, four, through sky and trees to earth, to lie there in the pattern opposite to the shade of the tree. He could feel his forehead bead with drops and the pleasure run like dripping juice through each plodding finger, at such an hour, on such a day, in such a place. Mississippi. A humming bird, like a little fish, a little green fish in the hot air, had hung for a moment before his gaze, then jerked, vanishing, away.

  He held his glass again to the Filipino's pitcher. Eugene saw himself for a moment as the kneeling Man in the Wilderness in the engraving in his father's remnant geography book, who hacked once at the Traveler's Tree, opened his mouth, and the water came pouring in. What did Eugene MacLain really care about the life of an artist, or a foreigner, or a wanderer, all the same thing—to have it all brought upon him now? That engraving itself, he had once believed, represented his father, King MacLain, in the flesh, the one who had never seen him or wanted to see him.

  A Filipino dropped a dish which broke to pieces on the floor and sent the food spilling. Eugene felt his face growing pointed with derogatory, yet pitying, truly pitying sounds. He was laughing at the Filipino; and all the time, out of the whole room, perhaps, only he knew how excruciating this small mishap probably was.

  But he had got his money mentally counted up. He found he could pay for this affair, almost exactly, with a few pennies left over. It made the awe of the thing settle a little and go down.

  The Spaniard had attracted some attention from the room, spitting out the bones of his special dish, breaking the bread and clamping it in his teeth with the sound of firecrackers. His black eyes were amiably following a little fly now. Dishes, hats, ladies' noses, curtains at the window, were his little fly's lighting places, his little choices. The Spaniard seemed to be playing the mildest little game with himself.

  This was what he was like when he was not playing the guitar. Yet—he was not so bad. When the waiter came with the bill, Eugene paid for the extravagance quite eagerly. The sight, the memory now, of the aloof and ravenous face opposite his, dark in the pearly window light, and the sorrowful mouth devouring the very best food until all had disappeared except for a pile of bones and a frill of paper—this filled him with a glow that began to increase while they smilingly nodded and rose. Like a peacock's tail the papered wall seemed lazily to extend now from the table at which they had sat. As they walked among the tables to leave, the Spaniard reaching out and gently taking a number of match packets, in a breeze of succession the women in their large hats leaned toward one another, the flowery brims touching, and murmured some name, and glanced. Eugene looked back at them and frowned in a deaf, possessive fashion.

  They came out into the flat light of day and the noise, like a deception or a concealment of rage, of the ordinary afternoon stir. As they paused on the walk, a streetcar not far away roared down a crowded street. With the air of a fool or a traitor, so the crowd felt all together—there was a feeling like a concussion in the air—a dumpy little woman tripped forward on high heels in the street, swung her purse like a hatful of flowers, spilling everything, and sank in an outrageous-looking pink color in the streetcar's path. In a moment the streetcar struck her. She was pitched about, thrown ahead on the tracks, then let alone; she was not run over by the car, but she was dead. Eugene could tell that, as they all could, by the slow swinging walk of the pair of policemen who saw everything and now had to take charge. This pair saw no use in the world to hurry now.

  "Accident!" Eugene said—repeated, that is. His voice must have told the Spaniard that this should be of special interest to him. The big man stood planted, his lower lip jutted out under his cigarette, his eyes squinting. It was unquestionably a very horrible thing. Nobody hurried.

  "She's dead, I'm pretty sure," Eugene said, but determined to keep his single voice a cautious one. Other voices close by were speaking. The Spaniard was shaking his head.

  "Why don't the ambulance come?"

  "Look at the motorman. His fault."

  "She had gray hair."

  Shake of the head.

  "Somebody ought to pick up all those things and get them back in her purse."

  "Don't they cover them up?"

  "I wonder who she was."

  "Who will they know to tell?"

  Shake of the head.

  The Spaniard shook his head.

  "Let's go." Two girls spoke, turning. "I'm ready when you are."

  But an inner group, a hollow square of people, hid the victim. They flanked her, and not all the time, but at moments, looked down at her. They held their ranks closed, like valuable persons. They were going to have been there. The group, business men, lady shoppers and children, seemed to consider themselves gently floating like the passengers on a raft, a little way out. One youth, hand on hip, looked with deep, idle, inward gaze at a street-sparrow by his foot, and then, beside the sparrow's little foot was the dead woman's open purse.

  "Well—!"

  They went around the corner, the Spaniard still shaking his head at moments. At a glance he looked as if he thought the place couldn't be any good, really.

  Eugene led him to a big hotel. They entered the glitter and perfume of the lobby and through its entire maze before Eugene could discover the men's room, feeling the responsibility of the big black Spaniard like a parade he was leading.

  As they stood in their caves with the echoing partition between, Eugene's head nodded and rolled once or twice, rhythmically....

  Well, the music last night had not been what he had thought it would be. In prophesying that, Emma had known what she was talking about. It was not at all throbbing. It had not a great many chords, it was never loud. The Spaniard's songs were old—ancient, his program said; some of them were written for organs and for lutes; and yet, he, So-and-So, the guitarist, played them. Were the difficulties and challenges what he had sought for most? Vain old person. Yes, it is the guitar I am playing. Yes, I am a guitar player. What did you think I was?

  He was in as overwhelming a degree as if he announced it from the stage—in English—an extremely careful old person, an extremely careful artist.

  Eugene suddenly felt both impatient and offended with him. Not bothering to conceal his own absorption in what he was playing, the man took no notice or care that he pleased anyone else either.... No! And Eugene had not been carried away altogether by the Spaniard's music. Not by any means. Only when the man at last played very softly some unbearably rapid or subtle songs of his own country, so soft as to be
almost without sound, only a beating on the air like a fast wing—then was Eugene moved. Sometimes the sounds seemed shaken out, not struck, with the unearthly faint crash of a tambourine.

  In love songs as in the rest, the artist himself remained remote, as a conscientious black cloud from a summer day. He only loomed. He ended the recital with a formal bow—as though it had been taken for granted by then that passion was the thing he had in hand, love was his servant, and even despair was a little tamed animal trotting about in plain view. The bow had been consummate with grace, and when he lifted up, he was so big he looked very close to the eyes.

  When Eugene came out, the Spaniard was weighing himself. The arrow trembled, the Spaniard gently regarding it, filling himself with a sigh to make it shake. Eugene frowned at the figure. Only 240. He had supposed the Spaniard would weigh more than that—250 or 255.

  His guest looked at him as bright and fresh as a daisy. "Where shall we go now?" he meant, as plain as day.

  Eugene ushered him to the street. On the step was a band of sunlight soft and level as little Fan's hair when she would go flying before him. The men began walking, the Spaniard with spirit—was this exercise? The square shone, and the façade of a steep street like a great gray accordion spread over a knee seemed about to stutter into the air.

  V

  They walked city squares in the sun until some meditative mood between them bound them like consenting speech. At a corner two old fellows, twins, absurdly dressed alike in plaid jackets, the same size and together still, were helping each other onto the crowded step of a streetcar. Eugene and the Spaniard noticed them at the same moment and casting each other amused glances, they stepped up too, as the car began moving, and rode off on the step. It was like surf-boarding on waves. Behind them, the cow-catcher was a big basketful of children.