by Eudora Welty
"Confession's free, why not?" remarked the lady, stepping over all their feet.
"You're a Catholic, too?" he said, as she hung above his knee.
And as they all closed their eyes she fell into his lap, right down on top of him. Even the dogs, now rushing along in the other direction, hung on the air a moment, their tongues out. Then one dog was inside with them. This greyhound flung herself forward, back, down to the floor, her tail slapped out like a dragon's. Her eyes gazed toward the confusion, and little bubbles of boredom and suspicion played under the skin of her jowls, puff, puff, puff, while wrinkles of various memories and agitations came and went on her forehead like little forks of lightning.
"Well, look what's with us," said the lover. "Here, lad, here, lad."
"That's Telephone Girl," said the lady in the raincoat, now on her feet and straightening herself with distant sweepings of both hands. "I was just in conversation with the keeper of those. Don't be getting her stirred up. She's a winner, he has it." She let herself down into the seat and spread a look on all of them as if she had always been too womanly for the place. Her mooning face turned slowly and met the Welshman's stern, strong glance: he appeared to be expecting some apology from some source.
"'Tisn't everybody runs so fast and gets nothing for it in the end herself, either," said the lady. Telephone Girl shuddered, ate some crumbs, coughed.
"I'm ashamed to hear you saying that, she gets the glory," said the man from Connemara. "How many human beings of your acquaintance get half a dog's chance at glory?"
"You don't like dogs." The lady looked at him, bowing her head.
"They're not my element. That's not the way I'm made, no."
The man in charge rushed in, and out he and the dog shot together. Somebody closed the door; it was the Welshman.
"Now: what time of the night do you get to Cork?" he asked.
The lover spoke, unexpectedly. "Tomorrow morning." The girl let out a long breath after him.
"What time of the morning?"
"Nine!" shouted everybody but the American.
"Travel all night," he said.
"Book a berth in Fishguard!"
The mincing woman with the red-haired baby boy passed—the baby with his same fat, enchanted squint looked through the glass at them.
"Oh, I always get seasick!" cried the young wife in fatalistic enthusiastic tones, only distantly watching the baby, who, although he stretched his little hand against the glass, was not being kidnaped now. She leaned over to tell the young girl, "Let me only step off the train at Fishguard and I'm dying already."
"What do you usually do for an attack of seasickness when you're on the Cork boat?"
"I just stay in one place and never move, that's what I do!" she cried, the smile that had never left her sad, sweet lips turned upon them all. "I don't try to move at all and I die all the way." Victor edged a little away from her.
"The boat rocks," suggested the Welshman. Victor edged away from him.
"The Innisfallen? Of course she rocks, there's a far, wide sea, very deep and treacherous, and very historic." The man from Connemara folded his arms.
"It takes six weeks, don't you think?" The young wife appealed to them all. "To get over the journey. I tell me husband, a fortnight is never enough. Me husband is English, though. I've never liked England. I have six aunts all living there, too. Me mother's sisters." She smiled. "They all are hating it. Me grandmother died while she was in England."
His cheeks sunk on his fists, Victor leaned forward over his knees. His hair, blue-black, whorled around the cowlick like a spinning gramophone record; he seemed to dream of being down on the ground, and fighting somebody on it.
"God rest her soul," said the lady in the raincoat, as if she might have passed through the goods car and seen where Grandmother was riding with them, to her grave in Ireland; but in that case the young wife would have been with the dead, and not playing at mother with Victor.
"Then how much does the passage cost you? Fishguard to Cork, Cork back to Fishguard? I may decide to try it on holiday sometime."
"Where are you leaving us this night?" asked the young wife, still in the voice in which she had spoken of her grandmother and her mother's sisters.
He gave out a name to make her look more commiserating, and repeated, "What is the fare from Fishguard to Cork?"
They stopped just then at a dark station and a paper boy's voice called his papers into the train.
"Oh my God. Where are we!"
The Welshman put up his finger and called for a paper, and one was brought inside to him by a strange, dark child.
At the sight of the man opening his newspaper, the lady in the raincoat spoke promptly and with her lips wooden, like an actress. "How did the race come out?"
"What's that? Race? What race would that be?" He gave her that look he gave her the time she sat down on him. He stretched and rattled his paper without exposing it too widely to anybody.
She tilted her head. "Little Boy Blue, yes," she murmured over his shoulder.
A discussion of Little Boy Blue arose while he kept on reading.
"How much money at a time do you bet on the races?" the Welshman asked suddenly, coming out from behind the paper. Then as suddenly he retreated, taking back the question entirely.
"Now the second race," murmured the lady in the raincoat. Everybody wreathed in the Welshman. He was in the middle of the Welsh news, silent as the dead.
The man from Connemara put up a hand as the page might have been turned, "Long Gone the favorite! You were long gone yourself," he added politely to the lady in the raincoat. Possibly she had been punished enough for going out to eat and coming in to fall down all over a man.
"Yes I was," she said, lifting her chin; she brought out a Player and lighted it herself. She puffed. "'Twas a long way, twelve cars. 'Twas a lovely dinner—chicken. One man rose up in the aisle when it was put before him and gave a cry, 'It's rabbit!'"
They were pleased. The man from Connemara gave his high, free laugh. The lovers were strung like bows in silent laughter, but the lady blew a ring of smoke, at which Victor aimed an imaginary weapon.
'A lovely, long dinner. A man left us but returned to the car to say that while we were eating they shifted the carriages about and he had gone up the train, down the train, and could not find himself at all." Her voice was so moody and remote now it might be some wandering of long ago she spoke to them about.
The Welshman said, over his paper, "Shifted the carriages?"
All laughed the harder.
"He said his carriage was gone, yes. From where he had left it: he hoped to find it yet, but I don't think he has. He came back the second time to the dining car and spoke about it. He laid his hand on the guard's arm. 'While I was sitting at the table and eating my dinner, the carriages have been shifted about,' he said. 'I wandered through the cars with the dogs running and cars with boxes in them, and through cars with human beings sitting in them I never laid eyes on in the journey—one party going on among some young people that would altogether block the traffic in the corridor.'"
"All Irish," said the young wife, and smoothed Victor's head; he looked big-eyed into space.
"The guard was busy and spoke to a third party, a gentleman eating. Yes, they were, all Irish. 'Will you mercifully take and show this gentleman where he is traveling, when you can, since he's lost?' 'Not lost,' he said, 'distracted,' and went through his system of argument. The gentleman said he could jolly well find his own carriage. The man opposite him rose up and that was when he declared the chicken was rabbit. The gentleman put down his knife and said man lost or not, carriage shifted or not, the stew rabbit or not, the man could just the same fight back to where he had come from, as he himself jolly well intended to do when he could finish the dinner on his plate in peace." She opened her purse, and passed licorice drops around.
"He sounds vulgar," said the man from Connemara.
"'Twas a lovely dinner."
"You weren't lost, I
take it?" said the Welshman, accepting a licorice drop. "Traveled much?"
"Oh dear Heaven, traveled? Well, I have. Yes, no end to it."
"Oh my God."
"No, I'm never lost."
"Let's drop the subject," said the Welshman.
The lovers settled back into the cushions. They were the one subject nobody was going to discuss.
"Look," the young girl said in a low voice, from within the square of the young man's arm, but not to him. "I see a face that keeps going past, looking through the window. A man, plying up and down, could he be the one so unfortunate?"
"Not him, he's leading greyhounds, didn't we see him come in?" The young man spoke eagerly, to them all. "Leading, or they leading him."
"'Tis a long train," the lady murmured to the Welshman. "The longest, most populated train leaving England, I would suppose, the one going over to catch the Innisfallen."
"Is that the name of the boat? You were glad to leave England?"
"It is and I was—pleased to be starting my journey, pleased to have it over." She gave a look at him—then at the others, the compartment, the tumbled baggage, everything. Outside, dim Wales clapped strongly at the window, like some accompanying bird. "I'll just lower the shade, will I?" she said.
She pulled at the window shade and fastened it down, and pulled down the door shade after it. The minute she did that, the window shade flew up, with a noise like a turkey.
They shouted for joy—they knew it! She was funny.
The train stopped and waited a long time in the dark, out from nowhere. They sat awhile, swung their feet; the man from Connemara whistled for a minute marvelously, Victor had his third orange.
"Suppose we're late!" shouted the man from Connemara. The mountains could hear him; they had opened the window to look out hoping to see the trouble, but could not. "And the Innisfallen sails without us! And we don't reach the other side in this night!"
"Then you'll all have to spend the night in Fishguard," said the Welshman.
"Oh, what a scene there'll be in Cork, when we don't arrive!" cried the young wife merrily. "When the boat sails in without us, oh poor souls."
Victor laughed harshly. He had made a pattern with his orange peel on the window ledge, which he now swept away.
"There's none too much room for the traveler in the town of Fishguard," said the Welshman over his pipe. "You'll do best to keep dry in the station."
"Won't they die of it in Cork?" The young wife cocked her head.
"Me five brothers will stand ready to give me a beating!" Victor said, then looked proud.
"I daresay it won't be the first occasion you've put in the night homeless in Fishguard."
"In Fishguard?" warningly cried the man from Connemara. A scowl lit up his face and his eyes opened wide with innocence. "Didn't you know this was the boat train you're riding, man?"
"Oh, is that what you call it?" said the Welshman in equal innocence.
"They hold the boat for us. I feel it's safe to say that every soul on board this train saving yourself is riding to catch the boat."
"Hold the Innisfallen at Fishguard Harbor? For how long?"
"If need be till doomsday, but we are generally sailing at midnight."
"No sir, we'll never be left helpless in Fishguard, this or any other night," said the lady in the raincoat.
"Or!" cried the man from Connemara. "Or! We could take the other boat if we're as late as that, to Rosslare, oh my God! And spend the Sunday bringing ourselves back to Cork!"
"You're going to Connemara to see your mother," the young wife said psychically.
"I'm sure as God's truth staying the one night in Cork first!" he shouted across at her, and banged himself on the knees, as if they were trying to take Cork away from him.
The Welshman asked, "What is the longest on record they have ever held the boat?"
"Who knows?" said the lady in the raincoat. "Maybe 'twill be tonight."
"Only can I get out now and see where we've stopped?" asked Victor.
"Oh my God—we've started! Oh that Cork City!"
"When you travel to Cork, do the lot of you generally get seasick?" inquired the Welshman, swaying among them as they got under way.
The lady in the raincoat made him a grand gesture with one hand, and rose and pulled down her suitcase. She opened it and fetched out from beneath the hot water bottle in pink flannel a little pasteboard box.
"What's that going to be—pills for seasickness?" he said.
She lifted the lid and passed the box under his eyes and then under their eyes, although too fast to be quite offering anything. "'Tis a present," she said. "A present of seasick pills, given me for the journey."
The lovers smiled simultaneously, as they would at the thought of any present.
The train stopped again, started; stopped, started. Here on the outer edge of Wales it advanced and hesitated as rhythmically and as interminably as a needle in a hem. The wheels had taken on that defenseless sound peculiar to running near the open sea. Oil lamps burned in their little boxes at the halts; there was a pull at the heart from the feeling of the trees all being bent the same way.
"Now where?" They had stopped again.
A sigh escaped the lovers, who had drawn a breath of the sea. A single lamp stared in at their window, like the eye of a dragon lifted out of the lid of sleep.
"It's my station!" The Welshman suddenly addressed himself. He reared up, banged down the bushes on his head under a black hat, collected his suitcase and overcoat, and almost swept away with it the parcel with the "Wee Cottage" in it, belonging to the young wife. He got past them, dragging his suitcase with a great heave of the shoulder—God knew what was inside. He wrenched open the door, turned and looked at the lot of them, and then gently backed down into the outdoors.
Only to reappear. He had mistaken the station after all. But he simply held his ground there in the doorway, brazening it out as the train darted on.
"I may decide on raising my own birds some day," he said in a somewhat louder voice. "What did you begin with, a cock and a hen?"
On the index finger which the man from Connemara raised before he answered was a black fingernail, like the mark of a hammer blow; it might have been a reminder not to do something or other before he got home to Ireland.
"I would advise you to begin with a cock and two hens. Don't go into it without getting advice."
"What did you start with?"
"Six cocks—"
Another dark station, and down the Welshman dropped.
"And six hens!"
It was almost too much that his face rose there again. He wasn't embarrased at himself, any more than he was by how black and all impenetrable it was outside in Wales, and asked, "Do you have to produce a passport to go into Ireland?"
"Certainly, a passport or a travel card. Oh my God."
"What do you mean by a travel card? Let me see yours. Every one of you carry one with you?"
Travel cards and passports were produced and handed up to him.
"Oh, how beautiful your mother is!" cried the young wife to Victor, over his shoulder. "Is that a wee strawberry mark she has there on her cheek?"
"'Tis!" he cried in agony.
The Welshman was holding the American's different-looking passport open in his hand; she looked startled, herself, that she had given it up and at once, as if this were required and he had waked her up in the night. He read out her name, nationality, age, her husband's name, nationality. It was not that he read it officially—worse: as if it were a poem in the paper, only with the last verse missing.
"My husband is a photographer. We've made a little darkroom in our flat," she told him.
But he all at once turned back and asked the man from Connemara, "And you give it as your opinion your prize bird died of longings for food from far away."
"There've been times when I've dreamed a certain person may have had more to do with it!" the man from Connemara cried in crescendo. "That I've never mentio
ned till now. But women are jealous and uncertain creatures, I've been thinking as we came this long way along tonight."
"Of birds!" cried the young wife, her fingers going to her shoulders.
"Name your poison."
"Why birds?"
"Why not?"
"Because it talked?"
"Name your poison."
Another lantern, another halt of the train.
"It'll be raining over the water," the Welshman called as he swung open his door. From the step he looked back and said, "What do you take the seasick pills in, have you drink to take them in?"
"I have."
He said out of the windy night, "Can you buy drink on board the ship? Or is it not too late for that?"
"Three miles out 'tis only the sea and glory," shouted the man from Connemara.
"Be good," the Welshman tossed back at him, and quite lightly he dropped away. He disappeared for the third time into the Welsh black, this time for keeps. It was as though a big thumb had snuffed him out.
They smoothed and straightened themselves behind him, all but the young lovers spreading out in the seats; she rubbed her arm, up and down. Not a soul had inquired of that poor vanquished man what he did, if he had wife and children living—he might have only had an auntie. They never let him tell what he was doing with himself in either end of Wales, or why he had to come on this very night, or even what in the world he was carrying in that heavy case.
As they talked, the American girl laid her head back, a faint smile on her face.
"Just one word of advice," said the man from Connemara in her ear, putting her passport, warm from his hand, into hers. "Be careful in future who you ask questions of. You were safe when you spoke to me, I'm a married man. I was pleased to tell you what I could—go to Killarney and so forth and so on, see the marvelous beauty of the lakes. But next time ask a guard."
Victor's head tumbled against the watchful side of the young wife, his right hand was flung in her lap, a fist floating away. In Fishguard, they had to shake him awake and pull him out into the rain.
No traveler out of that compartment was, actually, booked for a berth on the Innisfallen except the lady in the raincoat, who marched straight off. Most third-class train passengers spent the night third-class in the Innisfallen lounge. The man from Connemara was the first one stretched, a starfish of exhaustion, on a cretonne-covered couch. The American girl stared at a page of her book, then closed it until they were underway. The lovers disappeared. In the deeps of night that bright room reached some vortex of quiet, like a room where all brains are at work and great decisions are on the brink. Occasionally there was a tapping, as of drumming fingernails—that meant to closed or hypnotized eyes that dogs were being sped through. The random, gentle old men who were walking the corridors in their tweeds and seemed lost as Jesus's lambs, were waiting perhaps for the bar to open. The young wife, as desperate as she'd feared, saw nothing, forgot everything, and even abandoned Victor, as if there could never be any time or place in the world but this of her suffering. She spoke to the child as if she had never seen him before and would never see him again. Victor took the last little paper of biscuits she had given him away to a corner and slowly emptied it, making a mountain of the crumbs; then he bent his head over his travel card with its new stamp, on which presently he rolled his cheek and floated unconscious.
