The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [127]
The first thing next morning Josie ran outdoors to see what signs the equinox had left. The sun was shining. Will was already out, gruffly exhorting himself, digging in his old hole to China. The double-house across the street looked as if its old age had come upon it at last. Nobody was to be seen at the windows, and not a child was near. The whole façade drooped and gave way in the soft light, like the face of an old woman fallen asleep in church. In all the trees in all the yards the leaves were slowly drooping, one by one, as if in breath after breath.
There at Josie's foot on the porch was something. It was a folded bit of paper, wet and pale and thin, trembling in the air and clinging to the pedestal of the column, as though this were the residue of some great wave that had rolled upon the rock and then receded for another time. It was a fragment of a letter. It was written not properly in ink but in indelible pencil, and so its message had not been washed away as it might have been.
Josie knelt down and took the paper in both hands, and without moving read all that was there. Then she went to her room and pu.- it into her most secret place, the little drawstring bag that held her dancing shoes. The name Cornelia was on it, and it said, "O my darling I have waited so long when are you coming for me? Never a day or a night goes by that I do not ask When? When? When?"...
THE PURPLE HAT
It was in a bar, a quiet little hole in the wall. It was four o'clock in the afternoon. Beyond the open door the rain fell, the heavy color of the sea, in air where the sunlight was still suspended. Its watery reflection lighted the room, as a room might have lighted a mousehole. It was in New Orleans.
There was a bartender whose mouth and eyes curved downward from the divide of his baby-pink nose, as if he had combed them down, like his hair; he always just said nothing. The seats at his bar were black oilcloth knobs, worn and smooth and as much alike as six pebbles on the beach, and yet the two customers had chosen very particularly the knobs they would sit on. They had come in separately out of the wet, and had each chosen an end stool, and now sat with the length of the little bar between them. The bartender obviously did not know either one; he rested his eyes by closing them....
The fat customer, with a rather affable look about him, said he would have a rye. The unshaven young man with the shaking hands, though he had come in first, only looked fearfully at a spot on the counter before him until the bartender, as if he could hear silent prayer, covered the spot with a drink.
The fat man swallowed, and began at once to look a little cosy and prosperous. He seemed ready to speak, if the moment came....
There was a calm roll of thunder, no more than a shifting of the daily rain clouds over Royal Street.
Then—"Rain or shine," the fat man spoke, "she'll be there."
The bartender stilled his cloth on the bar, as if mopping up made a loud noise, and waited.
"Why, at the Palace of Pleasure," said the fat man. He was really more heavy and solid than he was simply fat.
The bartender leaned forward an inch on his hand.
"The lady will be at the Palace of Pleasure," said the fat man in his drowsy voice. "The lady with the purple hat."
Then the fat man turned on the black knob, put his elbow on the counter, and rested his cheek on his hand, where he could see all the way down