The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [231]
If Eugene had not known he could do such a thing as strike Emma, he was even less prepared for having done it. Down hill the eucalyptus trees seemed bigger in the fog than when the sun shone through them, they had the fluffiness of birds in the cold; he had the utterly strange and unamiable notion that he could hear their beating hearts. Walking down a very steep hill was an act of holding back; he had never seen it like that or particularly noticed himself reflected in these people's windows. His head and neck jerked in motions like a pigeon's; he looked down, and when he saw the fallen and purple eucalyptus leaves underfoot, his shoes suddenly stamped them hard as hooves.
A quarrel couldn't even grow between him and Emma. And she would be unfair, beg the question, if a quarrel did spring up; she would cry. That was a thing a stranger might feel on being introduced to Emma, even though Emma never proved it to anybody: she had a waterfall of tears back there. He walked on. The sun, smaller than the moon, rolled like a little wheel through the fog but gave no light yet.
Why strike her even softly? They weren't very lovingly inclined these days, with the heart taken out of them by sorrow; violence was out of place to begin with. Why not strike her? And if she thought he would stay around only to hear her start tuning up, she had another think coming. Let her take care and go about her business, he might do it once more and not so kindly.
If he had had time to think about it, he might simply have refused to eat his breakfast. He knew that she minded. Ever since Emma was a landlady calling "Come on quick, Mr. MacLain!" and he was an anxious roomer, he had known where she was sensitive. Actually, of course, he wouldn't have dared not eat—under any circumstances. If he had wanted to kill her, he would have had to eat everything on her table first, and praise it. She had had a first husband, the mighty Mr. Gaines, and she would love forever a compliment on her food. "Sit down and tell me what you see" was what Emma would say.
The present fact was that she'd said something innocent—innocent but personal, personal but not dear—to him, which she might have said a thousand times in twelve years of marriage, and simply taking the prerogative of a wife was leaning over to remove some offense of his with her own motherly finger, and he had slapped her face today. Why slap her today? The question prodded him locally now, in the back of one knee as nearly as he could tell. It accommodated itself like the bang of a small bell to the stiff pull of his shanks.
He struck her because she was a fat thing. Absurd, she had always been fat, at least plump ("Your little landlady's forever busy with something nice!"), plump when he married her. Always was is no reason for its being absurd even yet to—But couldn't it be his reason for hitting her, and not hers? He struck her because he wanted another love. The forties. Psychology.
Nevertheless a face from nowhere floated straight into that helpless irony and contemplated the world of his inward gaze, a dark full-face, obscure and obedient-looking as a newsprint face, looking outward from its cap of dark hair and a dark background—all shadow and softness, like a blurred spot on Jones Street. Miss Dimdummie Dumwiddie, he could the same as read underneath, in the italics of poetry. A regardful look. Should he suspect? She had died, was that the story? Then too late to love you now. Too late to verify this story of yours ... in the paper, though he was carrying