The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [240]
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