The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [245]
On the untidy embankment something else—the object of the gaze—presently showed itself by a motion in the grass. As if the sight pricked him to move, Eugene darted for a heavy pine twig with cones and threw it at the cat; it struck her side. She seemed not to feel it, since she did not waver.
He exclaimed. And all the while the Spaniard was standing there in a relaxed posture looking on—he might have been over in Paris, looking at the Seine! And yet that detachment, Eugene was not unaware, and it gave him some bitterness, had been the outer semblance of what passion in his music last night! Eugene watched stubbornly, and even felt his excitement grow as the whirring of a wing or the pulsing of a tongue, whatever it was, came at less frequent intervals. It was still too rapid for the eye to tell what made it. Which was happening: was the whirring spending itself out, or was the lure, on its side, becoming an old thing, taken for granted? This had a beginning and end.
"What's in the grass, a bird or a snake? What do you bet?" Eugene said softly.
But the Spaniard stood patiently planted there, while the terrible gaze ran fast as a humming wire between the cat and the other creature. Didn't it matter which poor, avid life took the gaze and which gave it? The cat's eyes big as watches shone fearlessly. Eugene thought all at once, It's all the same—it's a bestial thing, all of it, I don't care to know, thank you.
But he waited. The next minute he threw a stone, this time in the direction of the trembling in the grass. And of course it was just a cat. It was just the other cat.
The Spaniard, when Eugene looked to him, was simply making a face over the lighting of another cigarette. The muscles of his face grouped themselves in hideous luxuriousness, rippled once, then all cleared. His lips were grape-colored, and the smoke smelled sweet.
"Come on," Eugene said to him, and took his arm and pulled. "Come on, you Dago."
VI
They had come down at the end to the beach: great emptiness. At first it seemed no one was there, so late on this uncertain day. Then crossing the middle distance toward the sea appeared a student with his pants rolled up, reading as he walked, and a man, who looked like a hermit, rather gracefully shouldering wood. Farther away still in the pale expanse two middle-aged ladies in steadily threatened hats materialized; they looked at their watches: waiting for sunset. One battered, sand-colored auto was in sight; it had been left by the sea wall gate, one door open, a horse's bleached skull hanging on the face of the radiator. A little dog sat inside. Black smoke moved on the air, fading; the day's casual fires along the beach had gone out, and a ship was disclosed at sea. Some sea gulls perched on the roller-coaster humps, some stood short-necked and unmoving in front of the shuttered-down food stands, and the blackbirds like little ladies walked about at their feet, keeping busy.
How could it have seemed so silent, because it was deserted? Just the way it had seemed deserted, at first, because the noise hadn't been taken in. There was actually a steady tinkling where the carousel went around, with no child riding, and there was the excited and unrelieved sound of laughter filling the midway. Eugene knew its source and pointed it out to the Spaniard, who swayed each way and smiled faintly. The shouting mechanical dummy of a woman, larger than life, dressed up and with a feather in her hat, stood beckoning on the upper gallery of the House of Mirth and producing her wound-up laughter. In every way she called for the attention; the motions of her head with its feather, and of her arms and hips, were as raucous and hilarious as the sound that was played in her insides. The boom of the ocean seemed to be bearing that small sound, too, on its back, supporting this one extra little chip.
Eugene walked down to the