The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [247]
The steepness increased, the path after a certain point appeared entirely out of use. Here and there a boulder had lately fallen and lay in their path wet within its fissures as if it began to live, and secrete, and they had to climb around it, holding to brush. Where there were not rocks it was sandy and grassy and very wild. A fault of course lay all through the land.
Sometimes Eugene was aware that he jerked like a pigeon or rocked like a sailor, going down, or sagged like an old poodle, going up; it was all the same. Once he leaped, and almost without a care. His tiltings, projections, slidings, working to keep up, all were painless now, and a progress he kept to himself. When pain did not hurt, and the world did, things had got very strange—different.
The sun was low, and some of the fog bank had detached itself in narrow clouds thin and delicate as bone, with the red light beginning to come through. The Spaniard went as sedately as ever along the edge he walked; had he been here before too? When he jumped in his slick black shoes, his footing was sure. It was he who took the choice of paths, and the choice was always a clever and difficult one. Paths ran everywhere now, a network of threads over waste and rock, with dancing, graybeard bushes to hold to. Below, the wet boulders were now faintly covered with light. Bathers in the distance, or porpoises, rose and sank sky-colored; there are always strangers who swim at sunset time.
Eugene went where the Spaniard went, but not always everywhere he went. There were caves where the paths dropped to the sea, and the Spaniard went on his own to inspect them. Eugene ceased crying directions, for it made him feel like a lost lamb bleating. The huge fellow let himself down the steep rocks and with hands and knees peered into the caves, like a dentist into alluring mouths. Rats ran up the bald surfaces. They were big rats—a size not of any habitation anywhere but of away out here, of unvisited geographical parts—as the world's wild dogs and wild horses are unseen and sizeless. The Spaniard glanced after the rats with his head inclined to one side. Even he could not light his cigarettes in this wind.
As it grew later the men made their way on, and piercing the sound of the wind the little dark birds that lived for neatness about the edge of the sea began to fill the air with twitterings, like birds ready to nest in leafy trees in a little springtime town. There had evidently been, without their knowing it, a loss of the wish to go back. Perhaps this wish had expired. Eugene, who had once nearly drowned, remembered his discovery of the death of volition to stay up in the water. Such things were always found out no telling how long after it was too late.
The sun was dropping. It looked wetter than water, then not so much a bright body as a red body. It dropped and was gone in the blue mist that was coming in over the sea. For a brief period the water, brighter than air, turned smooth and calm and the fog with wings spreading sank over it and was skimming at Eugene's face.
"You heard me, all the time," he said.
But the Spaniard bent over with his back to Eugene, and was peering at some blotched wild lilies that grew in the coarse grass there. He touched the tips of his fingers deliberately under the soft pale petals and examined their hairy hearts. Eugene was waiting behind him as he turned with a flower in his hand. All at once the Spanish eyes looked wide awake, and the man smiled—like someone waking from a deep dream, the sleep of a month. He put up his little