The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [290]
Light on Delilah's head the Jubilee cup was set. She paused now and then to lick the rim and taste again the ghost of sweet that could still make her tongue start clinging—some sweet lapped up greedily long ago, only a mystery now when or who by. She carried her own black locust stick to drive the snakes.
Following the smell of horses and fire, to men, she kept in the wheel tracks till they broke down at the river. In the shade underneath the burned and fallen bridge she sat on a stump and chewed for a while, without dreams, the comb of a dirtdauber. Then once more kneeling, she took a drink from the Big Black, and pulled the shoes off her feet and waded in.
Submerged to the waist, to the breast, stretching her throat like a sunflower stalk above the river's opaque skin, she kept on, her treasure stacked on the roof of her head, hands laced upon it. She had forgotten how or when she knew, and she did not know what day this was, but she knew—it would not rain, the river would not rise, until Saturday.
THE BRIDE OF THE INNISFALLEN
There was something of the pavilion about one raincoat, the way—for some little time out there in the crowd—it stood flowing in its salmony-pink and yellow stripes down toward the wet floor of the platform, expanding as it went. In the Paddington gloom it was a little dim, but it was parading through now, and once inside the compartment it looked rainbow-bright.
In it a middle-aged lady climbed on like a sheltered girl—a boost up from behind she pretended not to need or notice. She was big-boned and taller than the man who followed her inside bringing the suitcase—he came up round and with a doll's smile, his black suit wet; she turned a look on him; this was farewell. The train to Fishguard to catch the Cork boat was leaving in fifteen minutes—at a black four o'clock in the afternoon of that spring that refused to flower. She, so clearly, was the one going.
There was nobody to share the compartment yet but one girl, and she not Irish.
Over a stronghold of a face, the blue hat of the lady in the raincoat was settled on like an Indian bonnet, or, rather, like an old hat, which it was. The hair that had been pulled out of its confines was flirtatious and went into two auburn-and-gray pomegranates along her cheeks. Her gaze was almost forgiving, if unsettled; it held its shine so long. Even yet, somewhere, sometime, the owner of those eyes might expect to rise to a tragic occasion. When the round man put the suitcase up in the rack, she sank down under it as if something were now done that could not be undone, and with tender glances brushed the soot and raindrops off herself, somewhat onto him. He perched beside her—it was his legs that were short—and then, as her hands dropped into her bright-stained lap, they both stared straight ahead, as if waiting for a metamorphosis.
The American girl sitting opposite could not have taken in anything they said as long as she kept feeling it necessary, herself, to subside. As long as the train stood in the station, her whole predicament seemed betrayed by her earliness. She was leaving London without her husband's knowledge. She was wearing rather worn American clothes and thin shoes, and, sitting up very straight, kept pulling her coat collar about her ears and throat. In the strange, diminished light of the station people seemed to stand and move on some dark stage; by now platform and train must be almost entirely Irish in their gathered population.
A fourth person suddenly came inside the compartment, a small, passionate-looking man. He was with them as suddenly as a gift—as if an arm had thrust in a bunch of roses or a telegram. There seemed