The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [293]
The little boy sped his breath up the harmonica scale; the young wife said "Victor!" and they all felt sorry for him and had his name.
"Air," she suddenly said, as if she felt their look. The man from Connemara hurled himself at the window and slid the pane, then at the corridor door, and opened it wide onto a woman passing with an eight-or nine-months-old baby. It was a red-haired boy with queenly jowls, squinting in at the world as if to say, "Will what has just been said be very kindly repeated?"
"Oh, isn't he beautiful!" the young wife cried reproachfully through the door. She would have put out her hands.
There was no response. On they went.
"An English nurse traveling with an Irish child, look at that, he's so grand, and such style, that dress, that petticoat, do you think she's kidnaped the lad?" suggested the lady in the raincoat, puffing.
"Oh my God," said the man from Connemara.
For a moment the schoolgirl made the only sounds—catching her breath and sobbing over her book.
"Kidnaping's farfetched," said the man from Connemara. "Maybe the woman's deaf and dumb."
"I couldn't sleep this night thinking such wickedness was traveling on the train and on the boat with me." The young wife's skin flooded to her temples.
"It's not your fault."
The schoolgirl bent lower still and, still reading, opened a canvas satchel at her feet, in which—all looked—were a thermos, a lunchbox under lock and key, a banana, and a Bible. She selected the banana by feel, and brought it up and ate it as she read.
"If it's kidnaping, it'll be in the Cork paper Sunday morning," said the lady in the raincoat with confidence. "Railway trains are great systems for goings on of all kinds. You'll never take me by surprise."
"But this is our train," said the young wife. "Women alone, sometimes exceptions, but often on the long journey alone or with children."
"There's evil where you'd least expect it," the man from Connemara said, somehow as if he didn't care for children. "There's one thing and another, so forth and so on, run your finger down the alphabet and see where it stops."
"I'll never see the Cork paper," replied the young wife. "But oh, I tell you I would rather do without air to breathe than see that poor baby pass again and put out his little arms to me."
"Ah, then. Shut the door," the man from Connemara said, and pointed it out to the lover, who after all sat nearer.
"Excuse me," the young man whispered to the girl, and shut the door at her knee and near where her small open hand rested.
"But why would she be kidnaping the baby into Ireland?" cried the young wife suddenly.
"Yes—you've been riding backwards: if we were going the other way, 'twould be a different story." And the lady in the raincoat looked at her wisely.
The train was grinding to a stop at a large station in Wales. The schoolgirl, after one paralyzed moment, rose and got off through the corridor in a dream; the book she closed was seen to be Black Stallion of the Downs. A big tall man climbed on and took her place. It was this station, it was felt, where they actually ceased leaving a place and from now on were arriving at one.
The tall Welshman drove into the compartment through any remarks that were going on and with great strength like a curse heaved his bag on top of several of theirs in the rack, where it had been thought there was no more room, and took the one seat without question. With serious sets of his shoulders he settled down in the middle of them, between Victor and the lady in the raincoat, facing the man from Connemara. His hair was in two corner bushes, and he had a full eye—like that of the horse in the storm in old chromos in the West of America—the kind of eye supposed to attract lightning. In the silence of the dreary stop, he slapped all his pockets—not having forgotten anything, only making sure. His hands were powdered over with something fairly black.
"Well! How far do you go?" he put to the man from Connemara and then to them in turn, and each time the answer came, "Ireland." He seemed unduly