The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [300]
"In Fishguard?" warningly cried the man from Connemara. A scowl lit up his face and his eyes opened wide with innocence. "Didn't you know this was the boat train you're riding, man?"
"Oh, is that what you call it?" said the Welshman in equal innocence.
"They hold the boat for us. I feel it's safe to say that every soul on board this train saving yourself is riding to catch the boat."
"Hold the Innisfallen at Fishguard Harbor? For how long?"
"If need be till doomsday, but we are generally sailing at midnight."
"No sir, we'll never be left helpless in Fishguard, this or any other night," said the lady in the raincoat.
"Or!" cried the man from Connemara. "Or! We could take the other boat if we're as late as that, to Rosslare, oh my God! And spend the Sunday bringing ourselves back to Cork!"
"You're going to Connemara to see your mother," the young wife said psychically.
"I'm sure as God's truth staying the one night in Cork first!" he shouted across at her, and banged himself on the knees, as if they were trying to take Cork away from him.
The Welshman asked, "What is the longest on record they have ever held the boat?"
"Who knows?" said the lady in the raincoat. "Maybe 'twill be tonight."
"Only can I get out now and see where we've stopped?" asked Victor.
"Oh my God—we've started! Oh that Cork City!"
"When you travel to Cork, do the lot of you generally get seasick?" inquired the Welshman, swaying among them as they got under way.
The lady in the raincoat made him a grand gesture with one hand, and rose and pulled down her suitcase. She opened it and fetched out from beneath the hot water bottle in pink flannel a little pasteboard box.
"What's that going to be—pills for seasickness?" he said.
She lifted the lid and passed the box under his eyes and then under their eyes, although too fast to be quite offering anything. "'Tis a present," she said. "A present of seasick pills, given me for the journey."
The lovers smiled simultaneously, as they would at the thought of any present.
The train stopped again, started; stopped, started. Here on the outer edge of Wales it advanced and hesitated as rhythmically and as interminably as a needle in a hem. The wheels had taken on that defenseless sound peculiar to running near the open sea. Oil lamps burned in their little boxes at the halts; there was a pull at the heart from the feeling of the trees all being bent the same way.
"Now where?" They had stopped again.
A sigh escaped the lovers, who had drawn a breath of the sea. A single lamp stared in at their window, like the eye of a dragon lifted out of the lid of sleep.
"It's my station!" The Welshman suddenly addressed himself. He reared up, banged down the bushes on his head under a black hat, collected his suitcase and overcoat, and almost swept away with it the parcel with the "Wee Cottage" in it, belonging to the young wife. He got past them, dragging his suitcase with a great heave of the shoulder—God knew what was inside. He wrenched open the door, turned and looked at the lot of them, and then gently backed down into the outdoors.
Only to reappear. He had mistaken the station after all. But he simply held his ground there in the doorway, brazening it out as the train darted on.
"I may decide on raising my own birds some day," he said in a somewhat louder voice. "What did you begin with, a cock and a hen?"
On the index finger which the man from Connemara raised before he answered was a black fingernail, like the mark of a hammer blow; it might have been a reminder not to do something or other before he got home to Ireland.
"I would advise you to begin with a cock and two hens. Don't go into it without getting advice."
"What did you start with?"
"Six cocks—"
Another dark station, and down the Welshman dropped.
"And six hens!"
It was almost too much that his face rose there again. He wasn't embarrased at himself, any more than he was by how black and all impenetrable it was outside in Wales, and asked, "Do you have to produce a passport to go into