The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [301]
"Certainly, a passport or a travel card. Oh my God."
"What do you mean by a travel card? Let me see yours. Every one of you carry one with you?"
Travel cards and passports were produced and handed up to him.
"Oh, how beautiful your mother is!" cried the young wife to Victor, over his shoulder. "Is that a wee strawberry mark she has there on her cheek?"
"'Tis!" he cried in agony.
The Welshman was holding the American's different-looking passport open in his hand; she looked startled, herself, that she had given it up and at once, as if this were required and he had waked her up in the night. He read out her name, nationality, age, her husband's name, nationality. It was not that he read it officially—worse: as if it were a poem in the paper, only with the last verse missing.
"My husband is a photographer. We've made a little darkroom in our flat," she told him.
But he all at once turned back and asked the man from Connemara, "And you give it as your opinion your prize bird died of longings for food from far away."
"There've been times when I've dreamed a certain person may have had more to do with it!" the man from Connemara cried in crescendo. "That I've never mentioned till now. But women are jealous and uncertain creatures, I've been thinking as we came this long way along tonight."
"Of birds!" cried the young wife, her fingers going to her shoulders.
"Name your poison."
"Why birds?"
"Why not?"
"Because it talked?"
"Name your poison."
Another lantern, another halt of the train.
"It'll be raining over the water," the Welshman called as he swung open his door. From the step he looked back and said, "What do you take the seasick pills in, have you drink to take them in?"
"I have."
He said out of the windy night, "Can you buy drink on board the ship? Or is it not too late for that?"
"Three miles out 'tis only the sea and glory," shouted the man from Connemara.
"Be good," the Welshman tossed back at him, and quite lightly he dropped away. He disappeared for the third time into the Welsh black, this time for keeps. It was as though a big thumb had snuffed him out.
They smoothed and straightened themselves behind him, all but the young lovers spreading out in the seats; she rubbed her arm, up and down. Not a soul had inquired of that poor vanquished man what he did, if he had wife and children living—he might have only had an auntie. They never let him tell what he was doing with himself in either end of Wales, or why he had to come on this very night, or even what in the world he was carrying in that heavy case.
As they talked, the American girl laid her head back, a faint smile on her face.
"Just one word of advice," said the man from Connemara in her ear, putting her passport, warm from his hand, into hers. "Be careful in future who you ask questions of. You were safe when you spoke to me, I'm a married man. I was pleased to tell you what I could—go to Killarney and so forth and so on, see the marvelous beauty of the lakes. But next time ask a guard."
Victor's head tumbled against the watchful side of the young wife, his right hand was flung in her lap, a fist floating away. In Fishguard, they had to shake him awake and pull him out into the rain.
No traveler out of that compartment was, actually, booked for a berth on the Innisfallen except the lady in the raincoat, who marched straight off. Most third-class train passengers spent the night third-class in the Innisfallen lounge. The man from Connemara was the first one stretched, a starfish of exhaustion, on a cretonne-covered couch. The American girl stared at a page of her book, then closed it until they were underway. The lovers disappeared. In the deeps of night that bright room reached some vortex of quiet, like a room where all brains are at work and great decisions are on the brink. Occasionally there was a tapping, as of drumming fingernails—that meant to closed or hypnotized eyes that dogs were being sped through. The random, gentle old men who were walking the corridors in their tweeds and seemed lost as Jesus's lambs, were