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Page 11
The potato girl was quite slim and small, and handled her potatoes as
an old bachelor uncle handles a baby who is cutting teeth. She had a
dull shoemaker's knife in her right hand, and she had begun to peel
one of the potatoes with it.
Hetty addressed her in the punctiliously formal tone of one who
intends to be cheerfully familiar with you in the second round.
"Beg pardon," she said, "for butting into what's not my business, but
if you peel them potatoes you lose out. They're new Bermudas. You
want to scrape 'em. Lemme show you."
She took a potato and the knife, and began to demonstrate.
"Oh, thank you," breathed the artist. "I didn't know. And I did hate
to see the thick peeling go; it seemed such a waste. But I thought
they always had to be peeled. When you've got only potatoes to eat,
the peelings count, you know."
"Say, kid," said Hetty, staying her knife, "you ain't up against it,
too, are you?"
The miniature artist smiled starvedly.
"I suppose I am. Art--or, at least, the way I interpret it--doesn't
seem to be much in demand. I have only these potatoes for my dinner.
But they aren't so bad boiled and hot, with a little butter and salt."
"Child," said Hetty, letting a brief smile soften her rigid features,
"Fate has sent me and you together. I've had it handed to me in the
neck, too; but I've got a chunk of meat in my, room as big as a lap-dog.
And I've done everything to get potatoes except pray for 'em.
Let's me and you bunch our commissary departments and make a stew of 'em.
We'll cook it in my room. If we only had an onion to go in it!
Say, kid, you haven't got a couple of pennies that've slipped down
into the lining of your last winter's sealskin, have you?
I could step down to the corner and get one at old Giuseppe's stand.
A stew without an onion is worse'n a matinee without candy."
"You may call me Cecilia," said the artist. "No; I spent my last
penny three days ago."
"Then we'll have to cut the onion out instead of slicing it in," said
Hetty. "I'd ask the janitress for one, but I don't want 'em hep just
yet to the fact that I'm pounding the asphalt for another job. But I
wish we did have an onion."
In the shop-girl's room the two began to prepare their supper.
Cecilia's part was to sit on the couch helplessly and beg to be
allowed to do something, in the voice of a cooing ring-dove. Hetty
prepared the rib beef, putting it in cold salted water in the stew-pan
and setting it on the one-burner gas-stove.
"I wish we had an onion," said Hetty, as she scraped the two potatoes.
On the wall opposite the couch was pinned a flaming, gorgeous
advertising picture of one of the new ferry-boats of the P. U. F.
F. Railroad that had been built to cut down the time between Los
Angeles and New York City one-eighth of a minute.
Hetty, turning her head during her continuous monologue, saw tears
running from her guest's eyes as she gazed on the idealized
presentment of the speeding, foam-girdled transport.
"Why, say, Cecilia, kid," said Hetty, poising her knife, "is it as bad
art as that? I ain't a critic; but I thought it kind of brightened up
the room. Of course, a manicure-painter could tell it was a bum
picture in a minute. I'll take it down if you say so. I wish to the
holy Saint Potluck we had an onion."
But the miniature miniature-painter had tumbled down, sobbing, with
her nose indenting the hard-woven drapery of the couch. Something was
here deeper than the artistic temperament offended at crude
lithography.
Hetty knew. She had accepted her role long ago. How scant the words
with which we try to describe a single quality of a human being! When
we reach the abstract we are lost. The nearer to Nature that the
babbling of our lips comes, the better do we understand. Figuratively
(let us say), some people are Bosoms, some are Hands, some are Heads,
some are Muscles, some are Feet, some are Backs for burdens.
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