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 matinée 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 shopgirl’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 stewpan 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 ferryboats 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 rôle 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.
Hetty was a Shoulder. Hers was a sharp, sinewy shoulder; but all her life people had laid their heads upon it, metaphorically or actually, and had left there all or half their troubles. Looking at Life anatomically, which is as good a way as any, she was preordained to be a Shoulder. There were few truer collarbones anywhere than hers.
Hetty was only thirty-three, and she had not yet outlived the little pang that visited her whenever the head of youth and beauty leaned upon her for consolation. But one glance in her mirror always served as an instantaneous pain-killer. So she gave one pale look into the crinkly old looking-glass on the wall above the gas-stove, turned down the flame a little lower from the bubbling beef and potatoes, went over to the couch, and lifted Cecilia’s head to its confessional.
“Go on and tell me, honey,” she said. “I know now that it ain’t art that’s worrying you. You met him on a ferryboat, didn’t you? Go on, Cecilia, kid, and tell your — your Aunt Hetty about it.”
But youth and melancholy must first spend the surplus of sighs and tears that waft and float the barque of romance to its harbor in the delectable isles. Presently, through the stringy tendons that formed the bars of the confessional, the penitent — or was it the glorified communicant of the sacred flame — told her story without art or illumination.
“It was only three days ago. I was coming back on the ferry from Jersey City. Old Mr. Schrum, an art dealer, told me of a rich man in Newark who wanted a miniature of his daughter painted. I went to see him and showed him some of my work. When I told him the price would be fifty dollars he laughed at me like a hyena. He said an enlarged crayon twenty times the size would cost him only eight dollars.
“I had just enough money to buy my ferry ticket back to New York. I felt as if I didn’t want to live another day. I must have looked as I felt, for I saw him on the row of seats opposite me, looking at me as if he understood. He was nice-looking, but oh, above everything else, he looked kind. When one is tired or unhappy or hopeless, kindness counts more than anything else.
“When I got so miserable that I couldn’t fight against it any longer, I got up and walked slowly out the rear door of the ferryboat cabin. No one was there, and I slipped quickly over the rail and dropped into the water. Oh, friend Hetty, it was cold, cold!
“For just one moment I wished I was back in the old Vallambrosa, starving and hoping. And then I got numb, and didn’t care. And then I felt that somebody else was in the water close by me, holding me up. He had followed me, and jumped in to save me.
“Somebody threw a thing like a big, white doughnut at us, and he made me put my arms through the hole. Then the ferryboat backed, and they pulled us on board. Oh, Hetty, I was so ashamed of my wickedness in trying to drown myself; and, besides, my hair had all tumbled down and was sopping wet, and I was such a sight.
“And then some men in blue clothes came around; and he gave them his card, and I heard him tell them he had seen me drop my purse on the edge of the boat outside the rail, and in leaning over to get it I had fallen overboard. And then I remembered having read in the papers that people who try to kill themselves are locked up in cells with people who try to kill other people, and I was afraid.
“But some ladies on the boat took me downstairs to the furnace-room and got me nearly dry and did up my hair. When the boat landed, he came and put me in a cab. He was all dripping himself, but laughed as if he thought it was all a joke. He begged me, but I wouldn’t tell him my name nor where I lived, I was so ashamed.”
“You were a fool, child,” said Hetty, kindly. “Wait till I turn the light up a bit. I wish to Heaven we had an onion.”
“Then he raised his hat,” went on Cecilia, “and said: ‘Very well. But I’ll find you, anyhow. I’m going to claim my rights of salvage.’ Then he gave money to the cab-driver and told him to take me where I wanted to go, and walked away. What is ‘salvage,’ Hetty?”
“The edge of a piece of goods that ain’t hemmed,” said the shopgirl. “You must have looked pretty well frazzled out to the little hero boy.”
“It’s been three days,” moaned the miniature-painter, “and he hasn’t found me yet.”
“Extend the time,” said Hetty. “This is a big town. Think of how many girls he might have to see soaked in water with their hair down before he would recognize you. The stew’s getting on fine — but oh, for an onion! I’d even use a piece of garlic if I had it.”
The beef and potatoes bubbled merrily, exhaling a mouth-watering savor that yet lacked something, leaving a hunger on the palate, a haunting, wistful desire for some lost and needful ingredient.
“I came near drowning in that awful river,” said Cecilia, shuddering.
“It ought to have more water in it,” said Hetty; “the stew, I mean. I’ll go get some at the sink.”
“It smells good,” said the artist.
“That
