FullReads

But the plot of nearly all the good stories in the world is concerned with shorts who were unable to cover; so you can find no fault with this one.

Hetty mounted with her rib beef to her $3.50 third-floor back. One hot, savory beef-stew for supper, a night’s good sleep, and she would be fit in the morning to apply again for the tasks of Hercules, Joan of Arc, Una, Job, and Little-Red-Riding-Hood.

In her room she got the granite-ware stew-pan out of the 2×4-foot china–er–I mean earthenware closet, and began to dig down in a rats’-nest of paper bags for the potatoes and onions. She came out with her nose and chin just a little sharper pointed.

There was neither a potato nor an onion. Now, what kind of a beef- Stew can you make out of simply beef? You can make oyster-soup without oysters, turtle-soup without turtles, coffee-cake without coffee, but you can’t make beef-stew without potatoes and onions.

But rib beef alone, in an emergency, can make an ordinary pine door look like a wrought-iron gambling-house portal to the wolf. With salt and pepper and a tablespoonful of flour (first well stirred in a little cold water) ’twill serve–’tis not so deep as a lobster a la Newburg nor so wide as a church festival doughnut; but ’twill serve.

Hetty took her stew-pan to the rear of the third-floor hall. According to the advertisements of the Vallambrosa there was running water to be found there. Between you and me and the water-meter, it only ambled or walked through the faucets; but technicalities have no place here. There was also a sink where housekeeping roomers often met to dump their coffee grounds and glare at one another’s kimonos.

At this sink Hetty found a girl with heavy, gold-brown, artistic hair and plaintive eyes, washing two large “Irish” potatoes. Hetty knew the Vallambrosa as well as any one not owning “double hextra- magnifying eyes” could compass its mysteries. The kimonos were her encyclopedia, her “Who’s What?” her clearinghouse of news, of goers and comers. From a rose-pink kimono edged with Nile green she had learned that the girl with the potatoes was a miniature-painter living in a kind of attic–or “studio,” as they prefer to call it–on the top floor. Hetty was not certain in her mind what a miniature was; but it certainly wasn’t a house; because house-painters, although they wear splashy overalls and poke ladders in your face on the street, are known to indulge in a riotous profusion of food at home.

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.”