IIIA FISH OMELET
SNOW had drifted into the outer basement stairway of the green house, and there was a thin frosty bar inside the door of the basement hall. Miss Claes opened the door and looked out through the iron railings to the street. Snow was six inches deep and still falling. She took a deep breath appreciatively, as if she found some faint exquisite scent in the cold air. Presently she began sweeping at the doorway, and continued up the stone steps to the walk. Her arms and throat were bare, and the dark gray dress that she wore was of wool but the fabric very thin. Apparently Miss Claes chose to enjoy the chill of the winter morning. When she returned to her living room, the fire in the grate had been started and a small cup of black coffee was on the table. She sipped thoughtfully and then lit a cigarette, which she half finished, standing by the fireplace.
The kindling had ignited the soft coal, but not without having shot out a spray of cinders over the cement hearth. Miss Claes swept the hearth unhurriedly. A cabinet of dishes across the room from the fireplace was full of color now from the light of the coals—vivid greens and bronzes, pomegranate reds. Atlength, she opened the door to the kitchen, where an Oriental stood by the big range.
“May I serve your breakfast?” he asked.
“Put it on a tray with something for Pidge. I’ll take it upstairs and perhaps she’ll join me. The child starves.”
“Not in this house——”
“She’s troublesome to do anything for, Nagar. She rebels against accepting any favor. I think she must have been forced to accept many favors from people outside, when she lived with her father. Was there a bit of boiled halibut left from last night?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll make a little omelet with a few flakes of fish in it. I’m sure she isn’t getting any money from her father, but she has kept up her rent in advance. Did she work all night?”
“Her room was quiet after two, until I came down. Then I heard her typewriter as I swept the upper hall.”
“It seems to be a race, Nagar, between the child and her book—which will finish the other? I love her spirit, but she isn’t taking care of herself.... Yes, we’ll put in these asparagus tips.... I think Mr. Musser believes that the world owes him a living, but finds it hard to collect, sometimes, with only metaphysics to offer. And now Pidge has flung herself to the opposite extreme; talks of earning her living in a factory, when her book is done. She’s a living protest against talking and not doing. We must be very good to her, Nagar.”
Miss Claes brought a little creamy porcelain urn, and held it for him to fill with coffee from the larger pot. Nagar held the door open for her into the basement hall. A moment later on the top floor, she tapped at the second last door on the left. Pidge sat at her machine under the gaslight beyond the head of the cot.
“I can’t make their swords play!” she moaned. “All my swords are stiff as shinny sticks. The trouble is, I don’t know men, Miss Claes—not red animal men like they should be in this story. I know pussy men. I know pious men, salvey and wormy men, monks and mummies and monsters, but I don’t know honest-to-Godmen! Here they are taunting each other as they stab, and their talk sounds—like Shakespeare! Oh, dear, you’ve brought me more coffee and eats!”
“I won’t touch your papers, Pidge, but if you take them off the cot, I’ll put the tray between us. I haven’t had breakfast.”
Pidge turned the roller of her typemill down so that the most recent literary revelation might not appear to a roving eye. Then she crisscrossed different packages of manuscript, placed the mass face down before the waving glass, and moved the oil stove aside so she could pass to her place on the cot.
“You always forget to bring your coffeepot down to the range, Pidge——”
The girl turned back to her typemachine. “He’s a jealous old devil when I leave the room,” she said. “I think the person who rented him before I did addressed envelopes all day—kept cranking him back andforth against time. Now I ride a little ways—then let him stop and browse. We ramble——”
Pidge stopped. Her eyes looked dry and smarting, as if tears were on the verge.
“Oh, Miss Claes,” she went on, “I’m just as crazy as that—I mean my figures of speech! Cranking him back and forth, and in the same breath letting him stop and browse. I wish you wouldn’t bring me this stuff any more. The coffee’s so good that it hurts—and the eggs. I always cry when I’m hurt.”
“But, Pidge, think what a privilege it is for me to climb from the heart of New York to eighteenth-century France, and not leave the house——”
“But you find a twisted cubist sort of France—part Dumas, part Mexican Plaza, Los Angeles, and the restme!”
“At least, you’re not carried away with the idea that it’s perfect.”
Pidge regarded the other’s face closely. She could see with uncanny clearness in this little dark room where she had struggled night and day for nearly three months; but what she saw now, or was looking for, she hardly knew herself. Her own face was spooky from sleepless strain.
“I’m eating shamelessly,” she said.
A moment later, she pointed to the rear wall, and whispered the question:
“Has Nagar stopped writing? I haven’t raced typewriters with him lately.”
“He hasn’t spoken of changing his work. Did youhear that New York has touched him with her magic?” Miss Claes asked.
“What do you mean?”
“He has sold a story—a short story for two hundred dollars toThe Public Square.”
“Nagar—your servant?”
“He isn’t my servant, Pidge. He just lives here and works with me.”
There was a clicking dryness to the girl’s tongue, as she asked:
“And now is he going away? You said they always do when they strike it rich.”
“Oh, no. Nagar wouldn’t leave for a little story success. But nobody quite knows Nagar—nobody.”
Pidge was alone.The Lance of the Rivernaiswas pricking at her to get back to work, but she resisted for a few minutes, thinking of Miss Claes.
“... She may be crazy, but she’s good to look at,” she muttered. “I believe she can look into me, too.... I wonder what she is?... She may be crazy, but she’s kind! And, oh, I’m so tired,” she yawned a moment later. “I’d like—I’d like to be a leaf in the park under the snow—still snowing, and sleep till spring. Only I’d like some roast turkey first.”
The recent breakfast had an extraordinary flavor, but it was all too dainty for one who had eaten little or nothing since yesterday morning. Her mind trailed off to buns she had seen in bakery windows; and delicatessen stores with opened sausages, big as one’shead and colored like tapestries, and little brown birds and deviled eggs, and sliced filets of fish of amazing tint.
All meats had been anathema in the house of Mr. Adolph Musser. Pidge had lived in no other house in all her years, before coming to New York, but since then, she had shocked her young self through various experiments among the fleshpots of Greenwich. Not so various, for the narrowness of her purse was ever a limp fact, but these few flavory adventures were exciting and memorable. There was a tap of a finger nail upon the panel.
“A letter, Miss Musser,” Nagar said.
She looked at the Hindu with different eyes from ever before. He had sold a story. She wanted to speak of it, wanted to sit before him and listen—this anomaly, whose typewriter she had sometimes heard through the partition, and rarely a low deep hum. She was prejudiced against Hindus, because her father had affected such a knowledge of them, but somehow she had been less lonely in New York because of this one. He was embodied Detachment and Impersonality.... He had turned away.
“Thanks, Nagar,” she called.
The letter was a typewriter bill.