“Go on,” said Scripps. “If you had ever been as hard up for plots as I have been!”
“Well,” the waitress said. “That’s all there is to the tale. I never saw my mother again. I communicated with the embassy, but they could do nothing. It was finally established by them that I had crossed the channel with my mother, but they could do nothing beyond that. “Tears came into the elderly waitress’s eyes. “I never saw Mummy again. Never again. Not even once.”
“What about the general?”
“He finally loaned me one hundred francs—not a great sum even in those days—and I came to America and became a waitress. That’s all there is to the story.”
“There’s more than that,” Scripps said. “I’d stake my life there’s more than that.”
“Sometimes, you know, I feel there is,” the waitress said. “I feel there must be more than that. Somewhere, somehow, there must be an explanation. I don’t know what brought the subject into my mind this morning.”
“It was a good thing to get it off your mind,” Scripps said.
“Yes,” the waitress smiled, the lines in her face not quite so deep now. “I feel better now.”
“Tell me,” Scripps asked the waitress. “Is there any work in this town for me and my bird?”
“Honest work?” asked the waitress. “I only know of honest work.”
“Yes, honest work,” Scripps said.
“They do say they’re hiring hands at the new pump-factory,” the waitress said. Why shouldn’t he work with his hands? Rodin had done it. Cezanne had been a butcher. Renoir a carpenter. Picasso had worked in a cigarette-factory in his boyhood. Gilbert Stuart, who painted those famous portraits of Washington that are reproduced all over this America of ours and hang in every schoolroom-Gilbert Stuart had been a blacksmith. Then there was Emerson. Emerson had been a hod-carrier. James Russell Lowell had been, he had heard, a telegraph operator in his youth. Like that chap down at the station. Perhaps even now that telegrapher at the station was working on his “Thanatopsis” or his “To a Waterfowl.” Why shouldn’t he, Scripps O’Neil, work in a pump-factory?
“You’ll come back again?” the waitress asked.
“If I may,” Scripps said.
“And bring your bird.”
“Yes,” Scripps said. “The little chap’s rather tired now. After all, it was a hard night for him.”
“I should say it was,” agreed the waitress.
Scripps went out again into the town. He felt clearheaded and ready to face life. A pump-factory would be interesting. Pumps were big things now. Fortunes were made and lost in pumps every day in New York in Wall Street. He knew of a chap who’d cleaned up a cool half-million on pumps in less than half an hour. They knew what they were about, these big Wall Street operators.
Outside on the street he looked up at the sign. BEST BY TEST, he read. They had the dope all right, he said. Was it true, though, that there had been a Negro cook? Just once, just for one moment, when the wicket went up, he thought he had caught a glimpse of something black. Perhaps the chap was only sooty from the stove.
And here I solemnly protest I have no intention to vilify or asperse anyone; for though everything is copied from the book if nature, and scarce a character or action produced which I have not taken from my own observations or experience; yet I have used the utmost care to obscure the persons by such different circumstances, degrees, and colors, that it will be impossible to guess at them with any degree of certainty; and if it ever happens otherwise, it is only where the failure characterized is so minute, that it is a foible only which the party himself may laugh at as well as any other.