Just now it was sparsely patronized. In one corner two women in mourning and a child were sitting. They glanced at Berny with languid curiosity and then resumed a loud and voluble conversation in Spanish. A party of three Jews, an over-dressed woman and two young men—evidently visitors from another part of town—sat near them. On the opposite side there was no one. Berny slipped noiselessly into a chair at the corner table, her back against the partition that shut off the rest of the dining-room. She felt sheltered in this unoccupied angle, despite the fact that the mirror hanging opposite gave a reflection of her to any one standing in the archway.
The cloth was dirty and here and there showed a hole. Her ineradicable fastidiousness was strong in her even at this hour, when everything that was a manifestation of her own personality seemed weak and devitalized. She was disgustedly clearing away the crumbs of the last occupant with daintily-brushing movements of her finger-tips, when the waiter drew up beside her and demanded her order. It was part of this weird evening, when natural surroundings seemed to combine with her own overwrought condition to create an effect of strangeness and terror, that the waiter should have been an old, shriveled man of shabby and dejected mien, with a defect in one eye, which rendered it abnormally large and prominent under a drooping, reddened lid. In order to see well it was necessary for him to hold his head at a certain angle and bring the eye, staring with alarming wildness, upon the object of his attention. His aspect added still further to Berny’s dissatisfaction. She resolved to eat little and leave the place as soon as possible.
When her soup came, a thin yellow liquid in which dark bits of leaves and herbs floated, she tasted it hesitatingly, and, after a mouthful or two, put down her spoon and leaned back against the wall. She felt very tired and incapable of any more concentration of mind. Her thoughts seemed to float, disconnectedly and indifferently, this way and that, like a cobweb stirred by air currents and half held by a restraining thread. To her dulled sense of observation the laughter of the Jewish party came mingled with the tinkling of the guitar outside, and the loud, continuous talk from the Spanish women in the corner.
The waiter brought fish—a fried smelt—and she roused herself and picked up her fork. She did not notice that a man was standing near her in the archway, the edge of the lace curtain in his hand, looking about the room. He threw a side glance at her which swept her shoulders, her hat, and her down-bent profile, and looked away. Then, as if something in this glimpse had suddenly touched a spring of curiosity, he looked back again. His second survey was longer. The glance he bent upon her was sharp and grew in intensity. He made no attempt to enter or to move nearer her, but any one watching him would have seen that his interest increased with the prolongation of his scrutiny.
As if afraid of being observed he cast a quick surreptitious look over the room, which in its circuit crossed the mirror. Here, reflected from a different point of view, Berny was shown in full face, her eyes lowered, her hands moving over her plate. The man scanned the reflection with immovable intentness. Berny laid down her fork and pushed the fish away with a petulant movement, and the watcher drew back behind the lace curtain. Through its meshes he continued to stare at the mirror, his lips tightly shut, his face becoming rigid in the fixity of his observation.
The waiter entered, his arms piled with dishes, and she made a beckoning gesture to him. He answered with a jerk of his head, and, going to the table where the Spanish women sat, unloaded his cargo there, as he set it out exchanging remarks with the women in their own language and showing no haste to answer Berny’s summons. She moved in her chair and muttered angrily. The man behind the lace curtain advanced his head and through the interstices of the drapery tried to look directly at her. In this position he could only catch a glimpse of her, but he saw her hand stretched forward to take one of the red beans from the glass saucer in the middle of the table. It was an elegant hand, the skin smooth and white, the fingers covered with rings. She again beckoned, this time peremptorily, and the waiter came. The listener could hear her voice distinctly as he watched her reflection in the glass.
“Why didn’t you come when I beckoned?” she said sharply.
“Because I had other people to wait on,” said the waiter with equal asperity. “They was here before you.”
“What’s the matter with the dinner to-night? It’s all bad.”
“I ain’t cooked it,” retorted the man, growing red with indignation, his swollen eye glaring fiercely at her. “And no one else’s complained. I guess it’s what’s the matter with you?”