OMELETTE - Helen with the High Hand

Page 30 of 111

OMELETTE

The mystery lay on a plate in the middle of the table. In colour it resembled scrambled eggs, except that it was tinted a more brownish, or coppery, gold--rather like a first-class Yorkshire pudding. He suspected for an instant that it might be a Yorkshire pudding according to the new-fangled recipe of Board Schools. But four eggs! No! He was sure that so small a quantity of Yorkshire pudding could not possibly have required four eggs.

He picked up the teapot, after his manner, and was in the act of pouring, when she struck him into immobility with a loud cry:

"Milk first!"

He understood that she had a caprice for pouring the tea on the top of the milk instead of the milk on the top of the tea.

"What difference does it make?" he demanded defiantly.

"What!" she cried again. "You think yourself a great authority on China tea, and yet you don't know that milk ought to be poured in first! Why, it makes quite a different taste!"

How in the name of Confucius did she know that he thought himself a great authority on China tea?

"Here!" she said. "If you don't mind, I'll pour out the tea. Thank you. Help yourself to this." She pointed to the mystery. "It must be eaten while it's hot, or it's worse than useless."

"What is it?" he asked, with false calm.

"It's a kidney omelette," she replied.

"Omelette!" he repeated, rather at a loss. He had never tasted an omelette; he had never seen an omelette. Omelettes form no part of the domestic cuisine of England. "Omelette!" he repeated. How was he familiar with the word--the word which conveyed nothing to his mind? Then he remembered: "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs." Of course she had broken eggs. She had broken four eggs--she had broken the entire household stock of eggs. And he had employed that proverb scores, hundreds of times! It was one of half-a-dozen favourite proverbs which he flung at the less sagacious and prudent of his tenants. And yet it had never occurred to him to wonder what an omelette was! Now he knew. At any rate, he knew what it looked like; and he was shortly to know what it tasted like.

"Yes," she said. "Cut it with a knife. Don't be frightened of it. You'll eat _it_; it won't eat you. And please give me very little. I ate a quarter of a pound of chocolates after dinner."

He conveyed one-third of the confection to his plate, and about a sixth to hers.

And he tasted--just a morsel, with a dash of kidney in the centre of it, on the end of his fork. He was not aware of the fact, but that was the decisive moment of his life--sixty though he was!

Had she really made this marvel, this dream, this idyll, this indescribable bliss, out of four common fresh eggs and a veal kidney that Mrs. Butt had dropped on the floor? He had come to loathe kidney. He had almost come to swearing that no manifestation or incarnation of kidney should ever again pass between his excellent teeth. And now he was ravished, rapt away on the wings of paradisaical ecstasy by a something that consisted of kidney and a few eggs. This omelette had all the finer and nobler qualities of Yorkshire pudding and scrambled eggs combined, together with others beyond the ken of his greedy fancy. Yes, he was a greedy man. He knew he was greedy. He was a greedy man whose evil passion had providentially been kept in check for over a quarter of a century by the gross unskilfulness, the appalling monotony, of a Mrs. Butt. Could it be that there existed women, light and light-handed creatures, creatures of originality and resource, who were capable of producing prodigies like this kidney omelette on the spur of the moment? Evidently! Helen existed. And the whole omelette, from the melting of the butter to the final steady glance into the saucepan, had not occupied her more than six minutes--at most. She had tossed it off as he might have tossed off a receipt for a week's rent. And the exquisite thought in his mind, the thought of penetrating sweetness, was that whence this delicacy had come, other and even rarer delicacies might have come. All his past life seemed to him to be a miserable waste of gloomy and joyless years.

		Never confuse motion with action. Ernest Hemingway