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The Three Of Them
by
Such was Martha Foote’s room. In a modern and successful hotel, whose foyer was rose-shaded, brass-grilled, peacock-alleyed and tessellated, that bed-sitting-room of hers was as wholesome, and satisfying, and real as a piece of home-made rye bread on a tray of French pastry; and as incongruous.
It was to the orderly comfort of these accustomed surroundings that the housekeeper of the Senate Hotel opened her eyes this Tuesday morning. Opened them, and lay a moment, bridging the morphean chasm that lay between last night and this morning. It was 6:30 A.M. It is bad enough to open one’s eyes at 6:30 on Monday morning. But to open them at 6:30 on Tuesday morning, after an indigo Monday…. The taste of yesterday lingered, brackish, in Martha’s mouth.
“Oh, well, it won’t be as bad as yesterday, anyway. It can’t.” So she assured herself, as she lay there. “There never were two days like that, hand running. Not even in the hotel business.”
For yesterday had been what is known as a muddy Monday. Thick, murky, and oozy with trouble. Two conventions, three banquets, the lobby so full of khaki that it looked like a sand-storm, a threatened strike in the laundry, a travelling man in two-twelve who had the grippe and thought he was dying, a shortage of towels (that bugaboo of the hotel housekeeper) due to the laundry trouble that had kept the linen-room telephone jangling to the tune of a hundred damp and irate guests. And weaving in and out, and above, and about and through it all, like a neuralgic toothache that can’t be located, persisted the constant, nagging, maddening complaints of the Chronic Kicker in six-eighteen.
Six-eighteen was a woman. She had arrived Monday morning, early. By Monday night every girl on the switchboard had the nervous jumps when they plugged in at her signal. She had changed her rooms, and back again. She had quarrelled with the room clerk. She had complained to the office about the service, the food, the linen, the lights, the noise, the chambermaid, all the bell-boys, and the colour of the furnishings in her suite. She said she couldn’t live with that colour. It made her sick. Between 8:30 and 10:30 that night, there had come a lull. Six-eighteen was doing her turn at the Majestic.
Martha Foote knew that. She knew, too, that her name was Geisha McCoy, and she knew what that name meant, just as you do. She had even laughed and quickened and responded to Geisha McCoy’s manipulation of her audience, just as you have. Martha Foote knew the value of the personal note, and it had been her idea that had resulted in the rule which obliged elevator boys, chambermaids, floor clerks, doormen and waiters if possible, to learn the names of Senate Hotel guests, no matter how brief their stay.
“They like it,” she had said, to Manager Brant. “You know that better than I do. They’ll be flattered, and surprised, and tickled to death, and they’ll go back to Burlington, Iowa, and tell how well known they are at the Senate.”
When the suggestion was met with the argument that no human being could be expected to perform such daily feats of memory Martha Foote battered it down with:
“That’s just where you’re mistaken. The first few days are bad. After that it’s easier every day, until it becomes mechanical. I remember when I first started waiting on table in my mother’s quick lunch eating house in Sorghum, Minnesota. I’d bring ’em wheat cakes when they’d ordered pork and beans, but it wasn’t two weeks before I could take six orders, from soup to pie, without so much as forgetting the catsup. Habit, that’s all.”
So she, as well as the minor hotel employes, knew six-eighteen as Geisha McCoy. Geisha McCoy, who got a thousand a week for singing a few songs and chatting informally with the delighted hundreds on the other side of the footlights. Geisha McCoy made nothing of those same footlights. She reached out, so to speak, and shook hands with you across their amber glare. Neither lovely nor alluring, this woman. And as for her voice!–And yet for ten years or more this rather plain person, somewhat dumpy, no longer young, had been singing her every-day, human songs about every-day, human people. And invariably (and figuratively) her audience clambered up over the footlights, and sat in her lap. She had never resorted to cheap music-hall tricks. She had never invited the gallery to join in the chorus. She descended to no finger-snapping. But when she sang a song about a waitress she was a waitress. She never hesitated to twist up her hair, and pull down her mouth, to get an effect. She didn’t seem to be thinking about herself, at all, or about her clothes, or her method, or her effort, or anything but the audience that was plastic to her deft and magic manipulation.