PAGE 4
The Three Of Them
by
“I’ll go down. Maybe it’s the plumbing. Or the radiator. Did you ask?”
“No, nothing like that. She kept talking about a wail.”
“A what!”
“A wail. A kind of groaning, you know. And then dull raps on the wall, behind the bed.”
“Now look here, Ed Healy; I get up at 6:30, but I can’t see a joke before ten. If you’re trying to be funny!–“
“Funny! Why, say, listen, Mrs. Foote. I may be a night clerk, but I’m not so low as to get you out at half past six to spring a thing like that in fun. I mean it. So did she.”
“But a kind of moaning! And then dull raps!”
“Those are her words. A kind of m–“
“Let’s not make a chant of it. I think I get you. I’ll be down there in ten minutes. Telephone her, will you?”
“Can’t you make it five?”
“Not without skipping something vital.”
Still, it couldn’t have been a second over ten, including shoes, hair, and hooks-and-eyes. And a fresh white blouse. It was Martha Foote’s theory that a hotel housekeeper, dressed for work, ought to be as inconspicuous as a steel engraving. She would have been, too, if it hadn’t been for her eyes.
She paused a moment before the door of six-eighteen and took a deep breath. At the first brisk rat-tat of her knuckles on the door there had sounded a shrill “Come in!” But before she could turn the knob the door was flung open by a kimonoed mulatto girl, her eyes all whites. The girl began to jabber, incoherently but Martha Foote passed on through the little hall to the door of the bedroom.
Six-eighteen was in bed. At sight of her Martha Foote knew that she had to deal with an over-wrought woman. Her hair was pushed back wildly from her forehead. Her arms were clasped about her knees. At the left her nightgown had slipped down so that one plump white shoulder gleamed against the background of her streaming hair. The room was in almost comic disorder. It was a room in which a struggle has taken place between its occupant and that burning-eyed hag, Sleeplessness. The hag, it was plain, had won. A half-emptied glass of milk was on the table by the bed. Warmed, and sipped slowly, it had evidently failed to soothe. A tray of dishes littered another table. Yesterday’s dishes, their contents congealed. Books and magazines, their covers spread wide as if they had been flung, sprawled where they lay. A little heap of grey-black cigarette stubs. The window curtain awry where she had stood there during a feverish moment of the sleepless night, looking down upon the lights of Grant Park and the sombre black void beyond that was Lake Michigan. A tiny satin bedroom slipper on a chair, its mate, sole up, peeping out from under the bed. A pair of satin slippers alone, distributed thus, would make a nun’s cell look disreputable. Over all this disorder the ceiling lights, the wall lights, and the light from two rosy lamps, beat mercilessly down; and upon the white-faced woman in the bed.
She stared, hollow-eyed, at Martha Foote. Martha Foote, in the doorway, gazed serenely back upon her. And Geisha McCoy’s quick intelligence and drama-sense responded to the picture of this calm and capable figure in the midst of the feverish, over-lighted, over-heated room. In that moment the nervous pucker between her eyes ironed out ever so little, and something resembling a wan smile crept into her face. And what she said was:
“I wouldn’t have believed it.”
“Believed what?” inquired Martha Foote, pleasantly.
“That there was anybody left in the world who could look like that in a white shirtwaist at 6:30 A.M. Is that all your own hair?”
“Strictly.”
“Some people have all the luck,” sighed Geisha McCoy, and dropped listlessly back on her pillows. Martha Foote came forward into the room. At that instant the woman in the bed sat up again, tense, every nerve strained in an attitude of listening. The mulatto girl had come swiftly to the foot of the bed and was clutching the footboard, her knuckles showing white.