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The Three Of Them
by
“Listen!” A hissing whisper from the haggard woman in the bed. “What’s that?”
“Wha’ dat!” breathed the coloured girl, all her elegance gone, her every look and motion a hundred-year throwback to her voodoo-haunted ancestors.
The three women remained rigid, listening. From the wall somewhere behind the bed came a low, weird monotonous sound, half wail, half croaking moan, like a banshee with a cold. A clanking, then, as of chains. A s-s-swish. Then three dull raps, seemingly from within the very wall itself.
The coloured girl was trembling. Her lips were moving, soundlessly. But Geisha McCoy’s emotion was made of different stuff.
“Now look here,” she said, desperately, “I don’t mind a sleepless night. I’m used to ’em. But usually I can drop off at five, for a little while. And that’s been going on–well, I don’t know how long. It’s driving me crazy. Blanche, you fool, stop that hand wringing! I tell you there’s no such thing as ghosts. Now you”–she turned to Martha Foote again–“you tell me, for God’s sake, what is that!”
And into Martha Foote’s face there came such a look of mingled compassion and mirth as to bring a quick flame of fury into Geisha McCoy’s eyes.
“Look here, you may think it’s funny but–“
“I don’t. I don’t. Wait a minute.” Martha Foote turned and was gone. An instant later the weird sounds ceased. The two women in the room looked toward the door, expectantly. And through it came Martha Foote, smiling. She turned and beckoned to some one without. “Come on,” she said. “Come on.” She put out a hand, encouragingly, and brought forward the shrinking, cowering, timorous figure of Anna Czarnik, scrub-woman on the sixth floor. Her hand still on her shoulder Martha Foote led her to the centre of the room, where she stood, gazing dumbly about. She was the scrub-woman you’ve seen in every hotel from San Francisco to Scituate. A shapeless, moist, blue calico mass. Her shoes turned up ludicrously at the toes, as do the shoes of one who crawls her way backward, crab-like, on hands and knees. Her hands were the shrivelled, unlovely members that bespeak long and daily immersion in dirty water. But even had these invariable marks of her trade been lacking, you could not have failed to recognise her type by the large and glittering mock-diamond comb which failed to catch up her dank and stringy hair in the back.
One kindly hand on the woman’s arm, Martha Foote performed the introduction.
“This is Mrs. Anna Czarnik, late of Poland. Widowed. Likewise childless. Also brotherless. Also many other uncomfortable things. But the life of the crowd in the scrub-girls’ quarters on the top floor. Aren’t you, Anna? Mrs. Anna Czarnik, I’m sorry to say, is the source of the blood-curdling moan, and the swishing, and the clanking, and the ghost-raps. There is a service stairway just on the other side of this wall. Anna Czarnik was performing her morning job of scrubbing it. The swishing was her wet rag. The clanking was her pail. The dull raps her scrubbing brush striking the stair corner just behind your wall.”
“You’re forgetting the wail,” Geisha McCoy suggested, icily.
“No, I’m not. The wail, I’m afraid, was Anna Czarnik, singing.”
“Singing?”
Martha Foote turned and spoke a gibberish of Polish and English to the bewildered woman at her side. Anna Czarnik’s dull face lighted up ever so little.
“She says the thing she was singing is a Polish folk-song about death and sorrow, and it’s called a–what was that, Anna?”
“Dumka.”
“It’s called a dumka. It’s a song of mourning, you see? Of grief. And of bitterness against the invaders who have laid her country bare.”
“Well, what’s the idea!” demanded Geisha McCoy. “What kind of a hotel is this, anyway? Scrub-girls waking people up in the middle of the night with a Polish cabaret. If she wants to sing her hymn of hate why does she have to pick on me!”
“I’m sorry. You can go, Anna. No sing, remember! Sh-sh-sh!”