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The Three Of Them
by
Her head came down on her arms, that rested on her tight-hugged knees.
“Somebody of yours in it?” Martha Foote asked, quietly. She waited. Then she made a wild guess–an intuitive guess. “Son?”
“How did you know?” Geisha McCoy’s head came up.
“I didn’t.”
“Well, you’re right. There aren’t fifty people in the world, outside my own friends, who know I’ve got a grown-up son. It’s bad business to have them think you’re middle-aged. And besides, there’s nothing of the stage about Fred. He’s one of those square-jawed kids that are just cut out to be engineers. Third year at Boston Tech.”
“Is he still there, then?”
“There! He’s in France, that’s where he is. Somewhere–in France. And I’ve worked for twenty-two years with everything in me just set, like an alarm-clock, for the time when that kid would step off on his own. He always hated to take money from me, and I loved him for it. I never went on that I didn’t think of him. I never came off with a half dozen encores that I didn’t wish he could hear it. Why, when I played a college town it used to be a riot, because I loved every fresh-faced boy in the house, and they knew it. And now–and now–what’s there in it? What’s there in it? I can’t even hold ’em any more. I’m through, I tell you. I’m through!”
And waited to be disputed. Martha Foote did not disappoint her.
“There’s just this in it. It’s up to you to make those three women in the third row forget what they’re knitting for, even if they don’t forget their knitting. Let ’em go on knitting with their hands, but keep their heads off it. That’s your job. You’re lucky to have it.”
“Lucky?”
“Yes ma’am! You can do all the dumka stuff in private, the way Anna Czarnik does, but it’s up to you to make them laugh twice a day for twenty minutes.”
“It’s all very well for you to talk that cheer-o stuff. It hasn’t come home to you, I can see that.”
Martha Foote smiled. “If you don’t mind my saying it, Miss McCoy, you’re too worn out from lack of sleep to see anything clearly. You don’t know me, but I do know you, you see. I know that a year ago Anna Czarnik would have been the most interesting thing in this town, for you. You’d have copied her clothes, and got a translation of her sob song, and made her as real to a thousand audiences as she was to us this morning; tragic history, patient animal face, comic shoes and all. And that’s the trouble with you, my dear. When we begin to brood about our own troubles we lose what they call the human touch. And that’s your business asset.”
Geisha McCoy was looking up at her with a whimsical half-smile. “Look here. You know too much. You’re not really the hotel housekeeper, are you?”
“I am.”
“Well, then, you weren’t always–“
“Yes I was. So far as I know I’m the only hotel housekeeper in history who can’t look back to the time when she had three servants of her own, and her private carriage. I’m no decayed black-silk gentlewoman. Not me. My father drove a hack in Sorgham, Minnesota, and my mother took in boarders and I helped wait on table. I married when I was twenty, my man died two years later, and I’ve been earning my living ever since.”
“Happy?”
“I must be, because I don’t stop to think about it. It’s part of my job to know everything that concerns the comfort of the guests in this hotel.”
“Including hysterics in six-eighteen?”
“Including. And that reminds me. Up on the twelfth floor of this hotel there’s a big, old-fashioned bedroom. In half an hour I can have that room made up with the softest linen sheets, and the curtains pulled down, and not a sound. That room’s so restful it would put old Insomnia himself to sleep. Will you let me tuck you away in it?”