Cheerful-By Request Part 38

Such was six-eighteen. Martha Foote, luxuriating in that one delicious moment between her 6:30 awakening, and her 6:31 arising, mused on these things. She thought of how, at eleven o'clock the night before, her telephone had rung with the sharp zing! of trouble. The voice of Irish Nellie, on night duty on the sixth floor, had sounded thick-brogued, sure sign of distress with her.

"I'm sorry to be a-botherin' ye, Mis' Phut. It's Nellie speakin'--Irish Nellie on the sixt'."

"What's the trouble, Nellie?"

"It's that six-eighteen again. She's goin' on like mad. She's carryin'

on something fierce."

"What about?"

"Th'--th' blankets, Mis' Phut."

"Blankets?--"

"She says--it's her wurruds, not mine--she says they're vile. Vile, she says."

Martha Foote's spine had stiffened. "In this house! Vile!"

If there was one thing more than another upon which Martha Foote prided herself it was the Senate Hotel bed coverings. Creamy, spotless, downy, they were her especial fad. "Brocade chairs, and pink lamps, and gold snake-work are all well and good," she was wont to say, "and so are American Beauties in the lobby and white gloves on the elevator boys.

But it's the blankets on the beds that stamp a hotel first or second cla.s.s." And now this, from Nellie.

"I know how ye feel, an' all. I sez to 'er, I sez: 'There never was a blanket in this _house_,' I sez, 'that didn't look as if it cud be sarved up wit' whipped cr-ream,' I sez, 'an' et,' I sez to her; 'an'

fu'thermore,' I sez--"

"Never mind, Nellie. I know. But we never argue with guests. You know that rule as well as I. The guest is right--always. I'll send up the linen-room keys. You get fresh blankets; new ones. And no arguments. But I want to see those--those vile--"

"Listen, Mis' Phut." Irish Nellie's voice, until now shrill with righteous anger, dropped a discreet octave. "I seen 'em. An' they _are_ vile. Wait a minnit! But why? Becus that there maid of hers--that yella'

hussy--give her a body ma.s.sage, wit' cold cream an' all, usin' th'

blankets f'r coverin', an' smearin' 'em right _an'_ lift. This was afther they come back from th' theayter. Th' crust of thim people, using the iligent blankets off'n the beds t'--"

"Good night, Nellie. And thank you."

"Sure, ye know I'm that upset f'r distarbin' yuh, an' all, but--"

Martha Foote cast an eye toward the great walnut bed. "That's all right.

Only, Nellie--"

"Yesm'm."

"If I'm disturbed again on that woman's account for anything less than murder--"

"Yesm'm?"

"Well, there'll _be_ one, that's all. Good night."

Such had been Monday's cheerful close.

Martha Foote sat up in bed, now, preparatory to the heroic flinging aside of the covers. "No," she a.s.sured herself, "it can't be as bad as yesterday." She reached round and about her pillow, groping for the recalcitrant hairpin that always slipped out during the night; found it, and twisted her hair into a hard bathtub bun.

With a jangle that tore through her half-wakened senses the telephone at her bedside shrilled into life. Martha Foote, hairpin in mouth, turned and eyed it, speculatively, fearfully. It shrilled on in her very face, and there seemed something taunting and vindictive about it. One long ring, followed by a short one; a long ring, a short. "Ca-a-an't it?

Ca-a-an't it?"

"Something tells me I'm wrong," Martha Foote told herself, ruefully, and reached for the blatant, snarling thing.

"Yes?"

"Mrs. Foote? This is Healy, the night clerk. Say, Mrs. Foote, I think you'd better step down to six-eighteen and see what's--"

"I _am_ wrong," said Martha Foote.

"What's that?"

"Nothing. Go on. Will I step down to six-eighteen and--?"

"She's sick, or something. Hysterics, I'd say. As far as I could make out it was something about a noise, or a sound or--Anyway, she can't locate it, and her maid says if we don't stop it right away--"

"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 k.n.o.b the door was flung open by a kimonoed mulatto girl, her eyes all whites. The girl began to jabber, incoherently but Martha Foote pa.s.sed 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 gla.s.s 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."