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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.
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 still sang her every-day, human songs about every-day, human people. But you failed, somehow, to recognise them as such. They sounded sawdust-stuffed. And you were likely to hear the man behind you say, "Yeh, but you ought to have heard her five years ago. She's about through." Such was six-eighteen.
Tony, the waiter, had just brought it on and had set it out for her, a gleaming island of white linen, and dome-shaped metal tops. Irish Nellie, a privileged person always, waxed conversational as she folded back the bed covers in a neat triangular wedge. "Six-eighteen kinda ca'med down, didn't she? High toime, the divil. She had us jumpin' yist'iddy.
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.
Thick, murky, and oozy with trouble. 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.
"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!
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 employés, knew six-eighteen as Geisha McCoy.
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.
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.
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