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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.
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.
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.
"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!" Anna Czarnik nodded and made her unwieldy escape. Geisha McCoy waved a hand at the mulatto maid. "Go to your room, Blanche.
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.
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.
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