For eleven years Martha Foote, head housekeeper at the Senate Hotel,
Chicago, had catered, unseen, and ministered, unknown, to that great,
careless, shifting, conglomerate mass known as the Travelling Public.
Wholesale hostessing was Martha Foote's job. Senators and suffragists,
ambassadors and first families had found ease and comfort under Martha
Foote's régime. Her carpets had bent their nap to the tread of kings,
and show girls, and buyers from Montana. Her sheets had soothed the
tired limbs of presidents, and princesses, and prima donnas. For the
Senate Hotel is more than a hostelry; it is a Chicago institution. The
whole world is churned in at its revolving front door.
For eleven years Martha Foote, then, had beheld humanity throwing its
grimy suitcases on her immaculate white bedspreads; wiping its muddy
boots on her bath towels; scratching its matches on her wall paper;
scrawling its pencil marks on her cream woodwork; spilling its greasy
crumbs on her carpet; carrying away her dresser scarfs and pincushions.
There is no supremer test of character. Eleven years of hotel
housekeepership guarantees a knowledge of human nature that includes
some things no living being ought to know about her fellow men. And
inevitably one of two results must follow. You degenerate into a bitter,
waspish, and fault-finding shrew; or you develop into a patient,
tolerant, and infinitely understanding woman. Martha Foote dealt daily
with Polack scrub girls, and Irish porters, and Swedish chambermaids,
and Swiss waiters, and Halsted Street bell-boys. Italian tenors fried
onions in her Louis-Quinze suite. College boys burned cigarette holes in
her best linen sheets. Yet any one connected with the Senate Hotel, from
Pete the pastry cook to H.G. Featherstone, lessee-director, could vouch
for Martha Foote's serene unacidulation.
* * * * *
Don't gather from this that Martha Foote was a beaming, motherly person
who called you dearie. Neither was she one of those managerial and
magnificent blonde beings occasionally encountered in hotel corridors,
engaged in addressing strident remarks to a damp and crawling huddle of
calico that is doing something sloppy to the woodwork. Perhaps the
shortest cut to Martha Foote's character is through Martha Foote's
bedroom. (Twelfth floor. Turn to your left. That's it; 1246. Come in!)
In the long years of its growth and success the Senate Hotel had known
the usual growing pains. Starting with walnut and red plush it had, in
its adolescence, broken out all over into brass beds and birds'-eye
maple. This, in turn, had vanished before mahogany veneer and brocade.
Hardly had the white scratches on these ruddy surfaces been doctored by
the house painter when--whisk! Away with that sombre stuff! And in
minced a whole troupe of near-French furnishings; cream enamel beds,
cane-backed; spindle-legged dressing tables before which it was
impossible to dress; perilous chairs with raspberry complexions. Through
all these changes Martha Foote, in her big, bright twelfth floor room,
had clung to her old black walnut set.
The bed, to begin with, was a massive, towering edifice with a headboard
that scraped the lofty ceiling. Head and foot-board were fretted and
carved with great blobs representing grapes, and cornucopias, and
tendrils, and knobs and other bedevilments of the cabinet-maker's craft.
It had been polished and rubbed until now it shone like soft brown
satin. There was a monumental dresser too, with a liver-coloured marble
top. Along the wall, near the windows, was a couch; a heavy, wheezing,
fat-armed couch decked out in white ruffled cushions. I suppose the mere
statement that, in Chicago, Illinois, Martha Foote kept these cushions
always crisply white, would make any further characterization
superfluous. The couch made you think of a plump grandmother of bygone
days, a beruffled white fichu across her ample, comfortable bosom. Then
there was the writing desk; a substantial structure that bore no
relation to the pindling rose-and-cream affairs that graced the guest
rooms. It was the solid sort of desk at which an English novelist of the
three-volume school might have written a whole row of books without
losing his dignity or cramping his style. Martha Foote used it for
making out reports and instruction sheets, for keeping accounts, and for
her small private correspondence.
Such was Martha Foote's room. In a modern and successful hotel, whose
foyer was rose-shaded, brass-grilled, peacock-alleyed and tessellated,
that bed-sitting-room of hers was as wholesome, and satisfying, and real
as a piece of home-made rye bread on a tray of French pastry; and as
incongruous.
It was to the orderly comfort of these accustomed surroundings that the
housekeeper of the Senate Hotel opened her eyes this Tuesday morning.
Opened them, and lay a moment, bridging the morphean chasm that lay
between last night and this morning. It was 6:30 A.M. It is bad enough
to open one's eyes at 6:30 on Monday morning. But to open them at 6:30
on Tuesday morning, after an indigo Monday.... The taste of yesterday
lingered, brackish, in Martha's mouth.
"Oh, well, it won't be as bad as yesterday, anyway. It can't." So she
assured herself, as she lay there. "There never were _two_ days like
that, hand running. Not even in the hotel business."
For yesterday had been what is known as a muddy Monday. Thick, murky,
and oozy with trouble. Two conventions, three banquets, the lobby so
full of khaki that it looked like a sand-storm, a threatened strike in
the laundry, a travelling man in two-twelve who had the grippe and
thought he was dying, a shortage of towels (that bugaboo of the hotel
housekeeper) due to the laundry trouble that had kept the linen-room
telephone jangling to the tune of a hundred damp and irate guests. 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. By
Monday night every girl on the switchboard had the nervous jumps when
they plugged in at her signal. She had changed her rooms, and back
again. She had quarrelled with the room clerk. She had complained to the
office about the service, the food, the linen, the lights, the noise,
the chambermaid, all the bell-boys, and the colour of the furnishings in
her suite. 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 had even laughed
and quickened and responded to Geisha McCoy's manipulation of her
audience, just as you have. Martha Foote knew the value of the personal
note, and it had been her idea that had resulted in the rule which
obliged elevator boys, chambermaids, floor clerks, doormen and waiters
if possible, to learn the names of Senate Hotel guests, no matter how
brief their stay.
"They like it," she had said, to Manager Brant. "You know that better
than I do. They'll be flattered, and surprised, and tickled to death,
and they'll go back to Burlington, Iowa, and tell how well known they
are at the Senate."
When the suggestion was met with the argument that no human being could
be expected to perform such daily feats of memory Martha Foote battered
it down with:
"That's just where you're mistaken. The first few days are bad. After
that it's easier every day, until it becomes mechanical. I remember when
I first started waiting on table in my mother's quick lunch eating house
in Sorghum, Minnesota. 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. Geisha McCoy, who got a thousand a week for singing a few songs
and chatting informally with the delighted hundreds on the other side of
the footlights. Geisha McCoy made nothing of those same footlights. She
reached out, so to speak, and shook hands with you across their amber
glare. Neither lovely nor alluring, this woman. And as for her
voice!--And yet for ten years or more this rather plain person, somewhat
dumpy, no longer young, had been singing her every-day, human songs
about every-day, human people. And invariably (and figuratively) her
audience clambered up over the footlights, and sat in her lap. She had
never resorted to cheap music-hall tricks. She had never invited the
gallery to join in the chorus. She descended to no finger-snapping. But
when she sang a song about a waitress she was a waitress. She never
hesitated to twist up her hair, and pull down her mouth, to get an
effect. She didn't seem to be thinking about herself, at all, or about
her clothes, or her method, or her effort, or anything but the audience
that was plastic to her deft and magic manipulation.
Until very recently. Six months had wrought a subtle change in Geisha
McCoy. 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. 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."