Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Mamma put her hat on for her last of all, and adjusted it, and thrust the pins through it. The hat that went way up on one side, way down on the other.

Then Mamma placed an arm about her waist, and kissed her once again on the forehead, the kiss that she remembered so well from her childhood, the kiss of security, the kiss of consolation, the kiss of belonging to someone, of being a part of them; the kiss of home. And Mamma murmured gently beside her ear, “Come, our little girl is coming home with us.”

Step by step, with her arm about her, she led her over to the door, then out past it to where Papa stood waiting, and reaching behind her, started to draw it tactfully closed after them.

But just as it was closing, the girl herself gave an abrupt turn, and pleading, “Just one moment—! Only one—!” stepped back to it and looked in once more, while Mamma’s arm still held her around the waist.

And staring around at the emptiness, as if seeking him everywhere and finding him nowhere, she called out with whispered intensity: “Good-bye, Johnny! Good-bye! And good-bye to me too. For we both died in here the other night.”

She arrived at about nine, that last night. That last night of the hotel. She came alone in a taxi. It had to take its place in what almost amounted to a conveyor-belt of taxis, each stopping in turn at the entrance, then drawing away again. There was this difference: hers was bringing its fare to the hotel, the rest were all taking theirs from it.

She was very frail and very old, and looked very small the way she sat there in the exact center of the broad rear scat. Her face looked unlined and peaceful, as though care had passed over it lightly.

The driver stopped at the entrance, his car grazing the one ahead as it drew away, the one just in back grazing his as it closed in to wait its turn.

She leaned forward a trifle and asked, “Is it that now?”

He looked at his watch and said, “Yes, ma’am, exactly that.”

She nodded, gratified. “I wanted it to be that exactly.”

“It’s a hard thing to do,” he said. “Let you out somewhere at an exact certain minute. I had to take you around the block three times. That made the meter climb up.”

“I don’t mind,” she reassured him quickly. “I don’t care.” She paid him, and then when he turned in the seat to try and pass the change back to her, she put the flat of her hand up against it. “No, I don’t want anything back,” she said.

“But that was a five,” he said.

“I know it was,” she said imperturbably. “My sight is good.” Then she added, as though that explained her generosity, “I don’t ride in taxis very often.”

He got out and opened the rear door for her and helped her down. She looked smaller than ever standing beside him there on the sidewalk and with two tremendous walls of baggage towering on both sides of her. He got her bag out. She only had one, a very small one, lightweight and old-fashioned. It too looked small, just as she did.

“The place is coming down, you know,” he told her.

“I know it is,” she said. “I can read the papers.” But it wasn’t said with asperity.

“They’re putting up a twenty-six-story office building on the site.”

“Twenty-eight,” she corrected him. Then she gave a contemptuous sniff, presumably intended for office buildings in general and not just the difference of two floors.

She left him and went inside, carrying the bag herself. She stopped at the desk. “I have a reservation for Room 923,” she said. “I engaged it several weeks ago.”

He scanned some sort of a chart he had tacked up there off to one side. “I believe that floor’s already been closed off,” he said. “Won’t one of the lower floors do?”

She was firm. “No. I specified that room, and my reservation was accepted. I had it confirmed. I won’t take any other.”

He went off and spoke to somebody about it. Then he came back and said, “You can have that room.” He presented the register to her for her signature. It was open very far to the back, at the last few of its pages. She fingered the thick bulk of its preceding ones.

“How far back docs this go?” she asked him.

He had to look at the opening page to find out. “Nineteen forty.”

“And what happened to the old ones? There must have been others before this. What happened to the very first one of all?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” he admitted. “Probably done away with long ago. Thrown out.”

“Thrown out!” she said with severity. “Things like that shouldn’t be thrown out.” She shook her head with disapproval. “Very well, I’ll sign,” she said. She wrote “Mrs. John Compton” in a wavering spidery hand, almost ghostly compared to some of the firm, fullbodied signatures that had gone before it.

He had to keep palming the bell repeatedly before he could attract any attention. The staff had already been skeletonized. Finally a harried bellboy appeared, picked up her bag, and mechanically started toward the street entrance with it. A sharp clang of the bell brought him around in his tracks.

“Show this lady to 923.”

The bellboy showed undisguised astonishment for a minute. “You mean the lady’s coming in? Now?”

“The lady’s checking in, not out.”

The elevator was empty on the up-trip, they and the operator were the only ones in it, though a moment before it had brought down fully twenty people.

He took her to the door of the room, opened it for her, put on the light.

She looked around, first from the threshold, then timorously step by step as she advanced further into it. “They changed it,” she said ruefully.

“No, ma’am,” he said. “It hasn’t been changed in years. It’s been like it is now ever since I can remember it.”

She smiled knowingly, as if to herself, but didn’t contradict him any further. “He said this floor was already shut off. Now see that I have everything.”

“Oh, you’ll be taken care of, ma’am,” he assured her earnestly. “I’ll send the maid from one of the lower floors right up to you. And don’t be nervous, ma’am. You’ll be safe. The building is still fully protected.”

“It never even occurred to me,” she said almost indifferently.

When he’d gone, the chair seemed to cause her some dissatisfaction. She kept giving it small nudges, until the sum total of them had altered its position very considerably, particularly as to the direction in which it faced.

“This was where it was,” she declared contentedly when she’d done. She even gave it a pat of commendation, as if to show how much better pleased with it she now was.

A maid tapped and came into the room. She was elderly, but still held herself straight. Her hair had grayed only to an intermediate salt-and-pepper, and then refused to whiten any further. Her figure was spare, in spite of her age. Or possibly because of it. Her eyes were sprightly, and the blue was very little dulled, behind the old-fashioned metal-rimmed spectacles she wore. Only her fingers, over-large at the joints, spindly between, betrayed the lifetime of hard work.

“Good evening,” she said.

“Good evening,” the other old woman replied.

Then she looked at her and asked, “What’s your name?”

“Ann,” the maid said. “Spelt the short way, without the ‘e.’ ”

“Well, it’s just as good that way as the other way,” the old lady told her.

“I’ve stayed with it this long, what would be the sense of changing it now?” the maid agreed.