Arthur Hailey - Hotel

"You make it sound as if you're saying goodbye."

"I am, Marsha." He met her eyes steadily, then smiled. "Right after the cripes suzette."

There was a silence before she said, "I thought .."

He reached out across the table, his hand covering Marsha's. "Perhaps we were both daydreaming. I think we were. But it's quite the nicest daydream I ever had."

"Why does it have to be just that?"

He answered gently, "Some things you can't explain. No matter how much you like someone, there's a question of deciding what's best to do; of judgment .."

"And my judgment doesn't count?"

"Marsha, I have to trust mine. For both of us." But he wondered: Could it be trusted? His own instincts had proven less than reliable before.

Perhaps, at this moment, he was making a mistake which years from now he would remember with regret. How to be sure of anything, when you often learned the truth too late?

He sensed that Marsha was close to tears.

"Excuse me," she said in a low voice. She stood up and walked swiftly from the gallery.

Sitting there, Peter wished he could have spoken less forthrightly, tempering his words with the gentleness that he felt for this lonely girl.

He wondered if she would return. After a few minutes, when Marsha failed to, Anna appeared. "Looks like you'll be finishing breakfast alone, sir. I don't believe Miss Marsha'll be back."

He asked, "How is she?"

"She's cryin' in her room." Anna shrugged. "Isn't the first time. Don't suppose it'll be the last. It's a way she has when she doesn't get all she wants." She removed the steak plates. "Ben'll serve you the rest."

He shook his head. "No, thank you. I must go."

"Then I'll just bring coffee." In the background, Ben had busied himself, but it was Anna who took the cafe au lait and put it beside Peter.

"Don't go away worrying over much, sir. When she's past the most of it, I'll do the best I can. Miss Marsha has maybe too much time to think about herself. If her daddy was here more, maybe things'd be different. But he ain't. Not hardly at all."

"You're very understanding."

Peter remembered what Marsha had told him about Anna: how, as a young girl, Anna had been forced by her family to marry a man she scarcely knew; but the marriage had lasted happily for more than forty years until Anna's husband died a year ago.

Peter said, "I heard about your husband. He must have been a fine man."

"My husband!" The housekeeper cackled. "I ain't had no husband. Never been married in my whole life. I'm a maiden lady - more or less."

Marsha had said: They lived with us here, Anna and her husband. He was the kindest, sweetest man I've ever known. If there was ever a perfect marriage, it belonged to them. Marsha had used the portrayal to bolster her own argument when she asked Peter to marry her.

Anna was still chuckling. "My goodness! Miss Marsha's been taking you in with all her stories. She makes up a good many. A lot of the time she's play acting, which is why you don't need to worry none now."

"I see." Peter was not sure that he did, though he felt relieved.

Ben showed him out. It was after nine o'clock and the day was already becoming hot. Peter walked briskly toward St. Charles Avenue where he headed for the hotel. He hoped that the walk would overcome any somnolence he might feel from the trencherman's meal. He felt a genuine regret that he would not see Marsha again, and a sorrow concerning her for a reason he could not fully comprehend. He wondered if he would ever be wise about women. He rather doubted it.

2

Number four elevator was acting up again. Cy Lewin, its elderly daytime operator, was getting thoroughly sick of number four and its capriciousness, which had started a week or more ago and seemed to be getting worse.

Last Sunday the elevator had several times refused to respond to its controls, even though both cage and landing doors were fully closed. The relief man had told Cy that the same thing happened Monday night when Mr. McDermott, the assistant general manager, was in the car.

Then, on Wednesday, there had been trouble which put number four out of service for several hours. Malfunctioning of the clutch arrangement, engineering said, whatever that meant; but the repair job had not prevented another hiatus the following day when on three separate occasions number four refused to start away from the fifteenth floor.

Now, today, number four was starting and stopping jerkily at every floor.

It was not Cy Lewin's business to know what was wrong. Nor did he especially care, even though he had heard the chief engineer, Doc Vickery, grumbling about "patching and patching" and complaining that he needed "a hundred thousand dollars to rip the elevators' guts out and begin again."

Well, who wouldn't like that kind of money? Cy Lewin himself sure would, which was why every year he scraped together the price of a sweepstake ticket, though a fat lot of good it had ever done him.

But a St. Gregory veteran like himself was entitled to consideration, and tomorrow he would ask to be moved over to one of the other cars. Why not?

He had worked twenty-seven years in the hotel and was running elevators before some of the young whippersnappers now around the place were born.

After today, let someone else put up with number four and its contrariness.

It was a little before ten a.m., and the hotel was becoming busy. Cy Lewin took a load up from the lobby, mostly conventioneers with names on their lapels - stopping at intermediate floors until the fifteenth, which was the top of the hotel. Going down, the car was filled to capacity by the time he reached the ninth, and he highballed the rest of the way to the main lobby. On this latest trip he noticed that the jerkiness had stopped. Well, whatever that trouble was, he guessed it had fixed itself.

He could not have been more wrong.

High above Cy Lewin, perched like an eyrie on the hotel roof, was the elevator control room. There, in the mechanical heart of number four elevator, a small electrical relay had reached the limit of its useful life. The cause, unknown and unsuspected, was a tiny push rod the size of a household nail.

The push rod was screwed into a miniature piston head which, in turn, actuated a trio of switches. One switch applied and released the elevator brake, a second supplied power to an operating motor; the third controlled a generator circuit. With all three functioning, the elevator car moved smoothly up and down in response to its controls. But with only two switches working - and if the nonworking switch should be that which controlled the elevator motor - the car would be free to fall under its own weight. Only one thing could cause such a failure - the over-all lengthening of the push rod and piston.

For several weeks the push rod had been working loose. With movements so infinitesimal that a hundred might equal the thickness of a human hair, the piston head had turned, slowly but inexorably unscrewing itself from the push rod thread. The effect was twofold. The push rod and piston had increased their total length. And the motor switch was barely functioning.

Just as a final grain of sand will tip a scale, so, at this moment, the slightest further twisting of the piston would isolate the motor switch entirely.

The defect had been the cause of number four's erratic functioning which Cy Lewin and others had observed. A maintenance crew had tried to trace the trouble, but had not succeeded. They could hardly be blamed. There were more than sixty relays to a single elevator, and twenty elevators in the entire hotel.

Nor had anyone observed that two safety devices on the elevator car were partially defective.

At ten past ten on Friday morning, number four elevator was - in fact, and figuratively - hanging by a thread.