A SIESTA.
How sleepy I feel! It is this beastly influenza cold and headache. The best thing to do for a headache is to have a little doze and sleep it off. Not a very easy thing to do in a big Paris hotel in the afternoon. However, it is quiet enough in my room, looking on to the courtyard, away from the noises of the Boulevard.
Just dropping off. Crash! Only someone shutting a door. That is not an unusual sound. In these big hotels no one closes a door, no one glides along a passage, no one speaks in a soft voice, but everyone bangs, and stamps, and shouts. If it is a woman, she screams. Another crash! The man in the next room just come in. That's the Frenchman with the awful cough. No one but a Frenchman could have a cough like that. Lie and listen to his cough for some time. Various other doors banged. But at last sink into unconsciousness. Good Heavens! What's happened now? Oh, it's the American trunks being dragged out of the room on the other side. Well, at any rate I shall not hear the American voices now through that miserable door of communication, which, locked and bolted ever so carefully, does not keep out sounds. But there is someone talking there now. Of course the new comers. It must be two people. No, twenty people. By Jove, they are Germans! And there's the Frenchman's cough again. I shall never get to sleep. Yet somehow the sounds get confused, I fancy the Germans are coughing and the Frenchman is saying "Ja, ja, ja," and then——
There, now I am awake again. Why, there's someone knocking at the door. "Pardon, monsieur, avez-vous reçu votre linge?" "Mais, oui, je l'ai reçu hier." "Pardon, monsieur, il y a des faux-cols." "Non, je les ai reçus tous." "Mais, monsieur——" "Mais qu'est-ce que vous me chantez là? Laissez-moi tranquille." "Mais, monsieur, le monsieur en face m'a dit que monsieur a reçu des faux-cols que monsieur——" Confound the collars! Get up, let in the garçon, examine my collars and the collars of the monsieur en face, who is just packing up, rectify the mistake of the washerwoman, and am again alone. Now is it worth going to sleep or not? Will try once more.
What's that? "Marie!" It's someone shouting outside my door. How fond they are of shouting outside my door! "Marie! De l'eau chaude." I hope she won't think it's for me, or she'll wake me up if at last I get a chance of dropping off. Then silence. Positively, absolute silence. The coughing Frenchman must have been suffocated; the Germans—no, nothing could stop the Germans from talking, only they have gone out of hearing. And the femme de chambre has hurried off to fetch that hot water for somebody, and the garçon is not banging his broom about in this couloir, and there is no baggage coming or going, and no door crashing; and, in the midst of profound peace, I think drowsily of quiet country afternoons, when one hears only the humming of the bees, and the whispering of the aspens, and then, and then——Hullo! What's up now? There's someone else knocking. My last chance gone. My head is aching more than ever. "Eh bien?" "C'est l'eau chaude que vous avez commandée, Monsieur."