“Why don’t you borrow of the elevator-man?” she asked, then added with a devil’s grin: “you’ve got thick enough with him considering you’ve been here less than twenty-four hours.”
“I shall ask him,” I told her. “If he’s got it I’m sure he’ll lend it to me.”
And I would have done it had I not recalled that the prescription was in my pocketbook, locked up in my room. I knew nothing of the drug-stores of that neighborhood. If the clerk at the desk would not trust me enough to lend me five cents, it was not at all probable that a druggist would let me have a medicine for which I could not pay. For the sake of getting farther away from that clerk when the elevator returned I took it and went back to my floor.
In the Jane Leonard one of the many “features” advertised is the sitting-rooms, one on each floor. It was to one of these I now crept. My head! My God! the pain in my head. The living flame that was my face! If, when I die, I go to hell I do not believe I shall—that I can suffer greater agony than I did during the three hours spent in that hot little room opening on a court and shut off from the outside air. Even now, looking back at this distance, that afternoon—like one mad, hideously flaming blur—is painful.
When, after eons of time, the elevator-man appeared in the door of that sitting-room, he had to repeat his statement that he had opened my door before I could understand. I think that I must have been semidelirious. I remember that as he followed me to my door he said that it had not taken him five minutes. Also—this more vividly—that he refused to take the tip that, though suffering pain almost unendurable, I had memory enough to offer.
Though the first half of that night was a hideous nightmare it was not so bad as the afternoon. I could not lie down, but I rested on the bed with my head on a pillow against the wall. Besides I had water, not very cool, but a refreshing moisture to the fever of my face. Most of all was the certainty that relief was on the way—once the medicine had time to act.
This must have happened toward midnight. I was sufficiently conscious to recognize the step of a man passing along the hall, and to know that he was the night-watchman. Calling through a crack of my door I asked him to turn off the light in the hall immediately in front of my transom. He was so concerned about my not being asleep that screwing up my courage I asked if he thought he could get me a small piece of ice.
“Sure, lady,” he told me. “I’ll get it from the ice-box in the basement, and I’ll bring it straight up—not wait to come on my rounds.”
That flint-faced woman in the office had shaken my faith in humanity to such an extent that I did not believe this watchman. I thought he was jollying me. So sure of it that I went back to dabbling my handkerchief in the little pan of water that I had fetched from the bathroom, and tried to make myself as comfortable as might be sitting on the bed with my head propped against the wall.
In a surprisingly short time the night-watchman was back again. He had brought me a pitcherful of ice, not a small pitcher either. He explained that he had put the large piece at the bottom so that I might easily get the smaller ones. When I offered him a tip he stepped beyond the reach of my hand, and told me: