10. A Midnight Visitor
I slipped unobserved into the diet kitchen, where I left my cape and to some degree repaired damages. I found, on emerging from the kitchen, that the new patient in Eighteen had arrived. It is a rule with me personally to superintend the installation of a new patient, so I went at once to Room 18. I still found it unpleasant to enter that room, especially since the figure on the narrow bed reminded me forcibly of that other figure that had lain there.
Mr. Gastin was an elderly man, somewhat peevish at being thrust into bed, and quite to my liking. He must have been a person of some importance, for flowers galore had already arrived, among them a potted lobelia, a sinister-looking flower that I have never liked.
He replied rather bitterly that he was as comfortable as might be expected and asked for the evening papers.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but we don’t have them.”
“Don’t have them!” he exclaimed, eyeing me shrewdly. “Oh. Oh, yes, I see why. Where did all this trouble occur, anyway? And see here, what’s the matter with this radio? The thing don’t work. Is it turned on at this hour? I want the stock reports. I want to tune in myself.”
“The radio is in the general office,” I explained hastily, fearing he would return to the question I did not wish to answer. “The speakers in the different rooms connect with it. It is usually turned on at this hour, but I don’t know whether they have got the stock reports or not.”
“Well, bring me a speaker that works, anyhow,” he said, hitching himself on one elbow among the pillows and then flopping back again. “Anything for amusement. I suppose it will be bedtime stories. Well, bring ’em on. And you might slip me a cigar.”
I felt rather sad as I took the loud speaker, pulled the plug from its connection above the bed, and started away. It doesn’t take five minutes to place a new patient in his correct category and I knew all too well where this one belonged. Someone had labelled them “crippled captains of finance,” and the title stuck.
Being in a hurry I took the faulty speaker into Sonny’s room. He was engrossed with a new block puzzle and paying no attention to the radio so I exchanged the speakers, taking the one in Sonny’s room to Mr. Gastin for the time being. Once connected, soft and dulcet tones rang through Number 18: “. . . and then Bunny Brown Eyes—scampered along . . .”