I hurried to the door and looked out. A battered roadster, which had apparently come from Williams street along our private road and entered the graveled driveway from the rear, had banged up against the curb of one of the grass islands. Two young men in the roadster were arguing in a heated and highly alcoholic manner.
The idea of approaching two angry, unpredictable drunks didn't appeal to me, but I knew I couldn't let them stay there, making a disturbance that would be sure to annoy our customers. "Thish ish too the highway!" one of the men roared.
"No, it ish not! Thash the highway over there, where the lightsh are! You better let me drive, you're drunk, don't even know where the highway ish."
They struggled for a moment over possession of the steering wheel. Finally the one who had been driving said, "You're drunk yourshelf. Here, you better drive."
They traded seats, with painstaking clumsiness. Then they sat quietly for a moment, apparently about to go to sleep.
I was trying to coax my reluctant legs to carry me fiercely toward them when, to my relief, the new driver started the car and pulled out onto the highway. I hoped they would get safely wherever they were going.
At last I relaxed and went to sleep. Anyone who drove up wanting a cabin would ring the bell by the office door, anyway.
I couldn't have been asleep more than five minutes when the bell rang for the first time. I rented four more cabins during the night, each about an hour after the other. Nervousness and excitement kept me awake about half an hour after I rented each cabin, and I'd just be drifting into the sounder stages of sleep when the bell would ring again.
It wasn't a very restful night.
In the morning Mrs. Clark, the husky maid, came to work in the cabins. She was, in a bristling way, proud of her dark complexion and her Irish-Italian ancestry, and contemptuous of "them funny-lookin' foreigners that's always stayin' in your cabins," but she seemed to enjoy the work of cleaning the cabins, and did it with a zest and speed I could never have equaled. When I got the children fed and dressed and the baby in her playpen, I decided to tackle the mountainous heap of laundry. The laundry truck was due in a couple of hours; and I felt sure that, on the first day at least, it would take me almost as long to sort and count and list the dirty things as it would have to actually wash and iron them myself.