I gave ten minutes to reflection and to the possibility of Arthur's coming back and pleading, on his knees, to be allowed to restore that defective larynx. Then I went straight upstairs to the telephone and rang up the Central office. When they replied "Hello," I said, in the moderate and concentrated tone which we all use through telephones, "Can you give me New York?"
Poppa was in New York, and in an emergency poppa and I always turn to one another. There was a delay, during which I listened attentively, with one eye closed—I believe it is the sign of an unbalanced intellect to shut one eye when you use the telephone, but I needn't go into that—and presently I got New York. In a few minutes more I was accommodated with the Fifth Avenue Hotel.
"Mr. T.P. Wick, of Chicago," I demanded.
"Is his room number Sixty-two?"
That is the kind of mind which you usually find attached to the New York end of a trans-American telephone. But one does not bandy words across a thousand miles of country with a hotel clerk, so I merely responded:
"Very probably."
There was a pause, and then the still small voice came again.
"Mr. Wick is in bed at present. Anything important?"
I reflected that while I in Chicago was speaking to the hotel clerk at half-past nine o'clock, the hotel clerk in New York was speaking to me at eleven. This in itself was enough to make our conversation disjointed.
"Yes," I responded, "it is important. Ask Mr. Wick to get out of bed."