Four Years in the Underbrush: Adventures as a Working Woman in New YorkAnonymous
History
Four Years in the Underbrush: Adventures as a Working Woman in New York
Anonymous
Women employees -- New York (State) -- New York
“You know yourself she is not here,” I wailed. “You told me so yesterday
when I came in. Said she wouldn’t be back from her vacation until
to-morrow. I gave you a note to be delivered as soon as she arrived.”
“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.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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