Work of Art

24

Or again just opp of Luxury Yacht and personally wd prefer: for people who like sailing yachts etc. & cant afford boat big enough open ocean: reg old-fash full-rigged sailing ship to Europe; advant.: quiet, rest, really feel at sea, get away fr jazz, motors. But good beds, wireless for safety, & elec. for lights, refrig., gas engines used only to charge batteries daily and as auxiliary in dead calm. Also appeal youngsters just out college.

Through all of 1918, Mark Elphinstone was weakened by attacks of angina pectoris, and the instant he was out of the army, Myron became unofficial president of the Elphinstone chain. Now he first really knew Mark as a human being.

For years Mark had lived in a large and very pseudo baronial apartment on the top floor of the Westward, with imitation beams, a heraldic fireplace, and a mute musicians'-gallery in the salon. Myron had rarely been in it, but now Mark lay abed and Myron went daily to see him. He was present through two of Mark's dreadful attacks, brought on by anger, or by an effort to get up and dress. Then, in an agony that lasted a minute and seemed to last an hour, Mark felt as though he were dying, as though a great hand were squeezing his heart, while the pain cut a gash up to his neck and down his left arm. He panted, his eyes bulging with terror. Myron and the nurse stood by the bed, in the embarrassment of futility. The horror gone, he would try to laugh, and mutter, 'Tell Carlos Jaynes to stop grabbing my heart--tell him to stop it--want it stopped right away.'

He talked now, wanderingly, of his private life. He was a widower; his one child, a daughter, was married to a lawyer of elegance, living in Brookline. Myron guessed, when he saw her, that she was gallantly trying to forgive her father for still living. She wore satin with chastely dangling chains, and was very crisp and literate, and her father was humble and conciliatory in her presence. For hours, when she had gone, Mark boasted to Myron about his daughter's music, her Italian, her friendship with bishops.

The doctor warned Mark that he must 'avoid all muscular excess and all emotion', and Mark's latest secretary, the clean, swift, amiable, rather dull young Mr. Clark Cleaver (he was rumoured to be a wizard at the parallel bars and flying rings in the Y.M.C.A. gymnasium) kept stirring Mark into furious emotion by coaxing him to avoid all emotion. Myron had sense enough to let him rave and get it over.

It was the Carlos Jaynes faction who brought on the catastrophe.

Jaynes' brother-in-law, large stockholder in the Elphinstone Company, called on Mark. Myron was not present, but he learned from Clark Cleaver that the brother-in-law pussy-catted about, patted Mark's hand, assured him that he would instantly be out and playing eighteen holes of golf, and then, with just the playful tactfulness which the bluff brigand most detested, hinted that Mark ought to resign and make Jaynes his successor.

The brother-in-law gone, Myron was sent for, and arrived by Mark's bed along with the hotel doctor. Mark was raving, 'That damned Jaynes and his damned relatives! I'll fire him! He's fired right now! Cleaver, you get on the 'phone and tell Jaynes he's fired, right now.' Cleaver dared not move. 'Get him, I tell you, get him, get him, get him on the 'phone, I tell you! They think they've got me down! They think they can jam Jaynes down my throat! I'll show 'em! I'm not afraid of any man living. I'm not afraid of anything!'

He choked. He clenched his fists in agony. His face was grey as March snow, and was greased over with cold sweat.

'But I am afraid of death!' he whimpered.

His old kneaded face fell into the blankness of childhood; defiance and courage dropped from it, and he muttered, 'Afraid of death! Myron! Cleaver! Stick by me! Stay there. Don't go away. I feel lonely. I'm afraid!' Veteran wisdom and courage came back into it, as the spasm lifted, and he snarled, 'I won't let 'em make me afraid, with their damn sympathy! Eighteen holes of golf! There's no man living can make me play golf! My game is Men, and they can't beat me! I've licked 'em!'

And he gasped and died.

The directors of the Elphinstone Company met two hours after the funeral, and learned that Mark Elphinstone's daughter, his sole heir, had contracted to sell all her holdings in the company to Carlos Jaynes and his brother-in-law. They elected Jaynes president of the company.

An hour after that, Jaynes sent for Myron and merrily offered to him the assistant managership of the Elphinstone Akron hotel.

Carlos Jaynes was not vastly popular with his fellow hotel-men throughout the country. It did not at all hurt the reputation of Myron to have been kicked out. After a week--though that week, with its agonizing enforced idleness, was long enough--he was offered the managership of an hotel in Wilmington, and took it, leaving Effie May and Luke in Mount Vernon.

He left Wilmington for the not-too-important but instructive job of chief assistant manager at the Hotel Crillon of New York, which had only five hundred rooms but was the newest and smartest hotel in the country, with a clientele altogether different from the run of amiable and prosperous social nobodies at the old Westward. The Crillon was patronized by ambassadors, princes, international crooks, and Americans so wealthy that they could afford to live on Long Island and again be farmers like their grandparents. He learned not to blink at hundred-dollar-a-day suites and small sleek dinners in private dining-room at fifty dollars a plate; he learned that one-half, at least, of the excessively rich are as annoyed as one-half, at least, of the excessively poor when they are insulted by receiving bills; and learned an Alice in Wonderland arithmetic whereof the chief problem was: 'Which pays better, ten dollars a day that you get or a hundred dollars a day that you don't get?'

He did not vastly care for the Crillon, its deftly obsequious staff, or its deftly supercilious guests. Not even yet was he fond of foot-kissing.

For one summer he was manager of the Frigate Haven, with Effie and Luke near him in an hotel cottage; for nearly a year and a half he was managing director of a large hotel in Philadelphia; and by then, in 1922, when he was forty-two years old, he had enough reputation and enough advantage from the hotel-world's continued enmity to Carlos Jaynes, to be able to stop roving, and settle down in a position that was by far the most important and best paid he had yet held: general director of all the Pye-Charian Hotels of New York, and managing director of their largest house, the Victor Hugo.

The Pye-Charian Company consisted of four men: Richard Montgomery Pye, the president; Adolph Charian, a fat, thoroughly vulgar, and thoroughly shrewd contractor; Colonel Ormond L. Westwind, the celebrated criminal lawyer, after-dinner speaker, and vestryman of St. Thomas's, and Nick Schirovsky, who called himself a manufacturer of mineral waters and whom Myron more than suspected of being a wholesale bootlegger. Myron himself and 'Jimmy' Shanks, manager of one of the Pye hotels, also had each a few shares in the company.

The holdings consisted of the Victor Hugo, a new eleven-hundred-bedroom, each-with-bath, transient hotel in upper Broadway, and six residential hotels on the West Side of New York between Seventieth and One-Hundred-and-Twenty-Fifth Streets. The largest of the residential hotels was The Dickens, on Riverside Drive, managed by Shanks. Jimmy was big and jovial and grinning and practical-joking, with his crisp rolls of the blackest hair; a shrewder and modernized version of J. Hector Warlock. He had played football for two years at the University of Kentucky, and been expelled for inattention to his books and general hell-raising.

An old friend of Myron, Clark Cleaver, Elphinstone's last secretary, was also with Pye-Charian, as chief clerk of the Walter Scott Hotel.

Of all these men, it was Richard Montgomery Pye whom Myron saw most often. His job, as president, was to control the somewhat mysterious finances of the chain, and to demand improvements which Myron had to carry out.

Dick Pye was slender and suave as a greyhound on a silver chain. He was chief among the new sort of hotel-men, detested by Mark Elphinstone, who were as likely to arrange their affairs on the golf links, in country-club bars, or in fast motor cars as in offices or the kitchen. He was a smiling man, not very tall and not over forty; he was apparently accepted as one of their own by the most pretentious country-club-and-estate circles on Long Island, and he played polo with the second team of the Old Chapel Club.

Pye's origin was in dispute. One faction asserted that he was the son of a doubtful minor Tammany official and had begun his career by selling newspapers and continued it as bell-boy in a scabby hotel in the old Tenderloin, but his friends contended that he came from what is known as a 'fine old family'. Virginians said he came from a fine old family in Massachusetts, and Massachusettsans said he came from a fine old family in Virginia. Harvard men said he was a graduate of Yale, Yale men said he was a graduate of Princeton, and Princeton men were divided between Harvard, Yale, the University of Oklahoma, and Maine Agricultural College. And Dick Pye smiled and never explained and played polo and arranged for mortgages and persuaded smart but liquorous young men to take costly suites at the Victor Hugo or The Dickens for the whole winter season, and seemed to know what Myron and Jimmy Shanks and Clark Cleaver were doing, every moment, and what unknown clerks, in some second-rate houses a thousand miles away, could be trained to take their places.

All very old and very rich women said that 'Dicky' was the sweetest boy they had ever seen, and all professional gamblers said that his poker was worthy of the most eminent practitioners.

Myron liked Dick Pye and the Victor Hugo enormously, for a few months, then dreaded them as poisonous, after the honest piracy of Mark Elphinstone.

His job was to control every department of the Victor Hugo, as resident manager, and to glance over the conduct of the six residential hotels. To these he was to give not so much time as experience and dependability. He looked into their kitchens or linen-rooms or garbage-trucks or the pile of chambermaids' O.K.'s on made-up rooms, and sometimes there was fatherly advice to department-heads and sometimes there was quick guillotining.

Most of his hours were devoted to the Victor Hugo.

The changes in hotels, in New York, and in all America, between 1905, when Myron had gone from Tippecanoe Lodge to the Westward, and the 1920's, were illustrated by the differences between the Westward and the Victor Hugo. The Hugo was intended to appeal to the same sort of solid, upper-middle-class, prosperous patrons, and it was on the same Broadway, though twenty blocks farther north. But it was nearly twice as large, eleven hundred rooms against six hundred and fifty, and it had none of the spurious grandeur which had gladdened the guests of the Westward in 1905; none of the velvet or tortured ironwork or carved teak or copper minarets or bread-pudding marble. It had, indeed, the 'good taste', or what to the 1920's and 1930's, seemed the good taste, of massive simplicity. The main entrance was a severe doorway of Indiana limestone, with no awning of glass and gilded iron; the lobby, lined with uncarved cedar panels, was half the size of the Westward's, and considerably less inviting to lobby-loungers; the elevators bore no sunbursts of brass, but they were thrice as swift and silent, and the elevator-runners discoursed on the current weather only with clients who desired it. The Victor Hugo bedrooms were free of imitation-brocade and lace table-covers, armchairs with frayed fringes, and ornamental brass beds which, even after many renovations, were still to be found in the Westward. There was less of tax-breeding space and fewer dust-collecting ornaments.

Mechanization had increased hugely, with air-conditioning, radios in all rooms, central vacuum-cleaning plant, electric refrigeration, stainless metal alloys instead of damp and seamy surfaces throughout the kitchens. There was a 'coffee-shop', approximately as large as the Grand Central and as busy. There were graduates of the Cornell and other hotel-schools in every corner.

But if the Victor Hugo was more expeditious and sophisticated and in better taste than the Westward, the trim bedrooms were far smaller, with less room for nervous patrons to poke about; if the washed and filtered air was purer, there seemed to be less of it for placid breathing; if the restaurants were better lighted, they were less leisurely; if there were more tropical fruits, there was less generous cooking; if the whole thing had become a better machine, it had become a less comfortable home.

America and the hotel of 1905 were not far from the America and the inn of Martin Chuzzlewit; America of the late 1920's had lost for all time that large, loquacious, gallant, often comic, rusticity. It had driven from Saratoga Springs to Nice, in a sixteen-cylinder car. It had gone from cotton stockings to silk; from the small beer of Weber and Fields to the champagne in 'Of Thee I Sing'; and sometimes Myron was bewildered and a little uneasy.

The guests of the Victor Hugo had familiar faces--more regularly shaved than at the Westward--yet their hearts seemed to Myron different, and he did not altogether like the change.

He still had the old dependables: the up-state banker and his family who came to New York for a month, for shopping and the opera, the Detroit purchasing agent and the Phoenix department-store buyer and the branch-manager from Spokane, all of them trained travellers who appreciated service. But among them, as was natural to an hotel which had Nick Schirovsky as one of its owners, had crept a new race of mild and solid-looking and well-behaved men, quietly dressed and most generous with tips, whom he guessed to be gamblers, racketeers, sellers of dubious stock and real estate. They did nothing of which you could complain; indeed they were ever so much quieter about sending for mineral water to accompany illicit whisky than were the innocent buyers, and they were less likely to sing 'Mandy, Mandy, Sweet as the Sugar Cane' after it. Yet Myron hated them, and felt insecure when he observed their intimacy with the aristocratic Mr. Richard Montgomery Pye.

He knew that the bell-boys were procuring liquor for the guests, from the lofty superintendent of service, but he could do nothing about it. They were under licence of Dick Pye, and they shared the profit with Pye, Charian, Schirovsky, and the pious Colonel Westwind.

But they shared, neither profits nor confidences with Myron. That was the one detail of the hotel-management that he neglected.

He had some comfort out of investing in Frigate Haven Manor, and a larger, more ambitious summer resort, Laurel Farms, and in improving his investments by giving advice as an expert.

But after three and a quarter years as general director of the Pye-Charian Hotels, he felt that he was in a blind alley. He might be a good innkeeper. He believed that he was. But just as he had never been particularly obsequious to the German barons and French vicomtes and Long Island squires at the Hotel Crillon, so he could make no especial effort to impress the slick friends of Nick Schirovsky as their natural provider and protector.

He said so to Gritzmeier the chef, and was shocked into doing something about it, instead of merely sitting around and enjoying his noble discontent.

Otto Gritzmeier was managing chef of the Hotel Victor Hugo, and for him Myron had more respect and liking than for any other officer in the Pye-Charian chain. He was a Swiss, trained in Lausanne, Biarritz, Hamburg, Milan, and Bournemouth. At fifty he had come to America as chef of the distinguished Restaurant Sylvère, but that shrine of gourmets had closed with Prohibition, and Gritzmeier had reluctantly turned from Homard Sauté à la Dumas to the Standard Cost per Ounce of Hamburg Steak.

Myron was merely supposed to confer with him several times a week, in the director's office, about menus and special dinners and the equipment and personnel of the kitchen, but almost every day found Myron sitting at Gritzmeier's desk, in his tiny glass-walled office in the good reek of the enormous kitchen, happily recovering from Schirovskism. Just Gritzmeier's appearance, the floury yet healthy cheeks, the grey huzzar moustache and imperial, the tall cap and apron and overalls (for Gritzmeier was one of the few managing chefs who refused to dress in a lounge suit) was refreshing after the pink-cheeked, ebon-haired, glossily brown-suited guests in the more expensive suites of the Victor Hugo. He became almost as intimate with Gritzmeier as he once had been with Luciano Mora--the cautious ultra-Yankee released by his admiration for an ultra-Continental.

This day in September, 1925, he growled to Gritzmeier, 'We've got to get together next week and plan the supper-dance menus for the season for the Laurentian Grill. Damn the grill! I hate planning anything for a bunch of drugstore cowboys with pocket flasks--trying to compete with the speakeasies! I've always wanted to have a really good country inn--good as any resort hotel in Europe.'

'Then vy don't you, Chief?'

'Well, it's difficult getting started . . .'

'T'ree years you've been talking about your fine inn. Talking! Vy don't you do it?'

'Oh, I . . .'

'You got some money saved, aind't you? You can get the rest, cand't you? Vy don't you do something? You aind't going to get a whole lot younger, Chief!'

'You're right. I'm forty-five and . . . I'll do it! I guess I will!'

And, rather scared, he knew he would.

It was easier to undertake the labour of financing and building his Perfect Inn than it was to loiter and face the cynical old eyes of Otto Gritzmeier.