Work of Art

27

Resort for Protestant preachers & families on vacation, & important Meth Bapt etc. laymen & profs from denominat colleges. All housekeeping cottages but w restaurant (cafeteria?) and general store--much of profits from this. Daily lectures on economics, history, rhetoric, oratory, etc. Circularize preachers' congregations: 'the best gift yr pastor & family, vacation at Camp Luther (Beulah? Pilgrim? Moody?)' All denominations, not just one like Ocean Grove; gt talking point--here Meth, Bapt, Cong, Epis, Xian, Presbyt, Lutheran, etc. get together, get acquainted, imp part of move unite all Protest bodies. Not expect over 6% profit. Note! try woman manager--be good at it and less fuss about which denom she belongs to than if man. Genl store must stock groceries, some meat, respt bathing suits, tennis sneakers, Bibles, patent medicines.

Excavations for the Black Thread Inn and its outbuildings were begun late in June, 1926. Myron's cottage was ready in May, and the Inn formally opened on June 10, 1927. Myron gave half his time, during this year, to the Pye-Charian Hotel in New York; the other half he divided between nagging the builders, and selecting and training his staff, which seemed to him rather more important than the building.

From the Pye-Charian organization he took only two officers: Clark Cleaver, chief clerk of the Walter Scott, for assistant manager and chief clerk of the Inn, and Otto Gritzmeier as chef. In so small a place, Otto was an extravagance, even though he was willing to come for three hundred a year less than he had in the steamy bedlam of the Victor Hugo.

Myron was happily able to hire his brother, Ora, to write publicity during most of the building. He had always felt guilty at doing so little for Ora, who just now happened to be rather hard up, having lost his job as editor and advertising manager of the Hidden Sex Truths Book Publishing Company for having offered to teach hidden sex truths to the stenographers. Before the Inn opened, Ora sold a series of very interesting 'Confessions of a Press-Agent' to a muckraking magazine, and was able to take a richly deserved rest and trip to Europe, to the satisfaction of Myron, who had always regretted that while a mere business man like himself had had that opportunity, it had hitherto been denied to Ora, with his splendid knowledge of history and literature.

As permanent press-agent and 'host' of the Inn, Myron hired Benny Rumble, hotel-news correspondent of Smart Mart. He did not like Benny, a dapper little young man with a smirk and clothes too well-fitted around the hips, given to dancing, bridge, poetic quotations, and rose-tipped cigarettes, but Dick Pye insisted that Benny would be just the lad to entertain the old ladies at the Inn, and absolutely safe with the young ladies.

The head waiter was to be Frank Rabatel of the Restaurant Cocarde, Philadelphia; the hotel detective--always known as 'hotel dick'--was Dutch Linderbeck from the Fishkill House of Albany, who was said to know more politicians more gloomily than even the Capitol janitor. For a hundred-and-twenty-room hotel, a detective was not necessary, but Myron wanted to protect the wealthy guests he was presumably going to have against every manner of confidence-man and fake Russian prince.

A yet greater extravagance was the veteran floor-waiters. His whole scheme of superior service would fail if guests, when they rang the bell, were answered by the amiable but untrained college students on vacation who were the bellboys and waiters in most summer hotels. The experienced guest wanted the bell answered by an initiate, to whom the procuring of coffee, stamps, aspirin or wrapping paper and cord, was a passionate duty.

For a month before the opening, Myron and his lieutenants drilled the kitchen staff, the waiters and bus-boys, the desk-clerks and bell-boys and telephone-girls and porters, and even the cigar-and-candy-stand girl, and when the last was offended at the suggestion that there was anything she could learn, Myron was pleased at having it happen so early, and hired another young lady. The chambermaids had blue-prints of what ought to be done in every room every day; precisely what must daily be swept, dusted. They were dragooned as thoroughly as chorus-girls--though they were expected to be more charming than chorus-girls during working-hours and considerably less so after hours. The whole Inn would open as smoothly as though it had been running for five years. Myron did not remember it, but he was carrying out vows he had made amid the deliriums of Tippacanoe Lodge, twenty years before.

His chief trouble in organizing the staff was in refusing the offers of Black Threaders whom he had known as boys. He would have hated himself had he been supercilious to men with whom he had once smoked cornsilk cigarettes in the livery stable; he was uncomfortably and almost too noisily cordial when they came poking about the rising walls of the Inn; but he tried to persuade them that their training in the railroad section gang or the clothes-pin factory or the shoe store hadn't really qualified them as to clerk in an expensive hotel, an occupation which they pictured as doing nothing all day long but wearing lovely new tail-coats and shaking hands and swapping dirty stories with fashionable guests. Myron heard, seven times a day, 'Sure, I know: you've gotten too good for your old friends. Your hat has got too small for you, since you went off to the City.'

He explained to himself, 'Anybody with the intelligence of a rabbit would have known that I was a fool to start this thing too near the old home town. You aren't very bright, Myron. You work hard, but you haven't got much intuition or inspiration. That's what Ora's told me, all along. Oh, damn Ora! Now, the old bunch here in the Centre will want me to fail. Oh well, damn them, too! Nobody can stop me, nothing can stop me, from making this the greatest success in the world! I'll have Vanderbilts begging for a reservation a year ahead!'

It was in such a mood of boastful depression that he determined to get even with the Fates by raising the minimum rate-per-day, room and meals, from twelve to fifteen dollars.

His old acquaintances, who remembered him so much more lovingly than seemed probable after twenty-eight years, continued to come around and, when he was most trying to be affectionate and very jokey, they drawled, 'Now don't try to pull any high-hat stuff on me! I knew you when you was emptying slops at the American House!'

He had some thirty local workmen employed in building, and when the Inn opened, he would use as many people from Black Thread as showed themselves willing to keep their shoes blacked and endure strict training. But he saw that to one faction he must forever continue to be an ingrate who 'pulled high-hat stuff'.

'Cheer up', said T. J. Dingle; 'consider what they think of me, the blood-sucking banker!'

His father was a trial. He was a case of hives. Not that old Tom ever bothered him by presenting his qualifications for working at the Inn. Tom was entirely satisfied with his present two hours a day of supervising the American House clerk. But he did come over to Lake Nekobee to tell the workers that he was Myron's dad and had taught Myron all he knew, and to direct them in their building. All that, Myron could settle easily enough. He set his mother on Tom and thereafter his father stayed home, grumbling to all guests whom he could persuade to listen that a serpent's tooth is nothing at all compared with a thankless child, and that throughout Myron's youth, half a century or so, he had risen at five daily to instruct his ungrateful son in every art of inn-keeping.

But Myron's mother was beatific. Now, as the Black Thread Inn advanced, she knew absolutely, where formerly she had only suspected, that her son was the greatest hotel-man the world had ever known, and late afternoons, guiltily leaving the supervision of supper at the American House to the second cook, she walked arm in arm with Myron about the scaffolding-covered walls, while he triumphantly showed the future terrace, sun-porch, cabañas, squash court.

Naturally, Professor Herbert Lambkin, B.A., M.A., was the worst pest of all. The moment Myron began to build, Herbert charged in with suggestions.

Myron must come stay with them at the Old Home.

Thanks no. Myron was perfectly comfortable at the American House. Besides. He had to be in New York so much--only spent a few nights at the Centre.

Well, look here, then. Did Myron remember that conceited fool, Monlux, who had offered Herbert a miserable thirty a week in New York? Herbert had always been pretty sore about that, and he didn't entirely absolve Myron from blame, and now was Myron's chance to make up for the insult. He, Herbert, as superintendent of schools, was free in the summer time, just when Myron would most need him in the Inn, and he would be willing to sink his social prestige and serve as assistant manager for seventy-five or eighty a week, and then he thought he might bring himself to forgive Monlux, Myron, Effie, and Heaven.

No . . . Myron was so sorry . . . But he had already chosen his whole staff.

That was only the beginning of happy talks between the brothers-in-law.

Myron reported it to Effie May, in Mt. Vernon, but for once she did not back him. 'Why, I think that's real mean of you! It would mean so much to Berty to have the job; it would please him like anything, and I think it's horrid giving all these dandy jobs to complete strangers when our own family need them!'

'He isn't trained--he hasn't the temperament--he'd make lots of trouble', Myron said feebly. But he was considerably less feeble when he returned to Black Thread and Herbert again pounced.

Then Herbert granted that if Myron would build a summer cottage for him and let him have it for the cost of electricity and telephone only, he would forgive Myron to a considerable extent and try to forget his origin.

Back in Mt. Vernon again, Myron suffered with a pity for her that was purest love when Effie May cried, 'Listen, duckie! If you'll give Herbert the job, like he wants, I'll turn in and help you, with ideas! I've been thinking them up all this week you've been gone. Listen! This would be just won'erful! Why not have a great big picnic ground, with big rustic tables, and get all the Sunday Schools for miles around to have their basket picnics there every summer! Of course you couldn't charge them, but it would make the Inn grounds so lively, and advertise the place like anything!'

And the question of liquor, that to any hotel project in 1926 was a sick headache.

Myron had planned space for a bar in the basement billiard-room of the Inn, and he intended, if Prohibition should be repealed, to have the best cellar in the State. He did not expect to interfere with guests who brought their own flasks, and were not too noisy. But on the other hand he would not sell any illicit liquor, nor permit any employee to sell it.

Then Mr. Everett Beasy came to him, and Mr. Everett Beasy was the sheriff of the county. He did not resemble the sheriffs of fiction; he had neither chin-whiskers combined with shrewdness in finding which tramp had fired the barn, nor a leather vest and a notched six-gun. He had been a respectable grocer, and he still looked like a respectable grocer: a small man in a well-pressed pepper-and-salt suit and a new derby.

'Well, Weagle, fine thing for the whole country round here, your putting up this big hotel. Give work to lots of needy folks, and set an example of nice living for all our young people.'

'Glad you like it.'

'You bet we like it. You're a real public benefactor. And now listen. I know how it is. You're going to have a lot of city folks that will want a little drink. Mostly, of course, that's against the law, but we don't feel disposed to be too hard on folks that will bring good money here, as long as they behave themselves and don't kick up any rows. If they mind their business, we'll mind ours. But of course you want to be able to give 'em first-class stuff that you can guarantee. Now myself, I'm against booze, and I never touch a drop, hardly, you might say, but I know a fellow that's a really honest bootlegger . . .'

'Shan't need one.'

'Look here. I don't know as we can allow anybody supplying you that we can't depend on. We officers of the law have got a responsibility to the public, let me tell you!'

'But I shan't sell any liquor at all. Really. I mean it. Not a drop'.

'Oh yes, you will! You don't think you will, but you will! And if you deal with the right people, it'll save you a lot of trouble in taxes and building-inspection and any fights that drunk guests might get into and traffic charges and all sorts of things. I just want to help you out. Think it over, and when you get ready, I'll have this fellow I know come see you.'

It took Myron a time to believe that Sheriff Beasy's honest friend was also Sheriff Beasy, and that a country political gang could be as intimidating as any city gang in compelling him to handle illicit booze whether he wanted to or not. He thought of Beasy's hard little eyes. He thought of the Inn being raided on a gay and prosperous evening. He shivered.

By contrast he almost had relief in the details of insurance. He had, it appeared, to insure against injury to employees, injury to the public, fire, lightning, burglary, floods, earthquakes, cyclones, termites, elephantiasis, insurrection, and the Acts of God.

In seeking the righteousness of creation he had not, he saw, altogether freed himself from the body of sin and doubt. Yet irritated or apprehensive or dreary with details, he was, all this tiring and glorious time, uplifted by the sight of the rising Inn, the actual coming into existence of his masterpiece.