Work of Art

28

Cruise: Long Island Sound steamer, two weeks up to Bar Harbour or beyond, exploring shores of Conn. Mass, L. I., Nantucket, etc. Anchor in quiet harbour every night, with dance on deck, movies, etc. and boats going ashore, and fishing & swimming in morning. Cd do very cheap, for summer vacation for clerks, stenogs etc. Daily lecture on history of coast. Specialize sea food--'catch your own mackerel & we'll cook it for you.' How about campfire on big iron plate, asbestos lined, on deck one evening of each cruise?

To make an inn that should be not merely good but near perfection, Myron asserted, he had to be fussy as an old-time housewife at spring-cleaning. He had to make himself an expert equally on the plan of the building in regard to convenience, quiet, light, and view, on the furnishing of bedrooms and public rooms, on food, linen, silver, china, glass, on amusements outdoors and inside. In any one of these departments, the Black Thread Inn might be surpassed; it was his job, as creative builder, to make sure that no other inn should surpass his in the combination of all the details.

All day, when he was not at Black Thread, he was consulting interior decorators, salesmen for hotel china and glass, books on furniture and, always, the realistic and experienced Mr. Otto Gritzmeier.

As to decoration, he was for awhile tempted by the heathen ritual of Modernism, particularly after he had lunched at the Tall Town Club, the best speakeasy in New York, which had been bedizened by Josef Lazaraki with a circular bar of black glass edged with a silver band, bright aluminium bar- stools with red leather seats, pictures made with outlines of silver wire against a powdery blue background, walls splashed with sunbursts and torch-flames of aluminium, and sunflowers whose petals were mirrors, Myron was impressed. Prohibition, he realized, had been an excellent thing for America: it had not only taught the traditionally unalcoholic American woman to drink and smoke with her men, but had, in its freedom from old standards, encouraged the arousing orgies of modernistic decoration, and all citizens, especially the surprised and delighted women, ought to be grateful to the Methodist and Baptist shepherds who had brought on Prohibition. But for his inn among New England hills, this jazz splendour would be false, and Myron was equally uninterested in the other extreme: an Olde Inne that should be a Colonial museum, with huge and dirty brick fireplaces bristling with sooty cranes, straight-backed oak chairs, and walls so prickly with warming-pans, candle-moulds, revolutionary muskets, grandfather clocks, wedgwood platters, grimy iron pots, and Currier & Ives prints that any honest guest would dash out shrieking. He decided on a key-note of Duncan Phyfe mahogany in accurate reproductions, graceful for summer, warm-hued for winter fire-light, and he was able to have all of it made together by one manufacturer, at a comfortingly reasonable price. He was able to get standard yet not too familiar patterns of glassware, china, and silver which harmonized with the mahogany. They were all marked with the BTI embroidered on the linen.

Not even the lounge, centre of the Inn, was planned so carefully as the kitchens, and these were planned to the last centimeter, as though he were devising a new motor engine. In everlasting headachy conferences with Gritzmeier, after reading everything he could find in the hotel magazines, he arranged exactly what and how long should be the path from refrigerator to work-table to condiment cupboard to stove to serving-bar to dining-room; what materials were best for sinks, for table-tops, floors and the weary swollen feet of cooks.

Food he studied as Duke Godfrey studied the imaginative maps to the Holy Land. Gritzmeier was one of the not-too-many Continental chefs who had added a study of native American foods to his knowledge of French and German and British cookery. As piously as Myron he revered the American dishes which would be the staples of this good provincial inn: clam chowder, planked shad with roe, crab-flakes, canvas-back with wild rice and black currant jelly, raisin pie, corn pones, pepper pot, and the breakfast doughnuts and waffles and buckwheat cakes which can be so delicate or so leaden, in accordance as the cook is a worthy man or a scoundrel.

To 'amusements' he gave scientific research. He had noticed that the chief horror of summer hotels in the evening, when it is too dark for golf and swimming, is that there is nothing to do. He would have either dancing or a movie, or both, every evening, along with radio, backgammon, dice racing, masquerades, a larger library, moonlight picnic-suppers, billiards, and a chief job of Benny Rumble would be to introduce poker-players and bridge-maniacs to one another.

The first building to be finished, in May, was Myron's cottage, which was to be the start of a whole crescent of hotel cottages on the hillside above the Inn. He had planned it himself, more precisely than any known housewife, with everything built in that could be built in, with composition floors that could be cleaned with a look, and enough sleeping-porch space for his family and for a guest . . . only he hoped that the guest would not too constantly be Professor Herbert Lambkin, M.A.

It was May 27th, 1927, just two weeks before the day set for the opening, and the Black Thread Inn was finished--at least as nearly finished as it would be, this season--and Myron could look upon his Works, bound in grey shingle.

The Inn fitted into the hillside. It was rather long and low, with wide dormers in the third story. The sides were finished in fire-proofed shingles, stained the soft grey of the sunless lake, with the shingled roof a little darker, and under the eaves was one violent band of scarlet. A terrace of red tiles was cut in under the building, on the ground floor, and extended outside along the whole length of the front, with French windows opening on it, with white wicker chairs and white-painted steel tables. Here lunch and tea were to be served on bright days. At one end was an untouched grove of elms and maples; at the other end was planted a garden of roses, peonies, and autumnal lilies, where tea would also be served when the garden should have grown.

The tennis-courts, the squash-courts, the stables of riding-horses, the garage, with titanic buses to meet the trains, were tucked among the woods behind the Inn, and here, next winter, would be a ski-slide and possibly a toboggan course. Golf was available at the Olde Mill Country Club, four miles away, and at three other clubs within eight miles. Some day, the Inn would have a nine-hole course of its own. Myron had insisted on laying out, on one of the lawns, croquet-grounds, though every one in the world, practically, rushed up to assure him that croquet was dead. There was to be a swimming-pool, warmed, for early spring and late autumn, when the lake would be too cold, but as yet there was only the excavation for the pool. It would be finished in the fall. The sandy lake shore was kaleidoscopic as the Riviera, with a huge T-shaped dock, four diving-boards, yellow and crimson canoes, row-boats with blue and crimson awnings, and cabañas with awnings grey and crimson. Only the beach was garish, however; the Inn itself was tranquil.

'Well,' grumbled Tom Weagle, 'it's all right, but strikes me it's a pretty simple shack to be making such a fuss over! Why didn't you make one of these French chateaux, or a Japanese garden, or something with class?'

'I planned it to be simple. I want it to fit in between the lake and the hill as if it had grown here, and still have as much luxury as the Ritz,' protested Myron.

'It's simple, all right! It just growed, all right! It certainly don't look like any good 220,000 bucks to me. What I could have done with that money, with my experience! Built you an hotel that'd bat you in the eye ten miles off. Just growed here on the hill is right! Like a doggone ole grey stump! After all the pains I've spent on you, I've never been able to learn you it pays to advertise!'

June tenth, then, and the publication of the Perfect Inn.

It was opening with every bedroom full save one, and that empty only because it was held for Adolph Charian, Pye's partner, who might or might not be able to come from New York for the ceremonies. Dick Pye would be there all week. Myron had had to reject more than sixty applications for rooms. He had captured for the first five days of the opening the convention of that extremely wealthy organization, the New England Brass Industries Institute. Benny Rumble, the natty press-agent, had lavishly invited the press to the opening of what he asserted to be the finest inn on the Atlantic Coast, and fifteen rooms were reserved for reporters from New York, Philadelphia, Boston, New Haven, Hartford, Bridgeport, and Greenwich, who did not mind submitting a few sticks to the society editors so long as the food and Benny's private stock were good. The other rooms were taken by a miscellany of regular guests, who drove up in expensive cars, well stocked with gin.

The opening evening!

The lobby and corridors at last whooped with voices besides those of the workmen and hotel staff, and Myron beamed owlishly as he heard, 'It's a charming place.' Everything began joyfully, with two big dinners--that of the Brass Institute, served in the Ballroom and entertained by the Jolly Rovers Jazz Orchestra, and the dinner for the press, in one end of the dining-room, which could be completely shut off by an electrically controlled screen of steel and rubber.

Even Myron took three cocktails, that evening: one in his cottage, with Effie May and Ora, who was their guest for the week; one with Benny Rumble and the press; one in the suite of the secretary of the Brass Institute. He was slightly hysterical with the success of his masterpiece. The Institute insisted on his joining them for a toast, and when its president stated (but not so briefly) that Mr. Weagle was another of those enterprising Yankees who was restoring New England to her former supremacy in industry and the resort business, and to hell with California, Myron bowed and flushed and felt very happy--and was suddenly a little homesick for a hotel in Naples and a black-bearded man toasting Signor Veeagley, while Luciano clapped his hands.

He himself dined, when he was not darting away to do most energetically nothing in particular, with a group composed of the press, the county and town dignitaries, his father and mother, Effie and Ora, the Dingles, and the entire Lambkin clan. It was a lovely dinner, with Moselle, bombe surprise, and brook-trout. It was addressed. It was a good deal addressed, though the press seemed not to mind, since 1909 brandy was served during the addressing. Myron told them, in a speech lasting exactly seventy seconds, that he was glad to see them. Dick Pye told them that Myron was a second George Boldt. T. J. Dingle told them that Black Thread had quantities of history and fishing. The mayor of Black Thread made a comic speech, Sheriff Everett Beasy made a witty speech, and then the real work was turned over to Pye's partner, Colonel Ormond L. Westwood, who was historic, comic, witty, impressively reverent regarding the church, the state, the press, and hotel-keeping, and wound up with one of his celebrated after-dinner stories which managed to be so delicate that it did not shock the ladies and yet so smutty that even the reporters laughed.

They did not break up till midnight, when the guests swayed up to their rooms.

Altogether, the opening evening was as nearly perfect as the Inn itself.

He was too happily excited to go back to his cottage and sleep. At half-past one he made the round of the Inn, just for the pleasure of seeing it. He looked upon his work and saw that it was good . . . The passionate pilgrim come to his shrine. The poet reading the first typescript of his epic, astonished by his own eloquence.

There was no one about save a watchman somewhere in the building, and the night-clerk in the office, working on accounts.

These glories he noted again:

The office, near the main door, though it was complete in every trick of telautograph and pneumatic chute, was not large, and it did not intrude on the lounges.

The main lounge was furnished in old maple, with a moulded plaster fireplace, and pine panelling and authentic old pine, for which Myron had sent a man searching Connecticut, studiously examining old barns, even fence-rails.

Whatever any guest might think of the excellence of Myron's Inn, he would have to admit that the main lounge did not have a single rustic rocker of unpeeled boughs, or a single cart-wheel candelabrum.

The second room was the radio lounge, sound-proofed, so that radio-fans might have as loud a speaker as they wanted, yet no one outside the room need listen. The third was the writing-room and library, with all known varieties of magazines, and three thousand books, chosen by a librarian and not by Ora, since Myron suspected that nothing would so much please Ora as to include every bawdy novel calculated to shock respectable guests. The dining-room was in moulded plaster, slightly tinted, with heavy mulberry-coloured curtains. The ballroom, on one side of the hotel, became by day a huge sun-room. In the basement was a clubroom for billiards, pool, cards, with another and more feminine card-room on the second floor.

'Well, if there's any prettier public rooms anywhere, in America or Europe, than those seven, I'd just like to know!' said Myron now, content.

As Charian had not been able to come, there was one bedroom which he could inspect, and he entered it, snapped on the light, happily. As pleasant to him as the Sheraton furniture were the candlewick spread on the four-poster, and the thick, faintly peach-coloured Bridgewater blankets. To him, a fine wool blanket had always been lovely as a sunset. The fireplace was of mahogany, painted white, with a deep chair before it. The curtains were cretonne, and the two, only two, pictures were German colour-prints. The whole room was gay.

'Why should it be supposed in a country inn that there will never be any wet, gloomy days when the guests will keep to their rooms, and so any old dark furniture and brindle walls will do?' inquired Myron, not without self-approval.

The bathroom was in white tiles with canary-yellow floor and ceiling border. It was bright yet not too orchidaceous, though it had been decorated at a period when America had been roused to a mania for wildly coloured bathrooms, stoves, stew-pans, typewriters, even toilet paper. They had all to be in pink or lavender, and a citizen who had to endure any article in white or brown was ashamed, and staggered away from the scorn of friends, a broken man.

Though at hotel-association meetings Myron had attacked a superfluity of accessories in rooms, and in particular the profusion of little cards advertising the meals, the courtesy, and other desirabilities of the hotel, in this bedroom there were many dodges--conceivably too many: bedside lights, of course, a box opening into both the room and the corridor, so that shoes and suits might be taken off for cleaning without disturbing the guest, extra folding chairs and baggage-stands ready in the closet, stacks of towels and washrags, shoe-cloths and cloths for wiping razor blades, a full-length mirror, an electric light in the closet, a desk that was not a rickety table but a real and solid desk, with ample stationery and a supply of free picture post-cards, which would presumably advertise the inn. The chambermaids were ordered to make sure that there was a low table beside each easy chair, and in each room, always, at least three ash-trays--and more if it proved that the guest was a conscientious smoker.

But there were other gadgets less common: A scale with the dial flush with the bathroom floor, for guests anxious about daily increase of weight. An electric door-bolt, controlled by tiny levers beside the bed. A package of cigarettes free in the morning, and fruit brought in every evening when the bed was turned down. A device which Myron had discovered in Switzerland and in which he poetically rejoiced: an automatic electrical arm-clock for morning calls. When he went to bed, the guest plugged in at the desired rising hour, and in the morning the alarm rang until he turned it off. There was thus no argument with the desk as to the time at which the guest had asked to be called, nor did the telephone girls go mad from trying to call forty rooms simultaneously at seven-thirty and eight and eight-thirty.

And by each bed were three buttons, for chambermaid, bell-boy, and room-waiter--though if the guest considered it a patriotic principle to telephone to room-service, he could do so. There was a breakfast kitchen on each floor, and no charge for meals in rooms.

He would have been glad, had he thought about it, that Ora was not with him on his tour. Ora would have remarked that the colours of blankets and of bathroom tiles, the number of ash-trays in a bedroom, and the convenience of Swiss automatic clocks were, judiciously considered, perhaps the most ludicrously unimportant details in the world, at least to one who gave earnest attention to such really important matters as whether, in a Western, it is sweeter to begin with a murder, a rodeo, or the arrival of the grouchy old ranchman's niece at Helenhighwater Forks.

There were yet other rare delights for Myron to gloat upon, and in particular the kitchen, with its stainless steel and surfaces of copper and nickel alloy, its cork floor, its charcoal and electric grills. He was, to his wonder, hungry, and realized that he had been too excited at dinner-time to eat even fresh brook trout. With a visage of solemn beatitude, a look of happy childishness uncommon in so plodding an adult, he sat at the end of a work table, admiring a steam cooker and sucking up soda crackers and milk.

He descended by the back stairs to the basement, stopping to admire the particularly large and numerous fire-extinguishers which he had planted all over the Inn. Huh! How many ghastly times it had happened that hotels had burned down on the very night of their opening! Nothing could happen to his inn! For he had taken pains--he had trained the staff before opening, he had provided all these fire extinguishers, he had proven that, by thoughtfulness and care, a man could make his handiwork perfect!

In the basement he gazed reverently on the oil furnaces, the laundry machinery, the store-rooms, the tile-and-marble barber-shop, the club room with its billiard tables, and then slowly, wearily, most triumphantly happy, he clumped up the front stairs from the basement to the office.

He heard a clamour. He hastened his step and in the entrance-hall he found the night-clerk, and Dutch Linderbeck, the hotel detective, listening to the night watchman, who was shouting, waving his arms. Alarmed guests were coming down the stairs, led by the president of the Brass Institute, in dressing-gown, and a sharp young Bridgeport reporter in top-coat over his pyjamas.

'What is it? What is it?' raged Myron.

'They're not married!' said Linderbeck. 'They're not Mr. and Mrs. Wood of Springfield, as they registered. The fellow is the son of U.S. Senator Colquhoun, and apparently she's Mardie Paxton, that professional alimony hound.'

'But my God, what of it? Why all this damn fool row?'

'Because they're dead! Looks like he shot her, and then killed himself. Anyway, they're dead as Moses. Shall I 'phone the sheriff, Boss, or will you? My managers have always said I did a good job on 'phoning the cops when a couple mess up an hotel room with blood.'