Work of Art

30

Cdn't you grow oysters, clams, crabs, saltwater fish etc., nr Chi, Detroit, Cleveland, etc. to have fresh for hotels & restaurants in artificial s.w. pools? Possible 3 methods get s.w., (1) have it analyzed, and synthesize on spot, (2) bring actual s.w. out in tank cars or (3) evap s.w. of ocean and add resultant salts to fresh water before it flows into pool? Remem. ask chemist.

The account in the weekly news-magazine, Time, began: 'Sin in Inn.'

'Boniface Myron Weagle strode the floor of the Royal Suite, whisky & soda in hand. "Let's drink a toast to my new hotel, the Black Thread (Conn.) Inn, the best lil ole inn in the world," he indicated. Tycoon B. F. Vince, president & founder of the Brass Institute, price-fixing and high-talk-slinging organization of Yankee pot-manufacturers, answered, "Brother, I'm with you". The six magnates present, and Mine Host Weagle, drank jovially. It was four o'clock on the morning of June 11th, after a successful opening of the Inn. As they swung into "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow," they heard a pistol shot & another. They stopped, aghast. It was merely an incident of conducting a successful roadhouse, however. Nothing had happened save that the motor-boat-racing only son of Former United States Senator Burnside Farragut Colquhoun (pron. Cahoon), celebrated advocate of the Christian virtues, had murdered self & lady, Cinemactress Paxton.

'Denizens of Black Thread Centre, small agricultural centre on the Housatonic River, do not know the name of their own town. They assume that its present designation refers to some imaginary textile mill once producing black mourning stuffs for unfortunate widows of Mexican & Civil Wars. The name should be Black Threat. It was historically a black threat to early Connecticut settlers, when it was an Indian encampment, and apparently it is now a more serious black threat to young motor-racers seeking a refuge for self & lady.'

The tabloid newspapers had little text but many pictures, showing the actual site of the tragedy, with the corpses--as obligingly posed by a male and a female cinema extra, in a room at the Gaiety Hotel on Broadway. They also were able, through the process of combining two pictures, to show the terrace of the Black Thread Inn crowded with chorus-girls in negligible bathing-suits; and they had dozens of views of Myron, Effie May, and Luke together. For days Myron was driving photographers out of the shrubs about his cottage. And it was one of the tabloid papers which gave to the Inn the name of 'Murder Tavern'.

On the noon after the murder, when the bodies had been taken away and Myron had already sent scrubwomen and painters to redecorate Number 97, Sheriff Beasy amiably called upon Myron in his office, and brought Dutch Linderbeck in with him.

'Well, my boy, this whole affair has certainly been tough! Little did we think, when we were having a good lively time with the newspaper boys just last evening, that anything like this would happen! I tell you, my boy, it certainly is a lesson about how little we know what Fate has in store for us! Yessir, it certainly makes a fellow stop and think! But don't you worry one bit, my boy. I'm going to do everything I possibly can, with the reporters and at the inquest and everything, to cover you up, and keep folks from thinking this is a tough joint. Now I never was one to say "I told you so", but don't it beat the dickens how just the other day I was telling you how necessary it is for you to stand in with the authorities? Now this bootlegger I was telling you about, Purvis, his name is, he's a fellow . . .'

'I get your idea, Sheriff! I don't worry about breaking the law in selling booze. It's just that bathtub gin and fine food and good service don't mix.'

'Well, do murder and suicide mix any better?'

'None of that!'

'Oh, I didn't mean to be fresh. But you'll see reason--just can't run a backwoods joint like this without sufficient likker on hand, convenient. I've talked this all over with your hotel dick here, and he agreed with me. How about it, Dutch?'

'Sure. You bet your life. Fellow's got to be reasonable, see how I mean, Chief?'

Myron murmured, 'It would give me the greatest pleasure if both you gentlemen went straight to hell. Good-day!'

Three deputies--though not, of course, led by the friendly Mr. Everett Beasy--raided the Inn a week later, and found a pint of whisky behind the bar. They were just arresting Clark Cleaver, chief clerk (an assonance which Ora found very funny indeed) when Myron telephoned to T. J. Dingle.

That ended the process of law and justice.

Two weeks later, when Myron was driving back from the Centre by moonlight, some one shot at him from the bushes. The shot bored his windshield. In his office at the Inn, he immediately telephoned to Beasy.

'Hello. The sheriff? Good evening. This is Myron Weagle.'

'Well, well, I was terribly sorry to hear about that outrage!'

'What outrage?'

'Uh, uh--I mean the murder and suicide.'

'The murder two weeks ago, Sheriff?'

'Yes, sure. What the hell did you think I meant?'

'Better than that, Beasy. I know what you meant! Listen. You remember the older New York reporter that was here at the opening? Denmack? The tall thin fellow, a little bald?'

'I guess so. What about him?'

'Didn't he strike you as a pretty competent man--rather too good to just do an hotel opening--probably got the assignment just to give him a little vacation?'

'What of it?'

'Didn't Denmack strike you as a fellow that would be very enterprising, and yet very judicious and accurate, and not easily scared?'

'I don't know as he struck me at all! I didn't pay any attention to him in any way, shape, or manner! Darned fresh, that's how he struck me!'

'Exactly! Well, you'll be interested to know that I'm typing out a complete account of everything I know about the officers of the peace around here; names and everything, from the time of your first call on me, through the phony raid here, to this evening--original and two carbons. I'll finish it before I get to bed to-night, and to-morrow one copy will be in T. J. Dingle's hands, and another in Denmack's, but sealed, with instructions that he is to open it only in case anything happens to me. It might make a nice piece for the household page of his newspaper. So if I were you, I'd tell your man to stop shooting so recklessly--or else shoot to kill, next time!'

'Weagle, I do believe you've gone plumb crazy! I just haven't got the slightest idea what you're talking about!'

'Well, I'm glad to hear that, old man. Certainly glad. And look now, as an expert, do you feel that Dutch Linderbeck, my dick here, is a competent loyal fellow?'

'He certainly is, Weagle. I don't understand one bit what you were kidding me about before, but when it comes to Dutch, he's O.K., a swell reliable guard.'

'Thanks a lot! I'll fire him first thing in the morning.'

It occurred to Myron that he had invited Beasy to shoot him that night, and the window-door of his office, opening into a grove, was perfect for convenient assassination. Yet he could not face being so melodramatic as to set out a guard or to borrow a revolver--provided, indeed, there was any revolver at the Inn, outside of Dutch Linderbeck's hip-pocket. He pulled down the curtain. His shadow fell on it, and he was uncomfortable as he sat typing not only his own experiences with the good Sheriff Beasy, but T. J. Dingle's information about Beasy's relationship to the Pinetop Dancing Pavilion.

He stopped, paralyzed. There was a distinct sound on the brick walk outside his window. He could not endure the inaction. He flung the window open, his back cold and shivering. He found the origin of the sound.

It was a porcupine, waddling away, terrified, looking back at him with the bleary, timid little eyes of a bear-cub, and skidding on the smooth brick as it tried to hurry.

In mid-August, two months after the opening, a time which should have been the best season, the Black Thread Inn was half empty. There had been other hotels aplenty in which there had been suicides, but the chance of one occurring on the opening night had tickled the imagination of that considerable part of the public which leads cautious lives and takes it out in gloating over the delights of suicides, torch-murders, sash-weight-murders, hangings, poison, and warfare. Myron knew that Sheriff Beasy and his intimates were scuttling about saying, 'I'd see my son or daughter dead before I'd let 'em so much as step foot in that den of iniquity!' And the tabloid newspaper had done much for Myron by its headline about 'Murder Tavern', run between an editorial on the necessity of church-going and a special article on Honour as one of the best-thought-of virtues.

There was a brisk scattering of sensation-lickers motoring for lunch, sometimes staying overnight. They vastly furthered the Inn's reputation as a sanctuary for illicit lovers. Some of them got more noisily drunk and burned more cigarette holes in the carpet than even a veteran hotel-man expects, and all of them hinted that they would just love to have a glimpse of the Murder Chamber. Occasionally the clerks satisfied them, by showing them any convenient room which happened to be empty; sometimes Myron indulged himself in the pleasure--his only one, just now--of refusing to do so, and thus losing for life their scabrous patronage.

Of the respectable couples who were neither rude nor greasy nor drunk, there was a proportion that had as much virtuous and smirking curiosity in peeping at the Inn as a haunt of vice as do respectable couples who go to slimy cafés in Paris or Berlin and are irritably disappointed when they see no degenerates to disgust them, but only other rabbit-nosed tourists like themselves.

Yet Myron was patient as he had never been in his zealous life. Daily he told himself to be patient--Effie May told him to be patient--Gritzmeier told him to be patient--Clark Cleaver begged him to be patient--Tom Weagle whined at him to be patient--and despite all this, he actually was patient. But he hated the loose-jawed gapers who believed that his clean place was a den of rottenness, and whose shambling curiosity polluted the Inn more than any swift and honest murder.

This too would pass away. People would forget. It was impossible that they should go on thinking of his Inn as merely a cheap bawdy house and not see the kindly rooms, the gay beach, the beautiful food that every day was lovingly prepared and at night had to be thrown away, untasted.

And people did forget. Other events claimed them. Labour Day, and the beginning of a new year in the office. The World's Series. New feature films. It was the year of Lindbergh and Clarence Chamberlin, and of Byrd and Maitland, and after their ocean flights, they were never out of the papers. Princess Lowenstein-Wertheim, Philip Payne, Mrs. Frances Grayson and half a dozen others winged out to sea and were never heard from again. Young Mr. Hickman, a prominent Sunday School scholar, kidnapped and murdered a child named Marion Parker, which entertained up-to-the-minute readers even more than an hotel-suicide. The Case of the Murder Tavern began to slide back into the indifference with which any democracy views any incident, noble or vile, that is more than four months old; and by October 1927, it was only history, as inconceivably ancient as the events of a whole year before--the positively medieval happenings of 1926, such as the coming over of Queen Marie and Ivar Kreuger to bear messages of Europe's love and its desire to do America good, or the re-opening of the Hall-Mills case, with its altogether elegant murder of a rector and his choir-singer.

The only son of Senator Colquhoun was one now with Hector.

Even in September, when the oaks and maples hung out the banners of a gallant and dying host, guests who did not snoop and giggle began to appear at the Inn, from nowhere in particular, and a few of them stayed a week, riding, tramping, playing golf, and shyly informing Myron that they had never known such food or such beds. For the first time, there was honest young laughter from the cabañas and diving-boards, and youth discovered as dizzily modern the croquet of its grandmothers. There were reservations scattered through October.

After all, Myron complimented himself, if the Inn wasn't really perfect, at least he had chosen the site prophetically. There was no rival within fifty miles.

Then, four miles away, the luxurious Olde Mill Country Club had financial trouble, and bid for transient strangers. On all the roads about Black Thread were placards reading: 'Hotel Prices but Club Exclusiveness--Rooms & Restaurant Open to Transients--Live At the Golf Course Not Near it.' The lettering was in black, except that the 'at' and 'near' were tastefully done in red.

The club had had no murder scandal. Customers who would have gone to the Black Thread Inn went there, and were delighted at being able to step from the golf course directly into the dining-room.

So Myron was apprehensive again, after a week of autumn-coloured tranquillity.

Pondering it all, he began to see vaguely now, in 1927, what he would see sharply in the early 1930's: that the entire 'resort-hotel business' was changing, and much of it would be lost; that with all love and devotion he had built his 'perfect inn', at exactly the worst possible time, as if one should triumphantly set up shop as epic poet just when the prose novel was ousting the hexameter, perhaps for ever.

The former summer resort, frequently centred about just one hotel, had been self-contained, with a social life that was exciting, however naive it might be, in the manner of William Dean Howells and the Golden Nineties. The chief travelling of the families who so joyously came for a fortnight or a month to Bar Harbour, Saratoga Springs, Bretton Woods, was the long, dusty, creaking journey by train that ended so gloriously in the sight of grey breakers or glistening hills, and the familiar, funny little station which signified that they were here again for a glorious recreation, and then the sad return home to New York or Boston. In between, the only locomotion was joyous sails and picnic-rides in haywagons or parades in smart red-wheeled buggies. Travel was the least of their vacationing. They needed no delicate coaxing by hotel-keepers to amuse themselves; no talkies nor golf-courses nor $20,000 a year leaders of jazz-bands to tickle jaded spirits. So long as they had a croquet ground, a big room and a piano for dancing, plenty of boats, and the hills and sea which, in those careless and uncharted days were provided by the Lord God and not by a hotel-keeper, they were content . . . as nearly content as any group of people ever are anywhere. Even among the Idle Rich, the elegants of the '90's who had actually been in Europe and married off a sister to the cousin of a baron, there were summer dramatic societies, yachting parties, men who needed no snarl of an outboard-motor to stomach them for fishing--who, indeed, for fishing chiefly demanded fish.

And they stayed put. Even the transients who remained but two weeks (which would correspond to-day to the lunchers who stay for but thirty minutes) were as eager as the passengers on a slow steamer to establish a social life.

The motor car changed the whole affair, as it changed the whole plan of cities and suburbs. It is not determined, but one may guess, that Benz, Haines, and Henry Ford have altered the world as much as Napoleon, Alexander, and Caesar.

The new motor tourists spent most of their time in travel, for its own sake, and hotels became to them not centres of amusement, to which they were eager to contribute their own efforts at conviviality, but merely stations for food and beds and gasoline.

There was an increase, also, in the number of families who had once been content to stay at hotels, but built now their own cottages, near their own friends, with a social life from which the strangers of the hotels were excluded.

The golfing mania finally finished the concentration of resort life. Swimmers and tennis-players and those content with the tepid thrills of croquet had been well-enough satisfied to go on swimming and playing tennis and clicking croquet balls on the same grounds. But the golfers were for ever leaping into automobiles and going on to new, distant hazards.

Though the motor brought more people out of the cities, the hotels did not profit. The motorists were neither willing to pay for nor so much interested in the excellences of hotel food and service which had once been the chief zest of citizens gossiping and rocking all day long on hotel porches. And many who were sufficiently prosperous to stay in decent hotels stopped at the farmhouses all over the land which began to hang out the sign 'Tourists Accommodated'. The food there was good enough, they said, and the bedchambers, and it was more convenient to make an Early Getaway from a farmhouse than from an elaborate hotel.

A little later to come--unknown as yet in the east, just beginning in the west, but by the early 1930's to be the final menace to resort hotels--were the professional Tourist Camps which grew out of the farmhouses: overnight cottages with restaurants and supply shops which were frankly and entirely devoted to the flying motorist and, with no corps of professional attendants, no effort to provide great lounging-rooms and varied meals and parking grounds, could so lower prices that the resort hotel, and the small-city hotel on main routes, were both to be bankrupted.

And, Myron saw, worrying, it was just at the beginning of this period of prose that he had brought forth his epic.

He tried every device of growing desperation. He cut the minimum rate, 'American plan', from fifteen dollars a day to ten. He gushed selling-letters like a fountain. To save money, he did not complete the swimming-pool, in the autumn. He pleaded with Dingle, who wanted to sell out his share for what he could get. He spent hours with Gritzmeier devising ways of saving money on food without lessening quality. After working all day, he swayed home to dress, and brought Effie May to dance all evening. He tried to act as 'social host', vice the departed Benny Rumble, to unite the suspicious guests in some sort of authentic gaiety.

Effie May liked dancing with him, but she was a bit shy of what seemed to her the grander guests and she, once so avid of crystal-lighted evenings, murmured to him, 'You seem so tired. Hadn't we better go home?' If ever he had fancied her provincial and inelastic and a little stupid, he forgot it all in clinging to her kindness . . . He had sometimes thought that he would, before it was too late, have an 'affair' with some woman brilliant and imaginative. He reflected now that this was one of the luxuries he would have to give up to reserve enough strength to make the Perfect Inn which, he now perceived, was not finished at all, but simply begun.

While he dealt with major misfortunes, he had the annoyances that he would have had in any resort hotel, however well established and patronized. The staff, being in the country yet barred from most country rollicking, were bored. They hadn't much fun in off hours in swimming under the eyes of those nobles, the aristocracy-by-grace-of-fifteen-dollars-a-day. They quit, just to have something amusing to do, and there were no hotel employment agencies round the corner. There was always a waiter or two on his way to New York, and a substitute supposedly, but not certainly, on his way to the Inn. And they took it out in feuds. Colleagues whom in June they had regarded as playmates they discovered in August to be anarchists who were plotting to give them poison in their coffee.

Clark Cleaver, the spotless chief clerk, came in to wail to Myron that another clerk was 'shystering on the job', and very perky about it, and that 'one or the other of us will have to leave'. The once benign Myron glared, and astounded his disciple by shouting, 'Then I've got a damn good mind to fire both of you! I'm not an ambulance surgeon! Go back and take care of your own troubles!'

'Oh yes, Mr. Weagle!' trembled the faithful Cleaver.

And the pretty young chambermaids would always be out in the woods by moonlight with the pretty young waiters, and the old and less pretty chambermaids would find this rural bliss very low and nasty, and they would threaten to quit, and Myron would try to keep from thinking of his clean sweep once at Tippecanoe Lodge, and how nice it would be to discharge every one of his trained staff, chase out every guest with a shot-gun, and sit happily alone amid the ruins.

As in every summer hotel, the hardest guests to manage were not the crooks, the blackmailers who pretended to have lost a case of jewels, and threatened to sue, nor the noisy boozers, but the respectables who were just plain nuisances: the run-of-the-mill pests, the bores, the imaginative old gentlemen who wanted the moon, and wanted it fried, and wanted it quick.

The resolute young lady who played the piano all afternoon in the ballroom-sunroom, and played it badly, so that her fellow customers went pale and thought about moving away. The resolute old lady who, happily spying, saw evil where none existed and--what made a great deal more trouble--where it did exist. The other old ladies who just rocked and watched and rocked and watched until less locomotive people went crazy. The man who wanted the desk to get impossible long-distance telephone-calls for him, and wanted his mail before it had ever reached Black Thread; and his cousin the man who was extremely important in Bellows Falls or Augusta or Tacoma, and who expected to be known here and treated with reverence--and flattering room-rates. The middle-aged ladies who all day long, with firm, quiet, steady, never-ceasing voices, told agonized strangers about their relatives--in particular about what Professor Pibkik--of course you know his name and what an authority he is, and he told me himself, he said, Mrs. Snodbody, in my opinion, after my thirty years of teaching, your son has one of the most remarkable intellects I have ever encountered, and I predict for him an extraordinary . . . Firm, quiet, steady, relentless voice, and Myron, hearing it through his open office window, longed for a decent drunken quartet singing 'Down Mobile Bay'.

But these were just the normal pleasures of his business. With them, he was beginning to have distresses out of the ordinary.