Work of Art

32

Four days later, Richard Pye and Nick Schirovsky decided that their labours in distributing booze to the solidest citizens of New York, the worthies who kept every law except inconvenient ones, merited a vacation. There were few guests at the Inn, and all of them of a reasonable, dripping sort, so Pye and Schirovsky took it over for a week-end, with a company of a dozen sympathetic ladies and gentlemen not of Pye's polo set. They had a splendid time. Everyone was drunk daily by noon, and slept it off, and was drunk before evening again, and danced till dawn. There was a pyjama parade, and much laughter about gentlemen who were found in wrong rooms at breakfast time, and the time when Nick Schirovsky, wearing only his drawers, went out and rolled in the snow.

Myron was on hand nineteen hours a day, protecting the decorations of the Inn so far as he could, for Jimmy Shanks, normally no fool, had gone native and become one of the most lush of the gay Bacchantes. Several times, not without roughness, Myron put to bed guests who wanted to play billiards with bottles for balls, or to toy with the firehose, and Dick Pye became irritated. After three days, he began gently, then much less gently, to tease Myron about his undignified exile-at-home. Whenever Myron made suggestions--such as that one of the joyous party really ought to stop setting his bed afire--Pye said mockingly, 'Anything you say goes with me, Boss, I'll certainly attend to it.'

Late one night, he swaggered and staggered into Myron's office, much drunker than Myron had ever seen him, and crowed, 'Everybody's insisting you come on join us. We're going to have an impromptu masquerade ball, right now! And chase your wife over here, too. Need more gals.'

'Nothing doing! And you better go to bed. You've got no right to raise such Cain. There are a few guests besides your party, Pye.'

'Oh, damn the guests! There wouldn't be even a few, if I hadn't taken hold! You always did want to run this place like a Methodist prayer-meeting.'

'We won't go into that now.'

'The hell we won't! You think you're a partner, but you're just a plain clerk, and you come when I ring the bell for you! You're a plain pen-pusher!'

Myron found himself in front of the desk, shaking Mr. Richard Pye like a school-boy. He shook him with all the fury of six months of brooding. Pye tried to hit back, but Myron rocked him till he was dizzy. He slapped Pye, then, and was frightened by discovering how homicidally he wanted to give him one sweet, ringing, murderous clip on the jaw and, lest he do it, he shoved Pye into the closet in his office, locked it, put the key with absurdly sober-looking methodicalness into the top drawer of his desk, and went quietly crazy.

Now that he had begun, he burned to go on and wipe out Schirovsky, Shanks, all their guests, and anybody else who came handy. He fled down into the quiet basement, to get hold of himself. He found himself in the furnace-room, staring at a heap of wrapping paper, excelsior, fragments of boxes. What suddenly made him really insane was this litter. When he had been in charge, the basement had been tidy as a parlour.

It would make a lovely fire! By God, he would burn up the whole place! With fire and fury he would destroy the abomination! He was a pen-pusher again, was he? He had to answer the bell to Dick Pye's fancy, did he?--yes, and to the whim of that murdering bootlegger, Schirovsky! He'd destroy them, along with their stinking den! He touched a match to the excelsior, and a flame ran up the wall, tasted a dry beam.

He gaped, surprised. Then he leaped. For forty years he had been trained to be ready for hotel-fires. Not thinking, not having to think, he snatched a fire-extinguisher from its bracket and, quite coolly, directed the chemical stream at the base of the writhing flare of paper and kindling.

It was a good fire-extinguisher, for it had been chosen, long before this building had been finished, by none other than Manager Weagle. If it had not been so good, so chosen, the Black Thread Inn, with Mr. Richard Pye locked in a closet, would have burned complete.

Myron stood trembling. He was too shocked to tamper with blaming himself. So quivery and weak of knee that he could scarcely walk, he got himself up the stairs, into his office, and unlocked the closet door.

Dick Pye was placidly asleep, and from the ballroom came the cheerfullest sound of jazz as the masquerade ball began. Then Myron laughed, gently shook Pye awake, and still more gently crooned, 'Sorry to disturb you, Dick, but I thought you ought to know that I have resigned, and my lawyer will be glad to arrange with you about the sale of my stock in this place--what's it called?--Black Thread Inn? Any time it's convenient. Good night.'

And walked across to his cottage, feeling exalted, while Dick Pye sat up stupidly, among brooms, dust-cloths, and letter-files, clumsily brushing a cob-web out of his hair.