Work of Art

8

During his first year at the Eagle Hotel, Myron slowly built up his plan of preparing himself for managership. He would try out every job in the establishment, and be intimate with every member of the staff. It was not too easy. There are more castes in an hotel than in India, and no Gandhi to starve himself. The Front Office looked down on the Back of the House as scullions, and the Back of the House observed frequently and publicly that the young men in the Front Office wore ragged underclothes beneath their natty gents' suitings.

Myron saw to it that when he met one of the bell-boys or the majestic clerks, at a soda-fountain or a pool-room or anywhere in the looser and more adventurous atmosphere outside the hotel, he should be polite but friendly. He feigned respect for their Front Office opinions of guests and of psychology in general which, after years in the American House and the Fandango Inn, he certainly did not feel. He was even attentive to the Eagle night-clerk, a notorious crab who, the Back of the House believed and stated, would never have been able to hold his job unless he 'had something on' Mr. Coram.

The night-clerk was one of the jacks in office, common in the hotel-world before 1915 but demoted to the poor-house in the days of competition since then, who were proud of 'never taking nothing from no "fresh" guests'. They have been replaced by the 'Greeter', who chants thirty times a day the first Beatitude of American hotel-keeping: 'Blessed is the Guest, for he is always right'. None of the Greeters, of course, are such idiots as to believe it.

The Eagle night-clerk boasted, as he sat in one of the tall thrones along the wall of the pool-room, that whenever any 'damn tightwad crank of a guest that's trying to let on what an important gazebo he is' complained about anything whatever--missing baggage or sour coffee, an unmade bed or a room without soap or the fact that he had not been called at seven, as promised--he 'just looked the guy straight in the face and told him, "Well, I'll tell you, brother. Of course you're used to chumming around with the Astors and Vanderbilts and having a vallay to look after you, but this is just a rube hotel for common folks like me, and I guess you'll have to put up with our hick ways till you can get back to your suite at the Hoffman House!" Say! Maybe those fourflushers don't look cheap when they meet a real man behind the desk, and he's got the nerve and the savvy to show 'em up!'

To him Myron listened with peculiar attention. He was more useful to Myron than Whitehead's handbook; he so perfectly explained what not to do.

It was not a large Front Office: Mr. Coram, who was chief clerk as well as manager, two other day-clerks, of whom one was also book-keeper and cashier and attendant on the cigar-counter, the night-clerk, a porter who cleaned the floors, two bell-boys, and three bartenders. But Myron studied them, found as many exciting and curious quirks in their ways of meeting guests and kitchen-hands as though they were an entire regiment. He was Jane Austen in a tavern.

Clint Hosea, the cook, particularly scorned the Front Office, including Mr. Coram. They were, he said, a bunch of cheap dudes whose mothers were all washerwomen or members of even less honoured professions. He composed dreadful scandals about them, cackling, as he shoved a dish of baking apples into the oven, that the 'grouch of a night-clerk had been thrown out of a bedroom at midnight, turned right out, bang! on his ear, by the little grass-widow up in 57'; that it was he, Mr. Hosea, and not Mr. Coram, who made up the bills of fare every day; that Myron was sucking around that gang of softies because he hoped to be invited to Mr. Coram's suite and steal his whisky; and that, as a consequence of his social climbing, Myron didn't know corn-beef from roast duckling.

But Myron persisted.

By coming to the kitchen at five-thirty in the morning--though he had a thirteen-hour trick of his own, from 6.45 a.m. to 7.45 p.m., with an hour's loaf in mid-afternoon--he was able by helping the baker-pastry-cook to learn bread, rolls, and cakes, even vast ornamental cakes in the elegant forms of ships and castles.

He cultivated the supercilious head waiter, who daily informed the world that he had worked in no less a city than Pittsburgh. He learned from the head waiter and from the older waitresses all the subtle and ancient technique of waiting: the setting of a table, from which side to serve, the proprieties of dress jackets and aprons, remembering six orders at once, polishing silverware, washing salt-cellars, moulding butter and all the other details of 'side work', tactfully keeping cranks out of the seats preferred by regular boarders, with what dishes to serve mustard, how to open champagne, and, more weighty, how to open boiled eggs, and, profoundest of all, how to smile so flatteringly upon mean customers that they would leave a respectable tip. (Such is the low custom of waiters, showing them to be as menial as physicians flattering their patients, lawyers flattering their clients, authors flattering editors, announcers flattering the vast radio audience, merchants flattering the good taste of their customers, college-presidents flattering the board of regents, senators flattering everybody--all of them making certain of their tips.)

Initiated into this wisdom, Myron tried to get taken on as temporary waiter for evening banquets. It was difficult. Everyone, even the alert Mr. Coram, was astonished by such eccentricity, and Clint Hosea, that baked-bean philosopher, heir to Emerson and Jonathan Edwards, remarked, 'What I always say is, a cook is a cook and a waiter is a waiter, and there ain't no two ways about it!'

But in an emergency or two, at a wedding reception and at the dinner of the Northern Connecticut Izaak Walton and Annual Re-stocking Association, Myron was permitted to try his hand. The head waiter was exasperated to discover that Myron had already bought a waiter's uniform for himself, and that there was nothing else for which he could rebuke this presumptuous scullion who had come out of the smoke into the refined airs of the dining-room.

After his two years at the Eagle, Myron went--with an agreeable farewell to Mr. Coram, who sighed, 'I wish we could afford to keep you here, son'--as meat-cook to New Haven, to the Connecticut Inn, which was almost a really good hotel, with a hundred rooms and occasional interesting food and guests who shaved daily. There were men waiters, and lunch instead of dinner was served at noon, which seemed to Myron very urban and fashionable.

After a year and three-quarters in New Haven, he had risen to the colonelcy of second-cook, and sometimes he was permitted to go to the open markets and help the steward buy meats and fowl and vegetables. But he went mad again, and informed the steward and the head waiter that, like a prototype of Colonel Lawrence of Arabia, he wanted to chuck his commission and re-enlist, as a regular waiter.

He was twenty-two, no longer a boy and a butt in the steamy back caverns of the hotel, but esteemed as an excellent cook who, with no jeers now from the chef, did conjuring tricks not only with his early loves, Béarnaise and Duchesse sauces, but with half a hundred--Bordelaise, Cumberland, Poivrade, Admiral, Sainte-Menehould, Raifort, Espagnole, Cardinal, Nantaise, Niçoise, romantic names which he crooned to himself--mispronouncing them badly--as he sifted and stirred. The bustling steward admired, 'I wonder where an upstate boy like that ever learned so many flavours!' It never came to the steward that all of Myron's magic, like precocious success in many other occupations, consisted in looking up the recipes in a book and having the remarkable energy to try them out.

They besought him, now, not to give up his career, not to 'monkey with the buzz-saw'. The steward remarked, 'Way I figure it, a cook is a cook and a waiter is a waiter and no sense trying to be both, and that's all there is to it.'

Myron insisted, and became a waiter, newest and least in his watch, making, with wages and tips, one-quarter his salary as second-cook. So he stopped smoking cigars, took to cigarettes, and was content as he learned every strategy of table-waiting.

When he had sufficiently mastered it so that he did not have to worry over broken dishes and unchilled celery, he began, through articles in hotel magazines and by snooping about the Inn between hours, to study the storekeeper's systems of keeping track of the receipt and issuance of hotel supplies, the housekeeper's inventory of linen and soap and curtains, the office's record of bills payable, the hundred ways in which the checker and cashier can keep the waiters from socializing the money paid by guests, and the three or four ways of keeping the checker and cashier from doing the socializing themselves.

Was he too weary after working all day and studying all evening?

Is any poet weary or dolorous when he sits up till dawn over a newly come parcel of books?