The monthly report--including expenses, receipts, inventory of supplies on hand, and estimated future repairs and replacements--should have been mailed by December 28th, and on that day it had not even been started. When Myron scolded the book-keeper, he answered, 'Mr. Barrow told me to hold it up a few days till he collects some more cash, so's it'll look better.'
On January 2nd, headquarters telegraphed, 'Monthly report not received stop send at once.'
Myron fussed up to Barrow with the message.
'I will get busy to-day--right away! We can just do a little fancy back-dating on the collections, date 'em December, and the report will look all right,' bubbled Barrow, from behind a strong Bourbon breath. 'I'll turn to and help the damn book-keeper, and we'll get the reports off to-morrow morning. I'll work at the report all night, if necessary.'
But it was at no financial report that Mr. Barrow worked all that night.
Myron went early to his room, angry, depressed, hopeless. 'I'll give him a week's notice, to-morrow. I feel dirty here. Aah!'
Just then Tansy Quill came in, to turn down the bed.
Now Tansy Quill was the one girl, or indeed female of any generation, whom Myron had noticed at Tippecanoe. As at the Connecticut Inn, with the Wild Widow, the conveniently unattached Myron had received hints from lady guests that they would be glad to see him in their rooms, what time their husbands were devoting themselves to serious drinking down in the bar. He had been too worried, too gaunt of mind, to consider their thoughtful offers. But Tansy had, in the few words between them, become his one sure friend at Tippecanoe Lodge.
And Tansy Quill was a chambermaid and an octoroon.
Her skin was the colour of a tawny chrysanthemum; her Caucasian features were fine but not too sharp; her laughter was easy but never meaningless. She was intelligent and bookish. She had probably read more, and more discriminatingly, than anyone else under the roof of Tippecanoe Lodge, except for Jerry Lietrich. And hers was the common tragedy of the superior negro, in that the poor whites and the poor blacks equally feared her superiority. Even more savagely than the thick-headed white roustabout, the black peon yelled after her, 'Yeh, uppity high yaller--sleepin' wif all de hotel clerks!'
Resented by the blacks as too white, and by the whites as too black. Resented by the illiterate as too sophisticated and resented by the sophisticated as exposing their provincial sophistication. Laden with all the complexities of twentieth-century America heaped upon the dark burden lugged up from old Africa's abyss.
Tansy had been grateful to Myron for treating her as neither black nor white, as neither intellectual nor chambermaid, but simply as a colleague whose work he found competent. She would have hated it if he had lavished on her that excessive attention with which Bohemian and radical white circles, trying to put the negro brother at his ease, make him more uncomfortable than would any insolence. Myron's most extensive greeting had been, 'Good evening, Tansy', but with it had gone an authentic smile--smile curiously weary, just now, for a man of only a little over twenty-four.
She peered at him to-night, as she bustled over the top sheet and patted the pillows.
'Tired, Mr. Weagle?'
'Yes, horribly.'
'The bar-room's noisy to-night--hear 'em way up here.'
'God, yes!'
'Mr. Weagle! It's not my place--and I suppose none of the other girls and men would agree with me--and I hope I'm not being impertinent--but I do know how you've worked to make a decent place out of this dump.' She was anxiously clasping her hands, tapering and coloured like old ivory, in front of her. 'Please don't get discouraged and leave us! It would be terrible, without you. The gentlemen would--oh, I reckon they'd bother me again. Oh, I'm afraid I'm forward! I'm sorry! Good night!'
She fled.
In amazement he blurted to himself, 'Why, she's lovely! Lovely! I could fall in love with her.' He imagined stroking Tansy's hand; he gloated that he did have one ally; and that night, for the first time in a fortnight, he really slept.
The next day the Elphinstone headquarters telegraphed: 'Insist on report at once,' and Fred Barrow, looking sallow, plodded about the bar collecting bills. But the labour, and the disgrace of seeming not to trust his dear friends, was too much for him, and he was dead drunk at five o'clock.
Two days later, a telegram not from the head office but from Mark Elphinstone himself: 'What's idea send report or will be plain and fancy slaughter.'
Barrow commanded the book-keeper, 'All right. We'll have to shoot in the figures just the way they stand now,' and to Myron he explained, 'It'll be all right. We'll pull through. Old Mark and me have been friendly for years. He appreciates all I've done for him, and I reckon he must've cottoned to you, or he'd never have sent you to an old, established place like this from a crazy shack like your St. Louis hotel. Sure. Let's have a drink. Don't you worry, my boy. Besides! I'll get busy right away--this morning. Work night and day, if necessary, and the February 1st report will look swell. I feel better now. I'm going right out and make those damn lazy gardeners clean up the grounds.'
He departed for the gardens--by way of the bar-room.
Three mornings later, when Fred Barrow was again, or still, in the bar-room, and Myron, grown reckless despite the soft encouragement of Tansy Quill, was refusing to let one of Barrow's best drinking-mates take his baggage before he had paid his bill, Mark Elphinstone trotted into the lobby.
13
Mark Elphinstone shook his head at Myron, commanding silence, and slipped out through the dining-room, into the kitchen. He reappeared in ten minutes and went upstairs. He popped into the lobby again, and charged on the bar-room. When he came out, Fred Barrow was following him, wailing, while Elphinstone yapped, '. . . I know, very useful then. I'll give you a pension of fifteen dollars a week. More than deserve. Now get out. Go up and pack. Expect you out of here by this evening.'
The recalcitrant guest, at the sight of Elphinstone's entrance, had paid his bill and tiptoed upstairs. Elphinstone leaned on his pudgy hands, flat on the counter, and gazed across at Myron.
'You're the new manager-in-chief. Try to keep from losing any more money this season. Prob'ly all you can do.'
'Why, I . . . I have the authority to hire and fire and make guests pay. . . .'
'You're the manager, I said! You're the manager! That's up to you! You're running things. You're the boss. You're the boss! I'll raise you. Don't know what you're getting. Don't know at all. Have it looked up at head office. Write you. Good morning. Got 'nautomobile waiting. Catch train at St. Augustine. Good morning.'
Before noon, Myron had telephoned to the employment agency in Jacksonville for a new skeleton staff of chef, second cook, working steward, storekeeper, head bartender, housekeeper, bell captain, and head waiter, all coloured; and two clerks and a book-keeper, white. He specified that none of them should ever have worked within twenty miles of Tippecanoe or have any relatives there, that they should be on the train by eight next morning, and that they should be confidentially informed that the new Tippecanoe manager was a regular damnyankee slave-driver and they would better not take the job if they expected to loaf.
Before evening supper, Fred Barrow had sadly gone off to catch the evening train south, and with him had gone Jared Lietrich and half a dozen other lights of the bar-room. They said good-bye to Myron coldly. He felt guilty. And before supper he sent to every employee in the hotel an order which he himself had typed and mimeographed, that whether they were then supposed to be off-duty or not, all of them should meet him in the dining-room at nine-thirty, under penalty of discharge. The order included the bartender. The bar-room would be closed for the rest of this day; the front door of the lobby be closed and locked, and guests could use the little side door. On the front door he hung up a sign which he himself had painfully lettered, 'Hotel under new management and being reorganized. No new guests received till January 11'.