Behind the bar they found Jock McCreedy, who shouted, 'Well, I'm a son of a gun! Here's Charley Delmonico come back to the old shanty! Shake, boy! Mighty proud!'
'Well, he ain't done so much. He's done elegant, but why shouldn't he? I taught him all he knows,' observed Tom.
'That's right,' said Myron. 'Say, wait just a minute. I've got something for you boys out in my bag.'
He brought in the two bottles of ripe Bourbon.
Jock McCreedy, tasting, rolled up his eyes, held up his hand, and murmured, 'Say, Myron, that certainly makes it up to a man for all the woes and tribulations of a sinful world, like the fellow says!'
But Tom grumbled, 'Well, I suppose it's good licker, but it ain't got much kick. I like to have my stomach telegraph up that it's had something stronger than diluted well-water!'
Jock looked at him in pious horror.
Myron was considering that, though his mother was more beautiful than ever to him in her tragic timidity, yet Mark Elphinstone or Jock McCreedy was spiritually more his father than Tom Weagle, Alec Monlux or Luciano more his brother than Ora, and his tight sunless office at the Westward more his home, now, than Black Thread Centre.
While Tom was droning on about his expert opinions on 'store whisky', apple-jack, and white mule, Myron was thinking that he had paid a good deal for the privilege of helping to make a clear, efficient, merciful system out of the tangle of commerce and industry. His easy-going employees resented him as supercilious and fussy. His old friends--even, he now saw, perhaps his father--felt that he was a hard money-grubber and climber, who had lost the pleasant sentimentality of boyhood. The 'intellectuals', like Ora, were certain that he was a vulgar Philistine, because he provided excellent bathrooms and ice cream (which people wanted) instead of providing atrocious paintings or novels (which they didn't want). To the old friends, he was too top-lofty an intellectual. To the intellectuals, he was too low a pedlar. To the pedlars, he was too scrupulous a fanatic about exact financial reports and honest advertising.
'Well, let 'em all roast me. I seem to go on living through it,' he thought, and delighted Jock McCreedy by asking for a golden fizz--a drink in whose mixing, Jock believed, he was superior to any barman in Paris, Kokomo, Shanghai, or North Braintree.
During his two months in Black Thread, while he was roaming the hills and lying in the sun and swimming in clear streams, while he was renewing acquaintance with old friends--or really, while he first had the leisure to become acquainted with them at all--he was busy.
'Mother--Dad--I've got an idea,' he said abruptly at the family supper-table, 'I've got an idea.'
'Don't let it bite you,' said Tom.
'Hush! . . . What is it, dearie?' said his mother.
'If I'm to carry it out, I've got to have a free hand and no discussions. I haven't got much time here. Now listen. The new thing in travel, and in hotel-patronage, is going to be automobile touring. Within another five or ten years, automobile tourists will be more important than travelling-men to an hotel like this, on one of the through routes from New York to the Berkshires and Canada. But to cater to them, you've got to have a garage, more flexible meal-hours, European plan instead of American, and a better decorated house all through.'
'Rats!' said his father, authoritatively. 'Never amount to nothing, this auto-touring. I was reading here just the other day where folks are getting so sick of breakdowns and gasoline stink that they're going back to hosses. By 1916 or so, you won't hardly see an auto.'
'Yes? Well, you're wrong. I'll give you my plan, dad. Take it or sink it, but don't argue! You ought to own this place, not just lease it. I'll buy it for you, and put it in shape, and build a garage, financing the whole thing through the Hotel Enterprise Bureau, of New York, and we'll lease it to a good small-town hotel-man. Even with the interest on the mortgage, I think you can count, if my figures are correct, on fourteen or fifteen hundred dollars a year clear profit to live on, and then you two can rent a bungalow here, and you won't have to do anything but loaf. I think you deserve it, ma, after all the years you've worked!'
'Oh, it would be lovely to lie abed till seven o'clock every morning!' sighed Mrs. Weagle.
His father did argue, of course, and insist that he needed a few days (which meant a few drinks) to do a mysterious something to which he airily referred as 'thinking it over'. But his mother's nod and smile had been enough for Myron. With an hour or two a day of restful business between rather tiring spasms of devoting himself to loafing, Myron in two months carried on more activity than had gone on in the American House in twenty-four years.
He hired as stenographer the smart little daughter of Reverend Snibbs, just graduated from business school in Bridgeport. That by itself, said Tom, showed Myron had got his head full of nonsensical ideas; all his life, running this whole hotel, he'd been able to get along by writing all the necessary letters by hand. Why! In one single letter, he'd ordered as much as four new bureaus!
Myron dictated some fifty letters to people, all over the country, who were advertising for the lease of country hotels. While Daisy Snibbs was writing these, and for the first time the American House was echoing to the sound of any faster typing than that of a drummer picking out reports with two fingers on a portable, Myron dashed down to New York, saw the Hotel Enterprise people, and apparently came back with assurance of finances, on a contract signed by Myron and by Mark Elphinstone.
Mark had observed, 'You back? Why, damn you, Myron, I told you to get out and loaf in the sun even if it roasts your damn hide off! Sign what? All right, all right, don't bother me with the details. I got hired men like you to look into those things!'
It appeared, then, that a quiet, rather shabby little lawyer from Torrington, whom Myron had known as a guest at the Eagle Hotel, had already taken an option on the American House building and plot; and that of the old livery stable behind it--and that he had taken it on behalf of Myron, who, with a swiftness that made his mother's head ache and made his father almost civil for a day or two, took up the option, bought the two 'parcels'. Instantly, workmen were busy remodelling the stable into a garage; tearing out stalls, putting in a cement floor, work bench, air pump. Other men were building behind the American House a twenty-room addition, with five baths, out over the alley and back yard, and providing for deliveries and the disposal of garbage through a truck-entrance into the basement. Others were installing five new bathrooms in what had been single rooms, so that eventually the American House would have forty-nine bedrooms and fourteen baths. A brisk little lady from a Hartford department-store was looking with dislike upon the spittoons and honest old scruffy leather chairs in the lobby, the equally honest iron beds and straight chairs in the bedrooms, and practically, Tom mourned, throwing them away. She then, according to Tom, turned the office crazy; in place of the straight, respectable lines of chairs along the walls, she put in a nasty mixture of wicker chairs with cretonne cushions, and leather chairs that weren't rockers, all of them in different groups, so that there was no geometrical arrangement to the room. She reduced the lordly desk to a mere nook in a corner, and hid the key-rack. And in the bedrooms she installed still other despicable wicker chairs, and painted pine bedsteads without one ornamental iron curleycue. But it was the dining-room that she most disfigured. She got rid of the long, solid, satisfactory tables and put in small separate tables with red tops on which, she directed, not luxurious thick cotton table-cloths but dinky little d'oyleys were to be used; and the wall she painted a shrieking canary yellow!
When Ora ran up to Black Thread, as the work was being finished, he groaned, 'Well, Myron, you've certainly brought some elegant urban improvements to our hick town! The hotel used to be just an honest country inn, that didn't pretend to be anything else, and now you've made it into a very handsome fourth-rate imitation of a city tea-room, as kept by our best cultured spinsters! If there are any J. Hector Warlocks left, they'll be just tickled pink to sit in a painted wicker chair and satisfy their appetites with a cream cheese and jelly sandwich!'