'Would I! You bet I would! I'd of shown you the whole shop, and given you a good bottle of wine.'
She giggled. 'That would be won'erful. But I guess wine would of been too strong for my poor little head. I never did taste it--except maybe some elderberry wine and dandelion wine and so on, and I just hate beer, it's so bitter. But oh, I would of loved to of seen a really big hotel; we stayed at a horrid pokey little place, hardly any bigger than that American House . . . Oh! How dreadful of me! I forgot the American House was . . .'
'But I agree with you. The American House is a fierce little dump. But you just wait till I finish remodelling it! It won't be any Inside Inn for size, but it will be as comfy and cheerful as any city hotel. But how would you like to travel way beyond that?--say to Europe, and see cathedrals and castles and a lot of art galleries and so on?'
'Oh, I'd love it! It would be just won'erful! I'm just as ignorant as a rabbit, Myron. I don't know a blessed thing about art or music or any of those things.'
'Well if you want to know, kid, neither do I! I certainly have picked up a fine junk-heap of information about electric dish-washers and combustion recorders and steel furniture, but the penalty I've paid is that I don't know much else. And God how I want to! I want to know! Everything.'
'But I bet you do, Myron. My! I always feel you know so much . . .'
'I don't. I'm an illiterate hash-hustler. And I like to learn. I wish I knew all about painting. I wish I could spiel French and German and Italian like Luciano Mora--he's a fellow at the Westward; you'll meet him some day and fall so hard for him I'll be jealous! And I wish I'd read all the poets, as Ora has.'
'Well, I'll bet he hasn't--of course I've only seen a little of Ora since I was a kid, but I'll bet he's a fourflusher, like my own darling brother . . . Gee, Bert never stops talking!'
'Now you look here, Effie May, that's the first time I ever knew you to be dumb. Ora is a very intellectual fellow, with the most extraordinary imagination and originality and insight into character and so on and so forth, and he's certainly read all the poets and authors--you can tell from the way he keeps referring to them. Of course to an old stick-in-the-mud like me, sometimes he seems pretty impractical and careless about financial details--I guess he'll always be hard-up and need a little help--but you can't expect a sensitive, sympathetic mind like his to stand the grind the way a hard-boiled old drudge like me does.'
'I won't have you calling yourself names! You aren't a stick-in-the-mud! You get ever so much fun out of trying new stunts--like putting that lovely new cretonne in the American House office. I won't have you calling yourself names! And let me catch Ora or Bert or anybody else doing it, and I'll scratch their eyes out!'
He looked up at her, her golden hair of a Norse goddess glistening as she bent a little over him. 'Would you, honestly?' he whispered.
She whispered back, 'I certainly would!'
He drew her down to him. So soft! She stooped, kissed his cheek with reckless heartiness, and sprang up, crying, 'Come on, silly! We'd better keep walking!'
They tramped over the hilltop, through the scarlet patches of devil's paint brush, their clasped hands swinging as though they were sixteen. In her free hand Effie May carried her old-fashioned flowery sunbonnet. Her sister Julia laughed at her for affecting anything so out of date and rustic, and Herbert scolded that if she was willing to disgrace herself socially by such childishness, at least, she might try to think a little of his official position, but she persisted in it, every summer--her only marked rebellion against the security of Black Thread Presbyterian circles. Now, when she appealed to that urban social arbiter, Myron Weagle, he assured her that there was nothing smarter than sunbonnets, as regularly worn by Van Rensselaers at Newport, and she panted with gratitude--and the unaccustomed walking--as they swung down the hillside to the Black Thread highway.
19
He admitted that he was probably sentimental in seeking, on this tramp by himself, the spot where he had stretched out beside Effie May, but it had a gay sanctity for him, and there he squatted, hands about knees, brooding while he looked unseeing across the valley of pastures, elm groves, and quiet old yellow houses with red barns.
'She's young yet. She doesn't know much. But how she will expand to the world outside! And me, what am I going to do? In ten or twelve years, I may be Mark's successor, if Carlos Jaynes doesn't cut my throat and convince the Old Man I'm a small-town book-keeper. But even that . . . It would be just a routine job. Old Mark created the chain, and his successor would just carry it on. I'd like to do something entirely new.'
And that hour he began--with notes on the backs of visiting cards, transferred later to a handsome pocket vademecum with seal binding and gilt edges, labelled, 'Hotel Project Notes'--what must, in exactness, be called 'The Note-Book of a Poet': the thoughts, story-plots, visions, observations, aspirations which he longed some day to write, only not in words but in steel and brick and composition flooring and best-quality bed-linen.
From the Note-Book of a Poet:
Most luxurious sanitorium in world, within hundred miles New York, freedom of a hotel but fine docs, elec equipment, baths, etc. but absolutely quiet, tennis and golf but far enough fr hotel no noise, no dances or music after 10 p.m., but movies nightly? large private balconies where can rest all day, extra big and up-to-date library, especially fine food bu simple like squab on toast and fresh veg & special milk, charge like hell but worth it. Note: have manicures etc.--God what a word, 'beautician'!--old dames have time for hair treatments, massage, etc., while getting in shape. Make it snotty & exclusive. I'd probably hate every guest in place, but fun building it.
Myron's note-book was a quarter filled before he had thrashed through the problem of what he really wanted to do--aside from immediately marrying Effie May Lambkin. In a sacred excitement he came full upon it.
He was an hotel-man, a professional innkeeper. Good. Well then, he wanted to build, to own, and without interference to conduct, the one Perfect Inn!
He wanted to create it as Ora (he supposed) wanted to create the Perfect Poem. And since in cities the modern hotel must be a combination of inn, restaurants, whole alleys of shops, rooms that were not so much bedchambers as offices for out-of-town business men, and gathering-place for conventions and public dinners and weddings, therefore he wanted his Perfect Inn to be in the country, by itself, altogether devoted to those blessings which no electricity or gasoline motor had made antiquated--perfect food and perfect wine and perfect bedrooms.
Assemble the best notions of all the best innkeepers, American or European. Conceive it not as a quick and certain way of making money, nor as a happy-go-lucky fulfilment of somebody's notion that 'I guess we need another hotel around here', but as a planned, perceived, exuberantly rich yet severely chastened idea, noble as an epic and lively as a swimming-race.
'I'll do it!' Myron vowed.
He sat in his rickety room at the American House till dawn, and by dawn he had filled eight pages of his handsome new Poet's Note-Book (only it never occurred to Myron himself to call it that) with plans for the Perfect Inn (and he never called his vision that, either, but only 'The best resort hotel that can be built'). From his experience, his reading, his talk, he put down all the things to be avoided, such as the equal horrors of indolent 'service' and of service that was presumptuously chummy; and all the things to be desired, such as, since Luciano Mora was always scolding that American inns do not use the good out-of-doors, a tea and luncheon terrace, vine-sheltered and looking on sea or lake or mountain-valley.