And Myron had a perfectly horrible time. He ardently hated everyone at the wedding except Effie May, his mother, Luciano, Dingle, and Ora. He had started in hating Ora, also, for it was just the day after Ora had informed him that his remodelling of the American House had turned it from an honest inn into a gifte-shoppe. But this morning, at the church, when he was riding hard on Myron in the parlours till the bride should have come up the aisle, Ora re-established himself by producing a pint of rye, ordering Myron to have a sip, and grunting, 'Well, I never thought any Lambkin would ever crawl out from under the rocks--God, that Herby is a stiff!--but your Effie May is a peach; pretty as Lillian Russell, and a jolly kid. Congratulations. And I have got the damn ring all safe, right here! There they come! Hey, hey! Keep your nerve! One more quick swig!'
Myron thought that the parson, as Effie May and he stood before him, sniffed rather hoitily, but he lived through it, and ceased to be a young bachelor. He began, now, the second half of his life, as he squeezed her hand and muttered 'My wife!'
'Ouch!' she said, and giggled, and he glowed like a cat on the hearth.
Item in the Hotel Era:
BONIFACE A BENEDICT
Greeter Myron S. Weagle, long one of the right-hand men of Mine Host Mark Elphinstone of the Westward Ho, in the Big Town, and formerly Boniface of the Tippecanoe Lodge, Fla., than whom none among the younger hoteliers is better known for dispensing lavish hospitality and for postprandial eloquence, has let himself in for the chime of merry wedding-bells, the fortunate lady being Miss E. Laski of Thread Mill Centre, Massachusetts, and the lucky couple are now spending their honeymoon in the golden isle of Bermuda.
Blazing white reefs, white-edged breakers, deep waters that shaded from stainless green into pure blue, plaster houses white and pink and yellow among dark cedars, gardens of palm and banana, the creak of an old barouche with a darky driver proceeding with no haste, since it made no difference where they were going nor whether they ever went there--late-summer Bermuda, and Myron and Effie May honeymooning, and discovering, both of them, their first foreign land.
That the shops should sell coral and mother-of-pearl, and herring-bone heather just come from London; that the policemen should have an English accent and the postmen wear funny hats; that they should dine in a garden of oleanders and roses; it was all a fairy tale that made up for the tragic honeymoon discoveries that she was likely to giggle at his enthusiasms over non-dripping hotel teapots and folding baggage-stands, that she liked to eat chocolates in bed, with the results that she made nasty brown daubs on the pillows and afterward had the most indelicate fits of indigestion; that he made horrid noises in the bathroom and wore long thin cotton and wool underwear instead of this jaunty new 'athletic' sort, and that neither of them had had enough experience of love-making to do it gracefully.
But she did warm his heart by regarding him as an authority on everything in general. Since he had been in Florida and Missouri, she happily assumed that he knew everything about reefs, tides, deep-sea fishing, wistaria, planter's punch, the intimate biology of the coral anthozoa, the varieties of palms, the constitutions of the several British colonies, the social life of the Governor of Bermuda, and the productivity of banana plants.
And he told her everything, to their mutual satisfaction.
Few of the great hotels which were later to make Bermuda, next to Paris, the most agreeable suburb of New York had yet been erected, but they stayed at a shiny pink and blue inn between Harrington Sound and the open ocean, and so agreeable was it to sit out under the coconut palms after dinner, or at tea-time, with hot buttered English scones and marmalade in stone jars, that Myron's concept of the Perfect Inn grew and kicked and crowed--doubtless the more so because he had never dared expose it to the snicker of Ora.
It would take years for him to accumulate the necessary money and, plainly, to know enough, but he would create this right and beautiful thing and it would be his excuse for having lived. So they came back to New York and to work, looking a little regretfully from the boat deck of the steamer along the nickled wake to the bright reefs of Bermuda.
20
From 1911 to 1926, from his thirty-first year to his forty-sixth, Myron was busy about this hotel and that in New York City and Philadelphia and Long Island and Wilmington, except for eight months in 1917 and 1918, when he was a captain in the Quartermaster's Department, saving the world by sitting in a warehouse in New York and buying blankets and bacon and beans. He never lost his fantastic notion of the Perfect Inn, but each year he felt that he was not yet ready, and he had to content himself with filling new volumes of his little books of 'Hotel Project Notes'.
What is an art, what is a profession, what is a business, what is a job? Is a man who runs a great grocery store like Park & Tilford, Acker, Charles, or the gr dept of Macy's just a business man, while anybody who makes smart pictures of girls is artist, and doc or lawyer who thinks about nothing but making money a professional and cranky old prof who goes on handing out same lectures yr after yr a scholar and not just on a white collar job?
Myron did institute new methods as purchasing-agent for the whole Elphinstone chain. Till now, the stewards and other buyers even for great hotels had not been so very different from Tom Weagle, whose system of purchasing for the American House had been to stamp into the local butcher shop and drone, 'Whacha got to-day? That legga lamb any good?' But Myron and other pests of his kind made the whole process as delicate and complicated as determining the weight of Saturn.
After three and a half years he was made chief assistant to Mark Elphinstone, to help direct all the hotels and restaurants, with the title of third vice-president of the company. Mark himself never told him, but Myron knew that there had been a battle before he got the position, which was really that of heir-apparent to the throne of the little Napoleon. Carlos Jaynes, now resident manager of the Westward, had fought sharply for it. Though Elphinstone owned more than half the stock of the company, the millionaire brother-in-law of Jaynes and his friends controlled over forty per cent, and they had supported Jaynes.
Myron had won, though Mark's latest secretary, a young Y.M.C.A. man named Clark Cleaver, told him that the Old Man had been gambling on the market, and might have to sell some of his stock in the company. But Myron forgot his precariousness in working out life with Effie May, in accumulating plans for the Perfect Inn, and, after the comparative simplicity of being purchasing-agent only, in the whirlwind of dealing with every sort of detail of every sort of hotel and restaurant.
Every detail of hotel-keeping--and J. Hector Warlock had been right, years ago, when he had instructed the young Myron that an hotel-keeper had to be a combination of nursery-governess, financier, steam-fitter, detective, upholsterer, architect, dietitian, garbage-handler, ventilation-engineer, lawyer, orchestra-director, psychiatrist, florist, guide to the city, state, nation, and all hotels in Switzerland, the Argentine, and South Africa, garage-manager, after-dinner speaker, and supreme expert on insurance, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.
Insol prob of hotel-man matter of 'morals'. To what extent should he let all guests do exactly what they like so long as pay bills, not disturb other guests, & not get hotel bad reputation--couples probably unmarried, strange gents possibly fugitives from justice, even degenerates. Luciano Mora insists hotel-man no more right censor than physician refuse treat immoral or criminal patients; he says would you excuse Methodist hotel-man if refused take in Jewish, Catholic, Buddhist, or atheist guests. Alec says, yes, but immoral guests, so-called, sooner or later get joint bad name gradually even if at 1st no one kick. I don't know. Guess will be slack enough to do like Elphinstone and most canny mgrs.--not notice anything 'immoral' unless made to by kicks.