How warmly they strode from the taxi into the hotel! How surprised they were to be interviewed! How modestly they explained they knew nothing about politics--and then proved it! How reluctantly they sipped of what they believed to be Mark's private stock of Bourbon--it was a private stock, right enough, but not the sort he drank. How buoyantly they said, of a private suite priced at thirty dollars a day which they were getting for ten, 'Oh, this is quite all right. It will do very nicely--very nicely! The price is a little steep, but I am sure I shall be very comfortable.'
And you had to send them flowers, and a bushel of fruit.
Fortunately, you could sometimes get these from the leftovers of last night's banquet.
And just as hard to swallow as the Celebrities who expected you to telephone about them to city editors--who would growl, 'Who the hell is he? What's he got to say? My supply of dumb sob-squad reporters is pretty well exhausted to-day'--were the other, usually more authentic Celebs who really wanted to be let alone. When they crossed the Atlantic, they kept their names off the passenger-list, in the touching belief that no one would know they were coming, though the London or Paris correspondents had cabled of their coming before they sailed. Down on these unfortunates, the reporters came via the transom, the keyhole, the fire escape, the fireplace, or just generally through the air, and the Celebs blamed the hotel management; they always said, 'I did think that You People might be trusted to make at least some slight effort to respect my wish for privacy!'
After a Celebrity, Myron appreciated a sound and seasoned travelling-man.
Conventions--oh God, conventions!
As restaurant and banquet manager, Myron had had to make love to lodge secretaries and committee chairmen to persuade them to hold their dinners at the Westward. Now, as assistant to the president, he had to back up the several resident managers of the hotels in securing conventions.
To an hotel-man, a convention is a nightmare of being for ever caught in a subway rush.
There is an Elphinstone hotel, let us say, in the city of Golden Glow, which is distinguished for being the dirtiest and noisiest industrial huddle in the state of Winnemac. Now the state organization of shoe-dealers, autograph collectors, petunia-growers, Schnauzer-fanciers, pacifists, big navyists, wholesale and retail tripe-dressers, or alumni of Pettifoot Military and Agricultural Institute are going to hold a convention. The Golden Glow Chamber of Commerce, together with the hotel-keepers, theatre-owners, taxi-cab-owners and the like of the city, send letters, telegrams, and emissaries to the committee to proclaim the beauties of Golden Glow--the park system, the almost radioactive drinking-water, the extraordinary situation whereby Golden Glow can with equal ease be reached from Key West, Medicine Hat, or Constantinople, the number and vehement luxury and unparalleled cheapness of the hotels, the rural grandeur that the Golden River will have as soon as a couple of hundred factories and the stockyards are removed from its banks, the grim splendour of Mount Glow, which is only fourteen thousand feet lower than Mount Whitney, and the acoustics of Memorial Hall, in which twenty thousand people can hear the lowest whisper, provided listening to low whispers is their notion of fun.
The convention once secured, the hitherto chummy hotel-keepers separate and begin trying to get reservations away from one another.
Then the convention. The arrival of kings, field-marshals, and archbishops, each expecting suitable reverence: the president of the state organization, the secretary, the chairman of the committee on meetings, the chairman of the accommodations committee, the chairman of the banquet committee. Delegates flooding in, demanding the rooms they have forgotten to reserve. Lobbies jammed with men slowly circling and exchanging remarks, flasks, and chewing gum, and agreeing that a three-hundred-room hotel which cannot take care of two hundred extra guests at the last moment is not enterprising, and they certainly will never come here again! Secretaries of committees, sitting at small desks in large rooms off the lobby, with so many delegates surging about them that they become deaf and blind, and are sometimes found weeks afterward, hiding under the pile of unanswered messages.
And his incessant problem of employees.
Myron had been an underling himself; he had vowed then that if he ever became an executive, he would never be irritated, that he would tenderly instruct all the employees, and be delighted to advance money to them in the middle of the week. He still felt that he ought to feel so.
He didn't.
He still had an uneasy sense, probably derived from Ora, that he ought to be a socialist, a comrade to all the workers.
He wasn't.
There had been so many instances when the 'help' had failed him: the cook who showed up drunk for the preparation of Thanksgiving dinner; the bell-boy, supposed to be hustling an urgent message up to a guest, who was found smoking a cigarette and playing craps in the linen-room; the steward who was taking a percentage from the provision merchants; the clerk who gave his friend an eight-dollar room for four; the chambermaid who, ordered to wash the fly-specks from one electric globe did not wash the other dirty globes in the room; the elevator-runner who sneered at funny old women with purple hats . . . A hundred of them, daily.
Yet Myron was a reasonably just and kindly man, and he fretted over his workers. He had no pleasure in kicking out even the surliest of them. If day on day they worried lest they lose their jobs, so day on day he worried, 'Oh Lord, have I got to fire him?' as he watched a man growing slack, doing less work, and no employee had more sternly to nerve himself, to still his quaking stomach, before edging into the Boss's office to ask for a rise, than did Myron before sending for an employee to scold him.
It was hard on an employee, he admitted, to be dependent for the job that meant life for himself and his family upon the whims of a boss who could discharge him because he did not like the colour of his hair; to give all his laborious days for the profit of some absentee owner whom he had never even seen. 'Just the same, as long as it's my job to control them, I'm going to drive 'em as hard as--as hard as I've always driven myself,' he insisted.
After the Bolshevik Socialist revolution, and the installation of the Fascists in Italy, he was interested to learn that under these new systems, slackers and dullards and falsifiers of reports were worse driven--even to prison or the rebuke of an automatic--than under the Capitalistic Democracy which, with no particular will or thought in the matter, he himself represented.
The coming of Prohibition, which was annoying to most citizens, was a catastrophe to the hotels. They had depended upon the bar to pay, at least, rent and taxes, and it had enabled them to lose on the dining-room, to lavish game, terrapin, caviare on the guests and positively urge them to take from the heaped dish left on the table more butter than they needed, and if the meals brought a deficit, what of it? It was good advertising. With Prohibition, they were compelled to turn niggardly or close their doors in bankruptcy. Myron had for a while to return to his food-cost-finding and determine exactly what proportion of an ounce of butter could be given to each guest without loss; just how much, to the tenth fraction of a cent, they could spend on an egg.