And with the loss from Prohibition, taxes went up.
Hotels and theatres are always excellent institutions to tax, when in doubt. Rural legislators live decently at home, or in boarding-houses at the capital; they go neither to hotels nor to theatres and see no reason why other people should; and in framing taxation bills always agree that these lairs of luxury will stand another raid. Income taxes have always been an especial delirium to hotels. A factory can strike a reasonable average for depreciation of machines and plant; but so varied is the custom of a hotel that a minor prophet is required to estimate the annual damage. Such an agreeable fad as stealing souvenir spoons, springing up mysteriously and ragingly, will suddenly cost an hotel thousands a year, to be more or less allowed for on the income tax, provided the inspectors of tax-reports condescend to permit it.
It was particularly pleasant for hotels to pay extra taxes to support extra prohibition agents for the purpose of keeping them from earning the extra taxes, and just as pleasant to realize that, privately, the guests were drinking as much as ever, with the difference that the hotels received none of the profit, while the merry men, communally guzzling in their bedrooms instead of the bar, were ruining varnished tables and bureaus with spilled alcohol and cigarettes left burning, were setting beds and chairs and curtains afire, were throwing empty bottles out of windows upon the heads of litigious passers-by, were keeping other guests awake, for which only the hotel was blamed . . . It scarcely seemed worth while to pay much extra income tax to get these results.
If the details of conventions or taxation seem to have nothing to do with the soul of Myron Weagle, poet, then is the seeming wrong, for it was with such details that he had to harass himself, it was for them that he had to give up leisure and love and play, all the years after 1917.
Ora, engaged in ghosting the memoirs of a charming lady blackmailer who had driven half a dozen men to suicide, complained that for all of marriage and Bermuda, Myron was less adventurous and picturesque than ever, unfit for the reverence of a novelist like himself, who would have liked an explorer or a soldier for brother. Effie May, left alone for a good part of the time, and now less entertained by the luxury of hotel suites, complained that Myron was neglecting her.
Carlos Jaynes complained that the crank Myron, with his dirty little insistences on economy, kept him from making the public rooms of the Westward as smart as those of the Ritz or Plaza or St. Regis. Even Mark Elphinstone complained that Myron criticized his ideas for new restaurants.
But while they complained of his coldness to Romance, Myron warmed in his heart the desire to create the Perfect Inn.
He was the inventor, or one of the inventors, of the 'emergency overnight kit' for people held too late at the office to get back to the suburbs. It contained cotton pyjamas, cheap comb and tooth-brush, a small tube of tooth-paste; it was given free to sober-looking guests who were benighted, and led several hundred business-men to making a habit of staying at the Westward. Also, as they were supposed to leave the pyjamas behind, to be laundered and used over again, it did not cost so much as it seemed.
Ora laughed enormously when he heard of Myron's invention. It was, he pointed out, a perfect example of what a modern American business-man considered an advance in civilization, and he had the funniest suggestions (Effie May giggled at them) for other items to be included in the kit: a paper-bound copy of the Gospel According to St. John, a celluloid sardine sandwich which could be used over and over again, a collection of the poems of Edgar Guest, pink wool bed-socks, and an eighteen-foot telescope so that the guest could study astronomy from the lofty altitudes of the Westward.
Myron argued with Carlos Jaynes and the other resident managers about extra attention to travelling-men and sample-rooms.
Jaynes had figures--like all statistics very impressive but rather vague as to origin--to prove that in 1922 there were, thanks to catalogues and larger wholesalers, only fifty per cent as many drummers on the road as in 1902, and he hinted that Myron could not get away from the psychology of Black Thread Centre of 1895.
Perhaps that was all true, said Myron, but travelling-men were the most important of all critics of hotels. It was they who remarked, in the smoking compartments of trains, 'Going to Golden Glow for the first time? Try the Smith Hotel. They treat you right. All new mattresses, and the clerks make sure you get your mail, and the coffee--ummmm!' Or: 'Don't let anybody tell you the Grand Hotel Royal Magnificent is any good. You take my tip and give it a miss. They got enough gilt in the lobby to sink a ship, but if you take a room for anything under six bucks a day, they treat you like a poor relation, and they stick you fifty cents for orange juice. Out!'
So Myron outraged Carlos Jaynes, bewildered Effie May, and shocked Ora by insisting that every employee give more attention to the veteran travelling-men than to Neapolitan dukes who came in brushing off reporters, and in particular he did so after a day in 1923--though then he was no longer at the Westward.
He was behind the desk, checking over the credit-card rack, the telautographs, the transfer-racks, the mail-stamping machine, the three fire-alarm systems, the time-clock, and the other complicated contrivances of that nerve-centre of the hotel. Up to the desk to register came a man foggily familiar to Myron; a tall, stooped man, neat of linen but with a suit at once flashy and badly worn, his grey hair bushy at the edge of his cocky grey hat. He was, Myron guessed, a Failure, but a Failure who would never give up his flamboyant hopes.
A man of sixty or sixty-two?
Now who the devil was he? Myron seemed to associate agreeable, even exciting memories with him. Elbowing the room-clerk aside, he read the signature upside down. That signature was 'J. Hector Warlock, Chi. Benjamin Belt Buckles the Best'.
Myron was within an inch of saying 'Number Four, as usual, Mr. Warlock? Mr. Dummy Dumbolton is in the house.'
But Dummy Dumbolton, meek and bewildered and admiring to the end, was dead now. And the J. Hector Warlock who, at thirty-four, could stay up all night drinking and gambling, and still laugh in the morning, was just as dead.
Myron was silent.
J. Hector looked straight at him, unrecognizing, his kind eyes a little bleary. He was rumbling, and his rotund voice had not shrivelled with the rest of him, 'Brother, do you happen to have a nice room for about three-fifty?'
'We certainly have, Mr. Uh . . .' Myron pretended to look at the registry card. J. Hector's script was as bold as ever, but shaky on the down strokes. '. . . Mr. Warlock. Three-fifty exactly, and I think you'll like it. Uh--Benjamin Belt Buckles, eh? How are they going?'
'Oh, pretty good'. Then J. Hector laughed, threw back his head with his old gesture of a matinée idol. 'That means pretty damn bad!' He looked away from Myron, awaiting a bell-boy, and Myron could not think of another question. He longed to bring back 1895, and credulity, and delight at the strangeness and variousness of life, and the round cheeks and mighty laugh and black locks of J. Hector. He nodded to the boy. 'Take Mr. Warlock up to 539.' He watched J. Hector bob wearily across to the elevator, his shoulders sinking as soon as he believed that he was no longer under observation. He vanished behind the elevator grill, bearing with him Myron's youthful certainty that somewhere in the beautiful world was to be found a blessed state called 'success'.
To the room-clerk Myron murmured, 'Just charge Mr. Warlock three-fifty for 539, and put the rest on my bill, and make a memo of this: Whenever he comes, he's to have any six- or seven-dollar room, the best that's vacant, for three-fifty. Charge the excess to me, and don't let him know, understand?