He was called to the telephone at once with, 'The gentleman in 539 wants to speak to you, Chief.'
'Is this the clerk that assigned me to 539?' J. Hector's voice was quavering, a little frightened.
'Yes.'
'Well, look, old man, sorry to bother you, but are you sure this is a three-fifty room?'
'Yes, absolutely; that's right.'
'It's such a swell room I was afraid . . . Hate to be a tight-wad, but you know how it is; firm won't just stand for more than that on the expense account.'
'Sure, I know how it is, Mr. Warlock. We like to cater to travelling-men here.'
'Well, I'm glad to hear that. I've been a drummer for more'n forty years and nowadays, it seems like most of these young glad-handers would rather have a bootlegger or a beautiful young movie actor guy than to have an old-time salesman that has to watch the nickels. Used to be a time I could blow myself to a six-dollar room, but somehow, nowadays. . . . Oh, excuse me; you don't want to hear my troubles! Much obliged, Cap'n; sorry to bothered you; sure am much obliged.'
Myron felt old, that night, and Effie May, prattling about the play to which they were going, seemed embarrassingly young. He wanted to get hold of J. Hector for a poker game. But--oh, Effie May would be so disappointed at missing the theatre, after being alone all day.
He liked novelties in food well enough, but when the manager of the Westward lunch-room innocently proposed a sandwich made of pineapple between halves of a doughnut, he forbade the crime without right of appeal. . . . And the question of the commercial value of a free basket of fruit in bedrooms; or could they sell such baskets, for fifty cents; or was the whole thing just an unprofitable extra bother? . . . And the comedy of the expansive gentleman who, after having a suite and vast meals for a week, so that the cash-drawer rattled with anticipation, paid for it with due-bills given for advertising. . . . And the growing importance of cafeterias and coffee-shops, as against the fact that the hasty gobbling of fodder in such places killed the tradition of leisurely dining. . . . And the question of how to provide amusement for lonely guests in the evening; how many liked a gramophone--later, a radio. . . . Lobby-sitters--well-dressed outsiders who all day long occupied chairs needed for guests. . . . The press-agent of the Westward, who pestered the officers by turning the whole hotel over to wedding-parties, so that Myron, however much that sentimentalist loved young love, was sick of dying flowers, dribbling champagne glasses, and weeping relations, who savagely stopped weeping when they had to pay the bills. . . . The newspapermen who blamed a thousand-room hotel because it served more stereotyped food and had more standardized bedroom-furnishings and less quaint, jolly, rubicund, Dickens-cum-Chesterton 'characters' than an 'old-world' inn of fifteen rooms and twenty seatings at table, as conducted by a famous retired chef who managed every detail. . . . The unhappy fact that, devoted to efficiency just as an impersonal ideal, Myron was as irritated by sloppiness and ignorance in rival hotels as in his own. To see on a table an ash-tray filled with cigarette-butts, unnoticed by the waiter, was to him what it was to a Black Thread deacon to catch the preacher kissing a choir-singer. There was no blacker shame--except, perhaps, a guest's marking on a linen tablecloth with a pencil. If he had no formal religion, nor gave any particular thought to his chances of Heaven, he did believe in Hell almost literally when he saw such a guest; and an otherwise perfect journey could, for a quarter hour, be ruined by a crooked tablecloth. He could see more things wrong with an apparently well-conducted restaurant in two minutes than the crankiest guest in as many hours.
He did not approve of himself for being so irritated by incompetence that it clouded the glory of life. He knew that he was 'fussy'.
He could scarcely avoid knowing it, with Ora and Effie May about.
All these details were so unimportant, they told him.
Yet to Effie May the health of her brother and sister and father, an extraordinarily indifferent matter to the world at large, appeared to be important, and equally so, the scent of her perfume, a pebble in her dancing-slipper, or runs in her stockings. And to Ora the horror of using the word 'delectable', the good harsh sound of words like 'grackle' and 'grunt' and 'starve', the crime of depending in stories upon roses, sunsets, and mother-love, and the not uninteresting question as to which magazines paid better, seemed weighty matters.
Sappy little truisms on red and green placards--the demands of Celebrities--emergency overnight kits--doughnut and pineapple sandwiches--unemptied ash-trays--Myron admitted that none of these atrocities singly much affected history, yet all together, he still insisted, they made the difference between doing his job excellently and doing it badly, and that to him was urgent.
The unfortunate thing is that though men have general resemblances in love, hunger, patriotism, and noses, they differ utterly in the technicalities of their work, and each grieves that all the others are idiots not to understand his particular language. Hotel-man or sculptor or sailor or manufacturer of tacks, each has a separate and self-conscious world, with a certainty of its significance to the universe, of the towering dignity of its every detail, and of the fascinating differences between colleagues who, to outsiders, seem indistinguishable 'types'.
To most guests at the Westward, every waiter looked like every other waiter, and a bell-boy was merely a bell-boy, but to one another, and to Myron Weagle, they were as different as Albert Einstein and John L. Sullivan, and all of them more reasonable and comprehensible than either Mr. Einstein or Mr. Sullivan.
Each world has not only its technicalities but its own heroes. To Myron, real history had nothing to do with Charlemagne, Moses, Garibaldi, Goethe, Thomas Edison, or Abraham Lincoln--except as Edison invented the lights that were so useful to hotels, and Lincoln took out an innkeeper's licence in Sangamon County in 1833. For him, the rulers of history were the greater American hotel-keepers: David Reynolds, the Boydens, Barnum (not P. T., but David, of the Indian Queen Tavern in Baltimore), Nathaniel Rogers, Cornelius Vanderbilt--until he gave up conducting the Bellona Hotel in New Brunswick for the outlandish occupation of captaining a steamship--Daniel Drew, who also abandoned innkeeping at the Bull's Head Tavern, on the Boston Post Road, for the vanities of railroad-financing, Rathbun, the Leylands, Paran Stevens, Potter Palmer, Oscar, Boldt, the two generations of Drakes, Statler, Muschenheim, Fred Harvey, Bowman, Boomer, Simeon Ford, Ralph Hitz, Willard, Flagler, Eppley, Ernie Byfield. To him, these names were as familiar and significant as the names of Dickens and Walter Scott to Ora. And to none of these masters, insisted Myron, when he defended himself against the scoffing of Ora or the incomprehension of Effie May, would an unemptied ash-tray be unimportant!
There had appeared in the New York Messenger and been copied all through the country a bit of free-verse doggerel in which, to Myron's fury, a wandering motorist made complaint against the hotel world: