As the pretty thought had indeed come to him from the lips of the Reverend Waldo Ivy, Ora answered furiously, 'It does not! He never had as good an idea as that in his life! I got lots of ideas. Wait 'll I get time to compose books and poems out of 'em! You'll see! I'll make so much money I'll have a yacht, and go off cruising to--oh, to Cambodia and Nantucket and the Vale of Avalon and all over.'
'Well, I hope you do. Say, kid, how about filling that wood-box now?'
Myron worried, 'He's certainly got elegant ideas. I guess he has a real superior mind. That poem he wrote--what was it?--
something like that, anyway; it certainly was quite an unusual poem. Only, why can't he do first things first, like Mr. Warlock always says? All fine and dandy to dream about Europe and the Alps and all them, but meanwhile he's here at the American House, and why not do the jobs he's got to do--and he has got to; I'll see he does 'em! Then get ready to go all them places when the time comes. I don't understand a fellow that just hasn't got a pride in doing well whatever he's got to do. . . . Oh, well, prob'ly I'm just an old stick. Prob'ly I'm like Ora says: No imagination. Just about as bad as that old stiff-neck, Trumbull Lambkin. . . . I wonder what kind of hotels they got up on the Alps? Must be big ones, with a view all over. Wonder if they have many private baths?'
In all the Black Thread High School there was no boy more popular than Myron Weagle. Yet he had no friends. For in boyhood, friendships are strictly based on leisure hours. Friends are the companions of your evening games of pom-pom-pullaway and prisoner's base, of Saturday afternoon hikes through the woods, of lolling at the swimming hole. They need have, these friends of boyhood, no two thoughts in common with you, nor any similarity of taste; met after a lapse of twenty years, they may be stranger than any chance acquaintance of yesterday in the Pullman car. They are comrades at arms, not intimates. And thus, having no leisure in boyhood, Myron could have no friends.
It never came to the jolly Tom Weagle or to the affectionate Mother Weagle that they kept Myron so busy, every second when he was not in school or in bed, that he had no authentic boyhood whatever. They treated him handsomely, they felt. Didn't he have, with hotel fare instead of the normal boy's restricted home table, more than enough to eat? Didn't he have a new suit of clothes every single year? And whenever they asked him just to do some very tiny little extra task (which they did approximately fifty times a day), didn't they put it politely, with 'If you can get around to it and it isn't too much trouble'? And didn't he usually seem willing to do it?
Thus they would have argued if ever, by a miracle, Tom and Edna Weagle could have achieved the profundity of thinking in any way whatever about their method of rearing Myron. . . . They thought enough about rearing Ora, though. Ora saw to that, by constantly and heroically complaining over whatever he was asked to do, and energetically not doing it.
As he had no fast friends, so Myron had none of the contact with Nature which often compensates a village boy for provincial dullness and nastiness, for nowhere to go in the evening save the same promenade down main street to the same drug-store for the same choc'late or strawb'ry ice-cream soda, for the invariable family conversation at supper table, with dad's same mean little joke about the boy's laziness and huge appetite, for the same tight crankiness of teachers who are teaching only because they have not been able to get married.
With most village children, this is usually balanced by a consciousness of flowers, groves, birds, little valleys in summer haze, but Myron never had time for hours of inspired loafing on hillsides, and without these hours of letting the sound and colour of the world soak in there can be no knowledge of Nature. But if he did not have a lover's intimacy with Nature, he did love scenery. The two are not at all the same thing.
The authentic city-man, to whom all properly planned Nature is of cement evenly marked out in squares, may for half an hour be able to admire the alienage of a Vermont valley with woods sloping up to a stalwart peak, even though he may not be sure whether the trees are date-palms or monkey-puzzles, and whether the hazy mountain is built of reinforced concrete or merely green-painted brick. Ora could tell a vesper sparrow from a thrush much farther off than Myron, yet when Myron stood on the roof of the American House, he found exciting and refreshing the view of angling river and demure hills which completely bored the sun-god who desired to enthrone his solar divinity in a private gondola.
Nor had he sports.
Over that, the high school wept. The baseball captain insisted that Myron was a natural pitcher. The football captain protested that Myron's chest and shoulders and a certain quickness of attack, as beheld in fights behind the schoolhouse, marked him as a tackle or half-back. Didn't he have any pride in his school? Wasn't he going to Do Anything for Good Old Black Thread? Was he so lazy and so unpatriotic that he would sit back and let Beulah H.S. lick Black Thread again this year?
Myron could not, he felt, explain that he was unable to get away from the hotel. That would be a criticism of his father and mother. He hedged and smiled and covered up, and with a poker face, as taught by J. Hector Warlock, he concealed his longing to be out on ringing autumn afternoons, practising with the team.
'I'll sure try to make it, but I'm kind of behind on that doggone Latin,' he lied amiably.
He was sixteen now. For a whole year, under J. Hector's spell, he had been a professional hotel-man, and he knew the loyalty of the guild.
If Myron lacked intimacy with arbutuses and squirrels, he had an intimacy with the much wandering, hard-headed hotel employees for which other boys envied him. Wise Uncle Jasper, the darky porter, cackled of the 1850's when, still a slave, he had swept the bar of the pavilion devoted to high-minded drinking at the Rockbridge Alum Springs, in Virginia, where the 'young gemmun' were exalted by the brandy crusta, the Louisiana sugar house punch, gin and tansy, and port wine negus. He told of driving General Grant when he had had a victoria at the stand of the Eutaw House in Baltimore, and Myron gloated. Some day he would have a hotel to which titans like General Grant would come, and he would know them!
'I trust this suite is to your Excellency's liking, General. Pray inform me, General, if there is any service which I can--may--may have the pleasure of rendering you, and it is my humble hope that your stay with us may be most agreeable, General. What, your signed portrait? Why, sir, that is a most thoughtful and highly appreciated favour, General. My very grandchildren will prize it.'
From Mrs. Hobby, the oldest of the waitress-chambermaids--she was a reduced lady, considerably reduced, and she liked being called the 'housekeeper'--Myron learned about repairing torn towels on the sewing machine, running across the tear over and over. Even from Imogene Heck, the frowsy and grease-scented wench who washed dishes and prepared the vegetables for Mother Weagle to cook, Myron learned kitchen tricks: cleaning copper with rock salt and vinegar, cleaning foggy water bottles with diced raw potatoes and boiling rancid oil with a potato to sweeten it. But it was Jock McCreedy, the bartender, who had most to teach Myron, and whose amiability made up to him for the loss of sun and wind and running laughter, for living most of his out-of-school hours in the queer, damp caverns of an inn.
No character in pre-Prohibition America, or in the few good 'American bars' in Europe since then, was quite so friendly with such a variety of people as the competent bartender. His court was the only authentic democracy America has ever known. The confidant of travelling princes and admirals, of thirsty authors and scientists, of apprentice drummers and of anxious insurance salesmen who wanted to know the rich men in town, of tired surgeons and swivel-eyed newspapermen, of crooks and yeggs and pan-handlers, of pompous merchants and mufti-cloaked clergymen from distant towns, the bartender was privileged, or gloomily fated, to know them better than did their own brothers, as the magic of alcohol opened their wicked hearts and made them say what they really thought to the one confessor near at hand. He listened to their dirty stories. It was a slow day when he didn't hear the Latest One at least seven times over. And he cured their morning shakiness. He heard out their troubles with their wives, and gave sage advice--the advice was never taken, but it did comfort afflicted husbands to find someone who was willing to listen to their troubles without sneaking away. He lent them money and sometimes got it back. He knew the best churches, the best fishing-tackle shops, and the best prostitutes in town. Better even than a veteran hotel clerk he could divine from the set of a stranger's lapels whether he would pay his bills, beat his wife, cheat at poker, and appreciate real French cognac.