He had taken an afternoon and evening off from the hotel. He conducted Ora through the metropolitan hustle of Church and Chapel Streets; showed him the wonders of the world from East Rock--where, on a bright day, you can look clear across to the alien, magic shore of Long Island--and finally, uneasily invading the preserves of the gentry, dragged him rapidly through the Yale Campus, pattering off, 'Durfee Hall--dormitory; South Middle--dormitory--ver' old; Dwight Hall--Y.M.C.A.; Osborn Hall--rec'ta-tions--let's get out of this now and have a nice ice cream soda.'
He escorted Ora to a real theatre that evening (it was the third time that Myron himself, with all his metropolitan experience, had ever been so extravagant and time-wasting) and they saw a splendid play called 'Midnight Villa', in which a Duke, who had a kind heart but lamentable habits as regards gambling, told his haughty family to go to hell, and married the lady secretary, instead of the thoroughly nasty Lady Montjoie. His Grace also shot a burglar, won a motor race at forty-five miles an hour (he did this off stage, but he came staggering on in a duster and goggles in the most convincing way), and saved the lady secretary's father from bankruptcy by presenting the old gentleman with his winnings at the Monte Carlo Casino that evening, which amounted to no less than a million francs. And at the end it proved that the father was really a Hungarian prince, characteristically in hard luck, and his daughter, therefore, a princess.
'Golly!' sighed Ora, as they ate Bird's Nest Soup and New York Chop Suey, at a Chinese restaurant, after the play. 'I'm going to Monte Carlo some day. Golly! That was an exciting play! Dandy acting! I'm going to write a play! A real highbrow Ibsen play . . . I wonder how much you get for a successful play on Broadway?'
In the room which Myron had taken for Ora on the same floor with his own in the rooming-house, Myron tried to make it clear, for communication at home, that though he was but a tyro waiter, he was doing well, really learning his trade.
'. . . and I can run a crew of waiters, I think. I honestly believe I could do it right now, if I had to. It looks to me, unless I make another switch, say to the Front Office, that I'll be head waiter in some smaller hotel in another couple years, and then a steward in another three or four.'
'Oh, yuuuuuh, sure, I guess so,' yawned Ora. 'Just climbing like a dear lil chipmunk, aren't we! Learned how to cook fried rootalulas and then how to hustle the hash! Sure, you'll go right on crawling up. You'll be manager and chief cook and bottlewasher of some great big cockroach warehouse someday. Regular Horatio Alger story: "From Bell-Hop to Boss." Don't mind me. I'm just kidding. You've done swell--I guess. Well, I think I'll turn in now.'
When they had explored the Yale Campus, Ora had insisted that they call on Herbert Lambkin who, after a year in Yale Law School, had decided that his talents were better suited to professing a subject called 'English Literature', which dealt with embalming and the revivification of mummies. He was staying on to acquire the priestly title of 'M.A.'
Myron had hesitated, 'Oh, we won't have time to-day. Maybe later.'
The second day, Ora insisted again, and Myron blurted, 'No, I won't. Bert hasn't been very nice to me. Thinks he's too good for a waiter! Maybe he is, but I don't care so much for his showing it!'
'All right. Hell with him,' said Ora.
Myron had to return to work that second day, and Ora was left to wander by himself. When Myron took a tray of free lunch from the kitchen into the bar-room at five, he found Ora and Herbert Lambkin together, at the bar. They ignored him. As Myron left, they glanced at him and giggled. The back of his neck was rigid with wrath, but--oh, thunder, Ora was still a kid! He was the only brother Myron had. Ora didn't mean so bad; he was just heedless. He must keep his temper and try--after all these years of failure at it--to be really friends with the kid and to appreciate his wonderful ability at word-slinging and imagination and all like that.
He did not mention Herbert when Ora came to the rooming-house, at nine-thirty, to pack for the Black Thread train.
'I had a dandy day,' glowed Ora. 'Oh, I ran into Bert Lambkin--by accident. I agree with you about him. He's a cheap snob. Say, I got a raft of Yale catalogues and stuff to-day. Maybe I'll try to get into Yale next fall. How'd it be to have a real Yale Man in the family, ole man? Say, My, could you let me have twenty-five dollars till I get home? I'm kind of low just now. I'll shoot it right back to you.'
When Myron next heard of him, Ora was a reporter on a Waterbury newspaper. Of his entering Yale, Myron heard as much as of his returning the twenty-five dollars.
It irritated Myron occasionally, occasionally it made him gloomy, to be that unheeded and automatic machine, a waiter, among the Yale students who frequented the Connecticut Grill where he often served in the evening and late afternoon, when the dining-room was closed. He liked being attentive to old, timid people, who were grateful for his help. He could even endure those pests the hotel children, the children of the 'permanents', with their golden ringlets, shrill voices, monstrous orders for sweets, and their assumption that everyone on the staff was not only a personal servant but filled with joy at being called on to entertain them--to bring them extra cakes, to let them ride in the elevator, to wash off doors the pencil marks they so playfully scrawled there. These he could endure, and the average middle-aged guest, travelling-man or other, was an amiable and friendly customer. But to be irrevocably a stranger among young men his own age, of not markedly better manners and of rather less curiosity about the mysteries which are supposed to be hidden in books, was to be an exile from the self-confidence of youth. They were most of them polite enough to him, these young gentlemen in tweeds and ties of shot silk who crooned 'Bingo' and 'Delta Kappa Upsilon' in corners, and talked actively of journeys to Europe, of polo, of week-ends at Northampton, or, at humblest, of sailing on the Sound, but after a hundred meetings, after he had even guided them out of the door and boosted them into cabs when they had had too much crème de menthe or pousse café, they still did not remember him. He could only meditate, 'Well, probably I'm better off than if I were a mechanic in Winchester's and never had a chance to meet any new kinds of folks and learn there are different ways of living', and again, with a growl like a hurt animal's, he would resolve, 'I'll show 'em all!'
'Some day, when I'm manager of a whale of a big hotel and these boys are teaching school or clerking in a bank and forget they ever were swell Yale Men, it's going to be funny to watch 'em coming to me, trying to get friendly and hoping His Nibs, the Manager, will be so kind and let 'em have a cut rate. No idea they ever saw me before. It'll be funny then . . . Maybe it will.'
The lonely and love-starved women living in the hotel were the greatest trial, and transport, of a stalwart young waiter. It has increasingly been the contention of novelists and psychologists that practically all of a man's emotion and secret thought are devoted to 'sex'. Probably this dogma is as false as the Victorian dogma that no respectable male ever thought of such matters, and invariably, when he happened to notice an unclad lady in his bedroom, did so only with dismayed surprise. It is to be observed that the citizens diligently given to amorousness are often anaemic and sedentary and adorned with lop-sided eyeglasses, while the deep-chested human gorillas, whether bond-salesmen, economists, or pugilists, are often known to flee chastely home to their wives on the 5.57, and to spend more Sunday afternoons on golf and gin and balance-sheets than in dancing with the wives of neighbours. If this be heresy to the psychoanalysts, yet we have the authority of the Bolsheviks and the Baptists, who for once agree, in contending that a lusty male will be less devoted to lechery than to his work.