Myron Weagle was a vigorous young man, and certainly he had applied most of his thought to work, not dalliance. At twenty-three he was still a virgin. Yet he had trembled at the revelation of girls' ankles and throats on picnics, and in his yearning over Julia Lambkin he had, without admitting it to himself, longed for much more intimacy than just a kiss.
He was first seduced, quite unromantically, by a meagre widow who went about the country 'demonstrating', advertising the virtues of Humming Bird Cake Flour by exhibitions of cookery in grocery shops, and who between campaigns lived at the Connecticut Inn . . . This was five years after Ora, at the age of sixteen, had made his first laboratory experiments with a German farm girl, the laboratory being a disused quarry.
Myron was sometimes drafted from the dining-room as a floor-waiter. He had taken a tray of breakfast to the demonstrating widow in Room 64. She was sitting up in bed. She was not enticing. Her face was like crumpled paper, but she had rouged extensively and put on a cap of lace and blue ribbons and, over her scant nightgown, a bed-jacket of knitted pink silk. She was at least forty.
'Shall I put the tray on the table, Madame?' murmured the perfect waiter.
'Oh no-no--that's not so cosy, do you think, Myron? Oh nowy no! Ithn't tho thweet, thitting up at dweat big tables, for a small, little girl like me, do you think? Put it down beside me, boy.' She was crooning. She made the 'boy' sound like 'dear'.
While Myron was setting the tray on the bed, and wondering where the devil she had got hold of his Christian name, she seized his hand and bubbled, 'My gracious me! What big strong hands! And such lovely strong shoulders. You ought to be in Yale, playing football, instead of waiting on silly nobodies like silly little me.'
He was alarmed. He wanted to escape. But she retained his hand as she went on: 'Don't be in such a hurry. I get so lonely, Myron--out on the road all week, and then just this lonely room to come back to instead of a real, cosy home, and not hardly knowing anybody and all. Sit down on the edge of the bed for just a sec' and talk to a fellow, can't you?'
He sat, as gingerly as though he was occupying an armchair in company with a pussy cat.
'Don't you get lonely, too, Myron, after hours?'
'I don't know. I guess I don't think much about it. I read quite a lot. It don't seem so lonely . . .'
'It doesn't. Not "it don't". I'm going to give you some lessons in grammar and vocabulary, Myron. I used to be a school-teacher, but they paid so badly. I'll lend you a grammar and some exercise books and make you work hard and speak like President Hadley. Would you like that?'
'Gee, I'd love it!' He was grateful; he was no longer shy.
'I'll look through my trunks and dig out the books to-day. Could you drop in about nine o'clock this evening . . .'
'Why . . . uh . . .'
'Just to get the books, I mean.'
'Sure, I'd be glad to.'
'Then give me a little good-morning kiss, and run along, you funny, timid child!'
He leaned toward her lips, uninterestedly, mechanically, but that was no mechanical kiss from a kind teacher. Her mouth was like hot cream; it was not a sensationless organ like the chill lips of the school-girls he had kissed in playing 'Post office' at parties, but an entity with a tense, skilled life of its own. He forgot that she was wrinkled. He shook with astonishment and bewildered emotion, and he did not draw back till she had pushed him away with a wiry hand on his chest, laughing, 'Now run along! You see, you're all safe with the Wild Widdy! Just a friendly good-morning kiss. Nine to-night, then. Don't let anybody see you come in. They might misunderstand.'
He stood outside in the hall, shaking as though he had a chill. All day, while he bustled with platters and droned, 'Yes, sir, beans on the side, sir', he was mooning over the Wild Widow. He pictured her as generous and merry and beautiful. When he came stumbling in at nine, she was in a dressing-gown of lace and peach-coloured satin. Silently they clasped each other; quite silently, without explanation in anything so worn and frazzled as words, they swayed together toward the bed. Not all the youth of Julia Lambkin had seemed so fresh to him as the flesh of the widow's arm about his neck.
The Wild Widow was altogether, in every way, good for Myron. She was kind, wise, and grateful. He was conscious of a lessening in the physical tension which had kept him awake nights worrying about cloudy nothings, in the spiritual tension which had been making him too grave, too diligent, too near the priggishness against which Miss Absolom had warned him in the Black Thread boarding-house.
She did teach him many things about proprieties of speech. He was supposed to have studied courses labelled 'English Grammar' and 'English Literature' in school, but since in the American pre-college educational system--of that day as of this--it was not necessary for a tall, amiable youth to learn any rigid facts or stern laws, but merely to smile on the amateur lady teachers and look interested, Myron knew rather less now of the rules of English speech than of those pertaining to French. Syntax had been a meaningless treadmill in airless class-rooms. Now it was a sharp need for his career, for association with the men whom he pleasantly hoped to oust in the hotel business. The only thing for which he really much envied the Yale students upon whom he waited was that even when they gabbled the slang of the moment, they still seemed to be talking more gracefully than Mr. Coram of the Eagle Hotel, or the fussy little manager of the Connecticut Inn.
With the Wild Widow he read King Lear aloud, and patches of Charles Lamb, Addison, De Quincey, and the rather highfalutin editorials then regarded as suitable to the great newspapers of New York.
When, without warning, she suddenly married a mysterious Captain somebody from Montclair, New Jersey, and moved to that town to live, Myron was shocked. He moped for weeks. He pictured the Wild Widow as a Helen of Troy, but wiser and more tender. But in three months he became interested in a pretty chambermaid, and there were a stock-company actress and yet others after her, without any complications, or any particular significance, for it is very doubtful whether he was ever so interested in any woman after the widow as in a proper Sauce Béarnaise.
10
The manager of the Connecticut Inn was also the proprietor. He was a high-powered ant. He was a moral fellow who drank nothing but hot rum and who talked of closing up the bar, though he never went so far as to do it. He was named Wheelwright, and was known to the travelling-salesmen as 'Deacon' Wheelwright. He was not deliberately cruel, but he was a fusser, a nagger, a discusser, a reminder; he had regular habits and did not see why other people's regularities should not jibe with his own. And he hated to pay salaries.
The nearer he was to people, the more he was irritated by their loose ways, so that while he was on reasonably good terms with the cooks and waiters in the Back of the House, he was always rushing in the manner of an agitated hen at the clerks immediately under his eye, and the labour turnover in the Front Office was prodigious. So Myron had his chance at clerking.
The third night-clerk in six months was gone, and when Deacon Wheelwright came nosing into the pantry, Myron tackled him with a bland, 'If you haven't got a new night-clerk yet, Mr. Wheelwright, I wish you'd let me sit in on the job till you get one. I've had experience--American House in Black Thread--father owns it. I could serve dinner here and still manage the night-desk.'
'Well, I'll think about it, young man, I'll think about it, I'll think about it.'
He called Myron in before dinner and, after questioning him briefly about his ancestry, education, religion, politics (none of which four Myron chanced to possess), and habits as regards alcohol, pilfering, women, cocaine, ballad-singing, and bathing, he doubtfully let him try the job as night-clerk. For a week then, Myron was on from five in the afternoon till eight the next morning, and later, when other clerks called the Deacon a 'mean ole hound' and slammed their clothes into small trunks and went their ways, Myron had further opportunity of learning the profound science of saying 'Good morning' civilly and choosing from among fifty rooms, all alike, which one to 'give' to the newly-arrived guest.