He began now, as night-clerk, to study accounting, and to dip into house-decoration and architecture. In the afternoon he sometimes climbed down to the basement, had the engineer demonstrate to him the balky ways of dynamos and boilers, and he read the manuals in the engineer's greasy, cheerful office, smelling always of a corn-cob pipe and somehow like a ship's hold.
While he sat studying late at night, the only sounds were the street-cars on Church Street, the march of a policeman. After the clatter of kitchen and dining-room, the stillness was like a plunge into sweet waters. He strode now and then to the water-cooler, a zinc barrel enclosed in staves of varnished dark-brown wood, the nickled handle of the tap worn through to the brass where many thumbs had pressed. He washed out the thick water glass and dried it. He looked proudly at desk, register, neat pigeon-holes for mail and room-keys, lines of chairs--a great hotel, and his. He was in supreme charge, from eight in the evening--or at least from midnight, when the proprietor had gone to bed--till eight in the morning. In case of fire, burglary, a guest's illness, a quarrel in a room, he was the boss!--it was his hotel!
After eight months of this, when Deacon Wheelwright was having unusual trouble in getting a new permanent night-clerk and Myron had sat in for a fortnight, Myron braced him curtly with, 'Why not put me on regularly instead of just temporarily? I think I can do it all right now'.
Deacon Wheelwright's pale eyes flickered, and he complained, 'But you ain't a clerk! You're a waiter. And didn't you use to be a cook?'
'Why, yes, but I think . . .'
'No, no, no, no! An hotel's like any other business. It's got to be run on regular, established principles and according to Hoyle, or it just goes to pieces, and there's no better rule of business than that a fellow has got to stick to the line he's trained to, if he's going to get results. That's why a lot of these fellows that take on an employee just because he seems like a bright fellow, without due and proper attention to how well trained he is, don't--well, you don't ever see 'em running a big hotel like I am! You prob'ly never thought about it this way, but if you get right down to brass tacks, a waiter is a waiter and a clerk is a clerk, and you can't get beyond it!'
'But I have had some training . . .'
'No, no, no, no! And that's one thing I don't like about you: you always want to argue and discuss and chew the rag about things, instead of coming right to the point, with no long-winded gassing about it!'
'But, sir, I have been on the night-desk--six weeks during this past eight months, and I don't think I've fallen . . .'
'No, no, no, I tell you! That's entirely different! That's just being on temporary!'
So within three weeks Myron had gone to the Old Eli Hotel, New Haven, as regular night-clerk. When he quit, Deacon Wheelwright sent for him and said that he was a fool, that he was a hasty and ill-regulated young fool, and that, if he just had the sense and the gumption to wait, the Deacon might take him on as a permanent clerk almost any time--in a year or so.
The Old Eli was a smaller establishment than the Connecticut Inn, and considerably less respectable, though the pay of employees was somewhat better. Myron was uncomfortable there. He was not too rigidly moral, for a native of Northern Connecticut; he liked his infrequent highball and he had come to regard his little friend, the stock-company actress, as a very sweet and reasonable young woman. But that did not mean that he vastly enjoyed working in a brothel.
The Yale students who never dared enter the pious plush and walnut lobby of the Connecticut Inn with fly-by-night females knew that at the Old Eli Hotel they could, as they gratefully said, 'get away with anything'. On Myron's first night there, when he refused to give a room to a celebrated football star and a flimsy little female in mussed crèpe de chine, both drunk and minus baggage, the manager came in on the controversy and hesitated, 'Don't do to be too strict, Weagle, when the gentleman's an old friend of the house', and 'It's all right, Mr. Blank. Boy! Show the gentleman and lady up to the Governor's Suite and see there's plenty of ice water and towels.'
The manager was a good-natured person, like so many who are engaged in catering to what is arbitrarily known as 'the vices'. He said nothing to Myron afterward save, 'Don't do to be too strict in this business, long as people mind their own affairs. Besides, these Yale guys are real gents--not like a lot of roughnecks. Give 'em anything they want, if they don't get noisy. See how it is?'
Myron saw, and did not especially like it.
And there were theatrical parties, late and extraordinarily noisy; magnificent training in fact for a night-clerk who had to keep the party-givers happy while soothing the embittered guests who were trying to sleep next door, and who telephoned down every fifteen minutes. (The Old Eli advertised that it was a 'high-class, de luxe, family and transient establishment', and that it had been the first hotel in New Haven to install electric lights or separate room telephones.)
The Old Eli was a favourite resort of the lesser and more sporting sort of actors. At this time, late in 1903, the touring troupes were still numerous, and their custom was important to hotel-keepers. The troupers had not yet been killed off by the automobile, the movies, the radio. There were hundreds of companies constantly out on the road, and even in Black Thread Centre, the young Myron had encountered actresses who cooked sausages with garlic on chafing dishes in their bedrooms, did their washing and ironing in the public bathrooms, let their long-haired, drooling dogs sleep on bed pillows in a corner, and chose 3 a.m. as the appropriate hour at which to tell a husband that if he was caught flirting with that nasty little female blackface comedian just once more, there would be trouble and lots of it.
The stage, like tavern-keeping, poetry, and pugilism, has become respectable, and thereby lost most of its colour and joy. Its practitioners wear spats and collect first editions. (No philosopher has yet explained why the precise opposite to this has occurred in the lesser professions of banking and publishing. In 1890, all bankers and publishers were middle-aged or ancient, invariably had whiskers and broadcloth coats and dignity, and took exercise only in squeezing interest and royalties. In 1933 all of them--except for the really trifling percentage of bankers who are in jail--are youthful, frivolous, given to driving fast motors, and, in checked stockings and maniacal sweaters, to playing golf. And consequently no one takes either actors, tavern-keepers, poets, pugilists, or bankers and publishers at all seriously to-day.)
But in 1903 the touring actors still retained a joyous and gipsy irregularity. To the Old Eli Hotel came the stars of burlesque, minor actors in 'straight drama', players of vaudeville, and old comedians from melodramas. Before midnight, they sent down for cheese crackers, Worcestershire, ham, ale, and whisky, and they received local admirers till four in the morning. Sometimes lone laymen came down from actresses' rooms considerably later than that, looking sheepish and wondering whether it was the swell, metropolitan thing to give the attentive night-clerk five dollars.