The theatrical shindies Myron did not mind; he was guilty, even, of joining them for five minutes at a time on dull nights. But he disliked the fact that any obviously unacquainted male and female could come in and register for a room. It made him feel like a procurer.
Early in 1904, when he was not quite twenty-four years old and had been at the Old Eli for only four months, he began to look for another job. That year the Louisiana Purchase Exposition was to be held in St. Louis.
To get out of this house of easy favours, to go West, to see the world, to learn quite new ways in hotel-keeping--and incidentally in living--that would be an adventure of the highest. In his weekly Hotel Era Myron found an advertisement of the Elphinstone Hotel and Restaurant Company of New York for 'all classes empl. St. Louis world fair hotel, open April 15th to abt. Oct. 1st, send foto and ref. first letter'.
He sent foto and ref. first letter. He signed the letter 'Myron S. Weagle'. The 'S' in his name stood for nothing whatever. He had put it in three years before because, obviously, a successful man can't go about naked, with no middle initial.
He was engaged by the Elphinstone Company as night-clerk at the Pierre Ronsard, adjoining Forest Park, St. Louis.
He pictured it as a chateau with heraldic shields chiselled in the stone of immemorial walls.
11
Between New Haven and St. Louis, after a week in Black Thread with his mother, Myron made a pilgrimage to the hotels and restaurants of New York, nor was any palmer ever more refreshed by actually seeing the shrines of which all his life he had heard in reverent gossip. Stepping in awe through their corridors, humbly peeping at the morning-coated high priests and acolytes in brass buttons and monkey caps, he viewed the Waldorf-Astoria, the Hoffman House, the Holland House, the Fifth Avenue, the Murray Hill, the Savoy, Fraunces Tavern, the ancient Brevoort, Delmonico's, Sherry's, Mouquin's, Martin's, and Jack's, that chapel for night-hawk journalists and actors and politicians. . . . The poet, incredulously seeing the actual floors trod once by the masters at Dove Cottage and Stratford and Weimar; the poet standing stilled in the English Cemetery in Rome before the grave of one whose name was writ in water.
Myron did not lodge at any of the cathedral hotels; he stayed at the Grand Union, for a dollar a night, and once in the lobby he saw its famous manager, Simeon Ford, the wit, and stood staring, foolish with admiration.
He wanted to, and did not quite dare, introduce himself to clerks and head waiters as an hotel-man. They would laugh at such a country cousin. But he did--and thereby used up most of his savings beyond a reserve for fare and Pullman to St. Louis--dine at the Waldorf and Delmonico's, and actually behold and (rather less important) taste the Pompano à la Potentini, the Pancakes with Orange-Flower Water, the Mousseline Waleski, the Cuissot de Chevreuil à la Francatelli which he had known, these years, only in a theoretical and literary way, and for the first time he had champagne and a half-bottle of Moselle.
He was amiable but demanding with the waiters. There is nothing a waiter so vastly enjoys as being a guest while on vacation, and lording it over the menials. He is like a surgeon with a chance to operate on his personal dentist; he is as intolerable as an author reviewing the lesser opera of his rivals.
If Myron had gone to New York a practical hotel-man who found his work interesting, he came out of it a fanatic who found it a holy cause. To give Chaudfroid de Bécassines--snipe in a bright brown-jellied gravy--to dreary and disillusioned men who considered their offices tiresome and their wives infuriating and their sons sapheaded--that was a sacred office. Myron did not, it is to be feared, reflect on the economic value of giving these fat and wealth-oozing guzzlers the good Chaudfroid or anything else whatever. He did not know yet, if indeed he was ever thoroughly to know, that there was a class struggle, a proletarian class, economic determinism, or the theory of conspicuous waste. To say this is not to praise Myron for his typical poet's absorption in his art; it is to indicate a lack in his many patches of knowledge.
So, softly whistling, he took train for St. Louis and the Great West.
He had never in his life made a greater journey than the seventy-two miles from New Haven to New York. He had never till now, at twenty-four, been in a dining-car or a Pullman, nor had he ever seen an observation car, with its glass sides and arm-chairs and platform like a back porch. He was fascinated by every trick of decoration or service; he was privileged to see them with the fresh excitement of an untravelled boy, yet with the trained observation of an expert in making wayfarers comfortable.
His poet's mind noted not new adjectives nor flower-names handy for rhyming, but berth-lights for reading in bed, the deftness of the porter, tucking in sheets so that they were anchored against the worst restlessness of insomniacs, the inlaid mahogany and rosewood of this period before the coming of steel cars, and the magic of the immense menu served from the tiny condensed kitchens. He was not so wary of the dining-car steward as of the baronial head waiters of New York, and he spent an entire afternoon examining the ice box, the gas stove, the miniature sink of the travelling kitchen, and in gossiping fraternally with the steward and the coloured waiters and cooks.
He had never before met Southern darkies. They delighted him, and all afternoon he exchanged with his colleagues the most scandalous anecdotes about cranky guests--the ones who wanted corn muffins made in five minutes, the ones who let their coffee stand and then complained because it was not hot, the peculiarly pestiferous ones who tried to walk out, absent-mindedly humming, without paying their bills.
He was more interested in such technicalities than in the new scenery, though out of that scenery he got enough thrill to stock a whole tourful of school-teachers. He was just more silent about it.
He gloated on the farms of Ohio and Indiana and Illinois, fields of a hundred acres that would soon be brilliant with young corn and wheat, fields gigantic to the New Englander to whom a stretch of twenty acres had been large.
He could not believe what the Pullman conductor said: that in Kansas and Nebraska there were fields ten times as great as 'these dinky little Illinois patches'.
For almost the first time since his conversion to a life of hotel service by J. Hector Warlock, he wanted to get out of steamy kitchens and dark corridors into the green sunny world. 'Be fine to live here and ride a horse all over--in this fresh air--for miles--completely free--no confounded city streets to stop you--no grouchy guests to have to cater to,' he meditated; but immediately thereafter, 'Terrible little frame hotels in these villages. Dirty. Shanties. Wonder how a chain of really good ones would make out--simple food but well-cooked?'
So he came, ruddy with adventure, to the Mississippi River and across it to St. Louis and the memory of pioneer wagon trains.
When he was met at the station by Mr. Alexander Monlux, the manager of the Pierre Ronsard, Myron perceived that Monlux did not regard him as a back-stairs apprentice but as a Trained Eastern Hotel-man.
Mr. Monlux had come from Iowa; he had never been East of Chicago, and he believed that any innkeeper or college-degree or red-wheeled buggy imported from New England must be better than any innkeeper or degree or vehicle from the middle west. He was not over thirty-two. He tried to keep up the dignity suitable to his very first position as manager, but it creaked a little. With Myron he was like the president of any American university meeting any English author-lecturer.
Myron let himself be received with éclat. 'This is a dandy fellow. Him and I--he and I are going to get along splendidly,' he decided, as they rode to the Pierre Ronsard in the luxury of a real automobile taxicab. (In both New Haven and New York he had ridden only on street-cars and the elevated.)