Myron's intimacy with the manager, and the general opinion of the staff that he was a sealed adept in night-clerking, gave him such self-confidence as he had not known before. He forgot tending bar at the American House, and bell-hopping at the Fandango Inn, as though they were comic incidents in the life of someone else--a man he had known once but lost from sight.
So hastily organized was the whole Pierre Ronsard staff that there was an open road for careerists. Presently Myron was helping the chief accountant on quiet evenings, and when the assistant accountant quit in an agony of snarled books, Myron found himself assistant accountant, working daytimes, with an increased salary and with, for the first time, a private office of his own.
It was not much of an office. It was an eleven-by-eleven wall-boarded coop, roaring with the sound of adding-machines and typewriters in the general office outside, furnished only with a desk, files, and two chairs, and looking out on a coal pile and an ice-cutting machine. But to Myron it was a throne-room.
He stayed late each evening to finish his accounts, and during the day he frequently dashed out to help the clerks. He was checking in a hot, irritable mob one afternoon, with Alec Monlux also behind the desk, when Alec whimpered, 'Oh, my Heaven! There's the Old Man himself! I thought he was in New York! Didn't think he'd ever come out here!'
'Huh?' said Myron.
'The Old Man! Mark Elphinstone! The pug-dog coming toward us! President of the Company--they own nine hotels, besides this ole barn! . . . Why, Mr. Elphinstone! Didn't have an inkling you were coming! Well, sir, mighty proud to see you! Why didn't you tip us off, so I could 've met you at the train and had a suite ready. We've got two of them here, you know!'
Mr. Mark Elphinstone's name remains in the history of the American hotel-world from 1900 to 1933 as ranking almost with those of Ellsworth M. Statler, John McEntee Bowman, Lucius Boomer--cardinals, deans, Pulitzer Prize Winners of hotel-keeping. He was not lordly of frame; he was short, squat, with cropped sandy hair, and freckles on neck and wrist, but he stood squarely, like a man who expected to control everything in sight, he gave his orders in brief barks, and Myron was later to see him in his New York office, posing with stubby fingers thrust between his vest buttons, directly under a portrait of Napoleon.
He was barking now:
'Suite? Here? Never stay at hotels like this, Monlux. Dreadful. Got suite at the Planters. Never seen this place before. Dreadful. You boys done well. Made some money for us. I'll just poke around. Want to see you and assistant manager and clerks. Book-keepers. Cashiers. Steward. Housekeeper. Head waiter. Chef. Captain of bell-boys. After I've snooped around. Borrow your office. Give 'em each five minutes. But you get fifteen. Have 'em ready to come in, right on the second. Start with you at three. Then the others, right on the dot. So. Three. Prompt. Prob'ly leave for New York morrow morning. So. Prompt!'
'First really top-notch hotel boss I ever met. Gives you a kick. Gee, he's a dynamo,' sighed Myron to Alec Monlux.
'He's that, all right,' said Monlux. 'He's the biggest of 'em all. The company owns some pretty rank hotels, like this, and I believe our Florida one, Tippecanoe Lodge, is lousy, but of course our New York hotel, the Westward Ho, is a top-notch house, and we've got good places in Buffalo and Hartford and Worcester and Akron and Scranton, and we own that chain of armchair lunches through New Jersey and Pennsylvania--the Pan Dandy Lunches. Elphinstone himself! It must be grand to be a really significant man like that!'
When Myron, in his turn, was admitted to Monlux's private office for his audience with the Napoleon of Innkeepers, Mark Elphinstone was standing by the desk, his left hand resting on it with the arched fingers outspread like the roots of a banian tree, the right hand ready for oratorical gestures. A still-faced intense private secretary, who played arc-light to Elphinstone's dynamo, was sitting at the desk, calling New York (and later Worcester and Trenton) on the long-distance telephone. Neither Myron nor Alec Monlux ever knew just how the secretary had come. He had not been seen entering the hotel. He was just there. He would be. He had eye-glasses and tight lips and a low voice that you always understood.
Waving his free hand, Elphinstone commanded Myron, 'Sit down. No, I'll stand. Well young man' (Myron shivered), 'you seem to be a night-clerk, a day-clerk, a book-keeper--or accountant, as they like to call their grubby trade now--a plumber, a waiter, and a cook. Apparently work all the time. What's the trouble? What you trying to hide? What vice you covering up? Not normal, working all the time. I do. I'm not normal, either. Eaten up with fool ambition. What is this vice you're trying to forget? Booze? Drugs? Women? Women, eh! Fine big fellow like you?'
'No, sir.'
'Well, then, gambling? Ah ha, yes, little gambling, eh? Fun to watch the hosses run, eh, or sit back with a full house and watch a flush trying to bluff you, eh? Yes, good fun!'
'Never play cards, sir, not more than twice a year, or solitaire when I'm on nights and get sleepy.'
'Then what the devil are you hiding? What's the matter with you? Working all the time! Idea!'
'Guess it's just the same as with you, sir. Ambition. I want to get ahead. Like to learn all about hotel-keeping.'
'You never will! You learn how to run a five-hundred room hotel, and they put up a thousand-room monstrosity on you and some thirty-year-old snip shows you you're old-fashioned and out of the game--and he shows you right, by God! Next to love, nothing that loses its rank so quick as a "leading hotel". So it's ambition, eh? I knew it--I knew you had some vice, and you've picked the worst of the whole damn bunch! I can see you walking over my neck, one of these days. Well. . . . You dress fairly well. Neat grey. I'd get just a tiny bit darker shade of blue in the necktie, with that suit. What you going to do, this fall, when this dump closes?'
'I don't know yet, sir.'
'Had many offers? Other companies?'
'None, sir.'
'Hm. Truthful and ambitious. Oh well, I'm getting ripe. Time to be picked off the tree by you young Marshal Neys. Want to go to Florida, Tippecanoe Lodge, 'tween St. Augustine and Daytona, coming season, as assistant manager? Vile place. Nice country, but vile hotel. Not much better'n this. Assistant manager. Fifteen a week more'n your present salary here, whatever that may be, if any. Want it?'
'Yes, sir, I . . .'
'Done. Report there, November fifteen. Manager's name Fred Barrow. Report to him. No need to bother me. No need at all. Needn't bother me. Just report to Barrow. Hobbs!' (to the intense secretary). 'Make a note of this--make a note of it. Weagle here hired assistant manager Tippecanoe. Check on his wages here. Fifteen more a week. Send him a letter confirming this when we get to New York. And inform Barrow. Make a note of it. So. Good morning, young man.'
Myron walked out, ten feet tall. He had gone into the office a captain; he came out a full colonel, having skipped the major's and lieutenant-colonel's ranks of day-clerk and chief day-clerk. He was, most magic title, a real assistant manager! His attitude toward Mark Elphinstone combined his feelings toward his mother, J. Hector Warlock, Miss Absolom, Julia Lambkin, Mr. Coram of the Eagle Hotel, Alec Monlux, and Brother Ora--that is, his feeling for Ora on the off days when Ora was agreeable.
The staff of the Pierre Ronsard became slightly hysterical during the last month of the season, when that already aged shanty was quietly falling down. The stairway to the fourth floor gave way, and they shut off the floor. Half the bathrooms were out of order. A thick fog was enough to make the roof leak. The paper roses on the candy and souvenir stand felt, as the stories say, the chill breath of autumn. The long porch sagged so that it made an admirable slope down which yelping children scooted on thunderous roller-skates. The head waiter left, and it was too late to hire a new one: his place was sometimes taken by the steward, sometimes by Myron, sometimes by Alec Monlux, to the considerable disorganization and sniggering of the waiters' crew. With these tokens of human mortality about them, it was impossible for the staff to pursue man's final purpose of chasing dollars with anything like solemnity. Monlux climbed down from his dignity--no vast descent, in any case--and the staff and the guests chattered, laughed, danced, played practical jokes; the captain of bell-boys was confidential with even the youngest of his privates, the porters openly admitted it when they had been so inept as to get only a ten-cent tip instead of a quarter for bringing down a heavy trunk, the haughty French chef confessed that he had never been nearer to Paris than Quebec, the earnestly hemming steward put a burr down the neck of the hotel doctor--who was twenty-five and very professional and serious--and the prophet and poet of inn-keeping, Myron Weagle, discovered with some astonishment that his art could be gay as well as prayerful.