He ate at the family table, behind the two long ones for the public. The dining-room had green wall-paper with yellow roses, bare floor and, for splendour, an enormous black walnut buffet adorned with silver cruet stands and fruit-and-nut bowls of imitation cut-glass--thriftily empty save at Sunday noon. Beside the double door, on a small table with a decorous white linen cover, was a large bowl of toothpicks.
The cloths of the long tables were clean, but that of the Weagle family table was somewhat geographic, with its islands of egg yolk, catsup, gravy, and butter.
While Ora was breakfasting, his father joined him.
Tom Weagle had a corded brown neck which his watery beard did not quite conceal. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles, crookedly, and behind them his expression was wistful and rather vague. His nose was red. Though he seemed frail, he had the leathery hands of a farmer.
'Morning,' said old Tom.
'Morning,' said Ora.
'Did you sweep the basement, like you was told?'
'Sure.'
'Well . . .'
That seemed to cover the subject. Tom, after ordering oatmeal, steak, fried eggs, and a double order of wheats--all of which would vanish without evident effect into his meagre corporation--was silent. He was long-winded enough with travelling-men, in the narration of anecdotes about old days on the farm, the wickedness of guests who did not pay, servants who did not work, and the wonders of his one trip to New York, but with his family he saw no gain in wasting wit.
They chewed opposite each other, Tom looking vague, Ora looking sleepy. But Ora was meditating like a quiescent volcano.
That big brute, Myron. . . . Didn't know any way of trying to deal with a slick brain like his brother's except by threatening to lick him! . . . And such stinking melodrama--vaulting the bar, like that big, fat, ridic'lous hero in the melodrama that played here under canvas last week, 'Barry O'Leary's Own Company in Bonnets o' Dundee'. Myron wouldn't even know the meaning of the word melodrama! Huh! Yuh! Sure! No brains, no education! Could Myron make a line like 'Till with blown flame thee the power of me fills'?
He could not!
Ora felt better, much better.
He was damped a little by the spectacle of a fat, moist forefinger beckoning from the door to the kitchen (the white paint of the door was worn in a blotch halfway up by the hips of urgent waitresses pushing out with trays of dirty dishes). It was the finger of a lady who had the honour of being not only cook of the American House but also mother of Ora Weagle--Edna Weagle, who combined the seemly plumpness of a cook with the worried intensity of the wife of a drunkard. Ora slowly forsook blown flame and potency and terror; he scooped up the last sweetness of syrup and crumbs of wheat cake with a spoon, while Alice Aggerty, the waitress, scowled at him. To think of that darn' boy using up a whole spoon, and it would have to be washed now, for just one mouthful!
Ora sauntered gracefully into the heat and the smell of frying grease in the kitchen.
'What do you want, Ma?' he complained.
'Your Pa has got to drive over to Beulah this morning, about some chickens, and we're short of lard, and I want you should go to Aldgate's sometime this morning and get a pail of it.'
'Gosh, I gotta do everything around this hotel--clean the basement and sweep the balconies and fill the wood-box and everything!'
'Yes, it's too bad about you!' Edna Weagle scoffed, and wiped her hands on the not very clean apron round the plumpness of her gingham-covered middle. 'I've only been working since five! You get that lard, or I'll have Myron . . .'
'Myron! Myron! Myron! Ain't I ever going to hear anything all my life but Myron! Me highest stand in the whole Soph'more Class, and him way down near the foot in the Senior!'
'Yes, baby, I know. Yes. I guess that's right. Maybe you ain't suited to this kind of work, like Myron is. I do believe and hope that some day you'll be a dentist or a lawyer or even a preacher! There.' She stroked his hair--which Ora hated, because she smelled of soft yellow soap and doughnut fat. 'You just go ahead reading and studying and all. But you won't forget my lard, will you!'
'No, sure not!'
Recognized for the pundit he was, Ora swaggered upstairs, to find the fair, fond Flossy Gitts and to persuade her to help him sweep the inevitable basement. She grumbled a little at having to leave a bed half made, but she came, and the sample-rooms and the furnace-room were cleaned and made beautiful. It was a satisfactory division of labour: Ora talked and Flossy worked. She swept, dusted, and nailed down a loose board on one of the long tables which, set across trestles in the sample-room, would presently bloom in un-Black-Thread-like splendours of the Orient; with silk Scotch plaid blouses, Eleganto brand leather belts in two colours, dainty Dot veils, gauntlet gloves; in fact, with all the choicest wares of M. & I. Vollschutz's Ladies Wear Company of New York, Cincinnati, and Kansas City, for the inspection of the ardent merchants of Black Thread Centre--this modern Oriental market, where the vendors did not squat about fires of camels' dung, but in check suits, smoking cigars, standing upright with the freedom and efficiency of 1897 in America, chose beauty with an eye to profit.
'You've done it pretty good, Flossy. Come 'ere and kiss me!' said Ora. 'Bye! See you later!'
He left her--somewhat perplexed, as later many ladies were to be, as to whether she had done too much or too little--and galloping up the stairs he swung through the alley behind the American House to Putnam Street, slinkingly followed by Lancelot. He had a moment's shudder at the greasy garbage in the alley, the debris of hotels and the whole frowziness of communal living, but he forgot it in the clean hot sun of the street, and Lancelot, again convinced that he was the dog of a sun-god and not the dog of an hotel, chased an imaginary cat and after it barked 'Potent and terrible'.
It must be stated that Lancelot was so named only by Ora. To the rest of the hotel personnel he was 'Spot' or merely, 'Get out of that'.
Not once, all day, did Ora remember the lard for his mother.
After all! There was a story, once much read, about Mary and Martha. And it was Ora's vacation time, it was summer, and beyond Black Thread Centre, up on Elm Hill, there were things more worth the inquiry of a young poet than lard and the state of a sample-room for the travelling representative of M. & I. Vollschutz.
2
Up to the little groves and hollows, to the peace and freedom of Elm Hill, pounded a young poet and his dog. But they stopped a moment at the garden of the man who had taught Ora that much existed in this world besides the lilies and Sunday-morning languors, the roses and strictly respectable raptures of Connecticut. This was the Reverend Waldo Ivy, the Episcopal pastor. Despite his name, Mr. Ivy was round, red, and breathless. He loved liturgy, tradition, cleanliness, and poetry. Black Thread thought him 'queer'. In ten years in this church he had found precisely one soul who understood his gospel, that beauty is truth, truth beauty, and that was Ora Weagle.
He loved to be called, and never save by one was called, 'Padre'. Again that one was Ora. Ora had probably got it from Kipling.
He had taught Ora everything he knew--provided Ora did know anything.
In High School, in which he was to be a Junior, this coming Fall, Ora had learned that the ways and finalities of literature are thus: In the far past--ever so long ago, even before the American Revolution--there were good writers. Quite good. There was a gentleman named Caesar, who went to England and Americanized the natives. There was Cicero, who objected to a man named Cataline, and so killed all gangsterdom for ever. There was Virgil, who was somehow very beautiful. And--though these were actually read only in swell schools like Andover--there were Greeks, like Homer and Sophocles and Aeschylus, who were pretty important. Then the history of literature skipped a long while--two hundred or maybe two thousand years--and you came to Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, Tennyson, Longfellow, Whittier, Walt Whitman, and Poe. These authors were all dead. In fact the Age of Literature was dead, like the Age of Chivalry, though there were some pretty good hack writers living now--William Dean Howells and Mark Twain and a Frenchman named Anatole France. But the Reverend Waldo Ivy had told Ora that literature was only beginning; that the world's struggle for beauty and justice had never been so glorious as now. The boy's eyes lightened, his breathing grew rapid, as Mr. Ivy testified to his gospel. And in that little Episcopal study, smelling of the leather bindings of old Greek books and the buckram of new novels, Mr. Ivy at last trusted one disciple, and read to him: