He attained to artistic ecstasy at the old Galt House in Louisville, the Burnet House of Cincinnati, and in Chicago, the much-hymned Palmer House, Sherman House, Briggs House, Bismarck, and Chicago Beach. At the Grand Pacific in Chicago he remembered criticizing the famous game dinners of John B. Drake, which had actually been served right here where he was now standing--he, a much wandering boy from obscure Connecticut hills! In Pittsburgh he searched for the Monongahela, which had been built in 1841, and in 1857 housed the first Republican National Convention. It seemed to him prehistoric; he gaped at it. 1841! True enough, there were a few houses in Black Thread Centre built before 1790, but they were not hotels. Age, like virtue, is comparative; the antiquarian who is all of a bother over an arrowhead which must date back to 1400 is likely to be indifferent to a hillside rock which has been there for uncertain millions of years. The old farmhouses at Black Thread meant to Myron only changeless farmers in patched trousers, while the Monongahela gave him lively, satisfying pictures of ladies in crinolines and a Mine Host (Myron called him that, being a reader of hotel magazines) in vast, curving beaver, and blue tail-coat with shining brass buttons; he saw Civil War generals ride up to the stoop, and heard the long, broken ululation at the news of Lincoln's murder.
He doubled back for an hour of worship at Newcomb's Tavern, in Dayton, built in 1796, though since it had never been what he regarded as a Modern Hotel, his interest was only nepotic and amiable.
In Philadelphia he saw the Continental, Lafayette, and Girard House; in Baltimore, the Eutaw House, built in 1835, even more venerable than the Monongahela. But just that year, in February of 1904, the Baltimore fire had destroyed those distinguished haunts where great men had eaten great oysters, the Carrolton, Howard, and Maltby, and Myron trotted reverently out to mourn on their remains. He would have hung a rue-draped harp upon them if it had been very feasible, and if he had thought of it.
Washington was his veritable Mecca. He had little time, or so he decided, for the Capitol, the White House, the Washington Monument, Mount Vernon, and it did not greatly interest him that just while he was in Washington, Roosevelt I defeated Mr. Parker for the presidency. But he had plenty of time for studious poring upon the Willard, Shoreham, Ebbitt, Riggs, Raleigh, the Arlington, where Mark Hanna had throned it during all his regency, and the National, built in 1827, where Henry Clay and J. Wilkes Booth had lived.
So, filled with pride, proud as a collector coming back from Europe with a Rembrandt, Myron went his ways to Florida.
Where the ordinary traveller would have seen in all these hotels, new and brisk or sunken with memories, only the distance from the railway station, the price-per-day, the extra cost of a private bath, the quality of the coffee, and the nimbleness of bell-boys, Myron looked through their walls and saw the founders risking their fortunes and that of their friends in building what would inevitably be called 'Howard's Folly' or 'Leland's Folly'. He saw distinguished chefs, homesick for Paris, struggling with sullen Yankee helpers to create the one really reasonable art, that of enticing cookery. He saw ratty little 'bus-boys growing up into bland maîtres d'hôtel. He saw guests glad of a refuge, committing suicide in despair, blessing the hospitality or cursing the bills, planning to pay with a false cheque, planning to become much better acquainted with the pretty lady across the hall, waiting--always guests nervously waiting in hotel rooms--for customers, for brides, for mistresses, for the police, for death.
He decided, meditating as he sat, chin in hand, on the train, that no church or capitol or university or fort or hospital has so known the heart and blood-circulation of history as a great hotel, where all the people, famous and petty--but especially the famous, since they must travel most--have rested and made plots, forgotten their masks in the exhilaration of wine, whispered in darkened chambers and roared at banquets in the admiring presence of all the press and dignitaries, and publicly thrice thrust aside crowns that had never been offered them.
He was ferociously proud of his profession as he learned, first-hand, the history of hotel-keeping . . . along with such perhaps not less significant matters as his new discoveries about the most compact form of towel-racks, the commercial value of free shoe-rags, the best position for bedside lights, and the excellence of planked Lake Superior whitefish, fried onion tops, Philadelphia scrapple, pepper pot, and beaten biscuits.
And, on many several trains, he became a very pretty authority on Pullman laundry-methods, repair of upholstery, and food-supply, and received from a conductor with five service-stripes the extraordinary compliment: 'Well, you're only an hotel-man, brother, and, of course, you don't have to bottle-feed a lot of greenhorn passengers night and day, like we do, but I swear, I believe you'd make a fair Pullman conductor!'
So he came to busy Jacksonville, to contemplative St. Augustine, down the coast to the sandy, unpainted village of Tippecanoe, and three miles in a crumbling barouche, with a crumbling darky driver, to Tippecanoe Lodge.
12
The wide grounds of Tippecanoe Lodge lay beside an estuary leading from Pontevedra Inlet, which was separated from open sea only by the long sand-bank of Pontevedra Island, with its hard bathing-beach. As they drove along the inlet, Myron was disappointed by the thickets of anonymous grey-green shrubbery. Was this the tropic-coloured Florida? It looked like ragged undergrowth on cut-over timber-land. But as they passed through the somewhat lopsided wooden ornamental gateway into the Tippecanoe grounds, he stiffened with admiration. The grounds were a little wild, but they were radiant, they were scented with orange trees, lemons, coco-nut palms, hairy-trunked palmettoes, live oaks cloaked with Spanish moss, cypresses through which glistened a swamp alive with bird-wings. He had never before seen palms outside a park. And here the geranium that in his Connecticut had behaved as a modest pussy-cat sort of plant towered up like a bush wanton with crimson.
'Tropics!' whispered the Northerner.
On the distant beach, across Pontevedra Island, he could hear the long rollers.
But as they drove among the gardens and lawns immediately surrounding the Lodge, he was shocked. On one side was a row of tar shanties apparently belonging to the negro 'help' of the Lodge, and in front of the shanties, directly upon a driveway supposedly kept chaste for the fashionable eyes and noses of the guests, quite pantaletteless negro babies tumbled in the weeds, wild roosters chased ragged-tailed hens, scabby wash-tubs rested on palmetto trunks, and old men sat in listed rockers smoking corncob pipes.
It cannot be said that after twenty years of training in neatness, Myron liked his picturesqueness quite so close at hand. He preferred it in China, or in books.
Nearer to the Lodge, the grounds were slightly more trim, but over them was an air, an odour, of slackness and decay. The two supposedly gravelled tennis-courts were grassy, a shining-leaved magnolia was full of dead and broken branches, the rose-beds needed weeding, and newspapers soggy with yesterday's rain were left on random benches that needed painting.
The Lodge itself was astounding. It was built of cypress logs, with a vast porch in front and balconies above it at the second and third stories, and supporting them all, high reared, were pillars of peeled cypress, reaching from porch to cornice of carved timber.
The porch was scattered with sweaters, tennis rackets, dog-eared books, cigarette butts. A negro girl, who presumably was supposed to be cleaning, stood at the rail, resting her two hands on the broom and gazing off hazily at the live oaks.