Myron had not been met at the station by the manager, as he had been at St. Louis. He moved hesitatingly into the large lobby, with its unsheathed rafters of cypress and rustic chairs of Carolina pine with the bark left on. The desk was a broad slab cut from a single pine log, stained and polished. The lobby was dimmed by the wide porch roof outside, and at first Myron thought no one was about. Certainly no one was behind the desk to receive him--a major crime in a country hotel just after train-arrival time. He did at last make out a couple of aged and raddled dames knitting and chewing gum--it may have been tobacco--at the far end of the lobby. But all life seemed to centre in a room to their left. Coming from it he could hear singing, earnest but not very sober, and a web of voices.
Irritably, he stalked there, and through an arched open door into a magnificent bar-room panelled with waxed pine. Four darky barmen in handsome white jackets were very busy, and before the bar, drinking mint juleps or straight Bourbon, were at least thirty Southern gentlemen. (Many of them, though, had been born in New York, or in Poland, and had become native Southern by learning to sing 'Dixie Land' and by spending portions of two winters in Florida.) Eight of the gentlemen, with their heads back, their glasses slightly wavering in their hands, were singing 'In the Gloaming'. Seven were gathered about a gentleman who was telling stories which produced cackling laughter. Three were violently discussing the Russo-Japanese War, using the phrases 'brave little fighters', and 'lazy damn Moujiks' rather often. The others before the bar were attentive to their drinking. In one of a series of alcoves along the side of the bar-room, five men, less liquefied, were snappishly playing cards.
Myron stood frowning. From the group about the local Boccaccio a round ruddy man detached himself; a man round and red as a child's rubber ball, and you felt that he would be as flabby to the touch.
'Anything I can do for you, brother?' said he.
'I'd like to find the chief day-clerk. Can you tell me where he is?'
'Well, to tell the truth, he's kind of passed out. We've been kind of having a party to-day. Jerry Lietrich--you know, the New York stock-broker--fellow that's telling the tall yarns--he just got in from the Big Burg to-day, and we been kind of holding a celebration--every year when Jerry hits town--great egg--comes every year.' The human rubber ball hiccupped mildly. 'But maybe I can do something for you. I'm Fred Barrow, the manager.'
'Oh! Oh! Well. . . . Pleasure meet you, Mr. Barrow. I'm Weagle. I believe I'm to be assistant manager this season. Mr. Elphinstone . . .'
Mr. Barrow whooped with a voice unbelievably basso in so soft a little man, 'Gentle-men! Gentle-men! Lend me your ears! Here's the new assistant m.g.r. I told you was coming! We'll all have a drink on him! Real, sure-'nough New York hotel shark! Lemme make you all 'quainted with Brother Weagle. Tim! Set 'em up all around--on Dr. Weagle here! Come on, boy! Come on in! The water's fine--as a chaser!'
When he had escaped from Fred Barrow and the too-congratulatory bar-flies and had begun to unpack, in his little suite (his first hotel suite!) Myron was angry. 'It's all very well for Barrow to raise the devil. He has his position, as manager. I've got to make mine. And everybody will think this crazy-house is my fault. Damn funny position when a subordinate, like me, has to coax his boss to be allowed to stay sober and go to work,' he fretted. 'Well, maybe it'll just be to-day.'
But every day thereafter was another 'celebration'--for the coming of another habitué of the Tippecanoe, like Jerry Lietrich, or for his leaving, or for his just staying on, while the food became greasy, the bell-boys disappeared half the day, the elevator was stuck between floors--how everybody in the bar-room did laugh at that, and at the memory of fat Boylston Leclay climbing up from the elevator by step-ladder. The socks and handkerchiefs and small change of guests disappeared, the floors became dirty, and the employees, all of them coloured save the front office staff, became daily more impertinent and full of idle laughter, for which Myron did not blame them. Fred Barrow and Jerry Lietrich were the masters of ceremony on these daily drunks, and the affable Barrow apparently did not mind the two day-clerks and the night-clerk and the dissipated and aged male stenographer imitating him. His only complaint, in fact, was against Myron for being so stand-offish as to want to quit after two drinks.
So Myron undertook rather more jobs than at the Pierre Ronsard; he was, at different times, manager, assistant manager, night-clerk, all the day-clerks, accountant, cashier, auditor, and sometimes bell-boy; with two fingers he typed answers to inquiries about reservations; he went out to the kitchen to complain to the chef about a menu consisting largely of fried potatoes and corn pone--and little good it did him, for the chef and all the other help were united in a clique which adored the kind Mr. Barrow who laughed with them and gave them drinks and did not expect them to do anything so exhausting as to work. Immediately they hated Myron as a snooper and a spoil-sport and a crank and a hypocritical Puritan.
He was so alone! There was not one person, employee or guest, in whom he could confide, with whom he could take counsel, as to what he ought to do.
He could not, at first, believe it was possible that an hotel, not too cheap or convenient, should go on with such filth, such sour food, such slack service, but as the season grew higher and they came to mid-December, every one of the 110 rooms was filled, and the door to the terrace outside the bar-room stood open night and day, to accommodate the extra drinkers, while the unused tennis courts grew weedier, the riding horses stood uncurried in the paddock, and the boat which was supposed to take bathers across to Pontevedra Island and the beach lay at the pier half-filled with slimy water, while the negro boatman slumbered on the pierhead. Compared with Tippecanoe, the Fandango Inn, where Myron had been a bell-boy, was a Y.M.C.A. camp with basket-ball and light, cheerful hymns.
Myron found the double answer. Not only did the guests, women as well as men, come to this secluded and shadowy place for a thoroughly good drunk away from the rebuking eyes of wives and partners, or of husbands and children, but they had the pleasure of rarely paying. Fred Barrow regarded them as his dear friends. He let their bills run on week after week, to Myron's protesting horror as he sat evenings, in the quiet lobby outside the howling bar-room, glowering over the carelessly kept books . . . the poet, condemned to read doggerel in which 'man' rhymes with 'lamb'.
But he was not meek about it. He had laughed in gipsy days at the Pierre Ronsard, when he had had to repair toilets at three in the morning, or take the place of the head waiter. He did not laugh now. He considered quitting, he was increasingly tart with Fred Barrow, and he put in a good many hours--wearily sitting on the edge of his bed when he had awakened at five, after having gone to bed at twelve-thirty, smoking a dawn cigarette and feeling shipwrecked--in fervently hating the Napoleonic Mr. Mark Elphinstone for having lured him to this Bedlam.
He might have left but for the guest whom he most despised, the anecdotal Mr. Jared Lietrich. Mr. Lietrich had been coming to Tippecanoe Lodge for years. He had some vague association with stocks and bonds in New York; he wore many various clothes and drank champagne and actually paid his bills. For this Myron might have loved him. But it was Mr. Lietrich who was always the first in the morning to take Fred Barrow away from his office with a rollicking, 'The top of the mornin' to ye, Fred. How do you feel, the morning's morn? Me, I feel like hell and raise you one! How about a little of the hair of the dog--just one, cross my heart, and then you can go back to your dull and sordid toil, and old Uncle Jerry will go out and hoist his self on a hoss.' And at three, then, Lietrich and Barrow would still be at the bar, too dubious of stomach to have taken noon-dinner or anything whatever except eight or ten drinks.