'Nonsense!'
Myron went to Black Thread next day.
His mother was sitting in a filthy kitchen, before a sink of dirty dishes, crying. She had, she sobbed, so got out of the habit of activity that now she could not stir at all, and old Tom, no longer needing to make an appearance as host, was drinking worse than ever.
'I've tried reading, and I've tried church-work and I've tried knitting and talking to the neighbours, but I guess folks like us, that have worked real hard all our lives, just don't know how to loaf,' she said. 'I'm kind of scared, dear. I've been noticing how many business folks seem to suddenly pop off and die, when they retire and say they're so glad they're out of the harness and now they're going to have a good time.'
He was bewildered. He assured himself that he really had meant well. He told himself that he would not afford to buy off the present lessee of the American House, and that if he did, his parents would let it go dirty and slack. He thought about a farm for them--he tried to consult them, but his mother only wept and looked forlorn. He might have rented a farm, except that at the Lambkins', when he hinted of his problem, Herbert blatted, 'Now you're married into Our Family, you can't go on being selfish and just thinking of yourself, the way you always have! . . . That fellow Monlux, offering a man with my degrees fifteen hundred a year, and you never even called him down! . . . And I want to tell you that I'm not going to have my sister's father-in-law running a miserable little tavern right here in our own town! Why don't you put 'em on a farm?'
That did it. Myron gave his father and mother a wild week in New York--Tom said that the Westward wasted a lot of good coin, dressing up the bell-hops in fool monkey jackets, and as a seasoned executive he disapproved of such incompetence--and he settled them again at the American House, where Edna Weagle, as she toiled twelve hours a day, began again to whistle.
And Ora commented on it all, 'Just as I've always told you, Myron, you lack the artist's sense of people. You're probably more generous than I am, in some ways, but I see inside people and let 'em alone.'
The young woman whom Ora brought up to the suite to meet Effie May and Myron, late in the evening, was a very friendly young woman. Within ten minutes she was calling them 'Teeny the Swede' and 'Snookums', and she was demanding, 'Well, where's the hooch? What's the idea of holding out on the girl friend like this?' And after the whisky, a good deal of it, she offered to take off her clothes and do imitations of Isadora Duncan.
Myron saw that the perplexed Effie May was wondering whether she ought to take her brother-in-law's lady-friend as a model. He lured Ora to the bedroom, and remarked, 'Take that girl away. Chase her out of here.'
'What the devil do you mean?'
'I don't like her, though probably she's merely silly. Out!'
'Then I'll go, too! And I'll stay away!'
'All right. Sorry not to see you again, but this is my house. . .'
'Oh no, it isn't, darling! It's anybody's house that's got the money, no matter what a stinker he may be, and you're just a hired man in it--you and your hick wife!'
Myron raised his fist, dropped it to his side, and muttered, 'Get out.'
He did not see Ora for a year after that.
He felt guilty and considerably relieved. He pictured his poor little brother in that poor little attic of his, and doubtless he would have suffered if it had not been for the fact that, as Ora was unanimously agreed, he lacked imagination.
23
It was in the early autumn of 1916, when they had been married for five years, that Myron became prouder than ever he had been in his life, prouder and taller and more excited. Effie May announced that she was going to have a baby!
Healthy wench as she was, though too well fed, she had no unusual trial, and in the spring in 1917, they had an eight-pound son, very fine and exceptionally handsome--which meant that even in the first month he was recognizably human. Now, along with every thought about his Perfect Inn, Myron gave another thought to the future when he would go hunting and fishing and travelling with His Son.
He was named Luke, more or less after Luciano Mora.
Before the baby's birth, Myron did what he called 'putting his foot down', and insisted that they must have more of a home than an hotel suite . . . How he reconciled it with his advertisements that 'A Suite at the Luxurious Westward Ho! Will Solve All Your Housekeeping Problems--We're Glad to do Your Hiring and Firing!' he never explained to himself nor ever tried to.
Effie May said that she 'wasn't--quite--sure--it's kind of convenient living in the city'. Myron was sure for her. 'I'm certainly not going to have our baby grow up one of these horrible, ringleted hotel-children, yelling in the corridors and bossing the servants and showing off to strangers,' he said, and was beautifully unconscious of any heresy to his faith as a sealed hotel-keeper.
They found and rented a seven-room house with a small garden in Mount Vernon, not too far from the station. Once it was veritably his, his own house, at least for a year, Myron found it magic with privacy. Its white wooden pillars and roofing of green imitation slates, its short sidewalk of parti-coloured slabs of stone, its yellow brick fireplace, its piano and glassed-in unit-bookcases and ash-tray stands were different, obviously, from those of any other house in Westchester County, and possibly in America.
The doubtful Effie, as the neighbours came in to see whether she was correct in the matters of piety and bridge, found the place at least won'erful. 'Why, now we got all the nice things in both New York and Black Thread!' she would explain, with awe. 'I can go in for the theatre or to see Bertha, and still have a garden and quiet for Junior, and such dandy neighbours to run in on--high-class--lots of them have tea almost every afternoon, and they play real bridge, for money!'
Myron loved the peace of it--what time he had it. Often he could not get home till midnight; often he had to be away by seven in the morning. But he rejoiced in seeing Effie May and Luke in the diminutive garden. He was only a little angry, so used was he to this attitude, when certain of his neighbours hinted that as an hotel-man, he would be able to direct them to gay but economical ladies and to powerful but inexpensive booze.
In the solitude of the many, on trains, he had the leisure now to make plans in his latest note-book for the Perfect Inn. During the war, when he served in the Quartermaster's Corps, he enjoyed that dangerous position, because he could be home every evening and all day Sunday. When the conflict was over, at least theoretically, he went back to his regular work as Mark Elphinstone's first assistant and to his irregular hours at home with Effie and the miraculous Luke, who was no dullard as he himself had been but, at eighteen months, could say 'Da!' He was saving money constantly, investing it, after a good deal of inquiry, mostly in hotel shares. Its accumulation was in his mind related with Effie, Luke, and the Perfect Inn.
He never missed a train into the city, but he was never seen to hurry . . . A tall man, inexpressive of face, a typical dull captain of business, making little business notes in a little pocket-book, in the smug smokiness of a commuters' train that clattered through dun fog streaked with factory fumes, while in his attic Ora still lay dreaming of damsels in Poictesme.
24
Or again just opp of Luxury Yacht and personally wd prefer: for people who like sailing yachts etc. & cant afford boat big enough open ocean: reg old-fash full-rigged sailing ship to Europe; advant.: quiet, rest, really feel at sea, get away fr jazz, motors. But good beds, wireless for safety, & elec. for lights, refrig., gas engines used only to charge batteries daily and as auxiliary in dead calm. Also appeal youngsters just out college.