Through all of 1918, Mark Elphinstone was weakened by attacks of angina pectoris, and the instant he was out of the army, Myron became unofficial president of the Elphinstone chain. Now he first really knew Mark as a human being.
For years Mark had lived in a large and very pseudo baronial apartment on the top floor of the Westward, with imitation beams, a heraldic fireplace, and a mute musicians'-gallery in the salon. Myron had rarely been in it, but now Mark lay abed and Myron went daily to see him. He was present through two of Mark's dreadful attacks, brought on by anger, or by an effort to get up and dress. Then, in an agony that lasted a minute and seemed to last an hour, Mark felt as though he were dying, as though a great hand were squeezing his heart, while the pain cut a gash up to his neck and down his left arm. He panted, his eyes bulging with terror. Myron and the nurse stood by the bed, in the embarrassment of futility. The horror gone, he would try to laugh, and mutter, 'Tell Carlos Jaynes to stop grabbing my heart--tell him to stop it--want it stopped right away.'
He talked now, wanderingly, of his private life. He was a widower; his one child, a daughter, was married to a lawyer of elegance, living in Brookline. Myron guessed, when he saw her, that she was gallantly trying to forgive her father for still living. She wore satin with chastely dangling chains, and was very crisp and literate, and her father was humble and conciliatory in her presence. For hours, when she had gone, Mark boasted to Myron about his daughter's music, her Italian, her friendship with bishops.
The doctor warned Mark that he must 'avoid all muscular excess and all emotion', and Mark's latest secretary, the clean, swift, amiable, rather dull young Mr. Clark Cleaver (he was rumoured to be a wizard at the parallel bars and flying rings in the Y.M.C.A. gymnasium) kept stirring Mark into furious emotion by coaxing him to avoid all emotion. Myron had sense enough to let him rave and get it over.
It was the Carlos Jaynes faction who brought on the catastrophe.
Jaynes' brother-in-law, large stockholder in the Elphinstone Company, called on Mark. Myron was not present, but he learned from Clark Cleaver that the brother-in-law pussy-catted about, patted Mark's hand, assured him that he would instantly be out and playing eighteen holes of golf, and then, with just the playful tactfulness which the bluff brigand most detested, hinted that Mark ought to resign and make Jaynes his successor.
The brother-in-law gone, Myron was sent for, and arrived by Mark's bed along with the hotel doctor. Mark was raving, 'That damned Jaynes and his damned relatives! I'll fire him! He's fired right now! Cleaver, you get on the 'phone and tell Jaynes he's fired, right now.' Cleaver dared not move. 'Get him, I tell you, get him, get him, get him on the 'phone, I tell you! They think they've got me down! They think they can jam Jaynes down my throat! I'll show 'em! I'm not afraid of any man living. I'm not afraid of anything!'
He choked. He clenched his fists in agony. His face was grey as March snow, and was greased over with cold sweat.
'But I am afraid of death!' he whimpered.
His old kneaded face fell into the blankness of childhood; defiance and courage dropped from it, and he muttered, 'Afraid of death! Myron! Cleaver! Stick by me! Stay there. Don't go away. I feel lonely. I'm afraid!' Veteran wisdom and courage came back into it, as the spasm lifted, and he snarled, 'I won't let 'em make me afraid, with their damn sympathy! Eighteen holes of golf! There's no man living can make me play golf! My game is Men, and they can't beat me! I've licked 'em!'
And he gasped and died.
The directors of the Elphinstone Company met two hours after the funeral, and learned that Mark Elphinstone's daughter, his sole heir, had contracted to sell all her holdings in the company to Carlos Jaynes and his brother-in-law. They elected Jaynes president of the company.
An hour after that, Jaynes sent for Myron and merrily offered to him the assistant managership of the Elphinstone Akron hotel.
Carlos Jaynes was not vastly popular with his fellow hotel-men throughout the country. It did not at all hurt the reputation of Myron to have been kicked out. After a week--though that week, with its agonizing enforced idleness, was long enough--he was offered the managership of an hotel in Wilmington, and took it, leaving Effie May and Luke in Mount Vernon.
He left Wilmington for the not-too-important but instructive job of chief assistant manager at the Hotel Crillon of New York, which had only five hundred rooms but was the newest and smartest hotel in the country, with a clientele altogether different from the run of amiable and prosperous social nobodies at the old Westward. The Crillon was patronized by ambassadors, princes, international crooks, and Americans so wealthy that they could afford to live on Long Island and again be farmers like their grandparents. He learned not to blink at hundred-dollar-a-day suites and small sleek dinners in private dining-room at fifty dollars a plate; he learned that one-half, at least, of the excessively rich are as annoyed as one-half, at least, of the excessively poor when they are insulted by receiving bills; and learned an Alice in Wonderland arithmetic whereof the chief problem was: 'Which pays better, ten dollars a day that you get or a hundred dollars a day that you don't get?'
He did not vastly care for the Crillon, its deftly obsequious staff, or its deftly supercilious guests. Not even yet was he fond of foot-kissing.
For one summer he was manager of the Frigate Haven, with Effie and Luke near him in an hotel cottage; for nearly a year and a half he was managing director of a large hotel in Philadelphia; and by then, in 1922, when he was forty-two years old, he had enough reputation and enough advantage from the hotel-world's continued enmity to Carlos Jaynes, to be able to stop roving, and settle down in a position that was by far the most important and best paid he had yet held: general director of all the Pye-Charian Hotels of New York, and managing director of their largest house, the Victor Hugo.
The Pye-Charian Company consisted of four men: Richard Montgomery Pye, the president; Adolph Charian, a fat, thoroughly vulgar, and thoroughly shrewd contractor; Colonel Ormond L. Westwind, the celebrated criminal lawyer, after-dinner speaker, and vestryman of St. Thomas's, and Nick Schirovsky, who called himself a manufacturer of mineral waters and whom Myron more than suspected of being a wholesale bootlegger. Myron himself and 'Jimmy' Shanks, manager of one of the Pye hotels, also had each a few shares in the company.
The holdings consisted of the Victor Hugo, a new eleven-hundred-bedroom, each-with-bath, transient hotel in upper Broadway, and six residential hotels on the West Side of New York between Seventieth and One-Hundred-and-Twenty-Fifth Streets. The largest of the residential hotels was The Dickens, on Riverside Drive, managed by Shanks. Jimmy was big and jovial and grinning and practical-joking, with his crisp rolls of the blackest hair; a shrewder and modernized version of J. Hector Warlock. He had played football for two years at the University of Kentucky, and been expelled for inattention to his books and general hell-raising.
An old friend of Myron, Clark Cleaver, Elphinstone's last secretary, was also with Pye-Charian, as chief clerk of the Walter Scott Hotel.
Of all these men, it was Richard Montgomery Pye whom Myron saw most often. His job, as president, was to control the somewhat mysterious finances of the chain, and to demand improvements which Myron had to carry out.
Dick Pye was slender and suave as a greyhound on a silver chain. He was chief among the new sort of hotel-men, detested by Mark Elphinstone, who were as likely to arrange their affairs on the golf links, in country-club bars, or in fast motor cars as in offices or the kitchen. He was a smiling man, not very tall and not over forty; he was apparently accepted as one of their own by the most pretentious country-club-and-estate circles on Long Island, and he played polo with the second team of the Old Chapel Club.