Pye's origin was in dispute. One faction asserted that he was the son of a doubtful minor Tammany official and had begun his career by selling newspapers and continued it as bell-boy in a scabby hotel in the old Tenderloin, but his friends contended that he came from what is known as a 'fine old family'. Virginians said he came from a fine old family in Massachusetts, and Massachusettsans said he came from a fine old family in Virginia. Harvard men said he was a graduate of Yale, Yale men said he was a graduate of Princeton, and Princeton men were divided between Harvard, Yale, the University of Oklahoma, and Maine Agricultural College. And Dick Pye smiled and never explained and played polo and arranged for mortgages and persuaded smart but liquorous young men to take costly suites at the Victor Hugo or The Dickens for the whole winter season, and seemed to know what Myron and Jimmy Shanks and Clark Cleaver were doing, every moment, and what unknown clerks, in some second-rate houses a thousand miles away, could be trained to take their places.
All very old and very rich women said that 'Dicky' was the sweetest boy they had ever seen, and all professional gamblers said that his poker was worthy of the most eminent practitioners.
Myron liked Dick Pye and the Victor Hugo enormously, for a few months, then dreaded them as poisonous, after the honest piracy of Mark Elphinstone.
His job was to control every department of the Victor Hugo, as resident manager, and to glance over the conduct of the six residential hotels. To these he was to give not so much time as experience and dependability. He looked into their kitchens or linen-rooms or garbage-trucks or the pile of chambermaids' O.K.'s on made-up rooms, and sometimes there was fatherly advice to department-heads and sometimes there was quick guillotining.
Most of his hours were devoted to the Victor Hugo.
The changes in hotels, in New York, and in all America, between 1905, when Myron had gone from Tippecanoe Lodge to the Westward, and the 1920's, were illustrated by the differences between the Westward and the Victor Hugo. The Hugo was intended to appeal to the same sort of solid, upper-middle-class, prosperous patrons, and it was on the same Broadway, though twenty blocks farther north. But it was nearly twice as large, eleven hundred rooms against six hundred and fifty, and it had none of the spurious grandeur which had gladdened the guests of the Westward in 1905; none of the velvet or tortured ironwork or carved teak or copper minarets or bread-pudding marble. It had, indeed, the 'good taste', or what to the 1920's and 1930's, seemed the good taste, of massive simplicity. The main entrance was a severe doorway of Indiana limestone, with no awning of glass and gilded iron; the lobby, lined with uncarved cedar panels, was half the size of the Westward's, and considerably less inviting to lobby-loungers; the elevators bore no sunbursts of brass, but they were thrice as swift and silent, and the elevator-runners discoursed on the current weather only with clients who desired it. The Victor Hugo bedrooms were free of imitation-brocade and lace table-covers, armchairs with frayed fringes, and ornamental brass beds which, even after many renovations, were still to be found in the Westward. There was less of tax-breeding space and fewer dust-collecting ornaments.
Mechanization had increased hugely, with air-conditioning, radios in all rooms, central vacuum-cleaning plant, electric refrigeration, stainless metal alloys instead of damp and seamy surfaces throughout the kitchens. There was a 'coffee-shop', approximately as large as the Grand Central and as busy. There were graduates of the Cornell and other hotel-schools in every corner.
But if the Victor Hugo was more expeditious and sophisticated and in better taste than the Westward, the trim bedrooms were far smaller, with less room for nervous patrons to poke about; if the washed and filtered air was purer, there seemed to be less of it for placid breathing; if the restaurants were better lighted, they were less leisurely; if there were more tropical fruits, there was less generous cooking; if the whole thing had become a better machine, it had become a less comfortable home.
America and the hotel of 1905 were not far from the America and the inn of Martin Chuzzlewit; America of the late 1920's had lost for all time that large, loquacious, gallant, often comic, rusticity. It had driven from Saratoga Springs to Nice, in a sixteen-cylinder car. It had gone from cotton stockings to silk; from the small beer of Weber and Fields to the champagne in 'Of Thee I Sing'; and sometimes Myron was bewildered and a little uneasy.
The guests of the Victor Hugo had familiar faces--more regularly shaved than at the Westward--yet their hearts seemed to Myron different, and he did not altogether like the change.
He still had the old dependables: the up-state banker and his family who came to New York for a month, for shopping and the opera, the Detroit purchasing agent and the Phoenix department-store buyer and the branch-manager from Spokane, all of them trained travellers who appreciated service. But among them, as was natural to an hotel which had Nick Schirovsky as one of its owners, had crept a new race of mild and solid-looking and well-behaved men, quietly dressed and most generous with tips, whom he guessed to be gamblers, racketeers, sellers of dubious stock and real estate. They did nothing of which you could complain; indeed they were ever so much quieter about sending for mineral water to accompany illicit whisky than were the innocent buyers, and they were less likely to sing 'Mandy, Mandy, Sweet as the Sugar Cane' after it. Yet Myron hated them, and felt insecure when he observed their intimacy with the aristocratic Mr. Richard Montgomery Pye.
He knew that the bell-boys were procuring liquor for the guests, from the lofty superintendent of service, but he could do nothing about it. They were under licence of Dick Pye, and they shared the profit with Pye, Charian, Schirovsky, and the pious Colonel Westwind.
But they shared, neither profits nor confidences with Myron. That was the one detail of the hotel-management that he neglected.
He had some comfort out of investing in Frigate Haven Manor, and a larger, more ambitious summer resort, Laurel Farms, and in improving his investments by giving advice as an expert.
But after three and a quarter years as general director of the Pye-Charian Hotels, he felt that he was in a blind alley. He might be a good innkeeper. He believed that he was. But just as he had never been particularly obsequious to the German barons and French vicomtes and Long Island squires at the Hotel Crillon, so he could make no especial effort to impress the slick friends of Nick Schirovsky as their natural provider and protector.
He said so to Gritzmeier the chef, and was shocked into doing something about it, instead of merely sitting around and enjoying his noble discontent.
Otto Gritzmeier was managing chef of the Hotel Victor Hugo, and for him Myron had more respect and liking than for any other officer in the Pye-Charian chain. He was a Swiss, trained in Lausanne, Biarritz, Hamburg, Milan, and Bournemouth. At fifty he had come to America as chef of the distinguished Restaurant Sylvère, but that shrine of gourmets had closed with Prohibition, and Gritzmeier had reluctantly turned from Homard Sauté à la Dumas to the Standard Cost per Ounce of Hamburg Steak.
Myron was merely supposed to confer with him several times a week, in the director's office, about menus and special dinners and the equipment and personnel of the kitchen, but almost every day found Myron sitting at Gritzmeier's desk, in his tiny glass-walled office in the good reek of the enormous kitchen, happily recovering from Schirovskism. Just Gritzmeier's appearance, the floury yet healthy cheeks, the grey huzzar moustache and imperial, the tall cap and apron and overalls (for Gritzmeier was one of the few managing chefs who refused to dress in a lounge suit) was refreshing after the pink-cheeked, ebon-haired, glossily brown-suited guests in the more expensive suites of the Victor Hugo. He became almost as intimate with Gritzmeier as he once had been with Luciano Mora--the cautious ultra-Yankee released by his admiration for an ultra-Continental.