Work of Art

This day in September, 1925, he growled to Gritzmeier, 'We've got to get together next week and plan the supper-dance menus for the season for the Laurentian Grill. Damn the grill! I hate planning anything for a bunch of drugstore cowboys with pocket flasks--trying to compete with the speakeasies! I've always wanted to have a really good country inn--good as any resort hotel in Europe.'

'Then vy don't you, Chief?'

'Well, it's difficult getting started . . .'

'T'ree years you've been talking about your fine inn. Talking! Vy don't you do it?'

'Oh, I . . .'

'You got some money saved, aind't you? You can get the rest, cand't you? Vy don't you do something? You aind't going to get a whole lot younger, Chief!'

'You're right. I'm forty-five and . . . I'll do it! I guess I will!'

And, rather scared, he knew he would.

It was easier to undertake the labour of financing and building his Perfect Inn than it was to loiter and face the cynical old eyes of Otto Gritzmeier.

25

'I just don't know where all my time goes to,' was Effie May's favourite observation. She said it oftener, these days, than 'won'erful'.

They had a larger house in Mount Vernon now, but in the same neighbourhood. Playing after school-hours with Luke, a tall boy of eight, finding out what orders the maid had decided to receive and then giving them, playing Russian Bank with Myron on evenings when he did not feel like reading, discussing garden seeds and the wearing-quality of boys' trouserings with the neighbours, trimming the church with flowers and rather irregularly going to a women's musical and literary club, she lived the same busy and unplanned life that she would have lived in Black Thread, save that once a fortnight she went into the city for the theatre or a placid, domestic afternoon in a speakeasy with Bertha Spinney.

She was well content, and gnawed candy as delicately and as much as ever. She was extremely fat, and at thirty-four looked a cheerful forty, and now that she rarely heard Ora's sneers, she regarded Myron as a sage, and knew that he depended on her as on cool water.

Myron had telephoned that he would be home at seven, and Luke had been permitted to sit up for him. Luke was riding his tricycle back and forth on the cement walk from street to house, occasionally falling off it into the bug-eaten rose-bushes. The tall, nervous shape of his father swung around the street corner.

'Hello, daddy!'

'Hello!'

'Hel-LO!

'Hello, son.'

'Whaja bring me?'

'Not a thing!'

'Not anything?'

'Not one darn thing!'

'Not anything at all?'

'No, sir! Expect me to bring you a present every night?'

'Sure-pop!'

'Who ever taught you to say that?'

'In school and then, of course, you always say it to ma.'

'Oh, I do, eh?'

'Uh-huh, sure, every day!'

'Well, then, I guess I'll have to see if anybody's stuck any chocolate in my pocket. Though, mind you, Luke, I disapprove of bribery as a means of enforcing discipline in large, efficient, modern institutions like this.'

'Uh-huh. Oh, that's swell--peanut brittle!'

'Luke! How would you like to live right out in the country, but near a lovely inn with grand food--fishing and swimming and meadows and hiking and squirrels and--oh, and flowers--you know, everything! Real country! How'd you like that?'

'Punk.'

'No, really! Wouldn't you love the country?'

'Naw. I like it here. It's all hicks in the country--like at Uncle Herbert's. Let's stay here. Or maybe move into New York. That would be dandy! Then I could go to the movies twice a day!'

Myron meditated, 'That helps! I can see that everybody is going to approve enthusiastically of my going off to run a country inn. Splendid! Oh hell. . . . But Luke will like it! I'll make the kind of place he'll like!'

'I've told you lots of times about building a really first-class inn,' said Myron. 'You know--my farm near the Centre. Lake Nekobee.'

'Yes, sure, ten thousand times,' said Effie. She yawned, then smiled in apology.

'Well, at last, after chewing the rag about it so many years and being scared of undertaking it all the time, I'm really going to do it!'

'Honestly?' She was affectionate, and entirely unimpressed.

'Yes. I mean it. Now I want you to pay some attention, Effie. If I put this through, or rather, when I do, it will affect you. We'll have to live there--I aim to have a place I can keep open all the year round--winter sports, too--and we'll have to live there.'

'Oh, but darling!' She squeaked like a cornered mouse. 'I can't leave the nice neighbours here, and Junior used to the school and all, and the Centre--oh, of course, it would be lovely to be near the Family, I suppose, but to not ever be able to get to New York and see some shows. . . . Oh, I don't think that would be any fun at all!'

'We'll try to get down to New York for a month every winter, or say late fall, between seasons, and not do a blessed thing then but raise Cain and enjoy ourselves, and that's something we've never had time to do, never.'

'Well . . .'

She looked about her well-loved sitting-room, the huge cabinet gramophone, the automatic heat-regulator, the silver cocktail shaker that would be taboo within reach of Brother Herbert. He knew that she was trying to nerve herself, and for her confused gallantry he loved her.

'Well, if you think it's best, Myron.'

'Look! I'll build us a grand cottage near the Inn--lots more room for Luke to play than here, and I don't know that the school in the Centre will be so much worse for him. These kids around New York are so frightfully fresh and knowing and impertinent. "Sure-pop"!'

'Well, I guess there'd be some nice folks at the Inn, too.'

He knew that she felt insecure. Oughtn't he to give up this unnecessary plan and go on with Pye-Charian? No! Be valet to Nick Schirovsky and his friends or, at best, give his life to wholesale cafeteria-keeping? There was peace and quiet skill in the tradition of every ancient Cat and Fiddle, or White Hart, or Old Bell, in which immemorially tired and drenched and hungry men had taken their ease. And he would make a greater masterpiece than any of them.

'But I wish Effie could see it like that,' he pondered.

He talked frankly about it to Ora, for Ora, he told himself, was the one person who would understand his doing something a little unconventional.

A year after he had kicked Ora and his girl out of the Westward--almost ten years ago, now--they had run into each other on the street, sheepishly shaken hands, and gone to lunch. He had seen Ora occasionally ever since. Hugely approving, he discovered that Ora had an almost regular job writing two-reelers for the movies, and articles for the new magazines devoted to the movie world, and he said profoundly, 'If he does get drunk pretty often, still there's quite a few fellows with good minds that have that unfortunate habit!'

He outlined the Perfect Inn and his determination to leave Pye-Charian. He waited for the first approval since Otto Gritzmeier's.

'Huh!' said Ora. 'I think you're a damn fool. Here you've got a good chance to go ahead with these high-class bootleggers and be a member of the firm some day, and then you can transfer to some other big outfit that isn't crooked, or only just average crooked. And you want to chase off and start another fancy arty tea-room, the kind you made out of the American House! My dear Myron, a man who doesn't have originality for his long suit oughtn't to strut around trying to show off his originality!'