'I'll do it, just the same!' growled Myron, and talked of baseball.
Richard Montgomery Pye, giving audience in his office, which resembled a Louis XVI boudoir reproduced by a steel-manufacturer, remarked formally, 'I won't say that the firm, or at least Adolph Charian and I, might not come in on financing your inn. But I think the project is pretty small for a man of your executive ability. At best, it would only pay a fair profit on a few hundred thousand. You see, I'm laying my cards on the table, Weagle. We're more than satisfied with you. I think sometimes you're too cautious, and worry too much about penny-pinching, but then, we're all four too much inclined to gamble, and you check us, and you have the patience to fuss with which firm will sell crackers at a sixteenth of a cent less a pound, and you don't customarily steal the handles off the office safe. Why don't you stick with us, and get in on the big money? We might take you in as a partner in a few years, and make it easy for you to acquire a share, and I can see us swinging an hotel twice as big as this.'
'And twice as noisy!' Myron thought silently.
'So give up this idea of yours for a year or so, anyway, and stick around.'
'No, I'm sorry, Pye, but I'm all set on it. Will you talk to Charian, or shall I? Or shall I arrange for the financing outside? I figure I'll need about two hundred thousand over and above what I have. Shall I see Charian?'
'No, I will. I'll let you know. But I hope you'll change your mind.'
Within two days, Dick Pye informed him that Charian and he would come in, but would leave their other partners, Westwind and Schirovsky, out of it, since their fine talents were better suited to criminal law--to the breaking and the avoidance of the same--than to country inn-keeping and the exploitation of daisies. Pye and Charian had a hundred and fifty thousand or so in hand; the other fifty thousand could be provided on mortgage.
'But we still think you're foolish to start anything so half-faced as a little resort hotel like that, and we're willing to invest in it only because we believe you're competent and dependable. We still want you to think this whole business over again,' said Pye, unapprovingly.
And almost as unapproving was Alec Monlux, who quivered, 'If it should flop, you'd be right out of things here; hotel game moves so fast it changes overnight. And I'd of thought you'd had enough of associating with the golden rod and gophers. I certainly did, in Iowa. I agree with what Effie May was arguing: New York is the only place where you can rub up against all the big, rich, important guys, and keep polished.'
In fact, no one approved, beside Gritzmeier and, unexpectedly, Jimmy Shanks, the beefily affable manager of that Pye-Charian house, The Dickens.
'Sure, it's a swell idea, Myron, and don't let these crêpe-hangers tell you anything different,' crowed Jimmy. 'You'll put it over, and then you'll go on and build others, till you have a whole Lake Placid of your own--that is, if you want to take the trouble, and I'll bet you won't. You'll have too much fun just running a good small place with a high-grade clientele and swell grub, and be able to call your soul your own and get out and breathe a little fresh air and catchum a fish whenever you feel like it. Swell idea! Like to do it myself, by golly, instead of holding the fevered hands of four hundred stock-brokers twenty-four hours a day!'
It did not occur to Myron that Jimmy Shank's enthusiasm might be connected with a certain willingness to inherit Myron' position, when he should be gone.
26
Chain of garages, to be as well known as chains of groceries and restaurants. All auto tourists wd use them, because know dependable. And adv in wholesale purchasing.
He would call it the 'Black Thread Inn'.
He would be so wise as not to expect any gratitude from Black Thread Centre for bringing them this new industry which might employ some scores of natives. He was even willing, or so he told himself, to have his old schoolmates, who now remembered him so well and whom he had so blankly forgotten, scold at him as one who was trying to 'high-hat' them.
Just the same, it would be doing something for his boyhood home to create there this mould of fashion and glass of form.
But he would be careful not to take any credit, or to become boastful if he should succeed in making a Grand-Trianon. He'd be the same blunt, unassuming business man he'd always been, with no nonsense about trying to be imaginative, idealistic, original.
The Frigate Haven Manor had, in cottages and main building, three hundred and ten bedrooms. That was too large. He planned for the Black Thread Inn a hundred and twenty bedrooms, and a cottage for himself, at first, with situations plotted for a future annex and cottages to provide a hundred bedrooms more.
He hastened up to Black Thread to look over his site. It was better than he thought. He talked it over with T. J. Dingle, the youngish banker of the Centre, who willingly said that he would invest $10,000, and with Mrs. Dingle, who more than willingly said that when the inn was built, Myron could count on Ted and her coming for supper every Sunday, 'Get some decent food in this wilderness at last!'
'Tut!' said Dingle. 'It's notorious that New England home food is the best in the world.'
'I know, my darling. Notorious is right. It's so good that they hide it away from you,' said his wife.
All winter, while he was conferring with the architects about plans for the Inn, Myron was trying to give Pye and Charian a notion of what he was up to, a task rather complicated by the fact that he did not entirely know. They could not in the least comprehend the idea of a Rose and Crown adapted to America of the late 1920's; they pictured a bawdy road-house which would be in the country only to be safely away from prying federal officers and divorce-seeking wives, and possibly for the sake of a little golf and swimming to whet the appetite between drinks.
But, 'Oh, I can handle 'em. They'll get the idea when they see the place all furnished. And, of course, I do want it to be cheery--only, not dissipated,' insisted Myron.
He worked out the details of financing the Inn. Pye and Charian were generous enough in this gamble, as they would have been generous in sending flowers to a bootlegger's funeral. They did not object to accepting Myron's Lake Nekobee property as the desired site for the Inn, at a valuation of $25,000, though it had cost him only $10,000 when lake sites were cheaper, to granting him 400 extra shares in the company for his services in building the Inn and assembling the staff, a salary of $12,000 a year and living-quarters in an hotel cottage when the Inn should be opened.
He cautiously sold his securities and his small interests in the Pye-Charian Company, Frigate Haven Manor, and Laurel Farms for slightly over $65,000 which, with the Lake Nekobee inn-site appraised at $25,000, gave him $90,000 to invest in the project.
The new company was capitalized at $300,000, with 3000 one-hundred-dollar shares, of which Myron had 1,300, Pye and Charian each 800, and T. J. Dingle 100. . . . It was true, admitted Myron, that with their 1600 shares together, Pye and Charian could outvote Dingle and himself, but what did that matter? They'd be so delighted with the way he'd build and run the place that they would never interfere, and in five or six years, he'd buy them out, and if they made a nice piece of change in profit, why, he'd be tickled to death--they'd deserve it for being so generous at the beginning. Everything rosy!