It took Myron a time to believe that Sheriff Beasy's honest friend was also Sheriff Beasy, and that a country political gang could be as intimidating as any city gang in compelling him to handle illicit booze whether he wanted to or not. He thought of Beasy's hard little eyes. He thought of the Inn being raided on a gay and prosperous evening. He shivered.
By contrast he almost had relief in the details of insurance. He had, it appeared, to insure against injury to employees, injury to the public, fire, lightning, burglary, floods, earthquakes, cyclones, termites, elephantiasis, insurrection, and the Acts of God.
In seeking the righteousness of creation he had not, he saw, altogether freed himself from the body of sin and doubt. Yet irritated or apprehensive or dreary with details, he was, all this tiring and glorious time, uplifted by the sight of the rising Inn, the actual coming into existence of his masterpiece.
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Cruise: Long Island Sound steamer, two weeks up to Bar Harbour or beyond, exploring shores of Conn. Mass, L. I., Nantucket, etc. Anchor in quiet harbour every night, with dance on deck, movies, etc. and boats going ashore, and fishing & swimming in morning. Cd do very cheap, for summer vacation for clerks, stenogs etc. Daily lecture on history of coast. Specialize sea food--'catch your own mackerel & we'll cook it for you.' How about campfire on big iron plate, asbestos lined, on deck one evening of each cruise?
To make an inn that should be not merely good but near perfection, Myron asserted, he had to be fussy as an old-time housewife at spring-cleaning. He had to make himself an expert equally on the plan of the building in regard to convenience, quiet, light, and view, on the furnishing of bedrooms and public rooms, on food, linen, silver, china, glass, on amusements outdoors and inside. In any one of these departments, the Black Thread Inn might be surpassed; it was his job, as creative builder, to make sure that no other inn should surpass his in the combination of all the details.
All day, when he was not at Black Thread, he was consulting interior decorators, salesmen for hotel china and glass, books on furniture and, always, the realistic and experienced Mr. Otto Gritzmeier.
As to decoration, he was for awhile tempted by the heathen ritual of Modernism, particularly after he had lunched at the Tall Town Club, the best speakeasy in New York, which had been bedizened by Josef Lazaraki with a circular bar of black glass edged with a silver band, bright aluminium bar- stools with red leather seats, pictures made with outlines of silver wire against a powdery blue background, walls splashed with sunbursts and torch-flames of aluminium, and sunflowers whose petals were mirrors, Myron was impressed. Prohibition, he realized, had been an excellent thing for America: it had not only taught the traditionally unalcoholic American woman to drink and smoke with her men, but had, in its freedom from old standards, encouraged the arousing orgies of modernistic decoration, and all citizens, especially the surprised and delighted women, ought to be grateful to the Methodist and Baptist shepherds who had brought on Prohibition. But for his inn among New England hills, this jazz splendour would be false, and Myron was equally uninterested in the other extreme: an Olde Inne that should be a Colonial museum, with huge and dirty brick fireplaces bristling with sooty cranes, straight-backed oak chairs, and walls so prickly with warming-pans, candle-moulds, revolutionary muskets, grandfather clocks, wedgwood platters, grimy iron pots, and Currier & Ives prints that any honest guest would dash out shrieking. He decided on a key-note of Duncan Phyfe mahogany in accurate reproductions, graceful for summer, warm-hued for winter fire-light, and he was able to have all of it made together by one manufacturer, at a comfortingly reasonable price. He was able to get standard yet not too familiar patterns of glassware, china, and silver which harmonized with the mahogany. They were all marked with the BTI embroidered on the linen.
Not even the lounge, centre of the Inn, was planned so carefully as the kitchens, and these were planned to the last centimeter, as though he were devising a new motor engine. In everlasting headachy conferences with Gritzmeier, after reading everything he could find in the hotel magazines, he arranged exactly what and how long should be the path from refrigerator to work-table to condiment cupboard to stove to serving-bar to dining-room; what materials were best for sinks, for table-tops, floors and the weary swollen feet of cooks.
Food he studied as Duke Godfrey studied the imaginative maps to the Holy Land. Gritzmeier was one of the not-too-many Continental chefs who had added a study of native American foods to his knowledge of French and German and British cookery. As piously as Myron he revered the American dishes which would be the staples of this good provincial inn: clam chowder, planked shad with roe, crab-flakes, canvas-back with wild rice and black currant jelly, raisin pie, corn pones, pepper pot, and the breakfast doughnuts and waffles and buckwheat cakes which can be so delicate or so leaden, in accordance as the cook is a worthy man or a scoundrel.
To 'amusements' he gave scientific research. He had noticed that the chief horror of summer hotels in the evening, when it is too dark for golf and swimming, is that there is nothing to do. He would have either dancing or a movie, or both, every evening, along with radio, backgammon, dice racing, masquerades, a larger library, moonlight picnic-suppers, billiards, and a chief job of Benny Rumble would be to introduce poker-players and bridge-maniacs to one another.
The first building to be finished, in May, was Myron's cottage, which was to be the start of a whole crescent of hotel cottages on the hillside above the Inn. He had planned it himself, more precisely than any known housewife, with everything built in that could be built in, with composition floors that could be cleaned with a look, and enough sleeping-porch space for his family and for a guest . . . only he hoped that the guest would not too constantly be Professor Herbert Lambkin, M.A.
It was May 27th, 1927, just two weeks before the day set for the opening, and the Black Thread Inn was finished--at least as nearly finished as it would be, this season--and Myron could look upon his Works, bound in grey shingle.
The Inn fitted into the hillside. It was rather long and low, with wide dormers in the third story. The sides were finished in fire-proofed shingles, stained the soft grey of the sunless lake, with the shingled roof a little darker, and under the eaves was one violent band of scarlet. A terrace of red tiles was cut in under the building, on the ground floor, and extended outside along the whole length of the front, with French windows opening on it, with white wicker chairs and white-painted steel tables. Here lunch and tea were to be served on bright days. At one end was an untouched grove of elms and maples; at the other end was planted a garden of roses, peonies, and autumnal lilies, where tea would also be served when the garden should have grown.
The tennis-courts, the squash-courts, the stables of riding-horses, the garage, with titanic buses to meet the trains, were tucked among the woods behind the Inn, and here, next winter, would be a ski-slide and possibly a toboggan course. Golf was available at the Olde Mill Country Club, four miles away, and at three other clubs within eight miles. Some day, the Inn would have a nine-hole course of its own. Myron had insisted on laying out, on one of the lawns, croquet-grounds, though every one in the world, practically, rushed up to assure him that croquet was dead. There was to be a swimming-pool, warmed, for early spring and late autumn, when the lake would be too cold, but as yet there was only the excavation for the pool. It would be finished in the fall. The sandy lake shore was kaleidoscopic as the Riviera, with a huge T-shaped dock, four diving-boards, yellow and crimson canoes, row-boats with blue and crimson awnings, and cabañas with awnings grey and crimson. Only the beach was garish, however; the Inn itself was tranquil.