'Well,' grumbled Tom Weagle, 'it's all right, but strikes me it's a pretty simple shack to be making such a fuss over! Why didn't you make one of these French chateaux, or a Japanese garden, or something with class?'
'I planned it to be simple. I want it to fit in between the lake and the hill as if it had grown here, and still have as much luxury as the Ritz,' protested Myron.
'It's simple, all right! It just growed, all right! It certainly don't look like any good 220,000 bucks to me. What I could have done with that money, with my experience! Built you an hotel that'd bat you in the eye ten miles off. Just growed here on the hill is right! Like a doggone ole grey stump! After all the pains I've spent on you, I've never been able to learn you it pays to advertise!'
June tenth, then, and the publication of the Perfect Inn.
It was opening with every bedroom full save one, and that empty only because it was held for Adolph Charian, Pye's partner, who might or might not be able to come from New York for the ceremonies. Dick Pye would be there all week. Myron had had to reject more than sixty applications for rooms. He had captured for the first five days of the opening the convention of that extremely wealthy organization, the New England Brass Industries Institute. Benny Rumble, the natty press-agent, had lavishly invited the press to the opening of what he asserted to be the finest inn on the Atlantic Coast, and fifteen rooms were reserved for reporters from New York, Philadelphia, Boston, New Haven, Hartford, Bridgeport, and Greenwich, who did not mind submitting a few sticks to the society editors so long as the food and Benny's private stock were good. The other rooms were taken by a miscellany of regular guests, who drove up in expensive cars, well stocked with gin.
The opening evening!
The lobby and corridors at last whooped with voices besides those of the workmen and hotel staff, and Myron beamed owlishly as he heard, 'It's a charming place.' Everything began joyfully, with two big dinners--that of the Brass Institute, served in the Ballroom and entertained by the Jolly Rovers Jazz Orchestra, and the dinner for the press, in one end of the dining-room, which could be completely shut off by an electrically controlled screen of steel and rubber.
Even Myron took three cocktails, that evening: one in his cottage, with Effie May and Ora, who was their guest for the week; one with Benny Rumble and the press; one in the suite of the secretary of the Brass Institute. He was slightly hysterical with the success of his masterpiece. The Institute insisted on his joining them for a toast, and when its president stated (but not so briefly) that Mr. Weagle was another of those enterprising Yankees who was restoring New England to her former supremacy in industry and the resort business, and to hell with California, Myron bowed and flushed and felt very happy--and was suddenly a little homesick for a hotel in Naples and a black-bearded man toasting Signor Veeagley, while Luciano clapped his hands.
He himself dined, when he was not darting away to do most energetically nothing in particular, with a group composed of the press, the county and town dignitaries, his father and mother, Effie and Ora, the Dingles, and the entire Lambkin clan. It was a lovely dinner, with Moselle, bombe surprise, and brook-trout. It was addressed. It was a good deal addressed, though the press seemed not to mind, since 1909 brandy was served during the addressing. Myron told them, in a speech lasting exactly seventy seconds, that he was glad to see them. Dick Pye told them that Myron was a second George Boldt. T. J. Dingle told them that Black Thread had quantities of history and fishing. The mayor of Black Thread made a comic speech, Sheriff Everett Beasy made a witty speech, and then the real work was turned over to Pye's partner, Colonel Ormond L. Westwood, who was historic, comic, witty, impressively reverent regarding the church, the state, the press, and hotel-keeping, and wound up with one of his celebrated after-dinner stories which managed to be so delicate that it did not shock the ladies and yet so smutty that even the reporters laughed.
They did not break up till midnight, when the guests swayed up to their rooms.
Altogether, the opening evening was as nearly perfect as the Inn itself.
He was too happily excited to go back to his cottage and sleep. At half-past one he made the round of the Inn, just for the pleasure of seeing it. He looked upon his work and saw that it was good . . . The passionate pilgrim come to his shrine. The poet reading the first typescript of his epic, astonished by his own eloquence.
There was no one about save a watchman somewhere in the building, and the night-clerk in the office, working on accounts.
These glories he noted again:
The office, near the main door, though it was complete in every trick of telautograph and pneumatic chute, was not large, and it did not intrude on the lounges.
The main lounge was furnished in old maple, with a moulded plaster fireplace, and pine panelling and authentic old pine, for which Myron had sent a man searching Connecticut, studiously examining old barns, even fence-rails.
Whatever any guest might think of the excellence of Myron's Inn, he would have to admit that the main lounge did not have a single rustic rocker of unpeeled boughs, or a single cart-wheel candelabrum.
The second room was the radio lounge, sound-proofed, so that radio-fans might have as loud a speaker as they wanted, yet no one outside the room need listen. The third was the writing-room and library, with all known varieties of magazines, and three thousand books, chosen by a librarian and not by Ora, since Myron suspected that nothing would so much please Ora as to include every bawdy novel calculated to shock respectable guests. The dining-room was in moulded plaster, slightly tinted, with heavy mulberry-coloured curtains. The ballroom, on one side of the hotel, became by day a huge sun-room. In the basement was a clubroom for billiards, pool, cards, with another and more feminine card-room on the second floor.
'Well, if there's any prettier public rooms anywhere, in America or Europe, than those seven, I'd just like to know!' said Myron now, content.
As Charian had not been able to come, there was one bedroom which he could inspect, and he entered it, snapped on the light, happily. As pleasant to him as the Sheraton furniture were the candlewick spread on the four-poster, and the thick, faintly peach-coloured Bridgewater blankets. To him, a fine wool blanket had always been lovely as a sunset. The fireplace was of mahogany, painted white, with a deep chair before it. The curtains were cretonne, and the two, only two, pictures were German colour-prints. The whole room was gay.
'Why should it be supposed in a country inn that there will never be any wet, gloomy days when the guests will keep to their rooms, and so any old dark furniture and brindle walls will do?' inquired Myron, not without self-approval.
The bathroom was in white tiles with canary-yellow floor and ceiling border. It was bright yet not too orchidaceous, though it had been decorated at a period when America had been roused to a mania for wildly coloured bathrooms, stoves, stew-pans, typewriters, even toilet paper. They had all to be in pink or lavender, and a citizen who had to endure any article in white or brown was ashamed, and staggered away from the scorn of friends, a broken man.
Though at hotel-association meetings Myron had attacked a superfluity of accessories in rooms, and in particular the profusion of little cards advertising the meals, the courtesy, and other desirabilities of the hotel, in this bedroom there were many dodges--conceivably too many: bedside lights, of course, a box opening into both the room and the corridor, so that shoes and suits might be taken off for cleaning without disturbing the guest, extra folding chairs and baggage-stands ready in the closet, stacks of towels and washrags, shoe-cloths and cloths for wiping razor blades, a full-length mirror, an electric light in the closet, a desk that was not a rickety table but a real and solid desk, with ample stationery and a supply of free picture post-cards, which would presumably advertise the inn. The chambermaids were ordered to make sure that there was a low table beside each easy chair, and in each room, always, at least three ash-trays--and more if it proved that the guest was a conscientious smoker.