After all, Myron complimented himself, if the Inn wasn't really perfect, at least he had chosen the site prophetically. There was no rival within fifty miles.
Then, four miles away, the luxurious Olde Mill Country Club had financial trouble, and bid for transient strangers. On all the roads about Black Thread were placards reading: 'Hotel Prices but Club Exclusiveness--Rooms & Restaurant Open to Transients--Live At the Golf Course Not Near it.' The lettering was in black, except that the 'at' and 'near' were tastefully done in red.
The club had had no murder scandal. Customers who would have gone to the Black Thread Inn went there, and were delighted at being able to step from the golf course directly into the dining-room.
So Myron was apprehensive again, after a week of autumn-coloured tranquillity.
Pondering it all, he began to see vaguely now, in 1927, what he would see sharply in the early 1930's: that the entire 'resort-hotel business' was changing, and much of it would be lost; that with all love and devotion he had built his 'perfect inn', at exactly the worst possible time, as if one should triumphantly set up shop as epic poet just when the prose novel was ousting the hexameter, perhaps for ever.
The former summer resort, frequently centred about just one hotel, had been self-contained, with a social life that was exciting, however naive it might be, in the manner of William Dean Howells and the Golden Nineties. The chief travelling of the families who so joyously came for a fortnight or a month to Bar Harbour, Saratoga Springs, Bretton Woods, was the long, dusty, creaking journey by train that ended so gloriously in the sight of grey breakers or glistening hills, and the familiar, funny little station which signified that they were here again for a glorious recreation, and then the sad return home to New York or Boston. In between, the only locomotion was joyous sails and picnic-rides in haywagons or parades in smart red-wheeled buggies. Travel was the least of their vacationing. They needed no delicate coaxing by hotel-keepers to amuse themselves; no talkies nor golf-courses nor $20,000 a year leaders of jazz-bands to tickle jaded spirits. So long as they had a croquet ground, a big room and a piano for dancing, plenty of boats, and the hills and sea which, in those careless and uncharted days were provided by the Lord God and not by a hotel-keeper, they were content . . . as nearly content as any group of people ever are anywhere. Even among the Idle Rich, the elegants of the '90's who had actually been in Europe and married off a sister to the cousin of a baron, there were summer dramatic societies, yachting parties, men who needed no snarl of an outboard-motor to stomach them for fishing--who, indeed, for fishing chiefly demanded fish.
And they stayed put. Even the transients who remained but two weeks (which would correspond to-day to the lunchers who stay for but thirty minutes) were as eager as the passengers on a slow steamer to establish a social life.
The motor car changed the whole affair, as it changed the whole plan of cities and suburbs. It is not determined, but one may guess, that Benz, Haines, and Henry Ford have altered the world as much as Napoleon, Alexander, and Caesar.
The new motor tourists spent most of their time in travel, for its own sake, and hotels became to them not centres of amusement, to which they were eager to contribute their own efforts at conviviality, but merely stations for food and beds and gasoline.
There was an increase, also, in the number of families who had once been content to stay at hotels, but built now their own cottages, near their own friends, with a social life from which the strangers of the hotels were excluded.
The golfing mania finally finished the concentration of resort life. Swimmers and tennis-players and those content with the tepid thrills of croquet had been well-enough satisfied to go on swimming and playing tennis and clicking croquet balls on the same grounds. But the golfers were for ever leaping into automobiles and going on to new, distant hazards.
Though the motor brought more people out of the cities, the hotels did not profit. The motorists were neither willing to pay for nor so much interested in the excellences of hotel food and service which had once been the chief zest of citizens gossiping and rocking all day long on hotel porches. And many who were sufficiently prosperous to stay in decent hotels stopped at the farmhouses all over the land which began to hang out the sign 'Tourists Accommodated'. The food there was good enough, they said, and the bedchambers, and it was more convenient to make an Early Getaway from a farmhouse than from an elaborate hotel.
A little later to come--unknown as yet in the east, just beginning in the west, but by the early 1930's to be the final menace to resort hotels--were the professional Tourist Camps which grew out of the farmhouses: overnight cottages with restaurants and supply shops which were frankly and entirely devoted to the flying motorist and, with no corps of professional attendants, no effort to provide great lounging-rooms and varied meals and parking grounds, could so lower prices that the resort hotel, and the small-city hotel on main routes, were both to be bankrupted.
And, Myron saw, worrying, it was just at the beginning of this period of prose that he had brought forth his epic.
He tried every device of growing desperation. He cut the minimum rate, 'American plan', from fifteen dollars a day to ten. He gushed selling-letters like a fountain. To save money, he did not complete the swimming-pool, in the autumn. He pleaded with Dingle, who wanted to sell out his share for what he could get. He spent hours with Gritzmeier devising ways of saving money on food without lessening quality. After working all day, he swayed home to dress, and brought Effie May to dance all evening. He tried to act as 'social host', vice the departed Benny Rumble, to unite the suspicious guests in some sort of authentic gaiety.
Effie May liked dancing with him, but she was a bit shy of what seemed to her the grander guests and she, once so avid of crystal-lighted evenings, murmured to him, 'You seem so tired. Hadn't we better go home?' If ever he had fancied her provincial and inelastic and a little stupid, he forgot it all in clinging to her kindness . . . He had sometimes thought that he would, before it was too late, have an 'affair' with some woman brilliant and imaginative. He reflected now that this was one of the luxuries he would have to give up to reserve enough strength to make the Perfect Inn which, he now perceived, was not finished at all, but simply begun.
While he dealt with major misfortunes, he had the annoyances that he would have had in any resort hotel, however well established and patronized. The staff, being in the country yet barred from most country rollicking, were bored. They hadn't much fun in off hours in swimming under the eyes of those nobles, the aristocracy-by-grace-of-fifteen-dollars-a-day. They quit, just to have something amusing to do, and there were no hotel employment agencies round the corner. There was always a waiter or two on his way to New York, and a substitute supposedly, but not certainly, on his way to the Inn. And they took it out in feuds. Colleagues whom in June they had regarded as playmates they discovered in August to be anarchists who were plotting to give them poison in their coffee.
Clark Cleaver, the spotless chief clerk, came in to wail to Myron that another clerk was 'shystering on the job', and very perky about it, and that 'one or the other of us will have to leave'. The once benign Myron glared, and astounded his disciple by shouting, 'Then I've got a damn good mind to fire both of you! I'm not an ambulance surgeon! Go back and take care of your own troubles!'