And if Shanks provided less edible food, he put more items on the menu, and printed it on cardboard edged with gold, and most customers liked the change, and the chagrined Myron wondered whether he knew anything about hotel-keeping.
And if Shanks changed the excellent orchestra for a cheaper one, the new players were much noisier, and he introduced in this ballroom just the changing coloured lights and confetti and paper-hats and streamers beloved in the worst night clubs, and again every one was happy, and Myron thought about going back to sweeping floors till he learned his profession.
The arrangements with Beasy's bootlegger ran quietly and well; the guests were not much more noisily drunken than when they had brought their own liquor, and the hotel had profit on it. The new chief clerk was much less inquisitive about the relationships of ladies and gentlemen than Clark Cleaver had been. And for all the lower rates, the general profits of the Inn increased. That winter of 1927-8, there was a fairly large crowd for the Winter Sports, and if most of them found dancing and drinking more reasonable than going out into the cold for skiing and luging and skating why, that merely lessened all worry as to whether there was enough snow. Under Shanks, the Inn was settling into a sensible, realistic position as one of the most comfortable houses of assignation and refuges for prosperous drunks within an afternoon motor-run of New York, and every one was happy, except Myron Weagle.
'I suppose they really are what is called "sensible". They accept sporting gentlemen for just what they are, and give them just what they want. Only I can't be satisfied with anything except what I think is a fine hotel,' thought the fanatic.
He sought to make clear to his few confidants, to Effie May, Ora, Alec Monlux, and perhaps to himself, just what he had been trying to do. 'I would have made a solid success here, that would have gone on for fifty years, if they had given me time,' he insisted.
Alec, for all his affection, was not much interested. He was no creator of hotels nor of anything else; he was a man on a job, who did as well as he could just what he was told to do. Ora scoffed. Even Effie May could not see anything to grieve about, if Myron would just get rid of Shanks. 'What's the difference between your letting your guests bring their own hootch, and selling it to them, except that this way the hotel gets some of the profit?' she demanded, and Myron was foundered; he had no logical answer.
He gave up trying to explain--except to himself, and himself he found no very good audience.
He felt lonely and shamed as he watched Shanks ruin the Inn. He tried often enough to seize control again, but Pye and Charian could have forced him out by court action. He wanted to run away from the spectacle of sacrilege, but perhaps if he stayed, he could get back into power. He was always making suggestions to Shanks, who agreed with him heartily, and never took them. For the rest, Myron sat in his office, idle, for as many minutes at a time as he could endure it. He was certainly not going to invite his private list of faithful guests to the sort of place this had become!
He did not sleep well. He got into a wretched habit of awakening at five, with nothing to do till seven. He would lie still, not to disturb Effie May, in the bed by his, till his muscles were racked with staying in one position, and he crept out into the cold, shawled himself in a grotesque costume of overcoat over dressing-gown over pyjamas, and padded down to sit by the cold fire-place and smoke cigarettes and, with scarlet aching eyes, try to read magazines. On the first mornings of this insomnia, he made coffee for himself, but it became too much trouble, and he just sat, trembling with sleepiness--till he lay down, when the enemy leaped on him again. All the while, he was coldly hungry, yet when the waiter came from the inn with breakfast, at eight, he could only sip coffee.
Effie May hardly suspected this tortured prowling. She was a healthy young sleeper, that one!
In all his life, Myron had never thought much about himself, as an individual, detached from his work. He had been old-fashioned in having, even now, after the war, no fascinating Troubles, Complexities, Maladjustments or what not. He became aware of himself as Myron, a person naked, no longer sheltered by the walls of work, and he got very tired of that ever-present person. Once he awoke to see the familiar hand of Myron Weagle lying on the counterpane, visible in moonlight through the window and in the divided personality that sometimes persists for seconds after awakening, he quaked, 'That's that man, still here! Oh my God! How he bores me! Have I got to be with him all day?'
He brooded, as he had not before, on every one who had ill-used him--on Pye, Ora, Herbert and Julia Lambkin, Carlos Jaynes, Sheriff Beasy, his father. Hitherto he had had his quarrel and done something about it and forgotten it; now, a sick man, he sat in the empty hours of early morning going over and over his grievances.
He tried to rouse himself to healing activity, but the habit of sloth was breaking him, and when he decided to find a new job, he could not get down to writing letters, could not even plan what to do, whom to see. In such hours he longed to get wholesomely and thoroughly drunk, but he was afraid of that anodyne; he had seen its too successful drugging, not only in a thousand unhappy guests, hiding out in hotels, but in his own father and brother. Afraid--definitely he was afraid; and never before had he been afraid.
Effie May was sleepily sympathetic, but she did not know. It was to his mother, still in the kitchen at the American House--though a chef emeritus now--that he fled. And to her who would have understood fast enough, he could not confess, for what sustained her life was the belief that her son was a conqueror. With her he actually boasted a little of how completely he was controlling Pye and Shanks, while his father fussed about them and waggled his little beard and piped, 'You want to stand in with those fellows--you want to stand in with those fellows--they're on to this high-class city trade and after all, you're just a small-town boy! What you need is to come ask my advice oftener!'
But Ora was helpful. Ora stayed away! He came once, saw the lay of the land, tried to become chummy with Jimmy Shanks, was snubbed, and did not come back.
Through it all, Myron's one consolation, and surprise, was that he became acquainted with his own son.
Even after years of seeing hotel children snatch things from waiters, Myron liked to picture the little things as all clinging sweetness, like warm cotton. But when he faced it, he admitted that, at ten and a half, Luke was as hard and sharp as a steel blade. He was independent, demanding, logical, secret. He was less blundering than either of his parents, and if he was less softly playful than either of them, and seemingly less sympathetic, he was more resolute. He knew what he wanted--apparently, for just what it was, Myron could never quite find out. Luke felt himself a representative of the great and dazzling city of Mount Vernon and, condescending to Black Thread Centre, amused himself by leading the sixth grade in the Centre public school. He was as civil as he was secret; only two things made him scowl--Effie May's fussing about such private matters as his nails, and the habit, seemingly inborn in all hotel-guests, of trying to be showily friendly, and screaming, 'Well, old man, I suppose you think you'll run a hotel too, when you grow up.'
He just did not answer.
Here, then, was a new thing for Myron to be afraid of, just as parents in general had been afraid of their children's hidden opinions, ever since the war. He cultivated Luke as he had never cultivated Mark Elphinstone or any gilded guest of the Hotel Crillon. Almost timidly he invited Luke to go tramping up the snowy hill above the lake. He panted beside him, longing for some magic by which he could enter the mind of this citizen of a new world that was more distant from his America of the 1890's than was Italy or Tibet. He guessed that the only passport to his son's heart, territory, uncontrollable by any Versailles Treaty of domesticity, was silence. He had noted how irritated Luke was by his mother's questions, that is (for he was just, as children often are) when they were foolish: 'Did you eat the sandwiches that mother gave you for lunch all up?' and 'Why don't you get better marks in Reading when you do so good in Arithmetic?'