Myron sighed, as he waited for the traitors. He thought nothing. There was nothing to think.
Otto Gritzmeier shambled in trying to look jolly. It was a ghastly look of jolliness--like the face of a Santa Claus coated with thick flour. Clark Cleaver was trembling.
Myron sat still, waving them to chairs.
'Well, what about it?' he said.
Gritzmeier's great red hands fluttered about his chin. 'Vat about vat?' he demanded belligerently.
Myron merely looked unhappy. 'I thought you two were loyal! You alone.'
Gritzmeier's eyes were damp, with the rheumy, undignified grief of old age. He sobbed.
'What happened?' Myron said more sharply.
With endless winding excuses, his accent almost unintelligible in his emotion, Gritzmeier told the story. Out of work after he had been discharged from the Black Thread Inn, his widowed daughter-in-law and three beloved grandchildren on his hands, he had got into debt before Myron had taken him on at the Fiesel. Then his grandson had infantile paralysis. He had spent thousands on the boy--and he did not have the thousands. He hated Fiesel, hated the sneakiness and the smirk of the old devil. 'He iss chust like a stale doughnut in a lunch-room, dat fellow!' wailed Gritzmeier. It angered him to think of working to make money for that human tin bank; angered him the more that Fiesel wanted none of his fine cooking, but only glorified hash. And the 'leetle boy' was so broken. He had felt that he was taking it out of Fiesel. He had never thought of injuring Myron.
He could not work out his happy plans of stealing without someone in the Front Office to falsify the accounts, and that one he found in his colleague at the Inn, Clark Cleaver.
'Yes. I understand, more or less,' Myron interrupted, not ungently. On Cleaver he turned with a terrible blazing: 'But you, you sanctified young pup! You turner on parallel bars! What the hell excuse had you?'
'Well, I just--I figured I could double it on the market and put it back. And Otto persuaded me . . .'
'All you characters in the Bible are alike! "Somebody tempted me and I did eat"! You make me sick, both of you. Either of you got any money left?'
'No-uh,' groaned Gritzmeier.
'Then I'll pay it, God damn you--I'll take it from my family for your damned families. What makes me sickest isn't you two, with your dirty little small-boy stealing--it's the fact that I'm supposed to be an executive, and I let this obvious stealing go on--that apparently you two didn't respect me enough to be loyal!'
'Oh, no, Chief, we . . .'
'Chief! Chief! Get out of my sight! I don't blame you. I that let you be weak. Only I'm not a superman. I simply can't stand the sight of you, or of myself. Get out!'
And he watched some large part of his honesty as a craftsman melt away, and he sat there in his prim, efficient office lonelier than he had been in all his life.
He paid to Fiesel the amount of the defalcation--slightly over thirty-five hundred dollars it came to, when the books had been checked.
He knew that Fiesel suspected him of having been guilty along with Gritzmeier and Cleaver. Why else, reasoned the good weasel, would a man willingly pay out money? Fiesel had never liked him, anyway; he felt, with justice, that Myron was a flippant fellow who had none of his own reverence for pennies. From now on, he bedeviled Myron in every little way. Fiesel's genius for observation would have made him a great journalist. For every torn towel or loose stair-rod that he had found before, he found a dozen, now, and he chattered to Myron about all of them.
And this time, Myron had no contract! He had at the beginning agreed to wait for a contract till they should 'see how they got along together'. Yet now he was not restrained and unresentful. The loss of Gritzmeier and Cleaver had shaken him into recklessness. He would growl at Fiesel, 'Kindly take that up with the housekeeper. I'm busy.'
He wondered slightly at the old man's simper. He knew that it meant something nasty.
In the late summer, he rejoiced in being able to slip away for a three-weeks motor trip with Effie May and Luke. He avoided equally the Lambkins and all hotels. They stayed at farmhouses, and for ten days camped out in a lakeside cottage.
He came back feeling calmer, surprised that he had ever let Fiesel make him jumpy. He'd just have it out with the old devil; really talk frankly. After all, Fiesel was a good hotel-keeper, at least in ingenuity about details. Yes. They'd have it out.
On Myron's first morning back in his office, Henry Fiesel came squeaking in, accompanied by a square-faced, youngish man with grave eye-glasses.
'Weagle,' peeped the old man, 'I want you to meet Mr. John Eggthorne, formerly of the Blakeslee Hotel Chain.'
'I'm pleased to . . .'
'Yes, you'll be interested in him, Weagle. Because he's your successor! As of this morning, Weagle!'
Mr. Eggthorne smiled.
Fiesel was watching Myron with all the affection of a copperhead.
Then, as when he had seen Dick Pye among the cobwebs in a closet, Myron laughed. His worried face cleared. 'Welcome, Brother Eggthorne! I'll have my personal stuff out of this desk in fifteen minutes. Be sure and inspect Room 504. There's a blown-out bulb there. Good morning!'
34
The years of the Great Depression were not at all lean for the well-known author, Mr. Ora Weagle. In 1930, '31, and '32, he had two plays on Broadway, and half a dozen scenarios in Hollywood, to which he generously lent half his time now. He made twenty-five thousand a year, and as he did not spend more than twenty-seven, he was financially comfortable. Early in 1932, he happened on a device which made him more famous than all his plays. He created the character of Old Aunty Depression for the radio, and in a voice sometimes facetiously feminine, sometimes splendidly virile, he gave to several million fond listeners the message that no Depression could defeat the America which had endured grasshoppers, William Jennings Bryan, earthquakes, the Civil War, hurricanes, and Henry Ward Beecher.
He received a thousand fawning letters a day, and ten stenographers (paid by the studio) were kept busy answering. Sometimes Mr. Weagle drifted in and laughingly glanced at a letter and at the charming response he was sending, but he grew tired of it, and at parties he often complained whimsically of his wearing duty to his radio audience.
His brother, Myron, a hotel clerk, had been fired from the Fiesel Hotel in New York, and Ora had lost track of him. He heard of him, now and then, without much interest--he had always tried to be friendly with Myron, but the fellow was, and he hated to say this of his own brother, but he had to admit that Myron was a suspicious crank. He was told, he did not know how accurately, that Myron had also been discharged from a hotel in Milwaukee for rudeness to guests, and that he had drifted still farther west, with his sappy wife and fresh kid.
He would--he was almost sure--have written to Myron if he had known his address.
He wondered sometimes if he had been just to Myron. The fellow had his merits. He was industrious and even generous. But--hell! Curious! He, Ora, the delicate poet, was a realist, while his brother, the drudge, the steel and rubber robot, was essentially a sentimentalist. Ora saw that life was a battle. It was, he admitted, just too bad that people were killed in battle, but strangely enough, they were! It was too bad that an essential rustic like Myron offended well-bred people, but strangely enough, he did! And Ora could not change it. He sighed a little, and had another drink, and planned to do a novel about the tragedy of a clodhopper like his brother who, because he was for a while and by chance able to buy decent city clothes, thought he was civilized, and then was hurled back into his manure heap.
Most of 1933 Ora was to spend in Hollywood, continuing his radio labours with a new character wittily christened Prosper E. Tee, while he prepared scenarios based on his own experiences as an aviator on the Roumanian, Russian, and Italian fronts in the Great War. He was pretty tired. He had slaved all winter on a magnificent book, 'Christ, the First Playwright', which his publishers (a new firm, for Ora had had to reject his former publishers, as crooks who did not keep their promises) ardently expected to equal the sales of 'The Man Nobody Knows' or even of Culbertson's manual of bridge.