It seemed a sound notion to drive out to California, in May, with his newest girl, that altogether spiritual and entertaining young actress, Miss Dimity Dove, in his newest car, a Twelve. (But next year he would have a Sixteen). And Dimity, the darling, certainly had earned a rest, with her agonized labours of singing in 'Buckety-Buckety-Buck' for seven minutes daily and fourteen minutes on Wednesdays and Saturdays. What a journey! What a forth-faring into the magic of May! New book, new publishers, new talkie-contract, new girl, new car, new scented airs of spring!
'I certainly am a lucky guy! Though I have worked for it!' he confided to Dimity Dove. 'Nobody ever knows how an author toils! Fifteen hours a day, every day, and all the damn publishers and managers trying to do him all the time.'
Yet with all this promised vernal splendour, the journey was not completely successful.
Ah, Dimity Dove was not what he had thought! Fooled again! Poor, soft, fluttering tender heart, was it always to be the victim of the steely selfishness of women?
Dimity said that he was a rotten driver. Dimity said that he made her sick by singing 'Wee Rose o' the Rockies.' Dimity said that when by ill chance they came on a country hotel, he hogged the whole bed--she actually said the coarse word, 'hogged', she of the lissom little body and grey eyes, so truly, if illegally, named Dove!
She made him so furious that he could never think of any retort more brilliant than 'Oh, go to hell!'
He was glad now that he had planned, before starting, to chuck Dimity and take up again with Gloria Gurss, when he got to Hollywood.
He had intended to be very historic and romantic, for Dimity's benefit, about the trail of Daniel Boone that he knew so poignantly. But Dimity's most appreciative remark was 'Say, where do you think we are? Back in the Eighth Grade? Going historical--on me!'
He was silent for a hundred miles, save for the moment when he answered 'Oh shut up!' to Dimity's protest of 'For the love o' God, were you trying to hit that guy? Cancha drive on the righthan side?' All that hundred miles, a curiously smaller Ora Weagle, nervous behind the wheel, inwardly whimpered, 'A mess of pottage--a mess of pottage'.
In a moonless and unbroken darkness, Ora was blazing across the plains of Kansas. Through the smells of gasoline and of Dimity's powder and of candy and of new dogskin gloves, he caught the smell of corn bursting the dark earth.
His great headlights devoured and spewed out a village that was only a general store, a section house, a garage, and four cottages rimmed with cottonwoods. Ora was dreaming. He was homesick for a home he had never before seen.
'I'd like to be one of the fellows here. Sit and chin. Talk about corn.'
And, 'I don't think so much of being a smart literary guy in speakeasies,' he grieved.
He was sorry, that second, that he had in all his life nothing as strong and enduring as this Kansas night, that Dimity was nothing but a convenient companion whom he would abandon in Los Angeles. Myron wouldn't do that and--oh, curse Myron, that hypocritical old Puritan! He'd ruined Ora's entire life by his smug correctness!
But it was a shame about Dimity.
He took his right hand from the wheel for a second to stroke her knee, consolingly.
'Say, for the love o' Christ, will you keep your hands on the wheel, and quit pinching my knee?' said Miss Dimity Dove.
It was after nine, and Dodge City, with the first possible hotel, was two hours ahead of them when Ora shot, horn-shrieking, into the prairie town of Lemuel, Kansas.
'Say, we might be able to find a taverno where we can stay here,' said Ora. 'Think you could stand another hick hotel, Dim?'
'Hell with you!' snarled Miss Dove.
'Well, hell with you, too! But I'm sick of driving. Ay-up! Let's have a look,' he pleaded, as he saw the electric sign 'Commercial Hotel' hung out across the sidewalk.
He came up all standing, and stiffly crawled out, on the cement sidewalk. He was so tired! If he could just have fried steak and a bed that wasn't too buggy, it would be all right. Somehow, he couldn't go on, challenging that darkness of cornfield and derisive prairie road and the sullen scent of land.
He swayed from the pavement up on the wooden porch of the hotel, and looked through the plate glass window into the office.
Um. It wasn't so bad. Leather rocking-chairs in two long lines, with brass cuspidors between, and the pine desk and register that revolved on a brass standard at the end. Not so unlike the American House of his boyhood, except that it was cleaner. Yes, try it. The fellow grim-faced behind the desk, the night clerk, looked quite decent. . . .
Ora clenched his hands, bit his doubled knuckles choked down a shriek. The grim-faced fellow behind the desk, in the Commercial Hotel, Lemuel, Kansas, was his brother Myron.
He fled back to the car. He was starting it before he had settled on the seat. He babbled, 'No, no, no, no!'
'What's the matter with you now?' snapped Miss Dimity Dove.
He awoke. He drove more steadily than he had all these past eighty miles. He droned, 'Looks kind of sloppy. Guess we better stick on till Dodge City. We'll make it in a couple hours, and maybe we'll pick up a hot dog on the way . . . Oh, my darling!'
'Now don't get sentimental,' said Miss Dimity Dove, with virtuous smugness.
Ora felt old and tired. The one thing in the world he wanted to do was to hasten to Los Angeles, that he might get rid of Dimity. He was old and tired. He was fifty-one, he realized. But on the way to Dodge City he found some admirable beet-sugar whisky at a garage, and next morning, free of the accusing darkness of the cornfields, he nervously assured himself, 'Well, that's his fault! Certainly can't blame me!'
After a week he had ceased babbling to himself, 'Myron, General Director of the whole Pye-Charian chain, a night-clerk in a lodging-house in Lemuel, Kansas! Well, it certainly isn't my look-out!'
He never saw Myron again.
35
During his two years as manager of the Alfred Hotel, Milwaukee, Myron was not discontented. The Alfred, with its four hundred and fifty rooms, had been built in 1900. It was astoundingly ugly: a vast cracker box, broken only by lines of bow-windows from second floor to top. The dull lobby was on the second floor; the ground floor was taken up by shops--a cut-rate tailor shop, a 'book store' which sold Easter cards and Christmas cards and newspapers and magazines of Western stories and almost everything except books; a jewellery shop with a gilded clock that was a veritable antique for a sign.
The hotel lobby smelled, ineradicably, of soap.
No Milwaukee fashionable ever entered the Alfred, except on the unfortunate occasion of a country relative's coming to town. The guests were travelling-men, merchants from small towns in Wisconsin and Southern Minnesota, dolorous widows come to help bury cousins.
It was an American House magnified ten times--and Myron was happier there than he had been since his first days with the Pye-Charian Company.
For the Alfred was genuine. It was exactly what it purported to be: a city inn for ordinary people. It had no gilt, and the honest menu did not do agonizing things with pineapple. The old German brewing family who owned it did not expect extravagant profits; they trusted Myron utterly, and had him and Effie May and Luke in for enormous dinners with Rhine wine. Myron ran the place as efficiently and as simply as a veteran engineer runs a locomotive, and his self-respect came flooding back like a spring freshet. 'I am an hotel-man, after all, by God!' he crowed, sure that he knew the whole craft, from carpet tacks to truite sauce bleu. And in their pleasant midwestern flat, with its sun-porch where she could sit and embroider and listen to the radio from the living-room, Effie May felt only a little bewildered and lost, and the tall young Luke played basket-ball in school, and told his respectful new friends about the glories of New York.