Title:      Work of Art (1934)
Author:     Sinclair Lewis
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WORK OF ART

A Novel

by

Sinclair Lewis

1934

1

The flat roof of the American House, the most spacious and important hotel in Black Thread Centre, Connecticut, was lined with sheets of red-painted tin, each embossed with 'Phoenix, the Tin of Kings'. Though it was only 6.02, this July morning in 1897, the roof was scorching. The tin was like a flat-iron, and the tar along the brick coping, which had bubbled all yesterday afternoon, was stinging to the fingers.

Far below, in Putnam Street, a whole three stories down from the red tin roof, Tad Smith, the constable, said to Mr. Barstow, the furniture-dealer, 'Well, sir, going to be another scorcher, like yesterday.'

Mr. Barstow thought it over. 'Don't know but what you're right. Regular scorcher.'

'Yessir, a scorcher,' ruminated Tad, and went his ways--never again, perhaps, to appear in history.

But on the red tin roof above these burghers, a young poet was dancing; child of the skies, rejoicing in youth and morning and his new-found power of song. He was alone, except for Lancelot, the hotel dog, and unashamed he saluted the sun-god who was his brother. Whistling 'There'll be a Hot Time in the Old Town To-night', he strode up and down, his hands swinging as though he were leading a military band, his feet making little intricate patterns, his whole body lurching, his head bobbing from one side to the other in the exhilaration of youth and his own genius. Lancelot barked in appreciation--the first, this, of the applause the Master was some day to know.

The young poet was named, not very romantically, Ora Weagle, but he had read a good deal of Swinburne, Longfellow, Tennyson, and Kipling. He was fifteen years old, and already he perceived that he belonged to a world greater than Black Thread Centre. In fact, he despised Black Thread, and in particular all manner of things associated with the American House, as owned by his father, old Tom Weagle.

The recollection of the fabulous poem he had written last evening turned Ora's faun-like effervescence to awe, and (while Lancelot looked disappointed and settled down to scratching and slumber), he began to croon, then to murmur, then to shout--Ora, the young Keats, rejoicing in his masterpiece, aloft between Phoenix Roofing and the sky:

'Cold are thine eyes and the flanks of the hands of thee,
Cold as crushed snow on Connecticut hills,
But lo! I will break and dissever the bands of thee,
Till with blown flame thee the power of me fills!
See, I am proud, I am potent and terrible,
Dust of the highway I tread in my scorn!
Thou unto me art a field that is arable,
In sun-soaring splendour thy soul shall be born!'

'Gee, I don't know where I get it!' he whispered. The booming glory exalted him, and he paraded again, tossing his arms and chanting:

'Proud, I am proud,
      I am
           Potent and terrible,
                Potent and terrible,

Listen! I'm proud
      And
           Potent and terrible,
                Terrible, terrible proud!'

And the sun-god showered him with rays which clothed him in double glory as they were reflected from the red tin roof.

The whistle of the 6.07 train from the Berkshires reduced Ora from cloud-treader, bright with morning fire, to kindling-splitter for the American House. Though he still murmured 'Potent and terrible', he was drawn to look over the coping at the actualities of provincial life. Up from the station of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford walked a typical, an unavoidable, a cosmic travelling salesman, carrying his two grips. Below Ora, abysmal depths below, his brother, Myron Weagle, was watering the sidewalk with a despicable battered green can. Ora watched this tedious daily comedy with amused eyes. His generosity toward Myron was as much a part of his poet's sovereignty as fire and potency and terribleness.

Poor Myron! Myron had, Ora meditated, no imagination, no passion, no ambition, no consciousness of beauty, no desire to be creative or to do anything but keep busy with the trivial daily jobs that seemed to satisfy him. Though Myron was theoretically two years older--seventeen--Ora felt himself a generation older and more worldly. Even physically you could see the difference: Ora, so slim, quick, dark, with fine hair black like black glass; Myron, then tall and lumbering, with big red hands and an absurd natural pompadour of rope-coloured hair. Often Ora had thought that he himself was like a cat--sinuous, swift, independent; while Myron was the perfect dog, and no greyhound or Scottie, but a farm dog--clumsy, contemptibly good-natured, loyal to any insignificant master.

'Well, the poor devil,' thought Ora, 'he'll probably be happier in his hick way than I will. I'm going to New York! I'm going to make me some perfect Work of Art! Golly, I bet I suffer like all get out, like in Sentimental Tommy and David Copperfield, while he sticks here and scratches himself in the sun--like you, Lancelot!'

Ora watched his dull big brother clumping down the street to welcome the travelling salesman and take his bags.

'Like a servant!' Ora sighed.

'Come on, Lancelot, we gotta go down and get a little breakfast,' he commanded. But before Ora left the coping, he looked distastefully over Black Thread Centre, and found nothing there. From the roof of the American house, towering as it did a whole story above any other building in town, he could view the microcosm of the village.

(There were people, reflected Ora, to whom Black Thread Centre and East Black Thread made up the Hub of the universe, from which you measured distances to Rome and Shanghai and Tierra del Fuego; people to whom a train or a circus or a religion was important as it did or did not touch Black Thread. Ora marvelled at their provinciality. For him--oh, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Monte Carlo!)

He regarded with disfavour the red-brick village; Cal Bigus's store--clocks, watches, jewellery, bicycles--beside the hotel. Barstow's furniture emporium, undertaking in all its branches, across the street. The frame station of the N.Y., N.H., and Hartford with its greasy platform. The village square and the grey cast-iron statue of a Civil War soldier. He could, it is true, see the light-flecked Housatonic river across the tracks, and on the other side of town, a hill thick with elm and maple and spruce.

'But even so, just sort of ordinary country. Nothing historical. No castles. Aah! Come on, you, Lancelot!' said Ora.

He thumbed his nose at the stolid Myron, carrying the travelling-man's bags, and skipped to the trap-door, singing, 'Potent and terrible'. He paused to muse, 'Nothing romantic. Not a doggone thing! What a name for a town! Black Thread Centre!'

The Reverend Thaddeus Prout, of Beulah, Connecticut, had Sunday after Sunday, through 1637, warned his complacent people that they must guard the hill-gap to the north and east against the Indians. 'I preach unto you eternal mercy and I also preach unto you eternal vigilance,' roared the old pastor in the high pulpit of the church. 'I preach to you the incessant practice of prayer . . . and the incessant practice of musketry, as I learned it in His Majesty's Own Right and Royal Worcestershires. I tell you that this hill-gap is a black threat . . . a black threat . . . a black threat to our peace and well-being!'

He said it so often that his parishioners began jestingly to call the settlement north and east of them (a settlement of one log tavern and store, and four cabins) 'the Black Threat'. They jested too warmly and too soon. When the Indians did tiptoe through the gap and circle Beulah, the settlers fought with axe and rifle, led by the Reverend Thaddeus, with a sabre-belt round his broadcloth and his white beard smeared with blood, but the goodly village was almost wiped out. Thereafter, the settlement beyond them was called 'Black Threat' with more anxious reverence.

It was a young government surveyor who put the name down as 'Black Thread' in 1810, considering, in his Harvard manner, the probabilities of spellings and the idiocy of myths.

Of all this Ora had never heard--nor anyone else, perhaps, in Black Thread Centre in 1897.

Followed by a subdued Lancelot, the subdued kin of the sun-god crept down the ladder from the roof into the hotel, into narrow hallways carpeted with straw matting worn in channels like foot-paths, into the enveloping smell of cheap pink soap and cabbage and sweaty clothes and old cotton sheets. The American House had thirty-four bedrooms; twenty-nine singles and five doubles. It was, the Weagles considered, a vigorously modern hotel; it had gas instead of kerosene lamps; and in the office was a telephone, in a long dark box like an up-ended coffin.

Each of the single rooms--Ora could see them as he passed open doors--contained one wooden bed, the varnish a little cracked, one straight chair, one strip of carpet beside the bed, lace curtains, very dingy, a gas light in so crafty a position on the wall that it neither illuminated the mirror nor enabled the guest to read in bed, one wash-stand with pitcher and bowl, painted with lilacs or a snow scene, a slop jar standing on a strip of linoleum not very successfully imitating marble, with white oilcloth tacked on the wall behind it, one cake of streaky soap, one thin towel, and a concentration of the prevailing smell.

But the double rooms were more elaborate. They added an extra towel, an extra straight chair, a table, and usually a calendar on the wall.

The mattresses on the beds were lumpy and sagging in the middle. The sheets were coarse, scratchy cotton--though, with Edna Weagle, Mrs. Tom Weagle, as housekeeper, they were immaculate and free of the bedbug. Edna spoke often and bitterly of bedbugs and pursued them daily. The blankets were of cotton and the comforters filled with cotton batting. They were very heavy and not warm. On winter nights, experienced travelling salesmen laid their overcoats on top them.

Though he was so used to the hotel, his home these years, that he rarely saw it, to-day Ora was so heightened by poetic triumph that for ten seconds he did stop to look into No. 20.

'What a hole!' he sighed. 'Sometime I'll have a room with a great big leather chair and a bed with silk sheets! Maybe black!'

He was too Black Thread Centre, too 1897, to admit that he was considering how voluptuous his slimness, the fine whiteness of his body, would seem against black silk sheets.

In the hall he met Flossy Gitts, the second maid. Now Ora was fifteen and Flossy was twenty, but she was generous and without prejudice: she had ringlets and what was then known as a bust; she dallied happily with any male from the age of ten to one hundred, though she preferred a ripe travelling-man of thirty-five, who wore a Masonic ring and was willing to hire a livery stable rig to give a girl a good time.

'Say, lissen, Ora, Myron is sore as a boil you ain't cleaned the basement and the sample-rooms!' said Flossy.

'The hell with him!' said Ora.

'Yeh, but what he'll do to you!'

'Aw, give us a kiss!'

'You behave yourself now! Oh! Why, Ora Weagle, you oughta be ashamed yourself, acting like that!'

'I am potent and terrible!'

'Gee, I bet you swallowed the dictionary--all them words! Lissen, Ora, I'll help you clean the basement, soon's I do No. 23 and 15.'

'All right, sweetie!'

Ora swaggered down to the 'office'. He did swagger. For all his conquests among the village girls of his own age, this was his first triumph as a gigolo, a young gallant cajoling an older woman.

The walls of the office were lined with cane rockers alternating with brass spittoons. The desk was of grained pine. Back of it hung the room-keys, attached to chunks of wood so that they might not be carried off, and on it were a pen stuck in a potato, and a register swung on a brass swivel. The register was always open, of course, for hotel-men of that period knew nothing else so certainly as that, if the register was ever closed, you would get no more business that day.

There was no one in the office.

Ora was relieved not to see Myron. Perhaps, after carrying the travelling-man's grips to his room, he had hustled out for early-morning shopping--old Tom was supposed to do all the buying, but he often slept late, almost till seven, and Myron was simpleton enough to be willing to run out for an extra pound of bacon in case of a breakfast rush. Ora felt free again. He slipped through the dining-room and billiard-room to the bar. If Jock McCreedy, the regular bartender, was on, he would be able to coax a tiny glass of beer before breakfast. But when Ora opened the door into that haven, with its cool smell of beer, magnificent mahogany bar, delicate pyramids of glassware, and that greatest painting Ora had ever seen--a nude lady lying among cushions scarlet and saffron and emerald--he hesitated, for it was Myron who stood behind the bar, with an ebony slicer removing the excess foam from a glass of beer for the first morning customer.

'Hey, you, come here!' thundered Myron.

'What's eating you?' whimpered the sun-god's heir.

He edged in, irritably facing Myron's sergeant-major eye. Seen close, Myron's tow-coloured exuberance of hair was stiff, as though his scalp had some extra vitality. His strong skin was of the Norse snow-fed pallor that no sun ever tanned, no adolescence ever blotched. Myron had, Ora sometimes admitted, a certain broad-shouldered power and health in him--if he could only have Ora's imagination, instead of being a mere human broom standing up-ended!

'Ora! You haven't swept the balconies for two days! You didn't have any kindling, when I started the range this morning, and the wood-box about half full! And the basement--here's a travelling-man just come in this morning; wants a sample-room right away, and both of 'em dirty!'

Feeling safe, across the bar, Ora jeered, 'What're you going to do about it?'

Through the air flew a tiger.

Myron had stepped on a beer keg and vaulted the bar. He was shaking Ora like a kitten. 'I'll whale the everlasting daylights out of you, that's what I'll do! I'm sick and tired of your loafing! The only person around this hotel that never does any work! Do you clean the sample-rooms and so on and so forth right now, or do I lick you?'

'All right! All right! Gosh! Gee whiz! You don't have to act like a hyena!'

'With you, I do! Now git! I'll let you have breakfast first, and then . . .'

Ora, already at the door, popped his small head in to retort, 'You'll let me have breakfast! It ain't yours to let! I guess it belongs to Pa and Ma!'

But he retreated with speed. He knew these 'lickings' by Myron: rare but extraordinarily painful and lasting.

Alice Aggerty, the bulky colleague of Flossy Gitts, was serving breakfast. Standing between two travelling-men she was chanting: 'Omeal, choicaveggs, baconam, steakchops, sausage, wheacakes.' Ora himself breakfasted poetically on oatmeal, pork chop with an egg, wheat cakes, bacon, coffee, and just a nibble or two of johnny-cake, and toast smeared with plum jam. The coffee was weak, with grounds floating on it. The butter was artificially coloured and, as it had come out of a tub preserved with salt, there were salt crystals apparent on the brilliantly yellow pat. With the chop, which had been fried in lard, there were last night's potatoes, warmed up. If Ora's delicacy and vision were offended by this coarse plenty, there were no signs of it as he wolfed it down.

He ate at the family table, behind the two long ones for the public. The dining-room had green wall-paper with yellow roses, bare floor and, for splendour, an enormous black walnut buffet adorned with silver cruet stands and fruit-and-nut bowls of imitation cut-glass--thriftily empty save at Sunday noon. Beside the double door, on a small table with a decorous white linen cover, was a large bowl of toothpicks.

The cloths of the long tables were clean, but that of the Weagle family table was somewhat geographic, with its islands of egg yolk, catsup, gravy, and butter.

While Ora was breakfasting, his father joined him.

Tom Weagle had a corded brown neck which his watery beard did not quite conceal. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles, crookedly, and behind them his expression was wistful and rather vague. His nose was red. Though he seemed frail, he had the leathery hands of a farmer.

'Morning,' said old Tom.

'Morning,' said Ora.

'Did you sweep the basement, like you was told?'

'Sure.'

'Well . . .'

That seemed to cover the subject. Tom, after ordering oatmeal, steak, fried eggs, and a double order of wheats--all of which would vanish without evident effect into his meagre corporation--was silent. He was long-winded enough with travelling-men, in the narration of anecdotes about old days on the farm, the wickedness of guests who did not pay, servants who did not work, and the wonders of his one trip to New York, but with his family he saw no gain in wasting wit.

They chewed opposite each other, Tom looking vague, Ora looking sleepy. But Ora was meditating like a quiescent volcano.

That big brute, Myron. . . . Didn't know any way of trying to deal with a slick brain like his brother's except by threatening to lick him! . . . And such stinking melodrama--vaulting the bar, like that big, fat, ridic'lous hero in the melodrama that played here under canvas last week, 'Barry O'Leary's Own Company in Bonnets o' Dundee'. Myron wouldn't even know the meaning of the word melodrama! Huh! Yuh! Sure! No brains, no education! Could Myron make a line like 'Till with blown flame thee the power of me fills'?

He could not!

Ora felt better, much better.

He was damped a little by the spectacle of a fat, moist forefinger beckoning from the door to the kitchen (the white paint of the door was worn in a blotch halfway up by the hips of urgent waitresses pushing out with trays of dirty dishes). It was the finger of a lady who had the honour of being not only cook of the American House but also mother of Ora Weagle--Edna Weagle, who combined the seemly plumpness of a cook with the worried intensity of the wife of a drunkard. Ora slowly forsook blown flame and potency and terror; he scooped up the last sweetness of syrup and crumbs of wheat cake with a spoon, while Alice Aggerty, the waitress, scowled at him. To think of that darn' boy using up a whole spoon, and it would have to be washed now, for just one mouthful!

Ora sauntered gracefully into the heat and the smell of frying grease in the kitchen.

'What do you want, Ma?' he complained.

'Your Pa has got to drive over to Beulah this morning, about some chickens, and we're short of lard, and I want you should go to Aldgate's sometime this morning and get a pail of it.'

'Gosh, I gotta do everything around this hotel--clean the basement and sweep the balconies and fill the wood-box and everything!'

'Yes, it's too bad about you!' Edna Weagle scoffed, and wiped her hands on the not very clean apron round the plumpness of her gingham-covered middle. 'I've only been working since five! You get that lard, or I'll have Myron . . .'

'Myron! Myron! Myron! Ain't I ever going to hear anything all my life but Myron! Me highest stand in the whole Soph'more Class, and him way down near the foot in the Senior!'

'Yes, baby, I know. Yes. I guess that's right. Maybe you ain't suited to this kind of work, like Myron is. I do believe and hope that some day you'll be a dentist or a lawyer or even a preacher! There.' She stroked his hair--which Ora hated, because she smelled of soft yellow soap and doughnut fat. 'You just go ahead reading and studying and all. But you won't forget my lard, will you!'

'No, sure not!'

Recognized for the pundit he was, Ora swaggered upstairs, to find the fair, fond Flossy Gitts and to persuade her to help him sweep the inevitable basement. She grumbled a little at having to leave a bed half made, but she came, and the sample-rooms and the furnace-room were cleaned and made beautiful. It was a satisfactory division of labour: Ora talked and Flossy worked. She swept, dusted, and nailed down a loose board on one of the long tables which, set across trestles in the sample-room, would presently bloom in un-Black-Thread-like splendours of the Orient; with silk Scotch plaid blouses, Eleganto brand leather belts in two colours, dainty Dot veils, gauntlet gloves; in fact, with all the choicest wares of M. & I. Vollschutz's Ladies Wear Company of New York, Cincinnati, and Kansas City, for the inspection of the ardent merchants of Black Thread Centre--this modern Oriental market, where the vendors did not squat about fires of camels' dung, but in check suits, smoking cigars, standing upright with the freedom and efficiency of 1897 in America, chose beauty with an eye to profit.

'You've done it pretty good, Flossy. Come 'ere and kiss me!' said Ora. 'Bye! See you later!'

He left her--somewhat perplexed, as later many ladies were to be, as to whether she had done too much or too little--and galloping up the stairs he swung through the alley behind the American House to Putnam Street, slinkingly followed by Lancelot. He had a moment's shudder at the greasy garbage in the alley, the debris of hotels and the whole frowziness of communal living, but he forgot it in the clean hot sun of the street, and Lancelot, again convinced that he was the dog of a sun-god and not the dog of an hotel, chased an imaginary cat and after it barked 'Potent and terrible'.

It must be stated that Lancelot was so named only by Ora. To the rest of the hotel personnel he was 'Spot' or merely, 'Get out of that'.

Not once, all day, did Ora remember the lard for his mother.

After all! There was a story, once much read, about Mary and Martha. And it was Ora's vacation time, it was summer, and beyond Black Thread Centre, up on Elm Hill, there were things more worth the inquiry of a young poet than lard and the state of a sample-room for the travelling representative of M. & I. Vollschutz.

2

Up to the little groves and hollows, to the peace and freedom of Elm Hill, pounded a young poet and his dog. But they stopped a moment at the garden of the man who had taught Ora that much existed in this world besides the lilies and Sunday-morning languors, the roses and strictly respectable raptures of Connecticut. This was the Reverend Waldo Ivy, the Episcopal pastor. Despite his name, Mr. Ivy was round, red, and breathless. He loved liturgy, tradition, cleanliness, and poetry. Black Thread thought him 'queer'. In ten years in this church he had found precisely one soul who understood his gospel, that beauty is truth, truth beauty, and that was Ora Weagle.

He loved to be called, and never save by one was called, 'Padre'. Again that one was Ora. Ora had probably got it from Kipling.

He had taught Ora everything he knew--provided Ora did know anything.

In High School, in which he was to be a Junior, this coming Fall, Ora had learned that the ways and finalities of literature are thus: In the far past--ever so long ago, even before the American Revolution--there were good writers. Quite good. There was a gentleman named Caesar, who went to England and Americanized the natives. There was Cicero, who objected to a man named Cataline, and so killed all gangsterdom for ever. There was Virgil, who was somehow very beautiful. And--though these were actually read only in swell schools like Andover--there were Greeks, like Homer and Sophocles and Aeschylus, who were pretty important. Then the history of literature skipped a long while--two hundred or maybe two thousand years--and you came to Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, Tennyson, Longfellow, Whittier, Walt Whitman, and Poe. These authors were all dead. In fact the Age of Literature was dead, like the Age of Chivalry, though there were some pretty good hack writers living now--William Dean Howells and Mark Twain and a Frenchman named Anatole France. But the Reverend Waldo Ivy had told Ora that literature was only beginning; that the world's struggle for beauty and justice had never been so glorious as now. The boy's eyes lightened, his breathing grew rapid, as Mr. Ivy testified to his gospel. And in that little Episcopal study, smelling of the leather bindings of old Greek books and the buckram of new novels, Mr. Ivy at last trusted one disciple, and read to him:

Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,
    Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,
Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble
    The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink,
Here now in his triumphs where all things falter,
    Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
                    Death lies dead.

It was such a little study, Mr. Ivy's, just behind the church; a plaster room, looking on a garden seven feet square, with a cement walk which he called his ambulatory. There were stiff crocuses and timid pansies in the garden. On the walls of the study were pictures of S. Paulo Fouri le Muri, of Thoreau and Emerson. The priest, after he had read Swinburne, looked at Ora diffidently and said:

'There is a greater poetry than all of this. It's from the Bible. I wonder if you know it. You see, my dear boy, the Fathers of my Church knew, so long ago, all that afflicts us now. Would you like to hear it?'

'Sure!' said Ora.

'This is perhaps the greatest poetry that has ever been written. Listen, my son:

"Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.

"Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

"Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity."'

Mr. Ivy looked up, over the eyeglasses that creased his red face.

The boy was weeping.

'I didn't know,' he sobbed, 'that the Bible was poetry! I thought it was nothing but religion!'

But that had been two years ago.

This July morning, when Ora condescendingly nodded to Mr. Ivy, over the fence, he was not awed. For he himself was a poet now, with no need for reverence for the old stiffs that were his rivals.

'Ora,' said Mr. Ivy, 'do you know the Wordsworth sonnet that begins, "The world is too much with us--late and soon"?'

'Sure. It's swell. Well, gotta be hustling on,' said Ora.

He did not know the sonnet, but then--it was morning, and vacation, and he lurched on, followed by a lurching Lancelot.

As it was called 'Elm Hill', naturally it was covered mostly with spruce and pine. There was a secret hollow which, Ora felt, no one save himself had ever discovered. He lay in its hot, resinous sweetness, while Lancelot panted and coughed and scratched beside him. He dreamed--the formless, visual dreams of a young poet: Castles. Girls milk-white. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree. Sleek greyhounds with silver bells. God through unending aeons drowsing on his throne of sharp-cut granite. Swords slender as pain. California and sunlight intolerable upon yellow poppies. Wings of the albatross. Wild white horses galloping through the desert, beneath an orange mesa. An archbishop chanting mass, in vestments stiff with gold. A starving explorer staggering into a Tibetan village. An English cottage among roses. An air-ship--only there could never be any air-ships, of course!--flashing through the empyrean at sixty miles an hour. . . . Empyrean! What a lovely word! Myron wouldn't know a word like 'empyrean'!

I saw Osirian Egypt kneel adown before the vine-wreath crown. Yea, with red sin the faces of them shine; but in all these there was no sin like mine. In the highlands, in the country places, where the old plain men have rosy faces, and the young fair maidens quiet eyes. The Courts where Tamshyd gloried and drank deep. A woman wailing for her demon lover. Set forth in something, something mail, to search in all lands for the Holy Grail. Delectable. Faerie. Clad in white samite, mystic, wonderful. Glamour. Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea. The owl for all his feathers was acold. Lances, lances dipped in light.

'Oh, dear God, if I could only do it!' whimpered Ora.

Like most healthy young animals, Ora was perpetually hungry. Yet rather than go back to the horrors of the American House, to his mother nagging, his father nagging, Myron nagging, and Alice Aggerty or Flossy Gitts intoning, 'Oysstew, creamtomato, steak, chop, Irish stew, roaspork, vegables,' he lunched on a corn pone which he had thoughtfully stolen from the kitchen while talking to his mother.

'What nahm de ploom will I use?' he inquired of Lancelot. 'Golly! A writer can't be called Ora Weagle!'

Thunder cracked, lightning vaulted, and inexplicably out of the unknown came his nahm de ploom, Marcel Lenoir!

'Jiminy, what a peach!' murmured Ora. 'I just don't know how I do it! Marcel Lenoir! What a beaut! Hey, you, Lancelot! Hear that! Marcel Lenoir!'

Thus, in a fragrant piney hollow, was born a poet-hero: Marcel Lenoir.

Pete Breyette, who was the reportorial staff of the Black Thread Centre Star and Tidings had just finished an important story,

Mrs. Trumbull Lambkin last Thursday entertained the Epworth League. Coffee, doughnuts, and ice-cream were served, the Reverend Swan gave a brief prayer, and a good time was reported by all.

Pete leaned back, pocketing his pencil, and sighed with contentment. He looked down at the yellow copy-paper. There it was, complete literature, the crude fact immortalized. But he sprang up, all pride in his style oozing away, for through the wide window of the one-story Star and Tidings building Ora Weagle was staring. Now Pete was a man of eighteen, and Ora but fifteen, yet Pete knew that, seasoned journalist though he was, competent to cover the G.A.R. parade or even the County Fair, Ora had a genius beyond him. He beckoned, and Ora came in, murmuring, 'Marcel Lenoir!'

'Huh?'

'Marcel Lenoir. My pen-name. Like it?'

'Gee--yes--that's swell. Something like a name. Lissen, Ora, what d'you plan to do?'

'Whaddha I plan to do? Whaddha you mean?'

'About your literary career.'

'Oh! Well, I'll tell you.' Ora sat down, tilted his chair, and put his heels on the desk like Pete at his best. He accepted a Sweet Caporal cigarette and smoked it in the manliest fashion, coughing only a little. 'I'll tell you. It's like this. First, I'm going to be a reporter. Of course you got to be a reporter before you can become an author--any reporter will tell you that. I guess I'll be on the New York Sun, but I won't be ready to accept a position there for two-three years; think I ought to have a little more schooling first. Then I'll wander--anywhere outside this doggone ole town! I think maybe I'll accompany an exploring party to Africa or like that. Then I'll get a job as secretary to some big author--say like Mark Twain. I guess he'd be pretty glad to have a secretary that was a literary fellow himself! And educated. Then I'll be ready to write. First I'll do poetry. But what I want to head for is big novels. I expect I'll be the Dickens of America. Golly! With a big house and a swell pair of trotters and six-seven suits of clothes! That's how I plan it. Course I may change my mind. I might go out and own a big ranch in the West for a while, instead of Africa. But time enough t' decide that later.'

'You certainly got ambition, Ora. I shouldn't wonder if you might do all that.'

'Why, certainly I will! Whaddha you think!'

'Well, why don't you get out of this hick town now?'

'Oh, it's my hayseed brother. He makes me stick here in school, when I already know a whale of a lot more than the teachers, only they can look at the book while you're reciting and catch you on dates. God, Pete, you don't know what I suffer from Myron, the big bully! He hasn't got brains enough to hate working in an hotel! Hotel-keeping! What a business! Havin' to be nice to drunk guests! Smell of cooking! Making beds all morning! What a job! And he doesn't even beef about it. Myron's got no imagination, no pride, no sense of beauty, you might say. He just naturally couldn't never understand how a real artist feels, never!'

3

Myron Weagle was seven years old when his father sold their rocky and isolated farm north of Beulah and moved to Black Thread Centre, with a notion of having ease and fortune in this metropolis of 1600 people. The father, Tom Weagle, was complacently certain that he could succeed as livery-stable keeper, grocer, undertaker, electric and herbal healer, or in any other of a dozen arts, but he chose keepin' hotel because his good wife, Edna, was a renowned cook. Her doughnuts and lemon meringue pie were without rivals in Beulah County, and at the Laurel Grove Congregational church-suppers, her scalloped potatoes and devil's-food cake roused even more exclamations than Mrs. Lyman Barstow's potato salad and sweet-pickle relish. She was also, Tom considered, a great hand at keeping bedrooms clean, though she was rather sluttish about her own neck and nails and hair, and her aprons were always smeared.

They did not, at first, enter the glories of keeping the American House, with its thirty-four bedrooms. They began in an eight-bedroom boarding-house, in the old Tatam Mansion, and within a month, Mother Weagle's troubles had started. Tom had always had a nose for apple-jack and now, with nothing much to do and twenty-four choreless hours a day to do it in, he had the leisure, along with money from the farm, to soak diligently. He had always resented the seclusion of the farm he had inherited from his father and had placidly let run down; he had resented having so few neighbours to whom he could boast of his ability to make a million dollars. Now, Tom sat in the back of Earle Peter's grocery, guzzling apple-jack, or with unshaven cronies and a jug of white mule, he rowed down to the Island, to fish, and crawled home in the evening with his jaw hanging and trembling.

Mother Weagle whisked him out of sight of the boarders and, after trying to do her duty in the way of scolding him--but she never could really scold anyone--she let him sleep it off. When they first took the boarding-house, Tom found plenty of little busynesses--nailing up shelves, laying a cement walk, which immediately cracked. But as he gradually found himself free for urbanity and apple-jack, he did nothing whatever, save carve at table when, if ever, he was sober.

And Myron became, before he was ten, the Man of the House.

Mother Weagle liked Myron and Ora equally; Tom preferred Ora who, even at the age of five, when they first came to Black Thread, regarded his father as an exciting character. When he was seven, Ora would sit in the flat unpainted punt which Tom had moored in the shadow of willows that leaned over to lap the water, and gape and bounce while Tom held his long bamboo fishing-rod over the side, took occasional pulls at the jug (leaning it on his shoulder and deftly tilting it up), and told endless stories--some of them almost true: How he had killed the last bear found in the state of Connecticut. How, as a young man, he had gone clear out to Michigan and seen Indians who, it seemed, always said, 'Ugh, me heap big Injun'. How, as a boy of thirteen at the end of the Civil War, he had seen the last Connecticut troops march out, and they were all six feet tall and very valiant, and most of the officers ran about six-foot-six and carried swords four feet long. And he would sing:

'Oh, bury me not on the lone pe-rar-ie,
Where the wyuld cooooooyotes will howl over me
Where the rattlesnakes hiss, and the wyund blows free,
Oh, bury me not on the lone pe-rar-ie!'

Ora leaned forward, transported from boarding-house kitchens and greasy school desks to a realm of soldiers and cow-punchers and lone mountains. And as much as his father he resented it when they returned to the monkey-like scolding of Mother Weagle and the scowls of Myron. They both suspected, as they sneaked in to their late supper of hash and coffee, that while they had been gone, gallantly trying to help the struggling household by catching fish, Myron had dined on the fat of the land--the thickest steaks, the hottest clam chowder, and three helpings of butter.

Before he was eleven, Myron had been trained in housework--'just like a doggone girl', Ora snivelled, when he had been particularly slapped. Myron wiped dishes, he sometimes washed them; the big lummox could shine a water-glass better than his mother, and his large hands were firm in handling a fruit-dish. He swept, he made beds, he fried or boiled the eggs, he could cook a chop. He learned from his mother's anxious whisperings to cajole an irritated guest by listening rapturously to any complaint and bubbling, 'I'll get Ma to fix it up right away quick'. He even learned, watching his mother, a little about cuts of meat, and how to tell a ripe melon or a sound pear.

But he learned more from a certain boarder than from his mother.

The star boarder was Miss Absolom, the elegant New York lady who taught in the high school. In the dining-room, Myron watched Miss Absolom, while he helped Minnie, the hired girl, wait at table. Feeling that, as a farm boy, he ought to learn table-manners, he spied on all the ten boarders. He noted that Horace Tiger, of the New York Dry Goods Store, had a strikingly refined way of drinking coffee: when he raised his cup his little finger stuck out as though it detached itself from the coarseness of mere guzzling. Miss Abbott, the milliner, picked her teeth behind an ample napkin held up before her face. It was evident to a waiter, standing behind her, that she did a great deal of struggling and gouging, but he was edified by her modesty. And contrariwise he was certain that, though they had always done it on the farm, it was not nice in old Mr. and Mrs. Glenn to blow loudly on their soup and, drinking coffee, to leave the spoon in the cup and anchor it with a clutching thumb.

But Miss Absolom never seemed to have any manners, good or bad. He never could remember just what she had done. On the infrequent occasions when she did use a toothpick, she just used it, without orgies of delicacy. She did not make much of laying her knife and fork across her plate when she was finished; the others were very clattering and exacting about it, but somehow her knife and fork were there.

'Gosh, she's so easy about things!' meditated Myron, as he polished the heavy plated cruet-stand with its bottles of catsup, vinegar, pepper sauce, and Worcestershire. 'I wonder if that's how you ought to do--so's people don't notice how swell your manners are?' It was a profound and disturbing theory. Not get any credit for being refined? What was the use, then? Well, he'd have to do it. He'd rather be like Miss Absolom, thin, dark, resolute, straight-backed, than like the plump and puffing Horace Tiger.

He was taking a cup of tea to Miss Absolom on an evening when she had what was then known as a 'headache' and had not come down to supper.

'Come in; talk to me,' she demanded.

According to the tradition of exotic New York ladies marooned in small towns in 1891, the room should have been voluptuous with Turkish hangings, a samovar, and Chinese lanterns--such lanterns as glorified a strawberry festival on a Black Thread lawn. Actually, there were none of these Oriental splendours. But the pine table was covered a foot deep with books; beside it was a chintz-covered chair; and covering the bed was a Chinese rug. (That was funny, Myron always thought--a rug on a bed! But it did look kind of nice; made the white iron bedstead seem kind of less ornery.) Otherwise the room was of the same clean, bare, plaster-and-matting simplicity as the rest of the house.

Miss Absolom was in the deep chair. 'Sit down!' She waved to the bed, and he teetered there, embarrassed.

For a boy in the sixth grade to talk privily with a teacher way up in the high school was for a private to be chummy with a major-general. But at the age of eleven he was, after four years of being right-hand man in a boarding-house, uncannily acquainted with human beings and their loves, their secret whisky bottles, their dirty tricks in the matter of weekly bills, generosities to one another regarding hot-water bottles and store candy. He was, in fact, as sharply aware of human ways as any normal boy of eleven would be if he were not squelched by the jealous demand of parents and teachers that they be allowed to do all the talking and deciding. Yet for all this premature knowledge, he was embarrassed when he met Miss Absolom not as a boarder, to be bedded, boarded and billed, but as a social acquaintance.

'Sit down, Myron. Like keeping a boarding-house?'

'Oh, I guess I like it all right. I guess so. Gee, I bet sometimes you don't like it much in a little place like this, after New York!'

'Not so bad. Escape from too much Hebraic Bach and Hebraic Kaffeeklatsch and Hebraic cousinry.'

'Hunh?'

'I mean . . . don't mind it. I'm just trying to be funny. And gallant, or something nasty like that. It doesn't mean anything. Myron! What are you going to do with yourself? You work hard, I've noticed. What's your ambition?'

'I dunno. I guess maybe a doctor.'

'Why?'

'I dunno. I guess it would be kind of interesting, taking care of people . . . I mean . . . learnin' all about them.'

'You want to get away from here?'

'Oh, I guess so. I never thought about it much.'

'Well, my child, whether you go or stay, you must learn to make a little better effect. I mean, be more careful about how you dress. I don't mean like Horace Tiger, with his silly white vests and his hair that smells like a barber-shop. . . . You'll be a big, impressive man, some day. You may as well take advantage of it by dressing well. Let me see your nails.'

He exhibited them, shyly. They were, within reason, clean, but they had been hacked short with his mother's larger shears.

'Don't you think mine look a little neater?' demanded Miss Absolom. Her almond-shaped nails were probably nothing extraordinary but to Myron they seemed exquisite, sleek as polished agate. 'You can get a nail-file for ten cents at the drug-store. File 'em, my child, file 'em. Now let me do your tie. You've just jerked it together.'

She patiently unknotted and re-did his slightly frayed blue bow, patting the ends. He leaned over, faint with her warm feminine scent. 'Now look in the mirror.' He marvelled at the cockiness of his tie. It had, now, a waist and symmetrical ends.

'I'll sure work on it!' he said fervently. 'Ora always can tie his good, and him only nine! But he won't work.'

'And listen, young man. I've been observing you. You bully Ora, to make him work. I don't blame you. He's a lazy little hound. But a solemn young man like you, earnest about all good works, must watch himself in a thing even more fundamentally spiritual than nail-filing. You must wrestle with the Lord and try, a little, to keep from being a prig. Tall, clean, earnest young gentlemen have a tendency that way . . . as do intellectual Jew girls!'

'Gee!'

'A prig is a person who . . . well, you see . . . of course when it comes to defining. . . . Well, a prig is a person who thinks he's marvellous, and lets everybody see it. He's . . . oh, he's like a man in a wagon who keeps jeering at all the people on foot, "Look at me! I'm riding!" Even when you're riding, and Ora is snaking along in the moral dust, don't feel too proud. The horse may run away!'

'I . . . guess . . . maybe . . . I . . . see . . . how . . . you . . . mean!'

It seemed to Miss Absolom obvious that he did not. But he did.

It is one of life's ironies that the suggestion of a passer-by--a man met on a train, the unknown author of an editorial, an actor repeating a pure and pompous sentiment in a melodrama--may be weightier than years of boring advice by parents. Myron, when he became a man and would normally have been too absorbed in affairs to think about clothes, years after he had forgotten Miss Absolom's name, remembered her rebuke of his carelessness and uneasily, unwillingly, was forced to dress the part of a successful urbanite, which, in despite of Carlyle, had an excellent effect on his self-respect and power to command men. He came to believe that Miss Absolom and he had talked many times, many hours. They had not. She was a goddess in his private mythology, with the indestructible sway of a goddess, immortal because she had never existed.

Whether she also cured him of potential priggishness cannot be said. Probably, like other 'successes', Myron was priggish. Nor is it certain that the enjoyment of priggishness is not one of the most innocent and wholesome of pleasures, as seen in the careers of most bishops, editors, sergeants major, instructors in athletics, and Socialist authors.

The next day Myron took twenty-five cents out of the two dollars and sixty-five that were his savings and bought a red tie, which he wore to Sunday School. It was violently red, and Myron considered it very choice. Also, he had filed his nails to the quick. They hurt considerably. But Miss Absolom did not even notice him. He whimpered, but he was the more determined to impress her; to impress all the shrewd, cynical Miss Absoloms in the world, and make them recognize him as one of them.

On Saturday evenings, Mother Weagle's guests in the boarding-house always had a party, with a climax of welsh rabbit or scrambled eggs or ice-cream, in the small, square parlour with its worn red carpet and lavishly nickled Garland stove. There was a forlorn palm in one corner, and among the seats were the last of the horsehair sofas, a patent rocker upholstered in Brussels carpet, and an interesting chair made by cutting a segment out of a barrel and gilding the remains.

Occasionally Miss Absolom played things she called 'Mozart' and 'Mendelssohn', names which Myron had never heard, but Horace Tiger was the chief entertainer. He could play on a saw, and did. He sang 'Oh my name is Samuel Hall, damn your eyes', only he was refined enough to render it 'darn your eyes', and 'Daisy, Daisy give me your answer true; you'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two', and, invariably:

'There is a boarding house
Not far away,
Where they have ham and eggs
     Three times a day.

'Oh how the boarders yell
When they hear that dinner-bell,
See how they run like--thunder,
     Three times a day.'

All the boarders laughed like anything when Horace hesitated and winked at them, and put in 'thunder' instead of the naughty word. So did Myron--after looking at Miss Absolom, to see if she smiled, which she always did. But Mother Weagle invariably fretted (fifty-two Saturday evenings a year), 'Now I don't think that's real nice! I'm sure you don't get ham and eggs three times a day here!'

And Horace did imitations: a negro preacher, very realistic, beginning a sermon with 'Ah absquatulates to guess,' which made every one feel very happy and superior to the lower races; and a Maine farmer whose remarks pleasantly started off, 'Well, by heckalorum, Cy!'

Miss Absolom always encouraged Horace, extensively; she sat with her chin in her thin dark hand, twinkling her eyes at him and murmuring, 'Bravissimo'. It did not occur to Myron till months after his session with her in the matter of nails that she was too encouraging to Horace. He was embarrassed after that by Horace's smirking parade, and with the inarticulate brooding of a boy of twelve he fretted that he must protect himself; not give people a chance to ridicule him.

He thought thus none the less when the child prodigy, Ora, was persuaded to speak that elevating piece, 'The Wreck of the Hesperus'. Myron gloated that his brother was a natural-born wonder, recited just like a regular actor, and him only ten! But he did kinda wish, he sighed, that Ora wouldn't wave his arms and pat his stomach in moments of eloquence, as though he had an ache.

Myron learned much from the Saturday evening parties. He learned that people have to be 'amused'; that they would do almost anything, listen to almost anything, rather than sit alone and read, and as for sitting alone and meditating, that could be tolerated only by the dullest-eyed clods or the calmest-eyed sages. He did not, as yet, formulate this for himself, any more than the fisher-boy formulates the tricks of steering through surf, but he began to perceive that if he ever had to care for a number of people, he must keep the childish brutes 'amused'. Bread and circuses, sleigh-rides and church-suppers, radios and talkies, opera and the horse-show--in any era, in any caste, anything to keep from beginning to doubt your complacent superiority by being alone.

With a hoarse secrecy rare to her, for generally she bawled and chuckled her thoughts all over the kitchen, while she stirred biscuit dough or whisked the whites of eggs, Mother Weagle summoned Myron to the room she shared with her husband. Tom was away for the afternoon, theoretically hunting quail. She had, after a quarrel in which she had threatened to leave him, taken control of all their money, and she let Tom have only a dollar a week, but on that he managed mysteriously to get drunk with frequency and ardour.

Myron suspected that his father stole food from the kitchen and sold it.

Myron was a month short of thirteen, now, five feet seven and skinny, but with a sign of big bones to make broad shoulders. He did not smile much. His hands were rough from incessant housework. To his mother, at least, he was always affectionate.

They sat on the edge of her bed; she fluttered with large-bosomed sighing, while he watched her anxiously. Her room was dusty, the bed was unmade, with a swirl of bedclothes from Tom's nightly threshing when he came out of the stupor of alcohol. On the floor was the last week's laundry, half open, a clean sheet dragging in the dirt. It was the only room in the house besides his own and Ora's that was unkempt: Mother Weagle had no time for herself or her own resting-place.

'Myron, you're awful young to talk to you about it, but I ain't got anybody else. You know how your Pa is. Well, I been thinking all this past year, and I got kind of a notion he wouldn't act up this way if he had something more to do. Ain't hardly anything for him to do round here.'

'I could let him help me make beds and saw the wood, if he wanted to,' said Myron, not trying to be funny.

'Well, I guess he wouldn't care for that. He'd like to be at the desk, showing off. The fellow that's running the American House is going West. It's for rent, furniture and all. I been kind of saving, and I could manage the rent for two years. Then your Pa could be in the front office, and maybe he'd straighten up. What do you think?'

'That would be something elegant!'

Within Myron's eyes was a vision of the splendour of the American House: the long spaces of the lobby, where forty people could sit, in contrast to the chubby little parlour of their boarding-house; the gilded radiators; the brilliant tall brass cuspidors; the enormous dining-room, with real printed menus, at least for Sunday dinner; the unending rows of bedrooms, with no less than four bath-rooms; and the building itself, three towering stories of brick, and an entrance that had always fascinated him--not just a door flush with a wall, but right on the corner, cut diagonally across. And the people! He was used to the boarding-house residents; most of them elderly local couples who had given up the woes of housekeeping. They were as familiar and uninspiring to Myron as a wart. But entering the American House, staring out through its splendid plate-glass window on Main Street, were valorous birds of passage: travelling-men in sporty pink vests, Ascot ties, and collars almost cutting their lower jaws; the star of the Original Drury Lane Touring Company, with his astrachan-lined overcoat and hair like a horse's tail.

'Gee, Ma, it would be slick! Peachy! But you'd have to work so hard.'

'Oh, I'd have more help. You'd help me, wouldn't you, wouldn't you? Wouldn't you help me?'

They clung together. He was never, all his life, to be so close to any other human being as to Mother Weagle.

'We'll make a dandy hotel!' he crowed.

'Yes, maybe we will,' she meditated, roused a little out of the melancholy which drugs all of us when we contemplate actually doing any of the things we have always wanted to do, such as getting married, or dying, or wearing spats, or keeping an hotel.

It seemed risky to give Tom Weagle charge of a hotel which included a bar-room. But Mother Weagle in a blind, rustic way understood people--the first requisite of hotel-keeping, as it is of law, medicine, or any other learned profession. Tom went on sneaking in little whiskies, but he tried to live up to the spectacle of himself as manager of a real hotel, one who met the glossiest travelling-man as an equal and had the power to make him comfortable or shunt him off to the meanest room on the third floor. He went so far as to keep his coat on in the office, except on the hottest days. He impressively rang the bell for Myron, or Uncle Jasper--the venerable negro who was porter, 'bus driver, saloon cleaner--to 'carry up the gennulman's valise and hustle with it'. His proudest task was to carve the cooked meats, on a table at the end of the dining-room instead of in the kitchen, as normally, during meals. Tom was congenitally a master carver, and carving, though the layman guest rarely appreciates it, is one of the most occult priest-crafts of hotel-keeping. He loved the staccato clash of carving knife on steel sharpener, the grandeur of the knife's horn handle and Roman blade, the war-like flash as he flourished it high, and his surgeon's skill in piercing a wing-joint at the first precise stroke. Helping him, admiring and learning, Myron perceived that in at least this one mystery, his father was a savant.

Tom even tried to keep the books, and made so few errors that Myron could usually correct them.

Myron's position in the hotel, outside of school hours, was definite and simple: he did everything that no one else wanted to do. He wiped dishes and scrubbed floors; he swept halls and steps and the office; he cooked the breakfast eggs before galloping off to school; he roused irate travelling-men for the 4.14 freight to Waterbury; he occasionally tended bar. He learned in his very bones the insignificant, unromantic, all-important details of hotel-keeping.

He learned to broil chickens and steaks instead of frying them into a semblance of boot-soles; he learned that there are soups outside of oyster stew, cream of tomato, vegetable, and chicken, and potatoes other than German fried, French fried, baked, and mashed; he learned and proved, over his mother's horrified protest, that what she called the 'nasty-looking' feet of chickens should not be thrown away but skinned and used to make soup stock. He even learned, at the bar, under the tutelage of the professional bartender, Jock McCreedy, to mix such sacred, old-fashioned, and now forgotten drinks as the timber doodle, sherry cobbler, golden fizz, spread-eagle punch, fish-house punch, pousse-café, balaklava nectar, white tiger's milk, rumfustian, and alligator's ear; the very names a feast of poesy, and the beverages themselves a foretaste for honest drinking men of nectar in the innermost saloon bar of Paradise.

For Myron showed uncommon talent, the first ever he had shown in his industrious life: he bought a cook-book. That was not extraordinary; people do buy cook-books, particularly brides. Between 1896 and 1931, 'The Boston Cooking School Cook Book' had sold a million and a half copies, making the author, Miss Fannie Merritt Farmer, one of the only five important American authors, along with Charles Sheldon, of In His Steps, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Arthur Brisbane, and Laura Jean Libbey. But thereafter his mild talent beat up into indisputable genius, for he actually read the cook-book, through and through.

And he built a linen-chute down the stair-well from the third floor to the basement, while old Tom (he was only forty-three, now, in 1894, when Myron was fourteen, but he was born old and it is believed that he became gently drunk on his mother's milk) sat on the stairs and helped by holding the nails and giving bad advice and quarrelling mildly at Myron for not doing better in school, since aside from seven or eight hours' work a day in the hotel, and perhaps seven wasted in sleeping, Myron was able to give all the rest of his time to attending high school and long, sweet, inspiring hours of study.

4

Not the triumph of entering college, nor even the triumph of a broker receiving his LL.D. degree from Muskingum College as a recognition of piety and generosity, is so satisfying an academic victory as emerging into high-school Sophomoredom. Sophomores are admitted now to be men and women, and they are still certain, on misinformation and belief derived from their parents, that it is worth while to become adults and have the privileges of shaving and bearing babies and tending the furnace and belching after meals. It is now that the boys are expected to smoke, though perhaps secretly, and the girls to have fellers and silk stockings.

Though most of his energy and his ideas were absorbed by the American House, now that he was fifteen and a Sophomore, Myron found high school diverting. The physical background was fairly bad. Not yet had New England towns discovered that the young can be educated only in a milieu of tapestry brick, Vita glass, $100,000 swimming pools, gymnasia with professional instructors, and marble-lined model kitchens. The Black Thread Centre High School was a slate-grey wooden shack with small, dirty windows and no ventilation. The floors were worn into channels around the knots in the boards, and the only decorations were portraits of the good grey poets. The students' desks were cramped, and the teachers still kept apples and punitive rulers on their desks instead of graphs of daily variation in individual suggestibility.

After daily enforced intimacy with old, worn travelling-men--thirty and upwards--Myron liked the association with causelessly giggling youth. As to the studies that year, except for plane geometry and German, he did not think so much of them. Caesar was dull--Latin in general was dull. What the dickens did the ablative absolute, or gerundives, or the fact that the accusative was used with ad, ante, apud, circum, contra, inter, per, and trans have to do with daily life in Black Thread, or in New York or California either? Nor did he much care whether Hamlet was crazy, or what was the date of Charles Martel--what was Myron Weagle to Charles Martel and what was Charles to Myron? He rather liked droning in the music-hour, and trying to sketch pots and petunias in the drawing-lesson. And German, now that was something! With it he could talk to the little colony of Heinies up the river at Dutch Bend, and have a lot of fun pretending to speak it with his friends. 'Be gehts it Ihr, meiner Frund?' they bellowed at one another and, in more serious hours of confessed ambition, squatting on the river bluff, they planned that some day they would go up the Rhine, observing castles and Fräuleins, and they sang softly:

'Ik weiss nick wot soll it bedeiten
Dass ik so traurick bin.'

Particularly, plane geometry was fun. Myron liked the neatness and precision of it, sleek triangles and deft segments of circles and provable facts about the degrees of angles--not all the fuzzy obscurity of Caesar's opinions about the Gauls. Anyway, he had to get through the year, because next year he would be allowed to take up this new course in book-keeping, and that would be useful, whether he should become a lawyer, an hotel-man, a railroad-man, or keep store. But beyond all, his reason for excitement at the beginning of Sophomore year was that he had fallen in love with his handsome classmate, Miss Julia Lambkin.

Julia Lambkin practically belonged to the aristocracy of Black Thread Centre. Her father, Trumbull Lambkin, was not only the leading druggist in town, which made him almost the same as a doctor, but also a director in the Housatonic Savings Bank, a member of the library board, and a vestryman in the Episcopal Church, and the Lambkins had lived in Black Thread for three long, tradition-crusted generations. Julia was a tall wench, with a high laugh, a high colour, and a richness of chestnut hair, which she had put up before any of the other girls in her class. She danced much, and entertained--entertained whole bevies of young people at summer-evening parties on her porch, with almost unlimited raspberry vinegar and lemonade and banana layer cake. She was one of the eleven members of the exclusive Pequot Cycling Club, which scorched with a soft whirring of wheels on cool evenings, all of them humming 'Sweet Marie' and looking down their noses at the common people and she was the only girl in town so luxurious as to own a Columbia bicycle!

With such charms in a classroom seat only three from his, it was not extraordinary that Myron (along with seven or eight other young gentlemen) should have fallen volcanically in love with Julia. Though he did not feel that he belonged to her set, they went to many of the same parties. In the '90's, small-town Connecticut was still sufficiently democratic for that. He waltzed with her, and he waltzed well, but he was lumbering and ridiculous when he tried to caper through the figures of the square dances--grand right 'n' lef, sashay all--and Julia snapped at him, 'Oh, don't be such a galoot!' It was dreadful, he admitted, to be a galoot.

All day long, in school, he sneaked glances at her over his geometry, while she bridled and would not look back. The other Sophomores watched them and giggled, and one little snip of a girl, with the daring of small contemptible females (this girl has become a woman and a mother since and has done no good; she plays contract by night and by day, and goes to a handsome chiropractor) passed along a row of seats such notes as 'Myron is crazy about Julie,' which everyone read and sniggered over. Evenings, whenever he could get away from the hotel and his home-work for a quarter of an hour, Myron plodded by Julia's house, poring upon it with hang-jawed and sad-eyed longing. The Lambkin mansion was in all of Black Thread surpassed only by the homes of the Boston Store owner, and of Mr. Dingle, the banker. It was of rather faded red brick, with dark-green shutters and a mansard roof. The porch was not, as was usual, exposed in front, but at the side, where it had a choice, mysterious secrecy. Myron gaped at the more fashionable and skittish of his classmates--some of the richer boys in white duck pants--lolling on the steps of this porch, and conversationally screeching at Julia.

He did not dare join them. He felt too big and awkward and graceless; he felt déclassé. But his heart swelled to take in every aspect of Lambkinism--the Lambkin residence, the fine new Lambkin surrey with its fringed whipcord top, Mr. Trumbull Lambkin with his grim leanness and grey side-whiskers and smell of camphor and formaldehyde. Myron looked with a brother-in-law's affection upon Julia's sister, Effie May, aged four. She was a dear little golden-haired tot, and had all the attributes of a hyena. 'Gosh, Effie May certainly is one cute lil trick!' glowed Myron. He took into his devotion the Lambkin dog, Fred, a foul animal who was collie in front and Newfoundland behind and mean all over, and given to nipping night-roaming lovers who slowed up at Julia's residence. He even fawned upon Julia's brother, Herbert, a cold-eyed, even-eyed young gentleman a year older than Myron, who responded to an effusive 'Good morning,' with a frosty nod, and who, when it was amiably inquired of him, 'Going to work in your dad's store this summer?' snapped, 'Certainly not; I'm pursuing my studies for Yale and for a career of architecture.'

Herbert really talked that way, and for the time being, Myron endured it. He walked past the Lambkin house and walked past it and walked past it and agonized over the chatterers on the porch, and his heart was lonely--lonely still when he got back to the hotel and his father (who, this past hour, had done nothing more important than pick his teeth and scratch) scolded him for not having taken a travelling-man's trunks down to the sample-room. He was lonely even when he took the late trick at the bar, and the room was filled with the flat rattle of poker chips and the clank of glasses touched in toasts of 'Lookin' at yuh' and guffaws over the new one about Napoleon and the dead fish.

He had fallen in love on the first day of Sophomore year, when his submerged passion had been revealed to him by the fact that, with her hair put up for the first time and her fine chin held high, Julia was the image of the Gibson Girl, who was the Venus and Helen of Troy of the time. Yes! He saw it now--saw his own heart. She was the real Gibson Girl, and to be worshipped beyond all other mortals. Since he was blossoming into the perilous age of fifteen, he longed for her with a sickening, defenceless ache. He was entirely vague as to what he wanted to do to her. He never dared think consciously of anything beyond sitting beside her on the steps of the porch, and perhaps shaking hands at parting, but that ambition kept him awake in his airless and cob-webbed room in the American House, as he pictured her: dear face, her large bright hands, her droll mouth, even the stuff of her beautiful percale blouse with its fashionable puffed sleeves.

Not till after a month of his passion and martyrdom, not till an October evening, did he catch her alone on the porch. For all his awe of her, he was not too timid a wren and, though he had to force his courage, he stalked up the path and firmly squatted on the top step, below her rocking chair.

'Hello,' he said.

'Hello.'

'Kind of cool.'

'Yes, it is kind of cool.'

'You all alone to-night?'

'Yes,' she admitted, 'I'm all alone. Nobody loves me, I guess.'

'Gee, I do, all right.' He was pleased by the feat of having got just the right lightness and stylishness into his tone.

'Oh yes, you do!' sardonically. 'You never come around.'

'Well, I got my work in the hotel, Jule. Have to help out.'

'Well, you could get off sometimes.'

'Well, it's awful' hard to get off.'

'Sure, you could get off lots of times.'

'Well, I can't get off much of the time.'

'Well, if you wanted to, you'd get off.'

'Would you like it if I got off and came over?'

She tossed her head--not quite the thing for a big, handsome Gibson Girl--and sniffed, 'It don't make me no neverminds, smarty. I guess you don't want to come, or you'd get off more.'

'Well, I'll try to get off more.'

'Well, if you manage to get off more, then maybe I'll believe you want to.'

'Well, I'll get off more--you see if I don't! Say, Jule, couldn't you go buggy-riding with me, some Sunday afternoon? We get half-rates from the stable, at the hotel.'

'Uh-huh, Mr. Smarty! So that's why you're so willing and all to actually go and take me driving--because you can get a rig cheap!'

'Oh, gee, Jule, I didn't mean . . .'

'Well, that's what you said; just prezactly what you said--you get half-rates, so maybe you might be willing to condescend to allow me to go driving!'

'I did not! I didn't mean it that way at all, and you know doggone well I didn't! If you want to go, all right, but if you don't, cut out the high and mighty! How about it?'

Rather weakly, Julia peeped, 'Oh, I'd like it, but Pa and Ma wouldn't stand for it.'

'Why not?'

'They wouldn't mind it if you came here, right under their eyes, but they wouldn't let me go riding with you.'

'Why the heck not?'

'Oh, I hate to say it but--they don't exactly approve of you, I guess.'

'Why not?'

'Pa's an awful old crank about some things, I guess, and your Dad is a saloon-keeper.'

'He is not! Just because there's a bar in the hotel . . .'

Thus far he had been bold and fluent, but he did not know how to finish, because he realized, appalled, that actually his father did belong to the class, pariahs in choice Connecticut villages, of saloon-keepers. He finished in confusion: 'He is not a saloon-keeper! He's an hotel-keeper!'

'Well, but I guess Pa doesn't think so much-a-much of hotel-keeping, either. He thinks waiting on a lot of people and feeding 'em and making their beds is kind of common.'

'Let me tell you, Julia Lambkin, my dad never made a bed in his life! He's the proprietor and manager! He just hands out keys and keeps the books and all like that!'

'Well, you make beds sometimes, and once you washed out a pair of socks for a travelling-man--your brother Ora told us!'

'The dirty little snitch! I'll poke his face in! And anyway, what's the diff? Don't your father have to wait on people, behind the counter, and make up prescriptions for their bellyaches?'

'I've never heard such disgusting language in all my life! No decent boy would dream of using a word like bel . . . like what you said, in the presence of a lady! And I'll have you to know, Mr. Smarty Weagle, that a druggist doesn't wash socks or sweep floors; he's a professional man, that people come to consult him in serious sickness and want his advice and let me tell you right here and now, Mr. Smarty, that old Doc Winter, and I heard him myself, with my own ears, and he said that my dad was a better doctor than nine-tenths of the people that call themselves "doctors", and if you think for one minute that I propose to sit here and let you insult my Papa, you're very badly mistaken.'

She dashed into the house. She was so subtle that, after starting to slam the door in a nice, normal, furious way, she closed it with rebuking quietness. Myron sat collapsed, like a half-empty hot-water bottle. He rose with pain and removed himself with anguish.

But this time he kicked Fred, the dog, and enjoyed it.

All the way home, amid tornadoes and dust-storms of humiliation, he vowed, 'When I get to be a big doctor or lawyer, or maybe own a great big hotel or something, she'll be sorry! I'll show 'em!'

He thought of ways of aggrandizement, as he sat on a fallen willow trunk in a secret corner near the bridge. He would never wear a celluloid collar again, but always linen, as on Sunday, no matter how much his father complained of the cost. He would learn German perfectly, and astonish Julia Lambkin by discoursing with the teacher (which would, as a matter of fact, have been considerably beyond the teacher's powers). He would somehow, maybe by picking and selling huge quantities of blueberries, get a horse and a second-hand buggy of his own and drive scornfully past her house, and when Herbert or she wanted a ride, he would answer curtly, 'Sorry, but I have an engagement.'

His plans for himself flowed into plans for the hotel. If it were a statelier establishment, Mr. Lambkin might be impressed. Of course Myron would get rid of the bar-room. (Of course he wouldn't, he admitted, even in his temporary insanity.) He'd persuade his mother to put in a 'ladies' parlour. Recently, on a Saturday, he had driven with his father to Torrington, and there, in the renowned Eagle Hotel, which had seventy rooms, he had seen a parlour all red plush and gilt. 'Add a lot of class to our place,' he meditated, almost forgetting Julia.

He did actually get his parents to install the parlour of his dream. His mother hesitated: it would cost so much, and take the space of one of their bedrooms. But Myron insisted that only at rush seasons, when the travelling-men were in the thick of spring or fall orders, were all their bedrooms occupied, and with a parlour they could cater to the schoolteachers and other lone females who had been their mainstay as 'steadies' at the boarding-house but who hesitated about living at an hotel in which the only lounges were a bar-room and an office infested with spittoons and men with hats cocked over their eyebrows.

The parlour was assembled--Myron Weagle's first triumph as a creative hotel-keeper, as he was some time to be called (to his slight but active nausea) at Rotary Club luncheons and Chamber of Commerce dinners.

The new parlour of the American House was an artistic triumph. Mother Weagle and Myron went by train clear to Hartford, to the second-hand shops there, for the furnishings. It had a golden ingrain carpet--at first Myron did not like it so well as the hot crimson of the carpet in their boarding-house parlour, but after a time he considered it more delicate, and likely to knock the eye out of even an aristocrat like Julia Lambkin. The wall-paper was of poison green, with yellow blotches like headless fish. The furniture was ample: four easy chairs upholstered in worn brown velvet, with doilies of imitation crochet pinned on back and arms, three straight chairs, four china cuspidors, and a folding desk incorporating a bookcase in which were six novels left behind by guests and a directory of Beulah County ten years old. There were impressive lace curtains, and plush side curtains with ball fringes. But the two glories of the new parlour were the enormous vase covered with stamps pasted on and glazed over, a vase to be filled with pussy willows and gilded cat-tails, and the rare centre table, which had interesting bandy legs and a real marble top only partly concealed by the embroidered cover. It was, altogether, the handsomest room Myron had ever seen, aside from the Lambkin parlour, and for several days after Mother Weagle and he had completed the arrangement of the furniture (how breathlessly they tried the effect of the exotic stamp-vase on this side and on that!), he slipped upstairs to peep in and sigh with ecstasy. And when he caught Ora reading Swiss Family Robinson in the parlour, humped up in one velvet chair with his feet on another, Myron yanked him out by the ear.

Yet at the sight of Julia going to church the next Sunday, in a new blue frock with ruffles which swept grandly through the dust and a superb large new hat on which unnatural violets and forget-me-nots bloomed upon a tufted bank of green velvet, all the splendour of the parlour seemed trivial, and his ambition of the last few days to become an hotel-man, to go on to even greater achievements than the parlour, became vulgar in his eyes. He longed to have a new blue-serge suit and a new Derby hat, and to follow Julia into church.

(None of the Weagles went to church. Hotel-keeping, especially when Sunday-noon dinner is the gala meal of the week, is not conducive to attending public worship. Tom Weagle sometimes grumbled, 'Well, you can say what you want to about Religion, but lemme tell you it never did nobody no harm to be religious, and it's the only thing that'll keep a lot of these yahoos and toughs and iggoramuses in order.' Mrs. Weagle observed, 'I says to him, let me tell you, I says, I guess a book like the Bible, that has lasted four thousand years like it has, and nobody has been able to contradict it, it must be inspired by the Lord, and there's no argument about it, I says.' But probably none of the Weagles gave five minutes thought a year to theology or ecclesiology, except for Ora, who occasionally stirred up a lot of interesting family irritation by announcing that he was going to become a Catholic, an Episcopalian, a Buddhist, or a Seventh Day Adventist.)

When pride in the new parlour slipped from him, when Julia in her gardened hat, entering the Litchfield County Gothic portal of the Congregational Church, seemed to him like an embodied light that dazzled him and left him dizzy and ridiculous, Myron wistfully gave up his plans to become a great hotel-man, and sought for a profession more worthy the traditions of Trumbull Lambkin, that distinguished seller of patent medicines and bath-sponges. Within a fortnight Myron was finally and irrevocably determined to become a doctor, a lawyer, a West Pointer, an explorer, a banker, a tobacco planter with a thousand lordly acres in the Connecticut River valley, the captain of a liner, and a professor of Greek--which language he chose as being the most unfamiliar of all known tongues. Just in between, and not quite so seriously, he considered becoming a tramp or a starved trapper in the Northern woods, and breaking Julia's cold and brittle heart by letting her know that she had ruined his life.

The game of 'what'll we do after school' was familiar enough in high school, but none of the other boys went at it with such earnestness, such brisk and practical drawing up of detailed plans, such excited sending off for university catalogues, as did Myron. He discussed it with Ora who, though he was but thirteen, was fuller of words and bookish misinformation than any boy Myron knew. Ora often exasperated him; Ora sulked and wailed; he never conceivably did any of the light work assigned to him in the hotel, and he was always late for meals. But now Myron turned to him, as to an oracle much travelled in the realms of gold.

'You ought to be a business man,' condescended Ora. 'You can stand sitting at a desk doing figgers. You didn't even mind arithmetic. Gosh, it drives me crazy! But then, I'm never going to be a business man. Maybe a nauthor.'

From earliest historical times Ora had desired to be a nauthor. Unlike Myron, he had never been tempted by law or banking, though where he first got a nauthorial ambition no one has an idea, for he had never met one of those exotic night-flying creatures.

Myron half agreed, though he blunderingly indicated that he was less interested in making money than in administering institutions--hotels, hospitals, law-courts. Maybe there were business men, and successful ones, who were not money-grubbers but creators, he suggested. The new notion inspired him, and for the next fortnight he was, in council with Ora, a bicycle-manufacturer, the president of a rifle-factory in New Haven making guns so cheaply that any farm boy could afford one, and head of all the brass industries in Connecticut. Never had he been so intimate with Ora as now, when he overlooked disagreeable facts like unfilled wood-boxes and submitted his unromantic destiny to Ora's poetic vision. He even let Ora quote Hiawatha to him, at length.

But their brotherly comradeship ended in tragedy.

Myron, returning from school, came round a corner to find Ora, encircled by cheers and jeers, in a desperate fight with Herbert Lambkin, who was three years older than Ora and twenty pounds heavier. Ora's nose was bleeding all over his fashionable Eton collar and his hair was mingled with his fluent tears, but he was not doing so badly. He was butting Herbert in the belly, kicking his shins, and scratching his neck, and though the older champion occasionally got in a stout cuff on Ora's ear, he was giving way, and the gang were yowling plaudits to the young warrior-bard.

Myron gave a bark of rage and threw himself in as though he were diving. He seized Herbert's collar, he socked Herbert upon the salient Lambkin nose, he kicked him, ran him up an alley, and came back beaming to his dear little brother. As they went off, Ora was sobbing, and when Myron chirped, 'There, there--you done simply grand!' dear little brother howled, 'Damn you, damn you, damn you, you went and spoiled everything, like you always do!'

'Huh?'

'I was scared of Bert. Then I went and made myself unscared, and I jumped on him when he grabbed my hat. And then I wasn't scared any more. I was sore. I wasn't scared. And I was licking him. And you butted in and kept me from licking him and spoiled it all, and you'll get all the credit, damn you! That's what you always do!'

For weeks Ora would not be confidential, and Myron had by his lone self to puzzle out whether he was, to-day, a predestined doctor or sea-captain or revolver-manufacturer.

Then to the American House came the inspired priest of commerce, Mr. J. Hector Warlock, and made everything clear.

5

Of all the drummers working out of Bridgeport in 1895, none was handsomer, more affable, or more affluent than Mr. J. Hector Warlock, travelling representative, as he called it, of the Spurgis & Pownall Hardware, Stove, and Kitchen Equipment Corporation. He was thirty-four years old. His hair was very black, very wavy, and very thick, like the more popular manly Christian evangelists of the day, and no evangelist could troll out a hymn with a soapier bass. (Not that Mr. Warlock was likely to be heard actually singing hymns in the House of the Lord on a Sabbath morning; he was much more likely to be sleeping off a late Saturday-night poker game.) His famous and frequent smile was enlivened by two gold teeth, and on his soft, white, swollen fingers he wore a Masonic ring, and a ring in the guise of a golden snake, with rubies for eyes; while his large watch-chain bore a tasty emblem in the way of a golden miniature kitchen range.

He was tall enough and broad enough by nature, but made to appear the taller and broader by his correct garments for 1895; the Derby hat, the thick dark suit with shoulders enormously padded, the stiff-bosomed shirt--though its solemnity was lightened by sprigs of tiny violets in the pattern--and the large bow tie. To this he brightly added the fanciest of fancy vests, and he owned not just one, like local sports, but half a dozen: yellow with red polka dots, blue with white stripes, tan with scarlet sumac berries. He also wore the most stylish pointed toothpick shoes ever seen in Black Thread.

His was a face that barbers loved. That broad, pale yet healthy, meaty yet jolly expanse of visage received more attention than the cheeks of a duchess. He always took what he called 'the whole works' at a barber's: shave, hair-cut, singe, shampoo, facial massage, violet water, talcum powder, and delicately lilac flavoured tonic for his dense hair.

He was impressive, yet he was not overpowering, so hearty and insistent was his good-fellowship. He called all trainmen, bellhops, bartenders, and waiters 'Cap'n,' and when they saw him coming they chuckled, 'Hello, Mr. Warlock! You with us again?' His customers, the greater hardware-men of Southern New England, he addressed as 'Boss', with a nice mixture of friendliness and deference, and they liked him, they gave him epic orders, they had him at their homes for Sunday noon dinner, which is the accolade of a travelling-man.

At the American House, Black Thread Centre, the staff lamented that J. Hector came so seldom--only four times a year. Mother Weagle would, without visible cue, suddenly burst into a communal silence with a giggling, 'The very idea--that Mr. Warlock--chucking an old hen like me under the chin and telling me I was the best cook in Connecticut! Fresh!'

Albert Dumbolton, vulgo, 'Dummy', who as a grocery salesman (out of Torrington) got around once every ten days, was of nothing so proud as of friendship with J. Hector, and he frequently informed the entire bar-room, 'Say, I've been on the road twenty-six years now, and I want to tell you that I've never met a finer drummer, or a better man of any kind, than J. Hector Warlock. Say, he's got a heart of gold, that fellow has! Pays his bills, stands back of his friends, tells a good story, treats you like you was the Queen of England no matter who you are! And say, that fellow, when he's playing poker he can keep his trap shut like he was deef and dumb, and then next morning he'll go into a hardware store and talk the hind leg right off a donkey. Why, he can sell anything! He could sell fleece-lined overshoes in Hell! And successful, say, I'll bet Heck Warlock makes his forty-five or forty-eight hundred dollars every year--more money than any man in this stuck-up town! And educated, why say, often on a train, when there ain't anybody he knows to talk to, he'll read clear through a book!'

It was this warrior-hero-prophet who came to Black Thread just as Myron, aged fifteen, was trying to determine his spiritual destiny--which, in the United States of America, meant his future job.

Myron was on the desk when the 7.36 p.m. from the South came in. There was presently a crepitation of 'Hello--hello--back again?' outside. Myron wandered to the plate-glass window giving on Main Street, and saw none other than J. Hector Warlock rolling up the street, seeming to fill it, his left thumb in the arm-hole of his vest, his right hand waving to the admiring citizenry. He was trailed by a boy pushing his suit-case in a wheel-barrow. It was not for J. Hector to tote his own bag, like an ordinary drummer; still less would it be his way to sleep in his shirt in the hotel and wait for his bag to be brought, along with his sample-trunks, by the dray-man in the morning.

He hurled open the door, roaring at Myron, 'Hello, Cap'n, here's the baby elephant back again! How's tricks? Chased your dad out and took charge of the hotel have you? Well, how about a handsome suit with private elevator and a solid gold bed?'

He patted Myron's shoulder. Myron beamed. Myron exulted. J. Hector treated him as though he were grown-up, really were the manager . . . This was one of the moments, in hotel-keeping.

He galloped behind the desk, smartly swung the register about on its brass standard, held out the pen, then hastily changed it for another, with a better nib. While he wrote, with a flourish and two little marks, like quotation marks, under the dashing signature, J. Hector asked genially, 'Who's in town? How's chances for a little bout of skill?'

'Al Dumbolton is here.'

'Fine! Where's a boy?'

'I guess he's up in his room, writing out his orders. He was down here at the desk, but the fellows got to kidding him--they put a fire-cracker under his chair--and he got sore and went up. But I guess he'll be down in the bar, pretty quick.'

(Poor Al! He looked like a rumpled red-satin sofa cushion. The fellows did 'get to kidding him' with frequency.)

'He will! He will! Right down in the well-known bar! Trust Dummy. But say, Cap'n. Listen. I got an idea. You go up and knock and tell him the sheriff is here looking for him. I know doggone good and well he's been sniffing after that cute little wife of the night watchman at the mill, and he's kind of scared about it. Speak to him real serious. I'll be right behind you.'

It was not easy for Myron, as it would have been for Ora, to enact nervous excitement, but he would try anything for J. Hector Warlock. He knocked, and when Mr. Dumbolton came, in shirt sleeves and slipperless grey woollen socks, Myron croaked, 'Say, Al, gee, the sheriff is downstairs and he wants to see you! Looks awful mysterious, and like he was sore about something. I told him I thought you was out. You could sneak down the back way through the kitchen.'

Mr. Dumbolton gaped. His frightened voice sounded like steam from a locomotive. 'D-did he say why he wanted to see me?'

'No, but he sure did insist.'

'Oh, God, I might of known! What a fool I--Myron! I'll skip out the back way. Catch late freight at the crossing. You hold my valise. Tell the damn sheriff you can't find me. Make out like you're looking for me. Keep him busy! I'll make it quick!'

J. Hector Warlock, in a voice convincingly changed from his natural humorous basso-profundo, growled, 'You will not! You won't make it at all, Dumbolton!'

While the victim shrank from a big red sofa-cushion into a very little red sofa-cushion, J. Hector pushed past Myron and stood grinning down at Mr. Dumbolton, who stared and wriggled, then groaned, 'Well, I'm a sock-eyed son of a gun! I might of known! I thought you wasn't coming for a week! If I'd of known you was within fifty miles, I'd of known it was you, you old potato-face! I'll get you for this!'

The two men pounded each other's backs, most affectionately and painfully.

'How about a little devotion to the Goddess of Fortune, this evening? How about making the aces gallop?' suggested J. Hector. 'No, Myron; wait a minute.'

'Sounds elegant to me,' said Dumbolton.

'Then look, Myron. Who's in the house that's good for an innocent, friendly little test of skill . . . with dynamite in the gloves?'

'Mr. Wood Harris is here from Hartford--boots and shoes?'

'Fine. Yes. I've played with him. Ask him to come up to my room in half an hour. By the way, you've given me the double room with the private bath as usual, I hope, Cap'n.'

'Why!' Hurt and a little indignant. 'Sure! Of course, Mr. Warlock! Number 4.'

Thirty years hence, Myron would remember, as it was indeed his business to remember, that J. Hector Warlock had been pleased to play cards with Mr. Woodland F. Harris; that he had the room with private bath; and that he--most extraordinary and inexplicable thing about this great man--actually preferred tea to coffee for breakfast.

Only there was no room with private bath in the American House, Black Thread. The bath was really one of the four public tubs, a 'down-the-hall-bath' as it was called. But it did have an entrance not only from the hall but from Double Room 4, and some six or eight times a year it was demanded as a private bath, it was called a private bath, and thereby, magically, as in theology, it became a private bath.

Mr. Warlock was proceeding, 'Get hold of Harris, boy. Then chase out or send that fresh brat of a brother of yours out and see if you can get hold of Cal Bigus and Ed Stuart and that livery-stable keeper, what's his name? for a game this evening. And shoot a bottle of Old Taylor and plenty of glasses and ice water up to the room. Here. Don't waste this. Invest it in New York Central Preferred.'

He handed Myron a whole quarter. The largest tip Myron had ever received was fifty cents; that was from a man who had stayed two weeks and who as he had developed symptoms of delirium tremens, persecution mania, arthritis, acid stomach, and nympholepsy, had required some attention. His normal tip was ten cents--no, his normal tip, for dragging a leaden bag upstairs and bringing a pitcher of ice water, was nothing; ten cents was a New Yorker's tip.

'Oh, gee, thanks! I'll send Ora--my brother. I'll be right back up with your valise.'

He was not going to miss the chance of as much time as possible with his idol, J. Hector, who had, to Myron, all the subtlety of Miss Absolom, and considerably more point. He bullied his father into leaving a game of casino in the bar and coming in to take the desk. He bribed Ora to search for Cal and Ed and the livery-stable man; bribed him with fifteen cents out of the quarter. . . . Perhaps Ora was right in saying that Myron was born to business, not the arts, for even in this moment of excitement at J. Hector's golden coming and of strain in getting the alienated Ora to do anything whatever, Myron did not fail to make his righteous, capitalistic profit of ten cents.

He summoned Mr. Woodland F. Harris from the bar, and tugged J. Hector's mighty suitcase up to Room 4. As long as he could without feeling intrusive, he hung about watching J. Hector unpack, getting a foretaste of the luxuries in the Great World to which he hoped some day to belong.

J. Hector had such accessories to living as Myron had hitherto seen only on the bureau of Miss Absolom, and J. Hector's were richer, more male. From his bag, while Myron stood at the door and goggled, J. Hector produced not one but two hair brushes, thick, heavy, without handles. 'Military brushes!' throbbed Myron. He had read of them in advertisements in the New York papers.

And shoes with dinguses in them, like pale-yellow wooden feet, to keep them unwrinkled. And a bottle with a rubber bulb and a sprayer-thing on it. This last J. Hector squeezed in Myron's direction, and Myron was conscious of a rarer, stranger scent than ever he had known. And these newfangled pyjamas, instead of a white night-shirt neatly edged at the neck with red binding such as Albert Dumbolton and Tom Weagle--and Myron and Ora Weagle--naturally wore. And not one or two but no less than six several neckties. And a whole box of fifty cigars, with red and gold bands. And--aside from the Old Taylor that Myron had brought up--a bottle of whisky curiously named 'John Haig'.

And even a book.

The book J. Hector tossed to Myron. 'Read much, Cap'n? Good thing to do. Broadens your mind and gives you a vocabulary, so you can get the customers dizzy and unload the orders on 'em, and even be able to make a speech at church suppers.'

Myron regarded the volume with awe. It was bound in paper, with a striking picture of a gentleman with moustache kissing a high-haired young lady in the presence of moonlight and a church tower, and it was entitled 'The Perils of Passion: or The Struggles of Sally St. Cyr: a Story of Humble Hearts and Proud Blood o' the Cumberlands'.

His unpacking done, J. Hector, brave with cigar smoke, thumbs in his arm-holes, lolled in a straight chair which seemed transformed into a velvet fauteuil. (Myron knew the word 'fauteuil' from the catalogues he had studied when they were furnishing the hotel parlour.) Myron did not ever, like the blandly intrusive Ora, assume that his presence was always wanted; but J. Hector seemed glad of his company till the poker game should begin, and Myron stood beaming, shyly dragging his foot, while J. Hector discoursed on Bridgeport, New York ('lot bigger burg than Bridgeport, but you take my word for it, boy, not half as live a town'), the wonders of the new Spurgis & Pownall kitchen range and the quixotic amount of nickle Mr. Pownall had caused to be spread upon it.

To any American village in 1895, except for the half-dozen old and wealthy families who were familiars of New York or Boston or Chicago or Europe, the travelling-man was the one missionary from the Great World, and the young people listened to him with reverence. He was the Marquis back from Paris; he was Erasmus and Casanova; he was the Phoenician galley-captain returned from Ostia; he was the radio and the Harvard graduate and the Book of Etiquette.

J. Hector gossiped of cocktails at the Waldorf bar, of planked blue-fish in Fulton Market, of champagne at Martin's, of the gigantic liners Campania and Lucania, each 13,000 tons, big as cathedrals, sailing from New York to Liverpool, and of an intimate friend of J. Hector's who had actually sailed on one of them and spent no less than eight weeks abroad, becoming authoritatively acquainted with England, Scotland, France, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Austro-Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, and Spain.

Myron looked rapturous and dragged his foot harder than ever. 'Golly!' he said.

The gamblers arrived, each affectionately greeting J. Hector as a horse-thief, a son-of-a-gun, and a card-sharper. While J. Hector pump-handled them and called them hicks, bank-robbers, and cradle-snatchers, Myron bustled blissfully. He brought glasses and ice-water, the ice clinking against the side of the white earthenware pitcher as he tramped down the hall; he neatly opened the bottle of Old Taylor; he snatched an extra table from a vacant room and brought it in, balancing one end of the table against his stomach, panting and staggering with it.

The five available players, J. Hector, Dummy Dumbolton, Woodland F. Harris, Cal Bigus, the jeweller, and Ed Stuart, the station agent, stripped off their coats, took off their stiff cuffs, and opened their vests, with a slight snifter of rye between operations, and sat down at the two joined tables with a firmness which indicated that they were here for business, and not to be taken lightly. J. Hector started by turning his chair about, facing the back, instead of waiting till he had to change his luck. This innovation astonished and impressed the local sports, and Myron was ever to remember it as a professional sort of thing to do. But the sports, and Myron, were yet more thrilled when J. Hector, tossing an unopened pack of cards on the table, stated unboastfully, 'Well, boys, to-night we don't play with any fifty-two slabs of butter. That's a fifty-cent pack, right from lil old Bridgeport!'

Myron had not known that you could pay more than fifteen cents for a pack of cards. When they were opened, he edged over to look at the backs. They did not have red and white scrolls, like all the cards he had ever seen, but real pictures, art pictures--a crescent moon against which reclined a lovely young woman who was, Myron thought, pretty much undressed.

He could find no further excuse for staying. But he came back, half a dozen times, to renew the ice water, unasked, and once, very urgently asked, to bring two more bottles of Old Taylor. Ordinarily he was in bed by ten-thirty, up at five-thirty, but to-night he stayed with the greatness and adventure of the game, and he saw moments of the titanic struggle.

He came in at midnight, with ice water, and found J. Hector and Ed Stuart watching each other with expressions of determined expressionlessness. The other three had dropped out and were looking on with something like awe. 'Nice lil pot,' Dummy Dumbolton whispered to Myron; 'only sixty-five dollars!'

'Sixty--five--dollars!' groaned Myron.

Ed Stuart was no mere victim to J. Hector. He was himself rather on the Homeric side, and it was told of him in the streets and lands and secret places of Black Thread that he had once sat in for thirty-six hours on a poker game at Beulah. And he was what Black Thread esteemed, 'pretty darn well-to-do'; he was not only station agent but he also had an interest in the bicycle shop, and owned and rented out a quarter section six miles north of town. Yet his voice was sharpening a little now, while J. Hector's was bland as mayonnaise.

'Raise you two white ones,' snapped Ed, unbuttoning his collar.

'And two!' crooned J. Hector.

Myron, having that invisibility which is sometimes the humiliation and sometimes the protection of waiters, was able to see their hands. Ed Stuart held a full house, while J. Hector sat lovingly over the four of spades, the seven of diamonds, the eight of diamonds, the jack of hearts, and the queen of clubs, a combination approximating the absolute zero.

Ed stared at his hand again; he forgot the esteemed virtue of looking completely dumb; he glanced anxiously at J. Hector as he hesitated, 'Well, up it two little ones.'

'And fifteen cold bucks more!' chuckled J. Hector joyously.

'Oh hell, take it!' wailed Ed, and as J. Hector coyly laid down his cats and dogs, one by reluctant one, all of the players howled and did homage to J. Hector Warlock.

At one o'clock they had stripped to their undershirts (two red flannel, two balbriggan, and the elegant soft silk and wool of J. Hector). At two, they were speaking with furry and wanton tongues, and J. Hector bribed Myron (he need not have) to go down and break the law and sneak them another Old Taylor. At three, J. Hector had dropped from a lead of seventy-four dollars to fifty cents, but he did not, like Ed Stuart, look put upon; he looked red-eyed, and his profuse hair was in his eyes, but he was good-natured. He alone seemed to regard this as a game, something having a distant but traceable relationship to pleasure. He rumbled at Myron, 'Good Godfrey, boy, you ought to be in bed! We keeping you up? You go to bed now!'

'Oh, gee, I don't mind. I want to see the game.'

'All right, Cap'n, you're the boss. No wise drummer ever butts in on the Mine Host of a caravansery. Never knows when he may need. . . .'

'Hey, are you playing poker, Heck, or giving a Ly-ce-yum lecture?' snarled Ed Stuart.

'. . . may need the manager to explain to folks about the hairpins in the bed. But if you're going to stay up, Myron, how about frying us a couple of eggs--or hippopotamus's ears, or whatever's handy?'

'Bet I will, Mr. Warlock!'

When Myron swayed in with an enormous tray with ten fried eggs, bacon, toast, coffee, and the crabapple jelly his mother always put up, J. Hector broke all the liturgical rules by rising in the middle of a hand, clapping Myron's shoulder, and observing, 'Well by the great jumping Jehosophat! You're the best night clerk I ever saw, Myron! George Boldt better watch his step; you'll be running the Waldorf, 'long in about five years! Well, what's the damage?'

'Oh, I don't know how to charge you. Usually it's a quarter when a guest gets a lunch if he's going to catch the late freight or the 6.07 to Bridgeport.'

'Well then, by golly, we'll call this two bucks--that's forty apiece for the grub--and here's fifty cents for you, Myron.'

'Oh, I can't . . .'

'The hell you can't! Here.' He roughly thrust two dollars and a half into Myron's pocket, turned him around, shot him out of the door, and jovially commanded, 'Now you go to bed, or I'll know the reason why, and if I hear you snoring or fighting with the bedbugs, I'll be up there and know the reason why! You git! Bless you, son; you took fine care of us!'

Myron stood outside the door and worshipped, 'That's the swellest fellow I ever knew!' He sleepily contrasted J. Hector with the bleak and whiskery respectability of Trumbull Lambkin, with the snippy superiority of Julia and Herbert Lambkin, with the dreary industry of Mr. Barstow, the furniture dealer across the street, with the feeble irritability of his father, with the contempt of Ora, even with the disconcerting secret smile of Miss Absolom.

'He's just grand!' said Myron.

That was at half past three. At a quarter to five, when Mr. Dummy Dumbolton tacked wanly down the hall from the grandeur of Double Room 4 to his own exiguous apartment, he found Myron sleeping in a sway-backed chair beside his door. Dummy peered owlishly at this phenomenon. It was all a part of the great unreality which had befogged the world, this last half hour. Myron awoke, sharply, awoke all awake, begging, 'Did he win, Mr. Dumbolton, did he win?'

'Di' whru win--win what?' gurgled Dummy.

'Mr. Warlock? Did he win?'

'Yesh--couple--guesh couple, couple dollars. G'night. . . . Oh my God!'

It was too late for Myron to go to bed; that would only make him feel the worse when he got up. He would be on duty in three-quarters of an hour. He wavered down to the kitch