Una"s interest in the Year-Round Inn at Crosshampton Harbor, the results obtained by reasonably good meals and a little chintz, and her memory of the family hotel, had led her attention to the commercial possibilities of innkeeping.
She was convinced that, despite the ingenuity and care displayed by the managers of the great urban hotels and the clever resorts, no calling included more unimaginative slackers than did innkeeping. She had heard traveling-men at Pemberton"s and at Truax & Fein"s complain of sour coffee and lumpy beds in the hotels of the smaller towns; of knives and forks that had to be wiped on the napkins before using; of shirt-sleeved proprietors who loafed within reach of the cuspidors while their wives tried to get the work done.
She began to read the _Hotel News_ and the _Hotel Bulletin_, and she called on the manager of a supply-house for hotels.
She read in the _Bulletin_ of Bob Sidney, an ex-traveling-man, who, in partnership with a small capitalist, had started a syndicate of inns. He advertised: "The White Line Hotels. Fellow-drummers, when you see the White Line sign hung out, you know you"re in for good beds and good coffee."
The idea seemed good to her. She fancied that traveling-men would go from one White Line Hotel to another. The hotels had been established in a dozen towns along the Pennsylvania Railroad, in Norristown, Reading, Williamsport, and others, and now Bob Sidney was promising to invade Ohio and Indiana. The blazed White Line across the continent caught Una"s growing commercial imagination. And she liked several of Mr.
Sidney"s ideas: The hotels would wire ahead to others of the Line for accommodations for the traveler; and a man known to the Line could get credit at any of its houses, by being registered on identifying cards.
She decided to capture Mr. Sidney. She made plans.
In the spring she took a mysterious two weeks" leave of absence and journeyed through New York State, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. The woman who had quite recently regarded it as an adventure to go to Brooklyn was so absorbed in her Big Idea that she didn"t feel self-conscious even when she talked to men on the train. If they smacked their lips and obviously said to themselves, "Gee! this is easy--not a bad little dame," she steered them into discussing hotels; what they wanted at hotels and didn"t get; what was their favorite hotel in towns in from fifteen hundred to forty thousand inhabitants, and precisely what details made it the favorite.
She stayed at two or three places a day for at least one meal--hotels in tiny towns she had never heard of, and in larger towns that were fumbling for metropolitanism. She sought out all the summer resorts that were open so early. She talked to travelers, men and women; to hack-drivers and to grocers supplying hotels; to proprietors and their wives; to clerks and waitresses and bell-boys, and unconsidered, observant porters. She read circulars and the catalogues of furniture establishments.
Finally, she visited each of Mr. Bob Sidney"s White Line Hotels. Aside from their arrangements for "accommodations" and credit, their superior cleanliness, good mattresses, and coffee with a real taste, she did not find them preferable to others. In their rows of cuspidors and shouldering desks, and barren offices hung with insurance calendars, and dining-rooms ornamented with portraits of decomposed ducks, they were typical of all the hotels she had seen.
On the train back to New York she formulated her suggestions for hotels, among which, in her own words, were the following:
"(1) Make the offices decent rooms--rem. living-room at Gray Wolf Lodge.
Take out desks--guests to register and pay bills in small office off living-room--keep letters there, too. Not much room needed and can"t make pleasant room with miserable old "desk" sticking out into it.
"(2) Cut out the cuspidors. Have special room where drummers can play cards and tell stories and _spit_. Allow smoking in "office," but make it pleasant. Rem. chintz and wicker chairs at $3 each. Small round tables with reading-lamps. Maybe fireplace.
"(3) Better pastry and soup and keep coffee up to standard. One surprise in each meal--for example, novel form of eggs, good salad, or canned lobster c.o.c.ktail. Rem. the same old pork, beans, cornbeef, steak, deadly cold boiled potato everywhere I went.
"(4) More attractive dining-rooms. Esp. small tables for 2 and 4. Cater more to local customers with a la carte menus--not long but good.
"(5) Women housekeepers and pay "em good.
"(6) Hygienic kitchens and advertise "em.
"(7) Train employees, as rem. trav. man told me United Cigar Stores do.
"(8) Better accom. for women. Rem. several traveling men"s wives told me they would go on many trips w. husbands if they could get decent hotels in all these towns.
"(9) Not ape N. Y. hotels. Nix on gilt and palms and marble. But clean and tasty food, and don"t have things like desks just because most hotels do."
- 4
Three hours after Una reached New York she telephoned to the object of her secret commercial affections, the unconscious Mr. Robert Sidney, at the White Line Hotels office. She was so excited that she took ten minutes for calming herself before she telephoned. Every time she lifted the receiver from its hook she thrust it back and mentally apologized to the operator. But when she got the office and heard Mr. Bob Sidney"s raw voice shouting, "Yas? This "s Mist" Sidney," Una was very cool.
"This is Mrs. Schwirtz, realty salesman for Truax & Fein. I"ve just been through Pennsylvania, and I stayed at your White Line Hotels. Of course I have to be an expert on different sorts of accommodations, and I made some notes on your hotels--some suggestions you might be glad to have.
If you care to, we might have lunch together to-morrow, and I"ll give you the suggestions."
"Why, uh, why--"
"Of course I"m rather busy with our new Long Island operations, so if you have a date to-morrow, the matter can wait, but I thought you"d better have the suggestions while they were fresh in my mind. But perhaps I can lunch with you week after next, if--"
"No, no, let"s make it to-morrow."
"Very well. Will you call for me here--Truax & Fein, Zodiac Building?"
Una arose at six-thirty next morning, to dress the part of the great business woman, and before she went to the office she had her hair waved.
Mr. Bob Sidney called for her. He was a simple, energetic soul, with a derby on the back of his head, cheerful, clean-shaven, large-chinned, hoa.r.s.e-voiced, rapidly revolving a chewed cigar. She, the commonplace, was highly evolved in comparison with Mr. Sidney, and there was no nervousness in her as she marched out in a twenty-dollar hat and casually said, "Let"s go to the Waldorf--it"s convenient and not at all bad."
On the way over Mr. Sidney fairly ma.s.saged his head with his agitated derby--c.o.c.ked it over one eye and pushed it back to the crown of his head--in his efforts to find out what and why was Mrs. Una Schwirtz. He kept appraising her. It was obvious that he was trying to decide whether this mysterious telephone correspondent was an available widow who had heard of his charms. He finally stumbled over the grating beside the Waldorf and b.u.mped into the carriage-starter, and dropped his dead cigar. But all the while Una steadily kept the conversation to the vernal beauties of Pennsylvania.
Thanks to rice powder and the pride of a new hat, she looked cool and adequate. But she was thinking all the time: "I never could keep up this Beatrice-Joline pose with Mr. Fein or Mr. Ross. Poor Una, with them she"d just have to blurt out that she wanted a job!"
She sailed up to a corner table by a window. The waiter gave the menu to Mr. Sidney, but she held out her hand for it. "This is my lunch. I"m a business woman, not just a woman," she said to Mr. Sidney; and she rapidly ordered a lunch which was shockingly imitative of one which Mr.
Fein had once ordered for her.
"Prett" hot day for April," said Mr. Sidney.
"Yes.... Is the White Line going well?"
"Yump. Doing a land-office business."
"You"re having trouble with your day clerk at Brockenfelt, I see."
"How juh know?"
"Oh--" She merely smiled.
"Well, that guy"s a four-flush. Came to us from the New Willard, and to hear him tell it you"d think he was the guy that put the "will" in the Willard. But he"s a credit-grabber, that"s what he is. Makes me think-- Nev" forget one time I was up in Boston and I met a c.o.o.n porter and he told me he was a friend of the president of the Pullman Company and had persuaded him to put on steel cars. Bet a hat he believed it himself. That"s "bout like this fellow. He"s going to get the razoo....
Gee! I hope you ain"t a friend of his."
Una had perfectly learned the Boeotian dialect so strangely spoken by Mr. Sidney, and she was able to reply:
"Oh no, no indeed! He ought to be fired. He gave me a room as though he were the superintendent of a free lodging-house."
"But it"s so hard to get trained employees that I hate to even let _him_ go. Just to show you the way things go, just when I was trying to swing a deal for a new hotel, I had to bust off negotiations and go and train a new crew of chambermaids at Sandsonville myself. You"d died laughing to seen _me_ making beds and teaching those birds to clean a spittador, beggin" your pardon, but it certainly was some show, and I do, by gum!
know a traveling-man likes his bed tucked in at the foot! Oh, it"s fierce! The traveling public kicks if they get b.u.m service, and the help kick if you demand any service from "em, and the boss gets it right in the collar-b.u.t.ton both ways from the ace."
"Well, I"m going to tell you how to have trained service and how to make your hotels distinctive. They"re good hotels, as hotels go, and you really do give people good coffee and good beds and credit conveniences, as you promise, but your hotels are not distinctive. I"m going to tell you how to make them so."
Una had waited till Mr. Sidney had disposed of his soup and filet mignon. She spoke deliberately, almost sternly. She reached for her new silver link bag, drew out immaculate typewritten schedules, and while he gaped she read to him precisely the faults of each of the hotels, her suggested remedies, and her general ideas of hotels, with less cuspidors, more originality, and a room where traveling-men could be at home on a rainy Sunday.
"Now you know, and I know," she wound up, "that the proprietor"s ideal of a hotel is one to which traveling-men will travel sixty miles on Sat.u.r.day evening, in order to spend Sunday there. You take my recommendations and you"ll have that kind of hotels. At the same time women will be tempted there and the local trade will go there when wife or the cook is away, or they want to give a big dinner."
"It does sound like it had some possibilities," said Mr. Sidney, as she stopped for breath, after quite the most impa.s.sioned invocation of her life.
She plunged in again:
"Now the point of all this is that I want to be the general manager of certain departments of the Line--catering, service, decoration, and so on. I"ll keep out of the financial end and we"ll work out the buying together. You know it"s women who make the homes for people at home, and why not the homes for people traveling?... I"m woman sales-manager for Truax & Fein--sell direct, and six women under me. I"ll show you my record of sales. I"ve been secretary to an architect, and studied architecture a little. And plenty other jobs. Now you take these suggestions of mine to your office and study "em over with your partner and we"ll talk about the job for me by and by."