I don’t know how I covered them two blocks, but I do know that when I reeled into the Decker my hands and arms was paralyzed and Ella had to do the registering.
Was you ever out there? Well, I s’pose it’s what you might call a family hotel, and a good many of the guests belongs to the cay-nine family. A few of the couples that can’t afford dogs has got children, and you’re always tripping over one or the other. They’s a dining room for the grownups and another for the kids, wile the dogs and their nurses eats in the grillroom à la carte. One part of the joint is bachelor quarters. It’s located right next to the dogs’ dormitories, and they’s a good deal of rivalry between the dogs and the souses to see who can make the most noise nights. They’s also a ballroom and a couple card rooms and a kind of a summer parlor where the folks sets round in the evening and listen to a three-piece orchestra that don’t know they’s been any music wrote since Poets and Peasants. The men get up about eight o’clock and go down to New York to Business. They don’t never go to work. About nine the women begins limping downstairs and either goes to call on their dogs or take them for a walk in the front yard. This is a great big yard with a whole lot of benches strewed round it, but you can’t set on them in the daytime because the women or the nurses uses them for a place to read to the dogs or kids, and in the evenings you would have to share them with the waitresses, which you have already had enough of them during the day.
When the women has prepared themselves for the long day’s grind with a four-course breakfast, they set round on the front porch and discuss the big questions of the hour, like for instance the last trunk murder or whether an Airedale is more loving than a Golden Bantam. Once in a wile one of them cracks that it looks like they was bound to be a panic pretty soon and a big drop in prices, and so forth. This shows they’re broad-minded and are giving a good deal of thought to up-to-date topics. Every so often one of them’ll say: “The present situation can’t keep up.” The hell it can’t!
By one o’clock their appetites is whetted so keen from brain exercise that they make a bum out of a plate of soup and an order of Long Island duckling, which they figure is caught fresh every day, and they wind up with salad and apple pie à la mode and a stein of coffee. Then they totter up to their rooms to sleep it off before Dear gets home from Business.
Saturday nights everybody puts on their evening clothes like something was going to happen. But it don’t. Sunday mornings the husbands and bachelors gets up earlier than usual to go to their real business, which is golf. The womenfolks are in full possession of the hotel till Sunday night supper and wives and husbands don’t see one another all day long, but it don’t seem as long as if they did. Most of them’s approaching their golden-wedding jubilee and haven’t nothing more to say to each other that you could call a novelty. The husband may make the remark, Sunday night, that he would of broke one hundred and twenty in the afternoon round if the caddy hadn’t of handed him a spoon when he asked for a nut pick, and the wife’ll probably reply that she’s got to go in Town some day soon and see a chiropodist. The rest of the Sabbath evening is spent in bridge or listening to the latest song hit from The Bohemian Girl.
The hotel’s got all the modern conveniences like artificial light and a stopper in the bathtubs. They even got a barber and a valet, but you can’t get a shave wile he’s pressing your clothes, so it’s pretty near impossible for a man to look their best at the same time.
Well, the second day we was there I bought me a deck of cards and got so good at solitary that pretty soon I could play fifty games between breakfast and lunch and a hundred from then till suppertime. During the first week Ella and Kate got on friendly terms with over a half dozen people—the head waiter, our waitress, some of the clerks and the manager and the two telephone gals. It wasn’t from lack of trying that they didn’t meet even more people. Every day one or the other of them would try and swap a little small talk with one of the other squatters, but it generally always wound up as a short monologue.
Ella said to me one day, she says: “I don’t know if we can stick it out here or not. Every hotel I was ever at before, it was easy enough to make a lot of friends, but you could stick a bottle of cream alongside one of these people and it’d stay sweet a week. Unless they looked at it. I’m sick of talking to you and Sis and the hired help, and Kate’s so lonesome that she cries herself to sleep nights.”
Well, if I’d of only had sense enough to insist on staying we’d of probably packed up and took the next train to Town. But instead of that I said: “What’s to prevent us from going back to New York?”
“Don’t be silly!” says the Mrs. “We come out here to spend the summer and here
