Langham, Renier, and the future Earl of Merrivale remained, of course, upon their well-established footing of companionship, but the Darlings began to play their parts of innkeepers with the utmost seriousness and to fight shy of any social advances from the ranks of their guests.
Indeed, for the real heads of the family, Mary, Maud, and Eve, there was serious work to be done. For, to keep thirty or forty exigent and extravagant people well fed, well laundered, well served, and well amused is no frisky skirmish but a morning-to-night battle, a constant looking ahead, a steady drain upon the patience and invention.
In Sam Langham Mary found an invaluable ally. He knew how to live, and could guess to a nicety the "inner man" of another. Nor did he stop at advice. Being a celebrated bon viveur he went subtly among the guests and praised the machinery of whose completed product they were the consumers and the beneficiaries. He knew of no place, he confided, up and down the whole world, where, for a sum of money, you got exactly what you wanted without asking for it.
"Take me for an example," he would say. "I have never before been able to get along without my valet. Here he would be a superfluity. I am 'done,' you may say, better than I have ever been able to do myself. And I know what I'm talking about. What! You think the prices are really rather high. Think what you are getting, man—think!"
Among the new guests was a young man from Boston by the name of Herring. He had written that he was convalescing from typhoid fever and that his doctor had prescribed Adirondack air.
Renier knew Herring slightly and vouched for him.
"They're good people," he said, "his branch of the Herring family—the 'red Herrings' they are called locally—if we may speak of Boston as a 'locality'—he's the reddest of them and the most showy. If there's anything he hasn't tried, he has to try it. He isn't good at things. But he does them. He's the fellow that went to the Barren Lands with a niblick. What, you never heard of that stunt? He was playing in foursome at Myopia. He got bunkered. He hit the sand a prodigious blow and the ball never moved. His partner said: 'Never mind, Syd, you hit hard enough to kill a musk-ox.'
"'Did I?' said Herring, much interested, 'but I never heard of killing a musk-ox with a niblick. Has it ever been done? Are there any authorities one might consult?'
"His partner assured him that 'it' had never been done. Herring said that was enough for him. The charm of Herring is that he never smiles; he's deadly serious—or pretends to be. When they had holed out at the eighteenth, Herring took his niblick and said: 'Well, so long. I'm off to the Barren Lands.'