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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/4961-0.txt b/4961-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..092c974 --- /dev/null +++ b/4961-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,10007 @@ +The Project Gutenberg eBook of Our Mr. Wrenn, by Sinclair Lewis + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and +most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions +whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms +of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at +www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you +will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before +using this eBook. + +Title: Our Mr. Wrenn + The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man + +Author: Sinclair Lewis + +Release Date: April 4, 2002 [eBook #4961] +[Most recently updated: July 28, 2021] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: UTF-8 + +Produced by: Charles Aldarondo + +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR MR. WRENN *** + +[Illustration] + + + + +Our Mr. Wrenn + +The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man + +by Sinclair Lewis + +NEW YORK AND LONDON + +MCMXIV + + + + +TO GRACE LIVINGSTONE HEGGER + + +Contents + + CHAPTER I. MR. WRENN IS LONELY + CHAPTER II. HE WALKS WITH MISS THERESA + CHAPTER III. HE STARTS FOR THE LAND OF ELSEWHERE + CHAPTER IV. HE BECOMES THE GREAT LITTLE BILL WRENN + CHAPTER V. HE FINDS MUCH QUAINT ENGLISH FLAVOR + CHAPTER VI. HE IS AN ORPHAN + CHAPTER VII. HE MEETS A TEMPERAMENT + CHAPTER VIII. HE TIFFINS + CHAPTER IX. HE ENCOUNTERS THE INTELLECTUALS + CHAPTER X. HE GOES A-GIPSYING + CHAPTER XI. HE BUYS AN ORANGE TIE + CHAPTER XII. HE DISCOVERS AMERICA + CHAPTER XIII. HE IS “OUR MR. WRENN” + CHAPTER XIV. HE ENTERS SOCIETY + CHAPTER XV. HE STUDIES FIVE HUNDRED, SAVOUIR FAIRE, AND LOTSA-SNAP OFFICE MOTTOES + CHAPTER XVI. HE BECOMES MILDLY RELIGIOUS AND HIGHLY LITERARY + CHAPTER XVII. HE IS BLOWN BY THE WHIRLWIND + CHAPTER XVIII. AND FOLLOWS A WANDERING FLAME THROUGH PERILOUS SEAS + CHAPTER XIX. TO A HAPPY SHORE + + + + +CHAPTER I +MR. WRENN IS LONELY + + +The ticket-taker of the Nickelorion Moving-Picture Show is a public +personage, who stands out on Fourteenth Street, New York, wearing a +gorgeous light-blue coat of numerous brass buttons. He nods to all the +patrons, and his nod is the most cordial in town. Mr. Wrenn used to +trot down to Fourteenth Street, passing ever so many other shows, just +to get that cordial nod, because he had a lonely furnished room for +evenings, and for daytime a tedious job that always made his head +stuffy. + +He stands out in the correspondence of the Souvenir and Art Novelty +Company as “Our Mr. Wrenn,” who would be writing you directly and +explaining everything most satisfactorily. At thirty-four Mr. Wrenn was +the sales-entry clerk of the Souvenir Company. He was always bending +over bills and columns of figures at a desk behind the stock-room. He +was a meek little bachlor—a person of inconspicuous blue ready-made +suits, and a small unsuccessful mustache. + +To-day—historians have established the date as April 9, 1910—there had +been some confusing mixed orders from the Wisconsin retailers, and Mr. +Wrenn had been “called down” by the office manager, Mr. Mortimer R. +Guilfogle. He needed the friendly nod of the Nickelorion ticket-taker. +He found Fourteenth Street, after office hours, swept by a dusty wind +that whisked the skirts of countless plump Jewish girls, whose V-necked +blouses showed soft throats of a warm brown. Under the elevated station +he secretly made believe that he was in Paris, for here beautiful +Italian boys swayed with trays of violets; a tramp displayed crimson +mechanical rabbits, which squeaked, on silvery leading-strings; and a +newsstand was heaped with the orange and green and gold of magazine +covers. + +“Gee!” inarticulated Mr. Wrenn. “Lots of colors. Hope I see foreign +stuff like that in the moving pictures.” + +He came primly up to the Nickelorion, feeling in his vest pockets for a +nickel and peering around the booth at the friendly ticket-taker. But +the latter was thinking about buying Johnny’s pants. Should he get them +at the Fourteenth Street Store, or Siegel-Cooper’s, or over at +Aronson’s, near home? So ruminating, he twiddled his wheel +mechanically, and Mr. Wrenn’s pasteboard slip was indifferently +received in the plate-glass gullet of the grinder without the taker’s +even seeing the clerk’s bow and smile. + +Mr. Wrenn trembled into the door of the Nickelorion. He wanted to turn +back and rebuke this fellow, but was restrained by shyness. He _had_ +liked the man’s “Fine evenin’, sir “—rain or shine—but he wouldn’t +stand for being cut. Wasn’t he making nineteen dollars a week, as +against the ticket-taker’s ten or twelve? He shook his head with the +defiance of a cornered mouse, fussed with his mustache, and regarded +the moving pictures gloomily. + +They helped him. After a Selig domestic drama came a stirring Vitagraph +Western scene, “The Goat of the Rancho,” which depicted with much humor +and tumult the revolt of a ranch cook, a Chinaman. Mr. Wrenn was really +seeing, not cow-punchers and sage-brush, but himself, defying the +office manager’s surliness and revolting against the ticket-man’s +rudeness. Now he was ready for the nearly overpowering delight of +travel-pictures. He bounced slightly as a Gaumont film presented Java. + +He was a connoisseur of travel-pictures, for all his life he had been +planning a great journey. Though he had done Staten Island and +patronized an excursion to Bound Brook, neither of these was his grand +tour. It was yet to be taken. In Mr. Wrenn, apparently fastened to New +York like a domestic-minded barnacle, lay the possibilities of heroic +roaming. He knew it. He, too, like the man who had taken the Gaumont +pictures, would saunter among dusky Javan natives in “markets with +tiles on the roofs and temples and—and—uh, well—places!” The scent of +Oriental spices was in his broadened nostrils as he scampered out of +the Nickelorion, without a look at the ticket-taker, and headed for +“home”—for his third-floor-front on West Sixteenth Street. He wanted to +prowl through his collection of steamship brochures for a description +of Java. But, of course, when one’s landlady has both the sciatica and +a case of Patient Suffering one stops in the basement dining-room to +inquire how she is. + +Mrs. Zapp was a fat landlady. When she sat down there was a straight +line from her chin to her knees. She was usually sitting down. When she +moved she groaned, and her apparel creaked. She groaned and creaked +from bed to breakfast, and ate five griddle-cakes, two helpin’s of +scrapple, an egg, some rump steak, and three cups of coffee, slowly and +resentfully. She creaked and groaned from breakfast to her +rocking-chair, and sat about wondering why Providence had inflicted +upon her a weak digestion. Mr. Wrenn also wondered why, +sympathetically, but Mrs. Zapp was too conscientiously dolorous to be +much cheered by the sympathy of a nigger-lovin’ Yankee, who couldn’t +appreciate the subtle sorrows of a Zapp of Zapp’s Bog, allied to all +the First Families of Virginia. + +Mr. Wrenn did nothing more presumptuous than sit still, in the stuffy +furniture-crowded basement room, which smelled of dead food and deader +pride in a race that had never existed. He sat still because the chair +was broken. It had been broken now for four years. + +For the hundred and twenty-ninth time in those years Mrs. Zapp said, in +her rich corruption of Southern negro dialect, which can only be +indicated here, “Ah been meaning to get that chair mended, Mist’ +Wrenn.” He looked gratified and gazed upon the crayon enlargements of +Lee Theresa, the older Zapp daughter (who was forewoman in a factory), +and of Godiva. Godiva Zapp was usually called “Goaty,” and many times a +day was she called by Mrs. Zapp. A tamed child drudge was Goaty, with +adenoids, which Mrs. Zapp had been meanin’ to have removed, and which +she would continue to have benevolent meanin’s about till it should be +too late, and she should discover that Providence never would let Goaty +go to school. + +“Yes, Mist’ Wrenn, Ah told Goaty she was to see the man about getting +that chair fixed, but she nev’ does nothing Ah tell her.” + +In the kitchen was the noise of Goaty, ungovernable Goaty, aged eight, +still snivelingly washing, though not cleaning, the incredible pile of +dinner dishes. With a trail of hesitating remarks on the sadness of +sciatica and windy evenings Mr. Wrenn sneaked forth from the august +presence of Mrs. Zapp and mounted to paradise—his third-floor-front. + +It was an abjectly respectable room—the bedspread patched; no two +pieces of furniture from the same family; half-tones from the magazines +pinned on the wall. But on the old marble mantelpiece lived his +friends, books from wanderland. Other friends the room had rarely +known. It was hard enough for Mr. Wrenn to get acquainted with people, +anyway, and Mrs. Zapp did not expect her gennulman lodgers to +entertain. So Mr. Wrenn had given up asking even Charley Carpenter, the +assistant bookkeeper at the Souvenir Company, to call. That left him +the books, which he now caressed with small eager finger-tips. He +picked out a P. & O. circular, and hastily left for fairyland. + +The April skies glowed with benevolence this Saturday morning. The +Metropolitan Tower was singing, bright ivory tipped with gold, uplifted +and intensely glad of the morning. The buildings walling in Madison +Square were jubilant; the honest red-brick fronts, radiant; the new +marble, witty. The sparrows in the middle of Fifth Avenue were all +talking at once, scandalously but cleverly. The polished brass of +limousines threw off teethy smiles. At least so Mr. Wrenn fancied as he +whisked up Fifth Avenue, the skirts of his small blue double-breasted +coat wagging. He was going blocks out of his way to the office; ready +to defy time and eternity, yes, and even the office manager. He had +awakened with Defiance as his bedfellow, and throughout breakfast at +the hustler Dairy Lunch sunshine had flickered over the dirty +tessellated floor. + +He pranced up to the Souvenir Company’s brick building, on +Twenty-eighth Street near Sixth Avenue. In the office he chuckled at +his ink-well and the untorn blotters on his orderly desk. Though he sat +under the weary unnatural brilliance of a mercury-vapor light, he +dashed into his work, and was too keen about this business of living +merrily to be much flustered by the bustle of the lady buyer’s superior +“_Good_ morning.” Even up to ten-thirty he was still slamming down +papers on his desk. Just let any one try to stop his course, his +readiness for snapping fingers at The Job; just let them _try_ it, that +was all he wanted! + +Then he was shot out of his chair and four feet along the corridor, in +reflex response to the surly “Bur-r-r-r-r” of the buzzer. Mr. Mortimer +R. Guilfogle, the manager, desired to see him. He scampered along the +corridor and slid decorously through the manager’s doorway into the +long sun-bright room, ornate with rugs and souvenirs. Seven Novelties +glittered on the desk alone, including a large rococo Shakespeare-style +glass ink-well containing cloves and a small iron Pittsburg-style one +containing ink. Mr. Wrenn blinked like a noon-roused owlet in the +brilliance. The manager dropped his fist on the desk, glared, smoothed +his flowered prairie of waistcoat, and growled, his red jowls +quivering: + +“Look here, Wrenn, what’s the matter with you? The Bronx Emporium order +for May Day novelties was filled twice, they write me.” + +“They ordered twice, sir. By ’phone,” smiled Mr. Wrenn, in an agony of +politeness. + +“They ordered hell, sir! Twice—the same order?” + +“Yes, sir; their buyer was prob—” + +“They say they’ve looked it up. Anyway, they won’t pay twice. I know, +em. We’ll have to crawl down graceful, and all because you—I want to +know why you ain’t more careful!” + +The announcement that Mr. Wrenn twice wriggled his head, and once +tossed it, would not half denote his wrath. At last! It was here—the +time for revolt, when he was going to be defiant. He had been careful; +old Goglefogle was only barking; but why should _he_ be barked at? With +his voice palpitating and his heart thudding so that he felt sick he +declared: + +“I’m _sure_, sir, about that order. I looked it up. Their buyer was +drunk!” + +It was done. And now would he be discharged? The manager was speaking: + +“Probably. You looked it up, eh? Um! Send me in the two order-records. +Well. But, anyway, I want you to be more careful after this, Wrenn. +You’re pretty sloppy. Now get out. Expect me to make firms pay twice +for the same order, cause of your carelessness?” + +Mr. Wrenn found himself outside in the dark corridor. The manager +hadn’t seemed much impressed by his revolt. + +The manager wasn’t. He called a stenographer and dictated: + +“Bronx Emporium: + +“GENTLEMEN:—Our Mr. Wrenn has again (underline that ‘again,’ Miss +Blaustein), again looked up your order for May Day novelties. As we +wrote before, order certainly was duplicated by ’phone. Our Mr. Wrenn +is thoroughly reliable, and we have his records of these two orders. We +shall therefore have to push collection on both—” + +After all, Mr. Wrenn was thinking, the crafty manager might be merely +concealing his hand. Perhaps he had understood the defiance. That +gladdened him till after lunch. But at three, when his head was again +foggy with work and he had forgotten whether there was still April +anywhere, he began to dread what the manager might do to him. Suppose +he lost his job; The Job! He worked unnecessarily late, hoping that the +manager would learn of it. As he wavered home, drunk with weariness, +his fear of losing The Job was almost equal to his desire to resign +from The Job. + +He had worked so late that when he awoke on Sunday morning he was still +in a whirl of figures. As he went out to his breakfast of coffee and +whisked wheat at the Hustler Lunch the lines between the blocks of the +cement walk, radiant in a white flare of sunshine, irritatingly +recalled the cross-lines of order-lists, with the narrow cement blocks +at the curb standing for unfilled column-headings. Even the ridges of +the Hustler Lunch’s imitation steel ceiling, running in parallel lines, +jeered down at him that he was a prosaic man whose path was a ruler. + +He went clear up to the branch post-office after breakfast to get the +Sunday mail, but the mail was a disappointment. He was awaiting a +wonderful fully illustrated guide to the Land of the Midnight Sun, a +suggestion of possible and coyly improbable trips, whereas he got only +a letter from his oldest acquaintance—Cousin John, of Parthenon, New +York, the boy-who-comes-to-play of Mr. Wrenn’s back-yard days in +Parthenon. Without opening the letter Mr. Wrenn tucked it into his +inside coat pocket, threw away his toothpick, and turned to Sunday +wayfaring. + +He jogged down Twenty-third Street to the North River ferries afoot. +Trolleys took money, and of course one saves up for future great +traveling. Over him the April clouds were fetterless vagabonds whose +gaiety made him shrug with excitement and take a curb with a frisk as +gambolsome as a Central Park lamb. There was no hint of sales-lists in +the clouds, at least. And with them Mr. Wrenn’s soul swept along, while +his half-soled Cum-Fee-Best $3.80 shoes were ambling past warehouses. +Only once did he condescend to being really on Twenty-third Street. At +the Ninth Avenue corner, under the grimy Elevated, he sighted two +blocks down to the General Theological Seminary’s brick Gothic and +found in a pointed doorway suggestions of alien beauty. + +But his real object was to loll on a West and South Railroad in luxury, +and go sailing out into the foam and perilous seas of North River. He +passed through the smoking-cabin. He didn’t smoke—the habit used up +travel-money. Once seated on the upper deck, he knew that at last he +was outward-bound on a liner. True, there was no great motion, but Mr. +Wrenn was inclined to let realism off easily in this feature of his +voyage. At least there were undoubted life-preservers in the white +racks overhead; and everywhere the world, to his certain witnessing, +was turned to crusading, to setting forth in great ships as if it were +again in the brisk morning of history when the joy of adventure +possessed the Argonauts. + +He wasn’t excited over the liners they passed. He was so experienced in +all of travel, save the traveling, as to have gained a calm interested +knowledge. He knew the _Campagnia_ three docks away, and explained to a +Harlem grocer her fine points, speaking earnestly of stacks and sticks, +tonnage and knots. + +Not excited, but—where couldn’t he go if he were pulling out for Arcady +on the _Campagnia!_ Gee! What were even the building-block towers of +the Metropolitan and Singer buildings and the _Times’s_ cream-stick +compared with some old shrine in a cathedral close that was misted with +centuries! + +All this he felt and hummed to himself, though not in words. He had +never heard of Arcady, though for many years he had been a citizen of +that demesne. + +Sure, he declared to himself, he was on the liner now; he was sliding +up the muddy Mersey (see the _W. S. Travel Notes_ for the source of his +visions); he was off to St. George’s Square for an organ-recital (see +the English Baedeker); then an express for London and—Gee! + +The ferryboat was entering her slip. Mr. Wrenn trotted toward the bow +to thrill over the bump of the boat’s snub nose against the lofty +swaying piles and the swash of the brown waves heaped before her as she +sidled into place. He was carried by the herd on into the station. + +He did not notice the individual people in his exultation as he heard +the great chords of the station’s paean. The vast roof roared as the +iron coursers stamped titanic hoofs of scorn at the little +stay-at-home. + +That is a washed-out hint of how the poets might describe Mr. Wrenn’s +passion. What he said was “Gee!” + +He strolled by the lists of destinations hung on the track gates. +Chicago (the plains! the Rockies! sunset over mining-camps!), +Washington, and the magic Southland—thither the iron horses would be +galloping, their swarthy smoke manes whipped back by the whirlwind, +pounding out with clamorous strong hoofs their sixty miles an hour. +Very well. In time he also would mount upon the iron coursers and +charge upon Chicago and the Southland; just as soon as he got ready. + +Then he headed for Cortlandt Street; for Long Island, City. finally, +the Navy Yard. Along his way were the docks of the tramp steamers where +he might ship as steward in the all-promising Sometime. He had never +done anything so reckless as actually to ask a skipper for the chance +to go a-sailing, but he had once gone into a mission society’s free +shipping-office on West Street where a disapproving elder had grumped +at him, “Are you a sailor? No? Can’t do anything for you, my friend. +Are you saved?” He wasn’t going to risk another horror like that, yet +when the golden morning of Sometime dawned he certainly was going to go +cruising off to palm-bordered lagoons. + +As he walked through Long Island City he contrived conversations with +the sailors he passed. It would have surprised a Norwegian bos’un’s +mate to learn that he was really a gun-runner, and that, as a matter of +fact, he was now telling yarns of the Spanish Main to the man who slid +deprecatingly by him. + +Mr. Wrenn envied the jackies on the training-ship and carelessly went +to sea as the President’s guest in the admiral’s barge and was +frightened by the stare of a sauntering shop-girl and arrived home +before dusk, to Mrs. Zapp’s straitened approval. + +Dusk made incantations in his third-floor-front. Pleasantly fagged in +those slight neat legs, after his walk, Mr. Wrenn sat in the wicker +rocker by the window, patting his scrubby tan mustache and reviewing +the day’s wandering. When the gas was lighted he yearned over pictures +in a geographical magazine for a happy hour, then yawned to himself, +“Well-l-l, Willum, guess it’s time to crawl into the downy.” + +He undressed and smoothed his ready-made suit on the rocking-chair +back. Sitting on the edge of his bed, quaint in his cotton night-gown, +like a rare little bird of dull plumage, he rubbed his head sleepily. +Um-m-m-m-m! How tired he was! He went to open the window. Then his +tamed heart leaped into a waltz, and he forgot third-floor-fronts and +sleepiness. + +Through the window came the chorus of fog-horns on North River. +“Boom-m-m!” That must be a giant liner, battling up through the fog. +(It was a ferry.) A liner! She’d be roaring just like that if she were +off the Banks! If he were only off the Banks! “Toot! Toot!” That was a +tug. “Whawn-n-n!” Another liner. The tumultuous chorus repeated to him +all the adventures of the day. + +He dropped upon the bed again and stared absently at his clothes. Out +of the inside coat pocket stuck the unopened letter from Cousin John. + +He read a paragraph of it. He sprang from the bed and danced a +tarantella, pranced in his cottony nightgown like a drunken Yaqui. The +letter announced that the flinty farm at Parthenon, left to Mr. Wrenn +by his father, had been sold. Its location on a river bluff had made it +valuable to the Parthenon Chautauqua Association. There was now to his +credit in the Parthenon National Bank nine hundred and forty dollars! + +He was wealthy, then. He had enough to stalk up and down the earth for +many venturesome (but economical) months, till he should learn the +trade of wandering, and its mysterious trick of living without a job or +a salary. + +He crushed his pillow with burrowing head and sobbed excitedly, with a +terrible stomach-sinking and a chill shaking. Then he laughed and +wanted to—but didn’t—rush into the adjacent hall room and tell the +total stranger there of this world-changing news. He listened in the +hall to learn whether the Zapps were up, but heard nothing; returned +and cantered up and down, gloating on a map of the world. + +“Gee! It’s happened. I could travel all the time. I guess I won’t +be—very much—afraid of wrecks and stuff. . . . Things like that. . . . +Gee! If I don’t get to bed I’ll be late at the office in the morning!” + +Mr. Wrenn lay awake till three o’clock. Monday morning he felt rather +ashamed of having done so eccentric a thing. But he got to the office +on time. He was worried with the cares of wealth, with having to decide +when to leave for his world-wanderings, but he was also very much aware +that office managers are disagreeable if one isn’t on time. All morning +he did nothing more reckless than balance his new fortune, plus his +savings, against steamship fares on a waste half-sheet of paper. + +The noon-hour was not The Job’s, but his, for exploration of the +parlous lands of romance that lie hard by Twenty-eighth Street and +Sixth Avenue. But he had to go out to lunch with Charley Carpenter, the +assistant bookkeeper, that he might tell the news. As for Charley, He +needed frequently to have a confidant who knew personally the tyrannous +ways of the office manager, Mr. Guilfogle. + +Mr. Wrenn and Charley chose (that is to say, Charley chose) a table at +Drubel’s Eating House. Mr. Wrenn timidly hinted, “I’ve got some big +news to tell you.” + +But Charley interrupted, “Say, did you hear old Goglefogle light into +me this morning? I won’t stand for it. Say, did you hear him—the old—” + +“What was the trouble, Charley?” + +“Trouble? Nothing was the trouble. Except with old Goglefogle. I made +one little break in my accounts. Why, if old Gogie had to keep track of +seventy-’leven accounts and watch every single last movement of a fool +girl that can’t even run the adding-machine, why, he’d get green around +the gills. He’d never do anything _but_ make mistakes! Well, I guess +the old codger must have had a bum breakfast this morning. Wanted some +exercise to digest it. Me, I was the exercise—I was the goat. He calls +me in, and he calls me _down_, and me—well, just lemme tell you, Wrenn, +I calls his bluff!” + +Charley Carpenter stopped his rapid tirade, delivered with quick +head-shakes like those of palsy, to raise his smelly cigarette to his +mouth. Midway in this slow gesture the memory of his wrongs again +overpowered him. He flung his right hand back on the table, scattering +cigarette ashes, jerked back his head with the irritated patience of a +nervous martyr, then waved both hands about spasmodically, while he +snarled, with his cheaply handsome smooth face more flushed than usual: + +“Sure! You can just bet your bottom dollar I let him see from the way I +looked at him that I wasn’t going to stand for no more monkey business. +You bet I did!… I’ll fix him, I will. You just _watch_ me. (Hey, +Drubel, got any lemon merang? Bring me a hunk, will yuh?) Why, Wrenn, +that cross-eyed double-jointed fat old slob, I’ll slam him in the slats +so hard some day—I will, you just watch my smoke. If it wasn’t for that +messy wife of mine—I ought to desert her, and I will some day, and—” + +“Yuh.” Mr. Wrenn was curt for a second…. “I know how it is, Charley. +But you’ll get over it, honest you will. Say, I’ve got some news. Some +land that my dad left me has sold for nearly a thousand plunks. By the +way, this lunch is on me. Let me pay for it, Charley.” + +Charley promised to let him pay, quite readily. And, expanding, said: + +“Great, Wrenn! Great! Lemme congratulate you. Don’t know anybody I’d +rather’ve had this happen to. You’re a meek little baa-lamb, but you’ve +got lots of stuff in you, old Wrennski. Oh say, by the way, could. you +let me have fifty cents till Saturday? Thanks. I’ll pay it back sure. +By golly! you’re the only man around the office that ’preciates what a +double duck-lined old fiend old Goglefogle is, the old—” + +“Aw, gee, Charley, I wish you wouldn’t jump on Guilfogle so hard. He’s +always treated me square.” + +“Gogie—square? Yuh, he’s square just like a hoop. You know it, too, +Wrenn. Now that you’ve got enough money so’s you don’t need to be +scared about the job you’ll realize it, and you’ll want to soak him, +same’s I do. _Say!_” The impulse of a great idea made him gleefully +shake his fist sidewise. “Say! Why _don’t_ you soak him? They bank on +you at the Souvenir Company. Darn’ sight more than you realize, lemme +tell you. Why, you do about half the stock-keeper’s work, sides your +own. Tell you what you do. You go to old Goglefogle and tell him you +want a raise to twenty-five, and want it right now. Yes, by golly, +_thirty!_ You’re worth that, or pretty darn’ near it, but ’course old +Goglefogle’ll never give it to you. He’ll threaten to fire you if you +say a thing more about it. You can tell him to go ahead, and then +where’ll he be? Guess that’ll call his bluff some!” + +“Yes, but, Charley, then if Guilfogle feels he can’t pay me that +much—you know he’s responsible to the directors; he can’t do everything +he wants to—why, he’ll just have to fire me, after I’ve talked to him +like that, whether he wants to or not. And that’d leave us—that’d leave +them—without a sales clerk, right in the busy season.” + +“Why, sure, Wrenn; that’s what we want to do. If you go it ’d leave ’em +without just about _two_ men. Bother ’em like the deuce. It ’d bother +Mr. Mortimer X. Y. Guglefugle most of all, thank the Lord. He wouldn’t +know where he was at—trying to break in a man right in the busy season. +Here’s your chance. Come on, kid; don’t pass it up.” + +“Oh gee, Charley, I can’t do that. You wouldn’t want me to try to +_hurt_ the Souvenir Company after being there for—lemme see, it must be +seven years.” + +“Well, maybe you _like_ to get your cute little nose rubbed on the +grindstone! I suppose you’d like to stay on at nineteen per for the +rest of your life.” + +“Aw, Charley, don’t get sore; please don’t! I’d like to get off, all +right—like to go traveling, and stuff like that. Gee! I’d like to +wander round. But I can’t cut out right in the bus—” + +“But can’t you see, you poor nut, you won’t be _leaving_ ’em—they’ll +either pay you what they ought to or lose you.” + +“Oh, I don’t know about that, Charley. + +“Charley was making up for some uncertainty as to his own logic by +beaming persuasiveness, and Mr. Wrenn was afraid of being hypnotized. +“No, no!” he throbbed, rising. + +“Well, all right!” snarled Charley, “if you like to be Gogie’s goat…. +Oh, you’re all right, Wrennski. I suppose you had ought to stay, if you +feel you got to…. Well, so long. I’ve got to beat it over and buy a +pair of socks before I go back.” + +Mr. Wrenn crept out of Drubel’s behind him, very melancholy. Even +Charley admitted that he “had ought to stay,” then; and what chance was +there of persuading the dread Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle that he wished +to be looked upon as one resigning? Where, then, any chance of +globe-trotting; perhaps for months he would remain in slavery, and he +had hoped just that morning— One dreadful quarter-hour with Mr. +Guilfogle and he might be free. He grinned to himself as he admitted +that this was like seeing Europe after merely swimming the mid-winter +Atlantic. + +Well, he had nine minutes more, by his two-dollar watch; nine minutes +of vagabondage. He gazed across at a Greek restaurant with signs in +real Greek letters like “ruins at—well, at Aythens.” A Chinese +chop-suey den with a red-and-yellow carved dragon, and at an upper +window a squat Chinaman who might easily be carrying a _kris_, “or +whatever them Chink knives are,” as he observed for the hundredth time +he had taken this journey. A rotisserie, before whose upright fender of +scarlet coals whole ducks were happily roasting to a shiny brown. In a +furrier’s window were Siberian foxes’ skins (Siberia! huts of “awful +brave convicks”; the steely Northern Sea; guards in blouses, just as +he’d seen them at an Academy of Music play) and a polar bear (meaning, +to him, the Northern Lights, the long hike, and the _igloo_ at night). +And the florists! There were orchids that (though he only half knew it, +and that all inarticulately) whispered to him of jungles where, in the +hot hush, he saw the slumbering python and—“What was it in that poem, +that, Mandalay, thing? _was_ it about jungles? Anyway: + +“‘Them garlicky smells, +And the sunshine and the palms and the bells.’” + + +He had to hurry back to the office. He stopped only to pat the head of +a florist’s delivery horse that looked wistfully at him from the curb. +“Poor old fella. What you thinking about? Want to be a circus horse and +wander? Le’s beat it together. You can’t, eh? Poor old fella!” + +At three-thirty, the time when it seems to office persons that the +day’s work never will end, even by a miracle, Mr. Wrenn was shaky about +his duty to the firm. He was more so after an electrical interview with +the manager, who spent a few minutes, which he happened to have free, +in roaring “I want to know why” at Mr. Wrenn. There was no particular +“why” that he wanted to know; he was merely getting scientific +efficiency out of employees, a phrase which Mr. Guilfogle had taken +from a business magazine that dilutes efficiency theories for +inefficient employers. + +At five-twenty the manager summoned him, complimented him on nothing in +particular, and suggested that he stay late with Charley Carpenter and +the stock-keeper to inventory a line of desk-clocks which they were +closing out. + +As Mr. Wrenn returned to his desk he stopped at a window on the +corridor and coveted the bright late afternoon. The cornices of lofty +buildings glistened; the sunset shone fierily through the +glass-inclosed layer-like upper floors. He wanted to be out there in +the streets with the shopping crowds. Old Goglefogle didn’t consider +him; why should he consider the firm? + + + + +CHAPTER II +HE WALKS WITH MISS THERESA + + +As he left the Souvenir Company building after working late at taking +inventory and roamed down toward Fourteenth Street, Mr. Wrenn felt +forlornly aimless. The worst of it all was that he could not go to the +Nickelorion for moving pictures; not after having been cut by the +ticket-taker. Then, there before him was the glaring sign of the +Nickelorion tempting him; a bill with “Great Train Robbery Film +Tonight” made his heart thump like stair-climbing—and he dashed at the +ticket-booth with a nickel doughtily extended. He felt queer about the +scalp as the cashier girl slid out a coupon. Why did she seem to be +watching him so closely? As he dropped the ticket in the chopper he +tried to glance away from the Brass-button Man. For one- nineteenth of +a second he kept his head turned. It turned back of itself; he stared +full at the man, half bowed—and received a hearty absent-minded nod and +a “Fine evenin’.” He sang to himself a monotonous song of great joy. +When he stumbled over the feet of a large German in getting to a seat, +he apologized as though he were accustomed to laugh easily with many +friends. + +The train-robbery film was—well, he kept repeating “Gee!” to himself +pantingly. How the masked men did sneak, simply sneak and sneak, behind +the bushes! Mr. Wrenn shrank as one of them leered out of the picture +at him. How gallantly the train dashed toward the robbers, to the +spirit-stirring roll of the snare-drum. The rush from the bushes +followed; the battle with detectives concealed in the express-car. Mr. +Wrenn was standing sturdily and shooting coolly with the slender +hawk-faced Pinkerton man in puttees; with him he leaped to horse and +followed the robbers through the forest. He stayed through the whole +program twice to see the train robbery again. + +As he started to go out he found the ticket-taker changing his long +light-blue robe of state for a highly commonplace sack-coat without +brass buttons. In his astonishment at seeing how a Highness could be +transformed into an every-day man, Mr. Wrenn stopped, and, having +stopped, spoke: + +“Uh—that was quite a—quite a picture—that train robbery. Wasn’t it.” + +“Yuh, I guess—Now where’s the devil and his wife flew away to with my +hat? Them guys is always swiping it. Picture, mister? Why, I didn’t see +it no more ’n—Say you, Pink Eye, say you crab-footed usher, did you +swipe my hat? Ain’t he the cut-up, mister! Ain’t both them ushers the +jingling sheepsheads, though! Being cute and hiding my hat in the +box-office. _Picture?_ I don’t get no chance to see any of ’em. Funny, +ain’t it?—me barking for ’em like I was the grandmother of the guy that +invented ’em, and not knowing whether the train robbery—Now who stole +my going-home shoes?… Why, I don’t know whether the train did any +robbing or not!” + +He slapped Mr. Wrenn on the back, and the sales clerk’s heart bounded +in comradeship. He was surprised into declaring: + +“Say—uh—I bowed to you the other night and you—well, honestly, you +acted like you never saw me.” + +“Well, well, now, and that’s what happens to me for being the dad of +five kids and a she-girl and a tom-cat. Sure, I couldn’t ’ve seen you. +Me, I was probably that busy with fambly cares—I was probably thinking +who was it et the lemon pie on me—was it Pete or Johnny, or shall I +lick ’em both together, or just bite me wife.” + +Mr. Wrenn knew that the ticket-taker had never, never really considered +biting his wife. _He_ knew! His nod and grin and “That’s the idea!” +were urbanely sophisticated. He urged: + +“Oh yes, I’m sure you didn’t intend to hand me the icy mitt. Say! I’m +thirsty. Come on over to Moje’s and I’ll buy you a drink.” + +He was aghast at this abyss of money-spending into which he had leaped, +and the Brass-button Man was suspiciously wondering what this person +wanted of him; but they crossed to the adjacent saloon, a New York +corner saloon, which of course “glittered” with a large mirror, heaped +glasses, and a long shining foot-rail on which, in bravado, Mr. Wrenn +placed his Cum-Fee-Best shoe. + +“Uh?” said the bartender. + +“Rye, Jimmy,” said the Brass-button Man. + +“Uh-h-h-h-h,” said Mr. Wrenn, in a frightened diminuendo, now +that—wealthy citizen though he had become—he was in danger of exposure +as a mollycoddle who couldn’t choose his drink properly. “Stummick been +hurting me. Guess I’d better just take a lemonade.” + +“You’re the brother-in-law to a wise one,” commented the Brass-button +Man. “Me, I ain’t never got the sense to do the traffic cop on the +booze. The old woman she says to me, ‘Mory,’ she says, ‘if you was in +heaven and there was a pail of beer on one side and a gold harp on the +other,’ she says, ‘and you was to have your pick, which would you +take?’ And what ’d yuh think I answers her?” + +“The beer,” said the bartender. “She had your number, all right.” + +“Not on your tin-type,” declared the ticket-taker. + +“‘Me?’ I says to her. ‘Me? I’d pinch the harp and pawn it for ten +growlers of Dutch beer and some man-sized rum!’” + +“Hee, hee hee!” grinned Mr. Wrenn. + +“Ha, ha, ha!” grumbled the bartender. + +“Well-l-l,” yawned the ticket-taker, “the old woman’ll be chasing me +best pants around the flat, if she don’t have me to chase, pretty soon. +Guess I’d better beat it. Much obliged for the drink, Mr. Uh. So long, +Jimmy.” + +Mr. Wrenn set off for home in a high state of exhilaration which, he +noticed, exactly resembled driving an aeroplane, and went briskly up +the steps of the Zapps’ genteel but unexciting residence. He was much +nearer to heaven than West Sixteenth Street appears to be to the +outsider. For he was an explorer of the Arctic, a trusted man on the +job, an associate of witty Bohemians. He was an army lieutenant who +had, with his friend the hawk-faced Pinkerton man, stood off bandits in +an attack on a train. He opened and closed the door gaily. + +He was an apologetic little Mr. Wrenn. His landlady stood on the bottom +step of the hall stairs in a bunchy Mother Hubbard, groaning: + +“Mist’ Wrenn, if you got to come in so late, Ah wish you wouldn’t just +make all the noise you can. Ah don’t see why Ah should have to be kept +awake all night. Ah suppose it’s the will of the Lord that whenever Ah +go out to see Mrs. Muzzy and just drink a drop of coffee Ah must get +insomina, but Ah don’t see why anybody that tries to be a gennulman +should have to go and bang the door and just rack mah nerves.” + +He slunk up-stairs behind Mrs. Zapp’s lumbering gloom. + +“There’s something I wanted to tell you, Mrs. Zapp—something that’s +happened to me. That’s why I was out celebrating last evening and got +in so late.” Mr. Wrenn was diffidently sitting in the basement. + +“Yes,” dryly, “Ah noticed you was out late, Mist’ Wrenn.” + +“You see, Mrs. Zapp, I—uh—my father left me some land, and it’s been +sold for about one thousand plunks.” + +“Ah’m awful’ glad, Mist’ Wrenn,” she said, funereally. “Maybe you’d +like to take that hall room beside yours now. The two rooms’d make a +nice apartment.” (She really said “nahs ‘pahtmun’,” you understand.) + +“Why, I hadn’t thought much about that yet.” He felt guilty, and was +profusely cordial to Lee Theresa Zapp, the factory forewoman, who had +just thumped down-stairs. + +Miss Theresa was a large young lady with a bust, much black hair, and a +handsome disdainful discontented face. She waited till he had finished +greeting her, then sniffed, and at her mother she snarled: + +“Ma, they went and kept us late again to-night. I’m getting just about +tired of having a bunch of Jews and Yankees think I’m a nigger. Uff! I +hate them!” + +“T’resa, Mist’ Wrenn’s just inherited two thousand dollars, and he’s +going to take that upper hall room.” Mrs. Zapp beamed with maternal +fondness at the timid lodger. + +But the gallant friend of Pinkertons faced her—for the first time. +“Waste his travel-money?” he was inwardly exclaiming as he said: + +“But I thought you had some one in that room. I heard som—” + +“That fellow! Oh, he ain’t going to be perm’nent. And he promised me—So +you can have—” + +“I’m _awful_ sorry, Mrs. Zapp, but I’m afraid I can’t take it. Fact is, +I may go traveling for a while.” + +“Co’se you’ll keep your room if you do, Mist’ Wrenn?” + +“Why, I’m afraid I’ll have to give it up, but—Oh, I may not be going +for a long long while yet; and of course I’ll be glad to come—I’ll want +to come back here when I get back to New York. I won’t be gone for more +than, oh, probably not more than a year anyway, and—” + +“And Ah thought you said you was going to be perm’nent!” Mrs. Zapp +began quietly, prefatory to working herself up into hysterics. “And +here Ah’ve gone and had your room fixed up just for you, and new paper +put in, and you’ve always been talking such a lot about how you wanted +your furniture arranged, and Ah’ve gone and made all mah plans—” + +Mr. Wrenn had been a shyly paying guest of the Zapps for four years. +That famous new paper had been put up two years before. So he +spluttered: “Oh, I’m _awfully_ sorry. I wish—uh—I don’t—” + +“Ah’d _thank_ you, Mist’ Wrenn, if you could _conveniently_ let me +_know_ before you go running off and leaving me with empty rooms, with +the landlord after the rent, and me turning away people that ’d pay +more for the room, because Ah wanted to keep it for you. And people +always coming to see you and making me answer the door and—” + +Even the rooming-house worm was making small worm-like sounds that +presaged turning. Lee Theresa snapped just in time, “Oh, cut it out, +Ma, will you!” She had been staring at the worm, for he had suddenly +become interesting and adorable and, incidentally, an heir. “I don’t +see why Mr. Wrenn ain’t giving us all the notice we can expect. He said +he mightn’t be going for a long time.” + +“Oh!” grunted Mrs. Zapp. “So mah own flesh and blood is going to turn +against me!” + +She rose. Her appearance of majesty was somewhat lessened by the creak +of stays, but her instinct for unpleasantness was always good. She said +nothing as she left them, and she plodded up-stairs with a train of +sighs. + +Mr. Wrenn looked as though sudden illness had overpowered him. But +Theresa laughed, and remarked: “You don’t want to let Ma get on her +high horse, Mr. Wrenn. She’s a bluff.” + +With much billowing of the lower, less stiff part of her garments, she +sailed to the cloudy mirror over the magazine-filled bookcase and +inspected her cap of false curls, with many prods of her large firm +hands which flashed with Brazilian diamonds. Though he had heard the +word “puffs,” he did not know that half her hair was false. He stared +at it. Though in disgrace, he felt the honor of knowing so ample and +rustling a woman as Miss Lee Theresa. + +“But, say, I wish I could ’ve let her know I was going earlier, Miss +Zapp. I didn’t know it myself, but it does seem like a mean trick. I +s’pose I ought to pay her something extra.” + +“Why, child, you won’t do anything of the sort. Ma hasn’t got a bit of +kick coming. You’ve always been awful nice, far as I can see.” She +smiled lavishly. “I went for a walk to-night…. I wish all those men +wouldn’t stare at a girl so. I’m sure I don’t see why they should stare +at me.” + +Mr. Wrenn nodded, but that didn’t seem to be the right comment, so he +shook his head, then looked frightfully embarrassed. + +“I went by that Armenian restaurant you were telling me about, Mr. +Wrenn. Some time I believe I’ll go dine there.” Again she paused. + +He said only, “Yes, it is a nice place.” + +Remarking to herself that there was no question about it, after all, he +_was_ a little fool, Theresa continued the siege. “Do you dine there +often?” + +“Oh yes. It is a nice place.” + +“Could a lady go there?” + +“Why, yes, I—” + +“Yes!” + +“I should think so,” he finished. + +“Oh!… I do get so awfully tired of the greasy stuff Ma and Goaty dish +up. They think a big stew that tastes like dish-water is a dinner, and +if they do have anything I like they keep on having the same thing +every day till I throw it in the sink. I wish I could go to a +restaurant once in a while for a change, but of course—I dunno’s it +would be proper for a lady to go alone even there. What do you think? +Oh dear!” She sat brooding sadly. + +He had an inspiration. Perhaps Miss Theresa could be persuaded to go +out to dinner with him some time. He begged: + +“Gee, I wish you’d let me take you up there some evening, Miss Zapp.” + +“Now, didn’t I tell you to call me ‘Miss Theresa’? Well, I suppose you +just don’t want to be friends with me. Nobody does.” She brooded again. + +“Oh, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. Honest I didn’t. I’ve always +thought you’d think I was fresh if I called you ‘Miss Theresa,’ and so +I—” + +“Why, I guess I could go up to the Armenian with you, perhaps. When +would you like to go? You know I’ve always got lots of dates but +I—um—let’s see, I think I could go to-morrow evening.” + +“Let’s do it! Shall I call for you, Miss—uh—Theresa?” + +“Yes, you may if you’ll be a good boy. Good night.” She departed with +an air of intimacy. + +Mr. Wrenn scuttled to the Nickelorion, and admitted to the Brass-button +Man that he was “feeling pretty good ’s evening.” + +He had never supposed that a handsome creature like Miss Theresa could +ever endure such a “slow fellow” as himself. For about one minute he +considered with a chill the question of whether she was agreeable +because of his new wealth, but reproved the fiend who was making the +suggestion; for had he not heard her mention with great scorn a second +cousin who had married an old Yankee for his money? That just settled +_that_, he assured himself, and scowled at a passing messenger-boy for +having thus hinted, but hastily grimaced as the youngster showed signs +of loud displeasure. + +The Armenian restaurant is peculiar, for it has foreign food at low +prices, and is below Thirtieth Street, yet it has not become Bohemian. +Consequently it has no bad music and no crowd of persons from Missouri +whose women risk salvation for an evening by smoking cigarettes. Here +prosperous Oriental merchants, of mild natures and bandit faces, drink +semi-liquid Turkish coffee and discuss rugs and revolutions. + +In fact, the place seemed so unartificial that Theresa, facing Mr. +Wrenn, was bored. And the menu was foreign without being Society +viands. It suggested rats’ tails and birds’ nests, she was quite sure. +She would gladly have experimented with _paté de foie gras_ or +alligator-pears, but what social prestige was there to be gained at the +factory by remarking that she “always did like _pahklava_”? Mr. Wrenn +did not see that she was glancing about discontentedly, for he was +delightedly listening to a lanky young man at the next table who was +remarking to his _vis-à-vis_, a pale slithey lady in black, with the +lines of a torpedo-boat: “Try some of the stuffed vine-leaves, child of +the angels, and some wheat _pilaf_ and some _bourma_. Your wheat +_pilaf_ is a comfortable food and cheering to the stomach of man. +Simply _won_-derful. As for the _bourma_, he is a merry beast, a brown +rose of pastry with honey cunningly secreted between his petals +and—Here! Waiter! Stuffed vine-leaves, wheat _p’laf, bourm’_—twice on +the order and hustle it.” + +“When you get through listening to that man—he talks like a bar of +soap—tell me what there is on this bill of fare that’s safe to eat,” +snorted Theresa. + +“I thought he was real funny,” insisted Mr. Wrenn…. “I’m sure you’ll +like _shish kebab_ and s—” + +“_Shish kibub!_ Who ever heard of such a thing! Haven’t they any—oh, I +thought they’d have stuff they call ‘Turkish Delight’ and things like +that.” + +“‘Turkish Delights’ is cigarettes, I think.” + +“Well, I know it isn’t, because I read about it in a story in a +magazine. And they were eating it. On the terrace…. What is that _shish +kibub_?” + +“_Kebab_…. It’s lamb roasted on skewers. I know you’ll like it.” + +“Well, I’m not going to trust any heathens to cook my meat. I’ll take +some eggs and some of that—what was it the idiot was talking +about—_berma_?” + +“_Bourma_…. That’s awful nice. With honey. And do try some of the +stuffed peppers and rice.” + +“All right,” said Theresa, gloomily. + +Somehow Mr. Wrenn wasn’t vastly transformed even by the possession of +the two thousand dollars her mother had reported. He was still “funny +and sort of scary,” not like the overpowering Southern gentlemen she +supposed she remembered. Also, she was hungry. She listened with stolid +glumness to Mr. Wrenn’s observation that that was “an awful big hat the +lady with the funny guy had on.” + +He was chilled into quietness till Papa Gouroff, the owner of the +restaurant, arrived from above-stairs. Papa Gouroff was a Russian Jew +who had been a police spy in Poland and a hotel proprietor in Mogador, +where he called himself Turkish and married a renegade Armenian. He had +a nose like a sickle and a neck like a blue-gum nigger. He hoped that +the place would degenerate into a Bohemian restaurant where liberal +clergymen would think they were slumming, and barbers would think they +were entering society, so he always wore a _fez_ and talked bad Arabic. +He was local color, atmosphere, Bohemian flavor. Mr. Wrenn murmured to +Theresa: + +“Say, do you see that man? He’s Signor Gouroff, the owner. I’ve talked +to him a lot of times. Ain’t he great! Golly! look at that beak of his. +Don’t he make you think of _kiosks_ and _hyrems_ and stuff? Gee! What +does he make you think—” + +“He’s got on a dirty collar…. That waiter’s awful slow…. Would you +please be so kind and pour me another glass of water?” + +But when she reached the honied _bourma_ she grew tolerant toward Mr. +Wrenn. She had two cups of cocoa and felt fat about the eyes and +affectionate. She had mentioned that there were good shows in town. Now +she resumed: + +“Have you been to ‘The Gold Brick’ yet?” + +“No, I—uh—I don’t go to the theater much.” + +“Gwendolyn Muzzy was telling me that this was the funniest show she’d +ever seen. Tells how two confidence men fooled one of those terrible +little jay towns. Shows all the funny people, you know, like they have +in jay towns…. I wish I could go to it, but of course I have to help +out the folks at home, so— Well…. Oh dear.” + +“Say! I’d like to take you, if I could. Let’s go—this evening!” He +quivered with the adventure of it. + +“Why, I don’t know; I didn’t tell Ma I was going to be out. But—oh, I +guess it would be all right if I was with you.” + +“Let’s go right up and get some tickets.” + +“All right.” Her assent was too eager, but she immediately corrected +that error by yawning, “I don’t suppose I’d ought to go, but if you +want to—” + +They were a very lively couple as they walked up. He trickled sympathy +when she told of the selfishness of the factory girls under her and the +meanness of the superintendent over her, and he laughed several times +as she remarked that the superintendent “ought to be boiled +alive—that’s what _all_ lobsters ought to be,” so she repeated the +epigram with such increased jollity that they swung up to the theater +in a gale; and, once facing the ennuied ticket-seller, he demanded +dollar seats just as though he had not been doing sums all the way up +to prove that seventy-five-cent seats were the best he could afford. + +The play was a glorification of Yankee smartness. Mr. Wrenn was +disturbed by the fact that the swindler heroes robbed quite all the +others, but he was stirred by the brisk romance of money-making. The +swindlers were supermen—blonde beasts with card indices and options +instead of clubs. Not that Mr. Wrenn made any observations regarding +supermen. But when, by way of commercial genius, the swindler robbed a +young night clerk Mr. Wrenn whispered to Theresa, “Gee! he certainly +does know how to jolly them, heh?” + +“Sh-h-h-h-h-h!” said Theresa. + +Every one made millions, victims and all, in the last act, as a proof +of the social value of being a live American business man. As they +oozed along with the departing audience Mr. Wrenn gurgled: + +“That makes me feel just like I’d been making a million dollars.” +Masterfully, he proposed, “Say, let’s go some place and have something +to eat.” + +“All right.” + +“Let’s—I almost feel as if I could afford Rector’s, after that play; +but, anyway, let’s go to Allaire’s.” + +Though he was ashamed of himself for it afterward, he was almost +haughty toward his waiter, and ordered Welsh rabbits and beer quite as +though he usually breakfasted on them. He may even have strutted a +little as he hailed a car with an imaginary walking-stick. His parting +with Miss Theresa was intimate; he shook her hand warmly. + +As he undressed he hoped that he had not been too abrupt with the +waiter, “poor cuss.” But he lay awake to think of Theresa’s hair and +hand-clasp; of polished desks and florid gentlemen who curtly summoned +bank-presidents and who had—he tossed the bedclothes about in his +struggle to get the word—who had a _punch!_ + +He would do that Great Traveling of his in the land of Big Business! + +The five thousand princes of New York to protect themselves against the +four million ungrateful slaves had devised the sacred symbols of +dress-coats, large houses, and automobiles as the outward and visible +signs of the virtue of making money, to lure rebels into respectability +and teach them the social value of getting a dollar away from that +inhuman, socially injurious fiend, Some One Else. That Our Mr. Wrenn +should dream for dreaming’s sake was catastrophic; he might do things +because he wanted to, not because they were fashionable; whereupon, +police forces and the clergy would disband, Wall Street and Fifth +Avenue would go thundering down. Hence, for him were provided those Y. +M. C. A. night bookkeeping classes administered by solemn earnest men +of thirty for solemn credulous youths of twenty-nine; those sermons on +content; articles on “building up the rundown store by live +advertising”; Kiplingesque stories about playing the game; and +correspondence-school advertisements that shrieked, “Mount the ladder +to thorough knowledge—the path to power and to the fuller +pay-envelope.” + +To all these Mr. Wrenn had been indifferent, for they showed no +imagination. But when he saw Big Business glorified by a humorous +melodrama, then The Job appeared to him as picaresque adventure, and he +was in peril of his imagination. + +The eight-o’clock sun, which usually found a wildly shaving Mr. Wrenn, +discovered him dreaming that he was the manager of the Souvenir +Company. But that was a complete misunderstanding of the case. The +manager of the Souvenir Company was Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle, and he +called Mr. Wrenn in to acquaint him with that fact when the new magnate +started his career in Big Business by arriving at the office one hour +late. + +What made it worse, considered Mr. Guilfogle, was that this Wrenn had a +higher average of punctuality than any one else in the office, which +proved that he knew better. Worst of all, the Guilfogle family eggs had +not been scrambled right at breakfast; they had been anemic. Mr. +Guilfogle punched the buzzer and set his face toward the door, with a +scowl prepared. + +Mr. Wrenn seemed weary, and not so intimidated as usual. + +“Look here, Wrenn; you were just about two hours late this morning. +What do you think this office is? A club or a reading-room for hoboes? +Ever occur to you we’d like to have you favor us with a call now and +then so’s we can learn how you’re getting along at golf or whatever +you’re doing these days?” + +There was a sample baby-shoe office pin-cushion on the manager’s desk. +Mr. Wrenn eyed this, and said nothing. The manager: + +“Hear what I said? D’yuh think I’m talking to give my throat exercise?” + +Mr. Wrenn was stubborn. “I couldn’t help it.” + +“Couldn’t help—! And you call that an explanation! I know just exactly +what you’re thinking, Wrenn; you’re thinking that because I’ve let you +have a lot of chances to really work into the business lately you’re +necessary to us, and not simply an expense—” + +“Oh no, Mr. Guilfogle; honest, I didn’t think—” + +“Well, hang it, man, you _want_ to think. What do you suppose we pay +you a salary for? And just let me tell you, Wrenn, right here and now, +that if you can’t condescend to spare us some of your valuable time, +now and then, we can good and plenty get along without you.” + +An old tale, oft told and never believed; but it interested Mr. Wrenn +just now. + +“I’m real glad you can get along without me. I’ve just inherited a big +wad of money! I think I’ll resign! Right now!” + +Whether he or Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle was the more aghast at hearing +him bawl this no one knows. The manager was so worried at the thought +of breaking in a new man that his eye-glasses slipped off his poor +perspiring nose. He begged, in sudden tones of old friendship: + +“Why, you can’t be thinking of leaving us! Why, we expect to make a big +man of you, Wrenn. I was joking about firing you. You ought to know +that, after the talk we had at Mouquin’s the other night. You can’t be +thinking of leaving us! There’s no end of possibilities here.” + +“Sorry,” said the dogged soldier of dreams. + +“Why—” wailed that hurt and astonished victim of ingratitude, Mr. +Guilfogle. + +“I’ll leave the middle of June. That’s plenty of notice,” chirruped Mr. +Wrenn. + +At five that evening Mr. Wrenn dashed up to the Brass-button Man at his +station before the Nickelorion, crying: + +“Say! You come from Ireland, don’t you?” + +“Now what would you think? Me—oh no; I’m a Chinaman from Oshkosh!” + +“No, honest, straight, tell me. I’ve got a chance to travel. What d’yuh +think of that? Ain’t it great! And I’m going right away. What I wanted +to ask you was, what’s the best place in Ireland to see?” + +“Donegal, o’ course. I was born there.” + +Hauling from his pocket a pencil and a worn envelope, Mr. Wrenn +joyously added the new point of interest to a list ranging from Delagoa +Bay to Denver. + +He skipped up-town, looking at the stars. He shouted as he saw the +stacks of a big Cunarder bulking up at the end of Fourteenth Street. He +stopped to chuckle over a lithograph of the Parthenon at the window of +a Greek bootblack’s stand. Stars—steamer—temples, all these were his. +He owned them now. He was free. + +Lee Theresa sat waiting for him in the basement livingroom till +ten-thirty while he was flirting with trainboards at the Grand Central. +Then she went to bed, and, though he knew it not, that prince of +wealthy suitors, Mr. Wrenn, had entirely lost the heart and hand of +Miss Zapp of the F. F. V. + +He stood before the manager’s god-like desk on June 14, 1910. Sadly: + +“Good-by, Mr. Guilfogle. Leaving to-day. I wish—Gee! I wish I could +tell you, you know—about how much I appreciate—” + +The manager moved a wire basket of carbon copies of letters from the +left side of his desk to the right, staring at them thoughtfully; +rearranged his pencils in a pile before his ink-well; glanced at the +point of an indelible pencil with a manner of startled examination; +tapped his desk-blotter with his knuckles; then raised his eyes. He +studied Mr. Wrenn, smiled, put on the look he used when inviting him +out for a drink. Mr. Guilfogle was essentially an honest fellow, +harshened by The Job; a well-satisfied victim, with the imagination +clean gone out of him, so that he took follow-up letters and the +celerity of office-boys as the only serious things in the world. He was +strong, alive, not at all a bad chap, merely efficient. + +“Well, Wrenn, I suppose there’s no use of rubbing it in. Course you +know what I think about the whole thing. It strikes me you’re a fool to +leave a good job. But, after all, that’s your business, not ours. We +like you, and when you get tired of being just a bum, why, come back; +we’ll always try to have a job open for you. Meanwhile I hope you’ll +have a mighty good time, old man. Where you going? When d’yuh start +out?” + +“Why, first I’m going to just kind of wander round generally. Lots of +things I’d like to do. I think I’ll get away real soon now…. Thank you +awfully, Mr. Guilfogle, for keeping a place open for me. Course I +prob’ly won’t need it, but gee! I sure do appreciate it.” + +“Say, I don’t believe you’re so plumb crazy about leaving us, after +all, now that the cards are all dole out. Straight now, are you?” + +“Yes, sir, it does make me feel a little blue—been here so long. But +it’ll be awful good to get out at sea.” + +“Yuh, I know, Wrenn. I’d like to go traveling myself—I suppose you +fellows think I wouldn’t care to go bumming around like you do and +never have to worry about how the firm’s going to break even. But—Well, +good-by, old man, and don’t forget us. Drop me a line now and then and +let me know how you’re getting along. Oh say, if you happen to see any +novelties that look good let us hear about them. But drop me a line, +anyway. We’ll always be glad to hear from you. Well, good-by and good +luck. Sure and drop me a line.” + +In the corner which had been his home for eight years Mr. Wrenn could +not devise any new and yet more improved arrangement of the wire +baskets and clips and desk reminders, so he cleaned a pen, blew some +gray eraser-dust from under his iron ink-well standard, and decided +that his desk was in order; reflecting: + +He’d been there a long time. Now he could never come back to it, no +matter how much he wanted to…. How good the manager had been to him. +Gee! he hadn’t appreciated how considerut Guilfogle was! + +He started down the corridor on a round of farewells to the boys. “Too +bad he hadn’t never got better acquainted with them, but it was too +late now. Anyway, they were such fine jolly sports; they’d never miss a +stupid guy like him.” + +Just then he met them in the corridor, all of them except Guilfogle, +headed by Rabin, the traveling salesman, and Charley Carpenter, who was +bearing a box of handkerchiefs with a large green-and-crimson-paper +label. + +“Gov’nor Wrenn,” orated Charley, “upon this suspicious occasion we have +the pleasure of showing by this small token of our esteem our +’preciation of your untiring efforts in the investigation of Mortimer +R. Gugglegiggle of the Graft Trust and— + +“Say, old man, joking aside, we’re mighty sorry you’re going +and—uh—well, we’d like to give you something to show we’re—uh—mighty +sorry you’re going. We thought of a box of cigars, but you don’t smoke +much; anyway, these han’k’chiefs’ll help to show—Three cheers for +Wrenn, fellows!” + +Afterward, by his desk, alone, holding the box of handkerchiefs with +the resplendent red-and-green label, Mr. Wrenn began to cry. + +He was lying abed at eight-thirty on a morning of late June, two weeks +after leaving the Souvenir Company, deliberately hunting over his +pillow for cool spots, very hot and restless in the legs and enormously +depressed in the soul. He would have got up had there been anything to +get up for. There was nothing, yet he felt uneasily guilty. For two +weeks he had been afraid of losing, by neglect, the job he had already +voluntarily given up. So there are men whom the fear of death has +driven to suicide. + +Nearly every morning he had driven himself from bed and had finished +shaving before he was quite satisfied that he didn’t have to get to the +office on time. As he wandered about during the day he remarked with +frequency, “I’m scared as teacher’s pet playing hookey for the first +time, like what we used to do in Parthenon.” All proper persons were at +work of a week-day afternoon. What, then, was he doing walking along +the street when all morality demanded his sitting at a desk at the +Souvenir Company, being a little more careful, to win the divine favor +of Mortimer R. Guilfogle? + +He was sure that if he were already out on the Great Traveling he would +be able to “push the buzzer on himself and get up his nerve.” But he +did not know where to go. He had planned so many trips these years that +now he couldn’t keep any one of them finally decided on for more than +an hour. It rather stretched his short arms to embrace at once a gay +old dream of seeing Venice and the stern civic duty of hunting +abominably dangerous beasts in the Guatemala bush. + +The expense bothered him, too. He had through many years so +persistently saved money for the Great Traveling that he begrudged +money for that Traveling itself. Indeed, he planned to spend not more +than $300 of the $1,235.80 he had now accumulated, on his first +venture, during which he hoped to learn the trade of wandering. + +He was always influenced by a sentence he had read somewhere about “one +of those globe-trotters you meet carrying a monkey-wrench in Calcutta, +then in raiment and a monocle at the Athenaeum.” He would learn some +Kiplingy trade that would teach him the use of astonishingly technical +tools, also daring and the location of smugglers’ haunts, copra +islands, and whaling-stations with curious names. + +He pictured himself shipping as third engineer at the Manihiki Islands +or engaged for taking moving pictures of an aeroplane flight in +Algiers. He _had_ to get away from Zappism. He had to be out on the +iron seas, where the battle-ships and liners went by like a marching +military band. But he couldn’t get started. + +Once beyond Sandy Hook, he would immediately know all about engines and +fighting. It would help, he was certain, to be shanghaied. But no +matter how wistfully, no matter how late at night he timorously forced +himself to loiter among unwashed English stokers on West Street, he +couldn’t get himself molested except by glib persons wishing ten cents +“for a place to sleep.” + +When he had dallied through breakfast that particular morning he sat +about. Once he had pictured sitting about reading travel-books as a +perfect occupation. But it concealed no exciting little surprises when +he could be a Sunday loafer on any plain Monday. Furthermore, Goaty +never made his bed till noon, and the gray-and-brown-patched coverlet +seemed to trail all about the disordered room. + +Midway in a paragraph he rose, threw _One Hundred Ways to See +California_ on the tumbled bed, and ran away from Our Mr. Wrenn. But +Our Mr. Wrenn pursued him along the wharves, where the sun glared on +oily water. He had seen the wharves twelve times that fortnight. In +fact, he even cried viciously that “he had seen too blame much of the +blame wharves.” + +Early in the afternoon he went to a moving-picture show, but the first +sight of the white giant figures bulking against the gray background +was wearily unreal; and when the inevitable large-eyed black-braided +Indian maiden met the canonical cow-puncher he threshed about in his +seat, was irritated by the nervous click of the machine and the hot +stuffiness of the room, and ran away just at the exciting moment when +the Indian chief dashed into camp and summoned his braves to the +war-path. + +Perhaps he could hide from thought at home. + +As he came into his room he stood at gaze like a kitten of good family +beholding a mangy mongrel asleep in its pink basket. For on his bed was +Mrs. Zapp, her rotund curves stretching behind her large flat feet, +whose soles were toward him. She was noisily somnolent; her stays +creaked regularly as she breathed, except when she moved slightly and +groaned. + +Guiltily he tiptoed down-stairs and went snuffling along the dusty +unvaried brick side streets, wondering where in all New York he could +go. He read minutely a placard advertising an excursion to the +Catskills, to start that evening. For an exhilarated moment he resolved +to go, but—” oh, there was a lot of them rich society folks up there.” +He bought a morning _American_ and, sitting in Union Square, gravely +studied the humorous drawings. + +He casually noticed the “Help Wanted” advertisements. + +They suggested an uninteresting idea that somehow he might find it +economical to go venturing as a waiter or farm-hand. + +And so he came to the gate of paradise: + +MEN WANTED. Free passage on cattle-boats to Liverpool feeding cattle. +Low fee. Easy work. Fast boats. Apply International and Atlantic +Employment Bureau,—Greenwich Street. + + +“Gee!” he cried, “I guess Providence has picked out my first hike for +me.” + + + + +CHAPTER III +HE STARTS FOR THE LAND OF ELSEWHERE + + +The International and Atlantic Employment Bureau is a long dirty room +with the plaster cracked like the outlines on a map, hung with +steamship posters and the laws of New York regarding employment +offices, which are regarded as humorous by the proprietor, M. Baraieff, +a short slender ejaculatory person with a nervous black beard, lively +blandness, and a knowledge of all the incorrect usages of nine +languages. Mr. Wrenn edged into this junk-heap of nationalities with +interested wonder. M. Baraieff rubbed his smooth wicked hands together +and bowed a number of times. + +Confidentially leaning across the counter, Mr. Wrenn murmured: “Say, I +read your ad. about wanting cattlemen. I want to make a trip to Europe. +How—?” + +“Yes, yes, yes, yes, Mistaire. I feex you up right away. Ten dollars +pleas-s-s-s.” + +“Well, what does that entitle me to?” + +“I tole you I feex you up. Ha! Ha! I know it; you are a gentleman; you +want a nice leetle trip on Europe. Sure. I feex you right up. I send +you off on a nice easy cattleboat where you won’t have to work much +hardly any. Right away it goes. Ten dollars pleas-s-s-s.” + +“But when does the boat start? Where does it start from?” Mr. Wrenn was +a bit confused. He had never met a man who grimaced so politely and so +rapidly. + +“Next Tuesday I send you right off.” + +Mr. Wrenn regretfully exchanged ten dollars for a card informing +Trubiggs, Atlantic Avenue, Boston, that Mr. “Ren” was to be “ship 1st +poss. catel boat right away and charge my acct. fee paid Baraieff.” +Brightly declaring “I geef you a fine ship,” M. Baraieff added, on the +margin of the card, in copper-plate script, “Best ship, easy work.” He +caroled, “Come early next Tuesday morning, “and bowed out Mr. Wrenn +like a Parisian shopkeeper. The row of waiting servant-girls curtsied +as though they were a hedge swayed by the wind, while Mr. Wrenn +self-consciously hurried to get past them. + +He was too excited to worry over the patient and quiet suffering with +which Mrs. Zapp heard the announcement that he was going. That Theresa +laughed at him for a cattleman, while Goaty, in the kitchen, audibly +observed that “nobody but a Yankee would travel in a pig-pen, “merely +increased his joy in moving his belongings to a storage warehouse. + +Tuesday morning, clad in a sweater-jacket, tennis-shoes, an old felt +hat, a khaki shirt and corduroys, carrying a suit-case packed to +bursting with clothes and Baedekers, with one hundred and fifty dollars +in express-company drafts craftily concealed, he dashed down to +Baraieff’s hole. Though it was only eight-thirty, he was afraid he was +going to be late. + +Till 2 P.M. he sat waiting, then was sent to the Joy Steamship Line +wharf with a ticket to Boston and a letter to Trubiggs’s +shipping-office: “Give bearer Ren as per inclosed receet one trip +England catel boat charge my acct. SYLVESTRE BARAIEFF, N. Y.” + +Standing on the hurricane-deck of the Joy Line boat, with his suit-case +guardedly beside him, he crooned to himself tuneless chants with the +refrain, “Free, free, out to sea. Free, free, that’s _me!_” He had +persuaded himself that there was practically no danger of the boat’s +sinking or catching fire. Anyway, he just wasn’t going to be scared. As +the steamer trudged up East River he watched the late afternoon sun +brighten the Manhattan factories and make soft the stretches of +Westchester fields. (Of course, he “thrilled.”) + +He had no state-room, but was entitled to a place in a twelve-berth +room in the hold. Here large farmers without their shoes were grumpily +talking all at once, so he returned to the deck; and the rest of the +night, while the other passengers snored, he sat modestly on a canvas +stool, unblinkingly gloating over a sea-fabric of frosty blue that was +shot through with golden threads when they passed lighthouses or ships. +At dawn he was weary, peppery-eyed, but he viewed the flooding light +with approval. + +At last, Boston. + +The front part of the shipping-office on Atlantic Avenue was a +glass-inclosed room littered with chairs, piles of circulars, old +pictures of Cunarders, older calendars, and directories to be ranked as +antiques. In the midst of these remains a red-headed Yankee of forty, +smoking a Pittsburg stogie, sat tilted back in a kitchen chair, reading +the Boston _American_. Mr. Wrenn delivered M. Baraieff’s letter and +stood waiting, holding his suit-case, ready to skip out and go aboard a +cattle-boat immediately. + +The shipping-agent glanced through the letter, then snapped: + +“Bryff’s crazy. Always sends ’em too early. Wrenn, you ought to come to +me first. What j’yuh go to that Jew first for? Here he goes and sends +you a day late—or couple days too early. ’F you’d got here last night I +could ’ve sent you off this morning on a Dominion Line boat. All I got +now is a Leyland boat that starts from Portland Saturday. Le’s see; +this is Wednesday. Thursday, Friday—you’ll have to wait three days. Now +you want me to fix you up, don’t you? I might not be able to get you +off till a week from now, but you’d like to get off on a good boat +Saturday instead, wouldn’t you?” + +“Oh yes; I _would_. I—” + +“Well, I’ll try to fix it. You can see for yourself; boats ain’t +leaving every minute just to please Bryff. And it’s the busy season. +Bunches of rah-rah boys wanting to cross, and Canadians wanting to get +back to England, and Jews beating it to Poland—to sling bombs at the +Czar, I guess. And lemme tell you, them Jews is all right. They’re +willing to pay for a man’s time and trouble in getting ’em fixed up, +and so—” + +With dignity Mr. William Wrenn stated, “Of course I’ll be glad +to—uh—make it worth your while.” + +“I _thought_ you was a gentleman. Hey, Al! _Al!_” An underfed boy with +few teeth, dusty and grown out of his trousers, appeared. “Clear off a +chair for the gentleman. Stick that valise on top my desk…. Sit down, +Mr. Wrenn. You see, it’s like this: I’ll tell you in confidence, you +understand. This letter from Bryff ain’t worth the paper it’s written +on. He ain’t got any right to be sending out men for cattle-boats. Me, +I’m running that. I deal direct with all the Boston and Portland lines. +If you don’t believe it just go out in the back room and ask any of the +cattlemen out there.” + +“Yes, I see,” Mr. Wrenn observed, as though he were ill, and toed an +old almanac about the floor. “Uh—Mr.—Trubiggs, is it?” + +“Yump. Yump, my boy. Trubiggs. Tru by name and true by nature. Heh?” + +This last was said quite without conviction. It was evidently a joke +which had come down from earlier years. Mr. Wrenn ignored it and +declared, as stoutly as he could: + +“You see, Mr. Trubiggs, I’d be willing to pay you—” + +“I’ll tell you just how it is, Mr. Wrenn. I ain’t one of these Sheeny +employment bureaus; I’m an American; I like to look out for Americans. +Even if you _didn’t_ come to me first I’ll watch out for your +interests, same’s if they was mine. Now, do you want to get fixed up +with a nice fast boat that leaves Portland next Saturday, just a couple +of days’ wait?” + +“Oh yes, I _do_, Mr. Trubiggs.” + +“Well, my list is really full—men waiting, too—but if it ’d be worth +five dollars to you to—” + +“Here’s the five dollars.” + +The shipping-agent was disgusted. He had estimated from Mr. Wrenn’s +cheap sweater-jacket and tennis-shoes that he would be able to squeeze +out only three or four dollars, and here he might have made ten. More +in sorrow than in anger: + +“Of course you understand I may have a lot of trouble working you in on +the _next_ boat, you coming as late as this. Course five dollars is +less ’n what I usually get.” He contemptuously tossed the bill on his +desk. “If you want me to slip a little something extra to the agents—” + +Mr. Wrenn was too head-achy to be customarily timid. “Let’s see that. +Did I give you only five dollars?” Receiving the bill, he folded it +with much primness, tucked it into the pocket of his shirt, and +remarked: + +“Now, you said you’d fix me up for five dollars. Besides, that letter +from Baraieff is a form with your name printed on it; so I know you do +business with him right along. If five dollars ain’t enough, why, then +you can just go to hell, Mr. Trubiggs; yes, sir, that’s what you can +do. I’m just getting tired of monkeying around. If five _is_ enough +I’ll give this back to you Friday, when you send me off to Portland, if +you give me a receipt. There!” He almost snarled, so weary and +discouraged was he. + +Now, Trubiggs was a warm-hearted rogue, and he liked the society of +what he called “white people.” He laughed, poked a Pittsburg stogie at +Mr. Wrenn, and consented: + +“All right. I’ll fix you up. Have a smoke. Pay me the five Friday, or +pay it to my foreman when he puts you on the cattle-boat. I don’t care +a rap which. You’re all right. Can’t bluff you, eh?” + +And, further bluffing Mr. Wrenn, he suggested to him a lodging-house +for his two nights in Boston. “Tell the clerk that red-headed Trubiggs +sent you, and he’ll give you the best in the house. Tell him you’re a +friend of mine.” + +When Mr. Wrenn had gone Mr. Trubiggs remarked to some one, by +telephone, “’Nother sucker coming, Blaugeld. Now don’t try to do me out +of my bit or I’ll cap for some other joint, understand? Huh? Yuh, stick +him for a thirty-five-cent bed. S’ long.” + +The caravan of Trubiggs’s cattlemen who left for Portland by night +steamer, Friday, was headed by a bulky-shouldered boss, who wore no +coat and whose corduroy vest swung cheerfully open. A motley troupe +were the cattlemen—Jews with small trunks, large imitation-leather +valises and assorted bundles, a stolid prophet-bearded procession of +weary men in tattered derbies and sweat-shop clothes. + +There were Englishmen with rope-bound pine chests. A lewd-mouthed +American named Tim, who said he was a hatter out of work, and a +loud-talking tough called Pete mingled with a straggle of hoboes. + +The boss counted the group and selected his confidants for the trip to +Portland—Mr. Wrenn and a youth named Morton. + +Morton was a square heavy-fleshed young man with stubby hands, who, up +to his eyes, was stolid and solid as a granite monument, but merry of +eye and hinting friendliness in his tousled soft-brown hair. He was +always wielding a pipe and artfully blowing smoke through his nostrils. + +Mr. Wrenn and he smiled at each other searchingly as the Portland boat +pulled out, and a wind swept straight from the Land of Elsewhere. + +After dinner Morton, smoking a pipe shaped somewhat like a golf-stick +head and somewhat like a toad, at the rail of the steamer, turned to +Mr. Wrenn with: + +“Classy bunch of cattlemen we’ve got to go with. Not!… My name’s +Morton.” + +“I’m awful glad to meet you, Mr. Morton. My name’s Wrenn.” + +“Glad to be off at last, ain’t you?” + +“Golly! I should say I _am!_” + +“So’m I. Been waiting for this for years. I’m a clerk for the P. R. R. +in N’ York.” + +“I come from New York, too.” + +“So? Lived there long?” + +“Uh-huh, I—” began Mr. Wrenn. + +“Well, I been working for the Penn. for seven years now. Now I’ve got a +vacation of three months. On me. Gives me a chance to travel a little. +Got ten plunks and a second-class ticket back from Glasgow. But I’m +going to see England and France just the same. Prob’ly Germany, too.” + +“Second class? Why don’t you go steerage, and save?” + +“Oh, got to come back like a gentleman. You know. You’re from New York, +too, eh?” + +“Yes, I’m with an art-novelty company on Twenty-eighth Street. I been +wanting to get away for quite some time, too…. How are you going to +travel on ten dollars?” + +“Oh, work m’ way. Cinch. Always land on my feet. Not on my uppers, at +that. I’m only twenty-eight, but I’ve been on my own, like the English +fellow says, since I was twelve…. Well, how about you? Traveling or +going somewhere?” + +“Just traveling. I’m glad we’re going together, Mr. Morton. I don’t +think most of these cattlemen are very nice. Except for the old Jews. +They seem to be fine old coots. They make you think of—oh—you +know—prophets and stuff. Watch ’em, over there, making tea. I suppose +the steamer grub ain’t kosher. I seen one on the Joy Line saying his +prayers—I suppose he was—in a kind of shawl.” + +“Well, well! You don’t say so!” + +Distinctly, Mr. Wrenn felt that he was one of the gentlemen who, in +Kipling, stand at steamer rails exchanging observations on strange +lands. He uttered, cosmopolitanly: + +“Gee! Look at that sunset. Ain’t that grand!” + +“Holy smoke! it sure is. I don’t see how anybody could believe in +religion after looking at that.” + +Shocked and confused at such a theory, yet excited at finding that +Morton apparently had thoughts, Mr. Wrenn piped: “Honestly, I don’t see +that at _all_. I don’t see how anybody could disbelieve anything after +a sunset like that. Makes me believe all sorts of thing—gets me going—I +imagine I’m all sorts of places—on the Nile and so on.” + +“Sure! That’s just it. Everything’s so peaceful and natural. Just _is_. +Gives the imagination enough to do, even by itself, without having to +have religion.” + +“Well,” reflected Mr. Wrenn, “I don’t hardly ever go to church. I don’t +believe much in all them highbrow sermons that don’t come down to brass +tacks—ain’t got nothing to do with real folks. But just the same, I +love to go up to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Why, I get real _thrilled_—I +hope you won’t think I’m trying to get high-browed, Mr. Morton.” + +“Why, no. Cer’nly not. I understand. Gwan.” + +“It gets me going when I look down the aisle at the altar and see the +arches and so on. And the priests in their robes—they look so—so way +up—oh, I dunno just how to say it—so kind of _uplifted_.” + +“Sure, I know. Just the esthetic end of the game. Esthetic, you +know—the beauty part of it.” + +“Yuh, sure, that’s the word. ’Sthetic, that’s what it is. Yes, +’sthetic. But, just the same, it makes me feel’s though I believed in +all sorts of things.” + +“Tell you what I believe may happen, though,” exulted Morton. “This +socialism, and maybe even these here International Workers of the +World, may pan out as a new kind of religion. I don’t know much about +it, I got to admit. But looks as though it might be that way. It’s dead +certain the old political parties are just gangs—don’t stand for +anything except the name. But this comrade business—good stunt. +Brotherhood of man—real brotherhood. My idea of religion. One that is +because it’s got to be, not just because it always has been. Yessir, me +for a religion of guys working together to make things easier for each +other.” + +“You bet!” commented Mr. Wrenn, and they smote each other upon the +shoulder and laughed together in a fine flame of shared hope. + +“I wish I knew something about this socialism stuff,” mused Mr. Wrenn, +with tilted head, examining the burnt-umber edges of the sunset. + +“Great stuff. Not working for some lazy cuss that’s inherited the right +to boss you. And _international_ brotherhood, not just neighborhoods. +New thing.” + +“Gee! I surely would like that, awfully,” sighed Mr. Wrenn. + +He saw the processional of world brotherhood tramp steadily through the +paling sunset; saffron-vestured Mandarin marching by flax-faced +Norseman and languid South Sea Islander—the diverse peoples toward whom +he had always yearned. + +“But I don’t care so much for some of these ranting street-corner +socialists, though,” mused Morton. “The kind that holler ‘Come get +saved _our_ way or go to hell! Keep off scab guides to prosperity.’” + +“Yuh, sure. Ha! ha! ha!” + +“Huh! huh!” + +Morton soon had another thought. “Still, same time, us guys that do the +work have got to work out something for ourselves. We can’t bank on the +rah-rah boys that wear eye-glasses and condescend to like us, cause +they think we ain’t entirely too dirty for ’em to associate with, and +all these writer guys and so on. That’s where you got to hand it to the +street-corner shouters.” + +“Yes, that’s _so_. Y’ right there, I guess, all right.” + +They looked at each other and laughed again; initiated friends; tasting +each other’s souls. They shared sandwiches and confessions. When the +other passengers had gone to bed and the sailors on watch seemed lonely +the two men were still declaring, shyly but delightedly, that “things +is curious.” + +In the damp discomfort of early morning the cattlemen shuffled from the +steamer at Portland and were herded to a lunch-room by the boss, who +cheerfully smoked his corn-cob and ejaculated to Mr. Wrenn and Morton +such interesting facts as: + +“Trubiggs is a lobster. You don’t want to let the bosses bluff you +aboard the _Merian_. They’ll try to chase you in where the steers’ll +gore you. The grub’ll be—” + +“What grub do you get?” + +“Scouse and bread. And water.” + +“What’s scouse?” + +“Beef stew without the beef. Oh, the grub’ll be rotten. Trubiggs is a +lobster. He wouldn’t be nowhere if ’t wa’n’t for me.” + +Mr. Wrenn appreciated England’s need of roast beef, but he timidly +desired not to be gored by steers, which seemed imminent, before +breakfast coffee. The streets were coldly empty, and he was sleepy, and +Morton was silent. At the restaurant, sitting on a high stool before a +pine counter, he choked over an egg sandwich made with thick crumby +slices of a bread that had no personality to it. He roved forlornly +about Portland, beside the gloomy pipe-valiant Morton, fighting two +fears: the company might not need all of them this trip, and he might +have to wait; secondly, if he incredibly did get shipped and started +for England the steers might prove dreadfully dangerous. After intense +thinking he ejaculated, “Gee! it’s be bored or get gored.” Which was +much too good not to tell Morton, so they laughed very much, and at ten +o’clock were signed on for the trip and led, whooping, to the deck of +the S.S. _Merian_. + +Cattle were still struggling down the chutes from the dock. The dirty +decks were confusingly littered with cordage and the cattlemen’s +luggage. The Jewish elders stared sepulchrally at the wilderness of +open hatches and rude passageways, as though they were prophesying +death. + +But Mr. Wrenn, standing sturdily beside his suit-case to guard it, +fawned with romantic love upon the rusty iron sides of their pilgrims’ +caravel; and as the _Merian_ left the wharf with no more +handkerchief-waving or tears than attends a ferry’s leaving he mumbled: + +“Free, free, out to sea. Free, free, that’s _me!_” + +Then, “Gee!… Gee whittakers!” + + + + +CHAPTER IV +HE BECOMES THE GREAT LITTLE BILL WRENN + + +When the _Merian_ was three days out from Portland the frightened +cattleman stiff known as “Wrennie” wanted to die, for he was now sure +that the smell of the fo’c’sle, in which he was lying on a thin +mattress of straw covered with damp gunny-sacking, both could and would +become daily a thicker smell, a stronger smell, a smell increasingly +diverse and deadly. + +Though it was so late as eight bells of the evening, Pete, the tough +factory hand, and Tim, the down-and-out hatter, were still playing +seven-up at the dirty fo’c’sle table, while McGarver, under-boss of the +Morris cattle gang, lay in his berth, heavily studying the game and +blowing sulphurous fumes of Lunch Pail Plug Cut tobacco up toward +Wrennie. + +Pete, the tough, was very evil. He sneered. He stole. He bullied. He +was a drunkard and a person without cleanliness of speech. Tim, the +hatter, was a loud-talking weakling, under Pete’s domination. Tim wore +a dirty rubber collar without a tie, and his soul was like his +neckware. + +McGarver, the under-boss, was a good shepherd among the men, though he +had recently lost the head foremanship by a spree complicated with +language and violence. He looked like one of the _Merian_ bulls, with +broad short neck and short curly hair above a thick-skinned deeply +wrinkled low forehead. He never undressed, but was always seen, as now, +in heavy shoes and blue-gray woolen socks tucked over the bottoms of +his overalls. He was gruff and kind and tyrannical and honest. + +Wrennie shook and drew his breath sharply as the foghorn yawped out its +“Whawn-n-n-n” again, reminding him that they were still in the Bank +fog; that at any moment they were likely to be stunned by a +heart-stopping crash as some liner’s bow burst through the fo’c’sle’s +walls in a collision. Bow-plates buckling in and shredding, the +in-thrust of an enormous black bow, water flooding in, cries +and—However, the horn did at least show that They were awake up there +on the bridge to steer him through the fog; and weren’t They +experienced seamen? Hadn’t They made this trip ever so many times and +never got killed? Wouldn’t They take all sorts of pains on Their own +account as well as on his? + +But—just the same, would he really ever get to England alive? And if he +did, would he have to go on holding his breath in terror for nine more +days? Would the fo’c’sle always keep heaving up—up—up, like this, then +down—down—down, as though it were going to sink? + +“How do yuh like de fog-horn, Wrennie?” + +Pete, the tough, spit the question up at him from a corner of his +mouth. “Hope we don’t run into no ships.” + +He winked at Tim, the weakling hatter, who took the cue and mourned: + +“I’m kinda afraid we’re going to, ain’t you, Pete? The mate was telling +me he was scared we would.” + +“Sures’ t’ing you know. Hey, Wrennie, wait till youse have to beat it +down-stairs and tie up a bull in a storm. Hully gee! Youse’ll last +quick on de game, Birdie!” + +“Oh, shut up,” snapped Wrennie’s friend Morton. + +But Morton was seasick; and Pete, not heeding him, outlined other +dangers which he was happily sure were threatening them. Wrennie +shivered to hear that the “grub ’d git worse.” He writhed under Pete’s +loud questions about his loss, in some cattle-pen, of the +gray-and-scarlet sweater-jacket which he had proudly and gaily +purchased in New York for his work on the ship. And the card-players +assured him that his suit-case, which he had intrusted to the Croac +ship’s carpenter, would probably be stolen by “Satan.” + +Satan! Wrennie shuddered still more. For Satan, the gaunt-jawed +hook-nosed rail-faced head foreman, diabolically smiling when angry, +sardonically sneering when calm, was a lean human whip-lash. Pete +sniggered. He dilated upon Satan’s wrath at Wrennie for not “coming +across” with ten dollars for a bribe as he, Pete, had done. + +(He lied, of course. And his words have not been given literally. They +were not beautiful words.) + +McGarver, the straw-boss, would always lie awake to enjoy a good brisk +indecent story, but he liked Wrennie’s admiration of him, so, lunging +with his bull-like head out of his berth, he snorted: + +“Hey, you, Pete, it’s time to pound your ear. Cut it out.” + +Wrennie called down, sternly, “I ain’t no theological student, Pete, +and I don’t mind profanity, but I wish you wouldn’t talk like a +garbage-scow.” + +“Hey, Poicy, did yuh bring your dictionary?” Pete bellowed to Tim, two +feet distant from him. To Wrennie, “Say, Gladys, ain’t you afraid one +of them long woids like, t’eological, will turn around and bite you +right on the wrist?” + +“Dry up!” irritatedly snapped a Canadian. + +“Aw, cut it out, you—,” groaned another. + +“Shut up,” added McGarver, the straw-boss. “Both of you.” Raging: “Gwan +to bed, Pete, or I’ll beat your block clean off. I mean it, see? _Hear +me?_” + +Yes, Pete heard him. Doubtless the first officer on the bridge heard, +too, and perhaps the inhabitants of Newfoundland. But Pete took his +time in scratching the back of his neck and stretching before he +crawled into his berth. For half an hour he talked softly to Tim, for +Wrennie’s benefit, stating his belief that Satan, the head boss, had +once thrown overboard a Jew much like Wrennie, and was likely thus to +serve Wrennie, too. Tim pictured the result when, after the capsizing +of the steamer which would undoubtedly occur if this long sickening +motion kept up, Wrennie had to take to a boat with Satan. + +The fingers of Wrennie curled into shape for strangling some one. + +When Pete was asleep he worried off into thin slumber. + +Then, there was Satan, the head boss, jerking him out of his berth, +stirring his cramped joints to another dawn of drudgery—two hours of +work and two of waiting before the daily eight-o’clock insult called +breakfast. He tugged on his shoes, marveling at Mr. Wrenn’s really +being there, at his sitting in cramped stoop on the side of a berth in +a dark filthy place that went up and down like a freight elevator, +subject to the orders of persons whom he did not in the least like. + +Through the damp gray sea-air he staggered hungrily along the gangway +to the hatch amidships, and trembled down the iron ladder to McGarver’s +crew ’tween-decks. + +First, watering the steers. Sickened by walking backward with pails of +water he carried till he could see and think of nothing in the world +save the water-butt, the puddle in front of it, and the cattlemen +mercilessly dipping out pails there, through centuries that would never +end. How those steers did drink! + +McGarver’s favorite bull, which he called “the Grenadier,” took ten +pails and still persisted in leering with dripping gray mouth beyond +the headboard, trying to reach more. As Wrennie was carrying a pail to +the heifers beyond, the Grenadier’s horn caught and tore his overalls. +The boat lurched. The pail whirled out of his hand. He grasped an iron +stanchion and kicked the Grenadier in the jaw till the steer backed +off, a reformed character. + +McGarver cheered, for such kicks were a rule of the game. + +“Good work,” ironically remarked Tim, the weakling hatter. + +“You go to hell,” snapped Wrennie, and Tim looked much more respectful. + +But Wrennie lost this credit before they had finished feeding out the +hay, for he grew too dizzy to resent Tim’s remarks. + +Straining to pitch forkfuls into the pens while the boat rolled, +slopping along the wet gangway, down by the bunkers of coal, where the +heat seemed a close-wound choking shroud and the darkness was made only +a little pale by light coming through dust-caked port-holes, he sneezed +and coughed and grunted till he was exhausted. The floating bits of +hay-dust were a thousand impish hands with poisoned nails scratching at +the roof of his mouth. His skin prickled all over. He constantly +discovered new and aching muscles. But he wabbled on until he finished +the work, fifteen minutes after Tim had given out. + +He crawled up to the main deck and huddled in the shelter of a pile of +hay-bales where Pete was declaring to Tim and the rest that Satan +“couldn’t never get nothing on him.” + +Morton broke into Pete’s publicity with the question, “Say, is it +straight what they say, Pete, that you’re the guy that owns the Leyland +Line and that’s why you know so much more than the rest of us poor +lollops? Watson, the needle, quick!” [Applause and laughter.] + +Wrennie felt personally grateful to Morton for this, but he went up to +the aft top deck, where he could lie alone on a pile of tarpaulins. He +made himself observe the sea which, as Kipling and Jack London had +specifically promised him in their stories, surrounded him, everywhere +shining free; but he glanced at it only once. To the north was a liner +bound for home. + +Home! Gee! That _was_ rubbing it in! While at work, whether he was sick +or not, he could forget—things. But the liner, fleeting on with bright +ease, made the cattle-boat seem about as romantic as Mrs. Zapp’s +kitchen sink. + +Why, he wondered—“why had he been a chump? Him a wanderer? No; he was a +hired man on a sea-going dairy-farm. Well, he’d get onto this +confounded job before he was through with it, but then—gee! back to +God’s Country!” + +While the _Merian_, eleven days out, pleasantly rocked through the +Irish Sea, with the moon revealing the coast of Anglesey, one Bill +Wrenn lay on the after-deck, condescending to the heavens. It was so +warm that they did not need to sleep below, and half a dozen of the +cattlemen had brought their mattresses up on deck. Beside Bill Wrenn +lay the man who had given him that name—Tim, the hatter, who had become +weakly alarmed and admiring as Wrennie learned to rise feeling like a +boy in early vacation-time, and to find shouting exhilaration in +sending a forkful of hay fifteen good feet. + +Morton, who lay near by, had also adopted the name “Bill Wrenn.” Most +of the trip Morton had discussed Pete and Tim instead of the fact that +“things is curious.” Mr. Wrenn had been jealous at first, but when he +learned from Morton the theory that even a Pete was a “victim of +’vironment” he went out for knowing him quite systematically. + +To McGarver he had been “Bill Wrenn” since the fifth day, when he had +kept a hay-bale from slipping back into the hold on the boss’s head. +Satan and Pete still called him “Wrennie,” but he was not thinking +about them just now with Tim listening admiringly to his observations +on socialism. + +Tim fell asleep. Bill Wrenn lay quiet and let memory color the sky +above him. He recalled the gardens of water which had flowered in foam +for him, strange ships and nomadic gulls, and the schools of sleekly +black porpoises that, for him, had whisked through violet waves. Most +of all, he brought back the yesterday’s long excitement and delight of +seeing the Irish coast hills—his first foreign land—whose faint sky +fresco had seemed magical with the elfin lore of Ireland, a country +that had ever been to him the haunt not of potatoes and politicians, +but of fays. He had wanted fays. They were not common on the asphalt of +West Sixteenth Street. But now he had seen them beckoning in +Wanderland. + +He was falling asleep under the dancing dome of the sky, a happy Mr. +Wrenn, when he was aroused as a furious Bill, the cattleman. Pete was +clogging near by, singing hoarsely, “Dey was a skoit and ’er name was +Goity.” + +“You shut up!” commanded Bill Wrenn. + +“Say, be careful!” the awakened Tim implored of him. Pete snorted: “Who +says to ‘shut up,’ hey? Who was it, Satan?” + +From the capstan, where he was still smoking, the head foreman +muttered: “What’s the odds? The little man won’t say it again.” + +Pete stood by Bill Wrenn’s mattress. “Who said ‘shut up’?” sounded +ominously. + +Bill popped out of bed with what he regarded as a vicious +fighting-crouch. For he was too sleepy to be afraid. “I did! What you +going to do about it?” More mildly, as a fear of his own courage began +to form, “I want to sleep.” + +“Oh! You want to sleep. Little mollycoddle wants to sleep, does he? +Come here!” + +The tough grabbed at Bill’s shirt-collar across the mattress. Bill +ducked, stuck out his arm wildly, and struck Pete, half by accident. +Roaring, Pete bunted him, and he went down, with Pete kneeling on his +stomach and pounding him. + +Morton and honest McGarver, the straw-boss, sprang to drag off Pete, +while Satan, the panther, with the first interest they had ever seen in +his eyes, snarled: “Let ’em fight fair. Rounds. You’re a’ right, Bill.” + +“Right,” commended Morton. + +Armored with Satan’s praise, firm but fearful in his rubber sneakers, +surprised and shocked to find himself here doing this, Bill Wrenn +squared at the rowdy. The moon touched sadly the lightly sketched +Anglesey coast and the rippling wake, but Bill Wrenn, oblivious of +dream moon and headland, faced his fellow-bruiser. + +They circled. Pete stuck out his foot gently. Morton sprang in, bawling +furiously, “None o’ them rough-and-tumble tricks.” + +“Right-o,” added McGarver. + +Pete scowled. He was left powerless. He puffed and grew dizzy as Bill +Wrenn danced delicately about him, for he could do nothing without +back-street tactics. He did bloody the nose of Bill and pummel his +ribs, but many cigarettes and much whisky told, and he was ready to +laugh foolishly and make peace when, at the end of the sixth round, he +felt Bill’s neat little fist in a straight—and entirely accidental—rip +to the point of his jaw. + +Pete sent his opponent spinning with a back-hander which awoke all the +cruelty of the terrible Bill. Silently Bill Wrenn plunged in with a +smash! smash! smash! like a murderous savage, using every grain of his +strength. + +Let us turn from the lamentable luck of Pete. He had now got the idea +that his supposed victim could really fight. Dismayed, shocked, +disgusted, he stumbled and sought to flee, and was sent flat. + +This time it was the great little Bill who had to be dragged off. +McGarver held him, kicking and yammering, his mild mustache bristling +like a battling cat’s, till the next round, when Pete was knocked out +by a clumsy whirlwind of fists. + +He lay on the deck, with Bill standing over him and demanding, “What’s +my name, _heh?_” + +“I t’ink it’s Bill now, all right, Wrennie, old hoss—Bill, old hoss,” +groaned Pete. + +He was permitted to sneak off into oblivion. + +Bill Wrenn went below. In the dark passage by the fidley he fell to +tremorous weeping. But the brackish hydrant water that stopped his +nose-bleed saved him from hysterics. He climbed to the top deck, and +now he could again see his brother pilgrim, the moon. + +The stiffs and bosses were talking excitedly of the fight. Tim rushed +up to gurgle: “Great, Bill, old man! You done just what I’d ’a’ done if +he’d cussed me. I told you Pete was a bluffer.” + +“Git out,” said Satan. + +Tim fled. + +Morton came up, looked at Bill Wrenn, pounded him on the shoulder, and +went off to his mattress. The other stiffs slouched away, but McGarver +and Satan were still discussing the fight. + +Snuggling on the hard black pile of tarpaulins, Bill talked to them, +warmed to them, and became Mr. Wrenn. He announced his determination to +wander adown every shining road of Europe. + +“Nice work.” “Sure.” “You’ll make a snappy little ole globe-trotter.” +“Sure; ought to be able to get the slickest kind of grub for four bits +a day.” “Nice work,” Satan interjected from time to time, with smooth +irony. “Sure. Go ahead. Like to hear your plans.” + +McGarver broke in: “Cut that out, Marvin. You’re a ‘Satan’ all right. +Quit your kidding the little man. He’s all right. And he done fine on +the job last three-four days.” + +Lying on his mattress, Bill stared at the network of the ratlines +against the brilliant sky. The crisscross lines made him think of the +ruled order-blanks of the Souvenir Company. + +“Gee!” he mused, “I’d like to know if Jake is handling my work the way +we—they—like it. I’d like to see the old office again, and Charley +Carpenter, just for a couple of minutes. Gee! I wish they could have +seen me put it all over Pete to-night! That’s what I’m going to do to +the blooming Englishmen if they don’t like me.” + +The S.S. _Merian_ panted softly beside the landing-stage at Birkenhead, +Liverpool’s Jersey City, resting in the sunshine after her voyage, +while the cattle were unloaded. They had encountered fog-banks at the +mouth of the Mersey River. Mr. Wrenn had ecstatically watched the +shores of England—_England!_—ride at him through the fog, and had +panted over the lines of English villas among the dunes. It was like a +dream, yet the shore had such amazingly safe solid colors, real red and +green and yellow, when contrasted with the fog-wet deck unearthily +glancing with mist-lights. + +Now he was seeing his first foreign city, and to Morton, stolidly +curious beside him, he could say nothing save “Gee!” With church-tower +and swarthy dome behind dome, Liverpool lay across the Mersey. Up +through the Liverpool streets that ran down to the river, as though +through peep-holes slashed straight back into the Middle Ages, his +vision plunged, and it wandered unchecked through each street while he +hummed: + +“Free, free, in Eu-ro-pee, that’s _me!_” + +The cattlemen were called to help unload the remaining hay. They made a +game of it. Even Satan smiled, even the Jewish elders were lightly +affable as they made pretendedly fierce gestures at the squat patient +hay-bales. Tim, the hatter, danced a limber foolish jig upon the deck, +and McGarver bellowed, “The bon-nee bon-nee banks of Loch +Lo-o-o-o-mond.” + +The crowd bawled: “Come on, Bill Wrenn; your turn. Hustle up with that +bale, Pete, or we’ll sic Bill on you.” + +Bill Wrenn, standing very dignified, piped: “I’m Colonel Armour. I own +all these cattle, ’cept the Morris uns, see? Gotta do what I say, +savvy? Tim, walk on your ear.” + +The hatter laid his head on the deck and waved his anemic legs in +accordance with directions from Colonel Armour (late Wrenn). + +The hay was off. The _Merian_ tooted and headed across the Mersey to +the Huskinson Dock, in Liverpool, while the cattlemen played tag about +the deck. Whooping and laughing, they made last splashy toilets at the +water-butts, dragged out their luggage, and descended to the +dock-house. + +As the cattlemen passed Bill Wrenn and Morton, shouting affectionate +good-bys in English or courteous Yiddish, Bill commented profanely to +Morton on the fact that the solid stone floor of the great shed seemed +to have enough sea-motion to “make a guy sick.” It was nearly his last +utterance as Bill Wrenn. He became Mr. Wrenn, absolute Mr. Wrenn, on +the street, as he saw a real English bobby, a real English carter, and +the sign, “Cocoa House. Tea _Id_.” + +England! + +“Now for some real grub!” cried Morton. “No more scouse and willow-leaf +tea.” + +Stretching out their legs under a table glorified with toasted Sally +Lunns and Melton Mowbrays, served by a waitress who said “Thank _you_” +with a rising inflection, they gazed at the line of mirrors running +Britishly all around the room over the long lounge seat, and smiled +with the triumphant content which comes to him whose hunger for dreams +and hunger for meat-pies are satisfied together. + + + + +CHAPTER V +HE FINDS MUCH QUAINT ENGLISH FLAVOR + + +Big wharves, all right. England sure is queen of the sea, heh? Busy +town, Liverpool. But, say, there is a quaint English flavor to these +shops…. Look at that: ‘Red Lion Inn.’… ‘Overhead trams’ they call the +elevated. Real flavor, all right. English as can be…. I sure like to +wander around these little shops. Street crowd. That’s where you get +the real quaint flavor.” + +Thus Morton, to the glowing Mr. Wrenn, as they turned into St. George’s +Square, noting the Lipton’s Tea establishment. _Sir_ Thomas +Lipton—wasn’t he a friend of the king? Anyway, he was some kind of a +lord, and he owned big society racing-yachts. + +In the grandiose square Mr. Wrenn prayerfully remarked, “Gee!” + +“Greek temple. Fine,” agreed Morton. + +“That’s St. George’s Hall, where they have big organ concerts,” +explained Mr. Wrenn. “And there’s the art-gallery across the Square, +and here’s the Lime Street Station.” He had studied his Baedeker as +club women study the cyclopedia. “Let’s go over and look at the +trains.” + +“Funny little boxes, ain’t they, Wrenn, them cars! Quaint things. What +is it they call ’em—carriages? First, second, third class….” + +“Just like in books.” + +“Booking-office. That’s tickets…. Funny, eh?” + +Mr. Wrenn insisted on paying for both their high teas at the cheap +restaurant, timidly but earnestly. Morton was troubled. As they sat on +a park bench, smoking those most Anglican cigarettes, “Dainty Bits,” +Mr. Wrenn begged: + +“What’s the matter, old man?” + +“Oh, nothing. Just thinking.” Morton smiled artificially. He added, +presently: “Well, old Bill, got to make the break. Can’t go on living +on you this way.” + +“Aw, thunder! You ain’t living on me. Besides, I want you to. Honest I +do. We can have a whole lot better time together, Morty.” + +“Yes, but—Nope; I can’t do it. Nice of you. Can’t do it, though. Got to +go on my own, like the fellow says.” + +“Aw, come on. Look here; it’s my money, ain’t it? I got a right to +spend it the way I want to, haven’t I? Aw, come on. We’ll bum along +together, and then when the money is gone we’ll get some kind of job +together. Honest, I want you to.” + +“Hunka. Don’t believe you’d care for the kind of knockabout jobs I’ll +have to get.” + +“Sure I would. Aw, come on, Morty. I—” + +“You’re too level-headed to like to bum around like a fool hobo. You’d +dam soon get tired of it.” + +“What if I did? Morty, look here. I’ve been learning something on this +trip. I’ve always wanted to just do one thing—see foreign places. Well, +I want to do that just as much as ever. But there’s something that’s a +whole lot more important. Somehow, I ain’t ever had many friends. Some +ways you’re about the best friend I’ve ever had—you ain’t neither too +highbrow or too lowbrow. And this friendship business—it means such an +awful lot. It’s like what I was reading about—something by Elbert +Hubbard or—thunder, I can’t remember his name, but, anyway, it’s one of +those poet guys that writes for the back page of the +_Journal_—something about a _joyous adventure_. That’s what being +friends is. Course you understand I wouldn’t want to say this to most +people, but you’ll understand how I mean. It’s—this friendship business +is just like those old crusaders— you know—they’d start out on a fine +morning—you know; armor shining, all that stuff. It wouldn’t make any +dif. what they met as long as they was fighting together. Rainy nights +with folks sneaking through the rain to get at ’em, and all sorts of +things— ready for anything, long as they just stuck together. That’s +the way this friendship business is, I b’lieve. Just like it said in +the _Journal_. Yump, sure is. Gee! it’s—Chance to tell folks what you +think and really get some fun out of seeing places together. And I +ain’t ever done it much. Course I don’t mean to say I’ve been living +off on any blooming desert island all my life, but, just the same, I’ve +always been kind of alone—not knowing many folks. You know how it is in +a New York rooming-house. So now—Aw, don’t slip up on me, Morty. +Honestly, I don’t care what kind of work we do as long as we can stick +together; I don’t care a hang if we don’t get anything better to do +than scrub floors!” + +Morton patted his arm and did not answer for a while. Then: + +“Yuh, I know how you mean. And it’s good of you to like beating it +around with me. But you sure got the exaggerated idee of me. And you’d +get sick of the holes I’m likely to land in.” + +There was a certain pride which seemed dreadfully to shut Mr. Wrenn out +as Morton added: + +“Why, man, I’m going to do all of Europe. From the Turkish jails to—oh, +St. Petersburg…. You made good on the _Merian_, all right. But you do +like things shipshape.” + +“Oh, I’d—” + +“We might stay friends if we busted up now and met in New York again. +But not if you get into all sorts of bum places w—” + +“Why, look here, Morty—” + +“—with me…. However, I’ll think it over. Let’s not talk about it till +to-morrow.” + +“Oh, please do think it over, Morty, old man, won’t you? And to-night +you’ll let me take you to a music-hall, won’t you?” + +“Uh—yes,” Morton hesitated. + +A music-hall—not mere vaudeville! Mr. Wrenn could hardly keep his feet +on the pavement as they scampered to it and got ninepenny seats. He +would have thought it absurd to pay eighteen cents for a ticket, but +pence—They were out at nine-thirty. Happily tired, Mr. Wrenn suggested +that they go to a temperance hotel at his expense, for he had read in +Baedeker that temperance hotels were respectable—also cheap. + +“No, no!” frowned Morton. “Tell you what you do, Bill. You go to a +hotel, and I’ll beat it down to a lodging-house on Duke Street…. Juke +Street!… Remember how I ran onto Pete on the street? He told me you +could get a cot down there for fourpence.” + +“Aw, come on to a hotel. Please do! It ’d just hurt me to think of you +sleeping in one of them holes. I wouldn’t sleep a bit if—” + +“Say, for the love of Mike, Wrenn, get wise! Get wise, son! I’m not +going to sponge on you, and that’s all there is to it.” + +Bill Wrenn strode into their company for a minute, and quoth the +terrible Bill: + +“Well, you don’t need to get so sore about it. I don’t go around asking +folks can I give ’em a meal ticket all the time, let me tell you, and +when I do—Oh rats! Say, I didn’t mean to get huffy, Morty. But, doggone +you, old man, you can’t shake me this easy. I sye, old top, I’m peeved; +yessir. We’ll go Dutch to a lodging-house, or even walk the streets.” + +“All right, sir; all right. I’ll take you up on that. We’ll sleep in an +areaway some place.” + +They walked to the outskirts of Liverpool, questing the desirable dark +alley. Awed by the solid quietude and semigrandeur of the large private +estates, through narrow streets where dim trees leaned over high walls +whose long silent stretches were broken only by mysterious little +doors, they tramped bashfully, inspecting, but always rejecting, nooks +by lodge gates. + +They came to a stone church with a porch easily reached from the +street, a large and airy stone porch, just suited, Morton declared, “to +a couple of hoboes like us. If a bobby butts in, why, we’ll just slide +under them seats. Then the bobby can go soak his head.” + +Mr. Wrenn had never so far defied society as to steal a place for +sleeping. He felt very uneasy, like a man left naked on the street by +robbers, as he rolled up his coat for a pillow and removed his shoes in +a place that was perfectly open to the street. The paved floor was cold +to his bare feet, and, as he tried to go to sleep, it kept getting +colder and colder to his back. Reaching out his hand, he fretfully +rubbed the cracks between stones. He scowled up at the ceiling of the +porch. He couldn’t bear to look out through the door, for it framed the +vicar’s house, with lamplight bodying forth latticed windows, +suggesting soft beds and laughter and comfortable books. All the while +his chilled back was aching in new places. + +He sprang up, put on his shoes, and paced the churchyard. It seemed a +great waste of educational advantages not to study the tower of this +foreign church, but he thought much more about his aching +shoulder-blades. + +Morton came from the porch stiff but grinning. “Didn’t like it much, +eh, Bill? Afraid you wouldn’t. Must say I didn’t either, though. Well, +come on. Let’s beat it around and see if we can’t find a better place.” + +In a vacant lot they discovered a pile of hay. Mr. Wrenn hardly winced +at the hearty slap Morton gave his back, and he pronounced, “Some +Waldorf-Astoria, that stack!” as they sneaked into the lot. They had +laid loving hands upon the hay, remarking, “Well, I _guess!_” when they +heard from a low stable at the very back of the lot: + +“I say, you chaps, what are you doing there?” + +A reflective carter, who had been twisting two straws, ambled out of +the shadow of the stable and prepared to do battle. + +“Say, old man, can’t we sleep in your hay just to-night?” argued +Morton. “We’re Americans. Came over on a cattle-boat. We ain’t got only +enough money to last us for food,” while Mr. Wrenn begged, “Aw, please +let us.” + +“Oh! You’re Americans, are you? You seem decent enough. I’ve got a +brother in the States. He used to own this stable with me. In St. +Cloud, Minnesota, he is, you know. Minnesota’s some kind of a shire. +Either of you chaps been in Minnesota?” + +“Sure,” lied Morton; “I’ve hunted bear there.” + +“Oh, I say, bear now! My brother’s never written m—” + +“Oh, that was way up in the northern part, in the Big Woods. I’ve had +some narrow escapes.” + +Then Morton, who had never been west of Pittsburg, sang somewhat in +this wise the epic of the hunting he had never done: + +Alone. Among the pines. Dead o’ winter. Only one shell in his rifle. +Cold of winter. Snow—deep snow. Snow-shoes. Hiking along—reg’lar +mushing—packing grub to the lumber-camp. Way up near the Canadian +border. Cold, terrible cold. Stars looked like little bits of steel. + +Mr. Wrenn thought he remembered the story. He had read it in a +magazine. Morton was continuing: + +Snow stretched out among the pines. He was wearing a Mackinaw and +shoe-packs. Saw a bear loping along. He had—Morton had—a .44-.40 +Marlin, but only one shell. Thrust the muzzle of his rifle right into +the bear’s mouth. Scared for a minute. Almost fell off his snow-shoes. +Hardest thing he ever did, to pull that trigger. Fired. Bear sort of +jumped at him, then rolled over, clawing. Great place, those Minnesota +Big— + +“What’s a shoe-pack?” the Englishman stolidly interjected. + +“Kind of a moccasin…. Great place, those woods. Hope your brother gets +the chance to get up there.” + +“I say, I wonder did you ever meet him? Scrabble is his name, Jock +Scrabble.” + +“Jock Scrabble—no, but _say!_ By golly, there was a fellow up in the +Big Woods that came from St. Cl—St. Cloud? Yes, that was it. He was +telling us about the town. I remember he said your brother had great +chances there.” + +The Englishman meditatively accepted a bad cigar from Mr. Wrenn. +Suddenly: “You chaps can sleep in the stable-loft if you’d like. But +you must blooming well stop smoking.” + +So in the dark odorous hay-mow Mr. Wrenn stretched out his legs with an +affectionate “good night” to Morton. He slept nine hours. When he +awoke, at the sound of a chain clanking in the stable below, Morton was +gone. This note was pinned to his sleeve: + +DEAR OLD MAN,—I still feel sure that you will not enjoy the hiking. +Bumming is not much fun for most people, I don’t think, even if they +say it is. I do not want to live on you. I always did hate to graft on +people. So I am going to beat it off alone. But I hope I will see you +in N Y & we will enjoy many a good laugh together over our trip. If you +will phone the P. R. R. you can find out when I get back & so on. As I +do not know what your address will be. Please look me up & I hope you +will have a good trip. + + +Yours truly, +HARRY P. MORTON. + + +Mr. Wrenn lay listening to the unfriendly rattling of the chain harness +below for a long time. When he crawled languidly down from the hay-loft +he glowered in a manner which was decidedly surly even for Bill Wrenn +at a middle-aged English stranger who was stooping over a cow’s hoof in +a stall facing the ladder. + +“Wot you doing here?” asked the Englishman, raising his head and +regarding Mr. Wrenn as a housewife does a cockroach in the salad-bowl. + +Mr. Wrenn was bored. This seemed a very poor sort of man; a bloated +Cockney, with a dirty neck-cloth, vile cuffs of grayish black, and a +waistcoat cut foolishly high. + +“The owner said I could sleep here,” he snapped. + +“Ow. ’E did, did ’e? ’E ayn’t been giving you any of the perishin’ +’osses, too, ’as ’e?” + +It was sturdy old Bill Wrenn who snarled, “Oh, shut up!” Bill didn’t +feel like standing much just then. He’d punch this fellow as he’d +punched Pete, as soon as not—or even sooner. + +“Ow…. It’s shut up, is it?… I’ve ’arf a mind to set the ’tecs on you, +but I’m lyte. I’ll just ’it you on the bloody nowse.” + +Bill Wrenn stepped off the ladder and squared at him. He was sorry that +the Cockney was smaller than Pete. + +The Cockney came over, feinted in an absent-minded manner, made swift +and confusing circles with his left hand, and hit Bill Wrenn on the +aforesaid bloody nose, which immediately became a bleeding nose. Bill +Wrenn felt dizzy and, sitting on a grain-sack, listened amazedly to the +Cockney’s apologetic: + +“I’m sorry I ayn’t got time to ’ave the law on you, but I could spare +time to ’it you again.” + +Bill shook the blood from his nose and staggered at the Cockney, who +seized his collar, set him down outside the stable with a jarring bump, +and walked away, whistling: + +“Come, oh come to our Sunday-school, +Ev-v-v-v-v-v-ry Sunday morn-ing.” + + +“Gee!” mourned Mr. William Wrenn, “and I thought I was getting this +hobo business down pat…. Gee! I wonder if Pete _was_ so hard to lick?” + + + + +CHAPTER VI +HE IS AN ORPHAN + + +Sadly clinging to the plan of the walking-trip he was to have made with +Morton, Mr. Wrenn crossed by ferry to Birkenhead, quite unhappily, for +he wanted to be discussing with Morton the quaintness of the uniformed +functionaries. He looked for the _Merian_ half the way over. As he +walked through Birkenhead, bound for Chester, he pricked himself on to +note red-brick house-rows, almost shocking in their lack of high front +stoops. Along the country road he reflected: “Wouldn’t Morty enjoy +this! Farm-yard all paved. Haystack with a little roof on it. Kitchen +stove stuck in a kind of fireplace. Foreign as the deuce.” + +But Morton was off some place, in a darkness where there weren’t things +to enjoy. Mr. Wrenn had lost him forever. Once he heard himself wishing +that even Tim, the hatter, or “good old McGarver” were along. A scene +so British that it seemed proper to enjoy it alone he did find in a +real garden-party, with what appeared to be a real curate, out of a +story in _The Strand_, passing teacups; but he passed out of that hot +glow into a cold plodding that led him to Chester and a dull hotel +which might as well have been in Bridgeport or Hoboken. + +He somewhat timidly enjoyed Chester the early part of the next day, +docilely following a guide about the walls, gaping at the mill on the +Dee and asking the guide two intelligent questions about Roman remains. +He snooped through the galleried streets, peering up dark stairways set +in heavy masonry that spoke of historic sieges, and imagined that he +was historically besieging. For a time Mr. Wrenn’s fancies contented +him. + +He smiled as he addressed glossy red and green postcards to Lee Theresa +and Goaty, Cousin John and Mr. Guilfogle, writing on each a variation +of “Having a splendid trip. This is a very interesting old town. Wish +you were here.” Pantingly, he found a panorama showing the hotel where +he was staying—or at least two of its chimneys—and, marking it with a +heavy cross and the announcement “This is my hotel where I am staying,” +he sent it to Charley Carpenter. + +He was at his nearest to greatness at Chester Cathedral. He chuckled +aloud as he passed the remains of a refectory of monastic days, in the +close, where knights had tied their romantically pawing chargers, “just +like he’d read about in a story about the olden times.” He was really +there. He glanced about and assured himself of it. He wasn’t in the +office. He was in an English cathedral close! + +But shortly thereafter he was in an English temperance hotel, sitting +still, almost weeping with the longing to see Morton. He walked abroad, +feeling like an intruder on the lively night crowd; in a tap-room he +drank a glass of English porter and tried to make himself believe that +he was acquainted with the others in the room, to which theory they +gave but little support. All this while his loneliness shadowed him. + +Of that loneliness one could make many books; how it sat down with him; +how he crouched in his chair, be-spelled by it, till he violently rose +and fled, with loneliness for companion in his flight. He was lonely. +He sighed that he was “lonely as fits.” Lonely—the word obsessed him. +Doubtless he was a bit mad, as are all the isolated men who sit in +distant lands longing for the voices of friendship. + +Next morning he hastened to take the train for Oxford to get away from +his loneliness, which lolled evilly beside him in the compartment. He +tried to convey to a stodgy North Countryman his interest in the way +the seats faced each other. The man said “Oh aye?” insultingly and +returned to his Manchester newspaper. + +Feeling that he was so offensive that it was a matter of honor for him +to keep his eyes away, Mr. Wrenn dutifully stared out of the door till +they reached Oxford. + +There is a calm beauty to New College gardens. There is, Mr. Wrenn +observed, “something simply _slick_ about all these old quatrangleses,” +crossed by summering students in short flappy gowns. But he always +returned to his exile’s room, where he now began to hear the new voice +of shapeless nameless Fear—fear of all this alien world that didn’t +care whether he loved it or not. + +He sat thinking of the cattle-boat as a home which he had loved but +which he would never see again. He had to use force on himself to keep +from hurrying back to Liverpool while there still was time to return on +the same boat. + +No! He was going to “stick it out somehow, and get onto the hang of all +this highbrow business.” + +Then he said: “Oh, darn it all. I feel rotten. I wish I was dead!” + +“Those, sir, are the windows of the apartment once occupied by Walter +Pater,” said the cultured American after whom he was trailing. Mr. +Wrenn viewed them attentively, and with shame remembered that he didn’t +know who Walter Pater was. But—oh yes, now he remembered; Walter was +the guy that ’d murdered his whole family. So, aloud, “Well, I guess +Oxford’s sorry Walt ever come here, all right.” + +“My dear sir, Mr. Pater was the most immaculate genius of the +nineteenth century,” lectured Dr. Mittyford, the cultured American, +severely. + +Mr. Wrenn had met Mittyford, Ph.D., near the barges; had, upon polite +request, still more politely lent him a match, and seized the chance to +confide in somebody. Mittyford had a bald head, neat eye-glasses, a +fair family income, a chatty good-fellowship at the Faculty Club, and a +chilly contemptuousness in his rhetoric class-room at Leland Stanford, +Jr., University. He wrote poetry, which he filed away under the letter +“P” in his letter-file. + +Dr. Mittyford grudgingly took Mr. Wrenn about, to teach him what not to +enjoy. He pointed at Shelley’s rooms as at a certificated angel’s +feather, but Mr. Wrenn writhingly admitted that he had never heard of +Shelley, whose name he confused with Max O’Rell’s, which Dr. Mittyford +deemed an error. Then, Pater’s window. The doctor shrugged. Oh well, +what could you expect of the proletariat! Swinging his stick aloofly, +he stalked to the Bodleian and vouchsafed, “That, sir, is the +_AEschylus_ Shelley had in his pocket when he was drowned.” + +Though he heard with sincere regret the news that his new idol was +drowned, Mr. Wrenn found that _AEschylus_ left him cold. It seemed to +be printed in a foreign language. But perhaps it was merely a very old +book. + +Standing before a case in which was an exquisite book in a queer +wrigglesome language, bearing the legend that from this volume +Fitzgerald had translated the _Rubaiyat_, Dr. Mittyford waved his hand +and looked for thanks. + +“Pretty book,” said Mr. Wrenn. + +“And did you note who used it?” + +“Uh—yes.” He hastily glanced at the placard. “Mr. Fitzgerald. Say, I +think I read some of that Rubaiyat. It was something about a Persian +kitten—I don’t remember exactly.” + +Dr. Mittyford walked bitterly to the other end of the room. + +About eight in the evening Mr. Wrenn’s landlady knocked with, “There’s +a gentleman below to see you, sir.” + +“Me?” blurted Mr. Wrenn. + +He galloped down-stairs, panting to himself that Morton had at last +found him. He peered out and was overwhelmed by a motor-car, with Dr. +Mittyford waiting in awesome fur coat, goggles, and gauntlets, centered +in the car-lamplight that loomed in the shivery evening fog. + +“Gee! just like a hero in a novel!” reflected Mr. Wrenn. + +“Get on your things,” said the pedagogue. “I’m going to give you the +time of your life.” + +Mr. Wrenn obediently went up and put on his cap. He was excited, yet +frightened and resentful at being “dragged into all this highbrow +business” which he had resolutely been putting away the past two hours. + +As he stole into the car Dr. Mittyford seemed comparatively human, +remarking: “I feel bored this evening. I thought I would give you a +_nuit blanche_. How would you like to go to the Red Unicorn at +Brempton—one of the few untouched old inns?” + +“That would be nice,” said Mr. Wrenn, unenthusiastically. + +His chilliness impressed Dr. Mittyford, who promptly told one of the +best of his well-known whimsical yet scholarly stories. + +“Ha! ha!” remarked Mr. Wrenn. + +He had been saying to himself: “By golly! I ain’t going to even try to +be a society guy with him no more. I’m just going to be _me_, and if he +don’t like it he can go to the dickens.” + +So he was gentle and sympathetic and talked West Sixteenth Street +slang, to the rhetorician’s lofty amusement. + +The tap-room of the Red Unicorn was lighted by candles and a fireplace. +That is a simple thing to say, but it was not a simple thing for Mr. +Wrenn to see. As he observed the trembling shadows on the sanded floor +he wriggled and excitedly murmured, “Gee!… Gee whittakers!” + +The shadows slipped in arabesques over the dust-gray floor and +scampered as bravely among the rafters as though they were in such a +tale as men told in believing days. Rustics in smocks drank ale from +tankards; and in a corner was snoring an ear-ringed peddler with his +beetle-black head propped on an oilcloth pack. + +Stamping in, chilly from the ride, Mr. Wrenn laughed aloud. With a +comfortable feeling on the side toward the fire he stuck his slight +legs straight out before the old-time settle, looked devil-may-care, +made delightful ridges on the sanded floor with his toe, and clapped a +pewter pot on his knee with a small emphatic “Wop!” After about two and +a quarter tankards he broke out, “Say, that peddler guy there, don’t he +look like he was a gipsy—you know—sneaking through the hedges around +the manner-house to steal the earl’s daughter, huh?” + +“Yes…. You’re a romanticist, then, I take it?” + +“Yes, I guess I am. Kind of. Like to read romances and stuff.” He +stared at Mittyford beseechingly. “But, say—say, I wonder why—Somehow, +I haven’t enjoyed Oxford and the rest of the places like I ought to. +See, I’d always thought I’d be simply nutty about the quatrangles and +stuff, but I’m afraid they’re too highbrow for me. I hate to own up, +but sometimes I wonder if I can get away with this traveling stunt.” + +Mittyford, the magnificent, had mixed ale and whisky punch. He was +mellowly instructive: + +“Do you know, I’ve been wondering just what you _would_ get out of all +this. You really have a very fine imagination of a sort, you know, but +of course you’re lacking in certain factual bases. As I see it, your +_metier_ would be to travel with a pleasant wife, the two of you hand +in hand, so to speak, looking at the more obvious public buildings and +plesaunces—avenues and plesuances. There must be a certain portion of +the tripper class which really has the ability ‘for to admire and for +to see.’” + +Dr. Mittyford finished his second toddy and with a wave of his hand +presented to Mr. Wrenn the world and all the plesaunces thereof, for to +see, though not, of course, to admire Mittyfordianly. + +“But—what are you to do now about Oxford? Well, I’m afraid you’re taken +into captivity a bit late to be trained for that sort of thing. Do +about Oxford? Why, go back, master the world you understand. By the +way, have you seen my book on _Saxon Derivatives?_ Not that I’m +prejudiced in its favor, but it might give you a glimmering of what +this difficile thing ‘culture’ really is.” + +The rustics were droning a church anthem. The glow of the ale was in +Mr. Wrenn. He leaned back, entirely happy, and it seemed confusedly to +him that what little he had heard of his learned and affectionate +friend’s advice gratefully confirmed his own theory that what one +wanted was friends—a “nice wife”—folks. “Yes, sir, by golly! It was +awfully nice of the Doc.” He pictured a tender girl in golden brown +back in the New York he so much desired to see who would await him +evenings with a smile that was kept for him. Homey—that was what _he_ +was going to be! He happily and thoughtfully ran his finger about the +rim of his glass ten times. + +“Time to go, I’ m afraid,” Dr. Mittyford was saying. Through the +exquisite haze that now filled the room Mr. Wrenn saw him dimly, as a +triangle of shirt-front and two gleaming ellipses for eyes…. His dear +friend, the Doc!… As he walked through the room chairs got humorously +in his way, but he good-naturedly picked a path among them, and fell +asleep in the motor-car. All the ride back he made soft mouse-like +sounds of snoring. + +When he awoke in the morning with a headache and surveyed his +unchangeably dingy room he realized slowly, after smothering his head +in the pillow to shut off the light from his scorching eyeballs, that +Dr. Mittyford had called him a fool for trying to wander. He protested, +but not for long, for he hated to venture out there among the +dreadfully learned colleges and try to understand stuff written in +letters that look like crow-tracks. + +He packed his suit-case slowly, feeling that he was very wicked in +leaving Oxford’s opportunities. + +Mr. Wrenn rode down on a Tottenham Court Road bus, viewing the +quaintness of London. Life was a rosy ringing valiant pursuit, for he +was about to ship on a Mediterranean steamer laden chiefly with +adventurous friends. The bus passed a victoria containing a man with a +real monocle. A newsboy smiled up at him. The Strand roared with lively +traffic. + +But the gray stonework and curtained windows of the Anglo-Southern +Steamship Company’s office did not invite any Mr. Wrenns to come in and +ship, nor did the hall porter, a beefy person with a huge collar and +sparse painfully sleek hair, whose eyes were like cold boiled mackerel +as Mr. Wrenn yearned: + +“Please—uh—please will you be so kind and tell me where I can ship as a +steward for the Med—” + +“None needed.” + +“Or Spain? I just want to get any kind of a job at first. Peeling +potatoes or—It don’t make any difference—” + +“None needed, I said, my man.” The porter examined the hall clock +extensively. + +Bill Wrenn suddenly popped into being and demanded: “Look here, you; I +want to see somebody in authority. I want to know what I _can_ ship +as.” + +The porter turned round and started. All his faith in mankind was +destroyed by the shock of finding the fellow still there. “Nothing, I +told you. No one needed.” + +“Look here; can I see somebody in authority or not?” + +The porter was privately esteemed a wit at his motherin-law’s. Waddling +away, he answered, “Or not.” + +Mr. Wrenn drooped out of the corridor. He had planned to see the Tate +Gallery, but now he hadn’t the courage to face the difficulties of +enjoying pictures. He zig-zagged home, mourning: “What’s the use. And +I’ll be hung if I’ll try any other offices, either. The icy mitt, +that’s what they hand you here. Some day I’ll go down to the docks and +try to ship there. Prob’ly. Gee! I feel rotten!” + +Out of all this fog of unfriendliness appeared the waitress at the St. +Brasten Cocoa House; first, as a human being to whom he could talk, +second, as a woman. She was ignorant and vulgar; she misused English +cruelly; she wore greasy cotton garments, planted her large feet on the +floor with firm clumsiness, and always laughed at the wrong cue in his +diffident jests. But she did laugh; she did listen while he stammered +his ideas of meat-pies and St. Paul’s and aeroplanes and Shelley and +fog and tan shoes. In fact, she supposed him to be a gentleman and +scholar, not an American. + +He went to the cocoa-house daily. + +She let him know that he was a man and she a woman, young and kindly, +clear-skinned and joyous-eyed. She touched him with warm elbow and +plump hip, leaning against his chair as he gave his order. To that he +looked forward from meal to meal, though he never ceased harrowing over +what he considered a shameful intrigue. + +That opinion of his actions did not keep him from tingling one +lunch-time when he suddenly understood that she was expecting to be +tempted. He tempted her without the slightest delay, muttering, “Let’s +take a walk this evening?” + +She accepted. He was shivery and short of breath while he was trying to +smile at her during the rest of the meal, and so he remained all +afternoon at the Tower of London, though he very well knew that all +this history—“kings and gwillotines and stuff”—demanded real Wrenn +thrills. + +They were to meet on a street-corner at eight. At seven-thirty he was +waiting for her. At eight-thirty he indignantly walked away, but he +hastily returned, and stood there another half-hour. She did not come. + +When he finally fled home he was glad to have escaped the great mystery +of life, then distressingly angry at the waitress, and desolate in the +desert stillness of his room. + +He sat in his cold hygienic uncomfortable room on Tavistock Place +trying to keep his attention on the “tick, tick, tick, tick” of his +two-dollar watch, but really cowering before the vast shadowy presences +that slunk in from the hostile city. + +He didn’t in the least know what he was afraid of. The actual +Englishman whom he passed on the streets did not seem to threaten his +life, yet his friendly watch and familiar suit-case seemed the only +things he could trust in all the menacing world as he sat there, so +vividly conscious of his fear and loneliness that he dared not move his +cramped legs. + +The tension could not last. For a time he was able to laugh at himself, +and he made pleasant pictures—Charley Carpenter telling him a story at +Drubel’s; Morton companionably smoking on the top deck; Lee Theresa +flattering him during an evening walk. Most of all he pictured the +brown-eyed sweetheart he was going to meet somewhere, sometime. He +thought with sophomoric shame of his futile affair with the waitress, +then forgot her as he seemed almost to touch the comforting hand of the +brown-eyed girl. + +“Friends, that’s what I want. You bet!” That was the work he was going +to do—make acquaintances. A girl who would understand him, with whom he +could trot about, seeing department-store windows and moving-picture +shows. + +It was then, probably, hunched up in the dowdy chair of faded +upholstery, that he created the two phrases which became his formula +for happiness. He desired “somebody to go home to evenings”; still +more, “some one to work with and work for.” + +It seemed to him that he had mapped out his whole life. He sat back, +satisfied, and caught the sound of emptiness in his room, emphasized by +the stilly tick of his watch. + +“Oh—Morton—” he cried. + +He leaped up and raised the window. It was raining, but through the +slow splash came the night rattle of hostile London. Staring down, he +studied the desolate circle of light a street-lamp cast on the wet +pavement. A cat gray as dish-water, its fur worn off in spots, lean and +horrible, sneaked through the circle of light like the spirit of +unhappiness, like London’s sneer at solitary Americans in Russell +Square rooms. + +Mr. Wrenn gulped. Through the light skipped a man and a girl, so little +aware of him that they stopped, laughingly, wrestling for an umbrella, +then disappeared, and the street was like a forgotten tomb. A hansom +swung by, the hoofbeats sharp and cheerless. The rain dripped. Nothing +else. Mr. Wrenn slammed down the window. + +He smoothed the sides of his suit-case and reckoned the number of miles +it had traveled with him. He spun his watch about on the table, and +listened to its rapid mocking speech, “Friends, friends; friends, +friends.” + +Sobbing, he began to undress, laying down each garment as though he +were going to the scaffold. When the room was dark the great shadowy +forms of fear thronged unchecked about his narrow dingy bed. + +Once during the night he woke. Some sound was threatening him. It was +London, coming to get him and torture him. The light in his room was +dusty, mottled, gray, lifeless. He saw his door, half ajar, and for +some moments lay motionless, watching stark and bodiless heads thrust +themselves through the opening and withdraw with sinister alertness +till he sprang up and opened the door wide. + +But he did not even stop to glance down the hall for the crowd of +phantoms that had gathered there. Some hidden manful scorn of weakness +made him sneer aloud, “Don’t be a baby even if you _are_ lonely.” + +His voice was deeper than usual, and he went to bed to sleep, throwing +himself down with a coarse wholesome scorn of his nervousness. + +He awoke after dawn, and for a moment curled in happy wriggles of +satisfaction over a good sleep. Then he remembered that he was in the +cold and friendless prison of England, and lay there panting with +desire to get away, to get back to America, where he would be safe. + +He wanted to leap out of bed, dash for the Liverpool train, and take +passage for America on the first boat. But perhaps the officials in +charge of the emigrants and the steerage (and of course a fellow would +go steerage to save money) would want to know his religion and the +color of his hair—as bad as trying to ship. They might hold him up for +a couple of days. There were quarantines and customs and things, of +which he had heard. Perhaps for two or even three days more he would +have to stay in this nauseating prison-land. + +This was the morning of August 3, 1910, two weeks after his arrival in +London, and twenty-two days after victoriously reaching England, the +land of romance. + + + + +CHAPTER VII +HE MEETS A TEMPERAMENT + + +Mr. Wrenn was sulkily breakfasting at Mrs. Cattermole’s Tea House, +which Mrs. Cattermole kept in a genteel fashion in a basement three +doors from his rooming-house on Tavistock Place. After his night of +fear and tragic portents he resented the general flowered-paper-napkin +aspect of Mrs. Cattermole’s establishment. “Hungh!” he grunted, as he +jabbed at the fringed doily under the silly pink-and-white tea-cup on +the green-and-white lacquered tray brought him by a fat waitress in a +frilly apron which must have been made for a Christmas pantomime fairy +who was not fat. “Hurump!” he snorted at the pictures of lambs and +radishes and cathedrals and little duckies on Mrs. Cattermole’s +pink-and-white wall. + +He wished it were possible—which, of course, it was not—to go back to +the St. Brasten Cocoa House, where he could talk to the honest +flat-footed galumping waitress, and cross his feet under his chair. For +here he was daintily, yes, daintily, studied by the tea-room +habitues—two bouncing and talkative daughters of an American tourist, a +slender pale-haired English girl student of Assyriology with large +top-barred eye-glasses over her protesting eyes, and a sprinkling of +people living along Tavistock Place, who looked as though they wanted +to know if your opinions on the National Gallery and abstinence were +sound. + +His disapproval of the lambiness of Mrs. Cattermole’s was turned to a +feeling of comradeship with the other patrons as he turned, with the +rest, to stare hostilely at a girl just entering. The talk in the room +halted, startled. + +Mr. Wrenn gasped. With his head solemnly revolving, his eyes followed +the young woman about his table to a table opposite. “A freak! Gee, +what red hair!” was his private comment. + +A slender girl of twenty-eight or twenty-nine, clad in a one-piece gown +of sage-green, its lines unbroken by either belt or collar-brooch, +fitting her as though it had been pasted on, and showing the long +beautiful sweep of her fragile thighs and long-curving breast. Her +collar, of the material of the dress, was so high that it touched her +delicate jaw, and it was set off only by a fine silver chain, with a La +Vallière of silver and carved Burmese jade. Her red hair, red as a +poinsettia, parted and drawn severely back, made a sweep about the fair +dead-white skin of her bored sensitive face. Bored blue-gray eyes, with +pathetic crescents of faintly violet-hued wrinkles beneath them, and a +scarce noticeable web of tinier wrinkles at the side. Thin long cheeks, +a delicate nose, and a straight strong mouth of thin but startlingly +red lips. + +Such was the new patron of Mrs. Cattermole. + +She stared about the tea-room like an officer inspecting raw recruits, +sniffed at the stare of the thin girl student, ordered breakfast in a +low voice, then languidly considered her toast and marmalade. Once she +glanced about the room. Her heavy brows were drawn close for a second, +making a deep-cleft wrinkle of ennui over her nose, and two little +indentations, like the impressions of a box corner, in her forehead +over her brows. + +Mr. Wrenn’s gaze ran down the line of her bosom again, and he wondered +at her hands, which touched the heavy bread-and-butter knife as though +it were a fine-point pen. Long hands, colored like ivory; the joint +wrinkles etched into her skin; orange cigarette stains on the second +finger; the nails— + +He stared at them. To himself he commented, “Gee! I never did see such +freak finger-nails in my life.” Instead of such smoothly rounded nails +as Theresa Zapp displayed, the new young lady had nails narrow and +sharp-pointed, the ends like little triangles of stiff white +writing-paper. + +As she breakfasted she scanned Mr. Wrenn for a second. He was too +obviously caught staring to be able to drop his eyes. She studied him +all out, with almost as much interest as a policeman gives to a passing +trolley-car, yawned delicately, and forgot him. + +Though you should penetrate Greenland or talk anarchism to the daughter +of a millionaire grocer, never shall you feel a more devouring chill +than enveloped Mr. Wrenn as the new young lady glanced away from him, +paid her check, rose slithily from her table, and departed. She rounded +his table; not stalking out of its way, as Theresa would have done, but +bending from the hips. Thus was it revealed to Mr. Wrenn that— + +He was almost too horrified to put it into words…. He had noticed that +there was something kind of funny in regard to her waist; he had had an +impression of remarkably smooth waist curves and an unjagged sweep of +back. Now he saw that—It was unheard of; not at all like Lee Theresa +Zapp or ladies in the Subway. For—the freak girl wasn’t wearing +corsets! + +When she had passed him he again studied her back, swiftly and +covertly. No, sir. No question about it. It couldn’t be denied by any +one now that the girl was a freak, for, charitable though Our Mr. Wrenn +was, he had to admit that there was no sign of the midback ridge and +little rounded knobbinesses of corseted respectability. And he had a +closer view of the texture of her sage-green crash gown. + +“Golly!” he said to himself; “of all the doggone cloth for a dress! +Reg’lar gunny-sacking. She’s skinny, too. Bright-red hair. She sure is +the prize freak. Kind of good-looking, but—get a brick!” + +He hated to rule so clever-seeming a woman quite out of court. But he +remembered her scissors glance at him, and his soft little heart became +very hard. + +How brittle are our steel resolves! When Mr. Wrenn walked out of Mrs. +Cattermole’s excellent establishment and heavily inspected the quiet +Bloomsbury Street, with a cat’s-meat-man stolidly clopping along the +pavement, as loneliness rushed on him and he wondered what in the world +he could do, he mused, “Gee! I bet that red-headed lady would be +interestin’ to know.” + +A day of furtive darts out from his room to do London, which glumly +declined to be done. He went back to the Zoological Gardens and made +friends with a tiger which, though it presumably came from an English +colony, was the friendliest thing he had seen for a week. It did yawn, +but it let him talk to it for a long while. He stood before the bars, +peering in, and whenever no one else was about he murmured: “Poor +fella, they won’t let you go, heh? You got a worse boss ’n Goglefogle, +heh? Poor old fella.” + +He didn’t at all mind the disorder and rancid smell of the cage; he had +no fear of the tiger’s sleek murderous power. But he was somewhat +afraid of the sound of his own tremorous voice. He had spoken aloud so +little lately. + +A man came, an Englishman in a high offensively well-fitting waistcoat, +and stood before the cage. Mr. Wrenn slunk away, robbed of his new +friend, the tiger, the forlornest person in all London, kicking at +pebbles in the path. + +As half-dusk made the quiet street even more detached, he sat on the +steps of his rooming-house on Tavistock Place, keeping himself from the +one definite thing he wanted to do—the thing he keenly imagined a happy +Mr. Wrenn doing—dashing over to the Euston Station to find out how soon +and where he could get a train for Liverpool and a boat for America. + +A girl was approaching the house. He viewed her carelessly, then +intently. It was the freak lady of Mrs. Cattermole’s Tea House—the +corsetless young woman of the tight-fitting crash gown and +flame-colored hair. She was coming up the steps of his house. + +He made room for her with feverish courtesy. She lived in the same +house—He instantly, without a bit of encouragement from the +uninterested way in which she snipped the door to, made up a whole +novel about her. Gee! She was a French countess, who lived in a reg’lar +chateau, and she was staying in Bloomsbury incognito, seeing the +sights. She was a noble. She was— + +Above him a window opened. He glanced up. The countess incog. was +leaning out, scanning the street uncaringly. Why—her windows were next +to his! He was living next room to an unusual person—as unusual as Dr. +Mittyford. + +He hurried up-stairs with a fervid but vague plan to meet her. Maybe +she really was a French countess or somepun’. All evening, sitting by +the window, he was comforted as he heard her move about her room. He +had a friend. He had started that great work of making friends—well, +not started, but started starting—then he got confused, but the idea +was a flame to warm the fog-chilled spaces of the London street. + +At his Cattermole breakfast he waited long. She did not come. Another +day—but why paint another day that was but a smear of flat dull slate? +Yet another breakfast, and the lady of mystery came. Before he knew he +was doing it he had bowed to her, a slight uneasy bend of his neck. She +peered at him, unseeing, and sat down with her back to him. + +He got much good healthy human vindictive satisfaction in evicting her +violently from the French chateau he had given her, and remembering +that, of course, she was just a “fool freak Englishwoman—prob’ly a +bloomin’ stoodent” he scorned, and so settled _her!_ Also he told her, +by telepathy, that her new gown was freakier than ever—a pale-green +thing, with large white buttons. + +As he was coming in that evening he passed her in the hall. She was +clad in what he called a bathrobe, and what she called an Arabian +_burnoose_, of black embroidered with dull-gold crescents and stars, +showing a V of exquisite flesh at her throat. A shred of tenuous lace +straggled loose at the opening of the _burnoose_. Her radiant hair, +tangled over her forehead, shone with a thousand various gleams from +the gas-light over her head as she moved back against the wall and +stood waiting for him to pass. She smiled very doubtfully, +distantly—the smile, he felt, of a great lady from Mayfair. He bobbed +his head, lowered his eyes abashedly, and noticed that along the shelf +of her forearm, held against her waist, she bore many silver toilet +articles, and such a huge heavy fringed Turkish bath-towel as he had +never seen before. + +He lay awake to picture her brilliant throat and shining hair. He +rebuked himself for the lack of dignity in “thinking of that freak, +when she wouldn’t even return a fellow’s bow.” But her shimmering hair +was the star of his dreams. + +Napping in his room in the afternoon, Mr. Wrenn heard slight active +sounds from her, next room. He hurried down to the stoop. + +She stood behind him on the door-step, glaring up and down the street, +as bored and as ready to spring as the Zoo tiger. Mr. Wrenn heard +himself saying to the girl, “Please, miss, do you mind telling me—I’m +an American; I’m a stranger in London—I want to go to a good play or +something and what would I—what would be good—” + +“I don’t know, reahlly,” she said, with much hauteur. “Everything’s +rather rotten this season, I fancy.” Her voice ran fluting up and down +the scale. Her a’s were very broad. + +“Oh—oh—y-you _are_ English, then?” + +“Yes!” + +“Why—uh—” + +“_Yes!_” + +“Oh, I just had a fool idea maybe you might be French.” + +“Perhaps I am, y’ know. I’m not reahlly English,” she said, blandly. + +“Why—uh—” + +“What made you think I was French? Tell me; I’m interested.” + +“Oh, I guess I was just—well, it was almost make-b’lieve—how you had a +castle in France—just a kind of a fool game.” + +“Oh, _don’t_ be ashamed of imagination,” she demanded, stamping her +foot, while her voice fluttered, low and beautifully controlled, +through half a dozen notes. “Tell me the rest of your story about me.” + +She was sitting on the rail above him now. As he spoke she cupped her +chin with the palm of her delicate hand and observed him curiously. + +“Oh, nothing much more. You were a countess—” + +“Please! Not just ‘were.’ Please, sir, mayn’t I be a countess now?” + +“Oh yes, of course you are!” he cried, delight submerging timidity. +“And your father was sick with somepun’ mysterious, and all the docs +shook their heads and said ‘Gee! we dunno what it is,’ and so you +sneaked down to the treasure-chamber—you see, your dad—your father, I +should say—he was a cranky old Frenchman—just in the story, you know. +He didn’t think you could do anything yourself about him being +mysteriously sick. So one night you—” + +“Oh, was it dark? Very _very_ dark? And silent? And my footsteps rang +on the hollow flagstones? And I swiped the gold and went forth into the +night?” + +“Yes, _yes!_ That’s it.” + +“But why did I swipe it?” + +“I’m just coming to that,” he said, sternly. + +“Oh, please, sir, I’m awful sorry I interrupted.” + +“It was like this: You wanted to come over here and study medicine so’s +you could cure your father.” + +“But please, sir,” said the girl, with immense gravity, “mayn’t I let +him die, and not find out what’s ailing him, so I can marry the +_maire?_” + +“Nope,” firmly, “you got to—Say, _gee!_ I didn’t expect to tell you all +this make-b’lieve…. I’m afraid you’ll think it’s awful fresh of me.” + +“Oh, I loved it—really I did—because you liked to make it up about poor +Istra. (My name is Istra Nash.) I’m sorry to say I’m not reahlly”—her +two “reallys” were quite different—“a countess, you know. Tell me—you +live in this same house, don’t you? Please tell me that you’re not an +interesting Person. Please!” + +“I—gee! I guess I don’t quite get you.” + +“Why, stupid, an Interesting Person is a writer or an artist or an +editor or a girl who’s been in Holloway Jail or Canongate for +suffraging, or any one else who depends on an accident to be +tolerable.” + +“No, I’m afraid not; I’m just a kind of clerk.” + +“Good! Good! My dear sir—whom I’ve never seen before—have I? By the +way, please don’t think I usually pick up stray gentlemen and talk to +them about my pure white soul. But you, you know, made stories about +me…. I was saying: If you could only know how I loathe and hate and +despise Interesting People just now! I’ve seen so much of them. They +talk and talk and talk—they’re just like Kipling’s bandar-log—What is +it? + +“See us rise in a flung festoon +Half-way up to the jealous moon. +Don’t you wish you— + + +could know all about art and economics as we do?’ That’s what they say. +Umph!” + +Then she wriggled her fingers in the air like white butterflies, +shrugged her shoulders elaborately, rose from the rail, and sat down +beside him on the steps, quite matter-of-factly. + +He could feel his temple-pulses beat with excitement. + +She turned her pale sensitive vivid face slowly toward him. + +“When did you see me—to make up the story?” + +“Breakfasts. At Mrs. Cattermole’s.” + +“Oh yes…. How is it you aren’t out sight-seeing? Or is it blessedly +possible that you aren’t a tripper—a tourist?” + +“Why, I dunno.” He hunted uneasily for the right answer. “Not exactly. +I tried a stunt—coming over on a cattle-boat.” + +“That’s good. Much better.” + +She sat silent while, with enormous and self-betraying pains to avoid +detection, he studied her firm thin brilliantly red lips. At last he +tried: + +“Please tell me something about London. Some of you English— Oh, I +dunno. I can’t get acquainted easily.” + +“My dear child, I’m not English! I’m quite as American as yourself. I +was born in California. I never saw England till two years ago, on my +way to Paris. I’m an art student…. That’s why my accent is so perishin’ +English—I can’t afford to be just _ordinary_ British, y’ know.” + +Her laugh had an October tang of bitterness in it. + +“Well, I’ll—say, what do you know about that!” he said, weakly. + +“Tell me about yourself—since apparently we’re now acquainted…. Unless +you want to go to that music-hall?” + +“Oh no, no, no! Gee, I was just _crazy_ to have somebody to talk +to—somebody nice—I was just about nutty, I was so lonely,” all in a +burst. He finished, hesitatingly, “I guess the English are kinda hard +to get acquainted with.” + +“Lonely, eh?” she mused, abrupt and bluffly kind as a man, for all her +modulating woman’s voice. “You don’t know any of the people here in the +house?” + +“No’m. Say, I guess we got rooms next to each other.” + +“How romantic!” she mocked. + +“Wrenn’s my name; William Wrenn. I work for—I used to work for the +Souvenir and Art Novelty Company. In New York.” + +“Oh. I see. Novelties? Nice little ash-trays with ‘Love from the Erie +Station’? And woggly pin-cushions?” + +“Yes! And fat pug-dogs with black eyes.” + +“Oh no-o-o! Please not black! Pale sympathetic blue eyes—nice honest +blue eyes!” + +“Nope. Black. Awful black…. Say, gee, I ain’t talking too nutty, am I?” + +“‘Nutty’? You mean ‘idiotically’? The slang’s changed since—Oh yes, of +course; you’ve succeeded in talking quite nice and ‘idiotic.’” + +“Oh, say, gee, I didn’t mean to—When you been so nice and all to me—” + +“Don’t apologize!” Istra Nash demanded, savagely. “Haven’t they taught +you that?” + +“Yes’m,” he mumbled, apologetically. + +She sat silent again, apparently not at all satisfied with the +architecture of the opposite side of Tavistock Place. Diffidently he +edged into speech: + +“Honest, I did think you was English. You came from California? Oh, +say, I wonder if you’ve ever heard of Dr. Mittyford. He’s some kind of +school-teacher. I think he teaches in Leland Stamford College.” + +“Leland Stanford? You know him?” She dropped into interested +familiarity. + +“I met him at Oxford.” + +“Really?… My brother was at Stanford. I think I’ve heard him speak +of—Oh yes. He said that Mittyford was a cultural climber, if you know +what I mean; rather—oh, how shall I express it?—oh, shall we put it, +finicky about things people have just told him to be finicky about.” + +“Yes!” glowed Mr. Wrenn. + +To the luxury of feeling that he knew the unusual Miss Istra Nash he +sacrificed Dr. Mittyford, scholarship and eye-glasses and Shelley and +all, without mercy. + +“Yes, he was awfully funny. Gee! I didn’t care much for him.” + +“Of course you know he’s a great man, however?” Istra was as bland as +though she had meant that all along, which left Mr. Wrenn nowhere at +all when it came to deciding what she meant. + +Without warning she rose from the steps, flung at him “G’ night,” and +was off down the street. + +Sitting alone, all excited happiness, Mr. Wrenn muttered: “Ain’t she a +wonder! Gee! she’s striking-lookin’! Gee whittakers!” + +Some hours later he said aloud, tossing about in bed: “I wonder if I +was too fresh. I hope I wasn’t. I ought to be careful.” + +He was so worried about it that he got up and smoked a cigarette, +remembered that he was breaking still another rule by smoking too much, +then got angry and snapped defiantly at his suit-case: “Well, what do I +care if I _am_ smoking too much? And I’ll be as fresh as I want to.” He +threw a newspaper at the censorious suit-case and, much relieved, went +to bed to dream that he was a rabbit making enormously amusing jests, +at which he laughed rollickingly in half-dream, till he realized that +he was being awakened by the sound of long sobs from the room of Istra +Nash. + +Afternoon; Mr. Wrenn in his room. Miss Nash was back from tea, but +there was not a sound to be heard from her room, though he listened +with mouth open, bent forward in his chair, his hands clutching the +wooden seat, his finger-tips rubbing nervously back and forth over the +rough under-surface of the wood. He wanted to help her—the wonderful +lady who had been sobbing in the night. He had a plan, in which he +really believed, to say to her, “Please let me help you, princess, jus’ +like I was a knight.” + +At last he heard her moving about. He rushed downstairs and waited on +the stoop. + +When she came out she glanced down and smiled contentedly. He was +flutteringly sure that she expected to see him there. But all his plan +of proffering assistance vanished as he saw her impatient eyes and her +splendors of dress—another tight-fitting gown, of smoky gray, with +faint silvery lights gliding along the fabric. + +She sat on the rail above him, immediately, unhesitatingly, and +answered his “Evenin’” cheerfully. + +He wanted so much to sit beside her, to be friends with her. But, he +felt, it took courage to sit beside her. She was likely to stare +haughtily at him. However, he did go up to the rail and sit, shyly +kicking his feet, beside her, and she did not stare haughtily. Instead +she moved over an inch or two, glanced at him almost as though they +were sharing a secret, and said, quietly: + +“I thought quite a bit about you last evening. I believe you really +have an imagination, even though you are a salesman—I mean so many +don’t; you know how it is.” + +“Oh yes.” + +You see, Mr. Wrenn didn’t know he was commonplace. + +“After I left here last night I went over to Olympia Johns’, and she +dragged me off to a play. I thought of you at it because there was an +imaginative butler in it. You don’t mind my comparing you to a butler, +do you? He was really quite the nicest person in the play, y’ know. +Most of it was gorgeously rotten. It used to be a French farce, but +they sent it to Sunday-school and gave it a nice fresh frock. It seemed +that a gentleman-tabby had been trying to make a match between his +nephew and his ward. The ward arted. Personally I think it was by +tonsorial art. But, anyway, the uncle knew that nothing brings people +together so well as hating the same person. You know, like hating the +cousin, when you’re a kiddy, hating the cousin that always keeps her +nails clean?” + +“Yes! That’s _so!_” + +“So he turned nasty, and of course the nephew and ward clinched till +death did them part—which, I’m very sorry to have to tell you, death +wasn’t decent enough to do on the stage. If the play could only have +ended with everybody’s funeral I should have called it a real happy +ending.” + +Mr. Wrenn laughed gratefully, though uncertainly. He knew that she had +made jokes for him, but he didn’t exactly know what they were. + +“The imaginative butler, he was rather good. But the rest—Ugh!” + +“That must have been a funny play,” he said, politely. + +She looked at him sidewise and confided, “Will you do me a favor?” + +“Oh yes, I—” + +“Ever been married?” + +He was frightfully startled. His “No” sounded as though he couldn’t +quite remember. + +She seemed much amused. You wouldn’t have believed that this superior +quizzical woman who tapped her fingers carelessly on her slim exquisite +knee had ever sobbed in the night. + +“Oh, that wasn’t a personal question,” she said. “I just wanted to know +what you’re like. Don’t you ever collect people? I do—chloroform ’em +quite cruelly and pin their poor little corpses out on nice clean +corks…. You live alone in New York, do you?” + +“Y-yes.” + +“Who do you play with—know?” + +“Not—not much of anybody. Except maybe Charley Carpenter. He’s +assistant bookkeeper for the Souvenir Company. “He had wanted to, and +immediately decided not to, invent _grandes mondes_ whereof he was an +intimate. + +“What do—oh, you know—people in New York who don’t go to parties or +read much—what do they do for amusement? I’m so interested in types.” + +“Well—” said he. + +That was all he could say till he had digested a pair of thoughts: Just +what did she mean by “types”? Had it something to do with printing +stories? And what could he say about the people, anyway? He observed: + +“Oh, I don’t know—just talk about—oh, cards and jobs and folks and +things and—oh, you know; go to moving pictures and vaudeville and go to +Coney Island and—oh, sleep.” + +“But you—?” + +“Well, I read a good deal. Quite a little. Shakespeare and geography +and a lot of stuff. I like reading.” + +“And how do you place Nietzsche?” she gravely desired to know. + +“?” + +“Nietzsche. You know—the German humorist.” + +“Oh yes—uh—let me see now; he’s—uh—” + +“Why, you remember, don’t you? Haeckel and he wrote the great musical +comedy of the century. And Matisse did the music—Matisse and Rodin.” + +“I haven’t been to it,” he said, vaguely. “…I don’t know much German. +Course I know a few words, like _Spricken Sie Dutch_ and _Bitty, sir_, +that Rabin at the Souvenir Company—he’s a German Jew, I guess—learnt +me…. But, say, isn’t Kipling great! Gee! when I read _Kim_ I can +imagine I’m hiking along one of those roads in India just like I was +there—you know, all those magicians and so on…. Readin’s wonderful, +ain’t it!” + +“Um. Yes.” + +“I bet you read an awful lot.” + +“Very little. Oh—D’Annunzio and some Turgenev and a little +Tourgenieff…. That last was a joke, you know.” + +“Oh yes,” disconcertedly. + +“What sorts of plays do you go to, Mr. Wrenn?” + +“Moving pictures mostly,” he said, easily, then bitterly wished he +hadn’t confessed so low-life a habit. + +“Well—tell me, my dear—Oh, I didn’t mean that; artists use it a good +deal; it just means ‘old chap.’ You _don’t_ mind my asking such beastly +personal questions, do you? I’m interested in people…. And now I must +go up and write a letter. I was going over to Olympia’s—she’s one of +the Interesting People I spoke of—but you see you have been much more +amusing. Good night. You’re lonely in London, aren’t you? We’ll have to +go sightseeing some day.” + +“Yes, I am lonely!” he exploded. Then, meekly: “Oh, thank you! I sh’d +be awful pleased to…. Have you seen the Tower, Miss Nash?” + +“No. Never. Have you?” + +“No. You see, I thought it ’d be kind of a gloomy thing to see all +alone. Is that why you haven’t never been there, too?” + +“My dear man, I see I shall have to educate you. Shall I? I’ve been +taken in hand by so many people—it would be a pleasure to pass on the +implied slur. Shall I?” + +“Please do.” + +“One simply doesn’t go and see the Tower, because that’s what trippers +do. Don’t you understand, my dear? (Pardon the ‘my dear’ again.) The +Tower is the sort of thing school superintendents see and then go back +and lecture on in school assembly-room and the G. A. R. hall. I’ll take +you to the Tate Gallery.” Then, very abruptly, “G’ night,” and she was +gone. + +He stared after her smooth back, thinking: “Gee! I wonder if she got +sore at something I said. I don’t think I was fresh this time. But she +beat it so quick…. Them lips of hers—I never knew there was such red +lips. And an artist—paints pictures!… Read a lot—Nitchy—German musical +comedy. Wonder if that’s that ‘Merry Widow’ thing?… That gray dress of +hers makes me think of fog. Cur’ous.” + +In her room Istra Nash inspected her nose in a mirror, powdered, and +sat down to write, on thick creamy paper: + +Skilly dear, I’m in a fierce Bloomsbury boarding-house—bores —except +for a Phe-nomenon—little man of 35 or 40 with embryonic imagination & a +virgin soul. I’ll try to keep from planting radical thoughts in the +virgin soul, but I’m tempted. + +Oh Skilly dear I’m lonely as the devil. Would it be too bromid. to say +I wish you were here? I put out my hand in the darkness, & yours wasn’t +there. My dear, my dear, how desolate—Oh you understand it only too +well with your supercilious grin & your superior eye-glasses & your +beatific Oxonian ignorance of poor eager America. + +I suppose I _am_ just a barbarous Californian kiddy. It’s just as Pere +Dureon said at the atelier, “You haf a’ onderstanding of the ’igher +immorality, but I ’ope you can cook—paint you cannot.” + +He wins. I can’t sell a single thing to the art editors here or get one +single order. One horrid eye-glassed earnest youth who Sees People at a +magazine, he vouchsafed that they “didn’t use any Outsiders.” +Outsiders! And his hair was nearly as red as my wretched mop. So I came +home & howled & burned Milan tapers before your picture. I did. Though +you don’t deserve it. + +Oh damn it, am I getting sentimental? You’ll read this at Petit Monsard +over your drip & grin at your poor unnietzschean barbarian. + +I. N. + + + + +CHAPTER VIII +HE TIFFINS + + +Mr. Wrenn, chewing and chewing and chewing the cud of thought in his +room next evening, after an hour had proved two things; thus: + +(a) The only thing he wanted to do was to go back to America at once, +because England was a country where every one—native or American—was so +unfriendly and so vastly wise that he could never understand them. + +(b) The one thing in the world that he wanted to do was to be right +here, for the most miraculous event of which he had ever heard was +meeting Miss Nash. First one, then the other, these thoughts swashed +back and forth like the swinging tides. He got away from them only long +enough to rejoice that somehow—he didn’t know how—he was going to be +her most intimate friend, because they were both Americans in a strange +land and because they both could make-believe. + +Then he was proving that Istra would, and would not, be the perfect +comrade among women when some one knocked at his door. + +Electrified, his cramped body shot up from its crouch, and he darted to +the door. + +Istra Nash stood there, tapping her foot on the sill with apologetic +haste in her manner. Abruptly she said: + +“So sorry to bother you. I just wondered if you could let me have a +match? I’m all out.” + +“Oh _yes!_ Here’s a whole box. Please take ’em. I got plenty more.” +[Which was absolutely untrue.] + +“Thank you. S’ good o’ you,” she said, hurriedly. “G’ night.” + +She turned away, but he followed her into the hall, bashfully urging: +“Have you been to another show? Gee! I hope you draw a better one next +time ’n the one about the guy with the nephew.” + +“Thank you.” + +She glanced back in the half dark hall from her door—some fifteen feet +from his. He was scratching at the wall-paper with a diffident finger, +hopeful for a talk. + +“Won’t you come in?” she said, hesitatingly. + +“Oh, thank you, but I guess I hadn’t better.” + +Suddenly she flashed out the humanest of smiles, her blue-gray eyes +crinkling with cheery friendship. “Come in, come in, child.” As he +hesitatingly entered she warbled: “Needn’t both be so lonely all the +time, after all, need we? Even if you _don’t_ like poor Istra. You +don’t—do you?” Seemingly she didn’t expect an answer to her question, +for she was busy lighting a Russian cigarette. It was the first time in +his life that he had seen a woman smoke. + +With embarrassed politeness he glanced away from her as she threw back +her head and inhaled deeply. He blushingly scrutinized the room. + +In the farther corner two trunks stood open. One had the tray removed, +and out of the lower part hung a confusion of lacey things from which +he turned away uncomfortable eyes. He recognized the black-and-gold +burnoose, which was tumbled on the bed, with a nightgown of lace +insertions and soft wrinkles in the lawn, a green book with a paper +label bearing the title _Three Plays for Puritans_, a red slipper, and +an open box of chocolates. + +On the plain kitchen-ware table was spread a cloth of Reseda green, +like a dull old leaf in color. On it lay a gold-mounted fountain-pen, +huge and stub-pointed; a medley of papers and torn envelopes, a bottle +of Creme Yvette, and a silver-framed portrait of a lean smiling man +with a single eye-glass. + +Mr. Wrenn did not really see all these details, but he had an +impression of luxury and high artistic success. He considered the +Yvette flask the largest bottle of perfume he’d ever seen; and remarked +that there was “some guy’s picture on the table.” He had but a moment +to reconnoiter, for she was astonishingly saying: + +“So you were lonely when I knocked?” + +“Why, how—” + +“Oh, I could see it. We all get lonely, don’t we? I do, of course. Just +now I’m getting sorer and sorer on Interesting People. I think I’ll go +back to Paris. There even the Interesting People are—why, they’re +interesting. Savvy—you see I _am_ an American—savvy?” + +“Why—uh—uh—uh—I d-don’t exactly get what you mean. How do you mean +about ‘Interesting People’?” + +“My dear child, of course you don’t get me.” She went to the mirror and +patted her hair, then curled on the bed, with an offhand “Won’t you sit +down?” and smoked elaborately, blowing the blue tendrils toward the +ceiling as she continued: “Of course you don’t get it. You’re a nice +sensible clerk who’ve had enough real work to do to keep you from being +afraid that other people will think you’re commonplace. You don’t have +to coddle yourself into working enough to earn a living by talking +about temperament. + +“Why, these Interesting People—You find ’em in London and New York and +San Francisco just the same. They’re convinced they’re the wisest +people on earth. There’s a few artists and a bum novelist or two +always, and some social workers. The particular bunch that it amuses me +to hate just now—and that I apparently can’t do without—they gather +around Olympia Johns, who makes a kind of salon out of her rooms on +Great James Street, off Theobald’s Road…. They might just as well be in +New York; but they’re even stodgier. They don’t get sick of the game of +being on intellectual heights as soon as New-Yorkers do. + +“I’ll have to take you there. It’s a cheery sensation, you know, to +find a man who has some imagination, but who has been unspoiled by +Interesting People, and take him to hear them wamble. They sit around +and growl and rush the growler—I hope you know growler-rushing—and +rejoice that they’re free spirits. Being Free, of course, they’re not +allowed to go and play with nice people, for when a person is Free, you +know, he is never free to be anything but Free. That may seem +confusing, but they understand it at Olympia’s. + +“Of course there’s different sorts of intellectuals, and each cult +despises all the others. Mostly, each cult consists of one person, but +sometimes there’s two—a talker and an audience—or even three. For +instance, you may be a militant and a vegetarian, but if some one is a +militant and has a good figure, why then—oof!… That’s what I mean by +‘Interesting People.’ I loathe them! So, of course, being one of them, +I go from one bunch to another, and, upon my honor, every single time I +think that the new bunch _is_ interesting!” + +Then she smoked in gloomy silence, while Mr. Wrenn remarked, after some +mental labor, “I guess they’re like cattlemen—the cattle-ier they are, +the more romantic they look, and then when you get to know them the +chief trouble with them is that they’re cattlemen.” + +“Yes, that’s it. They’re—why, they’re—Oh, poor dear, there, there, +there! It _sha’n’t_ have so much intellekchool discussion, _shall_ it!… +I think you’re a very nice person, and I’ll tell you what we’ll do. +We’ll have a small fire, shall we? In the fireplace.” + +“Yes!” + +She pulled the old-fashioned bell-cord, and the old-fashioned North +Country landlady came—tall, thin, parchment-faced, musty-looking as +though she had been dressed up in Victorian garments in 1880 and left +to stand in an unaired parlor ever since. She glowered silent +disapproval at the presence of Mr. Wrenn in Istra’s room, but sent a +slavey to make the fire—“saxpence uxtry.” Mr. Wrenn felt guilty till +the coming of the slavey, a perfect Christmas-story-book slavey, a +small and merry lump of soot, who sang out, “Chilly t’-night, ayn’t +it?” and made a fire that was soon singing “Chilly t’-night,” like the +slavey. + +Istra sat on the floor before the fire, Turk-wise, her quick delicate +fingers drumming excitedly on her knees. + +“Come sit by me. You, with your sense of the romantic, ought to +appreciate sitting by the fire. You know it’s always done.” + +He slumped down by her, clasping his knees and trying to appear the +dignified American business man in his country-house. + +She smiled at him intimately, and quizzed: + +“Tell me about the last time you sat with a girl by the fire. Tell poor +Istra the dark secret. Was she the perfect among pink faces?” + +“I’ve—never—sat—before—any—fireplace—with —any—one! Except when I was +about nine—one Hallowe’en—at a party in Parthenon—little town up York +State.” + +“Really? Poor kiddy!” + +She reached out her hand and took his. He was terrifically conscious of +the warm smoothness of her fingers playing a soft tattoo on the back of +his hand, while she said: + +“But you have been in love? Drefful in love?” + +“I never have.” + +“Dear child, you’ve missed so much of the tea and cakes of life, +haven’t you? And you have an interest in life. Do you know, when I +think of the jaded Interesting People I’ve met—Why do I leave you to be +spoiled by some shop-girl in a flowered hat? She’d drag you to +moving-picture shows…. Oh! You didn’t tell me that you went to moving +pictures, did you?” + +“No!” he lied, fervently, then, feeling guilty, “I used to, but no +more.” + +“It _shall_ go to the nice moving pictures if it wants to! It shall +take me, too. We’ll forget there are any syndicalists or +broken-colorists for a while, won’t we? We’ll let the robins cover us +with leaves.” + +“You mean like the babes in the woods? But, say, I’m afraid you ain’t +just a babe in the woods! You’re the first person with brains I ever +met, ’cept, maybe, Dr. Mittyford; and the Doc never would play games, I +don’t believe. The very first one, really.” + +“Thank you!” Her warm pressure on his hand tightened. His heart was +making the maddest gladdest leaps, and timidly, with a feeling of +historic daring, he ventured to explore with his thumb-tip the fine +lines of the side of her hand…. It actually was he, sitting here with a +princess, and he actually did feel the softness of her hand, he +pantingly assured himself. + +Suddenly she gave his hand a parting pressure and sprang up. + +“Come. We’ll have tiffin, and then I’ll send you away, and to-morrow +we’ll go see the Tate Gallery.” + +While Istra was sending the slavey for cakes and a pint of light wine +Mr. Wrenn sat in a chair—just sat in it; he wanted to show that he +could be dignified and not take advantage of Miss Nash’s kindness by +slouchin’ round. Having read much Kipling, he had an idea that tiffin +was some kind of lunch in the afternoon, but of course if Miss Nash +used the word for evening supper, then he had been wrong. + +Istra whisked the writing-table with the Reseda-green cover over before +the fire, chucked its papers on the bed, and placed a bunch of roses on +one end, moving the small blue vase two inches to the right, then two +inches forward. + +The wine she poured into a decanter. Wine was distinctly a problem to +him. He was excited over his sudden rise into a society where one took +wine as a matter of course. Mrs. Zapp wouldn’t take it as a matter of +course. He rejoiced that he wasn’t narrow-minded, like Mrs. Zapp. He +worked so hard at not being narrow-minded like Mrs. Zapp that he +started when he was called out of his day-dream by a mocking voice: + +“But you might look at the cakes. Just once, anyway. They are very nice +cakes.” + +“Uh—” + +“Yes, I know the wine is wine. Beastly of it.” + +“Say, Miss Nash, I did get you this time.” + +“Oh, don’t tell me that my presiding goddessship is over already.” + +“Uh—sure! Now I’m going to be a cruel boss.” + +“Dee-lighted! Are you going to be a caveman?” + +“I’m sorry. I don’t quite get you on that.” + +“That’s too bad, isn’t it. I think I’d rather like to meet a caveman.” + +“Oh say, I know about that caveman—Jack London’s guys. I’m afraid I +ain’t one. Still—on the cattle-boat—Say, I wish you could of seen it +when the gang were tying up the bulls, before starting. Dark close +place ’tween-decks, with the steers bellowin’ and all packed tight +together, and the stiffs gettin’ seasick—so seasick we just kind of +staggered around; and we’d get hold of a head rope and yank and then +let go, and the bosses’d yell, ‘Pull, or I’ll brain you.’ And then the +fo’c’sle—men packed in like herrings.” + +She was leaning over the table, making a labyrinth with the currants +from a cake and listening intently. He stopped politely, feeling that +he was talking too much. But, “Go on, please do,” she commanded, and he +told simply, seeing it more and more, of Satan and the Grenadier, of +the fairies who had beckoned to him from the Irish coast hills, and the +comradeship of Morton. + +She interrupted only once, murmuring, “My dear, it’s a good thing +you’re articulate, anyway—” which didn’t seem to have any bearing on +hay-bales. + +She sent him away with a light “It’s been a good party, hasn’t it, +caveman? (If you _are_ a caveman.) Call for me tomorrow at three. We’ll +go to the Tate Gallery.” + +She touched his hand in the fleetingest of grasps. + +“Yes. Good night, Miss Nash,” he quavered. + +A morning of planning his conduct so that in accompanying Istra Nash to +the Tate Gallery he might be the faithful shadow and beautiful +transcript of Mittyford, Ph.D. As a result, when he stood before the +large canvases of Mr. Watts at the Tate he was so heavy and correctly +appreciative, so ready not to enjoy the stories in the pictures of +Millais, that Istra suddenly demanded: + +“Oh, my dear child, I have taken a great deal on my hands. You’ve got +to learn to play. You don’t know how to play. Come. I shall teach you. +I don’t know why I should, either. But—come.” + +She explained as they left the gallery: “First, the art of riding on +the buses. Oh, it is an art, you know. You must appreciate the +flower-girls and the gr-r-rand young bobbies. You must learn to watch +for the blossoms on the restaurant terraces and roll on the grass in +the parks. You’re much too respectable to roll on the grass, aren’t +you? I’ll try ever so hard to teach you not to be. And we’ll go to tea. +How many kinds of tea are there?” + +“Oh, Ceylon and English Breakfast and—oh—Chinese.” + +“B—” + +“And golf tees!” he added, excitedly, as they took a seat in front atop +the bus. + +“Puns are a beginning at least,” she reflected. + +“But how many kinds of tea _are_ there, Istra?… Oh say, I hadn’t ought +to—” + +“Course; call me Istra or anything else. Only, you mustn’t call my +bluff. What do I know about tea? All of us who play are bluffers, more +or less, and we are ever so polite in pretending not to know the others +are bluffing…. There’s lots of kinds of tea. In the New York Chinatown +I saw once—Do you know Chinatown? Being a New-Yorker, I don’t suppose +you do.” + +“Oh yes. And Italiantown. I used to wander round there.” + +“Well, down at the Seven Flowery Kingdoms Chop Suey and American +Cooking there’s tea at five dollars a cup that they advertise is grown +on ‘cloud-covered mountain-tops.’ I suppose when the tops aren’t +cloud-covered they only charge three dollars a cup…. But, serious-like, +there’s really only two kinds of teas—those you go to to meet the man +you love and ought to hate, and those you give to spite the women you +hate but ought to—hate! Isn’t that lovely and complicated? That’s +playing. With words. My aged parent calls it ‘talking too much and not +saying anything.’ Note that last—not saying _anything!_ It’s one of the +rules in playing that mustn’t be broken.” + +He understood that better than most of the things she said. “Why,” he +exclaimed, “it’s kind of talking sideways.” + +“Why, yes. Of course. Talking sideways. Don’t you see now?” + +Gallant gentleman as he was, he let her think she had invented the +phrase. + +She said many other things; things implying such vast learning that he +made gigantic resolves to “read like thunder.” + +Her great lesson was the art of taking tea. He found, surprisedly, that +they weren’t really going to endanger their clothes by rolling on park +grass. Instead, she led him to a tea-room behind a candy-shop on +Tottenham Court Road, a low room with white wicker chairs, colored +tiles set in the wall, and green Sedji-ware jugs with irregular bunches +of white roses. A waitress with wild-rose cheeks and a busy step +brought Orange Pekoe and lemon for her, Ceylon and Russian Caravan tea +and a jug of clotted cream for him, with a pile of cinnamon buns. + +“But—” said Istra. “Isn’t this like Alice in Wonderland! But you must +learn the buttering of English muffins most of all. If you get to be +very good at it the flunkies will let you take tea at the Carleton. +They are such hypercritical flunkies, and the one that brings the gold +butter-measuring rod to test your skill, why, he always wears +knee-breeches of silver gray. So you can see, Billy, how careful you +have to be. And eat them without buttering your nose. For if you butter +your nose they’ll think you’re a Greek professor. And you wouldn’t like +that, would you, honey?” He learned how to pat the butter into the +comfortable brown insides of the muffins that looked so cold and floury +without. But Istra seemed to have lost interest; and he didn’t in the +least follow her when she observed: + +“Doubtless it _was_ the best butter. But where, where, dear dormouse, +are the hatter and hare? Especially the sweet bunny rabbit that +wriggled his ears and loved Gralice, the _princesse d’outre-mer._ + +“Where, where are the hatter and hare, +And where is the best butter gone?” + + +Presently: “Come on. Let’s beat it down to Soho for dinner. Or—no! Now +you shall lead me. Show me where you’d go for dinner. And you shall +take me to a music-hall, and make me enjoy it. Now _you_ teach _me_ to +play.” + +“Gee! I’m afraid I don’t know a single thing to teach you.” + +“Yes, but—See here! We are two lonely Western barbarians in a strange +land. We’ll play together for a little while. We’re not used to each +other’s sort of play, but that will break up the monotony of life all +the more. I don’t know how long we’ll play or—Shall we?” + +“Oh yes!” + +“Now show me how you play.” + +“I don’t believe I ever did much, really.” + +“Well, you shall take me to your kind of a restaurant.” + +“I don’t believe you’d care much for penny meat-pies.” + +“Little meat-pies?” + +“Um-huh.” + +“Little _crispy_ ones? With flaky covers?” + +“Um-huh.” + +“Why, course I would! And ha’p’ny tea? Lead me to it, O brave knight! +And to a vaudeville.” + +He found that this devoted attendant of theaters had never seen the +beautiful Italians who pounce upon protesting zylophones with small +clubs, or the side-splitting juggler’s assistant who breaks up piles +and piles of plates. And as to the top hat that turns into an accordion +and produces much melody, she was ecstatic. + +At after-theater supper he talked of Theresa and South Beach, of +Charley Carpenter and Morton—Morton—Morton. + +They sat, at midnight, on the steps of the house in Tavistock Place. + +“I do know you now, “she mused. “It’s curious how any two babes in a +strange-enough woods get acquainted. You _are_ a lonely child, aren’t +you?” Her voice was mother-soft. “We will play just a little—” + +“I wish I had some games to teach. But you know so much.” + +“And I’m a perfect beauty, too, aren’t I?” she said, gravely. + +“Yes, you are!” stoutly. + +“You would be loyal…. And I need some one’s admiration…. Mostly, Paris +and London hold their sides laughing at poor Istra.” + +He caught her hand. “Oh, don’t! They _must_ ’preciate you. I’d like to +kill anybody that didn’t!” + +“Thanks.” She gave his hand a return pressure and hastily withdrew her +own. “You’ll be good to some sweet pink face…. And I’ll go on being +discontented. Oh, isn ’t life the fiercest proposition!… We seem +different, you and I, but maybe it’s mostly surface—down deep we’re +alike in being desperately unhappy because we never know what we’re +unhappy about. Well—” + +He wanted to put his head down on her knees and rest there. But he sat +still, and presently their cold hands snuggled together. + +After a silence, in which they were talking of themselves, he burst +out: “But I don’t see how Paris could help ’preciating you. I’ll bet +you’re one of the best artists they ever saw…. The way you made up a +picture in your mind about that juggler!” + +“Nope. Sorry. Can’t paint at all.” + +“Ah, stuff!” with a rudeness quite masterful. “I’ll bet your pictures +are corkers.” + +“Um.” + +“Please, would you let me see some of them some time. I suppose it +would bother—” + +“Come up-stairs. I feel inspired. You are about to hear some great +though nasty criticisms on the works of the unfortunate Miss Nash.” + +She led the way, laughing to herself over something. She gave him no +time to blush and hesitate over the impropriety of entering a lady’s +room at midnight, but stalked ahead with a brief “Come in.” + +She opened a large portfolio covered with green-veined black paper and +yanked out a dozen unframed pastels and wash-drawings which she +scornfully tossed on the bed, saying, as she pointed to a mass of +Marseilles roofs: + +“Do you see this sketch? The only good thing about it is the thing that +last art editor, that red-headed youth, probably didn’t like. Don’t you +hate red hair? You see these ridiculous glaring purple shadows under +the _clocher?_” + +She stared down at the picture interestedly, forgetting him, pinching +her chin thoughtfully, while she murmured: “They’re rather nice. Rather +good. Rather good.” + +Then, quickly twisting her shoulders about, she poured out: + +“But look at this. Consider this arch. It’s miserably out of drawing. +And see how I’ve faked this figure? It isn’t a real person at all. +Don’t you notice how I’ve juggled with this stairway? Why, my dear man, +every bit of the drawing in this thing would disgrace a seventh-grade +drawing-class in Dos Puentes. And regard the bunch of lombardies in +this other picture. They look like umbrellas upside down in a silly +wash-basin. Uff! It’s terrible. _Affreux!_ Don’t act as though you +liked them. You really needn’t, you know. Can’t you see now that +they’re hideously out of drawing?” + +Mr. Wrenn’s fancy was walking down a green lane of old France toward a +white cottage with orange-trees gleaming against its walls. In her +pictures he had found the land of all his forsaken dreams. + +“I—I—I—” was all he could say, but admiration pulsed in it. + +“Thank you…. Yes, we _will_ play. Good night. To-morrow!” + + + + +CHAPTER IX +HE ENCOUNTERS THE INTELLECTUALS + + +He wanted to find a cable office, stalk in, and nonchalantly send to +his bank for more money. He could see himself doing it. Maybe the cable +clerk would think he was a rich American. What did he care if he spent +all he had? A guy, he admonished himself, just had to have coin when he +was goin’ with a girl like Miss Istra. At least seven times he darted +up from the door-step, where he was on watch for her, and briskly +trotted as far as the corner. Each time his courage melted, and he +slumped back to the door-step. Sending for money—gee, he groaned, that +was pretty dangerous. + +Besides, he didn’t wish to go away. Istra might come down and play with +him. + +For three hours he writhed on that door-step, till he came to hate it; +it was as much a prison as his room at the Zapps’ had been. He hated +the areaway grill, and a big brown spot on the pavement, and, as a +truck-driver hates a motorman, so did he hate a pudgy woman across the +street who peeped out from a second-story window and watched him with +cynical interest. He finally could endure no longer the world’s +criticism, as expressed by the woman opposite. He started as though he +were going to go right now to some place he had been intending to go to +all the time, and stalked away, ignoring the woman. + +He caught a bus, then another, then walked a while. Now that he was +moving, he was agonizedly considering his problem: What was Istra to +him, really? What could he be to her? He _was_ just a clerk. She could +never love him. “And of course,” he explained to himself, “you hadn’t +oughta love a person without you expected to marry them; you oughtn’t +never even touch her hand.” Yet he did want to touch hers. He suddenly +threw his chin back, high and firm, in defiance. He didn’t care if he +was wicked, he declared. He wanted to shout to Istra across all the +city: Let us be great lovers! Let us be mad! Let us stride over the +hilltops. Though that was not at all the way he phrased it. + +Then he bumped into a knot of people standing on the walk, and came +down from the hilltops in one swoop. + +A crowd was collecting before Rothsey Hall, which bore the sign: + +GLORY—GLORY—GLORY + +SPECIAL SALVATION ARMY JUBILEE MEETING + +EXPERIENCES OF ADJUTANT CRABBENTHWAITE IN AFRICA + + +He gaped at the sign. A Salvationist in the crowd, trim and well set +up, his red-ribboned Salvation Army cap at a jaunty angle, said, “Won’t +you come in, brother?” + +Mr. Wrenn meekly followed into the hall. Bill Wrenn was nowhere in +sight. + +Now it chanced that Adjutant Crabbenthwaite told much of Houssas and +the N’Gombi, of saraweks and week-long treks, but Mr. Wrenn’s +imagination was not for a second drawn to Africa, nor did he even +glance at the sun-bonneted Salvationist women packed in the hall. He +was going over and over the Adjutant’s denunciations of the Englishmen +and Englishwomen who flirt on the mail-boats. + +Suppose it had been himself and his madness over Istra—at the moment he +quite called it madness—that the Adjutant had denounced! + +A Salvationist near by was staring at him most accusingly…. + +He walked away from the jubilee reflectively. He ate his dinner with a +grave courtesy toward the food and the waiter. He was positively +courtly to his fork. For he was just reformed. He was going to “steer +clear” of mad artist women—of all but nice good girls whom you could +marry. He remembered the Adjutant’s thundered words: + +“Flirting you call it—flirting! Look into your hearts. God Himself hath +looked into them and found flirtation the gateway to hell. And I tell +you that these army officers and the bedizened women, with their wine +and cigarettes, with their devil’s calling-cards and their jewels, with +their hell-lighted talk of the sacrilegious follies of socialism and +art and horse-racing, O my brothers, it was all but a cloak for looking +upon one another to lust after one another. Rotten is this empire, and +shall fall when our soldiers seek flirtation instead of kneeling in +prayer like the iron men of Cromwell.” + +Istra…. Card-playing…. Talk of socialism and art. Mr. Wrenn felt very +guilty. Istra…. Smoking and drinking wine…. But his moral reflections +brought the picture of Istra the more clearly before him—the persuasive +warmth of her perfect fingers; the curve of her backward-bent throat as +she talked in her melodious voice of all the beautiful things made by +the wise hands of great men. + +He dashed out of the restaurant. No matter what happened, good or bad, +he had to see her. While he was climbing to the upper deck of a bus he +was trying to invent an excuse for seeing her…. Of course one couldn’t +“go and call on ladies in their rooms without havin’ some special +excuse; they would think that was awful fresh.” + +He left the bus midway, at the sign of a periodical shop, and purchased +a _Blackwood’s_ and a _Nineteenth Century_. Morton had told him these +were the chief English “highbrow magazines.” + +He carried them to his room, rubbed his thumb in the lampblack on the +gas-fixture, and smeared the magazine covers, then cut the leaves and +ruffled the margins to make the magazines look dog-eared with much +reading; not because he wanted to appear to have read them, but because +he felt that Istra would not permit him to buy things just for her. + +All this business with details so calmed him that he wondered if he +really cared to see her at all. Besides, it was so late—after half-past +eight. + +“Rats! Hang it all! I wish I was dead. I don’t know what I do want to +do,” he groaned, and cast himself upon his bed. He was sure of nothing +but the fact that he was unhappy. He considered suicide in a dignified +manner, but not for long enough to get much frightened about it. + +He did not know that he was the toy of forces which, working on him +through the strangeness of passionate womanhood, could have made him a +great cad or a petty hero as easily as they did make him confusedly +sorry for himself. That he wasn’t very much of a cad or anything of a +hero is a detail, an accident resulting from his thirty-five or +thirty-six years of stodgy environment. Cad or hero, filling scandal +columns or histories, he would have been the same William Wrenn. + +He was thinking of Istra as he lay on his bed. In a few minutes he +dashed to his bureau and brushed his thinning hair so nervously that he +had to try three times for a straight parting. While brushing his +eyebrows and mustache he solemnly contemplated himself in the mirror. + +“I look like a damn rabbit,” he scorned, and marched half-way to +Istra’s room. He went back to change his tie to a navy-blue bow which +made him appear younger. He was feeling rather resentful at everything, +including Istra, as he finally knocked and heard her “Yes? Come in.” + +There was in her room a wonderful being lolling in a wing-chair, one +leg over the chair-arm; a young young man, with broken brown teeth, +always seen in his perpetual grin, but a godlike Grecian nose, a high +forehead, and bristly yellow hair. The being wore large round +tortoise-shell spectacles, a soft shirt with a gold-plated collar-pin, +and delicately gray garments. + +Istra was curled on the bed in a leaf-green silk kimono with a great +gold-mounted medallion pinned at her breast. Mr. Wrenn tried not to be +shocked at the kimono. + +She had been frowning as he came in and fingering a long thin green +book of verses, but she glowed at Mr. Wrenn as though he were her most +familiar friend, murmuring, “Mouse dear, I’m _so_ glad you could come +in.” + +Mr. Wrenn stood there awkwardly. He hadn’t expected to find another +visitor. He seemed to have heard her call him “Mouse.” Yes, but what +did Mouse mean? It wasn’t his name at all. This was all very confusing. +But how awful glad she was to see him! + +“Mouse dear, this is one of our best little indecent poets, Mr. Carson +Haggerty. From America—California—too. Mr. Hag’ty, Mr. Wrenn.” + +“Pleased meet you,” said both men in the same tone of annoyance. + +Mr. Wrenn implored: “I—uh—I thought you might like to look at these +magazines. Just dropped in to give them to you.” He was ready to go. + +“Thank you—so good of you. _Please_ sit down. Carson and I were only +fighting—he’s going pretty soon. We knew each other at art school in +Berkeley. Now he knows all the toffs in London.” + +“Mr. Wrenn,” said the best little poet, “I hope you’ll back up my +contention. Izzy says th—” + +“Carson, I have told you just about enough times that I do not intend +to stand for ‘Izzy’ any more! I should think that even _you_ would be +able to outgrow the standard of wit that obtains in first-year art +class at Berkeley.” + +Mr. Haggerty showed quite all of his ragged teeth in a noisy joyous +grin and went on, unperturbed: “Miss Nash says that the best European +thought, personally gathered in the best salons, shows that the Rodin +vogue is getting the pickle-eye from all the real yearners. What is +your opinion?” + +Mr. Wrenn turned to Istra for protection. She promptly announced: “Mr. +Wrenn absolutely agrees with me. By the way, he’s doing a big book on +the recrudescence of Kipling, after his slump, and—” + +“Oh, come off, now! Kipling! Blatant imperialist, anti-Stirner!” cried +Carson Haggerty, kicking out each word with the assistance of his +swinging left foot. + +Much relieved that the storm-center had passed over him, Mr. Wrenn sat +on the front edge of a cane-seated chair, with the magazines between +his hands, and his hands pressed between his forward-cocked knees. +Always, in the hundreds of times he went over the scene in that room +afterward, he remembered how cool and smooth the magazine covers felt +to the palms of his flattened hands. For he associated the papery +surfaces with the apprehension he then had that Istra might give him up +to the jag-toothed grin of Carson Haggerty, who would laugh him out of +the room and out of Istra’s world. + +He hated the poetic youth, and would gladly have broken all of Carson’s +teeth short off. Yet the dread of having to try the feat himself made +him admire the manner in which Carson tossed about long creepy-sounding +words, like a bush-ape playing with scarlet spiders. He talked +insultingly of Yeats and the commutation of sex-energy and Isadora +Duncan and the poetry of Carson Haggerty. + +Istra yawned openly on the bed, kicking a pillow, but she was surprised +into energetic discussion now and then, till Haggerty intentionally +called her Izzy again, when she sat up and remarked to Mr. Wrenn: “Oh, +don’t go yet. You can tell me about the article when Carson goes. Dear +Carson said he was only going to stay till ten.” + +Mr. Wrenn hadn’t had any intention of going, so he merely smiled and +bobbed his head to the room in general, and stammered “Y-yes,” while he +tried to remember what he had told her about some article. Article. +Perhaps it was a Souvenir Company novelty article. Great idea! Perhaps +she wanted to design a motto for them. He decidedly hoped that he could +fix it up for her—he’d sure do his best. He’d be glad to write over to +Mr. Guilfogle about it. Anyway, she seemed willing to have him stick +here. + +Yet when dear Carson had jauntily departed, leaving the room still loud +with the smack of his grin, Istra seemed to have forgotten that Mr. +Wrenn was alive. She was scowling at a book on the bed as though it had +said things to her. So he sat quiet and crushed the magazine covers +more closely till the silence choked him, and he dared, “Mr. Carson is +an awful well-educated man.” + +“He’s a bounder,” she snapped. She softened her voice as she continued: +“He was in the art school in California when I was there, and he +presumes on that…. It was good of you to stay and help me get rid of +him…. I’m getting—I’m sorry I’m so dull to-night. I suppose I’ll get +sent off to bed right now, if I can’t be more entertaining. It was +sweet of you to come in, Mouse…. You don’t mind my calling you ‘Mouse,’ +do you? I won’t, if you do mind.” + +He awkwardly walked over and laid the magazines on the bed. “Why, it’s +all right…. What was it about some novelty—some article? If there’s +anything I could do—anything—” + +“Article?” + +“Why, yes. That you wanted to see me about.” + +“Oh! Oh, that was just to get rid of Carson…. His _insufferable_ +familiarity! The penalty for my having been a naive kiddy, hungry for +friendship, once. And now, good n—. Oh, Mouse, he says my eyes—even +with this green kimono on— Come here, dear. tell me what color my eyes +are.” + +She moved with a quick swing to the side of her bed. Thrusting out her +two arms, she laid ivory hands clutchingly on his shoulder. He stood +quaking, forgetting every one of the Wrennish rules by which he had +edged a shy polite way through life. He fearfully reached out his hands +toward her shoulders in turn, but his arms were shorter than hers, and +his hands rested on the sensitive warmth of her upper arms. He peered +at those dear gray-blue eyes of hers, but he could not calm himself +enough to tell whether they were china-blue or basalt-black. + +“Tell me,” she demanded; “_aren’t_ they green?” + +“Yes,” he quavered. + +“You’re sweet,” she said. + +Leaning out from the side of her bed, she kissed him. She sprang up, +and hastened to the window, laughing nervously, and deploring: “I +shouldn’t have done that! I shouldn’t! Forgive me!” Plaintively, like a +child: “Istra was so bad, so bad. Now you must go.” As she turned back +to him her eyes had the peace of an old friend’s. + +Because he had wished to be kind to people, because he had been pitiful +toward Goaty Zapp, Mr. Wrenn was able to understand that she was trying +to be a kindly big sister to him, and he said “Good night, Istra,” and +smiled in a lively way and walked out. He got out the smile by +wrenching his nerves, for which he paid in agony as he knelt by his +bed, acknowledging that Istra would never love him and that therefore +he was not to love, would be a fool to love, never would love her—and +seeing again her white arms softly shadowed by her green kimono +sleeves. + +No sight of Istra, no scent of her hair, no sound of her +always-changing voice for two days. Twice, seeing a sliver of light +under her door as he came up the darkened stairs, he knocked, but there +was no answer, and he marched into his room with the dignity of fury. + +Numbers of times he quite gave her up, decided he wanted never to see +her again. But after one of the savagest of these renunciations, while +he was stamping defiantly down Tottenham Court Road, he saw in a window +a walking-stick that he was sure she would like his carrying. And it +cost only two-and-six. Hastily, before he changed his mind, he rushed +in and slammed down his money. It was a very beautiful stick indeed, +and of a modesty to commend itself to Istra, just a plain straight +stick with a cap of metal curiously like silver. He was conscious that +the whole world was leering at him, demanding “What’re _you_ carrying a +cane for?” but he—the misunderstood—was willing to wait for the reward +of this martyrdom in Istra’s approval. + +The third night, as he stood at the window watching two children +playing in the dusk, there was a knock. It was Istra. She stood at his +door, smart and inconspicuous in a black suit with a small toque that +hid the flare of her red hair. + +“Come,” she said, abruptly. “I want you to take me to Olympia’s—Olympia +Johns’ flat. I’ve been reading all the Balzac there is. I want to talk. +Can you come?” + +“Oh, of course—” + +“Hurry, then!” + +He seized his small foolishly round hat, and he tucked his new +walking-stick under his arm without displaying it too proudly, waiting +for her comment. + +She led the way down-stairs and across the quiet streets and squares of +Bloomsbury to Great James Street. She did not even see the stick. + +She said scarce a word beyond: + +“I’m sick of Olympia’s bunch—I never want to dine in Soho with an +inhibition and a varietistic sex instinct again—_jamais de la vie._ But +one has to play with somebody.” + +Then he was so cheered that he tapped the pavements boldly with his +stick and delicately touched her arm as they crossed the street. For +she added: + +“We’ll just run in and see them for a little while, and then you can +take me out and buy me a Rhine wine and seltzer…. Poor Mouse, it shall +have its play!” + +Olympia Johns’ residence consisted of four small rooms. When Istra +opened the door, after tapping, the living-room was occupied by seven +people, all interrupting one another and drinking fourpenny ale; seven +people and a fog of cigarette smoke and a tangle of papers and books +and hats. A swamp of unwashed dishes appeared on a large table in the +room just beyond, divided off from the living-room by a burlap curtain +to which were pinned suffrage buttons and medallions. This last he +remembered afterward, thinking over the room, for the medals’ +glittering points of light relieved his eyes from the intolerable +glances of the people as he was hastily introduced to them. He was +afraid that he would be dragged into a discussion, and sat looking away +from them to the medals, and to the walls, on which were posters, +showing mighty fists with hammers and flaming torches, or hog-like men +lolling on the chests of workmen, which they seemed to enjoy more than +the workmen. By and by he ventured to scan the group. + +Carson Haggerty, the American poet, was there. But the center of them +all was Olympia Johns herself—spinster, thirty-four, as small and +active and excitedly energetic as an ant trying to get around a match. +She had much of the ant’s brownness and slimness, too. Her pale hair +was always falling from under her fillet of worn black velvet (with the +dingy under side of the velvet showing curled up at the edges). A lock +would tangle in front of her eyes, and she would impatiently shove it +back with a jab of her thin rough hands, never stopping in her +machine-gun volley of words. + +“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” she would pour out. “Don’t you _see?_ We must do +something. I tell you the conditions are intolerable, simply +intolerable. We must _do_ something.” + +The conditions were, it seemed, intolerable in the several branches of +education of female infants, water rates in Bloomsbury, the cutlery +industry, and ballad-singing. + +And mostly she was right. Only her rightness was so demanding, so +restless, that it left Mr. Wrenn gasping. + +Olympia depended on Carson Haggerty for most of the “Yes, that’s so’s,” +though he seemed to be trying to steal glances at another woman, a +young woman, a lazy smiling pretty girl of twenty, who, Istra told Mr. +Wrenn, studied Greek archaeology at the Museum. No one knew why she +studied it. She seemed peacefully ignorant of everything but her +kissable lips, and she adorably poked at things with lazy graceful +fingers, and talked the Little Language to Carson Haggerty, at which +Olympia shrugged her shoulders and turned to the others. + +There were a Mr. and Mrs. Stettinius—she a poet; he a bleached man, +with goatish whiskers and a sanctimonious white neck-cloth, who was +Puritanically, ethically, gloomily, religiously atheistic. Items in the +room were a young man who taught in Mr. Jeney’s Select School and an +Established Church mission worker from Whitechapel, who loved to be +shocked. + +It was Mr. Wrenn who was really shocked, however, not by the noise and +odor; not by the smoking of the women; not by the demand that “we” tear +down the state; no, not by these was Our Mr. Wrenn of the Souvenir +Company shocked, but by his own fascinated interest in the frank talk +of sex. He had always had a quite undefined supposition that it was +wicked to talk of sex unless one made a joke of it. + +Then came the superradicals, to confuse the radicals who confused Mr. +Wrenn. + +For always there is a greater rebellion; and though you sell your +prayer-book to buy Bakunine, and esteem yourself revolutionary to a +point of madness, you shall find one who calls you reactionary. The +scorners came in together—Moe Tchatzsky, the syndicalist and direct +actionist, and Jane Schott, the writer of impressionistic prose—and +they sat silently sneering on a couch. + +Istra rose, nodded at Mr. Wrenn, and departed, despite Olympia’s +hospitable shrieks after them of “Oh stay! It’s only a little after +ten. Do stay and have something to eat.” + +Istra shut the door resolutely. The hall was dark. It was gratefully +quiet. She snatched up Mr. Wrenn’s hand and held it to her breast. + +“Oh, Mouse dear, I’m so bored! I want some real things. They talk and +talk in there, and every night they settle all the fate of all the +nations, always the same way. I don’t suppose there’s ever been a bunch +that knew more things incorrectly. You hated them, didn’t you?” + +“Why, I don’t think you ought to talk about them so severe,” he +implored, as they started down-stairs. “I don’t mean they’re like you. +They don’t savvy like you do. I mean it! But I was awful int’rested in +what that Miss Johns said about kids in school getting crushed into a +mold. Gee! that’s so; ain’t it? Never thought of it before. And that +Mrs. Stettinius talked about Yeats so beautiful.” + +“Oh, my dear, you make my task so much harder. I want you to be +different. Can’t you see your cattle-boat experience is realer than any +of the things those half-baked thinkers have done? I _know_. I’m +half-baked myself.” + +“Oh, I’ve never done nothing.” + +“But you’re ready to. Oh, I don’t know. I want—I wish Jock Seton—the +filibuster I met in San Francisco—I wish he were here. Mouse, maybe I +can make a filibuster of you. I’ve got to create something. Oh, those +people! If you just knew them! That fool Mary Stettinius is mad about +that Tchatzsky person, and her husband invites him to teas. Stettinius +is mad about Olympia, who’ll probably take Carson out and marry him, +and he’ll keep on hanging about the Greek girl. Ungh!” + +“I don’t know—I don’t know—” + +But as he didn’t know what he didn’t know she merely patted his arm and +said, soothingly: “I won’t criticize your first specimens of radicals +any more. They are trying to do something, anyway.” Then she added, in +an irrelevant tone, “You’re exactly as tall as I am. Mouse dear, you +ought to be taller.” + +They were entering the drab stretch of Tavistock Place, after a silence +as drab, when she exclaimed: “Mouse, I am _so_ sick of everything. I +want to get out, away, anywhere, and do something, anything, just so’s +it’s different. Even the country. I’d like—Why couldn’t we?” + +“Let’s go out on a picnic to-morrow, Istra.” + +“A picnic picnic? With pickles and a pillow cushion and several kinds +of cake?… I’m afraid the Bois Boulogne has spoiled me for that…. Let me +think.” + +She drooped down on the steps of their house. Her head back, her supple +strong throat arched with the passion of hating boredom, she devoured +the starlight dim over the stale old roofs across the way. + +“Stars,” she said. “Out on the moors they would come down by you…. What +is _your_ adventure—your formula for it?… Let’s see; you take common +roadside things seriously; you’d be dear and excited over a Red Lion +Inn.” + +“Are there more than one Red Li—” + +“My dear Mouse, England is a menagerie of Red Lions and White Lions and +fuzzy Green Unicorns…. Why not, why not, _why not!_ Let’s walk to +Aengusmere. It’s a fool colony of artists and so on, up in Suffolk; but +they _have_ got some beautiful cottages, and they’re more Celt than +Dublin…. Start right now; take a train to Chelmsford, say, and tramp +all night. Take a couple of days or so to get there. Think of it! +Tramping through dawn, past English fields. Think of it, Yankee. And +not caring what anybody in the world thinks. Gipsies. Shall we?” + +“Wh-h-h-h-y—” He was sure she was mad. Tramping all night! He couldn’t +let her do this. + +She sprang up. She stared down at him in revulsion, her hands clenched. +Her voice was hostile as she demanded: + +“What? Don’t you want to? With _me?_” + +He was up beside her, angry, dignified; a man. + +“Look here. You know I want to. You’re the elegantest—I mean you’re—Oh, +you ought to know! Can’t you see how I feel about you? Why, I’d rather +do this than anything I ever heard of in my life. I just don’t want to +do anything that would get people to talking about you.” + +“Who would know? Besides, my dear man, I don’t regard it as exactly +wicked to walk decently along a country road.” + +“Oh, it isn’t that. Oh, please, Istra, don’t look at me like that—like +you hated me.” + +She calmed at once, drummed on his arm, sat down on the railing, and +drew him to a seat beside her. + +“Of course, Mouse. It’s silly to be angry. Yes, I do believe you want +to take care of me. But don’t worry…. Come! Shall we go?” + +“But wouldn’t you rather wait till to-morrow?” + +“No. The whole thing’s so mad that if I wait till then I’ll never want +to do it. And you’ve got to come, so that I’ll have some one to quarrel +with…. I hate the smugness of London, especially the smugness of the +anti-smug anti-bourgeois radicals, so that I have the finest mad mood! +Come. We’ll go.” + +Even this logical exposition had not convinced him, but he did not +gainsay as they entered the hall and Istra rang for the landlady. His +knees grew sick and old and quavery as he heard the landlady’s voice +loud below-stairs: “Now wot do they want? It’s eleven o’clock. Aren’t +they ever done a-ringing and a-ringing?” + +The landlady, the tired thin parchment-faced North Countrywoman, whose +god was Respectability of Lodgings, listened in a frightened way to +Istra’s blandly superior statement: “Mr. Wrenn and I have been invited +to join an excursion out of town that leaves to-night. We’ll pay our +rent and leave our things here.” + +“Going off together—” + +“My good woman, we are going to Aengusmere. Here’s two pound. Don’t +allow any one in my room. And I may send for my things from out of +town. Be ready to pack them in my trunks and send them to me. Do you +understand?” + +“Yes, miss, but—” + +“My good woman, do you realize that your ‘buts’ are insulting?” + +“Oh, I didn’t go to be insulting—” + +“Then that’s all…. Hurry now, Mouse!” + +On the stairs, ascending, she whispered, with the excitement not of a +tired woman, but of a tennis-and-dancing-mad girl: “We’re off! Just +take a tooth-brush. Put on an outing suit—any old thing—and an old +cap.” + +She darted into her room. + +Now Mr. Wrenn had, for any old thing, as well as for afternoon and +evening dress, only the sturdy undistinguished clothes he was wearing, +so he put on a cap, and hoped she wouldn’t notice. She didn’t. She came +knocking in fifteen minutes, trim in a khaki suit, with low thick boots +and a jolly tousled blue tam-o’-shanter. + +“Come on. There’s a train for Chelmsford in half an hour, my time-table +confided to me. I feel like singing.” + + + + +CHAPTER X +HE GOES A-GIPSYING + + +They rode out of London in a third-class compartment, opposite a curate +and two stodgy people who were just people and defied you (Istra +cheerfully explained to Mr. Wrenn) to make anything of them but just +people. + +“Wouldn’t they stare if they knew what idiocy we’re up to!” she +suggested. + +Mr. Wrenn bobbed his head in entire agreement. He was trying, without +any slightest success, to make himself believe that Mr. William Wrenn, +Our Mr. Wrenn, late of the Souvenir Company, was starting out for a +country tramp at midnight with an artist girl. + +The night foreman of the station, a person of bedizenment and pride, +stared at them as they alighted at Chelmsford and glanced around like +strangers. Mr. Wrenn stared back defiantly and marched with Istra from +the station, through the sleeping town, past its ragged edges, into the +country. + +They tramped on, a bit wearily. Mr. Wrenn was beginning to wonder if +they’d better go back to Chelmsford. Mist was dripping and blind and +silent about them, weaving its heavy gray with the night. Suddenly +Istra caught his arm at the gate to a farm-yard, and cried, “Look!” + +“Gee!… Gee! we’re in England. We’re abroad!” + +“Yes—abroad.” + +A paved courtyard with farm outbuildings thatched and ancient was lit +faintly by a lantern hung from a post that was thumbed to a soft +smoothness by centuries. + +“That couldn’t be America,” he exulted. “Gee! I’m just gettin’ it! I’m +so darn glad we came…. Here’s real England. No tourists. It’s what I’ve +always wanted—a country that’s old. And different…. Thatched houses!… +And pretty soon it’ll be dawn, summer dawn; with you, with Istra! +_Gee!_ It’s the darndest adventure.” + +“Yes…. Come on. Let’s walk fast or we’ll get sleepy, and then your +romantic heroine will be a grouchy Interesting People!… Listen! There’s +a sleepy dog barking, a million miles away…. I feel like telling you +about myself. You don’t know me. Or do you?” + +“I dunno just how you mean.” + +“Oh, it shall have its romance! But some time I’ll tell you—perhaps I +will—how I’m not really a clever person at all, but just a savage from +outer darkness, who pretends to understand London and Paris and Munich, +and gets frightfully scared of them…. Wait! Listen! Hear the mist drip +from that tree. Are you nice and drowned?” + +“Uh—kind of. But I been worrying about you being soaked.” + +“Let me see. Why, your sleeve is wet clear through. This khaki of mine +keeps out the water better…. But I don’t mind getting wet. All I mind +is being bored. I’d like to run up this hill without a thing on—just +feeling the good healthy real mist on my skin. But I’m afraid it isn’t +done.” + +Mile after mile. Mostly she talked of the boulevards and Pere Dureon, +of Debussy and artichokes, in little laughing sentences that sprang +like fire out of the dimness of the mist. + +Dawn came. From a hilltop they made out the roofs of a town and stopped +to wonder at its silence, as though through long ages past no happy +footstep had echoed there. The fog lifted. The morning was new-born and +clean, and they fairly sang as they clattered up to an old coaching inn +and demanded breakfast of an amazed rustic pottering about the inn yard +in a smock. He did not know that to a “thrilling” Mr. Wrenn he—or +perhaps it was his smock—was the hero in an English melodrama. Nor, +doubtless, did the English crisp bacon and eggs which a sleepy +housemaid prepared know that they were theater properties. Why, they +were English eggs, served at dawn in an English inn—a stone-floored +raftered room with a starling hanging in a little cage of withes +outside the latticed window. And there were no trippers to bother them! +(Mr. Wrenn really used the word “trippers” in his cogitations; he had +it from Istra.) + +When he informed her of this occult fact she laughed, “You know mighty +well, Mouse, that you have a sneaking wish there were one Yankee +stranger here to see our glory.” + +“I guess that’s right.” + +“But maybe I’m just as bad.” + +For once their tones had not been those of teacher and pupil, but of +comrades. They set out from the inn through the brightening morning +like lively boys on a vacation tramp. + +The sun crept out, with the warmth and the dust, and Istra’s steps +lagged. As they passed the outlying corner of a farm where a +straw-stack was secluded in a clump of willows Istra smiled and sighed: +“I’m pretty tired, dear. I’m going to sleep in that straw-stack. I’ve +always wanted to sleep in a straw-stack. It’s _comme il faut_ for +vagabonds in the best set, you know. And one can burrow. Exciting, eh?” + +She made a pillow of her khaki jacket, while he dug down to a dry place +for her. He found another den on the other side of the stack. + +It was afternoon when he awoke. He sprang up and rushed around the +stack. Istra was still asleep, curled in a pathetically small childish +heap, her tired face in repose against the brown-yellow of her khaki +jacket. Her red hair had come down and shone about her shoulders. + +She looked so frail that he was frightened. Surely, too, she’d be very +angry with him for letting her come on this jaunt. + +He scribbled on a leaf from his address-book—religiously carried for +six years, but containing only four addresses—this note: + +Gone to get stuff for bxfst be right back.—W. W. + + +and, softly crawling up the straw, left the note by her head. He +hastened to a farm-house. The farm-wife was inclined to be curious. O +curious farm-wife, you of the cream-thick Essex speech and the +shuffling feet, you were brave indeed to face Bill Wrenn the Great, +with his curt self-possession, for he was on a mission for Istra, and +he cared not for the goggling eyes of all England. What though he was a +bunny-faced man with an innocuous mustache? Istra would be awakening +hungry. That was why he bullied you into selling him a stew-pan and a +bundle of faggots along with the tea and eggs and a bread loaf and a +jar of the marmalade your husband’s farm had been making these two +hundred years. And you should have had coffee for him, not tea, woman +of Essex. + +When he returned to their outdoor inn the late afternoon glow lay along +the rich fields that sloped down from their well-concealed nook. Istra +was still asleep, but her cheek now lay wistfully on the crook of her +thin arm. He looked at the auburn-framed paleness of her face, its +lines of thought and ambition, unmasked, unprotected by the swift +changes of expression which defended her while she was awake. He +sobbed. If he could only make her happy! But he was afraid of her +moods. + +He built a fire by a brooklet beyond the willows, boiled the eggs and +toasted the bread and made the tea, with cream ready in a jar. He +remembered boyhood camping days in Parthenon and old camp lore. He +returned to the stack and called, “Istra—oh, Is-tra!” + +She shook her head, nestled closer into the straw, then sat up, her +hair about her shoulders. She smiled and called down: “Good morning. +Why, it’s afternoon! Did you sleep well, dear?” + +“Yes. Did you? Gee, I hope you did!” + +“Never better in my life. I’m so sleepy yet. But comfy. I needed a +quiet sleep outdoors, and it’s so peaceful here. Breakfast! I roar for +breakfast! Where’s the nearest house?” + +“Got breakfast all ready.” + +“You’re a dear!” + +She went to wash in the brook, and came back with eyes dancing and hair +trim, and they laughed over breakfast, glancing down the slope of +golden hazy fields. Only once did Istra pass out of the land of their +intimacy into some hinterland of analysis—when she looked at him as he +drank his tea aloud out of the stew-pan, and wondered: “Is this really +you here with me? But you _aren’t_ a boulevardier. I must say I don’t +understand what you’re doing here at all…. Nor a caveman, either. I +don’t understand it…. But you _sha’n’t_ be worried by bad Istra. Let’s +see; we went to grammar-school together.” + +“Yes, and we were in college. Don’t you remember when I was baseball +captain? You don’t? Gee, you got a bad memory!” + +At which she smiled properly, and they were away for Suffolk again. + +“I suppose now it’ll go and rain,” said Istra, viciously, at dusk. It +was the first time she had spoken for a mile. Then, after another +quarter-mile: “Please don’t mind my being silent. I’m sort of stiff, +and my feet hurt most unromantically. You won’t mind, will you?” + +Of course he did mind, and of course he said he didn’t. He artfully +skirted the field of conversation by very West Sixteenth Street +observations on a town through which they passed, while she merely +smiled wearily, and at best remarked “Yes, that’s so,” whether it was +so or not. + +He was reflecting: “Istra’s terrible tired. I ought to take care of +her.” He stopped at the wood-pillared entrance of a temperance inn and +commanded: “Come! We’ll have something to eat here.” To the +astonishment of both of them, she meekly obeyed with “If you wish.” + +It cannot be truthfully said that Mr. Wrenn proved himself a person of +_savoir faire_ in choosing a temperance hotel for their dinner. Istra +didn’t seem so much to mind the fact that the table-cloth was coarse +and the water-glasses thick, and that everywhere the elbow ran into a +superfluity of greasy pepper and salt castors. But when she raised her +head wearily to peer around the room she started, glared at Mr. Wrenn, +and accused: “Are you by any chance aware of the fact that this place +is crowded with tourists? There are two family parties from Davenport +or Omaha; I _know_ they are!” + +“Oh, they ain’t such bad-looking people,” protested Mr. Wrenn…. Just +because he had induced her to stop for dinner the poor man thought his +masculine superiority had been recognized. + +“Oh, they’re _terrible!_ Can’t you _see_ it? Oh, you’re _hopeless_.” + +“Why, that big guy—that big man with the rimless spectacles looks like +he might be a good civil engineer, and I think that lady opposite him—” + +“They’re Americans.” + +“So’re we!” + +“I’m not.” + +“I thought—why—” + +“Of course I was born there, but—” + +“Well, just the same, I think they’re nice people.” + +“Now see here. Must I argue with you? Can I have no peace, tired as I +am? Those trippers are speaking of ‘quaint English flavor.’ Can you +want anything more than that to damn them? And they’ve been touring by +motor—seeing every inn on the road.” + +“Maybe it’s fun for—” + +“Now _don’t_ argue with me. I know what I’m talking about. Why do I +have to explain everything? They’re hopeless!” + +Mr. Wrenn felt a good wholesome desire to spank her, but he said, most +politely: “You’re awful tired. Don’t you want to stay here tonight? Or +maybe some other hotel; and I’ll stay here.” + +“No. Don’t want to stay any place. Want to get away from myself,” she +said, exactly like a naughty child. + +So they tramped on again. + +Darkness was near. They had plunged into a country which in the night +seemed to be a stretch of desolate moorlands. As they were silently +plodding up a hill the rain came. It came with a roar, a pitiless +drenching against which they fought uselessly, soaking them, slapping +their faces, blinding their eyes. He caught her arm and dragged her +ahead. She would be furious with him because it rained, of course, but +this was no time to think of that; he had to get her to a dry place. + +Istra laughed: “Oh, isn’t this great! We’re real vagabonds now.” + +“Why! Doesn’t that khaki soak through? Aren’t you wet?” + +“To the skin!” she shouted, gleefully. “And I don’t care! We’re _doing_ +something. Poor dear, is it worried? I’ll race you to the top of the +hill.” + +The dark bulk of a building struck their sight at the top, and they ran +to it. Just now Mr. Wrenn was ready to devour alive any irate +householder who might try to turn them out. He found the building to be +a ruined stable—the door off the hinges, the desolate thatch falling +in. He struck a match and, holding it up, standing straight, the +master, all unconscious for once in his deprecating life of the +Wrennishness of Mr. Wrenn, he discovered that the thatch above the +horse-manger was fairly waterproof. + +“Come on! Up on the edge of the manger, Istra,” he ordered. + +“This is a perfectly good place for a murder,” she grinned, as they sat +swinging their legs. + +He could fancy her grinning. He was sure about it, and well content. + +“Have I been so very grouchy, Mouse? Don’t you want to murder me? I’ll +try to find you a long pin.” + +“Nope; I don’t think so, much. I guess we can get along without it this +time.” + +“Oh dear, dear! This is very dreadful. You’re so used to me now that +you aren’t even scared of me any more.” + +“Gee! I guess I’ll be scared of you all right as soon as I get you into +a dry place, but I ain’t got time now. Sitting on a manger! Ain’t this +the funniest place!… Now I must beat it out and find a house. There +ought to be one somewheres near here.” + +“And leave me here in the darknesses and wetnesses? Not a chance. The +rain’ll soon be over, anyway. Really, I don’t mind a bit. I think it’s +rather fun.” + +Her voice was natural again, natural and companionable and brave. She +laughed as she stroked her wet shoulder and held his hand, sitting +quietly and bidding him listen to the soft forlorn sound of the rain on +the thatch. + +But the rain was not soon over, and their dangling position was very +much like riding a rail. + +“I’m so uncomfortable!” fretted Istra. + +“See here, Istra, please, I think I’d better go see if I can’t find a +house for you to get dry in.” + +“I feel too wretched to go any place. Too wretched to move.” + +“Well, then, I’ll make a fire here. There ain’t much danger.” + +“The place will catch fire,” she began, querulously. + +But he interrupted her. “Oh, _let_ the darn place catch fire! I’m going +to make a fire, I tell you!” + +“I don’t want to move. It’ll just be another kind of discomfort, that’s +all. Why couldn’t you try and take a little bit of care of me, anyway?” + +“Oh, hon-ey!” he wailed, in youthful bewilderment. “I did try to get +you to stay at that hotel in town and get some rest.” + +“Well, you ought to have made me. Don’t you realize that I took you +along to take care of me?” + +“Uh—” + +“Now don’t argue about it. I can’t stand argument all the time.” + +He thought instantly of Lee Theresa Zapp quarreling with her mother, +but he said nothing. He gathered the driest bits of thatch and wood he +could find in the litter on the stable floor and kindled a fire, while +she sat sullenly glaring at him, her face wrinkled and tired in the wan +firelight. When the blaze was going steadily, a compact and safe little +fire, he spread his coat as a seat for her, and called, cheerily, “Come +on now, honey; here’s a regular home and hearthstone for you.” + +She slipped down from the manger edge and stood in front of him, +looking into his eyes—which were level with her own. + +“You _are_ good to me,” she half whispered, and smoothed his cheek, +then slipped down on the outspread coat, and murmured, “Come; sit here +by me, and we’ll both get warm.” + +All night the rain dribbled, but no one came to drive them away from +the fire, and they dozed side by side, their hands close and their +garments steaming. Istra fell asleep, and her head drooped on his +shoulder. He straightened to bear its weight, though his back twinged +with stiffness, and there he sat unmoving, through an hour of pain and +happiness and confused meditation, studying the curious background—the +dark roof of broken thatch, the age-corroded walls, the littered +earthen floor. His hand pressed lightly the clammy smoothness of the +wet khaki of her shoulder; his wet sleeve stuck to his arm, and he +wanted to pull it free. His eyes stung. But he sat tight, while his +mind ran round in circles, considering that he loved Istra, and that he +would not be entirely sorry when he was no longer the slave to her +moods; that this adventure was the strangest and most romantic, also +the most idiotic and useless, in history. + +Toward dawn she stirred, and, slipping stiffly from his position, he +moved her so that her back, which was still wet, faced the fire. He +built up the fire again, and sat brooding beside her, dozing and +starting awake, till morning. Then his head bobbed, and he was dimly +awake again, to find her sitting up straight, looking at him in +amazement. + +“It simply can’t be, that’s all…. Did you curl me up? I’m nice and dry +all over now. It was very good of you. You’ve been a most commendable +person…. But I think we’ll take a train for the rest of our pilgrimage. +It hasn’t been entirely successful, I’m afraid.” + +“Perhaps we’d better.” + +For a moment he hated her, with her smooth politeness, after a night +when she had been unbearable and human by turns. He hated her +bedraggled hair and tired face. Then he could have wept, so deeply did +he desire to pull her head down on his shoulder and smooth the wrinkles +of weariness out of her dear face, the dearer because they had endured +the weariness together. But he said, “Well, let’s try to get some +breakfast first, Istra.” + +With their garments wrinkled from rain, half asleep and rather cross, +they arrived at the esthetic but respectable colony of Aengusmere by +the noon train. + + + + +CHAPTER XI +HE BUYS AN ORANGE TIE + + +The Aengusmere Caravanserai is so unyieldingly cheerful and artistic +that it makes the ordinary person long for a dingy old-fashioned room +in which he can play solitaire and chew gum without being rebuked with +exasperating patience by the wall stencils and clever etchings and +polished brasses. It is adjectiferous. The common room (which is +uncommon for hotel parlor) is all in superlatives and chintzes. + +Istra had gone up to her room to sleep, bidding Mr. Wrenn do likewise +and avoid the wrong bunch at the Caravanserai; for besides the wrong +bunch of Interesting People there were, she explained, a right bunch, +of working artists. But he wanted to get some new clothes, to replace +his rain-wrinkled ready-mades. He was tottering through the common +room, wondering whether he could find a clothing-shop in Aengusmere, +when a shrill gurgle from a wing-chair by the rough-brick fireplace +halted him. + +“Oh-h-h-h, _Mister_ Wrenn; Mr. _Wrenn!_” There sat Mrs. Stettinius, the +poet-lady of Olympia’s rooms on Great James Street. + +“Oh-h-h-h, Mr. Wrenn, you _bad_ man, _do_ come sit down and tell me all +_about_ your _wonderful_ trek with Istra Nash. I _just_ met _dear_ +Istra in the upper hall. Poor dear, she was _so_ crumpled, but her hair +was like a sunset over mountain peaks—you know, as Yeats says: + +“A stormy sunset were her lips, +A stormy sunset on doomed ships, + + +only of course this was her _hair_ and not her _lips_—and she told me +that you had tramped all the _way_ from London. I’ve never heard of +anything so romantic—or no, I won’t say ‘romantic’—I _do_ agree with +dear Olympia—_isn’t_ she a mag_nifi_cent woman—_so_ fearless and +progressive—didn’t you _adore_ meeting her?—she is our modern Joan of +Arc—such a _noble_ figure—I _do_ agree with her that _romantic_ love is +_passé_, that we have entered the era of glorious companionship that +regards varietism as _exactly_ as romantic as monogamy. But—but—where +was I?—I think your gipsying down from London was _most_ exciting. Now +_do_ tell us all about it, Mr. Wrenn. First, I want you to meet Miss +Saxonby and Mr. Gutch and _dear_ Yilyena Dourschetsky and Mr. Howard +Bancock Binch—of course you know his poetry.” + +And then she drew a breath and flopped back into the wing-chair’s +muffling depths. + +During all this Mr. Wrenn had stood, frightened and unprotected and +rain-wrinkled, before the gathering by the fireless fireplace, +wondering how Mrs. Stettinius could get her nose so blue and yet so +powdery. Despite her encouragement he gave no fuller account of the +“gipsying” than, “Why—uh—we just tramped down,” till Russian-Jewish +Yilyena rolled her ebony eyes at him and insisted, “Yez, you mus’ tale +us about it.” + +Now, Yilyena had a pretty neck, colored like a cigar of mild flavor, +and a trick of smiling. She was accustomed to having men obey her. Mr. +Wrenn stammered: + +“Why—uh—we just walked, and we got caught in the rain. Say, Miss Nash +was a wonder. She never peeped when she got soaked through—she just +laughed and beat it like everything. And we saw a lot of quaint English +places along the road—got away from all them tourists—trippers—you +know.” + +A perfectly strange person, a heavy old man with horn spectacles and a +soft shirt, who had joined the group unbidden, cleared his throat and +interrupted: + +“Is it not a strange paradox that in traveling, the most observant of +all pursuits, one should have to encounter the eternal bourgeoisie!” + +From the Cockney Greek chorus about the unlighted fire: + +“Yes!” + +“Everywhere.” + +“Uh—” began Mr. Gutch. He apparently had something to say. But the +chorus went on: + +“And just as swelteringly monogamic in Port Said as in Brum.” + +“Yes, that’s so.” + +“Mr. Wr-r-renn,” thrilled Mrs. Stettinius, the lady poet, “didn’t you +notice that they were perfectly oblivious of all economic movements; +that their observations never post-dated ruins?” + +“I guess they wanted to make sure they were admirin’ the right things,” +ventured Mr. Wrenn, with secret terror. + +“Yes, that’s so,” came so approvingly from the Greek chorus that the +personal pupil of Mittyford, Ph.D., made his first epigram: + +“It isn’t so much what you like as what you don’t like that shows if +you’re wise.” + +“Yes,” they gurgled; and Mr. Wrenn, much pleased with himself, smiled +_au prince_ upon his new friends. + +Mrs. Stettinius was getting into her stride for a few remarks upon the +poetry of industrialism when Mr. Gutch, who had been “Uh—”ing for some +moments, trying to get in his remark, winked with sly rudeness at Miss +Saxonby and observed: + +“I fancy romance isn’t quite dead yet, y’ know. Our friends here seem +to have had quite a ro-mantic little journey.” Then he winked again. + +“Say, what do you mean?” demanded Bill Wrenn, hot-eyed, fists clenched, +but very quiet. + +“Oh, I’m not _blaming_ you and Miss Nash—quite the reverse!” tittered +the Gutch person, wagging his head sagely. + +Then Bill Wrenn, with his fist at Mr. Gutch’s nose, spoke his mind: + +“Say, you white-faced unhealthy dirty-minded lump, I ain’t much of a +fighter, but I’m going to muss you up so’s you can’t find your ears if +you don’t apologize for those insinuations.” + +“Oh, Mr. Wrenn—” + +“He didn’t mean—” + +“I didn’t mean—” + +“He was just spoofing—” + +“I was just spoofing—” + +Bill Wrenn, watching the dramatization of himself as hero, was enjoying +the drama. “You apologize, then?” + +“Why certainly, Mr. Wrenn. Let me explain—” + +“Oh, don’t explain,” snortled Miss Saxonby. + +“Yes!” from Mr. Bancock Binch, “explanations are _so_ conventional, old +chap.” + +Do you see them?—Mr. Wrenn, self-conscious and ready to turn into a +blind belligerent Bill Wrenn at the first disrespect; the talkers +sitting about and assassinating all the princes and proprieties and, +poor things, taking Mr. Wrenn quite seriously because he had uncovered +the great truth that the important thing in sight-seeing is not to see +sights. He was most unhappy, Mr. Wrenn was, and wanted to be away from +there. He darted as from a spring when he heard Istra’s voice, from the +edge of the group, calling, “Come here a sec’, Billy.” + +She was standing with a chair-back for support, tired but smiling. + +“I can’t get to sleep yet. Don’t you want me to show you some of the +buildings here?” + +“Oh _yes!_” + +“If Mrs. Stettinius can spare you!” + +This by way of remarking on the fact that the female poet was staring +volubly. + +“G-g-g-g-g-g—” said Mrs. Stettinius, which seemed to imply perfect +consent. + +Istra took him to the belvedere on a little slope overlooking the lawns +of Aengusmere, scattered with low bungalows and rose-gardens. + +“It is beautiful, isn’t it? Perhaps one could be happy here—if one +could kill all the people except the architect,” she mused. + +“Oh, it is,” he glowed. + +Standing there beside her, happiness enveloping them, looking across +the marvelous sward, Bill Wrenn was at the climax of his comedy of +triumph. Admitted to a world of lawns and bungalows and big studio +windows, standing in a belvedere beside Istra Nash as her friend— + +“Mouse dear,” she said, hesitatingly, “the reason why I wanted to have +you come out here, why I couldn’t sleep, I wanted to tell you how +ashamed I am for having been peevish, being petulant, last night. I’m +so sorry, because you were very patient with me, you were very good to +me. I don’t want you to think of me just as a crochety woman who didn’t +appreciate you. You are very kind, and when I hear that you’re married +to some nice girl I’ll be as happy as can be.” + +“Oh, Istra,” he cried, grasping her arm, “I don’t want any girl in the +world—I mean—oh, I just want to be let go ’round with you when you’ll +let me—” + +“No, no, dear. You must have seen last night; that’s impossible. Please +don’t argue about it now; I’m too tired. I just wanted to tell you I +appreciated—And when you get back to America you won’t be any the worse +for playing around with poor Istra because she told you about different +things from what you’ve played with, about rearing children as +individuals and painting in _tempera_ and all those things? And—and I +don’t want you to get too fond of me, because we’re—different…. But we +have had an adventure, even if it was a little moist.” She paused; +then, cheerily: “Well, I’m going to beat it back and try to sleep +again. Good-by, Mouse dear. No, don’t come back to the +Cara-advanced-serai. Play around and see the animiles. G’-by.” + +He watched her straight swaying figure swing across the lawn and up the +steps of the half-timbered inn. He watched her enter the door before he +hastened to the shops which clustered about the railway- station, +outside of the poetic preserves of the colony proper. + +He noticed, as he went, that the men crossing the green were mostly +clad in Norfolk jackets and knickers, so he purchased the first pair of +unrespectable un-ankle-concealing trousers he had owned since small +boyhood, and a jacket of rough serge, with a gaudy buckle on the belt. +Also, he actually dared an orange tie! + +He wanted something for Istra at dinner—“a s’prise,” he whispered under +his breath, with fond babying. For the first time in his life he +entered a florist’s shop…. Normally, you know, the poor of the city +cannot afford flowers till they are dead, and then for but one day…. He +came out with a bunch of orchids, and remembered the days when he had +envied the people he had seen in florists’ shops actually buying +flowers. When he was almost at the Caravanserai he wanted to go back +and change the orchids for simpler flowers, roses or carnations, but he +got himself not to. + +The linen and glassware and silver of the Caravanserai were almost as +coarse as those of a temperance hotel, for all the raftered ceiling and +the etchings in the dining-room. Hunting up the stewardess of the inn, +a bustling young woman who was reading Keats energetically at an +office-like desk, Mr. Wrenn begged: “I wonder could I get some special +cups and plates and stuff for high tea tonight. I got a kind of party—” + +“How many?” The stewardess issued the words as though he had put a +penny in the slot. + +“Just two. Kind of a birthday party.” Mendacious Mr. Wrenn! + +“Certainly. Of course there’s a small extra charge. I have a Royal +Satsuma tea-service—practically Royal Satsuma, at least—and some +special Limoges.” + +“I think Royal Sats’ma would be nice. And some silverware?” + +“Surely.” + +“And could we get some special stuff to eat?” + +“What would you like?” + +“Why—” + +Mendacious Mr. Wrenn! as we have commented. He put his head on one +side, rubbed his chin with nice consideration, and condescended, “What +would you suggest?” + +“For a party high tea? Why, perhaps consomme and omelet Bergerac and a +salad and a sweet and _cafe diable_. We have a chef who does French +eggs rather remarkably. That would be simple, but—” + +“Yes, that would be very good,” gravely granted the patron of cuisine. +“At six; for two.” + +As he walked away he grinned within. “Gee! I talked to that omelet +Berg’ rac like I’d known it all my life!” + +Other s’prises for Istra’s party he sought. Let’s see; suppose it +really were her birthday, wouldn’t she like to have a letter from some +important guy? he queried of himself. He’d write her a make-b’lieve +letter from a duke. Which he did. Purchasing a stamp, he humped over a +desk in the common room and with infinite pains he inked the stamp in +imitation of a postmark and addressed the letter to “Lady Istra Nash, +Mouse Castle, Suffolk.” + +Some one sat down at the desk opposite him, and he jealously carried +the task upstairs to his room. He rang for pen and ink as regally as +though he had never sat at the wrong end of a buzzer. After half an +hour of trying to visualize a duke writing a letter he produced this: + +LADY ISTRA NASH, + Mouse Castle. + + +DEAR MADAM,—We hear from our friend Sir William Wrenn that some folks +are saying that to-day is not your birthday & want to stop your +celebration, so if you should need somebody to make them believe to-day +is your birthday we have sent our secretary, Sir Percival Montague. Sir +William Wrenn will hide him behind his chair, and if they bother you +just call for Sir Percival and he will tell them. Permit us, dear Lady +Nash, to wish you all the greetings of the season, and in close we beg +to remain, as ever, Yours sincerely, + + +DUKE VERE DE VERE. + + +He was very tired. When he lay down for a minute, with a pillow tucked +over his head, he was almost asleep in ten seconds. But he sprang up, +washed his prickly eyes with cold water, and began to dress. He was shy +of the knickers and golf-stockings, but it was the orange tie that gave +him real alarm. He dared it, though, and went downstairs to make sure +they were setting the table with glory befitting the party. + +As he went through the common room he watched the three or four groups +scattered through it. They seemed to take his clothes as a matter of +course. He was glad. He wanted so much to be a credit to Istra. + +Returning from the dining-room to the common room, he passed a group +standing in a window recess and looking away from him. He overheard: + +“Who is the remarkable new person with the orange tie and the rococo +buckle on his jacket belt—the one that just went through? Did you ever +_see_ anything so funny! His collar didn’t come within an inch and a +half of fitting his neck. He must be a poet. I wonder if his verses are +as jerry-built as his garments!” + +Mr. Wrenn stopped. + +Another voice: + +“And the beautiful lack of development of his legs! It’s like the good +old cycling days, when every draper’s assistant went bank-holidaying…. +I don’t know him, but I suppose he’s some tuppeny-ha’p’ny illustrator.” + +“Or perhaps he has convictions about fried bananas, and dines on a bean +saute. O Aengusmere! Shades of Aengus!” + +“Not at all. When they look as gentle as he they always hate the +capitalists as a militant hates a cabinet minister. He probably dines +on the left ear of a South-African millionaire every evening before +exercise at the barricades…. I say, look over there; there’s a real +artist going across the green. You can tell he’s a real artist because +he’s dressed like a navvy and—” + +Mr. Wrenn was walking away, across the common room, quite sure that +every one was eying him with amusement. And it was too late to change +his clothes. It was six already. + +He stuck out his jaw, and remembered that he had planned to hide the +“letter from the duke” in Istra’s napkin that it might be the greater +surprise. He sat down at their table. He tucked the letter into the +napkin folds. He moved the vase of orchids nearer the center of the +table, and the table nearer the open window giving on the green. He +rebuked himself for not being able to think of something else to +change. He forgot his clothes, and was happy. + +At six-fifteen he summoned a boy and sent him up with a message that +Mr. Wrenn was waiting and high tea ready. + +The boy came back muttering, “Miss Nash left this note for you, sir, +the stewardess says.” + +Mr. Wrenn opened the green-and-white Caravanserai letter excitedly. +Perhaps Istra, too, was dressing for the party! He loved all s’prises +just then. He read: + +Mouse dear, I’m sorrier than I can tell you, but you know I warrned you +that bad Istra was a creature of moods, and just now my mood orders me +to beat it for Paris, which I’m doing, on the 5.17 train. I won’t say +good-by—I hate good-bys, they’re so stupid, don’t you think? Write me +some time, better make it care Amer. Express Co., Paris, because I +don’t know yet just where I’ll be. And please don’t look me up in +Paris, because it’s always better to end up an affair without +explanations, don’t you think? You have been wonderfully kind to me, +and I’ll send you some good thought-forms, shall I? + + +I. N. + + +He walked to the office of the Caravanserai, blindly, quietly. He paid +his bill, and found that he had only fifty dollars left. He could not +get himself to eat the waiting high tea. There was a seven-fourteen +train for London. He took it. Meantime he wrote out a cable to his New +York bank for a hundred and fifty dollars. To keep from thinking in the +train he talked gravely and gently to an old man about the brave days +of England, when men threw quoits. He kept thinking over and over, to +the tune set by the rattling of the train trucks: “Friends… I got to +make friends, now I know what they are…. Funny some guys don’t make +friends. Mustn’t forget. Got to make lots of ’em in New York. Learn how +to make ’em.” + +He arrived at his room on Tavistock Place about eleven, and tried to +think for the rest of the night of how deeply he was missing Morton of +the cattle-boat now that—now that he had no friend in all the hostile +world. + +In a London A. B. C. restaurant Mr. Wrenn was talking to an American +who had a clipped mustache, brisk manners, a Knight-of-Pythias pin, and +a mind for duck-shooting, hardware-selling, and cigars. + +“No more England for mine,” the American snapped, good-humoredly. “I’m +going to get out of this foggy hole and get back to God’s country just +as soon as I can. I want to find out what’s doing at the store, and I +want to sit down to a plate of flapjacks. I’m good and plenty sick of +tea and marmalade. Why, I wouldn’t take this fool country for a gift. +No, sir! Me for God’s country—Sleepy Eye, Brown County, Minnesota. You +bet!” + +“You don’t like England much, then?” Mr. Wrenn carefully reasoned. + +“Like it? Like this damp crowded hole, where they can’t talk English, +and have a fool coinage—Say, that’s a great system, that metric system +they’ve got over in France, but here—why, they don’t know whether +Kansas City is in Kansas or Missouri or both…. ‘Right as rain’—that’s +what a fellow said to me for ‘all right’! Ever hear such nonsense?…. +And tea for breakfast! Not for me! No, sir! I’m going to take the first +steamer!” + +With a gigantic smoke-puff of disgust the man from Sleepy Eye stalked +out, jingling the keys in his trousers pocket, cocking up his cigar, +and looking as though he owned the restaurant. + +Mr. Wrenn, picturing him greeting the Singer Tower from an incoming +steamer, longed to see the tower. + +“Gee! I’ll do it!” + +He rose and, from that table in the basement of an A. B. C. restaurant, +he fled to America. + +He dashed up-stairs, fidgeted while the cashier made his change, rang +for a bus, whisked into his room, slammed his things into his +suit-case, announced to it wildly that they were going home, and +scampered to the Northwestem Station. He walked nervously up and down +till the Liverpool train departed. “Suppose Istra wanted to make up, +and came back to London?” was a terrifying thought that hounded him. He +dashed into the waiting-room and wrote to her, on a souvenir post-card +showing the Abbey: “Called back to America—will write. Address care of +Souvenir Company, Twenty-eighth Street.” But he didn’t mail the card. + +Once settled in a second-class compartment, with the train in motion, +he seemed already much nearer America, and, humming, to the great +annoyance of a lady with bangs, he planned his new great work—the +making of friends; the discovery, some day, if Istra should not relent, +of “somebody to go home to.” There was no end to the “societies and +lodges and stuff” he was going to join directly he landed. + +At Liverpool he suddenly stopped at a post-box and mailed his card to +Istra. That ended his debate. Of course after that he had to go back to +America. + +He sailed exultantly, one month and seventeen days after leaving +Portland. + + + + +CHAPTER XII +HE DISCOVERS AMERICA + + +In his white-painted steerage berth Mr. Wrenn lay, with a scratch-pad +on his raised knees and a small mean pillow doubled under his head, +writing sample follow-up letters to present to the Souvenir and Art +Novelty Company, interrupting his work at intervals to add to a list of +the books which, beginning about five minutes after he landed in New +York, he was going to master. He puzzled over Marie Corelli. Morton +liked Miss Corelli so much; but would her works appeal to Istra Nash? + +He had worked for many hours on a letter to Istra in which he avoided +mention of such indecent matters as steerages and immigrants. He was +grateful, he told her, for “all you learned me,” and he had thought +that Aengusmere was a beautiful place, though he now saw “what you +meant about them interesting people,” and his New York address would be +the Souvenir Company. + +He tore up the several pages that repeated that oldest most melancholy +cry of the lover, which rang among the deodars, from viking ships, from +the moonlit courtyards of Provence, the cry which always sounded about +Mr. Wrenn as he walked the deck: “I want you so much; I miss you so +unendingly; I am so lonely for you, dear.” For no more clearly, no more +nobly did the golden Aucassin or lean Dante word that cry in their +thoughts than did Mr. William Wrenn, Our Mr. Wrenn. + +A third-class steward with a mangy mustache and setter-like tan eyes +came teetering down-stairs, each step like a nervous pencil tap on a +table, and peered over the side of Mr. Wrenn’s berth. He loved Mr. +Wrenn, who was proven a scholar by the reading of real bound books—an +English history and a second-hand copy of _Haunts of Historic English +Writers_, purchased in Liverpool—and who was willing to listen to the +steward’s serial story of how his woman, Mrs. Wargle, faithlessly +consorted with Foddle, the cat’s-meat man, when the steward was away, +and, when he was home, cooked for him lights and liver that +unquestionably were purchased from the same cat’s-meat man. He now +leered with a fond and watery gaze upon Mr. Wrenn’s scholarly pursuits, +and announced in a whisper: + +“They’ve sighted land.” + +“Land?” + +“Oh aye.” + +Mr. Wrenn sat up so vigorously that he bumped his head. He chucked his +papers beneath the pillow with his right hand, while the left was +feeling for the side of the berth. “Land!” he bellowed to drowsing +cabin-mates as he vaulted out. + +The steerage promenade-deck, iron-sided, black-floored, ending in the +iron approaches to the galley at one end and the iron superstructures +about a hatch at the other, was like a grim swart oilily clean +machine-shop aisle, so inclosed, so over-roofed, that the side toward +the sea seemed merely a long factory window. But he loved it and, +except when he had guiltily remembered the books he had to read, he had +stayed on deck, worshiping the naive bright attire of immigrants and +the dark roll and glory of the sea. + +Now, out there was a blue shading, made by a magic pencil; land, his +land, where he was going to become the beloved comrade of all the +friends whose likenesses he saw in the white-caps flashing before him. + +Humming, he paraded down to the buffet, where small beer and smaller +tobacco were sold, to buy another pound of striped candy for the +offspring of the Russian Jews. + +The children knew he was coming. “Fat rascals,” he chuckled, touching +their dark cheeks, pretending to be frightened as they pounded soft +fists against the iron side of the ship or rolled unregarded in the +scuppers. Their shawled mothers knew him, too, and as he shyly handed +about the candy the chattering stately line of Jewish elders nodded +their beards like the forest primeval in a breeze, saying words of +blessing in a strange tongue. + +He smiled back and made gestures, and shouted “Land! Land!” with +several variations in key, to make it sound foreign. + +But he withdrew for the sacred moment of seeing the Land of Promise he +was newly discovering—the Long Island shore; the grass-clad redouts at +Fort Wadsworth; the vast pile of New York sky-scrapers, standing in a +mist like an enormous burned forest. + +“Singer Tower…. Butterick Building,” he murmured, as they proceeded +toward their dock. “That’s something like…. Let’s see; yes, sir, by +golly, right up there between the Met. Tower and the _Times_—good old +Souvenir Company office. Jiminy! ‘One Dollar to Albany’—something +_like_ a sign, that is—good old dollar! To thunder with their darn +shillings. Home!… Gee! there’s where I used to moon on a wharf!… Gosh! +the old town looks good.” + +And all this was his to conquer, for friendship’s sake. + +He went to a hotel. While he had to go back to the Zapps’, of course, +he did not wish, by meeting those old friends, to spoil his first day. +No, it was cheerfuler to stand at a window of his cheap hotel on +Seventh Avenue, watching the “good old American crowd”—Germans, +Irishmen, Italians, and Jews. He went to the Nickelorion and grasped +the hand of the ticket-taker, the Brass-button Man, ejaculating: “How +are you? Well, how’s things going with the old show?… I been away +couple of months.” + +“Fine and dandy! Been away, uh? Well, it’s good to get back to the old +town, heh? Summer hotel?” + +“Unk?” + +“Why, you’re the waiter at Pat Maloney’s, ain’t you?” + +Next morning Mr. Wrenn made himself go to the Souvenir and Art Novelty +Company. He wanted to get the teasing, due him for staying away so +short a time, over as soon as possible. The office girl, addressing +circulars, seemed surprised when he stepped from the elevator, and +blushed her usual shy gratitude to the men of the office for allowing +her to exist and take away six dollars weekly. + +Then into the entry-room ran Rabin, one of the traveling salesmen. + +“Why, hul-lo, Wrenn! Wondered if that could be you. Back so soon? +Thought you were going to Europe.” + +“Just got back. Couldn’t stand it away from you, old scout!” + +“You must have been learning to sass back real smart, in the Old +Country, heh? Going to be with us again? Well, see you again soon. Glad +see you back.” + +He was not madly excited at seeing Rabin; still, the drummer was part +of the good old Souvenir Company, the one place in the world on which +he could absolutely depend, the one place where they always wanted him. + +He had been absently staring at the sample-tables, noting new +novelties. The office girl, speaking sweetly, but as to an outsider, +inquired, “Who did you wish to see, Mr. Wrenn?” + +“Why! Mr. Guilfogle.” + +“He’s busy, but if you’ll sit down I think you can see him in a few +minutes.” + +Mr. Wrenn felt like the prodigal son, with no calf in sight, at having +to wait on the callers’ bench, but he shook with faint excited gurgles +of mirth at the thought of the delightful surprise Mr. Mortimer R. +Guilfogle, the office manager, was going to have. He kept an eye out +for Charley Carpenter. If Charley didn’t come through the entry-room +he’d go into the bookkeeping-room, and—“talk about your surprises—” + +“Mr. Guilfogle will see you now,” said the office girl. + +As he entered the manager’s office Mr. Guilfogle made much of glancing +up with busy amazement. + +“Well, well, Wrenn! Back so soon? Thought you were going to be gone +quite a while.” + +“Couldn’t keep away from the office, Mr. Guilfogle,” with an uneasy +smile. + +“Have a good trip?” + +“Yes, a dandy.” + +“How’d you happen to get back so soon?” + +“Oh, I wanted to—Say, Mr. Guilfogle, I really wanted to get back to the +office again. I’m awfully glad to see it again.” + +“Glad see _you_. Well, where did you go? I got the card you sent me +from Chesterton with the picture of the old church on it.” + +“Why, I went to Liverpool and Oxford and London and—well—Kew and Ealing +and places and—And I tramped through Essex and Suffolk—all through—on +foot. Aengusmere and them places.” + +“Just a moment. (Well, Rabin, what is it? Why certainly. I’ve told you +that already about five times. _Yes_, I said—that’s what I had the +samples made up for. I wish you’d be a little more careful, d’ ye +hear?) You went to London, did you, Wrenn? Say, did you notice any +novelties we could copy?” + +“No, I’m afraid I didn’t, Mr. Guilfogle. I’m awfully sorry. I hunted +around, but I couldn’t find a thing we could use. I mean I couldn’t +find anything that began to come up to our line. Them English are +pretty slow.” + +“Didn’t, eh? Well, what’s your plans now?” + +“Why—uh—I kind of thought—Honestly, Mr. Guilfogle, I’d like to get back +on my old job. You remember—it was to be fixed so—” + +“Afraid there’s nothing doing just now, Wrenn. Not a thing. Course I +can’t tell what may happen, and you want to keep in touch with us, but +we’re pretty well filled up just now. Jake is getting along better than +we thought. He’s learning—” Not one word regarding Jake’s excellence +did Mr. Wrenn hear. + +Not get the job back? He sat down and stammered: + +“Gee! I hadn’t thought of that. I’d kind of banked on the Souvenir +Company, Mr. Guilfogle.” + +“Well, you know I told you I thought you were an idiot to go. I warned +you.” + +He timidly agreed, mourning: “Yes, that so; I know you did. But +uh—well—” + +“Sorry, Wrenn. That’s the way it goes in business, though. If you will +go beating it around—A rolling stone don’t gather any moss. Well, cheer +up! Possibly there may be something doing in—” + +“Tr-r-r-r-r-r-r,” said the telephone. + +Mr. Guilfogle remarked into it: “Hello. Yes, it’s me. Well, who did you +think it was? The cat? Yuh. Sure. No. Well, to-morrow, probably. All +right. Good-by.” + +Then he glanced at his watch and up at Mr. Wrenn impatiently. + +“Say, Mr. Guilfogle, you say there’ll be—when will there be likely to +be an opening?” + +“Now, how can I tell, my boy? We’ll work you in if we can—you ain’t a +bad clerk; or at least you wouldn’t be if you’d be a little more +careful. By the way, of course you understand that if we try to work +you in it’ll take lots of trouble, and we’ll expect you to not go +flirting round with other firms, looking for a job. Understand that?” + +“Oh yes, sir.” + +“All right. We appreciate your work all right, but of course you can ’t +expect us to fire any of our present force just because you take the +notion to come back whenever you want to…. Hiking off to Europe, +leaving a good job!… You didn’t get on the Continent, did you?” + +“No, I—” + +“Well…. Oh, say, how’s the grub in London? Cheaper than it is here? The +wife was saying this morning we’d have to stop eating if the high cost +of living goes on going up.” + +“Yes, it’s quite a little cheaper. You can get fine tea for two and +three cents a cup. Clothes is cheaper, too. But I don’t care much for +the English, though there is all sorts of quaint places with a real +flavor…. Say, Mr. Guilfogle, you know I inherited a little money, and I +can wait awhile, and you’ll kind of keep me in mind for a place if +one—” + +“Didn’t I _say_ I would?” + +“Yes, but—” + +“You come around and see me a week from now. And leave your address +with Rosey. I don’t know, though, as we can afford to pay you quite the +same salary at first, even if we can work you in—the season’s been very +slack. But I’ll do what I can for you. Come in and see me in about a +week. Goo’ day.” + +Rabin, the salesman, waylaid Mr. Wrenn in the corridor. + +“You look kind of peeked, Wrenn. Old Goglefogle been lighting into you? +Say, I ought to have told you first. I forgot it. The old rat, he’s +been planning to stick the knife into you all the while. ’Bout two +weeks ago me and him had a couple of cocktails at Mouquin’s. You know +how chummy he always gets after a couple of smiles. Well, he was +talking about—I was saying you’re a good man and hoping you were having +a good time—and he said, ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘he’s a good man, but he sure +did lay himself wide open by taking this trip. I’ve got him dead to +rights,’ he says to me. ‘I’ve got a hunch he’ll be back here in three +or four months,’ he says to me. ‘And do you think he’ll walk in and get +what he wants? Not him. I’ll keep him waiting a month before I give him +back his job, and then you watch, Rabin,’ he says to me, ‘you’ll see +he’ll be tickled to death to go back to work at less salary than he was +getting, and he’ll have sense enough to not try this stunt of getting +off the job again after that. And the trip’ll be good for him, +anyway—he’ll do better work—vacation at his own expense—save us money +all round. I tell you, Rabin,’ he says to me, ‘if any of you boys think +you can get the best of the company or me you just want to try it, +that’s all.’ Yessir, that’s what the old rat told me. You want to watch +out for him.” + +“Oh, I will; indeed I will—” + +“Did he spring any of this fairy tale just now?” + +“Well, kind of. Say, thanks, I’m awful obliged to—” + +“Say, for the love of Mike, don’t let him know I told you.” + +“No, no, I sure won’t.” + +They parted. Eager though he was for the great moment of again seeing +his comrade, Charley Carpenter, Mr. Wrenn dribbled toward the +bookkeeping-room mournfully, planning to tell Charley of Guilfogle’s +wickedness. + +The head bookkeeper shook his head at Mr. Wrenn’s inquiry: + +“Charley ain’t here any longer.” + +“Ain’t _here?_” + +“No. He got through. He got to boozing pretty bad, and one morning +about three weeks ago, when he had a pretty bad hang-over, he told +Guilfogle what he thought of him, so of course Guilfogle fired him.” + +“Oh, that’s too _bad_. Say, you don’t know his address, do you?” + +“—East a Hundred and Eighteenth…. Well, I’m glad to see you back, +Wrenn. Didn’t expect to see you back so soon, but always glad to see +you. Going to be with us?” + +“I ain’t sure,” said Mr. Wrenn, crabbedly, then shook hands warmly with +the bookkeeper, to show there was nothing personal in his snippishness. + +For nearly a hundred blocks Mr. Wrenn scowled at an advertisement of +Corn Flakes in the Third Avenue Elevated without really seeing it…. +Should he go back to the Souvenir Company at all? + +Yes. He would. That was the best way to start making friends. But he +would “get our friend Guilfogle at recess,” he assured himself, with an +out-thrust of the jaw like that of the great Bill Wrenn. He knew +Guilfogle’s lead now, and he would show that gentleman that he could +play the game. He’d take that lower salary and pretend to be +frightened, but when he got the chance— + +He did not proclaim even to himself what dreadful thing he was going to +do, but as he left the Elevated he said over and over, shaking his +closed fist inside his coat pocket: + +“When I get the chance—when I _get_ it—” + +The flat-building where Charley Carpenter lived was one of hundreds of +pressed-brick structures, apparently all turned out of the same mold. +It was filled with the smells of steamy washing and fried fish. Languid +with the heat, Mr. Wrenn crawled up an infinity of iron steps and +knocked three times at Charley’s door. No answer. He crawled down again +and sought out the janitress, who stopped watching an ice-wagon in the +street to say: + +“I guess you’ll be finding him asleep up there, sir. He do be lying +there drunk most of the day. His wife’s left him. The landlord’s give +him notice to quit, end of August. Warm day, sir. Be you a +bill-collector? Mostly, it’s bill-collectors that—” + +“Yes, it is hot.” + +Superior in manner, but deeply dejected, Mr. Wrenn rang the down-stairs +bell long enough to wake Charley, pantingly got himself up the +interminable stairs, and kicked the door till Charley’s voice quavered +inside: + +“Who zhat?” + +“It’s me, Charley. Wrenn.” + +“You’re in Yurp. Can’t fool me. G’ ’way from there.” + +Three other doors on the same landing were now partly open and blocked +with the heads of frowsy inquisitive women. The steamy smell was +thicker in the darkness. Mr. Wrenn felt prickly, then angry at this +curiosity, and again demanded: + +“Lemme in, I say.” + +“Tell you it ain’t you. I know you!” + +Charley Carpenter’s pale face leered out. His tousled hair was stuck to +his forehead by perspiration; his eyes were red and vaguely staring. +His clothes were badlv wrinkled. He wore a collarless shirt with a +frilled bosom of virulent pink, its cuffs grimy and limp. + +“It’s ol’ Wrenn. C’m in. C’m in quick. Collectors always hanging +around. They can’t catch me. You bet.” + +He closed the door and wabbled swiftly down the long drab hall of the +“railroad flat,” evidently trying to walk straight. The reeking +stifling main room at the end of the hall was terrible as Charley’s +eyes. Flies boomed everywhere. The oak table, which Charley and his +bride had once spent four happy hours in selecting, was littered with +half a dozen empty whisky-flasks, collars, torn sensational newspapers, +dirty plates and coffee-cups. The cheap brocade cover, which a bride +had once joyed to embroider with red and green roses, was half pulled +off and dragged on the floor amid the cigarette butts, Durham tobacco, +and bacon rinds which covered the green-and-yellow carpet-rug. + +This much Mr. Wrenn saw. Then he set himself to the hard task of +listening to Charley, who was muttering: + +“Back quick, ain’t you, ol’ Wrenn? You come up to see me, didn’t you? +You’re m’ friend, ain’t you, eh? I got an awful hang-over, ain’t I? You +don’t care, do you, ol’ Wrenn?” + +Mr. Wrenn stared at him weakly, but only for a minute. Perhaps it was +his cattle-boat experience which now made him deal directly with such +drunkenness as would have nauseated him three months before; perhaps +his attendance on a weary Istra. + +“Come now, Charley, you got to buck up,” he crooned. + +“_All_ ri’.” + +“What’s the trouble? How did you get going like this?” + +“Wife left me. I was drinking. You think I’m drunk, don’t you? But I +ain’t. She went off with her sister—always hated me. She took my money +out of savings-bank—three hundred; all money I had ’cept fifty dollars. +I’ll fix her. I’ll kill her. Took to hitting the booze. Goglefogle +fired me. Don’t care. Drink all I want. Keep young fellows from getting +it! Say, go down and get me pint. Just finished up pint. Got to have +one-die of thirst. Bourbon. Get—” + +“I’ll go and get you a drink, Charley—just one drink, savvy?—if you’ll +promise to get cleaned up, like I tell you, afterward.” + +“_All_ ri’.” + +Mr. Wrenn hastened out with a whisky-flask, muttering, feverishly, +“Gee! I got to save him.” Returning, he poured out one drink, as though +it were medicine for a refractory patient, and said, soothingly: + +“Now we’ll take a cold bath, heh? and get cleaned up and sobered up. +Then we’ll talk about a job, heh?” + +“Aw, don’t want a bath. Say, I feel better now. Let’s go out and have a +drink. Gimme that flask. Where j’ yuh put it?” + +Mr. Wrenn went to the bathroom, turned on the cold-water tap, returned, +and undressed Charley, who struggled and laughed and let his whole +inert weight rest against Mr. Wrenn’s shoulder. Though normally Charley +could have beaten three Mr. Wrenns, he was run into the bath-room and +poked into the tub. + +Instantly he began to splash, throwing up water in handfuls, singing. +The water poured over the side of the tub. Mr. Wrenn tried to hold him +still, but the wet sleek shoulders slipped through his hand like a wet +platter. Wholesomely vexed, he turned off the water and slammed the +bathroom door. + +In the bedroom he found an unwrinkled winter-weight suit and one clean +shirt. In the living-room he hung up his coat, covering it with a +newspaper, pulled the broom from under the table, and prepared to +sweep. + +The disorder was so great that he made one of the inevitable +discoveries of every housekeeper, and admitted to himself that he +“didn’t know where to begin.” He stumblingly lugged a heavy pile of +dishes from the center-table to the kitchen, shook and beat and folded +the table-cover, stuck the chairs atop the table, and began to sweep. + +At the door a shining wet naked figure stood, bellowing: + +“Hey! What d’ yuh think you’re doing? Cut it out.” + +“Just sweeping, Charley,” from Mr. Wrenn, and an uninterrupted “Tuff, +tuff, tuff” from the broom. + +“Cut it out, I said. Whose house _is_ this?” + +“Gwan back in the bath-tub, Charley.” + +“Say, d’ yuh think you can run me? Get out of this, or I’ll throw you +out. Got house way I want it.” + +Bill Wrenn, the cattleman, rushed at him, smacked him with the broom, +drove him back into the tub, and waited. He laughed. It was all a good +joke; his friend Charley and he were playing a little game. Charley +also laughed and splashed some more. Then he wept and said that the +water was cold, and that he was now deserted by his only friend. + +“Oh, shut up,” remarked Bill Wrenn, and swept the bathroom floor. + +Charley stopped swashing about to sneer: + +“Li’l ministering angel, ain’t you? You think you’re awful good, don’t +you? Come up here and bother me. When I ain’t well. Salvation Army. +You——. Aw, lemme _’lone_, will you?” Bill Wrenn kept on sweeping. “Get +out, you——.” + +There was enough energy in Charley’s voice to indicate that he was +getting sober. Bill Wrenn soused him under once more, so thoroughly +that his own cuffs were reduced to a state of flabbiness. He dragged +Charley out, helped him dry himself, and drove him to bed. + +He went out and bought dish-towels, soap, washing-powder, and collars +of Charley’s size, which was an inch larger than his own. He finished +sweeping and dusting and washing the dishes—all of them. He—who had +learned to comfort Istra—he really enjoyed it. His sense of order made +it a pleasure to see a plate yellow with dried egg glisten iridescently +and flash into shining whiteness; or a room corner filled with dust and +tobacco flakes become again a “nice square clean corner with the +baseboard shining, gee! just like it was new.” + +An irate grocer called with a bill for fifteen dollars. Mr. Wrenn +blandly heard his threats all through, pretending to himself that this +was his home, whose honor was his honor. He paid the man eight dollars +on account and loftily dismissed him. He sat down to wait for Charley, +reading a newspaper most of the time, but rising to pursue stray flies +furiously, stumbling over chairs, and making murderous flappings with a +folded newspaper. + +When Charley awoke, after three hours, clear of mind but not at all +clear as regards the roof of his mouth, Mr. Wrenn gave him a very +little whisky, with considerable coffee, toast, and bacon. The toast +was not bad. + +“Now, Charley,” he said, cheerfully, “your bat’s over, ain’t it, old +man?” + +“Say, you been darn’ decent to me, old man. Lord! how you’ve been +sweeping up! How was I—was I pretty soused?” + +“Honest, you were fierce. You will sober up, now, won’t you?” + +“Well, it’s no wonder I had a classy hang-over, Wrenn. I was at the +Amusieren Rathskeller till four this morning, and then I had a couple +of nips before breakfast, and then I didn’t have any breakfast. But +sa-a-a-ay, man, I sure did have some fiesta last night. There was a +little peroxide blonde that—” + +“Now you look here, Carpenter; you listen to me. You’re sober now. Have +you tried to find another job?” + +“Yes, I did. But I got down in the mouth. Didn’t feel like I had a +friend left.” + +“Well, you h—” + +“But I guess I have now, old Wrennski.” + +“Look here, Charley, you know I don’t want to pull off no Charity +Society stunt or talk like I was a preacher. But I like you so darn +much I want to see you sober up and get another job. Honestly I do, +Charley. Are you broke?” + +“Prett’ nearly. Only got about ten dollars to my name…. I _will_ take a +brace, old man. I know you ain’t no preacher. Course if you came around +with any ‘holierthan-thou’ stunt I’d have to go right out and get +soused on general principles…. Yuh—I’ll try to get a job.” + +“Here’s ten dollars. Please take it—aw—please, Charley.” + +“_All_ right; anything to oblige.” + +“What ’ve you got in sight in the job line?” + +“Well, there’s a chance at night clerking in a little hotel where I was +a bell-hop long time ago. The night clerk’s going to get through, but I +don’t know just when—prob’ly in a week or two.” + +“Well, keep after it. And _please_ come down to see me—the old +place—West Sixteenth Street.” + +“What about the old girl with the ingrowing grouch? What’s her name? +She ain’t stuck on me.” + +“Mrs. Zapp? Oh—hope she chokes. She can just kick all she wants to. I’m +just going to have all the visitors I want to.” + +“All right. Say, tell us something about your trip.” + +“Oh, I had a great time. Lots of nice fellows on the cattle-boat. I +went over on one, you know. Fellow named Morton—awfully nice fellow. +Say, Charley, you ought to seen me being butler to the steers. Handing +’em hay. But say, the sea was fine; all kinds of colors. Awful dirty on +the cattle-boat, though.” + +“Hard work?” + +“Yuh—kind of hard. Oh, not so very.” + +“What did you see in England?” + +“Oh, a lot of different places. Say, I seen some great vaudeville in +Liverpool, Charley, with Morton—he’s a slick fellow; works for the +Pennsylvania, here in town. I got to look him up. Say, I wish we had an +agency for college sofa-pillows and banners and souvenir stuff in +Oxford. There’s a whole bunch of colleges there, all right in the same +town. I met a prof. there from some American college—he hired an +automobubble and took me down to a reg’lar old inn—” + +“Well, well!” + +“—like you read about; sanded floor!” + +“Get to London?” + +“Yuh. Gee! it’s a big place. Say, that Westminster Abbey’s a great +place. I was in there a couple of times. More darn tombs of kings and +stuff. And I see a bishop, with leggins on! But I got kind of lonely. I +thought of you a lot of times. Wished we could go out and get an ale +together. Maybe pick up a couple of pretty girls.” + +“Oh, you sport!… Say, didn’t get over to gay Paree, did you?” + +“Nope…. Well, I guess I’d better beat it now. Got to move in—I’m at a +hotel. You will come down and see me to-night, won’t you?” + +“So you thought of me, eh?… Yuh—sure, old socks. I’ll be down to-night. +And I’ll get right after that job.” + +It is doubtful whether Mr. Wrenn would ever have returned to the Zapps’ +had he not promised to see Charley there. Even while he was carrying +his suit-case down West Sixteenth, broiling by degrees in the sunshine, +he felt like rushing up to Charley’s and telling him to come to the +hotel instead. + +Lee Theresa, taking the day off with a headache, answered the bell, and +ejaculated: + +“Well! So it’s you, is it?” + +“I guess it is.” + +“What, are you back so soon? Why, you ain’t been gone more than a month +and a half, have you?” + +Beware, daughter of Southern pride! The little Yankee is regarding your +full-blown curves and empty eyes with rebellion, though he says, ever +so meekly: + +“Yes, I guess it is about that, Miss Theresa.” + +“Well, I just knew you couldn’t stand it away from us. I suppose you’ll +want your room back. Ma, here’s Mr. Wrenn back again—Mr. Wrenn! _Ma!_” + +“Oh-h-h-h!” sounded Goaty Zapp’s voice, in impish disdain, below. “Mr. +Wrenn’s back. Hee, hee! Couldn’t stand it. Ain’t that like a Yankee!” + +A slap, a wail, then Mrs. Zapp’s elephantine slowness on the stairs +from the basement. She appeared, buttoning her collar, smiling almost +pleasantly, for she disliked Mr. Wrenn less than she did any other of +her lodgers. + +“Back already, Mist’ Wrenn? Ah declare, Ah was saying to Lee Theresa +just yest’day, Ah just knew you’d be wishing you was back with us. +Won’t you come in?” + +He edged into the parlor with, “How is the sciatica, Mrs. Zapp?” + +“Ah ain’t feeling right smart.” + +“My room occupied yet?” + +He was surveying the airless parlor rather heavily, and his curt manner +was not pleasing to the head of the house of Zapp, who remarked, +funereally: + +“It ain’t taken just now, Mist’ Wrenn, but Ah dunno. There was a +gennulman a-looking at it just yesterday, and he said he’d be permanent +if he came. Ah declare, Mist’ Wrenn, Ah dunno’s Ah like to have my +gennulmen just get up and go without giving me notice.” + +Lee Theresa scowled at her. + +Mr. Wrenn retorted, “I _did_ give you notice.” + +“Ah know, but—well, Ah reckon Ah can let you have it, but Ah’ll have to +have four and a half a week instead of four. Prices is all going up so, +Ah declare, Ah was just saying to Lee T’resa Ah dunno what we’re all +going to do if the dear Lord don’t look out for us. And, Mist’ Wrenn, +Ah dunno’s Ah like to have you coming in so late nights. But Ah reckon +Ah can accommodate you.” + +“It’s a good deal of a favor, isn’t it, Mrs. Zapp?” + +Mr. Wrenn was dangerously polite. Let gentility look out for the sharp +practices of the Yankee. + +“Yes, but—” + +It was our hero, our madman of the seven and seventy seas, our +revolutionist friend of Istra, who leaped straight from the +salt-incrusted decks of his laboring steamer to the musty parlor and +declared, quietly but unmovably-practically unmovably—“Well, then, I +guess I’d better not take it at all.” + +“So that’s the way you’re going to treat us!” bellowed Mrs. Zapp. “You +go off and leave us with an unoccupied room and— Oh! You poor white +trash—you—” + +“_Ma!_ You shut up and go down-stairs-s-s-s-s!” Theresa hissed. “Go +on.” + +Mrs. Zapp wabbled regally out. Lee Theresa spoke to Mr. Wrenn: + +“Ma ain’t feeling a bit well this afternoon. I’m sorry she talked like +that. You will come back, won’t you?” She showed all her teeth in a +genuine smile, and in her anxiety reached his heart. “Remember, you +promised you would.” + +“Well, I will, but—” + +Bill Wrenn was fading, an affrighted specter. The “but” was the last +glimpse of him, and that Theresa overlooked, as she bustlingly +chirruped: “I _knew_ you would understand. I’ll skip right up and look +at the room and put on fresh sheets.” + +One month, one hot New York month, passed before the imperial Mr. +Guilfogle gave him back The Job, and then at seventeen dollars and +fifty cents a week instead of his former nineteen dollars. Mr. Wrenn +refused, upon pretexts, to go out with the manager for a drink, and +presented him with twenty suggestions for new novelties and circular +letters. He rearranged the unsystematic methods of Jake, the cub, and +two days later he was at work as though he had never in his life been +farther from the Souvenir Company than Newark. + + + + +CHAPTER XIII +HE IS “OUR MR. WRENN” + + +DEAR ISTRA,—I am back in New York feeling very well & hope this finds +you the same. I have been wanting to write to you for quite a while now +but there has not been much news of any kind & so I have not written to +you. But now I am back working for the Souvenir Company. I hope you are +having a good time in Paris it must be a very pretty city & I have +often wished to be there perhaps some day I shall go. I [several +erasures here] have been reading quite a few books since I got back & +think now I shall get on better with my reading. You told me so many +things about books & so on & I do appreciate it. In closing, I am yours +very sincerely, + + +WILLIAM WRENN. + + +There was nothing else he could say. But there were a terrifying number +of things he could think as he crouched by the window overlooking West +Sixteenth Street, whose dull hue had not changed during the centuries +while he had been tramping England. Her smile he remembered—and he +cried, “Oh, I want to see her so much.” Her gallant dash through the +rain—and again the cry. + +At last he cursed himself, “Why don’t you _do_ something that ’d count +for her, and not sit around yammering for her like a fool?” + +He worked on his plan to “bring the South into line”—the Souvenir +Company’s line. Again and again he sprang up from the writing-table in +his hot room when the presence of Istra came and stood compellingly by +his chair. But he worked. + +The Souvenir Company salesmen had not been able to get from the South +the business which the company deserved if right and justice were to +prevail. On the steamer from England Mr. Wrenn had conceived the idea +that a Dixieland Ink-well, with the Confederate and Union flags draped +in graceful cast iron, would make an admirable present with which to +draw the attention of the Southem trade. The ink-well was to be +followed by a series of letters, sent on the slightest provocation, on +order or re-order, tactfully hoping the various healths of the +Southland were good and the baseball season important; all to insure a +welcome to the salesmen on the Southem route. + +He drew up his letters; he sketched his ink-well; he got up the courage +to talk with the office manager…. To forget love and the beloved, men +have ascended in aeroplanes and conquered African tribes. To forget +love, a new, busy, much absorbed Mr. Wrenn, very much Ours, bustled +into Mr. Guilfogle’s office, slapped down his papers on the desk, and +demanded: “Here’s that plan about gettin’ the South interested that I +was telling you about. Say, honest, I’d like awful much to try it on. +I’d just have to have part time of one stenographer.” + +“Well, you know our stenographers are pretty well crowded. But you can +leave the outline with me. I’ll look it over,” said Mr. Guilfogle. + +That same afternoon the manager enthusiastically O. K.’d the plan. To +enthusiastically—O. K. is an office technology for saying, gloomily, +“Well, I don’t suppose it ’d hurt to try it, anyway, but for the love +of Mike be careful, and let me see any letters you send out.” + +So Mr. Wrenn dictated a letter to each of their Southern merchants, +sending him a Dixieland Ink-well and inquiring about the crops. He had +a stenographer, an efficient intolerant young woman who wrote down his +halting words as though they were examples of bad English she wanted to +show her friends, and waited for the next word with cynical amusement. + +“By gosh!” growled Bill Wrenn, the cattleman, “I’ll show her I’m +running this. I’ll show her she’s got another think coming.” But he +dictated so busily and was so hot to get results that he forgot the +girl’s air of high-class martyrdom. + +He watched the Southern baseball results in the papers. He seized on +every salesman on the Southern route as he came in, and inquired about +the religion and politics of the merchants in his district. He even +forgot to worry about his next rise in salary, and found it much more +exciting to rush back for an important letter after a quick lunch than +to watch the time and make sure that he secured every minute of his +lunch-hour. + +When October came—October of the vagabond, with the leaves brilliant +out on the Palisades, and Sixth Avenue moving-picture palaces cool +again and gay—Mr. Wrenn stayed late, under the mercury-vapor lights, +making card cross-files of the Southern merchants, their hobbies and +prejudices, and whistling as he worked, stopping now and then to slap +the desk and mutter, “By gosh! I’m gettin’ ’em—gettin’ ’em.” + +He rarely thought of Istra till he was out on the street again, proud +of having worked so late that his eyes ached. In fact, his chief +troubles these days came when Mr. Guilfogle wouldn’t “let him put +through an idea.” + +Their first battle was over Mr. Wrenn’s signing the letters personally; +for the letters, the office manager felt, were as much Ours as was Mr. +Wrenn, and should be signed by the firm. After some difficulty Mr. +Wrenn persuaded him that one of the best ways to handle a personal +letter was to make it personal. They nearly cursed each other before +Mr. Wrenn was allowed to use his own judgment. + +It’s not at all certain that Mr. Guilfogle should have yielded. What’s +the use of a manager if his underlings use judgment? + +The next battle Mr. Wrenn lost. He had demanded a monthly holiday for +his stenographer. Mr. Guilfogle pointed out that she’d merely be the +worse off for a holiday, that it ’d make her discontented, that it was +a kindness to her to keep her mind occupied. Mr. Wrenn was, however, +granted a new typewriter, in a manner which revealed the fact that the +Souvenir Company was filled with almost too much mercy in permitting an +employee to follow his own selfish and stubborn desires. + +You cannot trust these employees. Mr. Wrenn was getting so absorbed in +his work that he didn’t even act as though it was a favor when Mr. +Guilfogle allowed him to have his letters to the trade copied by carbon +paper instead of having them blurred by the wet tissue-paper of a +copy-book. The manager did grant the request, but he was justly +indignant at the curt manner of the rascal, whereupon our bumptious +revolutionist, our friend to anarchists and red-headed artists, +demanded a “raise” and said that he didn’t care a hang if the +[qualified] letters never went out. The kindness of chiefs! For Mr. +Guilfogle apologized and raised the madman’s wage from seventeen +dollars and fifty cents a week to his former nineteen dollars. [He had +expected eighteen dollars; he had demanded twenty-two dollars and fifty +cents; he was worth on the labor market from twenty-five to thirty +dollars; while the profit to the Souvenir Company from his work was +about sixty dollars minus whatever salary he got.] + +Not only that. Mr. Guilfogle slapped him on the back and said: “You’re +doing good work, old man. It’s fine. I just don’t want you to be too +reckless.” + +That night Wrenn worked till eight. + +After his raise he could afford to go to the theater, since he was not +saving money for travel. He wrote small letters to Istra and read the +books he believed she would approve—a Paris Baedeker and the second +volume of Tolstoi’s _War and Peace_, which he bought at a second-hand +book-stall for five cents. He became interested in popular and +inaccurate French and English histories, and secreted any amount of +footnote anecdotes about Guy Fawkes and rush-lights and the divine +right of kings. He thought almost every night about making friends, +which he intended—just as much as ever—to do as soon as Sometime +arrived. + +On the day on which one of the Southern merchants wrote him about his +son—“fine young fellow, sir—has every chance of rising to a lieutenancy +on the Atlanta police force”—Mr. Wrenn’s eyes were moist. Here was a +friend already. Sure. He would make friends. Then there was the cripple +with the Capitol Corner News and Souvenir Stand in Austin, Texas. Mr. +Wrenn secreted two extra Dixieland Ink-wells and a Yale football banner +and sent them to the cripple for his brothers, who were in the +Agricultural College. + +The orders—yes, they were growing larger. The Southern salesmen took +him out to dinner sometimes. But he was shy of them. They were so +knowing and had so many smoking-room stories. He still had not found +the friends he desired. + +Miggleton’s restaurant, on Forty-second Street, was a romantic +discovery. Though it had “popular prices”—plain omelet, fifteen +cents—it had red and green bracket lights, mission-style tables, and +music played by a sparrowlike pianist and a violinist. Mr. Wrenn never +really heard the music, but while it was quavering he had a happier +appreciation of the Silk-Hat-Harry humorous pictures in the _Journal_, +which he always propped up against an oil-cruet. [That never caused him +inconvenience; he had no convictions in regard to salads.] He would +drop the paper to look out of the window at the Lazydays Improvement +Company’s electric sign, showing gardens of paradise on the instalment +plan, and dream of—well, he hadn’t the slightest idea what—something +distant and deliciously likely to become intimate. Once or twice he +knew that he was visioning the girl in soft brown whom he would “go +home to,” and who, in a Lazydays suburban residence, would play just +such music for him and the friends who lived near by. She would be as +clever as Istra, but “oh, more so’s you can go regular places with +her.”… Often he got good ideas about letters South, to be jotted down +on envelope backs, from that music. + +At last comes the historic match-box incident. + +On that October evening in 1910 he dined early at Miggleton’s. The +thirty-cent table d’hote was perfect. The cream-of-corn soup was, he +went so far as to remark to the waitress, “simply slick”; the Waldorf +salad had two whole walnuts in his portion alone. + +The fat man with the white waistcoat, whom he had often noted as dining +in this same corner of the restaurant, smiled at him and said “Pleasant +evening” as he sat down opposite Mr. Wrenn and smoothed the two sleek +bangs which decorated the front of his nearly bald head. + +The music included a “potpourri of airs from ‘The Merry Widow,’” which +set his foot tapping. All the while he was conscious that he’d made the +Seattle Novelty and Stationery Corner Store come through with a +five-hundred-dollar order on one of his letters. + +The _Journal_ contained an editorial essay on “Friendship” which would +have been, and was, a credit to Cicero. + +He laid down the paper, stirred his large cup of coffee, and stared at +the mother-of-pearl buttons on the waistcoat of the fat man, who was +now gulping down soup, opposite him. “My land!” he was thinking, +“friendship! I ain’t even begun to make all those friends I was going +to. Haven’t done a thing. Oh, I will; I must!” + +“Nice night,” said the fat man. + +“Yuh—it sure is,” brightly agreed Mr. Wrenn. + +“Reg’lar Indian-Summer weather.” + +“Yes, isn’t it! I feel like taking a walk on Riverside Drive—b’lieve I +will.” + +“Wish I had time. But I gotta get down to the store—cigar-store. I’m on +nights, three times a week.” + +“Yuh. I’ve seen you here most every time I eat early,” Mr. Wrenn +purred. + +“Yuh. The rest of the time I eat at the boarding-house.” + +Silence. But Mr. Wrenn was fighting for things to say, means of +approach, for the chance to become acquainted with a new person, for +all the friendly human ways he had desired in nights of loneliness. + +“Wonder when they’ll get the Grand Central done?” asked the fat man. + +“I s’pose it’ll take quite a few years,” said Mr. Wrenn, +conversationally. + +“Yuh. I s’pose it will.” + +Silence. + +Mr. Wrenn sat trying to think of something else to say. Lonely people +in city restaurants simply do not get acquainted. Yet he did manage to +observe, “Great building that’ll be,” in the friendliest manner. + +Silence. + +Then the fat man went on: + +“Wonder what Wolgast will do in his mill? Don’t believe he can stand +up.” + +Wolgast was, Mr. Wrenn seemed to remember, a pugilist. He agreed +vaguely: + +“Pretty hard, all right.” + +“Go out to the areoplane meet?” asked the fat man. + +“No. But I’d like to see it. Gee! there must be kind of—kind of +adventure in them things, heh?” + +“Yuh—sure is. First machine I saw, though—I was just getting off the +train at Belmont Park, and there was an areoplane up in the air, and it +looked like one of them big mechanical beetles these fellows sell on +the street buzzing around up there. I was kind of disappointed. But +what do you think? It was that J. A. D. McCurdy, in a Curtiss biplane—I +think it was—and by golly! he got to circling around and racing and +tipping so’s I thought I’d loose my hat off, I was so excited. And, +say, what do you think? I see McCurdy himself, afterward, standing near +one of the—the handgars—handsome young chap, not over twenty-eight or +thirty, built like a half-miler. And then I see Ralph Johnstone and +Arch Hoxey—” + +“Gee!” Mr. Wrenn was breathing. + +“—dipping and doing the—what do you call it?—Dutch sausage-roll or +something like that. Yelled my head off.” + +“Oh, it must have been great to see ’em, and so close, too.” + +“Yuh—it sure was.” + +There seemed to be no other questions to settle. Mr. Wrenn slowly +folded up his paper, pursued his check under three plates and the +menu-card to its hiding-place beyond the catsup-bottle, and left the +table with a regretful “Good night.” + +At the desk of the cashier, a decorative blonde, he put a cent in the +machine which good-naturedly drops out boxes of matches. No box dropped +this time, though he worked the lever noisily. + +“Out of order?” asked the cashier lady. “Here’s two boxes of matches. +Guess you’ve earned them.” + +“Well, well, well, well!” sounded the voice of his friend, the fat man, +who stood at the desk paying his bill. “Pretty easy, heh? Two boxes for +one cent! Sting the restaurant.” Cocking his head, he carefully +inserted a cent in the slot and clattered the lever, turning to grin at +Mr. Wrenn, who grinned back as the machine failed to work. + +“Let me try it,” caroled Mr. Wrenn, and pounded the lever with the +enthusiasm of comradeship. + +“Nothing doing, lady,” crowed the fat man to the cashier. + +“I guess _I_ draw two boxes, too, eh? And I’m in a cigar-store. How’s +that for stinging your competitors, heh? Ho, ho, ho!” + +The cashier handed him two boxes, with an embarrassed simper, and the +fat man clapped Mr. Wrenn’s shoulder joyously. + +“My turn!” shouted a young man in a fuzzy green hat and a bright-brown +suit, who had been watching with the sudden friendship which unites a +crowd brought together by an accident. + +Mr. Wrenn was glowing. “No, it ain’t—it’s mine,” he achieved. “I +invented this game.” Never had he so stood forth in a crowd. He was a +Bill Wrenn with the cosmopolitan polish of a floor-walker. He stood +beside the fat man as a friend of sorts, a person to be taken perfectly +seriously. + +It is true that he didn’t add to this spiritual triumph the triumph of +getting two more boxes of matches, for the cashier-girl exclaimed, “No +indeedy; it’s my turn!” and lifted the match machine to a high shelf +behind her. But Mr. Wrenn went out of the restaurant with his old +friend, the fat man, saying to him quite as would a wit, “I guess we +get stung, eh?” + +“Yuh!” gurgled the fat man. + +Walking down to your store?” + +“Yuh—sure—won’t you walk down a piece?” + +“Yes, I would like to. Which way is it?” + +“Fourth Avenue and Twenty-eighth.” + +“Walk down with you.” + +“Fine!” + +And the fat man seemed to mean it. He confided to Mr. Wrenn that the +fishing was something elegant at Trulen, New Jersey; that he was some +punkins at the casting of flies in fishing; that he wished exceedingly +to be at Trulen fishing with flies, but was prevented by the manager of +the cigar-store; that the manager was an old devil; that his (the fat +man’s own) name was Tom Poppins; that the store had a slick new brand +of Manila cigars, kept in a swell new humidor bought upon the advice of +himself (Mr. Poppins); that one of the young clerks in the store had +done fine in the Modified Marathon; that the Cubs had had a great team +this year; that he’d be glad to give Mr.—Mr. Wrenn, eh?—one of those +Manila cigars—great cigars they were, too; and that he hadn’t “laughed +so much for a month of Sundays as he had over the way they stung +Miggleton’s on them matches.” + +All this in the easy, affectionate, slightly wistful manner of fat men. +Mr. Poppins’s large round friendly childish eyes were never sarcastic. +He was the man who makes of a crowd in the Pullman smoking-room old +friends in half an hour. In turn, Mr. Wrenn did not shy off; he hinted +at most of his lifelong ambitions and a fair number of his sorrows and, +when they reached the store, not only calmly accepted, but even +sneezingly ignited one of the “slick new Manila cigars.” + +As he left the store he knew that the golden age had begun. He had a +friend! + +He was to see Tom Poppins the coming Thursday at Miggleton’s. And now +he was going to find Morton! He laughed so loudly that the policeman at +Thirty-fourth Street looked self-conscious and felt secretively to find +out what was the matter with his uniform. Now, this evening, he’d try +to get on the track of Morton. Well, perhaps not this evening—the +Pennsylvania offices wouldn’t be open, but some time this week, anyway. + +Two nights later, as he waited for Tom Poppins at Miggleton’s, he +lashed himself with the thought that he had not started to find Morton; +good old Morton of the cattle-boat. But that was forgotten in the +wonder of Tom Poppins’s account of Mrs. Arty’s, a boarding-house “where +all the folks likes each other.” + +“You’ve never fed at a boarding-house, eh?” said Tom. “Well, I guess +most of ’em are pretty poor feed. And pretty sad bunch. But Mrs. Arty’s +is about as near like home as most of us poor bachelors ever gets. Nice +crowd there. If Mrs. Arty—Mrs. R. T. Ferrard is her name, but we always +call her Mrs. Arty—if she don’t take to you she don’t mind letting you +know she won’t take you in at all; but if she does she’ll worry over +the holes in your socks as if they was her husband’s. All the bunch +there drop into the parlor when they come in, pretty near any time +clear up till twelve-thirty, and talk and laugh and rush the growler +and play Five Hundred. Just like home! + +“Mrs. Arty’s nearly as fat as I am, but she can be pretty spry if +there’s something she can do for you. Nice crowd there, too except that +Teddem—he’s one of these here Willy-boy actors, always out of work; I +guess Mrs. Arty is kind of sorry for him. Say, Wrenn—you seem to me +like a good fellow—why don’t you get acquainted with the bunch? Maybe +you’d like to move up there some time. You was telling me about what a +cranky old party your landlady is. Anyway, come on up there to dinner. +On me. Got anything on for next Monday evening?” + +“N-no.” + +“Come on up then——East Thirtieth.” + +“Gee, I’d like to!” + +“Well, why don’t you, then? Get there about six. Ask for me. Monday. +Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I don’t have to get to the store +evenings. Come on; you’ll find out if you like the place.” + +“By jiminy, I will!” Mr. Wrenn slapped the table, socially. + +At last he was “through, just _through_ with loafing around and not +getting acquainted,” he told himself. He was tired of Zapps. There was +nothing to Zapps. He would go up to Mrs. Arty’s and now—he was going to +find Morton. Next morning, marveling at himself for not having done +this easy task before, he telephoned to the Pennsylvania Railroad +offices, asked for Morton, and in one-half minute heard: + +“Yes? This is Harry Morton.” + +“Hullo, Mr. Morton! I’ll just bet you can’t guess who this is.” + +“I guess you’ve got me.” + +“Well, who do you think it—” + +“Jack?” + +“Hunka.” + +“Uncle Henry?” + +“Nope.” Mr. Wrenn felt lonely at finding himself so completely outside +Morton’s own world that he was not thought of. He hastened to claim a +part in that world: + +“Say, Mr. Morton, I wonder if you’ve ever heard of a cattle-boat called +the _Merian?_” + +“I—Say! Is this Bill Wrenn?” + +“Yes.” + +“Well, well, well! Where are you? When’d you get back?” + +“Oh, I been back quite a little while, Morty. Tried to get hold of +you—almost called up couple of times. I’m in my office—Souvenir +Company—now. Back on the old job. Say, I’d like to see you.” + +“Well, I’d like to see _you_, old Bill!” + +“Got a date for dinner this evening, Morty?” + +“N-no. No, I don’t _think_ I’ve got anything on.” Morton’s voice seemed +to sound a doubt. Mr. Wrenn reflected that Morton must be a society +person; and he made his invitation highly polite: + +“Well, say, old man, I’d be awful happy if you could come over and feed +on me. Can’t you come over and meet me, Morty?” + +“Y-yes, I guess I can. Yes, I’ll do it. Where’ll I meet you?” + +“How about Twenty-eighth and Sixth Avenue?” + +“That’ll be all right, Bill. ’Bout six o’clock?” + +“Fine! Be awful nice to see you again, old Morty.” + +“Same here. Goo’-by.” + +Gazing across the table at Miggleton’s, Mr. Wrenn saw, in the squat +familiar body and sturdy face of Morton of the cattle-boat, a stranger, +slightly uneasy and very quiet, wearing garments that had nothing +whatever to do with the cattle-boats—a crimson scarf with a +horseshoe-pin of “Brazilian diamonds,” and sleek brown ready-made +clothes with ornately curved cuffs and pocket flaps. + +Morton would say nothing of his wanderings after their parting in +Liverpool beyond: “Oh, I just bummed around. Places…. Warm to-night. +For this time of year.” Thrice he explained, “I was kind of afraid +you’d be sore at me for the way I left you; that’s why I’ve never +looked you up.” Thrice Mr. Wrenn declared that he had not been “sore,” +then ceased trying to make himself understood. + +Their talk wilted. Both of them played with their knives a good deal. +Morton built a set of triangles out of toothpicks while pretending to +give hushed attention to the pianist’s rendition of “Mammy’s Little +Cootsie Bootsie Coon,” while Mr. Wrenn stared out of the window as +though he expected to see the building across get afire immediately. +When either of them invented something to say they started chattering +with guilty haste, and each agreed hectically with any opinion the +other advanced. + +Mr. Wrenn surprised himself in the thought that Morton hadn’t anything +very new to say, which made him feel so disloyal that he burst out, +effusively: + +“Say, come on now, old man; I just got to hear about what you did after +you left Liverpool.” + +“I—” + +“Well—” + +“I never got out of Liverpool! Worked in a restaurant…. But next time—! +I’ll go clean to Constantinople!” Morton exploded. “And I did see a lot +of English life in Liverpool.” + +Mr. Wrenn talked long and rapidly of the world’s baseball series, and +Regal _vs._ Walkover shoes. + +He tried to think of something they could do. Suddenly: + +“Say, Morty, I know an awful nice guy down here in a cigar-store. Let’s +go down and see him.” + +“All right.” + +Tom Poppins was very cordial to them. He dragged brown canvas stools +out of the tobacco-scented room where cigars were made, and the three +of them squatted in the back of the store, while Tom gossiped of the +Juarez races, Taft, cigar-wrappers, and Jews. Morton was aroused to +tell the time-mellowed story of the judge and the darky. He was +cheerful and laughed much and frequently said “Ah there, cull!” in +general commendation. But he kept looking at the clock on the jog in +the wall over the watercooler. Just at ten he rose abashedly, +hesitated, and murmured, “Well, I guess I’ll have to be beating it +home.” + +From Mr. Wrenn: “Oh, Morty! So early?” + +Tom: “What’s the big hurry?” + +“I’ve got to run clear over to Jersey City.” Morton was cordial, but +not convincing. + +“Say—uh—Morton,” said Tom, kindly of face, his bald head shining behind +his twin bangs, as he rose, “I’m going to have Wrenn up to dinner at my +boarding-house next Monday. Like to have you come along. It’s a fine +place—Mrs. Arty—she’s the landlady—she’s a wonder. There’s going to be +a vacant room there—maybe you two fellows could frame it up to take it, +heh? Understand, I don’t get no rake-off on this, but we all like to do +what we can for M—” + +“No, no!” said Morton. “Sorry. Couldn’t do it. Staying with my +brother-in-law—costs me only ’bout half as much as it would I don’t do +much chasing around when I’m in town…. I’m going to save up enough +money for a good long hike. I’m going clean to St. Petersburg!… But +I’ve had a good time to-night.” + +“Glad. Great stuff about you fellows on the cattle-ship,” said Tom. + +Morton hastened on, protectively, a bit critically: “You fellows sport +around a good deal, don’t you?… I can’t afford to…. Well, good night. +Glad to met you, Mr. Poppins. G’ night, old Wr—” + +“Going to the ferry? For Jersey? I’ll walk over with you,” said Mr. +Wrenn. + +Their walk was quiet and, for Mr. Wrenn, tragically sad. He saw Morton +(presumably) doing the wandering he had once planned. He felt that, +while making his vast new circle of friends, he was losing all the wild +adventurousness of Bill Wrenn. And he was parting with his first +friend. + +At the ferry-house Morton pronounced his “Well, so long, old fellow” +with an affection that meant finality. + +Mr. Wrenn fled back to Tom Poppins’s store. On the way he was shocked +to find himself relieved at having parted with Morton. The cigar-store +was closed. + +At home Mrs. Zapp waylaid him for his rent (a day overdue), and he was +very curt. That was to keep back the “O God, how rotten I feel!” with +which, in his room, he voiced the desolation of loneliness. + +The ghost of Morton, dead and forgotten, was with him all next day, +till he got home and unbelievably found on the staid black-walnut Zapp +hat-rack a letter from Paris, in a gray foreign-appearing envelope with +Istra’s intensely black scrawl on it. + +He put off the luxury of opening the letter till after the rites of +brushing his teeth, putting on his slippers, pounding his rocking-chair +cushion into softness. Panting with the joy to come, he stared out of +the window at a giant and glorious figure of Istra—the laughing Istra +of breakfast camp-fire—which towered from the street below. He sighed +joyously and read: + +Mouse dear, just a word to let you know I haven’t forgotten you and am +very glad indeed to get your letters. Not much to write about. +Frightfully busy with work and fool parties. You _are_ a dear good soul +and I hope you’ll keep on writing me. In haste, I. N. + Longer letter next time. + + +He came to the end so soon. Istra was gone again. + + + + +CHAPTER XIV +HE ENTERS SOCIETY + + +England, in all its Istra-ness, scarce gave Mr. Wrenn a better thrill +for his collection than the thrill he received on the November evening +when he saw the white doorway of Mrs. R. T. Ferrard, in a decorous row +of houses on Thirtieth Street near Lexington Avenue. + +It is a block where the citizens have civic pride. A newspaper has not +the least chance of lying about on the asphalt—some householder with a +frequently barbered mustache will indignantly pounce upon it inside of +an hour. No awe. is caused by the sight of vestibules floored with +marble in alternate black and white tiles, scrubbed not by landladies, +but by maids. There are dotted Swiss curtains at the basement windows +and Irish point curtains on the first floors. There are two polished +brass doorplates in a stretch of less than eight houses. Distinctly, it +is not a quarter where children fill the street with shouting and +little sticks. + +Occasionally a taxicab drives up to some door without a crowd of small +boys gathering; and young men in evening clothes are not infrequently +seen to take out young ladies wearing tight-fitting gowns of black, and +light scarfs over their heads. A Middle Western college fraternity has +a club-house in the block, and four of the houses are private—one of +them belonging to a police inspector and one to a school principal who +wears spats. + +It is a block that is satisfied with itself; as different from the Zapp +district, where landladies in gingham run out to squabble with +berry-venders, as the Zapp district is from the Ghetto. + +Mrs. Arty Ferrard’s house is a poor relation to most of the residences +there. The black areaway rail is broken, and the basement-door grill is +rusty. But at the windows are red-and-white-figured chintz curtains, +with a $2.98 bisque figurine of an unclothed lady between them; the +door is of spotless white, with a bell-pull of polished brass. + +Mr. Wrenn yanked this bell-pull with an urbane briskness which, he +hoped, would conceal his nervousness and delight in dining out. For he +was one of the lonely men in New York. He had dined out four times in +eight years. + +The woman of thirty-five or thirty-eight who opened the door to him was +very fat, two-thirds as fat as Mrs. Zapp, but she had young eyes. Her +mouth was small, arched, and quivering in a grin. + +“This is Mr. Wrenn, isn’t it?” she gurgled, and leaned against the +doorpost, merry, apparently indolent. “I’m Mrs. Ferrard. Mr. Poppins +told me you were coming, and he said you were a terribly nice man, and +I was to be sure and welcome you. Come right in.” + +Her indolence turned to energy as she charged down the hall to the +large double door on the right and threw it open, revealing to him a +scene of splendor and revelry by night. + +Several persons [they seemed dozens, in their liveliness] were singing +and shouting to piano music, in the midst of a general redness and +brightness of furnishings—red paper and worn red carpet and a high +ceiling with circular moldings tinted in pink. Hand-painted pictures of +old mills and ladies brooding over salmon sunsets, and an especially +hand-painted Christmas scene with snow of inlaid mother-of-pearl, +animated the walls. On a golden-oak center-table was a large lamp with +a mosaic shade, and through its mingled bits of green and red and pearl +glass stormed the brilliance of a mantle-light. + +The room was crowded with tufted plush and imitation-leather chairs, +side-tables and corner brackets, a couch and a “lady’s desk.” Green and +red and yellow vases adorned with figures of youthful lovers crammed +the top of the piano at the farther end of the room and the polished +black-marble mantel of the fireplace. The glaring gas raced the +hearth-fire for snap and glare and excitement. The profusion of +furniture was like a tumult; the redness and oakness and polishedness +of furniture was a dizzying activity; and it was all overwhelmingly +magnified by the laughter and singing about the piano. + +Tom Poppins lumbered up from a couch of terrifically new and red +leather, and Mr. Wrenn was introduced to the five new people in the +room with dismaying swiftness. There seemed to be fifty times five +unapproachable and magnificent strangers from whom he wanted to flee. +Of them all he was sure of only two—a Miss Nelly somebody and what +sounded like Horatio Hood Tem (Teddem it was). + +He wished that he had caught Miss Nelly’s last name (which, at dinner, +proved to be Croubel), for he was instantly taken by her sweetness as +she smiled, held out a well-shaped hand, and said, “So pleased meet +you, Mr. Wrenn.” + +She returned to the front of the room and went on talking to a lank +spinster about ruchings, but Mr. Wrenn felt that he had known her long +and as intimately as it was possible to know so clever a young woman. + +Nelly Croubel gave him the impression of a delicate prettiness, a +superior sort of prettiness, like that of the daughter of the Big White +House on the Hill, the Squire’s house, at Parthenon; though Nelly was +not unusually pretty. Indeed, her mouth was too large, her hair of +somewhat ordinary brown. But her face was always changing with emotions +of kindliness and life. Her skin was perfect; her features fine, rather +Greek; her smile, quick yet sensitive. She was several inches shorter +than Mr. Wrenn, and all curves. Her blouse of white silk lay tenderly +along the adorably smooth softness of her young shoulders. A smart +patent-leather belt encircled her sleek waist. Thin black lisle +stockings showed a modestly arched and rather small foot in a black +pump. + +She looked as though she were trained for business; awake, +self-reliant, self-respecting, expecting to have to get things done, +all done, yet she seemed indestructibly gentle, indestructibly good and +believing, and just a bit shy. + +Nelly Croubel was twenty-four or twenty-five in years, older in +business, and far younger in love. She was born in Upton’s Grove, +Pennsylvania. There, for eighteen years, she had played Skip to Malue +at parties, hid away the notes with which the boys invited her to +picnics at Baptist Beach, read much Walter Scott, and occasionally +taught Sunday-school. Her parents died when she was beginning her +fourth year in high school, and she came to New York to work in +Wanamacy’s toy department at six dollars a week during the holiday +rush. Her patience with fussy old shoppers and her large sales-totals +had gained her a permanent place in the store. + +She had loftily climbed to the position of second assistant buyer in +the lingerie department, at fourteen dollars and eighty cents a week +That was quite all of her history except that she attended a +Presbyterian church nearly every Sunday. The only person she hated was +Horatio Hood Teddem, the cheap actor who was playing the piano at Mr. +Wrenn’s entrance. + +Just now Horatio was playing ragtime with amazing rapidity, stamping +his foot and turning his head to smirk at the others. + +Mrs. Arty led her chattering flock to the basement dining-room, which +had pink wall-paper and a mountainous sideboard. Mr. Wrenn was placed +between Mrs. Arty and Nelly Croubel. Out of the mist of strangeness +presently emerged the personality of Miss Mary Proudfoot, a lively but +religious spinster of forty who made doilies for the Dorcas Women’s +Exchange and had two hundred dollars a year family income. To the right +of the red-glass pickle-dish were the elderly Ebbitts—Samuel Ebbitt, +Esq., also Mrs. Ebbitt. Mr. Ebbitt had come from Hartford five years +before, but he always seemed just to have come from there. He was in a +real-estate office; he was gray, ill-tempered, impatiently honest, and +addicted to rheumatism and the newspapers. Mrs. Ebbitt was addicted +only to Mr. Ebbitt. + +Across the table was felt the presence of James T. Duncan, who looked +like a dignified red-mustached Sunday-school superintendent, but who +traveled for a cloak and suit house, gambled heavily on poker and +auction pinochle, and was esteemed for his straight back and knowledge +of trains. + +Which is all of them. + +As soon as Mrs. Arty had guided Annie, the bashful maid, in serving the +vegetable soup, and had coaxed her into bringing Mr. Wrenn a napkin, +she took charge of the conversation, a luxury which she would never +have intrusted to her flock’s amateurish efforts. Mr. Poppins, said +she, had spoken of meeting a friend of Mr. Wrenn’s; Mr. Morton, was it +not? A very nice man, she understood. Was it true that Mr. Wrenn and +Mr. Morton had gone clear across the Atlantic on a cattle-boat? It +really was? + +“Oh, how interesting!” contributed pretty Nelly Croubel, beside Mr. +Wrenn, her young eyes filled with an admiration which caused him +palpitation and difficulty in swallowing his soup. He was confused by +hearing old Samuel Ebbitt state: + +“Uh-h-h-h—back in 18—uh—1872 the vessel _Prissie_—no, it was 1873; no, +it must have been ’72—” + +“It was 1872, father,” said Mrs. Ebbitt. + +“1873. I was on a coasting-vessel, young man. But we didn’t carry +cattle.” Mr. Ebbitt inspected Horatio Hood Teddem darkly, clicked his +spectacle case sharply shut, and fell to eating, as though he had +settled all this nonsense. + +With occasional witty interruptions from the actor, Mr. Wrenn told of +pitching hay, of the wit of Morton, and the wickedness of Satan, the +boss. + +“But you haven’t told us about the brave things _you_ did,” cooed Mrs. +Arty. She appealed to Nelly Croubel: “I’ll bet he was a cool one. Don’t +you think he was, Nelly?” + +“I’m sure he was.” Nelly’s voice was like a flute. + +Mr. Wrenn knew that there was just one thing in the world that he +wanted to do; to persuade Miss Nelly Croubel that (though he was a +solid business man, indeed yes, and honorable) he was a cool one, who +had chosen, in wandering o’er this world so wide, the most perilous and +cattle-boaty places. He tried to think of something modest yet striking +to say, while Tom was arguing with Miss Mary Proudfoot, the respectable +spinster, about the ethics of giving away street-car transfers. + +As they finished their floating custard Mr. Wrenn achieved, “Do you +come from New York, Miss Croubel?” and listened to the tale of +sleighing-parties in Upton’s Grove, Pennsylvania. He was absolutely +happy. + +“This is like getting home,” he thought. “And they’re classy folks to +get home to—now that I can tell ’em apart. Gee! Miss Croubel is a +peach. And brains—golly!” + +He had a frightened hope that after dinner he would be able to get into +a corner and talk with Nelly, but Tom Poppins conferred with Horatio +Hood Teddenm and called Mr. Wrenn aside. Teddem had been acting with a +moving-picture company for a week, and had three passes to the +celebrated Waldorf Photoplay Theater. + +Mr. Wrenn had bloodthirstily disapproved Horatio Hood’s effeminate +remarks, such as “Tee _hee!_” and “Oh, you naughty man,” but when he +heard that this molly-coddle had shared in the glory of making moving +pictures he went proudly forth with him and Tom. He had no chance to +speak to Mrs. Arty about taking the room to be vacated. + +He wished that Charley Carpenter or the Zapps could see him sitting +right beside an actor who was shown in the pictures miraculously there +before them, asking him how they made movies, just as friendly as +though they had known each other always. + +He wanted to do something to entertain his friends beyond taking them +out for a drink. He invited them down to his room, and they came. + +Teddem was in wonderful form; he mimicked every one they saw so amiably +that Tom Poppins knew the actor wanted to borrow money. The party were +lovingly humming the popular song of the time—“Any Little Girl That’s a +Nice Little Girl is the Right Little Girl for Me”—as they frisked up +the gloomy steps of the Zapps. Entering, Poppins and Teddem struck +attitudes on the inside stairs and sang aloud. + +Mr. Wrenn felt enormously conscious of Mrs. Zapp down below. He kept +listening, as he led them up-stairs and lighted the gas. But Teddem so +imitated Colonel Roosevelt, with two water-glasses for eye-glasses and +a small hat-brush for mustache, that Mr. Wrenn was moved wrigglingly to +exclaim: “Say, I’m going out and get some beer. Or ’d you rather have +something else? Some cheese sandwiches? How about ’em?” + +“Fine,” said Tom and Teddem together. + +Not only did Mr. Wrenn buy a large newspaper-covered bundle of bottles +of beer and Swiss-cheese sandwiches, but also a small can of caviar and +salty crackers. In his room he spread a clean towel, then two clean +towels, on the bureau, and arrayed the feast, with two water-glasses +and a shaving-mug for cups. + +Horatio Hood Teddem, spreading caviar on a sandwich, and loudly singing +his masterpiece, “Waal I swan,” stopped short and fixed amazed eyes on +the door of the room. + +Mr. Wrenn hastily turned. The light fell—as on a cliff of crumbly gray +rock—on Mrs. Zapp, in the open door, vast in her ungirdled gray +wrapper, her arms folded, glowering speechlessly. + +“Mist’ Wrenn,” she began, in a high voice that promised to burst into +passion. + +But she was addressing the formidable adventurer, Bill Wrenn. He had to +protect his friends. He sprang up and walked across to her. + +He said, quietly, “I didn’t hear you knock, Mrs. Zapp.” + +“Ah _didn’t_ knock, and Ah want you should—” + +“Then please do knock, unless you want me to give notice.” + +He was quivering. His voice was shrill. + +From the hall below Theresa called up, “Ma, come down here. _Ma!_” + +But Mrs. Zapp was too well started. “If you think Ah’m going to stand +for a lazy sneaking little drunkard keeping the whole street awake, and +here it is prett’ nearly midnight—” + +Just then Mr. William Wrenn saw and heard the most astounding thing of +his life, and became an etemal slave to Tom Poppins. + +Tom’s broad face became hard, his voice businesslike. He shouted at +Mrs. Zapp: + +“Beat it or I’ll run you in. Trouble with you is, you old hag, you +don’t appreciate a nice quiet little chap like Wrenn, and you try to +bully him—and him here for years. Get out or I’ll put you out. I’m no +lamb, and I won’t stand for any of your monkey-shines. Get out. This +ain’t your room; he’s rented it—he’s paid the rent—it’s his room. Get +out!” + +Kindly Tom Poppins worked in a cigar-store and was accustomed to talk +back to drunken men six feet tall. His voice was tremendous, and he was +fatly immovable; he didn’t a bit mind the fact that Mrs. Zapp was still +“glaring speechless.” + +But behold an ally to the forlorn lady. When Theresa, in the hall +below, heard Tom, she knew that Mr. Wrenn would room here no more. She +galloped up-stairs and screeched over her mother’s shoulder: + +“You will pick on a lady, will you, you drunken scum—you—you cads—I’ll +have you arrested so quick you—” + +“Look here, lady,” said Tom, gently. “I’m a plain-clothes man, a +detective.” His large voice purred like a tiger-tabby’s. “I don’t want +to run you in, but I will if you don’t get out of here and shut that +door. Or you might go down and call the cop on this block. He’ll run +you in—for breaking Code 2762 of the Penal Law! Trespass and +flotsam—that’s what it is!” + +Uneasy, frightened, then horrified, Mrs. Zapp swung bulkily about and +slammed the door. + +Sick, guilty, banished from home though he felt, Mr. Wrenn’s voice +quavered, with an attempt at dignity: + +“I’m awful sorry she butted in while you fellows was here. I don’t know +how to apologize” + +“Forget it, old man,” rolled out Tom’s bass. “Come on, let’s go up to +Mrs. Arty’s.” + +“But, gee! it’s nearly a quarter to eleven.” + +“That’s all right. We can get up there by a little after, and Mrs. Arty +stays up playing cards till after twelve.” + +“Golly!” Mr. Wrenn agitatedly ejaculated under his breath, as they +noisily entered Mrs. Arty’s—though not noisily on his part. + +The parlor door was open. Mrs. Arty’s broad back was toward them, and +she was announcing to James T. Duncan and Miss Proudfoot, with whom she +was playing three-handed Five Hundred, “Well, I’ll just bid seven on +hearts if you’re going to get so set up.” She glanced back, nodded, +said, “Come in, children,” picked up the “widow,” and discarded with +quick twitches of the cards. The frightened Mr. Wrenn, feeling like a +shipwrecked land-lubber, compared this gaming smoking woman unfavorably +with the intense respectability of his dear lost patron, Mrs. Zapp. He +sat uneasy till the hand of cards was finished, feeling as though they +were only tolerating him. And Nelly Croubel was nowhere in sight. + +Suddenly said Mrs. Arty, “And now you would like to look at that room, +Mr. Wrenn, unless I’m wrong.” + +“Why—uh—yes, I guess I would like to.” + +“Come with me, child,” she said, in pretended severity. “Tom, you take +my hand in the game, and don’t let me hear you’ve been bidding ten on +no suit without the joker.” She led Mr. Wrenn to the settee hat-rack in +the hall. “The third-floor-back will be vacant in two weeks, Mr. Wrenn. +We can go up and look at it now if you’d like to. The man who has it +now works nights—he’s some kind of a head waiter at Rector’s, or +something like that, and he’s out till three or four. Come.” + +When he saw that third-floor-back, the room that the smart people at +Mrs. Arty’s were really willing to let him have, he felt like a man +just engaged. It was all in soft green—grass-green matting, pale-green +walls, chairs of white wicker with green cushions; the bed, a couch +with a denim cover and four sofa pillows. It gave him the impression of +being a guest on Fifth Avenue. + +“It’s kind of a plain room,” Mrs. Arty said, doubtfully. “The furniture +is kind of plain. But my head-waiter man—it was furnished for a friend +of his—he says he likes it better than any other room in the house. It +_is_ comfortable, and you get lots of sunlight and—” + +“I’ll take—How much is it, please, with board?” + +She spoke with a take-it-or-leave-it defiance. “Eleven-fifty a week.” + +It was a terrible extravagance; much like marrying a sick woman on a +salary of ten a week, he reflected; nine-teen minus eleven-fifty left +him only seven-fifty for clothes and savings and things and—but—” I’ll +take it,” he said, hastily. He was frightened at himself, but glad, +very glad. He was to live in this heaven; he was going to be away from +that Zapp woman; and Nelly Croubel—Was she engaged to some man? he +wondered. + +Mrs. Arty was saying: “First, I want to ask you some questions, though. +Please sit down.” As she creaked into one of the wicker chairs she +suddenly changed from the cigarette-rolling chaffing card-player to a +woman dignified, reserved, commanding. “Mr. Wrenn, you see, Miss +Proudfoot and Miss Croubel are on this floor. Miss Proudfoot can take +care of herself, all right, but Nelly is such a trusting little +thing—She’s like my daughter. She’s the only one I’ve ever given a +reduced rate to—and I swore I never would to anybody!… Do +you—uh—drink—drink much, I mean?” + +Nelly on this floor! Near him! Now! He had to have this room. He forced +himself to speak directly. + +“I know how you mean, Mrs. Ferrard. No, I don’t drink much of +any—hardly at all; just a glass of beer now and then; sometimes I don’t +even touch that a week at a time. And I don’t gamble and—and I do try +to keep—er—straight—and all that sort of thing.” + +“That’s good.” + +“I work for the Souvenir and Art Novelty Company on Twenty-eighth +Street. If you want to call them up I guess the manager’ll give me a +pretty good recommend.” + +“I don’t believe I’ll need it, Mr. Wrenn. It’s my business to find out +what sort of animiles men are by just talking to them.” She rose, +smiled, plumped out her hand. “You _will_ be nice to Nelly, _won’t_ +you! I’m going to fire that Teddem out—don’t tell him, but I am—because +he gets too fresh with her.” + +“Yes!” + +She suddenly broke into laughter, and ejaculated: “_Say_, that was hard +work! Don’t you _hate_ to have to be serious? Let’s trot down, and I’ll +make Tom or Duncan rush us a growler of beer to welcome you to our +midst…. I’ll bet your socks aren’t darned properly. I’m going to sneak +in and take a look at them, once I get you caged up here…. But I won’t +read your love-letters! Now let’s go down by the fire, where it’s +comfy.” + + + + +CHAPTER XV +HE STUDIES FIVE HUNDRED, SAVOUIR FAIRE, AND LOTSA-SNAP OFFICE MOTTOES + + +On a couch of glossy red leather with glossy black buttons and stiff +fringes also of glossy red leather, Mr. William Wrenn sat upright and +was very confiding to Miss Nelly Croubel, who was curled among the +satin pillows with her skirts drawn carefully about her ankles. He had +been at Mrs. Arty’s for two weeks now. He wore a new light-blue tie, +and his trousers were pressed like sheet steel. + +“Yes, I suppose you’re engaged to some one, Miss Nelly, and you’ll go +off and leave us—go off to that blamed Upton’s Grove or some place.” + +“I am _not_ engaged. I’ve told you so. Who would want to marry me? You +stop teasing me—you’re mean as can be; I’ll just have to get Tom to +protect me!” + +“Course you’re engaged.” + +“Ain’t.” + +“Are.” + +“Ain’t. Who would want to marry poor little me?” + +“Why, anybody, of course.” + +“You _stop_ teasing me…. Besides, probably you’re in love with twenty +girls.” + +“I am _not_. Why, I’ve never hardly known but just two girls in my +life. One was just a girl I went to theaters with once or twice—she was +the daughter of the landlady I used to have before I came here.” + + “If you don’t make love to the landlady’s daughter + You won’t get a second piece of pie!” + +quoted Nelly, out of the treasure-house of literature. + +“Sure. That’s it. But I bet you—” + +“Who was the other girl?” + +“Oh! She…. She was a—an artist. I liked her—a lot. But she was—oh, +awful highbrow. Gee! if—But—” + +A sympathetic silence, which Nelly broke with: + +“Yes, they’re funny people. Artists…. Do you have your lesson in Five +Hundred tonight? Your very first one?” + +“I think so. Say, is it much like this here bridge-whist? Oh say, Miss +Nelly, why do they call it Five Hundred?” + +“That’s what you have to make to go out. No, I guess it isn’t very much +like bridge; though, to tell the truth, I haven’t ever played bridge. . +My! it must be a nice game, though.” + +“Oh, I thought prob’ly you could play it. You can do ’most everything. +Honest, I’ve never seen nothing like it.” + +“Now you stop, Mr. Wrenn. I know I’m a—what was it Mr. Teddem used to +call me? A minx. But—” + +“Miss _Nelly!_ You _aren’t_ a minx!” + +“Well—” + +“Or a mink, either. You’re a—let’s see—an antelope.” + +“I am not! Even if I can wriggle my nose like a rabbit. Besides, it +sounds like a muskmelon. But, anyway, the head buyer said I was crazy +to-day.” + +“If I heard him say you were crazy—” + +“Would you beat him for me?” She cuddled a cushion and smiled +gratefully. Her big eyes seemed to fill with light. + +He caught himself wanting to kiss the softness of her shoulder, but he +said only, “Well, I ain’t much of a scrapper, but I’d try to make it +interesting for him.” + +“Tell me, did you ever have a fight? When you were a boy? Were you +_such_ a bad boy?” + +“I never did when I was a boy, but—well—I did have a couple of fights +when I was on the cattle-boat and in England. Neither of them amounted +to very much, though, I guess. I was scared stiff!” + +“Don’t believe it!” + +“Sure I was.” + +“I don’t believe you’d be scared. You’re too earnest.” + +“Me, Miss Nelly? Why, I’m a regular cut-up.” + +“You stop making fun of yourself! I _like_ it when you’re earnest—like +when you saw that beautiful snowfall last night…. Oh dear, isn’t it +hard to have to miss so many beautiful things here in the city—there’s +just the parks, and even there there aren’t any birds, real wild birds, +like we used to have in Pennsylvania.” + +“Yes, isn’t it! Isn’t it hard!” Mr. Wrenn drew nearer and looked +sympathy. + +“I’m afraid I’m getting gushy. Miss Hartenstein—she’s in my +department—she’d laugh at me…. But I do love birds and squirrels and +pussy-willows and all those things. In summer I love to go on picnics +on Staten Island or tramp in Van Cortlandt Park.” + +“Would you go on a picnic with me some day next spring?” Hastily, “I +mean with Miss Proudfoot and Mrs. Arty and me?” + +“I should be pleased to.” She was prim but trusting about it. “Oh, +listen, Mr. Wrenn; did you ever tramp along the Palisades as far as +Englewood? It’s lovely there—the woods and the river and all those +funny little tugs puffing along, way _way_ down below you—why, I could +lie on the rocks up there and just dream and dream for hours. After +I’ve spent Sunday up there”—she was dreaming now, he saw, and his heart +was passionately tender toward her—“I don’t hardly mind a bit having to +go back to the store Monday morning…. You’ve been up along there, +haven’t you?” + +“Me? Why, I guess I’m the guy that discovered the Palisades!… Yes, it +is _won_-derful up there!” + +“Oh, you are, are you? I read about that in American history!… But +honestly, Mr. Wrenn, I do believe you care for tramps and things—not +like that Teddem or Mr. Duncan—they always want to just stay in town—or +even Tom, though he’s an old dear.” + +Mr. Wrenn looked jealous, with a small hot jealousy. She hastened on +with: “Of course, I mean he’s just like a big brother. To all of us.” + +It was sweet to both of them, to her to declare and to him to hear, +that neither Tom nor any other possessed her heart. Their shy glances +were like an outreach of tenderly touching hands as she confided, “Mrs. +Arty and he get up picnics, and when we’re out on the Palisades he says +to me—you know, sometimes he almost makes me think he _is_ sleepy, +though I do believe he just sneaks off under a tree and talks to Mrs. +Arty or reads a magazine—but I was saying: he always says to me, ‘Well, +sister, I suppose you want to mousey round and dream by yourself—you +won’t talk to a growly old bear like me. Well, I’m glad of it. I want +to sleep. I don’t want to be bothered by you and your everlasting +chatter. Get out!’ I b’lieve he just says that ’cause he knows I +wouldn’t want to run off by myself if they didn’t think it was proper.” + +As he heard her lively effort to imitate Tom’s bass Mr. Wrenn laughed +and pounded his knee and agreed: “Yes, Tom’s an awfully fine fellow, +isn’t he!… I love to get out some place by myself, too. I like to +wander round places and make up the doggondest fool little stories to +myself about them; just as bad as a kiddy, that way.” + +“And you read such an awful lot, Mr. Wrenn! My! Oh, tell me, have you +ever read anything by Harold Bell Wright or Myrtle Reed, Mr. Wrenn? +They write such sweet stories.” + +He had not, but he expressed an unconquerable resolve so to do, and +with immediateness. She went on: + +“Mrs. Arty told me you had a real big library—nearly a hundred books +and—Do you mind? I went in your room and peeked at them.” + +“No, course I don’t mind! If there’s any of them you’d like to borrow +any time, Miss Nelly, I would be awful glad to lend them to you…. But, +rats! Why, I haven’t got hardly any books.” + +“That’s why you haven’t wasted any time learning Five Hundred and +things, isn’t it? Because you’ve been so busy reading and so on?” + +“Yes, kind of.” Mr. Wrenn looked modest. + +“Haven’t you always been lots of—oh, haven’t you always ’magined lots?” + +She really seemed to care. + +Mr. Wrenn felt excitedly sure of that, and imparted: “Yes, I guess I +have…. And I’ve always wanted to travel a lot.” + +“So have I! Isn’t it wonderful to go around and see new places!” + +“Yes, _isn’t_ it!” he breathed. “It was great to be in England—though +the people there are kind of chilly some ways. Even when I’m on a wharf +here in New York I feel just like I was off in China or somewheres. I’d +like to see China. And India…. Gee! when I hear the waves down at Coney +Island or some place—you know how the waves sound when they come in. +Well, sometimes I almost feel like they was talking to a guy—you +know—telling about ships. And, oh say, you know the whitecaps—aren’t +they just like the waves was motioning at you—they want you to come and +beat it with you—over to China and places.” + +“Why, Mr. Wrenn, you’re a regular poet!” + +He looked doubtful. + +“Honest; I’m not teasing you; you are a poet. And I think it’s fine +that Mr. Teddem was saying that nobody could be a poet or like that +unless they drank an awful lot and—uh—oh, not be honest and be on a +job. But you aren’t like that. _Are_ you?” + +He looked self-conscious and mumbled, earnestly, “Well, I try not to +be.” + +“But I am going to make you go to church. You’ll be a socialist or +something like that if you get to be too much of a poet and don’t—” + +“Miss Nelly, please _may_ I go to church with you?” + +“Why—” + +“Next Sunday?” + +“Why, yes, I should be pleased. Are you a Presbyterian, though?” + +“Why—uh—I guess I’m kind of a Congregationalist; but still, they’re all +so much alike.” + +“Yes, they really are. And besides, what does it matter if we all +believe the same and try to do right; and sometimes that’s hard, when +you’re poor, and it seems like—like—” + +“Seems like what?” Mr. Wrenn insisted. + +“Oh—nothing…. My, you’ll have to get up awful early Sunday morning if +you’d like to go with me. My church starts at ten-thirty.” + +“Oh, I’d get up at five to go with you.” + +“Stupid! Now you’re just trying to jolly me; you _are_; because you men +aren’t as fond of church as all that, I know you aren’t. You’re real +lazy Sunday mornings, and just want to sit around and read the papers +and leave the poor women—But please tell me some more about your +reading and all that.” + +“Well, I’ll be all ready to go at nine-thirty…. I don’t know; why, I +haven’t done much reading. But I would like to travel and—Say, wouldn’t +it be great to—I suppose I’m sort of a kid about it; of course, a guy +has to tend right to business, but it would be great—Say a man was in +Europe with—with—a friend, and they both knew a lot of history—say, +they both knew a lot about Guy Fawkes (he was the guy that tried to +blow up the English Parliament), and then when they were there in +London they could almost think they saw him, and they could go round +together and look at Shelley’s window—he was a poet at Oxford—Oh, it +would be great with a—with a friend.” + +“Yes, wouldn’t it?… I wanted to work in the book department one time. +It’s so nice your being—” + +“Ready for Five Hundred?” bellowed Tom Poppins in the hall below. +“Ready partner—you, Wrenn?” + +Tom was to initiate Mr. Wrenn into the game, playing with him against +Mrs. Arty and Miss Mary Proudfoot. + +Mrs. Arty sounded the occasion’s pitch of high merriment by delivering +from the doorway the sacred old saying, “Well, the ladies against the +men, eh?” + +A general grunt that might be spelled “Hmmmmhm” assented. + +“I’m a good suffragette,” she added. “Watch us squat the men, Mary.” + +“Like to smash windows? Let’s see—it’s red fours, black fives up?” +remarked Tom, as he prepared the pack of cards for playing. + +“Yes, I would! It makes me so tired,” asseverated Mrs. Arty, “to think +of the old goats that men put up for candidates when they _know_ +they’re solemn old fools! I’d just like to get out and vote my head +off.” + +“Well, I think the woman’s place is in the home,” sniffed Miss +Proudfoot, decisively, tucking away a doily she was finishing for the +Women’s Exchange and jabbing at her bangs. + +They settled themselves about the glowing, glancing, glittering, +golden-oak center-table. Miss Proudfoot shuffled sternly. Mr. Wrenn sat +still and frightened, like a shipwrecked professor on a raft with two +gamblers and a press-agent, though Nelly was smiling encouragingly at +him from the couch where she had started her embroidery—a large +Christmas lamp mat for the wife of the Presbyterian pastor at Upton’s +Grove. + +“Don’t you wish your little friend Horatio Hood Teddem was here to play +with you?” remarked Tom. + +“I _do_ not,” declared Mrs. Arty. “Still, there was one thing about +Horatio. I never had to look up his account to find out how much he +owed me. He stopped calling me, Little Buttercup, when he owed me ten +dollars, and he even stopped slamming the front door when he got up to +twenty. O Mr. Wrenn, did I ever tell you about the time I asked him if +he wanted to have Annie sweep—” + +“Gerty!” protested Miss Proudfoot, while Nelly, on the couch, +ejaculated mechanically, “That story!” but Mrs. Arty chuckled fatly, +and continued: + +“I asked him if he wanted me to have Annie sweep his nightshirt when +she swept his room. He changed it next day.” + +“Your bid, Mr. Poppins, “said Miss Proudfoot, severely. + +“First, I want to tell Wrenn how to play. You see, Wrenn, here’s the +schedule. We play Avondale Schedule, you know.” + +“Oh yes,” said Mr. Wrenn, timorously…. He had once heard of +Carbondale—in New Jersey or Pennsylvania or somewhere—but that didn’t +seem to help much. + +“Well, you see, you either make or go back,” continued Tom. “Plus and +minus, you know. Joker is high, then right bower, left, and ace. +Then—uh—let’s see; high bid takes the cat—widdie, you know—and +discards. Ten tricks. Follow suit like whist, of course. I guess that’s +all—that ought to give you the hang of it, anyway. I bid six on no +trump.” + +As Tom Poppins finished these instructions, given in the card-player’s +rapid don’t-ask-me-any-more-fool-questions manner, Mr. Wrenn felt that +he was choking. He craned up his neck, trying to ease his stiff collar. +So, then, he was a failure, a social outcast already. + +So, then, he couldn’t learn Five Hundred! And he had been very proud of +knowing one card from another perfectly, having played a number of +games of two-handed poker with Tim on the cattle-boat. But what the +dickens did “left—cat—follow suit” mean? + +And to fail with Nelly watching him! He pulled at his collar again. + +Thus he reflected while Mrs. Arty and Tom were carrying on the +following brilliant but cryptic society-dialogue: + +_Mrs. Arty:_ Well, I don’t know. + +_Tom:_ Not failure, but low bid is crime, little one. + +_Mrs. Arty:_ Mary, shall I make— + +_Tom:_ Hey! No talking ’cross table! + +_Mrs. Arty:_ Um—let—me—see. + +_Tom:_ Bid up, bid up! Bid a little seven on hearts? + +_Mrs. Arty:_ Just for that I _will_ bid seven on hearts, smarty! + +_Tom:_ Oh, how we will squat you!… What you bidding, Wrenn? + +Behind Mr. Wrenn, Nelly Croubel whispered to him: “Bid seven on no +suit. You’ve got the joker.” Her delicate forefinger, its nail shining, +was pointing at a curious card in his hand. + +“Seven nosut,” he mumbled. + +“Eight hearts,” snapped Miss Proudfoot. + +Nelly drew up a chair behind Mr. Wrenn’s. He listened to her soft +explanations with the desperate respect and affection which a green +subaltern would give to a general in battle. + +Tom and he won the hand. He glanced back at Nelly with awe, then +clutched his new hand, fearfully, dizzily, staring at it as though it +might conceal one of those malevolent deceivers of which Nelly had just +warned him—a left bower. + +“Good! Spades—see,” said Nelly. + +Fifteen minutes later Mr. Wrenn felt that Tom was hoping he would lead +a club. He played one, and the whole table said: “That’s right. Fine!” + +On his shoulder he felt a light tap, and he blushed like a sunset as he +peeped back at Nelly. + +Mr. Wrenn, the society light, was Our Mr. Wrenn of the Souvenir Company +all this time. Indeed, at present he intended to keep on taking The Job +seriously until that most mistily distant time, which we all await, +“when something turns up.” His fondling of the Southern merchants was +showing such results that he had grown from an interest in whatever +papers were on his desk to a belief in the divine necessity of The Job +as a whole. Not now, as of old, did he keep the personal letters in his +desk tied up, ready for a sudden departure for Vienna or Kamchatka. +Also, he wished to earn much more money for his new career of luxury. +Mr. Guilfogle had assured him that there might be chances +ahead—business had been prospering, two new road salesmen and a +city-trade man had been added to the staff, and whereas the firm had +formerly been jobbers only, buying their novelties from manufacturers, +now they were having printed for them their own Lotsa-Snap Cardboard +Office Mottoes, which were making a big hit with the trade. + +Through his friend Rabin, the salesman, Mr. Wrenn got better acquainted +with two great men—Mr. L. J. Glover, the purchasing agent of the +Souvenir Company, and John Hensen, the newly engaged head of motto +manufacturing. He “wanted to get onto all the different lines of the +business so’s he could step right in anywhere”; and from these men he +learned the valuable secrets of business wherewith the marts of trade +build up prosperity for all of us: how to seat a selling agent facing +the light, so you can see his face better than he can see yours. How +much ahead of time to telephone the motto-printer that “we’ve simply +got to have proof this afternoon; what’s the matter with you, down +there? Don’t you want our business any more?” He also learned something +of the various kinds of cardboard and ink-well glass, though these, of +course, were merely matters of knowledge, not of brilliant business +tactics, and far less important than what Tom Poppins and Rabin called +“handing out a snappy line of talk.” + +“Say, you’re getting quite chummy lately—reg’lar society leader,” Rabin +informed him. + +Mr. Wrenn’s answer was in itself a proof of the soundness of Rabin’s +observation: + +“Sure—I’m going to borrow some money from you fellows. Got to make an +impression, see?” + +A few hours after this commendation came Istra’s second letter: + +Mouse dear, I’m so glad to hear about the simpatico boarding- house. +Yes indeed I would like to hear about the people in it. And you are +reading history? That’s good. I’m getting sick of Paris and some day +I’m going to stop an absinthe on the boulevard and slap its face to +show I’m a sturdy moving-picture Western Amurrican and then leap to +saddle and pursue the bandit. I’m working like the devil but what’s the +use. That is I mean unless one is doing the job well, as I’m glad you +are. My Dear, keep it up. You know I want you to be _real_ whatever you +are. I didn’t mean to preach but you know I hate people who aren’t +real—that’s why I haven’t much of a flair for myself. _Au récrire_, + + +I. N. + + +After he had read her letter for the third time he was horribly shocked +and regarded himself as a traitor, because he found that he was only +pretending to be enjoyably excited over it…. It seemed so detached from +himself. “Flair”—“_au recrire_.” Now, what did those mean? And Istra +was always so discontented. “What ’d she do if she had to be on the job +like Nelly?… Oh, Istra _is_ wonderful. But—gee!—I dunno—” + +And when he who has valorously loved says “But—gee!—I dunno—” love +flees in panic. + +He walked home thoughtfully. + +After dinner he said abruptly to Nelly, “I had a letter from Paris +to-day.” + +“Honestly? Who is she?” + +“G-g-g-g—” + +“Oh, it’s always a she.” + +“Why—uh—it _is_ from a girl. I started to tell you about her one day. +She’s an artist, and once we took a long tramp in the country. I met +her—she was staying at the same place as I was in London. But—oh, gee! +I dunno; she’s so blame literary. She _is_ a _fine_ person—Do you think +you’d like a girl like that?” + +“Maybe I would.” + +“If she was a man?” + +“Oh, yes-s! Artists are so romantic.” + +“But they ain’t on the job more ’n half the time,” he said, jealously. + +“Yes, that’s _so_.” + +His hand stole secretly, craftily skirting a cushion, to touch +hers—which she withdrew, laughing: + +“Hump-a! You go hold your artist’s hand!” + +“Oh, Miss Nelly! When I _told_ you about her _myself!_” + +“Oh yes, of course.” + +She was contrite, and they played Five Hundred animatedly all evening. + + + + +CHAPTER XVI +HE BECOMES MILDLY RELIGIOUS AND HIGHLY LITERARY + + +The hero of the one-act play at Hammerstein’s Victoria vaudeville +theater on that December evening was, it appeared, a wealthy young +mine-owner in disguise. He was working for the “fake mine promoter” +because he loved the promoter’s daughter with a love that passed all +understanding except that of the girls in the gallery. When the postal +authorities were about to arrest the promoter our young hero saved him +by giving him a real mine, and the ensuing kiss of the daughter ended +the suspense in which Mr. Wrenn and Nelly, Mrs. Arty and Tom had +watched the play from the sixth row of the balcony. + +Sighing happily, Nelly cried to the group: “Wasn’t that grand? I got so +excited! Wasn’t that young miner a dear?” + +“Awfully nice,” said Mr. Wrenn. “And, gee! wasn’t that great, that +office scene—with that safe and the rest of the stuff—just like you was +in a real office. But, say, they wouldn’t have a copying-press in an +office like that; those fake mine promoters send out such swell +letters; they’d use carbon copies and not muss the letters all up.” + +“By gosh, that’s right!” and Tom nodded his chin toward his right +shoulder in approval. Nelly cried, “That’s so; they would”; while Mrs. +Arty, not knowing what a copying-press was, appeared highly +commendatory, and said nothing at all. + +During the moving pictures that followed, Mr. Wrenn felt proudly that +he was taken seriously, though he had known them but little over a +month. He followed up his conversational advantage by leading the +chorus in wondering, “which one of them two actors the heroine was +married to?” and “how much a week they get for acting in that thing?” +It was Tom who invited them to Miggleton’s for coffee and fried +oysters. Mr. Wrenn was silent for a while. But as they were stamping +through the rivulets of wheel-tracks that crisscrossed on a slushy +street-crossing Mr. Wrenn regained his advantage by crying, “Say, don’t +you think that play ’d have been better if the promoter ’d had an awful +grouch on the young miner and ’d had to crawfish when the miner saved +him?” + +“Why, yes; it would!” Nelly glowed at him. + +“Wouldn’t wonder if it would,” agreed Tom, kicking the December slush +off his feet and patting Mr. Wrenn’s back. + +“Well, look here,” said Mr. Wrenn, as they left Broadway, with its +crowds betokening the approach of Christmas, and stamped to the quieter +side of Forty-second, “why wouldn’t this make a slick play: say there’s +an awfully rich old guy; say he’s a railway president or something, d’ +you see? Well, he’s got a secretary there in the office—on the stage, +see? The scene is his office. Well, this guy’s—the rich old +guy’s—daughter comes in and says she’s married to a poor man and she +won’t tell his name, but she wants some money from her dad. You see, +her dad’s been planning for her to marry a marquise or some kind of a +lord, and he’s sore as can be, and he won’t listen to her, and he just +cusses her out something fierce, see? Course he doesn’t really cuss, +but he’s awful sore; and she tells him didn’t he marry her mother when +he was a poor young man; but he won’t listen. Then the secretary butts +in—my idea is he’s been kind of keeping in the background, see—and +_he’s_ the daughter’s husband all the while, see? and he tells the old +codger how he’s got some of his—some of the old fellow’s—papers that +give it away how he done something that was crooked—some kind of +deal—rebates and stuff, see how I mean?—and the secretary’s going to +spring this stuff on the newspapers if the old man don’t come through +and forgive them; so of course the president has to forgive them, see?” + +“You mean the secretary was the daughter’s husband all along, and he +heard what the president said right there?” Nelly panted, stopping +outside Miggleton’s, in the light from the oyster-filled window. + +“Yes; and he heard it all.” + +“Why, I think that’s just a _fine_ idea,” declared Nelly, as they +entered the restaurant. Though her little manner of dignity and even +restraint was evident as ever, she seemed keenly joyous over his +genius. + +“Say, that’s a corking idea for a play, Wrenn,” exclaimed Tom, at their +table, gallantly removing the ladies’ wraps. + +“It surely is,” agreed Mrs. Arty. + +“Why don’t you write it?” asked Nelly. + +“Aw—I couldn’t write it!” + +“Why, sure you could, Bill,” insisted Tom. “Straight; you ought to +write it. (Hey, waiter! Four fries and coffee!) You ought to write it. +Why, it’s a wonder; it ’d make a dev— ’Scuse me, ladies. It’d make a +howling hit. You might make a lot of money out of it.” + +The renewed warmth of their wet feet on the red-tile floor, the scent +of fried oysters, the din of “Any Little Girl” on the piano, these +added color to this moment of Mr. Wrenn’s great resolve. The four +stared at one another excitedly. Mr. Wrenn’s eyelids fluttered. Tom +brought his hand down on the table with a soft flat “plob” and +declared: “Say, there might be a lot of money in it. Why, I’ve heard +that Harry Smith—writes the words for these musical comedies—makes a +_mint_ of money.” + +“Mr. Poppins ought to help you in it—he’s seen such a lot of plays,” +Mrs. Arty anxiously advised. + +“That’s a good idea,” said Mr. Wrenn. It had, apparently, been ordained +that he was to write it. They were now settling important details. So +when Nelly cried, “I think it’s just a fine idea; I knew you had lots +of imagination,” Tom interrupted her with: + +“No; you write it, Bill. I’ll help you all I can, of course…. Tell you +what you ought to do: get hold of Teddem—he’s had a lot of stage +experience; he’d help you about seeing the managers. That ’d be the +hard part—you can write it, all right, but you’d have to get next to +the guys on the inside, and Teddem—Say, you cer_tain_ly ought to write +this thing, Bill. Might make a lot of money.” + +“Oh, a lot!” breathed Nelly. + +“Heard about a fellow,” continued Tom—” fellow named Gene Wolf, I think +it was—that was so broke he was sleeping in Bryant Park, and he made a +_hundred thousand dollars_ on his first play—or, no; tell you how it +was: he sold it outright for ten thousand—something like that, anyway. +I got that right from a fellow that’s met him.” + +“Still, an author’s got to go to college and stuff like that.” Mr. +Wrenn spoke as though he would be pleased to have the objection +overruled at once, which it was with a universal: + +“Oh, rats!” + +Crunching oysters in a brown jacket of flour, whose every lump was a +crisp delight, hearing his genius lauded and himself called Bill thrice +in a quarter-hour, Mr. Wrenn was beatified. He asked the waiter for +some paper, and while the four hotly discussed things which “it would +be slick to have the president’s daughter do” he drew up a list of +characters on a sheet of paper he still keeps. It is headed, +“Miggleton’s Forty-second Street Branch.” At the bottom appear numerous +scribblings of the name Nelly. + +[Illustration] + +“I think I’ll call the heroine ‘Nelly,’” he mused. + +Nelly Croubel blushed. Mrs. Arty and Tom glanced at each other. Mr. +Wrenn realized that he had, even at this moment of social triumph, +“made a break.” + +He said, hastily; “I always liked that name. I—I had an aunt named +that!” + +“Oh—” started Nelly. + +“She was fine to me when I was a kid, “Mr. Wrenn added, trying to +remember whether it was right to lie when in such need. + +“Oh, it’s a horrid name,” declared Nelly. “Why don’t you call her +something nice, like Hazel—or—oh—Dolores.” + +“Nope; Nelly’s an elegant name—an _elegant_ name.” + +He walked with Nelly behind the others, along Forty-second Street. To +the outsider’s eye he was a small respectable clerk, slightly stooped, +with a polite mustache and the dignity that comes from knowing well a +narrow world; wearing an overcoat too light for winter; too busily +edging out of the way of people and guiding the nice girl beside him +into clear spaces by diffidently touching her elbow, too pettily busy +to cast a glance out of the crowd and spy the passing poet or king, or +the iron night sky. He was as undistinguishable a bit of the evening +street life as any of the file of street-cars slashing through the wet +snow. Yet, he was the chivalrous squire to the greatest lady of all his +realm; he was a society author, and a man of great prospective wealth +and power over mankind! + +“Say, we’ll have the grandest dinner you ever saw if I get away with +the play,” he was saying. “Will you come, Miss Nelly?” + +“Indeed I will! Oh, you sha’n’t leave me out! Wasn’t I there when—” + +“Indeed you were! Oh, we’ll have a reg’lar feast at the +Astor—artichokes and truffles and all sorts of stuff…. Would—would you +like it if I sold the play?” + +“_Course_ I would, silly!” + +“I’d buy the business and make Rabin manager—the Souvenir Company. + +So he came to relate all those intimacies of The Job; and he was +overwhelmed at the ease with which she “got onto old Goglefogle.” + +His preparations for writing the play were elaborate. + +He paced Tom’s room till twelve-thirty, consulting as to whether he had +to plan the stage-setting; smoking cigarettes in attitudes on chair +arms. Next morning in the office he made numerous plans of the setting +on waste half-sheets of paper. At noon he was telephoning at Tom +regarding the question of whether there ought to be one desk or two on +the stage. + +He skipped the evening meal at Mrs. Arty’s, dining with literary +pensiveness at the Armenian, for he had subtle problems to meditate. He +bought a dollar fountain-pen, which had large gold-like bands and a +rather scratchy pen-point, and a box of fairly large sheets of paper. +Pressing his literary impedimenta tenderly under his arm, he attended +four moving-picture and vaudeville theaters. By eleven he had seen +three more one-act plays and a dramatic playlet. + +He slipped by the parlor door at Mrs. Arty’s. + +His room was quiet. The lamplight on the delicately green walls was +like that of a regular author’s den, he was quite sure. He happily +tested the fountain-pen by writing the names Nelly and William Wrenn on +a bit of wrapping-paper (which he guiltily burned in an ash-tray); +washed his face with water which he let run for a minute to cool; sat +down before his table with a grunt of content; went back and washed his +hands; fiercely threw off the bourgeois encumbrances of coat and +collar; sat down again; got up to straighten a picture; picked up his +pen; laid it down, and glowed as he thought of Nelly, slumbering there, +near at hand, her exquisite cheek nestling silkenly against her arm, +perhaps, and her white dreams— + +Suddenly he roared at himself, “Get on the job there, will yuh?” He +picked up the pen and wrote: + +THE MILLIONAIRE’S DAUGHTER +A ONE ACT DRAMATIC PLAYLET +by +WILLIAM WRENN + +CHARACTERS + + +_John Warrington_, a railway president; quite rich. +_Nelly Warrington_, Mr. Warrington’s daughter. +_Reginald Thorne_, his secretary. + + +He was jubilant. His pen whined at top speed, scattering a shower of +tiny drops of ink. + +_Stage Scene: An office. Very expensive. Mr. Warrington and Mr. Thorne +are sitting there. Miss Warrington comes in. She says:_ + + +He stopped. He thought. He held his head. He went over to the +stationary bowl and soaked his hair with water. He lay on the bed and +kicked his heels, slowly and gravely smoothing his mustache. Fifty +minutes later he gave a portentous groan and went to bed. + +He hadn’t been able to think of what Miss Warrington says beyond “I +have come to tell you that I am married, papa,” and that didn’t sound +just right; not for a first line it didn’t, anyway. + +At dinner next night—Saturday—Tom was rather inclined to make +references to “our author,” and to remark: “Well, I know where somebody +was last night, but of course I won’t tell. Say, them authors are a +wild lot.” + +Mr. Wrenn, who had permitted the teasing of even Tim, the hatter, +“wasn’t going to stand for no kidding from nobody—not when Nelly was +there,” and he called for a glass of water with the air of a Harvard +assistant professor forced to eat in a lunch-wagon and slapped on the +back by the cook. + +Nelly soothed him. “The play _is_ going well, _isn’t_ it?” + +When he had, with a detached grandeur of which he was immediately +ashamed, vouchsafed that he was already “getting right down to brass +tacks on it,” that he had already investigated four more plays and +begun the actual writing, every one looked awed and asked him assorted +questions. + +At nine-thirty that evening he combed and tightly brushed his hair, +which he had been pawing angrily for an hour and a half, went down the +hall to Nelly’s hall bedroom, and knocked with: “It’s Mr. Wrenn. May I +ask you something about the play?” + +“Just a moment,” he heard her say. + +He waited, panting softly, his lips apart. This was to be the first +time he had ever seen Nelly’s room. She opened the door part way, +smiling shyly, timidly, holding her pale-blue dressing-gown close. The +pale blueness was a modestly brilliant spot against the whiteness of +the room—white bureau, hung with dance programs and a yellow Upton’s +Grove High School banner, white tiny rocker, pale-yellow matting, +white-and-silver wall-paper, and a glimpse of a white soft bed. + +He was dizzy with the exaltation of that purity, but he got himself to +say: + +“I’m kind of stuck on the first part of the play, Miss Nelly. Please +tell me how you think the heroine would speak to her dad. Would she +call him ‘papa’ or ‘sir,’ do you think?” + +“Why—let me see—” + +“They’re such awful high society—” + +“Yes, that’s so. Why, I should think she’d say ‘sir.’ Maybe oh, what +was it I heard in a play at the Academy of Music? ‘Father, I have come +back to you!’” + +“Sa-a-ay, that’s a fine line! That’ll get the crowd going right from +the first…. I _told_ you you’d help me a lot.” + +“I’m awfully glad if I _have_ helped you,” she said, earnestly. Good +night—and good, “awfully glad, but luck with the play. Good night.” + +“Good night. Thank you a lot, Miss Nelly. Church in the morning, +remember! Good night.” + +“Good night.” + +As it is well known that all playwrights labor with toy theaters before +them for working models, Mr. Wrenn ran to earth a fine unbroken +pasteboard box in which a ninety-eight-cent alarm-clock had recently +arrived. He went out for some glue and three small corks. Setting up +his box stage, he glued a pill-box and a match-box on the floor—the +side of the box it had always been till now—and there he had the +mahogany desks. He thrust three matches into the corks, and behold +three graceful actors—graceful for corks, at least. There was +fascination in having them enter, through holes punched in the back of +the box, frisk up to their desks and deliver magic emotional speeches +that would cause any audience to weep; speeches regarding which he knew +everything but the words; a detail of which he was still quite ignorant +after half an hour of playing with his marionettes. + +Before he went despairingly to bed that Saturday night he had added to +his manuscript: + +_Mr. Thorne_ says: Here are the papers, sir. As a great railway +president you should— + + +The rest of that was to be filled in later. How the dickens could he +let the public know how truly great his president was? + +(_Daughter, Miss Nelly, comes in._) + + +_Miss Nelly:_ Father, I have come back to you, sir. +_Mr. Warrington:_ My Daughter! +_Nelly:_ Father, I have something to tell you; something— + + +Breakfast at Mrs. Arty’s was always an inspiration. In contrast to the +lonely dingy meal at the Hustler Dairy Lunch of his Zapp days, he sat +next to a trimly shirtwaisted Nelly, fresh and enthusiastic after nine +hours’ sleep. So much for ordinary days. But Sunday morning—that was +paradise! The oil-stove glowed and purred like a large tin pussy cat; +it toasted their legs into dreamy comfort, while they methodically +stuffed themselves with toast and waffles and coffee. Nelly and he +always felt gently superior to Tom Poppins, who would be a-sleeping +late, as they talked of the joy of not having to go to the office, of +approaching Christmas, and of the superiority of Upton’s Grove and +Parthenon. + +This morning was to be Mr. Wrenn’s first attendance at church with +Nelly. The previous time they had planned to go, Mr. Wrenn had spent +Sunday morning in unreligious fervor at the Chelsea Dental Parlors with +a young man in a white jacket instead of at church with Nelly. + +This was also the first time that he had attended a church service in +nine years, except for mass at St. Patrick’s, which he regarded not as +church, but as beauty. He felt tremendously reformed, set upon new +paths of virtue and achievement. He thought slightingly of those lonely +bachelors, Morton and Mittyford, Ph. D. They just didn’t know what it +meant to a fellow to be going to church with a girl like Miss Nelly, he +reflected, as he re brushed his hair after breakfast. + +He walked proudly beside her, and made much of the gentility of +entering the church, as one of the well-to-do and intensely bathed +congregation. He even bowed to an almost painfully washed and brushed +young usher with gold-rimmed eye-glasses. He thought scornfully of his +salad days, when he had bowed to the Brass-button Man at the +Nickelorion. + +The church interior was as comfortable as Sunday-morning toast and +marmalade—half a block of red carpet in the aisles; shiny solid-oak +pews, gorgeous stained-glass windows, and a general polite creaking of +ladies’ best stays and gentlemen’s stiff shirt-bosoms, and an odor of +the best cologne and moth-balls. + +It lacked but six days till Christmas. Mr. Wrenn’s heart was a little +garden, and his eyes were moist, and he peeped tenderly at Nelly as he +saw the holly and ivy and the frosted Christmas mottoes, “Peace on +Earth, Good Will to Men,” and the rest, that brightened the spaces +between windows. + +Christmas—happy homes—laughter…. Since, as a boy, he had attended the +Christmas festivities of the Old Church Sunday-school at Parthenon, and +got highly colored candy in a net bag, his holidays had been celebrated +by buying himself plum pudding at lonely Christmas dinners at large +cheap restaurants, where there was no one to wish him “Merry Christmas” +except his waiter, whom he would quite probably never see again, nor +ever wish to see. + +But this Christmas—he surprised himself and Nelly suddenly by hotly +thrusting out his hand and touching her sleeve with the searching +finger-tips of a child comforted from night fears. + +During the sermon he had an idea. What was it Nelly had told him about +“Peter Pan”? Oh yes; somebody in it had said “Do you believe in +fairies?” _Say_, why wouldn’t it be great to have the millionaire’s +daughter say to her father, “Do you believe in love?” + +“Gee, _I_ believe in love!” he yearned to himself, as he felt Nelly’s +arm unconsciously touch his. + +Tom Poppins had Horatio Hood Teddem in that afternoon for a hot toddy. +Horatio looked very boyish, very confiding, and borrowed five dollars +from Mr. Wrenn almost painlessly, so absorbed was Mr. Wrenn in learning +from Horatio how to sell a play. To know the address of the firm of +Wendelbaum & Schirtz, play-brokers, located in a Broadway theater +building, seemed next door to knowing a Broadway manager. + +When Horatio had gone Tom presented an idea which he had ponderously +conceived during his Sunday noon-hour at the cigar-store. + +“Why not have three of us—say me and you and Mrs. Arty—talk the play, +just like we was acting it?” + +He enthusiastically forced the plan on Mr. Wrenn. He pounded +down-stairs and brought up Mrs. Arty. He dashed about the room, +shouting directions. He dragged out his bureau for the +railroad-president’s desk, and a table for the secretary, and, after +some consideration and much rubbing of his chin, with two slams and a +bang he converted his hard green Morris-chair into an office safe. + +The play was on. Mr. T. Poppins, in the role of the president, entered, +with a stern high expression on his face, threw a “Good morning, +Thorne,” at Wrenn, his secretary, and peeled off his gloves. (Mr. Wrenn +noted the gloves; they were a Touch.) + +Mr. Wrenn approached diffidently, his face expressionless, lest Mrs. +Arty laugh at him. “Here— + +“Say, what do you think would be a good way for the secretary to tell +the crowd that the other guy is the president? Say, how about this: +‘The vice-president of the railway would like to have you sign these, +sir, as president’?” + +“That’s fine!” exclaimed Mrs. Arty, whose satin dress was carefully +spread over her swelling knees, as she sat in the oak rocker, like a +cheerful bronze monument to Sunday propriety. “But don’t you think he’d +say, ‘when it’s convenient to you, sir’?” + +“Gee, that’s dandy!” + +The play was on. + +It ended at seven. Mr. Wrenn took but fifteen minutes for Sunday +supper, and wrote till one of the morning, finishing the first draft of +his manuscript. + +Revision was delightful, for it demanded many conferences with Nelly, +sitting at the parlor table, with shoulders confidentially touching. +They were the more intimate because Tom had invited Mr. Wrenn, Nelly, +and Mrs. Arty to the Grand Christmas Eve Ball of the Cigar-Makers’ +Union at Melpomene Hall. Nelly asked of Mr. Wrenn, almost as urgently +as of Mrs. Arty, whether she should wear her new white mull or her +older rose-colored China silk. + +Two days before Christmas he timidly turned over the play for typing to +a haughty public stenographer who looked like Lee Theresa Zapp. She +yawned at him when he begged her to be careful of the manuscript. The +gloriously pink-bound and red-underlined typed manuscript of the play +was mailed to Messrs. Wendelbaum & Schirtz, play-brokers, at 6.15 P.M., +Christmas Eve. + +The four walked down Sixth Avenue to the Cigar-Makers’ Ball. They made +an Indian file through the Christmas shopping crowds, and stopped +frequently and noisily before the street-booths’ glamour of tinsel and +teddy-bears. They shrieked all with one rotund mad laughter as Tom +Poppins capered over and bought for seven cents a pink bisque doll, +which he pinned to the lapel of his plaid overcoat. They drank hot +chocolate at the Olympic Confectionery Store, pretending to each other +that they were shivering with cold. + +It was here that Nelly reached up and patted Mr. Wrenn’s pale-blue tie +into better lines. In her hair was the scent which he had come to +identify as hers. Her white furs brushed against his overcoat. + +The cigar-makers, with seven of them in full evening-dress and two in +dinner-coats, were already dancing on the waxy floor of Melpomene Hall +when they arrived. A full orchestra was pounding and scraping itself +into an hysteria of merriment on the platform under the red +stucco-fronted balcony, and at the bar behind the balcony there was a +spirit of beer and revelry by night. + +Mr. Wrenn embarrassedly passed large groups of pretty girls. He felt +very light and insecure in his new gun-metal-finish pumps now that he +had taken off his rubbers and essayed the slippery floor. He tried +desperately not to use his handkerchief too conspicuously, though he +had a cold. + +It was not till the choosing of partners for the next dance, when Tom +Poppins stood up beside Nelly, their arms swaying a little, their feet +tapping, that Mr. Wrenn quite got the fact that he could not dance. + +He had casually said to the others, a week before, that he knew only +the square dances which, as a boy, he had learned at parties at +Parthenon. But they had reassured him: “Oh, come on—we’ll teach you how +to dance at the ball—it won’t be formal. Besides, we’ll give you some +lessons before we go.” Playwriting and playing Five Hundred had +prevented their giving him the lessons. So he now sat terrified as a +two-step began and he saw what seemed to be thousands of glittering +youths and maidens whirling deftly in a most involved course, getting +themselves past each other in a way which he was sure he could never +imitate. The orchestra yearned over music as rich and smooth as milk +chocolate, which made him intensely lonely for Nelly, though she was +only across the room from him. + +Tom Poppins immediately introduced Nelly to a facetious cigar salesman, +who introduced her to three of the beaux in evening clothes, while Tom +led out Mrs. Arty. Mr. Wrenn, sitting in a row of persons who were not +at all interested in his sorrows, glowered out across the hall, and +wished, oh! so bitterly, to flee home. Nelly came up, glowing, +laughing, with black-mustached and pearl-waistcoated men, and +introduced him to them, but he glanced at them disapprovingly; and +always she was carried off to dance again. + +She found and hopefully introduced to Mr. Wrenn a wallflower who came +from Yonkers and had never heard of Tom Poppins or aeroplanes or Oxford +or any other topic upon which Mr. Wrenn uneasily tried to discourse as +he watched Nelly waltz and smile up at her partners. Presently the two +sat silent. The wallflower excused herself and went back to her mama +from Yonkers. + +Mr. Wrenn sat sulking, hating his friends for having brought him, +hating the sweetness of Nelly Croubel, and saying to himself, +“Oh—_sure_—she dances with all those other men—me, I’m only the poor +fool that talks to her when she’s tired and tries to cheer her up.” + +He did not answer when Tom came and told him a new story he had just +heard in the barroom. + +Once Nelly landed beside him and bubblingly insisted on his coming out +and trying to learn to dance. He brightened, but shyly remarked, “Oh +no, I don’t think I’d better.” Just then the blackest-mustached and +pearl-waistcoatedest of all the cigar salesmen came begging for a +dance, and she was gone, with only: “Now get up your courage. I’m going +to _make_ you dance.” + +At the intermission he watched her cross the floor with the hateful +cigar salesman, slender in her tight crisp new white mull, flourishing +her fan and talking with happy rapidity. She sat down beside him. He +said nothing; he still stared out across the glassy floor. She peeped +at him curiously several times, and made a low tapping with her fan on +the side of her chair. + +She sighed a little. Cautiously, but very casually, she said, “Aren’t +you going to take me out for some refreshments, Mr. Wrenn?” + +“Oh sure—I’m good enough to buy refreshments for her!” he said to +himself. + +Poor Mr. Wrenn; he had not gone to enough parties in Parthenon, and he +hadn’t gone to any in New York. At nearly forty he was just learning +the drab sulkiness and churlishness and black jealousy of the lover…. +To her: “Why didn’t you go out with that guy with the black mustache?” +He still stared straight ahead. + +She was big-eyed, a tear showing. “Why, Billy—” was all she answered. + +He clenched his hands to keep from bursting out with all the pitiful +tears which were surging in his eyes. But he said nothing. + +“Billy, what—” + +He turned shyly around to her; his hand touched hers softly. + +“Oh, I’m a beast,” he said, rapidly, low, his undertone trembling to +her ears through the laughter of a group next to them. “I didn’t mean +that, but I was—I felt like such a mutt—not being able to dance. Oh, +Nelly, I’m awfully sorry. You know I didn’t mean—_Come on!_ Let’s go +get something to eat!” + +As they consumed ice-cream, fudge, doughnuts, and chicken sandwiches at +the refreshment counter they were very intimate, resenting the presence +of others. Tom and Mrs. Arty joined them. Tom made Nelly light her +first cigarette. Mr. Wrenn admired the shy way in which, taking the +tiniest of puffs, she kept drawing out her cigarette with little pouts +and nose wriggles and pretended sneezes, but he felt a lofty gladness +when she threw it away after a minute, declaring that she’d never smoke +again, and that she was going to make all three of her companions stop +smoking, “now that she knew how horrid and sneezy it was, so there!” + +With what he intended to be deep subtlety Mr. Wrenn drew her away to +the barroom, and these two children, over two glasses of ginger-ale, +looked their innocent and rustic love so plainly that Mrs. Arty and Tom +sneaked away. Nelly cut out a dance, which she had promised to a +cigar-maker, and started homeward with Mr. Wrenn. + +“Let’s not take a car—I want some fresh air after that smoky place,” +she said. “But it _was_ grand…. Let’s walk up Fifth Avenue.” + +“Fine…. Tired, Nelly?” + +“A little.” + +He thought her voice somewhat chilly. + +“Nelly—I’m so sorry—I didn’t really have the chance to tell you in +there how sorry I was for the way I spoke to you. Gee! it was fierce of +me—but I felt—I couldn’t dance, and—oh—” + +No answer. + +“And you did mind it, didn’t you?” + +“Why, I didn’t think you were so very nice about it—when I’d tried so +hard to have you have a good time—” + +“Oh, Nelly, I’m so sorry—” + +There was tragedy in his voice. His shoulders, which he always tried to +keep as straight as though they were in a vise when he walked with her, +were drooping. + +She touched his glove. “Oh don’t, Billy; it’s all right now. I +understand. Let’s forget—” + +“Oh, you’re too good to me!” + +Silence. + +As they crossed Twenty-third on Fifth Avenue she took his arm. He +squeezed her hand. Suddenly the world was all young and beautiful and +wonderful. It was the first time in his life that he had ever walked +thus, with the arm of a girl for whom he cared cuddled in his. He +glanced down at her cheap white furs. Snowflakes, tremulous on the fur, +were turned into diamond dust in the light from a street-lamp which +showed as well a tiny place where her collar had been torn and mended +ever so carefully. Then, in a millionth of a second, he who had been a +wanderer in the lonely gray regions of a detached man’s heart knew the +pity of love, all its emotion, and the infinite care for the beloved +that makes a man of a rusty sales-clerk. He lifted a face of adoration +to the misty wonder of the bare trees, whose tracery of twigs filled +Madison Square; to the Metropolitan Tower, with its vast upward stretch +toward the ruddy sky of the city’s winter night. All these mysteries he +knew and sang. What he _said_ was: + +“Gee, those trees look like a reg’lar picture!… The Tower just kind of +fades away. Don’t it?” + +“Yes, it is pretty,” she said, doubtfully, but with a pressure of his +arm. + +Then they talked like a summer-time brook, planning that he was to buy +a Christmas bough of evergreen, which she would smuggle to breakfast in +the morning. Through their chatter persisted the new intimacy which had +been born in the pain of their misunderstanding. + +On January 10th the manuscript of “The Millionaire’s Daughter” was +returned by play-brokers Wendelbaum & Schirtz with this letter: + +DEAR SIR,—We regret to say that we do not find play available. We +inclose our reader’s report on the same. Also inclose bill for ten +dollars for reading-fee, which kindly remit at early convenience. + + +He stood in the hall at Mrs. Arty’s just before dinner. He reread the +letter and slowly opened the reader’s report, which announced: + +“Millionaire’s Daughter.” One-act vlle. Utterly impos. Amateurish to +the limit. Dialogue sounds like burlesque of Laura Jean Libbey. Can it. + + +Nelly was coming down-stairs. He handed her the letter and report, then +tried to stick out his jaw. She read them. Her hand slipped into his. +He went quickly toward the basement and made himself read the +letter—though not the report—to the tableful. He burned the manuscript +of his play before going to bed. The next morning he waded into The Job +as he never had before. He was gloomily certain that he would never get +away from The Job. But he thought of Nelly a hundred times a day and +hoped that sometime, some spring night of a burning moon, he might dare +the great adventure and kiss her. Istra— Theoretically, he remembered +her as a great experience. But what nebulous bodies these theories are! + +That slow but absolutely accurate Five-Hundred player, Mr. William +Wrenn, known as Billy, glanced triumphantly at Miss Proudfoot, who was +his partner against Mrs. Arty and James T. Duncan, the traveling-man, +on that night of late February. His was the last bid in the crucial +hand of the rubber game. The others waited respectfully. Confidently, +he bid “Nine on no trump.” + +“Good Lord, Billl” exclaimed James T. Duncan. + +“I’ll make it.” + +And he did. He arose a victor. There was no uneasiness, but rather all +the social polish of Mrs. Arty’s at its best, in his manner, as he +crossed to Mrs. Ebbitt’s chair and asked: “How is Mr. Ebbitt to-night? +Pretty rheumatic?” Miss Proudfoot offered him a lime tablet, and he +accepted it judicially. “I believe these tablets are just about as good +as Park & Tilford’s,” he said, cocking his head. “Say, Dunk, I’ll match +you to see who rushes a growler of beer. Tom’ll be here pretty +soon—store ought to be closed by now. We’ll have some ready for him.” + +“Right, Bill,” agreed James T. Duncan. + +Mr. Wrenn lost. He departed, after secretively obtaining not one, but +two pitchers, in one of which he got a “pint of dark” and in the other +a surprise. He bawled upstairs to Nelly, “Come on down, Nelly, can’t +you? Got a growler of ice-cream soda for the ladies!” + +It is true that when Tom arrived and fell to conversational blows with +James T. Duncan over the merits of a Tom Collins Mr. Wrenn was not +brilliant, for the reason that he took Tom Collins to be a man instead +of the drink he really is. + +Yet, as they went up-stairs Miss Proudfoot said to Nelly: “Mr. Wrenn is +quiet, but I do think in some ways he’s one of the nicest men I’ve seen +in the house for years. And he is so earnest. And I think he’ll make a +good pinochle player, besides Five Hundred.” + +“Yes,” said Nelly. + +“I think he was a little shy at first…. _I_ was always shy…. But he +likes us, and I like folks that like folks.” + +“_Yes!_” said Nelly. + + + + +CHAPTER XVII +HE IS BLOWN BY THE WHIRLWIND + + +“He was blown by the whirlwind and followed a wandering flame through +perilous seas to a happy shore.”—_Quoth François._ + + +On an April Monday evening, when a small moon passed shyly over the +city and the streets were filled with the sound of hurdy-gurdies and +the spring cries of dancing children, Mr. Wrenn pranced down to the +basement dining-room early, for Nelly Croubel would be down there +talking to Mrs. Arty, and he gaily wanted to make plans for a picnic to +occur the coming Sunday. He had a shy unacknowledged hope that he might +kiss Nelly after such a picnic; he even had the notion that he might +some day—well, other fellows had been married; why not? + +Miss Mary Proudfoot was mending a rent in the current table-cloth with +delicate swift motions of her silvery-skinned hands. She informed him: +“Mr. Duncan will be back from his Southern trip in five days. We’ll +have to have a grand closing progressive Five Hundred tournament.” Mr. +Wrenn was too much absorbed in wondering whether Miss Proudfoot would +make some of her celebrated—and justly celebrated—minced-ham sandwiches +for the picnic to be much interested. He was not much more interested +when she said, “Mrs. Ferrard’s got a letter or something for you.” + +Then, as dinner began, Mrs. Ferrard rushed in dramatically and said, +“There’s a telegram for you, Mr. Wrenn!” + +Was it death? Whose death? The table panted, Mr. Wrenn with them…. +That’s what a telegram meant to them. + +Their eyes were like a circle of charging bayonets as he opened and +read the message—a ship’s wireless. + +Meet me _Hesperida._—ISTRA. + + +“It’s just—a—a business message,” he managed to say, and splashed his +soup. This was not the place to take the feelings out of his thumping +heart and examine them. + +Dinner was begun. Picnics were conversationally considered in all their +more important phases—historical, dietetical, and social. Mr. Wrenn +talked much and a little wildly. After dinner he galloped out to buy a +paper. The S.S. _Hesperiida_ was due at ten next morning. + +It was an evening of frightened confusion. He tottered along Lexington +Avenue on a furtive walk. He knew only that he was very fond of Nelly, +yet pantingly eager to see Istra. He damned himself—“damned” is +literal—every other minute for a cad, a double-faced traitor, and all +the other horrifying things a man is likely to declare himself to be +for making the discovery that two women may be different and yet +equally likable. And every other minute he reveled in an adventurous +gladness that he was going to see Istra—actually, incredibly going to +see her, just the next day! He returned to find Nelly sitting on the +steps of Mrs. Arty’s. + +“Hello.” + +“Hello.” + +Both good sound observations, and all they could say for a time, while +Mr. Wrenn examined the under side of the iron steps rail minutely. + +“Billy—was it something serious, the telegram?” + +“No, it was—Miss Nash, the artist I told you about, asked me to meet +her at the boat. I suppose she wants me to help her with her baggage +and the customs and all them things. She’s just coming from Paris.” + +“Oh yes, I see.” + +So lacking in jealousy was Nelly that Mr. Wrenn was disappointed, +though he didn’t know why. It always hurts to have one’s thunderous +tragedies turn out realistic dialogues. + +“I wonder if you would like to meet her. She’s awful well educated, but +I dunno—maybe she’d strike you as kind of snobbish. But she dresses I +don’t think I ever seen anybody so elegant. In dressing, I mean. +Course”—hastily—“she’s got money, and so she can afford to. But +she’s—oh, awful nice, some ways. I hope you like—I hope she won’t—” + +“Oh, I sha’n’t mind if she’s a snob. Of course a lady gets used to +that, working in a department store,” she said, chillily; then repented +swiftly and begged: “Oh, I _didn’t_ mean to be snippy, Billy. Forgive +me! I’m sure Miss Nash will be real nice. Does she live here in New +York?” + +“No—in California…. I don’t know how long she’s going to stay here.” + +“Well—well—hum-m-m. I’m getting _so_ sleepy. I guess I’d better go up +to bed. Good night.” + +Uneasy because he was away from the office, displeased because he had +to leave his beloved letters to the Southern trade, angry because he +had had difficulty in getting a pass to the wharf, and furious, +finally, because he hadn’t slept, Mr. Wrenn nursed all these cumulative +emotions attentively and waited for the coming of the _Hesperida_. He +was wondering if he’d want to see Istra at all. He couldn’t remember +just how she looked. Would he like her? + +The great steamer swung side-to and was coaxed alongside the wharf. +Peering out between rows of crowding shoulders, Mr. Wrenn coldly +inspected the passengers lining the decks. Istra was not in sight. Then +he knew that he was wildly agitated about her. Suppose something had +happened to her! + +The smallish man who had been edging into the crowd so politely +suddenly dashed to the group forming at the gang-plank and pushed his +way rudely into the front rank. His elbow dug into the proper waistcoat +of a proper plump old gentleman, but he didn’t know it. He stood +grasping the rope rail of the plank, gazing goggle-eyed while the plank +was lifted to the steamer’s deck and the long line of smiling and +waving passengers disembarked. Then he saw her—tall, graceful, +nonchalant, uninterested, in a smart check suit with a lively hat of +black straw, carrying a new Gladstone bag. + +He stared at her. “Gee!” he gasped. “I’m crazy about her. I am, all +right.” + +She saw him, and their smiles of welcome made them one. She came from +the plank and hastily kissed him. + +“Really here!” she laughed. + +“Well, well, well, well! I’m so glad to see you!” + +“Glad to see you, Mouse dear.” + +“Have good tr—” + +“Don’t ask me about it! There was a married man _sans_ wife who +persecuted me all the way over. I’m glad _you_ aren’t going to fall in +love with me.” + +“Why—uh—” + +“Let’s hustle over and get through the customs as soon as we can. +Where’s N? Oh, how clever of it, it’s right by M. There’s one of my +trunks already. How are you, Mouse dear?” + +But she didn’t seem really to care so very much, and the old +bewilderment she always caused was over him. + +“It is good to get back after all, and—Mouse dear, I know you won’t +mind finding me a place to live the next few days, will you?” She quite +took it for granted. “We’ll find a place this morning, _n’est-ce pas?_ +Not too expensive. I’ve got just about enough to get back to +California.” + +Man fashion, he saw with acute clearness the pile of work on his desk, +and, man fashion, responded, “No; be glad tuh.” + +“How about the place where you’re living? You spoke about its being so +clean and all.” + +The thought of Nelly and Istra together frightened him. + +“Why, I don’t know as you’d like it so very much.” + +“Oh, it’ll be all right for a few days, anyway. Is there a room +vacant.” + +He was sulky about it. He saw much trouble ahead. + +“Why, yes, I suppose there is.” + +“Mouse dear!” Istra plumped down on a trunk in the confused billows of +incoming baggage, customs officials, and indignant passengers that +surged about them on the rough floor of the vast dock-house. She stared +up at him with real sorrow in her fine eyes. + +“Why, Mouse! I thought you’d be glad to see me. I’ve never rowed with +you, have I? I’ve tried not to be temperamental with you. That’s why I +wired you, when there are others I’ve known for years.” + +“Oh, I didn’t mean to seem grouchy; I didn’t! I just wondered if you’d +like the house.” + +He could have knelt in repentance before his goddess, what time she was +but a lonely girl in the clatter of New York. He went on: + +“And we’ve got kind of separated, and I didn’t know—But I guess I’ll +always—oh—kind of worship you.” + +“It’s all right, Mouse. It’s—Here’s the customs men.” + +Now Istra Nash knew perfectly that the customs persons were not ready +to examine her baggage as yet. But the discussion was ended, and they +seemed to understand each other. + +“Gee, there’s a lot of rich Jew ladies coming back this time!” said he. + +“Yes. They had diamonds three times a day,” she assented. + +“Gee, this is a big place!” + +“Yes.” So did they testify to fixity of friendship till they reached +the house and Istra was welcomed to “that Teddem’s” room as a new +guest. + +Dinner began with the ceremony due Mrs. Arty. There was no lack of the +sacred old jokes. Tom Poppins did not fail to bellow “Bring on the +dish-water,” nor Miss Mary Proudfoot to cheep demurely “Don’t y’ knaow” +in a tone which would have been recognized as fascinatingly English +anywhere on the American stage. Then the talk stopped dead as Istra +Nash stood agaze in the doorway—pale and intolerant, her red hair +twisted high on her head, tall and slim and uncorseted in a gray +tight-fitting gown. Every head turned as on a pivot, first to Istra, +then to Mr. Wrenn. He blushed and bowed as if he had been called on for +a speech, stumblingly arose, and said: “Uh—uh—uh—you met Mrs. Ferrard, +didn’t you, Istra? She’ll introduce you to the rest.” + +He sat down, wondering why the deuce he’d stood up, and unhappily +realized that Nelly was examining Istra and himself with cool +hostility. In a flurry he glowered at Istra as she nonchalantly sat +down opposite him, beside Mrs. Arty, and incuriously unfolded her +napkin. He thought that in her cheerful face there was an expression of +devilish amusement. + +He blushed. He furiously buttered his bread as Mrs. Arty remarked to +the assemblage: + +“Ladies and gentlemen, I want you all to meet Miss Istra Nash. Miss +Nash—you’ve met Mr. Wrenn; Miss Nelly Croubel, our baby; Tom Poppins, +the great Five-Hundred player; Mrs. Ebbitt, Mr. Ebbitt, Miss +Proudfoot.” + +Istra Nash lifted her bowed eyes with what seemed shyness, hesitated, +said “Thank you” in a clear voice with a precise pronunciation, and +returned to her soup, as though her pleasant communion with it had been +unpleasantly interrupted. + +The others began talking and eating very fast and rather noisily. Miss +Mary Proudfoot’s thin voice pierced the clamor: + +“I hear you have just come to New York, Miss Nash.” + +“Yes.” + +“Is this your first visit to—” + +“No.” + +Miss Proudfoot rancorously took a long drink of water. + +Nelly attempted, bravely: + +“Do you like New York, Miss Nash?” + +“Yes.” + +Nelly and Miss Proudfoot and Tom Poppins began discussing shoe-stores, +all at once and very rapidly, while hot and uncomfortable Mr. Wrenn +tried to think of something to say…. Good Lord, suppose Istra “queered” +him at Mrs. Arty’s!… Then he was angry at himself and all of them for +not appreciating her. How exquisite she looked, with her tired white +face! + +As the soup-plates were being removed by Annie, the maid, with an +elaborate confusion and a general passing of plates down the line, +Istra Nash peered at the maid petulantly. Mrs. Arty frowned, then grew +artificially pleasant and said: + +“Miss Nash has just come back from Paris. She’s a regular European +traveler, just like Mr. Wrenn.” + +Mrs. Samuel Ebbitt piped: “Mr. Ebbitt was to Europe. In 1882.” + +“No ’twa’n’t, Fannie; ’twas in 1881,” complained Mr. Ebbitt. + +Miss Nash waited for the end of this interruption as though it were a +noise which merely had to be endured, like the Elevated. + +Twice she drew in her breath to speak, and the whole table laid its +collective knife and fork down to listen. All she said was: + +“Oh, will you pardon me if I speak of it now, Mrs. Ferrard, but would +you mind letting me have my breakfast in my room to-morrow? About nine? +Just something simple—a canteloupe and some shirred eggs and +chocolate?” + +“Oh no; why, yes, certainly, “mumbled Mrs. Arty, while the table held +its breaths and underneath them gasped: + +“Chocolate!” + +“A canteloupe!” + +“Shirred eggs!” + +“_In her room—at nine!_” + +All this was very terrible to Mr. Wrenn. He found himself in the +position of a man scheduled to address the Brewers’ Association and the +W. C. T. U. at the same hour. Valiantly he attempted: + +“Miss Nash oughta be a good person for our picnics. She’s a regular +shark for outdoor tramping.” + +“Oh yes, Mr. Wrenn and I tramped most all night in England one time,” +said Istra, innocently. + +The eyes of the table asked Mr. Wrenn what he meant by it. He tried to +look at Nelly, but something hurt inside him. + +“Yes,” he mumbled. “Quite a long walk.” + +Miss Mary Proudfoot tried again: + +“is it pleasant to study in Paris? Mrs. Arty said you were an artist.” + +“No.” + +Then they were all silent, and the rest of the dinner Mr. Wrenn +alternately discussed Olympia Johns with Istra and picnics with Nelly. +There was an undertone of pleading in his voice which made Nelly glance +at him and even become kind. With quiet insistence she dragged Istra +into a discussion of rue de la Paix fashions which nearly united the +shattered table and won Mr. Wrenn’s palpitating thankfulness. + +After dessert Istra slowly drew a plain gold cigarette-case from a +brocade bag of silvery gray. She took out a match and a thin Russian +cigarette, which she carefully lighted. She sat smoking in one of her +best attitudes, pointed elbows on the table, coolly contemplating a +huge picture called “Hunting the Stag” on the wall behind Mr. Wrenn. + +Mrs. Arty snapped to the servant, “Annie, bring me _my_ cigarettes.” +But Mrs. Arty always was penitent when she had been nasty, and—though +Istra did not at once seem to know that the landlady _had_ been +nasty—Mrs. Arty invited her up to the parlor for after-dinner so +cordially that Istra could but grant “Perhaps I will,” and she even +went so far as to say, “I think you’re all to be envied, having such a +happy family.” + +“Yes, that’s so,” reflected Mrs. Arty. + +“Yes,” added Mr. Wrenn. + +And Nelly: “That’s so.” + +The whole table nodded gravely, “Yes, that’s so.” + +“I’m sure”—Istra smiled at Mrs. Arty—“that it’s because a woman is +running things. Now think what cat-and-dog lives you’d lead if Mr. +Wrenn or Mr.—Popple, was it?—were ruling.” + +They applauded. They felt that she had been humorous. She was again and +publicly invited up to the parlor, and she came, though she said, +rather shortly, that she didn’t play Five Hundred, but only bumblepuppy +bridge, a variety of whist which Mr. Wrenn instantly resolved to learn. +She reclined (“reclined” is perfectly accurate) on the red-leather +couch, among the pillows, and smoked two cigarettes, relapsing into +“No?”’s for conversation. + +Mr. Wrenn said to himself, almost spitefully, as she snubbed Nelly, +“Too good for us, is she?” But he couldn’t keep away from her. The +realization that Istra was in the room made him forget most of his +melds at pinochle; and when Miss Proudfoot inquired his opinion as to +whether the coming picnic should be held on Staten island or the +Palisades he said, vaguely, “Yes, I guess that would be better.” + +For he was wanting to sit down beside Istra Nash, just be near her; he +_had_ to be! So he ventured over and was instantly regarding all the +rest as outsiders whom his wise comrade and himself were studying. + +“Tell me, Mouse dear, why do you like the people here? The peepul, I +mean. They don’t seem so very remarkable. Enlighten poor Istra.” + +“Well, they’re awful kind. I’ve always lived in a house where the folks +didn’t hardly know each other at all, except Mrs. Zapp—she was the +landlady—and I didn’t like her very much. But here Tom Poppins and Mrs. +Arty and—the rest—they really like folks, and they make it just like a +home…. Miss Croubel is a very nice girl. She works for Wanamacy’s—she +has quite a big job there. She is assistant buyer in the—” + +He stopped in horror. He had nearly said “in the lingery department.” +He changed it to “in the clothing department,” and went on, doubtfully: +“Mr. Duncan is a traveling-man. He’s away on a trip.” + +“Which one do you play with? So Nelly likes to—well, make +b’lieve—’magine?” + +“How did you—” + +“Oh, I watched her looking at you. I think she’s a terribly nice +pink-face. And just now you’re comparing her and me.” + +“Gee!” he said. + +She was immensely pleased with herself. “Tell me, what do these people +think about; at least, what do you talk about?” + +“_Say!_” + +“S-s-s-h! Not so loud, my dear.” + +“Say, I know how you mean. You feel something like what I did in +England. You can’t get next to what the folks are thinking, and it +makes you sort of lonely.” + +“Well, I—” + +Just then Tom Poppins rolled jovially up to the couch. He had carried +his many and perspiring pounds over to Third Avenue because Miss +Proudfoot reflected, “I’ve got a regular sweet tooth to-night.” He +stood before Istra and Mr. Wrenn theatrically holding out a bag of +chocolate drops in one hand and peanut brittle in the other; and +grandiloquently: + +“Which shall it be, your Highness? Nobody loves a fat man, so he has to +buy candy so’s they’ll let him stick around. Le’s see; you take +chocolates, Bill. Name your drink, Miss Nash.” She looked up at him, +gravely and politely—too gravely and politely. She didn’t seem to +consider him a nice person. + +“Neither, thank you,” sharply, as he still stood there. He moved away, +hurt, bewildered. + +Istra was going on, “I haven’t been here long enough to be lonely yet, +but in any case—” when Mr. Wrenn interrupted: + +“You’ve hurt Tom’s feelings by not taking any candy; and, gee, he’s +awful kind!” + +“Have I?” mockingly. + +“Yes, you _have_. And there ain’t any too many kind people in this +world.” + +“Oh yes, of course you’ re right. I _am_ sorry, really I am.” + +She dived after Tom’s retreat and cheerfully addressed him: + +“Oh, I do want some of those chocolates. Will you let me change my +mind? Please do.” + +“Yes _ma’am_, you sure can!” said broad Tom, all one pleased chuckle, +poking out the two bags. + +Istra stopped beside the Five-Hundred table to smile in a lordly way +down at Mrs. Arty and say, quite humanly: + +“I’m so sorry I can’t play a decent game of cards. I’m afraid I’m too +stupid to learn. You are very lucky, I think.” + +Mr. Wrenn on the couch was horribly agitated…. Wasn’t Istra coming +back? + +She was. She detached herself from the hubbub of invitations to learn +to play Five Hundred and wandered back to the couch, murmuring: “Was +bad Istra good? Am I forgiven? Mouse dear, I didn’t mean to be rude to +your friends.” + +As the bubbles rise through water in a cooking-pot, as the surface +writhes, and then, after the long wait, suddenly the water is aboil, so +was the emotion of Mr. Wrenn now that Istra, the lordly, had actually +done something he suggested. + +“Istra—” That was all he could say, but from his eyes had gone all +reserve. + +Her glance back was as frank as his—only it had more of the mother in +it; it was like a kindly pat on the head; and she was the mother as she +mused: + +“So you _have_ missed me, then?” + +“Missed you—” + +“Did you think of me after you came here? Oh, I know—I was forgotten; +poor Istra abdicates to the pretty pink-face.” + +“Oh, Istra, _don’t_. I—can’t we just go out for a little walk so—so we +can talk?” + +“Why, we can talk here.” + +“Oh, gee!—there’s so many people around…. Golly! when I came back to +America—gee!—I couldn’t hardly sleep nights—” + +From across the room came the boisterous, somewhat coarse-timbred voice +of Tom, speaking to Nelly: + +“Oh yes, of course you think you’re the only girl that ever seen a +vodville show. _We_ ain’t never seen a vodville show. Oh no!” + +Nelly and Miss Proudfoot dissolved in giggles at the wit. + +Mr. Wrenn gazed at them, detached; these were not his people, and with +startled pride he glanced at Istra’s face, delicately carven by +thought, as he stumbled hotly on. + +“—just couldn’t sleep nights at all…. Then I got on the job….” + +“Let’s see, you’re still with that same company?” + +“Yes. Souvenir and Art Novelty Company. And I got awfully on the job +there, and so I managed to forget for a little while and—” + +“So you really do like me even after I was so beastly to you in +England.” + +“Oh, that wasn’t nothing…. But I was always thinking of you, even when +I was on the job—” + +“It’s gratifying to have some one continue taking me seriously…. +Really, dear, I do appreciate it. But you mustn’t—you mustn’t—” + +“Oh, gee! I just can’t get over it—you here by me—ain’t it curious!… +“Then he persisted with the tale of his longing, which she had so +carefully interrupted: “The people here are _awful_ kind and good, and +you can bank on ’em. But—oh—” + +From across the room, Tom’s pretended jeers, lighted up with Miss +Proudfoot’s giggles, as paper lanterns illumine Coney Island. From Tom: + +“Yes, you’re a hot dancer, all right. I suppose you can do the Boston +and all them swell dances. Wah-h-h-h-h!” + +“—but Istra, oh, gee! you’re like poetry—like all them things a feller +can’t get but he tries to when he reads Shakespeare and all those +poets.” + +“Oh, dear boy, you mustn’t! We will be good friends. I do appreciate +having some one care whether I’m alive or not. But I thought it was all +understood that we weren’t to take playing together seriously; that it +was to be merely playing—nothing more.” + +“But, anyway, you will let me play with you here in New York as much as +I can? Oh, come on, _let’s_ go for a walk—let’s—let’s go to a show.” + +“I’m awf’ly sorry, but I promised—a man’s going to call for me, and +we’re going to a stupid studio party on Bryant Park. Bore, isn’t it, +the day of landing? And poor Istra dreadfully landsick.” + +“Oh, then,” hopefully, “don’t go. Let’s—” + +“I’m sorry, Mouse dear, but I’m afraid I can’t break the date…. Fact, I +must go up and primp now—” + +“Don’t you care a bit?” he said, sulkily. + +“Why, yes, of course. But you wouldn’t have Istra disappoint a nice +Johnny after he’s bought him a cunnin’ new weskit, would you?… Good +night, dear.” She smiled—the mother smile—and was gone with a lively +good night to the room in general. + +Nelly went up to bed early. She was tired, she said. He had no chance +for a word with her. He sat on the steps outside alone a long time. +Sometimes he yearned for a sight of Istra’s ivory face. Sometimes, with +a fierce compassion that longed to take the burden from her, he +pictured Nelly working all day in the rushing department store on which +the fetid city summer would soon descend. + +They did have their walk the next night, Istra and Mr. Wrenn, but Istra +kept the talk to laughing burlesques of their tramp in England. +Somehow—he couldn’t tell exactly why—he couldn’t seem to get in all the +remarks he had inside him about how much he had missed her. + +Wednesday—Thursday—Friday; he saw her only at one dinner, or on the +stairs, departing volubly with clever-looking men in evening clothes to +taxis waiting before the house. + +Nelly was very pleasant; just that—pleasant. She pleasantly sat as his +partner at Five Hundred, and pleasantly declined to go to the moving +pictures with him. She was getting more and more tired, staying till +seven at the store, preparing what she called “special stunts” for the +summer white sale. Friday evening he saw her soft fresh lips drooping +sadly as she toiled up the front steps before dinner. She went to bed +at eight, at which time Istra was going out to dinner with a thin, +hatchet-faced sarcastic-looking man in a Norfolk jacket and a fluffy +black tie. Mr. Wrenn resented the Norfolk jacket. Of course, the kingly +men in evening dress would be expected to take Istra away from him, but +a Norfolk jacket—He did not call it that. Though he had worn one in the +fair village of Aengusmere, it was still to him a “coat with a belt.” + +He thought of Nelly all evening. He heard her—there on the same floor +with him—talking to Miss Proudfoot, who stood at Nelly’s door, three +hours after she was supposed to be asleep. + +“No,” Nelly was saying with evidently fictitious cheerfulness, “no, it +was just a little headache…. It’s much better. I think I can sleep now. +Thank you very much for coming.” + +Nelly hadn’t told Mr. Wrenn that she had a severe headache—she who had +once, a few weeks before, run to him with a cut in her soft small +finger, demanding that he bind it up…. He went slowly to bed. + +He had lain awake half an hour before his agony so overpowered him that +he flung out of bed. He crouched low by the bed, like a child, his legs +curled under him, the wooden sideboard pressing into his chest in one +long line of hot pain, while he prayed: + +“O God, O God, forgive me, forgive me, oh, forgive me! Here I been +forgetting Nelly (and I _love_ her) and comparing her with Istra and +not appreciating her, and Nelly always so sweet to me and trusting me +so—O God, keep me away from wickedness!” + +He huddled there many minutes, praying, the scorching pressure of the +bedside growing more painful. All the while the camp-fire he had shared +with Istra was burning within his closed eyes, and Istra was visibly +lording it in a London flat filled with clever people, and he was +passionately aware that the line of her slim breast was like the lip of +a shell; the line of her pallid cheek, defined by her flame-colored +hair, something utterly fine, something he could not express. + +“Oh,” he groaned, “she is like that poetry stuff in Shakespeare that’s +so hard to get…. I’ll be extra nice to Nelly at the picnic Sunday…. Her +trusting me so, and then me—O God, keep me away from wickedness!” + +As he was going out Saturday morning he found a note from Istra waiting +in the hall on the hat-rack: + +Do you want to play with poor Istra tomorrow Sat. afternoon and perhaps +evening, Mouse? You have Saturday afternoon off, don’t you? Leave me a +note if you can call for me at 1.30. + + +I. N. + + +He didn’t have Saturday afternoon off, but he said he did in his note, +and at one-thirty he appeared at her door in a new spring suit +(purchased on Tuesday), a new spring hat, very fuzzy and gay (purchased +Saturday noon), and the walking-stick he had bought on Tottenham Court +Road, but decently concealed from the boarding-house. + +Istra took him to what she called a “futurist play.” She explained it +all to him several times, and she stood him tea and muffins, and +recalled Mrs. Cattermole’s establishment with full attention to Mrs. +Cattermole’s bulbous but earnest nose. They dined at the Brevoort, and +were back at nine-thirty; for, said Istra, she was “just a bit tired, +Mouse.” + +They stood at the door of Istra’s room. Istra said, “You may come +in—just for a minute.” + +It was the first time he had even peeped into her room in New York. The +old shyness was on him, and he glanced back. + +Nelly was just coming up-stairs, staring at him where he stood inside +the door, her lips apart with amazement. + +Ladies distinctly did not entertain in their rooms at Mrs. Arty’s. + +He wanted to rush out, to explain, to invite her in, to—to— He +stuttered in his thought, and by now Nelly had hastened past, her face +turned from them. + +Uneasily he tilted on the front of a cane-seated rocking-chair, glaring +at a pile of books before one of Istra’s trunks. Istra sat on the +bedside nursing her knee. She burst out: + +“O Mouse dear, I’m so bored by everybody—every sort of everybody…. Of +course I don’t mean you; you’re a good pal…. Oh—Paris is _too_ +complex—especially when you can’t quite get the nasal vowels—and New +York is too youthful and earnest; and Dos Puentes, California, will be +plain hell…. And all my little parties—I start out on them happily, +always, as naive as a kiddy going to a birthday party, and then I get +there and find I can’t even dance square dances, as the kiddy does, and +go home—Oh damn it, damn it, damn it! Am I shocking you? Well, what do +I care if I shock everybody!” + +Her slim pliant length was flung out along the bed, and she was crying. +Her beautiful hands clutched the corners of a pillow bitterly. + +He crept over to the bed, patting her shoulder, slowly and regularly, +too frightened of her mood even to want to kiss her. + +She looked up, laughing tearfully. “Please say, ‘There, there, there; +don’t cry.’ It always goes with pats for weepy girls, you know…. O +Mouse, you will be good to some woman some day.” + +Her long strong arms reached up and drew him down. It was his head that +rested on her shoulder. It seemed to both of them that it was he who +was to be petted, not she. He pressed his cheek against the comforting +hollow of her curving shoulder and rested there, abandoned to a forlorn +and growing happiness, the happiness of getting so far outside of his +tight world of Wrennishness that he could give comfort and take comfort +with no prim worried thoughts of Wrenn. + +Istra murmured: “Perhaps that’s what I need—some one to need me. Only—” +She stroked his hair. “Now you must go, dear.” + +“You—It’s better now? I’m afraid I ain’t helped you much. It’s kinda t’ +other way round.” + +“Oh yes, indeed, it’s all right now! Just nerves. Nothing more. Now, +good night.” + +“Please, won’t you come to the picnic to-morrow? It’s—” + +“No. Sorry, but can’t possibly.” + +“Please think it over.” + +“No, no, no, no, dear! You go and forget me and enjoy yourself and be +good to your pink-face—Nelly, isn’t it? She seems to be terribly nice, +and I know you two will have a good party. You must forget me. I’m just +a teacher of playing games who hasn’t been successful at any game +whatever. Not that it matters. I don’t care. I don’t, really. Now, good +night.” + + + + +CHAPTER XVIII +AND FOLLOWS A WANDERING FLAME THROUGH PERILOUS SEAS + + +They had picnic dinner early up there on the Palisades: + +Nelly and Mr. Wrenn, Mrs. Arty and Tom, Miss Proudfoot and Mrs. Samuel +Ebbitt, the last of whom kept ejaculating: “Well! I ain’t run off like +this in ten years!” They squatted about a red-cotton table-cloth spread +on a rock, broadly discussing the sandwiches and cold chicken and +lemonade and stuffed olives, and laughing almost to a point of distress +over Tom’s accusation that Miss Proudfoot had secreted about her person +a bottle of rye whisky. + +Nelly was very pleasant to Mr. Wrenn, but she called him neither Billy +nor anything else, and mostly she talked to Miss Proudfoot, smiling at +him, but saying nothing when he managed to get out a jest about Mrs. +Arty’s chewing-gum. When he moved to her side with a wooden plate of +cream-cheese sandwiches (which Tom humorously termed “cold-cream +wafers”) Mr. Wrenn started to explain how he had come to enter Istra’s +room. + +“Why shouldn’t you?” Nelly asked, curtly, and turned to Miss Proudfoot. + +“She doesn’t seem to care much,” he reflected, relieved and stabbed in +his humble vanity and reattracted to Nelly, all at once. He was anxious +about her opinion of Istra and her opinion of himself, and slightly +defiant, as she continued to regard him as a respectable person whose +name she couldn’t exactly remember. + +Hadn’t he the right to love Istra if he wanted to? he desired to know +of himself. Besides, what had he _done?_ Just gone out walking with his +English hotel acquaintance Istra! He hadn’t been in her room but just a +few minutes. Fine reason that was for Nelly to act like a blooming +iceberg! Besides, it wasn’t as if he were engaged to Nelly, or anything +like that. Besides, of course Istra would never care for him. There +were several other besideses with which he harrowed himself while +trying to appear picnically agreeable. He was getting very much +confused, and was slightly abrupt as he said to Nelly, “Let’s walk over +to that high rock on the edge.” + +A dusky afterglow filled the sky before them as they silently trudged +to the rock and from the top of the sheer cliff contemplated the smooth +and steely-gray Hudson below. Nelly squeaked her fear at the drop and +clutched his arm, but suddenly let go and drew back without his aid. + +He groaned within, “I haven’t the right to help her.” He took her arm +as she hesitatingly climbed from the rock down to the ground. + +She jerked it free, curtly saying, “No, thank you.” + +She was repentant in a moment, and, cheerfully: + +“Miss Nash took me in her room yesterday and showed me her things. My, +she’s got such be-_yoo_-ti-ful jewels! La V’lieres and pearls and a +swell amethyst brooch. My! She told me all about how the girls used to +study in Paris, and how sorry she would be to go back to California and +keep house.” + +“Keep house?” + +Nelly let him suffer for a moment before she relieved him with, “For +her father.” + +“Oh…. Did she say she was going back to California soon?” + +“Not till the end of the summer, maybe.” + +“Oh…. Oh, Nelly—” + +For the first time that day he was perfectly sincere. He was trying to +confide in her. But the shame of having emotions was on him. He got no +farther. + +To his amazement, Nelly mused, “She is very nice.” + +He tried hard to be gallant. “Yes, she is interesting, but of course +she ain’t anywheres near as nice as you are, Nelly, be—” + +“Oh, don’t, Billy!” + +The quick agony in her voice almost set them both weeping. The shared +sorrow of separation drew them together for a moment. Then she started +off, with short swift steps, and he tagged after. He found little to +say. He tried to comment on the river. He remarked that the +apartment-houses across in New York were bright in the sunset; that, in +fact, the upper windows looked “like there was a fire in there.” Her +sole comment was “Yes.” + +When they rejoined the crowd he was surprised to hear her talking +volubly to Miss Proudfoot. He rejoiced that she was “game,” but he did +not rejoice long. For a frightened feeling that he had to hurry home +and see Istra at once was turning him weak and cold. He didn’t want to +see her; she was intruding; but he had to go—go at once; and the agony +held him all the way home, while he was mechanically playing the part +of stern reformer and agreeing with Tom Poppins that the horrors of the +recent Triangle shirt-waist-factory fire showed that “something oughta +be done—something sure oughta be.” + +He trembled on the ferry till Nelly, with a burst of motherly +tenderness in her young voice, suddenly asked: “Why, you’re shivering +dreadfully! Did you get a chill?” + +Naturally, he wanted the credit of being known as an invalid, and +pitied and nursed, but he reluctantly smiled and said, “Oh no, it ain’t +anything at all.” + +Then Istra called him again, and he fumed over the slowness of their +landing. + +And, at home, Istra was out. + +He went resolutely down and found Nelly alone, sitting on a round +pale-yellow straw mat on the steps. + +He sat by her. He was very quiet; not at all the jovial young man of +the picnic properly following the boarding-house-district rule that +males should be jocular and show their appreciation of the ladies by +“kidding them.” And he spoke with a quiet graciousness that was almost +courtly, with a note of weariness and spiritual experience such as +seldom comes into the boarding-houses, to slay joy and bring wisdom and +give words shyness. + +He had, as he sat down, intended to ask her to go with him to a +moving-picture show. But inspiration was on him. He merely sat and +talked. + +When Mr. Wrenn returned from the office, two evenings later, he found +this note awaiting him: + +DEAR MOUSE,—Friend has asked me to join her in studio & have beat it. +Sorry not see you & say good-by. Come see me sometime—phone before and +see if I’m in—Spring xxx—address xx South Washington Sq. In haste, + + +ISTRA. + + +He spent the evening in not going to the studio. Several times he broke +away from a pinochle game to rush upstairs and see if the note was as +chilly as he remembered. It always was. + +Then for a week he awaited a more definite invitation from her, which +did not come. He was uneasily polite to Nelly these days, and +tremulously appreciative of her gentleness. He wanted to brood, but he +did not take to his old habit of long solitary walks. Every afternoon +he planned one for the evening; every evening found that he “wanted to +be around with folks.” + +He had a sort of youthful defiant despair, so he jested much at the +card-table, by way of practising his new game of keeping people from +knowing what he was thinking. He took sophisticated pleasure in noting +that Mrs. Arty no longer condescended to him. He managed to imitate +Tom’s writing on a card which he left with a bunch of jonquils in +Nelly’s room, and nearly persuaded even Tom himself that Tom was the +donor. Probably because he didn’t much care what happened he was able +to force Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle to raise his salary to twenty-three +dollars a week. Mr. Guilfogle went out of his way to admit that the +letters to the Southern trade had been “a first-rate stunt, son.” + +John Henson, the head of the Souvenir Company’s manufacturing +department, invited Mr. Wrenn home to dinner, and the account of the +cattle-boat was much admired by Mrs. Henson and the three young +Hensons. + +A few days later, in mid-June, there was an unusually cheerful dinner +at the boarding-house. Nelly turned to Mr. Wrenn—yes, he was quite sure +about it; she was speaking exclusively to him, with a lengthy and most +merry account of the manner in which the floor superintendent had +“called down” the unkindest of the aislesmen. + +He longed to give his whole self in his answer, to be in the absolute +community of thought that lovers know. But the image of Istra was +behind his chair. Istra—he had to see her—now, this evening. He rushed +out to the corner drug-store and reached her by telephone. + +Yes-s, admitted Istra, a little grudgingly, she was going to be at the +studio that evening, though she—well, there was going to be a little +party—some friends—but—yes, she’d be glad to have him come. + +Grimly, Mr. Wrenn set out for Washington Square. + +Since this scientific treatise has so exhaustively examined Mr. Wrenn’s +reactions toward the esthetic, one need give but three of his +impressions of the studio and people he found on Washington +Square—namely: + +(_a_) That the big room was bare, ill kept, and not comparable to the +red-plush splendor of Mrs. Arty’s, for all its pretension to +superiority. Why, a lot of the pictures weren’t framed! And you should +have seen the giltness and fruit-borderness of the frames at Mrs. +Arty’s! + +(_b_) That the people were brothers-in-talk to the inmates of the flat +on Great James Street, London, only far less, and friendly. + +(_c_) That Mr. Wrenn was now a man of friends, and if the “blooming +Bohemians,” as he called them, didn’t like him they were permitted to +go to the dickens. + +Istra was always across the room from him somehow. He found himself +glad. It made their parting definite. + +He was going back to his own people, he was deciding. + +As he rose with elaborate boarding-house apologies to the room at large +for going, and a cheerful but not intimate “Good night” to Istra, she +followed him to the door and into the dark long hallway without. + +“Good night, Mouse dear. I’m glad you got a chance to talk to the +Silver Girl. But was Mr. Hargis rude to you? I heard him talking Single +Tax—or was it Matisse?—and he’s usually rude when he talks about them.” + +“No. He was all right.” + +“Then what _is_ worrying you?” + +“Oh—nothing. Good ni—” + +“You _are_ going off angry. _Aren’t_ you?” + +“No, but—oh, there ain’t any use of our—of me being— _Is_ there?” + +“N-no—” + +“Matisse—the guy you just spoke about—and these artists here tonight in +bobtail dress-suits—I wouldn’t know when to wear one of them things, +and when a swallow-tail—if I had one, even—or when a Prince Albert or—” + +“Oh, not a Prince Albert, Mouse dear. Say, a frock-coat.” + +“Sure. That’s what I mean. It’s like that Matisse guy. I don’t know +about none of the things you’re interested in. While you’ve been away +from Mrs. Arty’s—Lord, I’ve missed you so! But when I try to train with +your bunch, or when you spring Matisse” (he seemed peculiarly to resent +the unfortunate French artist) “on me I sort of get onto myself—and now +it ain’t like it was in England; I’ve got a bunch of my own I can chase +around with. Anyway, I got onto myself tonight. I s’pose it’s partly +because I been thinking you didn’t care much for _my_ friends.” + +“But, Mouse dear, all this isn’t news to me. Surely you, who’ve gipsied +with me, aren’t going to be so obvious, so banal, as to blame _me_ +because you’ve cared for me, are you, child?” + +“Oh no, no, no! I didn’t mean to do that. I just wanted—oh, gee! I +dunno—well, I wanted to have things between us definite.” + +“I do understand. You’re quite right. And now we’re just friends, +aren’t we?” + +“Yes.” + +“Then good-by. And sometime when I’m back in New York—I’m going to +California in a few days—I think I’ll be able to get back here—I +certainly hope so—though of course I’ll have to keep house for friend +father for a while, and maybe I’ll marry myself with a local magnate in +desperation—but, as I was saying, dear, when I get back here we’ll have +a good dinner, _nicht wahr?_” + +“Yes, and—good-by.” + +She stood at the top of the stairs looking down. He slowly clumped down +the wooden treads, boiling with the amazing discoveries that he had +said good-by to Istra, that he was not sorry, and that now he could +offer to Nelly Croubel everything. + +Istra suddenly called, “O Mouse, wait just a moment.” + +She darted like a swallow. She threw her arm about his shoulder and +kissed his cheek. Instantly she was running up-stairs again, and had +disappeared into the studio. + +Mr. William Wrenn was walking rapidly up Riverside Drive, thinking +about his letters to the Southern merchants. + +While he was leaving the studio building he had perfectly seen himself +as one who was about to go through a tumultuous agony, after which he +would be free of all the desire for Istra and ready to serve Nelly +sincerely and humbly. + +But he found that the agony was all over. Even to save his dignity as +one who was being dramatic, he couldn’t keep his thoughts on Istra. + +Every time he thought of Nelly his heart was warm and he chuckled +softly. Several times out of nothing came pictures of the supercilious +persons whom he had heard solving the problems of the world at the +studio on Washington Square, and he muttered: “Oh, hope they choke. +Istra’s all right, though; she learnt me an awful lot. But—gee! I’m +glad she ain’t in the same house; I suppose I’d ag’nize round if she +was.” + +Suddenly, at no particular street corner on Riverside Drive, just _a_ +street, he fled over to Broadway and the Subway. He had to be under the +same roof with Nelly. If it were only possible to see her that night! +But it was midnight. However, he formulated a plan. The next morning he +would leave the office, find her at her department store, and make her +go out to Manhattan Beach with him for dinner that night. + +He was home. He went happily up the stairs. He would dream of Nelly, +and— + +Nelly’s door opened, and she peered out, drawing her _peignoir_ about +her. + +“Oh,” she said, softly, “is it you?” + +“Yes. My, you’re up late.” + +“Do you—Are you all right?” + +He dashed down the hall and stood shyly scratching at the straw of his +newest hat. + +“Why yes, Nelly, course. Poor—Oh, don’t tell me you have a headache +again?” + +“No—I was awful foolish, of course, but I saw you when you went out +this evening, and you looked so savage, and you didn’t look very well.” + +“But now it’s all right.” + +“Then good night.” + +“Oh no—listen—please do! I went over to the place Miss Nash is living +at, because I was pretty sure that I ain’t hipped on her—sort of +hypnotized by her—any more. And I found I ain’t! _I ain’t!_ I don’t +know what to say, I want to—I want you to know that from going to try +and see if I can’t get you to care for me.” He was dreadfully earnest, +and rather quiet, with the dignity of the man who has found himself. +“I’m scared,” he went on, “about saying this, because maybe you’ll +think I’ve got an idea I’m kind of a little tin god, and all I’ve got +to do is to say which girl I’ll want and she’ll come a-running, but it +isn’t that; _it isn’t_. It’s just that I want you to know I’m going to +give _all_ of me to you now if I can get you to want me. And I _am_ +glad I knew Istra—she learnt me a lot about books and all, so I have +more to me, or maybe will have, for you. It’s —Nelly—promise you’ll +be—my friend—promise—If you knew how I rushed back here tonight to see +you!” + +“Billy—” + +She held out her hand, and he grasped it as though it were the sacred +symbol of his dreams. + +“To-morrow,” she smiled, with a hint of tears, “I’ll be a reg’lar lady, +I guess, and make you explain and explain like everything, but now I’m +just glad. Yes,” defiantly, “I _will_ admit it if I want to! I _am_ +glad!” + +Her door closed. + + + + +CHAPTER XIX +TO A HAPPY SHORE + + +Upon an evening of November, 1911, it chanced that of Mrs. Arty’s flock +only Nelly and Mr. Wrenn were at home. They had finished two hot games +of pinochle, and sat with their feet on a small amiable oil-stove. Mr. +Wrenn laid her hand against his cheek with infinite content. He was +outlining the situation at the office. + +The business had so increased that Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle, the +manager, had told Rabin, the head traveling-salesman, that he was going +to appoint an assistant manager. Should he, Mr. Wrenn queried, try to +get the position? The other candidates, Rabin and Henson and Glover, +were all good friends of his, and, furthermore, could he “run a bunch +of guys if he was over them?” + +“Why, of course you can, Billy. I remember when you came here you were +sort of shy. But now you’re ’most the star boarder! And won’t those +others be trying to get the job away from you? Of course!” + +“Yes, that’s so.” + +“Why, Billy, some day you might be manager!” + +“Say, that would be great, wouldn’t it! But hones’, Nell, do you think +I might have a chance to land the assistant’s job?” + +“I certainly do.” + +“Oh, Nelly—gee! you make me—oh, learn to bank on myself—” + +He kissed her for the second time in his life. + +“Mr. Guilfogle,” stated Mr. Wrenn, next day, “I want to talk to you +about that assistant managership.” + +The manager, in his new office and his new flowered waistcoat, had +acted interested when Our steady and reliable Mr. Wrenn came in. But +now he tried to appear dignified and impatient. + +“That—” he began. + +“I’ve been here longer than any of the other men, and I know every line +of the business now, even the manufacturing. You remember I held down +Henson’s job when his wife was sick.” + +“Yes, but—” + +“And I guess Jake thinks I can boss all right, and Miss Leavenbetz, +too.” + +“Now will you kindly ’low _me_ to talk a little, Wrenn? I know a +_little_ something about how things go in the office myself! I don’t +deny you’re a good man. Maybe some day you may get to be assistant +manager. But I’m going to give the first try at it to Glover. He’s had +so much more experience with meeting people directly—personally. But +you’re a good man—” + +“Yes, I’ve heard that before, but I’ll be gol-darned if I’ll stick at +one desk all my life just because I save you all the trouble in that +department, Guilfogle, and now—” + +“Now, now, now, now! Calm down; hold your horses, my boy. This ain’t a +melodrama, you know.” + +“Yes, I know; I didn’t mean to get sore, but you know—” + +“Well, now I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to make you +head of the manufacturing department instead of getting in a new man, +and shift Henson to purchasing. I’ll put Jake on your old job, and +expect you to give him a lift when he needs it. And you’d better keep +up the most important of the jollying-letters, I guess.” + +“Well, I like that all right. I appreciate it. But of course I expect +more pay—two men’s work—” + +“Let’s see; what you getting now?” + +“Twenty-three.” + +“Well, that’s a good deal, you know. The overhead expenses have been +increasing a lot faster than our profits, and we’ve—” + +“Huh!” + +“—got to see where new business is coming in to justify the liberal way +we’ve treated you men before we can afford to do much +salary-raising—though we’re just as glad to do it as you men to get it; +but—” + +“Huh!” + +“—if we go to getting extravagant we’ll go bankrupt, and then we won’t +any of us have jobs…. Still, I _am_ willing to raise you to +twenty-five, though—” + +“Thirty-five!” + +Mr. Wrenn stood straight. The manager tried to stare him down. Panic +was attacking Mr. Wrenn, and he had to think of Nelly to keep up his +defiance. At last Mr. Guilfogle glared, then roared: “Well, confound +it, Wrenn, I’ll give you twenty-nine-fifty, and not a cent more for at +least a year. That’s final. _Understand?_” + +“All right,” chirped Mr. Wrenn. + +“Gee!” he was exulting to himself, “never thought I’d get anything like +that. Twenty-nine-fifty! More ’n enough to marry on now! I’m going to +get _twenty-nine-fifty!_” + +“Married five months ago to-night, honey,” said Mr. Wrenn to Nelly, his +wife, in their Bronx flat, and thus set down October 17, 1913, as a +great date in history. + +“Oh, I _know_ it, Billy. I wondered if you’d remember. You just ought +to see the dessert I’m making—but that’s a s’prise.” + +“Remember! Should say I did! See what I’ve got for somebody!” + +He opened a parcel and displayed a pair of red-worsted bed-slippers, a +creation of one of the greatest red-worsted artists in the whole land. +Yes, and he could afford them, too. Was he not making thirty-two +dollars a week—he who had been poor! And his chances for the assistant +managership “looked good.” + +“Oh, they’ll be so comfy when it gets cold. You’re a dear! Oh, Billy, +the janitress says the Jewish lady across the court in number seventy +is so lazy she wears her corsets to bed!” + +“Did the janitress get the coal put in, Nell?” + +“Yes, but her husband is laid off again. I was talking to her quite a +while this afternoon…. Oh, dear, I do get so lonely for you, +sweetheart, with nothing to do. But I did read some _Kim_ this +afternoon. I liked it.” + +“That’s fine!” + +“But it’s kind of hard. Maybe I’ll—Oh, I don’t know. I guess I’ll have +to read a lot.” + +He patted her back softly, and hoped: “Maybe some day we can get a +little house out of town, and then you can garden…. Sorry old Siddons +is laid off again…. Is the gas-stove working all right now?” + +“Um-huh, honey. I fixed it.” + +“Say, let me make the coffee, Nell. You’ll have enough to do with +setting the table and watching the sausages.” + +“All rightee, hun. But, oh, Billy, I’m so, shamed. I was going to get +some potato salad, and I’ve just remembered I forgot.” She hung her +head, with a fingertip to her pretty lips, and pretended to look +dreadfully ashamed. “Would you mind so ver-ee much skipping down to +Bachmeyer’s for some? Ah-h, is it just fearful neglected when it comes +home all tired out?” + +“No, indeedy. But you got to kiss me first, else I won’t go at all.” + +Nelly turned to him and, as he held her, her head bent far back. She +lay tremblingly inert against his arms, staring up at him, panting. +With her head on his shoulder—a soft burden of love that his shoulder +rejoiced to bear—they stood gazing out of the narrow kitchen window of +their sixth-story flat and noticed for the hundredth time that the +trees in a vacant lot across were quite as red and yellow as the +millionaire trees in Central Park along Fifth Avenue. + +“Sometime,” mused Mr. Wrenn, “we’ll live in Jersey, where there’s trees +and trees and trees—and maybe there’ll be kiddies to play under them, +and then you won’t be lonely, honey; they’ll keep you some busy!” + +“You skip along now, and don’t be talking nonsense, or I’ll not give +you one single wee bit of dinner!” Then she blushed adorably, with +infinite hope. + +He hastened out of the kitchen, with the happy glance he never failed +to give the living-room—its red-papered walls with shiny imitation-oak +woodwork; the rows of steins on the plate-rack; the imitation-oak +dining-table, with a vase of newly dusted paper roses; the Morris +chair, with Nelly’s sewing on a tiny wicker table beside it; the large +gilt-framed oleograph of “Pike’s Peak by Moonlight.” + +He clattered down the slate treads of the stairs. He fairly vaulted out +of doors. He stopped, startled. + +Across the ragged vacant lots to the west a vast sunset processional +marched down the sky. It had not been visible from their flat, which +looked across East River to the tame grassy shore of a real-estate +boomer’s suburb. “Gee!” he mourned, “it’s the first time I’ve noticed a +sunset for a month! I used to see knights’ flags and Mandalay and all +sorts of stuff in sunsets!” + +Wistfully the exile gazed at his lost kingdom, till the October chill +aroused him. + +But he learned a new way to cook eggs from the proprietor of the +delicatessen store; and his plans for spending the evening playing +pinochle with Nelly, and reading the evening paper aloud, set him +chuckling softly to himself as he hurried home through the brisk autumn +breeze with seven cents’ worth of potato salad. + +THE END + + + + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR MR. 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You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms +of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online +at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you +are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the +country where you are located before using this eBook. +</div> +<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Our Mr. Wrenn<br /> +The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man</div> +<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Sinclair Lewis</div> +<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: April 4, 2002 [eBook #4961]<br /> +[Most recently updated: July 28, 2021]</div> +<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div> +<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div> +<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: Charles Aldarondo</div> +<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR MR. WRENN ***</div> + +<div class="fig" style="width:55%;"> +<img src="images/cover.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="[Illustration]" /> +</div> + +<h1>Our Mr. Wrenn</h1> + +<h3>The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man</h3> + +<h2 class="no-break">by Sinclair Lewis</h2> + +<h5>NEW YORK AND LONDON</h5> + +<h5>MCMXIV</h5> + +<hr /> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<p class="center"> +TO GRACE LIVINGSTONE HEGGER +</p> + +</div><!--end chapter--> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<hr /> + +<h2>Contents</h2> + +<table summary="" style=""> + +<tr> +<td> <a href="#chap01">CHAPTER I. MR. WRENN IS LONELY</a></td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td> <a href="#chap02">CHAPTER II. HE WALKS WITH MISS THERESA</a></td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td> <a href="#chap03">CHAPTER III. HE STARTS FOR THE LAND OF ELSEWHERE</a></td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td> <a href="#chap04">CHAPTER IV. HE BECOMES THE GREAT LITTLE BILL WRENN</a></td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td> <a href="#chap05">CHAPTER V. HE FINDS MUCH QUAINT ENGLISH FLAVOR</a></td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td> <a href="#chap06">CHAPTER VI. HE IS AN ORPHAN</a></td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td> <a href="#chap07">CHAPTER VII. HE MEETS A TEMPERAMENT</a></td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td> <a href="#chap08">CHAPTER VIII. HE TIFFINS</a></td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td> <a href="#chap09">CHAPTER IX. HE ENCOUNTERS THE INTELLECTUALS</a></td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td> <a href="#chap10">CHAPTER X. HE GOES A-GIPSYING</a></td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td> <a href="#chap11">CHAPTER XI. HE BUYS AN ORANGE TIE</a></td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td> <a href="#chap12">CHAPTER XII. HE DISCOVERS AMERICA</a></td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td> <a href="#chap13">CHAPTER XIII. HE IS “OUR MR. WRENN”</a></td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td> <a href="#chap14">CHAPTER XIV. HE ENTERS SOCIETY</a></td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td> <a href="#chap15">CHAPTER XV. HE STUDIES FIVE HUNDRED, SAVOUIR FAIRE, AND LOTSA-SNAP OFFICE MOTTOES</a></td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td> <a href="#chap16">CHAPTER XVI. HE BECOMES MILDLY RELIGIOUS AND HIGHLY LITERARY</a></td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td> <a href="#chap17">CHAPTER XVII. HE IS BLOWN BY THE WHIRLWIND</a></td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td> <a href="#chap18">CHAPTER XVIII. AND FOLLOWS A WANDERING FLAME THROUGH PERILOUS SEAS</a></td> +</tr> + +<tr> +<td> <a href="#chap19">CHAPTER XIX. TO A HAPPY SHORE</a></td> +</tr> + +</table> + +</div><!--end chapter--> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2><a name="chap01"></a>CHAPTER I<br/> +MR. WRENN IS LONELY</h2> + +<p> +The ticket-taker of the Nickelorion Moving-Picture Show is a public personage, +who stands out on Fourteenth Street, New York, wearing a gorgeous light-blue +coat of numerous brass buttons. He nods to all the patrons, and his nod is the +most cordial in town. Mr. Wrenn used to trot down to Fourteenth Street, passing +ever so many other shows, just to get that cordial nod, because he had a lonely +furnished room for evenings, and for daytime a tedious job that always made his +head stuffy. +</p> + +<p> +He stands out in the correspondence of the Souvenir and Art Novelty Company as +“Our Mr. Wrenn,” who would be writing you directly and explaining +everything most satisfactorily. At thirty-four Mr. Wrenn was the sales-entry +clerk of the Souvenir Company. He was always bending over bills and columns of +figures at a desk behind the stock-room. He was a meek little bachlor—a +person of inconspicuous blue ready-made suits, and a small unsuccessful +mustache. +</p> + +<p> +To-day—historians have established the date as April 9, 1910—there +had been some confusing mixed orders from the Wisconsin retailers, and Mr. +Wrenn had been “called down” by the office manager, Mr. Mortimer R. +Guilfogle. He needed the friendly nod of the Nickelorion ticket-taker. He found +Fourteenth Street, after office hours, swept by a dusty wind that whisked the +skirts of countless plump Jewish girls, whose V-necked blouses showed soft +throats of a warm brown. Under the elevated station he secretly made believe +that he was in Paris, for here beautiful Italian boys swayed with trays of +violets; a tramp displayed crimson mechanical rabbits, which squeaked, on +silvery leading-strings; and a newsstand was heaped with the orange and green +and gold of magazine covers. +</p> + +<p> +“Gee!” inarticulated Mr. Wrenn. “Lots of colors. Hope I see +foreign stuff like that in the moving pictures.” +</p> + +<p> +He came primly up to the Nickelorion, feeling in his vest pockets for a nickel +and peering around the booth at the friendly ticket-taker. But the latter was +thinking about buying Johnny’s pants. Should he get them at the +Fourteenth Street Store, or Siegel-Cooper’s, or over at Aronson’s, +near home? So ruminating, he twiddled his wheel mechanically, and Mr. +Wrenn’s pasteboard slip was indifferently received in the plate-glass +gullet of the grinder without the taker’s even seeing the clerk’s +bow and smile. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn trembled into the door of the Nickelorion. He wanted to turn back and +rebuke this fellow, but was restrained by shyness. He <i>had</i> liked the +man’s “Fine evenin’, sir “—rain or +shine—but he wouldn’t stand for being cut. Wasn’t he making +nineteen dollars a week, as against the ticket-taker’s ten or twelve? He +shook his head with the defiance of a cornered mouse, fussed with his mustache, +and regarded the moving pictures gloomily. +</p> + +<p> +They helped him. After a Selig domestic drama came a stirring Vitagraph Western +scene, “The Goat of the Rancho,” which depicted with much humor and +tumult the revolt of a ranch cook, a Chinaman. Mr. Wrenn was really seeing, not +cow-punchers and sage-brush, but himself, defying the office manager’s +surliness and revolting against the ticket-man’s rudeness. Now he was +ready for the nearly overpowering delight of travel-pictures. He bounced +slightly as a Gaumont film presented Java. +</p> + +<p> +He was a connoisseur of travel-pictures, for all his life he had been planning +a great journey. Though he had done Staten Island and patronized an excursion +to Bound Brook, neither of these was his grand tour. It was yet to be taken. In +Mr. Wrenn, apparently fastened to New York like a domestic-minded barnacle, lay +the possibilities of heroic roaming. He knew it. He, too, like the man who had +taken the Gaumont pictures, would saunter among dusky Javan natives in +“markets with tiles on the roofs and temples and—and—uh, +well—places!” The scent of Oriental spices was in his broadened +nostrils as he scampered out of the Nickelorion, without a look at the +ticket-taker, and headed for “home”—for his third-floor-front +on West Sixteenth Street. He wanted to prowl through his collection of +steamship brochures for a description of Java. But, of course, when one’s +landlady has both the sciatica and a case of Patient Suffering one stops in the +basement dining-room to inquire how she is. +</p> + +<p> +Mrs. Zapp was a fat landlady. When she sat down there was a straight line from +her chin to her knees. She was usually sitting down. When she moved she +groaned, and her apparel creaked. She groaned and creaked from bed to +breakfast, and ate five griddle-cakes, two helpin’s of scrapple, an egg, +some rump steak, and three cups of coffee, slowly and resentfully. She creaked +and groaned from breakfast to her rocking-chair, and sat about wondering why +Providence had inflicted upon her a weak digestion. Mr. Wrenn also wondered +why, sympathetically, but Mrs. Zapp was too conscientiously dolorous to be much +cheered by the sympathy of a nigger-lovin’ Yankee, who couldn’t +appreciate the subtle sorrows of a Zapp of Zapp’s Bog, allied to all the +First Families of Virginia. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn did nothing more presumptuous than sit still, in the stuffy +furniture-crowded basement room, which smelled of dead food and deader pride in +a race that had never existed. He sat still because the chair was broken. It +had been broken now for four years. +</p> + +<p> +For the hundred and twenty-ninth time in those years Mrs. Zapp said, in her +rich corruption of Southern negro dialect, which can only be indicated here, +“Ah been meaning to get that chair mended, Mist’ Wrenn.” He +looked gratified and gazed upon the crayon enlargements of Lee Theresa, the +older Zapp daughter (who was forewoman in a factory), and of Godiva. Godiva +Zapp was usually called “Goaty,” and many times a day was she +called by Mrs. Zapp. A tamed child drudge was Goaty, with adenoids, which Mrs. +Zapp had been meanin’ to have removed, and which she would continue to +have benevolent meanin’s about till it should be too late, and she should +discover that Providence never would let Goaty go to school. +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, Mist’ Wrenn, Ah told Goaty she was to see the man about +getting that chair fixed, but she nev’ does nothing Ah tell her.” +</p> + +<p> +In the kitchen was the noise of Goaty, ungovernable Goaty, aged eight, still +snivelingly washing, though not cleaning, the incredible pile of dinner dishes. +With a trail of hesitating remarks on the sadness of sciatica and windy +evenings Mr. Wrenn sneaked forth from the august presence of Mrs. Zapp and +mounted to paradise—his third-floor-front. +</p> + +<p> +It was an abjectly respectable room—the bedspread patched; no two pieces +of furniture from the same family; half-tones from the magazines pinned on the +wall. But on the old marble mantelpiece lived his friends, books from +wanderland. Other friends the room had rarely known. It was hard enough for Mr. +Wrenn to get acquainted with people, anyway, and Mrs. Zapp did not expect her +gennulman lodgers to entertain. So Mr. Wrenn had given up asking even Charley +Carpenter, the assistant bookkeeper at the Souvenir Company, to call. That left +him the books, which he now caressed with small eager finger-tips. He picked +out a P. & O. circular, and hastily left for fairyland. +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +The April skies glowed with benevolence this Saturday morning. The Metropolitan +Tower was singing, bright ivory tipped with gold, uplifted and intensely glad +of the morning. The buildings walling in Madison Square were jubilant; the +honest red-brick fronts, radiant; the new marble, witty. The sparrows in the +middle of Fifth Avenue were all talking at once, scandalously but cleverly. The +polished brass of limousines threw off teethy smiles. At least so Mr. Wrenn +fancied as he whisked up Fifth Avenue, the skirts of his small blue +double-breasted coat wagging. He was going blocks out of his way to the office; +ready to defy time and eternity, yes, and even the office manager. He had +awakened with Defiance as his bedfellow, and throughout breakfast at the +hustler Dairy Lunch sunshine had flickered over the dirty tessellated floor. +</p> + +<p> +He pranced up to the Souvenir Company’s brick building, on Twenty-eighth +Street near Sixth Avenue. In the office he chuckled at his ink-well and the +untorn blotters on his orderly desk. Though he sat under the weary unnatural +brilliance of a mercury-vapor light, he dashed into his work, and was too keen +about this business of living merrily to be much flustered by the bustle of the +lady buyer’s superior “<i>Good</i> morning.” Even up to +ten-thirty he was still slamming down papers on his desk. Just let any one try +to stop his course, his readiness for snapping fingers at The Job; just let +them <i>try</i> it, that was all he wanted! +</p> + +<p> +Then he was shot out of his chair and four feet along the corridor, in reflex +response to the surly “Bur-r-r-r-r” of the buzzer. Mr. Mortimer R. +Guilfogle, the manager, desired to see him. He scampered along the corridor and +slid decorously through the manager’s doorway into the long sun-bright +room, ornate with rugs and souvenirs. Seven Novelties glittered on the desk +alone, including a large rococo Shakespeare-style glass ink-well containing +cloves and a small iron Pittsburg-style one containing ink. Mr. Wrenn blinked +like a noon-roused owlet in the brilliance. The manager dropped his fist on the +desk, glared, smoothed his flowered prairie of waistcoat, and growled, his red +jowls quivering: +</p> + +<p> +“Look here, Wrenn, what’s the matter with you? The Bronx Emporium +order for May Day novelties was filled twice, they write me.” +</p> + +<p> +“They ordered twice, sir. By ’phone,” smiled Mr. Wrenn, in an +agony of politeness. +</p> + +<p> +“They ordered hell, sir! Twice—the same order?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, sir; their buyer was prob—” +</p> + +<p> +“They say they’ve looked it up. Anyway, they won’t pay twice. +I know, em. We’ll have to crawl down graceful, and all because +you—I want to know why you ain’t more careful!” +</p> + +<p> +The announcement that Mr. Wrenn twice wriggled his head, and once tossed it, +would not half denote his wrath. At last! It was here—the time for +revolt, when he was going to be defiant. He had been careful; old Goglefogle +was only barking; but why should <i>he</i> be barked at? With his voice +palpitating and his heart thudding so that he felt sick he declared: +</p> + +<p> +“I’m <i>sure</i>, sir, about that order. I looked it up. Their +buyer was drunk!” +</p> + +<p> +It was done. And now would he be discharged? The manager was speaking: +</p> + +<p> +“Probably. You looked it up, eh? Um! Send me in the two order-records. +Well. But, anyway, I want you to be more careful after this, Wrenn. +You’re pretty sloppy. Now get out. Expect me to make firms pay twice for +the same order, cause of your carelessness?” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn found himself outside in the dark corridor. The manager hadn’t +seemed much impressed by his revolt. +</p> + +<p> +The manager wasn’t. He called a stenographer and dictated: +</p> + +<p> +“Bronx Emporium: +</p> + +<p> +“G<small>ENTLEMEN</small>:—Our Mr. Wrenn has again (underline that +‘again,’ Miss Blaustein), again looked up your order for May Day +novelties. As we wrote before, order certainly was duplicated by ’phone. +Our Mr. Wrenn is thoroughly reliable, and we have his records of these two +orders. We shall therefore have to push collection on both—” +</p> + +<p> +After all, Mr. Wrenn was thinking, the crafty manager might be merely +concealing his hand. Perhaps he had understood the defiance. That gladdened him +till after lunch. But at three, when his head was again foggy with work and he +had forgotten whether there was still April anywhere, he began to dread what +the manager might do to him. Suppose he lost his job; The Job! He worked +unnecessarily late, hoping that the manager would learn of it. As he wavered +home, drunk with weariness, his fear of losing The Job was almost equal to his +desire to resign from The Job. +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +He had worked so late that when he awoke on Sunday morning he was still in a +whirl of figures. As he went out to his breakfast of coffee and whisked wheat +at the Hustler Lunch the lines between the blocks of the cement walk, radiant +in a white flare of sunshine, irritatingly recalled the cross-lines of +order-lists, with the narrow cement blocks at the curb standing for unfilled +column-headings. Even the ridges of the Hustler Lunch’s imitation steel +ceiling, running in parallel lines, jeered down at him that he was a prosaic +man whose path was a ruler. +</p> + +<p> +He went clear up to the branch post-office after breakfast to get the Sunday +mail, but the mail was a disappointment. He was awaiting a wonderful fully +illustrated guide to the Land of the Midnight Sun, a suggestion of possible and +coyly improbable trips, whereas he got only a letter from his oldest +acquaintance—Cousin John, of Parthenon, New York, the +boy-who-comes-to-play of Mr. Wrenn’s back-yard days in Parthenon. Without +opening the letter Mr. Wrenn tucked it into his inside coat pocket, threw away +his toothpick, and turned to Sunday wayfaring. +</p> + +<p> +He jogged down Twenty-third Street to the North River ferries afoot. Trolleys +took money, and of course one saves up for future great traveling. Over him the +April clouds were fetterless vagabonds whose gaiety made him shrug with +excitement and take a curb with a frisk as gambolsome as a Central Park lamb. +There was no hint of sales-lists in the clouds, at least. And with them Mr. +Wrenn’s soul swept along, while his half-soled Cum-Fee-Best $3.80 shoes +were ambling past warehouses. Only once did he condescend to being really on +Twenty-third Street. At the Ninth Avenue corner, under the grimy Elevated, he +sighted two blocks down to the General Theological Seminary’s brick +Gothic and found in a pointed doorway suggestions of alien beauty. +</p> + +<p> +But his real object was to loll on a West and South Railroad in luxury, and go +sailing out into the foam and perilous seas of North River. He passed through +the smoking-cabin. He didn’t smoke—the habit used up travel-money. +Once seated on the upper deck, he knew that at last he was outward-bound on a +liner. True, there was no great motion, but Mr. Wrenn was inclined to let +realism off easily in this feature of his voyage. At least there were undoubted +life-preservers in the white racks overhead; and everywhere the world, to his +certain witnessing, was turned to crusading, to setting forth in great ships as +if it were again in the brisk morning of history when the joy of adventure +possessed the Argonauts. +</p> + +<p> +He wasn’t excited over the liners they passed. He was so experienced in +all of travel, save the traveling, as to have gained a calm interested +knowledge. He knew the <i>Campagnia</i> three docks away, and explained to a +Harlem grocer her fine points, speaking earnestly of stacks and sticks, tonnage +and knots. +</p> + +<p> +Not excited, but—where couldn’t he go if he were pulling out for +Arcady on the <i>Campagnia!</i> Gee! What were even the building-block towers +of the Metropolitan and Singer buildings and the <i>Times’s</i> +cream-stick compared with some old shrine in a cathedral close that was misted +with centuries! +</p> + +<p> +All this he felt and hummed to himself, though not in words. He had never heard +of Arcady, though for many years he had been a citizen of that demesne. +</p> + +<p> +Sure, he declared to himself, he was on the liner now; he was sliding up the +muddy Mersey (see the <i>W. S. Travel Notes</i> for the source of his visions); +he was off to St. George’s Square for an organ-recital (see the English +Baedeker); then an express for London and—Gee! +</p> + +<p> +The ferryboat was entering her slip. Mr. Wrenn trotted toward the bow to thrill +over the bump of the boat’s snub nose against the lofty swaying piles and +the swash of the brown waves heaped before her as she sidled into place. He was +carried by the herd on into the station. +</p> + +<p> +He did not notice the individual people in his exultation as he heard the great +chords of the station’s paean. The vast roof roared as the iron coursers +stamped titanic hoofs of scorn at the little stay-at-home. +</p> + +<p> +That is a washed-out hint of how the poets might describe Mr. Wrenn’s +passion. What he said was “Gee!” +</p> + +<p> +He strolled by the lists of destinations hung on the track gates. Chicago (the +plains! the Rockies! sunset over mining-camps!), Washington, and the magic +Southland—thither the iron horses would be galloping, their swarthy smoke +manes whipped back by the whirlwind, pounding out with clamorous strong hoofs +their sixty miles an hour. Very well. In time he also would mount upon the iron +coursers and charge upon Chicago and the Southland; just as soon as he got +ready. +</p> + +<p> +Then he headed for Cortlandt Street; for Long Island, City. finally, the Navy +Yard. Along his way were the docks of the tramp steamers where he might ship as +steward in the all-promising Sometime. He had never done anything so reckless +as actually to ask a skipper for the chance to go a-sailing, but he had once +gone into a mission society’s free shipping-office on West Street where a +disapproving elder had grumped at him, “Are you a sailor? No? Can’t +do anything for you, my friend. Are you saved?” He wasn’t going to +risk another horror like that, yet when the golden morning of Sometime dawned +he certainly was going to go cruising off to palm-bordered lagoons. +</p> + +<p> +As he walked through Long Island City he contrived conversations with the +sailors he passed. It would have surprised a Norwegian bos’un’s +mate to learn that he was really a gun-runner, and that, as a matter of fact, +he was now telling yarns of the Spanish Main to the man who slid deprecatingly +by him. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn envied the jackies on the training-ship and carelessly went to sea as +the President’s guest in the admiral’s barge and was frightened by +the stare of a sauntering shop-girl and arrived home before dusk, to Mrs. +Zapp’s straitened approval. +</p> + +<p> +Dusk made incantations in his third-floor-front. Pleasantly fagged in those +slight neat legs, after his walk, Mr. Wrenn sat in the wicker rocker by the +window, patting his scrubby tan mustache and reviewing the day’s +wandering. When the gas was lighted he yearned over pictures in a geographical +magazine for a happy hour, then yawned to himself, “Well-l-l, Willum, +guess it’s time to crawl into the downy.” +</p> + +<p> +He undressed and smoothed his ready-made suit on the rocking-chair back. +Sitting on the edge of his bed, quaint in his cotton night-gown, like a rare +little bird of dull plumage, he rubbed his head sleepily. Um-m-m-m-m! How tired +he was! He went to open the window. Then his tamed heart leaped into a waltz, +and he forgot third-floor-fronts and sleepiness. +</p> + +<p> +Through the window came the chorus of fog-horns on North River. +“Boom-m-m!” That must be a giant liner, battling up through the +fog. (It was a ferry.) A liner! She’d be roaring just like that if she +were off the Banks! If he were only off the Banks! “Toot! Toot!” +That was a tug. “Whawn-n-n!” Another liner. The tumultuous chorus +repeated to him all the adventures of the day. +</p> + +<p> +He dropped upon the bed again and stared absently at his clothes. Out of the +inside coat pocket stuck the unopened letter from Cousin John. +</p> + +<p> +He read a paragraph of it. He sprang from the bed and danced a tarantella, +pranced in his cottony nightgown like a drunken Yaqui. The letter announced +that the flinty farm at Parthenon, left to Mr. Wrenn by his father, had been +sold. Its location on a river bluff had made it valuable to the Parthenon +Chautauqua Association. There was now to his credit in the Parthenon National +Bank nine hundred and forty dollars! +</p> + +<p> +He was wealthy, then. He had enough to stalk up and down the earth for many +venturesome (but economical) months, till he should learn the trade of +wandering, and its mysterious trick of living without a job or a salary. +</p> + +<p> +He crushed his pillow with burrowing head and sobbed excitedly, with a terrible +stomach-sinking and a chill shaking. Then he laughed and wanted to—but +didn’t—rush into the adjacent hall room and tell the total stranger +there of this world-changing news. He listened in the hall to learn whether the +Zapps were up, but heard nothing; returned and cantered up and down, gloating +on a map of the world. +</p> + +<p> +“Gee! It’s happened. I could travel all the time. I guess I +won’t be—very much—afraid of wrecks and stuff. . . . Things +like that. . . . Gee! If I don’t get to bed I’ll be late at the +office in the morning!” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn lay awake till three o’clock. Monday morning he felt rather +ashamed of having done so eccentric a thing. But he got to the office on time. +He was worried with the cares of wealth, with having to decide when to leave +for his world-wanderings, but he was also very much aware that office managers +are disagreeable if one isn’t on time. All morning he did nothing more +reckless than balance his new fortune, plus his savings, against steamship +fares on a waste half-sheet of paper. +</p> + +<p> +The noon-hour was not The Job’s, but his, for exploration of the parlous +lands of romance that lie hard by Twenty-eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. But he +had to go out to lunch with Charley Carpenter, the assistant bookkeeper, that +he might tell the news. As for Charley, He needed frequently to have a +confidant who knew personally the tyrannous ways of the office manager, Mr. +Guilfogle. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn and Charley chose (that is to say, Charley chose) a table at +Drubel’s Eating House. Mr. Wrenn timidly hinted, “I’ve got +some big news to tell you.” +</p> + +<p> +But Charley interrupted, “Say, did you hear old Goglefogle light into me +this morning? I won’t stand for it. Say, did you hear him—the +old—” +</p> + +<p> +“What was the trouble, Charley?” +</p> + +<p> +“Trouble? Nothing was the trouble. Except with old Goglefogle. I made one +little break in my accounts. Why, if old Gogie had to keep track of +seventy-’leven accounts and watch every single last movement of a fool +girl that can’t even run the adding-machine, why, he’d get green +around the gills. He’d never do anything <i>but</i> make mistakes! Well, +I guess the old codger must have had a bum breakfast this morning. Wanted some +exercise to digest it. Me, I was the exercise—I was the goat. He calls me +in, and he calls me <i>down</i>, and me—well, just lemme tell you, Wrenn, +I calls his bluff!” +</p> + +<p> +Charley Carpenter stopped his rapid tirade, delivered with quick head-shakes +like those of palsy, to raise his smelly cigarette to his mouth. Midway in this +slow gesture the memory of his wrongs again overpowered him. He flung his right +hand back on the table, scattering cigarette ashes, jerked back his head with +the irritated patience of a nervous martyr, then waved both hands about +spasmodically, while he snarled, with his cheaply handsome smooth face more +flushed than usual: +</p> + +<p> +“Sure! You can just bet your bottom dollar I let him see from the way I +looked at him that I wasn’t going to stand for no more monkey business. +You bet I did!… I’ll fix him, I will. You just <i>watch</i> me. (Hey, +Drubel, got any lemon merang? Bring me a hunk, will yuh?) Why, Wrenn, that +cross-eyed double-jointed fat old slob, I’ll slam him in the slats so +hard some day—I will, you just watch my smoke. If it wasn’t for +that messy wife of mine—I ought to desert her, and I will some day, +and—” +</p> + +<p> +“Yuh.” Mr. Wrenn was curt for a second…. “I know how it is, +Charley. But you’ll get over it, honest you will. Say, I’ve got +some news. Some land that my dad left me has sold for nearly a thousand plunks. +By the way, this lunch is on me. Let me pay for it, Charley.” +</p> + +<p> +Charley promised to let him pay, quite readily. And, expanding, said: +</p> + +<p> +“Great, Wrenn! Great! Lemme congratulate you. Don’t know anybody +I’d rather’ve had this happen to. You’re a meek little +baa-lamb, but you’ve got lots of stuff in you, old Wrennski. Oh say, by +the way, could. you let me have fifty cents till Saturday? Thanks. I’ll +pay it back sure. By golly! you’re the only man around the office that +’preciates what a double duck-lined old fiend old Goglefogle is, the +old—” +</p> + +<p> +“Aw, gee, Charley, I wish you wouldn’t jump on Guilfogle so hard. +He’s always treated me square.” +</p> + +<p> +“Gogie—square? Yuh, he’s square just like a hoop. You know +it, too, Wrenn. Now that you’ve got enough money so’s you +don’t need to be scared about the job you’ll realize it, and +you’ll want to soak him, same’s I do. <i>Say!</i>” The +impulse of a great idea made him gleefully shake his fist sidewise. “Say! +Why <i>don’t</i> you soak him? They bank on you at the Souvenir Company. +Darn’ sight more than you realize, lemme tell you. Why, you do about half +the stock-keeper’s work, sides your own. Tell you what you do. You go to +old Goglefogle and tell him you want a raise to twenty-five, and want it right +now. Yes, by golly, <i>thirty!</i> You’re worth that, or pretty +darn’ near it, but ’course old Goglefogle’ll never give it to +you. He’ll threaten to fire you if you say a thing more about it. You can +tell him to go ahead, and then where’ll he be? Guess that’ll call +his bluff some!” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, but, Charley, then if Guilfogle feels he can’t pay me that +much—you know he’s responsible to the directors; he can’t do +everything he wants to—why, he’ll just have to fire me, after +I’ve talked to him like that, whether he wants to or not. And +that’d leave us—that’d leave them—without a sales +clerk, right in the busy season.” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, sure, Wrenn; that’s what we want to do. If you go it ’d +leave ’em without just about <i>two</i> men. Bother ’em like the +deuce. It ’d bother Mr. Mortimer X. Y. Guglefugle most of all, thank the +Lord. He wouldn’t know where he was at—trying to break in a man +right in the busy season. Here’s your chance. Come on, kid; don’t +pass it up.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh gee, Charley, I can’t do that. You wouldn’t want me to +try to <i>hurt</i> the Souvenir Company after being there for—lemme see, +it must be seven years.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, maybe you <i>like</i> to get your cute little nose rubbed on the +grindstone! I suppose you’d like to stay on at nineteen per for the rest +of your life.” +</p> + +<p> +“Aw, Charley, don’t get sore; please don’t! I’d like to +get off, all right—like to go traveling, and stuff like that. Gee! +I’d like to wander round. But I can’t cut out right in the +bus—” +</p> + +<p> +“But can’t you see, you poor nut, you won’t be <i>leaving</i> +’em—they’ll either pay you what they ought to or lose +you.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, I don’t know about that, Charley. +</p> + +<p> +“Charley was making up for some uncertainty as to his own logic by +beaming persuasiveness, and Mr. Wrenn was afraid of being hypnotized. +“No, no!” he throbbed, rising. +</p> + +<p> +“Well, all right!” snarled Charley, “if you like to be +Gogie’s goat…. Oh, you’re all right, Wrennski. I suppose you had +ought to stay, if you feel you got to…. Well, so long. I’ve got to beat +it over and buy a pair of socks before I go back.” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn crept out of Drubel’s behind him, very melancholy. Even Charley +admitted that he “had ought to stay,” then; and what chance was +there of persuading the dread Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle that he wished to be +looked upon as one resigning? Where, then, any chance of globe-trotting; +perhaps for months he would remain in slavery, and he had hoped just that +morning— One dreadful quarter-hour with Mr. Guilfogle and he might be +free. He grinned to himself as he admitted that this was like seeing Europe +after merely swimming the mid-winter Atlantic. +</p> + +<p> +Well, he had nine minutes more, by his two-dollar watch; nine minutes of +vagabondage. He gazed across at a Greek restaurant with signs in real Greek +letters like “ruins at—well, at Aythens.” A Chinese chop-suey +den with a red-and-yellow carved dragon, and at an upper window a squat +Chinaman who might easily be carrying a <i>kris</i>, “or whatever them +Chink knives are,” as he observed for the hundredth time he had taken +this journey. A rotisserie, before whose upright fender of scarlet coals whole +ducks were happily roasting to a shiny brown. In a furrier’s window were +Siberian foxes’ skins (Siberia! huts of “awful brave +convicks”; the steely Northern Sea; guards in blouses, just as he’d +seen them at an Academy of Music play) and a polar bear (meaning, to him, the +Northern Lights, the long hike, and the <i>igloo</i> at night). And the +florists! There were orchids that (though he only half knew it, and that all +inarticulately) whispered to him of jungles where, in the hot hush, he saw the +slumbering python and—“What was it in that poem, that, Mandalay, +thing? <i>was</i> it about jungles? Anyway: +</p> + +<p class="poem"> +“‘Them garlicky smells,<br/> +And the sunshine and the palms and the bells.’” +</p> + +<p> +He had to hurry back to the office. He stopped only to pat the head of a +florist’s delivery horse that looked wistfully at him from the curb. +“Poor old fella. What you thinking about? Want to be a circus horse and +wander? Le’s beat it together. You can’t, eh? Poor old +fella!” +</p> + +<p> +At three-thirty, the time when it seems to office persons that the day’s +work never will end, even by a miracle, Mr. Wrenn was shaky about his duty to +the firm. He was more so after an electrical interview with the manager, who +spent a few minutes, which he happened to have free, in roaring “I want +to know why” at Mr. Wrenn. There was no particular “why” that +he wanted to know; he was merely getting scientific efficiency out of +employees, a phrase which Mr. Guilfogle had taken from a business magazine that +dilutes efficiency theories for inefficient employers. +</p> + +<p> +At five-twenty the manager summoned him, complimented him on nothing in +particular, and suggested that he stay late with Charley Carpenter and the +stock-keeper to inventory a line of desk-clocks which they were closing out. +</p> + +<p> +As Mr. Wrenn returned to his desk he stopped at a window on the corridor and +coveted the bright late afternoon. The cornices of lofty buildings glistened; +the sunset shone fierily through the glass-inclosed layer-like upper floors. He +wanted to be out there in the streets with the shopping crowds. Old Goglefogle +didn’t consider him; why should he consider the firm? +</p> + +</div><!--end chapter--> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2><a name="chap02"></a>CHAPTER II<br/> +HE WALKS WITH MISS THERESA</h2> + +<p> +As he left the Souvenir Company building after working late at taking inventory +and roamed down toward Fourteenth Street, Mr. Wrenn felt forlornly aimless. The +worst of it all was that he could not go to the Nickelorion for moving +pictures; not after having been cut by the ticket-taker. Then, there before him +was the glaring sign of the Nickelorion tempting him; a bill with “Great +Train Robbery Film Tonight” made his heart thump like +stair-climbing—and he dashed at the ticket-booth with a nickel doughtily +extended. He felt queer about the scalp as the cashier girl slid out a coupon. +Why did she seem to be watching him so closely? As he dropped the ticket in the +chopper he tried to glance away from the Brass-button Man. For one- nineteenth +of a second he kept his head turned. It turned back of itself; he stared full +at the man, half bowed—and received a hearty absent-minded nod and a +“Fine evenin’.” He sang to himself a monotonous song of great +joy. When he stumbled over the feet of a large German in getting to a seat, he +apologized as though he were accustomed to laugh easily with many friends. +</p> + +<p> +The train-robbery film was—well, he kept repeating “Gee!” to +himself pantingly. How the masked men did sneak, simply sneak and sneak, behind +the bushes! Mr. Wrenn shrank as one of them leered out of the picture at him. +How gallantly the train dashed toward the robbers, to the spirit-stirring roll +of the snare-drum. The rush from the bushes followed; the battle with +detectives concealed in the express-car. Mr. Wrenn was standing sturdily and +shooting coolly with the slender hawk-faced Pinkerton man in puttees; with him +he leaped to horse and followed the robbers through the forest. He stayed +through the whole program twice to see the train robbery again. +</p> + +<p> +As he started to go out he found the ticket-taker changing his long light-blue +robe of state for a highly commonplace sack-coat without brass buttons. In his +astonishment at seeing how a Highness could be transformed into an every-day +man, Mr. Wrenn stopped, and, having stopped, spoke: +</p> + +<p> +“Uh—that was quite a—quite a picture—that train +robbery. Wasn’t it.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yuh, I guess—Now where’s the devil and his wife flew away to +with my hat? Them guys is always swiping it. Picture, mister? Why, I +didn’t see it no more ’n—Say you, Pink Eye, say you +crab-footed usher, did you swipe my hat? Ain’t he the cut-up, mister! +Ain’t both them ushers the jingling sheepsheads, though! Being cute and +hiding my hat in the box-office. <i>Picture?</i> I don’t get no chance to +see any of ’em. Funny, ain’t it?—me barking for ’em +like I was the grandmother of the guy that invented ’em, and not knowing +whether the train robbery—Now who stole my going-home shoes?… Why, I +don’t know whether the train did any robbing or not!” +</p> + +<p> +He slapped Mr. Wrenn on the back, and the sales clerk’s heart bounded in +comradeship. He was surprised into declaring: +</p> + +<p> +“Say—uh—I bowed to you the other night and you—well, +honestly, you acted like you never saw me.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, well, now, and that’s what happens to me for being the dad +of five kids and a she-girl and a tom-cat. Sure, I couldn’t ’ve +seen you. Me, I was probably that busy with fambly cares—I was probably +thinking who was it et the lemon pie on me—was it Pete or Johnny, or +shall I lick ’em both together, or just bite me wife.” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn knew that the ticket-taker had never, never really considered biting +his wife. <i>He</i> knew! His nod and grin and “That’s the +idea!” were urbanely sophisticated. He urged: +</p> + +<p> +“Oh yes, I’m sure you didn’t intend to hand me the icy mitt. +Say! I’m thirsty. Come on over to Moje’s and I’ll buy you a +drink.” +</p> + +<p> +He was aghast at this abyss of money-spending into which he had leaped, and the +Brass-button Man was suspiciously wondering what this person wanted of him; but +they crossed to the adjacent saloon, a New York corner saloon, which of course +“glittered” with a large mirror, heaped glasses, and a long shining +foot-rail on which, in bravado, Mr. Wrenn placed his Cum-Fee-Best shoe. +</p> + +<p> +“Uh?” said the bartender. +</p> + +<p> +“Rye, Jimmy,” said the Brass-button Man. +</p> + +<p> +“Uh-h-h-h-h,” said Mr. Wrenn, in a frightened diminuendo, now +that—wealthy citizen though he had become—he was in danger of +exposure as a mollycoddle who couldn’t choose his drink properly. +“Stummick been hurting me. Guess I’d better just take a +lemonade.” +</p> + +<p> +“You’re the brother-in-law to a wise one,” commented the +Brass-button Man. “Me, I ain’t never got the sense to do the +traffic cop on the booze. The old woman she says to me, ‘Mory,’ she +says, ‘if you was in heaven and there was a pail of beer on one side and +a gold harp on the other,’ she says, ‘and you was to have your +pick, which would you take?’ And what ’d yuh think I answers +her?” +</p> + +<p> +“The beer,” said the bartender. “She had your number, all +right.” +</p> + +<p> +“Not on your tin-type,” declared the ticket-taker. +</p> + +<p> +“‘Me?’ I says to her. ‘Me? I’d pinch the harp and +pawn it for ten growlers of Dutch beer and some man-sized rum!’” +</p> + +<p> +“Hee, hee hee!” grinned Mr. Wrenn. +</p> + +<p> +“Ha, ha, ha!” grumbled the bartender. +</p> + +<p> +“Well-l-l,” yawned the ticket-taker, “the old woman’ll +be chasing me best pants around the flat, if she don’t have me to chase, +pretty soon. Guess I’d better beat it. Much obliged for the drink, Mr. +Uh. So long, Jimmy.” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn set off for home in a high state of exhilaration which, he noticed, +exactly resembled driving an aeroplane, and went briskly up the steps of the +Zapps’ genteel but unexciting residence. He was much nearer to heaven +than West Sixteenth Street appears to be to the outsider. For he was an +explorer of the Arctic, a trusted man on the job, an associate of witty +Bohemians. He was an army lieutenant who had, with his friend the hawk-faced +Pinkerton man, stood off bandits in an attack on a train. He opened and closed +the door gaily. +</p> + +<p> +He was an apologetic little Mr. Wrenn. His landlady stood on the bottom step of +the hall stairs in a bunchy Mother Hubbard, groaning: +</p> + +<p> +“Mist’ Wrenn, if you got to come in so late, Ah wish you +wouldn’t just make all the noise you can. Ah don’t see why Ah +should have to be kept awake all night. Ah suppose it’s the will of the +Lord that whenever Ah go out to see Mrs. Muzzy and just drink a drop of coffee +Ah must get insomina, but Ah don’t see why anybody that tries to be a +gennulman should have to go and bang the door and just rack mah nerves.” +</p> + +<p> +He slunk up-stairs behind Mrs. Zapp’s lumbering gloom. +</p> + +<p> +“There’s something I wanted to tell you, Mrs. Zapp—something +that’s happened to me. That’s why I was out celebrating last +evening and got in so late.” Mr. Wrenn was diffidently sitting in the +basement. +</p> + +<p> +“Yes,” dryly, “Ah noticed you was out late, Mist’ +Wrenn.” +</p> + +<p> +“You see, Mrs. Zapp, I—uh—my father left me some land, and +it’s been sold for about one thousand plunks.” +</p> + +<p> +“Ah’m awful’ glad, Mist’ Wrenn,” she said, +funereally. “Maybe you’d like to take that hall room beside yours +now. The two rooms’d make a nice apartment.” (She really said +“nahs ‘pahtmun’,” you understand.) +</p> + +<p> +“Why, I hadn’t thought much about that yet.” He felt guilty, +and was profusely cordial to Lee Theresa Zapp, the factory forewoman, who had +just thumped down-stairs. +</p> + +<p> +Miss Theresa was a large young lady with a bust, much black hair, and a +handsome disdainful discontented face. She waited till he had finished greeting +her, then sniffed, and at her mother she snarled: +</p> + +<p> +“Ma, they went and kept us late again to-night. I’m getting just +about tired of having a bunch of Jews and Yankees think I’m a nigger. +Uff! I hate them!” +</p> + +<p> +“T’resa, Mist’ Wrenn’s just inherited two thousand +dollars, and he’s going to take that upper hall room.” Mrs. Zapp +beamed with maternal fondness at the timid lodger. +</p> + +<p> +But the gallant friend of Pinkertons faced her—for the first time. +“Waste his travel-money?” he was inwardly exclaiming as he said: +</p> + +<p> +“But I thought you had some one in that room. I heard som—” +</p> + +<p> +“That fellow! Oh, he ain’t going to be perm’nent. And he +promised me—So you can have—” +</p> + +<p> +“I’m <i>awful</i> sorry, Mrs. Zapp, but I’m afraid I +can’t take it. Fact is, I may go traveling for a while.” +</p> + +<p> +“Co’se you’ll keep your room if you do, Mist’ +Wrenn?” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, I’m afraid I’ll have to give it up, but—Oh, I may +not be going for a long long while yet; and of course I’ll be glad to +come—I’ll want to come back here when I get back to New York. I +won’t be gone for more than, oh, probably not more than a year anyway, +and—” +</p> + +<p> +“And Ah thought you said you was going to be perm’nent!” Mrs. +Zapp began quietly, prefatory to working herself up into hysterics. “And +here Ah’ve gone and had your room fixed up just for you, and new paper +put in, and you’ve always been talking such a lot about how you wanted +your furniture arranged, and Ah’ve gone and made all mah +plans—” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn had been a shyly paying guest of the Zapps for four years. That +famous new paper had been put up two years before. So he spluttered: “Oh, +I’m <i>awfully</i> sorry. I wish—uh—I +don’t—” +</p> + +<p> +“Ah’d <i>thank</i> you, Mist’ Wrenn, if you could +<i>conveniently</i> let me <i>know</i> before you go running off and leaving me +with empty rooms, with the landlord after the rent, and me turning away people +that ’d pay more for the room, because Ah wanted to keep it for you. And +people always coming to see you and making me answer the door and—” +</p> + +<p> +Even the rooming-house worm was making small worm-like sounds that presaged +turning. Lee Theresa snapped just in time, “Oh, cut it out, Ma, will +you!” She had been staring at the worm, for he had suddenly become +interesting and adorable and, incidentally, an heir. “I don’t see +why Mr. Wrenn ain’t giving us all the notice we can expect. He said he +mightn’t be going for a long time.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh!” grunted Mrs. Zapp. “So mah own flesh and blood is going +to turn against me!” +</p> + +<p> +She rose. Her appearance of majesty was somewhat lessened by the creak of +stays, but her instinct for unpleasantness was always good. She said nothing as +she left them, and she plodded up-stairs with a train of sighs. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn looked as though sudden illness had overpowered him. But Theresa +laughed, and remarked: “You don’t want to let Ma get on her high +horse, Mr. Wrenn. She’s a bluff.” +</p> + +<p> +With much billowing of the lower, less stiff part of her garments, she sailed +to the cloudy mirror over the magazine-filled bookcase and inspected her cap of +false curls, with many prods of her large firm hands which flashed with +Brazilian diamonds. Though he had heard the word “puffs,” he did +not know that half her hair was false. He stared at it. Though in disgrace, he +felt the honor of knowing so ample and rustling a woman as Miss Lee Theresa. +</p> + +<p> +“But, say, I wish I could ’ve let her know I was going earlier, +Miss Zapp. I didn’t know it myself, but it does seem like a mean trick. I +s’pose I ought to pay her something extra.” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, child, you won’t do anything of the sort. Ma hasn’t got +a bit of kick coming. You’ve always been awful nice, far as I can +see.” She smiled lavishly. “I went for a walk to-night…. I wish all +those men wouldn’t stare at a girl so. I’m sure I don’t see +why they should stare at me.” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn nodded, but that didn’t seem to be the right comment, so he +shook his head, then looked frightfully embarrassed. +</p> + +<p> +“I went by that Armenian restaurant you were telling me about, Mr. Wrenn. +Some time I believe I’ll go dine there.” Again she paused. +</p> + +<p> +He said only, “Yes, it is a nice place.” +</p> + +<p> +Remarking to herself that there was no question about it, after all, he +<i>was</i> a little fool, Theresa continued the siege. “Do you dine there +often?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh yes. It is a nice place.” +</p> + +<p> +“Could a lady go there?” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, yes, I—” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes!” +</p> + +<p> +“I should think so,” he finished. +</p> + +<p> +“Oh!… I do get so awfully tired of the greasy stuff Ma and Goaty dish up. +They think a big stew that tastes like dish-water is a dinner, and if they do +have anything I like they keep on having the same thing every day till I throw +it in the sink. I wish I could go to a restaurant once in a while for a change, +but of course—I dunno’s it would be proper for a lady to go alone +even there. What do you think? Oh dear!” She sat brooding sadly. +</p> + +<p> +He had an inspiration. Perhaps Miss Theresa could be persuaded to go out to +dinner with him some time. He begged: +</p> + +<p> +“Gee, I wish you’d let me take you up there some evening, Miss +Zapp.” +</p> + +<p> +“Now, didn’t I tell you to call me ‘Miss Theresa’? +Well, I suppose you just don’t want to be friends with me. Nobody +does.” She brooded again. +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. Honest I didn’t. +I’ve always thought you’d think I was fresh if I called you +‘Miss Theresa,’ and so I—” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, I guess I could go up to the Armenian with you, perhaps. When would +you like to go? You know I’ve always got lots of dates but +I—um—let’s see, I think I could go to-morrow evening.” +</p> + +<p> +“Let’s do it! Shall I call for you, +Miss—uh—Theresa?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, you may if you’ll be a good boy. Good night.” She +departed with an air of intimacy. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn scuttled to the Nickelorion, and admitted to the Brass-button Man +that he was “feeling pretty good ’s evening.” +</p> + +<p> +He had never supposed that a handsome creature like Miss Theresa could ever +endure such a “slow fellow” as himself. For about one minute he +considered with a chill the question of whether she was agreeable because of +his new wealth, but reproved the fiend who was making the suggestion; for had +he not heard her mention with great scorn a second cousin who had married an +old Yankee for his money? That just settled <i>that</i>, he assured himself, +and scowled at a passing messenger-boy for having thus hinted, but hastily +grimaced as the youngster showed signs of loud displeasure. +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +The Armenian restaurant is peculiar, for it has foreign food at low prices, and +is below Thirtieth Street, yet it has not become Bohemian. Consequently it has +no bad music and no crowd of persons from Missouri whose women risk salvation +for an evening by smoking cigarettes. Here prosperous Oriental merchants, of +mild natures and bandit faces, drink semi-liquid Turkish coffee and discuss +rugs and revolutions. +</p> + +<p> +In fact, the place seemed so unartificial that Theresa, facing Mr. Wrenn, was +bored. And the menu was foreign without being Society viands. It suggested +rats’ tails and birds’ nests, she was quite sure. She would gladly +have experimented with <i>paté de foie gras</i> or alligator-pears, but what +social prestige was there to be gained at the factory by remarking that she +“always did like <i>pahklava</i>”? Mr. Wrenn did not see that she +was glancing about discontentedly, for he was delightedly listening to a lanky +young man at the next table who was remarking to his <i>vis-à-vis</i>, a pale +slithey lady in black, with the lines of a torpedo-boat: “Try some of the +stuffed vine-leaves, child of the angels, and some wheat <i>pilaf</i> and some +<i>bourma</i>. Your wheat <i>pilaf</i> is a comfortable food and cheering to +the stomach of man. Simply <i>won</i>-derful. As for the <i>bourma</i>, he is a +merry beast, a brown rose of pastry with honey cunningly secreted between his +petals and—Here! Waiter! Stuffed vine-leaves, wheat <i>p’laf, +bourm’</i>—twice on the order and hustle it.” +</p> + +<p> +“When you get through listening to that man—he talks like a bar of +soap—tell me what there is on this bill of fare that’s safe to +eat,” snorted Theresa. +</p> + +<p> +“I thought he was real funny,” insisted Mr. Wrenn…. +“I’m sure you’ll like <i>shish kebab</i> and s—” +</p> + +<p> +“<i>Shish kibub!</i> Who ever heard of such a thing! Haven’t they +any—oh, I thought they’d have stuff they call ‘Turkish +Delight’ and things like that.” +</p> + +<p> +“‘Turkish Delights’ is cigarettes, I think.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, I know it isn’t, because I read about it in a story in a +magazine. And they were eating it. On the terrace…. What is that <i>shish +kibub</i>?” +</p> + +<p> +“<i>Kebab</i>…. It’s lamb roasted on skewers. I know you’ll +like it.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, I’m not going to trust any heathens to cook my meat. +I’ll take some eggs and some of that—what was it the idiot was +talking about—<i>berma</i>?” +</p> + +<p> +“<i>Bourma</i>…. That’s awful nice. With honey. And do try some of +the stuffed peppers and rice.” +</p> + +<p> +“All right,” said Theresa, gloomily. +</p> + +<p> +Somehow Mr. Wrenn wasn’t vastly transformed even by the possession of the +two thousand dollars her mother had reported. He was still “funny and +sort of scary,” not like the overpowering Southern gentlemen she supposed +she remembered. Also, she was hungry. She listened with stolid glumness to Mr. +Wrenn’s observation that that was “an awful big hat the lady with +the funny guy had on.” +</p> + +<p> +He was chilled into quietness till Papa Gouroff, the owner of the restaurant, +arrived from above-stairs. Papa Gouroff was a Russian Jew who had been a police +spy in Poland and a hotel proprietor in Mogador, where he called himself +Turkish and married a renegade Armenian. He had a nose like a sickle and a neck +like a blue-gum nigger. He hoped that the place would degenerate into a +Bohemian restaurant where liberal clergymen would think they were slumming, and +barbers would think they were entering society, so he always wore a <i>fez</i> +and talked bad Arabic. He was local color, atmosphere, Bohemian flavor. Mr. +Wrenn murmured to Theresa: +</p> + +<p> +“Say, do you see that man? He’s Signor Gouroff, the owner. +I’ve talked to him a lot of times. Ain’t he great! Golly! look at +that beak of his. Don’t he make you think of <i>kiosks</i> and +<i>hyrems</i> and stuff? Gee! What does he make you think—” +</p> + +<p> +“He’s got on a dirty collar…. That waiter’s awful slow…. +Would you please be so kind and pour me another glass of water?” +</p> + +<p> +But when she reached the honied <i>bourma</i> she grew tolerant toward Mr. +Wrenn. She had two cups of cocoa and felt fat about the eyes and affectionate. +She had mentioned that there were good shows in town. Now she resumed: +</p> + +<p> +“Have you been to ‘The Gold Brick’ yet?” +</p> + +<p> +“No, I—uh—I don’t go to the theater much.” +</p> + +<p> +“Gwendolyn Muzzy was telling me that this was the funniest show +she’d ever seen. Tells how two confidence men fooled one of those +terrible little jay towns. Shows all the funny people, you know, like they have +in jay towns…. I wish I could go to it, but of course I have to help out the +folks at home, so— Well…. Oh dear.” +</p> + +<p> +“Say! I’d like to take you, if I could. Let’s go—this +evening!” He quivered with the adventure of it. +</p> + +<p> +“Why, I don’t know; I didn’t tell Ma I was going to be out. +But—oh, I guess it would be all right if I was with you.” +</p> + +<p> +“Let’s go right up and get some tickets.” +</p> + +<p> +“All right.” Her assent was too eager, but she immediately +corrected that error by yawning, “I don’t suppose I’d ought +to go, but if you want to—” +</p> + +<p> +They were a very lively couple as they walked up. He trickled sympathy when she +told of the selfishness of the factory girls under her and the meanness of the +superintendent over her, and he laughed several times as she remarked that the +superintendent “ought to be boiled alive—that’s what +<i>all</i> lobsters ought to be,” so she repeated the epigram with such +increased jollity that they swung up to the theater in a gale; and, once facing +the ennuied ticket-seller, he demanded dollar seats just as though he had not +been doing sums all the way up to prove that seventy-five-cent seats were the +best he could afford. +</p> + +<p> +The play was a glorification of Yankee smartness. Mr. Wrenn was disturbed by +the fact that the swindler heroes robbed quite all the others, but he was +stirred by the brisk romance of money-making. The swindlers were +supermen—blonde beasts with card indices and options instead of clubs. +Not that Mr. Wrenn made any observations regarding supermen. But when, by way +of commercial genius, the swindler robbed a young night clerk Mr. Wrenn +whispered to Theresa, “Gee! he certainly does know how to jolly them, +heh?” +</p> + +<p> +“Sh-h-h-h-h-h!” said Theresa. +</p> + +<p> +Every one made millions, victims and all, in the last act, as a proof of the +social value of being a live American business man. As they oozed along with +the departing audience Mr. Wrenn gurgled: +</p> + +<p> +“That makes me feel just like I’d been making a million +dollars.” Masterfully, he proposed, “Say, let’s go some place +and have something to eat.” +</p> + +<p> +“All right.” +</p> + +<p> +“Let’s—I almost feel as if I could afford Rector’s, +after that play; but, anyway, let’s go to Allaire’s.” +</p> + +<p> +Though he was ashamed of himself for it afterward, he was almost haughty toward +his waiter, and ordered Welsh rabbits and beer quite as though he usually +breakfasted on them. He may even have strutted a little as he hailed a car with +an imaginary walking-stick. His parting with Miss Theresa was intimate; he +shook her hand warmly. +</p> + +<p> +As he undressed he hoped that he had not been too abrupt with the waiter, +“poor cuss.” But he lay awake to think of Theresa’s hair and +hand-clasp; of polished desks and florid gentlemen who curtly summoned +bank-presidents and who had—he tossed the bedclothes about in his +struggle to get the word—who had a <i>punch!</i> +</p> + +<p> +He would do that Great Traveling of his in the land of Big Business! +</p> + +<p> +The five thousand princes of New York to protect themselves against the four +million ungrateful slaves had devised the sacred symbols of dress-coats, large +houses, and automobiles as the outward and visible signs of the virtue of +making money, to lure rebels into respectability and teach them the social +value of getting a dollar away from that inhuman, socially injurious fiend, +Some One Else. That Our Mr. Wrenn should dream for dreaming’s sake was +catastrophic; he might do things because he wanted to, not because they were +fashionable; whereupon, police forces and the clergy would disband, Wall Street +and Fifth Avenue would go thundering down. Hence, for him were provided those +Y. M. C. A. night bookkeeping classes administered by solemn earnest men of +thirty for solemn credulous youths of twenty-nine; those sermons on content; +articles on “building up the rundown store by live advertising”; +Kiplingesque stories about playing the game; and correspondence-school +advertisements that shrieked, “Mount the ladder to thorough +knowledge—the path to power and to the fuller pay-envelope.” +</p> + +<p> +To all these Mr. Wrenn had been indifferent, for they showed no imagination. +But when he saw Big Business glorified by a humorous melodrama, then The Job +appeared to him as picaresque adventure, and he was in peril of his +imagination. +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +The eight-o’clock sun, which usually found a wildly shaving Mr. Wrenn, +discovered him dreaming that he was the manager of the Souvenir Company. But +that was a complete misunderstanding of the case. The manager of the Souvenir +Company was Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle, and he called Mr. Wrenn in to acquaint +him with that fact when the new magnate started his career in Big Business by +arriving at the office one hour late. +</p> + +<p> +What made it worse, considered Mr. Guilfogle, was that this Wrenn had a higher +average of punctuality than any one else in the office, which proved that he +knew better. Worst of all, the Guilfogle family eggs had not been scrambled +right at breakfast; they had been anemic. Mr. Guilfogle punched the buzzer and +set his face toward the door, with a scowl prepared. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn seemed weary, and not so intimidated as usual. +</p> + +<p> +“Look here, Wrenn; you were just about two hours late this morning. What +do you think this office is? A club or a reading-room for hoboes? Ever occur to +you we’d like to have you favor us with a call now and then so’s we +can learn how you’re getting along at golf or whatever you’re doing +these days?” +</p> + +<p> +There was a sample baby-shoe office pin-cushion on the manager’s desk. +Mr. Wrenn eyed this, and said nothing. The manager: +</p> + +<p> +“Hear what I said? D’yuh think I’m talking to give my throat +exercise?” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn was stubborn. “I couldn’t help it.” +</p> + +<p> +“Couldn’t help—! And you call that an explanation! I know +just exactly what you’re thinking, Wrenn; you’re thinking that +because I’ve let you have a lot of chances to really work into the +business lately you’re necessary to us, and not simply an +expense—” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh no, Mr. Guilfogle; honest, I didn’t think—” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, hang it, man, you <i>want</i> to think. What do you suppose we pay +you a salary for? And just let me tell you, Wrenn, right here and now, that if +you can’t condescend to spare us some of your valuable time, now and +then, we can good and plenty get along without you.” +</p> + +<p> +An old tale, oft told and never believed; but it interested Mr. Wrenn just now. +</p> + +<p> +“I’m real glad you can get along without me. I’ve just +inherited a big wad of money! I think I’ll resign! Right now!” +</p> + +<p> +Whether he or Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle was the more aghast at hearing him bawl +this no one knows. The manager was so worried at the thought of breaking in a +new man that his eye-glasses slipped off his poor perspiring nose. He begged, +in sudden tones of old friendship: +</p> + +<p> +“Why, you can’t be thinking of leaving us! Why, we expect to make a +big man of you, Wrenn. I was joking about firing you. You ought to know that, +after the talk we had at Mouquin’s the other night. You can’t be +thinking of leaving us! There’s no end of possibilities here.” +</p> + +<p> +“Sorry,” said the dogged soldier of dreams. +</p> + +<p> +“Why—” wailed that hurt and astonished victim of ingratitude, +Mr. Guilfogle. +</p> + +<p> +“I’ll leave the middle of June. That’s plenty of +notice,” chirruped Mr. Wrenn. +</p> + +<p> +At five that evening Mr. Wrenn dashed up to the Brass-button Man at his station +before the Nickelorion, crying: +</p> + +<p> +“Say! You come from Ireland, don’t you?” +</p> + +<p> +“Now what would you think? Me—oh no; I’m a Chinaman from +Oshkosh!” +</p> + +<p> +“No, honest, straight, tell me. I’ve got a chance to travel. What +d’yuh think of that? Ain’t it great! And I’m going right +away. What I wanted to ask you was, what’s the best place in Ireland to +see?” +</p> + +<p> +“Donegal, o’ course. I was born there.” +</p> + +<p> +Hauling from his pocket a pencil and a worn envelope, Mr. Wrenn joyously added +the new point of interest to a list ranging from Delagoa Bay to Denver. +</p> + +<p> +He skipped up-town, looking at the stars. He shouted as he saw the stacks of a +big Cunarder bulking up at the end of Fourteenth Street. He stopped to chuckle +over a lithograph of the Parthenon at the window of a Greek bootblack’s +stand. Stars—steamer—temples, all these were his. He owned them +now. He was free. +</p> + +<p> +Lee Theresa sat waiting for him in the basement livingroom till ten-thirty +while he was flirting with trainboards at the Grand Central. Then she went to +bed, and, though he knew it not, that prince of wealthy suitors, Mr. Wrenn, had +entirely lost the heart and hand of Miss Zapp of the F. F. V. +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +He stood before the manager’s god-like desk on June 14, 1910. Sadly: +</p> + +<p> +“Good-by, Mr. Guilfogle. Leaving to-day. I wish—Gee! I wish I could +tell you, you know—about how much I appreciate—” +</p> + +<p> +The manager moved a wire basket of carbon copies of letters from the left side +of his desk to the right, staring at them thoughtfully; rearranged his pencils +in a pile before his ink-well; glanced at the point of an indelible pencil with +a manner of startled examination; tapped his desk-blotter with his knuckles; +then raised his eyes. He studied Mr. Wrenn, smiled, put on the look he used +when inviting him out for a drink. Mr. Guilfogle was essentially an honest +fellow, harshened by The Job; a well-satisfied victim, with the imagination +clean gone out of him, so that he took follow-up letters and the celerity of +office-boys as the only serious things in the world. He was strong, alive, not +at all a bad chap, merely efficient. +</p> + +<p> +“Well, Wrenn, I suppose there’s no use of rubbing it in. Course you +know what I think about the whole thing. It strikes me you’re a fool to +leave a good job. But, after all, that’s your business, not ours. We like +you, and when you get tired of being just a bum, why, come back; we’ll +always try to have a job open for you. Meanwhile I hope you’ll have a +mighty good time, old man. Where you going? When d’yuh start out?” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, first I’m going to just kind of wander round generally. Lots +of things I’d like to do. I think I’ll get away real soon now…. +Thank you awfully, Mr. Guilfogle, for keeping a place open for me. Course I +prob’ly won’t need it, but gee! I sure do appreciate it.” +</p> + +<p> +“Say, I don’t believe you’re so plumb crazy about leaving us, +after all, now that the cards are all dole out. Straight now, are you?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, sir, it does make me feel a little blue—been here so long. +But it’ll be awful good to get out at sea.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yuh, I know, Wrenn. I’d like to go traveling myself—I +suppose you fellows think I wouldn’t care to go bumming around like you +do and never have to worry about how the firm’s going to break even. +But—Well, good-by, old man, and don’t forget us. Drop me a line now +and then and let me know how you’re getting along. Oh say, if you happen +to see any novelties that look good let us hear about them. But drop me a line, +anyway. We’ll always be glad to hear from you. Well, good-by and good +luck. Sure and drop me a line.” +</p> + +<p> +In the corner which had been his home for eight years Mr. Wrenn could not +devise any new and yet more improved arrangement of the wire baskets and clips +and desk reminders, so he cleaned a pen, blew some gray eraser-dust from under +his iron ink-well standard, and decided that his desk was in order; reflecting: +</p> + +<p> +He’d been there a long time. Now he could never come back to it, no +matter how much he wanted to…. How good the manager had been to him. Gee! he +hadn’t appreciated how considerut Guilfogle was! +</p> + +<p> +He started down the corridor on a round of farewells to the boys. “Too +bad he hadn’t never got better acquainted with them, but it was too late +now. Anyway, they were such fine jolly sports; they’d never miss a stupid +guy like him.” +</p> + +<p> +Just then he met them in the corridor, all of them except Guilfogle, headed by +Rabin, the traveling salesman, and Charley Carpenter, who was bearing a box of +handkerchiefs with a large green-and-crimson-paper label. +</p> + +<p> +“Gov’nor Wrenn,” orated Charley, “upon this suspicious +occasion we have the pleasure of showing by this small token of our esteem our +’preciation of your untiring efforts in the investigation of Mortimer R. +Gugglegiggle of the Graft Trust and— +</p> + +<p> +“Say, old man, joking aside, we’re mighty sorry you’re going +and—uh—well, we’d like to give you something to show +we’re—uh—mighty sorry you’re going. We thought of a box +of cigars, but you don’t smoke much; anyway, these +han’k’chiefs’ll help to show—Three cheers for Wrenn, +fellows!” +</p> + +<p> +Afterward, by his desk, alone, holding the box of handkerchiefs with the +resplendent red-and-green label, Mr. Wrenn began to cry. +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +He was lying abed at eight-thirty on a morning of late June, two weeks after +leaving the Souvenir Company, deliberately hunting over his pillow for cool +spots, very hot and restless in the legs and enormously depressed in the soul. +He would have got up had there been anything to get up for. There was nothing, +yet he felt uneasily guilty. For two weeks he had been afraid of losing, by +neglect, the job he had already voluntarily given up. So there are men whom the +fear of death has driven to suicide. +</p> + +<p> +Nearly every morning he had driven himself from bed and had finished shaving +before he was quite satisfied that he didn’t have to get to the office on +time. As he wandered about during the day he remarked with frequency, +“I’m scared as teacher’s pet playing hookey for the first +time, like what we used to do in Parthenon.” All proper persons were at +work of a week-day afternoon. What, then, was he doing walking along the street +when all morality demanded his sitting at a desk at the Souvenir Company, being +a little more careful, to win the divine favor of Mortimer R. Guilfogle? +</p> + +<p> +He was sure that if he were already out on the Great Traveling he would be able +to “push the buzzer on himself and get up his nerve.” But he did +not know where to go. He had planned so many trips these years that now he +couldn’t keep any one of them finally decided on for more than an hour. +It rather stretched his short arms to embrace at once a gay old dream of seeing +Venice and the stern civic duty of hunting abominably dangerous beasts in the +Guatemala bush. +</p> + +<p> +The expense bothered him, too. He had through many years so persistently saved +money for the Great Traveling that he begrudged money for that Traveling +itself. Indeed, he planned to spend not more than $300 of the $1,235.80 he had +now accumulated, on his first venture, during which he hoped to learn the trade +of wandering. +</p> + +<p> +He was always influenced by a sentence he had read somewhere about “one +of those globe-trotters you meet carrying a monkey-wrench in Calcutta, then in +raiment and a monocle at the Athenaeum.” He would learn some Kiplingy +trade that would teach him the use of astonishingly technical tools, also +daring and the location of smugglers’ haunts, copra islands, and +whaling-stations with curious names. +</p> + +<p> +He pictured himself shipping as third engineer at the Manihiki Islands or +engaged for taking moving pictures of an aeroplane flight in Algiers. He +<i>had</i> to get away from Zappism. He had to be out on the iron seas, where +the battle-ships and liners went by like a marching military band. But he +couldn’t get started. +</p> + +<p> +Once beyond Sandy Hook, he would immediately know all about engines and +fighting. It would help, he was certain, to be shanghaied. But no matter how +wistfully, no matter how late at night he timorously forced himself to loiter +among unwashed English stokers on West Street, he couldn’t get himself +molested except by glib persons wishing ten cents “for a place to +sleep.” +</p> + +<p> +When he had dallied through breakfast that particular morning he sat about. +Once he had pictured sitting about reading travel-books as a perfect +occupation. But it concealed no exciting little surprises when he could be a +Sunday loafer on any plain Monday. Furthermore, Goaty never made his bed till +noon, and the gray-and-brown-patched coverlet seemed to trail all about the +disordered room. +</p> + +<p> +Midway in a paragraph he rose, threw <i>One Hundred Ways to See California</i> +on the tumbled bed, and ran away from Our Mr. Wrenn. But Our Mr. Wrenn pursued +him along the wharves, where the sun glared on oily water. He had seen the +wharves twelve times that fortnight. In fact, he even cried viciously that +“he had seen too blame much of the blame wharves.” +</p> + +<p> +Early in the afternoon he went to a moving-picture show, but the first sight of +the white giant figures bulking against the gray background was wearily unreal; +and when the inevitable large-eyed black-braided Indian maiden met the +canonical cow-puncher he threshed about in his seat, was irritated by the +nervous click of the machine and the hot stuffiness of the room, and ran away +just at the exciting moment when the Indian chief dashed into camp and summoned +his braves to the war-path. +</p> + +<p> +Perhaps he could hide from thought at home. +</p> + +<p> +As he came into his room he stood at gaze like a kitten of good family +beholding a mangy mongrel asleep in its pink basket. For on his bed was Mrs. +Zapp, her rotund curves stretching behind her large flat feet, whose soles were +toward him. She was noisily somnolent; her stays creaked regularly as she +breathed, except when she moved slightly and groaned. +</p> + +<p> +Guiltily he tiptoed down-stairs and went snuffling along the dusty unvaried +brick side streets, wondering where in all New York he could go. He read +minutely a placard advertising an excursion to the Catskills, to start that +evening. For an exhilarated moment he resolved to go, but—” oh, +there was a lot of them rich society folks up there.” He bought a morning +<i>American</i> and, sitting in Union Square, gravely studied the humorous +drawings. +</p> + +<p> +He casually noticed the “Help Wanted” advertisements. +</p> + +<p> +They suggested an uninteresting idea that somehow he might find it economical +to go venturing as a waiter or farm-hand. +</p> + +<p> +And so he came to the gate of paradise: +</p> + +<p class="letter"> +MEN WANTED. Free passage on cattle-boats to Liverpool feeding cattle. Low fee. +Easy work. Fast boats. Apply International and Atlantic Employment +Bureau,—Greenwich Street. +</p> + +<p> +“Gee!” he cried, “I guess Providence has picked out my first +hike for me.” +</p> + +</div><!--end chapter--> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2><a name="chap03"></a>CHAPTER III<br/> +HE STARTS FOR THE LAND OF ELSEWHERE</h2> + +<p> +The International and Atlantic Employment Bureau is a long dirty room with the +plaster cracked like the outlines on a map, hung with steamship posters and the +laws of New York regarding employment offices, which are regarded as humorous +by the proprietor, M. Baraieff, a short slender ejaculatory person with a +nervous black beard, lively blandness, and a knowledge of all the incorrect +usages of nine languages. Mr. Wrenn edged into this junk-heap of nationalities +with interested wonder. M. Baraieff rubbed his smooth wicked hands together and +bowed a number of times. +</p> + +<p> +Confidentially leaning across the counter, Mr. Wrenn murmured: “Say, I +read your ad. about wanting cattlemen. I want to make a trip to Europe. +How—?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, yes, yes, yes, Mistaire. I feex you up right away. Ten dollars +pleas-s-s-s.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, what does that entitle me to?” +</p> + +<p> +“I tole you I feex you up. Ha! Ha! I know it; you are a gentleman; you +want a nice leetle trip on Europe. Sure. I feex you right up. I send you off on +a nice easy cattleboat where you won’t have to work much hardly any. +Right away it goes. Ten dollars pleas-s-s-s.” +</p> + +<p> +“But when does the boat start? Where does it start from?” Mr. Wrenn +was a bit confused. He had never met a man who grimaced so politely and so +rapidly. +</p> + +<p> +“Next Tuesday I send you right off.” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn regretfully exchanged ten dollars for a card informing Trubiggs, +Atlantic Avenue, Boston, that Mr. “Ren” was to be “ship 1st +poss. catel boat right away and charge my acct. fee paid Baraieff.” +Brightly declaring “I geef you a fine ship,” M. Baraieff added, on +the margin of the card, in copper-plate script, “Best ship, easy +work.” He caroled, “Come early next Tuesday morning, “and +bowed out Mr. Wrenn like a Parisian shopkeeper. The row of waiting +servant-girls curtsied as though they were a hedge swayed by the wind, while +Mr. Wrenn self-consciously hurried to get past them. +</p> + +<p> +He was too excited to worry over the patient and quiet suffering with which +Mrs. Zapp heard the announcement that he was going. That Theresa laughed at him +for a cattleman, while Goaty, in the kitchen, audibly observed that +“nobody but a Yankee would travel in a pig-pen, “merely increased +his joy in moving his belongings to a storage warehouse. +</p> + +<p> +Tuesday morning, clad in a sweater-jacket, tennis-shoes, an old felt hat, a +khaki shirt and corduroys, carrying a suit-case packed to bursting with clothes +and Baedekers, with one hundred and fifty dollars in express-company drafts +craftily concealed, he dashed down to Baraieff’s hole. Though it was only +eight-thirty, he was afraid he was going to be late. +</p> + +<p> +Till 2 <small>P.M</small>. he sat waiting, then was sent to the Joy Steamship +Line wharf with a ticket to Boston and a letter to Trubiggs’s +shipping-office: “Give bearer Ren as per inclosed receet one trip England +catel boat charge my acct. S<small>YLVESTRE</small> B<small>ARAIEFF</small>, N. +Y.” +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +Standing on the hurricane-deck of the Joy Line boat, with his suit-case +guardedly beside him, he crooned to himself tuneless chants with the refrain, +“Free, free, out to sea. Free, free, that’s <i>me!</i>” He +had persuaded himself that there was practically no danger of the boat’s +sinking or catching fire. Anyway, he just wasn’t going to be scared. As +the steamer trudged up East River he watched the late afternoon sun brighten +the Manhattan factories and make soft the stretches of Westchester fields. (Of +course, he “thrilled.”) +</p> + +<p> +He had no state-room, but was entitled to a place in a twelve-berth room in the +hold. Here large farmers without their shoes were grumpily talking all at once, +so he returned to the deck; and the rest of the night, while the other +passengers snored, he sat modestly on a canvas stool, unblinkingly gloating +over a sea-fabric of frosty blue that was shot through with golden threads when +they passed lighthouses or ships. At dawn he was weary, peppery-eyed, but he +viewed the flooding light with approval. +</p> + +<p> +At last, Boston. +</p> + +<p> +The front part of the shipping-office on Atlantic Avenue was a glass-inclosed +room littered with chairs, piles of circulars, old pictures of Cunarders, older +calendars, and directories to be ranked as antiques. In the midst of these +remains a red-headed Yankee of forty, smoking a Pittsburg stogie, sat tilted +back in a kitchen chair, reading the Boston <i>American</i>. Mr. Wrenn +delivered M. Baraieff’s letter and stood waiting, holding his suit-case, +ready to skip out and go aboard a cattle-boat immediately. +</p> + +<p> +The shipping-agent glanced through the letter, then snapped: +</p> + +<p> +“Bryff’s crazy. Always sends ’em too early. Wrenn, you ought +to come to me first. What j’yuh go to that Jew first for? Here he goes +and sends you a day late—or couple days too early. ’F you’d +got here last night I could ’ve sent you off this morning on a Dominion +Line boat. All I got now is a Leyland boat that starts from Portland Saturday. +Le’s see; this is Wednesday. Thursday, Friday—you’ll have to +wait three days. Now you want me to fix you up, don’t you? I might not be +able to get you off till a week from now, but you’d like to get off on a +good boat Saturday instead, wouldn’t you?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh yes; I <i>would</i>. I—” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, I’ll try to fix it. You can see for yourself; boats +ain’t leaving every minute just to please Bryff. And it’s the busy +season. Bunches of rah-rah boys wanting to cross, and Canadians wanting to get +back to England, and Jews beating it to Poland—to sling bombs at the +Czar, I guess. And lemme tell you, them Jews is all right. They’re +willing to pay for a man’s time and trouble in getting ’em fixed +up, and so—” +</p> + +<p> +With dignity Mr. William Wrenn stated, “Of course I’ll be glad +to—uh—make it worth your while.” +</p> + +<p> +“I <i>thought</i> you was a gentleman. Hey, Al! <i>Al!</i>” An +underfed boy with few teeth, dusty and grown out of his trousers, appeared. +“Clear off a chair for the gentleman. Stick that valise on top my desk…. +Sit down, Mr. Wrenn. You see, it’s like this: I’ll tell you in +confidence, you understand. This letter from Bryff ain’t worth the paper +it’s written on. He ain’t got any right to be sending out men for +cattle-boats. Me, I’m running that. I deal direct with all the Boston and +Portland lines. If you don’t believe it just go out in the back room and +ask any of the cattlemen out there.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, I see,” Mr. Wrenn observed, as though he were ill, and toed +an old almanac about the floor. “Uh—Mr.—Trubiggs, is +it?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yump. Yump, my boy. Trubiggs. Tru by name and true by nature. +Heh?” +</p> + +<p> +This last was said quite without conviction. It was evidently a joke which had +come down from earlier years. Mr. Wrenn ignored it and declared, as stoutly as +he could: +</p> + +<p> +“You see, Mr. Trubiggs, I’d be willing to pay you—” +</p> + +<p> +“I’ll tell you just how it is, Mr. Wrenn. I ain’t one of +these Sheeny employment bureaus; I’m an American; I like to look out for +Americans. Even if you <i>didn’t</i> come to me first I’ll watch +out for your interests, same’s if they was mine. Now, do you want to get +fixed up with a nice fast boat that leaves Portland next Saturday, just a +couple of days’ wait?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh yes, I <i>do</i>, Mr. Trubiggs.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, my list is really full—men waiting, too—but if it +’d be worth five dollars to you to—” +</p> + +<p> +“Here’s the five dollars.” +</p> + +<p> +The shipping-agent was disgusted. He had estimated from Mr. Wrenn’s cheap +sweater-jacket and tennis-shoes that he would be able to squeeze out only three +or four dollars, and here he might have made ten. More in sorrow than in anger: +</p> + +<p> +“Of course you understand I may have a lot of trouble working you in on +the <i>next</i> boat, you coming as late as this. Course five dollars is less +’n what I usually get.” He contemptuously tossed the bill on his +desk. “If you want me to slip a little something extra to the +agents—” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn was too head-achy to be customarily timid. “Let’s see +that. Did I give you only five dollars?” Receiving the bill, he folded it +with much primness, tucked it into the pocket of his shirt, and remarked: +</p> + +<p> +“Now, you said you’d fix me up for five dollars. Besides, that +letter from Baraieff is a form with your name printed on it; so I know you do +business with him right along. If five dollars ain’t enough, why, then +you can just go to hell, Mr. Trubiggs; yes, sir, that’s what you can do. +I’m just getting tired of monkeying around. If five <i>is</i> enough +I’ll give this back to you Friday, when you send me off to Portland, if +you give me a receipt. There!” He almost snarled, so weary and +discouraged was he. +</p> + +<p> +Now, Trubiggs was a warm-hearted rogue, and he liked the society of what he +called “white people.” He laughed, poked a Pittsburg stogie at Mr. +Wrenn, and consented: +</p> + +<p> +“All right. I’ll fix you up. Have a smoke. Pay me the five Friday, +or pay it to my foreman when he puts you on the cattle-boat. I don’t care +a rap which. You’re all right. Can’t bluff you, eh?” +</p> + +<p> +And, further bluffing Mr. Wrenn, he suggested to him a lodging-house for his +two nights in Boston. “Tell the clerk that red-headed Trubiggs sent you, +and he’ll give you the best in the house. Tell him you’re a friend +of mine.” +</p> + +<p> +When Mr. Wrenn had gone Mr. Trubiggs remarked to some one, by telephone, +“’Nother sucker coming, Blaugeld. Now don’t try to do me out +of my bit or I’ll cap for some other joint, understand? Huh? Yuh, stick +him for a thirty-five-cent bed. S’ long.” +</p> + +<p> +The caravan of Trubiggs’s cattlemen who left for Portland by night +steamer, Friday, was headed by a bulky-shouldered boss, who wore no coat and +whose corduroy vest swung cheerfully open. A motley troupe were the +cattlemen—Jews with small trunks, large imitation-leather valises and +assorted bundles, a stolid prophet-bearded procession of weary men in tattered +derbies and sweat-shop clothes. +</p> + +<p> +There were Englishmen with rope-bound pine chests. A lewd-mouthed American +named Tim, who said he was a hatter out of work, and a loud-talking tough +called Pete mingled with a straggle of hoboes. +</p> + +<p> +The boss counted the group and selected his confidants for the trip to +Portland—Mr. Wrenn and a youth named Morton. +</p> + +<p> +Morton was a square heavy-fleshed young man with stubby hands, who, up to his +eyes, was stolid and solid as a granite monument, but merry of eye and hinting +friendliness in his tousled soft-brown hair. He was always wielding a pipe and +artfully blowing smoke through his nostrils. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn and he smiled at each other searchingly as the Portland boat pulled +out, and a wind swept straight from the Land of Elsewhere. +</p> + +<p> +After dinner Morton, smoking a pipe shaped somewhat like a golf-stick head and +somewhat like a toad, at the rail of the steamer, turned to Mr. Wrenn with: +</p> + +<p> +“Classy bunch of cattlemen we’ve got to go with. Not!… My +name’s Morton.” +</p> + +<p> +“I’m awful glad to meet you, Mr. Morton. My name’s +Wrenn.” +</p> + +<p> +“Glad to be off at last, ain’t you?” +</p> + +<p> +“Golly! I should say I <i>am!</i>” +</p> + +<p> +“So’m I. Been waiting for this for years. I’m a clerk for the +P. R. R. in N’ York.” +</p> + +<p> +“I come from New York, too.” +</p> + +<p> +“So? Lived there long?” +</p> + +<p> +“Uh-huh, I—” began Mr. Wrenn. +</p> + +<p> +“Well, I been working for the Penn. for seven years now. Now I’ve +got a vacation of three months. On me. Gives me a chance to travel a little. +Got ten plunks and a second-class ticket back from Glasgow. But I’m going +to see England and France just the same. Prob’ly Germany, too.” +</p> + +<p> +“Second class? Why don’t you go steerage, and save?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, got to come back like a gentleman. You know. You’re from New +York, too, eh?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, I’m with an art-novelty company on Twenty-eighth Street. I +been wanting to get away for quite some time, too…. How are you going to travel +on ten dollars?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, work m’ way. Cinch. Always land on my feet. Not on my uppers, +at that. I’m only twenty-eight, but I’ve been on my own, like the +English fellow says, since I was twelve…. Well, how about you? Traveling or +going somewhere?” +</p> + +<p> +“Just traveling. I’m glad we’re going together, Mr. Morton. I +don’t think most of these cattlemen are very nice. Except for the old +Jews. They seem to be fine old coots. They make you think of—oh—you +know—prophets and stuff. Watch ’em, over there, making tea. I +suppose the steamer grub ain’t kosher. I seen one on the Joy Line saying +his prayers—I suppose he was—in a kind of shawl.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, well! You don’t say so!” +</p> + +<p> +Distinctly, Mr. Wrenn felt that he was one of the gentlemen who, in Kipling, +stand at steamer rails exchanging observations on strange lands. He uttered, +cosmopolitanly: +</p> + +<p> +“Gee! Look at that sunset. Ain’t that grand!” +</p> + +<p> +“Holy smoke! it sure is. I don’t see how anybody could believe in +religion after looking at that.” +</p> + +<p> +Shocked and confused at such a theory, yet excited at finding that Morton +apparently had thoughts, Mr. Wrenn piped: “Honestly, I don’t see +that at <i>all</i>. I don’t see how anybody could disbelieve anything +after a sunset like that. Makes me believe all sorts of thing—gets me +going—I imagine I’m all sorts of places—on the Nile and so +on.” +</p> + +<p> +“Sure! That’s just it. Everything’s so peaceful and natural. +Just <i>is</i>. Gives the imagination enough to do, even by itself, without +having to have religion.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well,” reflected Mr. Wrenn, “I don’t hardly ever go to +church. I don’t believe much in all them highbrow sermons that +don’t come down to brass tacks—ain’t got nothing to do with +real folks. But just the same, I love to go up to St. Patrick’s +Cathedral. Why, I get real <i>thrilled</i>—I hope you won’t think +I’m trying to get high-browed, Mr. Morton.” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, no. Cer’nly not. I understand. Gwan.” +</p> + +<p> +“It gets me going when I look down the aisle at the altar and see the +arches and so on. And the priests in their robes—they look so—so +way up—oh, I dunno just how to say it—so kind of +<i>uplifted</i>.” +</p> + +<p> +“Sure, I know. Just the esthetic end of the game. Esthetic, you +know—the beauty part of it.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yuh, sure, that’s the word. ’Sthetic, that’s what it +is. Yes, ’sthetic. But, just the same, it makes me feel’s though I +believed in all sorts of things.” +</p> + +<p> +“Tell you what I believe may happen, though,” exulted Morton. +“This socialism, and maybe even these here International Workers of the +World, may pan out as a new kind of religion. I don’t know much about it, +I got to admit. But looks as though it might be that way. It’s dead +certain the old political parties are just gangs—don’t stand for +anything except the name. But this comrade business—good stunt. +Brotherhood of man—real brotherhood. My idea of religion. One that is +because it’s got to be, not just because it always has been. Yessir, me +for a religion of guys working together to make things easier for each +other.” +</p> + +<p> +“You bet!” commented Mr. Wrenn, and they smote each other upon the +shoulder and laughed together in a fine flame of shared hope. +</p> + +<p> +“I wish I knew something about this socialism stuff,” mused Mr. +Wrenn, with tilted head, examining the burnt-umber edges of the sunset. +</p> + +<p> +“Great stuff. Not working for some lazy cuss that’s inherited the +right to boss you. And <i>international</i> brotherhood, not just +neighborhoods. New thing.” +</p> + +<p> +“Gee! I surely would like that, awfully,” sighed Mr. Wrenn. +</p> + +<p> +He saw the processional of world brotherhood tramp steadily through the paling +sunset; saffron-vestured Mandarin marching by flax-faced Norseman and languid +South Sea Islander—the diverse peoples toward whom he had always yearned. +</p> + +<p> +“But I don’t care so much for some of these ranting street-corner +socialists, though,” mused Morton. “The kind that holler +‘Come get saved <i>our</i> way or go to hell! Keep off scab guides to +prosperity.’” +</p> + +<p> +“Yuh, sure. Ha! ha! ha!” +</p> + +<p> +“Huh! huh!” +</p> + +<p> +Morton soon had another thought. “Still, same time, us guys that do the +work have got to work out something for ourselves. We can’t bank on the +rah-rah boys that wear eye-glasses and condescend to like us, cause they think +we ain’t entirely too dirty for ’em to associate with, and all +these writer guys and so on. That’s where you got to hand it to the +street-corner shouters.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, that’s <i>so</i>. Y’ right there, I guess, all +right.” +</p> + +<p> +They looked at each other and laughed again; initiated friends; tasting each +other’s souls. They shared sandwiches and confessions. When the other +passengers had gone to bed and the sailors on watch seemed lonely the two men +were still declaring, shyly but delightedly, that “things is +curious.” +</p> + +<p> +In the damp discomfort of early morning the cattlemen shuffled from the steamer +at Portland and were herded to a lunch-room by the boss, who cheerfully smoked +his corn-cob and ejaculated to Mr. Wrenn and Morton such interesting facts as: +</p> + +<p> +“Trubiggs is a lobster. You don’t want to let the bosses bluff you +aboard the <i>Merian</i>. They’ll try to chase you in where the +steers’ll gore you. The grub’ll be—” +</p> + +<p> +“What grub do you get?” +</p> + +<p> +“Scouse and bread. And water.” +</p> + +<p> +“What’s scouse?” +</p> + +<p> +“Beef stew without the beef. Oh, the grub’ll be rotten. Trubiggs is +a lobster. He wouldn’t be nowhere if ’t wa’n’t for +me.” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn appreciated England’s need of roast beef, but he timidly +desired not to be gored by steers, which seemed imminent, before breakfast +coffee. The streets were coldly empty, and he was sleepy, and Morton was +silent. At the restaurant, sitting on a high stool before a pine counter, he +choked over an egg sandwich made with thick crumby slices of a bread that had +no personality to it. He roved forlornly about Portland, beside the gloomy +pipe-valiant Morton, fighting two fears: the company might not need all of them +this trip, and he might have to wait; secondly, if he incredibly did get +shipped and started for England the steers might prove dreadfully dangerous. +After intense thinking he ejaculated, “Gee! it’s be bored or get +gored.” Which was much too good not to tell Morton, so they laughed very +much, and at ten o’clock were signed on for the trip and led, whooping, +to the deck of the S.S. <i>Merian</i>. +</p> + +<p> +Cattle were still struggling down the chutes from the dock. The dirty decks +were confusingly littered with cordage and the cattlemen’s luggage. The +Jewish elders stared sepulchrally at the wilderness of open hatches and rude +passageways, as though they were prophesying death. +</p> + +<p> +But Mr. Wrenn, standing sturdily beside his suit-case to guard it, fawned with +romantic love upon the rusty iron sides of their pilgrims’ caravel; and +as the <i>Merian</i> left the wharf with no more handkerchief-waving or tears +than attends a ferry’s leaving he mumbled: +</p> + +<p> +“Free, free, out to sea. Free, free, that’s <i>me!</i>” +</p> + +<p> +Then, “Gee!… Gee whittakers!” +</p> + +</div><!--end chapter--> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2><a name="chap04"></a>CHAPTER IV<br/> +HE BECOMES THE GREAT LITTLE BILL WRENN</h2> + +<p> +When the <i>Merian</i> was three days out from Portland the frightened +cattleman stiff known as “Wrennie” wanted to die, for he was now +sure that the smell of the fo’c’sle, in which he was lying on a +thin mattress of straw covered with damp gunny-sacking, both could and would +become daily a thicker smell, a stronger smell, a smell increasingly diverse +and deadly. +</p> + +<p> +Though it was so late as eight bells of the evening, Pete, the tough factory +hand, and Tim, the down-and-out hatter, were still playing seven-up at the +dirty fo’c’sle table, while McGarver, under-boss of the Morris +cattle gang, lay in his berth, heavily studying the game and blowing sulphurous +fumes of Lunch Pail Plug Cut tobacco up toward Wrennie. +</p> + +<p> +Pete, the tough, was very evil. He sneered. He stole. He bullied. He was a +drunkard and a person without cleanliness of speech. Tim, the hatter, was a +loud-talking weakling, under Pete’s domination. Tim wore a dirty rubber +collar without a tie, and his soul was like his neckware. +</p> + +<p> +McGarver, the under-boss, was a good shepherd among the men, though he had +recently lost the head foremanship by a spree complicated with language and +violence. He looked like one of the <i>Merian</i> bulls, with broad short neck +and short curly hair above a thick-skinned deeply wrinkled low forehead. He +never undressed, but was always seen, as now, in heavy shoes and blue-gray +woolen socks tucked over the bottoms of his overalls. He was gruff and kind and +tyrannical and honest. +</p> + +<p> +Wrennie shook and drew his breath sharply as the foghorn yawped out its +“Whawn-n-n-n” again, reminding him that they were still in the Bank +fog; that at any moment they were likely to be stunned by a heart-stopping +crash as some liner’s bow burst through the fo’c’sle’s +walls in a collision. Bow-plates buckling in and shredding, the in-thrust of an +enormous black bow, water flooding in, cries and—However, the horn did at +least show that They were awake up there on the bridge to steer him through the +fog; and weren’t They experienced seamen? Hadn’t They made this +trip ever so many times and never got killed? Wouldn’t They take all +sorts of pains on Their own account as well as on his? +</p> + +<p> +But—just the same, would he really ever get to England alive? And if he +did, would he have to go on holding his breath in terror for nine more days? +Would the fo’c’sle always keep heaving up—up—up, like +this, then down—down—down, as though it were going to sink? +</p> + +<p> +“How do yuh like de fog-horn, Wrennie?” +</p> + +<p> +Pete, the tough, spit the question up at him from a corner of his mouth. +“Hope we don’t run into no ships.” +</p> + +<p> +He winked at Tim, the weakling hatter, who took the cue and mourned: +</p> + +<p> +“I’m kinda afraid we’re going to, ain’t you, Pete? The +mate was telling me he was scared we would.” +</p> + +<p> +“Sures’ t’ing you know. Hey, Wrennie, wait till youse have to +beat it down-stairs and tie up a bull in a storm. Hully gee! Youse’ll +last quick on de game, Birdie!” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, shut up,” snapped Wrennie’s friend Morton. +</p> + +<p> +But Morton was seasick; and Pete, not heeding him, outlined other dangers which +he was happily sure were threatening them. Wrennie shivered to hear that the +“grub ’d git worse.” He writhed under Pete’s loud +questions about his loss, in some cattle-pen, of the gray-and-scarlet +sweater-jacket which he had proudly and gaily purchased in New York for his +work on the ship. And the card-players assured him that his suit-case, which he +had intrusted to the Croac ship’s carpenter, would probably be stolen by +“Satan.” +</p> + +<p> +Satan! Wrennie shuddered still more. For Satan, the gaunt-jawed hook-nosed +rail-faced head foreman, diabolically smiling when angry, sardonically sneering +when calm, was a lean human whip-lash. Pete sniggered. He dilated upon +Satan’s wrath at Wrennie for not “coming across” with ten +dollars for a bribe as he, Pete, had done. +</p> + +<p> +(He lied, of course. And his words have not been given literally. They were not +beautiful words.) +</p> + +<p> +McGarver, the straw-boss, would always lie awake to enjoy a good brisk indecent +story, but he liked Wrennie’s admiration of him, so, lunging with his +bull-like head out of his berth, he snorted: +</p> + +<p> +“Hey, you, Pete, it’s time to pound your ear. Cut it out.” +</p> + +<p> +Wrennie called down, sternly, “I ain’t no theological student, +Pete, and I don’t mind profanity, but I wish you wouldn’t talk like +a garbage-scow.” +</p> + +<p> +“Hey, Poicy, did yuh bring your dictionary?” Pete bellowed to Tim, +two feet distant from him. To Wrennie, “Say, Gladys, ain’t you +afraid one of them long woids like, t’eological, will turn around and +bite you right on the wrist?” +</p> + +<p> +“Dry up!” irritatedly snapped a Canadian. +</p> + +<p> +“Aw, cut it out, you—,” groaned another. +</p> + +<p> +“Shut up,” added McGarver, the straw-boss. “Both of +you.” Raging: “Gwan to bed, Pete, or I’ll beat your block +clean off. I mean it, see? <i>Hear me?</i>” +</p> + +<p> +Yes, Pete heard him. Doubtless the first officer on the bridge heard, too, and +perhaps the inhabitants of Newfoundland. But Pete took his time in scratching +the back of his neck and stretching before he crawled into his berth. For half +an hour he talked softly to Tim, for Wrennie’s benefit, stating his +belief that Satan, the head boss, had once thrown overboard a Jew much like +Wrennie, and was likely thus to serve Wrennie, too. Tim pictured the result +when, after the capsizing of the steamer which would undoubtedly occur if this +long sickening motion kept up, Wrennie had to take to a boat with Satan. +</p> + +<p> +The fingers of Wrennie curled into shape for strangling some one. +</p> + +<p> +When Pete was asleep he worried off into thin slumber. +</p> + +<p> +Then, there was Satan, the head boss, jerking him out of his berth, stirring +his cramped joints to another dawn of drudgery—two hours of work and two +of waiting before the daily eight-o’clock insult called breakfast. He +tugged on his shoes, marveling at Mr. Wrenn’s really being there, at his +sitting in cramped stoop on the side of a berth in a dark filthy place that +went up and down like a freight elevator, subject to the orders of persons whom +he did not in the least like. +</p> + +<p> +Through the damp gray sea-air he staggered hungrily along the gangway to the +hatch amidships, and trembled down the iron ladder to McGarver’s crew +’tween-decks. +</p> + +<p> +First, watering the steers. Sickened by walking backward with pails of water he +carried till he could see and think of nothing in the world save the +water-butt, the puddle in front of it, and the cattlemen mercilessly dipping +out pails there, through centuries that would never end. How those steers did +drink! +</p> + +<p> +McGarver’s favorite bull, which he called “the Grenadier,” +took ten pails and still persisted in leering with dripping gray mouth beyond +the headboard, trying to reach more. As Wrennie was carrying a pail to the +heifers beyond, the Grenadier’s horn caught and tore his overalls. The +boat lurched. The pail whirled out of his hand. He grasped an iron stanchion +and kicked the Grenadier in the jaw till the steer backed off, a reformed +character. +</p> + +<p> +McGarver cheered, for such kicks were a rule of the game. +</p> + +<p> +“Good work,” ironically remarked Tim, the weakling hatter. +</p> + +<p> +“You go to hell,” snapped Wrennie, and Tim looked much more +respectful. +</p> + +<p> +But Wrennie lost this credit before they had finished feeding out the hay, for +he grew too dizzy to resent Tim’s remarks. +</p> + +<p> +Straining to pitch forkfuls into the pens while the boat rolled, slopping along +the wet gangway, down by the bunkers of coal, where the heat seemed a +close-wound choking shroud and the darkness was made only a little pale by +light coming through dust-caked port-holes, he sneezed and coughed and grunted +till he was exhausted. The floating bits of hay-dust were a thousand impish +hands with poisoned nails scratching at the roof of his mouth. His skin +prickled all over. He constantly discovered new and aching muscles. But he +wabbled on until he finished the work, fifteen minutes after Tim had given out. +</p> + +<p> +He crawled up to the main deck and huddled in the shelter of a pile of +hay-bales where Pete was declaring to Tim and the rest that Satan +“couldn’t never get nothing on him.” +</p> + +<p> +Morton broke into Pete’s publicity with the question, “Say, is it +straight what they say, Pete, that you’re the guy that owns the Leyland +Line and that’s why you know so much more than the rest of us poor +lollops? Watson, the needle, quick!” [Applause and laughter.] +</p> + +<p> +Wrennie felt personally grateful to Morton for this, but he went up to the aft +top deck, where he could lie alone on a pile of tarpaulins. He made himself +observe the sea which, as Kipling and Jack London had specifically promised him +in their stories, surrounded him, everywhere shining free; but he glanced at it +only once. To the north was a liner bound for home. +</p> + +<p> +Home! Gee! That <i>was</i> rubbing it in! While at work, whether he was sick or +not, he could forget—things. But the liner, fleeting on with bright ease, +made the cattle-boat seem about as romantic as Mrs. Zapp’s kitchen sink. +</p> + +<p> +Why, he wondered—“why had he been a chump? Him a wanderer? No; he +was a hired man on a sea-going dairy-farm. Well, he’d get onto this +confounded job before he was through with it, but then—gee! back to +God’s Country!” +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +While the <i>Merian</i>, eleven days out, pleasantly rocked through the Irish +Sea, with the moon revealing the coast of Anglesey, one Bill Wrenn lay on the +after-deck, condescending to the heavens. It was so warm that they did not need +to sleep below, and half a dozen of the cattlemen had brought their mattresses +up on deck. Beside Bill Wrenn lay the man who had given him that +name—Tim, the hatter, who had become weakly alarmed and admiring as +Wrennie learned to rise feeling like a boy in early vacation-time, and to find +shouting exhilaration in sending a forkful of hay fifteen good feet. +</p> + +<p> +Morton, who lay near by, had also adopted the name “Bill Wrenn.” +Most of the trip Morton had discussed Pete and Tim instead of the fact that +“things is curious.” Mr. Wrenn had been jealous at first, but when +he learned from Morton the theory that even a Pete was a “victim of +’vironment” he went out for knowing him quite systematically. +</p> + +<p> +To McGarver he had been “Bill Wrenn” since the fifth day, when he +had kept a hay-bale from slipping back into the hold on the boss’s head. +Satan and Pete still called him “Wrennie,” but he was not thinking +about them just now with Tim listening admiringly to his observations on +socialism. +</p> + +<p> +Tim fell asleep. Bill Wrenn lay quiet and let memory color the sky above him. +He recalled the gardens of water which had flowered in foam for him, strange +ships and nomadic gulls, and the schools of sleekly black porpoises that, for +him, had whisked through violet waves. Most of all, he brought back the +yesterday’s long excitement and delight of seeing the Irish coast +hills—his first foreign land—whose faint sky fresco had seemed +magical with the elfin lore of Ireland, a country that had ever been to him the +haunt not of potatoes and politicians, but of fays. He had wanted fays. They +were not common on the asphalt of West Sixteenth Street. But now he had seen +them beckoning in Wanderland. +</p> + +<p> +He was falling asleep under the dancing dome of the sky, a happy Mr. Wrenn, +when he was aroused as a furious Bill, the cattleman. Pete was clogging near +by, singing hoarsely, “Dey was a skoit and ’er name was +Goity.” +</p> + +<p> +“You shut up!” commanded Bill Wrenn. +</p> + +<p> +“Say, be careful!” the awakened Tim implored of him. Pete snorted: +“Who says to ‘shut up,’ hey? Who was it, Satan?” +</p> + +<p> +From the capstan, where he was still smoking, the head foreman muttered: +“What’s the odds? The little man won’t say it again.” +</p> + +<p> +Pete stood by Bill Wrenn’s mattress. “Who said ‘shut +up’?” sounded ominously. +</p> + +<p> +Bill popped out of bed with what he regarded as a vicious fighting-crouch. For +he was too sleepy to be afraid. “I did! What you going to do about +it?” More mildly, as a fear of his own courage began to form, “I +want to sleep.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh! You want to sleep. Little mollycoddle wants to sleep, does he? Come +here!” +</p> + +<p> +The tough grabbed at Bill’s shirt-collar across the mattress. Bill +ducked, stuck out his arm wildly, and struck Pete, half by accident. Roaring, +Pete bunted him, and he went down, with Pete kneeling on his stomach and +pounding him. +</p> + +<p> +Morton and honest McGarver, the straw-boss, sprang to drag off Pete, while +Satan, the panther, with the first interest they had ever seen in his eyes, +snarled: “Let ’em fight fair. Rounds. You’re a’ right, +Bill.” +</p> + +<p> +“Right,” commended Morton. +</p> + +<p> +Armored with Satan’s praise, firm but fearful in his rubber sneakers, +surprised and shocked to find himself here doing this, Bill Wrenn squared at +the rowdy. The moon touched sadly the lightly sketched Anglesey coast and the +rippling wake, but Bill Wrenn, oblivious of dream moon and headland, faced his +fellow-bruiser. +</p> + +<p> +They circled. Pete stuck out his foot gently. Morton sprang in, bawling +furiously, “None o’ them rough-and-tumble tricks.” +</p> + +<p> +“Right-o,” added McGarver. +</p> + +<p> +Pete scowled. He was left powerless. He puffed and grew dizzy as Bill Wrenn +danced delicately about him, for he could do nothing without back-street +tactics. He did bloody the nose of Bill and pummel his ribs, but many +cigarettes and much whisky told, and he was ready to laugh foolishly and make +peace when, at the end of the sixth round, he felt Bill’s neat little +fist in a straight—and entirely accidental—rip to the point of his +jaw. +</p> + +<p> +Pete sent his opponent spinning with a back-hander which awoke all the cruelty +of the terrible Bill. Silently Bill Wrenn plunged in with a smash! smash! +smash! like a murderous savage, using every grain of his strength. +</p> + +<p> +Let us turn from the lamentable luck of Pete. He had now got the idea that his +supposed victim could really fight. Dismayed, shocked, disgusted, he stumbled +and sought to flee, and was sent flat. +</p> + +<p> +This time it was the great little Bill who had to be dragged off. McGarver held +him, kicking and yammering, his mild mustache bristling like a battling +cat’s, till the next round, when Pete was knocked out by a clumsy +whirlwind of fists. +</p> + +<p> +He lay on the deck, with Bill standing over him and demanding, +“What’s my name, <i>heh?</i>” +</p> + +<p> +“I t’ink it’s Bill now, all right, Wrennie, old +hoss—Bill, old hoss,” groaned Pete. +</p> + +<p> +He was permitted to sneak off into oblivion. +</p> + +<p> +Bill Wrenn went below. In the dark passage by the fidley he fell to tremorous +weeping. But the brackish hydrant water that stopped his nose-bleed saved him +from hysterics. He climbed to the top deck, and now he could again see his +brother pilgrim, the moon. +</p> + +<p> +The stiffs and bosses were talking excitedly of the fight. Tim rushed up to +gurgle: “Great, Bill, old man! You done just what I’d +’a’ done if he’d cussed me. I told you Pete was a +bluffer.” +</p> + +<p> +“Git out,” said Satan. +</p> + +<p> +Tim fled. +</p> + +<p> +Morton came up, looked at Bill Wrenn, pounded him on the shoulder, and went off +to his mattress. The other stiffs slouched away, but McGarver and Satan were +still discussing the fight. +</p> + +<p> +Snuggling on the hard black pile of tarpaulins, Bill talked to them, warmed to +them, and became Mr. Wrenn. He announced his determination to wander adown +every shining road of Europe. +</p> + +<p> +“Nice work.” “Sure.” “You’ll make a snappy +little ole globe-trotter.” “Sure; ought to be able to get the +slickest kind of grub for four bits a day.” “Nice work,” +Satan interjected from time to time, with smooth irony. “Sure. Go ahead. +Like to hear your plans.” +</p> + +<p> +McGarver broke in: “Cut that out, Marvin. You’re a +‘Satan’ all right. Quit your kidding the little man. He’s all +right. And he done fine on the job last three-four days.” +</p> + +<p> +Lying on his mattress, Bill stared at the network of the ratlines against the +brilliant sky. The crisscross lines made him think of the ruled order-blanks of +the Souvenir Company. +</p> + +<p> +“Gee!” he mused, “I’d like to know if Jake is handling +my work the way we—they—like it. I’d like to see the old +office again, and Charley Carpenter, just for a couple of minutes. Gee! I wish +they could have seen me put it all over Pete to-night! That’s what +I’m going to do to the blooming Englishmen if they don’t like +me.” +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +The S.S. <i>Merian</i> panted softly beside the landing-stage at Birkenhead, +Liverpool’s Jersey City, resting in the sunshine after her voyage, while +the cattle were unloaded. They had encountered fog-banks at the mouth of the +Mersey River. Mr. Wrenn had ecstatically watched the shores of +England—<i>England!</i>—ride at him through the fog, and had panted +over the lines of English villas among the dunes. It was like a dream, yet the +shore had such amazingly safe solid colors, real red and green and yellow, when +contrasted with the fog-wet deck unearthily glancing with mist-lights. +</p> + +<p> +Now he was seeing his first foreign city, and to Morton, stolidly curious +beside him, he could say nothing save “Gee!” With church-tower and +swarthy dome behind dome, Liverpool lay across the Mersey. Up through the +Liverpool streets that ran down to the river, as though through peep-holes +slashed straight back into the Middle Ages, his vision plunged, and it wandered +unchecked through each street while he hummed: +</p> + +<p> +“Free, free, in Eu-ro-pee, that’s <i>me!</i>” +</p> + +<p> +The cattlemen were called to help unload the remaining hay. They made a game of +it. Even Satan smiled, even the Jewish elders were lightly affable as they made +pretendedly fierce gestures at the squat patient hay-bales. Tim, the hatter, +danced a limber foolish jig upon the deck, and McGarver bellowed, “The +bon-nee bon-nee banks of Loch Lo-o-o-o-mond.” +</p> + +<p> +The crowd bawled: “Come on, Bill Wrenn; your turn. Hustle up with that +bale, Pete, or we’ll sic Bill on you.” +</p> + +<p> +Bill Wrenn, standing very dignified, piped: “I’m Colonel Armour. I +own all these cattle, ’cept the Morris uns, see? Gotta do what I say, +savvy? Tim, walk on your ear.” +</p> + +<p> +The hatter laid his head on the deck and waved his anemic legs in accordance +with directions from Colonel Armour (late Wrenn). +</p> + +<p> +The hay was off. The <i>Merian</i> tooted and headed across the Mersey to the +Huskinson Dock, in Liverpool, while the cattlemen played tag about the deck. +Whooping and laughing, they made last splashy toilets at the water-butts, +dragged out their luggage, and descended to the dock-house. +</p> + +<p> +As the cattlemen passed Bill Wrenn and Morton, shouting affectionate good-bys +in English or courteous Yiddish, Bill commented profanely to Morton on the fact +that the solid stone floor of the great shed seemed to have enough sea-motion +to “make a guy sick.” It was nearly his last utterance as Bill +Wrenn. He became Mr. Wrenn, absolute Mr. Wrenn, on the street, as he saw a real +English bobby, a real English carter, and the sign, “Cocoa House. Tea +<i>Id</i>.” +</p> + +<p> +England! +</p> + +<p> +“Now for some real grub!” cried Morton. “No more scouse and +willow-leaf tea.” +</p> + +<p> +Stretching out their legs under a table glorified with toasted Sally Lunns and +Melton Mowbrays, served by a waitress who said “Thank <i>you</i>” +with a rising inflection, they gazed at the line of mirrors running Britishly +all around the room over the long lounge seat, and smiled with the triumphant +content which comes to him whose hunger for dreams and hunger for meat-pies are +satisfied together. +</p> + +</div><!--end chapter--> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2><a name="chap05"></a>CHAPTER V<br/> +HE FINDS MUCH QUAINT ENGLISH FLAVOR</h2> + +<p> +Big wharves, all right. England sure is queen of the sea, heh? Busy town, +Liverpool. But, say, there is a quaint English flavor to these shops…. Look at +that: ‘Red Lion Inn.’… ‘Overhead trams’ they call the +elevated. Real flavor, all right. English as can be…. I sure like to wander +around these little shops. Street crowd. That’s where you get the real +quaint flavor.” +</p> + +<p> +Thus Morton, to the glowing Mr. Wrenn, as they turned into St. George’s +Square, noting the Lipton’s Tea establishment. <i>Sir</i> Thomas +Lipton—wasn’t he a friend of the king? Anyway, he was some kind of +a lord, and he owned big society racing-yachts. +</p> + +<p> +In the grandiose square Mr. Wrenn prayerfully remarked, “Gee!” +</p> + +<p> +“Greek temple. Fine,” agreed Morton. +</p> + +<p> +“That’s St. George’s Hall, where they have big organ +concerts,” explained Mr. Wrenn. “And there’s the art-gallery +across the Square, and here’s the Lime Street Station.” He had +studied his Baedeker as club women study the cyclopedia. “Let’s go +over and look at the trains.” +</p> + +<p> +“Funny little boxes, ain’t they, Wrenn, them cars! Quaint things. +What is it they call ’em—carriages? First, second, third +class….” +</p> + +<p> +“Just like in books.” +</p> + +<p> +“Booking-office. That’s tickets…. Funny, eh?” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn insisted on paying for both their high teas at the cheap restaurant, +timidly but earnestly. Morton was troubled. As they sat on a park bench, +smoking those most Anglican cigarettes, “Dainty Bits,” Mr. Wrenn +begged: +</p> + +<p> +“What’s the matter, old man?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, nothing. Just thinking.” Morton smiled artificially. He added, +presently: “Well, old Bill, got to make the break. Can’t go on +living on you this way.” +</p> + +<p> +“Aw, thunder! You ain’t living on me. Besides, I want you to. +Honest I do. We can have a whole lot better time together, Morty.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, but—Nope; I can’t do it. Nice of you. Can’t do +it, though. Got to go on my own, like the fellow says.” +</p> + +<p> +“Aw, come on. Look here; it’s my money, ain’t it? I got a +right to spend it the way I want to, haven’t I? Aw, come on. We’ll +bum along together, and then when the money is gone we’ll get some kind +of job together. Honest, I want you to.” +</p> + +<p> +“Hunka. Don’t believe you’d care for the kind of knockabout +jobs I’ll have to get.” +</p> + +<p> +“Sure I would. Aw, come on, Morty. I—” +</p> + +<p> +“You’re too level-headed to like to bum around like a fool hobo. +You’d dam soon get tired of it.” +</p> + +<p> +“What if I did? Morty, look here. I’ve been learning something on +this trip. I’ve always wanted to just do one thing—see foreign +places. Well, I want to do that just as much as ever. But there’s +something that’s a whole lot more important. Somehow, I ain’t ever +had many friends. Some ways you’re about the best friend I’ve ever +had—you ain’t neither too highbrow or too lowbrow. And this +friendship business—it means such an awful lot. It’s like what I +was reading about—something by Elbert Hubbard or—thunder, I +can’t remember his name, but, anyway, it’s one of those poet guys +that writes for the back page of the <i>Journal</i>—something about a +<i>joyous adventure</i>. That’s what being friends is. Course you +understand I wouldn’t want to say this to most people, but you’ll +understand how I mean. It’s—this friendship business is just like +those old crusaders— you know—they’d start out on a fine +morning—you know; armor shining, all that stuff. It wouldn’t make +any dif. what they met as long as they was fighting together. Rainy nights with +folks sneaking through the rain to get at ’em, and all sorts of +things— ready for anything, long as they just stuck together. +That’s the way this friendship business is, I b’lieve. Just like it +said in the <i>Journal</i>. Yump, sure is. Gee! it’s—Chance to tell +folks what you think and really get some fun out of seeing places together. And +I ain’t ever done it much. Course I don’t mean to say I’ve +been living off on any blooming desert island all my life, but, just the same, +I’ve always been kind of alone—not knowing many folks. You know how +it is in a New York rooming-house. So now—Aw, don’t slip up on me, +Morty. Honestly, I don’t care what kind of work we do as long as we can +stick together; I don’t care a hang if we don’t get anything better +to do than scrub floors!” +</p> + +<p> +Morton patted his arm and did not answer for a while. Then: +</p> + +<p> +“Yuh, I know how you mean. And it’s good of you to like beating it +around with me. But you sure got the exaggerated idee of me. And you’d +get sick of the holes I’m likely to land in.” +</p> + +<p> +There was a certain pride which seemed dreadfully to shut Mr. Wrenn out as +Morton added: +</p> + +<p> +“Why, man, I’m going to do all of Europe. From the Turkish jails +to—oh, St. Petersburg…. You made good on the <i>Merian</i>, all right. +But you do like things shipshape.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, I’d—” +</p> + +<p> +“We might stay friends if we busted up now and met in New York again. But +not if you get into all sorts of bum places w—” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, look here, Morty—” +</p> + +<p> +“—with me…. However, I’ll think it over. Let’s not talk +about it till to-morrow.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, please do think it over, Morty, old man, won’t you? And +to-night you’ll let me take you to a music-hall, won’t you?” +</p> + +<p> +“Uh—yes,” Morton hesitated. +</p> + +<p> +A music-hall—not mere vaudeville! Mr. Wrenn could hardly keep his feet on +the pavement as they scampered to it and got ninepenny seats. He would have +thought it absurd to pay eighteen cents for a ticket, but pence—They were +out at nine-thirty. Happily tired, Mr. Wrenn suggested that they go to a +temperance hotel at his expense, for he had read in Baedeker that temperance +hotels were respectable—also cheap. +</p> + +<p> +“No, no!” frowned Morton. “Tell you what you do, Bill. You go +to a hotel, and I’ll beat it down to a lodging-house on Duke Street…. +Juke Street!… Remember how I ran onto Pete on the street? He told me you could +get a cot down there for fourpence.” +</p> + +<p> +“Aw, come on to a hotel. Please do! It ’d just hurt me to think of +you sleeping in one of them holes. I wouldn’t sleep a bit +if—” +</p> + +<p> +“Say, for the love of Mike, Wrenn, get wise! Get wise, son! I’m not +going to sponge on you, and that’s all there is to it.” +</p> + +<p> +Bill Wrenn strode into their company for a minute, and quoth the terrible Bill: +</p> + +<p> +“Well, you don’t need to get so sore about it. I don’t go +around asking folks can I give ’em a meal ticket all the time, let me +tell you, and when I do—Oh rats! Say, I didn’t mean to get huffy, +Morty. But, doggone you, old man, you can’t shake me this easy. I sye, +old top, I’m peeved; yessir. We’ll go Dutch to a lodging-house, or +even walk the streets.” +</p> + +<p> +“All right, sir; all right. I’ll take you up on that. We’ll +sleep in an areaway some place.” +</p> + +<p> +They walked to the outskirts of Liverpool, questing the desirable dark alley. +Awed by the solid quietude and semigrandeur of the large private estates, +through narrow streets where dim trees leaned over high walls whose long silent +stretches were broken only by mysterious little doors, they tramped bashfully, +inspecting, but always rejecting, nooks by lodge gates. +</p> + +<p> +They came to a stone church with a porch easily reached from the street, a +large and airy stone porch, just suited, Morton declared, “to a couple of +hoboes like us. If a bobby butts in, why, we’ll just slide under them +seats. Then the bobby can go soak his head.” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn had never so far defied society as to steal a place for sleeping. He +felt very uneasy, like a man left naked on the street by robbers, as he rolled +up his coat for a pillow and removed his shoes in a place that was perfectly +open to the street. The paved floor was cold to his bare feet, and, as he tried +to go to sleep, it kept getting colder and colder to his back. Reaching out his +hand, he fretfully rubbed the cracks between stones. He scowled up at the +ceiling of the porch. He couldn’t bear to look out through the door, for +it framed the vicar’s house, with lamplight bodying forth latticed +windows, suggesting soft beds and laughter and comfortable books. All the while +his chilled back was aching in new places. +</p> + +<p> +He sprang up, put on his shoes, and paced the churchyard. It seemed a great +waste of educational advantages not to study the tower of this foreign church, +but he thought much more about his aching shoulder-blades. +</p> + +<p> +Morton came from the porch stiff but grinning. “Didn’t like it +much, eh, Bill? Afraid you wouldn’t. Must say I didn’t either, +though. Well, come on. Let’s beat it around and see if we can’t +find a better place.” +</p> + +<p> +In a vacant lot they discovered a pile of hay. Mr. Wrenn hardly winced at the +hearty slap Morton gave his back, and he pronounced, “Some +Waldorf-Astoria, that stack!” as they sneaked into the lot. They had laid +loving hands upon the hay, remarking, “Well, I <i>guess!</i>” when +they heard from a low stable at the very back of the lot: +</p> + +<p> +“I say, you chaps, what are you doing there?” +</p> + +<p> +A reflective carter, who had been twisting two straws, ambled out of the shadow +of the stable and prepared to do battle. +</p> + +<p> +“Say, old man, can’t we sleep in your hay just to-night?” +argued Morton. “We’re Americans. Came over on a cattle-boat. We +ain’t got only enough money to last us for food,” while Mr. Wrenn +begged, “Aw, please let us.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh! You’re Americans, are you? You seem decent enough. I’ve +got a brother in the States. He used to own this stable with me. In St. Cloud, +Minnesota, he is, you know. Minnesota’s some kind of a shire. Either of +you chaps been in Minnesota?” +</p> + +<p> +“Sure,” lied Morton; “I’ve hunted bear there.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, I say, bear now! My brother’s never written m—” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, that was way up in the northern part, in the Big Woods. I’ve +had some narrow escapes.” +</p> + +<p> +Then Morton, who had never been west of Pittsburg, sang somewhat in this wise +the epic of the hunting he had never done: +</p> + +<p> +Alone. Among the pines. Dead o’ winter. Only one shell in his rifle. Cold +of winter. Snow—deep snow. Snow-shoes. Hiking along—reg’lar +mushing—packing grub to the lumber-camp. Way up near the Canadian border. +Cold, terrible cold. Stars looked like little bits of steel. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn thought he remembered the story. He had read it in a magazine. Morton +was continuing: +</p> + +<p> +Snow stretched out among the pines. He was wearing a Mackinaw and shoe-packs. +Saw a bear loping along. He had—Morton had—a .44-.40 Marlin, but +only one shell. Thrust the muzzle of his rifle right into the bear’s +mouth. Scared for a minute. Almost fell off his snow-shoes. Hardest thing he +ever did, to pull that trigger. Fired. Bear sort of jumped at him, then rolled +over, clawing. Great place, those Minnesota Big— +</p> + +<p> +“What’s a shoe-pack?” the Englishman stolidly interjected. +</p> + +<p> +“Kind of a moccasin…. Great place, those woods. Hope your brother gets +the chance to get up there.” +</p> + +<p> +“I say, I wonder did you ever meet him? Scrabble is his name, Jock +Scrabble.” +</p> + +<p> +“Jock Scrabble—no, but <i>say!</i> By golly, there was a fellow up +in the Big Woods that came from St. Cl—St. Cloud? Yes, that was it. He +was telling us about the town. I remember he said your brother had great +chances there.” +</p> + +<p> +The Englishman meditatively accepted a bad cigar from Mr. Wrenn. Suddenly: +“You chaps can sleep in the stable-loft if you’d like. But you must +blooming well stop smoking.” +</p> + +<p> +So in the dark odorous hay-mow Mr. Wrenn stretched out his legs with an +affectionate “good night” to Morton. He slept nine hours. When he +awoke, at the sound of a chain clanking in the stable below, Morton was gone. +This note was pinned to his sleeve: +</p> + +<p class="letter"> +D<small>EAR</small> O<small>LD</small> M<small>AN</small>,—I still feel +sure that you will not enjoy the hiking. Bumming is not much fun for most +people, I don’t think, even if they say it is. I do not want to live on +you. I always did hate to graft on people. So I am going to beat it off alone. +But I hope I will see you in N Y & we will enjoy many a good laugh together +over our trip. If you will phone the P. R. R. you can find out when I get back +& so on. As I do not know what your address will be. Please look me up +& I hope you will have a good trip. +</p> + +<p class="right"> +Yours truly,<br/> +H<small>ARRY</small> P. M<small>ORTON</small>. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn lay listening to the unfriendly rattling of the chain harness below +for a long time. When he crawled languidly down from the hay-loft he glowered +in a manner which was decidedly surly even for Bill Wrenn at a middle-aged +English stranger who was stooping over a cow’s hoof in a stall facing the +ladder. +</p> + +<p> +“Wot you doing here?” asked the Englishman, raising his head and +regarding Mr. Wrenn as a housewife does a cockroach in the salad-bowl. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn was bored. This seemed a very poor sort of man; a bloated Cockney, +with a dirty neck-cloth, vile cuffs of grayish black, and a waistcoat cut +foolishly high. +</p> + +<p> +“The owner said I could sleep here,” he snapped. +</p> + +<p> +“Ow. ’E did, did ’e? ’E ayn’t been giving you any +of the perishin’ ’osses, too, ’as ’e?” +</p> + +<p> +It was sturdy old Bill Wrenn who snarled, “Oh, shut up!” Bill +didn’t feel like standing much just then. He’d punch this fellow as +he’d punched Pete, as soon as not—or even sooner. +</p> + +<p> +“Ow…. It’s shut up, is it?… I’ve ’arf a mind to set the +’tecs on you, but I’m lyte. I’ll just ’it you on the +bloody nowse.” +</p> + +<p> +Bill Wrenn stepped off the ladder and squared at him. He was sorry that the +Cockney was smaller than Pete. +</p> + +<p> +The Cockney came over, feinted in an absent-minded manner, made swift and +confusing circles with his left hand, and hit Bill Wrenn on the aforesaid +bloody nose, which immediately became a bleeding nose. Bill Wrenn felt dizzy +and, sitting on a grain-sack, listened amazedly to the Cockney’s +apologetic: +</p> + +<p> +“I’m sorry I ayn’t got time to ’ave the law on you, but +I could spare time to ’it you again.” +</p> + +<p> +Bill shook the blood from his nose and staggered at the Cockney, who seized his +collar, set him down outside the stable with a jarring bump, and walked away, +whistling: +</p> + +<p class="poem"> +“Come, oh come to our Sunday-school,<br/> +Ev-v-v-v-v-v-ry Sunday morn-ing.” +</p> + +<p> +“Gee!” mourned Mr. William Wrenn, “and I thought I was +getting this hobo business down pat…. Gee! I wonder if Pete <i>was</i> so hard +to lick?” +</p> + +</div><!--end chapter--> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2><a name="chap06"></a>CHAPTER VI<br/> +HE IS AN ORPHAN</h2> + +<p> +Sadly clinging to the plan of the walking-trip he was to have made with Morton, +Mr. Wrenn crossed by ferry to Birkenhead, quite unhappily, for he wanted to be +discussing with Morton the quaintness of the uniformed functionaries. He looked +for the <i>Merian</i> half the way over. As he walked through Birkenhead, bound +for Chester, he pricked himself on to note red-brick house-rows, almost +shocking in their lack of high front stoops. Along the country road he +reflected: “Wouldn’t Morty enjoy this! Farm-yard all paved. +Haystack with a little roof on it. Kitchen stove stuck in a kind of fireplace. +Foreign as the deuce.” +</p> + +<p> +But Morton was off some place, in a darkness where there weren’t things +to enjoy. Mr. Wrenn had lost him forever. Once he heard himself wishing that +even Tim, the hatter, or “good old McGarver” were along. A scene so +British that it seemed proper to enjoy it alone he did find in a real +garden-party, with what appeared to be a real curate, out of a story in <i>The +Strand</i>, passing teacups; but he passed out of that hot glow into a cold +plodding that led him to Chester and a dull hotel which might as well have been +in Bridgeport or Hoboken. +</p> + +<p> +He somewhat timidly enjoyed Chester the early part of the next day, docilely +following a guide about the walls, gaping at the mill on the Dee and asking the +guide two intelligent questions about Roman remains. He snooped through the +galleried streets, peering up dark stairways set in heavy masonry that spoke of +historic sieges, and imagined that he was historically besieging. For a time +Mr. Wrenn’s fancies contented him. +</p> + +<p> +He smiled as he addressed glossy red and green postcards to Lee Theresa and +Goaty, Cousin John and Mr. Guilfogle, writing on each a variation of +“Having a splendid trip. This is a very interesting old town. Wish you +were here.” Pantingly, he found a panorama showing the hotel where he was +staying—or at least two of its chimneys—and, marking it with a +heavy cross and the announcement “This is my hotel where I am +staying,” he sent it to Charley Carpenter. +</p> + +<p> +He was at his nearest to greatness at Chester Cathedral. He chuckled aloud as +he passed the remains of a refectory of monastic days, in the close, where +knights had tied their romantically pawing chargers, “just like +he’d read about in a story about the olden times.” He was really +there. He glanced about and assured himself of it. He wasn’t in the +office. He was in an English cathedral close! +</p> + +<p> +But shortly thereafter he was in an English temperance hotel, sitting still, +almost weeping with the longing to see Morton. He walked abroad, feeling like +an intruder on the lively night crowd; in a tap-room he drank a glass of +English porter and tried to make himself believe that he was acquainted with +the others in the room, to which theory they gave but little support. All this +while his loneliness shadowed him. +</p> + +<p> +Of that loneliness one could make many books; how it sat down with him; how he +crouched in his chair, be-spelled by it, till he violently rose and fled, with +loneliness for companion in his flight. He was lonely. He sighed that he was +“lonely as fits.” Lonely—the word obsessed him. Doubtless he +was a bit mad, as are all the isolated men who sit in distant lands longing for +the voices of friendship. +</p> + +<p> +Next morning he hastened to take the train for Oxford to get away from his +loneliness, which lolled evilly beside him in the compartment. He tried to +convey to a stodgy North Countryman his interest in the way the seats faced +each other. The man said “Oh aye?” insultingly and returned to his +Manchester newspaper. +</p> + +<p> +Feeling that he was so offensive that it was a matter of honor for him to keep +his eyes away, Mr. Wrenn dutifully stared out of the door till they reached +Oxford. +</p> + +<p> +There is a calm beauty to New College gardens. There is, Mr. Wrenn observed, +“something simply <i>slick</i> about all these old quatrangleses,” +crossed by summering students in short flappy gowns. But he always returned to +his exile’s room, where he now began to hear the new voice of shapeless +nameless Fear—fear of all this alien world that didn’t care whether +he loved it or not. +</p> + +<p> +He sat thinking of the cattle-boat as a home which he had loved but which he +would never see again. He had to use force on himself to keep from hurrying +back to Liverpool while there still was time to return on the same boat. +</p> + +<p> +No! He was going to “stick it out somehow, and get onto the hang of all +this highbrow business.” +</p> + +<p> +Then he said: “Oh, darn it all. I feel rotten. I wish I was dead!” +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +“Those, sir, are the windows of the apartment once occupied by Walter +Pater,” said the cultured American after whom he was trailing. Mr. Wrenn +viewed them attentively, and with shame remembered that he didn’t know +who Walter Pater was. But—oh yes, now he remembered; Walter was the guy +that ’d murdered his whole family. So, aloud, “Well, I guess +Oxford’s sorry Walt ever come here, all right.” +</p> + +<p> +“My dear sir, Mr. Pater was the most immaculate genius of the nineteenth +century,” lectured Dr. Mittyford, the cultured American, severely. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn had met Mittyford, Ph.D., near the barges; had, upon polite request, +still more politely lent him a match, and seized the chance to confide in +somebody. Mittyford had a bald head, neat eye-glasses, a fair family income, a +chatty good-fellowship at the Faculty Club, and a chilly contemptuousness in +his rhetoric class-room at Leland Stanford, Jr., University. He wrote poetry, +which he filed away under the letter “P” in his letter-file. +</p> + +<p> +Dr. Mittyford grudgingly took Mr. Wrenn about, to teach him what not to enjoy. +He pointed at Shelley’s rooms as at a certificated angel’s feather, +but Mr. Wrenn writhingly admitted that he had never heard of Shelley, whose +name he confused with Max O’Rell’s, which Dr. Mittyford deemed an +error. Then, Pater’s window. The doctor shrugged. Oh well, what could you +expect of the proletariat! Swinging his stick aloofly, he stalked to the +Bodleian and vouchsafed, “That, sir, is the <i>AEschylus</i> Shelley had +in his pocket when he was drowned.” +</p> + +<p> +Though he heard with sincere regret the news that his new idol was drowned, Mr. +Wrenn found that <i>AEschylus</i> left him cold. It seemed to be printed in a +foreign language. But perhaps it was merely a very old book. +</p> + +<p> +Standing before a case in which was an exquisite book in a queer wrigglesome +language, bearing the legend that from this volume Fitzgerald had translated +the <i>Rubaiyat</i>, Dr. Mittyford waved his hand and looked for thanks. +</p> + +<p> +“Pretty book,” said Mr. Wrenn. +</p> + +<p> +“And did you note who used it?” +</p> + +<p> +“Uh—yes.” He hastily glanced at the placard. “Mr. +Fitzgerald. Say, I think I read some of that Rubaiyat. It was something about a +Persian kitten—I don’t remember exactly.” +</p> + +<p> +Dr. Mittyford walked bitterly to the other end of the room. +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +About eight in the evening Mr. Wrenn’s landlady knocked with, +“There’s a gentleman below to see you, sir.” +</p> + +<p> +“Me?” blurted Mr. Wrenn. +</p> + +<p> +He galloped down-stairs, panting to himself that Morton had at last found him. +He peered out and was overwhelmed by a motor-car, with Dr. Mittyford waiting in +awesome fur coat, goggles, and gauntlets, centered in the car-lamplight that +loomed in the shivery evening fog. +</p> + +<p> +“Gee! just like a hero in a novel!” reflected Mr. Wrenn. +</p> + +<p> +“Get on your things,” said the pedagogue. “I’m going to +give you the time of your life.” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn obediently went up and put on his cap. He was excited, yet frightened +and resentful at being “dragged into all this highbrow business” +which he had resolutely been putting away the past two hours. +</p> + +<p> +As he stole into the car Dr. Mittyford seemed comparatively human, remarking: +“I feel bored this evening. I thought I would give you a <i>nuit +blanche</i>. How would you like to go to the Red Unicorn at Brempton—one +of the few untouched old inns?” +</p> + +<p> +“That would be nice,” said Mr. Wrenn, unenthusiastically. +</p> + +<p> +His chilliness impressed Dr. Mittyford, who promptly told one of the best of +his well-known whimsical yet scholarly stories. +</p> + +<p> +“Ha! ha!” remarked Mr. Wrenn. +</p> + +<p> +He had been saying to himself: “By golly! I ain’t going to even try +to be a society guy with him no more. I’m just going to be <i>me</i>, and +if he don’t like it he can go to the dickens.” +</p> + +<p> +So he was gentle and sympathetic and talked West Sixteenth Street slang, to the +rhetorician’s lofty amusement. +</p> + +<p> +The tap-room of the Red Unicorn was lighted by candles and a fireplace. That is +a simple thing to say, but it was not a simple thing for Mr. Wrenn to see. As +he observed the trembling shadows on the sanded floor he wriggled and excitedly +murmured, “Gee!… Gee whittakers!” +</p> + +<p> +The shadows slipped in arabesques over the dust-gray floor and scampered as +bravely among the rafters as though they were in such a tale as men told in +believing days. Rustics in smocks drank ale from tankards; and in a corner was +snoring an ear-ringed peddler with his beetle-black head propped on an oilcloth +pack. +</p> + +<p> +Stamping in, chilly from the ride, Mr. Wrenn laughed aloud. With a comfortable +feeling on the side toward the fire he stuck his slight legs straight out +before the old-time settle, looked devil-may-care, made delightful ridges on +the sanded floor with his toe, and clapped a pewter pot on his knee with a +small emphatic “Wop!” After about two and a quarter tankards he +broke out, “Say, that peddler guy there, don’t he look like he was +a gipsy—you know—sneaking through the hedges around the +manner-house to steal the earl’s daughter, huh?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes…. You’re a romanticist, then, I take it?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, I guess I am. Kind of. Like to read romances and stuff.” He +stared at Mittyford beseechingly. “But, say—say, I wonder +why—Somehow, I haven’t enjoyed Oxford and the rest of the places +like I ought to. See, I’d always thought I’d be simply nutty about +the quatrangles and stuff, but I’m afraid they’re too highbrow for +me. I hate to own up, but sometimes I wonder if I can get away with this +traveling stunt.” +</p> + +<p> +Mittyford, the magnificent, had mixed ale and whisky punch. He was mellowly +instructive: +</p> + +<p> +“Do you know, I’ve been wondering just what you <i>would</i> get +out of all this. You really have a very fine imagination of a sort, you know, +but of course you’re lacking in certain factual bases. As I see it, your +<i>metier</i> would be to travel with a pleasant wife, the two of you hand in +hand, so to speak, looking at the more obvious public buildings and +plesaunces—avenues and plesuances. There must be a certain portion of the +tripper class which really has the ability ‘for to admire and for to +see.’” +</p> + +<p> +Dr. Mittyford finished his second toddy and with a wave of his hand presented +to Mr. Wrenn the world and all the plesaunces thereof, for to see, though not, +of course, to admire Mittyfordianly. +</p> + +<p> +“But—what are you to do now about Oxford? Well, I’m afraid +you’re taken into captivity a bit late to be trained for that sort of +thing. Do about Oxford? Why, go back, master the world you understand. By the +way, have you seen my book on <i>Saxon Derivatives?</i> Not that I’m +prejudiced in its favor, but it might give you a glimmering of what this +difficile thing ‘culture’ really is.” +</p> + +<p> +The rustics were droning a church anthem. The glow of the ale was in Mr. Wrenn. +He leaned back, entirely happy, and it seemed confusedly to him that what +little he had heard of his learned and affectionate friend’s advice +gratefully confirmed his own theory that what one wanted was friends—a +“nice wife”—folks. “Yes, sir, by golly! It was awfully +nice of the Doc.” He pictured a tender girl in golden brown back in the +New York he so much desired to see who would await him evenings with a smile +that was kept for him. Homey—that was what <i>he</i> was going to be! He +happily and thoughtfully ran his finger about the rim of his glass ten times. +</p> + +<p> +“Time to go, I’ m afraid,” Dr. Mittyford was saying. Through +the exquisite haze that now filled the room Mr. Wrenn saw him dimly, as a +triangle of shirt-front and two gleaming ellipses for eyes…. His dear friend, +the Doc!… As he walked through the room chairs got humorously in his way, but +he good-naturedly picked a path among them, and fell asleep in the motor-car. +All the ride back he made soft mouse-like sounds of snoring. +</p> + +<p> +When he awoke in the morning with a headache and surveyed his unchangeably +dingy room he realized slowly, after smothering his head in the pillow to shut +off the light from his scorching eyeballs, that Dr. Mittyford had called him a +fool for trying to wander. He protested, but not for long, for he hated to +venture out there among the dreadfully learned colleges and try to understand +stuff written in letters that look like crow-tracks. +</p> + +<p> +He packed his suit-case slowly, feeling that he was very wicked in leaving +Oxford’s opportunities. +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +Mr. Wrenn rode down on a Tottenham Court Road bus, viewing the quaintness of +London. Life was a rosy ringing valiant pursuit, for he was about to ship on a +Mediterranean steamer laden chiefly with adventurous friends. The bus passed a +victoria containing a man with a real monocle. A newsboy smiled up at him. The +Strand roared with lively traffic. +</p> + +<p> +But the gray stonework and curtained windows of the Anglo-Southern Steamship +Company’s office did not invite any Mr. Wrenns to come in and ship, nor +did the hall porter, a beefy person with a huge collar and sparse painfully +sleek hair, whose eyes were like cold boiled mackerel as Mr. Wrenn yearned: +</p> + +<p> +“Please—uh—please will you be so kind and tell me where I can +ship as a steward for the Med—” +</p> + +<p> +“None needed.” +</p> + +<p> +“Or Spain? I just want to get any kind of a job at first. Peeling +potatoes or—It don’t make any difference—” +</p> + +<p> +“None needed, I said, my man.” The porter examined the hall clock +extensively. +</p> + +<p> +Bill Wrenn suddenly popped into being and demanded: “Look here, you; I +want to see somebody in authority. I want to know what I <i>can</i> ship +as.” +</p> + +<p> +The porter turned round and started. All his faith in mankind was destroyed by +the shock of finding the fellow still there. “Nothing, I told you. No one +needed.” +</p> + +<p> +“Look here; can I see somebody in authority or not?” +</p> + +<p> +The porter was privately esteemed a wit at his motherin-law’s. Waddling +away, he answered, “Or not.” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn drooped out of the corridor. He had planned to see the Tate Gallery, +but now he hadn’t the courage to face the difficulties of enjoying +pictures. He zig-zagged home, mourning: “What’s the use. And +I’ll be hung if I’ll try any other offices, either. The icy mitt, +that’s what they hand you here. Some day I’ll go down to the docks +and try to ship there. Prob’ly. Gee! I feel rotten!” +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +Out of all this fog of unfriendliness appeared the waitress at the St. Brasten +Cocoa House; first, as a human being to whom he could talk, second, as a woman. +She was ignorant and vulgar; she misused English cruelly; she wore greasy +cotton garments, planted her large feet on the floor with firm clumsiness, and +always laughed at the wrong cue in his diffident jests. But she did laugh; she +did listen while he stammered his ideas of meat-pies and St. Paul’s and +aeroplanes and Shelley and fog and tan shoes. In fact, she supposed him to be a +gentleman and scholar, not an American. +</p> + +<p> +He went to the cocoa-house daily. +</p> + +<p> +She let him know that he was a man and she a woman, young and kindly, +clear-skinned and joyous-eyed. She touched him with warm elbow and plump hip, +leaning against his chair as he gave his order. To that he looked forward from +meal to meal, though he never ceased harrowing over what he considered a +shameful intrigue. +</p> + +<p> +That opinion of his actions did not keep him from tingling one lunch-time when +he suddenly understood that she was expecting to be tempted. He tempted her +without the slightest delay, muttering, “Let’s take a walk this +evening?” +</p> + +<p> +She accepted. He was shivery and short of breath while he was trying to smile +at her during the rest of the meal, and so he remained all afternoon at the +Tower of London, though he very well knew that all this +history—“kings and gwillotines and stuff”—demanded real +Wrenn thrills. +</p> + +<p> +They were to meet on a street-corner at eight. At seven-thirty he was waiting +for her. At eight-thirty he indignantly walked away, but he hastily returned, +and stood there another half-hour. She did not come. +</p> + +<p> +When he finally fled home he was glad to have escaped the great mystery of +life, then distressingly angry at the waitress, and desolate in the desert +stillness of his room. +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +He sat in his cold hygienic uncomfortable room on Tavistock Place trying to +keep his attention on the “tick, tick, tick, tick” of his +two-dollar watch, but really cowering before the vast shadowy presences that +slunk in from the hostile city. +</p> + +<p> +He didn’t in the least know what he was afraid of. The actual Englishman +whom he passed on the streets did not seem to threaten his life, yet his +friendly watch and familiar suit-case seemed the only things he could trust in +all the menacing world as he sat there, so vividly conscious of his fear and +loneliness that he dared not move his cramped legs. +</p> + +<p> +The tension could not last. For a time he was able to laugh at himself, and he +made pleasant pictures—Charley Carpenter telling him a story at +Drubel’s; Morton companionably smoking on the top deck; Lee Theresa +flattering him during an evening walk. Most of all he pictured the brown-eyed +sweetheart he was going to meet somewhere, sometime. He thought with sophomoric +shame of his futile affair with the waitress, then forgot her as he seemed +almost to touch the comforting hand of the brown-eyed girl. +</p> + +<p> +“Friends, that’s what I want. You bet!” That was the work he +was going to do—make acquaintances. A girl who would understand him, with +whom he could trot about, seeing department-store windows and moving-picture +shows. +</p> + +<p> +It was then, probably, hunched up in the dowdy chair of faded upholstery, that +he created the two phrases which became his formula for happiness. He desired +“somebody to go home to evenings”; still more, “some one to +work with and work for.” +</p> + +<p> +It seemed to him that he had mapped out his whole life. He sat back, satisfied, +and caught the sound of emptiness in his room, emphasized by the stilly tick of +his watch. +</p> + +<p> +“Oh—Morton—” he cried. +</p> + +<p> +He leaped up and raised the window. It was raining, but through the slow splash +came the night rattle of hostile London. Staring down, he studied the desolate +circle of light a street-lamp cast on the wet pavement. A cat gray as +dish-water, its fur worn off in spots, lean and horrible, sneaked through the +circle of light like the spirit of unhappiness, like London’s sneer at +solitary Americans in Russell Square rooms. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn gulped. Through the light skipped a man and a girl, so little aware +of him that they stopped, laughingly, wrestling for an umbrella, then +disappeared, and the street was like a forgotten tomb. A hansom swung by, the +hoofbeats sharp and cheerless. The rain dripped. Nothing else. Mr. Wrenn +slammed down the window. +</p> + +<p> +He smoothed the sides of his suit-case and reckoned the number of miles it had +traveled with him. He spun his watch about on the table, and listened to its +rapid mocking speech, “Friends, friends; friends, friends.” +</p> + +<p> +Sobbing, he began to undress, laying down each garment as though he were going +to the scaffold. When the room was dark the great shadowy forms of fear +thronged unchecked about his narrow dingy bed. +</p> + +<p> +Once during the night he woke. Some sound was threatening him. It was London, +coming to get him and torture him. The light in his room was dusty, mottled, +gray, lifeless. He saw his door, half ajar, and for some moments lay +motionless, watching stark and bodiless heads thrust themselves through the +opening and withdraw with sinister alertness till he sprang up and opened the +door wide. +</p> + +<p> +But he did not even stop to glance down the hall for the crowd of phantoms that +had gathered there. Some hidden manful scorn of weakness made him sneer aloud, +“Don’t be a baby even if you <i>are</i> lonely.” +</p> + +<p> +His voice was deeper than usual, and he went to bed to sleep, throwing himself +down with a coarse wholesome scorn of his nervousness. +</p> + +<p> +He awoke after dawn, and for a moment curled in happy wriggles of satisfaction +over a good sleep. Then he remembered that he was in the cold and friendless +prison of England, and lay there panting with desire to get away, to get back +to America, where he would be safe. +</p> + +<p> +He wanted to leap out of bed, dash for the Liverpool train, and take passage +for America on the first boat. But perhaps the officials in charge of the +emigrants and the steerage (and of course a fellow would go steerage to save +money) would want to know his religion and the color of his hair—as bad +as trying to ship. They might hold him up for a couple of days. There were +quarantines and customs and things, of which he had heard. Perhaps for two or +even three days more he would have to stay in this nauseating prison-land. +</p> + +<p> +This was the morning of August 3, 1910, two weeks after his arrival in London, +and twenty-two days after victoriously reaching England, the land of romance. +</p> + +</div><!--end chapter--> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2><a name="chap07"></a>CHAPTER VII<br/> +HE MEETS A TEMPERAMENT</h2> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn was sulkily breakfasting at Mrs. Cattermole’s Tea House, which +Mrs. Cattermole kept in a genteel fashion in a basement three doors from his +rooming-house on Tavistock Place. After his night of fear and tragic portents +he resented the general flowered-paper-napkin aspect of Mrs. Cattermole’s +establishment. “Hungh!” he grunted, as he jabbed at the fringed +doily under the silly pink-and-white tea-cup on the green-and-white lacquered +tray brought him by a fat waitress in a frilly apron which must have been made +for a Christmas pantomime fairy who was not fat. “Hurump!” he +snorted at the pictures of lambs and radishes and cathedrals and little duckies +on Mrs. Cattermole’s pink-and-white wall. +</p> + +<p> +He wished it were possible—which, of course, it was not—to go back +to the St. Brasten Cocoa House, where he could talk to the honest flat-footed +galumping waitress, and cross his feet under his chair. For here he was +daintily, yes, daintily, studied by the tea-room habitues—two bouncing +and talkative daughters of an American tourist, a slender pale-haired English +girl student of Assyriology with large top-barred eye-glasses over her +protesting eyes, and a sprinkling of people living along Tavistock Place, who +looked as though they wanted to know if your opinions on the National Gallery +and abstinence were sound. +</p> + +<p> +His disapproval of the lambiness of Mrs. Cattermole’s was turned to a +feeling of comradeship with the other patrons as he turned, with the rest, to +stare hostilely at a girl just entering. The talk in the room halted, startled. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn gasped. With his head solemnly revolving, his eyes followed the young +woman about his table to a table opposite. “A freak! Gee, what red +hair!” was his private comment. +</p> + +<p> +A slender girl of twenty-eight or twenty-nine, clad in a one-piece gown of +sage-green, its lines unbroken by either belt or collar-brooch, fitting her as +though it had been pasted on, and showing the long beautiful sweep of her +fragile thighs and long-curving breast. Her collar, of the material of the +dress, was so high that it touched her delicate jaw, and it was set off only by +a fine silver chain, with a La Vallière of silver and carved Burmese jade. Her +red hair, red as a poinsettia, parted and drawn severely back, made a sweep +about the fair dead-white skin of her bored sensitive face. Bored blue-gray +eyes, with pathetic crescents of faintly violet-hued wrinkles beneath them, and +a scarce noticeable web of tinier wrinkles at the side. Thin long cheeks, a +delicate nose, and a straight strong mouth of thin but startlingly red lips. +</p> + +<p> +Such was the new patron of Mrs. Cattermole. +</p> + +<p> +She stared about the tea-room like an officer inspecting raw recruits, sniffed +at the stare of the thin girl student, ordered breakfast in a low voice, then +languidly considered her toast and marmalade. Once she glanced about the room. +Her heavy brows were drawn close for a second, making a deep-cleft wrinkle of +ennui over her nose, and two little indentations, like the impressions of a box +corner, in her forehead over her brows. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn’s gaze ran down the line of her bosom again, and he wondered at +her hands, which touched the heavy bread-and-butter knife as though it were a +fine-point pen. Long hands, colored like ivory; the joint wrinkles etched into +her skin; orange cigarette stains on the second finger; the nails— +</p> + +<p> +He stared at them. To himself he commented, “Gee! I never did see such +freak finger-nails in my life.” Instead of such smoothly rounded nails as +Theresa Zapp displayed, the new young lady had nails narrow and sharp-pointed, +the ends like little triangles of stiff white writing-paper. +</p> + +<p> +As she breakfasted she scanned Mr. Wrenn for a second. He was too obviously +caught staring to be able to drop his eyes. She studied him all out, with +almost as much interest as a policeman gives to a passing trolley-car, yawned +delicately, and forgot him. +</p> + +<p> +Though you should penetrate Greenland or talk anarchism to the daughter of a +millionaire grocer, never shall you feel a more devouring chill than enveloped +Mr. Wrenn as the new young lady glanced away from him, paid her check, rose +slithily from her table, and departed. She rounded his table; not stalking out +of its way, as Theresa would have done, but bending from the hips. Thus was it +revealed to Mr. Wrenn that— +</p> + +<p> +He was almost too horrified to put it into words…. He had noticed that there +was something kind of funny in regard to her waist; he had had an impression of +remarkably smooth waist curves and an unjagged sweep of back. Now he saw +that—It was unheard of; not at all like Lee Theresa Zapp or ladies in the +Subway. For—the freak girl wasn’t wearing corsets! +</p> + +<p> +When she had passed him he again studied her back, swiftly and covertly. No, +sir. No question about it. It couldn’t be denied by any one now that the +girl was a freak, for, charitable though Our Mr. Wrenn was, he had to admit +that there was no sign of the midback ridge and little rounded knobbinesses of +corseted respectability. And he had a closer view of the texture of her +sage-green crash gown. +</p> + +<p> +“Golly!” he said to himself; “of all the doggone cloth for a +dress! Reg’lar gunny-sacking. She’s skinny, too. Bright-red hair. +She sure is the prize freak. Kind of good-looking, but—get a +brick!” +</p> + +<p> +He hated to rule so clever-seeming a woman quite out of court. But he +remembered her scissors glance at him, and his soft little heart became very +hard. +</p> + +<p> +How brittle are our steel resolves! When Mr. Wrenn walked out of Mrs. +Cattermole’s excellent establishment and heavily inspected the quiet +Bloomsbury Street, with a cat’s-meat-man stolidly clopping along the +pavement, as loneliness rushed on him and he wondered what in the world he +could do, he mused, “Gee! I bet that red-headed lady would be +interestin’ to know.” +</p> + +<p> +A day of furtive darts out from his room to do London, which glumly declined to +be done. He went back to the Zoological Gardens and made friends with a tiger +which, though it presumably came from an English colony, was the friendliest +thing he had seen for a week. It did yawn, but it let him talk to it for a long +while. He stood before the bars, peering in, and whenever no one else was about +he murmured: “Poor fella, they won’t let you go, heh? You got a +worse boss ’n Goglefogle, heh? Poor old fella.” +</p> + +<p> +He didn’t at all mind the disorder and rancid smell of the cage; he had +no fear of the tiger’s sleek murderous power. But he was somewhat afraid +of the sound of his own tremorous voice. He had spoken aloud so little lately. +</p> + +<p> +A man came, an Englishman in a high offensively well-fitting waistcoat, and +stood before the cage. Mr. Wrenn slunk away, robbed of his new friend, the +tiger, the forlornest person in all London, kicking at pebbles in the path. +</p> + +<p> +As half-dusk made the quiet street even more detached, he sat on the steps of +his rooming-house on Tavistock Place, keeping himself from the one definite +thing he wanted to do—the thing he keenly imagined a happy Mr. Wrenn +doing—dashing over to the Euston Station to find out how soon and where +he could get a train for Liverpool and a boat for America. +</p> + +<p> +A girl was approaching the house. He viewed her carelessly, then intently. It +was the freak lady of Mrs. Cattermole’s Tea House—the corsetless +young woman of the tight-fitting crash gown and flame-colored hair. She was +coming up the steps of his house. +</p> + +<p> +He made room for her with feverish courtesy. She lived in the same +house—He instantly, without a bit of encouragement from the uninterested +way in which she snipped the door to, made up a whole novel about her. Gee! She +was a French countess, who lived in a reg’lar chateau, and she was +staying in Bloomsbury incognito, seeing the sights. She was a noble. She +was— +</p> + +<p> +Above him a window opened. He glanced up. The countess incog. was leaning out, +scanning the street uncaringly. Why—her windows were next to his! He was +living next room to an unusual person—as unusual as Dr. Mittyford. +</p> + +<p> +He hurried up-stairs with a fervid but vague plan to meet her. Maybe she really +was a French countess or somepun’. All evening, sitting by the window, he +was comforted as he heard her move about her room. He had a friend. He had +started that great work of making friends—well, not started, but started +starting—then he got confused, but the idea was a flame to warm the +fog-chilled spaces of the London street. +</p> + +<p> +At his Cattermole breakfast he waited long. She did not come. Another +day—but why paint another day that was but a smear of flat dull slate? +Yet another breakfast, and the lady of mystery came. Before he knew he was +doing it he had bowed to her, a slight uneasy bend of his neck. She peered at +him, unseeing, and sat down with her back to him. +</p> + +<p> +He got much good healthy human vindictive satisfaction in evicting her +violently from the French chateau he had given her, and remembering that, of +course, she was just a “fool freak Englishwoman—prob’ly a +bloomin’ stoodent” he scorned, and so settled <i>her!</i> Also he +told her, by telepathy, that her new gown was freakier than ever—a +pale-green thing, with large white buttons. +</p> + +<p> +As he was coming in that evening he passed her in the hall. She was clad in +what he called a bathrobe, and what she called an Arabian <i>burnoose</i>, of +black embroidered with dull-gold crescents and stars, showing a V of exquisite +flesh at her throat. A shred of tenuous lace straggled loose at the opening of +the <i>burnoose</i>. Her radiant hair, tangled over her forehead, shone with a +thousand various gleams from the gas-light over her head as she moved back +against the wall and stood waiting for him to pass. She smiled very doubtfully, +distantly—the smile, he felt, of a great lady from Mayfair. He bobbed his +head, lowered his eyes abashedly, and noticed that along the shelf of her +forearm, held against her waist, she bore many silver toilet articles, and such +a huge heavy fringed Turkish bath-towel as he had never seen before. +</p> + +<p> +He lay awake to picture her brilliant throat and shining hair. He rebuked +himself for the lack of dignity in “thinking of that freak, when she +wouldn’t even return a fellow’s bow.” But her shimmering hair +was the star of his dreams. +</p> + +<p> +Napping in his room in the afternoon, Mr. Wrenn heard slight active sounds from +her, next room. He hurried down to the stoop. +</p> + +<p> +She stood behind him on the door-step, glaring up and down the street, as bored +and as ready to spring as the Zoo tiger. Mr. Wrenn heard himself saying to the +girl, “Please, miss, do you mind telling me—I’m an American; +I’m a stranger in London—I want to go to a good play or something +and what would I—what would be good—” +</p> + +<p> +“I don’t know, reahlly,” she said, with much hauteur. +“Everything’s rather rotten this season, I fancy.” Her voice +ran fluting up and down the scale. Her a’s were very broad. +</p> + +<p> +“Oh—oh—y-you <i>are</i> English, then?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes!” +</p> + +<p> +“Why—uh—” +</p> + +<p> +“<i>Yes!</i>” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, I just had a fool idea maybe you might be French.” +</p> + +<p> +“Perhaps I am, y’ know. I’m not reahlly English,” she +said, blandly. +</p> + +<p> +“Why—uh—” +</p> + +<p> +“What made you think I was French? Tell me; I’m interested.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, I guess I was just—well, it was almost +make-b’lieve—how you had a castle in France—just a kind of a +fool game.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, <i>don’t</i> be ashamed of imagination,” she demanded, +stamping her foot, while her voice fluttered, low and beautifully controlled, +through half a dozen notes. “Tell me the rest of your story about +me.” +</p> + +<p> +She was sitting on the rail above him now. As he spoke she cupped her chin with +the palm of her delicate hand and observed him curiously. +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, nothing much more. You were a countess—” +</p> + +<p> +“Please! Not just ‘were.’ Please, sir, mayn’t I be a +countess now?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh yes, of course you are!” he cried, delight submerging timidity. +“And your father was sick with somepun’ mysterious, and all the +docs shook their heads and said ‘Gee! we dunno what it is,’ and so +you sneaked down to the treasure-chamber—you see, your dad—your +father, I should say—he was a cranky old Frenchman—just in the +story, you know. He didn’t think you could do anything yourself about him +being mysteriously sick. So one night you—” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, was it dark? Very <i>very</i> dark? And silent? And my footsteps +rang on the hollow flagstones? And I swiped the gold and went forth into the +night?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, <i>yes!</i> That’s it.” +</p> + +<p> +“But why did I swipe it?” +</p> + +<p> +“I’m just coming to that,” he said, sternly. +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, please, sir, I’m awful sorry I interrupted.” +</p> + +<p> +“It was like this: You wanted to come over here and study medicine +so’s you could cure your father.” +</p> + +<p> +“But please, sir,” said the girl, with immense gravity, +“mayn’t I let him die, and not find out what’s ailing him, so +I can marry the <i>maire?</i>” +</p> + +<p> +“Nope,” firmly, “you got to—Say, <i>gee!</i> I +didn’t expect to tell you all this make-b’lieve…. I’m afraid +you’ll think it’s awful fresh of me.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, I loved it—really I did—because you liked to make it up +about poor Istra. (My name is Istra Nash.) I’m sorry to say I’m not +reahlly”—her two “reallys” were quite +different—“a countess, you know. Tell me—you live in this +same house, don’t you? Please tell me that you’re not an +interesting Person. Please!” +</p> + +<p> +“I—gee! I guess I don’t quite get you.” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, stupid, an Interesting Person is a writer or an artist or an editor +or a girl who’s been in Holloway Jail or Canongate for suffraging, or any +one else who depends on an accident to be tolerable.” +</p> + +<p> +“No, I’m afraid not; I’m just a kind of clerk.” +</p> + +<p> +“Good! Good! My dear sir—whom I’ve never seen +before—have I? By the way, please don’t think I usually pick up +stray gentlemen and talk to them about my pure white soul. But you, you know, +made stories about me…. I was saying: If you could only know how I loathe and +hate and despise Interesting People just now! I’ve seen so much of them. +They talk and talk and talk—they’re just like Kipling’s +bandar-log—What is it? +</p> + +<p class="poem"> +“See us rise in a flung festoon<br/> +Half-way up to the jealous moon.<br/> +Don’t you wish you— +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +could know all about art and economics as we do?’ That’s what they +say. Umph!” +</p> + +<p> +Then she wriggled her fingers in the air like white butterflies, shrugged her +shoulders elaborately, rose from the rail, and sat down beside him on the +steps, quite matter-of-factly. +</p> + +<p> +He could feel his temple-pulses beat with excitement. +</p> + +<p> +She turned her pale sensitive vivid face slowly toward him. +</p> + +<p> +“When did you see me—to make up the story?” +</p> + +<p> +“Breakfasts. At Mrs. Cattermole’s.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh yes…. How is it you aren’t out sight-seeing? Or is it blessedly +possible that you aren’t a tripper—a tourist?” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, I dunno.” He hunted uneasily for the right answer. “Not +exactly. I tried a stunt—coming over on a cattle-boat.” +</p> + +<p> +“That’s good. Much better.” +</p> + +<p> +She sat silent while, with enormous and self-betraying pains to avoid +detection, he studied her firm thin brilliantly red lips. At last he tried: +</p> + +<p> +“Please tell me something about London. Some of you English— Oh, I +dunno. I can’t get acquainted easily.” +</p> + +<p> +“My dear child, I’m not English! I’m quite as American as +yourself. I was born in California. I never saw England till two years ago, on +my way to Paris. I’m an art student…. That’s why my accent is so +perishin’ English—I can’t afford to be just <i>ordinary</i> +British, y’ know.” +</p> + +<p> +Her laugh had an October tang of bitterness in it. +</p> + +<p> +“Well, I’ll—say, what do you know about that!” he said, +weakly. +</p> + +<p> +“Tell me about yourself—since apparently we’re now +acquainted…. Unless you want to go to that music-hall?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh no, no, no! Gee, I was just <i>crazy</i> to have somebody to talk +to—somebody nice—I was just about nutty, I was so lonely,” +all in a burst. He finished, hesitatingly, “I guess the English are kinda +hard to get acquainted with.” +</p> + +<p> +“Lonely, eh?” she mused, abrupt and bluffly kind as a man, for all +her modulating woman’s voice. “You don’t know any of the +people here in the house?” +</p> + +<p> +“No’m. Say, I guess we got rooms next to each other.” +</p> + +<p> +“How romantic!” she mocked. +</p> + +<p> +“Wrenn’s my name; William Wrenn. I work for—I used to work +for the Souvenir and Art Novelty Company. In New York.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh. I see. Novelties? Nice little ash-trays with ‘Love from the +Erie Station’? And woggly pin-cushions?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes! And fat pug-dogs with black eyes.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh no-o-o! Please not black! Pale sympathetic blue eyes—nice +honest blue eyes!” +</p> + +<p> +“Nope. Black. Awful black…. Say, gee, I ain’t talking too nutty, am +I?” +</p> + +<p> +“‘Nutty’? You mean ‘idiotically’? The +slang’s changed since—Oh yes, of course; you’ve succeeded in +talking quite nice and ‘idiotic.’” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, say, gee, I didn’t mean to—When you been so nice and all +to me—” +</p> + +<p> +“Don’t apologize!” Istra Nash demanded, savagely. +“Haven’t they taught you that?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes’m,” he mumbled, apologetically. +</p> + +<p> +She sat silent again, apparently not at all satisfied with the architecture of +the opposite side of Tavistock Place. Diffidently he edged into speech: +</p> + +<p> +“Honest, I did think you was English. You came from California? Oh, say, +I wonder if you’ve ever heard of Dr. Mittyford. He’s some kind of +school-teacher. I think he teaches in Leland Stamford College.” +</p> + +<p> +“Leland Stanford? You know him?” She dropped into interested +familiarity. +</p> + +<p> +“I met him at Oxford.” +</p> + +<p> +“Really?… My brother was at Stanford. I think I’ve heard him speak +of—Oh yes. He said that Mittyford was a cultural climber, if you know +what I mean; rather—oh, how shall I express it?—oh, shall we put +it, finicky about things people have just told him to be finicky about.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes!” glowed Mr. Wrenn. +</p> + +<p> +To the luxury of feeling that he knew the unusual Miss Istra Nash he sacrificed +Dr. Mittyford, scholarship and eye-glasses and Shelley and all, without mercy. +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, he was awfully funny. Gee! I didn’t care much for him.” +</p> + +<p> +“Of course you know he’s a great man, however?” Istra was as +bland as though she had meant that all along, which left Mr. Wrenn nowhere at +all when it came to deciding what she meant. +</p> + +<p> +Without warning she rose from the steps, flung at him “G’ +night,” and was off down the street. +</p> + +<p> +Sitting alone, all excited happiness, Mr. Wrenn muttered: “Ain’t +she a wonder! Gee! she’s striking-lookin’! Gee whittakers!” +</p> + +<p> +Some hours later he said aloud, tossing about in bed: “I wonder if I was +too fresh. I hope I wasn’t. I ought to be careful.” +</p> + +<p> +He was so worried about it that he got up and smoked a cigarette, remembered +that he was breaking still another rule by smoking too much, then got angry and +snapped defiantly at his suit-case: “Well, what do I care if I <i>am</i> +smoking too much? And I’ll be as fresh as I want to.” He threw a +newspaper at the censorious suit-case and, much relieved, went to bed to dream +that he was a rabbit making enormously amusing jests, at which he laughed +rollickingly in half-dream, till he realized that he was being awakened by the +sound of long sobs from the room of Istra Nash. +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +Afternoon; Mr. Wrenn in his room. Miss Nash was back from tea, but there was +not a sound to be heard from her room, though he listened with mouth open, bent +forward in his chair, his hands clutching the wooden seat, his finger-tips +rubbing nervously back and forth over the rough under-surface of the wood. He +wanted to help her—the wonderful lady who had been sobbing in the night. +He had a plan, in which he really believed, to say to her, “Please let me +help you, princess, jus’ like I was a knight.” +</p> + +<p> +At last he heard her moving about. He rushed downstairs and waited on the +stoop. +</p> + +<p> +When she came out she glanced down and smiled contentedly. He was flutteringly +sure that she expected to see him there. But all his plan of proffering +assistance vanished as he saw her impatient eyes and her splendors of +dress—another tight-fitting gown, of smoky gray, with faint silvery +lights gliding along the fabric. +</p> + +<p> +She sat on the rail above him, immediately, unhesitatingly, and answered his +“Evenin’” cheerfully. +</p> + +<p> +He wanted so much to sit beside her, to be friends with her. But, he felt, it +took courage to sit beside her. She was likely to stare haughtily at him. +However, he did go up to the rail and sit, shyly kicking his feet, beside her, +and she did not stare haughtily. Instead she moved over an inch or two, glanced +at him almost as though they were sharing a secret, and said, quietly: +</p> + +<p> +“I thought quite a bit about you last evening. I believe you really have +an imagination, even though you are a salesman—I mean so many +don’t; you know how it is.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh yes.” +</p> + +<p> +You see, Mr. Wrenn didn’t know he was commonplace. +</p> + +<p> +“After I left here last night I went over to Olympia Johns’, and +she dragged me off to a play. I thought of you at it because there was an +imaginative butler in it. You don’t mind my comparing you to a butler, do +you? He was really quite the nicest person in the play, y’ know. Most of +it was gorgeously rotten. It used to be a French farce, but they sent it to +Sunday-school and gave it a nice fresh frock. It seemed that a gentleman-tabby +had been trying to make a match between his nephew and his ward. The ward +arted. Personally I think it was by tonsorial art. But, anyway, the uncle knew +that nothing brings people together so well as hating the same person. You +know, like hating the cousin, when you’re a kiddy, hating the cousin that +always keeps her nails clean?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes! That’s <i>so!</i>” +</p> + +<p> +“So he turned nasty, and of course the nephew and ward clinched till +death did them part—which, I’m very sorry to have to tell you, +death wasn’t decent enough to do on the stage. If the play could only +have ended with everybody’s funeral I should have called it a real happy +ending.” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn laughed gratefully, though uncertainly. He knew that she had made +jokes for him, but he didn’t exactly know what they were. +</p> + +<p> +“The imaginative butler, he was rather good. But the +rest—Ugh!” +</p> + +<p> +“That must have been a funny play,” he said, politely. +</p> + +<p> +She looked at him sidewise and confided, “Will you do me a favor?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh yes, I—” +</p> + +<p> +“Ever been married?” +</p> + +<p> +He was frightfully startled. His “No” sounded as though he +couldn’t quite remember. +</p> + +<p> +She seemed much amused. You wouldn’t have believed that this superior +quizzical woman who tapped her fingers carelessly on her slim exquisite knee +had ever sobbed in the night. +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, that wasn’t a personal question,” she said. “I +just wanted to know what you’re like. Don’t you ever collect +people? I do—chloroform ’em quite cruelly and pin their poor little +corpses out on nice clean corks…. You live alone in New York, do you?” +</p> + +<p> +“Y-yes.” +</p> + +<p> +“Who do you play with—know?” +</p> + +<p> +“Not—not much of anybody. Except maybe Charley Carpenter. +He’s assistant bookkeeper for the Souvenir Company. “He had wanted +to, and immediately decided not to, invent <i>grandes mondes</i> whereof he was +an intimate. +</p> + +<p> +“What do—oh, you know—people in New York who don’t go +to parties or read much—what do they do for amusement? I’m so +interested in types.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well—” said he. +</p> + +<p> +That was all he could say till he had digested a pair of thoughts: Just what +did she mean by “types”? Had it something to do with printing +stories? And what could he say about the people, anyway? He observed: +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, I don’t know—just talk about—oh, cards and jobs +and folks and things and—oh, you know; go to moving pictures and +vaudeville and go to Coney Island and—oh, sleep.” +</p> + +<p> +“But you—?” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, I read a good deal. Quite a little. Shakespeare and geography and +a lot of stuff. I like reading.” +</p> + +<p> +“And how do you place Nietzsche?” she gravely desired to know. +</p> + +<p> +“?” +</p> + +<p> +“Nietzsche. You know—the German humorist.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh yes—uh—let me see now; he’s—uh—” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, you remember, don’t you? Haeckel and he wrote the great +musical comedy of the century. And Matisse did the music—Matisse and +Rodin.” +</p> + +<p> +“I haven’t been to it,” he said, vaguely. “…I +don’t know much German. Course I know a few words, like <i>Spricken Sie +Dutch</i> and <i>Bitty, sir</i>, that Rabin at the Souvenir +Company—he’s a German Jew, I guess—learnt me…. But, say, +isn’t Kipling great! Gee! when I read <i>Kim</i> I can imagine I’m +hiking along one of those roads in India just like I was there—you know, +all those magicians and so on…. Readin’s wonderful, ain’t +it!” +</p> + +<p> +“Um. Yes.” +</p> + +<p> +“I bet you read an awful lot.” +</p> + +<p> +“Very little. Oh—D’Annunzio and some Turgenev and a little +Tourgenieff…. That last was a joke, you know.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh yes,” disconcertedly. +</p> + +<p> +“What sorts of plays do you go to, Mr. Wrenn?” +</p> + +<p> +“Moving pictures mostly,” he said, easily, then bitterly wished he +hadn’t confessed so low-life a habit. +</p> + +<p> +“Well—tell me, my dear—Oh, I didn’t mean that; artists +use it a good deal; it just means ‘old chap.’ You +<i>don’t</i> mind my asking such beastly personal questions, do you? +I’m interested in people…. And now I must go up and write a letter. I was +going over to Olympia’s—she’s one of the Interesting People I +spoke of—but you see you have been much more amusing. Good night. +You’re lonely in London, aren’t you? We’ll have to go +sightseeing some day.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, I am lonely!” he exploded. Then, meekly: “Oh, thank +you! I sh’d be awful pleased to…. Have you seen the Tower, Miss +Nash?” +</p> + +<p> +“No. Never. Have you?” +</p> + +<p> +“No. You see, I thought it ’d be kind of a gloomy thing to see all +alone. Is that why you haven’t never been there, too?” +</p> + +<p> +“My dear man, I see I shall have to educate you. Shall I? I’ve been +taken in hand by so many people—it would be a pleasure to pass on the +implied slur. Shall I?” +</p> + +<p> +“Please do.” +</p> + +<p> +“One simply doesn’t go and see the Tower, because that’s what +trippers do. Don’t you understand, my dear? (Pardon the ‘my +dear’ again.) The Tower is the sort of thing school superintendents see +and then go back and lecture on in school assembly-room and the G. A. R. hall. +I’ll take you to the Tate Gallery.” Then, very abruptly, +“G’ night,” and she was gone. +</p> + +<p> +He stared after her smooth back, thinking: “Gee! I wonder if she got sore +at something I said. I don’t think I was fresh this time. But she beat it +so quick…. Them lips of hers—I never knew there was such red lips. And an +artist—paints pictures!… Read a lot—Nitchy—German musical +comedy. Wonder if that’s that ‘Merry Widow’ thing?… That gray +dress of hers makes me think of fog. Cur’ous.” +</p> + +<p> +In her room Istra Nash inspected her nose in a mirror, powdered, and sat down +to write, on thick creamy paper: +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +Skilly dear, I’m in a fierce Bloomsbury boarding-house—bores +—except for a Phe-nomenon—little man of 35 or 40 with embryonic +imagination & a virgin soul. I’ll try to keep from planting radical +thoughts in the virgin soul, but I’m tempted. +</p> + +<p> +Oh Skilly dear I’m lonely as the devil. Would it be too bromid. to say I +wish you were here? I put out my hand in the darkness, & yours wasn’t +there. My dear, my dear, how desolate—Oh you understand it only too well +with your supercilious grin & your superior eye-glasses & your beatific +Oxonian ignorance of poor eager America. +</p> + +<p> +I suppose I <i>am</i> just a barbarous Californian kiddy. It’s just as +Pere Dureon said at the atelier, “You haf a’ onderstanding of the +’igher immorality, but I ’ope you can cook—paint you +cannot.” +</p> + +<p> +He wins. I can’t sell a single thing to the art editors here or get one +single order. One horrid eye-glassed earnest youth who Sees People at a +magazine, he vouchsafed that they “didn’t use any Outsiders.” +Outsiders! And his hair was nearly as red as my wretched mop. So I came home +& howled & burned Milan tapers before your picture. I did. Though you +don’t deserve it. +</p> + +<p> +Oh damn it, am I getting sentimental? You’ll read this at Petit Monsard +over your drip & grin at your poor unnietzschean barbarian. +</p> + +<p class="right"> +I. N. +</p> + +</div><!--end chapter--> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2><a name="chap08"></a>CHAPTER VIII<br/> +HE TIFFINS</h2> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn, chewing and chewing and chewing the cud of thought in his room next +evening, after an hour had proved two things; thus: +</p> + +<p> +(a) The only thing he wanted to do was to go back to America at once, because +England was a country where every one—native or American—was so +unfriendly and so vastly wise that he could never understand them. +</p> + +<p> +(b) The one thing in the world that he wanted to do was to be right here, for +the most miraculous event of which he had ever heard was meeting Miss Nash. +First one, then the other, these thoughts swashed back and forth like the +swinging tides. He got away from them only long enough to rejoice that +somehow—he didn’t know how—he was going to be her most +intimate friend, because they were both Americans in a strange land and because +they both could make-believe. +</p> + +<p> +Then he was proving that Istra would, and would not, be the perfect comrade +among women when some one knocked at his door. +</p> + +<p> +Electrified, his cramped body shot up from its crouch, and he darted to the +door. +</p> + +<p> +Istra Nash stood there, tapping her foot on the sill with apologetic haste in +her manner. Abruptly she said: +</p> + +<p> +“So sorry to bother you. I just wondered if you could let me have a +match? I’m all out.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh <i>yes!</i> Here’s a whole box. Please take ’em. I got +plenty more.” [Which was absolutely untrue.] +</p> + +<p> +“Thank you. S’ good o’ you,” she said, hurriedly. +“G’ night.” +</p> + +<p> +She turned away, but he followed her into the hall, bashfully urging: +“Have you been to another show? Gee! I hope you draw a better one next +time ’n the one about the guy with the nephew.” +</p> + +<p> +“Thank you.” +</p> + +<p> +She glanced back in the half dark hall from her door—some fifteen feet +from his. He was scratching at the wall-paper with a diffident finger, hopeful +for a talk. +</p> + +<p> +“Won’t you come in?” she said, hesitatingly. +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, thank you, but I guess I hadn’t better.” +</p> + +<p> +Suddenly she flashed out the humanest of smiles, her blue-gray eyes crinkling +with cheery friendship. “Come in, come in, child.” As he +hesitatingly entered she warbled: “Needn’t both be so lonely all +the time, after all, need we? Even if you <i>don’t</i> like poor Istra. +You don’t—do you?” Seemingly she didn’t expect an +answer to her question, for she was busy lighting a Russian cigarette. It was +the first time in his life that he had seen a woman smoke. +</p> + +<p> +With embarrassed politeness he glanced away from her as she threw back her head +and inhaled deeply. He blushingly scrutinized the room. +</p> + +<p> +In the farther corner two trunks stood open. One had the tray removed, and out +of the lower part hung a confusion of lacey things from which he turned away +uncomfortable eyes. He recognized the black-and-gold burnoose, which was +tumbled on the bed, with a nightgown of lace insertions and soft wrinkles in +the lawn, a green book with a paper label bearing the title <i>Three Plays for +Puritans</i>, a red slipper, and an open box of chocolates. +</p> + +<p> +On the plain kitchen-ware table was spread a cloth of Reseda green, like a dull +old leaf in color. On it lay a gold-mounted fountain-pen, huge and +stub-pointed; a medley of papers and torn envelopes, a bottle of Creme Yvette, +and a silver-framed portrait of a lean smiling man with a single eye-glass. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn did not really see all these details, but he had an impression of +luxury and high artistic success. He considered the Yvette flask the largest +bottle of perfume he’d ever seen; and remarked that there was “some +guy’s picture on the table.” He had but a moment to reconnoiter, +for she was astonishingly saying: +</p> + +<p> +“So you were lonely when I knocked?” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, how—” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, I could see it. We all get lonely, don’t we? I do, of course. +Just now I’m getting sorer and sorer on Interesting People. I think +I’ll go back to Paris. There even the Interesting People are—why, +they’re interesting. Savvy—you see I <i>am</i> an +American—savvy?” +</p> + +<p> +“Why—uh—uh—uh—I d-don’t exactly get what +you mean. How do you mean about ‘Interesting People’?” +</p> + +<p> +“My dear child, of course you don’t get me.” She went to the +mirror and patted her hair, then curled on the bed, with an offhand +“Won’t you sit down?” and smoked elaborately, blowing the +blue tendrils toward the ceiling as she continued: “Of course you +don’t get it. You’re a nice sensible clerk who’ve had enough +real work to do to keep you from being afraid that other people will think +you’re commonplace. You don’t have to coddle yourself into working +enough to earn a living by talking about temperament. +</p> + +<p> +“Why, these Interesting People—You find ’em in London and New +York and San Francisco just the same. They’re convinced they’re the +wisest people on earth. There’s a few artists and a bum novelist or two +always, and some social workers. The particular bunch that it amuses me to hate +just now—and that I apparently can’t do without—they gather +around Olympia Johns, who makes a kind of salon out of her rooms on Great James +Street, off Theobald’s Road…. They might just as well be in New York; but +they’re even stodgier. They don’t get sick of the game of being on +intellectual heights as soon as New-Yorkers do. +</p> + +<p> +“I’ll have to take you there. It’s a cheery sensation, you +know, to find a man who has some imagination, but who has been unspoiled by +Interesting People, and take him to hear them wamble. They sit around and growl +and rush the growler—I hope you know growler-rushing—and rejoice +that they’re free spirits. Being Free, of course, they’re not +allowed to go and play with nice people, for when a person is Free, you know, +he is never free to be anything but Free. That may seem confusing, but they +understand it at Olympia’s. +</p> + +<p> +“Of course there’s different sorts of intellectuals, and each cult +despises all the others. Mostly, each cult consists of one person, but +sometimes there’s two—a talker and an audience—or even three. +For instance, you may be a militant and a vegetarian, but if some one is a +militant and has a good figure, why then—oof!… That’s what I mean +by ‘Interesting People.’ I loathe them! So, of course, being one of +them, I go from one bunch to another, and, upon my honor, every single time I +think that the new bunch <i>is</i> interesting!” +</p> + +<p> +Then she smoked in gloomy silence, while Mr. Wrenn remarked, after some mental +labor, “I guess they’re like cattlemen—the cattle-ier they +are, the more romantic they look, and then when you get to know them the chief +trouble with them is that they’re cattlemen.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, that’s it. They’re—why, they’re—Oh, +poor dear, there, there, there! It <i>sha’n’t</i> have so much +intellekchool discussion, <i>shall</i> it!… I think you’re a very nice +person, and I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll have a small +fire, shall we? In the fireplace.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes!” +</p> + +<p> +She pulled the old-fashioned bell-cord, and the old-fashioned North Country +landlady came—tall, thin, parchment-faced, musty-looking as though she +had been dressed up in Victorian garments in 1880 and left to stand in an +unaired parlor ever since. She glowered silent disapproval at the presence of +Mr. Wrenn in Istra’s room, but sent a slavey to make the +fire—“saxpence uxtry.” Mr. Wrenn felt guilty till the coming +of the slavey, a perfect Christmas-story-book slavey, a small and merry lump of +soot, who sang out, “Chilly t’-night, ayn’t it?” and +made a fire that was soon singing “Chilly t’-night,” like the +slavey. +</p> + +<p> +Istra sat on the floor before the fire, Turk-wise, her quick delicate fingers +drumming excitedly on her knees. +</p> + +<p> +“Come sit by me. You, with your sense of the romantic, ought to +appreciate sitting by the fire. You know it’s always done.” +</p> + +<p> +He slumped down by her, clasping his knees and trying to appear the dignified +American business man in his country-house. +</p> + +<p> +She smiled at him intimately, and quizzed: +</p> + +<p> +“Tell me about the last time you sat with a girl by the fire. Tell poor +Istra the dark secret. Was she the perfect among pink faces?” +</p> + +<p> +“I’ve—never—sat—before—any—fireplace—with +—any—one! Except when I was about nine—one +Hallowe’en—at a party in Parthenon—little town up York +State.” +</p> + +<p> +“Really? Poor kiddy!” +</p> + +<p> +She reached out her hand and took his. He was terrifically conscious of the +warm smoothness of her fingers playing a soft tattoo on the back of his hand, +while she said: +</p> + +<p> +“But you have been in love? Drefful in love?” +</p> + +<p> +“I never have.” +</p> + +<p> +“Dear child, you’ve missed so much of the tea and cakes of life, +haven’t you? And you have an interest in life. Do you know, when I think +of the jaded Interesting People I’ve met—Why do I leave you to be +spoiled by some shop-girl in a flowered hat? She’d drag you to +moving-picture shows…. Oh! You didn’t tell me that you went to moving +pictures, did you?” +</p> + +<p> +“No!” he lied, fervently, then, feeling guilty, “I used to, +but no more.” +</p> + +<p> +“It <i>shall</i> go to the nice moving pictures if it wants to! It shall +take me, too. We’ll forget there are any syndicalists or broken-colorists +for a while, won’t we? We’ll let the robins cover us with +leaves.” +</p> + +<p> +“You mean like the babes in the woods? But, say, I’m afraid you +ain’t just a babe in the woods! You’re the first person with brains +I ever met, ’cept, maybe, Dr. Mittyford; and the Doc never would play +games, I don’t believe. The very first one, really.” +</p> + +<p> +“Thank you!” Her warm pressure on his hand tightened. His heart was +making the maddest gladdest leaps, and timidly, with a feeling of historic +daring, he ventured to explore with his thumb-tip the fine lines of the side of +her hand…. It actually was he, sitting here with a princess, and he actually +did feel the softness of her hand, he pantingly assured himself. +</p> + +<p> +Suddenly she gave his hand a parting pressure and sprang up. +</p> + +<p> +“Come. We’ll have tiffin, and then I’ll send you away, and +to-morrow we’ll go see the Tate Gallery.” +</p> + +<p> +While Istra was sending the slavey for cakes and a pint of light wine Mr. Wrenn +sat in a chair—just sat in it; he wanted to show that he could be +dignified and not take advantage of Miss Nash’s kindness by +slouchin’ round. Having read much Kipling, he had an idea that tiffin was +some kind of lunch in the afternoon, but of course if Miss Nash used the word +for evening supper, then he had been wrong. +</p> + +<p> +Istra whisked the writing-table with the Reseda-green cover over before the +fire, chucked its papers on the bed, and placed a bunch of roses on one end, +moving the small blue vase two inches to the right, then two inches forward. +</p> + +<p> +The wine she poured into a decanter. Wine was distinctly a problem to him. He +was excited over his sudden rise into a society where one took wine as a matter +of course. Mrs. Zapp wouldn’t take it as a matter of course. He rejoiced +that he wasn’t narrow-minded, like Mrs. Zapp. He worked so hard at not +being narrow-minded like Mrs. Zapp that he started when he was called out of +his day-dream by a mocking voice: +</p> + +<p> +“But you might look at the cakes. Just once, anyway. They are very nice +cakes.” +</p> + +<p> +“Uh—” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, I know the wine is wine. Beastly of it.” +</p> + +<p> +“Say, Miss Nash, I did get you this time.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, don’t tell me that my presiding goddessship is over +already.” +</p> + +<p> +“Uh—sure! Now I’m going to be a cruel boss.” +</p> + +<p> +“Dee-lighted! Are you going to be a caveman?” +</p> + +<p> +“I’m sorry. I don’t quite get you on that.” +</p> + +<p> +“That’s too bad, isn’t it. I think I’d rather like to +meet a caveman.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh say, I know about that caveman—Jack London’s guys. +I’m afraid I ain’t one. Still—on the cattle-boat—Say, I +wish you could of seen it when the gang were tying up the bulls, before +starting. Dark close place ’tween-decks, with the steers bellowin’ +and all packed tight together, and the stiffs gettin’ seasick—so +seasick we just kind of staggered around; and we’d get hold of a head +rope and yank and then let go, and the bosses’d yell, ‘Pull, or +I’ll brain you.’ And then the fo’c’sle—men packed +in like herrings.” +</p> + +<p> +She was leaning over the table, making a labyrinth with the currants from a +cake and listening intently. He stopped politely, feeling that he was talking +too much. But, “Go on, please do,” she commanded, and he told +simply, seeing it more and more, of Satan and the Grenadier, of the fairies who +had beckoned to him from the Irish coast hills, and the comradeship of Morton. +</p> + +<p> +She interrupted only once, murmuring, “My dear, it’s a good thing +you’re articulate, anyway—” which didn’t seem to have +any bearing on hay-bales. +</p> + +<p> +She sent him away with a light “It’s been a good party, +hasn’t it, caveman? (If you <i>are</i> a caveman.) Call for me tomorrow +at three. We’ll go to the Tate Gallery.” +</p> + +<p> +She touched his hand in the fleetingest of grasps. +</p> + +<p> +“Yes. Good night, Miss Nash,” he quavered. +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +A morning of planning his conduct so that in accompanying Istra Nash to the +Tate Gallery he might be the faithful shadow and beautiful transcript of +Mittyford, Ph.D. As a result, when he stood before the large canvases of Mr. +Watts at the Tate he was so heavy and correctly appreciative, so ready not to +enjoy the stories in the pictures of Millais, that Istra suddenly demanded: +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, my dear child, I have taken a great deal on my hands. You’ve +got to learn to play. You don’t know how to play. Come. I shall teach +you. I don’t know why I should, either. But—come.” +</p> + +<p> +She explained as they left the gallery: “First, the art of riding on the +buses. Oh, it is an art, you know. You must appreciate the flower-girls and the +gr-r-rand young bobbies. You must learn to watch for the blossoms on the +restaurant terraces and roll on the grass in the parks. You’re much too +respectable to roll on the grass, aren’t you? I’ll try ever so hard +to teach you not to be. And we’ll go to tea. How many kinds of tea are +there?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, Ceylon and English Breakfast and—oh—Chinese.” +</p> + +<p> +“B—” +</p> + +<p> +“And golf tees!” he added, excitedly, as they took a seat in front +atop the bus. +</p> + +<p> +“Puns are a beginning at least,” she reflected. +</p> + +<p> +“But how many kinds of tea <i>are</i> there, Istra?… Oh say, I +hadn’t ought to—” +</p> + +<p> +“Course; call me Istra or anything else. Only, you mustn’t call my +bluff. What do I know about tea? All of us who play are bluffers, more or less, +and we are ever so polite in pretending not to know the others are bluffing…. +There’s lots of kinds of tea. In the New York Chinatown I saw +once—Do you know Chinatown? Being a New-Yorker, I don’t suppose you +do.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh yes. And Italiantown. I used to wander round there.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, down at the Seven Flowery Kingdoms Chop Suey and American Cooking +there’s tea at five dollars a cup that they advertise is grown on +‘cloud-covered mountain-tops.’ I suppose when the tops aren’t +cloud-covered they only charge three dollars a cup…. But, serious-like, +there’s really only two kinds of teas—those you go to to meet the +man you love and ought to hate, and those you give to spite the women you hate +but ought to—hate! Isn’t that lovely and complicated? That’s +playing. With words. My aged parent calls it ‘talking too much and not +saying anything.’ Note that last—not saying <i>anything!</i> +It’s one of the rules in playing that mustn’t be broken.” +</p> + +<p> +He understood that better than most of the things she said. “Why,” +he exclaimed, “it’s kind of talking sideways.” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, yes. Of course. Talking sideways. Don’t you see now?” +</p> + +<p> +Gallant gentleman as he was, he let her think she had invented the phrase. +</p> + +<p> +She said many other things; things implying such vast learning that he made +gigantic resolves to “read like thunder.” +</p> + +<p> +Her great lesson was the art of taking tea. He found, surprisedly, that they +weren’t really going to endanger their clothes by rolling on park grass. +Instead, she led him to a tea-room behind a candy-shop on Tottenham Court Road, +a low room with white wicker chairs, colored tiles set in the wall, and green +Sedji-ware jugs with irregular bunches of white roses. A waitress with +wild-rose cheeks and a busy step brought Orange Pekoe and lemon for her, Ceylon +and Russian Caravan tea and a jug of clotted cream for him, with a pile of +cinnamon buns. +</p> + +<p> +“But—” said Istra. “Isn’t this like Alice in +Wonderland! But you must learn the buttering of English muffins most of all. If +you get to be very good at it the flunkies will let you take tea at the +Carleton. They are such hypercritical flunkies, and the one that brings the +gold butter-measuring rod to test your skill, why, he always wears +knee-breeches of silver gray. So you can see, Billy, how careful you have to +be. And eat them without buttering your nose. For if you butter your nose +they’ll think you’re a Greek professor. And you wouldn’t like +that, would you, honey?” He learned how to pat the butter into the +comfortable brown insides of the muffins that looked so cold and floury +without. But Istra seemed to have lost interest; and he didn’t in the +least follow her when she observed: +</p> + +<p> +“Doubtless it <i>was</i> the best butter. But where, where, dear +dormouse, are the hatter and hare? Especially the sweet bunny rabbit that +wriggled his ears and loved Gralice, the <i>princesse d’outre-mer.</i> +</p> + +<p class="poem"> +“Where, where are the hatter and hare,<br/> +And where is the best butter gone?” +</p> + +<p> +Presently: “Come on. Let’s beat it down to Soho for dinner. +Or—no! Now you shall lead me. Show me where you’d go for dinner. +And you shall take me to a music-hall, and make me enjoy it. Now <i>you</i> +teach <i>me</i> to play.” +</p> + +<p> +“Gee! I’m afraid I don’t know a single thing to teach +you.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, but—See here! We are two lonely Western barbarians in a +strange land. We’ll play together for a little while. We’re not +used to each other’s sort of play, but that will break up the monotony of +life all the more. I don’t know how long we’ll play or—Shall +we?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh yes!” +</p> + +<p> +“Now show me how you play.” +</p> + +<p> +“I don’t believe I ever did much, really.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, you shall take me to your kind of a restaurant.” +</p> + +<p> +“I don’t believe you’d care much for penny meat-pies.” +</p> + +<p> +“Little meat-pies?” +</p> + +<p> +“Um-huh.” +</p> + +<p> +“Little <i>crispy</i> ones? With flaky covers?” +</p> + +<p> +“Um-huh.” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, course I would! And ha’p’ny tea? Lead me to it, O brave +knight! And to a vaudeville.” +</p> + +<p> +He found that this devoted attendant of theaters had never seen the beautiful +Italians who pounce upon protesting zylophones with small clubs, or the +side-splitting juggler’s assistant who breaks up piles and piles of +plates. And as to the top hat that turns into an accordion and produces much +melody, she was ecstatic. +</p> + +<p> +At after-theater supper he talked of Theresa and South Beach, of Charley +Carpenter and Morton—Morton—Morton. +</p> + +<p> +They sat, at midnight, on the steps of the house in Tavistock Place. +</p> + +<p> +“I do know you now, “she mused. “It’s curious how any +two babes in a strange-enough woods get acquainted. You <i>are</i> a lonely +child, aren’t you?” Her voice was mother-soft. “We will play +just a little—” +</p> + +<p> +“I wish I had some games to teach. But you know so much.” +</p> + +<p> +“And I’m a perfect beauty, too, aren’t I?” she said, +gravely. +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, you are!” stoutly. +</p> + +<p> +“You would be loyal…. And I need some one’s admiration…. Mostly, +Paris and London hold their sides laughing at poor Istra.” +</p> + +<p> +He caught her hand. “Oh, don’t! They <i>must</i> ’preciate +you. I’d like to kill anybody that didn’t!” +</p> + +<p> +“Thanks.” She gave his hand a return pressure and hastily withdrew +her own. “You’ll be good to some sweet pink face…. And I’ll +go on being discontented. Oh, isn ’t life the fiercest proposition!… We +seem different, you and I, but maybe it’s mostly surface—down deep +we’re alike in being desperately unhappy because we never know what +we’re unhappy about. Well—” +</p> + +<p> +He wanted to put his head down on her knees and rest there. But he sat still, +and presently their cold hands snuggled together. +</p> + +<p> +After a silence, in which they were talking of themselves, he burst out: +“But I don’t see how Paris could help ’preciating you. +I’ll bet you’re one of the best artists they ever saw…. The way you +made up a picture in your mind about that juggler!” +</p> + +<p> +“Nope. Sorry. Can’t paint at all.” +</p> + +<p> +“Ah, stuff!” with a rudeness quite masterful. “I’ll bet +your pictures are corkers.” +</p> + +<p> +“Um.” +</p> + +<p> +“Please, would you let me see some of them some time. I suppose it would +bother—” +</p> + +<p> +“Come up-stairs. I feel inspired. You are about to hear some great though +nasty criticisms on the works of the unfortunate Miss Nash.” +</p> + +<p> +She led the way, laughing to herself over something. She gave him no time to +blush and hesitate over the impropriety of entering a lady’s room at +midnight, but stalked ahead with a brief “Come in.” +</p> + +<p> +She opened a large portfolio covered with green-veined black paper and yanked +out a dozen unframed pastels and wash-drawings which she scornfully tossed on +the bed, saying, as she pointed to a mass of Marseilles roofs: +</p> + +<p> +“Do you see this sketch? The only good thing about it is the thing that +last art editor, that red-headed youth, probably didn’t like. Don’t +you hate red hair? You see these ridiculous glaring purple shadows under the +<i>clocher?</i>” +</p> + +<p> +She stared down at the picture interestedly, forgetting him, pinching her chin +thoughtfully, while she murmured: “They’re rather nice. Rather +good. Rather good.” +</p> + +<p> +Then, quickly twisting her shoulders about, she poured out: +</p> + +<p> +“But look at this. Consider this arch. It’s miserably out of +drawing. And see how I’ve faked this figure? It isn’t a real person +at all. Don’t you notice how I’ve juggled with this stairway? Why, +my dear man, every bit of the drawing in this thing would disgrace a +seventh-grade drawing-class in Dos Puentes. And regard the bunch of lombardies +in this other picture. They look like umbrellas upside down in a silly +wash-basin. Uff! It’s terrible. <i>Affreux!</i> Don’t act as though +you liked them. You really needn’t, you know. Can’t you see now +that they’re hideously out of drawing?” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn’s fancy was walking down a green lane of old France toward a +white cottage with orange-trees gleaming against its walls. In her pictures he +had found the land of all his forsaken dreams. +</p> + +<p> +“I—I—I—” was all he could say, but admiration +pulsed in it. +</p> + +<p> +“Thank you…. Yes, we <i>will</i> play. Good night. To-morrow!” +</p> + +</div><!--end chapter--> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2><a name="chap09"></a>CHAPTER IX<br/> +HE ENCOUNTERS THE INTELLECTUALS</h2> + +<p> +He wanted to find a cable office, stalk in, and nonchalantly send to his bank +for more money. He could see himself doing it. Maybe the cable clerk would +think he was a rich American. What did he care if he spent all he had? A guy, +he admonished himself, just had to have coin when he was goin’ with a +girl like Miss Istra. At least seven times he darted up from the door-step, +where he was on watch for her, and briskly trotted as far as the corner. Each +time his courage melted, and he slumped back to the door-step. Sending for +money—gee, he groaned, that was pretty dangerous. +</p> + +<p> +Besides, he didn’t wish to go away. Istra might come down and play with +him. +</p> + +<p> +For three hours he writhed on that door-step, till he came to hate it; it was +as much a prison as his room at the Zapps’ had been. He hated the areaway +grill, and a big brown spot on the pavement, and, as a truck-driver hates a +motorman, so did he hate a pudgy woman across the street who peeped out from a +second-story window and watched him with cynical interest. He finally could +endure no longer the world’s criticism, as expressed by the woman +opposite. He started as though he were going to go right now to some place he +had been intending to go to all the time, and stalked away, ignoring the woman. +</p> + +<p> +He caught a bus, then another, then walked a while. Now that he was moving, he +was agonizedly considering his problem: What was Istra to him, really? What +could he be to her? He <i>was</i> just a clerk. She could never love him. +“And of course,” he explained to himself, “you hadn’t +oughta love a person without you expected to marry them; you oughtn’t +never even touch her hand.” Yet he did want to touch hers. He suddenly +threw his chin back, high and firm, in defiance. He didn’t care if he was +wicked, he declared. He wanted to shout to Istra across all the city: Let us be +great lovers! Let us be mad! Let us stride over the hilltops. Though that was +not at all the way he phrased it. +</p> + +<p> +Then he bumped into a knot of people standing on the walk, and came down from +the hilltops in one swoop. +</p> + +<p> +A crowd was collecting before Rothsey Hall, which bore the sign: +</p> + +<p class="center"> +GLORY—GLORY—GLORY<br/> +<br/> +SPECIAL SALVATION ARMY JUBILEE MEETING<br/> +<br/> +<small>EXPERIENCES OF ADJUTANT CRABBENTHWAITE IN AFRICA</small> +</p> + +<p> +He gaped at the sign. A Salvationist in the crowd, trim and well set up, his +red-ribboned Salvation Army cap at a jaunty angle, said, “Won’t you +come in, brother?” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn meekly followed into the hall. Bill Wrenn was nowhere in sight. +</p> + +<p> +Now it chanced that Adjutant Crabbenthwaite told much of Houssas and the +N’Gombi, of saraweks and week-long treks, but Mr. Wrenn’s +imagination was not for a second drawn to Africa, nor did he even glance at the +sun-bonneted Salvationist women packed in the hall. He was going over and over +the Adjutant’s denunciations of the Englishmen and Englishwomen who flirt +on the mail-boats. +</p> + +<p> +Suppose it had been himself and his madness over Istra—at the moment he +quite called it madness—that the Adjutant had denounced! +</p> + +<p> +A Salvationist near by was staring at him most accusingly…. +</p> + +<p> +He walked away from the jubilee reflectively. He ate his dinner with a grave +courtesy toward the food and the waiter. He was positively courtly to his fork. +For he was just reformed. He was going to “steer clear” of mad +artist women—of all but nice good girls whom you could marry. He +remembered the Adjutant’s thundered words: +</p> + +<p> +“Flirting you call it—flirting! Look into your hearts. God Himself +hath looked into them and found flirtation the gateway to hell. And I tell you +that these army officers and the bedizened women, with their wine and +cigarettes, with their devil’s calling-cards and their jewels, with their +hell-lighted talk of the sacrilegious follies of socialism and art and +horse-racing, O my brothers, it was all but a cloak for looking upon one +another to lust after one another. Rotten is this empire, and shall fall when +our soldiers seek flirtation instead of kneeling in prayer like the iron men of +Cromwell.” +</p> + +<p> +Istra…. Card-playing…. Talk of socialism and art. Mr. Wrenn felt very guilty. +Istra…. Smoking and drinking wine…. But his moral reflections brought the +picture of Istra the more clearly before him—the persuasive warmth of her +perfect fingers; the curve of her backward-bent throat as she talked in her +melodious voice of all the beautiful things made by the wise hands of great +men. +</p> + +<p> +He dashed out of the restaurant. No matter what happened, good or bad, he had +to see her. While he was climbing to the upper deck of a bus he was trying to +invent an excuse for seeing her…. Of course one couldn’t “go and +call on ladies in their rooms without havin’ some special excuse; they +would think that was awful fresh.” +</p> + +<p> +He left the bus midway, at the sign of a periodical shop, and purchased a +<i>Blackwood’s</i> and a <i>Nineteenth Century</i>. Morton had told him +these were the chief English “highbrow magazines.” +</p> + +<p> +He carried them to his room, rubbed his thumb in the lampblack on the +gas-fixture, and smeared the magazine covers, then cut the leaves and ruffled +the margins to make the magazines look dog-eared with much reading; not because +he wanted to appear to have read them, but because he felt that Istra would not +permit him to buy things just for her. +</p> + +<p> +All this business with details so calmed him that he wondered if he really +cared to see her at all. Besides, it was so late—after half-past eight. +</p> + +<p> +“Rats! Hang it all! I wish I was dead. I don’t know what I do want +to do,” he groaned, and cast himself upon his bed. He was sure of nothing +but the fact that he was unhappy. He considered suicide in a dignified manner, +but not for long enough to get much frightened about it. +</p> + +<p> +He did not know that he was the toy of forces which, working on him through the +strangeness of passionate womanhood, could have made him a great cad or a petty +hero as easily as they did make him confusedly sorry for himself. That he +wasn’t very much of a cad or anything of a hero is a detail, an accident +resulting from his thirty-five or thirty-six years of stodgy environment. Cad +or hero, filling scandal columns or histories, he would have been the same +William Wrenn. +</p> + +<p> +He was thinking of Istra as he lay on his bed. In a few minutes he dashed to +his bureau and brushed his thinning hair so nervously that he had to try three +times for a straight parting. While brushing his eyebrows and mustache he +solemnly contemplated himself in the mirror. +</p> + +<p> +“I look like a damn rabbit,” he scorned, and marched half-way to +Istra’s room. He went back to change his tie to a navy-blue bow which +made him appear younger. He was feeling rather resentful at everything, +including Istra, as he finally knocked and heard her “Yes? Come +in.” +</p> + +<p> +There was in her room a wonderful being lolling in a wing-chair, one leg over +the chair-arm; a young young man, with broken brown teeth, always seen in his +perpetual grin, but a godlike Grecian nose, a high forehead, and bristly yellow +hair. The being wore large round tortoise-shell spectacles, a soft shirt with a +gold-plated collar-pin, and delicately gray garments. +</p> + +<p> +Istra was curled on the bed in a leaf-green silk kimono with a great +gold-mounted medallion pinned at her breast. Mr. Wrenn tried not to be shocked +at the kimono. +</p> + +<p> +She had been frowning as he came in and fingering a long thin green book of +verses, but she glowed at Mr. Wrenn as though he were her most familiar friend, +murmuring, “Mouse dear, I’m <i>so</i> glad you could come +in.” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn stood there awkwardly. He hadn’t expected to find another +visitor. He seemed to have heard her call him “Mouse.” Yes, but +what did Mouse mean? It wasn’t his name at all. This was all very +confusing. But how awful glad she was to see him! +</p> + +<p> +“Mouse dear, this is one of our best little indecent poets, Mr. Carson +Haggerty. From America—California—too. Mr. Hag’ty, Mr. +Wrenn.” +</p> + +<p> +“Pleased meet you,” said both men in the same tone of annoyance. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn implored: “I—uh—I thought you might like to look at +these magazines. Just dropped in to give them to you.” He was ready to +go. +</p> + +<p> +“Thank you—so good of you. <i>Please</i> sit down. Carson and I +were only fighting—he’s going pretty soon. We knew each other at +art school in Berkeley. Now he knows all the toffs in London.” +</p> + +<p> +“Mr. Wrenn,” said the best little poet, “I hope you’ll +back up my contention. Izzy says th—” +</p> + +<p> +“Carson, I have told you just about enough times that I do not intend to +stand for ‘Izzy’ any more! I should think that even <i>you</i> +would be able to outgrow the standard of wit that obtains in first-year art +class at Berkeley.” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Haggerty showed quite all of his ragged teeth in a noisy joyous grin and +went on, unperturbed: “Miss Nash says that the best European thought, +personally gathered in the best salons, shows that the Rodin vogue is getting +the pickle-eye from all the real yearners. What is your opinion?” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn turned to Istra for protection. She promptly announced: “Mr. +Wrenn absolutely agrees with me. By the way, he’s doing a big book on the +recrudescence of Kipling, after his slump, and—” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, come off, now! Kipling! Blatant imperialist, anti-Stirner!” +cried Carson Haggerty, kicking out each word with the assistance of his +swinging left foot. +</p> + +<p> +Much relieved that the storm-center had passed over him, Mr. Wrenn sat on the +front edge of a cane-seated chair, with the magazines between his hands, and +his hands pressed between his forward-cocked knees. Always, in the hundreds of +times he went over the scene in that room afterward, he remembered how cool and +smooth the magazine covers felt to the palms of his flattened hands. For he +associated the papery surfaces with the apprehension he then had that Istra +might give him up to the jag-toothed grin of Carson Haggerty, who would laugh +him out of the room and out of Istra’s world. +</p> + +<p> +He hated the poetic youth, and would gladly have broken all of Carson’s +teeth short off. Yet the dread of having to try the feat himself made him +admire the manner in which Carson tossed about long creepy-sounding words, like +a bush-ape playing with scarlet spiders. He talked insultingly of Yeats and the +commutation of sex-energy and Isadora Duncan and the poetry of Carson Haggerty. +</p> + +<p> +Istra yawned openly on the bed, kicking a pillow, but she was surprised into +energetic discussion now and then, till Haggerty intentionally called her Izzy +again, when she sat up and remarked to Mr. Wrenn: “Oh, don’t go +yet. You can tell me about the article when Carson goes. Dear Carson said he +was only going to stay till ten.” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn hadn’t had any intention of going, so he merely smiled and +bobbed his head to the room in general, and stammered “Y-yes,” +while he tried to remember what he had told her about some article. Article. +Perhaps it was a Souvenir Company novelty article. Great idea! Perhaps she +wanted to design a motto for them. He decidedly hoped that he could fix it up +for her—he’d sure do his best. He’d be glad to write over to +Mr. Guilfogle about it. Anyway, she seemed willing to have him stick here. +</p> + +<p> +Yet when dear Carson had jauntily departed, leaving the room still loud with +the smack of his grin, Istra seemed to have forgotten that Mr. Wrenn was alive. +She was scowling at a book on the bed as though it had said things to her. So +he sat quiet and crushed the magazine covers more closely till the silence +choked him, and he dared, “Mr. Carson is an awful well-educated +man.” +</p> + +<p> +“He’s a bounder,” she snapped. She softened her voice as she +continued: “He was in the art school in California when I was there, and +he presumes on that…. It was good of you to stay and help me get rid of him…. +I’m getting—I’m sorry I’m so dull to-night. I suppose +I’ll get sent off to bed right now, if I can’t be more +entertaining. It was sweet of you to come in, Mouse…. You don’t mind my +calling you ‘Mouse,’ do you? I won’t, if you do mind.” +</p> + +<p> +He awkwardly walked over and laid the magazines on the bed. “Why, +it’s all right…. What was it about some novelty—some article? If +there’s anything I could do—anything—” +</p> + +<p> +“Article?” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, yes. That you wanted to see me about.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh! Oh, that was just to get rid of Carson…. His <i>insufferable</i> +familiarity! The penalty for my having been a naive kiddy, hungry for +friendship, once. And now, good n—. Oh, Mouse, he says my eyes—even +with this green kimono on— Come here, dear. tell me what color my eyes +are.” +</p> + +<p> +She moved with a quick swing to the side of her bed. Thrusting out her two +arms, she laid ivory hands clutchingly on his shoulder. He stood quaking, +forgetting every one of the Wrennish rules by which he had edged a shy polite +way through life. He fearfully reached out his hands toward her shoulders in +turn, but his arms were shorter than hers, and his hands rested on the +sensitive warmth of her upper arms. He peered at those dear gray-blue eyes of +hers, but he could not calm himself enough to tell whether they were china-blue +or basalt-black. +</p> + +<p> +“Tell me,” she demanded; “<i>aren’t</i> they +green?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes,” he quavered. +</p> + +<p> +“You’re sweet,” she said. +</p> + +<p> +Leaning out from the side of her bed, she kissed him. She sprang up, and +hastened to the window, laughing nervously, and deploring: “I +shouldn’t have done that! I shouldn’t! Forgive me!” +Plaintively, like a child: “Istra was so bad, so bad. Now you must +go.” As she turned back to him her eyes had the peace of an old +friend’s. +</p> + +<p> +Because he had wished to be kind to people, because he had been pitiful toward +Goaty Zapp, Mr. Wrenn was able to understand that she was trying to be a kindly +big sister to him, and he said “Good night, Istra,” and smiled in a +lively way and walked out. He got out the smile by wrenching his nerves, for +which he paid in agony as he knelt by his bed, acknowledging that Istra would +never love him and that therefore he was not to love, would be a fool to love, +never would love her—and seeing again her white arms softly shadowed by +her green kimono sleeves. +</p> + +<p> +No sight of Istra, no scent of her hair, no sound of her always-changing voice +for two days. Twice, seeing a sliver of light under her door as he came up the +darkened stairs, he knocked, but there was no answer, and he marched into his +room with the dignity of fury. +</p> + +<p> +Numbers of times he quite gave her up, decided he wanted never to see her +again. But after one of the savagest of these renunciations, while he was +stamping defiantly down Tottenham Court Road, he saw in a window a +walking-stick that he was sure she would like his carrying. And it cost only +two-and-six. Hastily, before he changed his mind, he rushed in and slammed down +his money. It was a very beautiful stick indeed, and of a modesty to commend +itself to Istra, just a plain straight stick with a cap of metal curiously like +silver. He was conscious that the whole world was leering at him, demanding +“What’re <i>you</i> carrying a cane for?” but he—the +misunderstood—was willing to wait for the reward of this martyrdom in +Istra’s approval. +</p> + +<p> +The third night, as he stood at the window watching two children playing in the +dusk, there was a knock. It was Istra. She stood at his door, smart and +inconspicuous in a black suit with a small toque that hid the flare of her red +hair. +</p> + +<p> +“Come,” she said, abruptly. “I want you to take me to +Olympia’s—Olympia Johns’ flat. I’ve been reading all +the Balzac there is. I want to talk. Can you come?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, of course—” +</p> + +<p> +“Hurry, then!” +</p> + +<p> +He seized his small foolishly round hat, and he tucked his new walking-stick +under his arm without displaying it too proudly, waiting for her comment. +</p> + +<p> +She led the way down-stairs and across the quiet streets and squares of +Bloomsbury to Great James Street. She did not even see the stick. +</p> + +<p> +She said scarce a word beyond: +</p> + +<p> +“I’m sick of Olympia’s bunch—I never want to dine in +Soho with an inhibition and a varietistic sex instinct again—<i>jamais de +la vie.</i> But one has to play with somebody.” +</p> + +<p> +Then he was so cheered that he tapped the pavements boldly with his stick and +delicately touched her arm as they crossed the street. For she added: +</p> + +<p> +“We’ll just run in and see them for a little while, and then you +can take me out and buy me a Rhine wine and seltzer…. Poor Mouse, it shall have +its play!” +</p> + +<p> +Olympia Johns’ residence consisted of four small rooms. When Istra opened +the door, after tapping, the living-room was occupied by seven people, all +interrupting one another and drinking fourpenny ale; seven people and a fog of +cigarette smoke and a tangle of papers and books and hats. A swamp of unwashed +dishes appeared on a large table in the room just beyond, divided off from the +living-room by a burlap curtain to which were pinned suffrage buttons and +medallions. This last he remembered afterward, thinking over the room, for the +medals’ glittering points of light relieved his eyes from the intolerable +glances of the people as he was hastily introduced to them. He was afraid that +he would be dragged into a discussion, and sat looking away from them to the +medals, and to the walls, on which were posters, showing mighty fists with +hammers and flaming torches, or hog-like men lolling on the chests of workmen, +which they seemed to enjoy more than the workmen. By and by he ventured to scan +the group. +</p> + +<p> +Carson Haggerty, the American poet, was there. But the center of them all was +Olympia Johns herself—spinster, thirty-four, as small and active and +excitedly energetic as an ant trying to get around a match. She had much of the +ant’s brownness and slimness, too. Her pale hair was always falling from +under her fillet of worn black velvet (with the dingy under side of the velvet +showing curled up at the edges). A lock would tangle in front of her eyes, and +she would impatiently shove it back with a jab of her thin rough hands, never +stopping in her machine-gun volley of words. +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” she would pour out. “Don’t you +<i>see?</i> We must do something. I tell you the conditions are intolerable, +simply intolerable. We must <i>do</i> something.” +</p> + +<p> +The conditions were, it seemed, intolerable in the several branches of +education of female infants, water rates in Bloomsbury, the cutlery industry, +and ballad-singing. +</p> + +<p> +And mostly she was right. Only her rightness was so demanding, so restless, +that it left Mr. Wrenn gasping. +</p> + +<p> +Olympia depended on Carson Haggerty for most of the “Yes, that’s +so’s,” though he seemed to be trying to steal glances at another +woman, a young woman, a lazy smiling pretty girl of twenty, who, Istra told Mr. +Wrenn, studied Greek archaeology at the Museum. No one knew why she studied it. +She seemed peacefully ignorant of everything but her kissable lips, and she +adorably poked at things with lazy graceful fingers, and talked the Little +Language to Carson Haggerty, at which Olympia shrugged her shoulders and turned +to the others. +</p> + +<p> +There were a Mr. and Mrs. Stettinius—she a poet; he a bleached man, with +goatish whiskers and a sanctimonious white neck-cloth, who was Puritanically, +ethically, gloomily, religiously atheistic. Items in the room were a young man +who taught in Mr. Jeney’s Select School and an Established Church mission +worker from Whitechapel, who loved to be shocked. +</p> + +<p> +It was Mr. Wrenn who was really shocked, however, not by the noise and odor; +not by the smoking of the women; not by the demand that “we” tear +down the state; no, not by these was Our Mr. Wrenn of the Souvenir Company +shocked, but by his own fascinated interest in the frank talk of sex. He had +always had a quite undefined supposition that it was wicked to talk of sex +unless one made a joke of it. +</p> + +<p> +Then came the superradicals, to confuse the radicals who confused Mr. Wrenn. +</p> + +<p> +For always there is a greater rebellion; and though you sell your prayer-book +to buy Bakunine, and esteem yourself revolutionary to a point of madness, you +shall find one who calls you reactionary. The scorners came in +together—Moe Tchatzsky, the syndicalist and direct actionist, and Jane +Schott, the writer of impressionistic prose—and they sat silently +sneering on a couch. +</p> + +<p> +Istra rose, nodded at Mr. Wrenn, and departed, despite Olympia’s +hospitable shrieks after them of “Oh stay! It’s only a little after +ten. Do stay and have something to eat.” +</p> + +<p> +Istra shut the door resolutely. The hall was dark. It was gratefully quiet. She +snatched up Mr. Wrenn’s hand and held it to her breast. +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, Mouse dear, I’m so bored! I want some real things. They talk +and talk in there, and every night they settle all the fate of all the nations, +always the same way. I don’t suppose there’s ever been a bunch that +knew more things incorrectly. You hated them, didn’t you?” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, I don’t think you ought to talk about them so severe,” +he implored, as they started down-stairs. “I don’t mean +they’re like you. They don’t savvy like you do. I mean it! But I +was awful int’rested in what that Miss Johns said about kids in school +getting crushed into a mold. Gee! that’s so; ain’t it? Never +thought of it before. And that Mrs. Stettinius talked about Yeats so +beautiful.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, my dear, you make my task so much harder. I want you to be +different. Can’t you see your cattle-boat experience is realer than any +of the things those half-baked thinkers have done? I <i>know</i>. I’m +half-baked myself.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, I’ve never done nothing.” +</p> + +<p> +“But you’re ready to. Oh, I don’t know. I want—I wish +Jock Seton—the filibuster I met in San Francisco—I wish he were +here. Mouse, maybe I can make a filibuster of you. I’ve got to create +something. Oh, those people! If you just knew them! That fool Mary Stettinius +is mad about that Tchatzsky person, and her husband invites him to teas. +Stettinius is mad about Olympia, who’ll probably take Carson out and +marry him, and he’ll keep on hanging about the Greek girl. Ungh!” +</p> + +<p> +“I don’t know—I don’t know—” +</p> + +<p> +But as he didn’t know what he didn’t know she merely patted his arm +and said, soothingly: “I won’t criticize your first specimens of +radicals any more. They are trying to do something, anyway.” Then she +added, in an irrelevant tone, “You’re exactly as tall as I am. +Mouse dear, you ought to be taller.” +</p> + +<p> +They were entering the drab stretch of Tavistock Place, after a silence as +drab, when she exclaimed: “Mouse, I am <i>so</i> sick of everything. I +want to get out, away, anywhere, and do something, anything, just so’s +it’s different. Even the country. I’d like—Why couldn’t +we?” +</p> + +<p> +“Let’s go out on a picnic to-morrow, Istra.” +</p> + +<p> +“A picnic picnic? With pickles and a pillow cushion and several kinds of +cake?… I’m afraid the Bois Boulogne has spoiled me for that…. Let me +think.” +</p> + +<p> +She drooped down on the steps of their house. Her head back, her supple strong +throat arched with the passion of hating boredom, she devoured the starlight +dim over the stale old roofs across the way. +</p> + +<p> +“Stars,” she said. “Out on the moors they would come down by +you…. What is <i>your</i> adventure—your formula for it?… Let’s +see; you take common roadside things seriously; you’d be dear and excited +over a Red Lion Inn.” +</p> + +<p> +“Are there more than one Red Li—” +</p> + +<p> +“My dear Mouse, England is a menagerie of Red Lions and White Lions and +fuzzy Green Unicorns…. Why not, why not, <i>why not!</i> Let’s walk to +Aengusmere. It’s a fool colony of artists and so on, up in Suffolk; but +they <i>have</i> got some beautiful cottages, and they’re more Celt than +Dublin…. Start right now; take a train to Chelmsford, say, and tramp all night. +Take a couple of days or so to get there. Think of it! Tramping through dawn, +past English fields. Think of it, Yankee. And not caring what anybody in the +world thinks. Gipsies. Shall we?” +</p> + +<p> +“Wh-h-h-h-y—” He was sure she was mad. Tramping all night! He +couldn’t let her do this. +</p> + +<p> +She sprang up. She stared down at him in revulsion, her hands clenched. Her +voice was hostile as she demanded: +</p> + +<p> +“What? Don’t you want to? With <i>me?</i>” +</p> + +<p> +He was up beside her, angry, dignified; a man. +</p> + +<p> +“Look here. You know I want to. You’re the elegantest—I mean +you’re—Oh, you ought to know! Can’t you see how I feel about +you? Why, I’d rather do this than anything I ever heard of in my life. I +just don’t want to do anything that would get people to talking about +you.” +</p> + +<p> +“Who would know? Besides, my dear man, I don’t regard it as exactly +wicked to walk decently along a country road.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, it isn’t that. Oh, please, Istra, don’t look at me like +that—like you hated me.” +</p> + +<p> +She calmed at once, drummed on his arm, sat down on the railing, and drew him +to a seat beside her. +</p> + +<p> +“Of course, Mouse. It’s silly to be angry. Yes, I do believe you +want to take care of me. But don’t worry…. Come! Shall we go?” +</p> + +<p> +“But wouldn’t you rather wait till to-morrow?” +</p> + +<p> +“No. The whole thing’s so mad that if I wait till then I’ll +never want to do it. And you’ve got to come, so that I’ll have some +one to quarrel with…. I hate the smugness of London, especially the smugness of +the anti-smug anti-bourgeois radicals, so that I have the finest mad mood! +Come. We’ll go.” +</p> + +<p> +Even this logical exposition had not convinced him, but he did not gainsay as +they entered the hall and Istra rang for the landlady. His knees grew sick and +old and quavery as he heard the landlady’s voice loud below-stairs: +“Now wot do they want? It’s eleven o’clock. Aren’t they +ever done a-ringing and a-ringing?” +</p> + +<p> +The landlady, the tired thin parchment-faced North Countrywoman, whose god was +Respectability of Lodgings, listened in a frightened way to Istra’s +blandly superior statement: “Mr. Wrenn and I have been invited to join an +excursion out of town that leaves to-night. We’ll pay our rent and leave +our things here.” +</p> + +<p> +“Going off together—” +</p> + +<p> +“My good woman, we are going to Aengusmere. Here’s two pound. +Don’t allow any one in my room. And I may send for my things from out of +town. Be ready to pack them in my trunks and send them to me. Do you +understand?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, miss, but—” +</p> + +<p> +“My good woman, do you realize that your ‘buts’ are +insulting?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, I didn’t go to be insulting—” +</p> + +<p> +“Then that’s all…. Hurry now, Mouse!” +</p> + +<p> +On the stairs, ascending, she whispered, with the excitement not of a tired +woman, but of a tennis-and-dancing-mad girl: “We’re off! Just take +a tooth-brush. Put on an outing suit—any old thing—and an old +cap.” +</p> + +<p> +She darted into her room. +</p> + +<p> +Now Mr. Wrenn had, for any old thing, as well as for afternoon and evening +dress, only the sturdy undistinguished clothes he was wearing, so he put on a +cap, and hoped she wouldn’t notice. She didn’t. She came knocking +in fifteen minutes, trim in a khaki suit, with low thick boots and a jolly +tousled blue tam-o’-shanter. +</p> + +<p> +“Come on. There’s a train for Chelmsford in half an hour, my +time-table confided to me. I feel like singing.” +</p> + +</div><!--end chapter--> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2><a name="chap10"></a>CHAPTER X<br/> +HE GOES A-GIPSYING</h2> + +<p> +They rode out of London in a third-class compartment, opposite a curate and two +stodgy people who were just people and defied you (Istra cheerfully explained +to Mr. Wrenn) to make anything of them but just people. +</p> + +<p> +“Wouldn’t they stare if they knew what idiocy we’re up +to!” she suggested. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn bobbed his head in entire agreement. He was trying, without any +slightest success, to make himself believe that Mr. William Wrenn, Our Mr. +Wrenn, late of the Souvenir Company, was starting out for a country tramp at +midnight with an artist girl. +</p> + +<p> +The night foreman of the station, a person of bedizenment and pride, stared at +them as they alighted at Chelmsford and glanced around like strangers. Mr. +Wrenn stared back defiantly and marched with Istra from the station, through +the sleeping town, past its ragged edges, into the country. +</p> + +<p> +They tramped on, a bit wearily. Mr. Wrenn was beginning to wonder if +they’d better go back to Chelmsford. Mist was dripping and blind and +silent about them, weaving its heavy gray with the night. Suddenly Istra caught +his arm at the gate to a farm-yard, and cried, “Look!” +</p> + +<p> +“Gee!… Gee! we’re in England. We’re abroad!” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes—abroad.” +</p> + +<p> +A paved courtyard with farm outbuildings thatched and ancient was lit faintly +by a lantern hung from a post that was thumbed to a soft smoothness by +centuries. +</p> + +<p> +“That couldn’t be America,” he exulted. “Gee! I’m +just gettin’ it! I’m so darn glad we came…. Here’s real +England. No tourists. It’s what I’ve always wanted—a country +that’s old. And different…. Thatched houses!… And pretty soon it’ll +be dawn, summer dawn; with you, with Istra! <i>Gee!</i> It’s the darndest +adventure.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes…. Come on. Let’s walk fast or we’ll get sleepy, and then +your romantic heroine will be a grouchy Interesting People!… Listen! +There’s a sleepy dog barking, a million miles away…. I feel like telling +you about myself. You don’t know me. Or do you?” +</p> + +<p> +“I dunno just how you mean.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, it shall have its romance! But some time I’ll tell +you—perhaps I will—how I’m not really a clever person at all, +but just a savage from outer darkness, who pretends to understand London and +Paris and Munich, and gets frightfully scared of them…. Wait! Listen! Hear the +mist drip from that tree. Are you nice and drowned?” +</p> + +<p> +“Uh—kind of. But I been worrying about you being soaked.” +</p> + +<p> +“Let me see. Why, your sleeve is wet clear through. This khaki of mine +keeps out the water better…. But I don’t mind getting wet. All I mind is +being bored. I’d like to run up this hill without a thing on—just +feeling the good healthy real mist on my skin. But I’m afraid it +isn’t done.” +</p> + +<p> +Mile after mile. Mostly she talked of the boulevards and Pere Dureon, of +Debussy and artichokes, in little laughing sentences that sprang like fire out +of the dimness of the mist. +</p> + +<p> +Dawn came. From a hilltop they made out the roofs of a town and stopped to +wonder at its silence, as though through long ages past no happy footstep had +echoed there. The fog lifted. The morning was new-born and clean, and they +fairly sang as they clattered up to an old coaching inn and demanded breakfast +of an amazed rustic pottering about the inn yard in a smock. He did not know +that to a “thrilling” Mr. Wrenn he—or perhaps it was his +smock—was the hero in an English melodrama. Nor, doubtless, did the +English crisp bacon and eggs which a sleepy housemaid prepared know that they +were theater properties. Why, they were English eggs, served at dawn in an +English inn—a stone-floored raftered room with a starling hanging in a +little cage of withes outside the latticed window. And there were no trippers +to bother them! (Mr. Wrenn really used the word “trippers” in his +cogitations; he had it from Istra.) +</p> + +<p> +When he informed her of this occult fact she laughed, “You know mighty +well, Mouse, that you have a sneaking wish there were one Yankee stranger here +to see our glory.” +</p> + +<p> +“I guess that’s right.” +</p> + +<p> +“But maybe I’m just as bad.” +</p> + +<p> +For once their tones had not been those of teacher and pupil, but of comrades. +They set out from the inn through the brightening morning like lively boys on a +vacation tramp. +</p> + +<p> +The sun crept out, with the warmth and the dust, and Istra’s steps +lagged. As they passed the outlying corner of a farm where a straw-stack was +secluded in a clump of willows Istra smiled and sighed: “I’m pretty +tired, dear. I’m going to sleep in that straw-stack. I’ve always +wanted to sleep in a straw-stack. It’s <i>comme il faut</i> for vagabonds +in the best set, you know. And one can burrow. Exciting, eh?” +</p> + +<p> +She made a pillow of her khaki jacket, while he dug down to a dry place for +her. He found another den on the other side of the stack. +</p> + +<p> +It was afternoon when he awoke. He sprang up and rushed around the stack. Istra +was still asleep, curled in a pathetically small childish heap, her tired face +in repose against the brown-yellow of her khaki jacket. Her red hair had come +down and shone about her shoulders. +</p> + +<p> +She looked so frail that he was frightened. Surely, too, she’d be very +angry with him for letting her come on this jaunt. +</p> + +<p> +He scribbled on a leaf from his address-book—religiously carried for six +years, but containing only four addresses—this note: +</p> + +<p class="poem"> +Gone to get stuff for bxfst be right back.—W. W. +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +and, softly crawling up the straw, left the note by her head. He hastened to a +farm-house. The farm-wife was inclined to be curious. O curious farm-wife, you +of the cream-thick Essex speech and the shuffling feet, you were brave indeed +to face Bill Wrenn the Great, with his curt self-possession, for he was on a +mission for Istra, and he cared not for the goggling eyes of all England. What +though he was a bunny-faced man with an innocuous mustache? Istra would be +awakening hungry. That was why he bullied you into selling him a stew-pan and a +bundle of faggots along with the tea and eggs and a bread loaf and a jar of the +marmalade your husband’s farm had been making these two hundred years. +And you should have had coffee for him, not tea, woman of Essex. +</p> + +<p> +When he returned to their outdoor inn the late afternoon glow lay along the +rich fields that sloped down from their well-concealed nook. Istra was still +asleep, but her cheek now lay wistfully on the crook of her thin arm. He looked +at the auburn-framed paleness of her face, its lines of thought and ambition, +unmasked, unprotected by the swift changes of expression which defended her +while she was awake. He sobbed. If he could only make her happy! But he was +afraid of her moods. +</p> + +<p> +He built a fire by a brooklet beyond the willows, boiled the eggs and toasted +the bread and made the tea, with cream ready in a jar. He remembered boyhood +camping days in Parthenon and old camp lore. He returned to the stack and +called, “Istra—oh, Is-tra!” +</p> + +<p> +She shook her head, nestled closer into the straw, then sat up, her hair about +her shoulders. She smiled and called down: “Good morning. Why, it’s +afternoon! Did you sleep well, dear?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes. Did you? Gee, I hope you did!” +</p> + +<p> +“Never better in my life. I’m so sleepy yet. But comfy. I needed a +quiet sleep outdoors, and it’s so peaceful here. Breakfast! I roar for +breakfast! Where’s the nearest house?” +</p> + +<p> +“Got breakfast all ready.” +</p> + +<p> +“You’re a dear!” +</p> + +<p> +She went to wash in the brook, and came back with eyes dancing and hair trim, +and they laughed over breakfast, glancing down the slope of golden hazy fields. +Only once did Istra pass out of the land of their intimacy into some hinterland +of analysis—when she looked at him as he drank his tea aloud out of the +stew-pan, and wondered: “Is this really you here with me? But you +<i>aren’t</i> a boulevardier. I must say I don’t understand what +you’re doing here at all…. Nor a caveman, either. I don’t +understand it…. But you <i>sha’n’t</i> be worried by bad Istra. +Let’s see; we went to grammar-school together.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, and we were in college. Don’t you remember when I was +baseball captain? You don’t? Gee, you got a bad memory!” +</p> + +<p> +At which she smiled properly, and they were away for Suffolk again. +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +“I suppose now it’ll go and rain,” said Istra, viciously, at +dusk. It was the first time she had spoken for a mile. Then, after another +quarter-mile: “Please don’t mind my being silent. I’m sort of +stiff, and my feet hurt most unromantically. You won’t mind, will +you?” +</p> + +<p> +Of course he did mind, and of course he said he didn’t. He artfully +skirted the field of conversation by very West Sixteenth Street observations on +a town through which they passed, while she merely smiled wearily, and at best +remarked “Yes, that’s so,” whether it was so or not. +</p> + +<p> +He was reflecting: “Istra’s terrible tired. I ought to take care of +her.” He stopped at the wood-pillared entrance of a temperance inn and +commanded: “Come! We’ll have something to eat here.” To the +astonishment of both of them, she meekly obeyed with “If you wish.” +</p> + +<p> +It cannot be truthfully said that Mr. Wrenn proved himself a person of +<i>savoir faire</i> in choosing a temperance hotel for their dinner. Istra +didn’t seem so much to mind the fact that the table-cloth was coarse and +the water-glasses thick, and that everywhere the elbow ran into a superfluity +of greasy pepper and salt castors. But when she raised her head wearily to peer +around the room she started, glared at Mr. Wrenn, and accused: “Are you +by any chance aware of the fact that this place is crowded with tourists? There +are two family parties from Davenport or Omaha; I <i>know</i> they are!” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, they ain’t such bad-looking people,” protested Mr. +Wrenn…. Just because he had induced her to stop for dinner the poor man thought +his masculine superiority had been recognized. +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, they’re <i>terrible!</i> Can’t you <i>see</i> it? Oh, +you’re <i>hopeless</i>.” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, that big guy—that big man with the rimless spectacles looks +like he might be a good civil engineer, and I think that lady opposite +him—” +</p> + +<p> +“They’re Americans.” +</p> + +<p> +“So’re we!” +</p> + +<p> +“I’m not.” +</p> + +<p> +“I thought—why—” +</p> + +<p> +“Of course I was born there, but—” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, just the same, I think they’re nice people.” +</p> + +<p> +“Now see here. Must I argue with you? Can I have no peace, tired as I am? +Those trippers are speaking of ‘quaint English flavor.’ Can you +want anything more than that to damn them? And they’ve been touring by +motor—seeing every inn on the road.” +</p> + +<p> +“Maybe it’s fun for—” +</p> + +<p> +“Now <i>don’t</i> argue with me. I know what I’m talking +about. Why do I have to explain everything? They’re hopeless!” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn felt a good wholesome desire to spank her, but he said, most +politely: “You’re awful tired. Don’t you want to stay here +tonight? Or maybe some other hotel; and I’ll stay here.” +</p> + +<p> +“No. Don’t want to stay any place. Want to get away from +myself,” she said, exactly like a naughty child. +</p> + +<p> +So they tramped on again. +</p> + +<p> +Darkness was near. They had plunged into a country which in the night seemed to +be a stretch of desolate moorlands. As they were silently plodding up a hill +the rain came. It came with a roar, a pitiless drenching against which they +fought uselessly, soaking them, slapping their faces, blinding their eyes. He +caught her arm and dragged her ahead. She would be furious with him because it +rained, of course, but this was no time to think of that; he had to get her to +a dry place. +</p> + +<p> +Istra laughed: “Oh, isn’t this great! We’re real vagabonds +now.” +</p> + +<p> +“Why! Doesn’t that khaki soak through? Aren’t you wet?” +</p> + +<p> +“To the skin!” she shouted, gleefully. “And I don’t +care! We’re <i>doing</i> something. Poor dear, is it worried? I’ll +race you to the top of the hill.” +</p> + +<p> +The dark bulk of a building struck their sight at the top, and they ran to it. +Just now Mr. Wrenn was ready to devour alive any irate householder who might +try to turn them out. He found the building to be a ruined stable—the +door off the hinges, the desolate thatch falling in. He struck a match and, +holding it up, standing straight, the master, all unconscious for once in his +deprecating life of the Wrennishness of Mr. Wrenn, he discovered that the +thatch above the horse-manger was fairly waterproof. +</p> + +<p> +“Come on! Up on the edge of the manger, Istra,” he ordered. +</p> + +<p> +“This is a perfectly good place for a murder,” she grinned, as they +sat swinging their legs. +</p> + +<p> +He could fancy her grinning. He was sure about it, and well content. +</p> + +<p> +“Have I been so very grouchy, Mouse? Don’t you want to murder me? +I’ll try to find you a long pin.” +</p> + +<p> +“Nope; I don’t think so, much. I guess we can get along without it +this time.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh dear, dear! This is very dreadful. You’re so used to me now +that you aren’t even scared of me any more.” +</p> + +<p> +“Gee! I guess I’ll be scared of you all right as soon as I get you +into a dry place, but I ain’t got time now. Sitting on a manger! +Ain’t this the funniest place!… Now I must beat it out and find a house. +There ought to be one somewheres near here.” +</p> + +<p> +“And leave me here in the darknesses and wetnesses? Not a chance. The +rain’ll soon be over, anyway. Really, I don’t mind a bit. I think +it’s rather fun.” +</p> + +<p> +Her voice was natural again, natural and companionable and brave. She laughed +as she stroked her wet shoulder and held his hand, sitting quietly and bidding +him listen to the soft forlorn sound of the rain on the thatch. +</p> + +<p> +But the rain was not soon over, and their dangling position was very much like +riding a rail. +</p> + +<p> +“I’m so uncomfortable!” fretted Istra. +</p> + +<p> +“See here, Istra, please, I think I’d better go see if I +can’t find a house for you to get dry in.” +</p> + +<p> +“I feel too wretched to go any place. Too wretched to move.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, then, I’ll make a fire here. There ain’t much +danger.” +</p> + +<p> +“The place will catch fire,” she began, querulously. +</p> + +<p> +But he interrupted her. “Oh, <i>let</i> the darn place catch fire! +I’m going to make a fire, I tell you!” +</p> + +<p> +“I don’t want to move. It’ll just be another kind of +discomfort, that’s all. Why couldn’t you try and take a little bit +of care of me, anyway?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, hon-ey!” he wailed, in youthful bewilderment. “I did try +to get you to stay at that hotel in town and get some rest.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, you ought to have made me. Don’t you realize that I took you +along to take care of me?” +</p> + +<p> +“Uh—” +</p> + +<p> +“Now don’t argue about it. I can’t stand argument all the +time.” +</p> + +<p> +He thought instantly of Lee Theresa Zapp quarreling with her mother, but he +said nothing. He gathered the driest bits of thatch and wood he could find in +the litter on the stable floor and kindled a fire, while she sat sullenly +glaring at him, her face wrinkled and tired in the wan firelight. When the +blaze was going steadily, a compact and safe little fire, he spread his coat as +a seat for her, and called, cheerily, “Come on now, honey; here’s a +regular home and hearthstone for you.” +</p> + +<p> +She slipped down from the manger edge and stood in front of him, looking into +his eyes—which were level with her own. +</p> + +<p> +“You <i>are</i> good to me,” she half whispered, and smoothed his +cheek, then slipped down on the outspread coat, and murmured, “Come; sit +here by me, and we’ll both get warm.” +</p> + +<p> +All night the rain dribbled, but no one came to drive them away from the fire, +and they dozed side by side, their hands close and their garments steaming. +Istra fell asleep, and her head drooped on his shoulder. He straightened to +bear its weight, though his back twinged with stiffness, and there he sat +unmoving, through an hour of pain and happiness and confused meditation, +studying the curious background—the dark roof of broken thatch, the +age-corroded walls, the littered earthen floor. His hand pressed lightly the +clammy smoothness of the wet khaki of her shoulder; his wet sleeve stuck to his +arm, and he wanted to pull it free. His eyes stung. But he sat tight, while his +mind ran round in circles, considering that he loved Istra, and that he would +not be entirely sorry when he was no longer the slave to her moods; that this +adventure was the strangest and most romantic, also the most idiotic and +useless, in history. +</p> + +<p> +Toward dawn she stirred, and, slipping stiffly from his position, he moved her +so that her back, which was still wet, faced the fire. He built up the fire +again, and sat brooding beside her, dozing and starting awake, till morning. +Then his head bobbed, and he was dimly awake again, to find her sitting up +straight, looking at him in amazement. +</p> + +<p> +“It simply can’t be, that’s all…. Did you curl me up? +I’m nice and dry all over now. It was very good of you. You’ve been +a most commendable person…. But I think we’ll take a train for the rest +of our pilgrimage. It hasn’t been entirely successful, I’m +afraid.” +</p> + +<p> +“Perhaps we’d better.” +</p> + +<p> +For a moment he hated her, with her smooth politeness, after a night when she +had been unbearable and human by turns. He hated her bedraggled hair and tired +face. Then he could have wept, so deeply did he desire to pull her head down on +his shoulder and smooth the wrinkles of weariness out of her dear face, the +dearer because they had endured the weariness together. But he said, +“Well, let’s try to get some breakfast first, Istra.” +</p> + +<p> +With their garments wrinkled from rain, half asleep and rather cross, they +arrived at the esthetic but respectable colony of Aengusmere by the noon train. +</p> + +</div><!--end chapter--> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2><a name="chap11"></a>CHAPTER XI<br/> +HE BUYS AN ORANGE TIE</h2> + +<p> +The Aengusmere Caravanserai is so unyieldingly cheerful and artistic that it +makes the ordinary person long for a dingy old-fashioned room in which he can +play solitaire and chew gum without being rebuked with exasperating patience by +the wall stencils and clever etchings and polished brasses. It is +adjectiferous. The common room (which is uncommon for hotel parlor) is all in +superlatives and chintzes. +</p> + +<p> +Istra had gone up to her room to sleep, bidding Mr. Wrenn do likewise and avoid +the wrong bunch at the Caravanserai; for besides the wrong bunch of Interesting +People there were, she explained, a right bunch, of working artists. But he +wanted to get some new clothes, to replace his rain-wrinkled ready-mades. He +was tottering through the common room, wondering whether he could find a +clothing-shop in Aengusmere, when a shrill gurgle from a wing-chair by the +rough-brick fireplace halted him. +</p> + +<p> +“Oh-h-h-h, <i>Mister</i> Wrenn; Mr. <i>Wrenn!</i>” There sat Mrs. +Stettinius, the poet-lady of Olympia’s rooms on Great James Street. +</p> + +<p> +“Oh-h-h-h, Mr. Wrenn, you <i>bad</i> man, <i>do</i> come sit down and +tell me all <i>about</i> your <i>wonderful</i> trek with Istra Nash. I +<i>just</i> met <i>dear</i> Istra in the upper hall. Poor dear, she was +<i>so</i> crumpled, but her hair was like a sunset over mountain +peaks—you know, as Yeats says: +</p> + +<p class="poem"> +“A stormy sunset were her lips,<br/> +A stormy sunset on doomed ships, +</p> + +<p class="noindent"> +only of course this was her <i>hair</i> and not her <i>lips</i>—and she +told me that you had tramped all the <i>way</i> from London. I’ve never +heard of anything so romantic—or no, I won’t say +‘romantic’—I <i>do</i> agree with dear +Olympia—<i>isn’t</i> she a mag<i>nifi</i>cent woman—<i>so</i> +fearless and progressive—didn’t you <i>adore</i> meeting +her?—she is our modern Joan of Arc—such a <i>noble</i> +figure—I <i>do</i> agree with her that <i>romantic</i> love is +<i>passé</i>, that we have entered the era of glorious companionship that +regards varietism as <i>exactly</i> as romantic as monogamy. +But—but—where was I?—I think your gipsying down from London +was <i>most</i> exciting. Now <i>do</i> tell us all about it, Mr. Wrenn. First, +I want you to meet Miss Saxonby and Mr. Gutch and <i>dear</i> Yilyena +Dourschetsky and Mr. Howard Bancock Binch—of course you know his +poetry.” +</p> + +<p> +And then she drew a breath and flopped back into the wing-chair’s +muffling depths. +</p> + +<p> +During all this Mr. Wrenn had stood, frightened and unprotected and +rain-wrinkled, before the gathering by the fireless fireplace, wondering how +Mrs. Stettinius could get her nose so blue and yet so powdery. Despite her +encouragement he gave no fuller account of the “gipsying” than, +“Why—uh—we just tramped down,” till Russian-Jewish +Yilyena rolled her ebony eyes at him and insisted, “Yez, you mus’ +tale us about it.” +</p> + +<p> +Now, Yilyena had a pretty neck, colored like a cigar of mild flavor, and a +trick of smiling. She was accustomed to having men obey her. Mr. Wrenn +stammered: +</p> + +<p> +“Why—uh—we just walked, and we got caught in the rain. Say, +Miss Nash was a wonder. She never peeped when she got soaked through—she +just laughed and beat it like everything. And we saw a lot of quaint English +places along the road—got away from all them +tourists—trippers—you know.” +</p> + +<p> +A perfectly strange person, a heavy old man with horn spectacles and a soft +shirt, who had joined the group unbidden, cleared his throat and interrupted: +</p> + +<p> +“Is it not a strange paradox that in traveling, the most observant of all +pursuits, one should have to encounter the eternal bourgeoisie!” +</p> + +<p> +From the Cockney Greek chorus about the unlighted fire: +</p> + +<p> +“Yes!” +</p> + +<p> +“Everywhere.” +</p> + +<p> +“Uh—” began Mr. Gutch. He apparently had something to say. +But the chorus went on: +</p> + +<p> +“And just as swelteringly monogamic in Port Said as in Brum.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, that’s so.” +</p> + +<p> +“Mr. Wr-r-renn,” thrilled Mrs. Stettinius, the lady poet, +“didn’t you notice that they were perfectly oblivious of all +economic movements; that their observations never post-dated ruins?” +</p> + +<p> +“I guess they wanted to make sure they were admirin’ the right +things,” ventured Mr. Wrenn, with secret terror. +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, that’s so,” came so approvingly from the Greek chorus +that the personal pupil of Mittyford, Ph.D., made his first epigram: +</p> + +<p> +“It isn’t so much what you like as what you don’t like that +shows if you’re wise.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes,” they gurgled; and Mr. Wrenn, much pleased with himself, +smiled <i>au prince</i> upon his new friends. +</p> + +<p> +Mrs. Stettinius was getting into her stride for a few remarks upon the poetry +of industrialism when Mr. Gutch, who had been “Uh—”ing for +some moments, trying to get in his remark, winked with sly rudeness at Miss +Saxonby and observed: +</p> + +<p> +“I fancy romance isn’t quite dead yet, y’ know. Our friends +here seem to have had quite a ro-mantic little journey.” Then he winked +again. +</p> + +<p> +“Say, what do you mean?” demanded Bill Wrenn, hot-eyed, fists +clenched, but very quiet. +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, I’m not <i>blaming</i> you and Miss Nash—quite the +reverse!” tittered the Gutch person, wagging his head sagely. +</p> + +<p> +Then Bill Wrenn, with his fist at Mr. Gutch’s nose, spoke his mind: +</p> + +<p> +“Say, you white-faced unhealthy dirty-minded lump, I ain’t much of +a fighter, but I’m going to muss you up so’s you can’t find +your ears if you don’t apologize for those insinuations.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, Mr. Wrenn—” +</p> + +<p> +“He didn’t mean—” +</p> + +<p> +“I didn’t mean—” +</p> + +<p> +“He was just spoofing—” +</p> + +<p> +“I was just spoofing—” +</p> + +<p> +Bill Wrenn, watching the dramatization of himself as hero, was enjoying the +drama. “You apologize, then?” +</p> + +<p> +“Why certainly, Mr. Wrenn. Let me explain—” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, don’t explain,” snortled Miss Saxonby. +</p> + +<p> +“Yes!” from Mr. Bancock Binch, “explanations are <i>so</i> +conventional, old chap.” +</p> + +<p> +Do you see them?—Mr. Wrenn, self-conscious and ready to turn into a blind +belligerent Bill Wrenn at the first disrespect; the talkers sitting about and +assassinating all the princes and proprieties and, poor things, taking Mr. +Wrenn quite seriously because he had uncovered the great truth that the +important thing in sight-seeing is not to see sights. He was most unhappy, Mr. +Wrenn was, and wanted to be away from there. He darted as from a spring when he +heard Istra’s voice, from the edge of the group, calling, “Come +here a sec’, Billy.” +</p> + +<p> +She was standing with a chair-back for support, tired but smiling. +</p> + +<p> +“I can’t get to sleep yet. Don’t you want me to show you some +of the buildings here?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh <i>yes!</i>” +</p> + +<p> +“If Mrs. Stettinius can spare you!” +</p> + +<p> +This by way of remarking on the fact that the female poet was staring volubly. +</p> + +<p> +“G-g-g-g-g-g—” said Mrs. Stettinius, which seemed to imply +perfect consent. +</p> + +<p> +Istra took him to the belvedere on a little slope overlooking the lawns of +Aengusmere, scattered with low bungalows and rose-gardens. +</p> + +<p> +“It is beautiful, isn’t it? Perhaps one could be happy +here—if one could kill all the people except the architect,” she +mused. +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, it is,” he glowed. +</p> + +<p> +Standing there beside her, happiness enveloping them, looking across the +marvelous sward, Bill Wrenn was at the climax of his comedy of triumph. +Admitted to a world of lawns and bungalows and big studio windows, standing in +a belvedere beside Istra Nash as her friend— +</p> + +<p> +“Mouse dear,” she said, hesitatingly, “the reason why I +wanted to have you come out here, why I couldn’t sleep, I wanted to tell +you how ashamed I am for having been peevish, being petulant, last night. +I’m so sorry, because you were very patient with me, you were very good +to me. I don’t want you to think of me just as a crochety woman who +didn’t appreciate you. You are very kind, and when I hear that +you’re married to some nice girl I’ll be as happy as can be.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, Istra,” he cried, grasping her arm, “I don’t want +any girl in the world—I mean—oh, I just want to be let go +’round with you when you’ll let me—” +</p> + +<p> +“No, no, dear. You must have seen last night; that’s impossible. +Please don’t argue about it now; I’m too tired. I just wanted to +tell you I appreciated—And when you get back to America you won’t +be any the worse for playing around with poor Istra because she told you about +different things from what you’ve played with, about rearing children as +individuals and painting in <i>tempera</i> and all those things? And—and +I don’t want you to get too fond of me, because +we’re—different…. But we have had an adventure, even if it was a +little moist.” She paused; then, cheerily: “Well, I’m going +to beat it back and try to sleep again. Good-by, Mouse dear. No, don’t +come back to the Cara-advanced-serai. Play around and see the animiles. +G’-by.” +</p> + +<p> +He watched her straight swaying figure swing across the lawn and up the steps +of the half-timbered inn. He watched her enter the door before he hastened to +the shops which clustered about the railway- station, outside of the poetic +preserves of the colony proper. +</p> + +<p> +He noticed, as he went, that the men crossing the green were mostly clad in +Norfolk jackets and knickers, so he purchased the first pair of unrespectable +un-ankle-concealing trousers he had owned since small boyhood, and a jacket of +rough serge, with a gaudy buckle on the belt. Also, he actually dared an orange +tie! +</p> + +<p> +He wanted something for Istra at dinner—“a s’prise,” he +whispered under his breath, with fond babying. For the first time in his life +he entered a florist’s shop…. Normally, you know, the poor of the city +cannot afford flowers till they are dead, and then for but one day…. He came +out with a bunch of orchids, and remembered the days when he had envied the +people he had seen in florists’ shops actually buying flowers. When he +was almost at the Caravanserai he wanted to go back and change the orchids for +simpler flowers, roses or carnations, but he got himself not to. +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +The linen and glassware and silver of the Caravanserai were almost as coarse as +those of a temperance hotel, for all the raftered ceiling and the etchings in +the dining-room. Hunting up the stewardess of the inn, a bustling young woman +who was reading Keats energetically at an office-like desk, Mr. Wrenn begged: +“I wonder could I get some special cups and plates and stuff for high tea +tonight. I got a kind of party—” +</p> + +<p> +“How many?” The stewardess issued the words as though he had put a +penny in the slot. +</p> + +<p> +“Just two. Kind of a birthday party.” Mendacious Mr. Wrenn! +</p> + +<p> +“Certainly. Of course there’s a small extra charge. I have a Royal +Satsuma tea-service—practically Royal Satsuma, at least—and some +special Limoges.” +</p> + +<p> +“I think Royal Sats’ma would be nice. And some silverware?” +</p> + +<p> +“Surely.” +</p> + +<p> +“And could we get some special stuff to eat?” +</p> + +<p> +“What would you like?” +</p> + +<p> +“Why—” +</p> + +<p> +Mendacious Mr. Wrenn! as we have commented. He put his head on one side, rubbed +his chin with nice consideration, and condescended, “What would you +suggest?” +</p> + +<p> +“For a party high tea? Why, perhaps consomme and omelet Bergerac and a +salad and a sweet and <i>cafe diable</i>. We have a chef who does French eggs +rather remarkably. That would be simple, but—” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, that would be very good,” gravely granted the patron of +cuisine. “At six; for two.” +</p> + +<p> +As he walked away he grinned within. “Gee! I talked to that omelet +Berg’ rac like I’d known it all my life!” +</p> + +<p> +Other s’prises for Istra’s party he sought. Let’s see; +suppose it really were her birthday, wouldn’t she like to have a letter +from some important guy? he queried of himself. He’d write her a +make-b’lieve letter from a duke. Which he did. Purchasing a stamp, he +humped over a desk in the common room and with infinite pains he inked the +stamp in imitation of a postmark and addressed the letter to “Lady Istra +Nash, Mouse Castle, Suffolk.” +</p> + +<p> +Some one sat down at the desk opposite him, and he jealously carried the task +upstairs to his room. He rang for pen and ink as regally as though he had never +sat at the wrong end of a buzzer. After half an hour of trying to visualize a +duke writing a letter he produced this: +</p> + +<p class="letter"> +L<small>ADY</small> I<small>STRA</small> N<small>ASH</small>,<br/> + Mouse Castle. +</p> + +<p class="letter"> +D<small>EAR</small> M<small>ADAM</small>,—We hear from our friend Sir +William Wrenn that some folks are saying that to-day is not your birthday & +want to stop your celebration, so if you should need somebody to make them +believe to-day is your birthday we have sent our secretary, Sir Percival +Montague. Sir William Wrenn will hide him behind his chair, and if they bother +you just call for Sir Percival and he will tell them. Permit us, dear Lady +Nash, to wish you all the greetings of the season, and in close we beg to +remain, as ever, Yours sincerely, +</p> + +<p class="right"> +D<small>UKE</small> V<small>ERE DE</small> V<small>ERE</small>. +</p> + +<p> +He was very tired. When he lay down for a minute, with a pillow tucked over his +head, he was almost asleep in ten seconds. But he sprang up, washed his prickly +eyes with cold water, and began to dress. He was shy of the knickers and +golf-stockings, but it was the orange tie that gave him real alarm. He dared +it, though, and went downstairs to make sure they were setting the table with +glory befitting the party. +</p> + +<p> +As he went through the common room he watched the three or four groups +scattered through it. They seemed to take his clothes as a matter of course. He +was glad. He wanted so much to be a credit to Istra. +</p> + +<p> +Returning from the dining-room to the common room, he passed a group standing +in a window recess and looking away from him. He overheard: +</p> + +<p> +“Who is the remarkable new person with the orange tie and the rococo +buckle on his jacket belt—the one that just went through? Did you ever +<i>see</i> anything so funny! His collar didn’t come within an inch and a +half of fitting his neck. He must be a poet. I wonder if his verses are as +jerry-built as his garments!” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn stopped. +</p> + +<p> +Another voice: +</p> + +<p> +“And the beautiful lack of development of his legs! It’s like the +good old cycling days, when every draper’s assistant went +bank-holidaying…. I don’t know him, but I suppose he’s some +tuppeny-ha’p’ny illustrator.” +</p> + +<p> +“Or perhaps he has convictions about fried bananas, and dines on a bean +saute. O Aengusmere! Shades of Aengus!” +</p> + +<p> +“Not at all. When they look as gentle as he they always hate the +capitalists as a militant hates a cabinet minister. He probably dines on the +left ear of a South-African millionaire every evening before exercise at the +barricades…. I say, look over there; there’s a real artist going across +the green. You can tell he’s a real artist because he’s dressed +like a navvy and—” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn was walking away, across the common room, quite sure that every one +was eying him with amusement. And it was too late to change his clothes. It was +six already. +</p> + +<p> +He stuck out his jaw, and remembered that he had planned to hide the +“letter from the duke” in Istra’s napkin that it might be the +greater surprise. He sat down at their table. He tucked the letter into the +napkin folds. He moved the vase of orchids nearer the center of the table, and +the table nearer the open window giving on the green. He rebuked himself for +not being able to think of something else to change. He forgot his clothes, and +was happy. +</p> + +<p> +At six-fifteen he summoned a boy and sent him up with a message that Mr. Wrenn +was waiting and high tea ready. +</p> + +<p> +The boy came back muttering, “Miss Nash left this note for you, sir, the +stewardess says.” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn opened the green-and-white Caravanserai letter excitedly. Perhaps +Istra, too, was dressing for the party! He loved all s’prises just then. +He read: +</p> + +<p class="letter"> +Mouse dear, I’m sorrier than I can tell you, but you know I warrned you +that bad Istra was a creature of moods, and just now my mood orders me to beat +it for Paris, which I’m doing, on the 5.17 train. I won’t say +good-by—I hate good-bys, they’re so stupid, don’t you think? +Write me some time, better make it care Amer. Express Co., Paris, because I +don’t know yet just where I’ll be. And please don’t look me +up in Paris, because it’s always better to end up an affair without +explanations, don’t you think? You have been wonderfully kind to me, and +I’ll send you some good thought-forms, shall I? +</p> + +<p class="right"> +I. N. +</p> + +<p> +He walked to the office of the Caravanserai, blindly, quietly. He paid his +bill, and found that he had only fifty dollars left. He could not get himself +to eat the waiting high tea. There was a seven-fourteen train for London. He +took it. Meantime he wrote out a cable to his New York bank for a hundred and +fifty dollars. To keep from thinking in the train he talked gravely and gently +to an old man about the brave days of England, when men threw quoits. He kept +thinking over and over, to the tune set by the rattling of the train trucks: +“Friends… I got to make friends, now I know what they are…. Funny some +guys don’t make friends. Mustn’t forget. Got to make lots of +’em in New York. Learn how to make ’em.” +</p> + +<p> +He arrived at his room on Tavistock Place about eleven, and tried to think for +the rest of the night of how deeply he was missing Morton of the cattle-boat +now that—now that he had no friend in all the hostile world. +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +In a London A. B. C. restaurant Mr. Wrenn was talking to an American who had a +clipped mustache, brisk manners, a Knight-of-Pythias pin, and a mind for +duck-shooting, hardware-selling, and cigars. +</p> + +<p> +“No more England for mine,” the American snapped, good-humoredly. +“I’m going to get out of this foggy hole and get back to +God’s country just as soon as I can. I want to find out what’s +doing at the store, and I want to sit down to a plate of flapjacks. I’m +good and plenty sick of tea and marmalade. Why, I wouldn’t take this fool +country for a gift. No, sir! Me for God’s country—Sleepy Eye, Brown +County, Minnesota. You bet!” +</p> + +<p> +“You don’t like England much, then?” Mr. Wrenn carefully +reasoned. +</p> + +<p> +“Like it? Like this damp crowded hole, where they can’t talk +English, and have a fool coinage—Say, that’s a great system, that +metric system they’ve got over in France, but here—why, they +don’t know whether Kansas City is in Kansas or Missouri or both…. +‘Right as rain’—that’s what a fellow said to me for +‘all right’! Ever hear such nonsense?…. And tea for breakfast! Not +for me! No, sir! I’m going to take the first steamer!” +</p> + +<p> +With a gigantic smoke-puff of disgust the man from Sleepy Eye stalked out, +jingling the keys in his trousers pocket, cocking up his cigar, and looking as +though he owned the restaurant. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn, picturing him greeting the Singer Tower from an incoming steamer, +longed to see the tower. +</p> + +<p> +“Gee! I’ll do it!” +</p> + +<p> +He rose and, from that table in the basement of an A. B. C. restaurant, he fled +to America. +</p> + +<p> +He dashed up-stairs, fidgeted while the cashier made his change, rang for a +bus, whisked into his room, slammed his things into his suit-case, announced to +it wildly that they were going home, and scampered to the Northwestem Station. +He walked nervously up and down till the Liverpool train departed. +“Suppose Istra wanted to make up, and came back to London?” was a +terrifying thought that hounded him. He dashed into the waiting-room and wrote +to her, on a souvenir post-card showing the Abbey: “Called back to +America—will write. Address care of Souvenir Company, Twenty-eighth +Street.” But he didn’t mail the card. +</p> + +<p> +Once settled in a second-class compartment, with the train in motion, he seemed +already much nearer America, and, humming, to the great annoyance of a lady +with bangs, he planned his new great work—the making of friends; the +discovery, some day, if Istra should not relent, of “somebody to go home +to.” There was no end to the “societies and lodges and stuff” +he was going to join directly he landed. +</p> + +<p> +At Liverpool he suddenly stopped at a post-box and mailed his card to Istra. +That ended his debate. Of course after that he had to go back to America. +</p> + +<p> +He sailed exultantly, one month and seventeen days after leaving Portland. +</p> + +</div><!--end chapter--> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2><a name="chap12"></a>CHAPTER XII<br/> +HE DISCOVERS AMERICA</h2> + +<p> +In his white-painted steerage berth Mr. Wrenn lay, with a scratch-pad on his +raised knees and a small mean pillow doubled under his head, writing sample +follow-up letters to present to the Souvenir and Art Novelty Company, +interrupting his work at intervals to add to a list of the books which, +beginning about five minutes after he landed in New York, he was going to +master. He puzzled over Marie Corelli. Morton liked Miss Corelli so much; but +would her works appeal to Istra Nash? +</p> + +<p> +He had worked for many hours on a letter to Istra in which he avoided mention +of such indecent matters as steerages and immigrants. He was grateful, he told +her, for “all you learned me,” and he had thought that Aengusmere +was a beautiful place, though he now saw “what you meant about them +interesting people,” and his New York address would be the Souvenir +Company. +</p> + +<p> +He tore up the several pages that repeated that oldest most melancholy cry of +the lover, which rang among the deodars, from viking ships, from the moonlit +courtyards of Provence, the cry which always sounded about Mr. Wrenn as he +walked the deck: “I want you so much; I miss you so unendingly; I am so +lonely for you, dear.” For no more clearly, no more nobly did the golden +Aucassin or lean Dante word that cry in their thoughts than did Mr. William +Wrenn, Our Mr. Wrenn. +</p> + +<p> +A third-class steward with a mangy mustache and setter-like tan eyes came +teetering down-stairs, each step like a nervous pencil tap on a table, and +peered over the side of Mr. Wrenn’s berth. He loved Mr. Wrenn, who was +proven a scholar by the reading of real bound books—an English history +and a second-hand copy of <i>Haunts of Historic English Writers</i>, purchased +in Liverpool—and who was willing to listen to the steward’s serial +story of how his woman, Mrs. Wargle, faithlessly consorted with Foddle, the +cat’s-meat man, when the steward was away, and, when he was home, cooked +for him lights and liver that unquestionably were purchased from the same +cat’s-meat man. He now leered with a fond and watery gaze upon Mr. +Wrenn’s scholarly pursuits, and announced in a whisper: +</p> + +<p> +“They’ve sighted land.” +</p> + +<p> +“Land?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh aye.” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn sat up so vigorously that he bumped his head. He chucked his papers +beneath the pillow with his right hand, while the left was feeling for the side +of the berth. “Land!” he bellowed to drowsing cabin-mates as he +vaulted out. +</p> + +<p> +The steerage promenade-deck, iron-sided, black-floored, ending in the iron +approaches to the galley at one end and the iron superstructures about a hatch +at the other, was like a grim swart oilily clean machine-shop aisle, so +inclosed, so over-roofed, that the side toward the sea seemed merely a long +factory window. But he loved it and, except when he had guiltily remembered the +books he had to read, he had stayed on deck, worshiping the naive bright attire +of immigrants and the dark roll and glory of the sea. +</p> + +<p> +Now, out there was a blue shading, made by a magic pencil; land, his land, +where he was going to become the beloved comrade of all the friends whose +likenesses he saw in the white-caps flashing before him. +</p> + +<p> +Humming, he paraded down to the buffet, where small beer and smaller tobacco +were sold, to buy another pound of striped candy for the offspring of the +Russian Jews. +</p> + +<p> +The children knew he was coming. “Fat rascals,” he chuckled, +touching their dark cheeks, pretending to be frightened as they pounded soft +fists against the iron side of the ship or rolled unregarded in the scuppers. +Their shawled mothers knew him, too, and as he shyly handed about the candy the +chattering stately line of Jewish elders nodded their beards like the forest +primeval in a breeze, saying words of blessing in a strange tongue. +</p> + +<p> +He smiled back and made gestures, and shouted “Land! Land!” with +several variations in key, to make it sound foreign. +</p> + +<p> +But he withdrew for the sacred moment of seeing the Land of Promise he was +newly discovering—the Long Island shore; the grass-clad redouts at Fort +Wadsworth; the vast pile of New York sky-scrapers, standing in a mist like an +enormous burned forest. +</p> + +<p> +“Singer Tower…. Butterick Building,” he murmured, as they proceeded +toward their dock. “That’s something like…. Let’s see; yes, +sir, by golly, right up there between the Met. Tower and the +<i>Times</i>—good old Souvenir Company office. Jiminy! ‘One Dollar +to Albany’—something <i>like</i> a sign, that is—good old +dollar! To thunder with their darn shillings. Home!… Gee! there’s where I +used to moon on a wharf!… Gosh! the old town looks good.” +</p> + +<p> +And all this was his to conquer, for friendship’s sake. +</p> + +<p> +He went to a hotel. While he had to go back to the Zapps’, of course, he +did not wish, by meeting those old friends, to spoil his first day. No, it was +cheerfuler to stand at a window of his cheap hotel on Seventh Avenue, watching +the “good old American crowd”—Germans, Irishmen, Italians, +and Jews. He went to the Nickelorion and grasped the hand of the ticket-taker, +the Brass-button Man, ejaculating: “How are you? Well, how’s things +going with the old show?… I been away couple of months.” +</p> + +<p> +“Fine and dandy! Been away, uh? Well, it’s good to get back to the +old town, heh? Summer hotel?” +</p> + +<p> +“Unk?” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, you’re the waiter at Pat Maloney’s, ain’t +you?” +</p> + +<p> +Next morning Mr. Wrenn made himself go to the Souvenir and Art Novelty Company. +He wanted to get the teasing, due him for staying away so short a time, over as +soon as possible. The office girl, addressing circulars, seemed surprised when +he stepped from the elevator, and blushed her usual shy gratitude to the men of +the office for allowing her to exist and take away six dollars weekly. +</p> + +<p> +Then into the entry-room ran Rabin, one of the traveling salesmen. +</p> + +<p> +“Why, hul-lo, Wrenn! Wondered if that could be you. Back so soon? Thought +you were going to Europe.” +</p> + +<p> +“Just got back. Couldn’t stand it away from you, old scout!” +</p> + +<p> +“You must have been learning to sass back real smart, in the Old Country, +heh? Going to be with us again? Well, see you again soon. Glad see you +back.” +</p> + +<p> +He was not madly excited at seeing Rabin; still, the drummer was part of the +good old Souvenir Company, the one place in the world on which he could +absolutely depend, the one place where they always wanted him. +</p> + +<p> +He had been absently staring at the sample-tables, noting new novelties. The +office girl, speaking sweetly, but as to an outsider, inquired, “Who did +you wish to see, Mr. Wrenn?” +</p> + +<p> +“Why! Mr. Guilfogle.” +</p> + +<p> +“He’s busy, but if you’ll sit down I think you can see him in +a few minutes.” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn felt like the prodigal son, with no calf in sight, at having to wait +on the callers’ bench, but he shook with faint excited gurgles of mirth +at the thought of the delightful surprise Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle, the office +manager, was going to have. He kept an eye out for Charley Carpenter. If +Charley didn’t come through the entry-room he’d go into the +bookkeeping-room, and—“talk about your surprises—” +</p> + +<p> +“Mr. Guilfogle will see you now,” said the office girl. +</p> + +<p> +As he entered the manager’s office Mr. Guilfogle made much of glancing up +with busy amazement. +</p> + +<p> +“Well, well, Wrenn! Back so soon? Thought you were going to be gone quite +a while.” +</p> + +<p> +“Couldn’t keep away from the office, Mr. Guilfogle,” with an +uneasy smile. +</p> + +<p> +“Have a good trip?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, a dandy.” +</p> + +<p> +“How’d you happen to get back so soon?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, I wanted to—Say, Mr. Guilfogle, I really wanted to get back to +the office again. I’m awfully glad to see it again.” +</p> + +<p> +“Glad see <i>you</i>. Well, where did you go? I got the card you sent me +from Chesterton with the picture of the old church on it.” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, I went to Liverpool and Oxford and London and—well—Kew +and Ealing and places and—And I tramped through Essex and +Suffolk—all through—on foot. Aengusmere and them places.” +</p> + +<p> +“Just a moment. (Well, Rabin, what is it? Why certainly. I’ve told +you that already about five times. <i>Yes</i>, I said—that’s what I +had the samples made up for. I wish you’d be a little more careful, +d’ ye hear?) You went to London, did you, Wrenn? Say, did you notice any +novelties we could copy?” +</p> + +<p> +“No, I’m afraid I didn’t, Mr. Guilfogle. I’m awfully +sorry. I hunted around, but I couldn’t find a thing we could use. I mean +I couldn’t find anything that began to come up to our line. Them English +are pretty slow.” +</p> + +<p> +“Didn’t, eh? Well, what’s your plans now?” +</p> + +<p> +“Why—uh—I kind of thought—Honestly, Mr. Guilfogle, +I’d like to get back on my old job. You remember—it was to be fixed +so—” +</p> + +<p> +“Afraid there’s nothing doing just now, Wrenn. Not a thing. Course +I can’t tell what may happen, and you want to keep in touch with us, but +we’re pretty well filled up just now. Jake is getting along better than +we thought. He’s learning—” Not one word regarding +Jake’s excellence did Mr. Wrenn hear. +</p> + +<p> +Not get the job back? He sat down and stammered: +</p> + +<p> +“Gee! I hadn’t thought of that. I’d kind of banked on the +Souvenir Company, Mr. Guilfogle.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, you know I told you I thought you were an idiot to go. I warned +you.” +</p> + +<p> +He timidly agreed, mourning: “Yes, that so; I know you did. But +uh—well—” +</p> + +<p> +“Sorry, Wrenn. That’s the way it goes in business, though. If you +will go beating it around—A rolling stone don’t gather any moss. +Well, cheer up! Possibly there may be something doing in—” +</p> + +<p> +“Tr-r-r-r-r-r-r,” said the telephone. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Guilfogle remarked into it: “Hello. Yes, it’s me. Well, who did +you think it was? The cat? Yuh. Sure. No. Well, to-morrow, probably. All right. +Good-by.” +</p> + +<p> +Then he glanced at his watch and up at Mr. Wrenn impatiently. +</p> + +<p> +“Say, Mr. Guilfogle, you say there’ll be—when will there be +likely to be an opening?” +</p> + +<p> +“Now, how can I tell, my boy? We’ll work you in if we can—you +ain’t a bad clerk; or at least you wouldn’t be if you’d be a +little more careful. By the way, of course you understand that if we try to +work you in it’ll take lots of trouble, and we’ll expect you to not +go flirting round with other firms, looking for a job. Understand that?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh yes, sir.” +</p> + +<p> +“All right. We appreciate your work all right, but of course you can +’t expect us to fire any of our present force just because you take the +notion to come back whenever you want to…. Hiking off to Europe, leaving a good +job!… You didn’t get on the Continent, did you?” +</p> + +<p> +“No, I—” +</p> + +<p> +“Well…. Oh, say, how’s the grub in London? Cheaper than it is here? +The wife was saying this morning we’d have to stop eating if the high +cost of living goes on going up.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, it’s quite a little cheaper. You can get fine tea for two and +three cents a cup. Clothes is cheaper, too. But I don’t care much for the +English, though there is all sorts of quaint places with a real flavor…. Say, +Mr. Guilfogle, you know I inherited a little money, and I can wait awhile, and +you’ll kind of keep me in mind for a place if one—” +</p> + +<p> +“Didn’t I <i>say</i> I would?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, but—” +</p> + +<p> +“You come around and see me a week from now. And leave your address with +Rosey. I don’t know, though, as we can afford to pay you quite the same +salary at first, even if we can work you in—the season’s been very +slack. But I’ll do what I can for you. Come in and see me in about a +week. Goo’ day.” +</p> + +<p> +Rabin, the salesman, waylaid Mr. Wrenn in the corridor. +</p> + +<p> +“You look kind of peeked, Wrenn. Old Goglefogle been lighting into you? +Say, I ought to have told you first. I forgot it. The old rat, he’s been +planning to stick the knife into you all the while. ’Bout two weeks ago +me and him had a couple of cocktails at Mouquin’s. You know how chummy he +always gets after a couple of smiles. Well, he was talking about—I was +saying you’re a good man and hoping you were having a good time—and +he said, ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘he’s a good man, but he sure +did lay himself wide open by taking this trip. I’ve got him dead to +rights,’ he says to me. ‘I’ve got a hunch he’ll be back +here in three or four months,’ he says to me. ‘And do you think +he’ll walk in and get what he wants? Not him. I’ll keep him waiting +a month before I give him back his job, and then you watch, Rabin,’ he +says to me, ‘you’ll see he’ll be tickled to death to go back +to work at less salary than he was getting, and he’ll have sense enough +to not try this stunt of getting off the job again after that. And the +trip’ll be good for him, anyway—he’ll do better +work—vacation at his own expense—save us money all round. I tell +you, Rabin,’ he says to me, ‘if any of you boys think you can get +the best of the company or me you just want to try it, that’s all.’ +Yessir, that’s what the old rat told me. You want to watch out for +him.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, I will; indeed I will—” +</p> + +<p> +“Did he spring any of this fairy tale just now?” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, kind of. Say, thanks, I’m awful obliged to—” +</p> + +<p> +“Say, for the love of Mike, don’t let him know I told you.” +</p> + +<p> +“No, no, I sure won’t.” +</p> + +<p> +They parted. Eager though he was for the great moment of again seeing his +comrade, Charley Carpenter, Mr. Wrenn dribbled toward the bookkeeping-room +mournfully, planning to tell Charley of Guilfogle’s wickedness. +</p> + +<p> +The head bookkeeper shook his head at Mr. Wrenn’s inquiry: +</p> + +<p> +“Charley ain’t here any longer.” +</p> + +<p> +“Ain’t <i>here?</i>” +</p> + +<p> +“No. He got through. He got to boozing pretty bad, and one morning about +three weeks ago, when he had a pretty bad hang-over, he told Guilfogle what he +thought of him, so of course Guilfogle fired him.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, that’s too <i>bad</i>. Say, you don’t know his address, +do you?” +</p> + +<p> +“—East a Hundred and Eighteenth…. Well, I’m glad to see you +back, Wrenn. Didn’t expect to see you back so soon, but always glad to +see you. Going to be with us?” +</p> + +<p> +“I ain’t sure,” said Mr. Wrenn, crabbedly, then shook hands +warmly with the bookkeeper, to show there was nothing personal in his +snippishness. +</p> + +<p> +For nearly a hundred blocks Mr. Wrenn scowled at an advertisement of Corn +Flakes in the Third Avenue Elevated without really seeing it…. Should he go +back to the Souvenir Company at all? +</p> + +<p> +Yes. He would. That was the best way to start making friends. But he would +“get our friend Guilfogle at recess,” he assured himself, with an +out-thrust of the jaw like that of the great Bill Wrenn. He knew +Guilfogle’s lead now, and he would show that gentleman that he could play +the game. He’d take that lower salary and pretend to be frightened, but +when he got the chance— +</p> + +<p> +He did not proclaim even to himself what dreadful thing he was going to do, but +as he left the Elevated he said over and over, shaking his closed fist inside +his coat pocket: +</p> + +<p> +“When I get the chance—when I <i>get</i> it—” +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +The flat-building where Charley Carpenter lived was one of hundreds of +pressed-brick structures, apparently all turned out of the same mold. It was +filled with the smells of steamy washing and fried fish. Languid with the heat, +Mr. Wrenn crawled up an infinity of iron steps and knocked three times at +Charley’s door. No answer. He crawled down again and sought out the +janitress, who stopped watching an ice-wagon in the street to say: +</p> + +<p> +“I guess you’ll be finding him asleep up there, sir. He do be lying +there drunk most of the day. His wife’s left him. The landlord’s +give him notice to quit, end of August. Warm day, sir. Be you a bill-collector? +Mostly, it’s bill-collectors that—” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, it is hot.” +</p> + +<p> +Superior in manner, but deeply dejected, Mr. Wrenn rang the down-stairs bell +long enough to wake Charley, pantingly got himself up the interminable stairs, +and kicked the door till Charley’s voice quavered inside: +</p> + +<p> +“Who zhat?” +</p> + +<p> +“It’s me, Charley. Wrenn.” +</p> + +<p> +“You’re in Yurp. Can’t fool me. G’ ’way from +there.” +</p> + +<p> +Three other doors on the same landing were now partly open and blocked with the +heads of frowsy inquisitive women. The steamy smell was thicker in the +darkness. Mr. Wrenn felt prickly, then angry at this curiosity, and again +demanded: +</p> + +<p> +“Lemme in, I say.” +</p> + +<p> +“Tell you it ain’t you. I know you!” +</p> + +<p> +Charley Carpenter’s pale face leered out. His tousled hair was stuck to +his forehead by perspiration; his eyes were red and vaguely staring. His +clothes were badlv wrinkled. He wore a collarless shirt with a frilled bosom of +virulent pink, its cuffs grimy and limp. +</p> + +<p> +“It’s ol’ Wrenn. C’m in. C’m in quick. Collectors +always hanging around. They can’t catch me. You bet.” +</p> + +<p> +He closed the door and wabbled swiftly down the long drab hall of the +“railroad flat,” evidently trying to walk straight. The reeking +stifling main room at the end of the hall was terrible as Charley’s eyes. +Flies boomed everywhere. The oak table, which Charley and his bride had once +spent four happy hours in selecting, was littered with half a dozen empty +whisky-flasks, collars, torn sensational newspapers, dirty plates and +coffee-cups. The cheap brocade cover, which a bride had once joyed to embroider +with red and green roses, was half pulled off and dragged on the floor amid the +cigarette butts, Durham tobacco, and bacon rinds which covered the +green-and-yellow carpet-rug. +</p> + +<p> +This much Mr. Wrenn saw. Then he set himself to the hard task of listening to +Charley, who was muttering: +</p> + +<p> +“Back quick, ain’t you, ol’ Wrenn? You come up to see me, +didn’t you? You’re m’ friend, ain’t you, eh? I got an +awful hang-over, ain’t I? You don’t care, do you, ol’ +Wrenn?” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn stared at him weakly, but only for a minute. Perhaps it was his +cattle-boat experience which now made him deal directly with such drunkenness +as would have nauseated him three months before; perhaps his attendance on a +weary Istra. +</p> + +<p> +“Come now, Charley, you got to buck up,” he crooned. +</p> + +<p> +“<i>All</i> ri’.” +</p> + +<p> +“What’s the trouble? How did you get going like this?” +</p> + +<p> +“Wife left me. I was drinking. You think I’m drunk, don’t +you? But I ain’t. She went off with her sister—always hated me. She +took my money out of savings-bank—three hundred; all money I had +’cept fifty dollars. I’ll fix her. I’ll kill her. Took to +hitting the booze. Goglefogle fired me. Don’t care. Drink all I want. +Keep young fellows from getting it! Say, go down and get me pint. Just finished +up pint. Got to have one-die of thirst. Bourbon. Get—” +</p> + +<p> +“I’ll go and get you a drink, Charley—just one drink, +savvy?—if you’ll promise to get cleaned up, like I tell you, +afterward.” +</p> + +<p> +“<i>All</i> ri’.” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn hastened out with a whisky-flask, muttering, feverishly, “Gee! +I got to save him.” Returning, he poured out one drink, as though it were +medicine for a refractory patient, and said, soothingly: +</p> + +<p> +“Now we’ll take a cold bath, heh? and get cleaned up and sobered +up. Then we’ll talk about a job, heh?” +</p> + +<p> +“Aw, don’t want a bath. Say, I feel better now. Let’s go out +and have a drink. Gimme that flask. Where j’ yuh put it?” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn went to the bathroom, turned on the cold-water tap, returned, and +undressed Charley, who struggled and laughed and let his whole inert weight +rest against Mr. Wrenn’s shoulder. Though normally Charley could have +beaten three Mr. Wrenns, he was run into the bath-room and poked into the tub. +</p> + +<p> +Instantly he began to splash, throwing up water in handfuls, singing. The water +poured over the side of the tub. Mr. Wrenn tried to hold him still, but the wet +sleek shoulders slipped through his hand like a wet platter. Wholesomely vexed, +he turned off the water and slammed the bathroom door. +</p> + +<p> +In the bedroom he found an unwrinkled winter-weight suit and one clean shirt. +In the living-room he hung up his coat, covering it with a newspaper, pulled +the broom from under the table, and prepared to sweep. +</p> + +<p> +The disorder was so great that he made one of the inevitable discoveries of +every housekeeper, and admitted to himself that he “didn’t know +where to begin.” He stumblingly lugged a heavy pile of dishes from the +center-table to the kitchen, shook and beat and folded the table-cover, stuck +the chairs atop the table, and began to sweep. +</p> + +<p> +At the door a shining wet naked figure stood, bellowing: +</p> + +<p> +“Hey! What d’ yuh think you’re doing? Cut it out.” +</p> + +<p> +“Just sweeping, Charley,” from Mr. Wrenn, and an uninterrupted +“Tuff, tuff, tuff” from the broom. +</p> + +<p> +“Cut it out, I said. Whose house <i>is</i> this?” +</p> + +<p> +“Gwan back in the bath-tub, Charley.” +</p> + +<p> +“Say, d’ yuh think you can run me? Get out of this, or I’ll +throw you out. Got house way I want it.” +</p> + +<p> +Bill Wrenn, the cattleman, rushed at him, smacked him with the broom, drove him +back into the tub, and waited. He laughed. It was all a good joke; his friend +Charley and he were playing a little game. Charley also laughed and splashed +some more. Then he wept and said that the water was cold, and that he was now +deserted by his only friend. +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, shut up,” remarked Bill Wrenn, and swept the bathroom floor. +</p> + +<p> +Charley stopped swashing about to sneer: +</p> + +<p> +“Li’l ministering angel, ain’t you? You think you’re +awful good, don’t you? Come up here and bother me. When I ain’t +well. Salvation Army. You——. Aw, lemme <i>’lone</i>, will +you?” Bill Wrenn kept on sweeping. “Get out, +you——.” +</p> + +<p> +There was enough energy in Charley’s voice to indicate that he was +getting sober. Bill Wrenn soused him under once more, so thoroughly that his +own cuffs were reduced to a state of flabbiness. He dragged Charley out, helped +him dry himself, and drove him to bed. +</p> + +<p> +He went out and bought dish-towels, soap, washing-powder, and collars of +Charley’s size, which was an inch larger than his own. He finished +sweeping and dusting and washing the dishes—all of them. He—who had +learned to comfort Istra—he really enjoyed it. His sense of order made it +a pleasure to see a plate yellow with dried egg glisten iridescently and flash +into shining whiteness; or a room corner filled with dust and tobacco flakes +become again a “nice square clean corner with the baseboard shining, gee! +just like it was new.” +</p> + +<p> +An irate grocer called with a bill for fifteen dollars. Mr. Wrenn blandly heard +his threats all through, pretending to himself that this was his home, whose +honor was his honor. He paid the man eight dollars on account and loftily +dismissed him. He sat down to wait for Charley, reading a newspaper most of the +time, but rising to pursue stray flies furiously, stumbling over chairs, and +making murderous flappings with a folded newspaper. +</p> + +<p> +When Charley awoke, after three hours, clear of mind but not at all clear as +regards the roof of his mouth, Mr. Wrenn gave him a very little whisky, with +considerable coffee, toast, and bacon. The toast was not bad. +</p> + +<p> +“Now, Charley,” he said, cheerfully, “your bat’s over, +ain’t it, old man?” +</p> + +<p> +“Say, you been darn’ decent to me, old man. Lord! how you’ve +been sweeping up! How was I—was I pretty soused?” +</p> + +<p> +“Honest, you were fierce. You will sober up, now, won’t you?” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, it’s no wonder I had a classy hang-over, Wrenn. I was at the +Amusieren Rathskeller till four this morning, and then I had a couple of nips +before breakfast, and then I didn’t have any breakfast. But sa-a-a-ay, +man, I sure did have some fiesta last night. There was a little peroxide blonde +that—” +</p> + +<p> +“Now you look here, Carpenter; you listen to me. You’re sober now. +Have you tried to find another job?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, I did. But I got down in the mouth. Didn’t feel like I had a +friend left.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, you h—” +</p> + +<p> +“But I guess I have now, old Wrennski.” +</p> + +<p> +“Look here, Charley, you know I don’t want to pull off no Charity +Society stunt or talk like I was a preacher. But I like you so darn much I want +to see you sober up and get another job. Honestly I do, Charley. Are you +broke?” +</p> + +<p> +“Prett’ nearly. Only got about ten dollars to my name…. I +<i>will</i> take a brace, old man. I know you ain’t no preacher. Course +if you came around with any ‘holierthan-thou’ stunt I’d have +to go right out and get soused on general principles…. Yuh—I’ll try +to get a job.” +</p> + +<p> +“Here’s ten dollars. Please take it—aw—please, +Charley.” +</p> + +<p> +“<i>All</i> right; anything to oblige.” +</p> + +<p> +“What ’ve you got in sight in the job line?” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, there’s a chance at night clerking in a little hotel where I +was a bell-hop long time ago. The night clerk’s going to get through, but +I don’t know just when—prob’ly in a week or two.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, keep after it. And <i>please</i> come down to see me—the old +place—West Sixteenth Street.” +</p> + +<p> +“What about the old girl with the ingrowing grouch? What’s her +name? She ain’t stuck on me.” +</p> + +<p> +“Mrs. Zapp? Oh—hope she chokes. She can just kick all she wants to. +I’m just going to have all the visitors I want to.” +</p> + +<p> +“All right. Say, tell us something about your trip.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, I had a great time. Lots of nice fellows on the cattle-boat. I went +over on one, you know. Fellow named Morton—awfully nice fellow. Say, +Charley, you ought to seen me being butler to the steers. Handing ’em +hay. But say, the sea was fine; all kinds of colors. Awful dirty on the +cattle-boat, though.” +</p> + +<p> +“Hard work?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yuh—kind of hard. Oh, not so very.” +</p> + +<p> +“What did you see in England?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, a lot of different places. Say, I seen some great vaudeville in +Liverpool, Charley, with Morton—he’s a slick fellow; works for the +Pennsylvania, here in town. I got to look him up. Say, I wish we had an agency +for college sofa-pillows and banners and souvenir stuff in Oxford. +There’s a whole bunch of colleges there, all right in the same town. I +met a prof. there from some American college—he hired an automobubble and +took me down to a reg’lar old inn—” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, well!” +</p> + +<p> +“—like you read about; sanded floor!” +</p> + +<p> +“Get to London?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yuh. Gee! it’s a big place. Say, that Westminster Abbey’s a +great place. I was in there a couple of times. More darn tombs of kings and +stuff. And I see a bishop, with leggins on! But I got kind of lonely. I thought +of you a lot of times. Wished we could go out and get an ale together. Maybe +pick up a couple of pretty girls.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, you sport!… Say, didn’t get over to gay Paree, did you?” +</p> + +<p> +“Nope…. Well, I guess I’d better beat it now. Got to move +in—I’m at a hotel. You will come down and see me to-night, +won’t you?” +</p> + +<p> +“So you thought of me, eh?… Yuh—sure, old socks. I’ll be down +to-night. And I’ll get right after that job.” +</p> + +<p> +It is doubtful whether Mr. Wrenn would ever have returned to the Zapps’ +had he not promised to see Charley there. Even while he was carrying his +suit-case down West Sixteenth, broiling by degrees in the sunshine, he felt +like rushing up to Charley’s and telling him to come to the hotel +instead. +</p> + +<p> +Lee Theresa, taking the day off with a headache, answered the bell, and +ejaculated: +</p> + +<p> +“Well! So it’s you, is it?” +</p> + +<p> +“I guess it is.” +</p> + +<p> +“What, are you back so soon? Why, you ain’t been gone more than a +month and a half, have you?” +</p> + +<p> +Beware, daughter of Southern pride! The little Yankee is regarding your +full-blown curves and empty eyes with rebellion, though he says, ever so +meekly: +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, I guess it is about that, Miss Theresa.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, I just knew you couldn’t stand it away from us. I suppose +you’ll want your room back. Ma, here’s Mr. Wrenn back +again—Mr. Wrenn! <i>Ma!</i>” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh-h-h-h!” sounded Goaty Zapp’s voice, in impish disdain, +below. “Mr. Wrenn’s back. Hee, hee! Couldn’t stand it. +Ain’t that like a Yankee!” +</p> + +<p> +A slap, a wail, then Mrs. Zapp’s elephantine slowness on the stairs from +the basement. She appeared, buttoning her collar, smiling almost pleasantly, +for she disliked Mr. Wrenn less than she did any other of her lodgers. +</p> + +<p> +“Back already, Mist’ Wrenn? Ah declare, Ah was saying to Lee +Theresa just yest’day, Ah just knew you’d be wishing you was back +with us. Won’t you come in?” +</p> + +<p> +He edged into the parlor with, “How is the sciatica, Mrs. Zapp?” +</p> + +<p> +“Ah ain’t feeling right smart.” +</p> + +<p> +“My room occupied yet?” +</p> + +<p> +He was surveying the airless parlor rather heavily, and his curt manner was not +pleasing to the head of the house of Zapp, who remarked, funereally: +</p> + +<p> +“It ain’t taken just now, Mist’ Wrenn, but Ah dunno. There +was a gennulman a-looking at it just yesterday, and he said he’d be +permanent if he came. Ah declare, Mist’ Wrenn, Ah dunno’s Ah like +to have my gennulmen just get up and go without giving me notice.” +</p> + +<p> +Lee Theresa scowled at her. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn retorted, “I <i>did</i> give you notice.” +</p> + +<p> +“Ah know, but—well, Ah reckon Ah can let you have it, but +Ah’ll have to have four and a half a week instead of four. Prices is all +going up so, Ah declare, Ah was just saying to Lee T’resa Ah dunno what +we’re all going to do if the dear Lord don’t look out for us. And, +Mist’ Wrenn, Ah dunno’s Ah like to have you coming in so late +nights. But Ah reckon Ah can accommodate you.” +</p> + +<p> +“It’s a good deal of a favor, isn’t it, Mrs. Zapp?” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn was dangerously polite. Let gentility look out for the sharp +practices of the Yankee. +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, but—” +</p> + +<p> +It was our hero, our madman of the seven and seventy seas, our revolutionist +friend of Istra, who leaped straight from the salt-incrusted decks of his +laboring steamer to the musty parlor and declared, quietly but +unmovably-practically unmovably—“Well, then, I guess I’d +better not take it at all.” +</p> + +<p> +“So that’s the way you’re going to treat us!” bellowed +Mrs. Zapp. “You go off and leave us with an unoccupied room and— +Oh! You poor white trash—you—” +</p> + +<p> +“<i>Ma!</i> You shut up and go down-stairs-s-s-s-s!” Theresa +hissed. “Go on.” +</p> + +<p> +Mrs. Zapp wabbled regally out. Lee Theresa spoke to Mr. Wrenn: +</p> + +<p> +“Ma ain’t feeling a bit well this afternoon. I’m sorry she +talked like that. You will come back, won’t you?” She showed all +her teeth in a genuine smile, and in her anxiety reached his heart. +“Remember, you promised you would.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, I will, but—” +</p> + +<p> +Bill Wrenn was fading, an affrighted specter. The “but” was the +last glimpse of him, and that Theresa overlooked, as she bustlingly chirruped: +“I <i>knew</i> you would understand. I’ll skip right up and look at +the room and put on fresh sheets.” +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +One month, one hot New York month, passed before the imperial Mr. Guilfogle +gave him back The Job, and then at seventeen dollars and fifty cents a week +instead of his former nineteen dollars. Mr. Wrenn refused, upon pretexts, to go +out with the manager for a drink, and presented him with twenty suggestions for +new novelties and circular letters. He rearranged the unsystematic methods of +Jake, the cub, and two days later he was at work as though he had never in his +life been farther from the Souvenir Company than Newark. +</p> + +</div><!--end chapter--> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2><a name="chap13"></a>CHAPTER XIII<br/> +HE IS “OUR MR. WRENN”</h2> + +<p class="letter"> +D<small>EAR</small> I<small>STRA</small>,—I am back in New York feeling +very well & hope this finds you the same. I have been wanting to write to +you for quite a while now but there has not been much news of any kind & so +I have not written to you. But now I am back working for the Souvenir Company. +I hope you are having a good time in Paris it must be a very pretty city & +I have often wished to be there perhaps some day I shall go. I [several +erasures here] have been reading quite a few books since I got back & think +now I shall get on better with my reading. You told me so many things about +books & so on & I do appreciate it. In closing, I am yours very +sincerely, +</p> + +<p class="right"> +W<small>ILLIAM</small> W<small>RENN</small>. +</p> + +<p> +There was nothing else he could say. But there were a terrifying number of +things he could think as he crouched by the window overlooking West Sixteenth +Street, whose dull hue had not changed during the centuries while he had been +tramping England. Her smile he remembered—and he cried, “Oh, I want +to see her so much.” Her gallant dash through the rain—and again +the cry. +</p> + +<p> +At last he cursed himself, “Why don’t you <i>do</i> something that +’d count for her, and not sit around yammering for her like a +fool?” +</p> + +<p> +He worked on his plan to “bring the South into line”—the +Souvenir Company’s line. Again and again he sprang up from the +writing-table in his hot room when the presence of Istra came and stood +compellingly by his chair. But he worked. +</p> + +<p> +The Souvenir Company salesmen had not been able to get from the South the +business which the company deserved if right and justice were to prevail. On +the steamer from England Mr. Wrenn had conceived the idea that a Dixieland +Ink-well, with the Confederate and Union flags draped in graceful cast iron, +would make an admirable present with which to draw the attention of the Southem +trade. The ink-well was to be followed by a series of letters, sent on the +slightest provocation, on order or re-order, tactfully hoping the various +healths of the Southland were good and the baseball season important; all to +insure a welcome to the salesmen on the Southem route. +</p> + +<p> +He drew up his letters; he sketched his ink-well; he got up the courage to talk +with the office manager…. To forget love and the beloved, men have ascended in +aeroplanes and conquered African tribes. To forget love, a new, busy, much +absorbed Mr. Wrenn, very much Ours, bustled into Mr. Guilfogle’s office, +slapped down his papers on the desk, and demanded: “Here’s that +plan about gettin’ the South interested that I was telling you about. +Say, honest, I’d like awful much to try it on. I’d just have to +have part time of one stenographer.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, you know our stenographers are pretty well crowded. But you can +leave the outline with me. I’ll look it over,” said Mr. Guilfogle. +</p> + +<p> +That same afternoon the manager enthusiastically O. K.’d the plan. To +enthusiastically—O. K. is an office technology for saying, gloomily, +“Well, I don’t suppose it ’d hurt to try it, anyway, but for +the love of Mike be careful, and let me see any letters you send out.” +</p> + +<p> +So Mr. Wrenn dictated a letter to each of their Southern merchants, sending him +a Dixieland Ink-well and inquiring about the crops. He had a stenographer, an +efficient intolerant young woman who wrote down his halting words as though +they were examples of bad English she wanted to show her friends, and waited +for the next word with cynical amusement. +</p> + +<p> +“By gosh!” growled Bill Wrenn, the cattleman, “I’ll +show her I’m running this. I’ll show her she’s got another +think coming.” But he dictated so busily and was so hot to get results +that he forgot the girl’s air of high-class martyrdom. +</p> + +<p> +He watched the Southern baseball results in the papers. He seized on every +salesman on the Southern route as he came in, and inquired about the religion +and politics of the merchants in his district. He even forgot to worry about +his next rise in salary, and found it much more exciting to rush back for an +important letter after a quick lunch than to watch the time and make sure that +he secured every minute of his lunch-hour. +</p> + +<p> +When October came—October of the vagabond, with the leaves brilliant out +on the Palisades, and Sixth Avenue moving-picture palaces cool again and +gay—Mr. Wrenn stayed late, under the mercury-vapor lights, making card +cross-files of the Southern merchants, their hobbies and prejudices, and +whistling as he worked, stopping now and then to slap the desk and mutter, +“By gosh! I’m gettin’ ’em—gettin’ +’em.” +</p> + +<p> +He rarely thought of Istra till he was out on the street again, proud of having +worked so late that his eyes ached. In fact, his chief troubles these days came +when Mr. Guilfogle wouldn’t “let him put through an idea.” +</p> + +<p> +Their first battle was over Mr. Wrenn’s signing the letters personally; +for the letters, the office manager felt, were as much Ours as was Mr. Wrenn, +and should be signed by the firm. After some difficulty Mr. Wrenn persuaded him +that one of the best ways to handle a personal letter was to make it personal. +They nearly cursed each other before Mr. Wrenn was allowed to use his own +judgment. +</p> + +<p> +It’s not at all certain that Mr. Guilfogle should have yielded. +What’s the use of a manager if his underlings use judgment? +</p> + +<p> +The next battle Mr. Wrenn lost. He had demanded a monthly holiday for his +stenographer. Mr. Guilfogle pointed out that she’d merely be the worse +off for a holiday, that it ’d make her discontented, that it was a +kindness to her to keep her mind occupied. Mr. Wrenn was, however, granted a +new typewriter, in a manner which revealed the fact that the Souvenir Company +was filled with almost too much mercy in permitting an employee to follow his +own selfish and stubborn desires. +</p> + +<p> +You cannot trust these employees. Mr. Wrenn was getting so absorbed in his work +that he didn’t even act as though it was a favor when Mr. Guilfogle +allowed him to have his letters to the trade copied by carbon paper instead of +having them blurred by the wet tissue-paper of a copy-book. The manager did +grant the request, but he was justly indignant at the curt manner of the +rascal, whereupon our bumptious revolutionist, our friend to anarchists and +red-headed artists, demanded a “raise” and said that he +didn’t care a hang if the [qualified] letters never went out. The +kindness of chiefs! For Mr. Guilfogle apologized and raised the madman’s +wage from seventeen dollars and fifty cents a week to his former nineteen +dollars. [He had expected eighteen dollars; he had demanded twenty-two dollars +and fifty cents; he was worth on the labor market from twenty-five to thirty +dollars; while the profit to the Souvenir Company from his work was about sixty +dollars minus whatever salary he got.] +</p> + +<p> +Not only that. Mr. Guilfogle slapped him on the back and said: +“You’re doing good work, old man. It’s fine. I just +don’t want you to be too reckless.” +</p> + +<p> +That night Wrenn worked till eight. +</p> + +<p> +After his raise he could afford to go to the theater, since he was not saving +money for travel. He wrote small letters to Istra and read the books he +believed she would approve—a Paris Baedeker and the second volume of +Tolstoi’s <i>War and Peace</i>, which he bought at a second-hand +book-stall for five cents. He became interested in popular and inaccurate +French and English histories, and secreted any amount of footnote anecdotes +about Guy Fawkes and rush-lights and the divine right of kings. He thought +almost every night about making friends, which he intended—just as much +as ever—to do as soon as Sometime arrived. +</p> + +<p> +On the day on which one of the Southern merchants wrote him about his +son—“fine young fellow, sir—has every chance of rising to a +lieutenancy on the Atlanta police force”—Mr. Wrenn’s eyes +were moist. Here was a friend already. Sure. He would make friends. Then there +was the cripple with the Capitol Corner News and Souvenir Stand in Austin, +Texas. Mr. Wrenn secreted two extra Dixieland Ink-wells and a Yale football +banner and sent them to the cripple for his brothers, who were in the +Agricultural College. +</p> + +<p> +The orders—yes, they were growing larger. The Southern salesmen took him +out to dinner sometimes. But he was shy of them. They were so knowing and had +so many smoking-room stories. He still had not found the friends he desired. +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +Miggleton’s restaurant, on Forty-second Street, was a romantic discovery. +Though it had “popular prices”—plain omelet, fifteen +cents—it had red and green bracket lights, mission-style tables, and +music played by a sparrowlike pianist and a violinist. Mr. Wrenn never really +heard the music, but while it was quavering he had a happier appreciation of +the Silk-Hat-Harry humorous pictures in the <i>Journal</i>, which he always +propped up against an oil-cruet. [That never caused him inconvenience; he had +no convictions in regard to salads.] He would drop the paper to look out of the +window at the Lazydays Improvement Company’s electric sign, showing +gardens of paradise on the instalment plan, and dream of—well, he +hadn’t the slightest idea what—something distant and deliciously +likely to become intimate. Once or twice he knew that he was visioning the girl +in soft brown whom he would “go home to,” and who, in a Lazydays +suburban residence, would play just such music for him and the friends who +lived near by. She would be as clever as Istra, but “oh, more so’s +you can go regular places with her.”… Often he got good ideas about +letters South, to be jotted down on envelope backs, from that music. +</p> + +<p> +At last comes the historic match-box incident. +</p> + +<p> +On that October evening in 1910 he dined early at Miggleton’s. The +thirty-cent table d’hote was perfect. The cream-of-corn soup was, he went +so far as to remark to the waitress, “simply slick”; the Waldorf +salad had two whole walnuts in his portion alone. +</p> + +<p> +The fat man with the white waistcoat, whom he had often noted as dining in this +same corner of the restaurant, smiled at him and said “Pleasant +evening” as he sat down opposite Mr. Wrenn and smoothed the two sleek +bangs which decorated the front of his nearly bald head. +</p> + +<p> +The music included a “potpourri of airs from ‘The Merry +Widow,’” which set his foot tapping. All the while he was conscious +that he’d made the Seattle Novelty and Stationery Corner Store come +through with a five-hundred-dollar order on one of his letters. +</p> + +<p> +The <i>Journal</i> contained an editorial essay on “Friendship” +which would have been, and was, a credit to Cicero. +</p> + +<p> +He laid down the paper, stirred his large cup of coffee, and stared at the +mother-of-pearl buttons on the waistcoat of the fat man, who was now gulping +down soup, opposite him. “My land!” he was thinking, +“friendship! I ain’t even begun to make all those friends I was +going to. Haven’t done a thing. Oh, I will; I must!” +</p> + +<p> +“Nice night,” said the fat man. +</p> + +<p> +“Yuh—it sure is,” brightly agreed Mr. Wrenn. +</p> + +<p> +“Reg’lar Indian-Summer weather.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, isn’t it! I feel like taking a walk on Riverside +Drive—b’lieve I will.” +</p> + +<p> +“Wish I had time. But I gotta get down to the store—cigar-store. +I’m on nights, three times a week.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yuh. I’ve seen you here most every time I eat early,” Mr. +Wrenn purred. +</p> + +<p> +“Yuh. The rest of the time I eat at the boarding-house.” +</p> + +<p> +Silence. But Mr. Wrenn was fighting for things to say, means of approach, for +the chance to become acquainted with a new person, for all the friendly human +ways he had desired in nights of loneliness. +</p> + +<p> +“Wonder when they’ll get the Grand Central done?” asked the +fat man. +</p> + +<p> +“I s’pose it’ll take quite a few years,” said Mr. +Wrenn, conversationally. +</p> + +<p> +“Yuh. I s’pose it will.” +</p> + +<p> +Silence. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn sat trying to think of something else to say. Lonely people in city +restaurants simply do not get acquainted. Yet he did manage to observe, +“Great building that’ll be,” in the friendliest manner. +</p> + +<p> +Silence. +</p> + +<p> +Then the fat man went on: +</p> + +<p> +“Wonder what Wolgast will do in his mill? Don’t believe he can +stand up.” +</p> + +<p> +Wolgast was, Mr. Wrenn seemed to remember, a pugilist. He agreed vaguely: +</p> + +<p> +“Pretty hard, all right.” +</p> + +<p> +“Go out to the areoplane meet?” asked the fat man. +</p> + +<p> +“No. But I’d like to see it. Gee! there must be kind of—kind +of adventure in them things, heh?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yuh—sure is. First machine I saw, though—I was just getting +off the train at Belmont Park, and there was an areoplane up in the air, and it +looked like one of them big mechanical beetles these fellows sell on the street +buzzing around up there. I was kind of disappointed. But what do you think? It +was that J. A. D. McCurdy, in a Curtiss biplane—I think it was—and +by golly! he got to circling around and racing and tipping so’s I thought +I’d loose my hat off, I was so excited. And, say, what do you think? I +see McCurdy himself, afterward, standing near one of the—the +handgars—handsome young chap, not over twenty-eight or thirty, built like +a half-miler. And then I see Ralph Johnstone and Arch Hoxey—” +</p> + +<p> +“Gee!” Mr. Wrenn was breathing. +</p> + +<p> +“—dipping and doing the—what do you call it?—Dutch +sausage-roll or something like that. Yelled my head off.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, it must have been great to see ’em, and so close, too.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yuh—it sure was.” +</p> + +<p> +There seemed to be no other questions to settle. Mr. Wrenn slowly folded up his +paper, pursued his check under three plates and the menu-card to its +hiding-place beyond the catsup-bottle, and left the table with a regretful +“Good night.” +</p> + +<p> +At the desk of the cashier, a decorative blonde, he put a cent in the machine +which good-naturedly drops out boxes of matches. No box dropped this time, +though he worked the lever noisily. +</p> + +<p> +“Out of order?” asked the cashier lady. “Here’s two +boxes of matches. Guess you’ve earned them.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, well, well, well!” sounded the voice of his friend, the fat +man, who stood at the desk paying his bill. “Pretty easy, heh? Two boxes +for one cent! Sting the restaurant.” Cocking his head, he carefully +inserted a cent in the slot and clattered the lever, turning to grin at Mr. +Wrenn, who grinned back as the machine failed to work. +</p> + +<p> +“Let me try it,” caroled Mr. Wrenn, and pounded the lever with the +enthusiasm of comradeship. +</p> + +<p> +“Nothing doing, lady,” crowed the fat man to the cashier. +</p> + +<p> +“I guess <i>I</i> draw two boxes, too, eh? And I’m in a +cigar-store. How’s that for stinging your competitors, heh? Ho, ho, +ho!” +</p> + +<p> +The cashier handed him two boxes, with an embarrassed simper, and the fat man +clapped Mr. Wrenn’s shoulder joyously. +</p> + +<p> +“My turn!” shouted a young man in a fuzzy green hat and a +bright-brown suit, who had been watching with the sudden friendship which +unites a crowd brought together by an accident. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn was glowing. “No, it ain’t—it’s mine,” +he achieved. “I invented this game.” Never had he so stood forth in +a crowd. He was a Bill Wrenn with the cosmopolitan polish of a floor-walker. He +stood beside the fat man as a friend of sorts, a person to be taken perfectly +seriously. +</p> + +<p> +It is true that he didn’t add to this spiritual triumph the triumph of +getting two more boxes of matches, for the cashier-girl exclaimed, “No +indeedy; it’s my turn!” and lifted the match machine to a high +shelf behind her. But Mr. Wrenn went out of the restaurant with his old friend, +the fat man, saying to him quite as would a wit, “I guess we get stung, +eh?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yuh!” gurgled the fat man. +</p> + +<p> +Walking down to your store?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yuh—sure—won’t you walk down a piece?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, I would like to. Which way is it?” +</p> + +<p> +“Fourth Avenue and Twenty-eighth.” +</p> + +<p> +“Walk down with you.” +</p> + +<p> +“Fine!” +</p> + +<p> +And the fat man seemed to mean it. He confided to Mr. Wrenn that the fishing +was something elegant at Trulen, New Jersey; that he was some punkins at the +casting of flies in fishing; that he wished exceedingly to be at Trulen fishing +with flies, but was prevented by the manager of the cigar-store; that the +manager was an old devil; that his (the fat man’s own) name was Tom +Poppins; that the store had a slick new brand of Manila cigars, kept in a swell +new humidor bought upon the advice of himself (Mr. Poppins); that one of the +young clerks in the store had done fine in the Modified Marathon; that the Cubs +had had a great team this year; that he’d be glad to give Mr.—Mr. +Wrenn, eh?—one of those Manila cigars—great cigars they were, too; +and that he hadn’t “laughed so much for a month of Sundays as he +had over the way they stung Miggleton’s on them matches.” +</p> + +<p> +All this in the easy, affectionate, slightly wistful manner of fat men. Mr. +Poppins’s large round friendly childish eyes were never sarcastic. He was +the man who makes of a crowd in the Pullman smoking-room old friends in half an +hour. In turn, Mr. Wrenn did not shy off; he hinted at most of his lifelong +ambitions and a fair number of his sorrows and, when they reached the store, +not only calmly accepted, but even sneezingly ignited one of the “slick +new Manila cigars.” +</p> + +<p> +As he left the store he knew that the golden age had begun. He had a friend! +</p> + +<p> +He was to see Tom Poppins the coming Thursday at Miggleton’s. And now he +was going to find Morton! He laughed so loudly that the policeman at +Thirty-fourth Street looked self-conscious and felt secretively to find out +what was the matter with his uniform. Now, this evening, he’d try to get +on the track of Morton. Well, perhaps not this evening—the Pennsylvania +offices wouldn’t be open, but some time this week, anyway. +</p> + +<p> +Two nights later, as he waited for Tom Poppins at Miggleton’s, he lashed +himself with the thought that he had not started to find Morton; good old +Morton of the cattle-boat. But that was forgotten in the wonder of Tom +Poppins’s account of Mrs. Arty’s, a boarding-house “where all +the folks likes each other.” +</p> + +<p> +“You’ve never fed at a boarding-house, eh?” said Tom. +“Well, I guess most of ’em are pretty poor feed. And pretty sad +bunch. But Mrs. Arty’s is about as near like home as most of us poor +bachelors ever gets. Nice crowd there. If Mrs. Arty—Mrs. R. T. Ferrard is +her name, but we always call her Mrs. Arty—if she don’t take to you +she don’t mind letting you know she won’t take you in at all; but +if she does she’ll worry over the holes in your socks as if they was her +husband’s. All the bunch there drop into the parlor when they come in, +pretty near any time clear up till twelve-thirty, and talk and laugh and rush +the growler and play Five Hundred. Just like home! +</p> + +<p> +“Mrs. Arty’s nearly as fat as I am, but she can be pretty spry if +there’s something she can do for you. Nice crowd there, too except that +Teddem—he’s one of these here Willy-boy actors, always out of work; +I guess Mrs. Arty is kind of sorry for him. Say, Wrenn—you seem to me +like a good fellow—why don’t you get acquainted with the bunch? +Maybe you’d like to move up there some time. You was telling me about +what a cranky old party your landlady is. Anyway, come on up there to dinner. +On me. Got anything on for next Monday evening?” +</p> + +<p> +“N-no.” +</p> + +<p> +“Come on up then——East Thirtieth.” +</p> + +<p> +“Gee, I’d like to!” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, why don’t you, then? Get there about six. Ask for me. +Monday. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I don’t have to get to the store +evenings. Come on; you’ll find out if you like the place.” +</p> + +<p> +“By jiminy, I will!” Mr. Wrenn slapped the table, socially. +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +At last he was “through, just <i>through</i> with loafing around and not +getting acquainted,” he told himself. He was tired of Zapps. There was +nothing to Zapps. He would go up to Mrs. Arty’s and now—he was +going to find Morton. Next morning, marveling at himself for not having done +this easy task before, he telephoned to the Pennsylvania Railroad offices, +asked for Morton, and in one-half minute heard: +</p> + +<p> +“Yes? This is Harry Morton.” +</p> + +<p> +“Hullo, Mr. Morton! I’ll just bet you can’t guess who this +is.” +</p> + +<p> +“I guess you’ve got me.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, who do you think it—” +</p> + +<p> +“Jack?” +</p> + +<p> +“Hunka.” +</p> + +<p> +“Uncle Henry?” +</p> + +<p> +“Nope.” Mr. Wrenn felt lonely at finding himself so completely +outside Morton’s own world that he was not thought of. He hastened to +claim a part in that world: +</p> + +<p> +“Say, Mr. Morton, I wonder if you’ve ever heard of a cattle-boat +called the <i>Merian?</i>” +</p> + +<p> +“I—Say! Is this Bill Wrenn?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, well, well! Where are you? When’d you get back?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, I been back quite a little while, Morty. Tried to get hold of +you—almost called up couple of times. I’m in my +office—Souvenir Company—now. Back on the old job. Say, I’d +like to see you.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, I’d like to see <i>you</i>, old Bill!” +</p> + +<p> +“Got a date for dinner this evening, Morty?” +</p> + +<p> +“N-no. No, I don’t <i>think</i> I’ve got anything on.” +Morton’s voice seemed to sound a doubt. Mr. Wrenn reflected that Morton +must be a society person; and he made his invitation highly polite: +</p> + +<p> +“Well, say, old man, I’d be awful happy if you could come over and +feed on me. Can’t you come over and meet me, Morty?” +</p> + +<p> +“Y-yes, I guess I can. Yes, I’ll do it. Where’ll I meet +you?” +</p> + +<p> +“How about Twenty-eighth and Sixth Avenue?” +</p> + +<p> +“That’ll be all right, Bill. ’Bout six o’clock?” +</p> + +<p> +“Fine! Be awful nice to see you again, old Morty.” +</p> + +<p> +“Same here. Goo’-by.” +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +Gazing across the table at Miggleton’s, Mr. Wrenn saw, in the squat +familiar body and sturdy face of Morton of the cattle-boat, a stranger, +slightly uneasy and very quiet, wearing garments that had nothing whatever to +do with the cattle-boats—a crimson scarf with a horseshoe-pin of +“Brazilian diamonds,” and sleek brown ready-made clothes with +ornately curved cuffs and pocket flaps. +</p> + +<p> +Morton would say nothing of his wanderings after their parting in Liverpool +beyond: “Oh, I just bummed around. Places…. Warm to-night. For this time +of year.” Thrice he explained, “I was kind of afraid you’d be +sore at me for the way I left you; that’s why I’ve never looked you +up.” Thrice Mr. Wrenn declared that he had not been “sore,” +then ceased trying to make himself understood. +</p> + +<p> +Their talk wilted. Both of them played with their knives a good deal. Morton +built a set of triangles out of toothpicks while pretending to give hushed +attention to the pianist’s rendition of “Mammy’s Little +Cootsie Bootsie Coon,” while Mr. Wrenn stared out of the window as though +he expected to see the building across get afire immediately. When either of +them invented something to say they started chattering with guilty haste, and +each agreed hectically with any opinion the other advanced. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn surprised himself in the thought that Morton hadn’t anything +very new to say, which made him feel so disloyal that he burst out, effusively: +</p> + +<p> +“Say, come on now, old man; I just got to hear about what you did after +you left Liverpool.” +</p> + +<p> +“I—” +</p> + +<p> +“Well—” +</p> + +<p> +“I never got out of Liverpool! Worked in a restaurant…. But next +time—! I’ll go clean to Constantinople!” Morton exploded. +“And I did see a lot of English life in Liverpool.” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn talked long and rapidly of the world’s baseball series, and +Regal <i>vs.</i> Walkover shoes. +</p> + +<p> +He tried to think of something they could do. Suddenly: +</p> + +<p> +“Say, Morty, I know an awful nice guy down here in a cigar-store. +Let’s go down and see him.” +</p> + +<p> +“All right.” +</p> + +<p> +Tom Poppins was very cordial to them. He dragged brown canvas stools out of the +tobacco-scented room where cigars were made, and the three of them squatted in +the back of the store, while Tom gossiped of the Juarez races, Taft, +cigar-wrappers, and Jews. Morton was aroused to tell the time-mellowed story of +the judge and the darky. He was cheerful and laughed much and frequently said +“Ah there, cull!” in general commendation. But he kept looking at +the clock on the jog in the wall over the watercooler. Just at ten he rose +abashedly, hesitated, and murmured, “Well, I guess I’ll have to be +beating it home.” +</p> + +<p> +From Mr. Wrenn: “Oh, Morty! So early?” +</p> + +<p> +Tom: “What’s the big hurry?” +</p> + +<p> +“I’ve got to run clear over to Jersey City.” Morton was +cordial, but not convincing. +</p> + +<p> +“Say—uh—Morton,” said Tom, kindly of face, his bald +head shining behind his twin bangs, as he rose, “I’m going to have +Wrenn up to dinner at my boarding-house next Monday. Like to have you come +along. It’s a fine place—Mrs. Arty—she’s the +landlady—she’s a wonder. There’s going to be a vacant room +there—maybe you two fellows could frame it up to take it, heh? +Understand, I don’t get no rake-off on this, but we all like to do what +we can for M—” +</p> + +<p> +“No, no!” said Morton. “Sorry. Couldn’t do it. Staying +with my brother-in-law—costs me only ’bout half as much as it would +I don’t do much chasing around when I’m in town…. I’m going +to save up enough money for a good long hike. I’m going clean to St. +Petersburg!… But I’ve had a good time to-night.” +</p> + +<p> +“Glad. Great stuff about you fellows on the cattle-ship,” said Tom. +</p> + +<p> +Morton hastened on, protectively, a bit critically: “You fellows sport +around a good deal, don’t you?… I can’t afford to…. Well, good +night. Glad to met you, Mr. Poppins. G’ night, old Wr—” +</p> + +<p> +“Going to the ferry? For Jersey? I’ll walk over with you,” +said Mr. Wrenn. +</p> + +<p> +Their walk was quiet and, for Mr. Wrenn, tragically sad. He saw Morton +(presumably) doing the wandering he had once planned. He felt that, while +making his vast new circle of friends, he was losing all the wild +adventurousness of Bill Wrenn. And he was parting with his first friend. +</p> + +<p> +At the ferry-house Morton pronounced his “Well, so long, old +fellow” with an affection that meant finality. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn fled back to Tom Poppins’s store. On the way he was shocked to +find himself relieved at having parted with Morton. The cigar-store was closed. +</p> + +<p> +At home Mrs. Zapp waylaid him for his rent (a day overdue), and he was very +curt. That was to keep back the “O God, how rotten I feel!” with +which, in his room, he voiced the desolation of loneliness. +</p> + +<p> +The ghost of Morton, dead and forgotten, was with him all next day, till he got +home and unbelievably found on the staid black-walnut Zapp hat-rack a letter +from Paris, in a gray foreign-appearing envelope with Istra’s intensely +black scrawl on it. +</p> + +<p> +He put off the luxury of opening the letter till after the rites of brushing +his teeth, putting on his slippers, pounding his rocking-chair cushion into +softness. Panting with the joy to come, he stared out of the window at a giant +and glorious figure of Istra—the laughing Istra of breakfast +camp-fire—which towered from the street below. He sighed joyously and +read: +</p> + +<p class="letter"> +Mouse dear, just a word to let you know I haven’t forgotten you and am +very glad indeed to get your letters. Not much to write about. Frightfully busy +with work and fool parties. You <i>are</i> a dear good soul and I hope +you’ll keep on writing me. In haste, I. N.<br/> + Longer letter next time. +</p> + +<p> +He came to the end so soon. Istra was gone again. +</p> + +</div><!--end chapter--> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2><a name="chap14"></a>CHAPTER XIV<br/> +HE ENTERS SOCIETY</h2> + +<p> +England, in all its Istra-ness, scarce gave Mr. Wrenn a better thrill for his +collection than the thrill he received on the November evening when he saw the +white doorway of Mrs. R. T. Ferrard, in a decorous row of houses on Thirtieth +Street near Lexington Avenue. +</p> + +<p> +It is a block where the citizens have civic pride. A newspaper has not the +least chance of lying about on the asphalt—some householder with a +frequently barbered mustache will indignantly pounce upon it inside of an hour. +No awe. is caused by the sight of vestibules floored with marble in alternate +black and white tiles, scrubbed not by landladies, but by maids. There are +dotted Swiss curtains at the basement windows and Irish point curtains on the +first floors. There are two polished brass doorplates in a stretch of less than +eight houses. Distinctly, it is not a quarter where children fill the street +with shouting and little sticks. +</p> + +<p> +Occasionally a taxicab drives up to some door without a crowd of small boys +gathering; and young men in evening clothes are not infrequently seen to take +out young ladies wearing tight-fitting gowns of black, and light scarfs over +their heads. A Middle Western college fraternity has a club-house in the block, +and four of the houses are private—one of them belonging to a police +inspector and one to a school principal who wears spats. +</p> + +<p> +It is a block that is satisfied with itself; as different from the Zapp +district, where landladies in gingham run out to squabble with berry-venders, +as the Zapp district is from the Ghetto. +</p> + +<p> +Mrs. Arty Ferrard’s house is a poor relation to most of the residences +there. The black areaway rail is broken, and the basement-door grill is rusty. +But at the windows are red-and-white-figured chintz curtains, with a $2.98 +bisque figurine of an unclothed lady between them; the door is of spotless +white, with a bell-pull of polished brass. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn yanked this bell-pull with an urbane briskness which, he hoped, would +conceal his nervousness and delight in dining out. For he was one of the lonely +men in New York. He had dined out four times in eight years. +</p> + +<p> +The woman of thirty-five or thirty-eight who opened the door to him was very +fat, two-thirds as fat as Mrs. Zapp, but she had young eyes. Her mouth was +small, arched, and quivering in a grin. +</p> + +<p> +“This is Mr. Wrenn, isn’t it?” she gurgled, and leaned +against the doorpost, merry, apparently indolent. “I’m Mrs. +Ferrard. Mr. Poppins told me you were coming, and he said you were a terribly +nice man, and I was to be sure and welcome you. Come right in.” +</p> + +<p> +Her indolence turned to energy as she charged down the hall to the large double +door on the right and threw it open, revealing to him a scene of splendor and +revelry by night. +</p> + +<p> +Several persons [they seemed dozens, in their liveliness] were singing and +shouting to piano music, in the midst of a general redness and brightness of +furnishings—red paper and worn red carpet and a high ceiling with +circular moldings tinted in pink. Hand-painted pictures of old mills and ladies +brooding over salmon sunsets, and an especially hand-painted Christmas scene +with snow of inlaid mother-of-pearl, animated the walls. On a golden-oak +center-table was a large lamp with a mosaic shade, and through its mingled bits +of green and red and pearl glass stormed the brilliance of a mantle-light. +</p> + +<p> +The room was crowded with tufted plush and imitation-leather chairs, +side-tables and corner brackets, a couch and a “lady’s desk.” +Green and red and yellow vases adorned with figures of youthful lovers crammed +the top of the piano at the farther end of the room and the polished +black-marble mantel of the fireplace. The glaring gas raced the hearth-fire for +snap and glare and excitement. The profusion of furniture was like a tumult; +the redness and oakness and polishedness of furniture was a dizzying activity; +and it was all overwhelmingly magnified by the laughter and singing about the +piano. +</p> + +<p> +Tom Poppins lumbered up from a couch of terrifically new and red leather, and +Mr. Wrenn was introduced to the five new people in the room with dismaying +swiftness. There seemed to be fifty times five unapproachable and magnificent +strangers from whom he wanted to flee. Of them all he was sure of only +two—a Miss Nelly somebody and what sounded like Horatio Hood Tem (Teddem +it was). +</p> + +<p> +He wished that he had caught Miss Nelly’s last name (which, at dinner, +proved to be Croubel), for he was instantly taken by her sweetness as she +smiled, held out a well-shaped hand, and said, “So pleased meet you, Mr. +Wrenn.” +</p> + +<p> +She returned to the front of the room and went on talking to a lank spinster +about ruchings, but Mr. Wrenn felt that he had known her long and as intimately +as it was possible to know so clever a young woman. +</p> + +<p> +Nelly Croubel gave him the impression of a delicate prettiness, a superior sort +of prettiness, like that of the daughter of the Big White House on the Hill, +the Squire’s house, at Parthenon; though Nelly was not unusually pretty. +Indeed, her mouth was too large, her hair of somewhat ordinary brown. But her +face was always changing with emotions of kindliness and life. Her skin was +perfect; her features fine, rather Greek; her smile, quick yet sensitive. She +was several inches shorter than Mr. Wrenn, and all curves. Her blouse of white +silk lay tenderly along the adorably smooth softness of her young shoulders. A +smart patent-leather belt encircled her sleek waist. Thin black lisle stockings +showed a modestly arched and rather small foot in a black pump. +</p> + +<p> +She looked as though she were trained for business; awake, self-reliant, +self-respecting, expecting to have to get things done, all done, yet she seemed +indestructibly gentle, indestructibly good and believing, and just a bit shy. +</p> + +<p> +Nelly Croubel was twenty-four or twenty-five in years, older in business, and +far younger in love. She was born in Upton’s Grove, Pennsylvania. There, +for eighteen years, she had played Skip to Malue at parties, hid away the notes +with which the boys invited her to picnics at Baptist Beach, read much Walter +Scott, and occasionally taught Sunday-school. Her parents died when she was +beginning her fourth year in high school, and she came to New York to work in +Wanamacy’s toy department at six dollars a week during the holiday rush. +Her patience with fussy old shoppers and her large sales-totals had gained her +a permanent place in the store. +</p> + +<p> +She had loftily climbed to the position of second assistant buyer in the +lingerie department, at fourteen dollars and eighty cents a week That was quite +all of her history except that she attended a Presbyterian church nearly every +Sunday. The only person she hated was Horatio Hood Teddem, the cheap actor who +was playing the piano at Mr. Wrenn’s entrance. +</p> + +<p> +Just now Horatio was playing ragtime with amazing rapidity, stamping his foot +and turning his head to smirk at the others. +</p> + +<p> +Mrs. Arty led her chattering flock to the basement dining-room, which had pink +wall-paper and a mountainous sideboard. Mr. Wrenn was placed between Mrs. Arty +and Nelly Croubel. Out of the mist of strangeness presently emerged the +personality of Miss Mary Proudfoot, a lively but religious spinster of forty +who made doilies for the Dorcas Women’s Exchange and had two hundred +dollars a year family income. To the right of the red-glass pickle-dish were +the elderly Ebbitts—Samuel Ebbitt, Esq., also Mrs. Ebbitt. Mr. Ebbitt had +come from Hartford five years before, but he always seemed just to have come +from there. He was in a real-estate office; he was gray, ill-tempered, +impatiently honest, and addicted to rheumatism and the newspapers. Mrs. Ebbitt +was addicted only to Mr. Ebbitt. +</p> + +<p> +Across the table was felt the presence of James T. Duncan, who looked like a +dignified red-mustached Sunday-school superintendent, but who traveled for a +cloak and suit house, gambled heavily on poker and auction pinochle, and was +esteemed for his straight back and knowledge of trains. +</p> + +<p> +Which is all of them. +</p> + +<p> +As soon as Mrs. Arty had guided Annie, the bashful maid, in serving the +vegetable soup, and had coaxed her into bringing Mr. Wrenn a napkin, she took +charge of the conversation, a luxury which she would never have intrusted to +her flock’s amateurish efforts. Mr. Poppins, said she, had spoken of +meeting a friend of Mr. Wrenn’s; Mr. Morton, was it not? A very nice man, +she understood. Was it true that Mr. Wrenn and Mr. Morton had gone clear across +the Atlantic on a cattle-boat? It really was? +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, how interesting!” contributed pretty Nelly Croubel, beside Mr. +Wrenn, her young eyes filled with an admiration which caused him palpitation +and difficulty in swallowing his soup. He was confused by hearing old Samuel +Ebbitt state: +</p> + +<p> +“Uh-h-h-h—back in 18—uh—1872 the vessel +<i>Prissie</i>—no, it was 1873; no, it must have been +’72—” +</p> + +<p> +“It was 1872, father,” said Mrs. Ebbitt. +</p> + +<p> +“1873. I was on a coasting-vessel, young man. But we didn’t carry +cattle.” Mr. Ebbitt inspected Horatio Hood Teddem darkly, clicked his +spectacle case sharply shut, and fell to eating, as though he had settled all +this nonsense. +</p> + +<p> +With occasional witty interruptions from the actor, Mr. Wrenn told of pitching +hay, of the wit of Morton, and the wickedness of Satan, the boss. +</p> + +<p> +“But you haven’t told us about the brave things <i>you</i> +did,” cooed Mrs. Arty. She appealed to Nelly Croubel: “I’ll +bet he was a cool one. Don’t you think he was, Nelly?” +</p> + +<p> +“I’m sure he was.” Nelly’s voice was like a flute. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn knew that there was just one thing in the world that he wanted to do; +to persuade Miss Nelly Croubel that (though he was a solid business man, indeed +yes, and honorable) he was a cool one, who had chosen, in wandering o’er +this world so wide, the most perilous and cattle-boaty places. He tried to +think of something modest yet striking to say, while Tom was arguing with Miss +Mary Proudfoot, the respectable spinster, about the ethics of giving away +street-car transfers. +</p> + +<p> +As they finished their floating custard Mr. Wrenn achieved, “Do you come +from New York, Miss Croubel?” and listened to the tale of +sleighing-parties in Upton’s Grove, Pennsylvania. He was absolutely +happy. +</p> + +<p> +“This is like getting home,” he thought. “And they’re +classy folks to get home to—now that I can tell ’em apart. Gee! +Miss Croubel is a peach. And brains—golly!” +</p> + +<p> +He had a frightened hope that after dinner he would be able to get into a +corner and talk with Nelly, but Tom Poppins conferred with Horatio Hood Teddenm +and called Mr. Wrenn aside. Teddem had been acting with a moving-picture +company for a week, and had three passes to the celebrated Waldorf Photoplay +Theater. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn had bloodthirstily disapproved Horatio Hood’s effeminate +remarks, such as “Tee <i>hee!</i>” and “Oh, you naughty +man,” but when he heard that this molly-coddle had shared in the glory of +making moving pictures he went proudly forth with him and Tom. He had no chance +to speak to Mrs. Arty about taking the room to be vacated. +</p> + +<p> +He wished that Charley Carpenter or the Zapps could see him sitting right +beside an actor who was shown in the pictures miraculously there before them, +asking him how they made movies, just as friendly as though they had known each +other always. +</p> + +<p> +He wanted to do something to entertain his friends beyond taking them out for a +drink. He invited them down to his room, and they came. +</p> + +<p> +Teddem was in wonderful form; he mimicked every one they saw so amiably that +Tom Poppins knew the actor wanted to borrow money. The party were lovingly +humming the popular song of the time—“Any Little Girl That’s +a Nice Little Girl is the Right Little Girl for Me”—as they frisked +up the gloomy steps of the Zapps. Entering, Poppins and Teddem struck attitudes +on the inside stairs and sang aloud. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn felt enormously conscious of Mrs. Zapp down below. He kept listening, +as he led them up-stairs and lighted the gas. But Teddem so imitated Colonel +Roosevelt, with two water-glasses for eye-glasses and a small hat-brush for +mustache, that Mr. Wrenn was moved wrigglingly to exclaim: “Say, +I’m going out and get some beer. Or ’d you rather have something +else? Some cheese sandwiches? How about ’em?” +</p> + +<p> +“Fine,” said Tom and Teddem together. +</p> + +<p> +Not only did Mr. Wrenn buy a large newspaper-covered bundle of bottles of beer +and Swiss-cheese sandwiches, but also a small can of caviar and salty crackers. +In his room he spread a clean towel, then two clean towels, on the bureau, and +arrayed the feast, with two water-glasses and a shaving-mug for cups. +</p> + +<p> +Horatio Hood Teddem, spreading caviar on a sandwich, and loudly singing his +masterpiece, “Waal I swan,” stopped short and fixed amazed eyes on +the door of the room. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn hastily turned. The light fell—as on a cliff of crumbly gray +rock—on Mrs. Zapp, in the open door, vast in her ungirdled gray wrapper, +her arms folded, glowering speechlessly. +</p> + +<p> +“Mist’ Wrenn,” she began, in a high voice that promised to +burst into passion. +</p> + +<p> +But she was addressing the formidable adventurer, Bill Wrenn. He had to protect +his friends. He sprang up and walked across to her. +</p> + +<p> +He said, quietly, “I didn’t hear you knock, Mrs. Zapp.” +</p> + +<p> +“Ah <i>didn’t</i> knock, and Ah want you should—” +</p> + +<p> +“Then please do knock, unless you want me to give notice.” +</p> + +<p> +He was quivering. His voice was shrill. +</p> + +<p> +From the hall below Theresa called up, “Ma, come down here. +<i>Ma!</i>” +</p> + +<p> +But Mrs. Zapp was too well started. “If you think Ah’m going to +stand for a lazy sneaking little drunkard keeping the whole street awake, and +here it is prett’ nearly midnight—” +</p> + +<p> +Just then Mr. William Wrenn saw and heard the most astounding thing of his +life, and became an etemal slave to Tom Poppins. +</p> + +<p> +Tom’s broad face became hard, his voice businesslike. He shouted at Mrs. +Zapp: +</p> + +<p> +“Beat it or I’ll run you in. Trouble with you is, you old hag, you +don’t appreciate a nice quiet little chap like Wrenn, and you try to +bully him—and him here for years. Get out or I’ll put you out. +I’m no lamb, and I won’t stand for any of your monkey-shines. Get +out. This ain’t your room; he’s rented it—he’s paid the +rent—it’s his room. Get out!” +</p> + +<p> +Kindly Tom Poppins worked in a cigar-store and was accustomed to talk back to +drunken men six feet tall. His voice was tremendous, and he was fatly +immovable; he didn’t a bit mind the fact that Mrs. Zapp was still +“glaring speechless.” +</p> + +<p> +But behold an ally to the forlorn lady. When Theresa, in the hall below, heard +Tom, she knew that Mr. Wrenn would room here no more. She galloped up-stairs +and screeched over her mother’s shoulder: +</p> + +<p> +“You will pick on a lady, will you, you drunken scum—you—you +cads—I’ll have you arrested so quick you—” +</p> + +<p> +“Look here, lady,” said Tom, gently. “I’m a +plain-clothes man, a detective.” His large voice purred like a +tiger-tabby’s. “I don’t want to run you in, but I will if you +don’t get out of here and shut that door. Or you might go down and call +the cop on this block. He’ll run you in—for breaking Code 2762 of +the Penal Law! Trespass and flotsam—that’s what it is!” +</p> + +<p> +Uneasy, frightened, then horrified, Mrs. Zapp swung bulkily about and slammed +the door. +</p> + +<p> +Sick, guilty, banished from home though he felt, Mr. Wrenn’s voice +quavered, with an attempt at dignity: +</p> + +<p> +“I’m awful sorry she butted in while you fellows was here. I +don’t know how to apologize” +</p> + +<p> +“Forget it, old man,” rolled out Tom’s bass. “Come on, +let’s go up to Mrs. Arty’s.” +</p> + +<p> +“But, gee! it’s nearly a quarter to eleven.” +</p> + +<p> +“That’s all right. We can get up there by a little after, and Mrs. +Arty stays up playing cards till after twelve.” +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +“Golly!” Mr. Wrenn agitatedly ejaculated under his breath, as they +noisily entered Mrs. Arty’s—though not noisily on his part. +</p> + +<p> +The parlor door was open. Mrs. Arty’s broad back was toward them, and she +was announcing to James T. Duncan and Miss Proudfoot, with whom she was playing +three-handed Five Hundred, “Well, I’ll just bid seven on hearts if +you’re going to get so set up.” She glanced back, nodded, said, +“Come in, children,” picked up the “widow,” and +discarded with quick twitches of the cards. The frightened Mr. Wrenn, feeling +like a shipwrecked land-lubber, compared this gaming smoking woman unfavorably +with the intense respectability of his dear lost patron, Mrs. Zapp. He sat +uneasy till the hand of cards was finished, feeling as though they were only +tolerating him. And Nelly Croubel was nowhere in sight. +</p> + +<p> +Suddenly said Mrs. Arty, “And now you would like to look at that room, +Mr. Wrenn, unless I’m wrong.” +</p> + +<p> +“Why—uh—yes, I guess I would like to.” +</p> + +<p> +“Come with me, child,” she said, in pretended severity. “Tom, +you take my hand in the game, and don’t let me hear you’ve been +bidding ten on no suit without the joker.” She led Mr. Wrenn to the +settee hat-rack in the hall. “The third-floor-back will be vacant in two +weeks, Mr. Wrenn. We can go up and look at it now if you’d like to. The +man who has it now works nights—he’s some kind of a head waiter at +Rector’s, or something like that, and he’s out till three or four. +Come.” +</p> + +<p> +When he saw that third-floor-back, the room that the smart people at Mrs. +Arty’s were really willing to let him have, he felt like a man just +engaged. It was all in soft green—grass-green matting, pale-green walls, +chairs of white wicker with green cushions; the bed, a couch with a denim cover +and four sofa pillows. It gave him the impression of being a guest on Fifth +Avenue. +</p> + +<p> +“It’s kind of a plain room,” Mrs. Arty said, doubtfully. +“The furniture is kind of plain. But my head-waiter man—it was +furnished for a friend of his—he says he likes it better than any other +room in the house. It <i>is</i> comfortable, and you get lots of sunlight +and—” +</p> + +<p> +“I’ll take—How much is it, please, with board?” +</p> + +<p> +She spoke with a take-it-or-leave-it defiance. “Eleven-fifty a +week.” +</p> + +<p> +It was a terrible extravagance; much like marrying a sick woman on a salary of +ten a week, he reflected; nine-teen minus eleven-fifty left him only +seven-fifty for clothes and savings and things and—but—” +I’ll take it,” he said, hastily. He was frightened at himself, but +glad, very glad. He was to live in this heaven; he was going to be away from +that Zapp woman; and Nelly Croubel—Was she engaged to some man? he +wondered. +</p> + +<p> +Mrs. Arty was saying: “First, I want to ask you some questions, though. +Please sit down.” As she creaked into one of the wicker chairs she +suddenly changed from the cigarette-rolling chaffing card-player to a woman +dignified, reserved, commanding. “Mr. Wrenn, you see, Miss Proudfoot and +Miss Croubel are on this floor. Miss Proudfoot can take care of herself, all +right, but Nelly is such a trusting little thing—She’s like my +daughter. She’s the only one I’ve ever given a reduced rate +to—and I swore I never would to anybody!… Do +you—uh—drink—drink much, I mean?” +</p> + +<p> +Nelly on this floor! Near him! Now! He had to have this room. He forced himself +to speak directly. +</p> + +<p> +“I know how you mean, Mrs. Ferrard. No, I don’t drink much of +any—hardly at all; just a glass of beer now and then; sometimes I +don’t even touch that a week at a time. And I don’t gamble +and—and I do try to keep—er—straight—and all that sort +of thing.” +</p> + +<p> +“That’s good.” +</p> + +<p> +“I work for the Souvenir and Art Novelty Company on Twenty-eighth Street. +If you want to call them up I guess the manager’ll give me a pretty good +recommend.” +</p> + +<p> +“I don’t believe I’ll need it, Mr. Wrenn. It’s my +business to find out what sort of animiles men are by just talking to +them.” She rose, smiled, plumped out her hand. “You <i>will</i> be +nice to Nelly, <i>won’t</i> you! I’m going to fire that Teddem +out—don’t tell him, but I am—because he gets too fresh with +her.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes!” +</p> + +<p> +She suddenly broke into laughter, and ejaculated: “<i>Say</i>, that was +hard work! Don’t you <i>hate</i> to have to be serious? Let’s trot +down, and I’ll make Tom or Duncan rush us a growler of beer to welcome +you to our midst…. I’ll bet your socks aren’t darned properly. +I’m going to sneak in and take a look at them, once I get you caged up +here…. But I won’t read your love-letters! Now let’s go down by the +fire, where it’s comfy.” +</p> + +</div><!--end chapter--> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2><a name="chap15"></a>CHAPTER XV<br/> +HE STUDIES FIVE HUNDRED, SAVOUIR FAIRE, AND LOTSA-SNAP OFFICE MOTTOES</h2> + +<p> +On a couch of glossy red leather with glossy black buttons and stiff fringes +also of glossy red leather, Mr. William Wrenn sat upright and was very +confiding to Miss Nelly Croubel, who was curled among the satin pillows with +her skirts drawn carefully about her ankles. He had been at Mrs. Arty’s +for two weeks now. He wore a new light-blue tie, and his trousers were pressed +like sheet steel. +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, I suppose you’re engaged to some one, Miss Nelly, and +you’ll go off and leave us—go off to that blamed Upton’s +Grove or some place.” +</p> + +<p> +“I am <i>not</i> engaged. I’ve told you so. Who would want to marry +me? You stop teasing me—you’re mean as can be; I’ll just have +to get Tom to protect me!” +</p> + +<p> +“Course you’re engaged.” +</p> + +<p> +“Ain’t.” +</p> + +<p> +“Are.” +</p> + +<p> +“Ain’t. Who would want to marry poor little me?” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, anybody, of course.” +</p> + +<p> +“You <i>stop</i> teasing me…. Besides, probably you’re in love with +twenty girls.” +</p> + +<p> +“I am <i>not</i>. Why, I’ve never hardly known but just two girls +in my life. One was just a girl I went to theaters with once or twice—she +was the daughter of the landlady I used to have before I came here.” +</p> + +<p> + “If you don’t make love to the landlady’s +daughter<br/> + You won’t get a second piece of pie!” +</p> + +<p> +quoted Nelly, out of the treasure-house of literature. +</p> + +<p> +“Sure. That’s it. But I bet you—” +</p> + +<p> +“Who was the other girl?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh! She…. She was a—an artist. I liked her—a lot. But she +was—oh, awful highbrow. Gee! if—But—” +</p> + +<p> +A sympathetic silence, which Nelly broke with: +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, they’re funny people. Artists…. Do you have your lesson in +Five Hundred tonight? Your very first one?” +</p> + +<p> +“I think so. Say, is it much like this here bridge-whist? Oh say, Miss +Nelly, why do they call it Five Hundred?” +</p> + +<p> +“That’s what you have to make to go out. No, I guess it isn’t +very much like bridge; though, to tell the truth, I haven’t ever played +bridge. . My! it must be a nice game, though.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, I thought prob’ly you could play it. You can do ’most +everything. Honest, I’ve never seen nothing like it.” +</p> + +<p> +“Now you stop, Mr. Wrenn. I know I’m a—what was it Mr. Teddem +used to call me? A minx. But—” +</p> + +<p> +“Miss <i>Nelly!</i> You <i>aren’t</i> a minx!” +</p> + +<p> +“Well—” +</p> + +<p> +“Or a mink, either. You’re a—let’s see—an +antelope.” +</p> + +<p> +“I am not! Even if I can wriggle my nose like a rabbit. Besides, it +sounds like a muskmelon. But, anyway, the head buyer said I was crazy +to-day.” +</p> + +<p> +“If I heard him say you were crazy—” +</p> + +<p> +“Would you beat him for me?” She cuddled a cushion and smiled +gratefully. Her big eyes seemed to fill with light. +</p> + +<p> +He caught himself wanting to kiss the softness of her shoulder, but he said +only, “Well, I ain’t much of a scrapper, but I’d try to make +it interesting for him.” +</p> + +<p> +“Tell me, did you ever have a fight? When you were a boy? Were you +<i>such</i> a bad boy?” +</p> + +<p> +“I never did when I was a boy, but—well—I did have a couple +of fights when I was on the cattle-boat and in England. Neither of them +amounted to very much, though, I guess. I was scared stiff!” +</p> + +<p> +“Don’t believe it!” +</p> + +<p> +“Sure I was.” +</p> + +<p> +“I don’t believe you’d be scared. You’re too +earnest.” +</p> + +<p> +“Me, Miss Nelly? Why, I’m a regular cut-up.” +</p> + +<p> +“You stop making fun of yourself! I <i>like</i> it when you’re +earnest—like when you saw that beautiful snowfall last night…. Oh dear, +isn’t it hard to have to miss so many beautiful things here in the +city—there’s just the parks, and even there there aren’t any +birds, real wild birds, like we used to have in Pennsylvania.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, isn’t it! Isn’t it hard!” Mr. Wrenn drew nearer +and looked sympathy. +</p> + +<p> +“I’m afraid I’m getting gushy. Miss +Hartenstein—she’s in my department—she’d laugh at me…. +But I do love birds and squirrels and pussy-willows and all those things. In +summer I love to go on picnics on Staten Island or tramp in Van Cortlandt +Park.” +</p> + +<p> +“Would you go on a picnic with me some day next spring?” Hastily, +“I mean with Miss Proudfoot and Mrs. Arty and me?” +</p> + +<p> +“I should be pleased to.” She was prim but trusting about it. +“Oh, listen, Mr. Wrenn; did you ever tramp along the Palisades as far as +Englewood? It’s lovely there—the woods and the river and all those +funny little tugs puffing along, way <i>way</i> down below you—why, I +could lie on the rocks up there and just dream and dream for hours. After +I’ve spent Sunday up there”—she was dreaming now, he saw, and +his heart was passionately tender toward her—“I don’t hardly +mind a bit having to go back to the store Monday morning…. You’ve been up +along there, haven’t you?” +</p> + +<p> +“Me? Why, I guess I’m the guy that discovered the Palisades!… Yes, +it is <i>won</i>-derful up there!” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, you are, are you? I read about that in American history!… But +honestly, Mr. Wrenn, I do believe you care for tramps and things—not like +that Teddem or Mr. Duncan—they always want to just stay in town—or +even Tom, though he’s an old dear.” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn looked jealous, with a small hot jealousy. She hastened on with: +“Of course, I mean he’s just like a big brother. To all of +us.” +</p> + +<p> +It was sweet to both of them, to her to declare and to him to hear, that +neither Tom nor any other possessed her heart. Their shy glances were like an +outreach of tenderly touching hands as she confided, “Mrs. Arty and he +get up picnics, and when we’re out on the Palisades he says to +me—you know, sometimes he almost makes me think he <i>is</i> sleepy, +though I do believe he just sneaks off under a tree and talks to Mrs. Arty or +reads a magazine—but I was saying: he always says to me, ‘Well, +sister, I suppose you want to mousey round and dream by yourself—you +won’t talk to a growly old bear like me. Well, I’m glad of it. I +want to sleep. I don’t want to be bothered by you and your everlasting +chatter. Get out!’ I b’lieve he just says that ’cause he +knows I wouldn’t want to run off by myself if they didn’t think it +was proper.” +</p> + +<p> +As he heard her lively effort to imitate Tom’s bass Mr. Wrenn laughed and +pounded his knee and agreed: “Yes, Tom’s an awfully fine fellow, +isn’t he!… I love to get out some place by myself, too. I like to wander +round places and make up the doggondest fool little stories to myself about +them; just as bad as a kiddy, that way.” +</p> + +<p> +“And you read such an awful lot, Mr. Wrenn! My! Oh, tell me, have you +ever read anything by Harold Bell Wright or Myrtle Reed, Mr. Wrenn? They write +such sweet stories.” +</p> + +<p> +He had not, but he expressed an unconquerable resolve so to do, and with +immediateness. She went on: +</p> + +<p> +“Mrs. Arty told me you had a real big library—nearly a hundred +books and—Do you mind? I went in your room and peeked at them.” +</p> + +<p> +“No, course I don’t mind! If there’s any of them you’d +like to borrow any time, Miss Nelly, I would be awful glad to lend them to +you…. But, rats! Why, I haven’t got hardly any books.” +</p> + +<p> +“That’s why you haven’t wasted any time learning Five Hundred +and things, isn’t it? Because you’ve been so busy reading and so +on?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, kind of.” Mr. Wrenn looked modest. +</p> + +<p> +“Haven’t you always been lots of—oh, haven’t you always +’magined lots?” +</p> + +<p> +She really seemed to care. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn felt excitedly sure of that, and imparted: “Yes, I guess I +have…. And I’ve always wanted to travel a lot.” +</p> + +<p> +“So have I! Isn’t it wonderful to go around and see new +places!” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, <i>isn’t</i> it!” he breathed. “It was great to +be in England—though the people there are kind of chilly some ways. Even +when I’m on a wharf here in New York I feel just like I was off in China +or somewheres. I’d like to see China. And India…. Gee! when I hear the +waves down at Coney Island or some place—you know how the waves sound +when they come in. Well, sometimes I almost feel like they was talking to a +guy—you know—telling about ships. And, oh say, you know the +whitecaps—aren’t they just like the waves was motioning at +you—they want you to come and beat it with you—over to China and +places.” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, Mr. Wrenn, you’re a regular poet!” +</p> + +<p> +He looked doubtful. +</p> + +<p> +“Honest; I’m not teasing you; you are a poet. And I think +it’s fine that Mr. Teddem was saying that nobody could be a poet or like +that unless they drank an awful lot and—uh—oh, not be honest and be +on a job. But you aren’t like that. <i>Are</i> you?” +</p> + +<p> +He looked self-conscious and mumbled, earnestly, “Well, I try not to +be.” +</p> + +<p> +“But I am going to make you go to church. You’ll be a socialist or +something like that if you get to be too much of a poet and +don’t—” +</p> + +<p> +“Miss Nelly, please <i>may</i> I go to church with you?” +</p> + +<p> +“Why—” +</p> + +<p> +“Next Sunday?” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, yes, I should be pleased. Are you a Presbyterian, though?” +</p> + +<p> +“Why—uh—I guess I’m kind of a Congregationalist; but +still, they’re all so much alike.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, they really are. And besides, what does it matter if we all believe +the same and try to do right; and sometimes that’s hard, when +you’re poor, and it seems like—like—” +</p> + +<p> +“Seems like what?” Mr. Wrenn insisted. +</p> + +<p> +“Oh—nothing…. My, you’ll have to get up awful early Sunday +morning if you’d like to go with me. My church starts at +ten-thirty.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, I’d get up at five to go with you.” +</p> + +<p> +“Stupid! Now you’re just trying to jolly me; you <i>are</i>; +because you men aren’t as fond of church as all that, I know you +aren’t. You’re real lazy Sunday mornings, and just want to sit +around and read the papers and leave the poor women—But please tell me +some more about your reading and all that.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, I’ll be all ready to go at nine-thirty…. I don’t know; +why, I haven’t done much reading. But I would like to travel +and—Say, wouldn’t it be great to—I suppose I’m sort of +a kid about it; of course, a guy has to tend right to business, but it would be +great—Say a man was in Europe with—with—a friend, and they +both knew a lot of history—say, they both knew a lot about Guy Fawkes (he +was the guy that tried to blow up the English Parliament), and then when they +were there in London they could almost think they saw him, and they could go +round together and look at Shelley’s window—he was a poet at +Oxford—Oh, it would be great with a—with a friend.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, wouldn’t it?… I wanted to work in the book department one +time. It’s so nice your being—” +</p> + +<p> +“Ready for Five Hundred?” bellowed Tom Poppins in the hall below. +“Ready partner—you, Wrenn?” +</p> + +<p> +Tom was to initiate Mr. Wrenn into the game, playing with him against Mrs. Arty +and Miss Mary Proudfoot. +</p> + +<p> +Mrs. Arty sounded the occasion’s pitch of high merriment by delivering +from the doorway the sacred old saying, “Well, the ladies against the +men, eh?” +</p> + +<p> +A general grunt that might be spelled “Hmmmmhm” assented. +</p> + +<p> +“I’m a good suffragette,” she added. “Watch us squat +the men, Mary.” +</p> + +<p> +“Like to smash windows? Let’s see—it’s red fours, black +fives up?” remarked Tom, as he prepared the pack of cards for playing. +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, I would! It makes me so tired,” asseverated Mrs. Arty, +“to think of the old goats that men put up for candidates when they +<i>know</i> they’re solemn old fools! I’d just like to get out and +vote my head off.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, I think the woman’s place is in the home,” sniffed +Miss Proudfoot, decisively, tucking away a doily she was finishing for the +Women’s Exchange and jabbing at her bangs. +</p> + +<p> +They settled themselves about the glowing, glancing, glittering, golden-oak +center-table. Miss Proudfoot shuffled sternly. Mr. Wrenn sat still and +frightened, like a shipwrecked professor on a raft with two gamblers and a +press-agent, though Nelly was smiling encouragingly at him from the couch where +she had started her embroidery—a large Christmas lamp mat for the wife of +the Presbyterian pastor at Upton’s Grove. +</p> + +<p> +“Don’t you wish your little friend Horatio Hood Teddem was here to +play with you?” remarked Tom. +</p> + +<p> +“I <i>do</i> not,” declared Mrs. Arty. “Still, there was one +thing about Horatio. I never had to look up his account to find out how much he +owed me. He stopped calling me, Little Buttercup, when he owed me ten dollars, +and he even stopped slamming the front door when he got up to twenty. O Mr. +Wrenn, did I ever tell you about the time I asked him if he wanted to have +Annie sweep—” +</p> + +<p> +“Gerty!” protested Miss Proudfoot, while Nelly, on the couch, +ejaculated mechanically, “That story!” but Mrs. Arty chuckled +fatly, and continued: +</p> + +<p> +“I asked him if he wanted me to have Annie sweep his nightshirt when she +swept his room. He changed it next day.” +</p> + +<p> +“Your bid, Mr. Poppins, “said Miss Proudfoot, severely. +</p> + +<p> +“First, I want to tell Wrenn how to play. You see, Wrenn, here’s +the schedule. We play Avondale Schedule, you know.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh yes,” said Mr. Wrenn, timorously…. He had once heard of +Carbondale—in New Jersey or Pennsylvania or somewhere—but that +didn’t seem to help much. +</p> + +<p> +“Well, you see, you either make or go back,” continued Tom. +“Plus and minus, you know. Joker is high, then right bower, left, and +ace. Then—uh—let’s see; high bid takes the cat—widdie, +you know—and discards. Ten tricks. Follow suit like whist, of course. I +guess that’s all—that ought to give you the hang of it, anyway. I +bid six on no trump.” +</p> + +<p> +As Tom Poppins finished these instructions, given in the card-player’s +rapid don’t-ask-me-any-more-fool-questions manner, Mr. Wrenn felt that he +was choking. He craned up his neck, trying to ease his stiff collar. So, then, +he was a failure, a social outcast already. +</p> + +<p> +So, then, he couldn’t learn Five Hundred! And he had been very proud of +knowing one card from another perfectly, having played a number of games of +two-handed poker with Tim on the cattle-boat. But what the dickens did +“left—cat—follow suit” mean? +</p> + +<p> +And to fail with Nelly watching him! He pulled at his collar again. +</p> + +<p> +Thus he reflected while Mrs. Arty and Tom were carrying on the following +brilliant but cryptic society-dialogue: +</p> + +<p> +<i>Mrs. Arty:</i> Well, I don’t know. +</p> + +<p> +<i>Tom:</i> Not failure, but low bid is crime, little one. +</p> + +<p> +<i>Mrs. Arty:</i> Mary, shall I make— +</p> + +<p> +<i>Tom:</i> Hey! No talking ’cross table! +</p> + +<p> +<i>Mrs. Arty:</i> Um—let—me—see. +</p> + +<p> +<i>Tom:</i> Bid up, bid up! Bid a little seven on hearts? +</p> + +<p> +<i>Mrs. Arty:</i> Just for that I <i>will</i> bid seven on hearts, smarty! +</p> + +<p> +<i>Tom:</i> Oh, how we will squat you!… What you bidding, Wrenn? +</p> + +<p> +Behind Mr. Wrenn, Nelly Croubel whispered to him: “Bid seven on no suit. +You’ve got the joker.” Her delicate forefinger, its nail shining, +was pointing at a curious card in his hand. +</p> + +<p> +“Seven nosut,” he mumbled. +</p> + +<p> +“Eight hearts,” snapped Miss Proudfoot. +</p> + +<p> +Nelly drew up a chair behind Mr. Wrenn’s. He listened to her soft +explanations with the desperate respect and affection which a green subaltern +would give to a general in battle. +</p> + +<p> +Tom and he won the hand. He glanced back at Nelly with awe, then clutched his +new hand, fearfully, dizzily, staring at it as though it might conceal one of +those malevolent deceivers of which Nelly had just warned him—a left +bower. +</p> + +<p> +“Good! Spades—see,” said Nelly. +</p> + +<p> +Fifteen minutes later Mr. Wrenn felt that Tom was hoping he would lead a club. +He played one, and the whole table said: “That’s right. +Fine!” +</p> + +<p> +On his shoulder he felt a light tap, and he blushed like a sunset as he peeped +back at Nelly. +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +Mr. Wrenn, the society light, was Our Mr. Wrenn of the Souvenir Company all +this time. Indeed, at present he intended to keep on taking The Job seriously +until that most mistily distant time, which we all await, “when something +turns up.” His fondling of the Southern merchants was showing such +results that he had grown from an interest in whatever papers were on his desk +to a belief in the divine necessity of The Job as a whole. Not now, as of old, +did he keep the personal letters in his desk tied up, ready for a sudden +departure for Vienna or Kamchatka. Also, he wished to earn much more money for +his new career of luxury. Mr. Guilfogle had assured him that there might be +chances ahead—business had been prospering, two new road salesmen and a +city-trade man had been added to the staff, and whereas the firm had formerly +been jobbers only, buying their novelties from manufacturers, now they were +having printed for them their own Lotsa-Snap Cardboard Office Mottoes, which +were making a big hit with the trade. +</p> + +<p> +Through his friend Rabin, the salesman, Mr. Wrenn got better acquainted with +two great men—Mr. L. J. Glover, the purchasing agent of the Souvenir +Company, and John Hensen, the newly engaged head of motto manufacturing. He +“wanted to get onto all the different lines of the business so’s he +could step right in anywhere”; and from these men he learned the valuable +secrets of business wherewith the marts of trade build up prosperity for all of +us: how to seat a selling agent facing the light, so you can see his face +better than he can see yours. How much ahead of time to telephone the +motto-printer that “we’ve simply got to have proof this afternoon; +what’s the matter with you, down there? Don’t you want our business +any more?” He also learned something of the various kinds of cardboard +and ink-well glass, though these, of course, were merely matters of knowledge, +not of brilliant business tactics, and far less important than what Tom Poppins +and Rabin called “handing out a snappy line of talk.” +</p> + +<p> +“Say, you’re getting quite chummy lately—reg’lar +society leader,” Rabin informed him. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn’s answer was in itself a proof of the soundness of +Rabin’s observation: +</p> + +<p> +“Sure—I’m going to borrow some money from you fellows. Got to +make an impression, see?” +</p> + +<p> +A few hours after this commendation came Istra’s second letter: +</p> + +<p class="letter"> +Mouse dear, I’m so glad to hear about the simpatico boarding- house. Yes +indeed I would like to hear about the people in it. And you are reading +history? That’s good. I’m getting sick of Paris and some day +I’m going to stop an absinthe on the boulevard and slap its face to show +I’m a sturdy moving-picture Western Amurrican and then leap to saddle and +pursue the bandit. I’m working like the devil but what’s the use. +That is I mean unless one is doing the job well, as I’m glad you are. My +Dear, keep it up. You know I want you to be <i>real</i> whatever you are. I +didn’t mean to preach but you know I hate people who aren’t +real—that’s why I haven’t much of a flair for myself. <i>Au +récrire</i>, +</p> + +<p class="right"> +I. N. +</p> + +<p> +After he had read her letter for the third time he was horribly shocked and +regarded himself as a traitor, because he found that he was only pretending to +be enjoyably excited over it…. It seemed so detached from himself. +“Flair”—“<i>au recrire</i>.” Now, what did those +mean? And Istra was always so discontented. “What ’d she do if she +had to be on the job like Nelly?… Oh, Istra <i>is</i> wonderful. +But—gee!—I dunno—” +</p> + +<p> +And when he who has valorously loved says “But—gee!—I +dunno—” love flees in panic. +</p> + +<p> +He walked home thoughtfully. +</p> + +<p> +After dinner he said abruptly to Nelly, “I had a letter from Paris +to-day.” +</p> + +<p> +“Honestly? Who is she?” +</p> + +<p> +“G-g-g-g—” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, it’s always a she.” +</p> + +<p> +“Why—uh—it <i>is</i> from a girl. I started to tell you about +her one day. She’s an artist, and once we took a long tramp in the +country. I met her—she was staying at the same place as I was in London. +But—oh, gee! I dunno; she’s so blame literary. She <i>is</i> a +<i>fine</i> person—Do you think you’d like a girl like that?” +</p> + +<p> +“Maybe I would.” +</p> + +<p> +“If she was a man?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, yes-s! Artists are so romantic.” +</p> + +<p> +“But they ain’t on the job more ’n half the time,” he +said, jealously. +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, that’s <i>so</i>.” +</p> + +<p> +His hand stole secretly, craftily skirting a cushion, to touch hers—which +she withdrew, laughing: +</p> + +<p> +“Hump-a! You go hold your artist’s hand!” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, Miss Nelly! When I <i>told</i> you about her <i>myself!</i>” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh yes, of course.” +</p> + +<p> +She was contrite, and they played Five Hundred animatedly all evening. +</p> + +</div><!--end chapter--> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2><a name="chap16"></a>CHAPTER XVI<br/> +HE BECOMES MILDLY RELIGIOUS AND HIGHLY LITERARY</h2> + +<p> +The hero of the one-act play at Hammerstein’s Victoria vaudeville theater +on that December evening was, it appeared, a wealthy young mine-owner in +disguise. He was working for the “fake mine promoter” because he +loved the promoter’s daughter with a love that passed all understanding +except that of the girls in the gallery. When the postal authorities were about +to arrest the promoter our young hero saved him by giving him a real mine, and +the ensuing kiss of the daughter ended the suspense in which Mr. Wrenn and +Nelly, Mrs. Arty and Tom had watched the play from the sixth row of the +balcony. +</p> + +<p> +Sighing happily, Nelly cried to the group: “Wasn’t that grand? I +got so excited! Wasn’t that young miner a dear?” +</p> + +<p> +“Awfully nice,” said Mr. Wrenn. “And, gee! wasn’t that +great, that office scene—with that safe and the rest of the +stuff—just like you was in a real office. But, say, they wouldn’t +have a copying-press in an office like that; those fake mine promoters send out +such swell letters; they’d use carbon copies and not muss the letters all +up.” +</p> + +<p> +“By gosh, that’s right!” and Tom nodded his chin toward his +right shoulder in approval. Nelly cried, “That’s so; they +would”; while Mrs. Arty, not knowing what a copying-press was, appeared +highly commendatory, and said nothing at all. +</p> + +<p> +During the moving pictures that followed, Mr. Wrenn felt proudly that he was +taken seriously, though he had known them but little over a month. He followed +up his conversational advantage by leading the chorus in wondering, +“which one of them two actors the heroine was married to?” and +“how much a week they get for acting in that thing?” It was Tom who +invited them to Miggleton’s for coffee and fried oysters. Mr. Wrenn was +silent for a while. But as they were stamping through the rivulets of +wheel-tracks that crisscrossed on a slushy street-crossing Mr. Wrenn regained +his advantage by crying, “Say, don’t you think that play ’d +have been better if the promoter ’d had an awful grouch on the young +miner and ’d had to crawfish when the miner saved him?” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, yes; it would!” Nelly glowed at him. +</p> + +<p> +“Wouldn’t wonder if it would,” agreed Tom, kicking the +December slush off his feet and patting Mr. Wrenn’s back. +</p> + +<p> +“Well, look here,” said Mr. Wrenn, as they left Broadway, with its +crowds betokening the approach of Christmas, and stamped to the quieter side of +Forty-second, “why wouldn’t this make a slick play: say +there’s an awfully rich old guy; say he’s a railway president or +something, d’ you see? Well, he’s got a secretary there in the +office—on the stage, see? The scene is his office. Well, this +guy’s—the rich old guy’s—daughter comes in and says +she’s married to a poor man and she won’t tell his name, but she +wants some money from her dad. You see, her dad’s been planning for her +to marry a marquise or some kind of a lord, and he’s sore as can be, and +he won’t listen to her, and he just cusses her out something fierce, see? +Course he doesn’t really cuss, but he’s awful sore; and she tells +him didn’t he marry her mother when he was a poor young man; but he +won’t listen. Then the secretary butts in—my idea is he’s +been kind of keeping in the background, see—and <i>he’s</i> the +daughter’s husband all the while, see? and he tells the old codger how +he’s got some of his—some of the old fellow’s—papers +that give it away how he done something that was crooked—some kind of +deal—rebates and stuff, see how I mean?—and the secretary’s +going to spring this stuff on the newspapers if the old man don’t come +through and forgive them; so of course the president has to forgive them, +see?” +</p> + +<p> +“You mean the secretary was the daughter’s husband all along, and +he heard what the president said right there?” Nelly panted, stopping +outside Miggleton’s, in the light from the oyster-filled window. +</p> + +<p> +“Yes; and he heard it all.” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, I think that’s just a <i>fine</i> idea,” declared +Nelly, as they entered the restaurant. Though her little manner of dignity and +even restraint was evident as ever, she seemed keenly joyous over his genius. +</p> + +<p> +“Say, that’s a corking idea for a play, Wrenn,” exclaimed +Tom, at their table, gallantly removing the ladies’ wraps. +</p> + +<p> +“It surely is,” agreed Mrs. Arty. +</p> + +<p> +“Why don’t you write it?” asked Nelly. +</p> + +<p> +“Aw—I couldn’t write it!” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, sure you could, Bill,” insisted Tom. “Straight; you +ought to write it. (Hey, waiter! Four fries and coffee!) You ought to write it. +Why, it’s a wonder; it ’d make a dev— ’Scuse me, +ladies. It’d make a howling hit. You might make a lot of money out of +it.” +</p> + +<p> +The renewed warmth of their wet feet on the red-tile floor, the scent of fried +oysters, the din of “Any Little Girl” on the piano, these added +color to this moment of Mr. Wrenn’s great resolve. The four stared at one +another excitedly. Mr. Wrenn’s eyelids fluttered. Tom brought his hand +down on the table with a soft flat “plob” and declared: “Say, +there might be a lot of money in it. Why, I’ve heard that Harry +Smith—writes the words for these musical comedies—makes a +<i>mint</i> of money.” +</p> + +<p> +“Mr. Poppins ought to help you in it—he’s seen such a lot of +plays,” Mrs. Arty anxiously advised. +</p> + +<p> +“That’s a good idea,” said Mr. Wrenn. It had, apparently, +been ordained that he was to write it. They were now settling important +details. So when Nelly cried, “I think it’s just a fine idea; I +knew you had lots of imagination,” Tom interrupted her with: +</p> + +<p> +“No; you write it, Bill. I’ll help you all I can, of course…. Tell +you what you ought to do: get hold of Teddem—he’s had a lot of +stage experience; he’d help you about seeing the managers. That ’d +be the hard part—you can write it, all right, but you’d have to get +next to the guys on the inside, and Teddem—Say, you cer<i>tain</i>ly +ought to write this thing, Bill. Might make a lot of money.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, a lot!” breathed Nelly. +</p> + +<p> +“Heard about a fellow,” continued Tom—” fellow named +Gene Wolf, I think it was—that was so broke he was sleeping in Bryant +Park, and he made a <i>hundred thousand dollars</i> on his first play—or, +no; tell you how it was: he sold it outright for ten thousand—something +like that, anyway. I got that right from a fellow that’s met him.” +</p> + +<p> +“Still, an author’s got to go to college and stuff like +that.” Mr. Wrenn spoke as though he would be pleased to have the +objection overruled at once, which it was with a universal: +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, rats!” +</p> + +<p> +Crunching oysters in a brown jacket of flour, whose every lump was a crisp +delight, hearing his genius lauded and himself called Bill thrice in a +quarter-hour, Mr. Wrenn was beatified. He asked the waiter for some paper, and +while the four hotly discussed things which “it would be slick to have +the president’s daughter do” he drew up a list of characters on a +sheet of paper he still keeps. It is headed, “Miggleton’s +Forty-second Street Branch.” At the bottom appear numerous scribblings of +the name Nelly. +</p> + +<div class="fig" style="width:100%;"> +<img src="images/img01.jpg" width="408" height="600" alt="[Illustration]" /> +</div> + +<p> +“I think I’ll call the heroine ‘Nelly,’” he +mused. +</p> + +<p> +Nelly Croubel blushed. Mrs. Arty and Tom glanced at each other. Mr. Wrenn +realized that he had, even at this moment of social triumph, “made a +break.” +</p> + +<p> +He said, hastily; “I always liked that name. I—I had an aunt named +that!” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh—” started Nelly. +</p> + +<p> +“She was fine to me when I was a kid, “Mr. Wrenn added, trying to +remember whether it was right to lie when in such need. +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, it’s a horrid name,” declared Nelly. “Why +don’t you call her something nice, like +Hazel—or—oh—Dolores.” +</p> + +<p> +“Nope; Nelly’s an elegant name—an <i>elegant</i> name.” +</p> + +<p> +He walked with Nelly behind the others, along Forty-second Street. To the +outsider’s eye he was a small respectable clerk, slightly stooped, with a +polite mustache and the dignity that comes from knowing well a narrow world; +wearing an overcoat too light for winter; too busily edging out of the way of +people and guiding the nice girl beside him into clear spaces by diffidently +touching her elbow, too pettily busy to cast a glance out of the crowd and spy +the passing poet or king, or the iron night sky. He was as undistinguishable a +bit of the evening street life as any of the file of street-cars slashing +through the wet snow. Yet, he was the chivalrous squire to the greatest lady of +all his realm; he was a society author, and a man of great prospective wealth +and power over mankind! +</p> + +<p> +“Say, we’ll have the grandest dinner you ever saw if I get away +with the play,” he was saying. “Will you come, Miss Nelly?” +</p> + +<p> +“Indeed I will! Oh, you sha’n’t leave me out! Wasn’t I +there when—” +</p> + +<p> +“Indeed you were! Oh, we’ll have a reg’lar feast at the +Astor—artichokes and truffles and all sorts of stuff…. Would—would +you like it if I sold the play?” +</p> + +<p> +“<i>Course</i> I would, silly!” +</p> + +<p> +“I’d buy the business and make Rabin manager—the Souvenir +Company. +</p> + +<p> +So he came to relate all those intimacies of The Job; and he was overwhelmed at +the ease with which she “got onto old Goglefogle.” +</p> + +<p> +His preparations for writing the play were elaborate. +</p> + +<p> +He paced Tom’s room till twelve-thirty, consulting as to whether he had +to plan the stage-setting; smoking cigarettes in attitudes on chair arms. Next +morning in the office he made numerous plans of the setting on waste +half-sheets of paper. At noon he was telephoning at Tom regarding the question +of whether there ought to be one desk or two on the stage. +</p> + +<p> +He skipped the evening meal at Mrs. Arty’s, dining with literary +pensiveness at the Armenian, for he had subtle problems to meditate. He bought +a dollar fountain-pen, which had large gold-like bands and a rather scratchy +pen-point, and a box of fairly large sheets of paper. Pressing his literary +impedimenta tenderly under his arm, he attended four moving-picture and +vaudeville theaters. By eleven he had seen three more one-act plays and a +dramatic playlet. +</p> + +<p> +He slipped by the parlor door at Mrs. Arty’s. +</p> + +<p> +His room was quiet. The lamplight on the delicately green walls was like that +of a regular author’s den, he was quite sure. He happily tested the +fountain-pen by writing the names Nelly and William Wrenn on a bit of +wrapping-paper (which he guiltily burned in an ash-tray); washed his face with +water which he let run for a minute to cool; sat down before his table with a +grunt of content; went back and washed his hands; fiercely threw off the +bourgeois encumbrances of coat and collar; sat down again; got up to straighten +a picture; picked up his pen; laid it down, and glowed as he thought of Nelly, +slumbering there, near at hand, her exquisite cheek nestling silkenly against +her arm, perhaps, and her white dreams— +</p> + +<p> +Suddenly he roared at himself, “Get on the job there, will yuh?” He +picked up the pen and wrote: +</p> + +<p class="center"> +THE MILLIONAIRE’S DAUGHTER<br/> +A ONE ACT DRAMATIC PLAYLET<br/> +by<br/> +WILLIAM WRENN<br/> +<br/> +CHARACTERS +</p> + +<p class="letter"> +<i>John Warrington</i>, a railway president; quite rich.<br/> +<i>Nelly Warrington</i>, Mr. Warrington’s daughter.<br/> +<i>Reginald Thorne</i>, his secretary. +</p> + +<p> +He was jubilant. His pen whined at top speed, scattering a shower of tiny drops +of ink. +</p> + +<p class="letter"> +<i>Stage Scene: An office. Very expensive. Mr. Warrington and Mr. Thorne are +sitting there. Miss Warrington comes in. She says:</i> +</p> + +<p> +He stopped. He thought. He held his head. He went over to the stationary bowl +and soaked his hair with water. He lay on the bed and kicked his heels, slowly +and gravely smoothing his mustache. Fifty minutes later he gave a portentous +groan and went to bed. +</p> + +<p> +He hadn’t been able to think of what Miss Warrington says beyond “I +have come to tell you that I am married, papa,” and that didn’t +sound just right; not for a first line it didn’t, anyway. +</p> + +<p> +At dinner next night—Saturday—Tom was rather inclined to make +references to “our author,” and to remark: “Well, I know +where somebody was last night, but of course I won’t tell. Say, them +authors are a wild lot.” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn, who had permitted the teasing of even Tim, the hatter, +“wasn’t going to stand for no kidding from nobody—not when +Nelly was there,” and he called for a glass of water with the air of a +Harvard assistant professor forced to eat in a lunch-wagon and slapped on the +back by the cook. +</p> + +<p> +Nelly soothed him. “The play <i>is</i> going well, <i>isn’t</i> +it?” +</p> + +<p> +When he had, with a detached grandeur of which he was immediately ashamed, +vouchsafed that he was already “getting right down to brass tacks on +it,” that he had already investigated four more plays and begun the +actual writing, every one looked awed and asked him assorted questions. +</p> + +<p> +At nine-thirty that evening he combed and tightly brushed his hair, which he +had been pawing angrily for an hour and a half, went down the hall to +Nelly’s hall bedroom, and knocked with: “It’s Mr. Wrenn. May +I ask you something about the play?” +</p> + +<p> +“Just a moment,” he heard her say. +</p> + +<p> +He waited, panting softly, his lips apart. This was to be the first time he had +ever seen Nelly’s room. She opened the door part way, smiling shyly, +timidly, holding her pale-blue dressing-gown close. The pale blueness was a +modestly brilliant spot against the whiteness of the room—white bureau, +hung with dance programs and a yellow Upton’s Grove High School banner, +white tiny rocker, pale-yellow matting, white-and-silver wall-paper, and a +glimpse of a white soft bed. +</p> + +<p> +He was dizzy with the exaltation of that purity, but he got himself to say: +</p> + +<p> +“I’m kind of stuck on the first part of the play, Miss Nelly. +Please tell me how you think the heroine would speak to her dad. Would she call +him ‘papa’ or ‘sir,’ do you think?” +</p> + +<p> +“Why—let me see—” +</p> + +<p> +“They’re such awful high society—” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, that’s so. Why, I should think she’d say +‘sir.’ Maybe oh, what was it I heard in a play at the Academy of +Music? ‘Father, I have come back to you!’” +</p> + +<p> +“Sa-a-ay, that’s a fine line! That’ll get the crowd going +right from the first…. I <i>told</i> you you’d help me a lot.” +</p> + +<p> +“I’m awfully glad if I <i>have</i> helped you,” she said, +earnestly. Good night—and good, “awfully glad, but luck with the +play. Good night.” +</p> + +<p> +“Good night. Thank you a lot, Miss Nelly. Church in the morning, +remember! Good night.” +</p> + +<p> +“Good night.” +</p> + +<p> +As it is well known that all playwrights labor with toy theaters before them +for working models, Mr. Wrenn ran to earth a fine unbroken pasteboard box in +which a ninety-eight-cent alarm-clock had recently arrived. He went out for +some glue and three small corks. Setting up his box stage, he glued a pill-box +and a match-box on the floor—the side of the box it had always been till +now—and there he had the mahogany desks. He thrust three matches into the +corks, and behold three graceful actors—graceful for corks, at least. +There was fascination in having them enter, through holes punched in the back +of the box, frisk up to their desks and deliver magic emotional speeches that +would cause any audience to weep; speeches regarding which he knew everything +but the words; a detail of which he was still quite ignorant after half an hour +of playing with his marionettes. +</p> + +<p> +Before he went despairingly to bed that Saturday night he had added to his +manuscript: +</p> + +<p class="letter"> +<i>Mr. Thorne</i> says: Here are the papers, sir. As a great railway president +you should— +</p> + +<p> +The rest of that was to be filled in later. How the dickens could he let the +public know how truly great his president was? +</p> + +<p class="center"> +(<i>Daughter, Miss Nelly, comes in.</i>) +</p> + +<p class="letter"> +<i>Miss Nelly:</i> Father, I have come back to you, sir.<br/> +<i>Mr. Warrington:</i> My Daughter!<br/> +<i>Nelly:</i> Father, I have something to tell you; something— +</p> + +<p> +Breakfast at Mrs. Arty’s was always an inspiration. In contrast to the +lonely dingy meal at the Hustler Dairy Lunch of his Zapp days, he sat next to a +trimly shirtwaisted Nelly, fresh and enthusiastic after nine hours’ +sleep. So much for ordinary days. But Sunday morning—that was paradise! +The oil-stove glowed and purred like a large tin pussy cat; it toasted their +legs into dreamy comfort, while they methodically stuffed themselves with toast +and waffles and coffee. Nelly and he always felt gently superior to Tom +Poppins, who would be a-sleeping late, as they talked of the joy of not having +to go to the office, of approaching Christmas, and of the superiority of +Upton’s Grove and Parthenon. +</p> + +<p> +This morning was to be Mr. Wrenn’s first attendance at church with Nelly. +The previous time they had planned to go, Mr. Wrenn had spent Sunday morning in +unreligious fervor at the Chelsea Dental Parlors with a young man in a white +jacket instead of at church with Nelly. +</p> + +<p> +This was also the first time that he had attended a church service in nine +years, except for mass at St. Patrick’s, which he regarded not as church, +but as beauty. He felt tremendously reformed, set upon new paths of virtue and +achievement. He thought slightingly of those lonely bachelors, Morton and +Mittyford, Ph. D. They just didn’t know what it meant to a fellow to be +going to church with a girl like Miss Nelly, he reflected, as he re brushed his +hair after breakfast. +</p> + +<p> +He walked proudly beside her, and made much of the gentility of entering the +church, as one of the well-to-do and intensely bathed congregation. He even +bowed to an almost painfully washed and brushed young usher with gold-rimmed +eye-glasses. He thought scornfully of his salad days, when he had bowed to the +Brass-button Man at the Nickelorion. +</p> + +<p> +The church interior was as comfortable as Sunday-morning toast and +marmalade—half a block of red carpet in the aisles; shiny solid-oak pews, +gorgeous stained-glass windows, and a general polite creaking of ladies’ +best stays and gentlemen’s stiff shirt-bosoms, and an odor of the best +cologne and moth-balls. +</p> + +<p> +It lacked but six days till Christmas. Mr. Wrenn’s heart was a little +garden, and his eyes were moist, and he peeped tenderly at Nelly as he saw the +holly and ivy and the frosted Christmas mottoes, “Peace on Earth, Good +Will to Men,” and the rest, that brightened the spaces between windows. +</p> + +<p> +Christmas—happy homes—laughter…. Since, as a boy, he had attended +the Christmas festivities of the Old Church Sunday-school at Parthenon, and got +highly colored candy in a net bag, his holidays had been celebrated by buying +himself plum pudding at lonely Christmas dinners at large cheap restaurants, +where there was no one to wish him “Merry Christmas” except his +waiter, whom he would quite probably never see again, nor ever wish to see. +</p> + +<p> +But this Christmas—he surprised himself and Nelly suddenly by hotly +thrusting out his hand and touching her sleeve with the searching finger-tips +of a child comforted from night fears. +</p> + +<p> +During the sermon he had an idea. What was it Nelly had told him about +“Peter Pan”? Oh yes; somebody in it had said “Do you believe +in fairies?” <i>Say</i>, why wouldn’t it be great to have the +millionaire’s daughter say to her father, “Do you believe in +love?” +</p> + +<p> +“Gee, <i>I</i> believe in love!” he yearned to himself, as he felt +Nelly’s arm unconsciously touch his. +</p> + +<p> +Tom Poppins had Horatio Hood Teddem in that afternoon for a hot toddy. Horatio +looked very boyish, very confiding, and borrowed five dollars from Mr. Wrenn +almost painlessly, so absorbed was Mr. Wrenn in learning from Horatio how to +sell a play. To know the address of the firm of Wendelbaum & Schirtz, +play-brokers, located in a Broadway theater building, seemed next door to +knowing a Broadway manager. +</p> + +<p> +When Horatio had gone Tom presented an idea which he had ponderously conceived +during his Sunday noon-hour at the cigar-store. +</p> + +<p> +“Why not have three of us—say me and you and Mrs. Arty—talk +the play, just like we was acting it?” +</p> + +<p> +He enthusiastically forced the plan on Mr. Wrenn. He pounded down-stairs and +brought up Mrs. Arty. He dashed about the room, shouting directions. He dragged +out his bureau for the railroad-president’s desk, and a table for the +secretary, and, after some consideration and much rubbing of his chin, with two +slams and a bang he converted his hard green Morris-chair into an office safe. +</p> + +<p> +The play was on. Mr. T. Poppins, in the role of the president, entered, with a +stern high expression on his face, threw a “Good morning, Thorne,” +at Wrenn, his secretary, and peeled off his gloves. (Mr. Wrenn noted the +gloves; they were a Touch.) +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn approached diffidently, his face expressionless, lest Mrs. Arty laugh +at him. “Here— +</p> + +<p> +“Say, what do you think would be a good way for the secretary to tell the +crowd that the other guy is the president? Say, how about this: ‘The +vice-president of the railway would like to have you sign these, sir, as +president’?” +</p> + +<p> +“That’s fine!” exclaimed Mrs. Arty, whose satin dress was +carefully spread over her swelling knees, as she sat in the oak rocker, like a +cheerful bronze monument to Sunday propriety. “But don’t you think +he’d say, ‘when it’s convenient to you, sir’?” +</p> + +<p> +“Gee, that’s dandy!” +</p> + +<p> +The play was on. +</p> + +<p> +It ended at seven. Mr. Wrenn took but fifteen minutes for Sunday supper, and +wrote till one of the morning, finishing the first draft of his manuscript. +</p> + +<p> +Revision was delightful, for it demanded many conferences with Nelly, sitting +at the parlor table, with shoulders confidentially touching. They were the more +intimate because Tom had invited Mr. Wrenn, Nelly, and Mrs. Arty to the Grand +Christmas Eve Ball of the Cigar-Makers’ Union at Melpomene Hall. Nelly +asked of Mr. Wrenn, almost as urgently as of Mrs. Arty, whether she should wear +her new white mull or her older rose-colored China silk. +</p> + +<p> +Two days before Christmas he timidly turned over the play for typing to a +haughty public stenographer who looked like Lee Theresa Zapp. She yawned at him +when he begged her to be careful of the manuscript. The gloriously pink-bound +and red-underlined typed manuscript of the play was mailed to Messrs. +Wendelbaum & Schirtz, play-brokers, at 6.15 P.M., Christmas Eve. +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +The four walked down Sixth Avenue to the Cigar-Makers’ Ball. They made an +Indian file through the Christmas shopping crowds, and stopped frequently and +noisily before the street-booths’ glamour of tinsel and teddy-bears. They +shrieked all with one rotund mad laughter as Tom Poppins capered over and +bought for seven cents a pink bisque doll, which he pinned to the lapel of his +plaid overcoat. They drank hot chocolate at the Olympic Confectionery Store, +pretending to each other that they were shivering with cold. +</p> + +<p> +It was here that Nelly reached up and patted Mr. Wrenn’s pale-blue tie +into better lines. In her hair was the scent which he had come to identify as +hers. Her white furs brushed against his overcoat. +</p> + +<p> +The cigar-makers, with seven of them in full evening-dress and two in +dinner-coats, were already dancing on the waxy floor of Melpomene Hall when +they arrived. A full orchestra was pounding and scraping itself into an +hysteria of merriment on the platform under the red stucco-fronted balcony, and +at the bar behind the balcony there was a spirit of beer and revelry by night. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn embarrassedly passed large groups of pretty girls. He felt very light +and insecure in his new gun-metal-finish pumps now that he had taken off his +rubbers and essayed the slippery floor. He tried desperately not to use his +handkerchief too conspicuously, though he had a cold. +</p> + +<p> +It was not till the choosing of partners for the next dance, when Tom Poppins +stood up beside Nelly, their arms swaying a little, their feet tapping, that +Mr. Wrenn quite got the fact that he could not dance. +</p> + +<p> +He had casually said to the others, a week before, that he knew only the square +dances which, as a boy, he had learned at parties at Parthenon. But they had +reassured him: “Oh, come on—we’ll teach you how to dance at +the ball—it won’t be formal. Besides, we’ll give you some +lessons before we go.” Playwriting and playing Five Hundred had prevented +their giving him the lessons. So he now sat terrified as a two-step began and +he saw what seemed to be thousands of glittering youths and maidens whirling +deftly in a most involved course, getting themselves past each other in a way +which he was sure he could never imitate. The orchestra yearned over music as +rich and smooth as milk chocolate, which made him intensely lonely for Nelly, +though she was only across the room from him. +</p> + +<p> +Tom Poppins immediately introduced Nelly to a facetious cigar salesman, who +introduced her to three of the beaux in evening clothes, while Tom led out Mrs. +Arty. Mr. Wrenn, sitting in a row of persons who were not at all interested in +his sorrows, glowered out across the hall, and wished, oh! so bitterly, to flee +home. Nelly came up, glowing, laughing, with black-mustached and +pearl-waistcoated men, and introduced him to them, but he glanced at them +disapprovingly; and always she was carried off to dance again. +</p> + +<p> +She found and hopefully introduced to Mr. Wrenn a wallflower who came from +Yonkers and had never heard of Tom Poppins or aeroplanes or Oxford or any other +topic upon which Mr. Wrenn uneasily tried to discourse as he watched Nelly +waltz and smile up at her partners. Presently the two sat silent. The +wallflower excused herself and went back to her mama from Yonkers. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn sat sulking, hating his friends for having brought him, hating the +sweetness of Nelly Croubel, and saying to himself, +“Oh—<i>sure</i>—she dances with all those other men—me, +I’m only the poor fool that talks to her when she’s tired and tries +to cheer her up.” +</p> + +<p> +He did not answer when Tom came and told him a new story he had just heard in +the barroom. +</p> + +<p> +Once Nelly landed beside him and bubblingly insisted on his coming out and +trying to learn to dance. He brightened, but shyly remarked, “Oh no, I +don’t think I’d better.” Just then the blackest-mustached and +pearl-waistcoatedest of all the cigar salesmen came begging for a dance, and +she was gone, with only: “Now get up your courage. I’m going to +<i>make</i> you dance.” +</p> + +<p> +At the intermission he watched her cross the floor with the hateful cigar +salesman, slender in her tight crisp new white mull, flourishing her fan and +talking with happy rapidity. She sat down beside him. He said nothing; he still +stared out across the glassy floor. She peeped at him curiously several times, +and made a low tapping with her fan on the side of her chair. +</p> + +<p> +She sighed a little. Cautiously, but very casually, she said, +“Aren’t you going to take me out for some refreshments, Mr. +Wrenn?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh sure—I’m good enough to buy refreshments for her!” +he said to himself. +</p> + +<p> +Poor Mr. Wrenn; he had not gone to enough parties in Parthenon, and he +hadn’t gone to any in New York. At nearly forty he was just learning the +drab sulkiness and churlishness and black jealousy of the lover…. To her: +“Why didn’t you go out with that guy with the black +mustache?” He still stared straight ahead. +</p> + +<p> +She was big-eyed, a tear showing. “Why, Billy—” was all she +answered. +</p> + +<p> +He clenched his hands to keep from bursting out with all the pitiful tears +which were surging in his eyes. But he said nothing. +</p> + +<p> +“Billy, what—” +</p> + +<p> +He turned shyly around to her; his hand touched hers softly. +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, I’m a beast,” he said, rapidly, low, his undertone +trembling to her ears through the laughter of a group next to them. “I +didn’t mean that, but I was—I felt like such a mutt—not being +able to dance. Oh, Nelly, I’m awfully sorry. You know I didn’t +mean—<i>Come on!</i> Let’s go get something to eat!” +</p> + +<p> +As they consumed ice-cream, fudge, doughnuts, and chicken sandwiches at the +refreshment counter they were very intimate, resenting the presence of others. +Tom and Mrs. Arty joined them. Tom made Nelly light her first cigarette. Mr. +Wrenn admired the shy way in which, taking the tiniest of puffs, she kept +drawing out her cigarette with little pouts and nose wriggles and pretended +sneezes, but he felt a lofty gladness when she threw it away after a minute, +declaring that she’d never smoke again, and that she was going to make +all three of her companions stop smoking, “now that she knew how horrid +and sneezy it was, so there!” +</p> + +<p> +With what he intended to be deep subtlety Mr. Wrenn drew her away to the +barroom, and these two children, over two glasses of ginger-ale, looked their +innocent and rustic love so plainly that Mrs. Arty and Tom sneaked away. Nelly +cut out a dance, which she had promised to a cigar-maker, and started homeward +with Mr. Wrenn. +</p> + +<p> +“Let’s not take a car—I want some fresh air after that smoky +place,” she said. “But it <i>was</i> grand…. Let’s walk up +Fifth Avenue.” +</p> + +<p> +“Fine…. Tired, Nelly?” +</p> + +<p> +“A little.” +</p> + +<p> +He thought her voice somewhat chilly. +</p> + +<p> +“Nelly—I’m so sorry—I didn’t really have the +chance to tell you in there how sorry I was for the way I spoke to you. Gee! it +was fierce of me—but I felt—I couldn’t dance, +and—oh—” +</p> + +<p> +No answer. +</p> + +<p> +“And you did mind it, didn’t you?” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, I didn’t think you were so very nice about it—when +I’d tried so hard to have you have a good time—” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, Nelly, I’m so sorry—” +</p> + +<p> +There was tragedy in his voice. His shoulders, which he always tried to keep as +straight as though they were in a vise when he walked with her, were drooping. +</p> + +<p> +She touched his glove. “Oh don’t, Billy; it’s all right now. +I understand. Let’s forget—” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, you’re too good to me!” +</p> + +<p> +Silence. +</p> + +<p> +As they crossed Twenty-third on Fifth Avenue she took his arm. He squeezed her +hand. Suddenly the world was all young and beautiful and wonderful. It was the +first time in his life that he had ever walked thus, with the arm of a girl for +whom he cared cuddled in his. He glanced down at her cheap white furs. +Snowflakes, tremulous on the fur, were turned into diamond dust in the light +from a street-lamp which showed as well a tiny place where her collar had been +torn and mended ever so carefully. Then, in a millionth of a second, he who had +been a wanderer in the lonely gray regions of a detached man’s heart knew +the pity of love, all its emotion, and the infinite care for the beloved that +makes a man of a rusty sales-clerk. He lifted a face of adoration to the misty +wonder of the bare trees, whose tracery of twigs filled Madison Square; to the +Metropolitan Tower, with its vast upward stretch toward the ruddy sky of the +city’s winter night. All these mysteries he knew and sang. What he +<i>said</i> was: +</p> + +<p> +“Gee, those trees look like a reg’lar picture!… The Tower just kind +of fades away. Don’t it?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, it is pretty,” she said, doubtfully, but with a pressure of +his arm. +</p> + +<p> +Then they talked like a summer-time brook, planning that he was to buy a +Christmas bough of evergreen, which she would smuggle to breakfast in the +morning. Through their chatter persisted the new intimacy which had been born +in the pain of their misunderstanding. +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +On January 10th the manuscript of “The Millionaire’s +Daughter” was returned by play-brokers Wendelbaum & Schirtz with this +letter: +</p> + +<p class="letter"> +D<small>EAR</small> S<small>IR</small>,—We regret to say that we do not +find play available. We inclose our reader’s report on the same. Also +inclose bill for ten dollars for reading-fee, which kindly remit at early +convenience. +</p> + +<p> +He stood in the hall at Mrs. Arty’s just before dinner. He reread the +letter and slowly opened the reader’s report, which announced: +</p> + +<p class="letter"> +“Millionaire’s Daughter.” One-act vlle. Utterly impos. +Amateurish to the limit. Dialogue sounds like burlesque of Laura Jean Libbey. +Can it. +</p> + +<p> +Nelly was coming down-stairs. He handed her the letter and report, then tried +to stick out his jaw. She read them. Her hand slipped into his. He went quickly +toward the basement and made himself read the letter—though not the +report—to the tableful. He burned the manuscript of his play before going +to bed. The next morning he waded into The Job as he never had before. He was +gloomily certain that he would never get away from The Job. But he thought of +Nelly a hundred times a day and hoped that sometime, some spring night of a +burning moon, he might dare the great adventure and kiss her. Istra— +Theoretically, he remembered her as a great experience. But what nebulous +bodies these theories are! +</p> + +<p> +That slow but absolutely accurate Five-Hundred player, Mr. William Wrenn, known +as Billy, glanced triumphantly at Miss Proudfoot, who was his partner against +Mrs. Arty and James T. Duncan, the traveling-man, on that night of late +February. His was the last bid in the crucial hand of the rubber game. The +others waited respectfully. Confidently, he bid “Nine on no trump.” +</p> + +<p> +“Good Lord, Billl” exclaimed James T. Duncan. +</p> + +<p> +“I’ll make it.” +</p> + +<p> +And he did. He arose a victor. There was no uneasiness, but rather all the +social polish of Mrs. Arty’s at its best, in his manner, as he crossed to +Mrs. Ebbitt’s chair and asked: “How is Mr. Ebbitt to-night? Pretty +rheumatic?” Miss Proudfoot offered him a lime tablet, and he accepted it +judicially. “I believe these tablets are just about as good as Park & +Tilford’s,” he said, cocking his head. “Say, Dunk, I’ll +match you to see who rushes a growler of beer. Tom’ll be here pretty +soon—store ought to be closed by now. We’ll have some ready for +him.” +</p> + +<p> +“Right, Bill,” agreed James T. Duncan. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn lost. He departed, after secretively obtaining not one, but two +pitchers, in one of which he got a “pint of dark” and in the other +a surprise. He bawled upstairs to Nelly, “Come on down, Nelly, +can’t you? Got a growler of ice-cream soda for the ladies!” +</p> + +<p> +It is true that when Tom arrived and fell to conversational blows with James T. +Duncan over the merits of a Tom Collins Mr. Wrenn was not brilliant, for the +reason that he took Tom Collins to be a man instead of the drink he really is. +</p> + +<p> +Yet, as they went up-stairs Miss Proudfoot said to Nelly: “Mr. Wrenn is +quiet, but I do think in some ways he’s one of the nicest men I’ve +seen in the house for years. And he is so earnest. And I think he’ll make +a good pinochle player, besides Five Hundred.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes,” said Nelly. +</p> + +<p> +“I think he was a little shy at first…. <i>I</i> was always shy…. But he +likes us, and I like folks that like folks.” +</p> + +<p> +“<i>Yes!</i>” said Nelly. +</p> + +</div><!--end chapter--> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2><a name="chap17"></a>CHAPTER XVII<br/> +HE IS BLOWN BY THE WHIRLWIND</h2> + +<p class="poem"> +“He was blown by the whirlwind and followed a wandering flame through +perilous seas to a happy shore.”—<i>Quoth François.</i> +</p> + +<p> +On an April Monday evening, when a small moon passed shyly over the city and +the streets were filled with the sound of hurdy-gurdies and the spring cries of +dancing children, Mr. Wrenn pranced down to the basement dining-room early, for +Nelly Croubel would be down there talking to Mrs. Arty, and he gaily wanted to +make plans for a picnic to occur the coming Sunday. He had a shy unacknowledged +hope that he might kiss Nelly after such a picnic; he even had the notion that +he might some day—well, other fellows had been married; why not? +</p> + +<p> +Miss Mary Proudfoot was mending a rent in the current table-cloth with delicate +swift motions of her silvery-skinned hands. She informed him: “Mr. Duncan +will be back from his Southern trip in five days. We’ll have to have a +grand closing progressive Five Hundred tournament.” Mr. Wrenn was too +much absorbed in wondering whether Miss Proudfoot would make some of her +celebrated—and justly celebrated—minced-ham sandwiches for the +picnic to be much interested. He was not much more interested when she said, +“Mrs. Ferrard’s got a letter or something for you.” +</p> + +<p> +Then, as dinner began, Mrs. Ferrard rushed in dramatically and said, +“There’s a telegram for you, Mr. Wrenn!” +</p> + +<p> +Was it death? Whose death? The table panted, Mr. Wrenn with them…. That’s +what a telegram meant to them. +</p> + +<p> +Their eyes were like a circle of charging bayonets as he opened and read the +message—a ship’s wireless. +</p> + +<p class="letter"> +Meet me <i>Hesperida.</i>—I<small>STRA</small>. +</p> + +<p> +“It’s just—a—a business message,” he managed to +say, and splashed his soup. This was not the place to take the feelings out of +his thumping heart and examine them. +</p> + +<p> +Dinner was begun. Picnics were conversationally considered in all their more +important phases—historical, dietetical, and social. Mr. Wrenn talked +much and a little wildly. After dinner he galloped out to buy a paper. The S.S. +<i>Hesperiida</i> was due at ten next morning. +</p> + +<p> +It was an evening of frightened confusion. He tottered along Lexington Avenue +on a furtive walk. He knew only that he was very fond of Nelly, yet pantingly +eager to see Istra. He damned himself—“damned” is +literal—every other minute for a cad, a double-faced traitor, and all the +other horrifying things a man is likely to declare himself to be for making the +discovery that two women may be different and yet equally likable. And every +other minute he reveled in an adventurous gladness that he was going to see +Istra—actually, incredibly going to see her, just the next day! He +returned to find Nelly sitting on the steps of Mrs. Arty’s. +</p> + +<p> +“Hello.” +</p> + +<p> +“Hello.” +</p> + +<p> +Both good sound observations, and all they could say for a time, while Mr. +Wrenn examined the under side of the iron steps rail minutely. +</p> + +<p> +“Billy—was it something serious, the telegram?” +</p> + +<p> +“No, it was—Miss Nash, the artist I told you about, asked me to +meet her at the boat. I suppose she wants me to help her with her baggage and +the customs and all them things. She’s just coming from Paris.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh yes, I see.” +</p> + +<p> +So lacking in jealousy was Nelly that Mr. Wrenn was disappointed, though he +didn’t know why. It always hurts to have one’s thunderous tragedies +turn out realistic dialogues. +</p> + +<p> +“I wonder if you would like to meet her. She’s awful well educated, +but I dunno—maybe she’d strike you as kind of snobbish. But she +dresses I don’t think I ever seen anybody so elegant. In dressing, I +mean. Course”—hastily—“she’s got money, and so +she can afford to. But she’s—oh, awful nice, some ways. I hope you +like—I hope she won’t—” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, I sha’n’t mind if she’s a snob. Of course a lady +gets used to that, working in a department store,” she said, chillily; +then repented swiftly and begged: “Oh, I <i>didn’t</i> mean to be +snippy, Billy. Forgive me! I’m sure Miss Nash will be real nice. Does she +live here in New York?” +</p> + +<p> +“No—in California…. I don’t know how long she’s going +to stay here.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well—well—hum-m-m. I’m getting <i>so</i> sleepy. I +guess I’d better go up to bed. Good night.” +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +Uneasy because he was away from the office, displeased because he had to leave +his beloved letters to the Southern trade, angry because he had had difficulty +in getting a pass to the wharf, and furious, finally, because he hadn’t +slept, Mr. Wrenn nursed all these cumulative emotions attentively and waited +for the coming of the <i>Hesperida</i>. He was wondering if he’d want to +see Istra at all. He couldn’t remember just how she looked. Would he like +her? +</p> + +<p> +The great steamer swung side-to and was coaxed alongside the wharf. Peering out +between rows of crowding shoulders, Mr. Wrenn coldly inspected the passengers +lining the decks. Istra was not in sight. Then he knew that he was wildly +agitated about her. Suppose something had happened to her! +</p> + +<p> +The smallish man who had been edging into the crowd so politely suddenly dashed +to the group forming at the gang-plank and pushed his way rudely into the front +rank. His elbow dug into the proper waistcoat of a proper plump old gentleman, +but he didn’t know it. He stood grasping the rope rail of the plank, +gazing goggle-eyed while the plank was lifted to the steamer’s deck and +the long line of smiling and waving passengers disembarked. Then he saw +her—tall, graceful, nonchalant, uninterested, in a smart check suit with +a lively hat of black straw, carrying a new Gladstone bag. +</p> + +<p> +He stared at her. “Gee!” he gasped. “I’m crazy about +her. I am, all right.” +</p> + +<p> +She saw him, and their smiles of welcome made them one. She came from the plank +and hastily kissed him. +</p> + +<p> +“Really here!” she laughed. +</p> + +<p> +“Well, well, well, well! I’m so glad to see you!” +</p> + +<p> +“Glad to see you, Mouse dear.” +</p> + +<p> +“Have good tr—” +</p> + +<p> +“Don’t ask me about it! There was a married man <i>sans</i> wife +who persecuted me all the way over. I’m glad <i>you</i> aren’t +going to fall in love with me.” +</p> + +<p> +“Why—uh—” +</p> + +<p> +“Let’s hustle over and get through the customs as soon as we can. +Where’s N? Oh, how clever of it, it’s right by M. There’s one +of my trunks already. How are you, Mouse dear?” +</p> + +<p> +But she didn’t seem really to care so very much, and the old bewilderment +she always caused was over him. +</p> + +<p> +“It is good to get back after all, and—Mouse dear, I know you +won’t mind finding me a place to live the next few days, will you?” +She quite took it for granted. “We’ll find a place this morning, +<i>n’est-ce pas?</i> Not too expensive. I’ve got just about enough +to get back to California.” +</p> + +<p> +Man fashion, he saw with acute clearness the pile of work on his desk, and, man +fashion, responded, “No; be glad tuh.” +</p> + +<p> +“How about the place where you’re living? You spoke about its being +so clean and all.” +</p> + +<p> +The thought of Nelly and Istra together frightened him. +</p> + +<p> +“Why, I don’t know as you’d like it so very much.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, it’ll be all right for a few days, anyway. Is there a room +vacant.” +</p> + +<p> +He was sulky about it. He saw much trouble ahead. +</p> + +<p> +“Why, yes, I suppose there is.” +</p> + +<p> +“Mouse dear!” Istra plumped down on a trunk in the confused billows +of incoming baggage, customs officials, and indignant passengers that surged +about them on the rough floor of the vast dock-house. She stared up at him with +real sorrow in her fine eyes. +</p> + +<p> +“Why, Mouse! I thought you’d be glad to see me. I’ve never +rowed with you, have I? I’ve tried not to be temperamental with you. +That’s why I wired you, when there are others I’ve known for +years.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, I didn’t mean to seem grouchy; I didn’t! I just wondered +if you’d like the house.” +</p> + +<p> +He could have knelt in repentance before his goddess, what time she was but a +lonely girl in the clatter of New York. He went on: +</p> + +<p> +“And we’ve got kind of separated, and I didn’t know—But +I guess I’ll always—oh—kind of worship you.” +</p> + +<p> +“It’s all right, Mouse. It’s—Here’s the customs +men.” +</p> + +<p> +Now Istra Nash knew perfectly that the customs persons were not ready to +examine her baggage as yet. But the discussion was ended, and they seemed to +understand each other. +</p> + +<p> +“Gee, there’s a lot of rich Jew ladies coming back this +time!” said he. +</p> + +<p> +“Yes. They had diamonds three times a day,” she assented. +</p> + +<p> +“Gee, this is a big place!” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes.” So did they testify to fixity of friendship till they +reached the house and Istra was welcomed to “that Teddem’s” +room as a new guest. +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +Dinner began with the ceremony due Mrs. Arty. There was no lack of the sacred +old jokes. Tom Poppins did not fail to bellow “Bring on the +dish-water,” nor Miss Mary Proudfoot to cheep demurely “Don’t +y’ knaow” in a tone which would have been recognized as +fascinatingly English anywhere on the American stage. Then the talk stopped +dead as Istra Nash stood agaze in the doorway—pale and intolerant, her +red hair twisted high on her head, tall and slim and uncorseted in a gray +tight-fitting gown. Every head turned as on a pivot, first to Istra, then to +Mr. Wrenn. He blushed and bowed as if he had been called on for a speech, +stumblingly arose, and said: “Uh—uh—uh—you met Mrs. +Ferrard, didn’t you, Istra? She’ll introduce you to the +rest.” +</p> + +<p> +He sat down, wondering why the deuce he’d stood up, and unhappily +realized that Nelly was examining Istra and himself with cool hostility. In a +flurry he glowered at Istra as she nonchalantly sat down opposite him, beside +Mrs. Arty, and incuriously unfolded her napkin. He thought that in her cheerful +face there was an expression of devilish amusement. +</p> + +<p> +He blushed. He furiously buttered his bread as Mrs. Arty remarked to the +assemblage: +</p> + +<p> +“Ladies and gentlemen, I want you all to meet Miss Istra Nash. Miss +Nash—you’ve met Mr. Wrenn; Miss Nelly Croubel, our baby; Tom +Poppins, the great Five-Hundred player; Mrs. Ebbitt, Mr. Ebbitt, Miss +Proudfoot.” +</p> + +<p> +Istra Nash lifted her bowed eyes with what seemed shyness, hesitated, said +“Thank you” in a clear voice with a precise pronunciation, and +returned to her soup, as though her pleasant communion with it had been +unpleasantly interrupted. +</p> + +<p> +The others began talking and eating very fast and rather noisily. Miss Mary +Proudfoot’s thin voice pierced the clamor: +</p> + +<p> +“I hear you have just come to New York, Miss Nash.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes.” +</p> + +<p> +“Is this your first visit to—” +</p> + +<p> +“No.” +</p> + +<p> +Miss Proudfoot rancorously took a long drink of water. +</p> + +<p> +Nelly attempted, bravely: +</p> + +<p> +“Do you like New York, Miss Nash?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes.” +</p> + +<p> +Nelly and Miss Proudfoot and Tom Poppins began discussing shoe-stores, all at +once and very rapidly, while hot and uncomfortable Mr. Wrenn tried to think of +something to say…. Good Lord, suppose Istra “queered” him at Mrs. +Arty’s!… Then he was angry at himself and all of them for not +appreciating her. How exquisite she looked, with her tired white face! +</p> + +<p> +As the soup-plates were being removed by Annie, the maid, with an elaborate +confusion and a general passing of plates down the line, Istra Nash peered at +the maid petulantly. Mrs. Arty frowned, then grew artificially pleasant and +said: +</p> + +<p> +“Miss Nash has just come back from Paris. She’s a regular European +traveler, just like Mr. Wrenn.” +</p> + +<p> +Mrs. Samuel Ebbitt piped: “Mr. Ebbitt was to Europe. In 1882.” +</p> + +<p> +“No ’twa’n’t, Fannie; ’twas in 1881,” +complained Mr. Ebbitt. +</p> + +<p> +Miss Nash waited for the end of this interruption as though it were a noise +which merely had to be endured, like the Elevated. +</p> + +<p> +Twice she drew in her breath to speak, and the whole table laid its collective +knife and fork down to listen. All she said was: +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, will you pardon me if I speak of it now, Mrs. Ferrard, but would you +mind letting me have my breakfast in my room to-morrow? About nine? Just +something simple—a canteloupe and some shirred eggs and chocolate?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh no; why, yes, certainly, “mumbled Mrs. Arty, while the table +held its breaths and underneath them gasped: +</p> + +<p> +“Chocolate!” +</p> + +<p> +“A canteloupe!” +</p> + +<p> +“Shirred eggs!” +</p> + +<p> +“<i>In her room—at nine!</i>” +</p> + +<p> +All this was very terrible to Mr. Wrenn. He found himself in the position of a +man scheduled to address the Brewers’ Association and the W. C. T. U. at +the same hour. Valiantly he attempted: +</p> + +<p> +“Miss Nash oughta be a good person for our picnics. She’s a regular +shark for outdoor tramping.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh yes, Mr. Wrenn and I tramped most all night in England one +time,” said Istra, innocently. +</p> + +<p> +The eyes of the table asked Mr. Wrenn what he meant by it. He tried to look at +Nelly, but something hurt inside him. +</p> + +<p> +“Yes,” he mumbled. “Quite a long walk.” +</p> + +<p> +Miss Mary Proudfoot tried again: +</p> + +<p> +“is it pleasant to study in Paris? Mrs. Arty said you were an +artist.” +</p> + +<p> +“No.” +</p> + +<p> +Then they were all silent, and the rest of the dinner Mr. Wrenn alternately +discussed Olympia Johns with Istra and picnics with Nelly. There was an +undertone of pleading in his voice which made Nelly glance at him and even +become kind. With quiet insistence she dragged Istra into a discussion of rue +de la Paix fashions which nearly united the shattered table and won Mr. +Wrenn’s palpitating thankfulness. +</p> + +<p> +After dessert Istra slowly drew a plain gold cigarette-case from a brocade bag +of silvery gray. She took out a match and a thin Russian cigarette, which she +carefully lighted. She sat smoking in one of her best attitudes, pointed elbows +on the table, coolly contemplating a huge picture called “Hunting the +Stag” on the wall behind Mr. Wrenn. +</p> + +<p> +Mrs. Arty snapped to the servant, “Annie, bring me <i>my</i> +cigarettes.” But Mrs. Arty always was penitent when she had been nasty, +and—though Istra did not at once seem to know that the landlady +<i>had</i> been nasty—Mrs. Arty invited her up to the parlor for +after-dinner so cordially that Istra could but grant “Perhaps I +will,” and she even went so far as to say, “I think you’re +all to be envied, having such a happy family.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, that’s so,” reflected Mrs. Arty. +</p> + +<p> +“Yes,” added Mr. Wrenn. +</p> + +<p> +And Nelly: “That’s so.” +</p> + +<p> +The whole table nodded gravely, “Yes, that’s so.” +</p> + +<p> +“I’m sure”—Istra smiled at Mrs. Arty—“that +it’s because a woman is running things. Now think what cat-and-dog lives +you’d lead if Mr. Wrenn or Mr.—Popple, was it?—were +ruling.” +</p> + +<p> +They applauded. They felt that she had been humorous. She was again and +publicly invited up to the parlor, and she came, though she said, rather +shortly, that she didn’t play Five Hundred, but only bumblepuppy bridge, +a variety of whist which Mr. Wrenn instantly resolved to learn. She reclined +(“reclined” is perfectly accurate) on the red-leather couch, among +the pillows, and smoked two cigarettes, relapsing into +“No?”’s for conversation. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn said to himself, almost spitefully, as she snubbed Nelly, “Too +good for us, is she?” But he couldn’t keep away from her. The +realization that Istra was in the room made him forget most of his melds at +pinochle; and when Miss Proudfoot inquired his opinion as to whether the coming +picnic should be held on Staten island or the Palisades he said, vaguely, +“Yes, I guess that would be better.” +</p> + +<p> +For he was wanting to sit down beside Istra Nash, just be near her; he +<i>had</i> to be! So he ventured over and was instantly regarding all the rest +as outsiders whom his wise comrade and himself were studying. +</p> + +<p> +“Tell me, Mouse dear, why do you like the people here? The peepul, I +mean. They don’t seem so very remarkable. Enlighten poor Istra.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, they’re awful kind. I’ve always lived in a house where +the folks didn’t hardly know each other at all, except Mrs. +Zapp—she was the landlady—and I didn’t like her very much. +But here Tom Poppins and Mrs. Arty and—the rest—they really like +folks, and they make it just like a home…. Miss Croubel is a very nice girl. +She works for Wanamacy’s—she has quite a big job there. She is +assistant buyer in the—” +</p> + +<p> +He stopped in horror. He had nearly said “in the lingery +department.” He changed it to “in the clothing department,” +and went on, doubtfully: “Mr. Duncan is a traveling-man. He’s away +on a trip.” +</p> + +<p> +“Which one do you play with? So Nelly likes to—well, make +b’lieve—’magine?” +</p> + +<p> +“How did you—” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, I watched her looking at you. I think she’s a terribly nice +pink-face. And just now you’re comparing her and me.” +</p> + +<p> +“Gee!” he said. +</p> + +<p> +She was immensely pleased with herself. “Tell me, what do these people +think about; at least, what do you talk about?” +</p> + +<p> +“<i>Say!</i>” +</p> + +<p> +“S-s-s-h! Not so loud, my dear.” +</p> + +<p> +“Say, I know how you mean. You feel something like what I did in England. +You can’t get next to what the folks are thinking, and it makes you sort +of lonely.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, I—” +</p> + +<p> +Just then Tom Poppins rolled jovially up to the couch. He had carried his many +and perspiring pounds over to Third Avenue because Miss Proudfoot reflected, +“I’ve got a regular sweet tooth to-night.” He stood before +Istra and Mr. Wrenn theatrically holding out a bag of chocolate drops in one +hand and peanut brittle in the other; and grandiloquently: +</p> + +<p> +“Which shall it be, your Highness? Nobody loves a fat man, so he has to +buy candy so’s they’ll let him stick around. Le’s see; you +take chocolates, Bill. Name your drink, Miss Nash.” She looked up at him, +gravely and politely—too gravely and politely. She didn’t seem to +consider him a nice person. +</p> + +<p> +“Neither, thank you,” sharply, as he still stood there. He moved +away, hurt, bewildered. +</p> + +<p> +Istra was going on, “I haven’t been here long enough to be lonely +yet, but in any case—” when Mr. Wrenn interrupted: +</p> + +<p> +“You’ve hurt Tom’s feelings by not taking any candy; and, +gee, he’s awful kind!” +</p> + +<p> +“Have I?” mockingly. +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, you <i>have</i>. And there ain’t any too many kind people in +this world.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh yes, of course you’ re right. I <i>am</i> sorry, really I +am.” +</p> + +<p> +She dived after Tom’s retreat and cheerfully addressed him: +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, I do want some of those chocolates. Will you let me change my mind? +Please do.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes <i>ma’am</i>, you sure can!” said broad Tom, all one +pleased chuckle, poking out the two bags. +</p> + +<p> +Istra stopped beside the Five-Hundred table to smile in a lordly way down at +Mrs. Arty and say, quite humanly: +</p> + +<p> +“I’m so sorry I can’t play a decent game of cards. I’m +afraid I’m too stupid to learn. You are very lucky, I think.” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn on the couch was horribly agitated…. Wasn’t Istra coming back? +</p> + +<p> +She was. She detached herself from the hubbub of invitations to learn to play +Five Hundred and wandered back to the couch, murmuring: “Was bad Istra +good? Am I forgiven? Mouse dear, I didn’t mean to be rude to your +friends.” +</p> + +<p> +As the bubbles rise through water in a cooking-pot, as the surface writhes, and +then, after the long wait, suddenly the water is aboil, so was the emotion of +Mr. Wrenn now that Istra, the lordly, had actually done something he suggested. +</p> + +<p> +“Istra—” That was all he could say, but from his eyes had +gone all reserve. +</p> + +<p> +Her glance back was as frank as his—only it had more of the mother in it; +it was like a kindly pat on the head; and she was the mother as she mused: +</p> + +<p> +“So you <i>have</i> missed me, then?” +</p> + +<p> +“Missed you—” +</p> + +<p> +“Did you think of me after you came here? Oh, I know—I was +forgotten; poor Istra abdicates to the pretty pink-face.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, Istra, <i>don’t</i>. I—can’t we just go out for a +little walk so—so we can talk?” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, we can talk here.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, gee!—there’s so many people around…. Golly! when I came +back to America—gee!—I couldn’t hardly sleep +nights—” +</p> + +<p> +From across the room came the boisterous, somewhat coarse-timbred voice of Tom, +speaking to Nelly: +</p> + +<p> +“Oh yes, of course you think you’re the only girl that ever seen a +vodville show. <i>We</i> ain’t never seen a vodville show. Oh no!” +</p> + +<p> +Nelly and Miss Proudfoot dissolved in giggles at the wit. +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn gazed at them, detached; these were not his people, and with startled +pride he glanced at Istra’s face, delicately carven by thought, as he +stumbled hotly on. +</p> + +<p> +“—just couldn’t sleep nights at all…. Then I got on the +job….” +</p> + +<p> +“Let’s see, you’re still with that same company?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes. Souvenir and Art Novelty Company. And I got awfully on the job +there, and so I managed to forget for a little while and—” +</p> + +<p> +“So you really do like me even after I was so beastly to you in +England.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, that wasn’t nothing…. But I was always thinking of you, even +when I was on the job—” +</p> + +<p> +“It’s gratifying to have some one continue taking me seriously…. +Really, dear, I do appreciate it. But you mustn’t—you +mustn’t—” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, gee! I just can’t get over it—you here by +me—ain’t it curious!… “Then he persisted with the tale of his +longing, which she had so carefully interrupted: “The people here are +<i>awful</i> kind and good, and you can bank on ’em. +But—oh—” +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +From across the room, Tom’s pretended jeers, lighted up with Miss +Proudfoot’s giggles, as paper lanterns illumine Coney Island. From Tom: +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, you’re a hot dancer, all right. I suppose you can do the +Boston and all them swell dances. Wah-h-h-h-h!” +</p> + +<p> +“—but Istra, oh, gee! you’re like poetry—like all them +things a feller can’t get but he tries to when he reads Shakespeare and +all those poets.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, dear boy, you mustn’t! We will be good friends. I do +appreciate having some one care whether I’m alive or not. But I thought +it was all understood that we weren’t to take playing together seriously; +that it was to be merely playing—nothing more.” +</p> + +<p> +“But, anyway, you will let me play with you here in New York as much as I +can? Oh, come on, <i>let’s</i> go for a +walk—let’s—let’s go to a show.” +</p> + +<p> +“I’m awf’ly sorry, but I promised—a man’s going +to call for me, and we’re going to a stupid studio party on Bryant Park. +Bore, isn’t it, the day of landing? And poor Istra dreadfully +landsick.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, then,” hopefully, “don’t go. +Let’s—” +</p> + +<p> +“I’m sorry, Mouse dear, but I’m afraid I can’t break +the date…. Fact, I must go up and primp now—” +</p> + +<p> +“Don’t you care a bit?” he said, sulkily. +</p> + +<p> +“Why, yes, of course. But you wouldn’t have Istra disappoint a nice +Johnny after he’s bought him a cunnin’ new weskit, would you?… Good +night, dear.” She smiled—the mother smile—and was gone with a +lively good night to the room in general. +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +Nelly went up to bed early. She was tired, she said. He had no chance for a +word with her. He sat on the steps outside alone a long time. Sometimes he +yearned for a sight of Istra’s ivory face. Sometimes, with a fierce +compassion that longed to take the burden from her, he pictured Nelly working +all day in the rushing department store on which the fetid city summer would +soon descend. +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +They did have their walk the next night, Istra and Mr. Wrenn, but Istra kept +the talk to laughing burlesques of their tramp in England. Somehow—he +couldn’t tell exactly why—he couldn’t seem to get in all the +remarks he had inside him about how much he had missed her. +</p> + +<p> +Wednesday—Thursday—Friday; he saw her only at one dinner, or on the +stairs, departing volubly with clever-looking men in evening clothes to taxis +waiting before the house. +</p> + +<p> +Nelly was very pleasant; just that—pleasant. She pleasantly sat as his +partner at Five Hundred, and pleasantly declined to go to the moving pictures +with him. She was getting more and more tired, staying till seven at the store, +preparing what she called “special stunts” for the summer white +sale. Friday evening he saw her soft fresh lips drooping sadly as she toiled up +the front steps before dinner. She went to bed at eight, at which time Istra +was going out to dinner with a thin, hatchet-faced sarcastic-looking man in a +Norfolk jacket and a fluffy black tie. Mr. Wrenn resented the Norfolk jacket. +Of course, the kingly men in evening dress would be expected to take Istra away +from him, but a Norfolk jacket—He did not call it that. Though he had +worn one in the fair village of Aengusmere, it was still to him a “coat +with a belt.” +</p> + +<p> +He thought of Nelly all evening. He heard her—there on the same floor +with him—talking to Miss Proudfoot, who stood at Nelly’s door, +three hours after she was supposed to be asleep. +</p> + +<p> +“No,” Nelly was saying with evidently fictitious cheerfulness, +“no, it was just a little headache…. It’s much better. I think I +can sleep now. Thank you very much for coming.” +</p> + +<p> +Nelly hadn’t told Mr. Wrenn that she had a severe headache—she who +had once, a few weeks before, run to him with a cut in her soft small finger, +demanding that he bind it up…. He went slowly to bed. +</p> + +<p> +He had lain awake half an hour before his agony so overpowered him that he +flung out of bed. He crouched low by the bed, like a child, his legs curled +under him, the wooden sideboard pressing into his chest in one long line of hot +pain, while he prayed: +</p> + +<p> +“O God, O God, forgive me, forgive me, oh, forgive me! Here I been +forgetting Nelly (and I <i>love</i> her) and comparing her with Istra and not +appreciating her, and Nelly always so sweet to me and trusting me so—O +God, keep me away from wickedness!” +</p> + +<p> +He huddled there many minutes, praying, the scorching pressure of the bedside +growing more painful. All the while the camp-fire he had shared with Istra was +burning within his closed eyes, and Istra was visibly lording it in a London +flat filled with clever people, and he was passionately aware that the line of +her slim breast was like the lip of a shell; the line of her pallid cheek, +defined by her flame-colored hair, something utterly fine, something he could +not express. +</p> + +<p> +“Oh,” he groaned, “she is like that poetry stuff in +Shakespeare that’s so hard to get…. I’ll be extra nice to Nelly at +the picnic Sunday…. Her trusting me so, and then me—O God, keep me away +from wickedness!” +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +As he was going out Saturday morning he found a note from Istra waiting in the +hall on the hat-rack: +</p> + +<p class="letter"> +Do you want to play with poor Istra tomorrow Sat. afternoon and perhaps +evening, Mouse? You have Saturday afternoon off, don’t you? Leave me a +note if you can call for me at 1.30. +</p> + +<p class="right"> +I. N. +</p> + +<p> +He didn’t have Saturday afternoon off, but he said he did in his note, +and at one-thirty he appeared at her door in a new spring suit (purchased on +Tuesday), a new spring hat, very fuzzy and gay (purchased Saturday noon), and +the walking-stick he had bought on Tottenham Court Road, but decently concealed +from the boarding-house. +</p> + +<p> +Istra took him to what she called a “futurist play.” She explained +it all to him several times, and she stood him tea and muffins, and recalled +Mrs. Cattermole’s establishment with full attention to Mrs. +Cattermole’s bulbous but earnest nose. They dined at the Brevoort, and +were back at nine-thirty; for, said Istra, she was “just a bit tired, +Mouse.” +</p> + +<p> +They stood at the door of Istra’s room. Istra said, “You may come +in—just for a minute.” +</p> + +<p> +It was the first time he had even peeped into her room in New York. The old +shyness was on him, and he glanced back. +</p> + +<p> +Nelly was just coming up-stairs, staring at him where he stood inside the door, +her lips apart with amazement. +</p> + +<p> +Ladies distinctly did not entertain in their rooms at Mrs. Arty’s. +</p> + +<p> +He wanted to rush out, to explain, to invite her in, to—to— He +stuttered in his thought, and by now Nelly had hastened past, her face turned +from them. +</p> + +<p> +Uneasily he tilted on the front of a cane-seated rocking-chair, glaring at a +pile of books before one of Istra’s trunks. Istra sat on the bedside +nursing her knee. She burst out: +</p> + +<p> +“O Mouse dear, I’m so bored by everybody—every sort of +everybody…. Of course I don’t mean you; you’re a good pal…. +Oh—Paris is <i>too</i> complex—especially when you can’t +quite get the nasal vowels—and New York is too youthful and earnest; and +Dos Puentes, California, will be plain hell…. And all my little parties—I +start out on them happily, always, as naive as a kiddy going to a birthday +party, and then I get there and find I can’t even dance square dances, as +the kiddy does, and go home—Oh damn it, damn it, damn it! Am I shocking +you? Well, what do I care if I shock everybody!” +</p> + +<p> +Her slim pliant length was flung out along the bed, and she was crying. Her +beautiful hands clutched the corners of a pillow bitterly. +</p> + +<p> +He crept over to the bed, patting her shoulder, slowly and regularly, too +frightened of her mood even to want to kiss her. +</p> + +<p> +She looked up, laughing tearfully. “Please say, ‘There, there, +there; don’t cry.’ It always goes with pats for weepy girls, you +know…. O Mouse, you will be good to some woman some day.” +</p> + +<p> +Her long strong arms reached up and drew him down. It was his head that rested +on her shoulder. It seemed to both of them that it was he who was to be petted, +not she. He pressed his cheek against the comforting hollow of her curving +shoulder and rested there, abandoned to a forlorn and growing happiness, the +happiness of getting so far outside of his tight world of Wrennishness that he +could give comfort and take comfort with no prim worried thoughts of Wrenn. +</p> + +<p> +Istra murmured: “Perhaps that’s what I need—some one to need +me. Only—” She stroked his hair. “Now you must go, +dear.” +</p> + +<p> +“You—It’s better now? I’m afraid I ain’t helped +you much. It’s kinda t’ other way round.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh yes, indeed, it’s all right now! Just nerves. Nothing more. +Now, good night.” +</p> + +<p> +“Please, won’t you come to the picnic to-morrow? +It’s—” +</p> + +<p> +“No. Sorry, but can’t possibly.” +</p> + +<p> +“Please think it over.” +</p> + +<p> +“No, no, no, no, dear! You go and forget me and enjoy yourself and be +good to your pink-face—Nelly, isn’t it? She seems to be terribly +nice, and I know you two will have a good party. You must forget me. I’m +just a teacher of playing games who hasn’t been successful at any game +whatever. Not that it matters. I don’t care. I don’t, really. Now, +good night.” +</p> + +</div><!--end chapter--> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2><a name="chap18"></a>CHAPTER XVIII<br/> +AND FOLLOWS A WANDERING FLAME THROUGH PERILOUS SEAS</h2> + +<p> +They had picnic dinner early up there on the Palisades: +</p> + +<p> +Nelly and Mr. Wrenn, Mrs. Arty and Tom, Miss Proudfoot and Mrs. Samuel Ebbitt, +the last of whom kept ejaculating: “Well! I ain’t run off like this +in ten years!” They squatted about a red-cotton table-cloth spread on a +rock, broadly discussing the sandwiches and cold chicken and lemonade and +stuffed olives, and laughing almost to a point of distress over Tom’s +accusation that Miss Proudfoot had secreted about her person a bottle of rye +whisky. +</p> + +<p> +Nelly was very pleasant to Mr. Wrenn, but she called him neither Billy nor +anything else, and mostly she talked to Miss Proudfoot, smiling at him, but +saying nothing when he managed to get out a jest about Mrs. Arty’s +chewing-gum. When he moved to her side with a wooden plate of cream-cheese +sandwiches (which Tom humorously termed “cold-cream wafers”) Mr. +Wrenn started to explain how he had come to enter Istra’s room. +</p> + +<p> +“Why shouldn’t you?” Nelly asked, curtly, and turned to Miss +Proudfoot. +</p> + +<p> +“She doesn’t seem to care much,” he reflected, relieved and +stabbed in his humble vanity and reattracted to Nelly, all at once. He was +anxious about her opinion of Istra and her opinion of himself, and slightly +defiant, as she continued to regard him as a respectable person whose name she +couldn’t exactly remember. +</p> + +<p> +Hadn’t he the right to love Istra if he wanted to? he desired to know of +himself. Besides, what had he <i>done?</i> Just gone out walking with his +English hotel acquaintance Istra! He hadn’t been in her room but just a +few minutes. Fine reason that was for Nelly to act like a blooming iceberg! +Besides, it wasn’t as if he were engaged to Nelly, or anything like that. +Besides, of course Istra would never care for him. There were several other +besideses with which he harrowed himself while trying to appear picnically +agreeable. He was getting very much confused, and was slightly abrupt as he +said to Nelly, “Let’s walk over to that high rock on the +edge.” +</p> + +<p> +A dusky afterglow filled the sky before them as they silently trudged to the +rock and from the top of the sheer cliff contemplated the smooth and +steely-gray Hudson below. Nelly squeaked her fear at the drop and clutched his +arm, but suddenly let go and drew back without his aid. +</p> + +<p> +He groaned within, “I haven’t the right to help her.” He took +her arm as she hesitatingly climbed from the rock down to the ground. +</p> + +<p> +She jerked it free, curtly saying, “No, thank you.” +</p> + +<p> +She was repentant in a moment, and, cheerfully: +</p> + +<p> +“Miss Nash took me in her room yesterday and showed me her things. My, +she’s got such be-<i>yoo</i>-ti-ful jewels! La V’lieres and pearls +and a swell amethyst brooch. My! She told me all about how the girls used to +study in Paris, and how sorry she would be to go back to California and keep +house.” +</p> + +<p> +“Keep house?” +</p> + +<p> +Nelly let him suffer for a moment before she relieved him with, “For her +father.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh…. Did she say she was going back to California soon?” +</p> + +<p> +“Not till the end of the summer, maybe.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh…. Oh, Nelly—” +</p> + +<p> +For the first time that day he was perfectly sincere. He was trying to confide +in her. But the shame of having emotions was on him. He got no farther. +</p> + +<p> +To his amazement, Nelly mused, “She is very nice.” +</p> + +<p> +He tried hard to be gallant. “Yes, she is interesting, but of course she +ain’t anywheres near as nice as you are, Nelly, be—” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, don’t, Billy!” +</p> + +<p> +The quick agony in her voice almost set them both weeping. The shared sorrow of +separation drew them together for a moment. Then she started off, with short +swift steps, and he tagged after. He found little to say. He tried to comment +on the river. He remarked that the apartment-houses across in New York were +bright in the sunset; that, in fact, the upper windows looked “like there +was a fire in there.” Her sole comment was “Yes.” +</p> + +<p> +When they rejoined the crowd he was surprised to hear her talking volubly to +Miss Proudfoot. He rejoiced that she was “game,” but he did not +rejoice long. For a frightened feeling that he had to hurry home and see Istra +at once was turning him weak and cold. He didn’t want to see her; she was +intruding; but he had to go—go at once; and the agony held him all the +way home, while he was mechanically playing the part of stern reformer and +agreeing with Tom Poppins that the horrors of the recent Triangle +shirt-waist-factory fire showed that “something oughta be +done—something sure oughta be.” +</p> + +<p> +He trembled on the ferry till Nelly, with a burst of motherly tenderness in her +young voice, suddenly asked: “Why, you’re shivering dreadfully! Did +you get a chill?” +</p> + +<p> +Naturally, he wanted the credit of being known as an invalid, and pitied and +nursed, but he reluctantly smiled and said, “Oh no, it ain’t +anything at all.” +</p> + +<p> +Then Istra called him again, and he fumed over the slowness of their landing. +</p> + +<p> +And, at home, Istra was out. +</p> + +<p> +He went resolutely down and found Nelly alone, sitting on a round pale-yellow +straw mat on the steps. +</p> + +<p> +He sat by her. He was very quiet; not at all the jovial young man of the picnic +properly following the boarding-house-district rule that males should be +jocular and show their appreciation of the ladies by “kidding +them.” And he spoke with a quiet graciousness that was almost courtly, +with a note of weariness and spiritual experience such as seldom comes into the +boarding-houses, to slay joy and bring wisdom and give words shyness. +</p> + +<p> +He had, as he sat down, intended to ask her to go with him to a moving-picture +show. But inspiration was on him. He merely sat and talked. +</p> + +<p> +When Mr. Wrenn returned from the office, two evenings later, he found this note +awaiting him: +</p> + +<p class="letter"> +D<small>EAR</small> M<small>OUSE</small>,—Friend has asked me to join her +in studio & have beat it. Sorry not see you & say good-by. Come see me +sometime—phone before and see if I’m in—Spring +xxx—address xx South Washington Sq. In haste, +</p> + +<p class="right"> +I<small>STRA</small>. +</p> + +<p> +He spent the evening in not going to the studio. Several times he broke away +from a pinochle game to rush upstairs and see if the note was as chilly as he +remembered. It always was. +</p> + +<p> +Then for a week he awaited a more definite invitation from her, which did not +come. He was uneasily polite to Nelly these days, and tremulously appreciative +of her gentleness. He wanted to brood, but he did not take to his old habit of +long solitary walks. Every afternoon he planned one for the evening; every +evening found that he “wanted to be around with folks.” +</p> + +<p> +He had a sort of youthful defiant despair, so he jested much at the card-table, +by way of practising his new game of keeping people from knowing what he was +thinking. He took sophisticated pleasure in noting that Mrs. Arty no longer +condescended to him. He managed to imitate Tom’s writing on a card which +he left with a bunch of jonquils in Nelly’s room, and nearly persuaded +even Tom himself that Tom was the donor. Probably because he didn’t much +care what happened he was able to force Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle to raise his +salary to twenty-three dollars a week. Mr. Guilfogle went out of his way to +admit that the letters to the Southern trade had been “a first-rate +stunt, son.” +</p> + +<p> +John Henson, the head of the Souvenir Company’s manufacturing department, +invited Mr. Wrenn home to dinner, and the account of the cattle-boat was much +admired by Mrs. Henson and the three young Hensons. +</p> + +<p> +A few days later, in mid-June, there was an unusually cheerful dinner at the +boarding-house. Nelly turned to Mr. Wrenn—yes, he was quite sure about +it; she was speaking exclusively to him, with a lengthy and most merry account +of the manner in which the floor superintendent had “called down” +the unkindest of the aislesmen. +</p> + +<p> +He longed to give his whole self in his answer, to be in the absolute community +of thought that lovers know. But the image of Istra was behind his chair. +Istra—he had to see her—now, this evening. He rushed out to the +corner drug-store and reached her by telephone. +</p> + +<p> +Yes-s, admitted Istra, a little grudgingly, she was going to be at the studio +that evening, though she—well, there was going to be a little +party—some friends—but—yes, she’d be glad to have him +come. +</p> + +<p> +Grimly, Mr. Wrenn set out for Washington Square. +</p> + +<p> +Since this scientific treatise has so exhaustively examined Mr. Wrenn’s +reactions toward the esthetic, one need give but three of his impressions of +the studio and people he found on Washington Square—namely: +</p> + +<p> +(<i>a</i>) That the big room was bare, ill kept, and not comparable to the +red-plush splendor of Mrs. Arty’s, for all its pretension to superiority. +Why, a lot of the pictures weren’t framed! And you should have seen the +giltness and fruit-borderness of the frames at Mrs. Arty’s! +</p> + +<p> +(<i>b</i>) That the people were brothers-in-talk to the inmates of the flat on +Great James Street, London, only far less, and friendly. +</p> + +<p> +(<i>c</i>) That Mr. Wrenn was now a man of friends, and if the “blooming +Bohemians,” as he called them, didn’t like him they were permitted +to go to the dickens. +</p> + +<p> +Istra was always across the room from him somehow. He found himself glad. It +made their parting definite. +</p> + +<p> +He was going back to his own people, he was deciding. +</p> + +<p> +As he rose with elaborate boarding-house apologies to the room at large for +going, and a cheerful but not intimate “Good night” to Istra, she +followed him to the door and into the dark long hallway without. +</p> + +<p> +“Good night, Mouse dear. I’m glad you got a chance to talk to the +Silver Girl. But was Mr. Hargis rude to you? I heard him talking Single +Tax—or was it Matisse?—and he’s usually rude when he talks +about them.” +</p> + +<p> +“No. He was all right.” +</p> + +<p> +“Then what <i>is</i> worrying you?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh—nothing. Good ni—” +</p> + +<p> +“You <i>are</i> going off angry. <i>Aren’t</i> you?” +</p> + +<p> +“No, but—oh, there ain’t any use of our—of me +being— <i>Is</i> there?” +</p> + +<p> +“N-no—” +</p> + +<p> +“Matisse—the guy you just spoke about—and these artists here +tonight in bobtail dress-suits—I wouldn’t know when to wear one of +them things, and when a swallow-tail—if I had one, even—or when a +Prince Albert or—” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, not a Prince Albert, Mouse dear. Say, a frock-coat.” +</p> + +<p> +“Sure. That’s what I mean. It’s like that Matisse guy. I +don’t know about none of the things you’re interested in. While +you’ve been away from Mrs. Arty’s—Lord, I’ve missed you +so! But when I try to train with your bunch, or when you spring Matisse” +(he seemed peculiarly to resent the unfortunate French artist) “on me I +sort of get onto myself—and now it ain’t like it was in England; +I’ve got a bunch of my own I can chase around with. Anyway, I got onto +myself tonight. I s’pose it’s partly because I been thinking you +didn’t care much for <i>my</i> friends.” +</p> + +<p> +“But, Mouse dear, all this isn’t news to me. Surely you, +who’ve gipsied with me, aren’t going to be so obvious, so banal, as +to blame <i>me</i> because you’ve cared for me, are you, child?” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh no, no, no! I didn’t mean to do that. I just wanted—oh, +gee! I dunno—well, I wanted to have things between us definite.” +</p> + +<p> +“I do understand. You’re quite right. And now we’re just +friends, aren’t we?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes.” +</p> + +<p> +“Then good-by. And sometime when I’m back in New +York—I’m going to California in a few days—I think I’ll +be able to get back here—I certainly hope so—though of course +I’ll have to keep house for friend father for a while, and maybe +I’ll marry myself with a local magnate in desperation—but, as I was +saying, dear, when I get back here we’ll have a good dinner, <i>nicht +wahr?</i>” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, and—good-by.” +</p> + +<p> +She stood at the top of the stairs looking down. He slowly clumped down the +wooden treads, boiling with the amazing discoveries that he had said good-by to +Istra, that he was not sorry, and that now he could offer to Nelly Croubel +everything. +</p> + +<p> +Istra suddenly called, “O Mouse, wait just a moment.” +</p> + +<p> +She darted like a swallow. She threw her arm about his shoulder and kissed his +cheek. Instantly she was running up-stairs again, and had disappeared into the +studio. +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +Mr. William Wrenn was walking rapidly up Riverside Drive, thinking about his +letters to the Southern merchants. +</p> + +<p> +While he was leaving the studio building he had perfectly seen himself as one +who was about to go through a tumultuous agony, after which he would be free of +all the desire for Istra and ready to serve Nelly sincerely and humbly. +</p> + +<p> +But he found that the agony was all over. Even to save his dignity as one who +was being dramatic, he couldn’t keep his thoughts on Istra. +</p> + +<p> +Every time he thought of Nelly his heart was warm and he chuckled softly. +Several times out of nothing came pictures of the supercilious persons whom he +had heard solving the problems of the world at the studio on Washington Square, +and he muttered: “Oh, hope they choke. Istra’s all right, though; +she learnt me an awful lot. But—gee! I’m glad she ain’t in +the same house; I suppose I’d ag’nize round if she was.” +</p> + +<p> +Suddenly, at no particular street corner on Riverside Drive, just <i>a</i> +street, he fled over to Broadway and the Subway. He had to be under the same +roof with Nelly. If it were only possible to see her that night! But it was +midnight. However, he formulated a plan. The next morning he would leave the +office, find her at her department store, and make her go out to Manhattan +Beach with him for dinner that night. +</p> + +<p> +He was home. He went happily up the stairs. He would dream of Nelly, and— +</p> + +<p> +Nelly’s door opened, and she peered out, drawing her <i>peignoir</i> +about her. +</p> + +<p> +“Oh,” she said, softly, “is it you?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes. My, you’re up late.” +</p> + +<p> +“Do you—Are you all right?” +</p> + +<p> +He dashed down the hall and stood shyly scratching at the straw of his newest +hat. +</p> + +<p> +“Why yes, Nelly, course. Poor—Oh, don’t tell me you have a +headache again?” +</p> + +<p> +“No—I was awful foolish, of course, but I saw you when you went out +this evening, and you looked so savage, and you didn’t look very +well.” +</p> + +<p> +“But now it’s all right.” +</p> + +<p> +“Then good night.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh no—listen—please do! I went over to the place Miss Nash +is living at, because I was pretty sure that I ain’t hipped on +her—sort of hypnotized by her—any more. And I found I ain’t! +<i>I ain’t!</i> I don’t know what to say, I want to—I want +you to know that from going to try and see if I can’t get you to care for +me.” He was dreadfully earnest, and rather quiet, with the dignity of the +man who has found himself. “I’m scared,” he went on, +“about saying this, because maybe you’ll think I’ve got an +idea I’m kind of a little tin god, and all I’ve got to do is to say +which girl I’ll want and she’ll come a-running, but it isn’t +that; <i>it isn’t</i>. It’s just that I want you to know I’m +going to give <i>all</i> of me to you now if I can get you to want me. And I +<i>am</i> glad I knew Istra—she learnt me a lot about books and all, so I +have more to me, or maybe will have, for you. It’s +—Nelly—promise you’ll be—my +friend—promise—If you knew how I rushed back here tonight to see +you!” +</p> + +<p> +“Billy—” +</p> + +<p> +She held out her hand, and he grasped it as though it were the sacred symbol of +his dreams. +</p> + +<p> +“To-morrow,” she smiled, with a hint of tears, “I’ll be +a reg’lar lady, I guess, and make you explain and explain like +everything, but now I’m just glad. Yes,” defiantly, “I +<i>will</i> admit it if I want to! I <i>am</i> glad!” +</p> + +<p> +Her door closed. +</p> + +</div><!--end chapter--> + +<div class="chapter"> + +<h2><a name="chap19"></a>CHAPTER XIX<br/> +TO A HAPPY SHORE</h2> + +<p> +Upon an evening of November, 1911, it chanced that of Mrs. Arty’s flock +only Nelly and Mr. Wrenn were at home. They had finished two hot games of +pinochle, and sat with their feet on a small amiable oil-stove. Mr. Wrenn laid +her hand against his cheek with infinite content. He was outlining the +situation at the office. +</p> + +<p> +The business had so increased that Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle, the manager, had +told Rabin, the head traveling-salesman, that he was going to appoint an +assistant manager. Should he, Mr. Wrenn queried, try to get the position? The +other candidates, Rabin and Henson and Glover, were all good friends of his, +and, furthermore, could he “run a bunch of guys if he was over +them?” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, of course you can, Billy. I remember when you came here you were +sort of shy. But now you’re ’most the star boarder! And won’t +those others be trying to get the job away from you? Of course!” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, that’s so.” +</p> + +<p> +“Why, Billy, some day you might be manager!” +</p> + +<p> +“Say, that would be great, wouldn’t it! But hones’, Nell, do +you think I might have a chance to land the assistant’s job?” +</p> + +<p> +“I certainly do.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, Nelly—gee! you make me—oh, learn to bank on +myself—” +</p> + +<p> +He kissed her for the second time in his life. +</p> + +<p> +“Mr. Guilfogle,” stated Mr. Wrenn, next day, “I want to talk +to you about that assistant managership.” +</p> + +<p> +The manager, in his new office and his new flowered waistcoat, had acted +interested when Our steady and reliable Mr. Wrenn came in. But now he tried to +appear dignified and impatient. +</p> + +<p> +“That—” he began. +</p> + +<p> +“I’ve been here longer than any of the other men, and I know every +line of the business now, even the manufacturing. You remember I held down +Henson’s job when his wife was sick.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, but—” +</p> + +<p> +“And I guess Jake thinks I can boss all right, and Miss Leavenbetz, +too.” +</p> + +<p> +“Now will you kindly ’low <i>me</i> to talk a little, Wrenn? I know +a <i>little</i> something about how things go in the office myself! I +don’t deny you’re a good man. Maybe some day you may get to be +assistant manager. But I’m going to give the first try at it to Glover. +He’s had so much more experience with meeting people +directly—personally. But you’re a good man—” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, I’ve heard that before, but I’ll be gol-darned if +I’ll stick at one desk all my life just because I save you all the +trouble in that department, Guilfogle, and now—” +</p> + +<p> +“Now, now, now, now! Calm down; hold your horses, my boy. This +ain’t a melodrama, you know.” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, I know; I didn’t mean to get sore, but you know—” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, now I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m +going to make you head of the manufacturing department instead of getting in a +new man, and shift Henson to purchasing. I’ll put Jake on your old job, +and expect you to give him a lift when he needs it. And you’d better keep +up the most important of the jollying-letters, I guess.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, I like that all right. I appreciate it. But of course I expect +more pay—two men’s work—” +</p> + +<p> +“Let’s see; what you getting now?” +</p> + +<p> +“Twenty-three.” +</p> + +<p> +“Well, that’s a good deal, you know. The overhead expenses have +been increasing a lot faster than our profits, and we’ve—” +</p> + +<p> +“Huh!” +</p> + +<p> +“—got to see where new business is coming in to justify the liberal +way we’ve treated you men before we can afford to do much +salary-raising—though we’re just as glad to do it as you men to get +it; but—” +</p> + +<p> +“Huh!” +</p> + +<p> +“—if we go to getting extravagant we’ll go bankrupt, and then +we won’t any of us have jobs…. Still, I <i>am</i> willing to raise you to +twenty-five, though—” +</p> + +<p> +“Thirty-five!” +</p> + +<p> +Mr. Wrenn stood straight. The manager tried to stare him down. Panic was +attacking Mr. Wrenn, and he had to think of Nelly to keep up his defiance. At +last Mr. Guilfogle glared, then roared: “Well, confound it, Wrenn, +I’ll give you twenty-nine-fifty, and not a cent more for at least a year. +That’s final. <i>Understand?</i>” +</p> + +<p> +“All right,” chirped Mr. Wrenn. +</p> + +<p> +“Gee!” he was exulting to himself, “never thought I’d +get anything like that. Twenty-nine-fifty! More ’n enough to marry on +now! I’m going to get <i>twenty-nine-fifty!</i>” +</p> + +<p class="p2"> +“Married five months ago to-night, honey,” said Mr. Wrenn to Nelly, +his wife, in their Bronx flat, and thus set down October 17, 1913, as a great +date in history. +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, I <i>know</i> it, Billy. I wondered if you’d remember. You +just ought to see the dessert I’m making—but that’s a +s’prise.” +</p> + +<p> +“Remember! Should say I did! See what I’ve got for somebody!” +</p> + +<p> +He opened a parcel and displayed a pair of red-worsted bed-slippers, a creation +of one of the greatest red-worsted artists in the whole land. Yes, and he could +afford them, too. Was he not making thirty-two dollars a week—he who had +been poor! And his chances for the assistant managership “looked +good.” +</p> + +<p> +“Oh, they’ll be so comfy when it gets cold. You’re a dear! +Oh, Billy, the janitress says the Jewish lady across the court in number +seventy is so lazy she wears her corsets to bed!” +</p> + +<p> +“Did the janitress get the coal put in, Nell?” +</p> + +<p> +“Yes, but her husband is laid off again. I was talking to her quite a +while this afternoon…. Oh, dear, I do get so lonely for you, sweetheart, with +nothing to do. But I did read some <i>Kim</i> this afternoon. I liked +it.” +</p> + +<p> +“That’s fine!” +</p> + +<p> +“But it’s kind of hard. Maybe I’ll—Oh, I don’t +know. I guess I’ll have to read a lot.” +</p> + +<p> +He patted her back softly, and hoped: “Maybe some day we can get a little +house out of town, and then you can garden…. Sorry old Siddons is laid off +again…. Is the gas-stove working all right now?” +</p> + +<p> +“Um-huh, honey. I fixed it.” +</p> + +<p> +“Say, let me make the coffee, Nell. You’ll have enough to do with +setting the table and watching the sausages.” +</p> + +<p> +“All rightee, hun. But, oh, Billy, I’m so, shamed. I was going to +get some potato salad, and I’ve just remembered I forgot.” She hung +her head, with a fingertip to her pretty lips, and pretended to look dreadfully +ashamed. “Would you mind so ver-ee much skipping down to +Bachmeyer’s for some? Ah-h, is it just fearful neglected when it comes +home all tired out?” +</p> + +<p> +“No, indeedy. But you got to kiss me first, else I won’t go at +all.” +</p> + +<p> +Nelly turned to him and, as he held her, her head bent far back. She lay +tremblingly inert against his arms, staring up at him, panting. With her head +on his shoulder—a soft burden of love that his shoulder rejoiced to +bear—they stood gazing out of the narrow kitchen window of their +sixth-story flat and noticed for the hundredth time that the trees in a vacant +lot across were quite as red and yellow as the millionaire trees in Central +Park along Fifth Avenue. +</p> + +<p> +“Sometime,” mused Mr. Wrenn, “we’ll live in Jersey, +where there’s trees and trees and trees—and maybe there’ll be +kiddies to play under them, and then you won’t be lonely, honey; +they’ll keep you some busy!” +</p> + +<p> +“You skip along now, and don’t be talking nonsense, or I’ll +not give you one single wee bit of dinner!” Then she blushed adorably, +with infinite hope. +</p> + +<p> +He hastened out of the kitchen, with the happy glance he never failed to give +the living-room—its red-papered walls with shiny imitation-oak woodwork; +the rows of steins on the plate-rack; the imitation-oak dining-table, with a +vase of newly dusted paper roses; the Morris chair, with Nelly’s sewing +on a tiny wicker table beside it; the large gilt-framed oleograph of +“Pike’s Peak by Moonlight.” +</p> + +<p> +He clattered down the slate treads of the stairs. He fairly vaulted out of +doors. He stopped, startled. +</p> + +<p> +Across the ragged vacant lots to the west a vast sunset processional marched +down the sky. It had not been visible from their flat, which looked across East +River to the tame grassy shore of a real-estate boomer’s suburb. +“Gee!” he mourned, “it’s the first time I’ve +noticed a sunset for a month! I used to see knights’ flags and Mandalay +and all sorts of stuff in sunsets!” +</p> + +<p> +Wistfully the exile gazed at his lost kingdom, till the October chill aroused +him. +</p> + +<p> +But he learned a new way to cook eggs from the proprietor of the delicatessen +store; and his plans for spending the evening playing pinochle with Nelly, and +reading the evening paper aloud, set him chuckling softly to himself as he +hurried home through the brisk autumn breeze with seven cents’ worth of +potato salad. +</p> + +<p class="center"> +THE END +</p> + +</div><!--end chapter--> + +<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR MR. 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Do not change or edit the +header without written permission. + +Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the +eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is +important information about your specific rights and restrictions in +how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a +donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved. + + +**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts** + +**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971** + +*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!***** + + +Title: Our Mr. Wrenn + The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man + +Author: Sinclair Lewis + +Release Date: January, 2004 [EBook #4961] +[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] +[This file was first posted on April 4, 2002] + +Edition: 10 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR MR. WRENN *** + + + + +This eBook was edited by Charles Aldarondo (www.aldarondo.net). + + + + +OUR MR. WRENN + +THE ROMANTIC ADVENTURES OF A GENTLE MAN + +BY + +SINCLAIR LEWIS + +NEW YORK AND LONDON + +MCMXIV + + + + + + +TO +GRACE LIVINGSTONE HEGGER + + + + + + +CHAPTER I + +MR. WRENN IS LONELY + + + + + +The ticket-taker of the Nickelorion Moving-Picture Show is a +public personage, who stands out on Fourteenth Street, New York, +wearing a gorgeous light-blue coat of numerous brass buttons. +He nods to all the patrons, and his nod is the most cordial +in town. Mr. Wrenn used to trot down to Fourteenth Street, +passing ever so many other shows, just to get that cordial nod, +because he had a lonely furnished room for evenings, and for +daytime a tedious job that always made his head stuffy. + +He stands out in the correspondence of the Souvenir and Art +Novelty Company as "Our Mr. Wrenn," who would be writing you +directly and explaining everything most satisfactorily. +At thirty-four Mr. Wrenn was the sales-entry clerk of the +Souvenir Company. He was always bending over bills and columns +of figures at a desk behind the stock-room. He was a meek little +bachlor--a person of inconspicuous blue ready-made suits, and a +small unsuccessful mustache. + +To-day--historians have established the date as April 9, +1910--there had been some confusing mixed orders from the +Wisconsin retailers, and Mr. Wrenn had been "called down" +by the office manager, Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle. He needed +the friendly nod of the Nickelorion ticket-taker. He found +Fourteenth Street, after office hours, swept by a dusty +wind that whisked the skirts of countless plump Jewish girls, +whose V-necked blouses showed soft throats of a warm brown. +Under the elevated station he secretly made believe that he was +in Paris, for here beautiful Italian boys swayed with trays of +violets; a tramp displayed crimson mechanical rabbits, which +squeaked, on silvery leading-strings; and a newsstand was heaped +with the orange and green and gold of magazine covers. + +"Gee!" inarticulated Mr. Wrenn. "Lots of colors. Hope I see +foreign stuff like that in the moving pictures." + +He came primly up to the Nickelorion, feeling in his vest +pockets for a nickel and peering around the booth at the +friendly ticket-taker. But the latter was thinking about buying +Johnny's pants. Should he get them at the Fourteenth Street +Store, or Siegel-Cooper's, or over at Aronson's, near home? +So ruminating, he twiddled his wheel mechanically, and Mr. Wrenn's +pasteboard slip was indifferently received in the plate-glass +gullet of the grinder without the taker's even seeing the +clerk's bow and smile. + +Mr. Wrenn trembled into the door of the Nickelorion. He wanted +to turn back and rebuke this fellow, but was restrained by +shyness. He _had_ liked the man's "Fine evenin', sir "--rain +or shine--but he wouldn't stand for being cut. Wasn't he making +nineteen dollars a week, as against the ticket-taker's ten +or twelve? He shook his head with the defiance of a cornered +mouse, fussed with his mustache, and regarded the moving +pictures gloomily. + +They helped him. After a Selig domestic drama came a stirring +Vitagraph Western scene, "The Goat of the Rancho," which +depicted with much humor and tumult the revolt of a ranch cook, +a Chinaman. Mr. Wrenn was really seeing, not cow-punchers and +sage-brush, but himself, defying the office manager's surliness +and revolting against the ticket-man's rudeness. Now he was +ready for the nearly overpowering delight of travel-pictures. +He bounced slightly as a Gaumont film presented Java. + +He was a connoisseur of travel-pictures, for all his life he had +been planning a great journey. Though he had done Staten Island +and patronized an excursion to Bound Brook, neither of these was +his grand tour. It was yet to be taken. In Mr. Wrenn, +apparently fastened to New York like a domestic-minded barnacle, +lay the possibilities of heroic roaming. He knew it. He, too, +like the man who had taken the Gaumont pictures, would saunter +among dusky Javan natives in "markets with tiles on the roofs +and temples and--and--uh, well--places!" The scent of Oriental +spices was in his broadened nostrils as he scampered out of the +Nickelorion, without a look at the ticket-taker, and headed for +"home"--for his third-floor-front on West Sixteenth Street. +He wanted to prowl through his collection of steamship brochures +for a description of Java. But, of course, when one's landlady +has both the sciatica and a case of Patient Suffering one stops +in the basement dining-room to inquire how she is. + +Mrs. Zapp was a fat landlady. When she sat down there was +a straight line from her chin to her knees. She was usually +sitting down. When she moved she groaned, and her apparel creaked. +She groaned and creaked from bed to breakfast, and ate five +griddle-cakes, two helpin's of scrapple, an egg, some rump steak, +and three cups of coffee, slowly and resentfully. She creaked +and groaned from breakfast to her rocking-chair, and sat about +wondering why Providence had inflicted upon her a weak digestion. +Mr. Wrenn also wondered why, sympathetically, but Mrs. Zapp was +too conscientiously dolorous to be much cheered by the sympathy +of a nigger-lovin' Yankee, who couldn't appreciate the subtle +sorrows of a Zapp of Zapp's Bog, allied to all the First Families +of Virginia. + +Mr. Wrenn did nothing more presumptuous than sit still, in the +stuffy furniture-crowded basement room, which smelled of dead +food and deader pride in a race that had never existed. He sat +still because the chair was broken. It had been broken now for +four years. + +For the hundred and twenty-ninth time in those years Mrs. Zapp +said, in her rich corruption of Southern negro dialect, which +can only be indicated here, "Ah been meaning to get that chair +mended, Mist' Wrenn." He looked gratified and gazed upon the +crayon enlargements of Lee Theresa, the older Zapp daughter (who +was forewoman in a factory), and of Godiva. Godiva Zapp was +usually called "Goaty," and many times a day was she called by +Mrs. Zapp. A tamed child drudge was Goaty, with adenoids, which +Mrs. Zapp had been meanin' to have removed, and which she would +continue to have benevolent meanin's about till it should be too +late, and she should discover that Providence never would let +Goaty go to school. + +"Yes, Mist' Wrenn, Ah told Goaty she was to see the man about +getting that chair fixed, but she nev' does nothing Ah tell her." + +In the kitchen was the noise of Goaty, ungovernable Goaty, aged +eight, still snivelingly washing, though not cleaning, the +incredible pile of dinner dishes. With a trail of hesitating +remarks on the sadness of sciatica and windy evenings Mr. Wrenn +sneaked forth from the august presence of Mrs. Zapp and mounted +to paradise--his third-floor-front. + +It was an abjectly respectable room--the bedspread patched; +no two pieces of furniture from the same family; half-tones +from the magazines pinned on the wall. But on the old marble +mantelpiece lived his friends, books from wanderland. +Other friends the room had rarely known. It was hard enough +for Mr. Wrenn to get acquainted with people, anyway, and Mrs. +Zapp did not expect her gennulman lodgers to entertain. So Mr. +Wrenn had given up asking even Charley Carpenter, the assistant +bookkeeper at the Souvenir Company, to call. That left him the +books, which he now caressed with small eager finger-tips. +He picked out a P. & O. circular, and hastily left for fairyland. + + +The April skies glowed with benevolence this Saturday morning. +The Metropolitan Tower was singing, bright ivory tipped with +gold, uplifted and intensely glad of the morning. The buildings +walling in Madison Square were jubilant; the honest red-brick +fronts, radiant; the new marble, witty. The sparrows in the +middle of Fifth Avenue were all talking at once, scandalously but +cleverly. The polished brass of limousines threw off teethy smiles. +At least so Mr. Wrenn fancied as he whisked up Fifth Avenue, +the skirts of his small blue double-breasted coat wagging. +He was going blocks out of his way to the office; ready to +defy time and eternity, yes, and even the office manager. +He had awakened with Defiance as his bedfellow, and +throughout breakfast at the hustler Dairy Lunch sunshine +had flickered over the dirty tessellated floor. + +He pranced up to the Souvenir Company's brick building, on +Twenty-eighth Street near Sixth Avenue. In the office he +chuckled at his ink-well and the untorn blotters on his +orderly desk. Though he sat under the weary unnatural brilliance +of a mercury-vapor light, he dashed into his work, and was too +keen about this business of living merrily to be much flustered +by the bustle of the lady buyer's superior "_Good_ morning." +Even up to ten-thirty he was still slamming down papers on +his desk. Just let any one try to stop his course, his readiness +for snapping fingers at The Job; just let them _try_ it, that was +all he wanted! + +Then he was shot out of his chair and four feet along the +corridor, in reflex response to the surly "Bur-r-r-r-r" of +the buzzer. Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle, the manager, desired +to see him. He scampered along the corridor and slid +decorously through the manager's doorway into the long sun-bright +room, ornate with rugs and souvenirs. Seven Novelties glittered +on the desk alone, including a large rococo Shakespeare-style +glass ink-well containing cloves and a small iron Pittsburg-style +one containing ink. Mr. Wrenn blinked like a noon-roused owlet +in the brilliance. The manager dropped his fist on the desk, +glared, smoothed his flowered prairie of waistcoat, and growled, +his red jowls quivering: + +"Look here, Wrenn, what's the matter with you? The Bronx +Emporium order for May Day novelties was filled twice, they +write me." + +"They ordered twice, sir. By 'phone," smiled Mr. Wrenn, in an +agony of politeness. + +"They ordered hell, sir! Twice--the same order?" + +"Yes, sir; their buyer was prob--" + +"They say they've looked it up. Anyway, they won't pay twice. +I know, em. We'll have to crawl down graceful, and all because +you--I want to know why you ain't more careful!" + +The announcement that Mr. Wrenn twice wriggled his head, and +once tossed it, would not half denote his wrath. At last! +It was here--the time for revolt, when he was going to be defiant. +He had been careful; old Goglefogle was only barking; but why +should _he_ be barked at? With his voice palpitating and his +heart thudding so that he felt sick he declared: + +"I'm _sure_, sir, about that order. I looked it up. Their buyer +was drunk!" + +It was done. And now would he be discharged? The manager +was speaking: + +"Probably. You looked it up, eh? Um! Send me in the two +order-records. Well. But, anyway, I want you to be more +careful after this, Wrenn. You're pretty sloppy. Now get out. +Expect me to make firms pay twice for the same order, cause of +your carelessness?" + +Mr. Wrenn found himself outside in the dark corridor. +The manager hadn't seemed much impressed by his revolt. + +The manager wasn't. He called a stenographer and dictated: + +"Bronx Emporium: + +"GENTLEMEN:--Our Mr. Wrenn has again (underline that `again,' +Miss Blaustein), again looked up your order for May Day novelties. +As we wrote before, order certainly was duplicated by 'phone. +Our Mr. Wrenn is thoroughly reliable, and we have his records +of these two orders. We shall therefore have to push +collection on both--" + +After all, Mr. Wrenn was thinking, the crafty manager might be +merely concealing his hand. Perhaps he had understood the defiance. +That gladdened him till after lunch. But at three, when his head +was again foggy with work and he had forgotten whether there was +still April anywhere, he began to dread what the manager might +do to him. Suppose he lost his job; The Job! He worked +unnecessarily late, hoping that the manager would learn of it. +As he wavered home, drunk with weariness, his fear of losing +The Job was almost equal to his desire to resign from The Job. + + +He had worked so late that when he awoke on Sunday morning he +was still in a whirl of figures. As he went out to his +breakfast of coffee and whisked wheat at the Hustler Lunch the +lines between the blocks of the cement walk, radiant in a white +flare of sunshine, irritatingly recalled the cross-lines of +order-lists, with the narrow cement blocks at the curb standing +for unfilled column-headings. Even the ridges of the Hustler +Lunch's imitation steel ceiling, running in parallel lines, +jeered down at him that he was a prosaic man whose path was a ruler. + +He went clear up to the branch post-office after breakfast to +get the Sunday mail, but the mail was a disappointment. +He was awaiting a wonderful fully illustrated guide to the +Land of the Midnight Sun, a suggestion of possible and +coyly improbable trips, whereas he got only a letter from his +oldest acquaintance--Cousin John, of Parthenon, New York, the +boy-who-comes-to-play of Mr. Wrenn's back-yard days in Parthenon. +Without opening the letter Mr. Wrenn tucked it into his inside coat +pocket, threw away his toothpick, and turned to Sunday wayfaring. + +He jogged down Twenty-third Street to the North River ferries afoot. +Trolleys took money, and of course one saves up for future great +traveling. Over him the April clouds were fetterless vagabonds +whose gaiety made him shrug with excitement and take a curb with +a frisk as gambolsome as a Central Park lamb. There was no hint +of sales-lists in the clouds, at least. And with them Mr. Wrenn's +soul swept along, while his half-soled Cum-Fee-Best $3.80 shoes +were ambling past warehouses. Only once did he condescend to +being really on Twenty-third Street. At the Ninth Avenue corner, +under the grimy Elevated, he sighted two blocks down to the +General Theological Seminary's brick Gothic and found in a +pointed doorway suggestions of alien beauty. + +But his real object was to loll on a West and South Railroad in +luxury, and go sailing out into the foam and perilous seas of +North River. He passed through the smoking-cabin. He didn't +smoke--the habit used up travel-money. Once seated on the upper +deck, he knew that at last he was outward-bound on a liner. +True, there was no great motion, but Mr. Wrenn was inclined to +let realism off easily in this feature of his voyage. At least +there were undoubted life-preservers in the white racks +overhead; and everywhere the world, to his certain witnessing, +was turned to crusading, to setting forth in great ships as if +it were again in the brisk morning of history when the joy of +adventure possessed the Argonauts. + +He wasn't excited over the liners they passed. He was so +experienced in all of travel, save the traveling, as to have +gained a calm interested knowledge. He knew the _Campagnia_ +three docks away, and explained to a Harlem grocer her fine +points, speaking earnestly of stacks and sticks, tonnage +and knots. + +Not excited, but--where couldn't he go if he were pulling out +for Arcady on the _Campagnia!_ Gee! What were even the +building-block towers of the Metropolitan and Singer buildings +and the _Times's_ cream-stick compared with some old shrine in a +cathedral close that was misted with centuries! + +All this he felt and hummed to himself, though not in words. +He had never heard of Arcady, though for many years he had +been a citizen of that demesne. + +Sure, he declared to himself, he was on the liner now; he was +sliding up the muddy Mersey (see the _W. S. Travel Notes_ for +the source of his visions); he was off to St. George's Square +for an organ-recital (see the English Baedeker); then an express +for London and--Gee! + +The ferryboat was entering her slip. Mr. Wrenn trotted toward +the bow to thrill over the bump of the boat's snub nose against +the lofty swaying piles and the swash of the brown waves heaped +before her as she sidled into place. He was carried by the herd +on into the station. + +He did not notice the individual people in his exultation as he +heard the great chords of the station's paean. The vast roof +roared as the iron coursers stamped titanic hoofs of scorn at +the little stay-at-home. + +That is a washed-out hint of how the poets might describe Mr. +Wrenn's passion. What he said was "Gee!" + +He strolled by the lists of destinations hung on the track gates. +Chicago (the plains! the Rockies! sunset over mining-camps!), +Washington, and the magic Southland--thither the iron horses +would be galloping, their swarthy smoke manes whipped back by +the whirlwind, pounding out with clamorous strong hoofs their +sixty miles an hour. Very well. In time he also would mount +upon the iron coursers and charge upon Chicago and the +Southland; just as soon as he got ready. + +Then he headed for Cortlandt Street; for Long Island, City. +finally, the Navy Yard. Along his way were the docks of the +tramp steamers where he might ship as steward in the +all-promising Sometime. He had never done anything so reckless +as actually to ask a skipper for the chance to go a-sailing, but +he had once gone into a mission society's free shipping-office +on West Street where a disapproving elder had grumped at him, +"Are you a sailor? No? Can't do anything for you, my friend. +Are you saved?" He wasn't going to risk another horror like +that, yet when the golden morning of Sometime dawned he +certainly was going to go cruising off to palm-bordered lagoons. + +As he walked through Long Island City he contrived conversations +with the sailors he passed. It would have surprised a Norwegian +bos'un's mate to learn that he was really a gun-runner, and +that, as a matter of fact, he was now telling yarns of the +Spanish Main to the man who slid deprecatingly by him. + +Mr. Wrenn envied the jackies on the training-ship and carelessly +went to sea as the President's guest in the admiral's barge and +was frightened by the stare of a sauntering shop-girl and +arrived home before dusk, to Mrs. Zapp's straitened approval. + +Dusk made incantations in his third-floor-front. Pleasantly +fagged in those slight neat legs, after his walk, Mr. Wrenn sat +in the wicker rocker by the window, patting his scrubby tan +mustache and reviewing the day's wandering. When the gas was +lighted he yearned over pictures in a geographical magazine for +a happy hour, then yawned to himself, "Well-l-l, Willum, guess +it's time to crawl into the downy." + +He undressed and smoothed his ready-made suit on the +rocking-chair back. Sitting on the edge of his bed, quaint in +his cotton night-gown, like a rare little bird of dull plumage, +he rubbed his head sleepily. Um-m-m-m-m! How tired he was! +He went to open the window. Then his tamed heart leaped into a +waltz, and he forgot third-floor-fronts and sleepiness. + +Through the window came the chorus of fog-horns on North River. +"Boom-m-m!" That must be a giant liner, battling up through the +fog. (It was a ferry.) A liner! She'd be roaring just like that +if she were off the Banks! If he were only off the Banks! "Toot! +Toot!" That was a tug. "Whawn-n-n!" Another liner. The tumultuous +chorus repeated to him all the adventures of the day. + +He dropped upon the bed again and stared absently at his +clothes. Out of the inside coat pocket stuck the unopened +letter from Cousin John. + +He read a paragraph of it. He sprang from the bed and danced a +tarantella, pranced in his cottony nightgown like a drunken +Yaqui. The letter announced that the flinty farm at Parthenon, +left to Mr. Wrenn by his father, had been sold. Its location on +a river bluff had made it valuable to the Parthenon Chautauqua +Association. There was now to his credit in the Parthenon +National Bank nine hundred and forty dollars! + +He was wealthy, then. He had enough to stalk up and down the +earth for many venturesome (but economical) months, till he +should learn the trade of wandering, and its mysterious trick of +living without a job or a salary. + +He crushed his pillow with burrowing head and sobbed excitedly, +with a terrible stomach-sinking and a chill shaking. Then he +laughed and wanted to--but didn't--rush into the adjacent hall +room and tell the total stranger there of this world-changing news. +He listened in the hall to learn whether the Zapps were up, +but heard nothing; returned and cantered up and down, gloating +on a map of the world. + +"Gee! It's happened. I could travel all the time. I guess I +won't be--very much--afraid of wrecks and stuff. . . . Things like +that. . . . Gee! If I don't get to bed I'll be late at the +office in the morning!" + +Mr. Wrenn lay awake till three o'clock. Monday morning he felt +rather ashamed of having done so eccentric a thing. But he got +to the office on time. He was worried with the cares of wealth, +with having to decide when to leave for his world-wanderings, +but he was also very much aware that office managers are +disagreeable if one isn't on time. All morning he did nothing +more reckless than balance his new fortune, plus his savings, +against steamship fares on a waste half-sheet of paper. + +The noon-hour was not The Job's, but his, for exploration of the +parlous lands of romance that lie hard by Twenty-eighth Street +and Sixth Avenue. But he had to go out to lunch with Charley +Carpenter, the assistant bookkeeper, that he might tell the news. +As for Charley, He needed frequently to have a confidant who knew +personally the tyrannous ways of the office manager, Mr. Guilfogle. + +Mr. Wrenn and Charley chose (that is to say, Charley chose) +a table at Drubel's Eating House. Mr. Wrenn timidly hinted, +"I've got some big news to tell you." + +But Charley interrupted, "Say, did you hear old Goglefogle light +into me this morning? I won't stand for it. Say, did you hear +him--the old--" + +"What was the trouble, Charley?" + +"Trouble? Nothing was the trouble. Except with old Goglefogle. +I made one little break in my accounts. Why, if old Gogie had +to keep track of seventy-'leven accounts and watch every single +last movement of a fool girl that can't even run the adding-machine, +why, he'd get green around the gills. He'd never do anything +_but_ make mistakes! Well, I guess the old codger must have had +a bum breakfast this morning. Wanted some exercise to digest it. +Me, I was the exercise--I was the goat. He calls me in, and he +calls me _down_, and me--well, just lemme tell you, Wrenn, +I calls his bluff!" + +Charley Carpenter stopped his rapid tirade, delivered with quick +head-shakes like those of palsy, to raise his smelly cigarette +to his mouth. Midway in this slow gesture the memory of his +wrongs again overpowered him. He flung his right hand back on +the table, scattering cigarette ashes, jerked back his head with +the irritated patience of a nervous martyr, then waved both +hands about spasmodically, while he snarled, with his cheaply +handsome smooth face more flushed than usual: + +"Sure! You can just bet your bottom dollar I let him see from +the way I looked at him that I wasn't going to stand for no more +monkey business. You bet I did!... I'll fix him, I will. +You just _watch_ me. (Hey, Drubel, got any lemon merang? Bring me +a hunk, will yuh?) Why, Wrenn, that cross-eyed double-jointed +fat old slob, I'll slam him in the slats so hard some day--I +will, you just watch my smoke. If it wasn't for that messy wife +of mine--I ought to desert her, and I will some day, and--" + +"Yuh." Mr. Wrenn was curt for a second.... "I know how it is, Charley. +But you'll get over it, honest you will. Say, I've got some news. +Some land that my dad left me has sold for nearly a thousand plunks. +By the way, this lunch is on me. Let me pay for it, Charley." + +Charley promised to let him pay, quite readily. And, expanding, said: + +"Great, Wrenn! Great! Lemme congratulate you. Don't know +anybody I'd rather've had this happen to. You're a meek little +baa-lamb, but you've got lots of stuff in you, old Wrennski. +Oh say, by the way, could. you let me have fifty cents till +Saturday? Thanks. I'll pay it back sure. By golly! you're +the only man around the office that 'preciates what a double +duck-lined old fiend old Goglefogle is, the old--" + +"Aw, gee, Charley, I wish you wouldn't jump on Guilfogle +so hard. He's always treated me square." + +"Gogie--square? Yuh, he's square just like a hoop. You know it, +too, Wrenn. Now that you've got enough money so's you don't +need to be scared about the job you'll realize it, and you'll +want to soak him, same's I do. _Say!_" The impulse of a great +idea made him gleefully shake his fist sidewise. "Say! +Why _don't_ you soak him? They bank on you at the Souvenir +Company. Darn' sight more than you realize, lemme tell you. +Why, you do about half the stock-keeper's work, sides your own. +Tell you what you do. You go to old Goglefogle and tell him you +want a raise to twenty-five, and want it right now. Yes, by +golly, _thirty!_ You're worth that, or pretty darn' near it, but +'course old Goglefogle'll never give it to you. He'll threaten +to fire you if you say a thing more about it. You can tell him +to go ahead, and then where'll he be? Guess that'll call his +bluff some!" + +"Yes, but, Charley, then if Guilfogle feels he can't pay me that +much--you know he's responsible to the directors; he can't do +everything he wants to--why, he'll just have to fire me, after +I've talked to him like that, whether he wants to or not. +And that'd leave us--that'd leave them--without a sales clerk, +right in the busy season." + +"Why, sure, Wrenn; that's what we want to do. If you go it 'd +leave 'em without just about _two_ men. Bother 'em like the deuce. +It 'd bother Mr. Mortimer X. Y. Guglefugle most of all, +thank the Lord. He wouldn't know where he was at--trying to +break in a man right in the busy season. Here's your chance. +Come on, kid; don't pass it up." + +"Oh gee, Charley, I can't do that. You wouldn't want me to try +to _hurt_ the Souvenir Company after being there for--lemme see, +it must be seven years." + +"Well, maybe you _like_ to get your cute little nose rubbed on +the grindstone! I suppose you'd like to stay on at nineteen per +for the rest of your life." + +"Aw, Charley, don't get sore; please don't! I'd like to get off, +all right--like to go traveling, and stuff like that. Gee! I'd +like to wander round. But I can't cut out right in the bus--" + +"But can't you see, you poor nut, you won't be _leaving_ +'em--they'll either pay you what they ought to or lose you." + +"Oh, I don't know about that, Charley. + +"Charley was making up for some uncertainty as to his own +logic by beaming persuasiveness, and Mr. Wrenn was afraid +of being hypnotized. "No, no!" he throbbed, rising. + +"Well, all right!" snarled Charley, "if you like to be Gogie's +goat.... Oh, you're all right, Wrennski. I suppose you had +ought to stay, if you feel you got to.... Well, so long. +I've got to beat it over and buy a pair of socks before I go back." + +Mr. Wrenn crept out of Drubel's behind him, very melancholy. +Even Charley admitted that he "had ought to stay," then; and +what chance was there of persuading the dread Mr. Mortimer R. +Guilfogle that he wished to be looked upon as one resigning? +Where, then, any chance of globe-trotting; perhaps for months he +would remain in slavery, and he had hoped just that morning-- +One dreadful quarter-hour with Mr. Guilfogle and he might be free. +He grinned to himself as he admitted that this was like +seeing Europe after merely swimming the mid-winter Atlantic. + +Well, he had nine minutes more, by his two-dollar watch; nine +minutes of vagabondage. He gazed across at a Greek restaurant +with signs in real Greek letters like "ruins at--well, at Aythens." +A Chinese chop-suey den with a red-and-yellow carved dragon, +and at an upper window a squat Chinaman who might easily +be carrying a _kris_, "or whatever them Chink knives are," as he +observed for the hundredth time he had taken this journey. +A rotisserie, before whose upright fender of scarlet coals whole +ducks were happily roasting to a shiny brown. In a furrier's +window were Siberian foxes' skins (Siberia! huts of "awful +brave convicks"; the steely Northern Sea; guards in blouses, +just as he'd seen them at an Academy of Music play) and a polar +bear (meaning, to him, the Northern Lights, the long hike, +and the _igloo_ at night). And the florists! There were orchids +that (though he only half knew it, and that all inarticulately) +whispered to him of jungles where, in the hot hush, he saw the +slumbering python and--"What was it in that poem, that, +Mandalay, thing? _was_ it about jungles? Anyway: + + +"'Them garlicky smells, +And the sunshine and the palms and the bells.'" + + +He had to hurry back to the office. He stopped only to pat the +head of a florist's delivery horse that looked wistfully at him +from the curb. "Poor old fella. What you thinking about? +Want to be a circus horse and wander? Le's beat it together. +You can't, eh? Poor old fella!" + +At three-thirty, the time when it seems to office persons that +the day's work never will end, even by a miracle, Mr. Wrenn was +shaky about his duty to the firm. He was more so after an +electrical interview with the manager, who spent a few minutes, +which he happened to have free, in roaring "I want to know why" +at Mr. Wrenn. There was no particular "why" that he wanted to +know; he was merely getting scientific efficiency out of +employees, a phrase which Mr. Guilfogle had taken from a +business magazine that dilutes efficiency theories for +inefficient employers. + +At five-twenty the manager summoned him, complimented him on +nothing in particular, and suggested that he stay late with +Charley Carpenter and the stock-keeper to inventory a line of +desk-clocks which they were closing out. + +As Mr. Wrenn returned to his desk he stopped at a window on the +corridor and coveted the bright late afternoon. The cornices of +lofty buildings glistened; the sunset shone fierily through the +glass-inclosed layer-like upper floors. He wanted to be out +there in the streets with the shopping crowds. Old Goglefogle +didn't consider him; why should he consider the firm? + + + + + + +CHAPTER II + +HE WALKS WITH MISS THERESA + + + + + +As he left the Souvenir Company building after working late at +taking inventory and roamed down toward Fourteenth Street, Mr. +Wrenn felt forlornly aimless. The worst of it all was that he +could not go to the Nickelorion for moving pictures; not after +having been cut by the ticket-taker. Then, there before him was +the glaring sign of the Nickelorion tempting him; a bill with +"Great Train Robbery Film Tonight" made his heart thump like +stair-climbing--and he dashed at the ticket-booth with a nickel +doughtily extended. He felt queer about the scalp as the +cashier girl slid out a coupon. Why did she seem to be watching +him so closely? As he dropped the ticket in the chopper he +tried to glance away from the Brass-button Man. For one- +nineteenth of a second he kept his head turned. It turned +back of itself; he stared full at the man, half bowed--and +received a hearty absent-minded nod and a "Fine evenin'." +He sang to himself a monotonous song of great joy. When he +stumbled over the feet of a large German in getting to a seat, +he apologized as though he were accustomed to laugh easily with +many friends. + +The train-robbery film was--well, he kept repeating "Gee!" to +himself pantingly. How the masked men did sneak, simply sneak +and sneak, behind the bushes! Mr. Wrenn shrank as one of them +leered out of the picture at him. How gallantly the train +dashed toward the robbers, to the spirit-stirring roll of the +snare-drum. The rush from the bushes followed; the battle with +detectives concealed in the express-car. Mr. Wrenn was +standing sturdily and shooting coolly with the slender +hawk-faced Pinkerton man in puttees; with him he leaped to horse +and followed the robbers through the forest. He stayed through +the whole program twice to see the train robbery again. + +As he started to go out he found the ticket-taker changing his +long light-blue robe of state for a highly commonplace sack-coat +without brass buttons. In his astonishment at seeing how a +Highness could be transformed into an every-day man, Mr. Wrenn +stopped, and, having stopped, spoke: + +"Uh--that was quite a--quite a picture--that train robbery. +Wasn't it." + +"Yuh, I guess--Now where's the devil and his wife flew away +to with my hat? Them guys is always swiping it. Picture, +mister? Why, I didn't see it no more 'n--Say you, Pink Eye, +say you crab-footed usher, did you swipe my hat? Ain't he the +cut-up, mister! Ain't both them ushers the jingling sheepsheads, +though! Being cute and hiding my hat in the box-office. +_Picture?_ I don't get no chance to see any of 'em. Funny, +ain't it?--me barking for 'em like I was the grandmother of the +guy that invented 'em, and not knowing whether the train +robbery--Now who stole my going-home shoes?... Why, I don't +know whether the train did any robbing or not!" + +He slapped Mr. Wrenn on the back, and the sales clerk's heart +bounded in comradeship. He was surprised into declaring: + +"Say--uh--I bowed to you the other night and you--well, honestly, +you acted like you never saw me." + +"Well, well, now, and that's what happens to me for being the +dad of five kids and a she-girl and a tom-cat. Sure, I couldn't +'ve seen you. Me, I was probably that busy with fambly cares--I +was probably thinking who was it et the lemon pie on me--was it Pete +or Johnny, or shall I lick 'em both together, or just bite me wife." + +Mr. Wrenn knew that the ticket-taker had never, never really +considered biting his wife. _He_ knew! His nod and grin and +"That's the idea!" were urbanely sophisticated. He urged: + +"Oh yes, I'm sure you didn't intend to hand me the icy mitt. +Say! I'm thirsty. Come on over to Moje's and I'll buy you a drink." + +He was aghast at this abyss of money-spending into which he had +leaped, and the Brass-button Man was suspiciously wondering what +this person wanted of him; but they crossed to the adjacent +saloon, a New York corner saloon, which of course "glittered" +with a large mirror, heaped glasses, and a long shining +foot-rail on which, in bravado, Mr. Wrenn placed his +Cum-Fee-Best shoe. + +"Uh?" said the bartender. + +"Rye, Jimmy," said the Brass-button Man. + +"Uh-h-h-h-h," said Mr. Wrenn, in a frightened diminuendo, now +that--wealthy citizen though he had become--he was in danger of +exposure as a mollycoddle who couldn't choose his drink properly. +"Stummick been hurting me. Guess I'd better just take a lemonade." + +"You're the brother-in-law to a wise one," commented the +Brass-button Man. "Me, I ain't never got the sense to do the +traffic cop on the booze. The old woman she says to me, `Mory,' +she says, `if you was in heaven and there was a pail of beer on +one side and a gold harp on the other,' she says, `and you was +to have your pick, which would you take?' And what 'd yuh think +I answers her?" + +"The beer," said the bartender. "She had your number, all right." + +"Not on your tin-type," declared the ticket-taker. + +"`Me?' I says to her. `Me? I'd pinch the harp and pawn it for +ten growlers of Dutch beer and some man-sized rum!'" + +"Hee, hee hee!" grinned Mr. Wrenn. + +"Ha, ha, ha!" grumbled the bartender. + +"Well-l-l," yawned the ticket-taker, "the old woman'll be +chasing me best pants around the flat, if she don't have me to +chase, pretty soon. Guess I'd better beat it. Much obliged for +the drink, Mr. Uh. So long, Jimmy." + +Mr. Wrenn set off for home in a high state of exhilaration +which, he noticed, exactly resembled driving an aeroplane, and +went briskly up the steps of the Zapps' genteel but unexciting +residence. He was much nearer to heaven than West Sixteenth +Street appears to be to the outsider. For he was an explorer of +the Arctic, a trusted man on the job, an associate of witty +Bohemians. He was an army lieutenant who had, with his friend +the hawk-faced Pinkerton man, stood off bandits in an attack +on a train. He opened and closed the door gaily. + +He was an apologetic little Mr. Wrenn. His landlady stood +on the bottom step of the hall stairs in a bunchy Mother +Hubbard, groaning: + +"Mist' Wrenn, if you got to come in so late, Ah wish you +wouldn't just make all the noise you can. Ah don't see why Ah +should have to be kept awake all night. Ah suppose it's the +will of the Lord that whenever Ah go out to see Mrs. Muzzy and +just drink a drop of coffee Ah must get insomina, but Ah don't +see why anybody that tries to be a gennulman should have to go +and bang the door and just rack mah nerves." + +He slunk up-stairs behind Mrs. Zapp's lumbering gloom. + + +"There's something I wanted to tell you, Mrs. Zapp--something +that's happened to me. That's why I was out celebrating last +evening and got in so late." Mr. Wrenn was diffidently sitting +in the basement. + +"Yes," dryly, "Ah noticed you was out late, Mist' Wrenn." + +"You see, Mrs. Zapp, I--uh--my father left me some land, and +it's been sold for about one thousand plunks." + +" Ah'm awful' glad, Mist' Wrenn," she said, funereally. "Maybe +you'd like to take that hall room beside yours now. The two +rooms'd make a nice apartment." (She really said "nahs +'pahtmun', "you understand.) + +"Why, I hadn't thought much about that yet." He felt guilty, and +was profusely cordial to Lee Theresa Zapp, the factory +forewoman, who had just thumped down-stairs. + +Miss Theresa was a large young lady with a bust, much black +hair, and a handsome disdainful discontented face. She waited +till he had finished greeting her, then sniffed, and at her +mother she snarled: + +"Ma, they went and kept us late again to-night. I'm getting +just about tired of having a bunch of Jews and Yankees think I'm +a nigger. Uff! I hate them!" + +"T'resa, Mist' Wrenn's just inherited two thousand dollars, and +he's going to take that upper hall room." Mrs. Zapp beamed with +maternal fondness at the timid lodger. + +But the gallant friend of Pinkertons faced her--for the first +time. "Waste his travel-money?" he was inwardly exclaiming as +he said: + +"But I thought you had some one in that room. I heard som--" + +"That fellow! Oh, he ain't going to be perm'nent. And he +promised me--So you can have--" + +"I'm _awful_ sorry, Mrs. Zapp, but I'm afraid I can't take it. +Fact is, I may go traveling for a while." + +"Co'se you'll keep your room if you do, Mist' Wrenn?" + +"Why, I'm afraid I'll have to give it up, but--Oh, I may not be +going for a long long while yet; and of course I'll be glad to +come--I'll want to come back here when I get back to New York. +I won't be gone for more than, oh, probably not more than a year +anyway, and--" + +"And Ah thought you said you was going to be perm'nent!" Mrs. +Zapp began quietly, prefatory to working herself up into +hysterics. "And here Ah've gone and had your room fixed up +just for you, and new paper put in, and you've always been +talking such a lot about how you wanted your furniture arranged, +and Ah've gone and made all mah plans--" + +Mr. Wrenn had been a shyly paying guest of the Zapps for four +years. That famous new paper had been put up two years before. +So he spluttered: "Oh, I'm _awfully_ sorry. I wish--uh--I +don't--" + +"Ah'd _thank_ you, Mist' Wrenn, if you could _conveniently_ let me +_know_ before you go running off and leaving me with empty rooms, +with the landlord after the rent, and me turning away people +that 'd pay more for the room, because Ah wanted to keep it for +you. And people always coming to see you and making me answer +the door and--" + +Even the rooming-house worm was making small worm-like sounds +that presaged turning. Lee Theresa snapped just in time, "Oh, +cut it out, Ma, will you!" She had been staring at the worm, for +he had suddenly become interesting and adorable and, +incidentally, an heir. "I don't see why Mr. Wrenn ain't giving +us all the notice we can expect. He said he mightn't be going +for a long time." + +"Oh!" grunted Mrs. Zapp. "So mah own flesh and blood is going +to turn against me!" + +She rose. Her appearance of majesty was somewhat lessened by +the creak of stays, but her instinct for unpleasantness was +always good. She said nothing as she left them, and she plodded +up-stairs with a train of sighs. + +Mr. Wrenn looked as though sudden illness had overpowered him. +But Theresa laughed, and remarked: "You don't want to let Ma +get on her high horse, Mr. Wrenn. She's a bluff." + +With much billowing of the lower, less stiff part of her +garments, she sailed to the cloudy mirror over the +magazine-filled bookcase and inspected her cap of false curls, +with many prods of her large firm hands which flashed with +Brazilian diamonds. Though he had heard the word "puffs," +he did not know that half her hair was false. He stared +at it. Though in disgrace, he felt the honor of knowing +so ample and rustling a woman as Miss Lee Theresa. + +"But, say, I wish I could 've let her know I was going earlier, +Miss Zapp. I didn't know it myself, but it does seem like a +mean trick. I s'pose I ought to pay her something extra." + +"Why, child, you won't do anything of the sort. Ma hasn't got +a bit of kick coming. You've always been awful nice, far as I +can see." She smiled lavishly. "I went for a walk to-night.... +I wish all those men wouldn't stare at a girl so. I'm sure I +don't see why they should stare at me." + +Mr. Wrenn nodded, but that didn't seem to be the right comment, +so he shook his head, then looked frightfully embarrassed. + +"I went by that Armenian restaurant you were telling me about, +Mr. Wrenn. Some time I believe I'll go dine there." Again she paused. + +He said only, "Yes, it is a nice place." + +Remarking to herself that there was no question about it, +after all, he _was_ a little fool, Theresa continued the siege. +"Do you dine there often?" + +"Oh yes. It is a nice place." + +"Could a lady go there?" + +"Why, yes, I--" + +"Yes!" + +"I should think so," he finished. + +"Oh!... I do get so awfully tired of the greasy stuff Ma and +Goaty dish up. They think a big stew that tastes like +dish-water is a dinner, and if they do have anything I like they +keep on having the same thing every day till I throw it in the +sink. I wish I could go to a restaurant once in a while for a +change, but of course--I dunno's it would be proper for a +lady to go alone even there. What do you think? Oh dear!" +She sat brooding sadly. + +He had an inspiration. Perhaps Miss Theresa could be persuaded +to go out to dinner with him some time. He begged: + +"Gee, I wish you'd let me take you up there some evening, Miss Zapp." + +"Now, didn't I tell you to call me `Miss Theresa'? Well, I +suppose you just don't want to be friends with me. Nobody +does." She brooded again. + +"Oh, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. Honest I didn't. +I've always thought you'd think I was fresh if I called you +`Miss Theresa,' and so I--" + +"Why, I guess I could go up to the Armenian with you, perhaps. +When would you like to go? You know I've always got lots of +dates but I--um--let's see, I think I could go to-morrow evening." + +"Let's do it! Shall I call for you, Miss--uh--Theresa?" + +"Yes, you may if you'll be a good boy. Good night." She +departed with an air of intimacy. + +Mr. Wrenn scuttled to the Nickelorion, and admitted to the +Brass-button Man that he was "feeling pretty good 's evening." + +He had never supposed that a handsome creature like Miss Theresa +could ever endure such a "slow fellow" as himself. For about +one minute he considered with a chill the question of whether +she was agreeable because of his new wealth, but reproved the +fiend who was making the suggestion; for had he not heard her +mention with great scorn a second cousin who had married an old +Yankee for his money? That just settled _that_, he assured +himself, and scowled at a passing messenger-boy for having thus +hinted, but hastily grimaced as the youngster showed signs of +loud displeasure. + + +The Armenian restaurant is peculiar, for it has foreign food at +low prices, and is below Thirtieth Street, yet it has not become +Bohemian. Consequently it has no bad music and no crowd of +persons from Missouri whose women risk salvation for an evening +by smoking cigarettes. Here prosperous Oriental merchants, +of mild natures and bandit faces, drink semi-liquid Turkish +coffee and discuss rugs and revolutions. + +In fact, the place seemed so unartificial that Theresa, facing +Mr. Wrenn, was bored. And the menu was foreign without being +Society viands. It suggested rats' tails and birds' nests, she +was quite sure. She would gladly have experimented with _pate +de foie gras_ or alligator-pears, but what social prestige was +there to be gained at the factory by remarking that she "always +did like _pahklava_"? Mr. Wrenn did not see that she was +glancing about discontentedly, for he was delightedly listening +to a lanky young man at the next table who was remarking to his +_vis-a-vis_, a pale slithey lady in black, with the lines of a +torpedo-boat: "Try some of the stuffed vine-leaves, child of +the angels, and some wheat _pilaf_ and some _bourma_. Your wheat +_pilaf_ is a comfortable food and cheering to the stomach of man. +Simply _won_-derful. As for the _bourma_, he is a merry beast, a +brown rose of pastry with honey cunningly secreted between his +petals and--Here! Waiter! Stuffed vine-leaves, wheat _p'laf, +bourm'_--twice on the order and hustle it." + +"When you get through listening to that man--he talks like a bar +of soap--tell me what there is on this bill of fare that's safe +to eat," snorted Theresa. + +"I thought he was real funny," insisted Mr. Wrenn.... "I'm sure +you'll like _shish kebab_ and s--" + +"_Shish kibub!_ Who ever heard of such a thing! Haven't they +any--oh, I thought they'd have stuff they call `Turkish Delight' +and things like that." + +"`Turkish Delights' is cigarettes, I think." + +"Well, I know it isn't, because I read about it in a story in a +magazine. And they were eating it. On the terrace.... What is +that _shish kibub_?" + +"_Kebab_.... It's lamb roasted on skewers. I know you'll like it." + +"Well, I'm not going to trust any heathens to cook my meat. +I'll take some eggs and some of that--what was it the idiot was +talking about--_berma_?" + +"_Bourma_.... That's awful nice. With honey. And do try some +of the stuffed peppers and rice." + +"All right," said Theresa, gloomily. + +Somehow Mr. Wrenn wasn't vastly transformed even by the +possession of the two thousand dollars her mother had reported. +He was still "funny and sort of scary," not like the +overpowering Southern gentlemen she supposed she remembered. +Also, she was hungry. She listened with stolid glumness to Mr. +Wrenn's observation that that was "an awful big hat the lady +with the funny guy had on." + +He was chilled into quietness till Papa Gouroff, the owner of +the restaurant, arrived from above-stairs. Papa Gouroff was +a Russian Jew who had been a police spy in Poland and a hotel +proprietor in Mogador, where he called himself Turkish and +married a renegade Armenian. He had a nose like a sickle and a +neck like a blue-gum nigger. He hoped that the place would +degenerate into a Bohemian restaurant where liberal clergymen +would think they were slumming, and barbers would think they +were entering society, so he always wore a _fez_ and talked bad +Arabic. He was local color, atmosphere, Bohemian flavor. Mr. +Wrenn murmured to Theresa: + +"Say, do you see that man? He's Signor Gouroff, the owner. +I've talked to him a lot of times. Ain't he great! Golly! look +at that beak of his. Don't he make you think of _kiosks_ and +_hyrems_ and stuff? Gee! What does he make you think--" + +"He's got on a dirty collar.... That waiter's awful slow.... +Would you please be so kind and pour me another glass of water?" + +But when she reached the honied _bourma_ she grew tolerant toward +Mr. Wrenn. She had two cups of cocoa and felt fat about the +eyes and affectionate. She had mentioned that there were good +shows in town. Now she resumed: + +"Have you been to `The Gold Brick' yet?" + +"No, I--uh--I don't go to the theater much." + +"Gwendolyn Muzzy was telling me that this was the funniest show +she'd ever seen. Tells how two confidence men fooled one of +those terrible little jay towns. Shows all the funny people, +you know, like they have in jay towns.... I wish I could go to +it, but of course I have to help out the folks at home, so-- +Well.... Oh dear." + +"Say! I'd like to take you, if I could. Let's go--this +evening!" He quivered with the adventure of it. + +"Why, I don't know; I didn't tell Ma I was going to be out. +But--oh, I guess it would be all right if I was with you." + +"Let's go right up and get some tickets." + +"All right." Her assent was too eager, but she immediately +corrected that error by yawning, "I don't suppose I'd ought to +go, but if you want to--" + +They were a very lively couple as they walked up. He trickled +sympathy when she told of the selfishness of the factory girls +under her and the meanness of the superintendent over her, and +he laughed several times as she remarked that the superintendent +"ought to be boiled alive--that's what _all_ lobsters ought to +be," so she repeated the epigram with such increased jollity +that they swung up to the theater in a gale; and, once facing +the ennuied ticket-seller, he demanded dollar seats just as +though he had not been doing sums all the way up to prove that +seventy-five-cent seats were the best he could afford. + +The play was a glorification of Yankee smartness. Mr. Wrenn was +disturbed by the fact that the swindler heroes robbed quite all +the others, but he was stirred by the brisk romance of +money-making. The swindlers were supermen--blonde beasts with +card indices and options instead of clubs. Not that Mr. Wrenn +made any observations regarding supermen. But when, by way of +commercial genius, the swindler robbed a young night clerk Mr. +Wrenn whispered to Theresa, "Gee! he certainly does know how to +jolly them, heh?" + +"Sh-h-h-h-h-h!" said Theresa. + +Every one made millions, victims and all, in the last act, as a +proof of the social value of being a live American business man. +As they oozed along with the departing audience Mr. Wrenn gurgled: + +"That makes me feel just like I'd been making a million +dollars." Masterfully, he proposed, "Say, let's go some place +and have something to eat." + +"All right." + +"Let's--I almost feel as if I could afford Rector's, after +that play; but, anyway, let's go to Allaire's." + +Though he was ashamed of himself for it afterward, he was almost +haughty toward his waiter, and ordered Welsh rabbits and beer +quite as though he usually breakfasted on them. He may even +have strutted a little as he hailed a car with an imaginary +walking-stick. His parting with Miss Theresa was intimate; he +shook her hand warmly. + +As he undressed he hoped that he had not been too abrupt with +the waiter, "poor cuss." But he lay awake to think of Theresa's +hair and hand-clasp; of polished desks and florid gentlemen who +curtly summoned bank-presidents and who had--he tossed the +bedclothes about in his struggle to get the word--who had a +_punch!_ + +He would do that Great Traveling of his in the land of Big +Business! + +The five thousand princes of New York to protect themselves +against the four million ungrateful slaves had devised the +sacred symbols of dress-coats, large houses, and automobiles as +the outward and visible signs of the virtue of making money, to +lure rebels into respectability and teach them the social value +of getting a dollar away from that inhuman, socially injurious +fiend, Some One Else. That Our Mr. Wrenn should dream for +dreaming's sake was catastrophic; he might do things because +he wanted to, not because they were fashionable; whereupon, +police forces and the clergy would disband, Wall Street and +Fifth Avenue would go thundering down. Hence, for him were +provided those Y. M. C. A. night bookkeeping classes +administered by solemn earnest men of thirty for solemn credulous +youths of twenty-nine; those sermons on content; articles on +"building up the rundown store by live advertising"; Kiplingesque +stories about playing the game; and correspondence-school +advertisements that shrieked, "Mount the ladder to thorough +knowledge--the path to power and to the fuller pay-envelope." + +To all these Mr. Wrenn had been indifferent, for they showed no +imagination. But when he saw Big Business glorified by a +humorous melodrama, then The Job appeared to him as picaresque +adventure, and he was in peril of his imagination. + + +The eight-o'clock sun, which usually found a wildly shaving Mr. +Wrenn, discovered him dreaming that he was the manager of the +Souvenir Company. But that was a complete misunderstanding of +the case. The manager of the Souvenir Company was Mr. Mortimer +R. Guilfogle, and he called Mr. Wrenn in to acquaint him with +that fact when the new magnate started his career in Big +Business by arriving at the office one hour late. + +What made it worse, considered Mr. Guilfogle, was that this +Wrenn had a higher average of punctuality than any one else in +the office, which proved that he knew better. Worst of all, the +Guilfogle family eggs had not been scrambled right at breakfast; +they had been anemic. Mr. Guilfogle punched the buzzer and set +his face toward the door, with a scowl prepared. + +Mr. Wrenn seemed weary, and not so intimidated as usual. + +"Look here, Wrenn; you were just about two hours late this +morning. What do you think this office is? A club or a +reading-room for hoboes? Ever occur to you we'd like to have +you favor us with a call now and then so's we can learn how +you're getting along at golf or whatever you're doing these days?" + +There was a sample baby-shoe office pin-cushion on the manager's +desk. Mr. Wrenn eyed this, and said nothing. The manager: + +"Hear what I said? D'yuh think I'm talking to give my throat exercise?" + +Mr. Wrenn was stubborn. "I couldn't help it." + +"Couldn't help--! And you call that an explanation! I know +just exactly what you're thinking, Wrenn; you're thinking that +because I've let you have a lot of chances to really work into +the business lately you're necessary to us, and not simply an +expense--" + +"Oh no, Mr. Guilfogle; honest, I didn't think--" + +"Well, hang it, man, you _want_ to think. What do you suppose we +pay you a salary for? And just let me tell you, Wrenn, right +here and now, that if you can't condescend to spare us some of +your valuable time, now and then, we can good and plenty get +along without you." + +An old tale, oft told and never believed; but it interested Mr. +Wrenn just now. + +"I'm real glad you can get along without me. I've just +inherited a big wad of money! I think I'll resign! Right now!" + +Whether he or Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle was the more aghast at +hearing him bawl this no one knows. The manager was so worried +at the thought of breaking in a new man that his eye-glasses +slipped off his poor perspiring nose. He begged, in sudden +tones of old friendship: + +"Why, you can't be thinking of leaving us! Why, we expect to +make a big man of you, Wrenn. I was joking about firing you. +You ought to know that, after the talk we had at Mouquin's the +other night. You can't be thinking of leaving us! There's no +end of possibilities here." + +"Sorry," said the dogged soldier of dreams. + +"Why--" wailed that hurt and astonished victim of ingratitude, +Mr. Guilfogle. + +"I'll leave the middle of June. That's plenty of notice," +chirruped Mr. Wrenn. + +At five that evening Mr. Wrenn dashed up to the Brass-button Man +at his station before the Nickelorion, crying: + +"Say! You come from Ireland, don't you?" + +"Now what would you think? Me--oh no; I'm a Chinaman from Oshkosh!" + +"No, honest, straight, tell me. I've got a chance to travel. +What d'yuh think of that? Ain't it great! And I'm going right +away. What I wanted to ask you was, what's the best place in +Ireland to see?" + +"Donegal, o' course. I was born there." + +Hauling from his pocket a pencil and a worn envelope, Mr. Wrenn +joyously added the new point of interest to a list ranging from +Delagoa Bay to Denver. + +He skipped up-town, looking at the stars. He shouted as he saw +the stacks of a big Cunarder bulking up at the end of Fourteenth +Street. He stopped to chuckle over a lithograph of the +Parthenon at the window of a Greek bootblack's stand. +Stars--steamer--temples, all these were his. He owned them now. +He was free. + +Lee Theresa sat waiting for him in the basement livingroom till +ten-thirty while he was flirting with trainboards at the Grand +Central. Then she went to bed, and, though he knew it not, that +prince of wealthy suitors, Mr. Wrenn, had entirely lost the +heart and hand of Miss Zapp of the F. F. V. + + +He stood before the manager's god-like desk on June 14, 1910. Sadly: + +"Good-by, Mr. Guilfogle. Leaving to-day. I wish--Gee! +I wish I could tell you, you know--about how much I appreciate--" + +The manager moved a wire basket of carbon copies of letters from +the left side of his desk to the right, staring at them +thoughtfully; rearranged his pencils in a pile before his +ink-well; glanced at the point of an indelible pencil with a +manner of startled examination; tapped his desk-blotter with his +knuckles; then raised his eyes. He studied Mr. Wrenn, smiled, +put on the look he used when inviting him out for a drink. Mr. +Guilfogle was essentially an honest fellow, harshened by The +Job; a well-satisfied victim, with the imagination clean gone out +of him, so that he took follow-up letters and the celerity of +office-boys as the only serious things in the world. He was +strong, alive, not at all a bad chap, merely efficient. + +"Well, Wrenn, I suppose there's no use of rubbing it in. Course +you know what I think about the whole thing. It strikes me +you're a fool to leave a good job. But, after all, that's your +business, not ours. We like you, and when you get tired of +being just a bum, why, come back; we'll always try to have a job +open for you. Meanwhile I hope you'll have a mighty good time, +old man. Where you going? When d'yuh start out?" + +"Why, first I'm going to just kind of wander round generally. +Lots of things I'd like to do. I think I'll get away real soon +now.... Thank you awfully, Mr. Guilfogle, for keeping a place +open for me. Course I prob'ly won't need it, but gee! I sure do +appreciate it." + +"Say, I don't believe you're so plumb crazy about leaving us, +after all, now that the cards are all dole out. Straight now, +are you?" + +"Yes, sir, it does make me feel a little blue--been here so +long. But it'll be awful good to get out at sea." + +"Yuh, I know, Wrenn. I'd like to go traveling myself--I +suppose you fellows think I wouldn't care to go bumming around +like you do and never have to worry about how the firm's going +to break even. But--Well, good-by, old man, and don't +forget us. Drop me a line now and then and let me know how +you're getting along. Oh say, if you happen to see any novelties +that look good let us hear about them. But drop me a line, anyway. +We'll always be glad to hear from you. Well, good-by and good luck. +Sure and drop me a line." + +In the corner which had been his home for eight years Mr. Wrenn +could not devise any new and yet more improved arrangement of +the wire baskets and clips and desk reminders, so he cleaned a +pen, blew some gray eraser-dust from under his iron ink-well +standard, and decided that his desk was in order; reflecting: + +He'd been there a long time. Now he could never come back to +it, no matter how much he wanted to.... How good the manager +had been to him. Gee! he hadn't appreciated how considerut +Guilfogle was! + +He started down the corridor on a round of farewells to the boys. +"Too bad he hadn't never got better acquainted with them, +but it was too late now. Anyway, they were such fine jolly +sports; they'd never miss a stupid guy like him." + +Just then he met them in the corridor, all of them except +Guilfogle, headed by Rabin, the traveling salesman, and Charley +Carpenter, who was bearing a box of handkerchiefs with a large +green-and-crimson-paper label. + +"Gov'nor Wrenn," orated Charley, "upon this suspicious occasion +we have the pleasure of showing by this small token of our +esteem our 'preciation of your untiring efforts in the +investigation of Mortimer R. Gugglegiggle of the Graft Trust +and-- + +"Say, old man, joking aside, we're mighty sorry you're going +and--uh--well, we'd like to give you something to show +we're--uh--mighty sorry you're going. We thought of a box of +cigars, but you don't smoke much; anyway, these han'k'chiefs'll +help to show--Three cheers for Wrenn, fellows!" + +Afterward, by his desk, alone, holding the box of handkerchiefs +with the resplendent red-and-green label, Mr. Wrenn began to cry. + + +He was lying abed at eight-thirty on a morning of late June, two +weeks after leaving the Souvenir Company, deliberately hunting +over his pillow for cool spots, very hot and restless in the +legs and enormously depressed in the soul. He would have got up +had there been anything to get up for. There was nothing, yet +he felt uneasily guilty. For two weeks he had been afraid of +losing, by neglect, the job he had already voluntarily given up. +So there are men whom the fear of death has driven to suicide. + +Nearly every morning he had driven himself from bed and had +finished shaving before he was quite satisfied that he didn't +have to get to the office on time. As he wandered about during +the day he remarked with frequency, "I'm scared as teacher's pet +playing hookey for the first time, like what we used to do +in Parthenon." All proper persons were at work of a week-day +afternoon. What, then, was he doing walking along the street +when all morality demanded his sitting at a desk at the Souvenir +Company, being a little more careful, to win the divine favor of +Mortimer R. Guilfogle? + +He was sure that if he were already out on the Great Traveling +he would be able to "push the buzzer on himself and get up his +nerve." But he did not know where to go. He had planned so many +trips these years that now he couldn't keep any one of them +finally decided on for more than an hour. It rather stretched +his short arms to embrace at once a gay old dream of seeing +Venice and the stern civic duty of hunting abominably dangerous +beasts in the Guatemala bush. + +The expense bothered him, too. He had through many years so +persistently saved money for the Great Traveling that he +begrudged money for that Traveling itself. Indeed, he planned +to spend not more than $300 of the $1,235.80 he had now +accumulated, on his first venture, during which he hoped to +learn the trade of wandering. + +He was always influenced by a sentence he had read somewhere +about "one of those globe-trotters you meet carrying a +monkey-wrench in Calcutta, then in raiment and a monocle at the +Athenaeum." He would learn some Kiplingy trade that would teach +him the use of astonishingly technical tools, also daring and +the location of smugglers' haunts, copra islands, and +whaling-stations with curious names. + +He pictured himself shipping as third engineer at the Manihiki +Islands or engaged for taking moving pictures of an aeroplane +flight in Algiers. He _had_ to get away from Zappism. He had to +be out on the iron seas, where the battle-ships and liners went +by like a marching military band. But he couldn't get started. + +Once beyond Sandy Hook, he would immediately know all about +engines and fighting. It would help, he was certain, to be +shanghaied. But no matter how wistfully, no matter how late at +night he timorously forced himself to loiter among unwashed +English stokers on West Street, he couldn't get himself molested +except by glib persons wishing ten cents "for a place to sleep." + +When he had dallied through breakfast that particular morning he +sat about. Once he had pictured sitting about reading +travel-books as a perfect occupation. But it concealed no +exciting little surprises when he could be a Sunday loafer on any +plain Monday. Furthermore, Goaty never made his bed till noon, +and the gray-and-brown-patched coverlet seemed to trail all +about the disordered room. + +Midway in a paragraph he rose, threw _One Hundred Ways to See +California_ on the tumbled bed, and ran away from Our Mr. Wrenn. +But Our Mr. Wrenn pursued him along the wharves, where the sun +glared on oily water. He had seen the wharves twelve times that +fortnight. In fact, he even cried viciously that "he had seen +too blame much of the blame wharves." + +Early in the afternoon he went to a moving-picture show, but the +first sight of the white giant figures bulking against the gray +background was wearily unreal; and when the inevitable +large-eyed black-braided Indian maiden met the canonical +cow-puncher he threshed about in his seat, was irritated by the +nervous click of the machine and the hot stuffiness of the room, +and ran away just at the exciting moment when the Indian chief +dashed into camp and summoned his braves to the war-path. + +Perhaps he could hide from thought at home. + +As he came into his room he stood at gaze like a kitten of good +family beholding a mangy mongrel asleep in its pink basket. +For on his bed was Mrs. Zapp, her rotund curves stretching behind +her large flat feet, whose soles were toward him. She was +noisily somnolent; her stays creaked regularly as she breathed, +except when she moved slightly and groaned. + +Guiltily he tiptoed down-stairs and went snuffling along the +dusty unvaried brick side streets, wondering where in all New +York he could go. He read minutely a placard advertising an +excursion to the Catskills, to start that evening. For an +exhilarated moment he resolved to go, but--" oh, there was a lot +of them rich society folks up there." He bought a morning +_American_ and, sitting in Union Square, gravely studied the +humorous drawings. + +He casually noticed the "Help Wanted" advertisements. + +They suggested an uninteresting idea that somehow he might find +it economical to go venturing as a waiter or farm-hand. + +And so he came to the gate of paradise: + + +MEN WANTED. Free passage on cattle-boats to Liverpool feeding +cattle. Low fee. Easy work. Fast boats. Apply International +and Atlantic Employment Bureau,--Greenwich Street. + + +"Gee!" he cried, "I guess Providence has picked out my first +hike for me." + + + + + + +CHAPTER III + +HE STARTS FOR THE LAND OF ELSEWHERE + + + + + +The International and Atlantic Employment Bureau is a long dirty +room with the plaster cracked like the outlines on a map, hung +with steamship posters and the laws of New York regarding +employment offices, which are regarded as humorous by the +proprietor, M. Baraieff, a short slender ejaculatory person +with a nervous black beard, lively blandness, and a knowledge of +all the incorrect usages of nine languages. Mr. Wrenn edged +into this junk-heap of nationalities with interested wonder. +M. Baraieff rubbed his smooth wicked hands together and bowed a +number of times. + +Confidentially leaning across the counter, Mr. Wrenn murmured: +"Say, I read your ad. about wanting cattlemen. I want to make +a trip to Europe. How--?" + +"Yes, yes, yes, yes, Mistaire. I feex you up right away. +Ten dollars pleas-s-s-s." + +"Well, what does that entitle me to?" + +"I tole you I feex you up. Ha! Ha! I know it; you are a +gentleman; you want a nice leetle trip on Europe. Sure. I feex +you right up. I send you off on a nice easy cattleboat where you +won't have to work much hardly any. Right away it goes. Ten +dollars pleas-s-s-s." + +"But when does the boat start? Where does it start from?" Mr. +Wrenn was a bit confused. He had never met a man who grimaced +so politely and so rapidly. + +"Next Tuesday I send you right off." + +Mr. Wrenn regretfully exchanged ten dollars for a card informing +Trubiggs, Atlantic Avenue, Boston, that Mr. "Ren" was to be +"ship 1st poss. catel boat right away and charge my acct. fee +paid Baraieff." Brightly declaring "I geef you a fine ship," +M. Baraieff added, on the margin of the card, in copper-plate +script, "Best ship, easy work." He caroled, "Come early next +Tuesday morning, "and bowed out Mr. Wrenn like a Parisian +shopkeeper. The row of waiting servant-girls curtsied as though +they were a hedge swayed by the wind, while Mr. Wrenn +self-consciously hurried to get past them. + +He was too excited to worry over the patient and quiet suffering +with which Mrs. Zapp heard the announcement that he was going. +That Theresa laughed at him for a cattleman, while Goaty, in the +kitchen, audibly observed that "nobody but a Yankee would travel +in a pig-pen, "merely increased his joy in moving his belongings +to a storage warehouse. + +Tuesday morning, clad in a sweater-jacket, tennis-shoes, an old +felt hat, a khaki shirt and corduroys, carrying a suit-case +packed to bursting with clothes and Baedekers, with one hundred +and fifty dollars in express-company drafts craftily concealed, +he dashed down to Baraieff's hole. Though it was only +eight-thirty, he was afraid he was going to be late. + +Till 2 P.M. he sat waiting, then was sent to the Joy Steamship +Line wharf with a ticket to Boston and a letter to Trubiggs's +shipping-office: "Give bearer Ren as per inclosed receet one +trip England catel boat charge my acct. SYLVESTRE BARAIEFF, N. Y." + + +Standing on the hurricane-deck of the Joy Line boat, with his +suit-case guardedly beside him, he crooned to himself tuneless +chants with the refrain, "Free, free, out to sea. Free, free, +that's _me!_" He had persuaded himself that there was practically +no danger of the boat's sinking or catching fire. Anyway, he +just wasn't going to be scared. As the steamer trudged up East +River he watched the late afternoon sun brighten the Manhattan +factories and make soft the stretches of Westchester fields. +(Of course, he "thrilled.") + +He had no state-room, but was entitled to a place in a +twelve-berth room in the hold. Here large farmers without their +shoes were grumpily talking all at once, so he returned to the +deck; and the rest of the night, while the other passengers +snored, he sat modestly on a canvas stool, unblinkingly gloating +over a sea-fabric of frosty blue that was shot through with +golden threads when they passed lighthouses or ships. At dawn +he was weary, peppery-eyed, but he viewed the flooding light +with approval. + +At last, Boston. + +The front part of the shipping-office on Atlantic Avenue was a +glass-inclosed room littered with chairs, piles of circulars, +old pictures of Cunarders, older calendars, and directories to +be ranked as antiques. In the midst of these remains a +red-headed Yankee of forty, smoking a Pittsburg stogie, sat +tilted back in a kitchen chair, reading the Boston _American_. +Mr. Wrenn delivered M. Baraieff's letter and stood waiting, +holding his suit-case, ready to skip out and go aboard a +cattle-boat immediately. + +The shipping-agent glanced through the letter, then snapped: + +"Bryff's crazy. Always sends 'em too early. Wrenn, you ought +to come to me first. What j'yuh go to that Jew first for? Here +he goes and sends you a day late--or couple days too early. 'F +you'd got here last night I could 've sent you off this morning +on a Dominion Line boat. All I got now is a Leyland boat that +starts from Portland Saturday. Le's see; this is Wednesday. +Thursday, Friday--you'll have to wait three days. Now you want +me to fix you up, don't you? I might not be able to get you off +till a week from now, but you'd like to get off on a good boat +Saturday instead, wouldn't you?" + +"Oh yes; I _would_. I--" + +"Well, I'll try to fix it. You can see for yourself; boats +ain't leaving every minute just to please Bryff. And it's the +busy season. Bunches of rah-rah boys wanting to cross, and +Canadians wanting to get back to England, and Jews beating it to +Poland--to sling bombs at the Czar, I guess. And lemme tell +you, them Jews is all right. They're willing to pay for a man's +time and trouble in getting 'em fixed up, and so--" + +With dignity Mr. William Wrenn stated, "Of course I'll be glad +to--uh--make it worth your while." + +"I _thought_ you was a gentleman. Hey, Al! _Al!_" An underfed boy +with few teeth, dusty and grown out of his trousers, appeared. +"Clear off a chair for the gentleman. Stick that valise on top +my desk.... Sit down, Mr. Wrenn. You see, it's like this: I'll +tell you in confidence, you understand. This letter from Bryff +ain't worth the paper it's written on. He ain't got any right +to be sending out men for cattle-boats. Me, I'm running that. +I deal direct with all the Boston and Portland lines. If you +don't believe it just go out in the back room and ask any of the +cattlemen out there." + +"Yes, I see," Mr. Wrenn observed, as though he were ill, and +toed an old almanac about the floor. "Uh--Mr.--Trubiggs, is it?" + +"Yump. Yump, my boy. Trubiggs. Tru by name and true by +nature. Heh?" + +This last was said quite without conviction. It was evidently +a joke which had come down from earlier years. Mr. Wrenn +ignored it and declared, as stoutly as he could: + +"You see, Mr. Trubiggs, I'd be willing to pay you--" + +"I'll tell you just how it is, Mr. Wrenn. I ain't one of these +Sheeny employment bureaus; I'm an American; I like to look out +for Americans. Even if you _didn't_ come to me first I'll watch +out for your interests, same's if they was mine. Now, do you +want to get fixed up with a nice fast boat that leaves Portland +next Saturday, just a couple of days' wait?" + +"Oh yes, I _do_, Mr. Trubiggs." + +"Well, my list is really full--men waiting, too--but if it 'd be +worth five dollars to you to--" + +"Here's the five dollars." + +The shipping-agent was disgusted. He had estimated from Mr. +Wrenn's cheap sweater-jacket and tennis-shoes that he would be +able to squeeze out only three or four dollars, and here he +might have made ten. More in sorrow than in anger: + +"Of course you understand I may have a lot of trouble working +you in on the _next_ boat, you coming as late as this. Course +five dollars is less 'n what I usually get." He contemptuously +tossed the bill on his desk. "If you want me to slip a little +something extra to the agents--" + +Mr. Wrenn was too head-achy to be customarily timid. "Let's see +that. Did I give you only five dollars?" Receiving the bill, he +folded it with much primness, tucked it into the pocket of his +shirt, and remarked: + +"Now, you said you'd fix me up for five dollars. Besides, that +letter from Baraieff is a form with your name printed on it; so +I know you do business with him right along. If five dollars +ain't enough, why, then you can just go to hell, Mr. Trubiggs; +yes, sir, that's what you can do. I'm just getting tired of +monkeying around. If five _is_ enough I'll give this back to you +Friday, when you send me off to Portland, if you give me a +receipt. There!" He almost snarled, so weary and discouraged +was he. + +Now, Trubiggs was a warm-hearted rogue, and he liked the society +of what he called "white people." He laughed, poked a Pittsburg +stogie at Mr. Wrenn, and consented: + +"All right. I'll fix you up. Have a smoke. Pay me the five +Friday, or pay it to my foreman when he puts you on the +cattle-boat. I don't care a rap which. You're all right. +Can't bluff you, eh?" + +And, further bluffing Mr. Wrenn, he suggested to him a +lodging-house for his two nights in Boston. "Tell the clerk +that red-headed Trubiggs sent you, and he'll give you the best +in the house. Tell him you're a friend of mine." + +When Mr. Wrenn had gone Mr. Trubiggs remarked to some one, by +telephone, "'Nother sucker coming, Blaugeld. Now don't try to +do me out of my bit or I'll cap for some other joint, +understand? Huh? Yuh, stick him for a thirty-five-cent bed. +S' long." + +The caravan of Trubiggs's cattlemen who left for Portland by +night steamer, Friday, was headed by a bulky-shouldered boss, who +wore no coat and whose corduroy vest swung cheerfully open. A +motley troupe were the cattlemen--Jews with small trunks, +large imitation-leather valises and assorted bundles, a stolid +prophet-bearded procession of weary men in tattered derbies and +sweat-shop clothes. + +There were Englishmen with rope-bound pine chests. A +lewd-mouthed American named Tim, who said he was a hatter out of +work, and a loud-talking tough called Pete mingled with a +straggle of hoboes. + +The boss counted the group and selected his confidants for the +trip to Portland--Mr. Wrenn and a youth named Morton. + +Morton was a square heavy-fleshed young man with stubby hands, +who, up to his eyes, was stolid and solid as a granite monument, +but merry of eye and hinting friendliness in his tousled +soft-brown hair. He was always wielding a pipe and artfully +blowing smoke through his nostrils. + +Mr. Wrenn and he smiled at each other searchingly as the +Portland boat pulled out, and a wind swept straight from the +Land of Elsewhere. + +After dinner Morton, smoking a pipe shaped somewhat like a +golf-stick head and somewhat like a toad, at the rail of the +steamer, turned to Mr. Wrenn with: + +"Classy bunch of cattlemen we've got to go with. Not!... My +name's Morton." + +"I'm awful glad to meet you, Mr. Morton. My name's Wrenn." + +"Glad to be off at last, ain't you?" + +"Golly! I should say I _am!_" + +"So'm I. Been waiting for this for years. I'm a clerk for the +P. R. R. in N' York." + +"I come from New York, too." + +"So? Lived there long?" + +"Uh-huh, I--" began Mr. Wrenn. + +"Well, I been working for the Penn. for seven years now. Now +I've got a vacation of three months. On me. Gives me a chance +to travel a little. Got ten plunks and a second-class ticket +back from Glasgow. But I'm going to see England and France just +the same. Prob'ly Germany, too." + +"Second class? Why don't you go steerage, and save?" + +"Oh, got to come back like a gentleman. You know. You're from +New York, too, eh?" + +"Yes, I'm with an art-novelty company on Twenty-eighth Street. +I been wanting to get away for quite some time, too.... How are +you going to travel on ten dollars?" + +"Oh, work m' way. Cinch. Always land on my feet. Not on my +uppers, at that. I'm only twenty-eight, but I've been on my +own, like the English fellow says, since I was twelve.... Well, +how about you? Traveling or going somewhere?" + +"Just traveling. I'm glad we're going together, Mr. Morton. +I don't think most of these cattlemen are very nice. Except for +the old Jews. They seem to be fine old coots. They make you +think of--oh--you know--prophets and stuff. Watch 'em, over +there, making tea. I suppose the steamer grub ain't kosher. +I seen one on the Joy Line saying his prayers--I suppose he +was--in a kind of shawl." + +"Well, well! You don't say so!" + +Distinctly, Mr. Wrenn felt that he was one of the gentlemen who, +in Kipling, stand at steamer rails exchanging observations on +strange lands. He uttered, cosmopolitanly: + +"Gee! Look at that sunset. Ain't that grand!" + +"Holy smoke! it sure is. I don't see how anybody could believe +in religion after looking at that." + +Shocked and confused at such a theory, yet excited at finding +that Morton apparently had thoughts, Mr. Wrenn piped: +"Honestly, I don't see that at _all_. I don't see how anybody +could disbelieve anything after a sunset like that. Makes me +believe all sorts of thing--gets me going--I imagine I'm all +sorts of places--on the Nile and so on." + +"Sure! That's just it. Everything's so peaceful and natural. +Just _is_. Gives the imagination enough to do, even by itself, +without having to have religion." + +"Well," reflected Mr. Wrenn, "I don't hardly ever go to church. +I don't believe much in all them highbrow sermons that don't +come down to brass tacks--ain't got nothing to do with real +folks. But just the same, I love to go up to St. Patrick's +Cathedral. Why, I get real _thrilled_--I hope you won't think +I'm trying to get high-browed, Mr. Morton." + +"Why, no. Cer'nly not. I understand. Gwan." + +"It gets me going when I look down the aisle at the altar and +see the arches and so on. And the priests in their robes--they +look so--so way up--oh, I dunno just how to say it--so kind of +_uplifted_." + +"Sure, I know. Just the esthetic end of the game. Esthetic, +you know--the beauty part of it." + +"Yuh, sure, that's the word. 'Sthetic, that's what it is. +Yes, 'sthetic. But, just the same, it makes me feel's though I +believed in all sorts of things." + +"Tell you what I believe may happen, though," exulted Morton. +"This socialism, and maybe even these here International Workers +of the World, may pan out as a new kind of religion. I don't +know much about it, I got to admit. But looks as though it might +be that way. It's dead certain the old political parties are just +gangs--don't stand for anything except the name. But this comrade +business--good stunt. Brotherhood of man--real brotherhood. My +idea of religion. One that is because it's got to be, not just +because it always has been. Yessir, me for a religion of guys +working together to make things easier for each other." + +"You bet!" commented Mr. Wrenn, and they smote each other upon +the shoulder and laughed together in a fine flame of shared hope. + +"I wish I knew something about this socialism stuff," mused Mr. +Wrenn, with tilted head, examining the burnt-umber edges of the +sunset. + +"Great stuff. Not working for some lazy cuss that's inherited +the right to boss you. And _international_ brotherhood, not just +neighborhoods. New thing." + +"Gee! I surely would like that, awfully," sighed Mr. Wrenn. + +He saw the processional of world brotherhood tramp steadily +through the paling sunset; saffron-vestured Mandarin marching by +flax-faced Norseman and languid South Sea Islander--the diverse +peoples toward whom he had always yearned. + +"But I don't care so much for some of these ranting street-corner +socialists, though," mused Morton. "The kind that holler `Come +get saved _our_ way or go to hell! Keep off scab guides to prosperity.'" + +"Yuh, sure. Ha! ha! ha!" + +"Huh! huh!" + +Morton soon had another thought. "Still, same time, us guys +that do the work have got to work out something for ourselves. +We can't bank on the rah-rah boys that wear eye-glasses and +condescend to like us, cause they think we ain't entirely too +dirty for 'em to associate with, and all these writer guys and +so on. That's where you got to hand it to the street-corner +shouters." + +"Yes, that's _so_. Y' right there, I guess, all right." + +They looked at each other and laughed again; initiated friends; +tasting each other's souls. They shared sandwiches and +confessions. When the other passengers had gone to bed and the +sailors on watch seemed lonely the two men were still declaring, +shyly but delightedly, that "things is curious." + +In the damp discomfort of early morning the cattlemen shuffled +from the steamer at Portland and were herded to a lunch-room by +the boss, who cheerfully smoked his corn-cob and ejaculated to +Mr. Wrenn and Morton such interesting facts as: + +"Trubiggs is a lobster. You don't want to let the bosses bluff +you aboard the _Merian_. They'll try to chase you in where the +steers'll gore you. The grub'll be--" + +"What grub do you get?" + +"Scouse and bread. And water." + +"What's scouse?" + +"Beef stew without the beef. Oh, the grub'll be rotten. +Trubiggs is a lobster. He wouldn't be nowhere if 't wa'n't for me." + +Mr. Wrenn appreciated England's need of roast beef, but he +timidly desired not to be gored by steers, which seemed +imminent, before breakfast coffee. The streets were coldly +empty, and he was sleepy, and Morton was silent. At the +restaurant, sitting on a high stool before a pine counter, he +choked over an egg sandwich made with thick crumby slices of a +bread that had no personality to it. He roved forlornly about +Portland, beside the gloomy pipe-valiant Morton, fighting two +fears: the company might not need all of them this trip, and he +might have to wait; secondly, if he incredibly did get shipped +and started for England the steers might prove dreadfully +dangerous. After intense thinking he ejaculated, "Gee! it's be +bored or get gored." Which was much too good not to tell Morton, +so they laughed very much, and at ten o'clock were signed on for +the trip and led, whooping, to the deck of the S.S. _Merian_. + +Cattle were still struggling down the chutes from the dock. The +dirty decks were confusingly littered with cordage and the +cattlemen's luggage. The Jewish elders stared sepulchrally at +the wilderness of open hatches and rude passageways, as though +they were prophesying death. + +But Mr. Wrenn, standing sturdily beside his suit-case to guard +it, fawned with romantic love upon the rusty iron sides of their +pilgrims' caravel; and as the _Merian_ left the wharf with no +more handkerchief-waving or tears than attends a ferry's leaving +he mumbled: + +"Free, free, out to sea. Free, free, that's _me!_" + +Then, "Gee!... Gee whittakers!" + + + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +HE BECOMES THE GREAT LITTLE BILL WRENN + + + + + +When the _Merian_ was three days out from Portland the frightened +cattleman stiff known as "Wrennie" wanted to die, for he was now +sure that the smell of the fo'c'sle, in which he was lying on a +thin mattress of straw covered with damp gunny-sacking, both +could and would become daily a thicker smell, a stronger smell, +a smell increasingly diverse and deadly. + +Though it was so late as eight bells of the evening, Pete, the +tough factory hand, and Tim, the down-and-out hatter, were still +playing seven-up at the dirty fo'c'sle table, while McGarver, +under-boss of the Morris cattle gang, lay in his berth, heavily +studying the game and blowing sulphurous fumes of Lunch Pail +Plug Cut tobacco up toward Wrennie. + +Pete, the tough, was very evil. He sneered. He stole. He +bullied. He was a drunkard and a person without cleanliness of +speech. Tim, the hatter, was a loud-talking weakling, under +Pete's domination. Tim wore a dirty rubber collar without a +tie, and his soul was like his neckware. + +McGarver, the under-boss, was a good shepherd among the men, +though he had recently lost the head foremanship by a spree +complicated with language and violence. He looked like one of +the _Merian_ bulls, with broad short neck and short curly hair +above a thick-skinned deeply wrinkled low forehead. He never +undressed, but was always seen, as now, in heavy shoes and +blue-gray woolen socks tucked over the bottoms of his overalls. +He was gruff and kind and tyrannical and honest. + +Wrennie shook and drew his breath sharply as the foghorn yawped +out its "Whawn-n-n-n" again, reminding him that they were +still in the Bank fog; that at any moment they were likely to be +stunned by a heart-stopping crash as some liner's bow burst +through the fo'c'sle's walls in a collision. Bow-plates +buckling in and shredding, the in-thrust of an enormous black +bow, water flooding in, cries and--However, the horn did at least +show that They were awake up there on the bridge to steer him +through the fog; and weren't They experienced seamen? Hadn't +They made this trip ever so many times and never got killed? +Wouldn't They take all sorts of pains on Their own account as +well as on his? + +But--just the same, would he really ever get to England alive? +And if he did, would he have to go on holding his breath in +terror for nine more days? Would the fo'c'sle always keep +heaving up--up--up, like this, then down--down--down, as though +it were going to sink? + +"How do yuh like de fog-horn, Wrennie?" + +Pete, the tough, spit the question up at him from a corner of +his mouth. "Hope we don't run into no ships." + +He winked at Tim, the weakling hatter, who took the cue and +mourned: + +"I'm kinda afraid we're going to, ain't you, Pete? The mate was +telling me he was scared we would." + +"Sures' t'ing you know. Hey, Wrennie, wait till youse have to +beat it down-stairs and tie up a bull in a storm. Hully gee! +Youse'll last quick on de game, Birdie!" + +"Oh, shut up," snapped Wrennie's friend Morton. + +But Morton was seasick; and Pete, not heeding him, outlined +other dangers which he was happily sure were threatening them. +Wrennie shivered to hear that the "grub 'd git worse." He +writhed under Pete's loud questions about his loss, in some +cattle-pen, of the gray-and-scarlet sweater-jacket which he had +proudly and gaily purchased in New York for his work on the +ship. And the card-players assured him that his suit-case, +which he had intrusted to the Croac ship's carpenter, would +probably be stolen by "Satan." + +Satan! Wrennie shuddered still more. For Satan, the gaunt-jawed +hook-nosed rail-faced head foreman, diabolically smiling when +angry, sardonically sneering when calm, was a lean human +whip-lash. Pete sniggered. He dilated upon Satan's wrath at +Wrennie for not "coming across" with ten dollars for a bribe +as he, Pete, had done. + +(He lied, of course. And his words have not been given +literally. They were not beautiful words.) + +McGarver, the straw-boss, would always lie awake to enjoy a good +brisk indecent story, but he liked Wrennie's admiration of him, +so, lunging with his bull-like head out of his berth, he snorted: + +"Hey, you, Pete, it's time to pound your ear. Cut it out." + +Wrennie called down, sternly, "I ain't no theological student, +Pete, and I don't mind profanity, but I wish you wouldn't talk +like a garbage-scow." + +"Hey, Poicy, did yuh bring your dictionary?" Pete bellowed to +Tim, two feet distant from him. To Wrennie, "Say, Gladys, ain't +you afraid one of them long woids like, t'eological, will turn +around and bite you right on the wrist?" + +"Dry up!" irritatedly snapped a Canadian. + +"Aw, cut it out, you--," groaned another. + +"Shut up," added McGarver, the straw-boss. "Both of you." +Raging: "Gwan to bed, Pete, or I'll beat your block clean off. +I mean it, see? _Hear me?_" + +Yes, Pete heard him. Doubtless the first officer on the bridge +heard, too, and perhaps the inhabitants of Newfoundland. But +Pete took his time in scratching the back of his neck and +stretching before he crawled into his berth. For half an hour +he talked softly to Tim, for Wrennie's benefit, stating his belief +that Satan, the head boss, had once thrown overboard a Jew much +like Wrennie, and was likely thus to serve Wrennie, too. +Tim pictured the result when, after the capsizing of the steamer +which would undoubtedly occur if this long sickening motion kept up, +Wrennie had to take to a boat with Satan. + +The fingers of Wrennie curled into shape for strangling some one. + +When Pete was asleep he worried off into thin slumber. + +Then, there was Satan, the head boss, jerking him out of his +berth, stirring his cramped joints to another dawn of +drudgery--two hours of work and two of waiting before the daily +eight-o'clock insult called breakfast. He tugged on his shoes, +marveling at Mr. Wrenn's really being there, at his sitting in +cramped stoop on the side of a berth in a dark filthy place that +went up and down like a freight elevator, subject to the orders +of persons whom he did not in the least like. + +Through the damp gray sea-air he staggered hungrily along the +gangway to the hatch amidships, and trembled down the iron +ladder to McGarver's crew 'tween-decks. + +First, watering the steers. Sickened by walking backward with +pails of water he carried till he could see and think of nothing +in the world save the water-butt, the puddle in front of it, and +the cattlemen mercilessly dipping out pails there, through +centuries that would never end. How those steers did drink! + +McGarver's favorite bull, which he called "the Grenadier," took +ten pails and still persisted in leering with dripping gray +mouth beyond the headboard, trying to reach more. As Wrennie +was carrying a pail to the heifers beyond, the Grenadier's horn +caught and tore his overalls. The boat lurched. The pail +whirled out of his hand. He grasped an iron stanchion and +kicked the Grenadier in the jaw till the steer backed off, a +reformed character. + +McGarver cheered, for such kicks were a rule of the game. + +"Good work," ironically remarked Tim, the weakling hatter. + +"You go to hell," snapped Wrennie, and Tim looked much more +respectful. + +But Wrennie lost this credit before they had finished feeding +out the hay, for he grew too dizzy to resent Tim's remarks. + +Straining to pitch forkfuls into the pens while the boat rolled, +slopping along the wet gangway, down by the bunkers of coal, +where the heat seemed a close-wound choking shroud and the +darkness was made only a little pale by light coming through +dust-caked port-holes, he sneezed and coughed and grunted till +he was exhausted. The floating bits of hay-dust were a thousand +impish hands with poisoned nails scratching at the roof of his +mouth. His skin prickled all over. He constantly discovered +new and aching muscles. But he wabbled on until he finished the +work, fifteen minutes after Tim had given out. + +He crawled up to the main deck and huddled in the shelter of a +pile of hay-bales where Pete was declaring to Tim and the rest +that Satan "couldn't never get nothing on him." + +Morton broke into Pete's publicity with the question, "Say, is +it straight what they say, Pete, that you're the guy that owns +the Leyland Line and that's why you know so much more than the +rest of us poor lollops? Watson, the needle, quick!" [Applause +and laughter.] + +Wrennie felt personally grateful to Morton for this, but he went +up to the aft top deck, where he could lie alone on a pile of +tarpaulins. He made himself observe the sea which, as Kipling +and Jack London had specifically promised him in their stories, +surrounded him, everywhere shining free; but he glanced at it +only once. To the north was a liner bound for home. + +Home! Gee! That _was_ rubbing it in! While at work, whether +he was sick or not, he could forget--things. But the liner, +fleeting on with bright ease, made the cattle-boat seem about +as romantic as Mrs. Zapp's kitchen sink. + +Why, he wondered--"why had he been a chump? Him a wanderer? +No; he was a hired man on a sea-going dairy-farm. Well, he'd get +onto this confounded job before he was through with it, but +then--gee! back to God's Country!" + + +While the _Merian_, eleven days out, pleasantly rocked through +the Irish Sea, with the moon revealing the coast of Anglesey, +one Bill Wrenn lay on the after-deck, condescending to the +heavens. It was so warm that they did not need to sleep below, +and half a dozen of the cattlemen had brought their mattresses +up on deck. Beside Bill Wrenn lay the man who had given him +that name--Tim, the hatter, who had become weakly alarmed and +admiring as Wrennie learned to rise feeling like a boy in early +vacation-time, and to find shouting exhilaration in sending a +forkful of hay fifteen good feet. + +Morton, who lay near by, had also adopted the name "Bill +Wrenn." Most of the trip Morton had discussed Pete and Tim +instead of the fact that "things is curious." Mr. Wrenn had been +jealous at first, but when he learned from Morton the theory +that even a Pete was a "victim of 'vironment" he went out for +knowing him quite systematically. + +To McGarver he had been "Bill Wrenn" since the fifth day, when +he had kept a hay-bale from slipping back into the hold on the +boss's head. Satan and Pete still called him "Wrennie," but he +was not thinking about them just now with Tim listening +admiringly to his observations on socialism. + +Tim fell asleep. Bill Wrenn lay quiet and let memory color the +sky above him. He recalled the gardens of water which had +flowered in foam for him, strange ships and nomadic gulls, and +the schools of sleekly black porpoises that, for him, had +whisked through violet waves. Most of all, he brought back the +yesterday's long excitement and delight of seeing the Irish +coast hills--his first foreign land--whose faint sky fresco had +seemed magical with the elfin lore of Ireland, a country that +had ever been to him the haunt not of potatoes and politicians, +but of fays. He had wanted fays. They were not common on the +asphalt of West Sixteenth Street. But now he had seen them +beckoning in Wanderland. + +He was falling asleep under the dancing dome of the sky, a happy +Mr. Wrenn, when he was aroused as a furious Bill, the cattleman. +Pete was clogging near by, singing hoarsely, "Dey was a skoit +and 'er name was Goity." + +"You shut up!" commanded Bill Wrenn. + +"Say, be careful!" the awakened Tim implored of him. +Pete snorted: "Who says to `shut up,' hey? Who was it, Satan?" + +From the capstan, where he was still smoking, the head foreman +muttered: "What's the odds? The little man won't say it again." + +Pete stood by Bill Wrenn's mattress. "Who said `shut up'?" +sounded ominously. + +Bill popped out of bed with what he regarded as a vicious +fighting-crouch. For he was too sleepy to be afraid. "I did! +What you going to do about it?" More mildly, as a fear of his +own courage began to form, "I want to sleep." + +"Oh! You want to sleep. Little mollycoddle wants to sleep, +does he? Come here!" + +The tough grabbed at Bill's shirt-collar across the mattress. +Bill ducked, stuck out his arm wildly, and struck Pete, half by +accident. Roaring, Pete bunted him, and he went down, with Pete +kneeling on his stomach and pounding him. + +Morton and honest McGarver, the straw-boss, sprang to drag off +Pete, while Satan, the panther, with the first interest they had +ever seen in his eyes, snarled: "Let 'em fight fair. Rounds. +You're a' right, Bill." + +"Right," commended Morton. + +Armored with Satan's praise, firm but fearful in his rubber +sneakers, surprised and shocked to find himself here doing this, +Bill Wrenn squared at the rowdy. The moon touched sadly the +lightly sketched Anglesey coast and the rippling wake, but Bill +Wrenn, oblivious of dream moon and headland, faced his +fellow-bruiser. + +They circled. Pete stuck out his foot gently. Morton sprang +in, bawling furiously, "None o' them rough-and-tumble tricks." + +"Right-o," added McGarver. + +Pete scowled. He was left powerless. He puffed and grew dizzy +as Bill Wrenn danced delicately about him, for he could do +nothing without back-street tactics. He did bloody the nose of +Bill and pummel his ribs, but many cigarettes and much whisky +told, and he was ready to laugh foolishly and make peace when, +at the end of the sixth round, he felt Bill's neat little fist +in a straight--and entirely accidental--rip to the point of +his jaw. + +Pete sent his opponent spinning with a back-hander which awoke +all the cruelty of the terrible Bill. Silently Bill Wrenn +plunged in with a smash! smash! smash! like a murderous savage, +using every grain of his strength. + +Let us turn from the lamentable luck of Pete. He had now got the +idea that his supposed victim could really fight. Dismayed, shocked, +disgusted, he stumbled and sought to flee, and was sent flat. + +This time it was the great little Bill who had to be dragged +off. McGarver held him, kicking and yammering, his mild +mustache bristling like a battling cat's, till the next round, +when Pete was knocked out by a clumsy whirlwind of fists. + +He lay on the deck, with Bill standing over him and demanding, +"What's my name, _heh?_" + +"I t'ink it's Bill now, all right, Wrennie, old hoss--Bill, old +hoss," groaned Pete. + +He was permitted to sneak off into oblivion. + +Bill Wrenn went below. In the dark passage by the fidley he +fell to tremorous weeping. But the brackish hydrant water that +stopped his nose-bleed saved him from hysterics. He climbed to +the top deck, and now he could again see his brother pilgrim, +the moon. + +The stiffs and bosses were talking excitedly of the fight. +Tim rushed up to gurgle: "Great, Bill, old man! You done just +what I'd 'a' done if he'd cussed me. I told you Pete was a bluffer." + +"Git out," said Satan. + +Tim fled. + +Morton came up, looked at Bill Wrenn, pounded him on the shoulder, +and went off to his mattress. The other stiffs slouched away, +but McGarver and Satan were still discussing the fight. + +Snuggling on the hard black pile of tarpaulins, Bill talked to +them, warmed to them, and became Mr. Wrenn. He announced his +determination to wander adown every shining road of Europe. + +"Nice work." "Sure." "You'll make a snappy little ole +globe-trotter." "Sure; ought to be able to get the slickest +kind of grub for four bits a day." "Nice work," Satan +interjected from time to time, with smooth irony. "Sure. +Go ahead. Like to hear your plans." + +McGarver broke in: "Cut that out, Marvin. You're a `Satan' all +right. Quit your kidding the little man. He's all right. And +he done fine on the job last three-four days." + +Lying on his mattress, Bill stared at the network of the +ratlines against the brilliant sky. The crisscross lines made +him think of the ruled order-blanks of the Souvenir Company. + +"Gee!" he mused, "I'd like to know if Jake is handling my work +the way we--they--like it. I'd like to see the old office again, +and Charley Carpenter, just for a couple of minutes. Gee! +I wish they could have seen me put it all over Pete to-night! +That's what I'm going to do to the blooming Englishmen if they +don't like me." + + +The S.S. _Merian_ panted softly beside the landing-stage at +Birkenhead, Liverpool's Jersey City, resting in the sunshine +after her voyage, while the cattle were unloaded. They had +encountered fog-banks at the mouth of the Mersey River. Mr. +Wrenn had ecstatically watched the shores of +England--_England!_--ride at him through the fog, and had panted +over the lines of English villas among the dunes. It was like +a dream, yet the shore had such amazingly safe solid colors, +real red and green and yellow, when contrasted with the fog-wet +deck unearthily glancing with mist-lights. + +Now he was seeing his first foreign city, and to Morton, +stolidly curious beside him, he could say nothing save "Gee!" +With church-tower and swarthy dome behind dome, Liverpool lay +across the Mersey. Up through the Liverpool streets that ran +down to the river, as though through peep-holes slashed straight +back into the Middle Ages, his vision plunged, and it wandered +unchecked through each street while he hummed: + +"Free, free, in Eu-ro-pee, that's _me!_" + +The cattlemen were called to help unload the remaining hay. +They made a game of it. Even Satan smiled, even the Jewish +elders were lightly affable as they made pretendedly fierce +gestures at the squat patient hay-bales. Tim, the hatter, +danced a limber foolish jig upon the deck, and McGarver +bellowed, "The bon-nee bon-nee banks of Loch Lo-o-o-o-mond." + +The crowd bawled: "Come on, Bill Wrenn; your turn. Hustle up +with that bale, Pete, or we'll sic Bill on you." + +Bill Wrenn, standing very dignified, piped: "I'm Colonel +Armour. I own all these cattle, 'cept the Morris uns, see? +Gotta do what I say, savvy? Tim, walk on your ear." + +The hatter laid his head on the deck and waved his anemic legs +in accordance with directions from Colonel Armour (late Wrenn). + +The hay was off. The _Merian_ tooted and headed across the +Mersey to the Huskinson Dock, in Liverpool, while the cattlemen +played tag about the deck. Whooping and laughing, they made +last splashy toilets at the water-butts, dragged out their +luggage, and descended to the dock-house. + +As the cattlemen passed Bill Wrenn and Morton, shouting +affectionate good-bys in English or courteous Yiddish, Bill +commented profanely to Morton on the fact that the solid stone +floor of the great shed seemed to have enough sea-motion to +"make a guy sick." It was nearly his last utterance as Bill Wrenn. +He became Mr. Wrenn, absolute Mr. Wrenn, on the street, +as he saw a real English bobby, a real English carter, and the +sign, "Cocoa House. Tea _Id_." + +England! + +"Now for some real grub!" cried Morton. "No more scouse and +willow-leaf tea." + +Stretching out their legs under a table glorified with toasted +Sally Lunns and Melton Mowbrays, served by a waitress who said +"Thank _you_" with a rising inflection, they gazed at the line of +mirrors running Britishly all around the room over the long +lounge seat, and smiled with the triumphant content which comes +to him whose hunger for dreams and hunger for meat-pies are +satisfied together. + + + + + + +CHAPTER V + +HE FINDS MUCH QUAINT ENGLISH FLAVOR + + + + + +Big wharves, all right. England sure is queen of the sea, heh? +Busy town, Liverpool. But, say, there is a quaint English +flavor to these shops.... Look at that: `Red Lion Inn.'... +`Overhead trams' they call the elevated. Real flavor, all +right. English as can be.... I sure like to wander around +these little shops. Street crowd. That's where you get the +real quaint flavor." + +Thus Morton, to the glowing Mr. Wrenn, as they turned into St. +George's Square, noting the Lipton's Tea establishment. _Sir_ +Thomas Lipton--wasn't he a friend of the king? Anyway, he was +some kind of a lord, and he owned big society racing-yachts. + +In the grandiose square Mr. Wrenn prayerfully remarked, "Gee!" + +"Greek temple. Fine," agreed Morton. + +"That's St. George's Hall, where they have big organ concerts," +explained Mr. Wrenn. "And there's the art-gallery across the +Square, and here's the Lime Street Station." He had studied his +Baedeker as club women study the cyclopedia. "Let's go over and +look at the trains." + +"Funny little boxes, ain't they, Wrenn, them cars! Quaint +things. What is it they call 'em--carriages? First, second, +third class...." + +"Just like in books." + +"Booking-office. That's tickets.... Funny, eh?" + +Mr. Wrenn insisted on paying for both their high teas at the +cheap restaurant, timidly but earnestly. Morton was troubled. +As they sat on a park bench, smoking those most Anglican +cigarettes, "Dainty Bits," Mr. Wrenn begged: + +"What's the matter, old man?" + +"Oh, nothing. Just thinking." Morton smiled artificially. +He added, presently: "Well, old Bill, got to make the break. +Can't go on living on you this way." + +"Aw, thunder! You ain't living on me. Besides, I want you to. +Honest I do. We can have a whole lot better time together, Morty." + +"Yes, but--Nope; I can't do it. Nice of you. Can't do it, +though. Got to go on my own, like the fellow says." + +"Aw, come on. Look here; it's my money, ain't it? I got a +right to spend it the way I want to, haven't I? Aw, come on. +We'll bum along together, and then when the money is gone we'll +get some kind of job together. Honest, I want you to." + +"Hunka. Don't believe you'd care for the kind of knockabout +jobs I'll have to get." + +"Sure I would. Aw, come on, Morty. I--" + +"You're too level-headed to like to bum around like a fool hobo. +You'd dam soon get tired of it." + +"What if I did? Morty, look here. I've been learning something +on this trip. I've always wanted to just do one thing--see +foreign places. Well, I want to do that just as much as ever. +But there's something that's a whole lot more important. +Somehow, I ain't ever had many friends. Some ways you're about +the best friend I've ever had--you ain't neither too highbrow or +too lowbrow. And this friendship business--it means such an +awful lot. It's like what I was reading about--something by +Elbert Hubbard or--thunder, I can't remember his name, but, +anyway, it's one of those poet guys that writes for the back +page of the _Journal_--something about a _joyous adventure_. +That's what being friends is. Course you understand I wouldn't +want to say this to most people, but you'll understand how I mean. +It's--this friendship business is just like those old crusaders-- +you know--they'd start out on a fine morning--you know; armor +shining, all that stuff. It wouldn't make any dif. what they met +as long as they was fighting together. Rainy nights with folks +sneaking through the rain to get at 'em, and all sorts of things-- +ready for anything, long as they just stuck together. That's the way +this friendship business is, I b'lieve. Just like it said in the +_Journal_. Yump, sure is. Gee! it's--Chance to tell folks +what you think and really get some fun out of seeing places +together. And I ain't ever done it much. Course I don't mean +to say I've been living off on any blooming desert island all my +life, but, just the same, I've always been kind of alone--not +knowing many folks. You know how it is in a New York +rooming-house. So now--Aw, don't slip up on me, Morty. +Honestly, I don't care what kind of work we do as long as we can +stick together; I don't care a hang if we don't get anything +better to do than scrub floors!" + +Morton patted his arm and did not answer for a while. Then: + +"Yuh, I know how you mean. And it's good of you to like beating +it around with me. But you sure got the exaggerated idee of me. +And you'd get sick of the holes I'm likely to land in." + +There was a certain pride which seemed dreadfully to shut Mr. +Wrenn out as Morton added: + +"Why, man, I'm going to do all of Europe. From the Turkish +jails to--oh, St. Petersburg.... You made good on the _Merian_, +all right. But you do like things shipshape." + +"Oh, I'd--" + +"We might stay friends if we busted up now and met in New York +again. But not if you get into all sorts of bum places w--" + +"Why, look here, Morty--" + +"--with me.... However, I'll think it over. Let's not talk +about it till to-morrow." + +"Oh, please do think it over, Morty, old man, won't you? And +to-night you'll let me take you to a music-hall, won't you?" + +"Uh--yes," Morton hesitated. + +A music-hall--not mere vaudeville! Mr. Wrenn could hardly keep +his feet on the pavement as they scampered to it and got +ninepenny seats. He would have thought it absurd to pay +eighteen cents for a ticket, but pence--They were out at +nine-thirty. Happily tired, Mr. Wrenn suggested that they go to +a temperance hotel at his expense, for he had read in Baedeker +that temperance hotels were respectable--also cheap. + +"No, no!" frowned Morton. "Tell you what you do, Bill. You go +to a hotel, and I'll beat it down to a lodging-house on Duke +Street.... Juke Street!... Remember how I ran onto Pete on the +street? He told me you could get a cot down there for fourpence." + +"Aw, come on to a hotel. Please do! It 'd just hurt me to think +of you sleeping in one of them holes. I wouldn't sleep a bit +if--" + +"Say, for the love of Mike, Wrenn, get wise! Get wise, son! +I'm not going to sponge on you, and that's all there is to it." + +Bill Wrenn strode into their company for a minute, and quoth the +terrible Bill: + +"Well, you don't need to get so sore about it. I don't go +around asking folks can I give 'em a meal ticket all the time, +let me tell you, and when I do--Oh rats! Say, I didn't mean to +get huffy, Morty. But, doggone you, old man, you can't shake me +this easy. I sye, old top, I'm peeved; yessir. We'll go Dutch +to a lodging-house, or even walk the streets." + +"All right, sir; all right. I'll take you up on that. We'll +sleep in an areaway some place." + +They walked to the outskirts of Liverpool, questing the desirable +dark alley. Awed by the solid quietude and semigrandeur of the +large private estates, through narrow streets where dim trees +leaned over high walls whose long silent stretches were broken +only by mysterious little doors, they tramped bashfully, +inspecting, but always rejecting, nooks by lodge gates. + +They came to a stone church with a porch easily reached from the +street, a large and airy stone porch, just suited, Morton +declared, "to a couple of hoboes like us. If a bobby butts in, +why, we'll just slide under them seats. Then the bobby can go +soak his head." + +Mr. Wrenn had never so far defied society as to steal a place +for sleeping. He felt very uneasy, like a man left naked on the +street by robbers, as he rolled up his coat for a pillow and +removed his shoes in a place that was perfectly open to the +street. The paved floor was cold to his bare feet, and, as he +tried to go to sleep, it kept getting colder and colder to his +back. Reaching out his hand, he fretfully rubbed the cracks +between stones. He scowled up at the ceiling of the porch. +He couldn't bear to look out through the door, for it framed the +vicar's house, with lamplight bodying forth latticed windows, +suggesting soft beds and laughter and comfortable books. All +the while his chilled back was aching in new places. + +He sprang up, put on his shoes, and paced the churchyard. It +seemed a great waste of educational advantages not to study the +tower of this foreign church, but he thought much more about his +aching shoulder-blades. + +Morton came from the porch stiff but grinning. "Didn't like it +much, eh, Bill? Afraid you wouldn't. Must say I didn't either, +though. Well, come on. Let's beat it around and see if we +can't find a better place." + +In a vacant lot they discovered a pile of hay. Mr. Wrenn hardly +winced at the hearty slap Morton gave his back, and he +pronounced, "Some Waldorf-Astoria, that stack!" as they sneaked +into the lot. They had laid loving hands upon the hay, +remarking, "Well, I _guess!_" when they heard from a low stable +at the very back of the lot: + +"I say, you chaps, what are you doing there?" + +A reflective carter, who had been twisting two straws, ambled +out of the shadow of the stable and prepared to do battle. + +"Say, old man, can't we sleep in your hay just to-night?" argued +Morton. "We're Americans. Came over on a cattle-boat. We +ain't got only enough money to last us for food," while Mr. +Wrenn begged, "Aw, please let us." + +"Oh! You're Americans, are you? You seem decent enough. I've +got a brother in the States. He used to own this stable with +me. In St. Cloud, Minnesota, he is, you know. Minnesota's some +kind of a shire. Either of you chaps been in Minnesota?" + +"Sure," lied Morton; "I've hunted bear there." + +"Oh, I say, bear now! My brother's never written m--" + +"Oh, that was way up in the northern part, in the Big Woods. +I've had some narrow escapes." + +Then Morton, who had never been west of Pittsburg, sang somewhat +in this wise the epic of the hunting he had never done: + +Alone. Among the pines. Dead o' winter. Only one shell in his +rifle. Cold of winter. Snow--deep snow. Snow-shoes. Hiking +along--reg'lar mushing--packing grub to the lumber-camp. Way up +near the Canadian border. Cold, terrible cold. Stars looked +like little bits of steel. + +Mr. Wrenn thought he remembered the story. He had read it in a +magazine. Morton was continuing: + +Snow stretched out among the pines. He was wearing a Mackinaw +and shoe-packs. Saw a bear loping along. He had--Morton had--a +.44-.40 Marlin, but only one shell. Thrust the muzzle of his +rifle right into the bear's mouth. Scared for a minute. Almost +fell off his snow-shoes. Hardest thing he ever did, to pull that +trigger. Fired. Bear sort of jumped at him, then rolled over, clawing. +Great place, those Minnesota Big-- + +"What's a shoe-pack?" the Englishman stolidly interjected. + +"Kind of a moccasin.... Great place, those woods. Hope your +brother gets the chance to get up there." + +"I say, I wonder did you ever meet him? Scrabble is his name, +Jock Scrabble." + +"Jock Scrabble--no, but _say!_ By golly, there was a fellow up in +the Big Woods that came from St. Cl--St. Cloud? Yes, that was +it. He was telling us about the town. I remember he said your +brother had great chances there." + +The Englishman meditatively accepted a bad cigar from Mr. Wrenn. +Suddenly: "You chaps can sleep in the stable-loft if you'd +like. But you must blooming well stop smoking." + +So in the dark odorous hay-mow Mr. Wrenn stretched out his legs +with an affectionate "good night" to Morton. He slept nine +hours. When he awoke, at the sound of a chain clanking in the +stable below, Morton was gone. This note was pinned to his +sleeve: + + +DEAR OLD MAN,--I still feel sure that you will not enjoy the +hiking. Bumming is not much fun for most people, I don't think, +even if they say it is. I do not want to live on you. I always +did hate to graft on people. So I am going to beat it off +alone. But I hope I will see you in N Y & we will enjoy many a +good laugh together over our trip. If you will phone the P. R. +R. you can find out when I get back & so on. As I do not know +what your address will be. Please look me up & I hope you will +have a good trip. + Yours truly, + HARRY P. MORTON. + + +Mr. Wrenn lay listening to the unfriendly rattling of the chain +harness below for a long time. When he crawled languidly down +from the hay-loft he glowered in a manner which was decidedly +surly even for Bill Wrenn at a middle-aged English stranger who +was stooping over a cow's hoof in a stall facing the ladder. + +"Wot you doing here?" asked the Englishman, raising his head and +regarding Mr. Wrenn as a housewife does a cockroach in the +salad-bowl. + +Mr. Wrenn was bored. This seemed a very poor sort of man; a +bloated Cockney, with a dirty neck-cloth, vile cuffs of grayish +black, and a waistcoat cut foolishly high. + +"The owner said I could sleep here," he snapped. + +"Ow. 'E did, did 'e? 'E ayn't been giving you any of the +perishin' 'osses, too, 'as 'e?" + +It was sturdy old Bill Wrenn who snarled, "Oh, shut up!" Bill +didn't feel like standing much just then. He'd punch this +fellow as he'd punched Pete, as soon as not--or even sooner. + +"Ow.... It's shut up, is it?... I've 'arf a mind to set the +'tecs on you, but I'm lyte. I'll just 'it you on the bloody nowse." + +Bill Wrenn stepped off the ladder and squared at him. He was +sorry that the Cockney was smaller than Pete. + +The Cockney came over, feinted in an absent-minded manner, made +swift and confusing circles with his left hand, and hit Bill +Wrenn on the aforesaid bloody nose, which immediately became a +bleeding nose. Bill Wrenn felt dizzy and, sitting on a +grain-sack, listened amazedly to the Cockney's apologetic: + +"I'm sorry I ayn't got time to 'ave the law on you, but I could +spare time to 'it you again." + +Bill shook the blood from his nose and staggered at the Cockney, +who seized his collar, set him down outside the stable with a +jarring bump, and walked away, whistling: + + + "Come, oh come to our Sunday-school, + Ev-v-v-v-v-v-ry Sunday morn-ing." + + +"Gee!" mourned Mr. William Wrenn, "and I thought I was getting +this hobo business down pat.... Gee! I wonder if Pete _was_ so +hard to lick?" + + + + + + +CHAPTER VI + +HE IS AN ORPHAN + + + + + +Sadly clinging to the plan of the walking-trip he was to have +made with Morton, Mr. Wrenn crossed by ferry to Birkenhead, +quite unhappily, for he wanted to be discussing with Morton the +quaintness of the uniformed functionaries. He looked for the +_Merian_ half the way over. As he walked through Birkenhead, +bound for Chester, he pricked himself on to note red-brick +house-rows, almost shocking in their lack of high front stoops. +Along the country road he reflected: "Wouldn't Morty enjoy +this! Farm-yard all paved. Haystack with a little roof on it. +Kitchen stove stuck in a kind of fireplace. Foreign as the deuce." + +But Morton was off some place, in a darkness where there weren't +things to enjoy. Mr. Wrenn had lost him forever. Once he heard +himself wishing that even Tim, the hatter, or "good old +McGarver" were along. A scene so British that it seemed proper +to enjoy it alone he did find in a real garden-party, with what +appeared to be a real curate, out of a story in _The Strand_, +passing teacups; but he passed out of that hot glow into a cold +plodding that led him to Chester and a dull hotel which might as +well have been in Bridgeport or Hoboken. + +He somewhat timidly enjoyed Chester the early part of the next +day, docilely following a guide about the walls, gaping at the +mill on the Dee and asking the guide two intelligent questions +about Roman remains. He snooped through the galleried streets, +peering up dark stairways set in heavy masonry that spoke of +historic sieges, and imagined that he was historically besieging. +For a time Mr. Wrenn's fancies contented him. + +He smiled as he addressed glossy red and green postcards to Lee +Theresa and Goaty, Cousin John and Mr. Guilfogle, writing on +each a variation of "Having a splendid trip. This is a very +interesting old town. Wish you were here." Pantingly, he found +a panorama showing the hotel where he was staying--or at least +two of its chimneys--and, marking it with a heavy cross and the +announcement "This is my hotel where I am staying," he sent it +to Charley Carpenter. + +He was at his nearest to greatness at Chester Cathedral. +He chuckled aloud as he passed the remains of a refectory of +monastic days, in the close, where knights had tied their +romantically pawing chargers, "just like he'd read about in a +story about the olden times." He was really there. He glanced +about and assured himself of it. He wasn't in the office. He +was in an English cathedral close! + +But shortly thereafter he was in an English temperance hotel, +sitting still, almost weeping with the longing to see Morton. +He walked abroad, feeling like an intruder on the lively night +crowd; in a tap-room he drank a glass of English porter and +tried to make himself believe that he was acquainted with the +others in the room, to which theory they gave but little +support. All this while his loneliness shadowed him. + +Of that loneliness one could make many books; how it sat down +with him; how he crouched in his chair, be-spelled by it, till +he violently rose and fled, with loneliness for companion in his +flight. He was lonely. He sighed that he was "lonely as fits." +Lonely--the word obsessed him. Doubtless he was a bit mad, as +are all the isolated men who sit in distant lands longing for +the voices of friendship. + +Next morning he hastened to take the train for Oxford to get +away from his loneliness, which lolled evilly beside him in +the compartment. He tried to convey to a stodgy North +Countryman his interest in the way the seats faced each other. +The man said "Oh aye?" insultingly and returned to his +Manchester newspaper. + +Feeling that he was so offensive that it was a matter of honor +for him to keep his eyes away, Mr. Wrenn dutifully stared out of +the door till they reached Oxford. + +There is a calm beauty to New College gardens. There is, Mr. +Wrenn observed, "something simply _slick_ about all these old +quatrangleses," crossed by summering students in short flappy +gowns. But he always returned to his exile's room, where he now +began to hear the new voice of shapeless nameless Fear--fear of +all this alien world that didn't care whether he loved it or not. + +He sat thinking of the cattle-boat as a home which he had loved +but which he would never see again. He had to use force on +himself to keep from hurrying back to Liverpool while there +still was time to return on the same boat. + +No! He was going to "stick it out somehow, and get onto the +hang of all this highbrow business." + +Then he said: "Oh, darn it all. I feel rotten. I wish I was dead!" + + +"Those, sir, are the windows of the apartment once occupied by +Walter Pater," said the cultured American after whom he was +trailing. Mr. Wrenn viewed them attentively, and with shame +remembered that he didn't know who Walter Pater was. But--oh +yes, now he remembered; Walter was the guy that 'd murdered his +whole family. So, aloud, "Well, I guess Oxford's sorry Walt +ever come here, all right." + +"My dear sir, Mr. Pater was the most immaculate genius of the +nineteenth century," lectured Dr. Mittyford, the cultured +American, severely. + +Mr. Wrenn had met Mittyford, Ph.D., near the barges; had, upon +polite request, still more politely lent him a match, and seized +the chance to confide in somebody. Mittyford had a bald head, +neat eye-glasses, a fair family income, a chatty good-fellowship +at the Faculty Club, and a chilly contemptuousness in his +rhetoric class-room at Leland Stanford, Jr., University. He +wrote poetry, which he filed away under the letter "P" in his +letter-file. + +Dr. Mittyford grudgingly took Mr. Wrenn about, to teach him what +not to enjoy. He pointed at Shelley's rooms as at a +certificated angel's feather, but Mr. Wrenn writhingly admitted +that he had never heard of Shelley, whose name he confused with +Max O'Rell's, which Dr. Mittyford deemed an error. Then, +Pater's window. The doctor shrugged. Oh well, what could you +expect of the proletariat! Swinging his stick aloofly, he +stalked to the Bodleian and vouchsafed, "That, sir, is the +_AEschylus_ Shelley had in his pocket when he was drowned." + +Though he heard with sincere regret the news that his new idol +was drowned, Mr. Wrenn found that _AEschylus_ left him cold. It +seemed to be printed in a foreign language. But perhaps it was +merely a very old book. + +Standing before a case in which was an exquisite book in a queer +wrigglesome language, bearing the legend that from this volume +Fitzgerald had translated the _Rubaiyat_, Dr. Mittyford waved his +hand and looked for thanks. + +"Pretty book," said Mr. Wrenn. + +"And did you note who used it?" + +"Uh--yes." He hastily glanced at the placard. "Mr. Fitzgerald. +Say, I think I read some of that Rubaiyat. It was something +about a Persian kitten--I don't remember exactly." + +Dr. Mittyford walked bitterly to the other end of the room. + + +About eight in the evening Mr. Wrenn's landlady knocked with, +"There's a gentleman below to see you, sir." + +"Me?" blurted Mr. Wrenn. + +He galloped down-stairs, panting to himself that Morton had at +last found him. He peered out and was overwhelmed by a +motor-car, with Dr. Mittyford waiting in awesome fur coat, +goggles, and gauntlets, centered in the car-lamplight that +loomed in the shivery evening fog. + +"Gee! just like a hero in a novel!" reflected Mr. Wrenn. + +"Get on your things," said the pedagogue. "I'm going to give +you the time of your life." + +Mr. Wrenn obediently went up and put on his cap. He was +excited, yet frightened and resentful at being "dragged into all +this highbrow business" which he had resolutely been putting +away the past two hours. + +As he stole into the car Dr. Mittyford seemed comparatively +human, remarking: "I feel bored this evening. I thought I would +give you a _nuit blanche_. How would you like to go to the Red +Unicorn at Brempton--one of the few untouched old inns?" + +"That would be nice," said Mr. Wrenn, unenthusiastically. + +His chilliness impressed Dr. Mittyford, who promptly told one of +the best of his well-known whimsical yet scholarly stories. + +"Ha! ha!" remarked Mr. Wrenn. + +He had been saying to himself: "By golly! I ain't going to even +try to be a society guy with him no more. I'm just going to be +_me_, and if he don't like it he can go to the dickens." + +So he was gentle and sympathetic and talked West Sixteenth +Street slang, to the rhetorician's lofty amusement. + +The tap-room of the Red Unicorn was lighted by candles and +a fireplace. That is a simple thing to say, but it was not a +simple thing for Mr. Wrenn to see. As he observed the trembling +shadows on the sanded floor he wriggled and excitedly murmured, +"Gee!... Gee whittakers!" + +The shadows slipped in arabesques over the dust-gray floor and +scampered as bravely among the rafters as though they were in +such a tale as men told in believing days. Rustics in smocks +drank ale from tankards; and in a corner was snoring an +ear-ringed peddler with his beetle-black head propped on an +oilcloth pack. + +Stamping in, chilly from the ride, Mr. Wrenn laughed aloud. +With a comfortable feeling on the side toward the fire he stuck +his slight legs straight out before the old-time settle, looked +devil-may-care, made delightful ridges on the sanded floor with +his toe, and clapped a pewter pot on his knee with a small +emphatic "Wop!" After about two and a quarter tankards he broke +out, "Say, that peddler guy there, don't he look like he was a +gipsy--you know--sneaking through the hedges around the +manner-house to steal the earl's daughter, huh?" + +"Yes.... You're a romanticist, then, I take it?" + +"Yes, I guess I am. Kind of. Like to read romances and stuff." +He stared at Mittyford beseechingly. "But, say--say, I wonder +why--Somehow, I haven't enjoyed Oxford and the rest of the places +like I ought to. See, I'd always thought I'd be simply nutty about +the quatrangles and stuff, but I'm afraid they're too highbrow for +me. I hate to own up, but sometimes I wonder if I can get away +with this traveling stunt." + +Mittyford, the magnificent, had mixed ale and whisky punch. +He was mellowly instructive: + +"Do you know, I've been wondering just what you _would_ get out +of all this. You really have a very fine imagination of a sort, +you know, but of course you're lacking in certain factual bases. +As I see it, your _metier_ would be to travel with a pleasant +wife, the two of you hand in hand, so to speak, looking at the +more obvious public buildings and plesaunces--avenues and +plesuances. There must be a certain portion of the tripper +class which really has the ability `for to admire and for to see.'" + +Dr. Mittyford finished his second toddy and with a wave of his +hand presented to Mr. Wrenn the world and all the plesaunces +thereof, for to see, though not, of course, to admire Mittyfordianly. + +"But--what are you to do now about Oxford? Well, I'm afraid +you're taken into captivity a bit late to be trained for that +sort of thing. Do about Oxford? Why, go back, master the world +you understand. By the way, have you seen my book on _Saxon +Derivatives?_ Not that I'm prejudiced in its favor, but it might +give you a glimmering of what this difficile thing `culture' +really is." + +The rustics were droning a church anthem. The glow of the ale +was in Mr. Wrenn. He leaned back, entirely happy, and it seemed +confusedly to him that what little he had heard of his learned +and affectionate friend's advice gratefully confirmed his own +theory that what one wanted was friends--a "nice wife"--folks. +"Yes, sir, by golly! It was awfully nice of the Doc." He +pictured a tender girl in golden brown back in the New York he +so much desired to see who would await him evenings with a smile +that was kept for him. Homey--that was what _he_ was going to be! +He happily and thoughtfully ran his finger about the rim of his +glass ten times. + +"Time to go, I' m afraid," Dr. Mittyford was saying. Through +the exquisite haze that now filled the room Mr. Wrenn saw him +dimly, as a triangle of shirt-front and two gleaming ellipses +for eyes.... His dear friend, the Doc!... As he walked through +the room chairs got humorously in his way, but he good-naturedly +picked a path among them, and fell asleep in the motor-car. All +the ride back he made soft mouse-like sounds of snoring. + +When he awoke in the morning with a headache and surveyed his +unchangeably dingy room he realized slowly, after smothering his +head in the pillow to shut off the light from his scorching +eyeballs, that Dr. Mittyford had called him a fool for trying to +wander. He protested, but not for long, for he hated to venture +out there among the dreadfully learned colleges and try to +understand stuff written in letters that look like crow-tracks. + +He packed his suit-case slowly, feeling that he was very wicked +in leaving Oxford's opportunities. + + +Mr. Wrenn rode down on a Tottenham Court Road bus, viewing the +quaintness of London. Life was a rosy ringing valiant pursuit, +for he was about to ship on a Mediterranean steamer laden +chiefly with adventurous friends. The bus passed a victoria +containing a man with a real monocle. A newsboy smiled up at him. +The Strand roared with lively traffic. + +But the gray stonework and curtained windows of the +Anglo-Southern Steamship Company's office did not invite any Mr. +Wrenns to come in and ship, nor did the hall porter, a beefy +person with a huge collar and sparse painfully sleek hair, whose +eyes were like cold boiled mackerel as Mr. Wrenn yearned: + +"Please--uh--please will you be so kind and tell me where I can +ship as a steward for the Med--" + +"None needed." + +"Or Spain? I just want to get any kind of a job at first. +Peeling potatoes or--It don't make any difference--" + +"None needed, I said, my man." The porter examined the hall +clock extensively. + +Bill Wrenn suddenly popped into being and demanded: "Look here, +you; I want to see somebody in authority. I want to know what +I _can_ ship as." + +The porter turned round and started. All his faith in mankind +was destroyed by the shock of finding the fellow still there. +"Nothing, I told you. No one needed." + +"Look here; can I see somebody in authority or not?" + +The porter was privately esteemed a wit at his motherin-law's. +Waddling away, he answered, "Or not." + +Mr. Wrenn drooped out of the corridor. He had planned to see the +Tate Gallery, but now he hadn't the courage to face the +difficulties of enjoying pictures. He zig-zagged home, mourning: +"What's the use. And I'll be hung if I'll try any other +offices, either. The icy mitt, that's what they hand you here. +Some day I'll go down to the docks and try to ship there. +Prob'ly. Gee! I feel rotten!" + + +Out of all this fog of unfriendliness appeared the waitress at +the St. Brasten Cocoa House; first, as a human being to whom he +could talk, second, as a woman. She was ignorant and vulgar; +she misused English cruelly; she wore greasy cotton garments, +planted her large feet on the floor with firm clumsiness, and +always laughed at the wrong cue in his diffident jests. But she +did laugh; she did listen while he stammered his ideas of +meat-pies and St. Paul's and aeroplanes and Shelley and fog and +tan shoes. In fact, she supposed him to be a gentleman and +scholar, not an American. + +He went to the cocoa-house daily. + +She let him know that he was a man and she a woman, young and +kindly, clear-skinned and joyous-eyed. She touched him with +warm elbow and plump hip, leaning against his chair as he gave +his order. To that he looked forward from meal to meal, though he +never ceased harrowing over what he considered a shameful intrigue. + +That opinion of his actions did not keep him from tingling one +lunch-time when he suddenly understood that she was expecting to +be tempted. He tempted her without the slightest delay, +muttering, "Let's take a walk this evening?" + +She accepted. He was shivery and short of breath while he was +trying to smile at her during the rest of the meal, and so he +remained all afternoon at the Tower of London, though he very +well knew that all this history--"kings and gwillotines and +stuff"--demanded real Wrenn thrills. + +They were to meet on a street-corner at eight. At seven-thirty +he was waiting for her. At eight-thirty he indignantly walked +away, but he hastily returned, and stood there another +half-hour. She did not come. + +When he finally fled home he was glad to have escaped the great +mystery of life, then distressingly angry at the waitress, and +desolate in the desert stillness of his room. + + +He sat in his cold hygienic uncomfortable room on Tavistock +Place trying to keep his attention on the "tick, tick, tick, +tick" of his two-dollar watch, but really cowering before the +vast shadowy presences that slunk in from the hostile city. + +He didn't in the least know what he was afraid of. The actual +Englishman whom he passed on the streets did not seem to +threaten his life, yet his friendly watch and familiar suit-case +seemed the only things he could trust in all the menacing world +as he sat there, so vividly conscious of his fear and loneliness +that he dared not move his cramped legs. + +The tension could not last. For a time he was able to laugh at +himself, and he made pleasant pictures--Charley Carpenter +telling him a story at Drubel's; Morton companionably smoking on +the top deck; Lee Theresa flattering him during an evening walk. +Most of all he pictured the brown-eyed sweetheart he was going +to meet somewhere, sometime. He thought with sophomoric shame +of his futile affair with the waitress, then forgot her as he +seemed almost to touch the comforting hand of the brown-eyed girl. + +"Friends, that's what I want. You bet!" That was the work +he was going to do--make acquaintances. A girl who would +understand him, with whom he could trot about, seeing +department-store windows and moving-picture shows. + +It was then, probably, hunched up in the dowdy chair of faded +upholstery, that he created the two phrases which became his +formula for happiness. He desired "somebody to go home to evenings"; +still more, "some one to work with and work for." + +It seemed to him that he had mapped out his whole life. He sat +back, satisfied, and caught the sound of emptiness in his room, +emphasized by the stilly tick of his watch. + +"Oh--Morton--" he cried. + +He leaped up and raised the window. It was raining, but through +the slow splash came the night rattle of hostile London. Staring +down, he studied the desolate circle of light a street-lamp cast +on the wet pavement. A cat gray as dish-water, its fur worn off +in spots, lean and horrible, sneaked through the circle of light +like the spirit of unhappiness, like London's sneer at solitary +Americans in Russell Square rooms. + +Mr. Wrenn gulped. Through the light skipped a man and a girl, +so little aware of him that they stopped, laughingly, wrestling +for an umbrella, then disappeared, and the street was like a +forgotten tomb. A hansom swung by, the hoofbeats sharp and +cheerless. The rain dripped. Nothing else. Mr. Wrenn slammed +down the window. + +He smoothed the sides of his suit-case and reckoned the number +of miles it had traveled with him. He spun his watch about on +the table, and listened to its rapid mocking speech, "Friends, +friends; friends, friends." + +Sobbing, he began to undress, laying down each garment as though +he were going to the scaffold. When the room was dark the great +shadowy forms of fear thronged unchecked about his narrow dingy bed. + +Once during the night he woke. Some sound was threatening him. +It was London, coming to get him and torture him. The light in +his room was dusty, mottled, gray, lifeless. He saw his door, +half ajar, and for some moments lay motionless, watching stark +and bodiless heads thrust themselves through the opening and +withdraw with sinister alertness till he sprang up and opened +the door wide. + +But he did not even stop to glance down the hall for the crowd +of phantoms that had gathered there. Some hidden manful scorn +of weakness made him sneer aloud, "Don't be a baby even if you +_are_ lonely." + +His voice was deeper than usual, and he went to bed to sleep, +throwing himself down with a coarse wholesome scorn of his +nervousness. + +He awoke after dawn, and for a moment curled in happy wriggles +of satisfaction over a good sleep. Then he remembered that he +was in the cold and friendless prison of England, and lay there +panting with desire to get away, to get back to America, where +he would be safe. + +He wanted to leap out of bed, dash for the Liverpool train, and +take passage for America on the first boat. But perhaps the +officials in charge of the emigrants and the steerage (and of +course a fellow would go steerage to save money) would want to +know his religion and the color of his hair--as bad as trying to +ship. They might hold him up for a couple of days. There were +quarantines and customs and things, of which he had heard. +Perhaps for two or even three days more he would have to stay in +this nauseating prison-land. + +This was the morning of August 3, 1910, two weeks after his +arrival in London, and twenty-two days after victoriously +reaching England, the land of romance. + + + + + + +CHAPTER VII + +HE MEETS A TEMPERAMENT + + + + + +Mr. Wrenn was sulkily breakfasting at Mrs. Cattermole's Tea +House, which Mrs. Cattermole kept in a genteel fashion in a +basement three doors from his rooming-house on Tavistock Place. +After his night of fear and tragic portents he resented the +general flowered-paper-napkin aspect of Mrs. Cattermole's +establishment. "Hungh!" he grunted, as he jabbed at the fringed +doily under the silly pink-and-white tea-cup on the +green-and-white lacquered tray brought him by a fat waitress in +a frilly apron which must have been made for a Christmas +pantomime fairy who was not fat. "Hurump!" he snorted at the +pictures of lambs and radishes and cathedrals and little duckies +on Mrs. Cattermole's pink-and-white wall. + +He wished it were possible--which, of course, it was not--to go +back to the St. Brasten Cocoa House, where he could talk to the +honest flat-footed galumping waitress, and cross his feet under +his chair. For here he was daintily, yes, daintily, studied by +the tea-room habitues--two bouncing and talkative daughters of an +American tourist, a slender pale-haired English girl student of +Assyriology with large top-barred eye-glasses over her +protesting eyes, and a sprinkling of people living along +Tavistock Place, who looked as though they wanted to know if +your opinions on the National Gallery and abstinence were sound. + +His disapproval of the lambiness of Mrs. Cattermole's was turned +to a feeling of comradeship with the other patrons as he turned, +with the rest, to stare hostilely at a girl just entering. The +talk in the room halted, startled. + +Mr. Wrenn gasped. With his head solemnly revolving, his eyes +followed the young woman about his table to a table opposite. +"A freak! Gee, what red hair!" was his private comment. + +A slender girl of twenty-eight or twenty-nine, clad in a +one-piece gown of sage-green, its lines unbroken by either belt +or collar-brooch, fitting her as though it had been pasted on, +and showing the long beautiful sweep of her fragile thighs and +long-curving breast. Her collar, of the material of the dress, +was so high that it touched her delicate jaw, and it was set off +only by a fine silver chain, with a La Valliere of silver and +carved Burmese jade. Her red hair, red as a poinsettia, parted +and drawn severely back, made a sweep about the fair dead-white +skin of her bored sensitive face. Bored blue-gray eyes, with +pathetic crescents of faintly violet-hued wrinkles beneath them, +and a scarce noticeable web of tinier wrinkles at the side. +Thin long cheeks, a delicate nose, and a straight strong mouth +of thin but startlingly red lips. + +Such was the new patron of Mrs. Cattermole. + +She stared about the tea-room like an officer inspecting raw +recruits, sniffed at the stare of the thin girl student, ordered +breakfast in a low voice, then languidly considered her toast +and marmalade. Once she glanced about the room. Her heavy +brows were drawn close for a second, making a deep-cleft wrinkle +of ennui over her nose, and two little indentations, like the +impressions of a box corner, in her forehead over her brows. + +Mr. Wrenn's gaze ran down the line of her bosom again, and he +wondered at her hands, which touched the heavy bread-and-butter +knife as though it were a fine-point pen. Long hands, colored +like ivory; the joint wrinkles etched into her skin; orange +cigarette stains on the second finger; the nails-- + +He stared at them. To himself he commented, "Gee! I never did +see such freak finger-nails in my life." Instead of such +smoothly rounded nails as Theresa Zapp displayed, the new young +lady had nails narrow and sharp-pointed, the ends like little +triangles of stiff white writing-paper. + +As she breakfasted she scanned Mr. Wrenn for a second. He was +too obviously caught staring to be able to drop his eyes. She +studied him all out, with almost as much interest as a policeman +gives to a passing trolley-car, yawned delicately, and forgot him. + +Though you should penetrate Greenland or talk anarchism to the +daughter of a millionaire grocer, never shall you feel a more +devouring chill than enveloped Mr. Wrenn as the new young lady +glanced away from him, paid her check, rose slithily from her +table, and departed. She rounded his table; not stalking out of +its way, as Theresa would have done, but bending from the hips. +Thus was it revealed to Mr. Wrenn that-- + +He was almost too horrified to put it into words.... He had +noticed that there was something kind of funny in regard to her +waist; he had had an impression of remarkably smooth waist +curves and an unjagged sweep of back. Now he saw that--It +was unheard of; not at all like Lee Theresa Zapp or ladies in +the Subway. For--the freak girl wasn't wearing corsets! + +When she had passed him he again studied her back, swiftly and +covertly. No, sir. No question about it. It couldn't be +denied by any one now that the girl was a freak, for, charitable +though Our Mr. Wrenn was, he had to admit that there was no sign +of the midback ridge and little rounded knobbinesses of corseted +respectability. And he had a closer view of the texture of her +sage-green crash gown. + +"Golly!" he said to himself; "of all the doggone cloth for a +dress! Reg'lar gunny-sacking. She's skinny, too. Bright-red +hair. She sure is the prize freak. Kind of good-looking, +but--get a brick!" + +He hated to rule so clever-seeming a woman quite out of court. +But he remembered her scissors glance at him, and his soft +little heart became very hard. + +How brittle are our steel resolves! When Mr. Wrenn walked out of +Mrs. Cattermole's excellent establishment and heavily inspected +the quiet Bloomsbury Street, with a cat's-meat-man stolidly +clopping along the pavement, as loneliness rushed on him and he +wondered what in the world he could do, he mused, "Gee! I bet +that red-headed lady would be interestin' to know." + +A day of furtive darts out from his room to do London, which +glumly declined to be done. He went back to the Zoological +Gardens and made friends with a tiger which, though it +presumably came from an English colony, was the friendliest +thing he had seen for a week. It did yawn, but it let him talk +to it for a long while. He stood before the bars, peering in, +and whenever no one else was about he murmured: "Poor fella, +they won't let you go, heh? You got a worse boss 'n Goglefogle, +heh? Poor old fella." + +He didn't at all mind the disorder and rancid smell of the cage; +he had no fear of the tiger's sleek murderous power. But he was +somewhat afraid of the sound of his own tremorous voice. He had +spoken aloud so little lately. + +A man came, an Englishman in a high offensively well-fitting +waistcoat, and stood before the cage. Mr. Wrenn slunk away, +robbed of his new friend, the tiger, the forlornest person in all +London, kicking at pebbles in the path. + +As half-dusk made the quiet street even more detached, he sat on +the steps of his rooming-house on Tavistock Place, keeping +himself from the one definite thing he wanted to do--the thing +he keenly imagined a happy Mr. Wrenn doing--dashing over to the +Euston Station to find out how soon and where he could get a +train for Liverpool and a boat for America. + +A girl was approaching the house. He viewed her carelessly, +then intently. It was the freak lady of Mrs. Cattermole's Tea +House--the corsetless young woman of the tight-fitting crash gown +and flame-colored hair. She was coming up the steps of his house. + +He made room for her with feverish courtesy. She lived in the +same house--He instantly, without a bit of encouragement from +the uninterested way in which she snipped the door to, made up +a whole novel about her. Gee! She was a French countess, who +lived in a reg'lar chateau, and she was staying in Bloomsbury +incognito, seeing the sights. She was a noble. She was-- + +Above him a window opened. He glanced up. The countess incog. +was leaning out, scanning the street uncaringly. Why--her +windows were next to his! He was living next room to an unusual +person--as unusual as Dr. Mittyford. + +He hurried up-stairs with a fervid but vague plan to meet her. +Maybe she really was a French countess or somepun'. All evening, +sitting by the window, he was comforted as he heard her move +about her room. He had a friend. He had started that great +work of making friends--well, not started, but started +starting--then he got confused, but the idea was a flame to warm +the fog-chilled spaces of the London street. + +At his Cattermole breakfast he waited long. She did not come. +Another day--but why paint another day that was but a smear of +flat dull slate? Yet another breakfast, and the lady of mystery +came. Before he knew he was doing it he had bowed to her, a +slight uneasy bend of his neck. She peered at him, unseeing, +and sat down with her back to him. + +He got much good healthy human vindictive satisfaction in +evicting her violently from the French chateau he had given her, +and remembering that, of course, she was just a "fool freak +Englishwoman--prob'ly a bloomin' stoodent" he scorned, and so +settled _her!_ Also he told her, by telepathy, that her new +gown was freakier than ever--a pale-green thing, with large +white buttons. + +As he was coming in that evening he passed her in the hall. She +was clad in what he called a bathrobe, and what she called an +Arabian _burnoose_, of black embroidered with dull-gold +crescents and stars, showing a V of exquisite flesh at her +throat. A shred of tenuous lace straggled loose at the opening +of the _burnoose_. Her radiant hair, tangled over her forehead, +shone with a thousand various gleams from the gas-light over her +head as she moved back against the wall and stood waiting for +him to pass. She smiled very doubtfully, distantly--the smile, +he felt, of a great lady from Mayfair. He bobbed his head, +lowered his eyes abashedly, and noticed that along the shelf of +her forearm, held against her waist, she bore many silver toilet +articles, and such a huge heavy fringed Turkish bath-towel as he +had never seen before. + +He lay awake to picture her brilliant throat and shining hair. +He rebuked himself for the lack of dignity in "thinking of that +freak, when she wouldn't even return a fellow's bow." But her +shimmering hair was the star of his dreams. + +Napping in his room in the afternoon, Mr. Wrenn heard slight +active sounds from her, next room. He hurried down to the stoop. + +She stood behind him on the door-step, glaring up and down the +street, as bored and as ready to spring as the Zoo tiger. Mr. +Wrenn heard himself saying to the girl, "Please, miss, do you +mind telling me--I'm an American; I'm a stranger in London--I +want to go to a good play or something and what would I--what +would be good--" + +"I don't know, reahlly," she said, with much hauteur. +"Everything's rather rotten this season, I fancy." Her voice +ran fluting up and down the scale. Her a's were very broad. + +"Oh--oh--y-you _are_ English, then?" + +"Yes!" + +"Why--uh--" + +"_Yes!_" + +"Oh, I just had a fool idea maybe you might be French." + +"Perhaps I am, y' know. I'm not reahlly English," she said, blandly. + +"Why--uh--" + +"What made you think I was French? Tell me; I'm interested." + +"Oh, I guess I was just--well, it was almost make-b'lieve--how +you had a castle in France--just a kind of a fool game." + +"Oh, _don't_ be ashamed of imagination," she demanded, stamping +her foot, while her voice fluttered, low and beautifully +controlled, through half a dozen notes. "Tell me the rest of +your story about me." + +She was sitting on the rail above him now. As he spoke she +cupped her chin with the palm of her delicate hand and observed +him curiously. + +"Oh, nothing much more. You were a countess--" + +"Please! Not just `were.' Please, sir, mayn't I be a countess now?" + +"Oh yes, of course you are!" he cried, delight submerging +timidity. "And your father was sick with somepun' mysterious, +and all the docs shook their heads and said `Gee! we dunno what +it is,' and so you sneaked down to the treasure-chamber--you +see, your dad--your father, I should say--he was a cranky old +Frenchman--just in the story, you know. He didn't think you +could do anything yourself about him being mysteriously sick. +So one night you--" + +"Oh, was it dark? Very _very_ dark? And silent? And my +footsteps rang on the hollow flagstones? And I swiped the gold +and went forth into the night?" + +"Yes, _yes!_ That's it." + +"But why did I swipe it?" + +"I'm just coming to that," he said, sternly. + +"Oh, please, sir, I'm awful sorry I interrupted." + +"It was like this: You wanted to come over here and study +medicine so's you could cure your father." + +"But please, sir," said the girl, with immense gravity, "mayn't +I let him die, and not find out what's ailing him, so I can +marry the _maire?_" + +"Nope," firmly, "you got to--Say, _gee!_ I didn't expect to +tell you all this make-b'lieve.... I'm afraid you'll think +it's awful fresh of me." + +"Oh, I loved it--really I did--because you liked to make it up +about poor Istra. (My name is Istra Nash.) I'm sorry to say I'm +not reahlly"--her two "reallys" were quite different--"a countess, +you know. Tell me--you live in this same house, don't you? +Please tell me that you're not an interesting Person. Please!" + +"I--gee! I guess I don't quite get you." + +"Why, stupid, an Interesting Person is a writer or an artist or +an editor or a girl who's been in Holloway Jail or Canongate for +suffraging, or any one else who depends on an accident to be +tolerable." + +"No, I'm afraid not; I'm just a kind of clerk." + +"Good! Good! My dear sir--whom I've never seen before--have I? +By the way, please don't think I usually pick up stray gentlemen +and talk to them about my pure white soul. But you, you know, +made stories about me.... I was saying: If you could only know +how I loathe and hate and despise Interesting People just now! +I've seen so much of them. They talk and talk and talk--they're +just like Kipling's bandar-log--What is it? + + + "See us rise in a flung festoon + Half-way up to the jealous moon. + Don't you wish you-- + + +could know all about art and economics as we do?' That's what +they say. Umph!" + +Then she wriggled her fingers in the air like white butterflies, +shrugged her shoulders elaborately, rose from the rail, and sat +down beside him on the steps, quite matter-of-factly. + +He gould feel his temple-pulses beat with excitement. + +She turned her pale sensitive vivid face slowly toward him. + +"When did you see me--to make up the story?" + +"Breakfasts. At Mrs. Cattermole's." + +"Oh yes.... How is it you aren't out sight-seeing? Or is it +blessedly possible that you aren't a tripper--a tourist?" + +"Why, I dunno." He hunted uneasily for the right answer. +"Not exactly. I tried a stunt--coming over on a cattle-boat." + +"That's good. Much better." + +She sat silent while, with enormous and self-betraying pains to +avoid detection, he studied her firm thin brilliantly red lips. +At last he tried: + +"Please tell me something about London. Some of you English-- +Oh, I dunno. I can't get acquainted easily." + +"My dear child, I'm not English! I'm quite as American as +yourself. I was born in California. I never saw England till two +years ago, on my way to Paris. I'm an art student.... That's +why my accent is so perishin' English--I can't afford to be just +_ordinary_ British, y' know." + +Her laugh had an October tang of bitterness in it. + +"Well, I'll--say, what do you know about that!" he said, weakly. + +"Tell me about yourself--since apparently we're now +acquainted.... Unless you want to go to that music-hall?" + +"Oh no, no, no! Gee, I was just _crazy_ to have somebody to talk +to--somebody nice--I was just about nutty, I was so lonely," all +in a burst. He finished, hesitatingly, "I guess the English are +kinda hard to get acquainted with." + +"Lonely, eh?" she mused, abrupt and bluffly kind as a man, for +all her modulating woman's voice. "You don't know any of the +people here in the house?" + +"No'm. Say, I guess we got rooms next to each other." + +"How romantic!" she mocked. + +"Wrenn's my name; William Wrenn. I work for--I used to work for +the Souvenir and Art Novelty Company. In New York." + +"Oh. I see. Novelties? Nice little ash-trays with `Love from +the Erie Station'? And woggly pin-cushions?" + +"Yes! And fat pug-dogs with black eyes." + +"Oh no-o-o! Please not black! Pale sympathetic blue eyes--nice +honest blue eyes!" + +"Nope. Black. Awful black.... Say, gee, I ain't talking too +nutty, am I?" + +"`Nutty'? You mean `idiotically'? The slang's changed +since--Oh yes, of course; you've succeeded in talking quite +nice and `idiotic.'" + +"Oh, say, gee, I didn't mean to--When you been so nice and +all to me--" + +"Don't apologize!" Istra Nash demanded, savagely. "Haven't they +taught you that?" + +"Yes'm," he mumbled, apologetically. + +She sat silent again, apparently not at all satisfied with the +architecture of the opposite side of Tavistock Place. +Diffidently he edged into speech: + +"Honest, I did think you was English. You came from California? +Oh, say, I wonder if you've ever heard of Dr. Mittyford. He's +some kind of school-teacher. I think he teaches in Leland +Stamford College." + +"Leland Stanford? You know him?" She dropped into interested +familiarity. + +"I met him at Oxford." + +"Really?... My brother was at Stanford. I think I've heard him +speak of--Oh yes. He said that Mittyford was a cultural +climber, if you know what I mean; rather--oh, how shall I +express it?--oh, shall we put it, finicky about things people +have just told him to be finicky about." + +"Yes!" glowed Mr. Wrenn. + +To the luxury of feeling that he knew the unusual Miss Istra +Nash he sacrificed Dr. Mittyford, scholarship and eye-glasses +and Shelley and all, without mercy. + +"Yes, he was awfully funny. Gee! I didn't care much for him." + +"Of course you know he's a great man, however?" Istra was as +bland as though she had meant that all along, which left Mr. +Wrenn nowhere at all when it came to deciding what she meant. + +Without warning she rose from the steps, flung at him "G' night," +and was off down the street. + +Sitting alone, all excited happiness, Mr. Wrenn muttered: "Ain't +she a wonder! Gee! she's striking-lookin'! Gee whittakers!" + +Some hours later he said aloud, tossing about in bed: "I wonder +if I was too fresh. I hope I wasn't. I ought to be careful." + +He was so worried about it that he got up and smoked a +cigarette, remembered that he was breaking still another rule by +smoking too much, then got angry and snapped defiantly at his +suit-case: "Well, what do I care if I _am_ smoking too much? +And I'll be as fresh as I want to." He threw a newspaper at the +censorious suit-case and, much relieved, went to bed to dream +that he was a rabbit making enormously amusing jests, at which +he laughed rollickingly in half-dream, till he realized that he +was being awakened by the sound of long sobs from the room of +Istra Nash. + + +Afternoon; Mr. Wrenn in his room. Miss Nash was back from tea, +but there was not a sound to be heard from her room, though he +listened with mouth open, bent forward in his chair, his hands +clutching the wooden seat, his finger-tips rubbing nervously +back and forth over the rough under-surface of the wood. +He wanted to help her--the wonderful lady who had been sobbing +in the night. He had a plan, in which he really believed, +to say to her, "Please let me help you, princess, jus' like I +was a knight." + +At last he heard her moving about. He rushed downstairs and +waited on the stoop. + +When she came out she glanced down and smiled contentedly. +He was flutteringly sure that she expected to see him there. +But all his plan of proffering assistance vanished as he saw +her impatient eyes and her splendors of dress--another +tight-fitting gown, of smoky gray, with faint silvery lights gliding +along the fabric. + +She sat on the rail above him, immediately, unhesitatingly, and +answered his "Evenin'" cheerfully. + +He wanted so much to sit beside her, to be friends with her. +But, he felt, it took courage to sit beside her. She was likely +to stare haughtily at him. However, he did go up to the rail +and sit, shyly kicking his feet, beside her, and she did not +stare haughtily. Instead she moved over an inch or two, glanced +at him almost as though they were sharing a secret, and said, quietly: + +"I thought quite a bit about you last evening. I believe you +really have an imagination, even though you are a salesman--I +mean so many don't; you know how it is." + +"Oh yes." + +You see, Mr. Wrenn didn't know he was commonplace. + +"After I left here last night I went over to Olympia Johns', and +she dragged me off to a play. I thought of you at it because +there was an imaginative butler in it. You don't mind my +comparing you to a butler, do you? He was really quite the +nicest person in the play, y' know. Most of it was gorgeously +rotten. It used to be a French farce, but they sent it to +Sunday-school and gave it a nice fresh frock. It seemed that a +gentleman-tabby had been trying to make a match between his +nephew and his ward. The ward arted. Personally I think it +was by tonsorial art. But, anyway, the uncle knew that nothing +brings people together so well as hating the same person. You know, +like hating the cousin, when you're a kiddy, hating the cousin +that always keeps her nails clean?" + +"Yes! That's _so!_" + +"So he turned nasty, and of course the nephew and ward clinched +till death did them part--which, I'm very sorry to have to tell +you, death wasn't decent enough to do on the stage. If the play +could only have ended with everybody's funeral I should have +called it a real happy ending." + +Mr. Wrenn laughed gratefully, though uncertainly. He knew that she +had made jokes for him, but he didn't exactly know what they were. + +"The imaginative butler, he was rather good. But the rest--Ugh!" + +"That must have been a funny play," he said, politely. + +She looked at him sidewise and confided, "Will you do me a favor?" + +"Oh yes, I--" + +"Ever been married?" + +He was frightfully startled. His "No" sounded as though he +couldn't quite remember. + +She seemed much amused. You wouldn't have believed that this +superior quizzical woman who tapped her fingers carelessly on +her slim exquisite knee had ever sobbed in the night. + +"Oh, that wasn't a personal question," she said. "I just wanted +to know what you're like. Don't you ever collect people? I +do--chloroform 'em quite cruelly and pin their poor little +corpses out on nice clean corks.... You live alone in New York, +do you?" + +"Y-yes." + +"Who do you play with--know?" + +"Not--not much of anybody. Except maybe Charley Carpenter. +He's assistant bookkeeper for the Souvenir Company. "He had +wanted to, and immediately decided not to, invent _grandes +mondes_ whereof he was an intimate. + +"What do--oh, you know--people in New York who don't go to +parties or read much--what do they do for amusement? I'm so +interested in types." + +"Well--" said he. + +That was all he could say till he had digested a pair of +thoughts: Just what did she mean by "types"? Had it something +to do with printing stories? And what could he say about the +people, anyway? He observed: + +"Oh, I don't know--just talk about--oh, cards and jobs and folks +and things and--oh, you know; go to moving pictures and +vaudeville and go to Coney Island and--oh, sleep." + +"But you--?" + +"Well, I read a good deal. Quite a little. Shakespeare and +geography and a lot of stuff. I like reading." + +"And how do you place Nietzsche?" she gravely desired to know. + +"?" + +"Nietzsche. You know--the German humorist." + +"Oh yes--uh--let me see now; he's--uh--" + +"Why, you remember, don't you? Haeckel and he wrote the great +musical comedy of the century. And Matisse did the +music--Matisse and Rodin." + +"I haven't been to it," he said, vaguely. "...I don't know +much German. Course I know a few words, like _Spricken Sie +Dutch_ and _Bitty, sir_, that Rabin at the Souvenir Company--he's +a German Jew, I guess--learnt me.... But, say, isn't Kipling +great! Gee! when I read _Kim_ I can imagine I'm hiking along one +of those roads in India just like I was there--you know, all +those magicians and so on.... Readin's wonderful, ain't it!" + +"Um. Yes." + +"I bet you read an awful lot." + +"Very little. Oh--D'Annunzio and some Turgenev and a little +Tourgenieff.... That last was a joke, you know." + +"Oh yes," disconcertedly. + +"What sorts of plays do you go to, Mr. Wrenn?" + +"Moving pictures mostly," he said, easily, then bitterly wished +he hadn't confessed so low-life a habit. + +"Well--tell me, my dear--Oh, I didn't mean that; artists use +it a good deal; it just means `old chap.' You _don't_ mind my +asking such beastly personal questions, do you? I'm interested +in people.... And now I must go up and write a letter. I was +going over to Olympia's--she's one of the Interesting People I +spoke of--but you see you have been much more amusing. Good night. +You're lonely in London, aren't you? We'll have to go sightseeing +some day." + +"Yes, I am lonely!" he exploded. Then, meekly: "Oh, thank you! +I sh'd be awful pleased to.... Have you seen the Tower, Miss Nash?" + +"No. Never. Have you?" + +"No. You see, I thought it 'd be kind of a gloomy thing to see +all alone. Is that why you haven't never been there, too?" + +"My dear man, I see I shall have to educate you. Shall I? I've +been taken in hand by so many people--it would be a pleasure to +pass on the implied slur. Shall I?" + +"Please do." + +"One simply doesn't go and see the Tower, because that's what +trippers do. Don't you understand, my dear? (Pardon the `my +dear' again.) The Tower is the sort of thing school +superintendents see and then go back and lecture on in school +assembly-room and the G. A. R. hall. I'll take you to the Tate +Gallery." Then, very abruptly, "G' night," and she was gone. + +He stared after her smooth back, thinking: "Gee! I wonder if +she got sore at something I said. I don't think I was fresh +this time. But she beat it so quick.... Them lips of hers--I +never knew there was such red lips. And an artist--paints +pictures!... Read a lot--Nitchy--German musical comedy. Wonder +if that's that `Merry Widow' thing?... That gray dress of hers +makes me think of fog. Cur'ous." + +In her room Istra Nash inspected her nose in a mirror, powdered, +and sat down to write, on thick creamy paper: + + +Skilly dear, I'm in a fierce Bloomsbury boarding-house--bores +--except for a Phe-nomenon--little man of 35 or 40 with +embryonic imagination & a virgin soul. I'll try to keep from +planting radical thoughts in the virgin soul, but I'm tempted. + +Oh Skilly dear I'm lonely as the devil. Would it be too bromid. +to say I wish you were here? I put out my hand in the darkness, +& yours wasn't there. My dear, my dear, how desolate--Oh you +understand it only too well with your supercilious grin & your +superior eye-glasses & your beatific Oxonian ignorance of poor +eager America. + +I suppose I _am_ just a barbarous Californian kiddy. It's just +as Pere Dureon said at the atelier, "You haf a' onderstanding of +the 'igher immorality, but I 'ope you can cook--paint you cannot." + +He wins. I can't sell a single thing to the art editors here or +get one single order. One horrid eye-glassed earnest youth who +Sees People at a magazine, he vouchsafed that they "didn't use +any Outsiders." Outsiders! And his hair was nearly as red as my +wretched mop. So I came home & howled & burned Milan tapers +before your picture. I did. Though you don't deserve it. + +Oh damn it, am I getting sentimental? You'll read this at Petit +Monsard over your drip & grin at your poor unnietzschean barbarian. + I. N. + + + + + +CHAPTER VIII + +HE TIFFINS + + + + + +Mr. Wrenn, chewing and chewing and chewing the cud of thought in +his room next evening, after an hour had proved two things; thus: + +(a) The only thing he wanted to do was to go back to America at +once, because England was a country where every one--native or +American--was so unfriendly and so vastly wise that he could +never understand them. + +(b) The one thing in the world that he wanted to do was to be +right here, for the most miraculous event of which he had ever +heard was meeting Miss Nash. First one, then the other, these +thoughts swashed back and forth like the swinging tides. He got +away from them only long enough to rejoice that somehow--he +didn't know how--he was going to be her most intimate friend, +because they were both Americans in a strange land and because +they both could make-believe. + +Then he was proving that Istra would, and would not, be the +perfect comrade among women when some one knocked at his door. + +Electrified, his cramped body shot up from its crouch, and he +darted to the door. + +Istra Nash stood there, tapping her foot on the sill with +apologetic haste in her manner. Abruptly she said: + +"So sorry to bother you. I just wondered if you could let me +have a match? I'm all out." + +"Oh _yes!_ Here's a whole box. Please take 'em. I got plenty +more." [Which was absolutely untrue.] + +"Thank you. S' good o' you," she said, hurriedly. "G' night." + +She turned away, but he followed her into the hall, bashfully +urging: "Have you been to another show? Gee! I hope you draw +a better one next time 'n the one about the guy with the nephew." + +"Thank you." + +She glanced back in the half dark hall from her door--some +fifteen feet from his. He was scratching at the wall-paper +with a diffident finger, hopeful for a talk. + +"Won't you come in?" she said, hesitatingly. + +"Oh, thank you, but I guess I hadn't better." + +Suddenly she flashed out the humanest of smiles, her blue-gray +eyes crinkling with cheery friendship. "Come in, come in, child." +As he hesitatingly entered she warbled: "Needn't both be so +lonely all the time, after all, need we? Even if you _don't_ +like poor Istra. You don't--do you?" Seemingly she didn't +expect an answer to her question, for she was busy lighting a +Russian cigarette. It was the first time in his life that he +had seen a woman smoke. + +With embarrassed politeness he glanced away from her as she +threw back her head and inhaled deeply. He blushingly +scrutinized the room. + +In the farther corner two trunks stood open. One had the tray +removed, and out of the lower part hung a confusion of lacey +things from which he turned away uncomfortable eyes. He +recognized the black-and-gold burnoose, which was tumbled on the +bed, with a nightgown of lace insertions and soft wrinkles in +the lawn, a green book with a paper label bearing the title +_Three Plays for Puritans_, a red slipper, and an open box of +chocolates. + +On the plain kitchen-ware table was spread a cloth of Reseda +green, like a dull old leaf in color. On it lay a gold-mounted +fountain-pen, huge and stub-pointed; a medley of papers and torn +envelopes, a bottle of Creme Yvette, and a silver-framed portrait +of a lean smiling man with a single eye-glass. + +Mr. Wrenn did not really see all these details, but he had an +impression of luxury and high artistic success. He considered +the Yvette flask the largest bottle of perfume he'd ever seen; +and remarked that there was "some guy's picture on the table." +He had but a moment to reconnoiter, for she was astonishingly saying: + +"So you were lonely when I knocked?" + +"Why, how--" + +"Oh, I could see it. We all get lonely, don't we? I do, of +course. Just now I'm getting sorer and sorer on Interesting +People. I think I'll go back to Paris. There even the +Interesting People are--why, they're interesting. Savvy--you +see I _am_ an American--savvy?" + +"Why--uh--uh--uh--I d-don't exactly get what you mean. How do +you mean about `Interesting People'?" + +"My dear child, of course you don't get me." She went to the +mirror and patted her hair, then curled on the bed, with an +offhand "Won't you sit down?" and smoked elaborately, blowing +the blue tendrils toward the ceiling as she continued: "Of +course you don't get it. You're a nice sensible clerk who've +had enough real work to do to keep you from being afraid that +other people will think you're commonplace. You don't have to +coddle yourself into working enough to earn a living by talking +about temperament. + +"Why, these Interesting People--You find 'em in London and +New York and San Francisco just the same. They're convinced +they're the wisest people on earth. There's a few artists and +a bum novelist or two always, and some social workers. The +particular bunch that it amuses me to hate just now--and that I +apparently can't do without--they gather around Olympia Johns, +who makes a kind of salon out of her rooms on Great James +Street, off Theobald's Road.... They might just as well be in +New York; but they're even stodgier. They don't get sick of the +game of being on intellectual heights as soon as New-Yorkers do. + +"I'll have to take you there. It's a cheery sensation, you +know, to find a man who has some imagination, but who has been +unspoiled by Interesting People, and take him to hear them +wamble. They sit around and growl and rush the growler--I hope +you know growler-rushing--and rejoice that they're free spirits. +Being Free, of course, they're not allowed to go and play with +nice people, for when a person is Free, you know, he is never +free to be anything but Free. That may seem confusing, but they +understand it at Olympia's. + +"Of course there's different sorts of intellectuals, and each +cult despises all the others. Mostly, each cult consists of one +person, but sometimes there's two--a talker and an audience--or +even three. For instance, you may be a militant and a +vegetarian, but if some one is a militant and has a good figure, +why then--oof!... That's what I mean by `Interesting People.' +I loathe them! So, of course, being one of them, I go from one +bunch to another, and, upon my honor, every single time I think +that the new bunch _is_ interesting!" + +Then she smoked in gloomy silence, while Mr. Wrenn remarked, +after some mental labor, "I guess they're like cattlemen--the +cattle-ier they are, the more romantic they look, and then when +you get to know them the chief trouble with them is that they're +cattlemen." + +"Yes, that's it. They're--why, they're--Oh, poor dear, there, +there, there! It _sha'n't_ have so much intellekchool discussion, +_shall_ it!... I think you're a very nice person, and I'll tell you +what we'll do. We'll have a small fire, shall we? In the fireplace." + +"Yes!" + +She pulled the old-fashioned bell-cord, and the old-fashioned +North Country landlady came--tall, thin, parchment-faced, +musty-looking as though she had been dressed up in Victorian +garments in 1880 and left to stand in an unaired parlor ever since. +She glowered silent disapproval at the presence of Mr. Wrenn in +Istra's room, but sent a slavey to make the fire--"saxpence uxtry." +Mr. Wrenn felt guilty till the coming of the slavey, a perfect +Christmas-story-book slavey, a small and merry lump of soot, who +sang out, "Chilly t'-night, ayn't it?" and made a fire that was +soon singing "Chilly t'-night," like the slavey. + +Istra sat on the floor before the fire, Turk-wise, her quick +delicate fingers drumming excitedly on her knees. + +"Come sit by me. You, with your sense of the romantic, ought to +appreciate sitting by the fire. You know it's always done." + +He slumped down by her, clasping his knees and trying to appear +the dignified American business man in his country-house. + +She smiled at him intimately, and quizzed: + +"Tell me about the last time you sat with a girl by the fire. +Tell poor Istra the dark secret. Was she the perfect among +pink faces?" + +"I've--never--sat--before--any--fireplace--with +--any--one! Except when I was about nine--one Hallowe'en--at a +party in Parthenon--little town up York State." + +"Really? Poor kiddy!" + +She reached out her hand and took his. He was terrifically +conscious of the warm smoothness of her fingers playing a soft +tattoo on the back of his hand, while she said: + +"But you have been in love? Drefful in love?" + +"I never have." + +"Dear child, you've missed so much of the tea and cakes of life, +haven't you? And you have an interest in life. Do you know, +when I think of the jaded Interesting People I've met--Why do +I leave you to be spoiled by some shop-girl in a flowered hat? +She'd drag you to moving-picture shows.... Oh! You didn't tell +me that you went to moving pictures, did you?" + +"No!" he lied, fervently, then, feeling guilty, "I used to, but +no more." + +"It _shall_ go to the nice moving pictures if it wants to! It +shall take me, too. We'll forget there are any syndicalists or +broken-colorists for a while, won't we? We'll let the robins +cover us with leaves." + +"You mean like the babes in the woods? But, say, I'm afraid you +ain't just a babe in the woods! You're the first person with +brains I ever met, 'cept, maybe, Dr. Mittyford; and the Doc never +would play games, I don't believe. The very first one, really." + +"Thank you!" Her warm pressure on his hand tightened. His heart +was making the maddest gladdest leaps, and timidly, with a +feeling of historic daring, he ventured to explore with his +thumb-tip the fine lines of the side of her hand.... It +actually was he, sitting here with a princess, and he actually +did feel the softness of her hand, he pantingly assured himself. + +Suddenly she gave his hand a parting pressure and sprang up. + +"Come. We'll have tiffin, and then I'll send you away, and +to-morrow we'll go see the Tate Gallery." + +While Istra was sending the slavey for cakes and a pint of light +wine Mr. Wrenn sat in a chair--just sat in it; he wanted to show +that he could be dignified and not take advantage of Miss Nash's +kindness by slouchin' round. Having read much Kipling, he had +an idea that tiffin was some kind of lunch in the afternoon, but +of course if Miss Nash used the word for evening supper, then he +had been wrong. + +Istra whisked the writing-table with the Reseda-green cover over +before the fire, chucked its papers on the bed, and placed a +bunch of roses on one end, moving the small blue vase two inches +to the right, then two inches forward. + +The wine she poured into a decanter. Wine was distinctly a +problem to him. He was excited over his sudden rise into a +society where one took wine as a matter of course. Mrs. Zapp +wouldn't take it as a matter of course. He rejoiced that he +wasn't narrow-minded, like Mrs. Zapp. He worked so hard at not +being narrow-minded like Mrs. Zapp that he started when he was +called out of his day-dream by a mocking voice: + +"But you might look at the cakes. Just once, anyway. They are +very nice cakes." + +"Uh--" + +"Yes, I know the wine is wine. Beastly of it." + +"Say, Miss Nash, I did get you this time." + +"Oh, don't tell me that my presiding goddessship is over already." + +"Uh--sure! Now I'm going to be a cruel boss." + +"Dee-lighted! Are you going to be a caveman?" + +"I'm sorry. I don't quite get you on that." + +"That's too bad, isn't it. I think I'd rather like to meet a caveman." + +"Oh say, I know about that caveman--Jack London's guys. I'm +afraid I ain't one. Still--on the cattle-boat--Say, I wish +you could of seen it when the gang were tying up the bulls, +before starting. Dark close place 'tween-decks, with the steers +bellowin' and all parked tight together, and the stiffs gettin' +seasick--so seasick we just kind of staggered around; and we'd +get hold of a head rope and yank and then let go, and the +bosses, d yell, `Pull, or I'll brain you.' And then the +fo'c'sle--men packed in like herrings." + +She was leaning over the table, making a labyrinth with the +currants from a cake and listening intently. He stopped +politely, feeling that he was talking too much. But, "Go on, +please do," she commanded, and he told simply, seeing it more +and more, of Satan and the Grenadier, of the fairies who had +beckoned to him from the Irish coast hills, and the comradeship +of Morton. + +She interrupted only once, murmuring, "My dear, it's a good +thing you're articulate, anyway--" which didn't seem to have +any bearing on hay-bales. + +She sent him away with a light "It's been a good party, hasn't +it, caveman? (If you _are_ a caveman.) Call for me tomorrow at +three. We'll go to the Tate Gallery." + +She touched his hand in the fleetingest of grasps. + +"Yes. Good night, Miss Nash," he quavered. + + +A morning of planning his conduct so that in accompanying Istra +Nash to the Tate Gallery he might be the faithful shadow and +beautiful transcript of Mittyford, Ph.D. As a result, when he +stood before the large canvases of Mr. Watts at the Tate he was +so heavy and correctly appreciative, so ready not to enjoy the +stories in the pictures of Millais, that Istra suddenly demanded: + +"Oh, my dear child, I have taken a great deal on my hands. +You've got to learn to play. You don't know how to play. Come. +I shall teach you. I don't know why I should, either. But--come." + +She explained as they left the gallery: "First, the art of +riding on the buses. Oh, it is an art, you know. You must +appreciate the flower-girls and the gr-r-rand young bobbies. +You must learn to watch for the blossoms on the restaurant +terraces and roll on the grass in the parks. You're much too +respectable to roll on the grass, aren't you? I'll try ever so +hard to teach you not to be. And we'll go to tea. How many +kinds of tea are there?" + +"Oh, Ceylon and English Breakfast and--oh--Chinese." + +"B--" + +"And golf tees!" he added, excitedly, as they took a seat in +front atop the bus. + +"Puns are a beginning at least," she reflected. + +"But how many kinds of tea _are_ there, Istra?... Oh say, I +hadn't ought to--" + +"Course; call me Istra or anything else. Only, you mustn't call +my bluff. What do I know about tea? All of us who play are +bluffers, more or less, and we are ever so polite in pretending +not to know the others are bluffing.... There's lots of kinds +of tea. In the New York Chinatown I saw once--Do you know +Chinatown? Being a New-Yorker, I don't suppose you do." + +"Oh yes. And Italiantown. I used to wander round there." + +"Well, down at the Seven Flowery Kingdoms Chop Suey and American +Cooking there's tea at five dollars a cup that they advertise is +grown on `cloud-covered mountain-tops.' I suppose when the tops +aren't cloud-covered they only charge three dollars a cup.... +But, serious-like, there's really only two kinds of teas--those +you go to to meet the man you love and ought to hate, and those +you give to spite the women you hate but ought to--hate! Isn't +that lovely and complicated? That's playing. With words. My +aged parent calls it `talking too much and not saying anything.' +Note that last--not saying _anything!_ It's one of the rules in +playing that mustn't be broken." + +He understood that better than most of the things she said. +"Why," he exclaimed, "it's kind of talking sideways." + +"Why, yes. Of course. Talking sideways. Don't you see now?" + +Gallant gentleman as he was, he let her think she had invented +the phrase. + +She said many other things; things implying such vast learning +that he made gigantic resolves to "read like thunder." + +Her great lesson was the art of taking tea. He found, +surprisedly, that they weren't really going to endanger their +clothes by rolling on park grass. Instead, she led him to a +tea-room behind a candy-shop on Tottenham Court Road, a low room +with white wicker chairs, colored tiles set in the wall, and +green Sedji-ware jugs with irregular bunches of white roses. +A waitress with wild-rose cheeks and a busy step brought Orange +Pekoe and lemon for her, Ceylon and Russian Caravan tea and a +jug of clotted cream for him, with a pile of cinnamon buns. + +"But--" said Istra. "Isn't this like Alice in Wonderland! +But you must learn the buttering of English muffins most of all. +If you get to be very good at it the flunkies will let you take +tea at the Carleton. They are such hypercritical flunkies, and +the one that brings the gold butter-measuring rod to test your +skill, why, he always wears knee-breeches of silver gray. +So you can see, Billy, how careful you have to be. And eat them +without buttering your nose. For if you butter your nose +they'll think you're a Greek professor. And you wouldn't like +that, would you, honey?" He learned how to pat the butter into +the comfortable brown insides of the muffins that looked so cold +and floury without. But Istra seemed to have lost interest; and +he didn't in the least follow her when she observed: + +"Doubtless it _was_ the best butter. But where, where, dear +dormouse, are the hatter and hare? Especially the sweet bunny +rabbit that wriggled his ears and loved Gralice, the _princesse +d' outre-mer._ + + + "Where, where are the hatter and hare, + And where is the best butter gone?" + + +Presently: "Come on. Let's beat it down to Soho for dinner. +Or--no! Now you shall lead me. Show me where you'd go for +dinner. And you shall take me to a music-hall, and make me +enjoy it. Now _you_ teach _me_ to play." + +"Gee! I'm afraid I don't know a single thing to teach you." + +"Yes, but--See here! We are two lonely Western barbarians in +a strange land. We'll play together for a little while. We're +not used to each other's sort of play, but that will break up +the monotony of life all the more. I don't know how long we'll +play or--Shall we?" + +"Oh yes!" + +"Now show me how you play." + +"I don't believe I ever did much, really." + +"Well, you shall take me to your kind of a restaurant." + +"I don't believe you'd care much for penny meat-pies." + +"Little meat-pies?" + +"Um-huh." + +"Little _crispy_ ones? With flaky covers?" + +"Um-huh." + +"Why, course I would! And ha'p'ny tea? Lead me to it, O brave +knight! And to a vaudeville." + +He found that this devoted attendant of theaters had never seen +the beautiful Italians who pounce upon protesting zylophones +with small clubs, or the side-splitting juggler's assistant who +breaks up piles and piles of plates. And as to the top hat that +turns into an accordion and produces much melody, she was ecstatic. + +At after-theater supper he talked of Theresa and South Beach, of +Charley Carpenter and Morton--Morton--Morton. + +They sat, at midnight, on the steps of the house in Tavistock Place. + +"I do know you now, "she mused. "It's curious how any two babes +in a strange-enough woods get acquainted. You _are_ a lonely +child, aren't you?" Her voice was mother-soft. "We will play +just a little--" + +"I wish I had some games to teach. But you know so much." + +"And I'm a perfect beauty, too, aren't I?" she said, gravely. + +"Yes, you are!" stoutly. + +"You would be loyal.... And I need some one's admiration.... +Mostly, Paris and London hold their sides laughing at poor Istra." + +He caught her hand. "Oh, don't! They _must_ 'preciate you. +I'd like to kill anybody that didn't!" + +"Thanks." She gave his hand a return pressure and hastily +withdrew her own. "You'll be good to some sweet pink face.... +And I'll go on being discontented. Oh, isn 't life the fiercest +proposition!... We seem different, you and I, but maybe it's +mostly surface--down deep we're alike in being desperately +unhappy because we never know what we're unhappy about. Well--" + +He wanted to put his head down on her knees and rest there. But +he sat still, and presently their cold hands snuggled together. + +After a silence, in which they were talking of themselves, he +burst out: "But I don't see how Paris could help 'preciating +you. I'll bet you're one of the best artists they ever saw.... +The way you made up a picture in your mind about that juggler!" + +"Nope. Sorry. Can't paint at all." + +"Ah, stuff!" with a rudeness quite masterful. "I'll bet your +pictures are corkers." + +"Um." + +"Please, would you let me see some of them some time. I suppose +it would bother--" + +"Come up-stairs. I feel inspired. You are about to hear some +great though nasty criticisms on the works of the unfortunate +Miss Nash." + +She led the way, laughing to herself over something. She gave +him no time to blush and hesitate over the impropriety of +entering a lady's room at midnight, but stalked ahead with a +brief "Come in." + +She opened a large portfolio covered with green-veined black +paper and yanked out a dozen unframed pastels and wash-drawings +which she scornfully tossed on the bed, saying, as she pointed to +a mass of Marseilles roofs: + +"Do you see this sketch? The only good thing about it is the +thing that last art editor, that red-headed youth, probably +didn't like. Don't you hate red hair? You see these +ridiculous glaring purple shadows under the _clocher?_" + +She stared down at the picture interestedly, forgetting him, +pinching her chin thoughtfully, while she murmured: "They're +rather nice. Rather good. Rather good." + +Then, quickly twisting her shoulders about, she poured out: + +"But look at this. Consider this arch. It's miserably out of +drawing. And see how I've faked this figure? It isn't a real +person at all. Don't you notice how I've juggled with this +stairway? Why, my dear man, every bit of the drawing in this +thing would disgrace a seventh-grade drawing-class in Dos +Puentes. And regard the bunch of lombardies in this other +picture. They look like umbrellas upside down in a silly +wash-basin. Uff! It's terrible. _Affreux!_ Don't act as though +you liked them. You really needn't, you know. Can't you see +now that they're hideously out of drawing?" + +Mr. Wrenn's fancy was walking down a green lane of old France +toward a white cottage with orange-trees gleaming against its +walls. In her pictures he had found the land of all his +forsaken dreams. + +"I--I--I--" was all he could say, but admiration pulsed in it. + +"Thank you.... Yes, we _will_ play. Good night. To-morrow!" + + + + + + +CHAPTER IX + +HE ENCOUNTERS THE INTELLECTUALS + + + + + +He wanted to find a cable office, stalk in, and nonchalantly +send to his bank for more money. He could see himself doing it. +Maybe the cable clerk would think he was a rich American. What +did he care if he spent all he had? A guy, he admonished +himself, just had to have coin when he was goin' with a girl +like Miss Istra. At least seven times he darted up from the +door-step, where he was on watch for her, and briskly trotted as +far as the corner. Each time his courage melted, and he slumped +back to the door-step. Sending for money--gee, he groaned, that +was pretty dangerous. + +Besides, he didn't wish to go away. Istra might come down and +play with him. + +For three hours he writhed on that door-step, till he came to +hate it; it was as much a prison as his room at the Zapps' had +been. He hated the areaway grill, and a big brown spot on the +pavement, and, as a truck-driver hates a motorman, so did he +hate a pudgy woman across the street who peeped out from a +second-story window and watched him with cynical interest. +He finally could endure no longer the world's criticism, as +expressed by the woman opposite. He started as though he were +going to go right now to some place he had been intending to go +to all the time, and stalked away, ignoring the woman. + +He caught a bus, then another, then walked a while. Now that he +was moving, he was agonizedly considering his problem: What was +Istra to him, really? What could he be to her? He _was_ just +a clerk. She could never love him. "And of course," he explained +to himself, "you hadn't oughta love a person without you expected +to marry them; you oughtn't never even touch her hand." Yet he +did want to touch hers. He suddenly threw his chin back, high and +firm, in defiance. He didn't care if he was wicked, he declared. +He wanted to shout to Istra across all the city: Let us be great lovers! +Let us be mad! Let us stride over the hilltops. Though that was not +at all the way he phrased it. + +Then he bumped into a knot of people standing on the walk, and +came down from the hilltops in one swoop. + +A crowd was collecting before Rothsey Hall, which bore the sign: + + +GLORY--GLORY--GLORY + + +SPECIAL SALVATION ARMY JUBILEE MEETING + + +EXPERIENCES OF ADJUTANT CRABBENTHWAITE IN AFRICA + + +He gaped at the sign. A Salvationist in the crowd, trim and +well set up, his red-ribboned Salvation Army cap at a jaunty +angle, said, "Won't you come in, brother?" + +Mr. Wrenn meekly followed into the hall. Bill Wrenn was nowhere +in sight. + +Now it chanced that Adjutant Crabbenthwaite told much of Houssas +and the N'Gombi, of saraweks and week-long treks, but Mr. +Wrenn's imagination was not for a second drawn to Africa, nor +did he even glance at the sun-bonneted Salvationist women packed +in the hall. He was going over and over the Adjutant's +denunciations of the Englishmen and Englishwomen who flirt on +the mail-boats. + +Suppose it had been himself and his madness over Istra--at the +moment he quite called it madness--that the Adjutant had denounced! + +A Salvationist near by was staring at him most accusingly.... + +He walked away from the jubilee reflectively. He ate his dinner +with a grave courtesy toward the food and the waiter. He was +positively courtly to his fork. For he was just reformed. He +was going to "steer clear" of mad artist women--of all but nice +good girls whom you could marry. He remembered the Adjutant's +thundered words: + +"Flirting you call it--flirting! Look into your hearts. God +Himself hath looked into them and found flirtation the gateway +to hell. And I tell you that these army officers and the +bedizened women, with their wine and cigarettes, with their +devil's calling-cards and their jewels, with their hell-lighted +talk of the sacrilegious follies of socialism and art and +horse-racing, O my brothers, it was all but a cloak for looking +upon one another to lust after one another. Rotten is this +empire, and shall fall when our soldiers seek flirtation instead +of kneeling in prayer like the iron men of Cromwell." + +Istra.... Card-playing.... Talk of socialism and art. Mr. +Wrenn felt very guilty. Istra.... Smoking and drinking +wine.... But his moral reflections brought the picture of Istra +the more clearly before him--the persuasive warmth of her +perfect fingers; the curve of her backward-bent throat as she +talked in her melodious voice of all the beautiful things made +by the wise hands of great men. + +He dashed out of the restaurant. No matter what happened, good +or bad, he had to see her. While he was climbing to the upper +deck of a bus he was trying to invent an excuse for seeing +her.... Of course one couldn't "go and call on ladies in their +rooms without havin' some special excuse; they would think that +was awful fresh." + +He left the bus midway, at the sign of a periodical shop, and +purchased a _Blackwood's_ and a _Nineteenth Century_. Morton had +told him these were the chief English "highbrow magazines." + +He carried them to his room, rubbed his thumb in the lampblack +on the gas-fixture, and smeared the magazine covers, then cut +the leaves and ruffled the margins to make the magazines look +dog-eared with much reading; not because he wanted to appear to +have read them, but because he felt that Istra would not permit +him to buy things just for her. + +All this business with details so calmed him that he wondered if +he really cared to see her at all. Besides, it was so +late--after half-past eight. + +"Rats! Hang it all! I wish I was dead. I don't know what I do +want to do," he groaned, and cast himself upon his bed. He was +sure of nothing but the fact that he was unhappy. He considered +suicide in a dignified manner, but not for long enough to get +much frightened about it. + +He did not know that he was the toy of forces which, working on +him through the strangeness of passionate womanhood, could have +made him a great cad or a petty hero as easily as they did make +him confusedly sorry for himself. That he wasn't very much of +a cad or anything of a hero is a detail, an accident resulting +from his thirty-five or thirty-six years of stodgy environment. +Cad or hero, filling scandal columns or histories, he would have +been the same William Wrenn. + +He was thinking of Istra as he lay on his bed. In a few minutes +he dashed to his bureau and brushed his thinning hair so +nervously that he had to try three times for a straight parting. +While brushing his eyebrows and mustache he solemnly +contemplated himself in the mirror. + +"I look like a damn rabbit," he scorned, and marched half-way to +Istra's room. He went back to change his tie to a navy-blue bow +which made him appear younger. He was feeling rather resentful +at everything, including Istra, as he finally knocked and heard +her "Yes? Come in." + +There was in her room a wonderful being lolling in a wing-chair, +one leg over the chair-arm; a young young man, with broken brown +teeth, always seen in his perpetual grin, but a godlike Grecian +nose, a high forehead, and bristly yellow hair. The being wore +large round tortoise-shell spectacles, a soft shirt with a +gold-plated collar-pin, and delicately gray garments. + +Istra was curled on the bed in a leaf-green silk kimono with a +great gold-mounted medallion pinned at her breast. Mr. Wrenn +tried not to be shocked at the kimono. + +She had been frowning as he came in and fingering a long thin +green book of verses, but she glowed at Mr. Wrenn as though he +were her most familiar friend, murmuring, "Mouse dear, I'm _so_ +glad you could come in." + +Mr. Wrenn stood there awkwardly. He hadn't expected to find +another visitor. He seemed to have heard her call him "Mouse." +Yes, but what did Mouse mean? It wasn't his name at all. This +was all very confusing. But how awful glad she was to see him! + +"Mouse dear, this is one of our best little indecent poets, Mr. +Carson Haggerty. From America--California--too. Mr. Hag'ty, +Mr. Wrenn." + +"Pleased meet you," said both men in the same tone of annoyance. + +Mr. Wrenn implored: "I--uh--I thought you might like to look at +these magazines. Just dropped in to give them to you." He was +ready to go. + +"Thank you--so good of you. _Please_ sit down. Carson and I +were only fighting--he's going pretty soon. We knew each other +at art school in Berkeley. Now he knows all the toffs in London." + +"Mr. Wrenn," said the best little poet, "I hope you'll back up +my contention. Izzy says th--" + +"Carson, I have told you just about enough times that I do not +intend to stand for `Izzy' any more! I should think that even +_you_ would be able to outgrow the standard of wit that obtains in +first-year art class at Berkeley." + +Mr. Haggerty showed quite all of his ragged teeth in a noisy +joyous grin and went on, unperturbed: "Miss Nash says that the +best European thought, personally gathered in the best salons, +shows that the Rodin vogue is getting the pickle-eye from all +the real yearners. What is your opinion?" + +Mr. Wrenn turned to Istra for protection. She promptly +announced: "Mr. Wrenn absolutely agrees with me. By the way, +he's doing a big book on the recrudescence of Kipling, after his +slump, and--" + +"Oh, come off, now! Kipling! Blatant imperialist, anti-Stirner!" +cried Carson Haggerty, kicking out each word with the assistance +of his swinging left foot. + +Much relieved that the storm-center had passed over him, Mr. +Wrenn sat on the front edge of a cane-seated chair, with the +magazines between his hands, and his hands pressed between his +forward-cocked knees. Always, in the hundreds of times he went +over the scene in that room afterward, he remembered how cool +and smooth the magazine covers felt to the palms of his +flattened hands. For he associated the papery surfaces with the +apprehension he then had that Istra might give him up to the +jag-toothed grin of Carson Haggerty, who would laugh him out of +the room and out of Istra's world. + +He hated the poetic youth, and would gladly have broken all of +Carson's teeth short off. Yet the dread of having to try the +feat himself made him admire the manner in which Carson tossed +about long creepy-sounding words, like a bush-ape playing with +scarlet spiders. He talked insultingly of Yeats and the +commutation of sex-energy and Isadora Duncan and the poetry of +Carson Haggerty. + +Istra yawned openly on the bed, kicking a pillow, but she was +surprised into energetic discussion now and then, till Haggerty +intentionally called her Izzy again, when she sat up and +remarked to Mr. Wrenn: "Oh, don't go yet. You can tell me about +the article when Carson goes. Dear Carson said he was only +going to stay till ten." + +Mr. Wrenn hadn't had any intention of going, so he merely smiled +and bobbed his head to the room in general, and stammered +"Y-yes," while he tried to remember what he had told her about +some article. Article. Perhaps it was a Souvenir Company +novelty article. Great idea! Perhaps she wanted to design a +motto for them. He decidedly hoped that he could fix it up for +her--he'd sure do his best. He'd be glad to write over to Mr. +Guilfogle about it. Anyway, she seemed willing to have him +stick here. + +Yet when dear Carson had jauntily departed, leaving the room +still loud with the smack of his grin, Istra seemed to have +forgotten that Mr. Wrenn was alive. She was scowling at a book +on the bed as though it had said things to her. So he sat quiet +and crushed the magazine covers more closely till the silence +choked him, and he dared, "Mr. Carson is an awful well-educated man." + +"He's a bounder," she snapped. She softened her voice as she +continued: "He was in the art school in California when I was +there, and he presumes on that.... It was good of you to stay +and help me get rid of him.... I'm getting--I'm sorry I'm so +dull to-night. I suppose I'll get sent off to bed right now, if +I can't be more entertaining. It was sweet of you to come in, +Mouse.... You don't mind my calling you `Mouse,' do you? I +won't, if you do mind." + +He awkwardly walked over and laid the magazines on the bed. +"Why, it's all right.... What was it about some novelty--some +article? If there's anything I could do--anything--" + +"Article?" + +"Why, yes. That you wanted to see me about." + +"Oh! Oh, that was just to get rid of Carson.... His +_insufferable_ familiarity! The penalty for my having been a +naive kiddy, hungry for friendship, once. And now, good n--. +Oh, Mouse, he says my eyes--even with this green kimono on-- +Come here, dear. tell me what color my eyes are." + +She moved with a quick swing to the side of her bed. Thrusting +out her two arms, she laid ivory hands clutchingly on his +shoulder. He stood quaking, forgetting every one of the +Wrennish rules by which he had edged a shy polite way through +life. He fearfully reached out his hands toward her shoulders +in turn, but his arms were shorter than hers, and his hands +rested on the sensitive warmth of her upper arms. He peered at +those dear gray-blue eyes of hers, but he could not calm himself +enough to tell whether they were china-blue or basalt-black. + +"Tell me," she demanded; "_aren't_ they green?" + +"Yes," he quavered. + +"You're sweet," she said. + +Leaning out from the side of her bed, she kissed him. She +sprang up, and hastened to the window, laughing nervously, and +deploring: "I shouldn't have done that! I shouldn't! Forgive +me!" Plaintively, like a child: "Istra was so bad, so bad. Now +you must go." As she turned back to him her eyes had the peace +of an old friend's. + +Because he had wished to be kind to people, because he had been +pitiful toward Goaty Zapp, Mr. Wrenn was able to understand that +she was trying to be a kindly big sister to him, and he said +"Good night, Istra," and smiled in a lively way and walked out. +He got out the smile by wrenching his nerves, for which he paid +in agony as he knelt by his bed, acknowledging that Istra would +never love him and that therefore he was not to love, would be +a fool to love, never would love her--and seeing again her white +arms softly shadowed by her green kimono sleeves. + +No sight of Istra, no scent of her hair, no sound of her +always-changing voice for two days. Twice, seeing a sliver of +light under her door as he came up the darkened stairs, he +knocked, but there was no answer, and he marched into his room +with the dignity of fury. + +Numbers of times he quite gave her up, decided he wanted never +to see her again. But after one of the savagest of these +renunciations, while he was stamping defiantly down Tottenham +Court Road, he saw in a window a walking-stick that he was sure +she would like his carrying. And it cost only two-and-six. +Hastily, before he changed his mind, he rushed in and slammed +down his money. It was a very beautiful stick indeed, and of a +modesty to commend itself to Istra, just a plain straight stick +with a cap of metal curiously like silver. He was conscious +that the whole world was leering at him, demanding "What're _you_ +carrying a cane for?" but he--the misunderstood--was willing +to wait for the reward of this martyrdom in Istra's approval. + +The third night, as he stood at the window watching two children +playing in the dusk, there was a knock. It was Istra. She +stood at his door, smart and inconspicuous in a black suit with +a small toque that hid the flare of her red hair. + +"Come," she said, abruptly. "I want you to take me to +Olympia's--Olympia Johns' flat. I've been reading all the +Balzac there is. I want to talk. Can you come?" + +"Oh, of course--" + +"Hurry, then!" + +He seized his small foolishly round hat, and he tucked his new +walking-stick under his arm without displaying it too proudly, +waiting for her comment. + +She led the way down-stairs and across the quiet streets and +squares of Bloomsbury to Great James Street. She did not even +see the stick. + +She said scarce a word beyond: + +"I'm sick of Olympia's bunch--I never want to dine in Soho with +an inhibition and a varietistic sex instinct again--_jamais de +la vie._ But one has to play with somebody." + +Then he was so cheered that he tapped the pavements boldly with +his stick and delicately touched her arm as they crossed the +street. For she added: + +"We'll just run in and see them for a little while, and then you +can take me out and buy me a Rhine wine and seltzer.... Poor +Mouse, it shall have its play!" + +Olympia Johns' residence consisted of four small rooms. When +Istra opened the door, after tapping, the living-room was +occupied by seven people, all interrupting one another and +drinking fourpenny ale; seven people and a fog of cigarette +smoke and a tangle of papers and books and hats. A swamp of +unwashed dishes appeared on a large table in the room just +beyond, divided off from the living-room by a burlap curtain to +which were pinned suffrage buttons and medallions. This last he +remembered afterward, thinking over the room, for the medals' +glittering points of light relieved his eyes from the +intolerable glances of the people as he was hastily introduced +to them. He was afraid that he would be dragged into a +discussion, and sat looking away from them to the medals, and to +the walls, on which were posters, showing mighty fists with +hammers and flaming torches, or hog-like men lolling on the +chests of workmen, which they seemed to enjoy more than the +workmen. By and by he ventured to scan the group. + +Carson Haggerty, the American poet, was there. But the center +of them all was Olympia Johns herself--spinster, thirty-four, as +small and active and excitedly energetic as an ant trying to get +around a match. She had much of the ant's brownness and +slimness, too. Her pale hair was always falling from under her +fillet of worn black velvet (with the dingy under side of the +velvet showing curled up at the edges). A lock would tangle in +front of her eyes, and she would impatiently shove it back with +a jab of her thin rough hands, never stopping in her machine-gun +volley of words. + +"Yes, yes, yes, yes," she would pour out. "Don't you _see?_ +We must do something. I tell you the conditions are intolerable, +simply intolerable. We must _do_ something." + +The conditions were, it seemed, intolerable in the several +branches of education of female infants, water rates in +Bloomsbury, the cutlery industry, and ballad-singing. + +And mostly she was right. Only her rightness was so demanding, +so restless, that it left Mr. Wrenn gasping. + +Olympia depended on Carson Haggerty for most of the "Yes, that's +so's," though he seemed to be trying to steal glances at another +woman, a young woman, a lazy smiling pretty girl of twenty, who, +Istra told Mr. Wrenn, studied Greek archaeology at the Museum. +No one knew why she studied it. She seemed peacefully ignorant +of everything but her kissable lips, and she adorably poked at +things with lazy graceful fingers, and talked the Little +Language to Carson Haggerty, at which Olympia shrugged her +shoulders and turned to the others. + +There were a Mr. and Mrs. Stettinius--she a poet; he a bleached +man, with goatish whiskers and a sanctimonious white neck-cloth, +who was Puritanically, ethically, gloomily, religiously +atheistic. Items in the room were a young man who taught in Mr. +Jeney's Select School and an Established Church mission worker +from Whitechapel, who loved to be shocked. + +It was Mr. Wrenn who was really shocked, however, not by the +noise and odor; not by the smoking of the women; not by the +demand that "we" tear down the state; no, not by these was Our +Mr. Wrenn of the Souvenir Company shocked, but by his own +fascinated interest in the frank talk of sex. He had always had +a quite undefined supposition that it was wicked to talk of sex +unless one made a joke of it. + +Then came the superradicals, to confuse the radicals who +confused Mr. Wrenn. + +For always there is a greater rebellion; and though you +sell your prayer-book to buy Bakunine, and esteem yourself +revolutionary to a point of madness, you shall find one who +calls you reactionary. The scorners came in together--Moe +Tchatzsky, the syndicalist and direct actionist, and Jane +Schott, the writer of impressionistic prose--and they sat +silently sneering on a couch. + +Istra rose, nodded at Mr. Wrenn, and departed, despite Olympia's +hospitable shrieks after them of "Oh stay! It's only a little +after ten. Do stay and have something to eat." + +Istra shut the door resolutely. The hall was dark. It was +gratefully quiet. She snatched up Mr. Wrenn's hand and held it +to her breast. + +"Oh, Mouse dear, I'm so bored! I want some real things. They +talk and talk in there, and every night they settle all the fate +of all the nations, always the same way. I don't suppose +there's ever been a bunch that knew more things incorrectly. +You hated them, didn't you?" + +"Why, I don't think you ought to talk about them so severe," he +implored, as they started down-stairs. "I don't mean they're +like you. They don't savvy like you do. I mean it! But I was +awful int'rested in what that Miss Johns said about kids in +school getting crushed into a mold. Gee! that's so; ain't it? +Never thought of it before. And that Mrs. Stettinius talked +about Yeats so beautiful." + +"Oh, my dear, you make my task so much harder. I want you to +be different. Can't you see your cattle-boat experience is realer +than any of the things those half-baked thinkers have done? I +_know_. I'm half-baked myself." + +"Oh, I've never done nothing." + +"But you're ready to. Oh, I don't know. I want--I wish Jock +Seton--the filibuster I met in San Francisco--I wish he were +here. Mouse, maybe I can make a filibuster of you. I've got to +create something. Oh, those people! If you just knew them! That +fool Mary Stettinius is mad about that Tchatzsky person, and her +husband invites him to teas. Stettinius is mad about Olympia, +who'll probably take Carson out and marry him, and he'll keep on +hanging about the Greek girl. Ungh!" + +"I don't know--I don't know--" + +But as he didn't know what he didn't know she merely patted his +arm and said, soothingly: "I won't criticize your first +specimens of radicals any more. They are trying to do something, +anyway." Then she added, in an irrelevant tone, "You're exactly +as tall as I am. Mouse dear, you ought to be taller." + +They were entering the drab stretch of Tavistock Place, after a +silence as drab, when she exclaimed: "Mouse, I am _so_ sick of +everything. I want to get out, away, anywhere, and do +something, anything, just so's it's different. Even the +country. I'd like--Why couldn't we?" + +"Let's go out on a picnic to-morrow, Istra." + +"A picnic picnic? With pickles and a pillow cushion and several +kinds of cake?... I'm afraid the Bois Boulogne has spoiled me +for that.... Let me think." + +She drooped down on the steps of their house. Her head back, +her supple strong throat arched with the passion of hating +boredom, she devoured the starlight dim over the stale old roofs +across the way. + +"Stars," she said. "Out on the moors they would come down by +you.... What is _your_ adventure--your formula for it?... Let's +see; you take common roadside things seriously; you'd be dear +and excited over a Red Lion Inn." + +"Are there more than one Red Li--" + +"My dear Mouse, England is a menagerie of Red Lions and White +Lions and fuzzy Green Unicorns.... Why not, why not, _why not!_ +Let's walk to Aengusmere. It's a fool colony of artists and so +on, up in Suffolk; but they _have_ got some beautiful cottages, +and they're more Celt than Dublin.... Start right now; take a +train to Chelmsford, say, and tramp all night. Take a couple +of days or so to get there. Think of it! Tramping through dawn, +past English fields. Think of it, Yankee. And not caring what +anybody in the world thinks. Gipsies. Shall we?" + +"Wh-h-h-h-y--" He was sure she was mad. Tramping all night! +He couldn't let her do this. + +She sprang up. She stared down at him in revulsion, her hands +clenched. Her voice was hostile as she demanded: + +"What? Don't you want to? With _me?_" + +He was up beside her, angry, dignified; a man. + +"Look here. You know I want to. You're the elegantest--I mean +you're--Oh, you ought to know! Can't you see how I feel +about you? Why, I'd rather do this than anything I ever heard +of in my life. I just don't want to do anything that would get +people to talking about you." + +"Who would know? Besides, my dear man, I don't regard it as +exactly wicked to walk decently along a country road." + +"Oh, it isn't that. Oh, please, Istra, don't look at me like +that--like you hated me." + +She calmed at once, drummed on his arm, sat down on the railing, +and drew him to a seat beside her. + +"Of course, Mouse. It's silly to be angry. Yes, I do believe +you want to take care of me. But don't worry.... Come! Shall +we go?" + +"But wouldn't you rather wait till to-morrow?" + +"No. The whole thing's so mad that if I wait till then I'll +never want to do it. And you've got to come, so that I'll have +some one to quarrel with.... I hate the smugness of London, +especially the smugness of the anti-smug anti-bourgeois +radicals, so that I have the finest mad mood! Come. We'll go." + +Even this logical exposition had not convinced him, but he did +not gainsay as they entered the hall and Istra rang for the +landlady. His knees grew sick and old and quavery as he heard +the landlady's voice loud below-stairs: "Now wot do they want? +It's eleven o'clock. Aren't they ever done a-ringing and +a-ringing?" + +The landlady, the tired thin parchment-faced North Countrywoman, +whose god was Respectability of Lodgings, listened in a +frightened way to Istra's blandly superior statement: "Mr. Wrenn +and I have been invited to join an excursion out of town that +leaves to-night. We'll pay our rent and leave our things here." + +"Going off together--" + +"My good woman, we are going to Aengusmere. Here's two pound. +Don't allow any one in my room. And I may send for my things +from out of town. Be ready to pack them in my trunks and send +them to me. Do you understand?" + +"Yes, miss, but--" + +"My good woman, do you realize that your `buts' are insulting?" + +"Oh, I didn't go to be insulting--" + +"Then that's all.... Hurry now, Mouse!" + +On the stairs, ascending, she whispered, with the excitement not +of a tired woman, but of a tennis-and-dancing-mad girl: "We're +off! Just take a tooth-brush. Put on an outing suit--any old +thing--and an old cap." + +She darted into her room. + +Now Mr. Wrenn had, for any old thing, as well as for afternoon +and evening dress, only the sturdy undistinguished clothes he +was wearing, so he put on a cap, and hoped she wouldn't notice. +She didn't. She came knocking in fifteen minutes, trim in a +khaki suit, with low thick boots and a jolly tousled blue +tam-o'-shanter. + +"Come on. There's a train for Chelmsford in half an hour, my +time-table confided to me. I feel like singing." + + + + + + +CHAPTER X + +HE GOES A-GIPSYING + + + + + +They rode out of London in a third-class compartment, opposite +a curate and two stodgy people who were just people and defied +you (Istra cheerfully explained to Mr. Wrenn) to make anything +of them but just people. + +"Wouldn't they stare if they knew what idiocy we're up to!" +she suggested. + +Mr. Wrenn bobbed his head in entire agreement. He was trying, +without any slightest success, to make himself believe that Mr. +William Wrenn, Our Mr. Wrenn, late of the Souvenir Company, was +starting out for a country tramp at midnight with an artist girl. + +The night foreman of the station, a person of bedizenment and +pride, stared at them as they alighted at Chelmsford and glanced +around like strangers. Mr. Wrenn stared back defiantly and +marched with Istra from the station, through the sleeping town, +past its ragged edges, into the country. + +They tramped on, a bit wearily. Mr. Wrenn was beginning to +wonder if they'd better go back to Chelmsford. Mist was +dripping and blind and silent about them, weaving its heavy gray +with the night. Suddenly Istra caught his arm at the gate to a +farm-yard, and cried, "Look!" + +"Gee!... Gee! we're in England. We're abroad!" + +"Yes--abroad." + +A paved courtyard with farm outbuildings thatched and ancient +was lit faintly by a lantern hung from a post that was thumbed to +a soft smoothness by centuries. + +"That couldn't be America," he exulted. "Gee! I'm just +gettin' it! I'm so darn glad we came.... Here's real England. +No tourists. It's what I've always wanted--a country that's old. +And different.... Thatched houses!... And pretty soon it'll +be dawn, summer dawn; with you, with Istra! _Gee!_ It's the +darndest adventure." + +"Yes.... Come on. Let's walk fast or we'll get sleepy, and +then your romantic heroine will be a grouchy Interesting +People!... Listen! There's a sleepy dog barking, a million +miles away.... I feel like telling you about myself. You don't +know me. Or do you?" + +"I dunno just how you mean." + +"Oh, it shall have its romance! But some time I'll tell +you--perhaps I will--how I'm not really a clever person at all, +but just a savage from outer darkness, who pretends to +understand London and Paris and Munich, and gets frightfully +scared of them.... Wait! Listen! Hear the mist drip from that +tree. Are you nice and drowned?" + +"Uh--kind of. But I been worrying about you being soaked." + +"Let me see. Why, your sleeve is wet clear through. This khaki +of mine keeps out the water better.... But I don't mind getting +wet. All I mind is being bored. I'd like to run up this hill +without a thing on--just feeling the good healthy real mist on +my skin. But I'm afraid it isn't done." + +Mile after mile. Mostly she talked of the boulevards and Pere +Dureon, of Debussy and artichokes, in little laughing sentences +that sprang like fire out of the dimness of the mist. + +Dawn came. From a hilltop they made out the roofs of a town and +stopped to wonder at its silence, as though through long ages +past no happy footstep had echoed there. The fog lifted. The +morning was new-born and clean, and they fairly sang as they +clattered up to an old coaching inn and demanded breakfast of an +amazed rustic pottering about the inn yard in a smock. He did +not know that to a "thrilling" Mr. Wrenn he--or perhaps it was his +smock--was the hero in an English melodrama. Nor, doubtless, +did the English crisp bacon and eggs which a sleepy housemaid +prepared know that they were theater properties. Why, they were +English eggs, served at dawn in an English inn--a stone-floored +raftered room with a starling hanging in a little cage of withes +outside the latticed window. And there were no trippers to +bother them! (Mr. Wrenn really used the word "trippers" in his +cogitations; he had it from Istra.) + +When he informed her of this occult fact she laughed, "You know +mighty well, Mouse, that you have a sneaking wish there were one +Yankee stranger here to see our glory." + +"I guess that's right." + +"But maybe I'm just as bad." + +For once their tones had not been those of teacher and pupil, +but of comrades. They set out from the inn through the +brightening morning like lively boys on a vacation tramp. + +The sun crept out, with the warmth and the dust, and Istra's +steps lagged. As they passed the outlying corner of a farm +where a straw-stack was secluded in a clump of willows Istra +smiled and sighed: "I'm pretty tired, dear. I'm going to sleep +in that straw-stack. I've always wanted to sleep in a +straw-stack. It's _comme il faut_ for vagabonds in the best set, +you know. And one can burrow. Exciting, eh?" + +She made a pillow of her khaki jacket, while he dug down to a +dry place for her. He found another den on the other side of +the stack. + +It was afternoon when he awoke. He sprang up and rushed around +the stack. Istra was still asleep, curled in a pathetically +small childish heap, her tired face in repose against the +brown-yellow of her khaki jacket. Her red hair had come down +and shone about her shoulders. + +She looked so frail that he was frightened. Surely, too, she'd +be very angry with him for letting her come on this jaunt. + +He scribbled on a leaf from his address-book--religiously carried +for six years, but containing only four addresses--this note: + + +Gone to get stuff for bxfst be right back.--W. W. + + +and, softly crawling up the straw, left the note by her head. +He hastened to a farm-house. The farm-wife was inclined to +be curious. O curious farm-wife, you of the cream-thick Essex +speech and the shuffling feet, you were brave indeed to face +Bill Wrenn the Great, with his curt self-possession, for he was +on a mission for Istra, and he cared not for the goggling eyes +of all England. What though he was a bunny-faced man with an +innocuous mustache? Istra would be awakening hungry. That was +why he bullied you into selling him a stew-pan and a bundle of +faggots along with the tea and eggs and a bread loaf and a jar +of the marmalade your husband's farm had been making these two +hundred years. And you should have had coffee for him, not tea, +woman of Essex. + +When he returned to their outdoor inn the late afternoon glow +lay along the rich fields that sloped down from their +well-concealed nook. Istra was still asleep, but her cheek now +lay wistfully on the crook of her thin arm. He looked at the +auburn-framed paleness of her face, its lines of thought and +ambition, unmasked, unprotected by the swift changes of +expression which defended her while she was awake. He sobbed. +If he could only make her happy! But he was afraid of her moods. + +He built a fire by a brooklet beyond the willows, boiled the +eggs and toasted the bread and made the tea, with cream ready in +a jar. He remembered boyhood camping days in Parthenon and old +camp lore. He returned to the stack and called, "Istra--oh, Is-tra!" + +She shook her head, nestled closer into the straw, then sat up, +her hair about her shoulders. She smiled and called down: +"Good morning. Why, it's afternoon! Did you sleep well, dear?" + +"Yes. Did you? Gee, I hope you did!" + +"Never better in my life. I'm so sleepy yet. But comfy. +I needed a quiet sleep outdoors, and it's so peaceful here. +Breakfast! I roar for breakfast! Where's the nearest house?" + +"Got breakfast all ready." + +"You're a dear!" + +She went to wash in the brook, and came back with eyes dancing +and hair trim, and they laughed over breakfast, glancing down +the slope of golden hazy fields. Only once did Istra pass out +of the land of their intimacy into some hinterland of +analysis--when she looked at him as he drank his tea aloud out +of the stew-pan, and wondered: "Is this really you here with +me? But you _aren't_ a boulevardier. I must say I don't +understand what you're doing here at all.... Nor a caveman, +either. I don't understand it.... But you _sha'n't_ be worried +by bad Istra. Let's see; we went to grammar-school together." + +"Yes, and we were in college. Don't you remember when I was +baseball captain? You don't? Gee, you got a bad memory!" + +At which she smiled properly, and they were away for Suffolk again. + + +"I suppose now it'll go and rain," said Istra, viciously, at +dusk. It was the first time she had spoken for a mile. Then, +after another quarter-mile: "Please don't mind my being silent. +I'm sort of stiff, and my feet hurt most unromantically. You +won't mind, will you?" + +Of course he did mind, and of course he said he didn't. +He artfully skirted the field of conversation by very West +Sixteenth Street observations on a town through which they +passed, while she merely smiled wearily, and at best remarked +"Yes, that's so," whether it was so or not. + +He was reflecting: "Istra's terrible tired. I ought to take +care of her." He stopped at the wood-pillared entrance of a +temperance inn and commanded: "Come! We'll have something to +eat here." To the astonishment of both of them, she meekly +obeyed with "If you wish." + +It cannot be truthfully said that Mr. Wrenn proved himself a +person of _savoir faire_ in choosing a temperance hotel for their +dinner. Istra didn't seem so much to mind the fact that the +table-cloth was coarse and the water-glasses thick, and that +everywhere the elbow ran into a superfluity of greasy pepper and +salt castors. But when she raised her head wearily to peer +around the room she started, glared at Mr. Wrenn, and accused: +"Are you by any chance aware of the fact that this place is +crowded with tourists? There are two family parties from +Davenport or Omaha; I _know_ they are!" + +"Oh, they ain't such bad-looking people," protested Mr. +Wrenn.... Just because he had induced her to stop for dinner +the poor man thought his masculine superiority had been +recognized. + +"Oh, they're _terrible!_ Can't you _see_ it? Oh, you're _hopeless_." + +"Why, that big guy--that big man with the rimless spectacles +looks like he might be a good civil engineer, and I think that +lady opposite him--" + +"They're Americans." + +"So're we!" + +"I'm not." + +"I thought--why--" + +"Of course I was born there, but--" + +"Well, just the same, I think they're nice people." + +"Now see here. Must I argue with you? Can I have no peace, +tired as I am? Those trippers are speaking of `quaint English +flavor.' Can you want anything more than that to damn them? And +they've been touring by motor--seeing every inn on the road." + +"Maybe it's fun for--" + +"Now _don't_ argue with me. I know what I'm talking about. +Why do I have to explain everything? They're hopeless!" + +Mr. Wrenn felt a good wholesome desire to spank her, but he +said, most politely: "You're awful tired. Don't you want to +stay here tonight? Or maybe some other hotel; and I'll stay here." + +"No. Don't want to stay any place. Want to get away from +myself," she said, exactly like a naughty child. + +So they tramped on again. + +Darkness was near. They had plunged into a country which in the +night seemed to be a stretch of desolate moorlands. As they +were silently plodding up a hill the rain came. It came with a +roar, a pitiless drenching against which they fought uselessly, +soaking them, slapping their faces, blinding their eyes. He +caught her arm and dragged her ahead. She would be furious with +him because it rained, of course, but this was no time to think +of that; he had to get her to a dry place. + +Istra laughed: "Oh, isn't this great! We're real vagabonds now." + +"Why! Doesn't that khaki soak through? Aren't you wet?" + +"To the skin!" she shouted, gleefully. "And I don't care! +We're _doing_ something. Poor dear, is it worried? I'll race +you to the top of the hill." + +The dark bulk of a building struck their sight at the top, and +they ran to it. Just now Mr. Wrenn was ready to devour alive +any irate householder who might try to turn them out. He found +the building to be a ruined stable--the door off the hinges, the +desolate thatch falling in. He struck a match and, holding it +up, standing straight, the master, all unconscious for once in +his deprecating life of the Wrennishness of Mr. Wrenn, he +discovered that the thatch above the horse-manger was fairly +waterproof. + +"Come on! Up on the edge of the manger, Istra," he ordered. + +"This is a perfectly good place for a murder," she grinned, as +they sat swinging their legs. + +He could fancy her grinning. He was sure about it, and well content. + +"Have I been so very grouchy, Mouse? Don't you want to murder +me? I'll try to find you a long pin." + +"Nope; I don't think so, much. I guess we can get along without +it this time." + +"Oh dear, dear! This is very dreadful. You're so used to me now +that you aren't even scared of me any more." + +"Gee! I guess I'll be scared of you all right as soon as I get +you into a dry place, but I ain't got time now. Sitting on a +manger! Ain't this the funniest place!... Now I must beat it +out and find a house. There ought to be one somewheres near here." + +"And leave me here in the darknesses and wetnesses? Not a chance. +The rain'll soon be over, anyway. Really, I don't mind a bit. +I think it's rather fun." + +Her voice was natural again, natural and companionable and brave. +She laughed as she stroked her wet shoulder and held his hand, +sitting quietly and bidding him listen to the soft forlorn +sound of the rain on the thatch. + +But the rain was not soon over, and their dangling position was +very much like riding a rail. + +"I'm so uncomfortable!" fretted Istra. + +"See here, Istra, please, I think I'd better go see if I can't +find a house for you to get dry in." + +"I feel too wretched to go any place. Too wretched to move." + +"Well, then, I'll make a fire here. There ain't much danger." + +"The place will catch fire," she began, querulously. + +But he interrupted her. "Oh, _let_ the darn place catch fire! +I'm going to make a fire, I tell you!" + +"I don't want to move. It'll just be another kind of +discomfort, that's all. Why couldn't you try and take a little +bit of care of me, anyway?" + +"Oh, hon-ey!" he wailed, in youthful bewilderment. "I did try +to get you to stay at that hotel in town and get some rest." + +"Well, you ought to have made me. Don't you realize that I took +you along to take care of me?" + +"Uh--" + +"Now don't argue about it. I can't stand argument all the time." + +He thought instantly of Lee Theresa Zapp quarreling with her +mother, but he said nothing. He gathered the driest bits of +thatch and wood he could find in the litter on the stable floor +and kindled a fire, while she sat sullenly glaring at him, her +face wrinkled and tired in the wan firelight. When the blaze +was going steadily, a compact and safe little fire, he spread +his coat as a seat for her, and called, cheerily, "Come on now, +honey; here's a regular home and hearthstone for you." + +She slipped down from the manger edge and stood in front of him, +looking into his eyes--which were level with her own. + +"You _are_ good to me," she half whispered, and smoothed his +cheek, then slipped down on the outspread coat, and murmured, +"Come; sit here by me, and we'll both get warm." + +All night the rain dribbled, but no one came to drive them away +from the fire, and they dozed side by side, their hands close +and their garments steaming. Istra fell asleep, and her head +drooped on his shoulder. He straightened to bear its weight, +though his back twinged with stiffness, and there he sat +unmoving, through an hour of pain and happiness and confused +meditation, studying the curious background--the dark roof of +broken thatch, the age-corroded walls, the littered earthen +floor. His hand pressed lightly the clammy smoothness of the +wet khaki of her shoulder; his wet sleeve stuck to his arm, and +he wanted to pull it free. His eyes stung. But he sat tight, +while his mind ran round in circles, considering that he loved +Istra, and that he would not be entirely sorry when he was no +longer the slave to her moods; that this adventure was the +strangest and most romantic, also the most idiotic and useless, +in history. + +Toward dawn she stirred, and, slipping stiffly from his +position, he moved her so that her back, which was still wet, +faced the fire. He built up the fire again, and sat brooding +beside her, dozing and starting awake, till morning. Then his +head bobbed, and he was dimly awake again, to find her sitting +up straight, looking at him in amazement. + +"It simply can't be, that's all.... Did you curl me up? I'm +nice and dry all over now. It was very good of you. You've +been a most commendable person.... But I think we'll take a +train for the rest of our pilgrimage. It hasn't been entirely +successful, I'm afraid." + +"Perhaps we'd better." + +For a moment he hated her, with her smooth politeness, after a +night when she had been unbearable and human by turns. He hated +her bedraggled hair and tired face. Then he could have wept, so +deeply did he desire to pull her head down on his shoulder and +smooth the wrinkles of weariness out of her dear face, the +dearer because they had endured the weariness together. But he +said, "Well, let's try to get some breakfast first, Istra." + +With their garments wrinkled from rain, half asleep and rather +cross, they arrived at the esthetic but respectable colony of +Aengusmere by the noon train. + + + + + + +CHAPTER XI + +HE BUYS AN ORANGE TIE + + + + + +The Aengusmere Caravanserai is so unyieldingly cheerful and +artistic that it makes the ordinary person long for a dingy +old-fashioned room in which he can play solitaire and chew gum +without being rebuked with exasperating patience by the wall +stencils and clever etchings and polished brasses. It is +adjectiferous. The common room (which is uncommon for hotel +parlor) is all in superlatives and chintzes. + +Istra had gone up to her room to sleep, bidding Mr. Wrenn do +likewise and avoid the wrong bunch at the Caravanserai; for +besides the wrong bunch of Interesting People there were, she +explained, a right bunch, of working artists. But he wanted to +get some new clothes, to replace his rain-wrinkled ready-mades. +He was tottering through the common room, wondering whether he +could find a clothing-shop in Aengusmere, when a shrill gurgle +from a wing-chair by the rough-brick fireplace halted him. + +"Oh-h-h-h, _Mister_ Wrenn; Mr. _Wrenn!_" There sat Mrs. Stettinius, +the poet-lady of Olympia's rooms on Great James Street. + +"Oh-h-h-h, Mr. Wrenn, you _bad_ man, _do_ come sit down and tell +me all _about_ your _wonderful_ trek with Istra Nash. I _just_ met +_dear_ Istra in the upper hall. Poor dear, she was _so_ crumpled, +but her hair was like a sunset over mountain peaks--you know, as +Yeats says: + + + "A stormy sunset were her lips, + A stormy sunset on doomed ships, + + +only of course this was her _hair_ and not her _lips_--and she +told me that you had tramped all the _way_ from London. I've +never heard of anything so romantic--or no, I won't say +`romantic'--I _do_ agree with dear Olympia--_isn't_ she a +mag_nificent_ woman--_so_ fearless and progressive--didn't you +_adore_ meeting her?--she is our modern Joan of Arc--such a _noble_ +figure--I _do_ agree with her that _romantic_ love is _passe_, +that we have entered the era of glorious companionship that +regards varietism as _exactly_ as romantic as monogamy. +But--but--where was I?--I think your gipsying down from London +was _most_ exciting. Now _do_ tell us all about it, Mr. Wrenn. +First, I want you to meet Miss Saxonby and Mr. Gutch and _dear_ +Yilyena Dourschetsky and Mr. Howard Bancock Binch--of course you +know his poetry." + +And then she drew a breath and flopped back into the +wing-chair's muffling depths. + +During all this Mr. Wrenn had stood, frightened and unprotected +and rain-wrinkled, before the gathering by the fireless +fireplace, wondering how Mrs. Stettinius could get her nose so +blue and yet so powdery. Despite her encouragement he gave no +fuller account of the "gipsying" than, "Why--uh--we just +tramped down," till Russian-Jewish Yilyena rolled her ebony eyes +at him and insisted, "Yez, you mus' tale us about it." + +Now, Yilyena had a pretty neck, colored like a cigar of mild +flavor, and a trick of smiling. She was accustomed to having +men obey her. Mr. Wrenn stammered: + +"Why--uh--we just walked, and we got caught in the rain. Say, +Miss Nash was a wonder. She never peeped when she got soaked +through--she just laughed and beat it like everything. And we +saw a lot of quaint English places along the road--got away from +all them tourists--trippers--you know." + +A perfectly strange person, a heavy old man with horn spectacles +and a soft shirt, who had joined the group unbidden, cleared his +throat and interrupted: + +"Is it not a strange paradox that in traveling, the most +observant of all pursuits, one should have to encounter the +eternal bourgeoisie!" + +From the Cockney Greek chorus about the unlighted fire: + +"Yes!" + +"Everywhere." + +"Uh--" began Mr. Gutch. He apparently had something to say. +But the chorus went on: + +"And just as swelteringly monogamic in Port Said as in Brum." + +"Yes, that's so." + +"Mr. Wr-r-renn," thrilled Mrs. Stettinius, the lady poet, "didn't +you notice that they were perfectly oblivious of all economic +movements; that their observations never post-dated ruins?" + +"I guess they wanted to make sure they were admirin' the right +things," ventured Mr. Wrenn, with secret terror. + +"Yes, that's so," came so approvingly from the Greek chorus that +the personal pupil of Mittyford, Ph.D., made his first epigram: + +"It isn't so much what you like as what you don't like that +shows if you're wise." + +"Yes," they gurgled; and Mr. Wrenn, much pleased with himself, +smiled _au prince_ upon his new friends. + +Mrs. Stettinius was getting into her stride for a few remarks +upon the poetry of industrialism when Mr. Gutch, who had been +"Uh--"ing for some moments, trying to get in his remark, winked +with sly rudeness at Miss Saxonby and observed: + +"I fancy romance isn't quite dead yet, y' know. Our friends +here seem to have had quite a ro-mantic little journey." Then he +winked again. + +"Say, what do you mean?" demanded Bill Wrenn, hot-eyed, fists +clenched, but very quiet. + +"Oh, I'm not _blaming_ you and Miss Nash--quite the reverse!" +tittered the Gutch person, wagging his head sagely. + +Then Bill Wrenn, with his fist at Mr. Gutch's nose, spoke his mind: + +"Say, you white-faced unhealthy dirty-minded lump, I ain't much +of a fighter, but I'm going to muss you up so's you can't find +your ears if you don't apologize for those insinuations." + +"Oh, Mr. Wrenn--" + +"He didn't mean--" + +"I didn't mean--" + +"He was just spoofing--" + +"I was just spoofing--" + +Bill Wrenn, watching the dramatization of himself as hero, was +enjoying the drama. "You apologize, then?" + +"Why certainly, Mr. Wrenn. Let me explain--" + +"Oh, don't explain," snortled Miss Saxonby. + +"Yes!" from Mr. Bancock Binch, "explanations are _so_ +conventional, old chap." + +Do you see them?--Mr. Wrenn, self-conscious and ready to turn +into a blind belligerent Bill Wrenn at the first disrespect; the +talkers sitting about and assassinating all the princes and +proprieties and, poor things, taking Mr. Wrenn quite seriously +because he had uncovered the great truth that the important +thing in sight-seeing is not to see sights. He was most +unhappy, Mr. Wrenn was, and wanted to be away from there. +He darted as from a spring when he heard Istra's voice, from +the edge of the group, calling, "Come here a sec', Billy." + +She was standing with a chair-back for support, tired but smiling. + +"I can't get to sleep yet. Don't you want me to show you some +of the buildings here?" + +"Oh _yes!_" + +"If Mrs. Stettinius can spare you!" + +This by way of remarking on the fact that the female poet was +staring volubly. + +"G-g-g-g-g-g--" said Mrs. Stettinius, which seemed to imply +perfect consent. + +Istra took him to the belvedere on a little slope overlooking +the lawns of Aengusmere, scattered with low bungalows and +rose-gardens. + +"It is beautiful, isn't it? Perhaps one could be happy here--if +one could kill all the people except the architect," she mused. + +"Oh, it is," he glowed. + +Standing there beside her, happiness enveloping them, looking +across the marvelous sward, Bill Wrenn was at the climax of his +comedy of triumph. Admitted to a world of lawns and bungalows +and big studio windows, standing in a belvedere beside Istra +Nash as her friend-- + +"Mouse dear," she said, hesitatingly, "the reason why I wanted +to have you come out here, why I couldn't sleep, I wanted to +tell you how ashamed I am for having been peevish, being +petulant, last night. I'm so sorry, because you were very +patient with me, you were very good to me. I don't want you to +think of me just as a crochety woman who didn't appreciate you. +You are very kind, and when I hear that you're married to some +nice girl I'll be as happy as can be." + +"Oh, Istra," he cried, grasping her arm, "I don't want any girl +in the world--I mean--oh, I just want to be let go 'round with +you when you'll let me--" + +"No, no, dear. You must have seen last night; that's impossible. +Please don't argue about it now; I'm too tired. I just wanted +to tell you I appreciated--And when you get back to America +you won't be any the worse for playing around with poor Istra +because she told you about different things from what you've +played with, about rearing children as individuals and +painting in _tempera_ and all those things? And--and I don't +want you to get too fond of me, because we're--different.... +But we have had an adventure, even if it was a little moist." +She paused; then, cheerily: "Well, I'm going to beat it back +and try to sleep again. Good-by, Mouse dear. No, don't come +back to the Cara-advanced-serai. Play around and see the +animiles. G'-by." + +He watched her straight swaying figure swing across the lawn and up +the steps of the half-timbered inn. He watched her enter the door +before he hastened to the shops which clustered about the railway- +station, outside of the poetic preserves of the colony proper. + +He noticed, as he went, that the men crossing the green were +mostly clad in Norfolk jackets and knickers, so he purchased the +first pair of unrespectable un-ankle-concealing trousers he had +owned since small boyhood, and a jacket of rough serge, with a +gaudy buckle on the belt. Also, he actually dared an orange tie! + +He wanted something for Istra at dinner--"a s'prise," he +whispered under his breath, with fond babying. For the first +time in his life he entered a florist's shop.... Normally, you +know, the poor of the city cannot afford flowers till they are +dead, and then for but one day.... He came out with a bunch of +orchids, and remembered the days when he had envied the people +he had seen in florists' shops actually buying flowers. When he +was almost at the Caravanserai he wanted to go back and change +the orchids for simpler flowers, roses or carnations, but he got +himself not to. + + +The linen and glassware and silver of the Caravanserai were +almost as coarse as those of a temperance hotel, for all the +raftered ceiling and the etchings in the dining-room. Hunting up +the stewardess of the inn, a bustling young woman who was +reading Keats energetically at an office-like desk, Mr. Wrenn +begged: "I wonder could I get some special cups and plates and +stuff for high tea tonight. I got a kind of party--" + +"How many?" The stewardess issued the words as though he had put +a penny in the slot. + +"Just two. Kind of a birthday party." Mendacious Mr. Wrenn! + +"Certainly. Of course there's a small extra charge. I have a +Royal Satsuma tea-service--practically Royal Satsuma, at +least--and some special Limoges." + +"I think Royal Sats'ma would be nice. And some silverware?" + +"Surely." + +"And could we get some special stuff to eat?" + +"What would you like?" + +"Why--" + +Mendacious Mr. Wrenn! as we have commented. He put his head on +one side, rubbed his chin with nice consideration, and +condescended, "What would you suggest?" + +"For a party high tea? Why, perhaps consomme and omelet +Bergerac and a salad and a sweet and _cafe diable_. We have a +chef who does French eggs rather remarkably. That would be +simple, but--" + +"Yes, that would be very good," gravely granted the patron of +cuisine. "At six; for two." + +As he walked away he grinned within. "Gee! I talked to that +omelet Berg' rac like I'd known it all my life!" + +Other s'prises for Istra's party he sought. Let's see; suppose +it really were her birthday, wouldn't she like to have a letter +from some important guy? he queried of himself. He'd write +her a make-b'lieve letter from a duke. Which he did. +Purchasing a stamp, he humped over a desk in the common room and +with infinite pains he inked the stamp in imitation of a +postmark and addressed the letter to "Lady Istra Nash, Mouse +Castle, Suffolk." + +Some one sat down at the desk opposite him, and he jealously +carried the task upstairs to his room. He rang for pen and ink +as regally as though he had never sat at the wrong end of a +buzzer. After half an hour of trying to visualize a duke +writing a letter he produced this: + + +LADY ISTRA NASH, + Mouse Castle. + +DEAR MADAM,--We hear from our friend Sir William Wrenn that some +folks are saying that to-day is not your birthday & want to stop +your celebration, so if you should need somebody to make them +believe to-day is your birthday we have sent our secretary, Sir +Percival Montague. Sir William Wrenn will hide him behind his +chair, and if they bother you just call for Sir Percival and he +will tell them. Permit us, dear Lady Nash, to wish you all the +greetings of the season, and in close we beg to remain, as ever, + Yours sincerely, + DUKE VERE DE VERE. + + +He was very tired. When he lay down for a minute, with a pillow +tucked over his head, he was almost asleep in ten seconds. But +he sprang up, washed his prickly eyes with cold water, and began +to dress. He was shy of the knickers and golf-stockings, but it +was the orange tie that gave him real alarm. He dared it, +though, and went downstairs to make sure they were setting the +table with glory befitting the party. + +As he went through the common room he watched the three or four +groups scattered through it. They seemed to take his clothes as +a matter of course. He was glad. He wanted so much to be a +credit to Istra. + +Returning from the dining-room to the common room, he passed a +group standing in a window recess and looking away from him. +He overheard: + +"Who is the remarkable new person with the orange tie and the +rococo buckle on his jacket belt--the one that just went +through? Did you ever _see_ anything so funny! His collar +didn't come within an inch and a half of fitting his neck. He +must be a poet. I wonder if his verses are as jerry-built as his +garments!" + +Mr. Wrenn stopped. + +Another voice: + +"And the beautiful lack of development of his legs! It's like +the good old cycling days, when every draper's assistant went +bank-holidaying.... I don't know him, but I suppose he's some +tuppeny-ha'p'ny illustrator." + +"Or perhaps he has convictions about fried bananas, and dines on +a bean saute. O Aengusmere! Shades of Aengus!" + +"Not at all. When they look as gentle as he they always hate +the capitalists as a militant hates a cabinet minister. He +probably dines on the left ear of a South-African millionaire +every evening before exercise at the barricades.... I say, look +over there; there's a real artist going across the green. You +can tell he's a real artist because he's dressed like a navvy +and--" + +Mr. Wrenn was walking away, across the common room, quite sure +that every one was eying him with amusement. And it was too +late to change his clothes. It was six already. + +He stuck out his jaw, and remembered that he had planned to hide +the "letter from the duke" in Istra's napkin that it might be +the greater surprise. He sat down at their table. He tucked +the letter into the napkin folds. He moved the vase of orchids +nearer the center of the table, and the table nearer the open +window giving on the green. He rebuked himself for not being +able to think of something else to change. He forgot his +clothes, and was happy. + +At six-fifteen he summoned a boy and sent him up with a message +that Mr. Wrenn was waiting and high tea ready. + +The boy came back muttering, "Miss Nash left this note for you, +sir, the stewardess says." + +Mr. Wrenn opened the green-and-white Caravanserai letter +excitedly. Perhaps Istra, too, was dressing for the party! +He loved all s'prises just then. He read: + + +Mouse dear, I'm sorrier than I can tell you, but you know I +warrned you that bad Istra was a creature of moods, and just now +my mood orders me to beat it for Paris, which I'm doing, on the +5.17 train. I won't say good-by--I hate good-bys, they're so +stupid, don't you think? Write me some time, better make it +care Amer. Express Co., Paris, because I don't know yet just +where I'll be. And please don't look me up in Paris, because +it's always better to end up an affair without explanations, +don't you think? You have been wonderfully kind to me, and I'll +send you some good thought-forms, shall I? + I. N. + + +He walked to the office of the Caravanserai, blindly, quietly. +He paid his bill, and found that he had only fifty dollars left. +He could not get himself to eat the waiting high tea. There was +a seven-fourteen train for London. He took it. Meantime he +wrote out a cable to his New York bank for a hundred and fifty +dollars. To keep from thinking in the train he talked gravely +and gently to an old man about the brave days of England, when +men threw quoits. He kept thinking over and over, to the tune +set by the rattling of the train trucks: "Friends... I got to +make friends, now I know what they are.... Funny some guys don't +make friends. Mustn't forget. Got to make lots of 'em in +New York. Learn how to make 'em." + +He arrived at his room on Tavistock Place about eleven, and +tried to think for the rest of the night of how deeply he was +missing Morton of the cattle-boat now that--now that he had no +friend in all the hostile world. + + +In a London A. B. C. restaurant Mr. Wrenn was talking to an +American who had a clipped mustache, brisk manners, a +Knight-of-Pythias pin, and a mind for duck-shooting, hardware-selling, +and cigars. + +"No more England for mine," the American snapped, +good-humoredly. "I'm going to get out of this foggy hole and +get back to God's country just as soon as I can. I want to find +out what's doing at the store, and I want to sit down to a plate +of flapjacks. I'm good and plenty sick of tea and marmalade. Why, +I wouldn't take this fool country for a gift. No, sir! Me for +God's country--Sleepy Eye, Brown County, Minnesota. You bet!" + +"You don't like England much, then?" Mr. Wrenn carefully reasoned. + +"Like it? Like this damp crowded hole, where they can't talk +English, and have a fool coinage--Say, that's a great system, +that metric system they've got over in France, but here--why, +they don't know whether Kansas City is in Kansas or Missouri or +both.... `Right as rain'--that's what a fellow said to me for +`all right'! Ever hear such nonsense?.... And tea for breakfast! +Not for me! No, sir! I'm going to take the first steamer!" + +With a gigantic smoke-puff of disgust the man from Sleepy Eye +stalked out, jingling the keys in his trousers pocket, cocking +up his cigar, and looking as though he owned the restaurant. + +Mr. Wrenn, picturing him greeting the Singer Tower from an +incoming steamer, longed to see the tower. + +"Gee! I'll do it!" + +He rose and, from that table in the basement of an A. B. C. +restaurant, he fled to America. + +He dashed up-stairs, fidgeted while the cashier made his change, +rang for a bus, whisked into his room, slammed his things into +his suit-case, announced to it wildly that they were going home, +and scampered to the Northwestem Station. He walked nervously +up and down till the Liverpool train departed. "Suppose Istra +wanted to make up, and came back to London?" was a terrifying +thought that hounded him. He dashed into the waiting-room and +wrote to her, on a souvenir post-card showing the Abbey: "Called +back to America--will write. Address care of Souvenir Company, +Twenty-eighth Street." But he didn't mail the card. + +Once settled in a second-class compartment, with the train in +motion, he seemed already much nearer America, and, humming, to +the great annoyance of a lady with bangs, he planned his new +great work--the making of friends; the discovery, some day, if +Istra should not relent, of "somebody to go home to." There was +no end to the "societies and lodges and stuff" he was going to +join directly he landed. + +At Liverpool he suddenly stopped at a post-box and mailed his +card to Istra. That ended his debate. Of course after that he +had to go back to America. + +He sailed exultantly, one month and seventeen days after leaving +Portland. + + + + + + +CHAPTER XII + +HE DISCOVERS AMERICA + + + + + +In his white-painted steerage berth Mr. Wrenn lay, with a +scratch-pad on his raised knees and a small mean pillow +doubled under his head, writing sample follow-up letters to +present to the Souvenir and Art Novelty Company, interrupting +his work at intervals to add to a list of the books which, +beginning about five minutes after he landed in New York, he was +going to master. He puzzled over Marie Corelli. Morton liked +Miss Corelli so much; but would her works appeal to Istra Nash? + +He had worked for many hours on a letter to Istra in which he +avoided mention of such indecent matters as steerages and +immigrants. He was grateful, he told her, for "all you learned +me," and he had thought that Aengusmere was a beautiful place, +though he now saw "what you meant about them interesting +people," and his New York address would be the Souvenir Company. + +He tore up the several pages that repeated that oldest most +melancholy cry of the lover, which rang among the deodars, from +viking ships, from the moonlit courtyards of Provence, the cry +which always sounded about Mr. Wrenn as he walked the deck: +"I want you so much; I miss you so unendingly; I am so lonely for +you, dear." For no more clearly, no more nobly did the golden +Aucassin or lean Dante word that cry in their thoughts than did +Mr. William Wrenn, Our Mr. Wrenn. + +A third-class steward with a mangy mustache and setter-like +tan eyes came teetering down-stairs, each step like a nervous +pencil tap on a table, and peered over the side of Mr. Wrenn's +berth. He loved Mr. Wrenn, who was proven a scholar by the +reading of real bound books--an English history and a +second-hand copy of _Haunts of Historic English Writers_, +purchased in Liverpool--and who was willing to listen to the +steward's serial story of how his woman, Mrs. Wargle, +faithlessly consorted with Foddle, the cat's-meat man, when the +steward was away, and, when he was home, cooked for him lights +and liver that unquestionably were purchased from the same +cat's-meat man. He now leered with a fond and watery gaze upon +Mr. Wrenn's scholarly pursuits, and announced in a whisper: + +"They've sighted land." + +"Land?" + +"Oh aye." + +Mr. Wrenn sat up so vigorously that he bumped his head. +He chucked his papers beneath the pillow with his right hand, +while the left was feeling for the side of the berth. +"Land!" he bellowed to drowsing cabin-mates as he vaulted out. + +The steerage promenade-deck, iron-sided, black-floored, ending +in the iron approaches to the galley at one end and the iron +superstructures about a hatch at the other, was like a grim +swart oilily clean machine-shop aisle, so inclosed, so +over-roofed, that the side toward the sea seemed merely a long +factory window. But he loved it and, except when he had +guiltily remembered the books he had to read, he had stayed on +deck, worshiping the naive bright attire of immigrants and the +dark roll and glory of the sea. + +Now, out there was a blue shading, made by a magic pencil; land, +his land, where he was going to become the beloved comrade of +all the friends whose likenesses he saw in the white-caps +flashing before him. + +Humming, he paraded down to the buffet, where small +beer and smaller tobacco were sold, to buy another pound of +striped candy for the offspring of the Russian Jews. + +The children knew he was coming. "Fat rascals," he chuckled, +touching their dark cheeks, pretending to be frightened as they +pounded soft fists against the iron side of the ship or rolled +unregarded in the scuppers. Their shawled mothers knew him, +too, and as he shyly handed about the candy the chattering +stately line of Jewish elders nodded their beards like the +forest primeval in a breeze, saying words of blessing in a +strange tongue. + +He smiled back and made gestures, and shouted "Land! Land!" with +several variations in key, to make it sound foreign. + +But he withdrew for the sacred moment of seeing the Land of +Promise he was newly discovering--the Long Island shore; the +grass-clad redouts at Fort Wadsworth; the vast pile of New York +sky-scrapers, standing in a mist like an enormous burned forest. + +"Singer Tower.... Butterick Building," he murmured, as they +proceeded toward their dock. "That's something like.... Let's +see; yes, sir, by golly, right up there between the Met. Tower +and the _Times_--good old Souvenir Company office. Jiminy! `One +Dollar to Albany'--something _like_ a sign, that is--good old +dollar! To thunder with their darn shillings. Home!... Gee! +there's where I used to moon on a wharf!... Gosh! the old town +looks good." + +And all this was his to conquer, for friendship's sake. + +He went to a hotel. While he had to go back to the Zapps', of +course, he did not wish, by meeting those old friends, to spoil +his first day. No, it was cheerfuler to stand at a window of +his cheap hotel on Seventh Avenue, watching the "good old +American crowd"--Germans, Irishmen, Italians, and Jews. He +went to the Nickelorion and grasped the hand of the ticket-taker, +the Brass-button Man, ejaculating: "How are you? Well, +how's things going with the old show?... I been away couple +of months." + +"Fine and dandy! Been away, uh? Well, it's good to get back to +the old town, heh? Summer hotel?" + +"Unk?" + +"Why, you're the waiter at Pat Maloney's, ain't you?" + +Next morning Mr. Wrenn made himself go to the Souvenir and Art +Novelty Company. He wanted to get the teasing, due him for +staying away so short a time, over as soon as possible. The +office girl, addressing circulars, seemed surprised when he +stepped from the elevator, and blushed her usual shy gratitude +to the men of the office for allowing her to exist and take away +six dollars weekly. + +Then into the entry-room ran Rabin, one of the traveling salesmen. + +"Why, hul-lo, Wrenn! Wondered if that could be you. Back so +soon? Thought you were going to Europe." + +"Just got back. Couldn't stand it away from you, old scout!" + +"You must have been learning to sass back real smart, in the Old +Country, heh? Going to be with us again? Well, see you again +soon. Glad see you back." + +He was not madly excited at seeing Rabin; still, the drummer was +part of the good old Souvenir Company, the one place in the +world on which he could absolutely depend, the one place where +they always wanted him. + +He had been absently staring at the sample-tables, noting new +novelties. The office girl, speaking sweetly, but as to an +outsider, inquired, "Who did you wish to see, Mr. Wrenn?" + +"Why! Mr. Guilfogle." + +"He's busy, but if you'll sit down I think you can see him in a +few minutes." + +Mr. Wrenn felt like the prodigal son, with no calf in sight, at +having to wait on the callers' bench, but he shook with faint +excited gurgles of mirth at the thought of the delightful +surprise Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle, the office manager, +was going to have. He kept an eye out for Charley Carpenter. +If Charley didn't come through the entry-room he'd go into the +bookkeeping-room, and--"talk about your surprises--" + +"Mr. Guilfogle will see you now," said the office girl. + +As he entered the manager's office Mr. Guilfogle made much of +glancing up with busy amazement. + +"Well, well, Wrenn! Back so soon? Thought you were going to be +gone quite a while." + +"Couldn't keep away from the office, Mr. Guilfogle," with an +uneasy smile. + +"Have a good trip?" + +"Yes, a dandy." + +"How'd you happen to get back so soon?" + +"Oh, I wanted to--Say, Mr. Guilfogle, I really wanted to get +back to the office again. I'm awfully glad to see it again." + +"Glad see _you_. Well, where did you go? I got the card you +sent me from Chesterton with the picture of the old church on it." + +"Why, I went to Liverpool and Oxford and London and--well--Kew +and Ealing and places and--And I tramped through Essex and +Suffolk--all through--on foot. Aengusmere and them places." + +"Just a moment. (Well, Rabin, what is it? Why certainly. I've +told you that already about five times. _Yes_, I said--that's +what I had the samples made up for. I wish you'd be a little +more careful, d' ye hear?) You went to London, did you, Wrenn? +Say, did you notice any novelties we could copy?" + +"No, I'm afraid I didn't, Mr. Guilfogle. I'm awfully sorry. I +hunted around, but I couldn't find a thing we could use. I mean +I couldn't find anything that began to come up to our line. +Them English are pretty slow." + +"Didn't, eh? Well, what's your plans now?" + +"Why--uh--I kind of thought--Honestly, Mr. Guilfogle, I'd +like to get back on my old job. You remember--it was to be +fixed so--" + +"Afraid there's nothing doing just now, Wrenn. Not a thing. +Course I can't tell what may happen, and you want to keep in +touch with us, but we're pretty well filled up just now. Jake +is getting along better than we thought. He's learning--" +Not one word regarding Jake's excellence did Mr. Wrenn hear. + +Not get the job back? He sat down and stammered: + +"Gee! I hadn't thought of that. I'd kind of banked on the +Souvenir Company, Mr. Guilfogle." + +"Well, you know I told you I thought you were an idiot to go. +I warned you." + +He timidly agreed, mourning: "Yes, that so; I know you did. +But uh--well--" + +"Sorry, Wrenn. That's the way it goes in business, though. If +you will go beating it around--A rolling stone don't gather any +moss. Well, cheer up! Possibly there may be something doing +in--" + +"Tr-r-r-r-r-r-r," said the telephone. + +Mr. Guilfogle remarked into it: "Hello. Yes, it's me. Well, +who did you think it was? The cat? Yuh. Sure. No. Well, +to-morrow, probably. All right. Good-by." + +Then he glanced at his watch and up at Mr. Wrenn impatiently. + +"Say, Mr. Guilfogle, you say there'll be--when will there be +likely to be an opening?" + +"Now, how can I tell, my boy? We'll work you in if we can--you +ain't a bad clerk; or at least you wouldn't be if you'd be a +little more careful. By the way, of course you understand that +if we try to work you in it'll take lots of trouble, and we'll +expect you to not go flirting round with other firms, looking +for a job. Understand that?" + +"Oh yes, sir." + +"All right. We appreciate your work all right, but of +course you can 't expect us to fire any of our present force +just because you take the notion to come back whenever you want +to.... Hiking off to Europe, leaving a good job!... You didn't +get on the Continent, did you?" + +"No, I--" + +"Well.... Oh, say, how's the grub in London? Cheaper than it +is here? The wife was saying this morning we'd have to stop +eating if the high cost of living goes on going up." + +"Yes, it's quite a little cheaper. You can get fine tea for two +and three cents a cup. Clothes is cheaper, too. But I don't +care much for the English, though there is all sorts of quaint +places with a real flavor.... Say, Mr. Guilfogle, you know I +inherited a little money, and I can wait awhile, and you'll kind +of keep me in mind for a place if one--" + +"Didn't I _say_ I would?" + +"Yes, but--" + +"You come around and see me a week from now. And leave your +address with Rosey. I don't know, though, as we can afford to +pay you quite the same salary at first, even if we can work you +in--the season's been very slack. But I'll do what I can for +you. Come in and see me in about a week. Goo' day." + +Rabin, the salesman, waylaid Mr. Wrenn in the corridor. + +"You look kind of peeked, Wrenn. Old Goglefogle been lighting +into you? Say, I ought to have told you first. I forgot it. +The old rat, he's been planning to stick the knife into you all +the while. 'Bout two weeks ago me and him had a couple of +cocktails at Mouquin's. You know how chummy he always gets +after a couple of smiles. Well, he was talking about--I was +saying you're a good man and hoping you were having a good +time--and he said, `Yes,' he says, `he's a good man, but he sure +did lay himself wide open by taking this trip. I've got him +dead to rights,' he says to me. `I've got a hunch he'll be +back here in three or four months,' he says to me. `And do you +think he'll walk in and get what he wants? Not him. I'll keep +him waiting a month before I give him back his job, and then you +watch, Rabin,' he says to me, `you'll see he'll be tickled to +death to go back to work at less salary than he was getting, and +he'll have sense enough to not try this stunt of getting off the +job again after that. And the trip'll be good for him, +anyway--he'll do better work--vacation at his own expense--save +us money all round. I tell you, Rabin,' he says to me, `if any +of you boys think you can get the best of the company or me you +just want to try it, that's all.' Yessir, that's what the old +rat told me. You want to watch out for him." + +"Oh, I will; indeed I will--" + +"Did he spring any of this fairy tale just now?" + +"Well, kind of. Say, thanks, I'm awful obliged to--" + +"Say, for the love of Mike, don't let him know I told you." + +"No, no, I sure won't." + +They parted. Eager though he was for the great moment of again +seeing his comrade, Charley Carpenter, Mr. Wrenn dribbled toward +the bookkeeping-room mournfully, planning to tell Charley of +Guilfogle's wickedness. + +The head bookkeeper shook his head at Mr. Wrenn's inquiry: + +"Charley ain't here any longer." + +"Ain't _here?_" + +"No. He got through. He got to boozing pretty bad, and one +morning about three weeks ago, when he had a pretty bad +hang-over, he told Guilfogle what he thought of him, so of +course Guilfogle fired him." + +"Oh, that's too _bad_. Say, you don't know his address, do you?" + +"--East a Hundred and Eighteenth.... Well, I'm glad to see +you back, Wrenn. Didn't expect to see you back so soon, but +always glad to see you. Going to be with us?" + +"I ain't sure," said Mr. Wrenn, crabbedly, then shook hands +warmly with the bookkeeper, to show there was nothing personal +in his snippishness. + +For nearly a hundred blocks Mr. Wrenn scowled at an +advertisement of Corn Flakes in the Third Avenue Elevated without +really seeing it.... Should he go back to the Souvenir Company +at all? + +Yes. He would. That was the best way to start making friends. +But he would "get our friend Guilfogle at recess," he assured +himself, with an out-thrust of the jaw like that of the great +Bill Wrenn. He knew Guilfogle's lead now, and he would show +that gentleman that he could play the game. He'd take that +lower salary and pretend to be frightened, but when he got the +chance-- + +He did not proclaim even to himself what dreadful thing he was +going to do, but as he left the Elevated he said over and over, +shaking his closed fist inside his coat pocket: + +"When I get the chance--when I _get_ it--" + + +The flat-building where Charley Carpenter lived was one of +hundreds of pressed-brick structures, apparently all turned out +of the same mold. It was filled with the smells of steamy +washing and fried fish. Languid with the heat, Mr. Wrenn +crawled up an infinity of iron steps and knocked three times at +Charley's door. No answer. He crawled down again and sought +out the janitress, who stopped watching an ice-wagon in the +street to say: + +"I guess you'll be finding him asleep up there, sir. He do be +lying there drunk most of the day. His wife's left him. The +landlord's give him notice to quit, end of August. Warm day, +sir. Be you a bill-collector? Mostly, it's bill-collectors +that--" + +"Yes, it is hot." + +Superior in manner, but deeply dejected, Mr. Wrenn rang the +down-stairs bell long enough to wake Charley, pantingly got +himself up the interminable stairs, and kicked the door till +Charley's voice quavered inside: + +"Who zhat?" + +"It's me, Charley. Wrenn." + +"You're in Yurp. Can't fool me. G' 'way from there." + +Three other doors on the same landing were now partly open and +blocked with the heads of frowsy inquisitive women. The steamy +smell was thicker in the darkness. Mr. Wrenn felt prickly, then +angry at this curiosity, and again demanded: + +"Lemme in, I say." + +"Tell you it ain't you. I know you!" + +Charley Carpenter's pale face leered out. His tousled hair was +stuck to his forehead by perspiration; his eyes were red and +vaguely staring. His clothes were badlv wrinkled. He wore a +collarless shirt with a frilled bosom of virulent pink, its +cuffs grimy and limp. + +"It's ol' Wrenn. C'm in. C'm in quick. Collectors always +hanging around. They can't catch me. You bet." + +He closed the door and wabbled swiftly down the long drab hall +of the "railroad flat," evidently trying to walk straight. The +reeking stifling main room at the end of the hall was terrible +as Charley's eyes. Flies boomed everywhere. The oak table, +which Charley and his bride had once spent four happy hours in +selecting, was littered with half a dozen empty whisky-flasks, +collars, torn sensational newspapers, dirty plates and +coffee-cups. The cheap brocade cover, which a bride had once +joyed to embroider with red and green roses, was half pulled off +and dragged on the floor amid the cigarette butts, Durham +tobacco, and bacon rinds which covered the green-and-yellow +carpet-rug. + +This much Mr. Wrenn saw. Then he set himself to the hard task +of listening to Charley, who was muttering: + +"Back quick, ain't you, ol' Wrenn? You come up to see me, +didn't you? You're m' friend, ain't you, eh? I got an awful +hang-over, ain't I? You don't care, do you, ol' Wrenn?" + +Mr. Wrenn stared at him weakly, but only for a minute. +Perhaps it was his cattle-boat experience which now made +him deal directly with such drunkenness as would have +nauseated him three months before; perhaps his attendance +on a weary Istra. + +"Come now, Charley, you got to buck up," he crooned. + +"_All_ ri'." + +"What's the trouble? How did you get going like this?" + +"Wife left me. I was drinking. You think I'm drunk, don't you? +But I ain't. She went off with her sister--always hated me. She +took my money out of savings-bank--three hundred; all money I had +'cept fifty dollars. I'll fix her. I'll kill her. Took to +hitting the booze. Goglefogle fired me. Don't care. Drink all +I want. Keep young fellows from getting it! Say, go down and +get me pint. Just finished up pint. Got to have one-die of +thirst. Bourbon. Get--" + +"I'll go and get you a drink, Charley--just one drink, +savvy?--if you'll promise to get cleaned up, like I tell +you, afterward." + +"_All_ ri'." + +Mr. Wrenn hastened out with a whisky-flask, muttering, +feverishly, "Gee! I got to save him." Returning, he poured out +one drink, as though it were medicine for a refractory patient, +and said, soothingly: + +"Now we'll take a cold bath, heh? and get cleaned up and +sobered up. Then we'll talk about a job, heh?" + +"Aw, don't want a bath. Say, I feel better now. Let's go out +and have a drink. Gimme that flask. Where j' yuh put it?" + +Mr. Wrenn went to the bathroom, turned on the cold-water tap, +returned, and undressed Charley, who struggled and laughed and +let his whole inert weight rest against Mr. Wrenn's shoulder. +Though normally Charley could have beaten three Mr. Wrenns, he +was run into the bath-room and poked into the tub. + +Instantly he began to splash, throwing up water in handfuls, +singing. The water poured over the side of the tub. Mr. Wrenn +tried to hold him still, but the wet sleek shoulders slipped +through his hand like a wet platter. Wholesomely vexed, he +turned off the water and slammed the bathroom door. + +In the bedroom he found an unwrinkled winter-weight suit and one +clean shirt. In the living-room he hung up his coat, covering +it with a newspaper, pulled the broom from under the table, and +prepared to sweep. + +The disorder was so great that he made one of the inevitable +discoveries of every housekeeper, and admitted to himself that +he "didn't know where to begin." He stumblingly lugged a heavy +pile of dishes from the center-table to the kitchen, shook and +beat and folded the table-cover, stuck the chairs atop the table, +and began to sweep. + +At the door a shining wet naked figure stood, bellowing: + +"Hey! What d' yuh think you're doing? Cut it out." + +"Just sweeping, Charley," from Mr. Wrenn, and an uninterrupted +"Tuff, tuff, tuff" from the broom. + +"Cut it out, I said. Whose house _is_ this?" + +"Gwan back in the bath-tub, Charley." + +"Say, d' yuh think you can run me? Get out of this, or I'll +throw you out. Got house way I want it." + +Bill Wrenn, the cattleman, rushed at him, smacked him with the +broom, drove him back into the tub, and waited. He laughed. +It was all a good joke; his friend Charley and he were playing +a little game. Charley also laughed and splashed some more. +Then he wept and said that the water was cold, and that he was now +deserted by his only friend. + +"Oh, shut up," remarked Bill Wrenn, and swept the bathroom floor. + +Charley stopped swashing about to sneer: + +"Li'l ministering angel, ain't you? You think you're awful +good, don't you? Come up here and bother me. When I ain't well. +Salvation Army. You----. Aw, lemme _'lone_, will you?" Bill +Wrenn kept on sweeping. "Get out, you----." + +There was enough energy in Charley's voice to indicate that he +was getting sober. Bill Wrenn soused him under once more, so +thoroughly that his own cuffs were reduced to a state of +flabbiness. He dragged Charley out, helped him dry himself, +and drove him to bed. + +He went out and bought dish-towels, soap, washing-powder, and +collars of Charley's size, which was an inch larger than his own. +He finished sweeping and dusting and washing the dishes--all +of them. He--who had learned to comfort Istra--he really +enjoyed it. His sense of order made it a pleasure to see +a plate yellow with dried egg glisten iridescently and flash +into shining whiteness; or a room corner filled with dust and +tobacco flakes become again a "nice square clean corner with +the baseboard shining, gee! just like it was new." + +An irate grocer called with a bill for fifteen dollars. Mr. +Wrenn blandly heard his threats all through, pretending to +himself that this was his home, whose honor was his honor. +He paid the man eight dollars on account and loftily dismissed him. +He sat down to wait for Charley, reading a newspaper most of the +time, but rising to pursue stray flies furiously, stumbling over +chairs, and making murderous flappings with a folded newspaper. + +When Charley awoke, after three hours, clear of mind but not at +all clear as regards the roof of his mouth, Mr. Wrenn gave him +a very little whisky, with considerable coffee, toast, and bacon. +The toast was not bad. + +"Now, Charley," he said, cheerfully, "your bat's over, ain't it, +old man?" + +"Say, you been darn' decent to me, old man. Lord! how you've +been sweeping up! How was I--was I pretty soused?" + +"Honest, you were fierce. You will sober up, now, won't you?" + +"Well, it's no wonder I had a classy hang-over, Wrenn. I was at +the Amusieren Rathskeller till four this morning, and then I had +a couple of nips before breakfast, and then I didn't have any +breakfast. But sa-a-a-ay, man, I sure did have some fiesta last +night. There was a little peroxide blonde that--" + +"Now you look here, Carpenter; you listen to me. You're sober +now. Have you tried to find another job?" + +"Yes, I did. But I got down in the mouth. Didn't feel like I +had a friend left." + +"Well, you h--" + +"But I guess I have now, old Wrennski." + +"Look here, Charley, you know I don't want to pull off no +Charity Society stunt or talk like I was a preacher. But I like +you so darn much I want to see you sober up and get another job. +Honestly I do, Charley. Are you broke?" + +"Prett' nearly. Only got about ten dollars to my name.... +I _will_ take a brace, old man. I know you ain't no preacher. +Course if you came around with any `holierthan-thou' stunt I'd +have to go right out and get soused on general principles.... +Yuh--I'll try to get a job." + +"Here's ten dollars. Please take it--aw--please, Charley." + +"_All_ right; anything to oblige." + +"What 've you got in sight in the job line?" + +"Well, there's a chance at night clerking in a little hotel +where I was a bell-hop long time ago. The night clerk's going to +get through, but I don't know just when--prob'ly in a week or two." + +"Well, keep after it. And _please_ come down to see me--the old +place--West Sixteenth Street." + +"What about the old girl with the ingrowing grouch? What's her +name? She ain't stuck on me." + +"Mrs. Zapp? Oh--hope she chokes. She can just kick all she +wants to. I'm just going to have all the visitors I want to." + +"All right. Say, tell us something about your trip." + +"Oh, I had a great time. Lots of nice fellows on the cattle-boat. +I went over on one, you know. Fellow named Morton--awfully +nice fellow. Say, Charley, you ought to seen me being butler +to the steers. Handing 'em hay. But say, the sea was fine; +all kinds of colors. Awful dirty on the cattle-boat, though." + +"Hard work?" + +"Yuh--kind of hard. Oh, not so very." + +"What did you see in England?" + +"Oh, a lot of different places. Say, I seen some great vaudeville +in Liverpool, Charley, with Morton--he's a slick fellow; works for +the Pennsylvania, here in town. I got to look him up. Say, I +wish we had an agency for college sofa-pillows and banners and +souvenir stuff in Oxford. There's a whole bunch of colleges there, +all right in the same town. I met a prof. there from some American +college--he hired an automobubble and took me down to a reg'lar +old inn--" + +"Well, well!" + +"--like you read about; sanded floor!" + +"Get to London?" + +"Yuh. Gee! it's a big place. Say, that Westminster +Abbey's a great place. I was in there a couple of times. +More darn tombs of kings and stuff. And I see a bishop, +with leggins on! But I got kind of lonely. I thought of +you a lot of times. Wished we could go out and get an ale +together. Maybe pick up a couple of pretty girls." + +"Oh, you sport!... Say, didn't get over to gay Paree, did you?" + +"Nope.... Well, I guess I'd better beat it now. +Got to move in--I'm at a hotel. You will come down and see +me to-night, won't you?" + +"So you thought of me, eh?... Yuh--sure, old socks. +I'll be down to-night. And I'll get right after that job." + +It is doubtful whether Mr. Wrenn would ever have returned +to the Zapps' had he not promised to see Charley there. +Even while he was carrying his suit-case down West Sixteenth, +broiling by degrees in the sunshine, he felt like rushing +up to Charley's and telling him to come to the hotel instead. + +Lee Theresa, taking the day off with a headache, +answered the bell, and ejaculated: + +"Well! So it's you, is it?" + +"I guess it is." + +"What, are you back so soon? Why, you ain't been gone more +than a month and a half, have you?" + +Beware, daughter of Southern pride! The little Yankee is +regarding your full-blown curves and empty eyes with rebellion, +though he says, ever so meekly: + +"Yes, I guess it is about that, Miss Theresa." + +"Well, I just knew you couldn't stand it away from us. +I suppose you'll want your room back. Ma, here's Mr. Wrenn +back again--Mr. Wrenn! _Ma!_" + +"Oh-h-h-h!" sounded Goaty Zapp's voice, in impish +disdain, below. "Mr. Wrenn's back. Hee, hee! Couldn't +stand it. Ain't that like a Yankee!" + +A slap, a wail, then Mrs. Zapp's elephantine slowness +on the stairs from the basement. She appeared, buttoning +her collar, smiling almost pleasantly, for she disliked +Mr. Wrenn less than she did any other of her lodgers. + +"Back already, Mist' Wrenn? Ah declare, Ah was +saying to Lee Theresa just yest'day, Ah just knew you'd +be wishing you was back with us. Won't you come in?" + +He edged into the parlor with, "How is the sciatica, Mrs. Zapp?" + +"Ah ain't feeling right smart." + +"My room occupied yet?" + +He was surveying the airless parlor rather heavily, and +his curt manner was not pleasing to the head of the house +of Zapp, who remarked, funereally: + +"It ain't taken just now, Mist' Wrenn, but Ah dunno. +There was a gennulman a-looking at it just yesterday, and +he said he'd be permanent if he came. Ah declare, Mist' Wrenn, +Ah dunno's Ah like to have my gennulmen just get up and +go without giving me notice." + +Lee Theresa scowled at her. + +Mr. Wrenn retorted, "I _did_ give you notice." + +"Ah know, but--well, Ah reckon Ah can let you have it, but Ah'll +have to have four and a half a week instead of four. Prices is +all going up so, Ah declare, Ah was just saying to Lee T'resa Ah +dunno what we're all going to do if the dear Lord don't look out +for us. And, Mist' Wrenn, Ah dunno's Ah like to have you coming +in so late nights. But Ah reckon Ah can accommodate you." + +"It's a good deal of a favor, isn't it, Mrs. Zapp?" + +Mr. Wrenn was dangerously polite. Let gentility look out for +the sharp practices of the Yankee. + +"Yes, but--" + +It was our hero, our madman of the seven and seventy seas, our +revolutionist friend of Istra, who leaped straight from the +salt-incrusted decks of his laboring steamer to the musty parlor +and declared, quietly but unmovably-practically +unmovably--"Well, then, I guess I'd better not take it at all." + +"So that's the way you're going to treat us!" bellowed Mrs. +Zapp. "You go off and leave us with an unoccupied room and-- +Oh! You poor white trash--you--" + +"_Ma!_ You shut up and go down-stairs-s-s-s-s!" Theresa hissed. +"Go on." + +Mrs. Zapp wabbled regally out. Lee Theresa spoke to Mr. Wrenn: + +"Ma ain't feeling a bit well this afternoon. I'm sorry she +talked like that. You will come back, won't you?" She showed +all her teeth in a genuine smile, and in her anxiety reached +his heart. "Remember, you promised you would." + +"Well, I will, but--" + +Bill Wrenn was fading, an affrighted specter. The "but" was +the last glimpse of him, and that Theresa overlooked, as she +bustlingly chirruped: "I _knew_ you would understand. I'll skip +right up and look at the room and put on fresh sheets." + + +One month, one hot New York month, passed before the imperial +Mr. Guilfogle gave him back The Job, and then at seventeen +dollars and fifty cents a week instead of his former nineteen +dollars. Mr. Wrenn refused, upon pretexts, to go out with the +manager for a drink, and presented him with twenty suggestions +for new novelties and circular letters. He rearranged the +unsystematic methods of Jake, the cub, and two days later he was +at work as though he had never in his life been farther from the +Souvenir Company than Newark. + + + + + + +CHAPTER XIII + +HE IS "OUR MR. WRENN" + + + + + +DEAR ISTRA,--I am back in New York feeling very well & hope this +finds you the same. I have been wanting to write to you for +quite a while now but there has not been much news of any kind +& so I have not written to you. But now I am back working for +the Souvenir Company. I hope you are having a good time in +Paris it must be a very pretty city & I have often wished to be +there perhaps some day I shall go. I [several erasures here] +have been reading quite a few books since I got back & think now +I shall get on better with my reading. You told me so many +things about books & so on & I do appreciate it. In closing, I +am yours very sincerely, + WILLIAM WRENN. + + +There was nothing else he could say. But there were a +terrifying number of things he could think as he crouched by the +window overlooking West Sixteenth Street, whose dull hue had not +changed during the centuries while he had been tramping England. +Her smile he remembered--and he cried, "Oh, I want to see her so +much." Her gallant dash through the rain--and again the cry. + +At last he cursed himself, "Why don't you _do_ something that 'd +count for her, and not sit around yammering for her like a fool?" + +He worked on his plan to "bring the South into line"--the +Souvenir Company's line. Again and again he sprang up from the +writing-table in his hot room when the presence of Istra came +and stood compellingly by his chair. But he worked. + +The Souvenir Company salesmen had not been able to get from the +South the business which the company deserved if right and +justice were to prevail. On the steamer from England Mr. Wrenn +had conceived the idea that a Dixieland Ink-well, with the +Confederate and Union flags draped in graceful cast iron, would +make an admirable present with which to draw the attention of +the Southem trade. The ink-well was to be followed by a series +of letters, sent on the slightest provocation, on order or +re-order, tactfully hoping the various healths of the Southland +were good and the baseball season important; all to insure a +welcome to the salesmen on the Southem route. + +He drew up his letters; he sketched his ink-well; he got up the +courage to talk with the office manager.... To forget love and +the beloved, men have ascended in aeroplanes and conquered +African tribes. To forget love, a new, busy, much absorbed Mr. +Wrenn, very much Ours, bustled into Mr. Guilfogle's office, +slapped down his papers on the desk, and demanded: "Here's that +plan about gettin' the South interested that I was telling you +about. Say, honest, I'd like awful much to try it on. I'd just +have to have part time of one stenographer." + +"Well, you know our stenographers are pretty well crowded. +But you can leave the outline with me. I'll look it over," +said Mr. Guilfogle. + +That same afternoon the manager enthusiastically O. K.'d the +plan. To enthusiastically--O. K. is an office technology for +saying, gloomily, "Well, I don't suppose it 'd hurt to try it, +anyway, but for the love of Mike be careful, and let me see any +letters you send out." + +So Mr. Wrenn dictated a letter to each of their Southern +merchants, sending him a Dixieland Ink-well and inquiring about +the crops. He had a stenographer, an efficient intolerant young +woman who wrote down his halting words as though they were +examples of bad English she wanted to show her friends, and +waited for the next word with cynical amusement. + +"By gosh!" growled Bill Wrenn, the cattleman, "I'll show her I'm +running this. I'll show her she's got another think coming." +But he dictated so busily and was so hot to get results that he +forgot the girl's air of high-class martyrdom. + +He watched the Southern baseball results in the papers. He +seized on every salesman on the Southern route as he came in, and +inquired about the religion and politics of the merchants in his +district. He even forgot to worry about his next rise in +salary, and found it much more exciting to rush back for an +important letter after a quick lunch than to watch the time and +make sure that he secured every minute of his lunch-hour. + +When October came--October of the vagabond, with the leaves +brilliant out on the Palisades, and Sixth Avenue moving-picture +palaces cool again and gay--Mr. Wrenn stayed late, under the +mercury-vapor lights, making card cross-files of the Southern +merchants, their hobbies and prejudices, and whistling as he +worked, stopping now and then to slap the desk and mutter, +"By gosh! I'm gettin' 'em--gettin' 'em." + +He rarely thought of Istra till he was out on the street again, +proud of having worked so late that his eyes ached. In fact, +his chief troubles these days came when Mr. Guilfogle wouldn't +"let him put through an idea." + +Their first battle was over Mr. Wrenn's signing the letters +personally; for the letters, the office manager felt, were as +much Ours as was Mr. Wrenn, and should be signed by the firm. +After some difficulty Mr. Wrenn persuaded him that one of the +best ways to handle a personal letter was to make it personal. +They nearly cursed each other before Mr. Wrenn was allowed to +use his own judgment. + +It's not at all certain that Mr. Guilfogle should have yielded. +What's the use of a manager if his underlings use judgment? + +The next battle Mr. Wrenn lost. He had demanded a monthly +holiday for his stenographer. Mr. Guilfogle pointed out that +she'd merely be the worse off for a holiday, that it 'd make her +discontented, that it was a kindness to her to keep her mind +occupied. Mr. Wrenn was, however, granted a new typewriter, in +a manner which revealed the fact that the Souvenir Company was +filled with almost too much mercy in permitting an employee to +follow his own selfish and stubborn desires. + +You cannot trust these employees. Mr. Wrenn was getting so +absorbed in his work that he didn't even act as though it was a +favor when Mr. Guilfogle allowed him to have his letters to the +trade copied by carbon paper instead of having them blurred by +the wet tissue-paper of a copy-book. The manager did grant the +request, but he was justly indignant at the curt manner of the +rascal, whereupon our bumptious revolutionist, our friend to +anarchists and red-headed artists, demanded a "raise" and said +that he didn't care a hang if the [qualified] letters never went +out. The kindness of chiefs! For Mr. Guilfogle apologized and +raised the madman's wage from seventeen dollars and fifty cents +a week to his former nineteen dollars. [He had expected +eighteen dollars; he had demanded twenty-two dollars and fifty +cents; he was worth on the labor market from twenty-five to +thirty dollars; while the profit to the Souvenir Company from +his work was about sixty dollars minus whatever salary he got.] + +Not only that. Mr. Guilfogle slapped him on the back and said: +"You're doing good work, old man. It's fine. I just don't want +you to be too reckless." + +That night Wrenn worked till eight. + +After his raise he could afford to go to the theater, since he +was not saving money for travel. He wrote small letters to +Istra and read the books he believed she would approve--a Paris +Baedeker and the second volume of Tolstoi's _War and Peace_, +which he bought at a second-hand book-stall for five cents. +He became interested in popular and inaccurate French and English +histories, and secreted any amount of footnote anecdotes about +Guy Fawkes and rush-lights and the divine right of kings. +He thought almost every night about making friends, which he +intended--just as much as ever--to do as soon as Sometime arrived. + +On the day on which one of the Southern merchants wrote him about +his son--"fine young fellow, sir--has every chance of rising +to a lieutenancy on the Atlanta police force"--Mr. Wrenn's eyes +were moist. Here was a friend already. Sure. He would make +friends. Then there was the cripple with the Capitol Corner News +and Souvenir Stand in Austin, Texas. Mr. Wrenn secreted two +extra Dixieland Ink-wells and a Yale football banner and sent +them to the cripple for his brothers, who were in the +Agricultural College. + +The orders--yes, they were growing larger. The Southern salesmen +took him out to dinner sometimes. But he was shy of them. They +were so knowing and had so many smoking-room stories. He still +had not found the friends he desired. + + +Miggleton's restaurant, on Forty-second Street, was a romantic +discovery. Though it had "popular prices"--plain omelet, +fifteen cents--it had red and green bracket lights, +mission-style tables, and music played by a sparrowlike pianist +and a violinist. Mr. Wrenn never really heard the music, but +while it was quavering he had a happier appreciation of the +Silk-Hat-Harry humorous pictures in the _Journal_, which he +always propped up against an oil-cruet. [That never caused him +inconvenience; he had no convictions in regard to salads.] +He would drop the paper to look out of the window at the Lazydays +Improvement Company's electric sign, showing gardens of paradise +on the instalment plan, and dream of--well, he hadn't the +slightest idea what--something distant and deliciously likely to +become intimate. Once or twice he knew that he was visioning +the girl in soft brown whom he would "go home to," and who, in +a Lazydays suburban residence, would play just such music for +him and the friends who lived near by. She would be as clever +as Istra, but "oh, more so's you can go regular places with +her."... Often he got good ideas about letters South, to be +jotted down on envelope backs, from that music. + +At last comes the historic match-box incident. + +On that October evening in 1910 he dined early at Miggleton's. +The thirty-cent table d'hote was perfect. The cream-of-corn soup +was, he went so far as to remark to the waitress, "simply slick"; +the Waldorf salad had two whole walnuts in his portion alone. + +The fat man with the white waistcoat, whom he had often noted as +dining in this same corner of the restaurant, smiled at him and +said "Pleasant evening" as he sat down opposite Mr. Wrenn and +smoothed the two sleek bangs which decorated the front of his +nearly bald head. + +The music included a "potpourri of airs from `The Merry Widow,'" +which set his foot tapping. All the while he was conscious +that he'd made the Seattle Novelty and Stationery Corner Store +come through with a five-hundred-dollar order on one of his letters. + +The _Journal_ contained an editorial essay on "Friendship" which +would have been, and was, a credit to Cicero. + +He laid down the paper, stirred his large cup of coffee, and +stared at the mother-of-pearl buttons on the waistcoat of the +fat man, who was now gulping down soup, opposite him. "My +land!" he was thinking, "friendship! I ain't even begun to +make all those friends I was going to. Haven't done a thing. +Oh, I will; I must!" + +"Nice night," said the fat man. + +"Yuh--it sure is," brightly agreed Mr. Wrenn. + +"Reg'lar Indian-Summer weather." + +"Yes, isn't it! I feel like taking a walk on Riverside +Drive--b'lieve I will." + +"Wish I had time. But I gotta get down to the +store--cigar-store. I'm on nights, three times a week." + +"Yuh. I've seen you here most every time I eat early," +Mr. Wrenn purred. + +"Yuh. The rest of the time I eat at the boarding-house." + +Silence. But Mr. Wrenn was fighting for things to say, means of +approach, for the chance to become acquainted with a new person, +for all the friendly human ways he had desired in nights of +loneliness. + +"Wonder when they'll get the Grand Central done?" asked the fat man. + +"I s'pose it'll take quite a few years," said Mr. Wrenn, +conversationally. + +"Yuh. I s'pose it will." + +Silence. + +Mr. Wrenn sat trying to think of something else to say. Lonely +people in city restaurants simply do not get acquainted. Yet he +did manage to observe, "Great building that'll be," in the +friendliest manner. + +Silence. + +Then the fat man went on: + +"Wonder what Wolgast will do in his mill? Don't believe he can +stand up." + +Wolgast was, Mr. Wrenn seemed to remember, a pugilist. He +agreed vaguely: + +"Pretty hard, all right." + +"Go out to the areoplane meet?" asked the fat man. + +"No. But I'd like to see it. Gee! there must be kind of--kind +of adventure in them things, heh?" + +"Yuh--sure is. First machine I saw, though--I was just getting +off the train at Belmont Park, and there was an areoplane up in +the air, and it looked like one of them big mechanical beetles +these fellows sell on the street buzzing around up there. I was +kind of disappointed. But what do you think? It was that J. +A. D. McCurdy, in a Curtiss biplane--I think it was--and by +golly! he got to circling around and racing and tipping so's I +thought I'd loose my hat off, I was so excited. And, say, what +do you think? I see McCurdy himself, afterward, standing near +one of the--the handgars--handsome young chap, not over +twenty-eight or thirty, built like a half-miler. And then I see +Ralph Johnstone and Arch Hoxey--" + +"Gee!" Mr. Wrenn was breathing. + +"--dipping and doing the--what do you call it?--Dutch +sausage-roll or something like that. Yelled my head off." + +"Oh, it must have been great to see 'em, and so close, too." + +"Yuh--it sure was." + +There seemed to be no other questions to settle. Mr. Wrenn +slowly folded up his paper, pursued his check under three plates +and the menu-card to its hiding-place beyond the catsup-bottle, +and left the table with a regretful "Good night." + +At the desk of the cashier, a decorative blonde, he put a cent +in the machine which good-naturedly drops out boxes of matches. +No box dropped this time, though he worked the lever noisily. + +"Out of order?" asked the cashier lady. "Here's two boxes of +matches. Guess you've earned them." + +"Well, well, well, well!" sounded the voice of his friend, the +fat man, who stood at the desk paying his bill. "Pretty easy, +heh? Two boxes for one cent! Sting the restaurant." Cocking his +head, he carefully inserted a cent in the slot and clattered the +lever, turning to grin at Mr. Wrenn, who grinned back as the +machine failed to work. + +"Let me try it," caroled Mr. Wrenn, and pounded the lever with +the enthusiasm of comradeship. + +"Nothing doing, lady," crowed the fat man to the cashier. + +"I guess _I_ draw two boxes, too, eh? And I'm in a cigar-store. +How's that for stinging your competitors, heh? Ho, ho, ho!" + +The cashier handed him two boxes, with an embarrassed simper, +and the fat man clapped Mr. Wrenn's shoulder joyously. + +"My turn!" shouted a young man in a fuzzy green hat and a +bright-brown suit, who had been watching with the sudden +friendship which unites a crowd brought together by an accident. + +Mr. Wrenn was glowing. "No, it ain't--it's mine," he achieved. +"I invented this game." Never had he so stood forth in a crowd. +He was a Bill Wrenn with the cosmopolitan polish of a +floor-walker. He stood beside the fat man as a friend of sorts, +a person to be taken perfectly seriously. + +It is true that he didn't add to this spiritual triumph the +triumph of getting two more boxes of matches, for the +cashier-girl exclaimed, "No indeedy; it's my turn!" and lifted +the match machine to a high shelf behind her. But Mr. Wrenn +went out of the restaurant with his old friend, the fat man, +saying to him quite as would a wit, "I guess we get stung, eh?" + +"Yuh!" gurgled the fat man. + +Walking down to your store?" + +"Yuh--sure--won't you walk down a piece?" + +"Yes, I would like to. Which way is it?" + +"Fourth Avenue and Twenty-eighth." + +"Walk down with you." + +"Fine!" + +And the fat man seemed to mean it. He confided to Mr. Wrenn +that the fishing was something elegant at Trulen, New Jersey; +that he was some punkins at the casting of flies in fishing; +that he wished exceedingly to be at Trulen fishing with flies, +but was prevented by the manager of the cigar-store; that the +manager was an old devil; that his (the fat man's own) name was +Tom Poppins; that the store had a slick new brand of Manila +cigars, kept in a swell new humidor bought upon the advice of +himself (Mr. Poppins); that one of the young clerks in the store +had done fine in the Modified Marathon; that the Cubs had had a +great team this year; that he'd be glad to give Mr.--Mr. +Wrenn, eh?--one of those Manila cigars--great cigars they were, +too; and that he hadn't "laughed so much for a month of Sundays +as he had over the way they stung Miggleton's on them matches." + +All this in the easy, affectionate, slightly wistful manner of +fat men. Mr. Poppins's large round friendly childish eyes were +never sarcastic. He was the man who makes of a crowd in the +Pullman smoking-room old friends in half an hour. In turn, Mr. +Wrenn did not shy off; he hinted at most of his lifelong +ambitions and a fair number of his sorrows and, when they +reached the store, not only calmly accepted, but even sneezingly +ignited one of the "slick new Manila cigars." + +As he left the store he knew that the golden age had begun. +He had a friend! + +He was to see Tom Poppins the coming Thursday at Miggleton's. +And now he was going to find Morton! He laughed so loudly that +the policeman at Thirty-fourth Street looked self-conscious and +felt secretively to find out what was the matter with his +uniform. Now, this evening, he'd try to get on the track of +Morton. Well, perhaps not this evening--the Pennsylvania +offices wouldn't be open, but some time this week, anyway. + +Two nights later, as he waited for Tom Poppins at Miggleton's, +he lashed himself with the thought that he had not started to +find Morton; good old Morton of the cattle-boat. But that was +forgotten in the wonder of Tom Poppins's account of Mrs. Arty's, +a boarding-house "where all the folks likes each other." + +"You've never fed at a boarding-house, eh?" said Tom. "Well, I +guess most of 'em are pretty poor feed. And pretty sad bunch. +But Mrs. Arty's is about as near like home as most of us poor +bachelors ever gets. Nice crowd there. If Mrs. Arty--Mrs. R. +T. Ferrard is her name, but we always call her Mrs. Arty--if she +don't take to you she don't mind letting you know she won't take +you in at all; but if she does she'll worry over the holes in your +socks as if they was her husband's. All the bunch there drop into +the parlor when they come in, pretty near any time clear up till +twelve-thirty, and talk and laugh and rush the growler and play +Five Hundred. Just like home! + +"Mrs. Arty's nearly as fat as I am, but she can be pretty spry +if there's something she can do for you. Nice crowd there, too +except that Teddem--he's one of these here Willy-boy actors, +always out of work; I guess Mrs. Arty is kind of sorry for him. +Say, Wrenn--you seem to me like a good fellow--why don't you get +acquainted with the bunch? Maybe you'd like to move up there +some time. You was telling me about what a cranky old party +your landlady is. Anyway, come on up there to dinner. On me. +Got anything on for next Monday evening?" + +"N-no." + +"Come on up then----East Thirtieth." + +"Gee, I'd like to!" + +"Well, why don't you, then? Get there about six. Ask for me. +Monday. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I don't have to get to the +store evenings. Come on; you'll find out if you like the place." + +"By jiminy, I will!" Mr. Wrenn slapped the table, socially. + + +At last he was "through, just _through_ with loafing around and +not getting acquainted," he told himself. He was tired of +Zapps. There was nothing to Zapps. He would go up to Mrs. +Arty's and now--he was going to find Morton. Next morning, +marveling at himself for not having done this easy task before, +he telephoned to the Pennsylvania Railroad offices, asked for +Morton, and in one-half minute heard: + +"Yes? This is Harry Morton." + +"Hullo, Mr. Morton! I'll just bet you can't guess who this is." + +"I guess you've got me." + +"Well, who do you think it--" + +"Jack?" + +"Hunka." + +"Uncle Henry?" + +"Nope." Mr. Wrenn felt lonely at finding himself so completely +outside Morton's own world that he was not thought of. +He hastened to claim a part in that world: + +"Say, Mr. Morton, I wonder if you've ever heard of a cattle-boat +called the _Merian?_" + +"I--Say! Is this Bill Wrenn?" + +"Yes." + +"Well, well, well! Where areyou? When'd you get back?" + +"Oh, I been back quite a little while, Morty. Tried to get hold +of you--almost called up couple of times. I'm in my +office--Souvenir Company--now. Back on the old job. Say, I'd +like to see you." + +"Well, I'd like to see _you_, old Bill!" + +"Got a date for dinner this evening, Morty?" + +"N-no. No, I don't _think_ I've got anything on." Morton's voice +seemed to sound a doubt. Mr. Wrenn reflected that Morton must +be a society person; and he made his invitation highly polite: + +"Well, say, old man, I'd be awful happy if you could come over +and feed on me. Can't you come over and meet me, Morty?" + +"Y-yes, I guess I can. Yes, I'll do it. Where'll I meet you?" + +"How about Twenty-eighth and Sixth Avenue?" + +"That'll be all right, Bill. 'Bout six o'clock?" + +"Fine! Be awful nice to see you again, old Morty." + +"Same here. Goo'-by." + + +Gazing across the table at Miggleton's, Mr. Wrenn saw, in the +squat familiar body and sturdy face of Morton of the cattle-boat, +a stranger, slightly uneasy and very quiet, wearing garments that +had nothing whatever to do with the cattle-boats--a crimson scarf +with a horseshoe-pin of "Brazilian diamonds," and sleek brown +ready-made clothes with ornately curved cuffs and pocket flaps. + +Morton would say nothing of his wanderings after their parting +in Liverpool beyond: "Oh, I just bummed around. Places.... +Warm to-night. For this time of year." Thrice he explained, "I +was kind of afraid you'd be sore at me for the way I left you; +that's why I've never looked you up." Thrice Mr. Wrenn declared +that he had not been "sore," then ceased trying to make himself +understood. + +Their talk wilted. Both of them played with their knives a good +deal. Morton built a set of triangles out of toothpicks while +pretending to give hushed attention to the pianist's rendition +of "Mammy's Little Cootsie Bootsie Coon," while Mr. Wrenn +stared out of the window as though he expected to see the +building across get afire immediately. When either of them +invented something to say they started chattering with guilty +haste, and each agreed hectically with any opinion the other +advanced. + +Mr. Wrenn surprised himself in the thought that Morton hadn't +anything very new to say, which made him feel so disloyal that +he burst out, effusively: + +"Say, come on now, old man; I just got to hear about what you +did after you left Liverpool." + +"I--" + +"Well--" + +"I never got out of Liverpool! Worked in a restaurant.... But +next time--! I'll go clean to Constantinople!" Morton +exploded. "And I did see a lot of English life in Liverpool." + +Mr. Wrenn talked long and rapidly of the world's baseball +series, and Regal _vs._ Walkover shoes. + +He tried to think of something they could do. Suddenly: + +"Say, Morty, I know an awful nice guy down here in a +cigar-store. Let's go down and see him." + +"All right." + +Tom Poppins was very cordial to them. He dragged brown canvas +stools out of the tobacco-scented room where cigars were made, +and the three of them squatted in the back of the store, while +Tom gossiped of the Juarez races, Taft, cigar-wrappers, and Jews. +Morton was aroused to tell the time-mellowed story of the judge +and the darky. He was cheerful and laughed much and frequently +said "Ah there, cull!" in general commendation. But he kept +looking at the clock on the jog in the wall over the +watercooler. Just at ten he rose abashedly, hesitated, and +murmured, "Well, I guess I'll have to be beating it home." + +From Mr. Wrenn: "Oh, Morty! So early?" + +Tom: "What's the big hurry?" + +"I've got to run clear over to Jersey City." Morton was cordial, +but not convincing. + +"Say--uh--Morton," said Tom, kindly of face, his bald head +shining behind his twin bangs, as he rose, "I'm going to have +Wrenn up to dinner at my boarding-house next Monday. Like to +have you come along. It's a fine place--Mrs. Arty--she's the +landlady--she's a wonder. There's going to be a vacant room +there--maybe you two fellows could frame it up to take it, heh? +Understand, I don't get no rake-off on this, but we all like to +do what we can for M--" + +"No, no!" said Morton. "Sorry. Couldn't do it. Staying with +my brother-in-law--costs me only 'bout half as much as it would +I don't do much chasing around when I'm in town.... I'm going +to save up enough money for a good long hike. I'm going clean +to St. Petersburg!... But I've had a good time to-night." + +"Glad. Great stuff about you fellows on the cattle-ship," said Tom. + +Morton hastened on, protectively, a bit critically: "You fellows +sport around a good deal, don't you?... I can't afford to.... +Well, good night. Glad to met you, Mr. Poppins. G' night, old Wr--" + +"Going to the ferry? For Jersey? I'll walk over with you," +said Mr. Wrenn. + +Their walk was quiet and, for Mr. Wrenn, tragically sad. He saw +Morton (presumably) doing the wandering he had once planned. He +felt that, while making his vast new circle of friends, he was +losing all the wild adventurousness of Bill Wrenn. And he was +parting with his first friend. + +At the ferry-house Morton pronounced his "Well, so long, old +fellow" with an affection that meant finality. + +Mr. Wrenn fled back to Tom Poppins's store. On the way he was +shocked to find himself relieved at having parted with Morton. +The cigar-store was closed. + +At home Mrs. Zapp waylaid him for his rent (a day overdue), and +he was very curt. That was to keep back the "O God, how rotten +I feel!" with which, in his room, he voiced the desolation of +loneliness. + +The ghost of Morton, dead and forgotten, was with him all next +day, till he got home and unbelievably found on the staid +black-walnut Zapp hat-rack a letter from Paris, in a gray +foreign-appearing envelope with Istra's intensely black scrawl +on it. + +He put off the luxury of opening the letter till after the rites +of brushing his teeth, putting on his slippers, pounding his +rocking-chair cushion into softness. Panting with the joy to +come, he stared out of the window at a giant and glorious figure +of Istra--the laughing Istra of breakfast camp-fire--which +towered from the street below. He sighed joyously and read: + + +Mouse dear, just a word to let you know I haven't forgotten you +and am very glad indeed to get your letters. Not much to write +about. Frightfully busy with work and fool parties. You _are_ +a dear good soul and I hope you'll keep on writing me. In +haste, + I. N. +Longer letter next time. + + +He came to the end so soon. Istra was gone again. + + + + + + +CHAPTER XIV + +HE ENTERS SOCIETY + + + + + +England, in all its Istra-ness, scarce gave Mr. Wrenn a better +thrill for his collection than the thrill he received on the +November evening when he saw the white doorway of Mrs. R. T. +Ferrard, in a decorous row of houses on Thirtieth Street near +Lexington Avenue. + +It is a block where the citizens have civic pride. A newspaper +has not the least chance of lying about on the asphalt--some +householder with a frequently barbered mustache will indignantly +pounce upon it inside of an hour. No awe. is caused by the +sight of vestibules floored with marble in alternate black and +white tiles, scrubbed not by landladies, but by maids. There +are dotted Swiss curtains at the basement windows and Irish +point curtains on the first floors. There are two polished +brass doorplates in a stretch of less than eight houses. +Distinctly, it is not a quarter where children fill the street +with shouting and little sticks. + +Occasionally a taxicab drives up to some door without a crowd of +small boys gathering; and young men in evening clothes are not +infrequently seen to take out young ladies wearing tight-fitting +gowns of black, and light scarfs over their heads. A Middle +Western college fraternity has a club-house in the block, and four +of the houses are private--one of them belonging to a police +inspector and one to a school principal who wears spats. + +It is a block that is satisfied with itself; as different from +the Zapp district, where landladies in gingham run out to squabble +with berry-venders, as the Zapp district is from the Ghetto. + +Mrs. Arty Ferrard's house is a poor relation to most of the +residences there. The black areaway rail is broken, and the +basement-door grill is rusty. But at the windows are +red-and-white-figured chintz curtains, with a $2.98 bisque +figurine of an unclothed lady between them; the door is of +spotless white, with a bell-pull of polished brass. + +Mr. Wrenn yanked this bell-pull with an urbane briskness which, +he hoped, would conceal his nervousness and delight in dining +out. For he was one of the lonely men in New York. He had +dined out four times in eight years. + +The woman of thirty-five or thirty-eight who opened the door to +him was very fat, two-thirds as fat as Mrs. Zapp, but she had +young eyes. Her mouth was small, arched, and quivering in a grin. + +"This is Mr. Wrenn, isn't it?" she gurgled, and leaned against +the doorpost, merry, apparently indolent. "I'm Mrs. Ferrard. +Mr. Poppins told me you were coming, and he said you were a +terribly nice man, and I was to be sure and welcome you. Come +right in." + +Her indolence turned to energy as she charged down the hall to +the large double door on the right and threw it open, revealing +to him a scene of splendor and revelry by night. + +Several persons [they seemed dozens, in their liveliness] were +singing and shouting to piano music, in the midst of a general +redness and brightness of furnishings--red paper and worn red +carpet and a high ceiling with circular moldings tinted in pink. +Hand-painted pictures of old mills and ladies brooding over +salmon sunsets, and an especially hand-painted Christmas scene +with snow of inlaid mother-of-pearl, animated the walls. On a +golden-oak center-table was a large lamp with a mosaic shade, and +through its mingled bits of green and red and pearl glass +stormed the brilliance of a mantle-light. + +The room was crowded with tufted plush and imitation-leather +chairs, side-tables and corner brackets, a couch and a "lady's +desk." Green and red and yellow vases adorned with figures of +youthful lovers crammed the top of the piano at the farther end +of the room and the polished black-marble mantel of the +fireplace. The glaring gas raced the hearth-fire for snap and +glare and excitement. The profusion of furniture was like a +tumult; the redness and oakness and polishedness of furniture +was a dizzying activity; and it was all overwhelmingly magnified +by the laughter and singing about the piano. + +Tom Poppins lumbered up from a couch of terrifically new and red +leather, and Mr. Wrenn was introduced to the five new people in +the room with dismaying swiftness. There seemed to be fifty +times five unapproachable and magnificent strangers from whom he +wanted to flee. Of them all he was sure of only two--a Miss Nelly +somebody and what sounded like Horatio Hood Tem (Teddem it was). + +He wished that he had caught Miss Nelly's last name (which, at +dinner, proved to be Croubel), for he was instantly taken by her +sweetness as she smiled, held out a well-shaped hand, and said, +"So pleased meet you, Mr. Wrenn." + +She returned to the front of the room and went on talking to a +lank spinster about ruchings, but Mr. Wrenn felt that he had +known her long and as intimately as it was possible to know so +clever a young woman. + +Nelly Croubel gave him the impression of a delicate prettiness, +a superior sort of prettiness, like that of the daughter of the +Big White House on the Hill, the Squire's house, at Parthenon; +though Nelly was not unusually pretty. Indeed, her mouth was +too large, her hair of somewhat ordinary brown. But her face +was always changing with emotions of kindliness and life. Her +skin was perfect; her features fine, rather Greek; her smile, +quick yet sensitive. She was several inches shorter than Mr. +Wrenn, and all curves. Her blouse of white silk lay tenderly +along the adorably smooth softness of her young shoulders. A +smart patent-leather belt encircled her sleek waist. Thin black +lisle stockings showed a modestly arched and rather small foot +in a black pump. + +She looked as though she were trained for business; awake, +self-reliant, self-respecting, expecting to have to get things +done, all done, yet she seemed indestructibly gentle, +indestructibly good and believing, and just a bit shy. + +Nelly Croubel was twenty-four or twenty-five in years, older in +business, and far younger in love. She was born in Upton's +Grove, Pennsylvania. There, for eighteen years, she had played +Skip to Malue at parties, hid away the notes with which the boys +invited her to picnics at Baptist Beach, read much Walter Scott, +and occasionally taught Sunday-school. Her parents died when +she was beginning her fourth year in high school, and she came +to New York to work in Wanamacy's toy department at six dollars +a week during the holiday rush. Her patience with fussy old +shoppers and her large sales-totals had gained her a permanent +place in the store. + +She had loftily climbed to the position of second assistant +buyer in the lingerie department, at fourteen dollars and eighty +cents a week That was quite all of her history except that she +attended a Presbyterian church nearly every Sunday. The only +person she hated was Horatio Hood Teddem, the cheap actor who +was playing the piano at Mr. Wrenn's entrance. + +Just now Horatio was playing ragtime with amazing rapidity, +stamping his foot and turning his head to smirk at the others. + +Mrs. Arty led her chattering flock to the basement dining-room, +which had pink wall-paper and a mountainous sideboard. Mr. +Wrenn was placed between Mrs. Arty and Nelly Croubel. Out of +the mist of strangeness presently emerged the personality of +Miss Mary Proudfoot, a lively but religious spinster of forty +who made doilies for the Dorcas Women's Exchange and had two +hundred dollars a year family income. To the right of the +red-glass pickle-dish were the elderly Ebbitts--Samuel Ebbitt, +Esq., also Mrs. Ebbitt. Mr. Ebbitt had come from Hartford five +years before, but he always seemed just to have come from there. +He was in a real-estate office; he was gray, ill-tempered, +impatiently honest, and addicted to rheumatism and the +newspapers. Mrs. Ebbitt was addicted only to Mr. Ebbitt. + +Across the table was felt the presence of James T. Duncan, who +looked like a dignified red-mustached Sunday-school +superintendent, but who traveled for a cloak and suit house, +gambled heavily on poker and auction pinochle, and was esteemed +for his straight back and knowledge of trains. + +Which is all of them. + +As soon as Mrs. Arty had guided Annie, the bashful maid, in +serving the vegetable soup, and had coaxed her into bringing Mr. +Wrenn a napkin, she took charge of the conversation, a luxury +which she would never have intrusted to her flock's amateurish +efforts. Mr. Poppins, said she, had spoken of meeting a friend +of Mr. Wrenn's; Mr. Morton, was it not? A very nice man, she +understood. Was it true that Mr. Wrenn and Mr. Morton had gone +clear across the Atlantic on a cattle-boat? It really was? + +"Oh, how interesting!" contributed pretty Nelly Croubel, beside +Mr. Wrenn, her young eyes filled with an admiration which caused +him palpitation and difficulty in swallowing his soup. He was +confused by hearing old Samuel Ebbitt state: + +"Uh-h-h-h--back in 18--uh--1872 the vessel _Prissie_--no, it was +1873; no, it must have been '72--" + +"It was 1872, father," said Mrs. Ebbitt. + +"1873. I was on a coasting-vessel, young man. But we didn't +carry cattle." Mr. Ebbitt inspected Horatio Hood Teddem darkly, +clicked his spectacle case sharply shut, and fell to eating, +as though he had settled all this nonsense. + +With occasional witty interruptions from the actor, Mr. Wrenn +told of pitching hay, of the wit of Morton, and the wickedness +of Satan, the boss. + +"But you haven't told us about the brave things _you_ did," cooed +Mrs. Arty. She appealed to Nelly Croubel: "I'll bet he was a +cool one. Don't you think he was, Nelly?" + +"I'm sure he was." Nelly's voice was like a flute. + +Mr. Wrenn knew that there was just one thing in the world that +he wanted to do; to persuade Miss Nelly Croubel that (though he +was a solid business man, indeed yes, and honorable) he was a +cool one, who had chosen, in wandering o'er this world so wide, +the most perilous and cattle-boaty places. He tried to think of +something modest yet striking to say, while Tom was arguing with +Miss Mary Proudfoot, the respectable spinster, about the ethics +of giving away street-car transfers. + +As they finished their floating custard Mr. Wrenn achieved, +"Do you come from New York, Miss Croubel?" and listened to the +tale of sleighing-parties in Upton's Grove, Pennsylvania. He was +absolutely happy. + +"This is like getting home," he thought. "And they're classy +folks to get home to--now that I can tell 'em apart. Gee! +Miss Croubel is a peach. And brains--golly!" + +He had a frightened hope that after dinner he would be able to +get into a corner and talk with Nelly, but Tom Poppins conferred +with Horatio Hood Teddenm and called Mr. Wrenn aside. Teddem +had been acting with a moving-picture company for a week, and +had three passes to the celebrated Waldorf Photoplay Theater. + +Mr. Wrenn had bloodthirstily disapproved Horatio Hood's +effeminate remarks, such as "Tee _hee!_" and "Oh, you naughty +man," but when he heard that this molly-coddle had shared in the +glory of making moving pictures he went proudly forth with him +and Tom. He had no chance to speak to Mrs. Arty about taking +the room to be vacated. + +He wished that Charley Carpenter or the Zapps could see him +sitting right beside an actor who was shown in the pictures +miraculously there before them, asking him how they made movies, +just as friendly as though they had known each other always. + +He wanted to do something to entertain his friends beyond taking +them out for a drink. He invited them down to his room, and +they came. + +Teddem was in wonderful form; he mimicked every one they saw so +amiably that Tom Poppins knew the actor wanted to borrow money. +The party were lovingly humming the popular song of the +time--"Any Little Girl That's a Nice Little Girl is the Right +Little Girl for Me"--as they frisked up the gloomy steps of the +Zapps. Entering, Poppins and Teddem struck attitudes on the +inside stairs and sang aloud. + +Mr. Wrenn felt enormously conscious of Mrs. Zapp down below. He +kept listening, as he led them up-stairs and lighted the gas. +But Teddem so imitated Colonel Roosevelt, with two water-glasses +for eye-glasses and a small hat-brush for mustache, that Mr. +Wrenn was moved wrigglingly to exclaim: "Say, I'm going out and +get some beer. Or 'd you rather have something else? Some +cheese sandwiches? How about 'em?" + +"Fine," said Tom and Teddem together. + +Not only did Mr. Wrenn buy a large newspaper-covered bundle of +bottles of beer and Swiss-cheese sandwiches, but also a small +can of caviar and salty crackers. In his room he spread a clean +towel, then two clean towels, on the bureau, and arrayed the +feast, with two water-glasses and a shaving-mug for cups. + +Horatio Hood Teddem, spreading caviar on a sandwich, and loudly +singing his masterpiece, "Waal I swan," stopped short and fixed +amazed eyes on the door of the room. + +Mr. Wrenn hastily turned. The light fell--as on a cliff of +crumbly gray rock--on Mrs. Zapp, in the open door, vast in her +ungirdled gray wrapper, her arms folded, glowering speechlessly. + +"Mist' Wrenn," she began, in a high voice that promised to burst +into passion. + +But she was addressing the formidable adventurer, Bill Wrenn. +He had to protect his friends. He sprang up and walked across +to her. + +He said, quietly, "I didn't hear you knock, Mrs. Zapp." + +"Ah _didn't_ knock, and Ah want you should--" + +"Then please do knock, unless you want me to give notice." + +He was quivering. His voice was shrill. + +From the hall below Theresa called up, "Ma, come down here. _Ma!_" + +But Mrs. Zapp was too well started. "If you think Ah'm going +to stand for a lazy sneaking little drunkard keeping the whole +street awake, and here it is prett' nearly midnight--" + +Just then Mr. William Wrenn saw and heard the most astounding +thing of his life, and became an etemal slave to Tom Poppins. + +Tom's broad face became hard, his voice businesslike. He +shouted at Mrs. Zapp: + +"Beat it or I'll run you in. Trouble with you is, you old hag, +you don't appreciate a nice quiet little chap like Wrenn, and +you try to bully him--and him here for years. Get out or I'll +put you out. I'm no lamb, and I won't stand for any of your +monkey-shines. Get out. This ain't your room; he's rented +it--he's paid the rent--it's his room. Get out!" + +Kindly Tom Poppins worked in a cigar-store and was accustomed to +talk back to drunken men six feet tall. His voice was +tremendous, and he was fatly immovable; he didn't a bit mind the +fact that Mrs. Zapp was still "glaring speechless." + +But behold an ally to the forlorn lady. When Theresa, in the +hall below, heard Tom, she knew that Mr. Wrenn would room here +no more. She galloped up-stairs and screeched over her mother's +shoulder: + +"You will pick on a lady, will you, you drunken scum--you--you +cads--I'll have you arrested so quick you--" + +"Look here, lady," said Tom, gently. "I'm a plain-clothes man, +a detective." His large voice purred like a tiger-tabby's. "I +don't want to run you in, but I will if you don't get out of +here and shut that door. Or you might go down and call the cop +on this block. He'll run you in--for breaking Code 2762 of the +Penal Law! Trespass and flotsam--that's what it is!" + +Uneasy, frightened, then horrified, Mrs. Zapp swung bulkily +about and slammed the door. + +Sick, guilty, banished from home though he felt, Mr. Wrenn's +voice quavered, with an attempt at dignity: + +"I'm awful sorry she butted in while you fellows was here. +I don't know how to apologize" + +"Forget it, old man," rolled out Tom's bass. "Come on, let's go +up to Mrs. Arty's." + +"But, gee! it's nearly a quarter to eleven." + +"That's all right. We can get up there by a little after, and +Mrs. Arty stays up playing cards till after twelve." + + +"Golly!" Mr. Wrenn agitatedly ejaculated under his breath, as +they noisily entered Mrs. Arty's--though not noisily on his part. + +The parlor door was open. Mrs. Arty's broad back was toward +them, and she was announcing to James T. Duncan and Miss +Proudfoot, with whom she was playing three-handed Five Hundred, +"Well, I'll just bid seven on hearts if you're going to get so +set up." She glanced back, nodded, said, "Come in, children," +picked up the "widow," and discarded with quick twitches of +the cards. The frightened Mr. Wrenn, feeling like a shipwrecked +land-lubber, compared this gaming smoking woman unfavorably with +the intense respectability of his dear lost patron, Mrs. Zapp. +He sat uneasy till the hand of cards was finished, feeling as +though they were only tolerating him. And Nelly Croubel was +nowhere in sight. + +Suddenly said Mrs. Arty, "And now you would like to look at that +room, Mr. Wrenn, unless I'm wrong." + +"Why--uh--yes, I guess I would like to." + +"Come with me, child," she said, in pretended severity. "Tom, +you take my hand in the game, and don't let me hear you've been +bidding ten on no suit without the joker." She led Mr. Wrenn to +the settee hat-rack in the hall. "The third-floor-back will be +vacant in two weeks, Mr. Wrenn. We can go up and look at it now +if you'd like to. The man who has it now works nights--he's +some kind of a head waiter at Rector's, or something like that, +and he's out till three or four. Come." + +When he saw that third-floor-back, the room that the smart +people at Mrs. Arty's were really willing to let him have, he +felt like a man just engaged. It was all in soft +green--grass-green matting, pale-green walls, chairs of white +wicker with green cushions; the bed, a couch with a denim cover +and four sofa pillows. It gave him the impression of being a +guest on Fifth Avenue. + +"It's kind of a plain room," Mrs. Arty said, doubtfully. "The +furniture is kind of plain. But my head-waiter man--it was +furnished for a friend of his--he says he likes it better than +any other room in the house. It _is_ comfortable, and you get +lots of sunlight and--" + +"I'll take--How much is it, please, with board?" + +She spoke with a take-it-or-leave-it defiance. "Eleven-fifty a week." + +It was a terrible extravagance; much like marrying a sick woman +on a salary of ten a week, he reflected; nine-teen minus +eleven-fifty left him only seven-fifty for clothes and savings +and things and--but--" I'll take it," he said, hastily. He +was frightened at himself, but glad, very glad. He was to live +in this heaven; he was going to be away from that Zapp woman; +and Nelly Croubel--Was she engaged to some man? he wondered. + +Mrs. Arty was saying: "First, I want to ask you some questions, +though. Please sit down." As she creaked into one of the wicker +chairs she suddenly changed from the cigarette-rolling chaffing +card-player to a woman dignified, reserved, commanding. "Mr. +Wrenn, you see, Miss Proudfoot and Miss Croubel are on this +floor. Miss Proudfoot can take care of herself, all right, but +Nelly is such a trusting little thing--She's like my +daughter. She's the only one I've ever given a reduced rate +to--and I swore I never would to anybody!... Do +you--uh--drink--drink much, I mean?" + +Nelly on this floor! Near him! Now! He had to have this room. +He forced himself to speak directly. + +"I know how you mean, Mrs. Ferrard. No, I don't drink much of +any--hardly at all; just a glass of beer now and then; sometimes +I don't even touch that a week at a time. And I don't gamble +and--and I do try to keep--er--straight--and all that sort of thing." + +"That's good." + +"I work for the Souvenir and Art Novelty Company on +Twenty-eighth Street. If you want to call them up I guess the +manager'll give me a pretty good recommend." + +"I don't believe I'll need it, Mr. Wrenn. It's my business to +find out what sort of animiles men are by just talking to them." +She rose, smiled, plumped out her hand. "You _will_ be nice to +Nelly, _won't_ you! I'm going to fire that Teddem out--don't tell +him, but I am--because he gets too fresh with her." + +"Yes!" + +She suddenly broke into laughter, and ejaculated: "_Say_, that +was hard work! Don't you _hate_ to have to be serious? Let's trot +down, and I'll make Tom or Duncan rush us a growler of beer to +welcome you to our midst.... I'll bet your socks aren't darned +properly. I'm going to sneak in and take a look at them, once I +get you caged up here.... But I won't read your love-letters! +Now let's go down by the fire, where it's comfy." + + + + + + +CHAPTER XV + +HE STUDIES FIVE HUNDRED, SAVOUIR FAIRE, AND LOTSA-SNAP OFFICE MOTTOES + + + + + +On a couch of glossy red leather with glossy black buttons and +stiff fringes also of glossy red leather, Mr. William Wrenn sat +upright and was very confiding to Miss Nelly Croubel, who was +curled among the satin pillows with her skirts drawn carefully +about her ankles. He had been at Mrs. Arty's for two weeks now. +He wore a new light-blue tie, and his trousers were pressed like +sheet steel. + +"Yes, I suppose you're engaged to some one, Miss Nelly, and +you'll go off and leave us--go off to that blamed Upton's Grove +or some place." + +"I am _not_ engaged. I've told you so. Who would want to marry +me? You stop teasing me--you're mean as can be; I'll just have +to get Tom to protect me!" + +"Course you're engaged." + +"Ain't." + +"Are." + +"Ain't. Who would want to marry poor little me?" + +"Why, anybody, of course." + +"You _stop_ teasing me.... Besides, probably you're in love with +twenty girls." + +"I am _not_. Why, I've never hardly known but just two girls in +my life. One was just a girl I went to theaters with once or +twice--she was the daughter of the landlady I used to have +before I came here." + + + "If you don't make love to the landlady's daughter + You won't get a second piece of pie!" + +quoted Nelly, out of the treasure-house of literature. + +"Sure. That's it. But I bet you--" + +"Who was the other girl?" + +"Oh! She.... She was a--an artist. I liked her--a lot. +But she was--oh, awful highbrow. Gee! if--But--" + +A sympathetic silence, which Nelly broke with: + +"Yes, they're funny people. Artists.... Do you have your +lesson in Five Hundred tonight? Your very first one?" + +"I think so. Say, is it much like this here bridge-whist? Oh +say, Miss Nelly, why do they call it Five Hundred?" + +"That's what you have to make to go out. No, I guess it isn't +very much like bridge; though, to tell the truth, I haven't ever +played bridge. . My! it must be a nice game, though." + +"Oh, I thought prob'ly you could play it. You can do 'most +everything. Honest, I've never seen nothing like it." + +"Now you stop, Mr. Wrenn. I know I'm a--what was it Mr. Teddem +used to call me? A minx. But--" + +"Miss _Nelly!_ You _aren't_ a minx!" + +"Well--" + +"Or a mink, either. You're a--let's see--an antelope." + +"I am not! Even if I can wriggle my nose like a rabbit. +Besides, it sounds like a muskmelon. But, anyway, the head +buyer said I was crazy to-day." + +"If I heard him say you were crazy--" + +"Would you beat him for me?" She cuddled a cushion and smiled +gratefully. Her big eyes seemed to fill with light. + +He caught himself wanting to kiss the softness of her shoulder, +but he said only, "Well, I ain't much of a scrapper, but I'd try +to make it interesting for him." + +"Tell me, did you ever have a fight? When you were a boy? Were +you _such_ a bad boy?" + +"I never did when I was a boy, but--well--I did have a couple of +fights when I was on the cattle-boat and in England. Neither of +them amounted to very much, though, I guess. I was scared stiff!" + +"Don't believe it!" + +"Sure I was." + +"I don't believe you'd be scared. You're too earnest." + +"Me, Miss Nelly? Why, I'm a regular cut-up." + +"You stop making fun of yourself! I _like_ it when you're +earnest--like when you saw that beautiful snowfall last +night.... Oh dear, isn't it hard to have to miss so many +beautiful things here in the city--there's just the parks, and +even there there aren't any birds, real wild birds, like we used +to have in Pennsylvania." + +"Yes, isn't it! Isn't it hard!" Mr. Wrenn drew nearer and looked +sympathy. + +"I'm afraid I'm getting gushy. Miss Hartenstein--she's in my +department--she'd laugh at me.... But I do love birds and +squirrels and pussy-willows and all those things. In summer +I love to go on picnics on Staten Island or tramp in Van +Cortlandt Park." + +"Would you go on a picnic with me some day next spring?" +Hastily, "I mean with Miss Proudfoot and Mrs. Arty and me?" + +"I should be pleased to." She was prim but trusting about it. +"Oh, listen, Mr. Wrenn; did you ever tramp along the Palisades +as far as Englewood? It's lovely there--the woods and the river +and all those funny little tugs puffing along, way _way_ down +below you--why, I could lie on the rocks up there and just dream +and dream for hours. After I've spent Sunday up there"--she +was dreaming now, he saw, and his heart was passionately tender +toward her--"I don't hardly mind a bit having to go back to the +store Monday morning.... You've been up along there, haven't you?" + +"Me? Why, I guess I'm the guy that discovered the Palisades!... +Yes, it is _won_-derful up there!" + +"Oh, you are, are you? I read about that in American history!... +But honestly, Mr. Wrenn, I do believe you care for tramps and +things--not like that Teddem or Mr. Duncan--they always want +to just stay in town--or even Tom, though he's an old dear." + +Mr. Wrenn looked jealous, with a small hot jealousy. She +hastened on with: "Of course, I mean he's just like a big +brother. To all of us." + +It was sweet to both of them, to her to declare and to him to +hear, that neither Tom nor any other possessed her heart. Their +shy glances were like an outreach of tenderly touching hands as +she confided, "Mrs. Arty and he get up picnics, and when we're +out on the Palisades he says to me--you know, sometimes he +almost makes me think he _is_ sleepy, though I do believe he just +sneaks off under a tree and talks to Mrs. Arty or reads a +magazine--but I was saying: he always says to me, 'Well, sister, +I suppose you want to mousey round and dream by yourself--you +won't talk to a growly old bear like me. Well, I'm glad of it. +I want to sleep. I don't want to be bothered by you and your +everlasting chatter. Get out!' I b'lieve he just says that +'cause he knows I wouldn't want to run off by myself if they +didn't think it was proper." + +As he heard her lively effort to imitate Tom's bass Mr. Wrenn +laughed and pounded his knee and agreed: "Yes, Tom's an awfully +fine fellow, isn't he!... I love to get out some place by +myself, too. I like to wander round places and make up the +doggondest fool little stories to myself about them; just as bad +as a kiddy, that way." + +"And you read such an awful lot, Mr. Wrenn! My! Oh, tell me, +have you ever read anything by Harold Bell Wright or Myrtle +Reed, Mr. Wrenn? They write such sweet stories." + +He had not, but he expressed an unconquerable resolve so to do, +and with immediateness. She went on: + +"Mrs. Arty told me you had a real big library--nearly a +hundred books and--Do you mind? I went in your room and peeked +at them." + +"No, course I don't mind! If there's any of them you'd like to +borrow any time, Miss Nelly, I would be awful glad to lend them +to you.... But, rats! Why, I haven't got hardly any books." + +"That's why you haven't wasted any time learning Five Hundred and +things, isn't it? Because you've been so busy reading and so on?" + +"Yes, kind of." Mr. Wrenn looked modest. + +"Haven't you always been lots of--oh, haven't you always +'magined lots?" + +She really seemed to care. + +Mr. Wrenn felt excitedly sure of that, and imparted: "Yes, I +guess I have.... And I've always wanted to travel a lot." + +"So have I! Isn't it wonderful to go around and see new places!" + +"Yes, _isn't_ it!" he breathed. "It was great to be in +England--though the people there are kind of chilly some ways. +Even when I'm on a wharf here in New York I feel just like I was +off in China or somewheres. I'd like to see China. And +India.... Gee! when I hear the waves down at Coney Island or +some place--you know how the waves sound when they come in. +Well, sometimes I almost feel like they was talking to a +guy--you know--telling about ships. And, oh say, you know the +whitecaps--aren't they just like the waves was motioning at +you--they want you to come and beat it with you--over to China +and places." + +"Why, Mr. Wrenn, you're a regular poet!" + +He looked doubtful. + +"Honest; I'm not teasing you; you are a poet. And I think it's +fine that Mr. Teddem was saying that nobody could be a poet or +like that unless they drank an awful lot and--uh--oh, not be +honest and be on a job. But you aren't like that. _Are_ you?" + +He looked self-conscious and mumbled, earnestly, "Well, I try +not to be." + +"But I am going to make you go to church. You'll be a socialist +or something like that if you get to be too much of a poet and +don't--" + +"Miss Nelly, please _may_ I go to church with you?" + +"Why--" + +"Next Sunday?" + +"Why, yes, I should be pleased. Are you a Presbyterian, though?" + +"Why--uh--I guess I'm kind of a Congregationalist; but still, +they're all so much alike." + +"Yes, they really are. And besides, what does it matter if we +all believe the same and try to do right; and sometimes that's hard, +when you're poor, and it seems like--like--" + +"Seems like what?" Mr. Wrenn insisted. + +"Oh--nothing.... My, you'll have to get up awful early Sunday +morning if you'd like to go with me. My church starts at +ten-thirty." + +"Oh, I'd get up at five to go with you." + +"Stupid! Now you're just trying to jolly me; you _are_; +because you men aren't as fond of church as all that, I know you +aren't. You're real lazy Sunday mornings, and just want to sit +around and read the papers and leave the poor women--But +please tell me some more about your reading and all that." + +"Well, I'll be all ready to go at nine-thirty.... I don't know; +why, I haven't done much reading. But I would like to travel +and--Say, wouldn't it be great to--I suppose I'm sort of a +kid about it; of course, a guy has to tend right to business, +but it would be great--Say a man was in Europe with--with--a +friend, and they both knew a lot of history--say, they both knew +a lot about Guy Fawkes (he was the guy that tried to blow up +the English Parliament), and then when they were there in London +they could almost think they saw him, and they could go round +together and look at Shelley's window--he was a poet at +Oxford--Oh, it would be great with a--with a friend." + +"Yes, wouldn't it?... I wanted to work in the book department +one time. It's so nice your being--" + +"Ready for Five Hundred?" bellowed Tom Poppins in the hall +below. "Ready partner--you, Wrenn?" + +Tom was to initiate Mr. Wrenn into the game, playing with him +against Mrs. Arty and Miss Mary Proudfoot. + +Mrs. Arty sounded the occasion's pitch of high merriment by +delivering from the doorway the sacred old saying, "Well, the +ladies against the men, eh?" + +A general grunt that might be spelled "Hmmmmhm" assented. + +"I'm a good suffragette," she added. "Watch us squat the men, Mary." + +"Like to smash windows? Let's see--it's red fours, black fives +up?" remarked Tom, as he prepared the pack of cards for playing. + +"Yes, I would! It makes me so tired," asseverated Mrs. Arty, "to +think of the old goats that men put up for candidates when they +_know_ they're solemn old fools! I'd just like to get out and +vote my head off." + +"Well, I think the woman's place is in the home," sniffed Miss +Proudfoot, decisively, tucking away a doily she was finishing +for the Women's Exchange and jabbing at her bangs. + +They settled themselves about the glowing, glancing, glittering, +golden-oak center-table. Miss Proudfoot shuffled sternly. Mr. +Wrenn sat still and frightened, like a shipwrecked professor on +a raft with two gamblers and a press-agent, though Nelly was +smiling encouragingly at him from the couch where she had +started her embroidery--a large Christmas lamp mat for the wife +of the Presbyterian pastor at Upton's Grove. + +"Don't you wish your little friend Horatio Hood Teddem was here +to play with you?" remarked Tom. + +"I _do_ not," declared Mrs. Arty. "Still, there was one thing +about Horatio. I never had to look up his account to find out +how much he owed me. He stopped calling me, Little Buttercup, +when he owed me ten dollars, and he even stopped slamming the +front door when he got up to twenty. O Mr. Wrenn, did I ever +tell you about the time I asked him if he wanted to have Annie +sweep--" + +"Gerty!" protested Miss Proudfoot, while Nelly, on the couch, +ejaculated mechanically, "That story!" but Mrs. Arty chuckled +fatly, and continued: + +"I asked him if he wanted me to have Annie sweep his nightshirt +when she swept his room. He changed it next day." + +"Your bid, Mr. Poppins, "said Miss Proudfoot, severely. + +"First, I want to tell Wrenn how to play. You see, Wrenn, +here's the schedule. We play Avondale Schedule, you know." + +"Oh yes," said Mr. Wrenn, timorously.... He had once heard of +Carbondale--in New Jersey or Pennsylvania or somewhere--but that +didn't seem to help much. + +"Well, you see, you either make or go back," continued Tom. +"Plus and minus, you know. Joker is high, then right bower, +left, and ace. Then--uh--let's see; high bid takes the +cat--widdie, you know--and discards. Ten tricks. Follow suit +like whist, of course. I guess that's all--that ought to give +you the hang of it, anyway. I bid six on no trump." + +As Tom Poppins finished these instructions, given in the +card-player's rapid don't-ask-me-any-more-fool-questions manner, +Mr. Wrenn felt that he was choking. He craned up his neck, +trying to ease his stiff collar. So, then, he was a failure, a +social outcast already. + +So, then, he couldn't learn Five Hundred! And he had been very +proud of knowing one card from another perfectly, having played +a number of games of two-handed poker with Tim on the cattle-boat. +But what the dickens did "left--cat--follow suit" mean? + +And to fail with Nelly watching him! He pulled at his collar again. + +Thus he reflected while Mrs. Arty and Tom were carrying on the +following brilliant but cryptic society-dialogue: + +_Mrs. Arty:_ Well, I don't know. + +_Tom:_ Not failure, but low bid is crime, little one. + +_Mrs. Arty:_ Mary, shall I make-- + +_Tom:_ Hey! No talking 'cross table! + +_Mrs. Arty:_ Um--let--me--see. + +_Tom:_ Bid up, bid up! Bid a little seven on hearts? + +_Mrs. Arty:_ Just for that I _will_ bid seven on hearts, smarty! + +_Tom:_ Oh, how we will squat you!... What you bidding, Wrenn? + +Behind Mr. Wrenn, Nelly Croubel whispered to him: "Bid seven on +no suit. You've got the joker." Her delicate forefinger, its +nail shining, was pointing at a curious card in his hand. + +"Seven nosut," he mumbled. + +"Eight hearts," snapped Miss Proudfoot. + +Nelly drew up a chair behind Mr. Wrenn's. He listened to her +soft explanations with the desperate respect and affection which +a green subaltern would give to a general in battle. + +Tom and he won the hand. He glanced back at Nelly with awe, +then clutched his new hand, fearfully, dizzily, staring at it as +though it might conceal one of those malevolent deceivers of +which Nelly had just warned him--a left bower. + +"Good! Spades--see," said Nelly. + +Fifteen minutes later Mr. Wrenn felt that Tom was hoping he +would lead a club. He played one, and the whole table said: +"That's right. Fine!" + +On his shoulder he felt a light tap, and he blushed like a +sunset as he peeped back at Nelly. + + +Mr. Wrenn, the society light, was Our Mr. Wrenn of the Souvenir +Company all this time. Indeed, at present he intended to keep +on taking The Job seriously until that most mistily distant time, +which we all await, "when something turns up." His fondling of +the Southern merchants was showing such results that he had grown +from an interest in whatever papers were on his desk to a belief +in the divine necessity of The Job as a whole. Not now, as of old, +did he keep the personal letters in his desk tied up, ready for a +sudden departure for Vienna or Kamchatka. Also, he wished to earn +much more money for his new career of luxury. Mr. Guilfogle had +assured him that there might be chances ahead--business had been +prospering, two new road salesmen and a city-trade man had been +added to the staff, and whereas the firm had formerly been jobbers +only, buying their novelties from manufacturers, now they were +having printed for them their own Lotsa-Snap Cardboard Office +Mottoes, which were making a big hit with the trade. + +Through his friend Rabin, the salesman, Mr. Wrenn got better +acquainted with two great men--Mr. L. J. Glover, the +purchasing agent of the Souvenir Company, and John Hensen, the +newly engaged head of motto manufacturing. He "wanted to get +onto all the different lines of the business so's he could step +right in anywhere"; and from these men he learned the valuable +secrets of business wherewith the marts of trade build up +prosperity for all of us: how to seat a selling agent facing the +light, so you can see his face better than he can see yours. +How much ahead of time to telephone the motto-printer that +"we've simply got to have proof this afternoon; what's the matter +with you, down there? Don't you want our business any more?" He +also learned something of the various kinds of cardboard and +ink-well glass, though these, of course, were merely matters of +knowledge, not of brilliant business tactics, and far less +important than what Tom Poppins and Rabin called "handing out a +snappy line of talk." + +"Say, you're getting quite chummy lately--reg'lar society +leader," Rabin informed him. + +Mr. Wrenn's answer was in itself a proof of the soundness of +Rabin's observation: + +"Sure--I'm going to borrow some money from you fellows. Got to +make an impression, see?" + +A few hours after this commendation came Istra's second letter: + + +Mouse dear, I'm so glad to hear about the simpatico boarding- +house. Yes indeed I would like to hear about the people in it. +And you are reading history? That's good. I'm getting sick of +Paris and some day I'm going to stop an absinthe on the +boulevard and slap its face to show I'm a sturdy moving-picture +Western Amurrican and then leap to saddle and pursue the bandit. +I'm working like the devil but what's the use. That is I mean +unless one is doing the job well, as I'm glad you are. My Dear, +keep it up. You know I want you to be _real_ whatever you are. +I didn't mean to preach but you know I hate people who aren't +real--that's why I haven't much of a flair for myself. + _Au recrire_, + I. N. + + +After he had read her letter for the third time he was horribly +shocked and regarded himself as a traitor, because he found that +he was only pretending to be enjoyably excited over it.... It +seemed so detached from himself. "Flair"--"_au recrire_." +Now, what did those mean? And Istra was always so discontented. +"What 'd she do if she had to be on the job like Nelly?... Oh, +Istra _is_ wonderful. But--gee!--I dunno--" + +And when he who has valorously loved says "But--gee!--I +dunno--" love flees in panic. + +He walked home thoughtfully. + +After dinner he said abruptly to Nelly, "I had a letter from +Paris to-day." + +"Honestly? Who is she?" + +"G-g-g-g--" + +"Oh, it's always a she." + +"Why--uh--it _is_ from a girl. I started to tell you about +her one day. She's an artist, and once we took a long tramp in +the country. I met her--she was staying at the same place as I +was in London. But--oh, gee! I dunno; she's so blame literary. +She _is_ a _fine_ person--Do you think you'd like a girl like that?" + +"Maybe I would." + +"If she was a man?" + +"Oh, yes-s! Artists are so romantic." + +"But they ain't on the job more 'n half the time," he said, jealously. + +"Yes, that's _so_." + +His hand stole secretly, craftily skirting a cushion, to touch +hers--which she withdrew, laughing: + +"Hump-a! You go hold your artist's hand!" + +"Oh, Miss Nelly! When I _told_ you about her _myself!_" + +"Oh yes, of course." + +She was contrite, and they played Five Hundred animatedly all evening. + + + + + + +CHAPTER XVI + +HE BECOMES MILDLY RELIGIOUS AND HIGHLY LITERARY + + + + + +The hero of the one-act play at Hammerstein's Victoria +vaudeville theater on that December evening was, it appeared, a +wealthy young mine-owner in disguise. He was working for the +"fake mine promoter" because he loved the promoter's daughter +with a love that passed all understanding except that of the +girls in the gallery. When the postal authorities were about to +arrest the promoter our young hero saved him by giving him a +real mine, and the ensuing kiss of the daughter ended the +suspense in which Mr. Wrenn and Nelly, Mrs. Arty and Tom had +watched the play from the sixth row of the balcony. + +Sighing happily, Nelly cried to the group: "Wasn't that grand? +I got so excited! Wasn't that young miner a dear?" + +"Awfully nice," said Mr. Wrenn. "And, gee! wasn't that great, +that office scene--with that safe and the rest of the +stuff--just like you was in a real office. But, say, they +wouldn't have a copying-press in an office like that; those fake +mine promoters send out such swell letters; they'd use carbon +copies and not muss the letters all up." + +"By gosh, that's right!" and Tom nodded his chin toward his +right shoulder in approval. Nelly cried, "That's so; they +would"; while Mrs. Arty, not knowing what a copying-press was, +appeared highly commendatory, and said nothing at all. + +During the moving pictures that followed, Mr. Wrenn felt +proudly that he was taken seriously, though he had known +them but little over a month. He followed up his conversational +advantage by leading the chorus in wondering, "which one of them +two actors the heroine was married to?" and "how much a week +they get for acting in that thing?" It was Tom who invited them +to Miggleton's for coffee and fried oysters. Mr. Wrenn was +silent for a while. But as they were stamping through the +rivulets of wheel-tracks that crisscrossed on a slushy +street-crossing Mr. Wrenn regained his advantage by crying, +"Say, don't you think that play 'd have been better if the +promoter 'd had an awful grouch on the young miner and 'd had to +crawfish when the miner saved him?" + +"Why, yes; it would!" Nelly glowed at him. + +"Wouldn't wonder if it would," agreed Tom, kicking the December +slush off his feet and patting Mr. Wrenn's back. + +"Well, look here," said Mr. Wrenn, as they left Broadway, with +its crowds betokening the approach of Christmas, and stamped to +the quieter side of Forty-second, "why wouldn't this make a +slick play: say there's an awfully rich old guy; say he's a +railway president or something, d' you see? Well, he's got a +secretary there in the office--on the stage, see? The scene is +his office. Well, this guy's--the rich old guy's--daughter +comes in and says she's married to a poor man and she won't tell +his name, but she wants some money from her dad. You see, her +dad's been planning for her to marry a marquise or some kind of +a lord, and he's sore as can be, and he won't listen to her, and +he just cusses her out something fierce, see? Course he doesn't +really cuss, but he's awful sore; and she tells him didn't he +marry her mother when he was a poor young man; but he won't +listen. Then the secretary butts in--my idea is he's been kind +of keeping in the background, see--and _he's_ the daughter's +husband all the while, see? and he tells the old codger how +he's got some of his--some of the old fellow's--papers that give +it away how he done something that was crooked--some kind of +deal--rebates and stuff, see how I mean?--and the secretary's +going to spring this stuff on the newspapers if the old man +don't come through and forgive them; so of course the president +has to forgive them, see?" + +"You mean the secretary was the daughter's husband all along, +and he heard what the president said right there?" Nelly panted, +stopping outside Miggleton's, in the light from the +oyster-filled window. + +"Yes; and he heard it all." + +"Why, I think that's just a _fine_ idea," declared Nelly, as they +entered the restaurant. Though her little manner of dignity and +even restraint was evident as ever, she seemed keenly joyous +over his genius. + +"Say, that's a corking idea for a play, Wrenn," exclaimed Tom, +at their table, gallantly removing the ladies' wraps. + +"It surely is," agreed Mrs. Arty. + +"Why don't you write it?" asked Nelly. + +"Aw--I couldn't write it!" + +"Why, sure you could, Bill," insisted Tom. "Straight; you +ought to write it. (Hey, waiter! Four fries and coffee!) +You ought to write it. Why, it's a wonder; it 'd make a dev-- +'Scuse me, ladies. It'd make a howling hit. You might make a +lot of money out of it." + +The renewed warmth of their wet feet on the red-tile floor, the +scent of fried oysters, the din of "Any Little Girl" on the +piano, these added color to this moment of Mr. Wrenn's great +resolve. The four stared at one another excitedly. Mr. Wrenn's +eyelids fluttered. Tom brought his hand down on the table with +a soft flat "plob" and declared: "Say, there might be a lot +of money in it. Why, I've heard that Harry Smith--writes the +words for these musical comedies--makes a _mint_ of money." + +"Mr. Poppins ought to help you in it--he's seen such a lot of +plays," Mrs. Arty anxiously advised. + +"That's a good idea," said Mr. Wrenn. It had, apparently, been +ordained that he was to write it. They were now settling +important details. So when Nelly cried, "I think it's just a +fine idea; I knew you had lots of imagination," Tom interrupted +her with: + +"No; you write it, Bill. I'll help you all I can, of course.... +Tell you what you ought to do: get hold of Teddem--he's had a +lot of stage experience; he'd help you about seeing the managers. +That 'd be the hard part--you can write it, all right, but you'd +have to get next to the guys on the inside, and Teddem--Say, +you cer_tain_ly ought to write this thing, Bill. Might make a lot +of money." + +"Oh, a lot!" breathed Nelly. + +"Heard about a fellow," continued Tom--" fellow named Gene +Wolf, I think it was--that was so broke he was sleeping in +Bryant Park, and he made a _hundred thousand dollars_ on his +first play--or, no; tell you how it was: he sold it outright for +ten thousand--something like that, anyway. I got that right +from a fellow that's met him." + +"Still, an author's got to go to college and stuff like that." +Mr. Wrenn spoke as though he would be pleased to have the +objection overruled at once, which it was with a universal: + +"Oh, rats!" + +Crunching oysters in a brown jacket of flour, whose every lump +was a crisp delight, hearing his genius lauded and himself +called Bill thrice in a quarter-hour, Mr. Wrenn was beatified. +He asked the waiter for some paper, and while the four hotly +discussed things which "it would be slick to have the +president's daughter do" he drew up a list of characters on a +sheet of paper he still keeps. It is headed, "Miggleton's +Forty-second Street Branch." At the bottom appear numerous +scribblings of the name Nelly. + + + +{the full page is covered with doodling as well} + + + +"I think I'll call the heroine `Nelly,'" he mused. + +Nelly Croubel blushed. Mrs. Arty and Tom glanced at each other. +Mr. Wrenn realized that he had, even at this moment of social +triumph, "made a break." + +He said, hastily; "I always liked that name. I--I had an aunt +named that!" + +"Oh--" started Nelly. + +"She was fine to me when I was a kid, "Mr. Wrenn added, trying +to remember whether it was right to lie when in such need. + +"Oh, it's a horrid name," declared Nelly. "Why don't you call +her something nice, like Hazel--or--oh--Dolores." + +"Nope; Nelly's an elegant name--an _elegant_ name." + +He walked with Nelly behind the others, along Forty-second +Street. To the outsider's eye he was a small respectable clerk, +slightly stooped, with a polite mustache and the dignity that +comes from knowing well a narrow world; wearing an overcoat too +light for winter; too busily edging out of the way of people and +guiding the nice girl beside him into clear spaces by +diffidently touching her elbow, too pettily busy to cast a +glance out of the crowd and spy the passing poet or king, or the +iron night sky. He was as undistinguishable a bit of the +evening street life as any of the file of street-cars slashing +through the wet snow. Yet, he was the chivalrous squire to the +greatest lady of all his realm; he was a society author, and a +man of great prospective wealth and power over mankind! + +"Say, we'll have the grandest dinner you ever saw if I get away +with the play," he was saying. "Will you come, Miss Nelly?" + +"Indeed I will! Oh, you sha'n't leave me out! Wasn't I there when--" + +"Indeed you were! Oh, we'll have a reg'lar feast at the +Astor--artichokes and truffles and all sorts of stuff.... +Would--would you like it if I sold the play?" + +"_Course_ I would, silly!" + +"I'd buy the business and make Rabin manager--the Souvenir Company. + +So he came to relate all those intimacies of The Job; and he was +overwhelmed at the ease with which she "got onto old Goglefogle." + +His preparations for writing the play were elaborate. + +He paced Tom's room till twelve-thirty, consulting as to whether +he had to plan the stage-setting; smoking cigarettes in +attitudes on chair arms. Next morning in the office he made +numerous plans of the setting on waste half-sheets of paper. +At noon he was telephoning at Tom regarding the question of +whether there ought to be one desk or two on the stage. + +He skipped the evening meal at Mrs. Arty's, dining with literary +pensiveness at the Armenian, for he had subtle problems to +meditate. He bought a dollar fountain-pen, which had large +gold-like bands and a rather scratchy pen-point, and a box of +fairly large sheets of paper. Pressing his literary impedimenta +tenderly under his arm, he attended four moving-picture and +vaudeville theaters. By eleven he had seen three more one-act +plays and a dramatic playlet. + +He slipped by the parlor door at Mrs. Arty's. + +His room was quiet. The lamplight on the delicately green walls +was like that of a regular author's den, he was quite sure. He +happily tested the fountain-pen by writing the names Nelly and +William Wrenn on a bit of wrapping-paper (which he guiltily +burned in an ash-tray); washed his face with water which he let +run for a minute to cool; sat down before his table with a grunt +of content; went back and washed his hands; fiercely threw off +the bourgeois encumbrances of coat and collar; sat down again; +got up to straighten a picture; picked up his pen; laid it down, +and glowed as he thought of Nelly, slumbering there, near at +hand, her exquisite cheek nestling silkenly against her arm, +perhaps, and her white dreams-- + +Suddenly he roared at himself, "Get on the job there, will yuh?" +He picked up the pen and wrote: + + THE MILLIONAIRE'S DAUGHTER + + A ONE ACT DRAMATIC PLAYLET + by + + WILLIAM WRENN + + CHARACTERS + +_John Warrington_, a railway president; quite rich. +_Nelty Warrington_, Mr. Warrington's daughter. +_Reginald Thorne_, his secretary. + +He was jubilant. His pen whined at top speed, scattering a +shower of tiny drops of ink. + + +_Stage Scene: An office. Very expensive. Mr. Warrington and Mr. +Thorne are sitting there. Miss Warrington comes in. She says:_ + + +He stopped. He thought. He held his head. He went over to the +stationary bowl and soaked his hair with water. He lay on the +bed and kicked his heels, slowly and gravely smoothing his +mustache. Fifty minutes later he gave a portentous groan and +went to bed. + +He hadn't been able to think of what Miss Warrington says beyond +"I have come to tell you that I am married, papa," and that +didn't sound just right; not for a first line it didn't, anyway. + +At dinner next night--Saturday--Tom was rather inclined to make +references to "our author," and to remark: "Well, I know where +somebody was last night, but of course I won't tell. Say, them +authors are a wild lot." + +Mr. Wrenn, who had permitted the teasing of even Tim, the +hatter, "wasn't going to stand for no kidding from nobody--not +when Nelly was there," and he called for a glass of water with +the air of a Harvard assistant professor forced to eat in a +lunch-wagon and slapped on the back by the cook. + +Nelly soothed him. "The play _is_ going well, _isn't_ it?" + +When he had, with a detached grandeur of which he was +immediately ashamed, vouchsafed that he was already "getting +right down to brass tacks on it," that he had already +investigated four more plays and begun the actual writing, +every one looked awed and asked him assorted questions. + +At nine-thirty that evening he combed and tightly brushed his +hair, which he had been pawing angrily for an hour and a half, +went down the hall to Nelly's hall bedroom, and knocked with: +"It's Mr. Wrenn. May I ask you something about the play?" + +"Just a moment," he heard her say. + +He waited, panting softly, his lips apart. This was to be the +first time he had ever seen Nelly's room. She opened the door +part way, smiling shyly, timidly, holding her pale-blue +dressing-gown close. The pale blueness was a modestly brilliant +spot against the whiteness of the room--white bureau, hung with +dance programs and a yellow Upton's Grove High School banner, +white tiny rocker, pale-yellow matting, white-and-silver +wall-paper, and a glimpse of a white soft bed. + +He was dizzy with the exaltation of that purity, but he got +himself to say: + +"I'm kind of stuck on the first part of the play, Miss Nelly. +Please tell me how you think the heroine would speak to her dad. +Would she call him `papa' or `sir,' do you think?" + +"Why--let me see--" + +"They're such awful high society--" + +"Yes, that's so. Why, I should think she'd say `sir.' Maybe oh, +what was it I heard in a play at the Academy of Music? +`Father, I have come back to you!'" + +"Sa-a-ay, that's a fine line! That'll get the crowd going right +from the first.... I _told_ you you'd help me a lot." + +"I'm awfully glad if I _have_ helped you," she said, earnestly. +Good night--and good, "awfully glad, but luck with the play. +Good night." + +"Good night. Thank you a lot, Miss Nelly. Church in the +morning, remember! Good night." + +"Good night." + +As it is well known that all playwrights labor with toy theaters +before them for working models, Mr. Wrenn ran to earth a fine +unbroken pasteboard box in which a ninety-eight-cent alarm-clock +had recently arrived. He went out for some glue and three small +corks. Setting up his box stage, he glued a pill-box and a +match-box on the floor--the side of the box it had always been +till now--and there he had the mahogany desks. He thrust three +matches into the corks, and behold three graceful +actors--graceful for corks, at least. There was fascination in +having them enter, through holes punched in the back of the box, +frisk up to their desks and deliver magic emotional speeches +that would cause any audience to weep; speeches regarding which +he knew everything but the words; a detail of which he was still +quite ignorant after half an hour of playing with his marionettes. + +Before he went despairingly to bed that Saturday night he had +added to his manuscript: + + +_Mr. Thorne_ says: Here are the papers, sir. As a great railway +president you should-- + + +The rest of that was to be filled in later. How the dickens +could he let the public know how truly great his president was? + +(_Daughter, Miss Nelly, comes in._) + +_Miss Nelly:_ Father, I have come back to you, sir. + +_Mr. Warrington:_ My Daughter! + +_Nelly:_ Father, I have something to tell you; something-- + + +Breakfast at Mrs. Arty's was always an inspiration. In contrast +to the lonely dingy meal at the Hustler Dairy Lunch of his Zapp +days, he sat next to a trimly shirtwaisted Nelly, fresh and +enthusiastic after nine hours' sleep. So much for ordinary +days. But Sunday morning--that was paradise! The oil-stove +glowed and purred like a large tin pussy cat; it toasted their +legs into dreamy comfort, while they methodically stuffed +themselves with toast and waffles and coffee. Nelly and he +always felt gently superior to Tom Poppins, who would be +a-sleeping late, as they talked of the joy of not having to go +to the office, of approaching Christmas, and of the superiority +of Upton's Grove and Parthenon. + +This morning was to be Mr. Wrenn's first attendance at church +with Nelly. The previous time they had planned to go, Mr. Wrenn +had spent Sunday morning in unreligious fervor at the Chelsea +Dental Parlors with a young man in a white jacket instead of at +church with Nelly. + +This was also the first time that he had attended a church +service in nine years, except for mass at St. Patrick's, which +he regarded not as church, but as beauty. He felt tremendously +reformed, set upon new paths of virtue and achievement. He +thought slightingly of those lonely bachelors, Morton and +Mittyford, Ph. D. They just didn't know what it meant to a +fellow to be going to church with a girl like Miss Nelly, he +reflected, as he re brushed his hair after breakfast. + +He walked proudly beside her, and made much of the gentility of +entering the church, as one of the well-to-do and intensely +bathed congregation. He even bowed to an almost painfully +washed and brushed young usher with gold-rimmed eye-glasses. +He thought scornfully of his salad days, when he had bowed to +the Brass-button Man at the Nickelorion. + +The church interior was as comfortable as Sunday-morning toast +and marmalade--half a block of red carpet in the aisles; shiny +solid-oak pews, gorgeous stained-glass windows, and a general +polite creaking of ladies' best stays and gentlemen's stiff +shirt-bosoms, and an odor of the best cologne and moth-balls. + +It lacked but six days till Christmas. Mr. Wrenn's heart was a +little garden, and his eyes were moist, and he peeped tenderly +at Nelly as he saw the holly and ivy and the frosted Christmas +mottoes, "Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men," and the rest, that +brightened the spaces between windows. + +Christmas--happy homes--laughter.... Since, as a boy, he had +attended the Christmas festivities of the Old Church +Sunday-school at Parthenon, and got highly colored candy in a +net bag, his holidays had been celebrated by buying himself plum +pudding at lonely Christmas dinners at large cheap restaurants, +where there was no one to wish him "Merry Christmas" except +his waiter, whom he would quite probably never see again, nor +ever wish to see. + +But this Christmas--he surprised himself and Nelly suddenly by +hotly thrusting out his hand and touching her sleeve with the +searching finger-tips of a child comforted from night fears. + +During the sermon he had an idea. What was it Nelly had told +him about "Peter Pan"? Oh yes; somebody in it had said "Do you +believe in fairies?" _Say_, why wouldn't it be great to have the +millionaire's daughter say to her father, "Do you believe in love?" + +"Gee, _I_ believe in love!" he yearned to himself, as he felt +Nelly's arm unconsciously touch his. + +Tom Poppins had Horatio Hood Teddem in that afternoon for a hot +toddy. Horatio looked very boyish, very confiding, and borrowed +five dollars from Mr. Wrenn almost painlessly, so absorbed was +Mr. Wrenn in learning from Horatio how to sell a play. To know +the address of the firm of Wendelbaum & Schirtz, play-brokers, +located in a Broadway theater building, seemed next door to +knowing a Broadway manager. + +When Horatio had gone Tom presented an idea which he had +ponderously conceived during his Sunday noon-hour at the +cigar-store. + +"Why not have three of us--say me and you and Mrs. Arty--talk +the play, just like we was acting it?" + +He enthusiastically forced the plan on Mr. Wrenn. He pounded +down-stairs and brought up Mrs. Arty. He dashed about the room, +shouting directions. He dragged out his bureau for the +railroad-president's desk, and a table for the secretary, and, +after some consideration and much rubbing of his chin, with two +slams and a bang he converted his hard green Morris-chair into +an office safe. + +The play was on. Mr. T. Poppins, in the role of the president, +entered, with a stern high expression on his face, threw a "Good +morning, Thorne," at Wrenn, his secretary, and peeled off his gloves. +(Mr. Wrenn noted the gloves; they were a Touch.) + +Mr. Wrenn approached diffidently, his face expressionless, lest +Mrs. Arty laugh at him. "Here-- + +"Say, what do you think would be a good way for the secretary to +tell the crowd that the other guy is the president? Say, how +about this: `The vice-president of the railway would like to +have you sign these, sir, as president'?" + +"That's fine!" exclaimed Mrs. Arty, whose satin dress was +carefully spread over her swelling knees, as she sat in the oak +rocker, like a cheerful bronze monument to Sunday propriety. +"But don't you think he'd say, `when it's convenient to you, sir'?" + +"Gee, that's dandy!" + +The play was on. + +It ended at seven. Mr. Wrenn took but fifteen minutes for +Sunday supper, and wrote till one of the morning, finishing the +first draft of his manuscript. + +Revision was delightful, for it demanded many conferences with +Nelly, sitting at the parlor table, with shoulders +confidentially touching. They were the more intimate because +Tom had invited Mr. Wrenn, Nelly, and Mrs. Arty to the Grand +Christmas Eve Ball of the Cigar-Makers' Union at Melpomene Hall. +Nelly asked of Mr. Wrenn, almost as urgently as of Mrs. Arty, +whether she should wear her new white mull or her older +rose-colored China silk. + +Two days before Christmas he timidly turned over the play for +typing to a haughty public stenographer who looked like Lee +Theresa Zapp. She yawned at him when he begged her to be +careful of the manuscript. The gloriously pink-bound and +red-underlined typed manuscript of the play was mailed to +Messrs. Wendelbaum & Schirtz, play-brokers, at 6.15 P.M., +Christmas Eve. + + +The four walked down Sixth Avenue to the Cigar-Makers' Ball. +They made an Indian file through the Christmas shopping crowds, +and stopped frequently and noisily before the street-booths' +glamour of tinsel and teddy-bears. They shrieked all with one +rotund mad laughter as Tom Poppins capered over and bought for +seven cents a pink bisque doll, which he pinned to the lapel of +his plaid overcoat. They drank hot chocolate at the Olympic +Confectionery Store, pretending to each other that they were +shivering with cold. + +It was here that Nelly reached up and patted Mr. Wrenn's +pale-blue tie into better lines. In her hair was the scent +which he had come to identify as hers. Her white furs brushed +against his overcoat. + +The cigar-makers, with seven of them in full evening-dress and +two in dinner-coats, were already dancing on the waxy floor of +Melpomene Hall when they arrived. A full orchestra was pounding +and scraping itself into an hysteria of merriment on the +platform under the red stucco-fronted balcony, and at the bar +behind the balcony there was a spirit of beer and revelry by night. + +Mr. Wrenn embarrassedly passed large groups of pretty girls. +He felt very light and insecure in his new gun-metal-finish +pumps now that he had taken off his rubbers and essayed the +slippery floor. He tried desperately not to use his handkerchief +too conspicuously, though he had a cold. + +It was not till the choosing of partners for the next dance, +when Tom Poppins stood up beside Nelly, their arms swaying a +little, their feet tapping, that Mr. Wrenn quite got the fact +that he could not dance. + +He had casually said to the others, a week before, that he knew +only the square dances which, as a boy, he had learned at +parties at Parthenon. But they had reassured him: "Oh, come +on--we'll teach you how to dance at the ball--it won't be formal. +Besides, we'll give you some lessons before we go." +Playwriting and playing Five Hundred had prevented their giving +him the lessons. So he now sat terrified as a two-step began +and he saw what seemed to be thousands of glittering youths and +maidens whirling deftly in a most involved course, getting +themselves past each other in a way which he was sure he could +never imitate. The orchestra yearned over music as rich and +smooth as milk chocolate, which made him intensely lonely for +Nelly, though she was only across the room from him. + +Tom Poppins immediately introduced Nelly to a facetious cigar +salesman, who introduced her to three of the beaux in evening +clothes, while Tom led out Mrs. Arty. Mr. Wrenn, sitting in a +row of persons who were not at all interested in his sorrows, +glowered out across the hall, and wished, oh! so bitterly, to +flee home. Nelly came up, glowing, laughing, with +black-mustached and pearl-waistcoated men, and introduced him to +them, but he glanced at them disapprovingly; and always she was +carried off to dance again. + +She found and hopefully introduced to Mr. Wrenn a wallflower who +came from Yonkers and had never heard of Tom Poppins or +aeroplanes or Oxford or any other topic upon which Mr. Wrenn +uneasily tried to discourse as he watched Nelly waltz and smile +up at her partners. Presently the two sat silent. The wallflower +excused herself and went back to her mama from Yonkers. + +Mr. Wrenn sat sulking, hating his friends for having brought +him, hating the sweetness of Nelly Croubel, and saying to +himself, "Oh--_sure_--she dances with all those other men--me, +I'm only the poor fool that talks to her when she's tired and +tries to cheer her up." + +He did not answer when Tom came and told him a new story he had +just heard in the barroom. + +Once Nelly landed beside him and bubblingly insisted on his +coming out and trying to learn to dance. He brightened, but +shyly remarked, "Oh no, I don't think I'd better." Just then the +blackest-mustached and pearl-waistcoatedest of all the cigar +salesmen came begging for a dance, and she was gone, with only: +"Now get up your courage. I'm going to _make_ you dance." + +At the intermission he watched her cross the floor with the +hateful cigar salesman, slender in her tight crisp new white +mull, flourishing her fan and talking with happy rapidity. +She sat down beside him. He said nothing; he still stared out +across the glassy floor. She peeped at him curiously several +times, and made a low tapping with her fan on the side of her chair. + +She sighed a little. Cautiously, but very casually, she said, +"Aren't you going to take me out for some refreshments, Mr. Wrenn?" + +"Oh sure--I'm good enough to buy refreshments for her!" he said +to himself. + +Poor Mr. Wrenn; he had not gone to enough parties in Parthenon, +and he hadn't gone to any in New York. At nearly forty he was +just learning the drab sulkiness and churlishness and black +jealousy of the lover.... To her: "Why didn't you go out with +that guy with the black mustache?" He still stared straight ahead. + +She was big-eyed, a tear showing. "Why, Billy--" was all she +answered. + +He clenched his hands to keep from bursting out with all the +pitiful tears which were surging in his eyes. But he said nothing. + +"Billy, what--" + +He turned shyly around to her; his hand touched hers softly. + +"Oh, I'm a beast," he said, rapidly, low, his undertone +trembling to her ears through the laughter of a group next to +them. "I didn't mean that, but I was--I felt like such a +mutt--not being able to dance. Oh, Nelly, I'm awfully sorry. +You know I didn't mean--_Come on!_ Let's go get something to eat!" + +As they consumed ice-cream, fudge, doughnuts, and chicken +sandwiches at the refreshment counter they were very intimate, +resenting the presence of others. Tom and Mrs. Arty joined +them. Tom made Nelly light her first cigarette. Mr. Wrenn +admired the shy way in which, taking the tiniest of puffs, she +kept drawing out her cigarette with little pouts and nose +wriggles and pretended sneezes, but he felt a lofty gladness +when she threw it away after a minute, declaring that she'd +never smoke again, and that she was going to make all three of +her companions stop smoking, "now that she knew how horrid and +sneezy it was, so there!" + +With what he intended to be deep subtlety Mr. Wrenn drew her +away to the barroom, and these two children, over two glasses of +ginger-ale, looked their innocent and rustic love so plainly +that Mrs. Arty and Tom sneaked away. Nelly cut out a dance, +which she had promised to a cigar-maker, and started homeward +with Mr. Wrenn. + +"Let's not take a car--I want some fresh air after that smoky +place," she said. "But it _was_ grand.... Let's walk up +Fifth Avenue." + +"Fine.... Tired, Nelly?" + +"A little." + +He thought her voice somewhat chilly. + +"Nelly--I'm so sorry--I didn't really have the chance to tell +you in there how sorry I was for the way I spoke to you. +Gee! it was fierce of me--but I felt--I couldn't dance, and--oh--" + +No answer. + +"And you did mind it, didn't you?" + +"Why, I didn't think you were so very nice about it--when I'd +tried so hard to have you have a good time--" + +"Oh, Nelly, I'm so sorry--" + +There was tragedy in his voice. His shoulders, which he always +tried to keep as straight as though they were in a vise when he +walked with her, were drooping. + +She touched his glove. "Oh don't, Billy; it's all right now. +I understand. Let's forget--" + +"Oh, you're too good to me!" + +Silence. + +As they crossed Twenty-third on Fifth Avenue she took his arm. +He squeezed her hand. Suddenly the world was all young and +beautiful and wonderful. It was the first time in his life that +he had ever walked thus, with the arm of a girl for whom he +cared cuddled in his. He glanced down at her cheap white furs. +Snowflakes, tremulous on the fur, were turned into diamond dust +in the light from a street-lamp which showed as well a tiny +place where her collar had been torn and mended ever so +carefully. Then, in a millionth of a second, he who had been a +wanderer in the lonely gray regions of a detached man's heart +knew the pity of love, all its emotion, and the infinite care +for the beloved that makes a man of a rusty sales-clerk. +He lifted a face of adoration to the misty wonder of the bare +trees, whose tracery of twigs filled Madison Square; to the +Metropolitan Tower, with its vast upward stretch toward the +ruddy sky of the city's winter night. All these mysteries he +knew and sang. What he _said_ was: + +"Gee, those trees look like a reg'lar picture!... The Tower +just kind of fades away. Don't it?" + +"Yes, it is pretty," she said, doubtfully, but with a pressure +of his arm. + +Then they talked like a summer-time brook, planning that he was +to buy a Christmas bough of evergreen, which she would smuggle +to breakfast in the morning. Through their chatter persisted +the new intimacy which had been born in the pain of their +misunderstanding. + + +On January 10th the manuscript of "The Millionaire's Daughter" +was returned by play-brokers Wendelbaum & Schirtz with this letter: + + +DEAR SIR,--We regret to say that we do not find play available. +We inclose our reader's report on the same. Also inclose bill +for ten dollars for reading-fee, which kindly remit at early +convenience. + + +He stood in the hall at Mrs. Arty's just before dinner. +He reread the letter and slowly opened the reader's report, +which announced: + + +"Millionaire's Daughter." One-act vlle. Utterly impos. +Amateurish to the limit. Dialogue sounds like burlesque of +Laura Jean Libbey. Can it. + + +Nelly was coming down-stairs. He handed her the letter and +report, then tried to stick out his jaw. She read them. Her +hand slipped into his. He went quickly toward the basement and +made himself read the letter--though not the report--to the +tableful. He burned the manuscript of his play before going to +bed. The next morning he waded into The Job as he never had +before. He was gloomily certain that he would never get away +from The Job. But he thought of Nelly a hundred times a day and +hoped that sometime, some spring night of a burning moon, he +might dare the great adventure and kiss her. Istra-- +Theoretically, he remembered her as a great experience. +But what nebulous bodies these theories are! + + +That slow but absolutely accurate Five-Hundred player, Mr. +William Wrenn, known as Billy, glanced triumphantly at Miss +Proudfoot, who was his partner against Mrs. Arty and James +T. Duncan, the traveling-man, on that night of late February. +His was the last bid in the crucial hand of the rubber game. +The others waited respectfully. Confidently, he bid "Nine +on no trump." + +"Good Lord, Billl" exclaimed James T. Duncan. + +"I'll make it." + +And he did. He arose a victor. There was no uneasiness, but +rather all the social polish of Mrs. Arty's at its best, in his +manner, as he crossed to Mrs. Ebbitt's chair and asked: "How is +Mr. Ebbitt to-night? Pretty rheumatic?" Miss Proudfoot offered +him a lime tablet, and he accepted it judicially. "I believe +these tablets are just about as good as Park & Tilford's," he +said, cocking his head. "Say, Dunk, I'll match you to see who +rushes a growler of beer. Tom'll be here pretty soon--store +ought to be closed by now. We'll have some ready for him." + +"Right, Bill," agreed James T. Duncan. + +Mr. Wrenn lost. He departed, after secretively obtaining not +one, but two pitchers, in one of which he got a "pint of dark" +and in the other a surprise. He bawled upstairs to Nelly, +"Come on down, Nelly, can't you? Got a growler of ice-cream +soda for the ladies!" + +It is true that when Tom arrived and fell to conversational +blows with James T. Duncan over the merits of a Tom Collins Mr. +Wrenn was not brilliant, for the reason that he took Tom Collins +to be a man instead of the drink he really is. + +Yet, as they went up-stairs Miss Proudfoot said to Nelly: +"Mr. Wrenn is quiet, but I do think in some ways he's one of the +nicest men I've seen in the house for years. And he is so earnest. +And I think he'll make a good pinochle player, besides Five Hundred." + +"Yes," said Nelly. + +"I think he was a little shy at first.... _I_ was always +shy.... But he likes us, and I like folks that like folks." + +"_Yes!_" said Nelly. + + + + + + +CHAPTER XVII + +HE IS BLOWN BY THE WHIRLWIND + + + + + +"He was blown by the whirlwind and followed a wandering flame +through perilous seas to a happy shore."--_Quoth Francois._ + + +On an April Monday evening, when a small moon passed shyly over +the city and the streets were filled with the sound of +hurdy-gurdies and the spring cries of dancing children, Mr. +Wrenn pranced down to the basement dining-room early, for Nelly +Croubel would be down there talking to Mrs. Arty, and he gaily +wanted to make plans for a picnic to occur the coming Sunday. +He had a shy unacknowledged hope that he might kiss Nelly after +such a picnic; he even had the notion that he might some +day--well, other fellows had been married; why not? + +Miss Mary Proudfoot was mending a rent in the current +table-cloth with delicate swift motions of her silvery-skinned +hands. She informed him: "Mr. Duncan will be back from his +Southern trip in five days. We'll have to have a grand closing +progressive Five Hundred tournament." Mr. Wrenn was too much +absorbed in wondering whether Miss Proudfoot would make some of +her celebrated--and justly celebrated--minced-ham sandwiches +for the picnic to be much interested. He was not much more +interested when she said, "Mrs. Ferrard's got a letter or +something for you." + +Then, as dinner began, Mrs. Ferrard rushed in dramatically and +said, "There's a telegram for you, Mr. Wrenn!" + +Was it death? Whose death? The table panted, Mr. Wrenn with +them.... That's what a telegram meant to them. + +Their eyes were like a circle of charging bayonets as he opened +and read the message--a ship's wireless. + + +Meet me _Hesperida._--ISTRA. + + +"It's just--a--a business message," he managed to say, and +splashed his soup. This was not the place to take the feelings +out of his thumping heart and examine them. + +Dinner was begun. Picnics were conversationally considered in +all their more important phases--historical, dietetical, and +social. Mr. Wrenn talked much and a little wildly. After +dinner he galloped out to buy a paper. The S.S. _Hesperiida_ was +due at ten next morning. + +It was an evening of frightened confusion. He tottered along +Lexington Avenue on a furtive walk. He knew only that he was +very fond of Nelly, yet pantingly eager to see Istra. He damned +himself--"damned" is literal--every other minute for a cad, a +double-faced traitor, and all the other horrifying things a man +is likely to declare himself to be for making the discovery that +two women may be different and yet equally likable. And every +other minute he reveled in an adventurous gladness that he was +going to see Istra--actually, incredibly going to see her, just +the next day! He returned to find Nelly sitting on the steps of +Mrs. Arty's. + +"Hello." + +"Hello." + +Both good sound observations, and all they could say for a time, +while Mr. Wrenn examined the under side of the iron steps rail +minutely. + +"Billy--was it something serious, the telegram?" + +"No, it was--Miss Nash, the artist I told you about, asked me +to meet her at the boat. I suppose she wants me to help her +with her baggage and the customs and all them things. She's +just coming from Paris." + +"Oh yes, I see." + +So lacking in jealousy was Nelly that Mr. Wrenn was +disappointed, though he didn't know why. It always hurts to +have one's thunderous tragedies turn out realistic dialogues. + +"I wonder if you would like to meet her. She's awful well +educated, but I dunno--maybe she'd strike you as kind of +snobbish. But she dresses I don't think I ever seen anybody so +elegant. In dressing, I mean. Course"--hastily--"she's got +money, and so she can afford to. But she's--oh, awful nice, +some ways. I hope you like--I hope she won't--" + +"Oh, I sha'n't mind if she's a snob. Of course a lady gets used +to that, working in a department store," she said, chillily; +then repented swiftly and begged: "Oh, I _didn't_ mean to be +snippy, Billy. Forgive me! I'm sure Miss Nash will be real +nice. Does she live here in New York?" + +"No--in California.... I don't know how long she's going to +stay here." + +"Well--well--hum-m-m. I'm getting _so_ sleepy. I guess I'd +better go up to bed. Good night." + + +Uneasy because he was away from the office, displeased because +he had to leave his beloved letters to the Southern trade, angry +because he had had difficulty in getting a pass to the wharf, +and furious, finally, because he hadn't slept, Mr. Wrenn nursed +all these cumulative emotions attentively and waited for the +coming of the _Hesperida_. He was wondering if he'd want to see +Istra at all. He couldn't remember just how she looked. Would +he like her? + +The great steamer swung side-to and was coaxed alongside the +wharf. Peering out between rows of crowding shoulders, Mr. +Wrenn coldly inspected the passengers lining the decks. Istra +was not in sight. Then he knew that he was wildly agitated +about her. Suppose something had happened to her! + +The smallish man who had been edging into the crowd so politely +suddenly dashed to the group forming at the gang-plank and +pushed his way rudely into the front rank. His elbow dug into +the proper waistcoat of a proper plump old gentleman, but he +didn't know it. He stood grasping the rope rail of the plank, +gazing goggle-eyed while the plank was lifted to the steamer's +deck and the long line of smiling and waving passengers +disembarked. Then he saw her--tall, graceful, nonchalant, +uninterested, in a smart check suit with a lively hat of black +straw, carrying a new Gladstone bag. + +He stared at her. "Gee!" he gasped. "I'm crazy about her. +I am, all right." + +She saw him, and their smiles of welcome made them one. +She came from the plank and hastily kissed him. + +"Really here!" she laughed. + +"Well, well, well, well! I'm so glad to see you!" + +"Glad to see you, Mouse dear." + +"Have good tr--" + +"Don't ask me about it! There was a married man _sans_ wife who +persecuted me all the way over. I'm glad _you_ aren't going to +fall in love with me." + +"Why--uh--" + +"Let's hustle over and get through the customs as soon as we +can. Where's N? Oh, how clever of it, it's right by M. +There's one of my trunks already. How are you, Mouse dear?" + +But she didn't seem really to care so very much, and the old +bewilderment she always caused was over him. + +"It is good to get back after all, and--Mouse dear, I know you +won't mind finding me a place to live the next few days, will +you?" She quite took it for granted. "We'll find a place this +morning, _n'est-ce pas?_ Not too expensive. I've got just about +enough to get back to California." + +Man fashion, he saw with acute clearness the pile of work on his +desk, and, man fashion, responded, "No; be glad tuh." + +"How about the place where you're living? You spoke about its +being so clean and all." + +The thought of Nelly and Istra together frightened him. + +"Why, I don't know as you'd like it so very much." + +"Oh, it'll be all right for a few days, anyway. Is there a +room vacant." + +He was sulky about it. He saw much trouble ahead. + +"Why, yes, I suppose there is." + +"Mouse dear!" Istra plumped down on a trunk in the confused +billows of incoming baggage, customs officials, and indignant +passengers that surged about them on the rough floor of the vast +dock-house. She stared up at him with real sorrow in her fine eyes. + +"Why, Mouse! I thought you'd be glad to see me. I've never +rowed with you, have I? I've tried not to be temperamental with +you. That's why I wired you, when there are others I've known +for years." + +"Oh, I didn't mean to seem grouchy; I didn't! I just wondered if +you'd like the house." + +He could have knelt in repentance before his goddess, what time +she was but a lonely girl in the clatter of New York. He went on: + +"And we've got kind of separated, and I didn't know--But I guess +I'll always--oh--kind of worship you." + +"It's all right, Mouse. It's--Here's the customs men." + +Now Istra Nash knew perfectly that the customs persons were not +ready to examine her baggage as yet. But the discussion was +ended, and they seemed to understand each other. + +"Gee, there's a lot of rich Jew ladies coming back this time!" +said he. + +"Yes. They had diamonds three times a day," she assented. + +"Gee, this is a big place!" + +"Yes." So did they testify to fixity of friendship till they +reached the house and Istra was welcomed to "that Teddem's" room +as a new guest. + + +Dinner began with the ceremony due Mrs. Arty. There was no lack +of the sacred old jokes. Tom Poppins did not fail to bellow +"Bring on the dish-water," nor Miss Mary Proudfoot to cheep +demurely "Don't y' knaow" in a tone which would have been +recognized as fascinatingly English anywhere on the American +stage. Then the talk stopped dead as Istra Nash stood agaze in +the doorway--pale and intolerant, her red hair twisted high on +her head, tall and slim and uncorseted in a gray tight-fitting +gown. Every head turned as on a pivot, first to Istra, then to +Mr. Wrenn. He blushed and bowed as if he had been called on for +a speech, stumblingly arose, and said: "Uh--uh--uh--you met +Mrs. Ferrard, didn't you, Istra? She'll introduce you to the rest." + +He sat down, wondering why the deuce he'd stood up, and +unhappily realized that Nelly was examining Istra and himself +with cool hostility. In a flurry he glowered at Istra as she +nonchalantly sat down opposite him, beside Mrs. Arty, and +incuriously unfolded her napkin. He thought that in her +cheerful face there was an expression of devilish amusement. + +He blushed. He furiously buttered his bread as Mrs. Arty +remarked to the assemblage: + +"Ladies and gentlemen, I want you all to meet Miss Istra Nash. +Miss Nash--you've met Mr. Wrenn; Miss Nelly Croubel, our baby; +Tom Poppins, the great Five-Hundred player; Mrs. Ebbitt, Mr. +Ebbitt, Miss Proudfoot." + +Istra Nash lifted her bowed eyes with what seemed shyness, +hesitated, said "Thank you" in a clear voice with a precise +pronunciation, and returned to her soup, as though her pleasant +communion with it had been unpleasantly interrupted. + +The others began talking and eating very fast and rather noisily. +Miss Mary Proudfoot's thin voice pierced the clamor: + +"I hear you have just come to New York, Miss Nash." + +"Yes." + +"Is this your first visit to--" + +"No." + +Miss Proudfoot rancorously took a long drink of water. + +Nelly attempted, bravely: + +"Do you like New York, Miss Nash?" + +"Yes." + +Nelly and Miss Proudfoot and Tom Poppins began discussing +shoe-stores, all at once and very rapidly, while hot and +uncomfortable Mr. Wrenn tried to think of something to say.... +Good Lord, suppose Istra "queered" him at Mrs. Arty's!... +Then he was angry at himself and all of them for not +appreciating her. How exquisite she looked, with her tired +white face! + +As the soup-plates were being removed by Annie, the maid, with +an elaborate confusion and a general passing of plates down the +line, Istra Nash peered at the maid petulantly. Mrs. Arty +frowned, then grew artificially pleasant and said: + +"Miss Nash has just come back from Paris. She's a regular +European traveler, just like Mr. Wrenn." + +Mrs. Samuel Ebbitt piped: "Mr. Ebbitt was to Europe. In 1882." + +"No 'twa'n't, Fannie; 'twas in 1881," complained Mr. Ebbitt. + +Miss Nash waited for the end of this interruption as though it +were a noise which merely had to be endured, like the Elevated. + +Twice she drew in her breath to speak, and the whole table laid +its collective knife and fork down to listen. All she said was: + +"Oh, will you pardon me if I speak of it now, Mrs. Ferrard, but +would you mind letting me have my breakfast in my room +to-morrow? About nine? Just something simple--a canteloupe +and some shirred eggs and chocolate?" + +"Oh no; why, yes, certainly, "mumbled Mrs. Arty, while the table +held its breaths and underneath them gasped: + +"Chocolate!" + +"A canteloupe!" + +"Shirred eggs!" + +"_In her room--at nine!_" + +All this was very terrible to Mr. Wrenn. He found himself in +the position of a man scheduled to address the Brewers' +Association and the W. C. T. U. at the same hour. +Valiantly he attempted: + +"Miss Nash oughta be a good person for our picnics. She's a +regular shark for outdoor tramping." + +"Oh yes, Mr. Wrenn and I tramped most all night in England one +time," said Istra, innocently. + +The eyes of the table asked Mr. Wrenn what he meant by it. +He tried to look at Nelly, but something hurt inside him. + +"Yes," he mumbled. "Quite a long walk." + +Miss Mary Proudfoot tried again: + +"is it pleasant to study in Paris? Mrs. Arty said you were an artist." + +"No." + +Then they were all silent, and the rest of the dinner Mr. Wrenn +alternately discussed Olympia Johns with Istra and picnics with +Nelly. There was an undertone of pleading in his voice which +made Nelly glance at him and even become kind. With quiet +insistence she dragged Istra into a discussion of rue de la Paix +fashions which nearly united the shattered table and won Mr. +Wrenn's palpitating thankfulness. + +After dessert Istra slowly drew a plain gold cigarette-case from +a brocade bag of silvery gray. She took out a match and a thin +Russian cigarette, which she carefully lighted. She sat smoking +in one of her best attitudes, pointed elbows on the table, +coolly contemplating a huge picture called "Hunting the Stag" +on the wall behind Mr. Wrenn. + +Mrs. Arty snapped to the servant, "Annie, bring me _my_ cigarettes." +But Mrs. Arty always was penitent when she had been nasty, +and--though Istra did not at once seem to know that the +landlady _had_ been nasty--Mrs. Arty invited her up to the parlor +for after-dinner so cordially that Istra could but grant +"Perhaps I will," and she even went so far as to say, "I think +you're all to be envied, having such a happy family." + +"Yes, that's so," reflected Mrs. Arty. + +"Yes," added Mr. Wrenn. + +And Nelly: "That's so." + +The whole table nodded gravely, "Yes, that's so." + +"I'm sure"--Istra smiled at Mrs. Arty--"that it's because a +woman is running things. Now think what cat-and-dog lives you'd +lead if Mr. Wrenn or Mr.--Popple, was it?--were ruling." + +They applauded. They felt that she had been humorous. She was +again and publicly invited up to the parlor, and she came, +though she said, rather shortly, that she didn't play Five +Hundred, but only bumblepuppy bridge, a variety of whist which +Mr. Wrenn instantly resolved to learn. She reclined ("reclined" +is perfectly accurate) on the red-leather couch, among the +pillows, and smoked two cigarettes, relapsing into "No?"'s for +conversation. + +Mr. Wrenn said to himself, almost spitefully, as she snubbed +Nelly, "Too good for us, is she?" But he couldn't keep away from +her. The realization that Istra was in the room made him forget +most of his melds at pinochle; and when Miss Proudfoot inquired +his opinion as to whether the coming picnic should be held on +Staten island or the Palisades he said, vaguely, "Yes, I guess +that would be better." + +For he was wanting to sit down beside Istra Nash, just be near her; +he _had_ to be! So he ventured over and was instantly regarding +all the rest as outsiders whom his wise comrade and himself +were studying. + +"Tell me, Mouse dear, why do you like the people here? The +peepul, I mean. They don't seem so very remarkable. Enlighten +poor Istra." + +"Well, they're awful kind. I've always lived in a house where +the folks didn't hardly know each other at all, except Mrs. +Zapp--she was the landlady--and I didn't like her very much. +But here Tom Poppins and Mrs. Arty and--the rest--they really +like folks, and they make it just like a home.... Miss Croubel +is a very nice girl. She works for Wanamacy's--she has quite a +big job there. She is assistant buyer in the--" + +He stopped in horror. He had nearly said "in the lingery +department." He changed it to "in the clothing department," and +went on, doubtfully: "Mr. Duncan is a traveling-man. He's +away on a trip." + +"Which one do you play with? So Nelly likes to--well, make +b'lieve--'magine?" + +"How did you--" + +"Oh, I watched her looking at you. I think she's a terribly +nice pink-face. And just now you're comparing her and me." + +"Gee!" he said. + +She was immensely pleased with herself. "Tell me, what do these +people think about; at least, what do you talk about?" + +"_Say!_" + +"'S-s-s-h! Not so loud, my dear." + +"Say, I know how you mean. You feel something like what I did +in England. You can't get next to what the folks are thinking, +and it makes you sort of lonely." + +"Well, I--" + +Just then Tom Poppins rolled jovially up to the couch. He had +carried his many and perspiring pounds over to Third Avenue +because Miss Proudfoot reflected, "I've got a regular sweet +tooth to-night." He stood before Istra and Mr. Wrenn +theatrically holding out a bag of chocolate drops in one hand +and peanut brittle in the other; and grandiloquently: + +"Which shall it be, your Highness? Nobody loves a fat man, so +he has to buy candy so's they'll let him stick around. Le's +see; you take chocolates, Bill. Name your drink, Miss Nash." +She looked up at him, gravely and politely--too gravely and +politely. She didn't seem to consider him a nice person. + +"Neither, thank you," sharply, as he still stood there. +He moved away, hurt, bewildered. + +Istra was going on, "I haven't been here long enough to be +lonely yet, but in any case--" when Mr. Wrenn interrupted: + +"You've hurt Tom's feelings by not taking any candy; and, gee, +he's awful kind!" + +"Have I?" mockingly. + +"Yes, you _have_. And there ain't any too many kind people in +this world." + +"Oh yes, of course you' re right. I _am_ sorry, really I am." + +She dived after Tom's retreat and cheerfully addressed him: + +"Oh, I do want some of those chocolates. Will you let me change +my mind? Please do." + +"Yes _ma'am_, you sure can!" said broad Tom, all one pleased +chuckle, poking out the two bags. + +Istra stopped beside the Five-Hundred table to smile in a lordly +way down at Mrs. Arty and say, quite humanly: + +"I'm so sorry I can't play a decent game of cards. I'm afraid +I'm too stupid to learn. You are very lucky, I think." + +Mr. Wrenn on the couch was horribly agitated.... Wasn't Istra +coming back? + +She was. She detached herself from the hubbub of invitations +to learn to play Five Hundred and wandered back to the couch, +murmuring: "Was bad Istra good? Am I forgiven? Mouse dear, +I didn't mean to be rude to your friends." + +As the bubbles rise through water in a cooking-pot, as the +surface writhes, and then, after the long wait, suddenly the +water is aboil, so was the emotion of Mr. Wrenn now that Istra, +the lordly, had actually done something he suggested. + +"Istra--" That was all he could say, but from his eyes had +gone all reserve. + +Her glance back was as frank as his--only it had more of the +mother in it; it was like a kindly pat on the head; and she was +the mother as she mused: + +"So you _have_ missed me, then?" + +"Missed you--" + +"Did you think of me after you came here? Oh, I know--I was +forgotten; poor Istra abdicates to the pretty pink-face." + +"Oh, Istra, _don't_. I--can't we just go out for a little walk +so--so we can talk?" + +"Why, we can talk here." + +"Oh, gee!--there's so many people around.... Golly! when I +came back to America--gee!--I couldn't hardly sleep nights--" + +From across the room came the boisterous, somewhat +coarse-timbred voice of Tom, speaking to Nelly: + +"Oh yes, of course you think you're the only girl that ever seen +a vodville show. _We_ ain't never seen a vodville show. Oh no!" + +Nelly and Miss Proudfoot dissolved in giggles at the wit. + +Mr. Wrenn gazed at them, detached; these were not his people, +and with startled pride he glanced at Istra's face, delicately +carven by thought, as he stumbled hotly on. + +"--just couldn't sleep nights at all.... Then I got on the job...." + +"Let's see, you're still with that same company?" + +"Yes. Souvenir and Art Novelty Company. And I got awfully on +the job there, and so I managed to forget for a little while +and--" + +"So you really do like me even after I was so beastly to you in +England." + +"Oh, that wasn't nothing.... But I was always thinking of you, +even when I was on the job--" + +"It's gratifying to have some one continue taking me +seriously.... Really, dear, I do appreciate it. But you +mustn't--you mustn't--" + +"Oh, gee! I just can't get over it--you here by me--ain't it +curious!... "Then he persisted with the tale of his longing, +which she had so carefully interrupted: "The people here are +_awful_ kind and good, and you can bank on 'em. But--oh--" + + +From across the room, Tom's pretended jeers, lighted up with Miss +Proudfoot's giggles, as paper lanterns illumine Coney Island. +From Tom: + +"Yes, you're a hot dancer, all right. I suppose you can do the +Boston and all them swell dances. Wah-h-h-h-h!" + + +"--but Istra, oh, gee! you're like poetry--like all them +things a feller can't get but he tries to when he reads +Shakespeare and all those poets." + +"Oh, dear boy, you mustn't! We will be good friends. I do +appreciate having some one care whether I'm alive or not. +But I thought it was all understood that we weren't to take +playing together seriously; that it was to be merely +playing--nothing more." + +"But, anyway, you will let me play with you here in New York as +much as I can? Oh, come on, _let's_ go for a walk--let's--let's +go to a show." + +"I'm awf'ly sorry, but I promised--a man's going to call for me, +and we're going to a stupid studio party on Bryant Park. Bore, +isn't it, the day of landing? And poor Istra dreadfully landsick." + +"Oh, then," hopefully, "don't go. Let's--" + +"I'm sorry, Mouse dear, but I'm afraid I can't break the +date.... Fact, I must go up and primp now--" + +"Don't you care a bit?" he said, sulkily. + +"Why, yes, of course. But you wouldn't have Istra disappoint a +nice Johnny after he's bought him a cunnin' new weskit, would +you?... Good night, dear." She smiled--the mother smile--and +was gone with a lively good night to the room in general. + + +Nelly went up to bed early. She was tired, she said. He had no +chance for a word with her. He sat on the steps outside alone +a long time. Sometimes he yearned for a sight of Istra's ivory +face. Sometimes, with a fierce compassion that longed to take +the burden from her, he pictured Nelly working all day in the +rushing department store on which the fetid city summer would +soon descend. + + +They did have their walk the next night, Istra and Mr. Wrenn, +but Istra kept the talk to laughing burlesques of their tramp in +England. Somehow--he couldn't tell exactly why--he couldn't +seem to get in all the remarks he had inside him about how much +he had missed her. + +Wednesday--Thursday--Friday; he saw her only at one dinner, or +on the stairs, departing volubly with clever-looking men in +evening clothes to taxis waiting before the house. + +Nelly was very pleasant; just that--pleasant. She pleasantly +sat as his partner at Five Hundred, and pleasantly declined to +go to the moving pictures with him. She was getting more and +more tired, staying till seven at the store, preparing what she +called "special stunts" for the summer white sale. Friday +evening he saw her soft fresh lips drooping sadly as she toiled +up the front steps before dinner. She went to bed at eight, at +which time Istra was going out to dinner with a thin, +hatchet-faced sarcastic-looking man in a Norfolk jacket and a +fluffy black tie. Mr. Wrenn resented the Norfolk jacket. Of +course, the kingly men in evening dress would be expected to +take Istra away from him, but a Norfolk jacket--He did not +call it that. Though he had worn one in the fair village of +Aengusmere, it was still to him a "coat with a belt." + +He thought of Nelly all evening. He heard her--there on the +same floor with him--talking to Miss Proudfoot, who stood at +Nelly's door, three hours after she was supposed to be asleep. + +"No," Nelly was saying with evidently fictitious cheerfulness, +"no, it was just a little headache.... It's much better. I +think I can sleep now. Thank you very much for coming." + +Nelly hadn't told Mr. Wrenn that she had a severe headache--she +who had once, a few weeks before, run to him with a cut in her +soft small finger, demanding that he bind it up.... He went +slowly to bed. + +He had lain awake half an hour before his agony so overpowered +him that he flung out of bed. He crouched low by the bed, like +a child, his legs curled under him, the wooden sideboard pressing +into his chest in one long line of hot pain, while he prayed: + +"O God, O God, forgive me, forgive me, oh, forgive me! Here I +been forgetting Nelly (and I _love_ her) and comparing her with +Istra and not appreciating her, and Nelly always so sweet to me +and trusting me so--O God, keep me away from wickedness!" + +He huddled there many minutes, praying, the scorching pressure +of the bedside growing more painful. All the while the +camp-fire he had shared with Istra was burning within his closed +eyes, and Istra was visibly lording it in a London flat filled +with clever people, and he was passionately aware that the line +of her slim breast was like the lip of a shell; the line of her +pallid cheek, defined by her flame-colored hair, something +utterly fine, something he could not express. + +"Oh," he groaned, "she is like that poetry stuff in Shakespeare +that's so hard to get.... I'll be extra nice to Nelly at the +picnic Sunday.... Her trusting me so, and then me--O God, +keep me away from wickedness!" + + +As he was going out Saturday morning he found a note from Istra +waiting in the hall on the hat-rack: + + +Do you want to play with poor Istra tomorrow Sat. afternoon and +perhaps evening, Mouse? You have Saturday afternoon off, don't +you? Leave me a note if you can call for me at 1.30. + I. N. + + +He didn't have Saturday afternoon off, but he said he did in his +note, and at one-thirty he appeared at her door in a new spring +suit (purchased on Tuesday), a new spring hat, very fuzzy and +gay (purchased Saturday noon), and the walking-stick he had +bought on Tottenham Court Road, but decently concealed from the +boarding-house. + +Istra took him to what she called a "futurist play." She +explained it all to him several times, and she stood him tea and +muffins, and recalled Mrs. Cattermole's establishment with full +attention to Mrs. Cattermole's bulbous but earnest nose. They +dined at the Brevoort, and were back at nine-thirty; for, said +Istra, she was "just a bit tired, Mouse." + +They stood at the door of Istra's room. Istra said, "You may +come in--just for a minute." + +It was the first time he had even peeped into her room in New +York. The old shyness was on him, and he glanced back. + +Nelly was just coming up-stairs, staring at him where he stood +inside the door, her lips apart with amazement. + +Ladies distinctly did not entertain in their rooms at Mrs. Arty's. + +He wanted to rush out, to explain, to invite her in, to--to-- +He stuttered in his thought, and by now Nelly had hastened past, +her face turned from them. + +Uneasily he tilted on the front of a cane-seated rocking-chair, +glaring at a pile of books before one of Istra's trunks. Istra +sat on the bedside nursing her knee. She burst out: + +"O Mouse dear, I'm so bored by everybody--every sort of +everybody.... Of course I don't mean you; you're a good pal.... +Oh--Paris is _too_ complex--especially when you can't quite get +the nasal vowels--and New York is too youthful and earnest; and +Dos Puentes, California, will be plain hell.... And all my +little parties--I start out on them happily, always, as naive as +a kiddy going to a birthday party, and then I get there and find +I can't even dance square dances, as the kiddy does, and go +home--Oh damn it, damn it, damn it! Am I shocking you? Well, +what do I care if I shock everybody!" + +Her slim pliant length was flung out along the bed, and she was +crying. Her beautiful hands clutched the corners of a pillow +bitterly. + +He crept over to the bed, patting her shoulder, slowly and +regularly, too frightened of her mood even to want to kiss her. + +She looked up, laughing tearfully. "Please say, `There, there, +there; don't cry.' It always goes with pats for weepy girls, you +know.... O Mouse, you will be good to some woman some day." + +Her long strong arms reached up and drew him down. It was his +head that rested on her shoulder. It seemed to both of them +that it was he who was to be petted, not she. He pressed his +cheek against the comforting hollow of her curving shoulder and +rested there, abandoned to a forlorn and growing happiness, the +happiness of getting so far outside of his tight world of +Wrennishness that he could give comfort and take comfort with no +prim worried thoughts of Wrenn. + +Istra murmured: "Perhaps that's what I need--some one to need +me. Only--" She stroked his hair. "Now you must go, dear." + +"You--It's better now? I'm afraid I ain't helped you much. +It's kinda t' other way round." + +"Oh yes, indeed, it's all right now! Just nerves. Nothing more. +Now, good night." + +"Please, won't you come to the picnic to-morrow? It's--" + +"No. Sorry, but can't possibly." + +"Please think it over." + +"No, no, no, no, dear! You go and forget me and enjoy yourself +and be good to your pink-face--Nelly, isn't it? She seems to be +terribly nice, and I know you two will have a good party. You +must forget me. I'm just a teacher of playing games who hasn't +been successful at any game whatever. Not that it matters. +I don't care. I don't, really. Now, good night." + + + + + + +CHAPTER XVIII + +AND FOLLOWS A WANDERING FLAME THROUGH PERILOUS SEAS + + + + + +They had picnic dinner early up there on the Palisades: + +Nelly and Mr. Wrenn, Mrs. Arty and Tom, Miss Proudfoot and Mrs. +Samuel Ebbitt, the last of whom kept ejaculating: "Well! I +ain't run off like this in ten years!" They squatted about a +red-cotton table-cloth spread on a rock, broadly discussing the +sandwiches and cold chicken and lemonade and stuffed olives, and +laughing almost to a point of distress over Tom's accusation +that Miss Proudfoot had secreted about her person a bottle of +rye whisky. + +Nelly was very pleasant to Mr. Wrenn, but she called him neither +Billy nor anything else, and mostly she talked to Miss Proudfoot, +smiling at him, but saying nothing when he managed to get out a +jest about Mrs. Arty's chewing-gum. When he moved to her side +with a wooden plate of cream-cheese sandwiches (which Tom +humorously termed "cold-cream wafers") Mr. Wrenn started to +explain how he had come to enter Istra's room. + +"Why shouldn't you?" Nelly asked, curtly, and turned to Miss +Proudfoot. + +"She doesn't seem to care much," he reflected, relieved and +stabbed in his humble vanity and reattracted to Nelly, all at +once. He was anxious about her opinion of Istra and her opinion +of himself, and slightly defiant, as she continued to regard him +as a respectable person whose name she couldn't exactly +remember. + +Hadn't he the right to love Istra if he wanted to? he desired +to know of himself. Besides, what had he _done?_ Just gone out +walking with his English hotel acquaintance Istra! He hadn't +been in her room but just a few minutes. Fine reason that was +for Nelly to act like a blooming iceberg! Besides, it wasn't +as if he were engaged to Nelly, or anything like that. +Besides, of course Istra would never care for him. There were +several other besideses with which he harrowed himself while +trying to appear picnically agreeable. He was getting very much +confused, and was slightly abrupt as he said to Nelly, "Let's +walk over to that high rock on the edge." + +A dusky afterglow filled the sky before them as they silently +trudged to the rock and from the top of the sheer cliff +contemplated the smooth and steely-gray Hudson below. Nelly +squeaked her fear at the drop and clutched his arm, but suddenly +let go and drew back without his aid. + +He groaned within, "I haven't the right to help her." He took her +arm as she hesitatingly climbed from the rock down to the ground. + +She jerked it free, curtly saying, "No, thank you." + +She was repentant in a moment, and, cheerfully: + +"Miss Nash took me in her room yesterday and showed me her +things. My, she's got such be-_yoo_-ti-ful jewels! La V'lieres +and pearls and a swell amethyst brooch. My! She told me all +about how the girls used to study in Paris, and how sorry she +would be to go back to California and keep house." + +"Keep house?" + +Nelly let him suffer for a moment before she relieved him with, +"For her father." + +"Oh.... Did she say she was going back to California soon?" + +"Not till the end of the summer, maybe." + +"Oh.... Oh, Nelly--" + +For the first time that day he was perfectly sincere. He was +trying to confide in her. But the shame of having emotions was +on him. He got no farther. + +To his amazement, Nelly mused, "She is very nice." + +He tried hard to be gallant. "Yes, she is interesting, but of +course she ain't anywheres near as nice as you are, Nelly, be--" + +"Oh, don't, Billy!" + +The quick agony in her voice almost set them both weeping. The +shared sorrow of separation drew them together for a moment. +Then she started off, with short swift steps, and he tagged +after. He found little to say. He tried to comment on the +river. He remarked that the apartment-houses across in New York +were bright in the sunset; that, in fact, the upper windows +looked "like there was a fire in there." Her sole comment was "Yes." + +When they rejoined the crowd he was surprised to hear her +talking volubly to Miss Proudfoot. He rejoiced that she was +"game," but he did not rejoice long. For a frightened feeling +that he had to hurry home and see Istra at once was turning him +weak and cold. He didn't want to see her; she was intruding; +but he had to go--go at once; and the agony held him all the way +home, while he was mechanically playing the part of stern +reformer and agreeing with Tom Poppins that the horrors of the +recent Triangle shirt-waist-factory fire showed that "something +oughta be done--something sure oughta be." + +He trembled on the ferry till Nelly, with a burst of motherly +tenderness in her young voice, suddenly asked: "Why, you're +shivering dreadfully! Did you get a chill?" + +Naturally, he wanted the credit of being known as an invalid, +and pitied and nursed, but he reluctantly smiled and said, "Oh +no, it ain't anything at all." + +Then Istra called him again, and he fumed over the slowness of +their landing. + +And, at home, Istra was out. + +He went resolutely down and found Nelly alone, sitting on a +round pale-yellow straw mat on the steps. + +He sat by her. He was very quiet; not at all the jovial young +man of the picnic properly following the boarding-house-district +rule that males should be jocular and show their appreciation of +the ladies by "kidding them." And he spoke with a quiet +graciousness that was almost courtly, with a note of weariness +and spiritual experience such as seldom comes into the +boarding-houses, to slay joy and bring wisdom and give words shyness. + +He had, as he sat down, intended to ask her to go with him to a +moving-picture show. But inspiration was on him. He merely sat +and talked. + +When Mr. Wrenn returned from the office, two evenings later, he +found this note awaiting him: + + +DEAR MOUSE,--Friend has asked me to join her in studio & have +beat it. Sorry not see you & say good-by. Come see me +sometime--phone before and see if I'm in--Spring xxx--address xx +South Washington Sq. In haste, ISTRA. + + +He spent the evening in not going to the studio. Several times +he broke away from a pinochle game to rush upstairs and see if +the note was as chilly as he remembered. It always was. + +Then for a week he awaited a more definite invitation from her, +which did not come. He was uneasily polite to Nelly these days, +and tremulously appreciative of her gentleness. He wanted to +brood, but he did not take to his old habit of long solitary +walks. Every afternoon he planned one for the evening; every +evening found that he "wanted to be around with folks." + +He had a sort of youthful defiant despair, so he jested much at +the card-table, by way of practising his new game of keeping +people from knowing what he was thinking. He took sophisticated +pleasure in noting that Mrs. Arty no longer condescended to him. +He managed to imitate Tom's writing on a card which he left with +a bunch of jonquils in Nelly's room, and nearly persuaded even +Tom himself that Tom was the donor. Probably because he didn't +much care what happened he was able to force Mr. Mortimer R. +Guilfogle to raise his salary to twenty-three dollars a week. +Mr. Guilfogle went out of his way to admit that the letters to +the Southern trade had been "a first-rate stunt, son." + +John Henson, the head of the Souvenir Company's manufacturing +department, invited Mr. Wrenn home to dinner, and the account of +the cattle-boat was much admired by Mrs. Henson and the three +young Hensons. + +A few days later, in mid-June, there was an unusually cheerful +dinner at the boarding-house. Nelly turned to Mr. Wrenn--yes, +he was quite sure about it; she was speaking exclusively to him, +with a lengthy and most merry account of the manner in which the +floor superintendent had "called down" the unkindest of the +aislesmen. + +He longed to give his whole self in his answer, to be in the +absolute community of thought that lovers know. But the image +of Istra was behind his chair. Istra--he had to see her--now, +this evening. He rushed out to the corner drug-store and +reached her by telephone. + +Yes-s, admitted Istra, a little grudgingly, she was going to be +at the studio that evening, though she--well, there was going to +be a little party--some friends--but--yes, she'd be glad to have +him come. + +Grimly, Mr. Wrenn set out for Washington Square. + +Since this scientific treatise has so exhaustively examined Mr. +Wrenn's reactions toward the esthetic, one need give but three +of his impressions of the studio and people he found on +Washington Square--namely: + +(a) That the big room was bare, ill kept, and not comparable to +the red-plush splendor of Mrs. Arty's, for all its pretension to +superiority. Why, a lot of the pictures weren't framed! And you +should have seen the giltness and fruit-borderness of the frames +at Mrs. Arty's! + +(b) That the people were brothers-in-talk to the inmates of the +flat on Great James Street, London, only far less, and friendly. + +(c) That Mr. Wrenn was now a man of friends, and if the +"blooming Bohemians," as he called them, didn't like him they +were permitted to go to the dickens. + +Istra was always across the room from him somehow. He found +himself glad. It made their parting definite. + +He was going back to his own people, he was deciding. + +As he rose with elaborate boarding-house apologies to the room +at large for going, and a cheerful but not intimate "Good night" +to Istra, she followed him to the door and into the dark long +hallway without. + +"Good night, Mouse dear. I'm glad you got a chance to talk to +the Silver Girl. But was Mr. Hargis rude to you? I heard him +talking Single Tax--or was it Matisse?--and he's usually rude +when he talks about them." + +"No. He was all right." + +"Then what _is_ worrying you?" + +"Oh--nothing. Good ni--" + +"You _are_ going off angry. _Aren't_ you?" + +"No, but--oh, there ain't any use of our--of me being-- +_Is_ there?" + +"N-no--" + +"Matisse--the guy you just spoke about--and these artists here +tonight in bobtail dress-suits--I wouldn't know when to wear one +of them things, and when a swallow-tail--if I had one, even--or +when a Prince Albert or--" + +"Oh, not a Prince Albert, Mouse dear. Say, a frock-coat." + +"Sure. That's what I mean. It's like that Matisse guy. I +don't know about none of the things you're interested in. While +you've been away from Mrs. Arty's--Lord, I've missed you so! But +when I try to train with your bunch, or when you spring Matisse" +(he seemed peculiarly to resent the unfortunate French artist) +"on me I sort of get onto myself--and now it ain't like it was +in England; I've got a bunch of my own I can chase around with. +Anyway, I got onto myself tonight. I s'pose it's partly because +I been thinking you didn't care much for _my_ friends." + +"But, Mouse dear, all this isn't news to me. Surely you, who've +gipsied with me, aren't going to be so obvious, so banal, as to +blame _me_ because you've cared for me, are you, child?" + +"Oh no, no, no! I didn't mean to do that. I just wanted--oh, +gee! I dunno--well, I wanted to have things between us definite." + +"I do understand. You're quite right. And now we're just +friends, aren't we?" + +"Yes." + +"Then good-by. And sometime when I'm back in New York--I'm +going to California in a few days--I think I'll be able to get +back here--I certainly hope so--though of course I'll have to +keep house for friend father for a while, and maybe I'll marry +myself with a local magnate in desperation--but, as I was +saying, dear, when I get back here we'll have a good dinner, +_nicht wahr?_" + +"Yes, and--good-by." + +She stood at the top of the stairs looking down. He slowly +clumped down the wooden treads, boiling with the amazing +discoveries that he had said good-by to Istra, that he was not +sorry, and that now he could offer to Nelly Croubel everything. + +Istra suddenly called, "O Mouse, wait just a moment." + +She darted like a swallow. She threw her arm about his shoulder +and kissed his cheek. Instantly she was running up-stairs +again, and had disappeared into the studio. + + +Mr. William Wrenn was walking rapidly up Riverside Drive, +thinking about his letters to the Southern merchants. + +While he was leaving the studio building he had perfectly seen +himself as one who was about to go through a tumultuous agony, +after which he would be free of all the desire for Istra and +ready to serve Nelly sincerely and humbly. + +But he found that the agony was all over. Even to save his +dignity as one who was being dramatic, he couldn't keep his +thoughts on Istra. + +Every time he thought of Nelly his heart was warm and he +chuckled softly. Several times out of nothing came pictures of +the supercilious persons whom he had heard solving the problems +of the world at the studio on Washington Square, and he +muttered: "Oh, hope they choke. Istra's all right, though; she +learnt me an awful lot. But--gee! I'm glad she ain't in the same +house; I suppose I'd ag'nize round if she was." + +Suddenly, at no particular street corner on Riverside Drive, just +_a_ street, he fled over to Broadway and the Subway. He had to +be under the same roof with Nelly. If it were only possible to +see her that night! But it was midnight. However, he formulated +a plan. The next morning he would leave the office, find her at +her department store, and make her go out to Manhattan Beach +with him for dinner that night. + +He was home. He went happily up the stairs. He would dream of +Nelly, and-- + +Nelly's door opened, and she peered out, drawing her _peignoir_ +about her. + +"Oh," she said, softly, "is it you?" + +"Yes. My, you're up late." + +"Do you--Are you all right?" + +He dashed down the hall and stood shyly scratching at the straw +of his newest hat. + +"Why yes, Nelly, course. Poor--Oh, don't tell me you have a +headache again?" + +"No--I was awful foolish, of course, but I saw you when you +went out this evening, and you looked so savage, and you didn't +look very well." + +"But now it's all right." + +"Then good night." + +"Oh no--listen--please do! I went over to the place Miss Nash is +living at, because I was pretty sure that I ain't hipped on +her--sort of hypnotized by her--any more. And I found I ain't! +_I ain't!_ I don't know what to say, I want to--I want you to +know that from going to try and see if I can't get you to care +for me." He was dreadfully earnest, and rather quiet, with the +dignity of the man who has found himself. "I'm scared," he went +on, "about saying this, because maybe you'll think I've got an +idea I'm kind of a little tin god, and all I've got to do is to +say which girl I'll want and she'll come a-running, but it isn't +that; _it isn't_. It's just that I want you to know I'm going +to give _all_ of me to you now if I can get you to want me. And +I _am_ glad I knew Istra--she learnt me a lot about books and all, +so I have more to me, or maybe will have, for you. It's +--Nelly--promise you'll be--my friend--promise--If you knew how +I rushed back here tonight to see you!" + +"Billy--" + +She held out her hand, and he grasped it as though it were the +sacred symbol of his dreams. + +"To-morrow," she smiled, with a hint of tears, "I'll be a +reg'lar lady, I guess, and make you explain and explain like +everything, but now I'm just glad. Yes," defiantly, "I _will_ +admit it if I want to! I _am_ glad!" + +Her door closed. + + + + + + +CHAPTER XIX + +TO A HAPPY SHORE + + + + + +Upon an evening of November, 1911, it chanced that of Mrs. Arty's +flock only Nelly and Mr. Wrenn were at home. They had finished +two hot games of pinochle, and sat with their feet on a small +amiable oil-stove. Mr. Wrenn laid her hand against his cheek +with infinite content. He was outlining the situation at the +office. + +The business had so increased that Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle, +the manager, had told Rabin, the head traveling-salesman, that +he was going to appoint an assistant manager. Should he, Mr. +Wrenn queried, try to get the position? The other candidates, +Rabin and Henson and Glover, were all good friends of his, and, +furthermore, could he "run a bunch of guys if he was over them?" + +"Why, of course you can, Billy. I remember when you came here +you were sort of shy. But now you're 'most the star boarder! +And won't those others be trying to get the job away from you? +Of course!" + +"Yes, that's so." + +"Why, Billy, some day you might be manager!" + +"Say, that would be great, wouldn't it! But hones', Nell, do you +think I might have a chance to land the assistant's job?" + +"I certainly do." + +"Oh, Nelly--gee! you make me--oh, learn to bank on myself--" + +He kissed her for the second time in his life. + +"Mr. Guilfogle," stated Mr. Wrenn, next day, "I want to talk to +you about that assistant managership." + +The manager, in his new office and his new flowered waistcoat, +had acted interested when Our steady and reliable Mr. Wrenn came +in. But now he tried to appear dignified and impatient. + +"That--" he began. + +"I've been here longer than any of the other men, and I know +every line of the business now, even the manufacturing. You +remember I held down Henson's job when his wife was sick." + +"Yes, but--" + +"And I guess Jake thinks I can boss all right, and Miss +Leavenbetz, too." + +"Now will you kindly 'low _me_ to talk a little, Wrenn? I know +a _little_ something about how things go in the office myself! +I don't deny you're a good man. Maybe some day you may get to be +assistant manager. But I'm going to give the first try at it to +Glover. He's had so much more experience with meeting people +directly--personally. But you're a good man--" + +"Yes, I've heard that before, but I'll be gol-darned if I'll +stick at one desk all my life just because I save you all the +trouble in that department, Guilfogle, and now--" + +"Now, now, now, now! Calm down; hold your horses, my boy. This +ain't a melodrama, you know." + +"Yes, I know; I didn't mean to get sore, but you know--" + +"Well, now I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to +make you head of the manufacturing department instead of getting +in a new man, and shift Henson to purchasing. I'll put Jake on +your old job, and expect you to give him a lift when he needs +it. And you'd better keep up the most important of the +jollying-letters, I guess." + +"Well, I like that all right. I appreciate it. But of course +I expect more pay--two men's work--" + +"Let's see; what you getting now?" + +"Twenty-three." + +"Well, that's a good deal, you know. The overhead expenses have +been increasing a lot faster than our profits, and we've--" + +"Huh!" + +"--got to see where new business is coming in to justify the +liberal way we've treated you men before we can afford to do +much salary-raising--though we're just as glad to do it as you +men to get it; but--" + +"Huh!" + +"--if we go to getting extravagant we'll go bankrupt, and then +we won't any of us have jobs.... Still, I _am_ willing to raise +you to twenty-five, though--" + +"Thirty-five!" + +Mr. Wrenn stood straight. The manager tried to stare him down. +Panic was attacking Mr. Wrenn, and he had to think of Nelly to +keep up his defiance. At last Mr. Guilfogle glared, then roared: +"Well, confound it, Wrenn, I'll give you twenty-nine-fifty, and not +a cent more for at least a year. That's final. _Understand?_" + +"All right," chirped Mr. Wrenn. + +"Gee!" he was exulting to himself, "never thought I'd get +anything like that. Twenty-nine-fifty! More 'n enough to marry +on now! I'm going to get _twenty-nine-fifty!_" + + +"Married five months ago to-night, honey," said Mr. Wrenn to +Nelly, his wife, in their Bronx flat, and thus set down October +17, 1913, as a great date in history. + +"Oh, I _know_ it, Billy. I wondered if you'd remember. You just +ought to see the dessert I'm making--but that's a s'prise." + +"Remember! Should say I did! See what I've got for somebody!" + +He opened a parcel and displayed a pair of red-worsted +bed-slippers, a creation of one of the greatest red-worsted +artists in the whole land. Yes, and he could afford them, too. +Was he not making thirty-two dollars a week--he who had been poor! +And his chances for the assistant managership "looked good." + +"Oh, they'll be so comfy when it gets cold. You're a dear! Oh, +Billy, the janitress says the Jewish lady across the court in +number seventy is so lazy she wears her corsets to bed!" + +"Did the janitress get the coal put in, Nell?" + +"Yes, but her husband is laid off again. I was talking to her +quite a while this afternoon.... Oh, dear, I do get so lonely +for you, sweetheart, with nothing to do. But I did read some +_Kim_ this afternoon. I liked it." + +"That's fine!" + +"But it's kind of hard. Maybe I'll--Oh, I don't know. +I guess I'll have to read a lot." + +He patted her back softly, and hoped: "Maybe some day we can get +a little house out of town, and then you can garden.... Sorry +old Siddons is laid off again.... Is the gas-stove working all +right now?" + +"Um-huh, honey. I fixed it." + +"Say, let me make the coffee, Nell. You'll have enough to do +with setting the table and watching the sausages." + +"All rightee, hun. But, oh, Billy, I'm so, shamed. I was going +to get some potato salad, and I've just remembered I forgot." +She hung her head, with a fingertip to her pretty lips, and +pretended to look dreadfully ashamed. "Would you mind so ver-ee +much skipping down to Bachmeyer's for some? Ah-h, is it just +fearful neglected when it comes home all tired out?" + +"No, indeedy. But you got to kiss me first, else I won't go at all." + +Nelly turned to him and, as he held her, her head bent far back. +She lay tremblingly inert against his arms, staring up at him, +panting. With her head on his shoulder--a soft burden of love +that his shoulder rejoiced to bear--they stood gazing out of the +narrow kitchen window of their sixth-story flat and noticed for +the hundredth time that the trees in a vacant lot across were +quite as red and yellow as the millionaire trees in Central Park +along Fifth Avenue. + +"Sometime," mused Mr. Wrenn, "we'll live in Jersey, where +there's trees and trees and trees--and maybe there'll be kiddies +to play under them, and then you won't be lonely, honey; they'll +keep you some busy!" + +"You skip along now, and don't be talking nonsense, or I'll not +give you one single wee bit of dinner!" Then she blushed adorably, +with infinite hope. + +He hastened out of the kitchen, with the happy glance he never +failed to give the living-room--its red-papered walls with shiny +imitation-oak woodwork; the rows of steins on the plate-rack; +the imitation-oak dining-table, with a vase of newly dusted +paper roses; the Morris chair, with Nelly's sewing on a tiny +wicker table beside it; the large gilt-framed oleograph of +"Pike's Peak by Moonlight." + +He clattered down the slate treads of the stairs. He fairly +vaulted out of doors. He stopped, startled. + +Across the ragged vacant lots to the west a vast sunset +processional marched down the sky. It had not been visible from +their flat, which looked across East River to the tame grassy +shore of a real-estate boomer's suburb. "Gee!" he mourned, +"it's the first time I've noticed a sunset for a month! I used +to see knights' flags and Mandalay and all sorts of stuff in +sunsets!" + +Wistfully the exile gazed at his lost kingdom, till the October +chill aroused him. + +But he learned a new way to cook eggs from the proprietor of the +delicatessen store; and his plans for spending the evening +playing pinochle with Nelly, and reading the evening paper +aloud, set him chuckling softly to himself as he hurried home +through the brisk autumn breeze with seven cents' worth of +potato salad. + +THE END + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Our Mr. Wrenn, by Sinclair Lewis + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR MR. WRENN *** + +This file should be named 4961.txt or 4961.zip + +This eBook was edited by Charles Aldarondo (www.aldarondo.net). + +Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed +editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US +unless a copyright notice is included. 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