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

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.”