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 slo w 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 trave led 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-haire
d English girl student of
Assyriology with large top-barred eye-glasses over her
protesting eyes, and a sprinkling of people living along
Tavistock Place, who looked as though they wanted to know if
your opinions on the National Gallery and abstinence were sound.
His disapproval of the lambiness of Mrs. Cattermole's was turned
to a feeling of comradeship with the other patrons as he turned,
with the rest, to stare hostilely at a girl just entering. The
talk in the room halted, startled.
Mr. Wrenn gasped. With his head solemnly revolving, his eyes
followed the young woman about his table to a table opposite.
"A freak! Gee, what red hair!" was his private comment.
A slender girl of twenty-eight or twenty- nine, clad in a
one-piece gown of sage-green, its lines unbroken by either belt
or collar-brooch, fitting her as though it had been pasted on,
and showing the long beautiful sweep of her fragile thighs and
long-curving breast. Her collar, of the material of the dress,
was so high that it touched her delicate jaw, and it was set off
only by a fine silver chain, with a La Valliere of silver and
carved Burmese jade. Her red hair, red as a poinsettia, parted
and drawn severely back, made a sweep about the fair dead-white
skin of her bored sensitive face. Bored blue- gray eyes, with
pathetic crescents of faintly violet-hued wrinkles beneath them,
and a scarce noticeable web of tinier wrinkles at the side.
Thin long cheeks, a delicate nose, and a straight strong mouth
of thin but startlingly red lips.
Such was the new patron of Mrs. Cattermole.
She stared about the tea-room like an officer inspecting raw
recruits, sniffed at the stare of the thin girl student, ordered
breakfast in a low voice, then languidly considered her toast
and marmalade. Once she glanced about the room. Her heavy
brows were drawn close for a second, making a deep-cleft wrinkle
of ennui over her nose, and two little indentations, like the
impressions of a box corner, in her forehead over her brows.
Mr. Wrenn's gaze ran down the line of her bosom again, and he
wondered at her hands, which touched the heavy bread-and-butter
knife as though it were a fine-point pen. Long hands, colored
like ivory; the joint wrinkles etched into her skin; orange
cigarette stains on the second finger; the nails----
He stared at them. To himself he commented, "Gee! I never did
see such freak finger-nails in my life." Instead of such
smoothly rounded nails as Theresa Zapp displayed, the new young
lady had nails narrow and sharp-pointed, the ends like little
triangles of stiff white writing-paper.
As she breakfasted she scanned Mr. Wrenn for a second. He was
too obviously caught staring to be able to drop his eyes. She
studied him all out, with almost as much interest as a policeman
gives to a passing trolley-car, yawned delicately, and forgot him.
Though you should penetrate Greenland or talk anarchism to the
daughter of a millionaire grocer, never shall you feel a more
devouring chill than enveloped Mr. Wrenn as the new young lady
glanced away from him, paid her check, rose slithily from her
table, and departed. She rounded his table; not stalking out of
its way, as Theresa would have done, but bending from the hips.
Thus was it revealed to Mr. Wrenn that----
He was almost too horrified to put it into words.... He had
noticed that there was something kind of funny in regard to her
waist; he had had an impression of remarkably smooth waist
curves and an unjagged sweep of back. Now he saw that---- It
was unheard of; not at all like Lee Theresa Zapp or ladies in
the Subway. For--the freak girl wasn't wearing corsets!
When she had passed him he again studied her back, swiftly and
covertly. No, sir. No question about it. It couldn't be
denied by any one now that the girl was a freak, for, charitable
though Our Mr. Wrenn was, he had to admit that there was no sign
of the midback ridge and little rounded knobbinesses of corseted
respectability. And he had a closer view of the texture of her
sage-green crash gown.
"Golly!" he said to himself; "of all the doggone cloth for a
dress! Reg'lar gunny - sacking. She's skinny, too. Bright-red
hair. She sure is the prize freak. Kind of good- looking,
but--get a brick!"
He hated to rule so clever-seeming a woman quite out of court.
But he remembered her scissors glance at him, and his soft
little heart became very hard.
How brittle are our steel resolves! When Mr. Wrenn walked out of
Mrs. Cattermole's excellent establishment and heavily inspected
the quiet Bloomsbury Street, with a cat's-meat- man stolidly
clopping along the pavement, as loneliness rushed on him and he
wondered what in the world he could do, he mused, "Gee! I bet
that red- headed lady would be interestin' to know."
A day of furtive darts out from his room to do London, which
glumly declined to be done. He went back to the Zoological
Gardens and made friends with a tiger which, though it
presumably came from an English colony, was the friendliest
thing he had seen for a week. It did yawn, but it let him talk
to it for a long while. He stood before the bars, peering in,
and whenever no one else was about he murmured: "Poor fella,
they won't let you go, heh? You got a worse boss 'n Goglefogle,
heh? Poor old fella."
He didn't at all mind the disorder and rancid smell of the cage;
he had no fear of the tiger's sleek murderous power. But he was
somewhat afraid of the sound of his own tremorous voice. He had
spoken aloud so little lately.
A man came, an Englishman in a high offensively well- fitting
waistcoat, and stood before the cage. Mr. Wrenn slunk away,
robbed of his new friend, the tiger, the forlornest person in all
London, kicking at pebbles in the path.
As half-dusk made the quiet street even more detached, he sat on
the steps of his rooming-house on Tavistock Place, keeping
himself from the one definite thing he wanted to do--the thing
he keenly imagined a happy Mr. Wrenn doing--dashing over to the
Euston Station to find out how soon and where he could get a
train for Liverpool and a boat for America.
A girl was approaching the house. He viewed her carelessly,
then intently. It was the freak lady of Mrs. Cattermole's Tea
House--the corsetless young woman of the tight-fitting crash gown
and flame-colored hair. She was coming up the steps of his house.
He made room for her with feverish courtesy. She lived in the
same house---- He instantly, without a bit of encouragement from
the uninterested way in which she snipped the door to, made up
a whole novel about her. Gee! She was a French countess, who
lived in a reg'lar chateau, and she was staying in Bloomsbury
incognito, seeing the sights. She was a noble. She was----
Above him a window opened. He glanced up. The countess incog.
was leaning out, scanning the street uncaringly. Why--her
/> windows were next to his! He was living next room to an unusual
person--as unusual as Dr. Mittyford.
He hurried up-stairs with a fervid but vague plan to meet her.
Maybe she really was a French countess or somepun'. All evening,
sitting by the window, he was comforted as he heard her move
about her room. He had a friend. He had started that great
work of making friends--well, not started, but started
starting--then he got confused, but the idea was a flame to warm
the fog-chilled spaces of the London street.
At his Cattermole breakfast he waited long. She did not come.
Another day--but why paint another day that was but a smear of
flat dull slate? Yet another breakfast, and the lady of mystery
came. Before he knew he was doing it he had bowed to her, a
slight uneasy bend of his neck. She peered at him, unseeing,
and sat down with her back to him.
He got much good healthy human vindictive satisfaction in
evicting her violently from the French chateau he had given her,
and remembering that, of course, she was just a "fool freak
Englishwoman--prob'ly a bloomin' stoodent" he scorned, and so
settled _her!_ Also he told her, by telepathy, that her new
gown was freakier than ever--a pale-green thing, with large
white buttons.
As he was coming in that evening he passed her in the hall. She
was clad in what he called a bathrobe, and what she called an
Arabian _burnoose_, of black embroidered with dull - gold
crescents and stars, showing a V of exquisite flesh at her
throat. A shred of tenuous lace straggled loose at the opening
of the _burnoose_. Her radiant hair, tangled over her forehead,
shone with a thousand various gleams from the gas- light over her
head as she moved back against the wall and stood waiting for
him to pass. She smiled very doubtfully, distantly--the smile,
he felt, of a great lady from Mayfair. He bobbed his head,
lowered his eyes abashedly, and noticed that along the shelf of
her forearm, held against her waist, she bore many silver toilet
articles, and such a huge heavy fringed Turkish bath-towel as he
had never seen before.
He lay awake to picture her brilliant throat and shining hair.
He rebuked himself for the lack of dignity in "thinking of that
freak, when she wouldn't even return a fellow's bow." But her
shimmering hair was the star of his dreams.
Napping in his room in the afternoon, Mr. Wrenn heard slight
Our Mister Wren Page 9