LADY ISTRA NASH,
Mouse Castle.
DEAR MADAM,--We hear from our friend Sir William Wrenn that some
folks are saying that to-day is not your birthday & want to stop
your celebration, so if you should need somebody to make them
believe to-day is your birthday we have sent our secretary, Sir
Percival Montague. Sir William Wrenn will hide him behind his
chair, and if they bother you just call for Sir Percival and he
will tell them. Permit us, dear Lady Nash, to wish you all the
greetings of the season, and in close we beg to remain, as ever,
Yours sincerely,
DUKE VERE DE VERE.
He was very tired. When he lay down for a minute, with a pillow
tucked over his head, he was almost asleep in ten seconds. But
he sprang up, washed his prickly eyes with cold water, and began
to dress. He was shy of the knickers and golf-stockings, but it
was the orange tie that gave him real alarm. He dared it,
though, and went downstairs to make sure they were setting the
table with glory befitting the party.
As he went through the common room he watched the three or four
groups scattered through it. They seemed to take his clothes as
a matter of course. He was glad. He wanted so much to be a
credit to Istra.
Returning from the dining-room to the common room, he passed a
group standing in a window recess and looking away from him.
He overheard:
"Who is the remarkable new person with the orange tie and the
rococo buckle on his jacket belt--the one that just went
through? Did you ever _see_ anything so funny!
His collar didn't come within an inch and a half of fitting
his neck. He must be a poet. I wonder if his verses are as
jerry-built as his garments!"
Mr. Wrenn stopped.
Another voice:
"And the beautiful lack of development of his legs! It's like
the good old cycling days, when every draper's assistant went
bank-holidaying.... I don't know him, but I suppose he's some
tuppeny-ha'p'ny illustrator."
"Or perhaps he has convictions about fried bananas, and dines on
a bean saute. O Aengusme re! Shades of Aengus!"
"Not at all. When they look as gentle as he they always hate
the capitalists as a militant hates a cabinet minister. He
probably dines on the left ear of a South-African millionaire
every evening before exercise at the barricades.... I say, look
over there; there's a real artist going across the green. You
can tell he's a real artist because he's dressed like a navvy
and----"
Mr. Wrenn was walking away, across the common room, quite sure
that every one was eying him with amusement. And it was too
late to change his clothes. It was six already.
He stuck out his jaw, and remembered that he had planned to hide
the "letter from the duke" in Istra's napkin that it might be
the greater surprise. He sat down at their table. He tucked
the letter into the napkin folds. He moved the vase of orchids
nearer the center of the table, and the table nearer the open
window giving on the green. He rebuked himself for not being
able to think of something else to change. He forgot his
clothes, and was happy.
At six-fifteen he summoned a boy and sent him up with a message
that Mr. Wrenn was waiting and high tea ready.
The boy came back muttering, "Miss Nash left this note for you,
sir, the stewardess says."
Mr. Wrenn opened the green-and-white Caravanserai letter
excitedly. Perhaps Istra, too, was dressing for the party!
He loved all s'prises just then. He read:
Mouse dear, I'm sorrier than I can tell you, but you know I
warrned you that bad Istra was a creature of moods, and just now
my mood orders me to beat it for Paris, which I'm doing, on the
5.17 train. I won't say good-by--I hate good-bys, they're so
stupid, don't you think? Write me some time, better make it
care Amer. Express Co., Paris, because I don't know yet just
where I'll be. And please don't look me up in Paris, because
it's always better to end up an affair without explanations,
don't you think? You have been wonderfully kind to me, and I'll
send you some good thought- forms, shall I?
I. N.
He walked to the office of the Caravanserai, blindly, quietly.
He paid his bill, and found that he had only fifty dollars left.
He could not get himself to eat the waiting high tea. There was
a seven-fourteen train for London. He took it. Meantime he
wrote out a cable to his New York bank for a hundred and fifty
dollars. To keep from thinking in the train he talked gravely
and gently to an old man about the brave days of England, when
men threw quoits. He kept thinking over and over, to the tune
set by the rattling of the train trucks: "Friends... I got to
make friends, now I know what they are.... Funny some guys don't
make friends. Mustn't forget. Got to make lots of 'em in
New York. Learn how to make 'em."
He arrived at his room on Tavistock Place about eleven, and
tried to think for the rest of the night of how deeply he was
missing Morton of the cattle-boat now that--now that he had no
friend in all the hostile world.
In a London A. B. C. restaurant Mr. Wrenn was talking to an
American who had a clipped mustache, brisk manners, a
Knight-of-Pythias pin, and a mind for duck-shooting,
hardware-selling, and cigars.
"No more England for mine," the American snapped,
good-humoredly. "I'm going to get out of this foggy hole and
get back to God's country just as soon as I can.
I want to find out what's doing at the store, and I want to sit
down to a plate of flapjacks. I'm good and plenty sick of tea
and marmalade. Why, I wouldn't take this fool country for a gift.
No, sir! Me for God's country--Sleepy Eye, Brown County, Minnesota.
You bet!"
"You don't like England much, then?" Mr. Wrenn carefully reasoned.
"Like it? Like this damp crowded hole, where they can't talk
English, and have a fool coinage---- Say, that's a great system,
that metric system they've got over in France, but here--why,
they don't know whether Kansas City is in Kansas or Missouri or
both.... `Right as rain'--that's what a fellow said to me for
`all right'! Ever hear such nonsense?.... And tea for breakfast!
Not for me! No, sir! I'm going to take the first steamer!"
With a gigantic smoke-puff of disgust the man from Sleepy Eye
stalked out, jingling the keys in his trousers pocket, cocking
up his cigar, and looking as though he owned the restaurant.
Mr. Wrenn, picturing him greeting the Singer Tower from an
incoming steamer, longed to see the tower.
"Gee! I'll do it!"
He rose and, from that table in the basement of an A. B. C.
restaurant, he fled to America.
He dashed up-stairs, fidgeted while the cashier made his change,
rang for a bus, whisked into his room, slammed his things into
his suit-case, announced to it wildly that they were going home,
and scampered to the Northwestem Station. He walked nervously
up and down till the Liverpool train departed. "Suppose Istra
wanted to make up, and came back to London?" was a terrifying
thought that hounded him. He dashed into the waiting-room and
wrote to her, on a souvenir post-card showing the Abbey: "Called
back to America--will write. Address care of Souvenir Company,
Twenty-eighth Street." But he didn't mail the card.
Once settled in a second-class compartment, with the train in
motion, he seemed already much nearer America, and, humming, to
the great annoyance of a lady with bangs, he planned his new
great work--the making of friends; the discovery, some day, if
Istra should not relent, of "somebody to go home to." There was
no end to the "societies and lodges and stuff" he was going to
join directly he landed.
At Liverpool he suddenly stopped at a post-box and mailed his
card to Istra. That ended his debate. Of course after that he
had to go back to America.
He sailed exultantly, one month and seventeen days after leaving
Portland.
CHAPTER XII
HE DISCOVERS AMERICA
In his white-painted steerage berth Mr. Wrenn lay, with a
scratch - pad on his raised knees and a small mean pillow
doubled under his head, writing sample follow- up letters to
present to the Souvenir and Art Novelty Company, interrupting
his work at intervals to add to a list of the books which,
beginning about five minutes after he landed in New York, he was
going to master. He puzzled over Marie Corelli. Morton liked
Miss Corelli so much; but would her works appeal to Istra Nash?
He had worked for many hours on a letter to Istra in which he
avoided mention of such indecent matters as steerages and
immigrants. He was grateful, he told her, for "all you learned
me," and he had thought that Aengusmere was a beautiful place,
though he now saw "what you meant about the m interesting
people," and his New York address would be the Souvenir Company.
He tore up the several pages that repeated that oldest most
melancholy cry of the lover, which rang among the deodars, from
viking ships, from the moonlit courtyards of Provence, the cry
which always sounded about Mr. Wrenn as he walked the deck:
"I want you so much; I miss you so unendingly; I am so lonely for
you, dear." For no more clearly, no more nobly did the golden
Aucassin or lean Dante word that cry in their thoughts than did
Mr. William Wrenn, Our Mr. Wrenn.
A third - class steward with a mangy mustache and setter - like
tan eyes came teetering down - stairs, each step like a nervous
pencil tap on a table, and peered over the side of Mr. Wrenn's
berth. He loved Mr. Wrenn, who was proven a scholar by the
reading of real bound books--an English history and a
second- hand copy of _Haunts of Historic English Writers_,
purchased in Liverpool--and who was willing to listen to the
steward's serial story of how his woman, Mrs. Wargle,
faithlessly consorted with Foddle, the cat's-meat man, when the
steward was away, and, when he was home, cooked for him lights
and liver that unquestionably were purchased from the same
cat's-meat man. He now leered with a fond and watery gaze upon
Mr. Wrenn's scholarly pursuits, and announced in a whisper:
"They've sighted land."
"Land?"
"Oh aye."
Mr. Wrenn sat up so vigorously that he bumped his head.
He chucked his papers beneath the pillow with his right hand,
while the left was feeling for the side of the berth.
"Land!" he bellowed to drowsing cabin- mates as he vaulted out.
The steerage promenade-deck, iron-sided, black-floored, ending
in the iron approaches to the galley at one end and the iron
superstructures about a hatch at the other, was like a grim
swart oilily clean machine-shop aisle, so inclosed, so
over-roofed, that the side toward the sea seemed merely a long
factory window. But he loved it and, except when he had
guiltily remembered the books he had to read, he had stayed on
deck, worshiping the naive bright attire of immigrants and the
dark roll and glory of the sea.
Now, out there was a blue shading, made by a magic pencil; land,
his land, where he was going to become the beloved comrade of
all the friends whose likenesses he saw in the white-caps
flashing before him.
Humming, he paraded down to the buffet, where small
beer and smaller tobacco were sold, to buy another pound of
striped candy for the offspring of the Russian Jews.
The children knew he was coming. "Fat rascals," he chuckled,
touching their dark cheeks, pretending to be frightened as they
pounded soft fists against the iron side of the ship or rolled
unregarded in the scuppers. Their shawled mothers knew him,
too, and as he shyly handed about the candy the chattering
stately line of Jewish elders nodded their beards like the
forest primeval in a breeze, saying words of blessing in a
strange tongue.
He smiled back and made gestures, and shouted "Land! Land!" with
several variations in key, to make it sound foreign.
But he withdrew for the sacred moment of seeing the Land of
Promise he was newly discovering--the Long Island shore; the
grass-clad redouts at Fort Wadsworth; the vast pile of New York
sky-scrapers, standing in a mist like an enormous burned fo rest.
"Singer Tower.... Butterick Building," he murmured, as they
proceeded toward their dock. "That's something like.... Let's
see; yes, sir, by golly, right up there between the Met. Tower
and the _Times_--good old Souvenir Company office. Jiminy! `One
Dollar to Albany'--something _like_ a sign, that is--good old
dollar! To thunder with their darn shillings. Home!... Gee!
there's where I used to moon on a wharf!... Gosh! the old town
looks good."
And all this was his to conquer, for friendship's sake.
He went to a hotel. While he had to go back to the Zapps', of
course, he did not wish, by meeting those old friends, to spoil
his first day. No, it was cheerfuler to stand at a window of
his cheap hotel on Seventh Avenue, watching the "good old
American crowd"--Germans, Irishmen, Italians, and Jews. He
went to the Nickelorion and grasped the hand of the ticket -
taker, the Brass-button Man, ejaculating: "How are you? Well,
how's things going with the old show?... I been away couple
of months."
"Fine and dandy! Been away, uh? Well, it's good to get back to
the old town, heh? Summer hotel?"
"Unk?"
"Why, you're the waiter at Pat Maloney's, ain't you?"
Next morning Mr. Wrenn made himself go to the Souvenir and Art
Novelty Company. He wanted to get the teasing, due him for
staying away so short a time, over as soon as possible. The
office girl, addressing circulars, seemed surprised when he
stepped from the elevator, and blushed her usual shy gratitude
to the men of the office for allowing her to exist and take away
Then into the entry-room ran Rabin, one of the traveling salesmen.
"Why, hul- lo, Wrenn! Wondered if that could be you. Back so
soon? Thought you were going to Europe."
"Just got back. Couldn't stand it away from you, old scout!"
"You must have been learning to sass back real smart, in the Old
Country, heh? Going to be with us again? Well, see you again
soon. Glad see you back."
He was not madly excited at seeing Rabin; still, the drummer was
part of the good old Souvenir Company, the one place in the
world on which he could absolutely depend, the one place where
they always wanted him.
He had been absently staring at the sample-tables, noting new
novelties. The office girl, speaking sweetly, but as to an
outsider, inquired, "Who did you wish to see, Mr. Wrenn?"
"Why! Mr. Guilfogle."
"He's busy, but if you'll sit down I think you can see him in a
few minutes."
Mr. Wrenn felt like the prodigal son, with no calf in sight, at
having to wait on the callers' bench, but he shook with faint
excited gurgles of mirth at the thought of the delightful
surprise Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle, the office manager,
was going to have. He kept an eye out for Charley Carpenter.
If Charley didn't come through the entry-room he'd go into the
bookkeeping-room, and--"talk about your surprises----"
"Mr. Guilfogle will see you now," said the office girl.
As he entered the manager's office Mr. Guilfogle made much of
glancing up with busy amazement.
"Well, well, Wrenn! Back so soon? Thought you were going to be
gone quite a while."
"Couldn't keep away from the office, Mr. Guilfogle," with an
uneasy smile.
"Have a good trip?"
"Yes, a dandy."
"How'd you happen to get back so soon?"
"Oh, I wanted to---- Say, Mr. Guilfogle, I really wanted to get
back to the office again. I'm awfully glad to see it again."
"Glad see _you_. Well, where did you go? I got the card you
sent me from Chesterton with the picture of the old church on it."
"Why, I went to Liverpool and Oxford and London and --well--Kew
and Ealing and places and---- And I tramped through Essex and
Suffolk--all through--on foot. Aengusmere and them places."
"Just a moment. (Well, Rabin, what is it? Why certainly. I've
told you that already about five times. _Yes_, I said--that's
what I had the samples made up for. I wish you'd be a little
Our Mister Wren Page 16