CHAPTER II. HE WALKS WITH MISS THERESA
CHAPTER III. HE STARTS FOR THE LAND OF ELSEWHERE
CHAPTER IV. HE BECOMES THE GREAT LITTLE BILL WRENN
CHAPTER V. HE FINDS MUCH QUAINT ENGLISH FLAVOR
CHAPTER VI. HE IS AN ORPHAN
CHAPTER VII. HE MEETS A TEMPERAMENT
CHAPTER VIII. HE TIFFINS
CHAPTER IX. HE ENCOUNTERS THE INTELLECTUALS
CHAPTER X. HE GOES A-GIPSYING
CHAPTER XI. HE BUYS AN ORANGE TIE
CHAPTER XII. HE DISCOVERS AMERICA
CHAPTER XIII. HE IS “OUR MR. WRENN”
CHAPTER XIV. HE ENTERS SOCIETY
CHAPTER XV. HE STUDIES FIVE HUNDRED, SAVOUIR FAIRE, AND LOTSA-SNAP OFFICE MOTTOES
CHAPTER XVI. HE BECOMES MILDLY RELIGIOUS AND HIGHLY LITERARY
CHAPTER XVII. HE IS BLOWN BY THE WHIRLWIND
CHAPTER XVIII. AND FOLLOWS A WANDERING FLAME THROUGH PERILOUS SEAS
CHAPTER XIX. TO A HAPPY SHORE
CHAPTER I
MR. WRENN IS LONELY
The ticket-taker of the Nickelorion Moving-Picture Show is a public
personage, who stands out on Fourteenth Street, New York, wearing a
gorgeous light-blue coat of numerous brass buttons. He nods to all the
patrons, and his nod is the most cordial in town. Mr. Wrenn used to
trot down to Fourteenth Street, passing ever so many other shows, just
to get that cordial nod, because he had a lonely furnished room for
evenings, and for daytime a tedious job that always made his head
stuffy.
He stands out in the correspondence of the Souvenir and Art Novelty
Company as “Our Mr. Wrenn,” who would be writing you directly and
explaining everything most satisfactorily. At thirty-four Mr. Wrenn was
the sales-entry clerk of the Souvenir Company. He was always bending
over bills and columns of figures at a desk behind the stock-room. He
was a meek little bachlor—a person of inconspicuous blue ready-made
suits, and a small unsuccessful mustache.
To-day—historians have established the date as April 9, 1910—there had
been some confusing mixed orders from the Wisconsin retailers, and Mr.
Wrenn had been “called down” by the office manager, Mr. Mortimer R.
Guilfogle. He needed the friendly nod of the Nickelorion ticket-taker.
He found Fourteenth Street, after office hours, swept by a dusty wind
that whisked the skirts of countless plump Jewish girls, whose V-necked
blouses showed soft throats of a warm brown. Under the elevated station
he secretly made believe that he was in Paris, for here beautiful
Italian boys swayed with trays of violets; a tramp displayed crimson
mechanical rabbits, which squeaked, on silvery leading-strings; and a
newsstand was heaped with the orange and green and gold of magazine
covers.
“Gee!” inarticulated Mr. Wrenn. “Lots of colors. Hope I see foreign
stuff like that in the moving pictures.”
He came primly up to the Nickelorion, feeling in his vest pockets for a
nickel and peering around the booth at the friendly ticket-taker. But
the latter was thinking about buying Johnny’s pants. Should he get them
at the Fourteenth Street Store, or Siegel-Cooper’s, or over at
Aronson’s, near home? So ruminating, he twiddled his wheel
mechanically, and Mr. Wrenn’s pasteboard slip was indifferently
received in the plate-glass gullet of the grinder without the taker’s
even seeing the clerk’s bow and smile.
Mr. Wrenn trembled into the door of the Nickelorion. He wanted to turn
back and rebuke this fellow, but was restrained by shyness. He _had_
liked the man’s “Fine evenin’, sir “—rain or shine—but he wouldn’t
stand for being cut. Wasn’t he making nineteen dollars a week, as
against the ticket-taker’s ten or twelve? He shook his head with the
defiance of a cornered mouse, fussed with his mustache, and regarded
the moving pictures gloomily.
They helped him. After a Selig domestic drama came a stirring Vitagraph
Western scene, “The Goat of the Rancho,” which depicted with much humor
and tumult the revolt of a ranch cook, a Chinaman. Mr. Wrenn was really
seeing, not cow-punchers and sage-brush, but himself, defying the
office manager’s surliness and revolting against the ticket-man’s
rudeness. Now he was ready for the nearly overpowering delight of
travel-pictures. He bounced slightly as a Gaumont film presented Java.
He was a connoisseur of travel-pictures, for all his life he had been
planning a great journey. Though he had done Staten Island and
patronized an excursion to Bound Brook, neither of these was his grand
tour. It was yet to be taken. In Mr. Wrenn, apparently fastened to New
York like a domestic-minded barnacle, lay the possibilities of heroic
roaming. He knew it. He, too, like the man who had taken the Gaumont
pictures, would saunter among dusky Javan natives in “markets with
tiles on the roofs and temples and—and—uh, well—places!” The scent of
Oriental spices was in his broadened nostrils as he scampered out of
the Nickelorion, without a look at the ticket-taker, and headed for
“home”—for his third-floor-front on West Sixteenth Street. He wanted to
prowl through his collection of steamship brochures for a description
of Java. But, of course, when one’s landlady has both the sciatica and
a case of Patient Suffering one stops in the basement dining-room to
inquire how she is.
Mrs. Zapp was a fat landlady. When she sat down there was a straight
line from her chin to her knees. She was usually sitting down. When she
moved she groaned, and her apparel creaked. She groaned and creaked
from bed to breakfast, and ate five griddle-cakes, two helpin’s of
scrapple, an egg, some rump steak, and three cups of coffee, slowly and
resentfully. She creaked and groaned from breakfast to her
rocking-chair, and sat about wondering why Providence had inflicted
upon her a weak digestion. Mr. Wrenn also wondered why,
sympathetically, but Mrs. Zapp was too conscientiously dolorous to be
much cheered by the sympathy of a nigger-lovin’ Yankee, who couldn’t
appreciate the subtle sorrows of a Zapp of Zapp’s Bog, allied to all
the First Families of Virginia.
Mr. Wrenn did nothing more presumptuous than sit still, in the stuffy
furniture-crowded basement room, which smelled of dead food and deader
pride in a race that had never existed. He sat still because the chair
was broken. It had been broken now for four years.
For the hundred and twenty-ninth time in those years Mrs. Zapp said, in
her rich corruption of Southern negro dialect, which can only be
indicated here, “Ah been meaning to get that chair mended, Mist’
Wrenn.” He looked gratified and gazed upon the crayon enlargements of
Lee Theresa, the older Zapp daughter (who was forewoman in a factory),
and of Godiva. Godiva Zapp was usually called “Goaty,” and many times a
day was she called by Mrs. Zapp. A tamed child drudge was Goaty, with
adenoids, which Mrs. Zapp had been meanin’ to have removed, and which
she would continue to have benevolent meanin’s about till it should be
too late, and she should discover that Providence never would let Goaty
go to school.
“Yes, Mist’ Wrenn, Ah told Goaty she was to see the man about getting
that chair fixed, but she nev’ does nothing Ah tell her.”
In the kitchen was the noise of Goaty, ungovernable Goaty, aged eight,
still snivelingly washing, though not cleaning, the incredible pile of
dinner dishes. With a trail of hesitating remarks on the sadness of
sciatica and windy evenings Mr. Wrenn sneaked forth from the august
presence of Mrs. Zapp and mounted to paradise—his third-floor-front.
It was an abjectly respectable room—the bedspread patched; no two
pieces of furniture from the same family; half-tones from the magazines
pinned on the wall. But on the old marble mantelpiece lived his
friends, books from wanderland. Other friends the room had rarely
known. It was hard enough for Mr. Wrenn to get acquainted with people,
anyway, and Mrs. Zapp did not expect her gennulman lodgers to
entertain. So Mr. Wrenn had given up asking even Charley Carpenter, the
assistant bookkeeper at the Souvenir Company, to call. That left him
the books, which he now caressed with small eager finger-tips. He
picked out a P. & O. circular, and hastily left for fairyland.
The April skies glowed with benevolence this Saturday morning. The
Metropolitan Tower was singing, bright ivory tipped with gold, uplifted
and intensely glad of the morning. The buildings walling in Madison
Square were jubilant; the honest red-brick fronts, radiant; the new
marble, witty. The sparrows in the middle of Fifth Avenue were all
talking at once, scandalously but cleverly. The polished brass of
limousines threw off teethy smiles. At least so Mr. Wrenn fancied as he
whisked up Fifth Avenue, the skirts of his small blue double-breasted
coat wagging. He was going blocks out of his way to the office; ready
to defy time and eternity, yes, and even the office manager. He had
awakened with Defiance as his bedfellow, and throughout breakfast at
the hustler Dairy Lunch sunshine had flickered over the dirty
tessellated floor.
He pranced up to the Souvenir Company’s brick building, on
Twenty-eighth Street near Sixth Avenue. In the office he chuckled at
his ink-well and the untorn blotters on his orderly desk. Though he sat
under the weary unnatural brilliance of a mercury-vapor light, he
dashed into his work, and was too keen about this business of living
merrily to be much flustered by the bustle of the lady buyer’s superior
“_Good_ morning.” Even up to ten-thirty he was still slamming down
papers on his desk. Just let any one try to stop his course, his
readiness for snapping fingers at The Job; just let them _try_ it, that
was all he wanted!
Then he was shot out of his chair and four feet along the corridor, in
reflex response to the surly “Bur-r-r-r-r” of the buzzer. Mr. Mortimer
R. Guilfogle, the manager, desired to see him. He scampered along the
corridor and slid decorously through the manager’s doorway into the
long sun-bright room, ornate with rugs and souvenirs. Seven Novelties
glittered on the desk alone, including a large rococo Shakespeare-style
glass ink-well containing cloves and a small iron Pittsburg-style one
containing ink. Mr. Wrenn blinked like a noon-roused owlet in the
brilliance. The manager dropped his fist on the desk, glared, smoothed
his flowered prairie of waistcoat, and growled, his red jowls
quivering:
“Look here, Wrenn, what’s the matter with you? The Bronx Emporium order
for May Day novelties was filled twice, they write me.”
“They ordered twice, sir. By ’phone,” smiled Mr. Wrenn, in an agony of
politeness.
“They ordered hell, sir! Twice—the same order?”
“Yes, sir; their buyer was prob—”
“They say they’ve looked it up. Anyway, they won’t pay twice. I know,
em. We’ll have to crawl down graceful, and all because you—I want to
know why you ain’t more careful!”
The announcement that Mr. Wrenn twice wriggled his head, and once
tossed it, would not half denote his wrath. At last! It was here—the
time for revolt, when he was going to be defiant. He had been careful;
old Goglefogle was only barking; but why should _he_ be barked at? With
his voice palpitating and his heart thudding so that he felt sick he
declared:
“I’m _sure_, sir, about that order. I looked it up. Their buyer was
drunk!”
It was done. And now would he be discharged? The manager was speaking:
“Probably. You looked it up, eh? Um! Send me in the two order-records.
Well. But, anyway, I want you to be more careful after this, Wrenn.
You’re pretty sloppy. Now get out. Expect me to make firms pay twice
for the same order, cause of your carelessness?”
Mr. Wrenn found himself outside in the dark corridor. The manager
hadn’t seemed much impressed by his revolt.
The manager wasn’t. He called a stenographer and dictated:
“Bronx Emporium:
“GENTLEMEN:—Our Mr. Wrenn has again (underline that ‘again,’ Miss
Blaustein), again looked up your order for May Day novelties. As we
wrote before, order certainly was duplicated by ’phone. Our Mr. Wrenn
is thoroughly reliable, and we have his records of these two orders. We
shall therefore have to push collection on both—”
After all, Mr. Wrenn was thinking, the crafty manager might be merely
concealing his hand. Perhaps he had understood the defiance. That
gladdened him till after lunch. But at three, when his head was again
foggy with work and he had forgotten whether there was still April
anywhere, he began to dread what the manager might do to him. Suppose
he lost his job; The Job! He worked unnecessarily late, hoping that the
manager would learn of it. As he wavered home, drunk with weariness,
his fear of losing The Job was almost equal to his desire to resign
from The Job.
He had worked so late that when he awoke on Sunday morning he was still
in a whirl of figures. As he went out to his breakfast of coffee and
whisked wheat at the Hustler Lunch the lines between the blocks of the
cement walk, radiant in a white flare of sunshine, irritatingly
recalled the cross-lines of order-lists, with the narrow cement blocks
at the curb standing for unfilled column-headings. Even the ridges of
the Hustler Lunch’s imitation steel ceiling, running in parallel lines,
jeered down at him that he was a prosaic man whose path was a ruler.
He went clear up to the branch post-office after breakfast to get the
Sunday mail, but the mail was a disappointment. He was awaiting a
wonderful fully illustrated guide to the Land of the Midnight Sun, a
suggestion of possible and coyly improbable trips, whereas he got only
a letter from his oldest acquaintance—Cousin John, of Parthenon, New
York, the boy-who-comes-to-play of Mr. Wrenn’s back-yard days in
Parthenon. Without opening the letter Mr. Wrenn tucked it into his
inside coat pocket, threw away his toothpick, and turned to Sunday
wayfaring.
He jogged down Twenty-third Street to the North River ferries afoot.
Trolleys took money, and of course one saves up for future great
traveling. Over him the April clouds were fetterless vagabonds whose
gaiety made him shrug with excitement and take a curb with a frisk as
gambolsome as a Central Park lamb. There was no hint of sales-lists in
the clouds, at least. And with them Mr. Wrenn’s soul swept along, while
his half-soled Cum-Fee-Best $3.80 shoes were ambling past warehouses.
Only once did he condescend to being really on Twenty-third Street. At
the Ninth Avenue corner, under the grimy Elevated, he sighted two
blocks down to the General Theological Seminary’s brick Gothic and
found in a pointed doorway suggestions of alien beauty.
But his real object was to loll on a West and South Railroad in luxury,
and go sailing out into the foam and perilous seas of North River. He
passed through the smoking-cabin. He didn’t smoke—the habit used up
travel-money. Once seated on the upper deck, he knew that at last he
was outward-bound on a liner. True, there was no great motion, but Mr.
Wrenn was inclined to let realism off easily in this feature of his
voyage. At least there were undoubted life-preservers in the white
racks overhead; and everywhere the world, to his certain witnessing,
was turned to crusading, to setting forth in great ships as if it were
again in the brisk morning of history when the joy of adventure
possessed the Argonauts.
He wasn’t excited over the liners they passed. He was so experienced in
all of travel, save the traveling, as to have gained a calm interested
knowledge. He knew the _Campagnia_ three docks away, and explained to a
Harlem grocer her fine points, speaking earnestly of stacks and sticks,
tonnage and knots.
Not excited, but—where couldn’t he go if he were pulling out for Arcady
on the _Campagnia!_ Gee! What were even the building-block towers of
the Metropolitan and Singer buildings and the _Times’s_ cream-stick
compared with some old shrine in a cathedral close that was misted with
centuries!
All this he felt and hummed to himself, though not in words. He had
never heard of Arcady, though for many years he had been a citizen of
that demesne.
Sure, he declared to himself, he was on the liner now; he was sliding
up the muddy Mersey (see the _W. S. Travel Notes_ for the source of his
visions); he was off to St. George’s Square for an organ-recital (see
the English Baedeker); then an express for London and—Gee!
The ferryboat was entering her slip. Mr. Wrenn trotted toward the bow
to thrill over the bump of the boat’s snub nose against the lofty
swaying piles and the swash of the brown waves heaped before her as she
sidled into place. He was carried by the herd on into the station.
He did not notice the individual people in his exultation as he heard
the great chords of the station’s paean. The vast roof roared as the
iron coursers stamped titanic hoofs of scorn at the little
stay-at-home.
That is a washed-out hint of how the poets might describe Mr. Wrenn’s
passion. What he said was “Gee!”
He strolled by the lists of destinations hung on the track gates.
Chicago (the plains! the Rockies! sunset over mining-camps!),
Washington, and the magic Southland—thither the iron horses would be
galloping, their swarthy smoke manes whipped back by the whirlwind,
pounding out with clamorous strong hoofs their sixty miles an hour.
Very well. In time he also would mount upon the iron coursers and
charge upon Chicago and the Southland; just as soon as he got ready.
Then he headed for Cortlandt Street; for Long Island, City. finally,
the Navy Yard. Along his way were the docks of the tramp steamers where
he might ship as steward in the all-promising Sometime. He had never
done anything so reckless as actually to ask a skipper for the chance
to go a-sailing, but he had once gone into a mission society’s free
shipping-office on West Street where a disapproving elder had grumped
at him, “Are you a sailor? No? Can’t do anything for you, my friend.
Are you saved?” He wasn’t going to risk another horror like that, yet
when the golden morning of Sometime dawned he certainly was going to go
cruising off to palm-bordered lagoons.
As he walked through Long Island City he contrived conversations with
the sailors he passed. It would have surprised a Norwegian bos’un’s
mate to learn that he was really a gun-runner, and that, as a matter of
fact, he was now telling yarns of the Spanish Main to the man who slid
deprecatingly by him.
Mr. Wrenn envied the jackies on the training-ship and carelessly went
to sea as the President’s guest in the admiral’s barge and was
frightened by the stare of a sauntering shop-girl and arrived home
before dusk, to Mrs. Zapp’s straitened approval.
Dusk made incantations in his third-floor-front. Pleasantly fagged in
those slight neat legs, after his walk, Mr. Wrenn sat in the wicker
rocker by the window, patting his scrubby tan mustache and reviewing
the day’s wandering. When the gas was lighted he yearned over pictures
in a geographical magazine for a happy hour, then yawned to himself,
“Well-l-l, Willum, guess it’s time to crawl into the downy.”
He undressed and smoothed his ready-made suit on the rocking-chair
back. Sitting on the edge of his bed, quaint in his cotton night-gown,
like a rare little bird of dull plumage, he rubbed his head sleepily.
Um-m-m-m-m! How tired he was! He went to open the window. Then his
tamed heart leaped into a waltz, and he forgot third-floor-fronts and
sleepiness.
Through the window came the chorus of fog-horns on North River.
“Boom-m-m!” That must be a giant liner, battling up through the fog.
(It was a ferry.) A liner! She’d be roaring just like that if she were
off the Banks! If he were only off the Banks! “Toot! Toot!” That was a
tug. “Whawn-n-n!” Another liner. The tumultuous chorus repeated to him
all the adventures of the day.
He dropped upon the bed again and stared absently at his clothes. Out
of the inside coat pocket stuck the unopened letter from Cousin John.
He read a paragraph of it. He sprang from the bed and danced a
tarantella, pranced in his cottony nightgown like a drunken Yaqui. The
letter announced that the flinty farm at Parthenon, left to Mr. Wrenn
by his father, had been sold. Its location on a river bluff had made it
valuable to the Parthenon Chautauqua Association. There was now to his
credit in the Parthenon National Bank nine hundred and forty dollars!
He was wealthy, then. He had enough to stalk up and down the earth for
many venturesome (but economical) months, till he should learn the
trade of wandering, and its mysterious trick of living without a job or
a salary.
He crushed his pillow with burrowing head and sobbed excitedly, with a
terrible stomach-sinking and a chill shaking. Then he laughed and
wanted to—but didn’t—rush into the adjacent hall room and tell the
total stranger there of this world-changing news. He listened in the
hall to learn whether the Zapps were up, but heard nothing; returned
and cantered up and down, gloating on a map of the world.
“Gee! It’s happened. I could travel all the time. I guess I won’t
be—very much—afraid of wrecks and stuff. . . . Things like that. . . .
Gee! If I don’t get to bed I’ll be late at the office in the morning!”
Mr. Wrenn lay awake till three o’clock. Monday morning he felt rather
ashamed of having done so eccentric a thing. But he got to the office
on time. He was worried with the cares of wealth, with having to decide
when to leave for his world-wanderings, but he was also very much aware
that office managers are disagreeable if one isn’t on time. All morning
he did nothing more reckless than balance his new fortune, plus his
savings, against steamship fares on a waste half-sheet of paper.
The noon-hour was not The Job’s, but his, for exploration of the
parlous lands of romance that lie hard by Twenty-eighth Street and
Sixth Avenue. But he had to go out to lunch with Charley Carpenter, the
assistant bookkeeper, that he might tell the news. As for Charley, He
needed frequently to have a confidant who knew personally the tyrannous
ways of the office manager, Mr. Guilfogle.
Mr. Wrenn and Charley chose (that is to say, Charley chose) a table at
Drubel’s Eating House. Mr. Wrenn timidly hinted, “I’ve got some big
news to tell you.”
But Charley interrupted, “Say, did you hear old Goglefogle light into
me this morning? I won’t stand for it. Say, did you hear him—the old—”
“What was the trouble, Charley?”
“Trouble? Nothing was the trouble. Except with old Goglefogle. I made
one little break in my accounts. Why, if old Gogie had to keep track of
seventy-’leven accounts and watch every single last movement of a fool
girl that can’t even run the adding-machine, why, he’d get green around
the gills. He’d never do anything _but_ make mistakes! Well, I guess
the old codger must have had a bum breakfast this morning. Wanted some
exercise to digest it. Me, I was the exercise—I was the goat. He calls
me in, and he calls me _down_, and me—well, just lemme tell you, Wrenn,
I calls his bluff!”
Charley Carpenter stopped his rapid tirade, delivered with quick
head-shakes like those of palsy, to raise his smelly cigarette to his
mouth. Midway in this slow gesture the memory of his wrongs again
overpowered him. He flung his right hand back on the table, scattering
cigarette ashes, jerked back his head with the irritated patience of a
nervous martyr, then waved both hands about spasmodically, while he
snarled, with his cheaply handsome smooth face more flushed than usual:
“Sure! You can just bet your bottom dollar I let him see from the way I
looked at him that I wasn’t going to stand for no more monkey business.
You bet I did!… I’ll fix him, I will. You just _watch_ me. (Hey,
Drubel, got any lemon merang? Bring me a hunk, will yuh?) Why, Wrenn,
that cross-eyed double-jointed fat old slob, I’ll slam him in the slats
so hard some day—I will, you just watch my smoke. If it wasn’t for that
messy wife of mine—I ought to desert her, and I will some day, and—”
“Yuh.” Mr. Wrenn was curt for a second…. “I know how it is, Charley.
But you’ll get over it, honest you will. Say, I’ve got some news. Some
land that my dad left me has sold for nearly a thousand plunks. By the
way, this lunch is on me. Let me pay for it, Charley.”
Charley promised to let him pay, quite readily. And, expanding, said:
“Great, Wrenn! Great! Lemme congratulate you. Don’t know anybody I’d
rather’ve had this happen to. You’re a meek little baa-lamb, but you’ve
got lots of stuff in you, old Wrennski. Oh say, by the way, could. you
let me have fifty cents till Saturday? Thanks. I’ll pay it back sure.
By golly! you’re the only man around the office that ’preciates what a
double duck-lined old fiend old Goglefogle is, the old—”
“Aw, gee, Charley, I wish you wouldn’t jump on Guilfogle so hard. He’s
always treated me square.”
“Gogie—square? Yuh, he’s square just like a hoop. You know it, too,
Wrenn. Now that you’ve got enough money so’s you don’t need to be
scared about the job you’ll realize it, and you’ll want to soak him,
same’s I do. _Say!_” The impulse of a great idea made him gleefully
shake his fist sidewise. “Say! Why _don’t_ you soak him? They bank on
you at the Souvenir Company. Darn’ sight more than you realize, lemme
tell you. Why, you do about half the stock-keeper’s work, sides your
own. Tell you what you do. You go to old Goglefogle and tell him you
want a raise to twenty-five, and want it right now. Yes, by golly,
_thirty!_ You’re worth that, or pretty darn’ near it, but ’course old
Goglefogle’ll never give it to you. He’ll threaten to fire you if you
say a thing more about it. You can tell him to go ahead, and then
where’ll he be? Guess that’ll call his bluff some!”
“Yes, but, Charley, then if Guilfogle feels he can’t pay me that
much—you know he’s responsible to the directors; he can’t do everything
he wants to—why, he’ll just have to fire me, after I’ve talked to him
like that, whether he wants to or not. And that’d leave us—that’d leave
them—without a sales clerk, right in the busy season.”
“Why, sure, Wrenn; that’s what we want to do. If you go it ’d leave ’em
without just about _two_ men. Bother ’em like the deuce. It ’d bother
Mr. Mortimer X. Y. Guglefugle most of all, thank the Lord. He wouldn’t
know where he was at—trying to break in a man right in the busy season.
Here’s your chance. Come on, kid; don’t pass it up.”
“Oh gee, Charley, I can’t do that. You wouldn’t want me to try to
_hurt_ the Souvenir Company after being there for—lemme see, it must be
seven years.”
“Well, maybe you _like_ to get your cute little nose rubbed on the
grindstone! I suppose you’d like to stay on at nineteen per for the
rest of your life.”
“Aw, Charley, don’t get sore; please don’t! I’d like to get off, all
right—like to go traveling, and stuff like that. Gee! I’d like to
wander round. But I can’t cut out right in the bus—”
“But can’t you see, you poor nut, you won’t be _leaving_ ’em—they’ll
either pay you what they ought to or lose you.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that, Charley.
“Charley was making up for some uncertainty as to his own logic by
beaming persuasiveness, and Mr. Wrenn was afraid of being hypnotized.
“No, no!” he throbbed, rising.
“Well, all right!” snarled Charley, “if you like to be Gogie’s goat….
Oh, you’re all right, Wrennski. I suppose you had ought to stay, if you
feel you got to…. Well, so long. I’ve got to beat it over and buy a
pair of socks before I go back.”
Mr. Wrenn crept out of Drubel’s behind him, very melancholy. Even
Charley admitted that he “had ought to stay,” then; and what chance was
there of persuading the dread Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle that he wished
to be looked upon as one resigning? Where, then, any chance of
globe-trotting; perhaps for months he would remain in slavery, and he
had hoped just that morning— One dreadful quarter-hour with Mr.
Guilfogle and he might be free. He grinned to himself as he admitted
that this was like seeing Europe after merely swimming the mid-winter
Atlantic.
Well, he had nine minutes more, by his two-dollar watch; nine minutes
of vagabondage. He gazed across at a Greek restaurant with signs in
real Greek letters like “ruins at—well, at Aythens.” A Chinese
chop-suey den with a red-and-yellow carved dragon, and at an upper
window a squat Chinaman who might easily be carrying a _kris_, “or
whatever them Chink knives are,” as he observed for the hundredth time
he had taken this journey. A rotisserie, before whose upright fender of
scarlet coals whole ducks were happily roasting to a shiny brown. In a
furrier’s window were Siberian foxes’ skins (Siberia! huts of “awful
brave convicks”; the steely Northern Sea; guards in blouses, just as
he’d seen them at an Academy of Music play) and a polar bear (meaning,
to him, the Northern Lights, the long hike, and the _igloo_ at night).
And the florists! There were orchids that (though he only half knew it,
and that all inarticulately) whispered to him of jungles where, in the
hot hush, he saw the slumbering python and—“What was it in that poem,
that, Mandalay, thing? _was_ it about jungles? Anyway:
“‘Them garlicky smells,
And the sunshine and the palms and the bells.’”
He had to hurry back to the office. He stopped only to pat the head of
a florist’s delivery horse that looked wistfully at him from the curb.
“Poor old fella. What you thinking about? Want to be a circus horse and
wander? Le’s beat it together. You can’t, eh? Poor old fella!”
At three-thirty, the time when it seems to office persons that the
day’s work never will end, even by a miracle, Mr. Wrenn was shaky about
his duty to the firm. He was more so after an electrical interview with
the manager, who spent a few minutes, which he happened to have free,
in roaring “I want to know why” at Mr. Wrenn. There was no particular
“why” that he wanted to know; he was merely getting scientific
efficiency out of employees, a phrase which Mr. Guilfogle had taken
from a business magazine that dilutes efficiency theories for
inefficient employers.
At five-twenty the manager summoned him, complimented him on nothing in
particular, and suggested that he stay late with Charley Carpenter and
the stock-keeper to inventory a line of desk-clocks which they were
closing out.
As Mr. Wrenn returned to his desk he stopped at a window on the
corridor and coveted the bright late afternoon. The cornices of lofty
buildings glistened; the sunset shone fierily through the
glass-inclosed layer-like upper floors. He wanted to be out there in
the streets with the shopping crowds. Old Goglefogle didn’t consider
him; why should he consider the firm?