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.”