HE IS AN ORPHAN
Sadly clinging to the plan of the walking-trip he was to have made with
Morton, Mr. Wrenn crossed by ferry to Birkenhead, quite unhappily, for
he wanted to be discussing with Morton the quaintness of the uniformed
functionaries. He looked for the _Merian_ half the way over. As he
walked through Birkenhead, bound for Chester, he pricked himself on to
note red-brick house-rows, almost shocking in their lack of high front
stoops. Along the country road he reflected: “Wouldn’t Morty enjoy
this! Farm-yard all paved. Haystack with a little roof on it. Kitchen
stove stuck in a kind of fireplace. Foreign as the deuce.”
But Morton was off some place, in a darkness where there weren’t things
to enjoy. Mr. Wrenn had lost him forever. Once he heard himself wishing
that even Tim, the hatter, or “good old McGarver” were along. A scene
so British that it seemed proper to enjoy it alone he did find in a
real garden-party, with what appeared to be a real curate, out of a
story in _The Strand_, passing teacups; but he passed out of that hot
glow into a cold plodding that led him to Chester and a dull hotel
which might as well have been in Bridgeport or Hoboken.
He somewhat timidly enjoyed Chester the early part of the next day,
docilely following a guide about the walls, gaping at the mill on the
Dee and asking the guide two intelligent questions about Roman remains.
He snooped through the galleried streets, peering up dark stairways set
in heavy masonry that spoke of historic sieges, and imagined that he
was historically besieging. For a time Mr. Wrenn’s fancies contented
him.
He smiled as he addressed glossy red and green postcards to Lee Theresa
and Goaty, Cousin John and Mr. Guilfogle, writing on each a variation
of “Having a splendid trip. This is a very interesting old town. Wish
you were here.” Pantingly, he found a panorama showing the hotel where
he was staying—or at least two of its chimneys—and, marking it with a
heavy cross and the announcement “This is my hotel where I am staying,”
he sent it to Charley Carpenter.
He was at his nearest to greatness at Chester Cathedral. He chuckled
aloud as he passed the remains of a refectory of monastic days, in the
close, where knights had tied their romantically pawing chargers, “just
like he’d read about in a story about the olden times.” He was really
there. He glanced about and assured himself of it. He wasn’t in the
office. He was in an English cathedral close!
But shortly thereafter he was in an English temperance hotel, sitting
still, almost weeping with the longing to see Morton. He walked abroad,
feeling like an intruder on the lively night crowd; in a tap-room he
drank a glass of English porter and tried to make himself believe that
he was acquainted with the others in the room, to which theory they
gave but little support. All this while his loneliness shadowed him.
Of that loneliness one could make many books; how it sat down with him;
how he crouched in his chair, be-spelled by it, till he violently rose
and fled, with loneliness for companion in his flight. He was lonely.
He sighed that he was “lonely as fits.” Lonely—the word obsessed him.
Doubtless he was a bit mad, as are all the isolated men who sit in
distant lands longing for the voices of friendship.
Next morning he hastened to take the train for Oxford to get away from
his loneliness, which lolled evilly beside him in the compartment. He
tried to convey to a stodgy North Countryman his interest in the way
the seats faced each other. The man said “Oh aye?” insultingly and
returned to his Manchester newspaper.
Feeling that he was so offensive that it was a matter of honor for him
to keep his eyes away, Mr. Wrenn dutifully stared out of the door till
they reached Oxford.
There is a calm beauty to New College gardens. There is, Mr. Wrenn
observed, “something simply _slick_ about all these old quatrangleses,”
crossed by summering students in short flappy gowns. But he always
returned to his exile’s room, where he now began to hear the new voice
of shapeless nameless Fear—fear of all this alien world that didn’t
care whether he loved it or not.
He sat thinking of the cattle-boat as a home which he had loved but
which he would never see again. He had to use force on himself to keep
from hurrying back to Liverpool while there still was time to return on
the same boat.
No! He was going to “stick it out somehow, and get onto the hang of all
this highbrow business.”
Then he said: “Oh, darn it all. I feel rotten. I wish I was dead!”
“Those, sir, are the windows of the apartment once occupied by Walter
Pater,” said the cultured American after whom he was trailing. Mr.
Wrenn viewed them attentively, and with shame remembered that he didn’t
know who Walter Pater was. But—oh yes, now he remembered; Walter was
the guy that ’d murdered his whole family. So, aloud, “Well, I guess
Oxford’s sorry Walt ever come here, all right.”
“My dear sir, Mr. Pater was the most immaculate genius of the
nineteenth century,” lectured Dr. Mittyford, the cultured American,
severely.
Mr. Wrenn had met Mittyford, Ph.D., near the barges; had, upon polite
request, still more politely lent him a match, and seized the chance to
confide in somebody. Mittyford had a bald head, neat eye-glasses, a
fair family income, a chatty good-fellowship at the Faculty Club, and a
chilly contemptuousness in his rhetoric class-room at Leland Stanford,
Jr., University. He wrote poetry, which he filed away under the letter
“P” in his letter-file.
Dr. Mittyford grudgingly took Mr. Wrenn about, to teach him what not to
enjoy. He pointed at Shelley’s rooms as at a certificated angel’s
feather, but Mr. Wrenn writhingly admitted that he had never heard of
Shelley, whose name he confused with Max O’Rell’s, which Dr. Mittyford
deemed an error. Then, Pater’s window. The doctor shrugged. Oh well,
what could you expect of the proletariat! Swinging his stick aloofly,
he stalked to the Bodleian and vouchsafed, “That, sir, is the
_AEschylus_ Shelley had in his pocket when he was drowned.”
Though he heard with sincere regret the news that his new idol was
drowned, Mr. Wrenn found that _AEschylus_ left him cold. It seemed to
be printed in a foreign language. But perhaps it was merely a very old
book.
Standing before a case in which was an exquisite book in a queer
wrigglesome language, bearing the legend that from this volume
Fitzgerald had translated the _Rubaiyat_, Dr. Mittyford waved his hand
and looked for thanks.
“Pretty book,” said Mr. Wrenn.
“And did you note who used it?”
“Uh—yes.” He hastily glanced at the placard. “Mr. Fitzgerald. Say, I
think I read some of that Rubaiyat. It was something about a Persian
kitten—I don’t remember exactly.”
Dr. Mittyford walked bitterly to the other end of the room.
About eight in the evening Mr. Wrenn’s landlady knocked with, “There’s
a gentleman below to see you, sir.”
“Me?” blurted Mr. Wrenn.
He galloped down-stairs, panting to himself that Morton had at last
found him. He peered out and was overwhelmed by a motor-car, with Dr.
Mittyford waiting in awesome fur coat, goggles, and gauntlets, centered
in the car-lamplight that loomed in the shivery evening fog.
“Gee! just like a hero in a novel!” reflected Mr. Wrenn.
“Get on your things,” said the pedagogue. “I’m going to give you the
time of your life.”
Mr. Wrenn obediently went up and put on his cap. He was excited, yet
frightened and resentful at being “dragged into all this highbrow
business” which he had resolutely been putting away the past two hours.
As he stole into the car Dr. Mittyford seemed comparatively human,
remarking: “I feel bored this evening. I thought I would give you a
_nuit blanche_. How would you like to go to the Red Unicorn at
Brempton—one of the few untouched old inns?”
“That would be nice,” said Mr. Wrenn, unenthusiastically.
His chilliness impressed Dr. Mittyford, who promptly told one of the
best of his well-known whimsical yet scholarly stories.
“Ha! ha!” remarked Mr. Wrenn.
He had been saying to himself: “By golly! I ain’t going to even try to
be a society guy with him no more. I’m just going to be _me_, and if he
don’t like it he can go to the dickens.”
So he was gentle and sympathetic and talked West Sixteenth Street
slang, to the rhetorician’s lofty amusement.
The tap-room of the Red Unicorn was lighted by candles and a fireplace.
That is a simple thing to say, but it was not a simple thing for Mr.
Wrenn to see. As he observed the trembling shadows on the sanded floor
he wriggled and excitedly murmured, “Gee!… Gee whittakers!”
The shadows slipped in arabesques over the dust-gray floor and
scampered as bravely among the rafters as though they were in such a
tale as men told in believing days. Rustics in smocks drank ale from
tankards; and in a corner was snoring an ear-ringed peddler with his
beetle-black head propped on an oilcloth pack.
Stamping in, chilly from the ride, Mr. Wrenn laughed aloud. With a
comfortable feeling on the side toward the fire he stuck his slight
legs straight out before the old-time settle, looked devil-may-care,
made delightful ridges on the sanded floor with his toe, and clapped a
pewter pot on his knee with a small emphatic “Wop!” After about two and
a quarter tankards he broke out, “Say, that peddler guy there, don’t he
look like he was a gipsy—you know—sneaking through the hedges around
the manner-house to steal the earl’s daughter, huh?”
“Yes…. You’re a romanticist, then, I take it?”
“Yes, I guess I am. Kind of. Like to read romances and stuff.” He
stared at Mittyford beseechingly. “But, say—say, I wonder why—Somehow,
I haven’t enjoyed Oxford and the rest of the places like I ought to.
See, I’d always thought I’d be simply nutty about the quatrangles and
stuff, but I’m afraid they’re too highbrow for me. I hate to own up,
but sometimes I wonder if I can get away with this traveling stunt.”
Mittyford, the magnificent, had mixed ale and whisky punch. He was
mellowly instructive:
“Do you know, I’ve been wondering just what you _would_ get out of all
this. You really have a very fine imagination of a sort, you know, but
of course you’re lacking in certain factual bases. As I see it, your
_metier_ would be to travel with a pleasant wife, the two of you hand
in hand, so to speak, looking at the more obvious public buildings and
plesaunces—avenues and plesuances. There must be a certain portion of
the tripper class which really has the ability ‘for to admire and for
to see.’”
Dr. Mittyford finished his second toddy and with a wave of his hand
presented to Mr. Wrenn the world and all the plesaunces thereof, for to
see, though not, of course, to admire Mittyfordianly.
“But—what are you to do now about Oxford? Well, I’m afraid you’re taken
into captivity a bit late to be trained for that sort of thing. Do
about Oxford? Why, go back, master the world you understand. By the
way, have you seen my book on _Saxon Derivatives?_ Not that I’m
prejudiced in its favor, but it might give you a glimmering of what
this difficile thing ‘culture’ really is.”
The rustics were droning a church anthem. The glow of the ale was in
Mr. Wrenn. He leaned back, entirely happy, and it seemed confusedly to
him that what little he had heard of his learned and affectionate
friend’s advice gratefully confirmed his own theory that what one
wanted was friends—a “nice wife”—folks. “Yes, sir, by golly! It was
awfully nice of the Doc.” He pictured a tender girl in golden brown
back in the New York he so much desired to see who would await him
evenings with a smile that was kept for him. Homey—that was what _he_
was going to be! He happily and thoughtfully ran his finger about the
rim of his glass ten times.
“Time to go, I’ m afraid,” Dr. Mittyford was saying. Through the
exquisite haze that now filled the room Mr. Wrenn saw him dimly, as a
triangle of shirt-front and two gleaming ellipses for eyes…. His dear
friend, the Doc!… As he walked through the room chairs got humorously
in his way, but he good-naturedly picked a path among them, and fell
asleep in the motor-car. All the ride back he made soft mouse-like
sounds of snoring.
When he awoke in the morning with a headache and surveyed his
unchangeably dingy room he realized slowly, after smothering his head
in the pillow to shut off the light from his scorching eyeballs, that
Dr. Mittyford had called him a fool for trying to wander. He protested,
but not for long, for he hated to venture out there among the
dreadfully learned colleges and try to understand stuff written in
letters that look like crow-tracks.
He packed his suit-case slowly, feeling that he was very wicked in
leaving Oxford’s opportunities.
Mr. Wrenn rode down on a Tottenham Court Road bus, viewing the
quaintness of London. Life was a rosy ringing valiant pursuit, for he
was about to ship on a Mediterranean steamer laden chiefly with
adventurous friends. The bus passed a victoria containing a man with a
real monocle. A newsboy smiled up at him. The Strand roared with lively
traffic.
But the gray stonework and curtained windows of the Anglo-Southern
Steamship Company’s office did not invite any Mr. Wrenns to come in and
ship, nor did the hall porter, a beefy person with a huge collar and
sparse painfully sleek hair, whose eyes were like cold boiled mackerel
as Mr. Wrenn yearned:
“Please—uh—please will you be so kind and tell me where I can ship as a
steward for the Med—”
“None needed.”
“Or Spain? I just want to get any kind of a job at first. Peeling
potatoes or—It don’t make any difference—”
“None needed, I said, my man.” The porter examined the hall clock
extensively.
Bill Wrenn suddenly popped into being and demanded: “Look here, you; I
want to see somebody in authority. I want to know what I _can_ ship
as.”
The porter turned round and started. All his faith in mankind was
destroyed by the shock of finding the fellow still there. “Nothing, I
told you. No one needed.”
“Look here; can I see somebody in authority or not?”
The porter was privately esteemed a wit at his motherin-law’s. Waddling
away, he answered, “Or not.”
Mr. Wrenn drooped out of the corridor. He had planned to see the Tate
Gallery, but now he hadn’t the courage to face the difficulties of
enjoying pictures. He zig-zagged home, mourning: “What’s the use. And
I’ll be hung if I’ll try any other offices, either. The icy mitt,
that’s what they hand you here. Some day I’ll go down to the docks and
try to ship there. Prob’ly. Gee! I feel rotten!”
Out of all this fog of unfriendliness appeared the waitress at the St.
Brasten Cocoa House; first, as a human being to whom he could talk,
second, as a woman. She was ignorant and vulgar; she misused English
cruelly; she wore greasy cotton garments, planted her large feet on the
floor with firm clumsiness, and always laughed at the wrong cue in his
diffident jests. But she did laugh; she did listen while he stammered
his ideas of meat-pies and St. Paul’s and aeroplanes and Shelley and
fog and tan shoes. In fact, she supposed him to be a gentleman and
scholar, not an American.
He went to the cocoa-house daily.
She let him know that he was a man and she a woman, young and kindly,
clear-skinned and joyous-eyed. She touched him with warm elbow and
plump hip, leaning against his chair as he gave his order. To that he
looked forward from meal to meal, though he never ceased harrowing over
what he considered a shameful intrigue.
That opinion of his actions did not keep him from tingling one
lunch-time when he suddenly understood that she was expecting to be
tempted. He tempted her without the slightest delay, muttering, “Let’s
take a walk this evening?”
She accepted. He was shivery and short of breath while he was trying to
smile at her during the rest of the meal, and so he remained all
afternoon at the Tower of London, though he very well knew that all
this history—“kings and gwillotines and stuff”—demanded real Wrenn
thrills.
They were to meet on a street-corner at eight. At seven-thirty he was
waiting for her. At eight-thirty he indignantly walked away, but he
hastily returned, and stood there another half-hour. She did not come.
When he finally fled home he was glad to have escaped the great mystery
of life, then distressingly angry at the waitress, and desolate in the
desert stillness of his room.
He sat in his cold hygienic uncomfortable room on Tavistock Place
trying to keep his attention on the “tick, tick, tick, tick” of his
two-dollar watch, but really cowering before the vast shadowy presences
that slunk in from the hostile city.
He didn’t in the least know what he was afraid of. The actual
Englishman whom he passed on the streets did not seem to threaten his
life, yet his friendly watch and familiar suit-case seemed the only
things he could trust in all the menacing world as he sat there, so
vividly conscious of his fear and loneliness that he dared not move his
cramped legs.
The tension could not last. For a time he was able to laugh at himself,
and he made pleasant pictures—Charley Carpenter telling him a story at
Drubel’s; Morton companionably smoking on the top deck; Lee Theresa
flattering him during an evening walk. Most of all he pictured the
brown-eyed sweetheart he was going to meet somewhere, sometime. He
thought with sophomoric shame of his futile affair with the waitress,
then forgot her as he seemed almost to touch the comforting hand of the
brown-eyed girl.
“Friends, that’s what I want. You bet!” That was the work he was going
to do—make acquaintances. A girl who would understand him, with whom he
could trot about, seeing department-store windows and moving-picture
shows.
It was then, probably, hunched up in the dowdy chair of faded
upholstery, that he created the two phrases which became his formula
for happiness. He desired “somebody to go home to evenings”; still
more, “some one to work with and work for.”
It seemed to him that he had mapped out his whole life. He sat back,
satisfied, and caught the sound of emptiness in his room, emphasized by
the stilly tick of his watch.
“Oh—Morton—” he cried.
He leaped up and raised the window. It was raining, but through the
slow splash came the night rattle of hostile London. Staring down, he
studied the desolate circle of light a street-lamp cast on the wet
pavement. A cat gray as dish-water, its fur worn off in spots, lean and
horrible, sneaked through the circle of light like the spirit of
unhappiness, like London’s sneer at solitary Americans in Russell
Square rooms.
Mr. Wrenn gulped. Through the light skipped a man and a girl, so little
aware of him that they stopped, laughingly, wrestling for an umbrella,
then disappeared, and the street was like a forgotten tomb. A hansom
swung by, the hoofbeats sharp and cheerless. The rain dripped. Nothing
else. Mr. Wrenn slammed down the window.
He smoothed the sides of his suit-case and reckoned the number of miles
it had traveled with him. He spun his watch about on the table, and
listened to its rapid mocking speech, “Friends, friends; friends,
friends.”
Sobbing, he began to undress, laying down each garment as though he
were going to the scaffold. When the room was dark the great shadowy
forms of fear thronged unchecked about his narrow dingy bed.
Once during the night he woke. Some sound was threatening him. It was
London, coming to get him and torture him. The light in his room was
dusty, mottled, gray, lifeless. He saw his door, half ajar, and for
some moments lay motionless, watching stark and bodiless heads thrust
themselves through the opening and withdraw with sinister alertness
till he sprang up and opened the door wide.
But he did not even stop to glance down the hall for the crowd of
phantoms that had gathered there. Some hidden manful scorn of weakness
made him sneer aloud, “Don’t be a baby even if you _are_ lonely.”
His voice was deeper than usual, and he went to bed to sleep, throwing
himself down with a coarse wholesome scorn of his nervousness.
He awoke after dawn, and for a moment curled in happy wriggles of
satisfaction over a good sleep. Then he remembered that he was in the
cold and friendless prison of England, and lay there panting with
desire to get away, to get back to America, where he would be safe.
He wanted to leap out of bed, dash for the Liverpool train, and take
passage for America on the first boat. But perhaps the officials in
charge of the emigrants and the steerage (and of course a fellow would
go steerage to save money) would want to know his religion and the
color of his hair—as bad as trying to ship. They might hold him up for
a couple of days. There were quarantines and customs and things, of
which he had heard. Perhaps for two or even three days more he would
have to stay in this nauseating prison-land.
This was the morning of August 3, 1910, two weeks after his arrival in
London, and twenty-two days after victoriously reaching England, the
land of romance.