HE BECOMES MILDLY RELIGIOUS AND HIGHLY LITERARY
The hero of the one-act play at Hammerstein’s Victoria vaudeville
theater on that December evening was, it appeared, a wealthy young
mine-owner in disguise. He was working for the “fake mine promoter”
because he loved the promoter’s daughter with a love that passed all
understanding except that of the girls in the gallery. When the postal
authorities were about to arrest the promoter our young hero saved him
by giving him a real mine, and the ensuing kiss of the daughter ended
the suspense in which Mr. Wrenn and Nelly, Mrs. Arty and Tom had
watched the play from the sixth row of the balcony.
Sighing happily, Nelly cried to the group: “Wasn’t that grand? I got so
excited! Wasn’t that young miner a dear?”
“Awfully nice,” said Mr. Wrenn. “And, gee! wasn’t that great, that
office scene—with that safe and the rest of the stuff—just like you was
in a real office. But, say, they wouldn’t have a copying-press in an
office like that; those fake mine promoters send out such swell
letters; they’d use carbon copies and not muss the letters all up.”
“By gosh, that’s right!” and Tom nodded his chin toward his right
shoulder in approval. Nelly cried, “That’s so; they would”; while Mrs.
Arty, not knowing what a copying-press was, appeared highly
commendatory, and said nothing at all.
During the moving pictures that followed, Mr. Wrenn felt proudly that
he was taken seriously, though he had known them but little over a
month. He followed up his conversational advantage by leading the
chorus in wondering, “which one of them two actors the heroine was
married to?” and “how much a week they get for acting in that thing?”
It was Tom who invited them to Miggleton’s for coffee and fried
oysters. Mr. Wrenn was silent for a while. But as they were stamping
through the rivulets of wheel-tracks that crisscrossed on a slushy
street-crossing Mr. Wrenn regained his advantage by crying, “Say, don’t
you think that play ’d have been better if the promoter ’d had an awful
grouch on the young miner and ’d had to crawfish when the miner saved
him?”
“Why, yes; it would!” Nelly glowed at him.
“Wouldn’t wonder if it would,” agreed Tom, kicking the December slush
off his feet and patting Mr. Wrenn’s back.
“Well, look here,” said Mr. Wrenn, as they left Broadway, with its
crowds betokening the approach of Christmas, and stamped to the quieter
side of Forty-second, “why wouldn’t this make a slick play: say there’s
an awfully rich old guy; say he’s a railway president or something, d’
you see? Well, he’s got a secretary there in the office—on the stage,
see? The scene is his office. Well, this guy’s—the rich old
guy’s—daughter comes in and says she’s married to a poor man and she
won’t tell his name, but she wants some money from her dad. You see,
her dad’s been planning for her to marry a marquise or some kind of a
lord, and he’s sore as can be, and he won’t listen to her, and he just
cusses her out something fierce, see? Course he doesn’t really cuss,
but he’s awful sore; and she tells him didn’t he marry her mother when
he was a poor young man; but he won’t listen. Then the secretary butts
in—my idea is he’s been kind of keeping in the background, see—and
_he’s_ the daughter’s husband all the while, see? and he tells the old
codger how he’s got some of his—some of the old fellow’s—papers that
give it away how he done something that was crooked—some kind of
deal—rebates and stuff, see how I mean?—and the secretary’s going to
spring this stuff on the newspapers if the old man don’t come through
and forgive them; so of course the president has to forgive them, see?”
“You mean the secretary was the daughter’s husband all along, and he
heard what the president said right there?” Nelly panted, stopping
outside Miggleton’s, in the light from the oyster-filled window.
“Yes; and he heard it all.”
“Why, I think that’s just a _fine_ idea,” declared Nelly, as they
entered the restaurant. Though her little manner of dignity and even
restraint was evident as ever, she seemed keenly joyous over his
genius.
“Say, that’s a corking idea for a play, Wrenn,” exclaimed Tom, at their
table, gallantly removing the ladies’ wraps.
“It surely is,” agreed Mrs. Arty.
“Why don’t you write it?” asked Nelly.
“Aw—I couldn’t write it!”
“Why, sure you could, Bill,” insisted Tom. “Straight; you ought to
write it. (Hey, waiter! Four fries and coffee!) You ought to write it.
Why, it’s a wonder; it ’d make a dev— ’Scuse me, ladies. It’d make a
howling hit. You might make a lot of money out of it.”
The renewed warmth of their wet feet on the red-tile floor, the scent
of fried oysters, the din of “Any Little Girl” on the piano, these
added color to this moment of Mr. Wrenn’s great resolve. The four
stared at one another excitedly. Mr. Wrenn’s eyelids fluttered. Tom
brought his hand down on the table with a soft flat “plob” and
declared: “Say, there might be a lot of money in it. Why, I’ve heard
that Harry Smith—writes the words for these musical comedies—makes a
_mint_ of money.”
“Mr. Poppins ought to help you in it—he’s seen such a lot of plays,”
Mrs. Arty anxiously advised.
“That’s a good idea,” said Mr. Wrenn. It had, apparently, been ordained
that he was to write it. They were now settling important details. So
when Nelly cried, “I think it’s just a fine idea; I knew you had lots
of imagination,” Tom interrupted her with:
“No; you write it, Bill. I’ll help you all I can, of course…. Tell you
what you ought to do: get hold of Teddem—he’s had a lot of stage
experience; he’d help you about seeing the managers. That ’d be the
hard part—you can write it, all right, but you’d have to get next to
the guys on the inside, and Teddem—Say, you cer_tain_ly ought to write
this thing, Bill. Might make a lot of money.”
“Oh, a lot!” breathed Nelly.
“Heard about a fellow,” continued Tom—” fellow named Gene Wolf, I think
it was—that was so broke he was sleeping in Bryant Park, and he made a
_hundred thousand dollars_ on his first play—or, no; tell you how it
was: he sold it outright for ten thousand—something like that, anyway.
I got that right from a fellow that’s met him.”
“Still, an author’s got to go to college and stuff like that.” Mr.
Wrenn spoke as though he would be pleased to have the objection
overruled at once, which it was with a universal:
“Oh, rats!”
Crunching oysters in a brown jacket of flour, whose every lump was a
crisp delight, hearing his genius lauded and himself called Bill thrice
in a quarter-hour, Mr. Wrenn was beatified. He asked the waiter for
some paper, and while the four hotly discussed things which “it would
be slick to have the president’s daughter do” he drew up a list of
characters on a sheet of paper he still keeps. It is headed,
“Miggleton’s Forty-second Street Branch.” At the bottom appear numerous
scribblings of the name Nelly.
[Illustration]
“I think I’ll call the heroine ‘Nelly,’” he mused.
Nelly Croubel blushed. Mrs. Arty and Tom glanced at each other. Mr.
Wrenn realized that he had, even at this moment of social triumph,
“made a break.”
He said, hastily; “I always liked that name. I—I had an aunt named
that!”
“Oh—” started Nelly.
“She was fine to me when I was a kid, “Mr. Wrenn added, trying to
remember whether it was right to lie when in such need.
“Oh, it’s a horrid name,” declared Nelly. “Why don’t you call her
something nice, like Hazel—or—oh—Dolores.”
“Nope; Nelly’s an elegant name—an _elegant_ name.”
He walked with Nelly behind the others, along Forty-second Street. To
the outsider’s eye he was a small respectable clerk, slightly stooped,
with a polite mustache and the dignity that comes from knowing well a
narrow world; wearing an overcoat too light for winter; too busily
edging out of the way of people and guiding the nice girl beside him
into clear spaces by diffidently touching her elbow, too pettily busy
to cast a glance out of the crowd and spy the passing poet or king, or
the iron night sky. He was as undistinguishable a bit of the evening
street life as any of the file of street-cars slashing through the wet
snow. Yet, he was the chivalrous squire to the greatest lady of all his
realm; he was a society author, and a man of great prospective wealth
and power over mankind!
“Say, we’ll have the grandest dinner you ever saw if I get away with
the play,” he was saying. “Will you come, Miss Nelly?”
“Indeed I will! Oh, you sha’n’t leave me out! Wasn’t I there when—”
“Indeed you were! Oh, we’ll have a reg’lar feast at the
Astor—artichokes and truffles and all sorts of stuff…. Would—would you
like it if I sold the play?”
“_Course_ I would, silly!”
“I’d buy the business and make Rabin manager—the Souvenir Company.
So he came to relate all those intimacies of The Job; and he was
overwhelmed at the ease with which she “got onto old Goglefogle.”
His preparations for writing the play were elaborate.
He paced Tom’s room till twelve-thirty, consulting as to whether he had
to plan the stage-setting; smoking cigarettes in attitudes on chair
arms. Next morning in the office he made numerous plans of the setting
on waste half-sheets of paper. At noon he was telephoning at Tom
regarding the question of whether there ought to be one desk or two on
the stage.
He skipped the evening meal at Mrs. Arty’s, dining with literary
pensiveness at the Armenian, for he had subtle problems to meditate. He
bought a dollar fountain-pen, which had large gold-like bands and a
rather scratchy pen-point, and a box of fairly large sheets of paper.
Pressing his literary impedimenta tenderly under his arm, he attended
four moving-picture and vaudeville theaters. By eleven he had seen
three more one-act plays and a dramatic playlet.
He slipped by the parlor door at Mrs. Arty’s.
His room was quiet. The lamplight on the delicately green walls was
like that of a regular author’s den, he was quite sure. He happily
tested the fountain-pen by writing the names Nelly and William Wrenn on
a bit of wrapping-paper (which he guiltily burned in an ash-tray);
washed his face with water which he let run for a minute to cool; sat
down before his table with a grunt of content; went back and washed his
hands; fiercely threw off the bourgeois encumbrances of coat and
collar; sat down again; got up to straighten a picture; picked up his
pen; laid it down, and glowed as he thought of Nelly, slumbering there,
near at hand, her exquisite cheek nestling silkenly against her arm,
perhaps, and her white dreams—
Suddenly he roared at himself, “Get on the job there, will yuh?” He
picked up the pen and wrote:
THE MILLIONAIRE’S DAUGHTER
A ONE ACT DRAMATIC PLAYLET
by
WILLIAM WRENN
CHARACTERS
_John Warrington_, a railway president; quite rich.
_Nelly Warrington_, Mr. Warrington’s daughter.
_Reginald Thorne_, his secretary.
He was jubilant. His pen whined at top speed, scattering a shower of
tiny drops of ink.
_Stage Scene: An office. Very expensive. Mr. Warrington and Mr. Thorne
are sitting there. Miss Warrington comes in. She says:_
He stopped. He thought. He held his head. He went over to the
stationary bowl and soaked his hair with water. He lay on the bed and
kicked his heels, slowly and gravely smoothing his mustache. Fifty
minutes later he gave a portentous groan and went to bed.
He hadn’t been able to think of what Miss Warrington says beyond “I
have come to tell you that I am married, papa,” and that didn’t sound
just right; not for a first line it didn’t, anyway.
At dinner next night—Saturday—Tom was rather inclined to make
references to “our author,” and to remark: “Well, I know where somebody
was last night, but of course I won’t tell. Say, them authors are a
wild lot.”
Mr. Wrenn, who had permitted the teasing of even Tim, the hatter,
“wasn’t going to stand for no kidding from nobody—not when Nelly was
there,” and he called for a glass of water with the air of a Harvard
assistant professor forced to eat in a lunch-wagon and slapped on the
back by the cook.
Nelly soothed him. “The play _is_ going well, _isn’t_ it?”
When he had, with a detached grandeur of which he was immediately
ashamed, vouchsafed that he was already “getting right down to brass
tacks on it,” that he had already investigated four more plays and
begun the actual writing, every one looked awed and asked him assorted
questions.
At nine-thirty that evening he combed and tightly brushed his hair,
which he had been pawing angrily for an hour and a half, went down the
hall to Nelly’s hall bedroom, and knocked with: “It’s Mr. Wrenn. May I
ask you something about the play?”
“Just a moment,” he heard her say.
He waited, panting softly, his lips apart. This was to be the first
time he had ever seen Nelly’s room. She opened the door part way,
smiling shyly, timidly, holding her pale-blue dressing-gown close. The
pale blueness was a modestly brilliant spot against the whiteness of
the room—white bureau, hung with dance programs and a yellow Upton’s
Grove High School banner, white tiny rocker, pale-yellow matting,
white-and-silver wall-paper, and a glimpse of a white soft bed.
He was dizzy with the exaltation of that purity, but he got himself to
say:
“I’m kind of stuck on the first part of the play, Miss Nelly. Please
tell me how you think the heroine would speak to her dad. Would she
call him ‘papa’ or ‘sir,’ do you think?”
“Why—let me see—”
“They’re such awful high society—”
“Yes, that’s so. Why, I should think she’d say ‘sir.’ Maybe oh, what
was it I heard in a play at the Academy of Music? ‘Father, I have come
back to you!’”
“Sa-a-ay, that’s a fine line! That’ll get the crowd going right from
the first…. I _told_ you you’d help me a lot.”
“I’m awfully glad if I _have_ helped you,” she said, earnestly. Good
night—and good, “awfully glad, but luck with the play. Good night.”
“Good night. Thank you a lot, Miss Nelly. Church in the morning,
remember! Good night.”
“Good night.”
As it is well known that all playwrights labor with toy theaters before
them for working models, Mr. Wrenn ran to earth a fine unbroken
pasteboard box in which a ninety-eight-cent alarm-clock had recently
arrived. He went out for some glue and three small corks. Setting up
his box stage, he glued a pill-box and a match-box on the floor—the
side of the box it had always been till now—and there he had the
mahogany desks. He thrust three matches into the corks, and behold
three graceful actors—graceful for corks, at least. There was
fascination in having them enter, through holes punched in the back of
the box, frisk up to their desks and deliver magic emotional speeches
that would cause any audience to weep; speeches regarding which he knew
everything but the words; a detail of which he was still quite ignorant
after half an hour of playing with his marionettes.
Before he went despairingly to bed that Saturday night he had added to
his manuscript:
_Mr. Thorne_ says: Here are the papers, sir. As a great railway
president you should—
The rest of that was to be filled in later. How the dickens could he
let the public know how truly great his president was?
(_Daughter, Miss Nelly, comes in._)
_Miss Nelly:_ Father, I have come back to you, sir.
_Mr. Warrington:_ My Daughter!
_Nelly:_ Father, I have something to tell you; something—
Breakfast at Mrs. Arty’s was always an inspiration. In contrast to the
lonely dingy meal at the Hustler Dairy Lunch of his Zapp days, he sat
next to a trimly shirtwaisted Nelly, fresh and enthusiastic after nine
hours’ sleep. So much for ordinary days. But Sunday morning—that was
paradise! The oil-stove glowed and purred like a large tin pussy cat;
it toasted their legs into dreamy comfort, while they methodically
stuffed themselves with toast and waffles and coffee. Nelly and he
always felt gently superior to Tom Poppins, who would be a-sleeping
late, as they talked of the joy of not having to go to the office, of
approaching Christmas, and of the superiority of Upton’s Grove and
Parthenon.
This morning was to be Mr. Wrenn’s first attendance at church with
Nelly. The previous time they had planned to go, Mr. Wrenn had spent
Sunday morning in unreligious fervor at the Chelsea Dental Parlors with
a young man in a white jacket instead of at church with Nelly.
This was also the first time that he had attended a church service in
nine years, except for mass at St. Patrick’s, which he regarded not as
church, but as beauty. He felt tremendously reformed, set upon new
paths of virtue and achievement. He thought slightingly of those lonely
bachelors, Morton and Mittyford, Ph. D. They just didn’t know what it
meant to a fellow to be going to church with a girl like Miss Nelly, he
reflected, as he re brushed his hair after breakfast.
He walked proudly beside her, and made much of the gentility of
entering the church, as one of the well-to-do and intensely bathed
congregation. He even bowed to an almost painfully washed and brushed
young usher with gold-rimmed eye-glasses. He thought scornfully of his
salad days, when he had bowed to the Brass-button Man at the
Nickelorion.
The church interior was as comfortable as Sunday-morning toast and
marmalade—half a block of red carpet in the aisles; shiny solid-oak
pews, gorgeous stained-glass windows, and a general polite creaking of
ladies’ best stays and gentlemen’s stiff shirt-bosoms, and an odor of
the best cologne and moth-balls.
It lacked but six days till Christmas. Mr. Wrenn’s heart was a little
garden, and his eyes were moist, and he peeped tenderly at Nelly as he
saw the holly and ivy and the frosted Christmas mottoes, “Peace on
Earth, Good Will to Men,” and the rest, that brightened the spaces
between windows.
Christmas—happy homes—laughter…. Since, as a boy, he had attended the
Christmas festivities of the Old Church Sunday-school at Parthenon, and
got highly colored candy in a net bag, his holidays had been celebrated
by buying himself plum pudding at lonely Christmas dinners at large
cheap restaurants, where there was no one to wish him “Merry Christmas”
except his waiter, whom he would quite probably never see again, nor
ever wish to see.
But this Christmas—he surprised himself and Nelly suddenly by hotly
thrusting out his hand and touching her sleeve with the searching
finger-tips of a child comforted from night fears.
During the sermon he had an idea. What was it Nelly had told him about
“Peter Pan”? Oh yes; somebody in it had said “Do you believe in
fairies?” _Say_, why wouldn’t it be great to have the millionaire’s
daughter say to her father, “Do you believe in love?”
“Gee, _I_ believe in love!” he yearned to himself, as he felt Nelly’s
arm unconsciously touch his.
Tom Poppins had Horatio Hood Teddem in that afternoon for a hot toddy.
Horatio looked very boyish, very confiding, and borrowed five dollars
from Mr. Wrenn almost painlessly, so absorbed was Mr. Wrenn in learning
from Horatio how to sell a play. To know the address of the firm of
Wendelbaum & Schirtz, play-brokers, located in a Broadway theater
building, seemed next door to knowing a Broadway manager.
When Horatio had gone Tom presented an idea which he had ponderously
conceived during his Sunday noon-hour at the cigar-store.
“Why not have three of us—say me and you and Mrs. Arty—talk the play,
just like we was acting it?”
He enthusiastically forced the plan on Mr. Wrenn. He pounded
down-stairs and brought up Mrs. Arty. He dashed about the room,
shouting directions. He dragged out his bureau for the
railroad-president’s desk, and a table for the secretary, and, after
some consideration and much rubbing of his chin, with two slams and a
bang he converted his hard green Morris-chair into an office safe.
The play was on. Mr. T. Poppins, in the role of the president, entered,
with a stern high expression on his face, threw a “Good morning,
Thorne,” at Wrenn, his secretary, and peeled off his gloves. (Mr. Wrenn
noted the gloves; they were a Touch.)
Mr. Wrenn approached diffidently, his face expressionless, lest Mrs.
Arty laugh at him. “Here—
“Say, what do you think would be a good way for the secretary to tell
the crowd that the other guy is the president? Say, how about this:
‘The vice-president of the railway would like to have you sign these,
sir, as president’?”
“That’s fine!” exclaimed Mrs. Arty, whose satin dress was carefully
spread over her swelling knees, as she sat in the oak rocker, like a
cheerful bronze monument to Sunday propriety. “But don’t you think he’d
say, ‘when it’s convenient to you, sir’?”
“Gee, that’s dandy!”
The play was on.
It ended at seven. Mr. Wrenn took but fifteen minutes for Sunday
supper, and wrote till one of the morning, finishing the first draft of
his manuscript.
Revision was delightful, for it demanded many conferences with Nelly,
sitting at the parlor table, with shoulders confidentially touching.
They were the more intimate because Tom had invited Mr. Wrenn, Nelly,
and Mrs. Arty to the Grand Christmas Eve Ball of the Cigar-Makers’
Union at Melpomene Hall. Nelly asked of Mr. Wrenn, almost as urgently
as of Mrs. Arty, whether she should wear her new white mull or her
older rose-colored China silk.
Two days before Christmas he timidly turned over the play for typing to
a haughty public stenographer who looked like Lee Theresa Zapp. She
yawned at him when he begged her to be careful of the manuscript. The
gloriously pink-bound and red-underlined typed manuscript of the play
was mailed to Messrs. Wendelbaum & Schirtz, play-brokers, at 6.15 P.M.,
Christmas Eve.
The four walked down Sixth Avenue to the Cigar-Makers’ Ball. They made
an Indian file through the Christmas shopping crowds, and stopped
frequently and noisily before the street-booths’ glamour of tinsel and
teddy-bears. They shrieked all with one rotund mad laughter as Tom
Poppins capered over and bought for seven cents a pink bisque doll,
which he pinned to the lapel of his plaid overcoat. They drank hot
chocolate at the Olympic Confectionery Store, pretending to each other
that they were shivering with cold.
It was here that Nelly reached up and patted Mr. Wrenn’s pale-blue tie
into better lines. In her hair was the scent which he had come to
identify as hers. Her white furs brushed against his overcoat.
The cigar-makers, with seven of them in full evening-dress and two in
dinner-coats, were already dancing on the waxy floor of Melpomene Hall
when they arrived. A full orchestra was pounding and scraping itself
into an hysteria of merriment on the platform under the red
stucco-fronted balcony, and at the bar behind the balcony there was a
spirit of beer and revelry by night.
Mr. Wrenn embarrassedly passed large groups of pretty girls. He felt
very light and insecure in his new gun-metal-finish pumps now that he
had taken off his rubbers and essayed the slippery floor. He tried
desperately not to use his handkerchief too conspicuously, though he
had a cold.
It was not till the choosing of partners for the next dance, when Tom
Poppins stood up beside Nelly, their arms swaying a little, their feet
tapping, that Mr. Wrenn quite got the fact that he could not dance.
He had casually said to the others, a week before, that he knew only
the square dances which, as a boy, he had learned at parties at
Parthenon. But they had reassured him: “Oh, come on—we’ll teach you how
to dance at the ball—it won’t be formal. Besides, we’ll give you some
lessons before we go.” Playwriting and playing Five Hundred had
prevented their giving him the lessons. So he now sat terrified as a
two-step began and he saw what seemed to be thousands of glittering
youths and maidens whirling deftly in a most involved course, getting
themselves past each other in a way which he was sure he could never
imitate. The orchestra yearned over music as rich and smooth as milk
chocolate, which made him intensely lonely for Nelly, though she was
only across the room from him.
Tom Poppins immediately introduced Nelly to a facetious cigar salesman,
who introduced her to three of the beaux in evening clothes, while Tom
led out Mrs. Arty. Mr. Wrenn, sitting in a row of persons who were not
at all interested in his sorrows, glowered out across the hall, and
wished, oh! so bitterly, to flee home. Nelly came up, glowing,
laughing, with black-mustached and pearl-waistcoated men, and
introduced him to them, but he glanced at them disapprovingly; and
always she was carried off to dance again.
She found and hopefully introduced to Mr. Wrenn a wallflower who came
from Yonkers and had never heard of Tom Poppins or aeroplanes or Oxford
or any other topic upon which Mr. Wrenn uneasily tried to discourse as
he watched Nelly waltz and smile up at her partners. Presently the two
sat silent. The wallflower excused herself and went back to her mama
from Yonkers.
Mr. Wrenn sat sulking, hating his friends for having brought him,
hating the sweetness of Nelly Croubel, and saying to himself,
“Oh—_sure_—she dances with all those other men—me, I’m only the poor
fool that talks to her when she’s tired and tries to cheer her up.”
He did not answer when Tom came and told him a new story he had just
heard in the barroom.
Once Nelly landed beside him and bubblingly insisted on his coming out
and trying to learn to dance. He brightened, but shyly remarked, “Oh
no, I don’t think I’d better.” Just then the blackest-mustached and
pearl-waistcoatedest of all the cigar salesmen came begging for a
dance, and she was gone, with only: “Now get up your courage. I’m going
to _make_ you dance.”
At the intermission he watched her cross the floor with the hateful
cigar salesman, slender in her tight crisp new white mull, flourishing
her fan and talking with happy rapidity. She sat down beside him. He
said nothing; he still stared out across the glassy floor. She peeped
at him curiously several times, and made a low tapping with her fan on
the side of her chair.
She sighed a little. Cautiously, but very casually, she said, “Aren’t
you going to take me out for some refreshments, Mr. Wrenn?”
“Oh sure—I’m good enough to buy refreshments for her!” he said to
himself.
Poor Mr. Wrenn; he had not gone to enough parties in Parthenon, and he
hadn’t gone to any in New York. At nearly forty he was just learning
the drab sulkiness and churlishness and black jealousy of the lover….
To her: “Why didn’t you go out with that guy with the black mustache?”
He still stared straight ahead.
She was big-eyed, a tear showing. “Why, Billy—” was all she answered.
He clenched his hands to keep from bursting out with all the pitiful
tears which were surging in his eyes. But he said nothing.
“Billy, what—”
He turned shyly around to her; his hand touched hers softly.
“Oh, I’m a beast,” he said, rapidly, low, his undertone trembling to
her ears through the laughter of a group next to them. “I didn’t mean
that, but I was—I felt like such a mutt—not being able to dance. Oh,
Nelly, I’m awfully sorry. You know I didn’t mean—_Come on!_ Let’s go
get something to eat!”
As they consumed ice-cream, fudge, doughnuts, and chicken sandwiches at
the refreshment counter they were very intimate, resenting the presence
of others. Tom and Mrs. Arty joined them. Tom made Nelly light her
first cigarette. Mr. Wrenn admired the shy way in which, taking the
tiniest of puffs, she kept drawing out her cigarette with little pouts
and nose wriggles and pretended sneezes, but he felt a lofty gladness
when she threw it away after a minute, declaring that she’d never smoke
again, and that she was going to make all three of her companions stop
smoking, “now that she knew how horrid and sneezy it was, so there!”
With what he intended to be deep subtlety Mr. Wrenn drew her away to
the barroom, and these two children, over two glasses of ginger-ale,
looked their innocent and rustic love so plainly that Mrs. Arty and Tom
sneaked away. Nelly cut out a dance, which she had promised to a
cigar-maker, and started homeward with Mr. Wrenn.
“Let’s not take a car—I want some fresh air after that smoky place,”
she said. “But it _was_ grand…. Let’s walk up Fifth Avenue.”
“Fine…. Tired, Nelly?”
“A little.”
He thought her voice somewhat chilly.
“Nelly—I’m so sorry—I didn’t really have the chance to tell you in
there how sorry I was for the way I spoke to you. Gee! it was fierce of
me—but I felt—I couldn’t dance, and—oh—”
No answer.
“And you did mind it, didn’t you?”
“Why, I didn’t think you were so very nice about it—when I’d tried so
hard to have you have a good time—”
“Oh, Nelly, I’m so sorry—”
There was tragedy in his voice. His shoulders, which he always tried to
keep as straight as though they were in a vise when he walked with her,
were drooping.
She touched his glove. “Oh don’t, Billy; it’s all right now. I
understand. Let’s forget—”
“Oh, you’re too good to me!”
Silence.
As they crossed Twenty-third on Fifth Avenue she took his arm. He
squeezed her hand. Suddenly the world was all young and beautiful and
wonderful. It was the first time in his life that he had ever walked
thus, with the arm of a girl for whom he cared cuddled in his. He
glanced down at her cheap white furs. Snowflakes, tremulous on the fur,
were turned into diamond dust in the light from a street-lamp which
showed as well a tiny place where her collar had been torn and mended
ever so carefully. Then, in a millionth of a second, he who had been a
wanderer in the lonely gray regions of a detached man’s heart knew the
pity of love, all its emotion, and the infinite care for the beloved
that makes a man of a rusty sales-clerk. He lifted a face of adoration
to the misty wonder of the bare trees, whose tracery of twigs filled
Madison Square; to the Metropolitan Tower, with its vast upward stretch
toward the ruddy sky of the city’s winter night. All these mysteries he
knew and sang. What he _said_ was:
“Gee, those trees look like a reg’lar picture!… The Tower just kind of
fades away. Don’t it?”
“Yes, it is pretty,” she said, doubtfully, but with a pressure of his
arm.
Then they talked like a summer-time brook, planning that he was to buy
a Christmas bough of evergreen, which she would smuggle to breakfast in
the morning. Through their chatter persisted the new intimacy which had
been born in the pain of their misunderstanding.
On January 10th the manuscript of “The Millionaire’s Daughter” was
returned by play-brokers Wendelbaum & Schirtz with this letter:
DEAR SIR,—We regret to say that we do not find play available. We
inclose our reader’s report on the same. Also inclose bill for ten
dollars for reading-fee, which kindly remit at early convenience.
He stood in the hall at Mrs. Arty’s just before dinner. He reread the
letter and slowly opened the reader’s report, which announced:
“Millionaire’s Daughter.” One-act vlle. Utterly impos. Amateurish to
the limit. Dialogue sounds like burlesque of Laura Jean Libbey. Can it.
Nelly was coming down-stairs. He handed her the letter and report, then
tried to stick out his jaw. She read them. Her hand slipped into his.
He went quickly toward the basement and made himself read the
letter—though not the report—to the tableful. He burned the manuscript
of his play before going to bed. The next morning he waded into The Job
as he never had before. He was gloomily certain that he would never get
away from The Job. But he thought of Nelly a hundred times a day and
hoped that sometime, some spring night of a burning moon, he might dare
the great adventure and kiss her. Istra— Theoretically, he remembered
her as a great experience. But what nebulous bodies these theories are!
That slow but absolutely accurate Five-Hundred player, Mr. William
Wrenn, known as Billy, glanced triumphantly at Miss Proudfoot, who was
his partner against Mrs. Arty and James T. Duncan, the traveling-man,
on that night of late February. His was the last bid in the crucial
hand of the rubber game. The others waited respectfully. Confidently,
he bid “Nine on no trump.”
“Good Lord, Billl” exclaimed James T. Duncan.
“I’ll make it.”
And he did. He arose a victor. There was no uneasiness, but rather all
the social polish of Mrs. Arty’s at its best, in his manner, as he
crossed to Mrs. Ebbitt’s chair and asked: “How is Mr. Ebbitt to-night?
Pretty rheumatic?” Miss Proudfoot offered him a lime tablet, and he
accepted it judicially. “I believe these tablets are just about as good
as Park & Tilford’s,” he said, cocking his head. “Say, Dunk, I’ll match
you to see who rushes a growler of beer. Tom’ll be here pretty
soon—store ought to be closed by now. We’ll have some ready for him.”
“Right, Bill,” agreed James T. Duncan.
Mr. Wrenn lost. He departed, after secretively obtaining not one, but
two pitchers, in one of which he got a “pint of dark” and in the other
a surprise. He bawled upstairs to Nelly, “Come on down, Nelly, can’t
you? Got a growler of ice-cream soda for the ladies!”
It is true that when Tom arrived and fell to conversational blows with
James T. Duncan over the merits of a Tom Collins Mr. Wrenn was not
brilliant, for the reason that he took Tom Collins to be a man instead
of the drink he really is.
Yet, as they went up-stairs Miss Proudfoot said to Nelly: “Mr. Wrenn is
quiet, but I do think in some ways he’s one of the nicest men I’ve seen
in the house for years. And he is so earnest. And I think he’ll make a
good pinochle player, besides Five Hundred.”
“Yes,” said Nelly.
“I think he was a little shy at first…. _I_ was always shy…. But he
likes us, and I like folks that like folks.”
“_Yes!_” said Nelly.