Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man Part 12

"What's a shoe-pack?" the Englishman stolidly interjected.

"Kind of a moccasin.... Great place, those woods. Hope your brother gets the chance to get up there."

"I say, I wonder did you ever meet him? Scrabble is his name, Jock Scrabble."

"Jock Scrabble--no, but _say!_ By golly, there was a fellow up in the Big Woods that came from St. Cl--St. Cloud? Yes, that was it. He was telling us about the town. I remember he said your brother had great chances there."

The Englishman meditatively accepted a bad cigar from Mr. Wrenn.

Suddenly: "You chaps can sleep in the stable-loft if you'd like. But you must blooming well stop smoking."

So in the dark odorous hay-mow Mr. Wrenn stretched out his legs with an affectionate "good night" to Morton. He slept nine hours. When he awoke, at the sound of a chain clanking in the stable below, Morton was gone. This note was pinned to his sleeve:

DEAR OLD MAN,--I still feel sure that you will not enjoy the hiking. b.u.mming is not much fun for most people, I don't think, even if they say it is. I do not want to live on you. I always did hate to graft on people. So I am going to beat it off alone. But I hope I will see you in N Y & we will enjoy many a good laugh together over our trip. If you will phone the P. R.

R. you can find out when I get back & so on. As I do not know what your address will be. Please look me up & I hope you will have a good trip.

Yours truly, HARRY P. MORTON.

Mr. Wrenn lay listening to the unfriendly rattling of the chain harness below for a long time. When he crawled languidly down from the hay-loft he glowered in a manner which was decidedly surly even for Bill Wrenn at a middle-aged English stranger who was stooping over a cow's hoof in a stall facing the ladder.

"Wot you doing here?" asked the Englishman, raising his head and regarding Mr. Wrenn as a housewife does a c.o.c.kroach in the salad-bowl.

Mr. Wrenn was bored. This seemed a very poor sort of man; a bloated c.o.c.kney, with a dirty neck-cloth, vile cuffs of grayish black, and a waistcoat cut foolishly high.

"The owner said I could sleep here," he snapped.

"Ow. 'E did, did 'e? 'E ayn't been giving you any of the perishin' 'osses, too, 'as 'e?"

It was st.u.r.dy old Bill Wrenn who snarled, "Oh, shut up!" Bill didn't feel like standing much just then. He'd punch this fellow as he'd punched Pete, as soon as not--or even sooner.

"Ow.... It's shut up, is it?... I've 'arf a mind to set the 'tecs on you, but I'm lyte. I'll just 'it you on the b.l.o.o.d.y nowse."

Bill Wrenn stepped off the ladder and squared at him. He was sorry that the c.o.c.kney was smaller than Pete.

The c.o.c.kney came over, feinted in an absent-minded manner, made swift and confusing circles with his left hand, and hit Bill Wrenn on the aforesaid b.l.o.o.d.y nose, which immediately became a bleeding nose. Bill Wrenn felt dizzy and, sitting on a grain-sack, listened amazedly to the c.o.c.kney's apologetic:

"I'm sorry I ayn't got time to 'ave the law on you, but I could spare time to 'it you again."

Bill shook the blood from his nose and staggered at the c.o.c.kney, who seized his collar, set him down outside the stable with a jarring b.u.mp, and walked away, whistling:

"Come, oh come to our Sunday-school, Ev-v-v-v-v-v-ry Sunday morn-ing."

"Gee!" mourned Mr. William Wrenn, "and I thought I was getting this hobo business down pat.... Gee! I wonder if Pete _was_ so hard to lick?"

CHAPTER VI

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 p.r.i.c.ked 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_, pa.s.sing teacups; but he pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sured 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 gla.s.s 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.