Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man Part 15

"Golly!" he said to himself; "of all the doggone cloth for a dress! Reg'lar gunny-sacking. She's skinny, too. Bright-red hair. She sure is the prize freak. Kind of good-looking, but--get a brick!"

He hated to rule so clever-seeming a woman quite out of court.

But he remembered her scissors glance at him, and his soft little heart became very hard.

How brittle are our steel resolves! When Mr. Wrenn walked out of Mrs. Cattermole's excellent establishment and heavily inspected the quiet Bloomsbury Street, with a cat's-meat-man stolidly clopping along the pavement, as loneliness rushed on him and he wondered what in the world he could do, he mused, "Gee! I bet that red-headed lady would be interestin' to know."

A day of furtive darts out from his room to do London, which glumly declined to be done. He went back to the Zoological Gardens and made friends with a tiger which, though it presumably came from an English colony, was the friendliest thing he had seen for a week. It did yawn, but it let him talk to it for a long while. He stood before the bars, peering in, and whenever no one else was about he murmured: "Poor fella, they won't let you go, heh? You got a worse boss 'n Goglefogle, heh? Poor old fella."

He didn't at all mind the disorder and rancid smell of the cage; he had no fear of the tiger's sleek murderous power. But he was somewhat afraid of the sound of his own tremorous voice. He had spoken aloud so little lately.

A man came, an Englishman in a high offensively well-fitting waistcoat, and stood before the cage. Mr. Wrenn slunk away, robbed of his new friend, the tiger, the forlornest person in all London, kicking at pebbles in the path.

As half-dusk made the quiet street even more detached, he sat on the steps of his rooming-house on Tavistock Place, keeping himself from the one definite thing he wanted to do--the thing he keenly imagined a happy Mr. Wrenn doing--dashing over to the Euston Station to find out how soon and where he could get a train for Liverpool and a boat for America.

A girl was approaching the house. He viewed her carelessly, then intently. It was the freak lady of Mrs. Cattermole's Tea House--the corsetless young woman of the tight-fitting crash gown and flame-colored hair. She was coming up the steps of his house.

He made room for her with feverish courtesy. She lived in the same house--He instantly, without a bit of encouragement from the uninterested way in which she snipped the door to, made up a whole novel about her. Gee! She was a French countess, who lived in a reg'lar chateau, and she was staying in Bloomsbury incognito, seeing the sights. She was a n.o.ble. She was--

Above him a window opened. He glanced up. The countess incog.

was leaning out, scanning the street uncaringly. Why--her windows were next to his! He was living next room to an unusual person--as unusual as Dr. Mittyford.

He hurried up-stairs with a fervid but vague plan to meet her.

Maybe she really was a French countess or somepun'. All evening, sitting by the window, he was comforted as he heard her move about her room. He had a friend. He had started that great work of making friends--well, not started, but started starting--then he got confused, but the idea was a flame to warm the fog-chilled s.p.a.ces of the London street.

At his Cattermole breakfast he waited long. She did not come.

Another day--but why paint another day that was but a smear of flat dull slate? Yet another breakfast, and the lady of mystery came. Before he knew he was doing it he had bowed to her, a slight uneasy bend of his neck. She peered at him, unseeing, and sat down with her back to him.

He got much good healthy human vindictive satisfaction in evicting her violently from the French chateau he had given her, and remembering that, of course, she was just a "fool freak Englishwoman--prob'ly a bloomin' stoodent" he scorned, and so settled _her!_ Also he told her, by telepathy, that her new gown was freakier than ever--a pale-green thing, with large white b.u.t.tons.

As he was coming in that evening he pa.s.sed her in the hall. She was clad in what he called a bathrobe, and what she called an Arabian _burnoose_, of black embroidered with dull-gold crescents and stars, showing a V of exquisite flesh at her throat. A shred of tenuous lace straggled loose at the opening of the _burnoose_. Her radiant hair, tangled over her forehead, shone with a thousand various gleams from the gas-light over her head as she moved back against the wall and stood waiting for him to pa.s.s. She smiled very doubtfully, distantly--the smile, he felt, of a great lady from Mayfair. He bobbed his head, lowered his eyes abashedly, and noticed that along the shelf of her forearm, held against her waist, she bore many silver toilet articles, and such a huge heavy fringed Turkish bath-towel as he had never seen before.

He lay awake to picture her brilliant throat and shining hair.

He rebuked himself for the lack of dignity in "thinking of that freak, when she wouldn't even return a fellow's bow." But her shimmering hair was the star of his dreams.

Napping in his room in the afternoon, Mr. Wrenn heard slight active sounds from her, next room. He hurried down to the stoop.

She stood behind him on the door-step, glaring up and down the street, as bored and as ready to spring as the Zoo tiger. Mr.

Wrenn heard himself saying to the girl, "Please, miss, do you mind telling me--I'm an American; I'm a stranger in London--I want to go to a good play or something and what would I--what would be good--"

"I don't know, reahlly," she said, with much hauteur.

"Everything's rather rotten this season, I fancy." Her voice ran fluting up and down the scale. Her a's were very broad.

"Oh--oh--y-you _are_ English, then?"

"Yes!"

"Why--uh--"

"_Yes!_"

"Oh, I just had a fool idea maybe you might be French."

"Perhaps I am, y' know. I'm not reahlly English," she said, blandly.

"Why--uh--"

"What made you think I was French? Tell me; I'm interested."

"Oh, I guess I was just--well, it was almost make-b'lieve--how you had a castle in France--just a kind of a fool game."

"Oh, _don't_ be ashamed of imagination," she demanded, stamping her foot, while her voice fluttered, low and beautifully controlled, through half a dozen notes. "Tell me the rest of your story about me."

She was sitting on the rail above him now. As he spoke she cupped her chin with the palm of her delicate hand and observed him curiously.

"Oh, nothing much more. You were a countess--"

"Please! Not just 'were.' Please, sir, mayn't I be a countess now?"

"Oh yes, of course you are!" he cried, delight submerging timidity. "And your father was sick with somepun' mysterious, and all the docs shook their heads and said 'Gee! we dunno what it is,' and so you sneaked down to the treasure-chamber--you see, your dad--your father, I should say--he was a cranky old Frenchman--just in the story, you know. He didn't think you could do anything yourself about him being mysteriously sick.

So one night you--"

"Oh, was it dark? Very _very_ dark? And silent? And my footsteps rang on the hollow flagstones? And I swiped the gold and went forth into the night?"

"Yes, _yes!_ That's it."

"But why did I swipe it?"

"I'm just coming to that," he said, sternly.

"Oh, please, sir, I'm awful sorry I interrupted."

"It was like this: You wanted to come over here and study medicine so's you could cure your father."

"But please, sir," said the girl, with immense gravity, "mayn't I let him die, and not find out what's ailing him, so I can marry the _maire?_"

"Nope," firmly, "you got to--Say, _gee!_ I didn't expect to tell you all this make-b'lieve.... I'm afraid you'll think it's awful fresh of me."

"Oh, I loved it--really I did--because you liked to make it up about poor Istra. (My name is Istra Nash.) I'm sorry to say I'm not reahlly"--her two "reallys" were quite different--"a countess, you know. Tell me--you live in this same house, don't you?

Please tell me that you're not an interesting Person. Please!"

"I--gee! I guess I don't quite get you."

"Why, stupid, an Interesting Person is a writer or an artist or an editor or a girl who's been in Holloway Jail or Canongate for suffraging, or any one else who depends on an accident to be tolerable."

"No, I'm afraid not; I'm just a kind of clerk."

"Good! Good! My dear sir--whom I've never seen before--have I?

By the way, please don't think I usually pick up stray gentlemen and talk to them about my pure white soul. But you, you know, made stories about me.... I was saying: If you could only know how I loathe and hate and despise Interesting People just now!