Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man Part 28

He walked to the office of the Caravanserai, blindly, quietly.

He paid his bill, and found that he had only fifty dollars left.

He could not get himself to eat the waiting high tea. There was a seven-fourteen train for London. He took it. Meantime he wrote out a cable to his New York bank for a hundred and fifty dollars. To keep from thinking in the train he talked gravely and gently to an old man about the brave days of England, when men threw quoits. He kept thinking over and over, to the tune set by the rattling of the train trucks: "Friends... I got to make friends, now I know what they are.... Funny some guys don't make friends. Mustn't forget. Got to make lots of 'em in New York. Learn how to make 'em."

He arrived at his room on Tavistock Place about eleven, and tried to think for the rest of the night of how deeply he was missing Morton of the cattle-boat now that--now that he had no friend in all the hostile world.

In a London A. B. C. restaurant Mr. Wrenn was talking to an American who had a clipped mustache, brisk manners, a Knight-of-Pythias pin, and a mind for duck-shooting, hardware-selling, and cigars.

"No more England for mine," the American snapped, good-humoredly. "I'm going to get out of this foggy hole and get back to G.o.d's country just as soon as I can. I want to find out what's doing at the store, and I want to sit down to a plate of flapjacks. I'm good and plenty sick of tea and marmalade. Why, I wouldn't take this fool country for a gift. No, sir! Me for G.o.d's country--Sleepy Eye, Brown County, Minnesota. You bet!"

"You don't like England much, then?" Mr. Wrenn carefully reasoned.

"Like it? Like this damp crowded hole, where they can't talk English, and have a fool coinage--Say, that's a great system, that metric system they've got over in France, but here--why, they don't know whether Kansas City is in Kansas or Missouri or both.... 'Right as rain'--that's what a fellow said to me for 'all right'! Ever hear such nonsense?.... And tea for breakfast!

Not for me! No, sir! I'm going to take the first steamer!"

With a gigantic smoke-puff of disgust the man from Sleepy Eye stalked out, jingling the keys in his trousers pocket, c.o.c.king up his cigar, and looking as though he owned the restaurant.

Mr. Wrenn, picturing him greeting the Singer Tower from an incoming steamer, longed to see the tower.

"Gee! I'll do it!"

He rose and, from that table in the bas.e.m.e.nt of an A. B. C.

restaurant, he fled to America.

He dashed up-stairs, fidgeted while the cashier made his change, rang for a bus, whisked into his room, slammed his things into his suit-case, announced to it wildly that they were going home, and scampered to the Northwestem Station. He walked nervously up and down till the Liverpool train departed. "Suppose Istra wanted to make up, and came back to London?" was a terrifying thought that hounded him. He dashed into the waiting-room and wrote to her, on a souvenir post-card showing the Abbey: "Called back to America--will write. Address care of Souvenir Company, Twenty-eighth Street." But he didn't mail the card.

Once settled in a second-cla.s.s compartment, with the train in motion, he seemed already much nearer America, and, humming, to the great annoyance of a lady with bangs, he planned his new great work--the making of friends; the discovery, some day, if Istra should not relent, of "somebody to go home to." There was no end to the "societies and lodges and stuff" he was going to join directly he landed.

At Liverpool he suddenly stopped at a post-box and mailed his card to Istra. That ended his debate. Of course after that he had to go back to America.

He sailed exultantly, one month and seventeen days after leaving Portland.

CHAPTER XII

HE DISCOVERS AMERICA

In his white-painted steerage berth Mr. Wrenn lay, with a scratch-pad on his raised knees and a small mean pillow doubled under his head, writing sample follow-up letters to present to the Souvenir and Art Novelty Company, interrupting his work at intervals to add to a list of the books which, beginning about five minutes after he landed in New York, he was going to master. He puzzled over Marie Corelli. Morton liked Miss Corelli so much; but would her works appeal to Istra Nash?

He had worked for many hours on a letter to Istra in which he avoided mention of such indecent matters as steerages and immigrants. He was grateful, he told her, for "all you learned me," and he had thought that Aengusmere was a beautiful place, though he now saw "what you meant about them interesting people," and his New York address would be the Souvenir Company.

He tore up the several pages that repeated that oldest most melancholy cry of the lover, which rang among the deodars, from viking ships, from the moonlit courtyards of Provence, the cry which always sounded about Mr. Wrenn as he walked the deck: "I want you so much; I miss you so unendingly; I am so lonely for you, dear." For no more clearly, no more n.o.bly did the golden Auca.s.sin or lean Dante word that cry in their thoughts than did Mr. William Wrenn, Our Mr. Wrenn.

A third-cla.s.s steward with a mangy mustache and setter-like tan eyes came teetering down-stairs, each step like a nervous pencil tap on a table, and peered over the side of Mr. Wrenn's berth. He loved Mr. Wrenn, who was proven a scholar by the reading of real bound books--an English history and a second-hand copy of _Haunts of Historic English Writers_, purchased in Liverpool--and who was willing to listen to the steward's serial story of how his woman, Mrs. Wargle, faithlessly consorted with Foddle, the cat's-meat man, when the steward was away, and, when he was home, cooked for him lights and liver that unquestionably were purchased from the same cat's-meat man. He now leered with a fond and watery gaze upon Mr. Wrenn's scholarly pursuits, and announced in a whisper:

"They've sighted land."

"Land?"

"Oh aye."

Mr. Wrenn sat up so vigorously that he b.u.mped his head.

He chucked his papers beneath the pillow with his right hand, while the left was feeling for the side of the berth.

"Land!" he bellowed to drowsing cabin-mates as he vaulted out.

The steerage promenade-deck, iron-sided, black-floored, ending in the iron approaches to the galley at one end and the iron superstructures about a hatch at the other, was like a grim swart oilily clean machine-shop aisle, so inclosed, so over-roofed, that the side toward the sea seemed merely a long factory window. But he loved it and, except when he had guiltily remembered the books he had to read, he had stayed on deck, worshiping the naive bright attire of immigrants and the dark roll and glory of the sea.

Now, out there was a blue shading, made by a magic pencil; land, his land, where he was going to become the beloved comrade of all the friends whose likenesses he saw in the white-caps flashing before him.

Humming, he paraded down to the buffet, where small beer and smaller tobacco were sold, to buy another pound of striped candy for the offspring of the Russian Jews.

The children knew he was coming. "Fat rascals," he chuckled, touching their dark cheeks, pretending to be frightened as they pounded soft fists against the iron side of the ship or rolled unregarded in the scuppers. Their shawled mothers knew him, too, and as he shyly handed about the candy the chattering stately line of Jewish elders nodded their beards like the forest primeval in a breeze, saying words of blessing in a strange tongue.

He smiled back and made gestures, and shouted "Land! Land!" with several variations in key, to make it sound foreign.

But he withdrew for the sacred moment of seeing the Land of Promise he was newly discovering--the Long Island sh.o.r.e; the gra.s.s-clad redouts at Fort Wadsworth; the vast pile of New York sky-sc.r.a.pers, standing in a mist like an enormous burned forest.

"Singer Tower.... b.u.t.terick Building," he murmured, as they proceeded toward their dock. "That's something like.... Let's see; yes, sir, by golly, right up there between the Met. Tower and the _Times_--good old Souvenir Company office. Jiminy! 'One Dollar to Albany'--something _like_ a sign, that is--good old dollar! To thunder with their darn shillings. Home!... Gee!

there's where I used to moon on a wharf!... Gosh! the old town looks good."

And all this was his to conquer, for friendship's sake.

He went to a hotel. While he had to go back to the Zapps', of course, he did not wish, by meeting those old friends, to spoil his first day. No, it was cheerfuler to stand at a window of his cheap hotel on Seventh Avenue, watching the "good old American crowd"--Germans, Irishmen, Italians, and Jews. He went to the Nickelorion and grasped the hand of the ticket-taker, the Bra.s.s-b.u.t.ton Man, ejaculating: "How are you? Well, how's things going with the old show?... I been away couple of months."

"Fine and dandy! Been away, uh? Well, it's good to get back to the old town, heh? Summer hotel?"

"Unk?"

"Why, you're the waiter at Pat Maloney's, ain't you?"

Next morning Mr. Wrenn made himself go to the Souvenir and Art Novelty Company. He wanted to get the teasing, due him for staying away so short a time, over as soon as possible. The office girl, addressing circulars, seemed surprised when he stepped from the elevator, and blushed her usual shy grat.i.tude to the men of the office for allowing her to exist and take away six dollars weekly.

Then into the entry-room ran Rabin, one of the traveling salesmen.

"Why, hul-lo, Wrenn! Wondered if that could be you. Back so soon? Thought you were going to Europe."

"Just got back. Couldn't stand it away from you, old scout!"

"You must have been learning to sa.s.s back real smart, in the Old Country, heh? Going to be with us again? Well, see you again soon. Glad see you back."

He was not madly excited at seeing Rabin; still, the drummer was part of the good old Souvenir Company, the one place in the world on which he could absolutely depend, the one place where they always wanted him.