Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man Part 48

"So you really do like me even after I was so beastly to you in England."

"Oh, that wasn't nothing.... But I was always thinking of you, even when I was on the job--"

"It's gratifying to have some one continue taking me seriously.... Really, dear, I do appreciate it. But you mustn't--you mustn't--"

"Oh, gee! I just can't get over it--you here by me--ain't it curious!... "Then he persisted with the tale of his longing, which she had so carefully interrupted: "The people here are _awful_ kind and good, and you can bank on 'em. But--oh--"

From across the room, Tom's pretended jeers, lighted up with Miss Proudfoot's giggles, as paper lanterns illumine Coney Island.

From Tom:

"Yes, you're a hot dancer, all right. I suppose you can do the Boston and all them swell dances. Wah-h-h-h-h!"

"--but Istra, oh, gee! you're like poetry--like all them things a feller can't get but he tries to when he reads Shakespeare and all those poets."

"Oh, dear boy, you mustn't! We will be good friends. I do appreciate having some one care whether I'm alive or not.

But I thought it was all understood that we weren't to take playing together seriously; that it was to be merely playing--nothing more."

"But, anyway, you will let me play with you here in New York as much as I can? Oh, come on, _let's_ go for a walk--let's--let's go to a show."

"I'm awf'ly sorry, but I promised--a man's going to call for me, and we're going to a stupid studio party on Bryant Park. Bore, isn't it, the day of landing? And poor Istra dreadfully landsick."

"Oh, then," hopefully, "don't go. Let's--"

"I'm sorry, Mouse dear, but I'm afraid I can't break the date.... Fact, I must go up and primp now--"

"Don't you care a bit?" he said, sulkily.

"Why, yes, of course. But you wouldn't have Istra disappoint a nice Johnny after he's bought him a cunnin' new weskit, would you?... Good night, dear." She smiled--the mother smile--and was gone with a lively good night to the room in general.

Nelly went up to bed early. She was tired, she said. He had no chance for a word with her. He sat on the steps outside alone a long time. Sometimes he yearned for a sight of Istra's ivory face. Sometimes, with a fierce compa.s.sion that longed to take the burden from her, he pictured Nelly working all day in the rushing department store on which the fetid city summer would soon descend.

They did have their walk the next night, Istra and Mr. Wrenn, but Istra kept the talk to laughing burlesques of their tramp in England. Somehow--he couldn't tell exactly why--he couldn't seem to get in all the remarks he had inside him about how much he had missed her.

Wednesday--Thursday--Friday; he saw her only at one dinner, or on the stairs, departing volubly with clever-looking men in evening clothes to taxis waiting before the house.

Nelly was very pleasant; just that--pleasant. She pleasantly sat as his partner at Five Hundred, and pleasantly declined to go to the moving pictures with him. She was getting more and more tired, staying till seven at the store, preparing what she called "special stunts" for the summer white sale. Friday evening he saw her soft fresh lips drooping sadly as she toiled up the front steps before dinner. She went to bed at eight, at which time Istra was going out to dinner with a thin, hatchet-faced sarcastic-looking man in a Norfolk jacket and a fluffy black tie. Mr. Wrenn resented the Norfolk jacket. Of course, the kingly men in evening dress would be expected to take Istra away from him, but a Norfolk jacket--He did not call it that. Though he had worn one in the fair village of Aengusmere, it was still to him a "coat with a belt."

He thought of Nelly all evening. He heard her--there on the same floor with him--talking to Miss Proudfoot, who stood at Nelly's door, three hours after she was supposed to be asleep.

"No," Nelly was saying with evidently fict.i.tious cheerfulness, "no, it was just a little headache.... It's much better. I think I can sleep now. Thank you very much for coming."

Nelly hadn't told Mr. Wrenn that she had a severe headache--she who had once, a few weeks before, run to him with a cut in her soft small finger, demanding that he bind it up.... He went slowly to bed.

He had lain awake half an hour before his agony so overpowered him that he flung out of bed. He crouched low by the bed, like a child, his legs curled under him, the wooden sideboard pressing into his chest in one long line of hot pain, while he prayed:

"O G.o.d, O G.o.d, forgive me, forgive me, oh, forgive me! Here I been forgetting Nelly (and I _love_ her) and comparing her with Istra and not appreciating her, and Nelly always so sweet to me and trusting me so--O G.o.d, keep me away from wickedness!"

He huddled there many minutes, praying, the scorching pressure of the bedside growing more painful. All the while the camp-fire he had shared with Istra was burning within his closed eyes, and Istra was visibly lording it in a London flat filled with clever people, and he was pa.s.sionately aware that the line of her slim breast was like the lip of a sh.e.l.l; the line of her pallid cheek, defined by her flame-colored hair, something utterly fine, something he could not express.

"Oh," he groaned, "she is like that poetry stuff in Shakespeare that's so hard to get.... I'll be extra nice to Nelly at the picnic Sunday.... Her trusting me so, and then me--O G.o.d, keep me away from wickedness!"

As he was going out Sat.u.r.day morning he found a note from Istra waiting in the hall on the hat-rack:

Do you want to play with poor Istra tomorrow Sat. afternoon and perhaps evening, Mouse? You have Sat.u.r.day afternoon off, don't you? Leave me a note if you can call for me at 1.30.

I. N.

He didn't have Sat.u.r.day afternoon off, but he said he did in his note, and at one-thirty he appeared at her door in a new spring suit (purchased on Tuesday), a new spring hat, very fuzzy and gay (purchased Sat.u.r.day noon), and the walking-stick he had bought on Tottenham Court Road, but decently concealed from the boarding-house.

Istra took him to what she called a "futurist play." She explained it all to him several times, and she stood him tea and m.u.f.fins, and recalled Mrs. Cattermole's establishment with full attention to Mrs. Cattermole's bulbous but earnest nose. They dined at the Brevoort, and were back at nine-thirty; for, said Istra, she was "just a bit tired, Mouse."

They stood at the door of Istra's room. Istra said, "You may come in--just for a minute."

It was the first time he had even peeped into her room in New York. The old shyness was on him, and he glanced back.

Nelly was just coming up-stairs, staring at him where he stood inside the door, her lips apart with amazement.

Ladies distinctly did not entertain in their rooms at Mrs. Arty's.

He wanted to rush out, to explain, to invite her in, to--to-- He stuttered in his thought, and by now Nelly had hastened past, her face turned from them.

Uneasily he tilted on the front of a cane-seated rocking-chair, glaring at a pile of books before one of Istra's trunks. Istra sat on the bedside nursing her knee. She burst out:

"O Mouse dear, I'm so bored by everybody--every sort of everybody.... Of course I don't mean you; you're a good pal....

Oh--Paris is _too_ complex--especially when you can't quite get the nasal vowels--and New York is too youthful and earnest; and Dos Puentes, California, will be plain h.e.l.l.... And all my little parties--I start out on them happily, always, as naive as a kiddy going to a birthday party, and then I get there and find I can't even dance square dances, as the kiddy does, and go home--Oh d.a.m.n it, d.a.m.n it, d.a.m.n it! Am I shocking you? Well, what do I care if I shock everybody!"

Her slim pliant length was flung out along the bed, and she was crying. Her beautiful hands clutched the corners of a pillow bitterly.

He crept over to the bed, patting her shoulder, slowly and regularly, too frightened of her mood even to want to kiss her.

She looked up, laughing tearfully. "Please say, 'There, there, there; don't cry.' It always goes with pats for weepy girls, you know.... O Mouse, you will be good to some woman some day."

Her long strong arms reached up and drew him down. It was his head that rested on her shoulder. It seemed to both of them that it was he who was to be petted, not she. He pressed his cheek against the comforting hollow of her curving shoulder and rested there, abandoned to a forlorn and growing happiness, the happiness of getting so far outside of his tight world of Wrennishness that he could give comfort and take comfort with no prim worried thoughts of Wrenn.

Istra murmured: "Perhaps that's what I need--some one to need me. Only--" She stroked his hair. "Now you must go, dear."

"You--It's better now? I'm afraid I ain't helped you much.

It's kinda t' other way round."

"Oh yes, indeed, it's all right now! Just nerves. Nothing more.

Now, good night."

"Please, won't you come to the picnic to-morrow? It's--"