Our Mister Wren Read online

  do anything for you, my friend. Are you saved?" He wasn't going to risk another horror like that, yet when the

  golden morning of Sometime dawned he certainly was going to go cruising off to palm-bordered lagoons.

  As he walked through Long Island City he contrived conversations with the sailors he passed. It would have

  surprised a Norwegian bos'un's mate to learn that he was really a gun-runner, and that, as a matter of fact, he was

  now telling yarns of the Spanish Main to the man who slid deprecatingly by him.

  Mr. Wrenn envied the jackies on the training- ship and carelessly went to sea as the President's guest in the admiral's

  barge and was frightened by the stare of a sauntering shop-girl and arrived home before dusk, to Mrs. Zapp's

  straitened approval.

  Dusk made incantations in his third- floor-front. Pleasantly fagged in those slight neat legs, after his walk, Mr.

  Wrenn sat in the wicker rocker by the window, patting his scrubby tan mustache and reviewing the day's

  wandering. When the gas was lighted he yearned over pictures in a geographical magazine for

  a happy hour, then yawned to hmself, "Well- l- l, Willum, guess it's time to crawl into the downy."

  He undressed and smoothed his ready- made suit on the rocking-chair back. Sitting on the edge of his bed, quaint in

  his cotton night-gown, like a rare little bird of dull plumage, he rubbed his head sleepily. Um-m-m-m-m! How

  tired he was! He went to open the window. Then his tamed heart leaped into a waltz, and he forgot third-floorfronts

  and sleepiness.

  Through the window came the chorus of fog-horns on North River. "Boom-m- m!" That must be a giant liner,

  battling up through the fog. (It was a ferry.) A liner! She'd be roaring just like that if she were off the Banks! If he

  were only off the Banks! "Toot! Toot!" That was a tug. "Whawn-n-n!" Another liner. The tumultuous chorus

  repeated to him all the adventures of the day.

  He dropped upon the bed again and stared absently at his clothes. Out of the inside coat pocket stuck the unopened

  letter from Cousin John.

  He read a paragraph of it. He sprang from the bed and danced a tarantella, pranced in his cottony nightgown like a

  drunken Yaqui. The letter announced that the flinty farm at Parthenon, left to Mr. Wrenn by his father, had been

  sold. Its location on a river bluff had made it valuable to the Parthenon Chautauqua Association. There was now to

  his credit in the Parthenon National Bank nine hundred and forty dollars!

  He was wealthy, then. He had enough to stalk up and down the earth for many venturesome (but economical)

  months, till he should learn the trade of wandering, and its mysterious trick of living without a job or a salary.

  He crushed his pillow with burrowing head and sobbed excitedly, with a terrible stomach-sinking and a chill

  shaking. Then he laughed and wanted to--but didn't--rush into the adjacent hall room and tell the total stranger

  there of this world-changing news. He listened in the hall to learn whether the Zapps were up, but heard nothing;

  returned and cantered up and down, gloating on a map of the world.

  "Gee! It's happened. I could travel all the time. I guess I won't be--very much--afraid of wrecks and stuff. . . .

  Things like that. . . . Gee! If I don't get to bed I'll be late at the office in the morning!"

  Mr. Wrenn lay awake till three o'clock. Monday morning he felt rather ashamed of having done so eccentric a

  thing. But he got to the office on time. He was worried with the cares of wealth, with having to decide when to

  leave for his world-wanderings, but he was also very much aware that office managers are disagreeable if one isn't

  on time. All morning he did nothing more reckless than balance his new fortune, plus his savings, against

  steamship fares on a waste half-sheet of paper.

  The noon-hour was not The Job's, but his, for exploration of the parlous lands of romance that lie hard by Twentyeighth

  Street and Sixth Avenue. But he had to go out to lunch with Charley Carpenter, the assistant bookkeeper,

  that he might tell the news. As for Charley, He needed frequently to have a confidant who knew personally the

  tyrannous ways of the office manager, Mr. Guilfogle.

  Mr. Wrenn and Charley chose (that is to say, Charley chose) a table at Drubel's Eating House. Mr. Wrenn timidly

  hinted, "I've got some big news to tell you."

  But Charley interrupted, "Say, did you hear old Goglefogle light into me this morning? I won't stand for it. Say,

  did you hear him--the old----"

  "What was the trouble, Charley?"

  "Trouble? Nothing was the trouble. Except with old Goglefogle. I made one little break in my accounts. Why, if

  old Gogie had to keep track of seventy-'leven accounts and watch every single last movement of a fool girl that

  can't even run the adding- machine, why, he'd get green around the gills. He'd never do anything _but_ make

  mistakes! Well, I guess the old codger must have had a bum breakfast this morning. Wanted some exercise to

  digest it. Me, I was the exercise--I was the goat. He calls me in, and he calls me _down_, and me--well, just

  lemme tell you, Wrenn, I calls his bluff!"

  Charley Carpenter stopped his rapid tirade, delivered with quick head-shakes like those of palsy, to raise his smelly

  cigarette to his mouth. Midway in this slow gesture the memory of his wrongs again overpowered him. He flung

  his right hand back on the table, scattering cigarette ashes, jerked back his head with the irritated patience of a

  nervous martyr, then waved both hands about spasmodically, while he snarled, with his cheaply handsome smooth

  face more flushed than usual:

  "Sure! You can just bet your bottom dollar I let him see from the way I looked at him that I wasn't going to stand

  for no more monkey business. You bet I did!... I'll fix him, I will. You just _watch_ me. (Hey, Drubel, got any

  lemon merang? Bring me a hunk, will yuh?) Why, Wrenn, that cross-eyed double-jointed fat old slob, I'll slam

  him in the slats so hard some day---- I will, you just watch my smoke. If it wasn't for that messy wife of mine---- I

  ought to desert her, and I will some day, and----"

  "Yuh." Mr. Wrenn was curt for a second.... "I know how it is, Charley. But you'll get over it, honest you will.

  Say, I've got some news. Some land that my dad left me has sold for nearly a thousand plunks. By the way, this

  lunch is on me. Let me pay for it, Charley."

  Charley promised to let him pay, quite readily. And, expanding, said:

  "Great, Wrenn! Great! Lemme congratulate you. Don't know anybody I'd rather've had this happen to. You're a

  meek little baa- lamb, but you've got lots of stuff in you, old Wrennski. Oh say, by the way, could. you let me have

  fifty cents till Saturday? Thanks. I'll pay it back sure. By golly! you're the only man around the office that

  appreciates what a double duck- lined old fiend old Goglefogle is, the old----"

  "Aw, gee, Charley, I wish you wouldn't jump on Guilfogle so hard. He's always treated me square."

  "Gogie--square? Yuh, he's square just like a hoop. You know it, too, Wrenn. Now that you've got enough money

  so's you don't need to be scared about the job you'll realize it, and you'll want to soak him, same's I do. _Say!_"

  The impulse of a great idea made him gleefully shake his fist sidewise. "Say! Why _don't_ you soak him? They

  bank on you at the SouvenirCompany. Darn' sight more than you realize, lemme tell you. Why, you do about half

  the stock-keeper's work, sides your own. Tell you what you do. You go to old Goglefogle and tell him you want a

 
; raise to twenty- five, and want it right now. Yes, by golly, _thirty!_ You're worth that, or pretty darn' near it, but

  'course old Goglefogle'll never give it to you. He'll threaten to fire you if you say a thing more about it. You can

  tell him to go ahead, and then where'll he be? Guess that'll call his bluff some!"

  "Yes, but, Charley, then if Guilfogle feels he can't pay me that much--you know he's responsible to the directors; he

  can't do everything he wants to--why, he'll just have to fire me, after I've talked to him like that, whether he wants

  to or not. And that'd leave us -- that'd leave them -- without a sales clerk, right in the busy season."

  "Why, sure, Wrenn; that's what we want to do. If you go it 'd leave 'em without just about _two_ men. Bother 'em

  like the deuce. t 'd bother Mr. Mortimer X. Y. Guglefugle most of all, thank the Lord. He wouldn't know where he

  was at--trying to break in a man right in the busy season. Here's your chance. Come on, kid; don't pass it up."

  "Oh gee, Charley, I can't do that. You wouldn't want me to try to _hurt_ the Souvenir Company after being there

  for--lemme see, it must be seven years."

  "Well, maybe you _like_ to get your cute little nose rubbed on the grindstone! I suppose you'd like to stay on at

  nineteen per for the rest of your life."

  "Aw, Charley, don't get sore; please don't! I'd like to get off, all right--like to go traveling, and stuff like that.

  Gee! I'd like to wander round. But I can't cut out right in the bus----"

  "But can't you see, you poor nut, you won't be _leaving_ 'em--they'll either pay you what they ought to or lose you."

  "Oh, I don't know about that, Charley.

  "Charley was making up for some uncertainty as to his own logic by beaming persuasiveness, and Mr. Wrenn was

  afraid of being hypnotized. "No, no!" he throbbed, rising.

  "Well, all right!" snarled Charley, "if you like to be Gogie's goat.... Oh, you're all right, Wrennski. I suppose you

  had ought to stay, if you feel you got to.... Well, so long. I've got to beat it over and buy a pair of socks before I go

  back."

  Mr. Wrenn crept out of Drubel's behind him, very melancholy. Even Charley admitted that he "had ought to stay,"

  then; and what chance was there of persuading the dread Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle that he wished to be looked

  upon as one resigning? Where, then, any chance of globe-trotting; perhaps for months he would remain in slavery,

  and he had hoped just that morning---- One dreadful quarter-hour with Mr. Guilfogle and he might be free. He

  grinned to himself as he admitted that this was likeseeing Europe after merely swimming the mid-winter Atlantic.

  Well, he had nine minutes more, by his two-dollar watch; nine minutes of vagabondage. He gazed across at a

  Greek restaurant with signs in real Greek letters like "ruins at--well, at Aythens." A Chinese chop-suey den with a

  red-and-yellow carved dragon, and at an upper window a squat Chinaman who might easily be carrying a _kris_,

  "or whatever them Chink knives are," as he observed for the hundredth time he had taken this journey. A rotisserie,

  before whose upright fender of scarlet coals whole ducks were happily roasting to a shiny brown. In a furrier's

  window were Siberian foxes' skins (Siberia! huts of "awful brave convicks"; the steely Northern Sea; guards in

  blouses, just as he'd seen them at an Academy of Music play) and a polar bear (meaning, to him, the Northern

  Lights, the long hike, and the _igloo_ at night). And the florists! There were orchids that (though he only half

  knew it, and that all inarticulately) whispered to him of jungles where, in the hot hush, he saw the slumbering

  python and---- "What was it in that poem, that, Mandalay, thing? _was_ it about jungles? Anyway:

  "`Them garlicky smells, And the sunshine and the palms and the bells.'"

  He had to hurry back to the office. He stopped only to pat the head of a florist's delivery horse that looked wistfully

  at him from the curb. "Poor old fella. What you thinking about? Want to be a circus horse and wander? Le's beat

  it together. You can't, eh? Poor old fella!"

  At three-thirty, the time when it seems to office persons that the day's work never will end, even by a miracle, Mr.

  Wrenn was shaky about his duty to the firm. He was more so after an electrical interview with the manager, who

  spent a few minutes, which he happened to have free, in roaring "I want to know why" at Mr. Wrenn. There was no

  particular "why" that he wanted to know; he was merely getting scientific efficiency out of employees, a phrase

  which Mr. Guilfogle had taken from a business magazine that dilutes efficiency theories for inefficient employers.

  At five-twenty the manager summoned him, complimented him on nothing in particular, and suggested that he stay

  late with Charley Carpenter and the stock-keeper to inventory a line of desk-clocks which they were closing out.

  As Mr. Wrenn returned to his desk he stopped at a window on the corridor and coveted the bright late afternoon.

  The cornices of lofty buildings glistened; the sunset shone fierily through the glass- inclosed layer-like upper floors.

  He wanted to be out there in the streets with the shopping crowds. Old Goglefogle didn't consider him; why should

  he consider the firm?

  CHAPTER II

  HE WALKS WITH MISS THERESA

  As he left the Souvenir Company building after working late at taking inventory and roamed down toward

  Fourteenth Street, Mr. Wrenn felt forlornly aimless. The worst of it all was that he could not go to the Nickelorion

  for moving pictures; not after having been cut by the ticket-taker. Then, there before him was the glaring sign of

  the Nickelorion tempting him; a bill with "Great Train Robbery Film Tonight" made his heart thump like

  stair-climbing--and he dashed at the ticket-booth with a nickel doughtily extended. He felt queer about the scalp as

  the cashier girl slid out a coupon. Why did she seem to be watching him so closely? As he dropped the ticket in

  the chopper he tried to glance away from the Brass-button Man. For one- nineteenth of a second he kept his head

  turned. It turned back of itself; he stared full at the man, half bowed—and received a hearty absent-minded nod and

  a "Fine evenin'." He sang to himself a monotonous song of great joy. When he stumbled over the feet of a large

  German in getting to a seat, he apologized as though he were accustomed to laugh easily with many friends.

  The train-robbery film was--well, he kept repeating "Gee!" to himself pantingly. How the masked men did sneak,

  simply sneak and sneak, behind the bushes! Mr. Wrenn shrank as one of them leered out of the picture at him.

  How gallantly the train dashed toward the robbers, to the spirit-stirring roll of the snare-drum. The rush from the

  bushes followed; the battle with detectives concealed in the express - car. Mr. Wrenn was standing sturdily and

  shooting coolly with the slender hawk- faced Pinkerton man in puttees; with him he leaped to horse and followed

  the robbers through the forest. He stayed through the whole program twice to see the train robbery again.

  As he started to go out he found the ticket-taker changing his long light-blue robe of state for a highly

  commonplace sack-coat without brass buttons. In his astonishment at seeing how a Highness could be transformed

  into an every-day man, Mr. Wrenn stopped, and, having stopped, spoke:

  "Uh--that was quite a--quite a picture--that train robbery. Wasn't it."

  "Yuh, I guess---- Now where's the devil and his wife flew away to with my hat? Them guys is always swiping it.

  Picture, mister? Why, I didn't see it no more
'n---- Say you, Pink Eye, say you crab- footed usher, did you swipe my

  hat? Ain't he the cut- up, mister! Ain't both them ushers the jingling sheepsheads, though! Being cute and hiding

  my hat in the box-office. _Picture?_ I don't get no chance to see any of 'em. Funny, ain't it?--me barking for 'em

  like I was the grandmother of the guy that invented 'em, and not knowing whether the train robbery---- Now who

  stole my going-home shoes?... Why, I don't know whether the train did any robbing or not!"

  He slapped Mr. Wrenn on the back, and the sales clerk's heart bounded in comradeship. He was surprised into

  declaring:

  "Say--uh--I bowed to you the other night and you--well, honestly, you acted like you never saw me."

  "Well, well, now, and that's what happens to me for being the dad of five kids and a she-girl and a tom-cat. Sure, I

  couldn't 've seen you. Me, I was probably that busy with fambly cares—I was probably thinking who was it et the

  lemon pie on me--was it Pete or Johnny, or shall I lick 'em both together, or just bite me wife."

  Mr. Wrenn knew that the ticket-taker had never, never really considered biting his wife. _He_ knew! His nod and

  grin and "That's the idea!" were urbanely sophisticated. He urged:

  "Oh yes, I'm sure you didn't intend to hand me the icy mitt. Say! I'm thirsty. Come on over to Moje's and I'll buy

  you a drink."

  He was aghast at this abyss of money-spending into which he had leaped, and the Brass-button Man was

  suspiciously wondering what this person wanted of him; but they crossed to the adjacent saloon, a New York corner

  saloon, which of course "glittered" with a large mirror, heaped glasses, and a long shining foot-rail on which, in

  bravado, Mr. Wrenn placed his Cum-Fee-Best shoe.

  "Uh?" said the bartender.

  "Rye, Jimmy," said the Brass-button Man.

  "Uh-h-h-h-h," said Mr. Wrenn, in a frightened diminuendo, now that--wealthy citizen though he had become--he

  was in danger of exposure as a mollycoddle who couldn't choose his drink properly. "Stummick been hurting me.

  Guess I'd better just take a lemonade."

  "You're the brother- in-law to a wise one," commented the Brass-button Man. "Me, I ain't never got the sense to do