Books: Our Mr. Wrenn
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Sinclair Lewis >> Our Mr. Wrenn
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"Here's ten dollars. Please take it--aw--please, Charley."
"_All_ right; anything to oblige."
"What 've you got in sight in the job line?"
"Well, there's a chance at night clerking in a little hotel
where I was a bell-hop long time ago. The night clerk's going to
get through, but I don't know just when--prob'ly in a week or two."
"Well, keep after it. And _please_ come down to see me--the old
place--West Sixteenth Street."
"What about the old girl with the ingrowing grouch? What's her
name? She ain't stuck on me."
"Mrs. Zapp? Oh--hope she chokes. She can just kick all she
wants to. I'm just going to have all the visitors I want to."
"All right. Say, tell us something about your trip."
"Oh, I had a great time. Lots of nice fellows on the cattle-boat.
I went over on one, you know. Fellow named Morton--awfully
nice fellow. Say, Charley, you ought to seen me being butler
to the steers. Handing 'em hay. But say, the sea was fine;
all kinds of colors. Awful dirty on the cattle-boat, though."
"Hard work?"
"Yuh--kind of hard. Oh, not so very."
"What did you see in England?"
"Oh, a lot of different places. Say, I seen some great vaudeville
in Liverpool, Charley, with Morton--he's a slick fellow; works for
the Pennsylvania, here in town. I got to look him up. Say, I
wish we had an agency for college sofa-pillows and banners and
souvenir stuff in Oxford. There's a whole bunch of colleges there,
all right in the same town. I met a prof. there from some American
college--he hired an automobubble and took me down to a reg'lar
old inn--"
"Well, well!"
"--like you read about; sanded floor!"
"Get to London?"
"Yuh. Gee! it's a big place. Say, that Westminster
Abbey's a great place. I was in there a couple of times.
More darn tombs of kings and stuff. And I see a bishop,
with leggins on! But I got kind of lonely. I thought of
you a lot of times. Wished we could go out and get an ale
together. Maybe pick up a couple of pretty girls."
"Oh, you sport!... Say, didn't get over to gay Paree, did you?"
"Nope.... Well, I guess I'd better beat it now.
Got to move in--I'm at a hotel. You will come down and see
me to-night, won't you?"
"So you thought of me, eh?... Yuh--sure, old socks.
I'll be down to-night. And I'll get right after that job."
It is doubtful whether Mr. Wrenn would ever have returned
to the Zapps' had he not promised to see Charley there.
Even while he was carrying his suit-case down West Sixteenth,
broiling by degrees in the sunshine, he felt like rushing
up to Charley's and telling him to come to the hotel instead.
Lee Theresa, taking the day off with a headache,
answered the bell, and ejaculated:
"Well! So it's you, is it?"
"I guess it is."
"What, are you back so soon? Why, you ain't been gone more
than a month and a half, have you?"
Beware, daughter of Southern pride! The little Yankee is
regarding your full-blown curves and empty eyes with rebellion,
though he says, ever so meekly:
"Yes, I guess it is about that, Miss Theresa."
"Well, I just knew you couldn't stand it away from us.
I suppose you'll want your room back. Ma, here's Mr. Wrenn
back again--Mr. Wrenn! _Ma!_"
"Oh-h-h-h!" sounded Goaty Zapp's voice, in impish
disdain, below. "Mr. Wrenn's back. Hee, hee! Couldn't
stand it. Ain't that like a Yankee!"
A slap, a wail, then Mrs. Zapp's elephantine slowness
on the stairs from the basement. She appeared, buttoning
her collar, smiling almost pleasantly, for she disliked
Mr. Wrenn less than she did any other of her lodgers.
"Back already, Mist' Wrenn? Ah declare, Ah was
saying to Lee Theresa just yest'day, Ah just knew you'd
be wishing you was back with us. Won't you come in?"
He edged into the parlor with, "How is the sciatica, Mrs. Zapp?"
"Ah ain't feeling right smart."
"My room occupied yet?"
He was surveying the airless parlor rather heavily, and
his curt manner was not pleasing to the head of the house
of Zapp, who remarked, funereally:
"It ain't taken just now, Mist' Wrenn, but Ah dunno.
There was a gennulman a-looking at it just yesterday, and
he said he'd be permanent if he came. Ah declare, Mist' Wrenn,
Ah dunno's Ah like to have my gennulmen just get up and
go without giving me notice."
Lee Theresa scowled at her.
Mr. Wrenn retorted, "I _did_ give you notice."
"Ah know, but--well, Ah reckon Ah can let you have it, but Ah'll
have to have four and a half a week instead of four. Prices is
all going up so, Ah declare, Ah was just saying to Lee T'resa Ah
dunno what we're all going to do if the dear Lord don't look out
for us. And, Mist' Wrenn, Ah dunno's Ah like to have you coming
in so late nights. But Ah reckon Ah can accommodate you."
"It's a good deal of a favor, isn't it, Mrs. Zapp?"
Mr. Wrenn was dangerously polite. Let gentility look out for
the sharp practices of the Yankee.
"Yes, but--"
It was our hero, our madman of the seven and seventy seas, our
revolutionist friend of Istra, who leaped straight from the
salt-incrusted decks of his laboring steamer to the musty parlor
and declared, quietly but unmovably-practically
unmovably--"Well, then, I guess I'd better not take it at all."
"So that's the way you're going to treat us!" bellowed Mrs.
Zapp. "You go off and leave us with an unoccupied room and--
Oh! You poor white trash--you--"
"_Ma!_ You shut up and go down-stairs-s-s-s-s!" Theresa hissed.
"Go on."
Mrs. Zapp wabbled regally out. Lee Theresa spoke to Mr. Wrenn:
"Ma ain't feeling a bit well this afternoon. I'm sorry she
talked like that. You will come back, won't you?" She showed
all her teeth in a genuine smile, and in her anxiety reached
his heart. "Remember, you promised you would."
"Well, I will, but--"
Bill Wrenn was fading, an affrighted specter. The "but" was
the last glimpse of him, and that Theresa overlooked, as she
bustlingly chirruped: "I _knew_ you would understand. I'll skip
right up and look at the room and put on fresh sheets."
One month, one hot New York month, passed before the imperial
Mr. Guilfogle gave him back The Job, and then at seventeen
dollars and fifty cents a week instead of his former nineteen
dollars. Mr. Wrenn refused, upon pretexts, to go out with the
manager for a drink, and presented him with twenty suggestions
for new novelties and circular letters. He rearranged the
unsystematic methods of Jake, the cub, and two days later he was
at work as though he had never in his life been farther from the
Souvenir Company than Newark.
CHAPTER XIII
HE IS "OUR MR. WRENN"
DEAR ISTRA,--I am back in New York feeling very well & hope this
finds you the same. I have been wanting to write to you for
quite a while now but there has not been much news of any kind
& so I have not written to you. But now I am back working for
the Souvenir Company. I hope you are having a good time in
Paris it must be a very pretty city & I have often wished to be
there perhaps some day I shall go. I [several erasures here]
have been reading quite a few books since I got back & think now
I shall get on better with my reading. You told me so many
things about books & so on & I do appreciate it. In closing, I
am yours very sincerely,
WILLIAM WRENN.
There was nothing else he could say. But there were a
terrifying number of things he could think as he crouched by the
window overlooking West Sixteenth Street, whose dull hue had not
changed during the centuries while he had been tramping England.
Her smile he remembered--and he cried, "Oh, I want to see her so
much." Her gallant dash through the rain--and again the cry.
At last he cursed himself, "Why don't you _do_ something that 'd
count for her, and not sit around yammering for her like a fool?"
He worked on his plan to "bring the South into line"--the
Souvenir Company's line. Again and again he sprang up from the
writing-table in his hot room when the presence of Istra came
and stood compellingly by his chair. But he worked.
The Souvenir Company salesmen had not been able to get from the
South the business which the company deserved if right and
justice were to prevail. On the steamer from England Mr. Wrenn
had conceived the idea that a Dixieland Ink-well, with the
Confederate and Union flags draped in graceful cast iron, would
make an admirable present with which to draw the attention of
the Southem trade. The ink-well was to be followed by a series
of letters, sent on the slightest provocation, on order or
re-order, tactfully hoping the various healths of the Southland
were good and the baseball season important; all to insure a
welcome to the salesmen on the Southem route.
He drew up his letters; he sketched his ink-well; he got up the
courage to talk with the office manager.... To forget love and
the beloved, men have ascended in aeroplanes and conquered
African tribes. To forget love, a new, busy, much absorbed Mr.
Wrenn, very much Ours, bustled into Mr. Guilfogle's office,
slapped down his papers on the desk, and demanded: "Here's that
plan about gettin' the South interested that I was telling you
about. Say, honest, I'd like awful much to try it on. I'd just
have to have part time of one stenographer."
"Well, you know our stenographers are pretty well crowded.
But you can leave the outline with me. I'll look it over,"
said Mr. Guilfogle.
That same afternoon the manager enthusiastically O. K.'d the
plan. To enthusiastically--O. K. is an office technology for
saying, gloomily, "Well, I don't suppose it 'd hurt to try it,
anyway, but for the love of Mike be careful, and let me see any
letters you send out."
So Mr. Wrenn dictated a letter to each of their Southern
merchants, sending him a Dixieland Ink-well and inquiring about
the crops. He had a stenographer, an efficient intolerant young
woman who wrote down his halting words as though they were
examples of bad English she wanted to show her friends, and
waited for the next word with cynical amusement.
"By gosh!" growled Bill Wrenn, the cattleman, "I'll show her I'm
running this. I'll show her she's got another think coming."
But he dictated so busily and was so hot to get results that he
forgot the girl's air of high-class martyrdom.
He watched the Southern baseball results in the papers. He
seized on every salesman on the Southern route as he came in, and
inquired about the religion and politics of the merchants in his
district. He even forgot to worry about his next rise in
salary, and found it much more exciting to rush back for an
important letter after a quick lunch than to watch the time and
make sure that he secured every minute of his lunch-hour.
When October came--October of the vagabond, with the leaves
brilliant out on the Palisades, and Sixth Avenue moving-picture
palaces cool again and gay--Mr. Wrenn stayed late, under the
mercury-vapor lights, making card cross-files of the Southern
merchants, their hobbies and prejudices, and whistling as he
worked, stopping now and then to slap the desk and mutter,
"By gosh! I'm gettin' 'em--gettin' 'em."
He rarely thought of Istra till he was out on the street again,
proud of having worked so late that his eyes ached. In fact,
his chief troubles these days came when Mr. Guilfogle wouldn't
"let him put through an idea."
Their first battle was over Mr. Wrenn's signing the letters
personally; for the letters, the office manager felt, were as
much Ours as was Mr. Wrenn, and should be signed by the firm.
After some difficulty Mr. Wrenn persuaded him that one of the
best ways to handle a personal letter was to make it personal.
They nearly cursed each other before Mr. Wrenn was allowed to
use his own judgment.
It's not at all certain that Mr. Guilfogle should have yielded.
What's the use of a manager if his underlings use judgment?
The next battle Mr. Wrenn lost. He had demanded a monthly
holiday for his stenographer. Mr. Guilfogle pointed out that
she'd merely be the worse off for a holiday, that it 'd make her
discontented, that it was a kindness to her to keep her mind
occupied. Mr. Wrenn was, however, granted a new typewriter, in
a manner which revealed the fact that the Souvenir Company was
filled with almost too much mercy in permitting an employee to
follow his own selfish and stubborn desires.
You cannot trust these employees. Mr. Wrenn was getting so
absorbed in his work that he didn't even act as though it was a
favor when Mr. Guilfogle allowed him to have his letters to the
trade copied by carbon paper instead of having them blurred by
the wet tissue-paper of a copy-book. The manager did grant the
request, but he was justly indignant at the curt manner of the
rascal, whereupon our bumptious revolutionist, our friend to
anarchists and red-headed artists, demanded a "raise" and said
that he didn't care a hang if the [qualified] letters never went
out. The kindness of chiefs! For Mr. Guilfogle apologized and
raised the madman's wage from seventeen dollars and fifty cents
a week to his former nineteen dollars. [He had expected
eighteen dollars; he had demanded twenty-two dollars and fifty
cents; he was worth on the labor market from twenty-five to
thirty dollars; while the profit to the Souvenir Company from
his work was about sixty dollars minus whatever salary he got.]
Not only that. Mr. Guilfogle slapped him on the back and said:
"You're doing good work, old man. It's fine. I just don't want
you to be too reckless."
That night Wrenn worked till eight.
After his raise he could afford to go to the theater, since he
was not saving money for travel. He wrote small letters to
Istra and read the books he believed she would approve--a Paris
Baedeker and the second volume of Tolstoi's _War and Peace_,
which he bought at a second-hand book-stall for five cents.
He became interested in popular and inaccurate French and English
histories, and secreted any amount of footnote anecdotes about
Guy Fawkes and rush-lights and the divine right of kings.
He thought almost every night about making friends, which he
intended--just as much as ever--to do as soon as Sometime arrived.
On the day on which one of the Southern merchants wrote him about
his son--"fine young fellow, sir--has every chance of rising
to a lieutenancy on the Atlanta police force"--Mr. Wrenn's eyes
were moist. Here was a friend already. Sure. He would make
friends. Then there was the cripple with the Capitol Corner News
and Souvenir Stand in Austin, Texas. Mr. Wrenn secreted two
extra Dixieland Ink-wells and a Yale football banner and sent
them to the cripple for his brothers, who were in the
Agricultural College.
The orders--yes, they were growing larger. The Southern salesmen
took him out to dinner sometimes. But he was shy of them. They
were so knowing and had so many smoking-room stories. He still
had not found the friends he desired.
Miggleton's restaurant, on Forty-second Street, was a romantic
discovery. Though it had "popular prices"--plain omelet,
fifteen cents--it had red and green bracket lights,
mission-style tables, and music played by a sparrowlike pianist
and a violinist. Mr. Wrenn never really heard the music, but
while it was quavering he had a happier appreciation of the
Silk-Hat-Harry humorous pictures in the _Journal_, which he
always propped up against an oil-cruet. [That never caused him
inconvenience; he had no convictions in regard to salads.]
He would drop the paper to look out of the window at the Lazydays
Improvement Company's electric sign, showing gardens of paradise
on the instalment plan, and dream of--well, he hadn't the
slightest idea what--something distant and deliciously likely to
become intimate. Once or twice he knew that he was visioning
the girl in soft brown whom he would "go home to," and who, in
a Lazydays suburban residence, would play just such music for
him and the friends who lived near by. She would be as clever
as Istra, but "oh, more so's you can go regular places with
her."... Often he got good ideas about letters South, to be
jotted down on envelope backs, from that music.
At last comes the historic match-box incident.
On that October evening in 1910 he dined early at Miggleton's.
The thirty-cent table d'hote was perfect. The cream-of-corn soup
was, he went so far as to remark to the waitress, "simply slick";
the Waldorf salad had two whole walnuts in his portion alone.
The fat man with the white waistcoat, whom he had often noted as
dining in this same corner of the restaurant, smiled at him and
said "Pleasant evening" as he sat down opposite Mr. Wrenn and
smoothed the two sleek bangs which decorated the front of his
nearly bald head.
The music included a "potpourri of airs from `The Merry Widow,'"
which set his foot tapping. All the while he was conscious
that he'd made the Seattle Novelty and Stationery Corner Store
come through with a five-hundred-dollar order on one of his letters.
The _Journal_ contained an editorial essay on "Friendship" which
would have been, and was, a credit to Cicero.
He laid down the paper, stirred his large cup of coffee, and
stared at the mother-of-pearl buttons on the waistcoat of the
fat man, who was now gulping down soup, opposite him. "My
land!" he was thinking, "friendship! I ain't even begun to
make all those friends I was going to. Haven't done a thing.
Oh, I will; I must!"
"Nice night," said the fat man.
"Yuh--it sure is," brightly agreed Mr. Wrenn.
"Reg'lar Indian-Summer weather."
"Yes, isn't it! I feel like taking a walk on Riverside
Drive--b'lieve I will."
"Wish I had time. But I gotta get down to the
store--cigar-store. I'm on nights, three times a week."
"Yuh. I've seen you here most every time I eat early,"
Mr. Wrenn purred.
"Yuh. The rest of the time I eat at the boarding-house."
Silence. But Mr. Wrenn was fighting for things to say, means of
approach, for the chance to become acquainted with a new person,
for all the friendly human ways he had desired in nights of
loneliness.
"Wonder when they'll get the Grand Central done?" asked the fat man.
"I s'pose it'll take quite a few years," said Mr. Wrenn,
conversationally.
"Yuh. I s'pose it will."
Silence.
Mr. Wrenn sat trying to think of something else to say. Lonely
people in city restaurants simply do not get acquainted. Yet he
did manage to observe, "Great building that'll be," in the
friendliest manner.
Silence.
Then the fat man went on:
"Wonder what Wolgast will do in his mill? Don't believe he can
stand up."
Wolgast was, Mr. Wrenn seemed to remember, a pugilist. He
agreed vaguely:
"Pretty hard, all right."
"Go out to the areoplane meet?" asked the fat man.
"No. But I'd like to see it. Gee! there must be kind of--kind
of adventure in them things, heh?"
"Yuh--sure is. First machine I saw, though--I was just getting
off the train at Belmont Park, and there was an areoplane up in
the air, and it looked like one of them big mechanical beetles
these fellows sell on the street buzzing around up there. I was
kind of disappointed. But what do you think? It was that J.
A. D. McCurdy, in a Curtiss biplane--I think it was--and by
golly! he got to circling around and racing and tipping so's I
thought I'd loose my hat off, I was so excited. And, say, what
do you think? I see McCurdy himself, afterward, standing near
one of the--the handgars--handsome young chap, not over
twenty-eight or thirty, built like a half-miler. And then I see
Ralph Johnstone and Arch Hoxey--"
"Gee!" Mr. Wrenn was breathing.
"--dipping and doing the--what do you call it?--Dutch
sausage-roll or something like that. Yelled my head off."
"Oh, it must have been great to see 'em, and so close, too."
"Yuh--it sure was."
There seemed to be no other questions to settle. Mr. Wrenn
slowly folded up his paper, pursued his check under three plates
and the menu-card to its hiding-place beyond the catsup-bottle,
and left the table with a regretful "Good night."
At the desk of the cashier, a decorative blonde, he put a cent
in the machine which good-naturedly drops out boxes of matches.
No box dropped this time, though he worked the lever noisily.
"Out of order?" asked the cashier lady. "Here's two boxes of
matches. Guess you've earned them."
"Well, well, well, well!" sounded the voice of his friend, the
fat man, who stood at the desk paying his bill. "Pretty easy,
heh? Two boxes for one cent! Sting the restaurant." Cocking his
head, he carefully inserted a cent in the slot and clattered the
lever, turning to grin at Mr. Wrenn, who grinned back as the
machine failed to work.
"Let me try it," caroled Mr. Wrenn, and pounded the lever with
the enthusiasm of comradeship.
"Nothing doing, lady," crowed the fat man to the cashier.
"I guess _I_ draw two boxes, too, eh? And I'm in a cigar-store.
How's that for stinging your competitors, heh? Ho, ho, ho!"
The cashier handed him two boxes, with an embarrassed simper,
and the fat man clapped Mr. Wrenn's shoulder joyously.
"My turn!" shouted a young man in a fuzzy green hat and a
bright-brown suit, who had been watching with the sudden
friendship which unites a crowd brought together by an accident.
Mr. Wrenn was glowing. "No, it ain't--it's mine," he achieved.
"I invented this game." Never had he so stood forth in a crowd.
He was a Bill Wrenn with the cosmopolitan polish of a
floor-walker. He stood beside the fat man as a friend of sorts,
a person to be taken perfectly seriously.
It is true that he didn't add to this spiritual triumph the
triumph of getting two more boxes of matches, for the
cashier-girl exclaimed, "No indeedy; it's my turn!" and lifted
the match machine to a high shelf behind her. But Mr. Wrenn
went out of the restaurant with his old friend, the fat man,
saying to him quite as would a wit, "I guess we get stung, eh?"
"Yuh!" gurgled the fat man.
Walking down to your store?"
"Yuh--sure--won't you walk down a piece?"
"Yes, I would like to. Which way is it?"
"Fourth Avenue and Twenty-eighth."
"Walk down with you."
"Fine!"
And the fat man seemed to mean it. He confided to Mr. Wrenn
that the fishing was something elegant at Trulen, New Jersey;
that he was some punkins at the casting of flies in fishing;
that he wished exceedingly to be at Trulen fishing with flies,
but was prevented by the manager of the cigar-store; that the
manager was an old devil; that his (the fat man's own) name was
Tom Poppins; that the store had a slick new brand of Manila
cigars, kept in a swell new humidor bought upon the advice of
himself (Mr. Poppins); that one of the young clerks in the store
had done fine in the Modified Marathon; that the Cubs had had a
great team this year; that he'd be glad to give Mr.--Mr.
Wrenn, eh?--one of those Manila cigars--great cigars they were,
too; and that he hadn't "laughed so much for a month of Sundays
as he had over the way they stung Miggleton's on them matches."
All this in the easy, affectionate, slightly wistful manner of
fat men. Mr. Poppins's large round friendly childish eyes were
never sarcastic. He was the man who makes of a crowd in the
Pullman smoking-room old friends in half an hour. In turn, Mr.
Wrenn did not shy off; he hinted at most of his lifelong
ambitions and a fair number of his sorrows and, when they
reached the store, not only calmly accepted, but even sneezingly
ignited one of the "slick new Manila cigars."
As he left the store he knew that the golden age had begun.
He had a friend!
He was to see Tom Poppins the coming Thursday at Miggleton's.
And now he was going to find Morton! He laughed so loudly that
the policeman at Thirty-fourth Street looked self-conscious and
felt secretively to find out what was the matter with his
uniform. Now, this evening, he'd try to get on the track of
Morton. Well, perhaps not this evening--the Pennsylvania
offices wouldn't be open, but some time this week, anyway.
Two nights later, as he waited for Tom Poppins at Miggleton's,
he lashed himself with the thought that he had not started to
find Morton; good old Morton of the cattle-boat. But that was
forgotten in the wonder of Tom Poppins's account of Mrs. Arty's,
a boarding-house "where all the folks likes each other."
"You've never fed at a boarding-house, eh?" said Tom. "Well, I
guess most of 'em are pretty poor feed. And pretty sad bunch.
But Mrs. Arty's is about as near like home as most of us poor
bachelors ever gets. Nice crowd there. If Mrs. Arty--Mrs. R.
T. Ferrard is her name, but we always call her Mrs. Arty--if she
don't take to you she don't mind letting you know she won't take
you in at all; but if she does she'll worry over the holes in your
socks as if they was her husband's. All the bunch there drop into
the parlor when they come in, pretty near any time clear up till
twelve-thirty, and talk and laugh and rush the growler and play
Five Hundred. Just like home!
"Mrs. Arty's nearly as fat as I am, but she can be pretty spry
if there's something she can do for you. Nice crowd there, too
except that Teddem--he's one of these here Willy-boy actors,
always out of work; I guess Mrs. Arty is kind of sorry for him.
Say, Wrenn--you seem to me like a good fellow--why don't you get
acquainted with the bunch? Maybe you'd like to move up there
some time. You was telling me about what a cranky old party
your landlady is. Anyway, come on up there to dinner. On me.
Got anything on for next Monday evening?"
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