Books: Our Mr. Wrenn
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Sinclair Lewis >> Our Mr. Wrenn
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"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!
I've seen so much of them. They talk and talk and talk--they're
just like Kipling's bandar-log--What is it?
"See us rise in a flung festoon
Half-way up to the jealous moon.
Don't you wish you--
could know all about art and economics as we do?' That's what
they say. Umph!"
Then she wriggled her fingers in the air like white butterflies,
shrugged her shoulders elaborately, rose from the rail, and sat
down beside him on the steps, quite matter-of-factly.
He gould feel his temple-pulses beat with excitement.
She turned her pale sensitive vivid face slowly toward him.
"When did you see me--to make up the story?"
"Breakfasts. At Mrs. Cattermole's."
"Oh yes.... How is it you aren't out sight-seeing? Or is it
blessedly possible that you aren't a tripper--a tourist?"
"Why, I dunno." He hunted uneasily for the right answer.
"Not exactly. I tried a stunt--coming over on a cattle-boat."
"That's good. Much better."
She sat silent while, with enormous and self-betraying pains to
avoid detection, he studied her firm thin brilliantly red lips.
At last he tried:
"Please tell me something about London. Some of you English--
Oh, I dunno. I can't get acquainted easily."
"My dear child, I'm not English! I'm quite as American as
yourself. I was born in California. I never saw England till two
years ago, on my way to Paris. I'm an art student.... That's
why my accent is so perishin' English--I can't afford to be just
_ordinary_ British, y' know."
Her laugh had an October tang of bitterness in it.
"Well, I'll--say, what do you know about that!" he said, weakly.
"Tell me about yourself--since apparently we're now
acquainted.... Unless you want to go to that music-hall?"
"Oh no, no, no! Gee, I was just _crazy_ to have somebody to talk
to--somebody nice--I was just about nutty, I was so lonely," all
in a burst. He finished, hesitatingly, "I guess the English are
kinda hard to get acquainted with."
"Lonely, eh?" she mused, abrupt and bluffly kind as a man, for
all her modulating woman's voice. "You don't know any of the
people here in the house?"
"No'm. Say, I guess we got rooms next to each other."
"How romantic!" she mocked.
"Wrenn's my name; William Wrenn. I work for--I used to work for
the Souvenir and Art Novelty Company. In New York."
"Oh. I see. Novelties? Nice little ash-trays with `Love from
the Erie Station'? And woggly pin-cushions?"
"Yes! And fat pug-dogs with black eyes."
"Oh no-o-o! Please not black! Pale sympathetic blue eyes--nice
honest blue eyes!"
"Nope. Black. Awful black.... Say, gee, I ain't talking too
nutty, am I?"
"`Nutty'? You mean `idiotically'? The slang's changed
since--Oh yes, of course; you've succeeded in talking quite
nice and `idiotic.'"
"Oh, say, gee, I didn't mean to--When you been so nice and
all to me--"
"Don't apologize!" Istra Nash demanded, savagely. "Haven't they
taught you that?"
"Yes'm," he mumbled, apologetically.
She sat silent again, apparently not at all satisfied with the
architecture of the opposite side of Tavistock Place.
Diffidently he edged into speech:
"Honest, I did think you was English. You came from California?
Oh, say, I wonder if you've ever heard of Dr. Mittyford. He's
some kind of school-teacher. I think he teaches in Leland
Stamford College."
"Leland Stanford? You know him?" She dropped into interested
familiarity.
"I met him at Oxford."
"Really?... My brother was at Stanford. I think I've heard him
speak of--Oh yes. He said that Mittyford was a cultural
climber, if you know what I mean; rather--oh, how shall I
express it?--oh, shall we put it, finicky about things people
have just told him to be finicky about."
"Yes!" glowed Mr. Wrenn.
To the luxury of feeling that he knew the unusual Miss Istra
Nash he sacrificed Dr. Mittyford, scholarship and eye-glasses
and Shelley and all, without mercy.
"Yes, he was awfully funny. Gee! I didn't care much for him."
"Of course you know he's a great man, however?" Istra was as
bland as though she had meant that all along, which left Mr.
Wrenn nowhere at all when it came to deciding what she meant.
Without warning she rose from the steps, flung at him "G' night,"
and was off down the street.
Sitting alone, all excited happiness, Mr. Wrenn muttered: "Ain't
she a wonder! Gee! she's striking-lookin'! Gee whittakers!"
Some hours later he said aloud, tossing about in bed: "I wonder
if I was too fresh. I hope I wasn't. I ought to be careful."
He was so worried about it that he got up and smoked a
cigarette, remembered that he was breaking still another rule by
smoking too much, then got angry and snapped defiantly at his
suit-case: "Well, what do I care if I _am_ smoking too much?
And I'll be as fresh as I want to." He threw a newspaper at the
censorious suit-case and, much relieved, went to bed to dream
that he was a rabbit making enormously amusing jests, at which
he laughed rollickingly in half-dream, till he realized that he
was being awakened by the sound of long sobs from the room of
Istra Nash.
Afternoon; Mr. Wrenn in his room. Miss Nash was back from tea,
but there was not a sound to be heard from her room, though he
listened with mouth open, bent forward in his chair, his hands
clutching the wooden seat, his finger-tips rubbing nervously
back and forth over the rough under-surface of the wood.
He wanted to help her--the wonderful lady who had been sobbing
in the night. He had a plan, in which he really believed,
to say to her, "Please let me help you, princess, jus' like I
was a knight."
At last he heard her moving about. He rushed downstairs and
waited on the stoop.
When she came out she glanced down and smiled contentedly.
He was flutteringly sure that she expected to see him there.
But all his plan of proffering assistance vanished as he saw
her impatient eyes and her splendors of dress--another
tight-fitting gown, of smoky gray, with faint silvery lights gliding
along the fabric.
She sat on the rail above him, immediately, unhesitatingly, and
answered his "Evenin'" cheerfully.
He wanted so much to sit beside her, to be friends with her.
But, he felt, it took courage to sit beside her. She was likely
to stare haughtily at him. However, he did go up to the rail
and sit, shyly kicking his feet, beside her, and she did not
stare haughtily. Instead she moved over an inch or two, glanced
at him almost as though they were sharing a secret, and said, quietly:
"I thought quite a bit about you last evening. I believe you
really have an imagination, even though you are a salesman--I
mean so many don't; you know how it is."
"Oh yes."
You see, Mr. Wrenn didn't know he was commonplace.
"After I left here last night I went over to Olympia Johns', and
she dragged me off to a play. I thought of you at it because
there was an imaginative butler in it. You don't mind my
comparing you to a butler, do you? He was really quite the
nicest person in the play, y' know. Most of it was gorgeously
rotten. It used to be a French farce, but they sent it to
Sunday-school and gave it a nice fresh frock. It seemed that a
gentleman-tabby had been trying to make a match between his
nephew and his ward. The ward arted. Personally I think it
was by tonsorial art. But, anyway, the uncle knew that nothing
brings people together so well as hating the same person. You know,
like hating the cousin, when you're a kiddy, hating the cousin
that always keeps her nails clean?"
"Yes! That's _so!_"
"So he turned nasty, and of course the nephew and ward clinched
till death did them part--which, I'm very sorry to have to tell
you, death wasn't decent enough to do on the stage. If the play
could only have ended with everybody's funeral I should have
called it a real happy ending."
Mr. Wrenn laughed gratefully, though uncertainly. He knew that she
had made jokes for him, but he didn't exactly know what they were.
"The imaginative butler, he was rather good. But the rest--Ugh!"
"That must have been a funny play," he said, politely.
She looked at him sidewise and confided, "Will you do me a favor?"
"Oh yes, I--"
"Ever been married?"
He was frightfully startled. His "No" sounded as though he
couldn't quite remember.
She seemed much amused. You wouldn't have believed that this
superior quizzical woman who tapped her fingers carelessly on
her slim exquisite knee had ever sobbed in the night.
"Oh, that wasn't a personal question," she said. "I just wanted
to know what you're like. Don't you ever collect people? I
do--chloroform 'em quite cruelly and pin their poor little
corpses out on nice clean corks.... You live alone in New York,
do you?"
"Y-yes."
"Who do you play with--know?"
"Not--not much of anybody. Except maybe Charley Carpenter.
He's assistant bookkeeper for the Souvenir Company. "He had
wanted to, and immediately decided not to, invent _grandes
mondes_ whereof he was an intimate.
"What do--oh, you know--people in New York who don't go to
parties or read much--what do they do for amusement? I'm so
interested in types."
"Well--" said he.
That was all he could say till he had digested a pair of
thoughts: Just what did she mean by "types"? Had it something
to do with printing stories? And what could he say about the
people, anyway? He observed:
"Oh, I don't know--just talk about--oh, cards and jobs and folks
and things and--oh, you know; go to moving pictures and
vaudeville and go to Coney Island and--oh, sleep."
"But you--?"
"Well, I read a good deal. Quite a little. Shakespeare and
geography and a lot of stuff. I like reading."
"And how do you place Nietzsche?" she gravely desired to know.
"?"
"Nietzsche. You know--the German humorist."
"Oh yes--uh--let me see now; he's--uh--"
"Why, you remember, don't you? Haeckel and he wrote the great
musical comedy of the century. And Matisse did the
music--Matisse and Rodin."
"I haven't been to it," he said, vaguely. "...I don't know
much German. Course I know a few words, like _Spricken Sie
Dutch_ and _Bitty, sir_, that Rabin at the Souvenir Company--he's
a German Jew, I guess--learnt me.... But, say, isn't Kipling
great! Gee! when I read _Kim_ I can imagine I'm hiking along one
of those roads in India just like I was there--you know, all
those magicians and so on.... Readin's wonderful, ain't it!"
"Um. Yes."
"I bet you read an awful lot."
"Very little. Oh--D'Annunzio and some Turgenev and a little
Tourgenieff.... That last was a joke, you know."
"Oh yes," disconcertedly.
"What sorts of plays do you go to, Mr. Wrenn?"
"Moving pictures mostly," he said, easily, then bitterly wished
he hadn't confessed so low-life a habit.
"Well--tell me, my dear--Oh, I didn't mean that; artists use
it a good deal; it just means `old chap.' You _don't_ mind my
asking such beastly personal questions, do you? I'm interested
in people.... And now I must go up and write a letter. I was
going over to Olympia's--she's one of the Interesting People I
spoke of--but you see you have been much more amusing. Good night.
You're lonely in London, aren't you? We'll have to go sightseeing
some day."
"Yes, I am lonely!" he exploded. Then, meekly: "Oh, thank you!
I sh'd be awful pleased to.... Have you seen the Tower, Miss Nash?"
"No. Never. Have you?"
"No. You see, I thought it 'd be kind of a gloomy thing to see
all alone. Is that why you haven't never been there, too?"
"My dear man, I see I shall have to educate you. Shall I? I've
been taken in hand by so many people--it would be a pleasure to
pass on the implied slur. Shall I?"
"Please do."
"One simply doesn't go and see the Tower, because that's what
trippers do. Don't you understand, my dear? (Pardon the `my
dear' again.) The Tower is the sort of thing school
superintendents see and then go back and lecture on in school
assembly-room and the G. A. R. hall. I'll take you to the Tate
Gallery." Then, very abruptly, "G' night," and she was gone.
He stared after her smooth back, thinking: "Gee! I wonder if
she got sore at something I said. I don't think I was fresh
this time. But she beat it so quick.... Them lips of hers--I
never knew there was such red lips. And an artist--paints
pictures!... Read a lot--Nitchy--German musical comedy. Wonder
if that's that `Merry Widow' thing?... That gray dress of hers
makes me think of fog. Cur'ous."
In her room Istra Nash inspected her nose in a mirror, powdered,
and sat down to write, on thick creamy paper:
Skilly dear, I'm in a fierce Bloomsbury boarding-house--bores
--except for a Phe-nomenon--little man of 35 or 40 with
embryonic imagination & a virgin soul. I'll try to keep from
planting radical thoughts in the virgin soul, but I'm tempted.
Oh Skilly dear I'm lonely as the devil. Would it be too bromid.
to say I wish you were here? I put out my hand in the darkness,
& yours wasn't there. My dear, my dear, how desolate--Oh you
understand it only too well with your supercilious grin & your
superior eye-glasses & your beatific Oxonian ignorance of poor
eager America.
I suppose I _am_ just a barbarous Californian kiddy. It's just
as Pere Dureon said at the atelier, "You haf a' onderstanding of
the 'igher immorality, but I 'ope you can cook--paint you cannot."
He wins. I can't sell a single thing to the art editors here or
get one single order. One horrid eye-glassed earnest youth who
Sees People at a magazine, he vouchsafed that they "didn't use
any Outsiders." Outsiders! And his hair was nearly as red as my
wretched mop. So I came home & howled & burned Milan tapers
before your picture. I did. Though you don't deserve it.
Oh damn it, am I getting sentimental? You'll read this at Petit
Monsard over your drip & grin at your poor unnietzschean barbarian.
I. N.
CHAPTER VIII
HE TIFFINS
Mr. Wrenn, chewing and chewing and chewing the cud of thought in
his room next evening, after an hour had proved two things; thus:
(a) The only thing he wanted to do was to go back to America at
once, because England was a country where every one--native or
American--was so unfriendly and so vastly wise that he could
never understand them.
(b) The one thing in the world that he wanted to do was to be
right here, for the most miraculous event of which he had ever
heard was meeting Miss Nash. First one, then the other, these
thoughts swashed back and forth like the swinging tides. He got
away from them only long enough to rejoice that somehow--he
didn't know how--he was going to be her most intimate friend,
because they were both Americans in a strange land and because
they both could make-believe.
Then he was proving that Istra would, and would not, be the
perfect comrade among women when some one knocked at his door.
Electrified, his cramped body shot up from its crouch, and he
darted to the door.
Istra Nash stood there, tapping her foot on the sill with
apologetic haste in her manner. Abruptly she said:
"So sorry to bother you. I just wondered if you could let me
have a match? I'm all out."
"Oh _yes!_ Here's a whole box. Please take 'em. I got plenty
more." [Which was absolutely untrue.]
"Thank you. S' good o' you," she said, hurriedly. "G' night."
She turned away, but he followed her into the hall, bashfully
urging: "Have you been to another show? Gee! I hope you draw
a better one next time 'n the one about the guy with the nephew."
"Thank you."
She glanced back in the half dark hall from her door--some
fifteen feet from his. He was scratching at the wall-paper
with a diffident finger, hopeful for a talk.
"Won't you come in?" she said, hesitatingly.
"Oh, thank you, but I guess I hadn't better."
Suddenly she flashed out the humanest of smiles, her blue-gray
eyes crinkling with cheery friendship. "Come in, come in, child."
As he hesitatingly entered she warbled: "Needn't both be so
lonely all the time, after all, need we? Even if you _don't_
like poor Istra. You don't--do you?" Seemingly she didn't
expect an answer to her question, for she was busy lighting a
Russian cigarette. It was the first time in his life that he
had seen a woman smoke.
With embarrassed politeness he glanced away from her as she
threw back her head and inhaled deeply. He blushingly
scrutinized the room.
In the farther corner two trunks stood open. One had the tray
removed, and out of the lower part hung a confusion of lacey
things from which he turned away uncomfortable eyes. He
recognized the black-and-gold burnoose, which was tumbled on the
bed, with a nightgown of lace insertions and soft wrinkles in
the lawn, a green book with a paper label bearing the title
_Three Plays for Puritans_, a red slipper, and an open box of
chocolates.
On the plain kitchen-ware table was spread a cloth of Reseda
green, like a dull old leaf in color. On it lay a gold-mounted
fountain-pen, huge and stub-pointed; a medley of papers and torn
envelopes, a bottle of Creme Yvette, and a silver-framed portrait
of a lean smiling man with a single eye-glass.
Mr. Wrenn did not really see all these details, but he had an
impression of luxury and high artistic success. He considered
the Yvette flask the largest bottle of perfume he'd ever seen;
and remarked that there was "some guy's picture on the table."
He had but a moment to reconnoiter, for she was astonishingly saying:
"So you were lonely when I knocked?"
"Why, how--"
"Oh, I could see it. We all get lonely, don't we? I do, of
course. Just now I'm getting sorer and sorer on Interesting
People. I think I'll go back to Paris. There even the
Interesting People are--why, they're interesting. Savvy--you
see I _am_ an American--savvy?"
"Why--uh--uh--uh--I d-don't exactly get what you mean. How do
you mean about `Interesting People'?"
"My dear child, of course you don't get me." She went to the
mirror and patted her hair, then curled on the bed, with an
offhand "Won't you sit down?" and smoked elaborately, blowing
the blue tendrils toward the ceiling as she continued: "Of
course you don't get it. You're a nice sensible clerk who've
had enough real work to do to keep you from being afraid that
other people will think you're commonplace. You don't have to
coddle yourself into working enough to earn a living by talking
about temperament.
"Why, these Interesting People--You find 'em in London and
New York and San Francisco just the same. They're convinced
they're the wisest people on earth. There's a few artists and
a bum novelist or two always, and some social workers. The
particular bunch that it amuses me to hate just now--and that I
apparently can't do without--they gather around Olympia Johns,
who makes a kind of salon out of her rooms on Great James
Street, off Theobald's Road.... They might just as well be in
New York; but they're even stodgier. They don't get sick of the
game of being on intellectual heights as soon as New-Yorkers do.
"I'll have to take you there. It's a cheery sensation, you
know, to find a man who has some imagination, but who has been
unspoiled by Interesting People, and take him to hear them
wamble. They sit around and growl and rush the growler--I hope
you know growler-rushing--and rejoice that they're free spirits.
Being Free, of course, they're not allowed to go and play with
nice people, for when a person is Free, you know, he is never
free to be anything but Free. That may seem confusing, but they
understand it at Olympia's.
"Of course there's different sorts of intellectuals, and each
cult despises all the others. Mostly, each cult consists of one
person, but sometimes there's two--a talker and an audience--or
even three. For instance, you may be a militant and a
vegetarian, but if some one is a militant and has a good figure,
why then--oof!... That's what I mean by `Interesting People.'
I loathe them! So, of course, being one of them, I go from one
bunch to another, and, upon my honor, every single time I think
that the new bunch _is_ interesting!"
Then she smoked in gloomy silence, while Mr. Wrenn remarked,
after some mental labor, "I guess they're like cattlemen--the
cattle-ier they are, the more romantic they look, and then when
you get to know them the chief trouble with them is that they're
cattlemen."
"Yes, that's it. They're--why, they're--Oh, poor dear, there,
there, there! It _sha'n't_ have so much intellekchool discussion,
_shall_ it!... I think you're a very nice person, and I'll tell you
what we'll do. We'll have a small fire, shall we? In the fireplace."
"Yes!"
She pulled the old-fashioned bell-cord, and the old-fashioned
North Country landlady came--tall, thin, parchment-faced,
musty-looking as though she had been dressed up in Victorian
garments in 1880 and left to stand in an unaired parlor ever since.
She glowered silent disapproval at the presence of Mr. Wrenn in
Istra's room, but sent a slavey to make the fire--"saxpence uxtry."
Mr. Wrenn felt guilty till the coming of the slavey, a perfect
Christmas-story-book slavey, a small and merry lump of soot, who
sang out, "Chilly t'-night, ayn't it?" and made a fire that was
soon singing "Chilly t'-night," like the slavey.
Istra sat on the floor before the fire, Turk-wise, her quick
delicate fingers drumming excitedly on her knees.
"Come sit by me. You, with your sense of the romantic, ought to
appreciate sitting by the fire. You know it's always done."
He slumped down by her, clasping his knees and trying to appear
the dignified American business man in his country-house.
She smiled at him intimately, and quizzed:
"Tell me about the last time you sat with a girl by the fire.
Tell poor Istra the dark secret. Was she the perfect among
pink faces?"
"I've--never--sat--before--any--fireplace--with
--any--one! Except when I was about nine--one Hallowe'en--at a
party in Parthenon--little town up York State."
"Really? Poor kiddy!"
She reached out her hand and took his. He was terrifically
conscious of the warm smoothness of her fingers playing a soft
tattoo on the back of his hand, while she said:
"But you have been in love? Drefful in love?"
"I never have."
"Dear child, you've missed so much of the tea and cakes of life,
haven't you? And you have an interest in life. Do you know,
when I think of the jaded Interesting People I've met--Why do
I leave you to be spoiled by some shop-girl in a flowered hat?
She'd drag you to moving-picture shows.... Oh! You didn't tell
me that you went to moving pictures, did you?"
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