Books: Our Mr. Wrenn
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Sinclair Lewis >> Our Mr. Wrenn
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He awkwardly walked over and laid the magazines on the bed.
"Why, it's all right.... What was it about some novelty--some
article? If there's anything I could do--anything--"
"Article?"
"Why, yes. That you wanted to see me about."
"Oh! Oh, that was just to get rid of Carson.... His
_insufferable_ familiarity! The penalty for my having been a
naive kiddy, hungry for friendship, once. And now, good n--.
Oh, Mouse, he says my eyes--even with this green kimono on--
Come here, dear. tell me what color my eyes are."
She moved with a quick swing to the side of her bed. Thrusting
out her two arms, she laid ivory hands clutchingly on his
shoulder. He stood quaking, forgetting every one of the
Wrennish rules by which he had edged a shy polite way through
life. He fearfully reached out his hands toward her shoulders
in turn, but his arms were shorter than hers, and his hands
rested on the sensitive warmth of her upper arms. He peered at
those dear gray-blue eyes of hers, but he could not calm himself
enough to tell whether they were china-blue or basalt-black.
"Tell me," she demanded; "_aren't_ they green?"
"Yes," he quavered.
"You're sweet," she said.
Leaning out from the side of her bed, she kissed him. She
sprang up, and hastened to the window, laughing nervously, and
deploring: "I shouldn't have done that! I shouldn't! Forgive
me!" Plaintively, like a child: "Istra was so bad, so bad. Now
you must go." As she turned back to him her eyes had the peace
of an old friend's.
Because he had wished to be kind to people, because he had been
pitiful toward Goaty Zapp, Mr. Wrenn was able to understand that
she was trying to be a kindly big sister to him, and he said
"Good night, Istra," and smiled in a lively way and walked out.
He got out the smile by wrenching his nerves, for which he paid
in agony as he knelt by his bed, acknowledging that Istra would
never love him and that therefore he was not to love, would be
a fool to love, never would love her--and seeing again her white
arms softly shadowed by her green kimono sleeves.
No sight of Istra, no scent of her hair, no sound of her
always-changing voice for two days. Twice, seeing a sliver of
light under her door as he came up the darkened stairs, he
knocked, but there was no answer, and he marched into his room
with the dignity of fury.
Numbers of times he quite gave her up, decided he wanted never
to see her again. But after one of the savagest of these
renunciations, while he was stamping defiantly down Tottenham
Court Road, he saw in a window a walking-stick that he was sure
she would like his carrying. And it cost only two-and-six.
Hastily, before he changed his mind, he rushed in and slammed
down his money. It was a very beautiful stick indeed, and of a
modesty to commend itself to Istra, just a plain straight stick
with a cap of metal curiously like silver. He was conscious
that the whole world was leering at him, demanding "What're _you_
carrying a cane for?" but he--the misunderstood--was willing
to wait for the reward of this martyrdom in Istra's approval.
The third night, as he stood at the window watching two children
playing in the dusk, there was a knock. It was Istra. She
stood at his door, smart and inconspicuous in a black suit with
a small toque that hid the flare of her red hair.
"Come," she said, abruptly. "I want you to take me to
Olympia's--Olympia Johns' flat. I've been reading all the
Balzac there is. I want to talk. Can you come?"
"Oh, of course--"
"Hurry, then!"
He seized his small foolishly round hat, and he tucked his new
walking-stick under his arm without displaying it too proudly,
waiting for her comment.
She led the way down-stairs and across the quiet streets and
squares of Bloomsbury to Great James Street. She did not even
see the stick.
She said scarce a word beyond:
"I'm sick of Olympia's bunch--I never want to dine in Soho with
an inhibition and a varietistic sex instinct again--_jamais de
la vie._ But one has to play with somebody."
Then he was so cheered that he tapped the pavements boldly with
his stick and delicately touched her arm as they crossed the
street. For she added:
"We'll just run in and see them for a little while, and then you
can take me out and buy me a Rhine wine and seltzer.... Poor
Mouse, it shall have its play!"
Olympia Johns' residence consisted of four small rooms. When
Istra opened the door, after tapping, the living-room was
occupied by seven people, all interrupting one another and
drinking fourpenny ale; seven people and a fog of cigarette
smoke and a tangle of papers and books and hats. A swamp of
unwashed dishes appeared on a large table in the room just
beyond, divided off from the living-room by a burlap curtain to
which were pinned suffrage buttons and medallions. This last he
remembered afterward, thinking over the room, for the medals'
glittering points of light relieved his eyes from the
intolerable glances of the people as he was hastily introduced
to them. He was afraid that he would be dragged into a
discussion, and sat looking away from them to the medals, and to
the walls, on which were posters, showing mighty fists with
hammers and flaming torches, or hog-like men lolling on the
chests of workmen, which they seemed to enjoy more than the
workmen. By and by he ventured to scan the group.
Carson Haggerty, the American poet, was there. But the center
of them all was Olympia Johns herself--spinster, thirty-four, as
small and active and excitedly energetic as an ant trying to get
around a match. She had much of the ant's brownness and
slimness, too. Her pale hair was always falling from under her
fillet of worn black velvet (with the dingy under side of the
velvet showing curled up at the edges). A lock would tangle in
front of her eyes, and she would impatiently shove it back with
a jab of her thin rough hands, never stopping in her machine-gun
volley of words.
"Yes, yes, yes, yes," she would pour out. "Don't you _see?_
We must do something. I tell you the conditions are intolerable,
simply intolerable. We must _do_ something."
The conditions were, it seemed, intolerable in the several
branches of education of female infants, water rates in
Bloomsbury, the cutlery industry, and ballad-singing.
And mostly she was right. Only her rightness was so demanding,
so restless, that it left Mr. Wrenn gasping.
Olympia depended on Carson Haggerty for most of the "Yes, that's
so's," though he seemed to be trying to steal glances at another
woman, a young woman, a lazy smiling pretty girl of twenty, who,
Istra told Mr. Wrenn, studied Greek archaeology at the Museum.
No one knew why she studied it. She seemed peacefully ignorant
of everything but her kissable lips, and she adorably poked at
things with lazy graceful fingers, and talked the Little
Language to Carson Haggerty, at which Olympia shrugged her
shoulders and turned to the others.
There were a Mr. and Mrs. Stettinius--she a poet; he a bleached
man, with goatish whiskers and a sanctimonious white neck-cloth,
who was Puritanically, ethically, gloomily, religiously
atheistic. Items in the room were a young man who taught in Mr.
Jeney's Select School and an Established Church mission worker
from Whitechapel, who loved to be shocked.
It was Mr. Wrenn who was really shocked, however, not by the
noise and odor; not by the smoking of the women; not by the
demand that "we" tear down the state; no, not by these was Our
Mr. Wrenn of the Souvenir Company shocked, but by his own
fascinated interest in the frank talk of sex. He had always had
a quite undefined supposition that it was wicked to talk of sex
unless one made a joke of it.
Then came the superradicals, to confuse the radicals who
confused Mr. Wrenn.
For always there is a greater rebellion; and though you
sell your prayer-book to buy Bakunine, and esteem yourself
revolutionary to a point of madness, you shall find one who
calls you reactionary. The scorners came in together--Moe
Tchatzsky, the syndicalist and direct actionist, and Jane
Schott, the writer of impressionistic prose--and they sat
silently sneering on a couch.
Istra rose, nodded at Mr. Wrenn, and departed, despite Olympia's
hospitable shrieks after them of "Oh stay! It's only a little
after ten. Do stay and have something to eat."
Istra shut the door resolutely. The hall was dark. It was
gratefully quiet. She snatched up Mr. Wrenn's hand and held it
to her breast.
"Oh, Mouse dear, I'm so bored! I want some real things. They
talk and talk in there, and every night they settle all the fate
of all the nations, always the same way. I don't suppose
there's ever been a bunch that knew more things incorrectly.
You hated them, didn't you?"
"Why, I don't think you ought to talk about them so severe," he
implored, as they started down-stairs. "I don't mean they're
like you. They don't savvy like you do. I mean it! But I was
awful int'rested in what that Miss Johns said about kids in
school getting crushed into a mold. Gee! that's so; ain't it?
Never thought of it before. And that Mrs. Stettinius talked
about Yeats so beautiful."
"Oh, my dear, you make my task so much harder. I want you to
be different. Can't you see your cattle-boat experience is realer
than any of the things those half-baked thinkers have done? I
_know_. I'm half-baked myself."
"Oh, I've never done nothing."
"But you're ready to. Oh, I don't know. I want--I wish Jock
Seton--the filibuster I met in San Francisco--I wish he were
here. Mouse, maybe I can make a filibuster of you. I've got to
create something. Oh, those people! If you just knew them! That
fool Mary Stettinius is mad about that Tchatzsky person, and her
husband invites him to teas. Stettinius is mad about Olympia,
who'll probably take Carson out and marry him, and he'll keep on
hanging about the Greek girl. Ungh!"
"I don't know--I don't know--"
But as he didn't know what he didn't know she merely patted his
arm and said, soothingly: "I won't criticize your first
specimens of radicals any more. They are trying to do something,
anyway." Then she added, in an irrelevant tone, "You're exactly
as tall as I am. Mouse dear, you ought to be taller."
They were entering the drab stretch of Tavistock Place, after a
silence as drab, when she exclaimed: "Mouse, I am _so_ sick of
everything. I want to get out, away, anywhere, and do
something, anything, just so's it's different. Even the
country. I'd like--Why couldn't we?"
"Let's go out on a picnic to-morrow, Istra."
"A picnic picnic? With pickles and a pillow cushion and several
kinds of cake?... I'm afraid the Bois Boulogne has spoiled me
for that.... Let me think."
She drooped down on the steps of their house. Her head back,
her supple strong throat arched with the passion of hating
boredom, she devoured the starlight dim over the stale old roofs
across the way.
"Stars," she said. "Out on the moors they would come down by
you.... What is _your_ adventure--your formula for it?... Let's
see; you take common roadside things seriously; you'd be dear
and excited over a Red Lion Inn."
"Are there more than one Red Li--"
"My dear Mouse, England is a menagerie of Red Lions and White
Lions and fuzzy Green Unicorns.... Why not, why not, _why not!_
Let's walk to Aengusmere. It's a fool colony of artists and so
on, up in Suffolk; but they _have_ got some beautiful cottages,
and they're more Celt than Dublin.... Start right now; take a
train to Chelmsford, say, and tramp all night. Take a couple
of days or so to get there. Think of it! Tramping through dawn,
past English fields. Think of it, Yankee. And not caring what
anybody in the world thinks. Gipsies. Shall we?"
"Wh-h-h-h-y--" He was sure she was mad. Tramping all night!
He couldn't let her do this.
She sprang up. She stared down at him in revulsion, her hands
clenched. Her voice was hostile as she demanded:
"What? Don't you want to? With _me?_"
He was up beside her, angry, dignified; a man.
"Look here. You know I want to. You're the elegantest--I mean
you're--Oh, you ought to know! Can't you see how I feel
about you? Why, I'd rather do this than anything I ever heard
of in my life. I just don't want to do anything that would get
people to talking about you."
"Who would know? Besides, my dear man, I don't regard it as
exactly wicked to walk decently along a country road."
"Oh, it isn't that. Oh, please, Istra, don't look at me like
that--like you hated me."
She calmed at once, drummed on his arm, sat down on the railing,
and drew him to a seat beside her.
"Of course, Mouse. It's silly to be angry. Yes, I do believe
you want to take care of me. But don't worry.... Come! Shall
we go?"
"But wouldn't you rather wait till to-morrow?"
"No. The whole thing's so mad that if I wait till then I'll
never want to do it. And you've got to come, so that I'll have
some one to quarrel with.... I hate the smugness of London,
especially the smugness of the anti-smug anti-bourgeois
radicals, so that I have the finest mad mood! Come. We'll go."
Even this logical exposition had not convinced him, but he did
not gainsay as they entered the hall and Istra rang for the
landlady. His knees grew sick and old and quavery as he heard
the landlady's voice loud below-stairs: "Now wot do they want?
It's eleven o'clock. Aren't they ever done a-ringing and
a-ringing?"
The landlady, the tired thin parchment-faced North Countrywoman,
whose god was Respectability of Lodgings, listened in a
frightened way to Istra's blandly superior statement: "Mr. Wrenn
and I have been invited to join an excursion out of town that
leaves to-night. We'll pay our rent and leave our things here."
"Going off together--"
"My good woman, we are going to Aengusmere. Here's two pound.
Don't allow any one in my room. And I may send for my things
from out of town. Be ready to pack them in my trunks and send
them to me. Do you understand?"
"Yes, miss, but--"
"My good woman, do you realize that your `buts' are insulting?"
"Oh, I didn't go to be insulting--"
"Then that's all.... Hurry now, Mouse!"
On the stairs, ascending, she whispered, with the excitement not
of a tired woman, but of a tennis-and-dancing-mad girl: "We're
off! Just take a tooth-brush. Put on an outing suit--any old
thing--and an old cap."
She darted into her room.
Now Mr. Wrenn had, for any old thing, as well as for afternoon
and evening dress, only the sturdy undistinguished clothes he
was wearing, so he put on a cap, and hoped she wouldn't notice.
She didn't. She came knocking in fifteen minutes, trim in a
khaki suit, with low thick boots and a jolly tousled blue
tam-o'-shanter.
"Come on. There's a train for Chelmsford in half an hour, my
time-table confided to me. I feel like singing."
CHAPTER X
HE GOES A-GIPSYING
They rode out of London in a third-class compartment, opposite
a curate and two stodgy people who were just people and defied
you (Istra cheerfully explained to Mr. Wrenn) to make anything
of them but just people.
"Wouldn't they stare if they knew what idiocy we're up to!"
she suggested.
Mr. Wrenn bobbed his head in entire agreement. He was trying,
without any slightest success, to make himself believe that Mr.
William Wrenn, Our Mr. Wrenn, late of the Souvenir Company, was
starting out for a country tramp at midnight with an artist girl.
The night foreman of the station, a person of bedizenment and
pride, stared at them as they alighted at Chelmsford and glanced
around like strangers. Mr. Wrenn stared back defiantly and
marched with Istra from the station, through the sleeping town,
past its ragged edges, into the country.
They tramped on, a bit wearily. Mr. Wrenn was beginning to
wonder if they'd better go back to Chelmsford. Mist was
dripping and blind and silent about them, weaving its heavy gray
with the night. Suddenly Istra caught his arm at the gate to a
farm-yard, and cried, "Look!"
"Gee!... Gee! we're in England. We're abroad!"
"Yes--abroad."
A paved courtyard with farm outbuildings thatched and ancient
was lit faintly by a lantern hung from a post that was thumbed to
a soft smoothness by centuries.
"That couldn't be America," he exulted. "Gee! I'm just
gettin' it! I'm so darn glad we came.... Here's real England.
No tourists. It's what I've always wanted--a country that's old.
And different.... Thatched houses!... And pretty soon it'll
be dawn, summer dawn; with you, with Istra! _Gee!_ It's the
darndest adventure."
"Yes.... Come on. Let's walk fast or we'll get sleepy, and
then your romantic heroine will be a grouchy Interesting
People!... Listen! There's a sleepy dog barking, a million
miles away.... I feel like telling you about myself. You don't
know me. Or do you?"
"I dunno just how you mean."
"Oh, it shall have its romance! But some time I'll tell
you--perhaps I will--how I'm not really a clever person at all,
but just a savage from outer darkness, who pretends to
understand London and Paris and Munich, and gets frightfully
scared of them.... Wait! Listen! Hear the mist drip from that
tree. Are you nice and drowned?"
"Uh--kind of. But I been worrying about you being soaked."
"Let me see. Why, your sleeve is wet clear through. This khaki
of mine keeps out the water better.... But I don't mind getting
wet. All I mind is being bored. I'd like to run up this hill
without a thing on--just feeling the good healthy real mist on
my skin. But I'm afraid it isn't done."
Mile after mile. Mostly she talked of the boulevards and Pere
Dureon, of Debussy and artichokes, in little laughing sentences
that sprang like fire out of the dimness of the mist.
Dawn came. From a hilltop they made out the roofs of a town and
stopped to wonder at its silence, as though through long ages
past no happy footstep had echoed there. The fog lifted. The
morning was new-born and clean, and they fairly sang as they
clattered up to an old coaching inn and demanded breakfast of an
amazed rustic pottering about the inn yard in a smock. He did
not know that to a "thrilling" Mr. Wrenn he--or perhaps it was his
smock--was the hero in an English melodrama. Nor, doubtless,
did the English crisp bacon and eggs which a sleepy housemaid
prepared know that they were theater properties. Why, they were
English eggs, served at dawn in an English inn--a stone-floored
raftered room with a starling hanging in a little cage of withes
outside the latticed window. And there were no trippers to
bother them! (Mr. Wrenn really used the word "trippers" in his
cogitations; he had it from Istra.)
When he informed her of this occult fact she laughed, "You know
mighty well, Mouse, that you have a sneaking wish there were one
Yankee stranger here to see our glory."
"I guess that's right."
"But maybe I'm just as bad."
For once their tones had not been those of teacher and pupil,
but of comrades. They set out from the inn through the
brightening morning like lively boys on a vacation tramp.
The sun crept out, with the warmth and the dust, and Istra's
steps lagged. As they passed the outlying corner of a farm
where a straw-stack was secluded in a clump of willows Istra
smiled and sighed: "I'm pretty tired, dear. I'm going to sleep
in that straw-stack. I've always wanted to sleep in a
straw-stack. It's _comme il faut_ for vagabonds in the best set,
you know. And one can burrow. Exciting, eh?"
She made a pillow of her khaki jacket, while he dug down to a
dry place for her. He found another den on the other side of
the stack.
It was afternoon when he awoke. He sprang up and rushed around
the stack. Istra was still asleep, curled in a pathetically
small childish heap, her tired face in repose against the
brown-yellow of her khaki jacket. Her red hair had come down
and shone about her shoulders.
She looked so frail that he was frightened. Surely, too, she'd
be very angry with him for letting her come on this jaunt.
He scribbled on a leaf from his address-book--religiously carried
for six years, but containing only four addresses--this note:
Gone to get stuff for bxfst be right back.--W. W.
and, softly crawling up the straw, left the note by her head.
He hastened to a farm-house. The farm-wife was inclined to
be curious. O curious farm-wife, you of the cream-thick Essex
speech and the shuffling feet, you were brave indeed to face
Bill Wrenn the Great, with his curt self-possession, for he was
on a mission for Istra, and he cared not for the goggling eyes
of all England. What though he was a bunny-faced man with an
innocuous mustache? Istra would be awakening hungry. That was
why he bullied you into selling him a stew-pan and a bundle of
faggots along with the tea and eggs and a bread loaf and a jar
of the marmalade your husband's farm had been making these two
hundred years. And you should have had coffee for him, not tea,
woman of Essex.
When he returned to their outdoor inn the late afternoon glow
lay along the rich fields that sloped down from their
well-concealed nook. Istra was still asleep, but her cheek now
lay wistfully on the crook of her thin arm. He looked at the
auburn-framed paleness of her face, its lines of thought and
ambition, unmasked, unprotected by the swift changes of
expression which defended her while she was awake. He sobbed.
If he could only make her happy! But he was afraid of her moods.
He built a fire by a brooklet beyond the willows, boiled the
eggs and toasted the bread and made the tea, with cream ready in
a jar. He remembered boyhood camping days in Parthenon and old
camp lore. He returned to the stack and called, "Istra--oh, Is-tra!"
She shook her head, nestled closer into the straw, then sat up,
her hair about her shoulders. She smiled and called down:
"Good morning. Why, it's afternoon! Did you sleep well, dear?"
"Yes. Did you? Gee, I hope you did!"
"Never better in my life. I'm so sleepy yet. But comfy.
I needed a quiet sleep outdoors, and it's so peaceful here.
Breakfast! I roar for breakfast! Where's the nearest house?"
"Got breakfast all ready."
"You're a dear!"
She went to wash in the brook, and came back with eyes dancing
and hair trim, and they laughed over breakfast, glancing down
the slope of golden hazy fields. Only once did Istra pass out
of the land of their intimacy into some hinterland of
analysis--when she looked at him as he drank his tea aloud out
of the stew-pan, and wondered: "Is this really you here with
me? But you _aren't_ a boulevardier. I must say I don't
understand what you're doing here at all.... Nor a caveman,
either. I don't understand it.... But you _sha'n't_ be worried
by bad Istra. Let's see; we went to grammar-school together."
"Yes, and we were in college. Don't you remember when I was
baseball captain? You don't? Gee, you got a bad memory!"
At which she smiled properly, and they were away for Suffolk again.
"I suppose now it'll go and rain," said Istra, viciously, at
dusk. It was the first time she had spoken for a mile. Then,
after another quarter-mile: "Please don't mind my being silent.
I'm sort of stiff, and my feet hurt most unromantically. You
won't mind, will you?"
Of course he did mind, and of course he said he didn't.
He artfully skirted the field of conversation by very West
Sixteenth Street observations on a town through which they
passed, while she merely smiled wearily, and at best remarked
"Yes, that's so," whether it was so or not.
He was reflecting: "Istra's terrible tired. I ought to take
care of her." He stopped at the wood-pillared entrance of a
temperance inn and commanded: "Come! We'll have something to
eat here." To the astonishment of both of them, she meekly
obeyed with "If you wish."
It cannot be truthfully said that Mr. Wrenn proved himself a
person of _savoir faire_ in choosing a temperance hotel for their
dinner. Istra didn't seem so much to mind the fact that the
table-cloth was coarse and the water-glasses thick, and that
everywhere the elbow ran into a superfluity of greasy pepper and
salt castors. But when she raised her head wearily to peer
around the room she started, glared at Mr. Wrenn, and accused:
"Are you by any chance aware of the fact that this place is
crowded with tourists? There are two family parties from
Davenport or Omaha; I _know_ they are!"
"Oh, they ain't such bad-looking people," protested Mr.
Wrenn.... Just because he had induced her to stop for dinner
the poor man thought his masculine superiority had been
recognized.
"Oh, they're _terrible!_ Can't you _see_ it? Oh, you're _hopeless_."
"Why, that big guy--that big man with the rimless spectacles
looks like he might be a good civil engineer, and I think that
lady opposite him--"
"They're Americans."
"So're we!"
"I'm not."
"I thought--why--"
"Of course I was born there, but--"
"Well, just the same, I think they're nice people."
"Now see here. Must I argue with you? Can I have no peace,
tired as I am? Those trippers are speaking of `quaint English
flavor.' Can you want anything more than that to damn them? And
they've been touring by motor--seeing every inn on the road."
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