Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man Part 2

"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.

It '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 pa.s.s 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 like seeing 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 c.h.i.n.k 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 s.h.i.+ny 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 gla.s.s-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 cas.h.i.+er 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 Bra.s.s-b.u.t.ton 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 st.u.r.dily 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 bra.s.s b.u.t.tons. 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 comrades.h.i.+p. 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 Bra.s.s-b.u.t.ton 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 gla.s.ses, and a long s.h.i.+ning foot-rail on which, in bravado, Mr. Wrenn placed his c.u.m-Fee-Best shoe.

"Uh?" said the bartender.

"Rye, Jimmy," said the Bra.s.s-b.u.t.ton 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 Bra.s.s-b.u.t.ton Man. "Me, I ain't never got the sense to do the traffic cop on the booze. The old woman she says to me, 'Mory,'

she says, 'if you was in heaven and there was a pail of beer on one side and a gold harp on the other,' she says, 'and you was to have your pick, which would you take?' And what 'd yuh think I answers her?"

"The beer," said the bartender. "She had your number, all right."

"Not on your tin-type," declared the ticket-taker.