Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man Part 24

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 pa.s.sed 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 Ess.e.x 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 f.a.ggots 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 Ess.e.x.

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 pa.s.s out of the land of their intimacy into some hinterland of a.n.a.lysis--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 pa.s.sed, 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 coa.r.s.e and the water-gla.s.ses 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--"