________________________________________________
_ He wanted to find a cable office, stalk in, and nonchalantly
send to his bank for more money. He could see himself doing it.
Maybe the cable clerk would think he was a rich American. What
did he care if he spent all he had? A guy, he admonished
himself, just had to have coin when he was goin' with a girl
like Miss Istra. At least seven times he darted up from the
door-step, where he was on watch for her, and briskly trotted as
far as the corner. Each time his courage melted, and he slumped
back to the door-step. Sending for money--gee, he groaned, that
was pretty dangerous.
Besides, he didn't wish to go away. Istra might come down and
play with him.
For three hours he writhed on that door-step, till he came to
hate it; it was as much a prison as his room at the Zapps' had
been. He hated the areaway grill, and a big brown spot on the
pavement, and, as a truck-driver hates a motorman, so did he
hate a pudgy woman across the street who peeped out from a
second-story window and watched him with cynical interest.
He finally could endure no longer the world's criticism, as
expressed by the woman opposite. He started as though he were
going to go right now to some place he had been intending to go
to all the time, and stalked away, ignoring the woman.
He caught a bus, then another, then walked a while. Now that he
was moving, he was agonizedly considering his problem: What was
Istra to him, really? What could he be to her? He _was_ just
a clerk. She could never love him. "And of course," he explained
to himself, "you hadn't oughta love a person without you expected
to marry them; you oughtn't never even touch her hand." Yet he
did want to touch hers. He suddenly threw his chin back, high and
firm, in defiance. He didn't care if he was wicked, he declared.
He wanted to shout to Istra across all the city: Let us be great lovers!
Let us be mad! Let us stride over the hilltops. Though that was not
at all the way he phrased it.
Then he bumped into a knot of people standing on the walk, and
came down from the hilltops in one swoop.
A crowd was collecting before Rothsey Hall, which bore the sign:
GLORY--GLORY--GLORY
SPECIAL SALVATION ARMY JUBILEE MEETING
EXPERIENCES OF ADJUTANT CRABBENTHWAITE IN AFRICA
He gaped at the sign. A Salvationist in the crowd, trim and
well set up, his red-ribboned Salvation Army cap at a jaunty
angle, said, "Won't you come in, brother?"
Mr. Wrenn meekly followed into the hall. Bill Wrenn was nowhere
in sight.
Now it chanced that Adjutant Crabbenthwaite told much of Houssas
and the N'Gombi, of saraweks and week-long treks, but Mr.
Wrenn's imagination was not for a second drawn to Africa, nor
did he even glance at the sun-bonneted Salvationist women packed
in the hall. He was going over and over the Adjutant's
denunciations of the Englishmen and Englishwomen who flirt on
the mail-boats.
Suppose it had been himself and his madness over Istra--at the
moment he quite called it madness--that the Adjutant had denounced!
A Salvationist near by was staring at him most accusingly....
He walked away from the jubilee reflectively. He ate his dinner
with a grave courtesy toward the food and the waiter. He was
positively courtly to his fork. For he was just reformed. He
was going to "steer clear" of mad artist women--of all but nice
good girls whom you could marry. He remembered the Adjutant's
thundered words:
"Flirting you call it--flirting! Look into your hearts. God
Himself hath looked into them and found flirtation the gateway
to hell. And I tell you that these army officers and the
bedizened women, with their wine and cigarettes, with their
devil's calling-cards and their jewels, with their hell-lighted
talk of the sacrilegious follies of socialism and art and
horse-racing, O my brothers, it was all but a cloak for looking
upon one another to lust after one another. Rotten is this
empire, and shall fall when our soldiers seek flirtation instead
of kneeling in prayer like the iron men of Cromwell."
Istra.... Card-playing.... Talk of socialism and art. Mr.
Wrenn felt very guilty. Istra.... Smoking and drinking
wine.... But his moral reflections brought the picture of Istra
the more clearly before him--the persuasive warmth of her
perfect fingers; the curve of her backward-bent throat as she
talked in her melodious voice of all the beautiful things made
by the wise hands of great men.
He dashed out of the restaurant. No matter what happened, good
or bad, he had to see her. While he was climbing to the upper
deck of a bus he was trying to invent an excuse for seeing
her.... Of course one couldn't "go and call on ladies in their
rooms without havin' some special excuse; they would think that
was awful fresh."
He left the bus midway, at the sign of a periodical shop, and
purchased a _Blackwood's_ and a _Nineteenth Century_. Morton had
told him these were the chief English "highbrow magazines."
He carried them to his room, rubbed his thumb in the lampblack
on the gas-fixture, and smeared the magazine covers, then cut
the leaves and ruffled the margins to make the magazines look
dog-eared with much reading; not because he wanted to appear to
have read them, but because he felt that Istra would not permit
him to buy things just for her.
All this business with details so calmed him that he wondered if
he really cared to see her at all. Besides, it was so
late--after half-past eight.
"Rats! Hang it all! I wish I was dead. I don't know what I do
want to do," he groaned, and cast himself upon his bed. He was
sure of nothing but the fact that he was unhappy. He considered
suicide in a dignified manner, but not for long enough to get
much frightened about it.
He did not know that he was the toy of forces which, working on
him through the strangeness of passionate womanhood, could have
made him a great cad or a petty hero as easily as they did make
him confusedly sorry for himself. That he wasn't very much of
a cad or anything of a hero is a detail, an accident resulting
from his thirty-five or thirty-six years of stodgy environment.
Cad or hero, filling scandal columns or histories, he would have
been the same William Wrenn.
He was thinking of Istra as he lay on his bed. In a few minutes
he dashed to his bureau and brushed his thinning hair so
nervously that he had to try three times for a straight parting.
While brushing his eyebrows and mustache he solemnly
contemplated himself in the mirror.
"I look like a damn rabbit," he scorned, and marched half-way to
Istra's room. He went back to change his tie to a navy-blue bow
which made him appear younger. He was feeling rather resentful
at everything, including Istra, as he finally knocked and heard
her "Yes? Come in."
There was in her room a wonderful being lolling in a wing-chair,
one leg over the chair-arm; a young young man, with broken brown
teeth, always seen in his perpetual grin, but a godlike Grecian
nose, a high forehead, and bristly yellow hair. The being wore
large round tortoise-shell spectacles, a soft shirt with a
gold-plated collar-pin, and delicately gray garments.
Istra was curled on the bed in a leaf-green silk kimono with a
great gold-mounted medallion pinned at her breast. Mr. Wrenn
tried not to be shocked at the kimono.
She had been frowning as he came in and fingering a long thin
green book of verses, but she glowed at Mr. Wrenn as though he
were her most familiar friend, murmuring, "Mouse dear, I'm _so_
glad you could come in."
Mr. Wrenn stood there awkwardly. He hadn't expected to find
another visitor. He seemed to have heard her call him "Mouse."
Yes, but what did Mouse mean? It wasn't his name at all. This
was all very confusing. But how awful glad she was to see him!
"Mouse dear, this is one of our best little indecent poets, Mr.
Carson Haggerty. From America--California--too. Mr. Hag'ty,
Mr. Wrenn."
"Pleased meet you," said both men in the same tone of annoyance.
Mr. Wrenn implored: "I--uh--I thought you might like to look at
these magazines. Just dropped in to give them to you." He was
ready to go.
"Thank you--so good of you. _Please_ sit down. Carson and I
were only fighting--he's going pretty soon. We knew each other
at art school in Berkeley. Now he knows all the toffs in London."
"Mr. Wrenn," said the best little poet, "I hope you'll back up
my contention. Izzy says th--"
"Carson, I have told you just about enough times that I do not
intend to stand for `Izzy' any more! I should think that even
_you_ would be able to outgrow the standard of wit that obtains in
first-year art class at Berkeley."
Mr. Haggerty showed quite all of his ragged teeth in a noisy
joyous grin and went on, unperturbed: "Miss Nash says that the
best European thought, personally gathered in the best salons,
shows that the Rodin vogue is getting the pickle-eye from all
the real yearners. What is your opinion?"
Mr. Wrenn turned to Istra for protection. She promptly
announced: "Mr. Wrenn absolutely agrees with me. By the way,
he's doing a big book on the recrudescence of Kipling, after his
slump, and--"
"Oh, come off, now! Kipling! Blatant imperialist, anti-Stirner!"
cried Carson Haggerty, kicking out each word with the assistance
of his swinging left foot.
Much relieved that the storm-center had passed over him, Mr.
Wrenn sat on the front edge of a cane-seated chair, with the
magazines between his hands, and his hands pressed between his
forward-cocked knees. Always, in the hundreds of times he went
over the scene in that room afterward, he remembered how cool
and smooth the magazine covers felt to the palms of his
flattened hands. For he associated the papery surfaces with the
apprehension he then had that Istra might give him up to the
jag-toothed grin of Carson Haggerty, who would laugh him out of
the room and out of Istra's world.
He hated the poetic youth, and would gladly have broken all of
Carson's teeth short off. Yet the dread of having to try the
feat himself made him admire the manner in which Carson tossed
about long creepy-sounding words, like a bush-ape playing with
scarlet spiders. He talked insultingly of Yeats and the
commutation of sex-energy and Isadora Duncan and the poetry of
Carson Haggerty.
Istra yawned openly on the bed, kicking a pillow, but she was
surprised into energetic discussion now and then, till Haggerty
intentionally called her Izzy again, when she sat up and
remarked to Mr. Wrenn: "Oh, don't go yet. You can tell me about
the article when Carson goes. Dear Carson said he was only
going to stay till ten."
Mr. Wrenn hadn't had any intention of going, so he merely smiled
and bobbed his head to the room in general, and stammered
"Y-yes," while he tried to remember what he had told her about
some article. Article. Perhaps it was a Souvenir Company
novelty article. Great idea! Perhaps she wanted to design a
motto for them. He decidedly hoped that he could fix it up for
her--he'd sure do his best. He'd be glad to write over to Mr.
Guilfogle about it. Anyway, she seemed willing to have him
stick here.
Yet when dear Carson had jauntily departed, leaving the room
still loud with the smack of his grin, Istra seemed to have
forgotten that Mr. Wrenn was alive. She was scowling at a book
on the bed as though it had said things to her. So he sat quiet
and crushed the magazine covers more closely till the silence
choked him, and he dared, "Mr. Carson is an awful well-educated man."
"He's a bounder," she snapped. She softened her voice as she
continued: "He was in the art school in California when I was
there, and he presumes on that.... It was good of you to stay
and help me get rid of him.... I'm getting--I'm sorry I'm so
dull to-night. I suppose I'll get sent off to bed right now, if
I can't be more entertaining. It was sweet of you to come in,
Mouse.... You don't mind my calling you `Mouse,' do you? I
won't, if you do mind."
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." _
Read next: CHAPTER X HE GOES A-GIPSYING
Read previous: CHAPTER VIII HE TIFFINS
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