Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man Part 18

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-gla.s.ses & 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-gla.s.sed 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 d.a.m.n it, am I getting sentimental? You'll read this at Pet.i.t 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 friends.h.i.+p. "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 embarra.s.sed politeness he glanced away from her as she threw back her head and inhaled deeply. He blus.h.i.+ngly 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 t.i.tle _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-gla.s.s.

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 astonis.h.i.+ngly 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 b.u.m 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-rus.h.i.+ng--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-fas.h.i.+oned bell-cord, and the old-fas.h.i.+oned 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."