Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man Part 41

The hero of the one-act play at Hammerstein's Victoria vaudeville theater on that December evening was, it appeared, a wealthy young mine-owner in disguise. He was working for the "fake mine promoter" because he loved the promoter's daughter with a love that pa.s.sed all understanding except that of the girls in the gallery. When the postal authorities were about to arrest the promoter our young hero saved him by giving him a real mine, and the ensuing kiss of the daughter ended the suspense in which Mr. Wrenn and Nelly, Mrs. Arty and Tom had watched the play from the sixth row of the balcony.

Sighing happily, Nelly cried to the group: "Wasn't that grand?

I got so excited! Wasn't that young miner a dear?"

"Awfully nice," said Mr. Wrenn. "And, gee! wasn't that great, that office scene--with that safe and the rest of the stuff--just like you was in a real office. But, say, they wouldn't have a copying-press in an office like that; those fake mine promoters send out such swell letters; they'd use carbon copies and not muss the letters all up."

"By gosh, that's right!" and Tom nodded his chin toward his right shoulder in approval. Nelly cried, "That's so; they would"; while Mrs. Arty, not knowing what a copying-press was, appeared highly commendatory, and said nothing at all.

During the moving pictures that followed, Mr. Wrenn felt proudly that he was taken seriously, though he had known them but little over a month. He followed up his conversational advantage by leading the chorus in wondering, "which one of them two actors the heroine was married to?" and "how much a week they get for acting in that thing?" It was Tom who invited them to Miggleton's for coffee and fried oysters. Mr. Wrenn was silent for a while. But as they were stamping through the rivulets of wheel-tracks that crisscrossed on a slushy street-crossing Mr. Wrenn regained his advantage by crying, "Say, don't you think that play 'd have been better if the promoter 'd had an awful grouch on the young miner and 'd had to crawfish when the miner saved him?"

"Why, yes; it would!" Nelly glowed at him.

"Wouldn't wonder if it would," agreed Tom, kicking the December slush off his feet and patting Mr. Wrenn's back.

"Well, look here," said Mr. Wrenn, as they left Broadway, with its crowds betokening the approach of Christmas, and stamped to the quieter side of Forty-second, "why wouldn't this make a slick play: say there's an awfully rich old guy; say he's a railway president or something, d' you see? Well, he's got a secretary there in the office--on the stage, see? The scene is his office. Well, this guy's--the rich old guy's--daughter comes in and says she's married to a poor man and she won't tell his name, but she wants some money from her dad. You see, her dad's been planning for her to marry a marquise or some kind of a lord, and he's sore as can be, and he won't listen to her, and he just cusses her out something fierce, see? Course he doesn't really cuss, but he's awful sore; and she tells him didn't he marry her mother when he was a poor young man; but he won't listen. Then the secretary b.u.t.ts in--my idea is he's been kind of keeping in the background, see--and _he's_ the daughter's husband all the while, see? and he tells the old codger how he's got some of his--some of the old fellow's--papers that give it away how he done something that was crooked--some kind of deal--rebates and stuff, see how I mean?--and the secretary's going to spring this stuff on the newspapers if the old man don't come through and forgive them; so of course the president has to forgive them, see?"

"You mean the secretary was the daughter's husband all along, and he heard what the president said right there?" Nelly panted, stopping outside Miggleton's, in the light from the oyster-filled window.

"Yes; and he heard it all."

"Why, I think that's just a _fine_ idea," declared Nelly, as they entered the restaurant. Though her little manner of dignity and even restraint was evident as ever, she seemed keenly joyous over his genius.

"Say, that's a corking idea for a play, Wrenn," exclaimed Tom, at their table, gallantly removing the ladies' wraps.

"It surely is," agreed Mrs. Arty.

"Why don't you write it?" asked Nelly.

"Aw--I couldn't write it!"

"Why, sure you could, Bill," insisted Tom. "Straight; you ought to write it. (Hey, waiter! Four fries and coffee!) You ought to write it. Why, it's a wonder; it 'd make a dev-- 'Scuse me, ladies. It'd make a howling hit. You might make a lot of money out of it."

The renewed warmth of their wet feet on the red-tile floor, the scent of fried oysters, the din of "Any Little Girl" on the piano, these added color to this moment of Mr. Wrenn's great resolve. The four stared at one another excitedly. Mr. Wrenn's eyelids fluttered. Tom brought his hand down on the table with a soft flat "plob" and declared: "Say, there might be a lot of money in it. Why, I've heard that Harry Smith--writes the words for these musical comedies--makes a _mint_ of money."

"Mr. Poppins ought to help you in it--he's seen such a lot of plays," Mrs. Arty anxiously advised.

"That's a good idea," said Mr. Wrenn. It had, apparently, been ordained that he was to write it. They were now settling important details. So when Nelly cried, "I think it's just a fine idea; I knew you had lots of imagination," Tom interrupted her with:

"No; you write it, Bill. I'll help you all I can, of course....

Tell you what you ought to do: get hold of Teddem--he's had a lot of stage experience; he'd help you about seeing the managers.

That 'd be the hard part--you can write it, all right, but you'd have to get next to the guys on the inside, and Teddem--Say, you cer_tain_ly ought to write this thing, Bill. Might make a lot of money."

"Oh, a lot!" breathed Nelly.

"Heard about a fellow," continued Tom--" fellow named Gene Wolf, I think it was--that was so broke he was sleeping in Bryant Park, and he made a _hundred thousand dollars_ on his first play--or, no; tell you how it was: he sold it outright for ten thousand--something like that, anyway. I got that right from a fellow that's met him."

"Still, an author's got to go to college and stuff like that."

Mr. Wrenn spoke as though he would be pleased to have the objection overruled at once, which it was with a universal:

"Oh, rats!"

Crunching oysters in a brown jacket of flour, whose every lump was a crisp delight, hearing his genius lauded and himself called Bill thrice in a quarter-hour, Mr. Wrenn was beatified.

He asked the waiter for some paper, and while the four hotly discussed things which "it would be slick to have the president's daughter do" he drew up a list of characters on a sheet of paper he still keeps. It is headed, "Miggleton's Forty-second Street Branch." At the bottom appear numerous scribblings of the name Nelly.

{the full page is covered with doodling as well}

"I think I'll call the heroine 'Nelly,'" he mused.

Nelly Croubel blushed. Mrs. Arty and Tom glanced at each other.

Mr. Wrenn realized that he had, even at this moment of social triumph, "made a break."

He said, hastily; "I always liked that name. I--I had an aunt named that!"

"Oh--" started Nelly.

"She was fine to me when I was a kid, "Mr. Wrenn added, trying to remember whether it was right to lie when in such need.

"Oh, it's a horrid name," declared Nelly. "Why don't you call her something nice, like Hazel--or--oh--Dolores."

"Nope; Nelly's an elegant name--an _elegant_ name."

He walked with Nelly behind the others, along Forty-second Street. To the outsider's eye he was a small respectable clerk, slightly stooped, with a polite mustache and the dignity that comes from knowing well a narrow world; wearing an overcoat too light for winter; too busily edging out of the way of people and guiding the nice girl beside him into clear s.p.a.ces by diffidently touching her elbow, too pettily busy to cast a glance out of the crowd and spy the pa.s.sing poet or king, or the iron night sky. He was as undistinguishable a bit of the evening street life as any of the file of street-cars slas.h.i.+ng through the wet snow. Yet, he was the chivalrous squire to the greatest lady of all his realm; he was a society author, and a man of great prospective wealth and power over mankind!

"Say, we'll have the grandest dinner you ever saw if I get away with the play," he was saying. "Will you come, Miss Nelly?"

"Indeed I will! Oh, you sha'n't leave me out! Wasn't I there when--"

"Indeed you were! Oh, we'll have a reg'lar feast at the Astor--artichokes and truffles and all sorts of stuff....

Would--would you like it if I sold the play?"

"_Course_ I would, silly!"

"I'd buy the business and make Rabin manager--the Souvenir Company.

So he came to relate all those intimacies of The Job; and he was overwhelmed at the ease with which she "got onto old Goglefogle."

His preparations for writing the play were elaborate.

He paced Tom's room till twelve-thirty, consulting as to whether he had to plan the stage-setting; smoking cigarettes in att.i.tudes on chair arms. Next morning in the office he made numerous plans of the setting on waste half-sheets of paper.

At noon he was telephoning at Tom regarding the question of whether there ought to be one desk or two on the stage.

He skipped the evening meal at Mrs. Arty's, dining with literary pensiveness at the Armenian, for he had subtle problems to meditate. He bought a dollar fountain-pen, which had large gold-like bands and a rather scratchy pen-point, and a box of fairly large sheets of paper. Pressing his literary impedimenta tenderly under his arm, he attended four moving-picture and vaudeville theaters. By eleven he had seen three more one-act plays and a dramatic playlet.

He slipped by the parlor door at Mrs. Arty's.