Our Mr. Wrenn.
by Sinclair Lewis.
CHAPTER I
MR. WRENN IS LONELY
The ticket-taker of the Nickelorion Moving-Picture Show is a public personage, who stands out on Fourteenth Street, New York, wearing a gorgeous light-blue coat of numerous bra.s.s b.u.t.tons.
He nods to all the patrons, and his nod is the most cordial in town. Mr. Wrenn used to trot down to Fourteenth Street, pa.s.sing ever so many other shows, just to get that cordial nod, because he had a lonely furnished room for evenings, and for daytime a tedious job that always made his head stuffy.
He stands out in the correspondence of the Souvenir and Art Novelty Company as "Our Mr. Wrenn," who would be writing you directly and explaining everything most satisfactorily.
At thirty-four Mr. Wrenn was the sales-entry clerk of the Souvenir Company. He was always bending over bills and columns of figures at a desk behind the stock-room. He was a meek little bachlor--a person of inconspicuous blue ready-made suits, and a small unsuccessful mustache.
To-day--historians have established the date as April 9, 1910--there had been some confusing mixed orders from the Wisconsin retailers, and Mr. Wrenn had been "called down"
by the office manager, Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle. He needed the friendly nod of the Nickelorion ticket-taker. He found Fourteenth Street, after office hours, swept by a dusty wind that whisked the skirts of countless plump Jewish girls, whose V-necked blouses showed soft throats of a warm brown.
Under the elevated station he secretly made believe that he was in Paris, for here beautiful Italian boys swayed with trays of violets; a tramp displayed crimson mechanical rabbits, which squeaked, on silvery leading-strings; and a newsstand was heaped with the orange and green and gold of magazine covers.
"Gee!" inarticulated Mr. Wrenn. "Lots of colors. Hope I see foreign stuff like that in the moving pictures."
He came primly up to the Nickelorion, feeling in his vest pockets for a nickel and peering around the booth at the friendly ticket-taker. But the latter was thinking about buying Johnny"s pants. Should he get them at the Fourteenth Street Store, or Siegel-Cooper"s, or over at Aronson"s, near home?
So ruminating, he twiddled his wheel mechanically, and Mr. Wrenn"s pasteboard slip was indifferently received in the plate-gla.s.s gullet of the grinder without the taker"s even seeing the clerk"s bow and smile.
Mr. Wrenn trembled into the door of the Nickelorion. He wanted to turn back and rebuke this fellow, but was restrained by shyness. He _had_ liked the man"s "Fine evenin", sir "--rain or shine--but he wouldn"t stand for being cut. Wasn"t he making nineteen dollars a week, as against the ticket-taker"s ten or twelve? He shook his head with the defiance of a cornered mouse, fussed with his mustache, and regarded the moving pictures gloomily.
They helped him. After a Selig domestic drama came a stirring Vitagraph Western scene, "The Goat of the Rancho," which depicted with much humor and tumult the revolt of a ranch cook, a Chinaman. Mr. Wrenn was really seeing, not cow-punchers and sage-brush, but himself, defying the office manager"s surliness and revolting against the ticket-man"s rudeness. Now he was ready for the nearly overpowering delight of travel-pictures.
He bounced slightly as a Gaumont film presented Java.
He was a connoisseur of travel-pictures, for all his life he had been planning a great journey. Though he had done Staten Island and patronized an excursion to Bound Brook, neither of these was his grand tour. It was yet to be taken. In Mr. Wrenn, apparently fastened to New York like a domestic-minded barnacle, lay the possibilities of heroic roaming. He knew it. He, too, like the man who had taken the Gaumont pictures, would saunter among dusky Javan natives in "markets with tiles on the roofs and temples and--and--uh, well--places!" The scent of Oriental spices was in his broadened nostrils as he scampered out of the Nickelorion, without a look at the ticket-taker, and headed for "home"--for his third-floor-front on West Sixteenth Street.
He wanted to prowl through his collection of steamship brochures for a description of Java. But, of course, when one"s landlady has both the sciatica and a case of Patient Suffering one stops in the bas.e.m.e.nt dining-room to inquire how she is.
Mrs. Zapp was a fat landlady. When she sat down there was a straight line from her chin to her knees. She was usually sitting down. When she moved she groaned, and her apparel creaked.
She groaned and creaked from bed to breakfast, and ate five griddle-cakes, two helpin"s of sc.r.a.pple, an egg, some rump steak, and three cups of coffee, slowly and resentfully. She creaked and groaned from breakfast to her rocking-chair, and sat about wondering why Providence had inflicted upon her a weak digestion.
Mr. Wrenn also wondered why, sympathetically, but Mrs. Zapp was too conscientiously dolorous to be much cheered by the sympathy of a n.i.g.g.e.r-lovin" Yankee, who couldn"t appreciate the subtle sorrows of a Zapp of Zapp"s Bog, allied to all the First Families of Virginia.
Mr. Wrenn did nothing more presumptuous than sit still, in the stuffy furniture-crowded bas.e.m.e.nt room, which smelled of dead food and deader pride in a race that had never existed. He sat still because the chair was broken. It had been broken now for four years.
For the hundred and twenty-ninth time in those years Mrs. Zapp said, in her rich corruption of Southern negro dialect, which can only be indicated here, "Ah been meaning to get that chair mended, Mist" Wrenn." He looked gratified and gazed upon the crayon enlargements of Lee Theresa, the older Zapp daughter (who was forewoman in a factory), and of G.o.diva. G.o.diva Zapp was usually called "Goaty," and many times a day was she called by Mrs. Zapp. A tamed child drudge was Goaty, with adenoids, which Mrs. Zapp had been meanin" to have removed, and which she would continue to have benevolent meanin"s about till it should be too late, and she should discover that Providence never would let Goaty go to school.
"Yes, Mist" Wrenn, Ah told Goaty she was to see the man about getting that chair fixed, but she nev" does nothing Ah tell her."
In the kitchen was the noise of Goaty, ungovernable Goaty, aged eight, still snivelingly washing, though not cleaning, the incredible pile of dinner dishes. With a trail of hesitating remarks on the sadness of sciatica and windy evenings Mr. Wrenn sneaked forth from the august presence of Mrs. Zapp and mounted to paradise--his third-floor-front.
It was an abjectly respectable room--the bedspread patched; no two pieces of furniture from the same family; half-tones from the magazines pinned on the wall. But on the old marble mantelpiece lived his friends, books from wanderland.
Other friends the room had rarely known. It was hard enough for Mr. Wrenn to get acquainted with people, anyway, and Mrs.
Zapp did not expect her gennulman lodgers to entertain. So Mr.
Wrenn had given up asking even Charley Carpenter, the a.s.sistant bookkeeper at the Souvenir Company, to call. That left him the books, which he now caressed with small eager finger-tips.
He picked out a P. & O. circular, and hastily left for fairyland.
The April skies glowed with benevolence this Sat.u.r.day morning.
The Metropolitan Tower was singing, bright ivory tipped with gold, uplifted and intensely glad of the morning. The buildings walling in Madison Square were jubilant; the honest red-brick fronts, radiant; the new marble, witty. The sparrows in the middle of Fifth Avenue were all talking at once, scandalously but cleverly. The polished bra.s.s of limousines threw off teethy smiles.
At least so Mr. Wrenn fancied as he whisked up Fifth Avenue, the skirts of his small blue double-breasted coat wagging.
He was going blocks out of his way to the office; ready to defy time and eternity, yes, and even the office manager.
He had awakened with Defiance as his bedfellow, and throughout breakfast at the hustler Dairy Lunch sunshine had flickered over the dirty tessellated floor.
He pranced up to the Souvenir Company"s brick building, on Twenty-eighth Street near Sixth Avenue. In the office he chuckled at his ink-well and the untorn blotters on his orderly desk. Though he sat under the weary unnatural brilliance of a mercury-vapor light, he dashed into his work, and was too keen about this business of living merrily to be much fl.u.s.tered by the bustle of the lady buyer"s superior "_Good_ morning."
Even up to ten-thirty he was still slamming down papers on his desk. Just let any one try to stop his course, his readiness for snapping fingers at The Job; just let them _try_ it, that was all he wanted!
Then he was shot out of his chair and four feet along the corridor, in reflex response to the surly "Bur-r-r-r-r" of the buzzer. Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle, the manager, desired to see him. He scampered along the corridor and slid decorously through the manager"s doorway into the long sun-bright room, ornate with rugs and souvenirs. Seven Novelties glittered on the desk alone, including a large rococo Shakespeare-style gla.s.s ink-well containing cloves and a small iron Pittsburg-style one containing ink. Mr. Wrenn blinked like a noon-roused owlet in the brilliance. The manager dropped his fist on the desk, glared, smoothed his flowered prairie of waistcoat, and growled, his red jowls quivering:
"Look here, Wrenn, what"s the matter with you? The Bronx Emporium order for May Day novelties was filled twice, they write me."
"They ordered twice, sir. By "phone," smiled Mr. Wrenn, in an agony of politeness.
"They ordered h.e.l.l, sir! Twice--the same order?"
"Yes, sir; their buyer was prob--"
"They say they"ve looked it up. Anyway, they won"t pay twice.
I know, em. We"ll have to crawl down graceful, and all because you--I want to know why you ain"t more careful!"
The announcement that Mr. Wrenn twice wriggled his head, and once tossed it, would not half denote his wrath. At last!
It was here--the time for revolt, when he was going to be defiant.
He had been careful; old Goglefogle was only barking; but why should _he_ be barked at? With his voice palpitating and his heart thudding so that he felt sick he declared:
"I"m _sure_, sir, about that order. I looked it up. Their buyer was drunk!"
It was done. And now would he be discharged? The manager was speaking:
"Probably. You looked it up, eh? Um! Send me in the two order-records. Well. But, anyway, I want you to be more careful after this, Wrenn. You"re pretty sloppy. Now get out.
Expect me to make firms pay twice for the same order, cause of your carelessness?"
Mr. Wrenn found himself outside in the dark corridor.
The manager hadn"t seemed much impressed by his revolt.
The manager wasn"t. He called a stenographer and dictated:
"Bronx Emporium:
"GENTLEMEN:--Our Mr. Wrenn has again (underline that "again,"
Miss Blaustein), again looked up your order for May Day novelties.
As we wrote before, order certainly was duplicated by "phone.
Our Mr. Wrenn is thoroughly reliable, and we have his records of these two orders. We shall therefore have to push collection on both--"
After all, Mr. Wrenn was thinking, the crafty manager might be merely concealing his hand. Perhaps he had understood the defiance.
That gladdened him till after lunch. But at three, when his head was again foggy with work and he had forgotten whether there was still April anywhere, he began to dread what the manager might do to him. Suppose he lost his job; The Job! He worked unnecessarily late, hoping that the manager would learn of it.
As he wavered home, drunk with weariness, his fear of losing The Job was almost equal to his desire to resign from The Job.