"I--I--I--" was all he could say, but admiration pulsed in it.
"Thank you.... Yes, we _will_ play. Good night. To-morrow!"
CHAPTER IX
HE ENCOUNTERS THE INTELLECTUALS
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 b.u.mped 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. G.o.d Himself hath looked into them and found flirtation the gateway to h.e.l.l. 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 h.e.l.l-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 l.u.s.t 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 pa.s.sionate 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 d.a.m.n 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 G.o.dlike Grecian nose, a high forehead, and bristly yellow hair. The being wore large round tortoise-sh.e.l.l 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 cla.s.s at Berkeley."