"Oh yes. And Italiantown. I used to wander round there."
"Well, down at the Seven Flowery Kingdoms Chop Suey and American
Cooking there's tea at five dollars a cup that they advertise is
grown on `cloud-covered mountain-tops.' I suppose when the tops
aren't cloud-covered they only charge three dollars a cup....
But, serious- like, there's really only two kinds of teas--those
you go to to meet the man you love and ought to hate, and those
you give to spite the women you hate but ought to--hate! Isn't
that lovely and complicated? That's playing. With words. My
aged parent calls it `talking too much and not saying anything.'
Note that last--not saying _anything!_ It's one of the rules in
playing that mustn't be broken."
He understood that better than most of the things she said.
"Why," he exclaimed, "it's kind of talk ing sideways."
"Why, yes. Of course. Talking sideways. Don't you see now?"
Gallant gentleman as he was, he let her think she had invented
the phrase.
She said many other things; things implying such vast learning
that he made gigantic resolves to "read like thunder."
Her great lesson was the art of taking tea. He found,
surprisedly, that they weren't really going to endanger their
clothes by rolling on park grass. Instead, she led him to a
tea-room behind a candy-shop on Tottenham Court Road, a low room
with white wicker chairs, colored tiles set in the wall, and
green Sedji-ware jugs with irregular bunches of white roses.
A waitress with wild-rose cheeks and a busy step brought Orange
Pekoe and lemon for her, Ceylon and Russian Caravan tea and a
jug of clotted cream for him, with a pile of cinnamon buns.
"But----" said Istra. "Isn't this like Alice in Wonderland!
But you must learn the buttering of English muffins most of all.
If you get to be very good at it the flunkies will let you take
tea at the Carleton. They are such hypercritical flunkies, and
the one that brings the gold butter- measuring rod to test your
skill, why, he always wears knee-breeches of silver gray.
So you can see, Billy, how careful you have to be. And eat them
without buttering your nose. For if you butter your nose
they'll think you're a Greek professor. And you wouldn't like
that, would you, honey?" He learned how to pat the butter into
the comfortable brown insides of the muffins that looked so cold
and floury witho ut. But Istra seemed to have lost interest; and
he didn't in the least follow her when she observed:
"Doubtless it _was_ the best butter. But where, where, dear
dormouse, are the hatter and hare? Especially the sweet bunny
rabbit that wriggled his ears and loved Gralice, the _princesse
d' outre-mer._
"Where, where are the hatter and hare,
And where is the best butter gone?"
Presently: "Come on. Let's beat it down to Soho for dinner.
Or--no! Now you shall lead me. Show me where you'd go for
dinner. And you shall take me to a music-hall, and make me
enjoy it. Now _you_ teach _me_ to play."
"Gee! I'm afraid I don't know a single thing to teach you."
"Yes, but---- See here! We are two lonely Western barbarians in
a strange land. We'll play together for a little while. We're
not used to each other's sort of play, but that will break up
the monotony of life all the more. I don't know how long we'll
play or---- Shall we?"
"Oh yes!"
"Now show me how you play."
"I don't believe I ever did much, really."
"Well, you shall take me to your kind of a restaurant."
"I don't believe you'd care much for penny meat-pies."
"Little meat-pies?"
"Um-huh."
"Little _crispy_ ones? With flaky covers?"
"Um-huh."
"Why, course I would! And ha'p'ny tea? Lead me to it, O brave
knight! And to a vaudeville."
He found that this devoted attendant of theaters had never seen
the beautiful Italians who pounce upon protesting zylophones
with small clubs, or the side-splitting juggler's assistant who
breaks up piles and piles of plates. And as to the top hat that
At after-theater supper he talked of Theresa and South Beach, of
Charley Carpenter and Morton--Morton--Morton.
They sat, at midnight, on the steps of the house in Tavistock Place.
"I do know you now, "she mused. "It's curious how any two babes
in a strange-enough woods get acquainted. You _are_ a lonely
child, aren't you?" Her voice was mother-soft. "We will play
just a little----"
"I wish I had some games to teach. But you know so much."
"And I'm a perfect beauty, too, aren't I?" she said, gravely.
"Yes, you are!" stoutly.
"You would be loyal.... And I need some one's admiration....
Mostly, Paris and London hold their sides laughing at poor Istra."
He caught her hand. "Oh, don't! They _must_ 'preciate you.
I'd like to kill anybody that didn't!"
"Thanks." She gave his hand a return pressure and hastily
withdrew her own. "You'll be good to some sweet pink face....
And I'll go on being discontented. Oh, isn 't life the fiercest
proposition!... We seem different, you and I, but maybe it's
mostly surface--down deep we're alike in being desperately
unhappy because we never know what we're unhappy about. Well----"
He wanted to put his head down on her knees and rest there. But
he sat still, and presently their cold hands snuggled together.
After a silence, in which they were talking of themselves, he
burst out: "But I don't see how Paris could help 'preciating
you. I'll bet you're one of the best artists they ever saw....
The way you made up a picture in your mind about that juggler!"
"Nope. Sorry. Can't paint at all."
"Ah, stuff!" with a rudeness quite masterful. "I'll bet your
pictures are corkers."
"Um."
"Please, would you let me see some of them some time. I suppose
it would bother----"
"Come up-stairs. I feel inspired. You are about to hear some
great though nasty criticisms on the works of the unfortunate
Miss Nash."
She led the way, laughing to herself over something. She gave
him no time to blush and hesitate over the impropriety of
entering a lady's room at midnight, but stalked ahead with a
brief "Come in."
She opened a large portfolio covered with green-veined black
paper and yanked out a dozen unframed pastels and wash-drawings
which she scornfully tossed on the bed, saying, as she pointed to
a mass of Marseilles roofs:
"Do you see this sketch? The only good thing about it is the
thing that last art editor, that red-headed youth, probably
didn't like. Don't you hate red hair? You see these
ridiculous glaring purple shadows under the _clocher?_"
She stared down at the picture interestedly, forgetting him,
pinching her chin thoughtfully, while she murmured: "They're
rather nice. Rather good. Rather good."
Then, quickly twisting
her shoulders about, she poured out:
"But look at this. Consider this arch. It's miserably out of
drawing. And see how I've faked this figure? It isn't a real
person at all. Don't you notice how I've juggled with this
stairway? Why, my dear man, every bit of the drawing in this
thing would disgrace a seventh-grade drawing-class in Dos
Puentes. And regard the bunch of lombardies in this other
picture. They look like umbrellas upside down in a silly
wash-basin. Uff! It's terrible. _Affreux!_ Don't act as though
you liked them. You really needn't, you know. Can't you see
now that they're hideously out of drawing?"
Mr. Wrenn's fancy was walking down a green lane of old France
toward a white cottage with orange-trees gleaming against its
walls. In her pictures he had found the land of all his
forsaken dreams.
"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 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 flirtatio n 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