"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 ele gant 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 spaces by
diffidently touching her elbow, too pettily busy to cast a
glance out of the crowd and spy the passing 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 slashing
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
attitudes 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.
His room was quiet. The lamplight on the delicately green walls
was like that of a regular author's den, he was quite sure. He
happily tested the fountain-pen by writing the names Nelly and
William Wrenn on a bit of wrapping-paper (which he guiltily
burned in an ash-tray); washed his face with water which he let
run for a minute to cool; sat down before his table with a grunt
of content; went back and washed his hands; fiercely threw off
the bourgeois encumbrances of coat and collar; sat down again;
got up to straighten a picture; picked up his pen; laid it down,
and glowed as he thought of Nelly, slumbering there, near at
hand, her exquisite cheek nestling silkenly against her arm,
Suddenly he roared at himself, "Get on the job there, will yuh?"
He picked up the pen and wrote:
THE MILLIONAIRE'S DAUGHTER
A ONE ACT DRAMATIC PLAYLET
by
WILLIAM WRENN
CHARACTERS
_John Warrington_, a railway president; quite rich.
_Nelty Warrington_, Mr. Warrington's daughter.
_Reginald Thorne_, his secretary.
He was jubilant. His pen whined at top speed, scattering a
shower of tiny drops of ink.
_Stage Scene: An office. Very expensive. Mr. Warrington and Mr.
Thorne are sitting there. Miss Warrington comes in. She says:_
He stopped. He thought. He held his head. He went over to the
stationary bowl and soaked his hair with water. He lay on the
bed and kicked his heels, slowly and gravely smoothing his
mustache. Fifty minutes later he gave a portentous groan and
went to bed.
He hadn't been able to think of what Miss Warrington says beyond
"I have come to tell you that I am married, papa," and that
didn't sound just right; not for a first line it didn't, anyway.
At dinner next night--Saturday--Tom was rather inclined to make
references to "our author," and to remark: "Well, I know where
somebody was last night, but of course I won't tell. Say, them
authors are a wild lot."
Mr. Wrenn, who had permitted the teasing of even Tim, the
hatter, "wasn't going to stand for no kidding from nobody--not
when Nelly was there," and he called for a glass of water with
the air of a Harvard assistant professor forced to eat in a
lunch-wagon and slapped on the back by the cook.
Nelly soothed him. "The play _is_ going well, _isn't_ it?"
When he had, with a detached grandeur of which he was
immediately ashamed, vouchsafed that he was already "getting
right down to brass tacks on it," that he had already
investigated four more plays and begun the actual writing,
every one looked awed and asked him assorted questions.
At nine-thirty that evening he combed and tightly brushed his
hair, which he had been pawing angrily for an hour and a half,
went down the hall to Nelly's hall bedroom, and knocked with:
"It's Mr. Wrenn. May I ask you something about the play?"
"Just a moment," he heard her say.
He waited, panting softly, his lips apart. This was to be the
first time he had ever seen Nelly's room. She opened the door
part way, smiling shyly, timidly, holding her pale-blue
dressing- gown close. The pale blueness was a modestly brilliant
spot against the whiteness of the room--white bureau, hung with
dance programs and a yellow Upton's Grove High School banner,
white tiny rocker, pale
-yellow matting, white-and-silver
wall-paper, and a glimpse of a white soft bed.
He was dizzy with the exaltation of that purity, but he got
himself to say:
"I'm kind of stuck on the first part of the play, Miss Nelly.
Please tell me how you think the heroine would speak to her dad.
Would she call him `papa' or `sir,' do you think?"
"Why--let me see----"
"They're such awful high society----"
"Yes, that's so. Why, I should think she'd say `sir.' Maybe oh,
what was it I heard in a play at the Academy of Music?
`Father, I have come back to you!'"
"Sa-a-ay, that's a fine line! That'll get the crowd going right
from the first.... I _told_ you you'd help me a lot."
"I'm awfully glad if I _have_ helped you," she said, earnestly.
Good night--and good, "awfully glad, but luck with the play.
Good night."
"Good night. Thank you a lot, Miss Nelly. Church in the
morning, remember! Good night."
"Good night."
As it is well known that all playwrights labor with toy theaters
before them for working models, Mr. Wrenn ran to earth a fine
unbroken pasteboard box in which a ninety-eight-cent alarm-clock
corks. Setting up his box stage, he glued a pill-box and a
match-box on the floor--the side of the box it had always been
till now--and there he had the mahogany desks. He thrust three
matches into the corks, and behold three graceful
actors--graceful for corks, at least. There was fascination in
having them enter, through holes punched in the back of the box,
frisk up to their desks and deliver magic emotional speeches
that would cause any audience to weep; speeches regarding which
he knew everything but the words; a detail of which he was still
quite ignorant after half an hour of playing with his marionettes.
Before he went despairingly to bed that Saturday night he had
added to his manuscript:
_Mr. Thorne_ says: Here are the papers, sir. As a great railway
president you should----
The rest of that was to be filled in later. How the dickens
could he let the public know how truly great his president was?
(_Daughter, Miss Nelly, comes in._)
_Miss Nelly:_ Father, I have come back to you, sir.
_Mr. Warrington:_ My Daughter!
_Nelly:_ Father, I have something to tell you; something----
Breakfast at Mrs. Arty's was always an inspiration. In contrast
to the lonely dingy meal at the Hustler Dairy Lunch of his Zapp
days, he sat next to a trimly shirtwaisted Nelly, fresh and
enthusiastic after nine hours' sleep. So much for ordinary
days. But Sunday morning--that was paradise! The oil-stove
glowed and purred like a large tin pussy cat; it toasted their
legs into dreamy comfort, while they methodically stuffed
themselves with toast and waffles and coffee. Nelly and he
always felt gently superior to Tom Poppins, who would be
a-sleeping late, as they talked of the joy of not having to go
to the office, of approaching Christmas, and of the superiority
of Upton's Grove and Parthenon.
This morning was to be Mr. Wrenn's first attendance at church
with Nelly. The previous time they had planned to go, Mr. Wrenn
had spent Sunday morning in unreligious fervor at the Chelsea
Dental Parlors with a young man in a white jacket instead of at
church with Nelly.
This was also the first time that he had attended a church
service in nine years, except for mass at St. Patrick's, which
he regarded not as church, but as beauty. He felt tremendously
reformed, set upon new paths of virtue and achievement. He
thought slightingly of those lonely bachelors, Morton and
Mittyford, Ph. D. They just didn't know what it meant to a
fellow to be going to church with a girl like Miss Nelly, he
reflected, as he re brushed his hair after breakfast.
He walked proudly beside her, and made much of the gentility of
entering the church, as one of the well-to-do and intensely
bathed congregation. He even bowed to an almost painfully
washed and brushed young usher with gold-rimmed eye-glasses.
He thought scornfully of his salad days, when he had bowed to
the Brass-button Man at the Nickelorion.
The church interior was as comfortable as Sunday-morning toast
and marmalade--half a block of red carpet in the aisles; shiny
solid-oak pews, gorgeous stained-glass windows, and a general
polite creaking of ladies' best stays and gentlemen's stiff
shirt-bosoms, and an odor of the best cologne and moth-balls.
It lacked but six days till Christmas. Mr. Wrenn's heart was a
little garden, and his eyes were moist, and he peeped tenderly
at Nelly as he saw the holly and ivy and the frosted Christmas
mottoes, "Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men," and the rest, that
brightened the spaces between windows.
Christmas--happy homes--laughter.... Since, as a boy, he had
attended the Christmas festivities of the Old Church
Sunday-school at Parthenon, and got highly colored candy in a
net bag, his holidays had been celebrated by buying himself plum
pudding at lonely Christmas dinners at large cheap restaurants,
where there was no one to wish him "Merry Christmas" except
his waiter, whom he would quite probably never see again, nor
ever wish to see.
But this Christmas--he surprised himself and Nelly suddenly by
hotly thrusting out his hand and touching her sleeve with the
searching finger-tips of a child comforted from night fears.
During the sermon he had an idea. What was it Nelly had told
him about "Peter Pan"? Oh yes; somebody in it had said "Do you
believe in fairies?" _Say_, why wouldn't it be great to have the
millionaire's daughter say to her father, "Do you believe in love?"
"Gee, _I_ believe in love!" he yearned to himself, as he felt
Nelly's arm unconsciously touch his.
Tom Poppins had Horatio Hood Teddem in that afternoon for a hot
toddy. Horatio looked very boyish, very confiding, and borrowed
five dollars from Mr. Wrenn almost painlessly, so absorbed was
Mr. Wrenn in learning from Horatio how to sell a play. To know
the address of the firm of Wendelbaum & Schirtz, play-brokers,
located in a Broadway theater building, seemed next door to
knowing a Broadway manager.
When Horatio had gone Tom presented an idea which he had
ponderously conceived during his Sunday noon-hour at the
cigar-store.
"Why not have three of us--say me and you and Mrs. Arty--talk
the play, just like we was acting it?"
He enthusiastically forced the plan on Mr. Wrenn. He pounded
down-stairs and brought up Mrs. Arty. He dashed about the room,
shouting directions. He dragged out his bureau for the
railroad-president's desk, and a table for the secretary, and,
after some consideration and much rubbing of his chin, with two
slams and a bang he converted his hard green Morris-chair into
an office safe.
The play was on. Mr. T. Poppins, i
n the role of the president,
entered, with a stern high expression on his face, threw a "Good
morning, Thorne," at Wrenn, his secretary, and peeled off his gloves.
(Mr. Wrenn noted the gloves; they were a Touch.)
Mr. Wrenn approached diffidently, his face expressionless, lest
Mrs. Arty laugh at him. "Here----
"Say, what do you think would be a good way for the secretary to
tell the crowd that the other guy is the president? Say, how
about this: `The vice-president of the railway would like to
have you sign these, sir, as president'?"
"That's fine!" exclaimed Mrs. Arty, whose satin dress was
carefully spread over her swelling knees, as she sat in the oak
rocker, like a cheerful bronze monument to Sunday propriety.
"But don't you think he'd say, `when it's convenient to you, sir'?"
"Gee, that's dandy!"
The play was on.
It ended at seven. Mr. Wrenn took but fifteen minutes for
Sunday supper, and wrote till one of the morning, finishing the
first draft of his manuscript.
Revision was delightful, for it demanded many conferences with
Nelly, sitting at the parlor table, with shoulders
confidentially touching. They were the more intimate because
Tom had invited Mr. Wrenn, Nelly, and Mrs. Arty to the Grand
Christmas Eve Ball of the Cigar-Makers' Union at Melpomene Hall.
Nelly asked of Mr. Wrenn, almost as urgently as of Mrs. Arty,
whether she should wear her new white mull or her older
rose-colored China silk.
Two days before Christmas he timidly turned over the play for
typing to a haughty public stenographer who looked like Lee
Theresa Zapp. She yawned at him when he begged her to be
careful of the manuscript. The gloriously pink-bound and
red-underlined typed manuscript of the play was mailed to
Messrs. Wendelbaum & Schirtz, play-brokers, at 6.15 P.M.,
Christmas Eve.
The four walked down Sixth Avenue to the Cigar-Makers' Ball.
They made an Indian file through the Christmas shopping crowds,
and stopped frequently and noisily before the street-booths'
glamour of tinsel and teddy-bears. They shrieked all with one
rotund mad laughter as Tom Poppins capered over and bought for
seven cents a pink bisque doll, which he pinned to the lapel of
his plaid overcoat. They drank hot chocolate at the Olympic
Confectionery Store, pretending to each other that they were
shivering with cold.
It was here that Nelly reached up and patted Mr. Wrenn's