Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man Part 33

Their first battle was over Mr. Wrenn's signing the letters personally; for the letters, the office manager felt, were as much Ours as was Mr. Wrenn, and should be signed by the firm.

After some difficulty Mr. Wrenn persuaded him that one of the best ways to handle a personal letter was to make it personal.

They nearly cursed each other before Mr. Wrenn was allowed to use his own judgment.

It's not at all certain that Mr. Guilfogle should have yielded.

What's the use of a manager if his underlings use judgment?

The next battle Mr. Wrenn lost. He had demanded a monthly holiday for his stenographer. Mr. Guilfogle pointed out that she'd merely be the worse off for a holiday, that it 'd make her discontented, that it was a kindness to her to keep her mind occupied. Mr. Wrenn was, however, granted a new typewriter, in a manner which revealed the fact that the Souvenir Company was filled with almost too much mercy in permitting an employee to follow his own selfish and stubborn desires.

You cannot trust these employees. Mr. Wrenn was getting so absorbed in his work that he didn't even act as though it was a favor when Mr. Guilfogle allowed him to have his letters to the trade copied by carbon paper instead of having them blurred by the wet tissue-paper of a copy-book. The manager did grant the request, but he was justly indignant at the curt manner of the rascal, whereupon our b.u.mptious revolutionist, our friend to anarchists and red-headed artists, demanded a "raise" and said that he didn't care a hang if the [qualified] letters never went out. The kindness of chiefs! For Mr. Guilfogle apologized and raised the madman's wage from seventeen dollars and fifty cents a week to his former nineteen dollars. [He had expected eighteen dollars; he had demanded twenty-two dollars and fifty cents; he was worth on the labor market from twenty-five to thirty dollars; while the profit to the Souvenir Company from his work was about sixty dollars minus whatever salary he got.]

Not only that. Mr. Guilfogle slapped him on the back and said: "You're doing good work, old man. It's fine. I just don't want you to be too reckless."

That night Wrenn worked till eight.

After his raise he could afford to go to the theater, since he was not saving money for travel. He wrote small letters to Istra and read the books he believed she would approve--a Paris Baedeker and the second volume of Tolstoi's _War and Peace_, which he bought at a second-hand book-stall for five cents.

He became interested in popular and inaccurate French and English histories, and secreted any amount of footnote anecdotes about Guy Fawkes and rush-lights and the divine right of kings.

He thought almost every night about making friends, which he intended--just as much as ever--to do as soon as Sometime arrived.

On the day on which one of the Southern merchants wrote him about his son--"fine young fellow, sir--has every chance of rising to a lieutenancy on the Atlanta police force"--Mr. Wrenn's eyes were moist. Here was a friend already. Sure. He would make friends. Then there was the cripple with the Capitol Corner News and Souvenir Stand in Austin, Texas. Mr. Wrenn secreted two extra Dixieland Ink-wells and a Yale football banner and sent them to the cripple for his brothers, who were in the Agricultural College.

The orders--yes, they were growing larger. The Southern salesmen took him out to dinner sometimes. But he was shy of them. They were so knowing and had so many smoking-room stories. He still had not found the friends he desired.

Miggleton's restaurant, on Forty-second Street, was a romantic discovery. Though it had "popular prices"--plain omelet, fifteen cents--it had red and green bracket lights, mission-style tables, and music played by a sparrowlike pianist and a violinist. Mr. Wrenn never really heard the music, but while it was quavering he had a happier appreciation of the Silk-Hat-Harry humorous pictures in the _Journal_, which he always propped up against an oil-cruet. [That never caused him inconvenience; he had no convictions in regard to salads.]

He would drop the paper to look out of the window at the Lazydays Improvement Company's electric sign, showing gardens of paradise on the instalment plan, and dream of--well, he hadn't the slightest idea what--something distant and deliciously likely to become intimate. Once or twice he knew that he was visioning the girl in soft brown whom he would "go home to," and who, in a Lazydays suburban residence, would play just such music for him and the friends who lived near by. She would be as clever as Istra, but "oh, more so's you can go regular places with her."... Often he got good ideas about letters South, to be jotted down on envelope backs, from that music.

At last comes the historic match-box incident.

On that October evening in 1910 he dined early at Miggleton's.

The thirty-cent table d'hote was perfect. The cream-of-corn soup was, he went so far as to remark to the waitress, "simply slick"; the Waldorf salad had two whole walnuts in his portion alone.

The fat man with the white waistcoat, whom he had often noted as dining in this same corner of the restaurant, smiled at him and said "Pleasant evening" as he sat down opposite Mr. Wrenn and smoothed the two sleek bangs which decorated the front of his nearly bald head.

The music included a "potpourri of airs from 'The Merry Widow,'"

which set his foot tapping. All the while he was conscious that he'd made the Seattle Novelty and Stationery Corner Store come through with a five-hundred-dollar order on one of his letters.

The _Journal_ contained an editorial essay on "Friends.h.i.+p" which would have been, and was, a credit to Cicero.

He laid down the paper, stirred his large cup of coffee, and stared at the mother-of-pearl b.u.t.tons on the waistcoat of the fat man, who was now gulping down soup, opposite him. "My land!" he was thinking, "friends.h.i.+p! I ain't even begun to make all those friends I was going to. Haven't done a thing.

Oh, I will; I must!"

"Nice night," said the fat man.

"Yuh--it sure is," brightly agreed Mr. Wrenn.

"Reg'lar Indian-Summer weather."

"Yes, isn't it! I feel like taking a walk on Riverside Drive--b'lieve I will."

"Wish I had time. But I gotta get down to the store--cigar-store. I'm on nights, three times a week."

"Yuh. I've seen you here most every time I eat early,"

Mr. Wrenn purred.

"Yuh. The rest of the time I eat at the boarding-house."

Silence. But Mr. Wrenn was fighting for things to say, means of approach, for the chance to become acquainted with a new person, for all the friendly human ways he had desired in nights of loneliness.

"Wonder when they'll get the Grand Central done?" asked the fat man.

"I s'pose it'll take quite a few years," said Mr. Wrenn, conversationally.

"Yuh. I s'pose it will."

Silence.

Mr. Wrenn sat trying to think of something else to say. Lonely people in city restaurants simply do not get acquainted. Yet he did manage to observe, "Great building that'll be," in the friendliest manner.

Silence.

Then the fat man went on:

"Wonder what Wolgast will do in his mill? Don't believe he can stand up."

Wolgast was, Mr. Wrenn seemed to remember, a pugilist. He agreed vaguely:

"Pretty hard, all right."

"Go out to the areoplane meet?" asked the fat man.

"No. But I'd like to see it. Gee! there must be kind of--kind of adventure in them things, heh?"

"Yuh--sure is. First machine I saw, though--I was just getting off the train at Belmont Park, and there was an areoplane up in the air, and it looked like one of them big mechanical beetles these fellows sell on the street buzzing around up there. I was kind of disappointed. But what do you think? It was that J.

A. D. McCurdy, in a Curtiss biplane--I think it was--and by golly! he got to circling around and racing and tipping so's I thought I'd loose my hat off, I was so excited. And, say, what do you think? I see McCurdy himself, afterward, standing near one of the--the handgars--handsome young chap, not over twenty-eight or thirty, built like a half-miler. And then I see Ralph Johnstone and Arch Hoxey--"

"Gee!" Mr. Wrenn was breathing.

"--dipping and doing the--what do you call it?--Dutch sausage-roll or something like that. Yelled my head off."

"Oh, it must have been great to see 'em, and so close, too."

"Yuh--it sure was."

There seemed to be no other questions to settle. Mr. Wrenn slowly folded up his paper, pursued his check under three plates and the menu-card to its hiding-place beyond the catsup-bottle, and left the table with a regretful "Good night."

At the desk of the cas.h.i.+er, a decorative blonde, he put a cent in the machine which good-naturedly drops out boxes of matches.

No box dropped this time, though he worked the lever noisily.

"Out of order?" asked the cas.h.i.+er lady. "Here's two boxes of matches. Guess you've earned them."