Sinclair Lewis

“ Mortimer R. Guilfogle was the more aghast at hearing him bawl this no one knows. The manager was so worried at the thought of breaking in a new man that his eye-glasses slipped off his poor perspiring nose. He begged, in sudden tones of old friendship:
“Why, you can’t be thinking of leaving us! Why, we expect to make a big man of you, Wrenn. I was joking about firing you. You ought to know that, after the talk we had at Mouquin’s the other night. You can’t be thinking of leaving us! There’s no end of possibilities here.” ”

“ By golly! you’re the only man around the office that ’preciates what a double duck-lined old fiend old Goglefogle is, the old—”
“Aw, gee, Charley, I wish you wouldn’t jump on Guilfogle so hard. He’s always treated me square.”
“Gogie—square? Yuh, he’s square just like a hoop. You know it, too, Wrenn. Now that you’ve got enough money so’s you don’t need to be scared about the job you’ll realize it, and you’ll want to soak him, same’s I do. Say!” The impulse of a great idea made him gleefully shake his fist sidewise. “Say! Why don’t you soak him? They bank on you at the Souvenir Company. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Across the table was felt the presence of James T. Duncan, who looked like a dignified red-mustached Sunday-school superintendent, but who traveled for a cloak and suit house, gambled heavily on poker and auction pinochle, and was esteemed for his straight back and knowledge of trains.
Which is all of them.
As soon as Mrs. Arty had guided Annie, the bashful maid, in serving the vegetable soup, and had coaxed her into bringing Mr. Wrenn a napkin, she took charge of the conversation, a luxury which she would never have intrusted to her flock’s amateurish efforts. ”

“ Mr. Wrenn talked much and a little wildly. After dinner he galloped out to buy a paper. The S.S. Hesperiida was due at ten next morning.
It was an evening of frightened confusion. He tottered along Lexington Avenue on a furtive walk. He knew only that he was very fond of Nelly, yet pantingly eager to see Istra. He damned himself—“damned” is literal—every other minute for a cad, a double-faced traitor, and all the other horrifying things a man is likely to declare himself to be for making the discovery that two women may be different and yet equally likable. ”

“ He did bloody the nose of Bill and pummel his ribs, but many cigarettes and much whisky told, and he was ready to laugh foolishly and make peace when, at the end of the sixth round, he felt Bill’s neat little fist in a straight—and entirely accidental—rip to the point of his jaw.
Pete sent his opponent spinning with a back-hander which awoke all the cruelty of the terrible Bill. Silently Bill Wrenn plunged in with a smash! smash! smash! like a murderous savage, using every grain of his strength. ”

“ Through the light skipped a man and a girl, so little aware of him that they stopped, laughingly, wrestling for an umbrella, then disappeared, and the street was like a forgotten tomb. A hansom swung by, the hoofbeats sharp and cheerless. The rain dripped. Nothing else. Mr. Wrenn slammed down the window.
He smoothed the sides of his suit-case and reckoned the number of miles it had traveled with him. He spun his watch about on the table, and listened to its rapid mocking speech, “Friends, friends; friends, friends.” ”

“ 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 glass 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? ”

“ Out of all this fog of unfriendliness appeared the waitress at the St. Brasten Cocoa House; first, as a human being to whom he could talk, second, as a woman. She was ignorant and vulgar; she misused English cruelly; she wore greasy cotton garments, planted her large feet on the floor with firm clumsiness, and always laughed at the wrong cue in his diffident jests. But she did laugh; she did listen while he stammered his ideas of meat-pies and St. Paul’s and aeroplanes and Shelley and fog and tan shoes. In fact, she supposed him to be a gentleman and scholar, not an American. ”

“ He was reflecting: “Istra’s terrible tired. I ought to take care of her.” He stopped at the wood-pillared entrance of a temperance inn and commanded: “Come! We’ll have something to eat here.” To the astonishment of both of them, she meekly obeyed with “If you wish.”
It cannot be truthfully said that Mr. Wrenn proved himself a person of savoir faire in choosing a temperance hotel for their dinner. Istra didn’t seem so much to mind the fact that the table-cloth was coarse and the water-glasses thick, and that everywhere the elbow ran into a superfluity of greasy pepper and salt castors. ”

“ Wrenn began to cry.
He was lying abed at eight-thirty on a morning of late June, two weeks after leaving the Souvenir Company, deliberately hunting over his pillow for cool spots, very hot and restless in the legs and enormously depressed in the soul. He would have got up had there been anything to get up for. There was nothing, yet he felt uneasily guilty. For two weeks he had been afraid of losing, by neglect, the job he had already voluntarily given up. So there are men whom the fear of death has driven to suicide. ”

“ He would do that Great Traveling of his in the land of Big Business!
The five thousand princes of New York to protect themselves against the four million ungrateful slaves had devised the sacred symbols of dress-coats, large houses, and automobiles as the outward and visible signs of the virtue of making money, to lure rebels into respectability and teach them the social value of getting a dollar away from that inhuman, socially injurious fiend, Some One Else. That Our Mr. Wrenn should dream for dreaming’s sake was catastrophic ”

“ He writhed under Pete’s loud questions about his loss, in some cattle-pen, of the gray-and-scarlet sweater-jacket which he had proudly and gaily purchased in New York for his work on the ship. And the card-players assured him that his suit-case, which he had intrusted to the Croac ship’s carpenter, would probably be stolen by “Satan.”
Satan! Wrennie shuddered still more. For Satan, the gaunt-jawed hook-nosed rail-faced head foreman, diabolically smiling when angry, sardonically sneering when calm, was a lean human whip-lash. Pete sniggered. ”

“ Tell poor Istra the dark secret. Was she the perfect among pink faces?”
“I’ve—never—sat—before—any—fireplace—with —any—one! Except when I was about nine—one Hallowe’en—at a party in Parthenon—little town up York State.”
“Really? Poor kiddy!”
She reached out her hand and took his. He was terrifically conscious of the warm smoothness of her fingers playing a soft tattoo on the back of his hand, while she said:
“But you have been in love? Drefful in love?”
“I never have.”
“Dear child, you’ve missed so much of the tea and cakes of life, haven’t you? And you have an interest in life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The tough grabbed at Bill’s shirt-collar across the mattress. Bill ducked, stuck out his arm wildly, and struck Pete, half by accident. Roaring, Pete bunted him, and he went down, with Pete kneeling on his stomach and pounding him.
Morton and honest McGarver, the straw-boss, sprang to drag off Pete, while Satan, the panther, with the first interest they had ever seen in his eyes, snarled: “Let ’em fight fair. Rounds. You’re a’ right, Bill.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Mr. Wrenn and he smiled at each other searchingly as the Portland boat pulled out, and a wind swept straight from the Land of Elsewhere.
After dinner Morton, smoking a pipe shaped somewhat like a golf-stick head and somewhat like a toad, at the rail of the steamer, turned to Mr. Wrenn with:
“Classy bunch of cattlemen we’ve got to go with. Not!... My name’s Morton.”
“I’m awful glad to meet you, Mr. Morton. My name’s Wrenn.”
“Glad to be off at last, ain’t you?”
“Golly! I should say I am!”
“So’m I. Been waiting for this for years. I’m a clerk for the P. R. R. in N’ York.” ”

“ They set out from the inn through the brightening morning like lively boys on a vacation tramp.
The sun crept out, with the warmth and the dust, and Istra’s steps lagged. As they passed the outlying corner of a farm where a straw-stack was secluded in a clump of willows Istra smiled and sighed: “I’m pretty tired, dear. I’m going to sleep in that straw-stack. I’ve always wanted to sleep in a straw-stack. It’s comme il faut for vagabonds in the best set, you know. And one can burrow. Exciting, eh?”
She made a pillow of her khaki jacket, while he dug down to a dry place for her. ”

“ Through his friend Rabin, the salesman, Mr. Wrenn got better acquainted with two great men—Mr. L. J. Glover, the purchasing agent of the Souvenir Company, and John Hensen, the newly engaged head of motto manufacturing. He “wanted to get onto all the different lines of the business so’s he could step right in anywhere”; and from these men he learned the valuable secrets of business wherewith the marts of trade build up prosperity for all of us: how to seat a selling agent facing the light, so you can see his face better than he can see yours. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A few hours after this commendation came Istra’s second letter:
Mouse dear, I’m so glad to hear about the simpatico boarding- house. Yes indeed I would like to hear about the people in it. And you are reading history? That’s good. I’m getting sick of Paris and some day I’m going to stop an absinthe on the boulevard and slap its face to show I’m a sturdy moving-picture Western Amurrican and then leap to saddle and pursue the bandit. I’m working like the devil but what’s the use. That is I mean unless one is doing the job well, as I’m glad you are. My Dear, keep it up. ”

“ He sat by her. He was very quiet; not at all the jovial young man of the picnic properly following the boarding-house-district rule that males should be jocular and show their appreciation of the ladies by “kidding them.” And he spoke with a quiet graciousness that was almost courtly, with a note of weariness and spiritual experience such as seldom comes into the boarding-houses, to slay joy and bring wisdom and give words shyness.
He had, as he sat down, intended to ask her to go with him to a moving-picture show. ”

“ Wrenn felt excitedly sure of that, and imparted: “Yes, I guess I have.... And I’ve always wanted to travel a lot.”
“So have I! Isn’t it wonderful to go around and see new places!”
“Yes, isn’t it!” he breathed. “It was great to be in England—though the people there are kind of chilly some ways. Even when I’m on a wharf here in New York I feel just like I was off in China or somewheres. I’d like to see China. And India.... Gee! when I hear the waves down at Coney Island or some place—you know how the waves sound when they come in. ”

“ Miss Mary Proudfoot tried again:
“is it pleasant to study in Paris? Mrs. Arty said you were an artist.”
“No.”
Then they were all silent, and the rest of the dinner Mr. Wrenn alternately discussed Olympia Johns with Istra and picnics with Nelly. There was an undertone of pleading in his voice which made Nelly glance at him and even become kind. With quiet insistence she dragged Istra into a discussion of rue de la Paix fashions which nearly united the shattered table and won Mr. Wrenn’s palpitating thankfulness. ”

“ Istra shut the door resolutely. The hall was dark. It was gratefully quiet. She snatched up Mr. Wrenn’s hand and held it to her breast.
“Oh, Mouse dear, I’m so bored! I want some real things. They talk and talk in there, and every night they settle all the fate of all the nations, always the same way. I don’t suppose there’s ever been a bunch that knew more things incorrectly. You hated them, didn’t you?”
“Why, I don’t think you ought to talk about them so severe,” he implored, as they started down-stairs. “I don’t mean they’re like you. They don’t savvy like you do. ”

“ 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! ”