OUR MR. WRENN THE ROMANTIC ADVENTURES OF A GENTLE MAN

CHAPTER I

MR. WRENN IS LONELY





The ticket-taker of the Nickelorion Moving-Picture Show is a
public personage, who stands out on Fourteenth Street, New York,
wearing a gorgeous light-blue coat of numerous brass buttons.
He nods to all the patrons, and his nod is the most cordial
in town. Mr. Wrenn used to trot down to Fourteenth Street,
passing ever so many other shows, just to get that cordial nod,
because he had a lonely furnished room for evenings, and for
daytime a tedious job that always made his head stuffy.

He stands out in the correspondence of the Souvenir and Art
Novelty Company as "Our Mr. Wrenn," who would be writing you
directly and explaining everything most satisfactorily.
At thirty-four Mr. Wrenn was the sales-entry clerk of the
Souvenir Company. He was always bending over bills and columns
of figures at a desk behind the stock-room. He was a meek little
bachlor--a person of inconspicuous blue ready-made suits, and a
small unsuccessful mustache.

To-day--historians have established the date as April 9,
1910--there had been some confusing mixed orders from the
Wisconsin retailers, and Mr. Wrenn had been "called down"
by the office manager, Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle. He needed
the friendly nod of the Nickelorion ticket-taker. He found
Fourteenth Street, after office hours, swept by a dusty
wind that whisked the skirts of countless plump Jewish girls,
whose V-necked blouses showed soft throats of a warm brown.
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. But the latter was thinking about buying
Johnny's pants. Should he get them at the Fourteenth Street
Store, or Siegel-Cooper's, or over at Aronson's, near home?
So ruminating, he twiddled his wheel mechanically, and Mr. Wrenn's
pasteboard slip was indifferently received in the plate-glass
gullet of the grinder without the taker's even seeing the
clerk's bow and smile.

Mr. Wrenn trembled into the door of the Nickelorion. He wanted
to turn back and rebuke this fellow, but was restrained by
shyness. He _had_ liked the man's "Fine evenin', sir "--rain
or shine--but he wouldn't stand for being cut. Wasn't he making
nineteen dollars a week, as against the ticket-taker's ten
or twelve? He shook his head with the defiance of a cornered
mouse, fussed with his mustache, and regarded the moving
pictures gloomily.

They helped him. After a Selig domestic drama came a stirring
Vitagraph Western scene, "The Goat of the Rancho," which
depicted with much humor and tumult the revolt of a ranch cook,
a Chinaman. Mr. Wrenn was really seeing, not cow-punchers and
sage-brush, but himself, defying the office manager's surliness
and revolting against the ticket-man's rudeness. Now he was
ready for the nearly overpowering delight of travel-pictures.
He bounced slightly as a Gaumont film presented Java.

He was a connoisseur of travel-pictures, for all his life he had
been planning a great journey. Though he had done Staten Island
and patronized an excursion to Bound Brook, neither of these was
his grand tour. It was yet to be taken. In Mr. Wrenn,
apparently fastened to New York like a domestic-minded barnacle,
lay the possibilities of heroic roaming. He knew it. He, too,
like the man who had taken the Gaumont pictures, would saunter
among dusky Javan natives in "markets with tiles on the roofs
and temples and--and--uh, well--places!" The scent of Oriental
spices was in his broadened nostrils as he scampered out of the
Nickelorion, without a look at the ticket-taker, and headed for
"home"--for his third-floor-front on West Sixteenth Street.
He wanted to prowl through his collection of steamship brochures
for a description of Java. But, of course, when one's landlady
has both the sciatica and a case of Patient Suffering one stops
in the basement dining-room to inquire how she is.

Mrs. Zapp was a fat landlady. When she sat down there was
a straight line from her chin to her knees. She was usually
sitting down. When she moved she groaned, and her apparel creaked.
She groaned and creaked from bed to breakfast, and ate five
griddle-cakes, two helpin's of scrapple, an egg, some r