Our Mr. Wrenn

"Oh gee, Charley, I can't do that. You wouldn't want me to try to hurt the Souvenir Company after being there for--lemme see, it must be seven years."

"Well, maybe you like to get your cute little nose rubbed on the grindstone! I suppose you'd like to stay on at nineteen per for the rest of your life."

"Aw, Charley, don't get sore; please don't! I'd like to get off, all right--like to go traveling, and stuff like that. Gee! I'd like to wander round. But I can't cut out right in the bus--"

"But can't you see, you poor nut, you won't be leaving 'em--they'll either pay you what they ought to or lose you."

"Oh, I don't know about that, Charley.

"Charley was making up for some uncertainty as to his own logic by beaming persuasiveness, and Mr. Wrenn was afraid of being hypnotized. "No, no!" he throbbed, rising.

"Well, all right!" snarled Charley, "if you like to be Gogie's goat.... Oh, you're all right, Wrennski. I suppose you had ought to stay, if you feel you got to.... Well, so long. I've got to beat it over and buy a pair of socks before I go back."

Mr. Wrenn crept out of Drubel's behind him, very melancholy. Even Charley admitted that he "had ought to stay," then; and what chance was there of persuading the dread Mr. Mortimer R. Guilfogle that he wished to be looked upon as one resigning? Where, then, any chance of globe-trotting; perhaps for months he would remain in slavery, and he had hoped just that morning-- One dreadful quarter-hour with Mr. Guilfogle and he might be free. He grinned to himself as he admitted that this was like seeing Europe after merely swimming the mid-winter Atlantic.

Well, he had nine minutes more, by his two-dollar watch; nine minutes of vagabondage. He gazed across at a Greek restaurant with signs in real Greek letters like "ruins at--well, at Aythens." A Chinese chop-suey den with a red-and-yellow carved dragon, and at an upper window a squat Chinaman who might easily be carrying a kris, "or whatever them Chink knives are," as he observed for the hundredth time he had taken this journey. A rotisserie, before whose upright fender of scarlet coals whole ducks were happily roasting to a shiny brown. In a furrier's window were Siberian foxes' skins (Siberia! huts of "awful brave convicks"; the steely Northern Sea; guards in blouses, just as he'd seen them at an Academy of Music play) and a polar bear (meaning, to him, the Northern Lights, the long hike, and the igloo at night). And the florists! There were orchids that (though he only half knew it, and that all inarticulately) whispered to him of jungles where, in the hot hush, he saw the slumbering python and--"What was it in that poem, that, Mandalay, thing? was it about jungles? Anyway: "'Them garlicky smells, And the sunshine and the palms and the bells.'"