Our Mr. Wrenn

"Mouse dear, this is one of our best little indecent poets, Mr. Carson Haggerty. From America--California--too. Mr. Hag'ty, Mr. Wrenn."

"Pleased meet you," said both men in the same tone of annoyance.

Mr. Wrenn implored: "I--uh--I thought you might like to look at these magazines. Just dropped in to give them to you." He was ready to go.

"Thank you--so good of you. Please sit down. Carson and I were only fighting--he's going pretty soon. We knew each other at art school in Berkeley. Now he knows all the toffs in London."

"Mr. Wrenn," said the best little poet, "I hope you'll back up my contention. Izzy says th--"

"Carson, I have told you just about enough times that I do not intend to stand for `Izzy' any more! I should think that even you would be able to outgrow the standard of wit that obtains in first-year art class at Berkeley."

Mr. Haggerty showed quite all of his ragged teeth in a noisy joyous grin and went on, unperturbed: "Miss Nash says that the best European thought, personally gathered in the best salons, shows that the Rodin vogue is getting the pickle-eye from all the real yearners. What is your opinion?"

Mr. Wrenn turned to Istra for protection. She promptly announced: "Mr. Wrenn absolutely agrees with me. By the way, he's doing a big book on the recrudescence of Kipling, after his slump, and--"

"Oh, come off, now! Kipling! Blatant imperialist, anti-Stirner!" cried Carson Haggerty, kicking out each word with the assistance of his swinging left foot.

Much relieved that the storm-center had passed over him, Mr. Wrenn sat on the front edge of a cane-seated chair, with the magazines between his hands, and his hands pressed between his forward-cocked knees. Always, in the hundreds of times he went over the scene in that room afterward, he remembered how cool and smooth the magazine covers felt to the palms of his flattened hands. For he associated the papery surfaces with the apprehension he then had that Istra might give him up to the jag-toothed grin of Carson Haggerty, who would laugh him out of the room and out of Istra's world.

He hated the poetic youth, and would gladly have broken all of Carson's teeth short off. Yet the dread of having to try the feat himself made him admire the manner in which Carson tossed about long creepy-sounding words, like a bush-ape playing with scarlet spiders. He talked insultingly of Yeats and the commutation of sex-energy and Isadora Duncan and the poetry of Carson Haggerty.

Istra yawned openly on the bed, kicking a pillow, but she was surprised into energetic discussion now and then, till Haggerty intentionally called her Izzy again, when she sat up and remarked to Mr. Wrenn: "Oh, don't go yet. You can tell me about the article when Carson goes. Dear Carson said he was only going to stay till ten."