"Good night. Thank you a lot, Miss Nelly. Church in the morning, remember! Good night."
"Good night."
As it is well known that all playwrights labor with toy theaters before them for working models, Mr. Wrenn ran to earth a fine unbroken pasteboard box in which a ninety-eight-cent alarm-clock had recently arrived. He went out for some glue and three small corks. Setting up his box stage, he glued a pill-box and a match-box on the floor-the side of the box it had always been till now-and there he had the mahogany desks. He thrust three matches into the corks, and behold three graceful actors-graceful for corks, at least. There was fascination in having them enter, through holes punched in the back of the box, frisk up to their desks and deliver magic emotional speeches that would cause any audience to weep; speeches regarding which he knew everything but the words; a detail of which he was still quite ignorant after half an hour of playing with his marionettes.
Before he went despairingly to bed that Saturday night he had added to his manuscript:
Mr. Thorne says: Here are the papers, sir. As a great railway president you should-
The rest of that was to be filled in later. How the dickens could he let the public know how truly great his president was?
(Daughter, Miss Nelly, comes in.)
Miss Nelly: Father, I have come back to you, sir.
Mr. Warrington: My Daughter!
Nelly: Father, I have something to tell you; something-
Breakfast at Mrs. Arty's was always an inspiration. In contrast to the lonely dingy meal at the Hustler Dairy Lunch of his Zapp days, he sat next to a trimly shirtwaisted Nelly, fresh and enthusiastic after nine hours' sleep. So much for ordinary days. But Sunday morning-that was paradise! The oil-stove glowed and purred like a large tin pussy cat; it toasted their legs into dreamy comfort, while they methodically stuffed themselves with toast and waffles and coffee. Nelly and he always felt gently superior to Tom Poppins, who would be a-sleeping late, as they talked of the joy of not having to go to the office, of approaching Christmas, and of the superiority of Upton's Grove and Parthenon.
This morning was to be Mr. Wrenn's first attendance at church with Nelly. The previous time they had planned to go, Mr. Wrenn had spent Sunday morning in unreligious fervor at the Chelsea Dental Parlors with a young man in a white jacket instead of at church with Nelly.
This was also the first time that he had attended a church service in nine years, except for mass at St. Patrick's, which he regarded not as church, but as beauty. He felt tremendously reformed, set upon new paths of virtue and achievement. He thought slightingly of those lonely bachelors, Morton and Mittyford, Ph. D. They just didn't know what it meant to a fellow to be going to church with a girl like Miss Nelly, he reflected, as he re brushed his hair after breakfast.
He walked proudly beside her, and made much of the gentility of entering the church, as one of the well-to-do and intensely bathed congregation. He even bowed to an almost painfully washed and brushed young usher with gold-rimmed eye-glasses. He thought scornfully of his salad days, when he had bowed to the Brass-button Man at the Nickelorion.
The church interior was as comfortable as Sunday-morning toast and marmalade-half a block of red carpet in the aisles; shiny solid-oak pews, gorgeous stained-glass windows, and a general polite creaking of ladies' best stays and gentlemen's stiff shirt-bosoms, and an odor of the best cologne and moth-balls.
It lacked but six days till Christmas. Mr. Wrenn's heart was a little garden, and his eyes were moist, and he peeped tenderly at Nelly as he saw the holly and ivy and the frosted Christmas mottoes, "Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men," and the rest, that brightened the spaces between windows.
Christmas-happy homes-laughter.... Since, as a boy, he had attended the Christmas festivities of the Old Church Sunday-school at Parthenon, and got highly colored candy in a net bag, his holidays had been celebrated by buying himself plum pudding at lonely Christmas dinners at large cheap restaurants, where there was no one to wish him "Merry Christmas" except his waiter, whom he would quite probably never see again, nor ever wish to see.
But this Christmas-he surprised himself and Nelly suddenly by hotly thrusting out his hand and touching her sleeve with the searching finger-tips of a child comforted from night fears.
During the sermon he had an idea. What was it Nelly had told him about "Peter Pan"? Oh yes; somebody in it had said "Do you believe in fairies?" Say, why wouldn't it be great to have the millionaire's daughter say to her father, "Do you believe in love?"
"Gee, I believe in love!" he yearned to himself, as he felt Nelly's arm unconsciously touch his.
Tom Poppins had Horatio Hood Teddem in that afternoon for a hot toddy. Horatio looked very boyish, very confiding, and borrowed five dollars from Mr. Wrenn almost painlessly, so absorbed was Mr. Wrenn in learning from Horatio how to sell a play. To know the address of the firm of Wendelbaum Schirtz, play-brokers, located in a Broadway theater building, seemed next door to knowing a Broadway manager.
When Horatio had gone Tom presented an idea which he had ponderously conceived during his Sunday noon-hour at the cigar-store.
"Why not have three of us-say me and you and Mrs. Arty-talk the play, just like we was acting it?"
He enthusiastically forced the plan on Mr. Wrenn. He pounded down-stairs and brought up Mrs. Arty. He dashed about the room, shouting directions. He dragged out his bureau for the railroad-president's desk, and a table for the secretary, and, after some consideration and much rubbing of his chin, with two slams and a bang he converted his hard green Morris-chair into an office safe.
The play was on. Mr. T. Poppins, in the role of the president, entered, with a stern high expression on his face, threw a "Good morning, Thorne," at Wrenn, his secretary, and peeled off his gloves. (Mr. Wrenn noted the gloves; they were a Touch.)
Mr. Wrenn approached diffidently, his face expressionless, lest Mrs. Arty laugh at him. "Here-
"Say, what do you think would be a good way for the secretary to tell the crowd that the other guy is the president? Say, how about this: `The vice-president of the railway would like to have you sign these, sir, as president'?"
"That's fine!" exclaimed Mrs. Arty, whose satin dress was carefully spread over her swelling knees, as she sat in the oak rocker, like a cheerful bronze monument to Sunday propriety. "But don't you think he'd say, `when it's convenient to you, sir'?"
"Gee, that's dandy!"
The play was on.
It ended at seven. Mr. Wrenn took but fifteen minutes for Sunday supper, and wrote till one of the morning, finishing the first draft of his manuscript.
Revision was delightful, for it demanded many conferences with Nelly, sitting at the parlor table, with shoulders confidentially touching. They were the more intimate because Tom had invited Mr. Wrenn, Nelly, and Mrs. Arty to the Grand Christmas Eve Ball of the Cigar-Makers' Union at Melpomene Hall. Nelly asked of Mr. Wrenn, almost as urgently as of Mrs. Arty, whether she should wear her new white mull or her older rose-colored China silk.
Two days before Christmas he timidly turned over the play for typing to a haughty public stenographer who looked like Lee Theresa Zapp. She yawned at him when he begged her to be careful of the manuscript. The gloriously pink-bound and red-underlined typed manuscript of the play was mailed to Messrs. Wendelbaum Schirtz, play-brokers, at 6.15 P.M., Christmas Eve.
The four walked down Sixth Avenue to the Cigar-Makers' Ball. They made an Indian file through the Christmas shopping crowds, and stopped frequently and noisily before the street-booths' glamour of tinsel and teddy-bears. They shrieked all with one rotund mad laughter as Tom Poppins capered over and bought for seven cents a pink bisque doll, which he pinned to the lapel of his plaid overcoat. They drank hot chocolate at the Olympic Confectionery Store, pretending to each other that they were shivering with cold.