"Still, an author's got to go to college and stuff like that." Mr. Wrenn spoke as though he would be pleased to have the objection overruled at once, which it was with a universaclass="underline"
"Oh, rats!"
Crunching oysters in a brown jacket of flour, whose every lump was a crisp delight, hearing his genius lauded and himself called Bill thrice in a quarter-hour, Mr. Wrenn was beatified. He asked the waiter for some paper, and while the four hotly discussed things which "it would be slick to have the president's daughter do" he drew up a list of characters on a sheet of paper he still keeps. It is headed, "Miggleton's Forty-second Street Branch." At the bottom appear numerous scribblings of the name Nelly.
{the full page is covered with doodling as well}
"I think I'll call the heroine `Nelly,'" he mused.
Nelly Croubel blushed. Mrs. Arty and Tom glanced at each other. Mr. Wrenn realized that he had, even at this moment of social triumph, "made a break."
He said, hastily; "I always liked that name. I-I had an aunt named that!"
"Oh-" started Nelly.
"She was fine to me when I was a kid, "Mr. Wrenn added, trying to remember whether it was right to lie when in such need.
"Oh, it's a horrid name," declared Nelly. "Why don't you call her something nice, like Hazel-or-oh-Dolores."
"Nope; Nelly's an elegant name-an elegant name."
He walked with Nelly behind the others, along Forty-second Street. To the outsider's eye he was a small respectable clerk, slightly stooped, with a polite mustache and the dignity that comes from knowing well a narrow world; wearing an overcoat too light for winter; too busily edging out of the way of people and guiding the nice girl beside him into clear spaces by diffidently touching her elbow, too pettily busy to cast a glance out of the crowd and spy the passing poet or king, or the iron night sky. He was as undistinguishable a bit of the evening street life as any of the file of street-cars slashing through the wet snow. Yet, he was the chivalrous squire to the greatest lady of all his realm; he was a society author, and a man of great prospective wealth and power over mankind!
"Say, we'll have the grandest dinner you ever saw if I get away with the play," he was saying. "Will you come, Miss Nelly?"
"Indeed I will! Oh, you sha'n't leave me out! Wasn't I there when-"
"Indeed you were! Oh, we'll have a reg'lar feast at the Astor-artichokes and truffles and all sorts of stuff.... Would-would you like it if I sold the play?"
"Course I would, silly!"
"I'd buy the business and make Rabin manager-the Souvenir Company.
So he came to relate all those intimacies of The Job; and he was overwhelmed at the ease with which she "got onto old Goglefogle."
His preparations for writing the play were elaborate.
He paced Tom's room till twelve-thirty, consulting as to whether he had to plan the stage-setting; smoking cigarettes in attitudes on chair arms. Next morning in the office he made numerous plans of the setting on waste half-sheets of paper. At noon he was telephoning at Tom regarding the question of whether there ought to be one desk or two on the stage.
He skipped the evening meal at Mrs. Arty's, dining with literary pensiveness at the Armenian, for he had subtle problems to meditate. He bought a dollar fountain-pen, which had large gold-like bands and a rather scratchy pen-point, and a box of fairly large sheets of paper. Pressing his literary impedimenta tenderly under his arm, he attended four moving-picture and vaudeville theaters. By eleven he had seen three more one-act plays and a dramatic playlet.
He slipped by the parlor door at Mrs. Arty's.
His room was quiet. The lamplight on the delicately green walls was like that of a regular author's den, he was quite sure. He happily tested the fountain-pen by writing the names Nelly and William Wrenn on a bit of wrapping-paper (which he guiltily burned in an ash-tray); washed his face with water which he let run for a minute to cool; sat down before his table with a grunt of content; went back and washed his hands; fiercely threw off the bourgeois encumbrances of coat and collar; sat down again; got up to straighten a picture; picked up his pen; laid it down, and glowed as he thought of Nelly, slumbering there, near at hand, her exquisite cheek nestling silkenly against her arm, perhaps, and her white dreams-
Suddenly he roared at himself, "Get on the job there, will yuh?" He picked up the pen and wrote:
THE MILLIONAIRE'S DAUGHTER
A ONE ACT DRAMATIC PLAYLET
by
WILLIAM WRENN
CHARACTERS
John Warrington, a railway president; quite rich. Nelty Warrington, Mr. Warrington's daughter. Reginald Thorne, his secretary.
He was jubilant. His pen whined at top speed, scattering a shower of tiny drops of ink.
Stage Scene: An office. Very expensive. Mr. Warrington and Mr. Thorne are sitting there. Miss Warrington comes in. She says:
He stopped. He thought. He held his head. He went over to the stationary bowl and soaked his hair with water. He lay on the bed and kicked his heels, slowly and gravely smoothing his mustache. Fifty minutes later he gave a portentous groan and went to bed.
He hadn't been able to think of what Miss Warrington says beyond "I have come to tell you that I am married, papa," and that didn't sound just right; not for a first line it didn't, anyway.
At dinner next night-Saturday-Tom was rather inclined to make references to "our author," and to remark: "Well, I know where somebody was last night, but of course I won't tell. Say, them authors are a wild lot."
Mr. Wrenn, who had permitted the teasing of even Tim, the hatter, "wasn't going to stand for no kidding from nobody-not when Nelly was there," and he called for a glass of water with the air of a Harvard assistant professor forced to eat in a lunch-wagon and slapped on the back by the cook.
Nelly soothed him. "The play is going well, isn't it?"
When he had, with a detached grandeur of which he was immediately ashamed, vouchsafed that he was already "getting right down to brass tacks on it," that he had already investigated four more plays and begun the actual writing, every one looked awed and asked him assorted questions.
At nine-thirty that evening he combed and tightly brushed his hair, which he had been pawing angrily for an hour and a half, went down the hall to Nelly's hall bedroom, and knocked with: "It's Mr. Wrenn. May I ask you something about the play?"
"Just a moment," he heard her say.
He waited, panting softly, his lips apart. This was to be the first time he had ever seen Nelly's room. She opened the door part way, smiling shyly, timidly, holding her pale-blue dressing-gown close. The pale blueness was a modestly brilliant spot against the whiteness of the room-white bureau, hung with dance programs and a yellow Upton's Grove High School banner, white tiny rocker, pale-yellow matting, white-and-silver wall-paper, and a glimpse of a white soft bed.
He was dizzy with the exaltation of that purity, but he got himself to say:
"I'm kind of stuck on the first part of the play, Miss Nelly. Please tell me how you think the heroine would speak to her dad. Would she call him `papa' or `sir,' do you think?"
"Why-let me see-"
"They're such awful high society-"
"Yes, that's so. Why, I should think she'd say `sir.' Maybe oh, what was it I heard in a play at the Academy of Music? `Father, I have come back to you!'"
"Sa-a-ay, that's a fine line! That'll get the crowd going right from the first.... I told you you'd help me a lot."
"I'm awfully glad if I have helped you," she said, earnestly. Good night-and good, "awfully glad, but luck with the play. Good night."