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Come on; you'll find out if you like the place." "By jiminy, I will!" Mr. Wrenn slapped the table, socially. At last he was "through, just through with loafing around and not getting acquainted," he told himself. He was tired of Zapps. There was nothing to Zapps. He would go up to Mrs. Arty's and now he was going to find Morton.
He wished that Charley Carpenter or the Zapps could see him sitting right beside an actor who was shown in the pictures miraculously there before them, asking him how they made movies, just as friendly as though they had known each other always. He wanted to do something to entertain his friends beyond taking them out for a drink. He invited them down to his room, and they came.
Guess I'd better beat it. Much obliged for the drink, Mr. Uh. So long, Jimmy." Mr. Wrenn set off for home in a high state of exhilaration which, he noticed, exactly resembled driving an aeroplane, and went briskly up the steps of the Zapps' genteel but unexciting residence. He was much nearer to heaven than West Sixteenth Street appears to be to the outsider.
He listened in the hall to learn whether the Zapps were up, but heard nothing; returned and cantered up and down, gloating on a map of the world. "Gee! It's happened. I could travel all the time. I guess I won't be very much afraid of wrecks and stuff. . . . Things like that. . . . Gee! If I don't get to bed I'll be late at the office in the morning!" Mr. Wrenn lay awake till three o'clock.
And I'll get right after that job." It is doubtful whether Mr. Wrenn would ever have returned to the Zapps' had he not promised to see Charley there. Even while he was carrying his suit-case down West Sixteenth, broiling by degrees in the sunshine, he felt like rushing up to Charley's and telling him to come to the hotel instead.
For three hours he writhed on that door-step, till he came to hate it; it was as much a prison as his room at the Zapps' had been. He hated the areaway grill, and a big brown spot on the pavement, and, as a truck-driver hates a motorman, so did he hate a pudgy woman across the street who peeped out from a second-story window and watched him with cynical interest.
Teddem was in wonderful form; he mimicked every one they saw so amiably that Tom Poppins knew the actor wanted to borrow money. The party were lovingly humming the popular song of the time "Any Little Girl That's a Nice Little Girl is the Right Little Girl for Me" as they frisked up the gloomy steps of the Zapps. Entering, Poppins and Teddem struck attitudes on the inside stairs and sang aloud.
Wrenn had been a shyly paying guest of the Zapps for four years. That famous new paper had been put up two years before. So he spluttered: "Oh, I'm awfully sorry. I wish uh I don't "
And all this was his to conquer, for friendship's sake. He went to a hotel. While he had to go back to the Zapps', of course, he did not wish, by meeting those old friends, to spoil his first day. No, it was cheerfuler to stand at a window of his cheap hotel on Seventh Avenue, watching the "good old American crowd" Germans, Irishmen, Italians, and Jews.
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