He walked to the office of the Caravanserai, blindly, quietly. He paid his bill, and found that he had only fifty dollars left. He could not get himself to eat the waiting high tea. There was a seven-fourteen train for London. He took it. Meantime he wrote out a cable to his New York bank for a hundred and fifty dollars. To keep from thinking in the train he talked gravely and gently to an old man about the brave days of England, when men threw quoits. He kept thinking over and over, to the tune set by the rattling of the train trucks: “Friends… I got to make friends, now I know what they are…. Funny some guys don’t make friends. Mustn’t forget. Got to make lots of ’em in New York. Learn how to make ’em.”
He arrived at his room on Tavistock Place about eleven, and tried to think for the rest of the night of how deeply he was missing Morton of the cattle-boat now that—now that he had no friend in all the hostile world.
In a London A. B. C. restaurant Mr. Wrenn was talking to an American who had a clipped mustache, brisk manners, a Knight-of-Pythias pin, and a mind for duck-shooting, hardware-selling, and cigars.
“No more England for mine,” the American snapped, good-humoredly. “I’m going to get out of this foggy hole and get back to God’s country just as soon as I can. I want to find out what’s doing at the store, and I want to sit down to a plate of flapjacks. I’m good and plenty sick of tea and marmalade. Why, I wouldn’t take this fool country for a gift. No, sir! Me for God’s country—Sleepy Eye, Brown County, Minnesota. You bet!”
“You don’t like England much, then?” Mr. Wrenn carefully reasoned.
“Like it? Like this damp crowded hole, where they can’t talk English, and have a fool coinage—Say, that’s a great system, that metric system they’ve got over in France, but here—why, they don’t know whether Kansas City is in Kansas or Missouri or both…. ‘Right as rain’—that’s what a fellow said to me for ‘all right’! Ever hear such nonsense?…. And tea for breakfast! Not for me! No, sir! I’m going to take the first steamer!”
With a gigantic smoke-puff of disgust the man from Sleepy Eye stalked out, jingling the keys in his trousers pocket, cocking up his cigar, and looking as though he owned the restaurant.
Mr. Wrenn, picturing him greeting the Singer Tower from an incoming steamer, longed to see the tower.
“Gee! I’ll do it!”
He rose and, from that table in the basement of an A. B. C. restaurant, he fled to America.