Part 4

Mame sighed. “Not heard of pumpkin pie!” This was a backward land. There was a lot of spadework to be done in it. A suspicion was growing that she would have done better to stay in New York. She had to be content with custard and stewed figs, upon which poor substitute she walked slowly along the Strand to Trafalgar Square. Here she turned into the National Gallery. As she ascended the many steps of the building she tried to raise a feeling of awe. Even if she was a little hick she knew that a true American citizeness mentally takes off her shoes when she enters a dome of Culture.

The feeling of awe was not very powerful. But she was a sane and cool observer of things and people; and if she was too honest to pretend to emotions she didn’t possess there was no reason why those walls should not be a mental stimulus.

She took a seat on a comfortable divan, before a large and lurid Turner, all raging sea and angry sky. This picture impressed Mame Durrance considerably less than it had impressed Ruskin. But a hush of culture all around enabled her to sit two good hours putting her ideas in order. A plan of some sort was necessary if she was going to make good. When she set out from Cowbarn, six months back, she felt that her natural abilities would carry her through anything. Now, she was not so sure. Things were no longer rose colour. There was a terrible lot of leeway to make up. She just had not guessed that she was so far behind the game. Perhaps it had been wiser to stay at home and put herself through college.

Chastened by the buffets of the day she returned to Montacute Square about five. When she entered the gloomy drawing room the tabbies received her icily. Not a sign of success on the horizon so far. The tea drinking was as depressing as ever. Nobody took any notice of her.

The aloofness of these frumps was as hard to bear as the insolence of the editor of _High Life_. Mame’s resentment grew. Presently she rose and went up to her cold bedroom. She got out her writing case. Perched with knees crossed, on the end of her bed, she spent a prosperous hour jotting down her first day’s impressions of London, England.

Vigorous mental exercise seemed to take a load off her spirit. What she had written ought to raise a smile in Elmer P. To-morrow she would go at it again; then it should be typed and mailed. If the boob fell for it, and born optimist that Mame Durrance was, she felt he sure would, where that stuff came from there was good and plenty more to pull.

VII

When Mame returned to the drawing room she was dressed for the evening meal. It was only seven o’clock and she counted on having the place to herself, since at that hour the tabbies would be occupied with their own preparations. But as it happened the room was not quite empty. There was just one person in it.

The old elegant, who had already excited Mame’s curiosity, stood before the meagre fire warming his thin hands. As soon as she came in he turned towards her with a little bow of rare politeness.

“I am told,” he said in the deepest, most measured tone Mame had ever heard, “you are an American.”

Mame owned to that in the half-humorous manner she had already adopted for the benefit of these islanders. Some folks might have been abashed by this obvious grandee. Not so Miss Amethyst Du Rance. She was as good as the best and she was in business to prove it. These bums were not to be taken at their own valuation. Back of everything her faith in her own shrewd wits was unshakable.

“I have a very warm corner in my heart for all Americans.”

“Have you so?” said Mame.

There was not a hint of patronage in the old buck’s manner, yet in spite of his air of simple kindness, Mame somehow felt the King-of-England-with-his-beard-off feeling creeping upon her. He was the goods all right, this old john, but she was determined to take him in her stride as she would have taken President Harding or any other regular fellow.

“Won’t you tell me your name?”

Mame opened the small bag which she never parted with, even at meal times, and took out her card. The old man fixed his eyeglass and scanned it with prodigious solemnity. “Cowbarn.” A bland pause. “Now tell me, what state is that in? It’s very ignorant not to know,” he apologetically added.

“No, it ain’t.” Mame was captivated by the air of humility, although not sure that it was real. “Cowbarn’s in the state of Iowa. On’y a one-horse burg.”

“Ah, yes, to be sure, Iowa.” The grandee made play with his eyeglass. “I remember touring the Middle West with Henry Irving in ’89.”

So long was ’89 before Mame was born that she was a trifle vague upon the subject of Henry Irving. But she knew all about Lloyd George, Arthur, Earl of Balfour, and even Old Man Gladstone of an earlier day. She surmised that Henry was one of these.

“A senator, I guess?”

“My dear young lady, no.” The tone of surprise was comically tragic. “Henry Irving was the greatest ac-torr Eng-laand ever produced.”

“You don’t say!” The awe in Mame’s voice was an automatic concession to the awe in the voice of the speaker.

“Yes, Eng-laand’s greatest ac-torr.” There was a note of religious exaltation in the old grandee. “I toured the United States three times with Henry Irving.”

“Did you visit Cowbarn?” Mame asked for politeness’ sake. To the best of her information, Cowbarn, like herself, had not been invented in ’89.

“I seem to remember playing the Duke there to Henry Irving’s Shylock at a one-night stand,” said the grandee also for politeness’ sake. He had never heard of Cowbarn, he had never been to Iowa, and in ’89 Henry the August had given up the practice of playing one-night stands. But the higher amenities of the drawing room are not always served by a conservative handling of raw fact.

Mame, with that sharp instinct of hers, knew the old chap was lying. But it didn’t lessen her respect. He had an overwhelming manner and when he gave the miserable fire a simple poke he used the large gesture of one who feels that the eyes of the universe are upon him. Still, with every deduction made, and a homely daughter of a republic felt bound to make many, he was the most human thing she had met so far in her travels.

His name was Falkland Vavasour. And in confiding to Mame this bright jewel of the English theatre, which his pronunciation of it led her to think it must be, he yet modestly said that its lustre was nought compared with the blinding effulgence of the divine Henry.

“Some ac-torr, old man Henry Irv,” Mame was careful to pronounce the sacred word “actor” in the manner of this old-timer.

“My de-ah young lady, Henry Irving was a swell. Never again shall we look upon his like.”

“I’ll say not.” And then with an instinct to hold the conversation at the level to which it had now risen Mame opened the door of fancy. “Come to think of it, I’ve heard my great-uncle Nel speak of Henry Irving. You’ve heard, I guess, of Nelson E. Grice, the Federal general, one of the signatures to the peace of Appomattox. He was the brother of my mother’s mother. Many’s the time I’ve set on Great-uncle’s knee and played with the gold watch and chain that his old friend General Sherman give him the day after the battle of Gettysburg.”

Great-uncle Nel had really nothing to do with the case, but Mame felt he was a sure card to play in this high-class conversation. The old Horse had not been a general, he had not signed the peace of Appomattox, and there was a doubt whether General Sherman, whose friend he certainly was, had ever given him a gold watch and chain; but he was a real asset in the Durrance family. Apart from this hero there was nothing to lift it out of the rut of mediocrity. Quite early in life Mame had realized the worth of great-uncle Nel.

Mr. Falkland Vavasour had the historical sense. He rose to General Nelson E. Grice like a trout to a may fly. The old buck refixed his eyeglass and recalled the Sixties. He was playing junior lead at the Liverpool Rotunda when the news came of President Lincoln’s assassination. He remembered-- But what did he not remember? Yes, great-uncle Nel was going to be a sure card in London, England.

Mame was getting on with the old beau like a house on fire when the clock on the chimneypiece struck half-past seven. Mr. Falkland Vavasour gave a little sigh and said he must go. Mame, quickened already by a regard for this charming old man, who lit the gloom of Fotheringay House, expressed sorrow that he was not dining in.

But it seemed that Mr. Falkland Vavasour never did dine in. This applied, in fact, to all his meals. All his meals were taken out.

“But why?” asked Mame disappointedly.

“My dear young lady”--the old-timer’s shrug was so whimsical yet so elegant it sure would have made Henry Irving jealous--“one has nothing against the cook of our hostess-- But!”

Until that moment Mame had not realized what a world of meaning a simple word can hold.

She was keenly disappointed. As the first tabby invaded the drawing room Mr. Falkland Vavasour passed out. A glamour, a warmth, passed out with him. Everything grew different. It was a change from light to darkness; it was like a swift cloud across the sun.

VIII

The days to follow wrought havoc with Aunt Lou’s legacy. Mame’s idea had been to support herself with her pen during her stay in England. She had a gift, or thought she had, for expressing herself on paper; she had a sharp eye for things, she had energy and she had ideas; yet soon was she to learn that as far as London went the market for casual writing was no better than New York.

Times there were when she began to regret her safe anchorage at Cowbarn. But she did not spend much time looking back. She was determined to be a go-getter. Briskly she went about the town, seeing and hearing and jotting down what she saw and heard. And every Friday morning she mailed a packet of her observations to the Cowbarn _Independent_.

Weeks went quickly by. No word came from the only friend she had in the small and tight world of editors. Even Elmer P. Dobree, on whom she had optimistically counted, had turned her down. And things were not going well with her. She had not been able to earn a dollar in Europe, yet daily the wad was growing less. The time was sure coming when she would have to go home with her money spent and only a few chunks of raw experience to show for it.

Perhaps she had tried to prise off a bit too much. Wiser, perhaps, to have stuck to her job. She had been a fairly efficient stenographer and typist. But her active mind was bored. Hovering around that hard stool in the _Independent_ office it wanted all there was in the world. Yet first New York and now London, in their sharp reality, had taught her that the world was a bigger place than she had allowed for. And there were more folks in it. There were simply millions of Mame Durrances around: every sort of go-getter, all wanting the earth and with just her chance of connecting up. But if the worst came, so she had figured it out, and she failed to click in what these Britishers called “journalism,” she would always be able to return to an office stool.

Now, however, she was not so sure. As far as London went, it had six million people and half of them seemed to be looking for jobs. Just to keep in touch she had applied for one or two vacancies advertised in the papers. She had no real wish to get them. It would have been an admission of defeat and it was early days for that. But it would be well, in case the time really came, to know how to come in out of the rain.

She had applied in person but results were not encouraging. Secretarial work was badly paid in London and the struggle for it terrible. There was nothing like enough to go round. Besides, when all was said, Miss Amethyst Du Rance had not come to England to adorn an office stool.

It was not yet time to say good-bye to ambition. She still firmly believed it was in her to make good as a newspaper girl. But it was not easy to conquer the East. Compared with most of these high-flyers and four-flushers she was up against, with their finesse and their culture and their slick talk, Mame Durrance was a little hick. No use disguising it; she was a little hick. “A sense of ignorance is the beginning of knowledge” was one of the mottoes for 1921 in the office calendar which had adorned the fly-walk at the back of her typewriter and which, with an eye to the future, she had committed to memory in her spare moments.

The beginning of knowledge for Mame Durrance meant covering up your tracks. She must see that none of her fellow go-getters put one over on her. But even that simple precaution was not easy. They smiled every time she opened her face, these college boobs. And being as sharp as a hawk she had soon decided that her first duty was to get rid of her accent.

To this end she went freely about, she dressed to the limit of her slim purse, she laid herself out to meet interesting folks. Her fellow p.g.’s of Fotheringay House could not be considered interesting. But there was one exception. Mr. Falkland Vavasour continued to show himself much her friend. And he was quite the most interesting creature she had met. He was, also, very useful. It was a joy to hear him speak what he called the King’s English. She felt she could not do better than model herself on this living fount of euphony.

First she must cast out the nasal drawl that raised a smile wherever it was heard. Then she must mobilise the vowels and consonants of the mother tongue in the style which gave Mr. Falkland Vavasour an assured position in the drawing room of Fotheringay House. The tabbies, for the most part man-haters, simply hung on the words of Mr. Falkland Vavasour. This was mainly due, in Mame’s opinion, to his faultless voice production; and she soon set to work to study it.

Paula Wyse Ling, the most accomplished go-getter of her acquaintance, had said it was worth any girl’s while to visit London in order to acquire an English accent. Mame had doubted this. What was good enough for Cowbarn, Iowa, should have been good enough for the whole world. But the world, it seemed, was some place. She now began to see what Paula meant.

No sooner had Miss Amethyst Du Rance won the friendship of Mr. Falkland Vavasour than she decided that something must be done in the matter. She discreetly asked if he could tell her how to improve her voice. The old man tactfully said it didn’t need improvement. In his opinion it was a fine and powerful organ. Mame felt this was politeness. Her voice didn’t lack force but force was the trouble. “It needs a soft pedal,” said Mame. “Refinement, you know, and charm and all the frills of the West End theatres, restaurants and shops.”

The old actor had a sense of humour and a kind heart. He was amused by Mame, and he liked her. It would have been hard for an artist in life not to like such naïveté, such enthusiasm, such concentration, such fire. But this voice of hers was a problem. It had a natural punch that treated brick walls as if they were brown paper.

Toying with his monocle, in all things the perfect john, he drawled: “My de-ah young lady, if I may say so, your voice is mag-nif-i-cent, simply mag-nif-i-cent.”

Mame’s smile crumpled under the sheer action-pressure of her mind. “Some ways it ain’t. Some ways it’s wanting.”

“A shade more of--er, distinction perhaps?”

“Distinction.” Mame darted on the word like a bird on an insect. “You said it. Distinction’s mine. And I’ll get it, too--if it kills me.”

“My de-ah young lady, perfectly simple for a girl of your talent.”

“Honest? You think that?” The good grey eye glowed hopefully. “I wish I could say mag-nif-i-cent as poyfect as you can.”

“You will, my de-ah young lady, believe me, you will.”

“Well, I’ll start to learn right now.”

Mr. Falkland Vavasour smiled approval. He advised her to draw three deep breaths from the lower chest and to pronounce the word syllable by syllable.

Mame stood to her full height. She inflated. “Mag-nif-i-cent! Mag-nif-i-cent! Mag-nif-i-cent!”

“My de-ah young lady, what could be better?”

This was vastly encouraging. But it was only a beginning and her nature was to leave nothing to chance. A little later that day she acquired a second-hand copy of Bell’s _Standard Elocutionist_ from a bookshop in the Charing Cross Road. And then she arranged for Mr. Falkland Vavasour to hear her say a little piece every morning, when the drawing room was empty.

IX

Mame’s friendship with “the mystery man” continued to grow. That was a name his fellow guests had given him. His comings and goings were indeed mysterious. Nobody knew where he took his meals. Nobody knew what his circumstances were. All the time he had been at Fotheringay House, which was quite a number of years, his name had never been seen in a playbill. But there was a legend that he had once had an engagement with Bancroft at the old Prince of Wales.

He was always dressed immaculately, he was the soul of courtesy, his talk was urbane, and to Mame at any rate, it seemed highly informed. But there was no concealing from her keen eyes that the old boy was thin as a rail. In fact she would hardly have been surprised if some bright morning a wind from the east had blown him away altogether. As for his clothes, in spite of the wonderful air with which he wore them, and good as they had been, they were almost threadbare and literally shone with age.

Mame gathered from one of the tabbies, who in the process of time began to thaw a little, that Mr. Falkland Vavasour was a distant connection of the landlady’s. This fact was held to explain why he was allowed to live at Fotheringay House while invariably taking his meals at his club. At least it was generally understood that it was at his club that he took his meals. But wherever he may have taken them, even if the food was more delicate than at Fotheringay House, it could hardly have been more abundant. Week by week the old man grew thinner and thinner. His step on the drawing room carpet grew lighter and more feeble. Even his wonderful voice lost something of its timbre. Yet amid all these signs of decay, he retained that alert, sprightly man-of-the-worldliness which Mame found so curiously fascinating.

One morning, soon after breakfast, when she had been nearly five weeks at Fotheringay House, she sat in a corner of the dismal drawing room adding up her accounts and gloomily wondering whether the time had not come to look for “board and residence” that would cost less. Suddenly there came a rude shock. Mrs. Toogood entered in a state of agitation. Mr. Falkland Vavasour had just been found dead in his bed.

A doctor had already been sent for. But until he arrived the cause of Mr. Falkland Vavasour’s death must remain, like the old man himself, a mystery. The landlady as well as her p.g.’s were quite at a loss to account for the tragic occurrence. Miss Glendower, the most conversational of the tabbies, opined that it must be sheer old age. Dear Mr. Falkland Vavasour must certainly be very old.

Miss Du Rance agreed that he must be. For was he not playing the junior lead at the Liverpool Rotunda when the news came of President Lincoln’s assassination?

“What year was that?” asked Miss Glendower.

“’Sixty-five.” Mame gave that outstanding date in history with pride and with promptitude. Before starting east she had fortified a memory naturally good by a correspondence course; therefore she could trust it.

Miss Glendower had no doubt at all that old age was the cause of death. But Mame was visited suddenly by a grim suspicion. It might be old age. Or it might not-- Before giving an opinion she would await the doctor’s verdict.

In a few minutes came the doctor. He was received by Mrs. Toogood, who led him slowly up two flights of stairs to the room of Mr. Falkland Vavasour. Overmastered by curiosity, and with an ever-deepening agitation fixing itself upon her--Mame had really liked this kindly and charming old man--she followed a small procession up the stairs.

She stood on the threshold of the room while the doctor bent over the bed. First he took one frail and shrunken hand and then he took the other.

“I’ve never heard him complain of any kind of illness,” she heard the landlady say in a low voice. “He never gave one the slightest reason to suspect there was anything wrong.”

“How long has he lived here?” the doctor asked.

“He has occupied this room for more than twenty years.”

“An actor, I think you said?”

“Oh, yes. Mr. Falkland Vavasour, quite a celebrated actor.”

“I don’t seem to remember the name. No doubt he belongs to a bygone generation.”

“He was a very distinguished man.”

“Where did he get his meals?”

“His meals?” The voice of the landlady grew a little vague. “Of late years he always took his meals out.”

“Can you tell me where?”

“At one of his smart clubs in the West End, I believe.”

“Which one in particular did he frequent? Can you tell me?”

Mrs. Toogood, unfortunately, could not. But she understood that he had been a member of several.

“Do I understand you to say, ma’am,” said the doctor, gently releasing the hand of the old man, “that Mr. Falkland Vavasour never took any food in this house?”

“When he came here first,” said the landlady, “he was usually in to all his meals. Then he gave up having dinner in the evening because of his digestion. After that he took to having his luncheon out. And for the last year, for some reason or other--he was always a bit faddy and peculiar in his ways--he used to go out for his breakfast. But as he had been here so long and he was a sort of connexion of my late husband’s--I don’t quite know what the relationship was but my husband was always proud of him--I allowed him to keep on his room.”

“It was duly paid for, I presume?”

“Always, punctually, until about three weeks ago. When he got behind it seemed to trouble him a good deal, but I told him not to worry.”