Part 5

“Well, I am sorry to have to tell you that there will have to be a post mortem. Mr. Falkland Vavasour has all the appearance of having died of starvation.”

Mame waited to hear no more. She was deeply grieved. And she was rather shocked. Yet she was not so shocked as she would have been had not her swift mind leaped forward to the doctor’s verdict, even before the worthy man had arrived to give it. Yes, the grisly truth was plain for any who had eyes to see. Grand seigneur to the end, too proud to eat a crust he could not pay for, his only means of livelihood vanished long ago, he had passed out as he had lived, a prince among four-flushers.

Upstairs, in the privacy of her dismal room, Mame wept. Something had gone from Fotheringay House, something that could never return. Among all the millions of people seething around, this dear old man had been her only friend.

Shivering on the edge of her bed in that chill attic, she felt horribly lonely now. Nostalgia came upon her, a longing for home. She did not understand these people. A powerful craving for the hearty, simple folks she knew and loved crept over her while she fought to control her tears.

X

Such havoc had been played in a short time with Mame’s cash balance by the life of London, England, that already the margin of safety was nearly reached. By the end of that week--it was Tuesday now--she would be compelled to take a bus to Cockspur Street and see about a passage home.

The thought was not pleasant. A second failure, if hardly so painful as the one in New York, was even more dire. For by the time she looked again on the Statue of Liberty very nearly all the munitions of war would have vanished. And what would remain to show?

Mame needed all her grit to bear up. The tragic end of Mr. Falkland Vavasour was the writing on the wall. Did it not prove how fatally easy it was for people, even of a certain position, to fall out of the ranks?

The clouds were gathering. Since landing in England she had not earned a dime. She had called on many editors and found them inaccessible; she had mailed them her stuff; but there was nothing doing. Her style was not what they were used to; and this nation of snails prided itself on being conservative. But the worst blow of all was the silence of Elmer P. Dobree.

Swift time flowed on. But the much-looked-for envelope, bearing the magic postmark “Cowbarn, Iowa,” did not come. Friday by Friday, with the super-optimism her high-spirited countrywomen have elevated to a religion, the dauntless Mame mailed two columns to the editor of the Cowbarn _Independent_. Each week as she registered the packet and slipped the chit into her handbag she was as sure that Elmer P. would fall as she was convinced she could turn off that sort of junk until the cows came home. The stuff was good. Even a simp with half an eye could see that. Not highbrow, but better; the newspapers wanted things homely and plain. And there was any amount of pep in it. Every word was hot from the mint of experience.

All the same the weeks went and not so much as a line of acknowledgment came from the man on whose friendship she had counted. This silence was mysterious and exasperating. However, she would not let herself be cast down. She went freely about this comic town of London. There was more to it than at first she had supposed. Her first impression had been of a slower New York; a New York with a certain amount of moss on it. But when she had spent a few weeks noting and recording the ways of this queer burg, she began to see that it had its own standards, its own way of doing things and that it would repay study.

She had really come to Europe to improve her knowledge of the world. Once properly grounded in what to Mame’s mind was the first of all sciences, she would return to New York, that city of four-flushers which had mocked and derided her, with the ace of trumps concealed up a fashionable sleeve.

To this end she must get around; and, if she could, contrive to see the life of London from the inside. Among such self-contained and stand-off folks this was not easy. That was why she had stayed on at Fotheringay House. It was the best address she could afford. Nay, as things went with her, it was a better address than she could afford. But its portentous air of propriety was worth paying for. New York had taught her that propriety, an elusive soulless thing, was indispensable for a girl who had to play a lone hand.

She was living far beyond her means, but she managed to see just a little of smart restaurants at luncheon and at tea time. Picture galleries bored her, but she conscientiously did them. Culture was always worth while; another card to keep up your sleeve. At concerts and theatres she occupied a cheap seat; she saw all the sights of the town. And now, at a tragic moment, came the knowledge that she must pack up and go home.

Moving about the streets, she felt this day to be the worst she had yet known. Even the humiliation put on her by the New York police had not yielded a sensation of being so truly up against it. Not a chance did there seem of making good. She would give herself till Saturday and then arrange to quit.

For the first time since her arrival in London she perceived a touch of spring in the air. Emboldened, she climbed on to the roof of Bus 56 and let it take her where it would. The line of route was along the Embankment, past the Houses of Parliament, across Westminster Bridge. Old Father Thames was lovely this morning, with a hint of blue sky furtively peeping through soft grey mist.

As Mame looked back and saw the line of great hotels towering up and dominating the river with their haughty façades, never to her had they appeared so aloof, so magnetic, so inaccessible. Her desire had been to storm those cosmopolitan portals, but moving now towards the humbler purlieus of the southeast, she could not help reflecting bitterly how ill-founded was that ambition.

Still she was a fighter. The trick was in her blood. And never had the sense of her inheritance been more insurgent than on the top of Bus 56 this rare March morning, when for Mame Durrance the bottom seemed out of things. She could not bear the thought of giving in. Memories of great-uncle Nel rose in her heart. She could remember that fine old warrior having said that when things looked blackest for the Union in the Civil War, his chief, the famous General Sherman, had declared, “If only we can stick it the clouds will lift.”

These words, of late, had been much with her. Since she had started out to see the world and had known what it was to lie worried, sleepless, heavy eyed, in an airless attic, she had often recalled just how great-uncle Nel turned a thin but strong cigar over in his teeth as he made his contribution to history.

Yes, all came back to the power of sticking it. As Bus 56 trundled on, Mame kept repeating to herself that memorable phrase. If only she could stick it! That odd faculty was the measure of her worth, as it had been that of folks whose shoes she was not fit to tie.

XI

As luck would have it, Bus 56 came at last to a stop opposite a cinema in Camberwell Green. The posters outside were featuring the fratricidal conflict in which great-uncle Nel had borne a part. Indeed, there was a certain quaint old-timer who had a poster all to himself immediately under the booking office window who was General Sherman’s colleague to the very life. At the sight of this warrior something thrilled in Mame. She was not superstitious and she always made a point of believing as little as possible of what one had no means of proving; but that picture went some way to convince her that at this moment the occult was putting one over on her.

Promptly she got off the bus and made for the booking office. But a notice under the window said it was not open until two o’clock and that the show did not begin until half an hour later. As yet it was barely one o’clock, so there was nothing for it but to kill the time.

Mame took a walk up Denmark Hill. It was not a very inspiring altitude. Nor did a glass of milk and a bath bun at a dairyman’s near the tram terminus at East Dulwich station do much to raise her spirits. Never had she felt so intensely that she was nearing a crisis.

Back again at Camberwell Green she entered the cinema just as the orchestra was tuning up. It was an orchestra of two, a fiddle and a piano, and it seemed to add to her depression. Out of deference to the film, which was entitled “Scenes from the Great Civil War,” the fiddle and the piano discoursed those melodies with which Mame’s childhood had been most familiar.

They began with “Suwanee River” and kindred themes of de ole plantation and went on to “John Brown’s Body” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Mame soon wished that she had stayed outside. With all respect to great-uncle Nel she was not in a mood to enjoy this _réchauffé_ of her youth. For she could not forget that her youth had been hard and unhappy.

In the first place she had never known a mother’s love. At her birth her father had been left a widower. But when Mame, an only child, was five years old, he married a hard-natured, unsympathetic woman. Good had come, indirectly, of the stepmother’s rule. It had not made for joy; but those years had fanned a secret flame in Mame’s ambitious heart. Resentment took the form of a passion for self-improvement. With the help of the village schoolmarm, kindly Miss Jenkins, she studied so hard in the hours when minds less nimble were asleep, that on her eighteenth birthday she was able to fill a vacant stool in the _Independent_ office. And on that red-letter day, life for Mame Durrance began.

The opening scenes of the film brought back the past vividly. A hundred details, half-forgotten, reminded her of the farm four miles from Cowbarn, where she had been brought up. She saw again, in the types thrown on the screen, the dour, lean, Middle Western farmer, her father. The sight of him was an intolerably painful memory. An embittered, unsuccessful man, who in his later days had often drunk more whiskey than was good for him, in Mame’s recollection, he had never been happy in his work or in his home. He had been years in his grave, yet time, the healer, did not allow his daughter to feel affection for him. Still perhaps she had a little pity. He was one of life’s miss-fires. Groping along from year to year in the old rut, without vision, without initiative, a weak man rather than a bad one, his sins mainly were the sins of omission. And the worst of them, in the eyes of his child who had paid for it, was that he had not been man enough to stand up to the selfish vixen he had taken for his second wife.

It was no use pretending that the film’s poignant reminders of her childhood were pleasant. The discomfort, the toil, the loneliness, all came back to her. How had it been possible for a creature like herself, with only a half-educated village dame to help her, to get away from it all? That was the question now in her mind. And the emotion aroused by these familiar scenes had little enough to do with the heroic figure of her real mother’s Uncle Nel, although the fine type to which he belonged was also there. Uppermost in Mame were disgust and pity. But she had escaped. By some miracle she had escaped. And no matter what happened to her now, she knew that she could never go back to the drudgery and the boredom of the place whence she came.

Memories of the past grew too painful to bear. Mame did not wait for the battle pieces. Even great-uncle Nel’s General Sherman, who had a picture all to himself, and the soldierly groups, in any one of whom might be the rare old man she remembered so clearly, had not the power to stay the panic rising in her heart. It was weak, this sense of tumult; it was foolish and worse than foolish, it was cowardly; but quite suddenly Mame cast all thought from her of great-uncle Nel. She got up and fled from the cinema.

Outside, amid the dismal waste of bricks and mortar, which ironically called itself Camberwell Green, a rather frosty March sun was waning. Mame stood a few moments under the awning of the cinema in a state of irresolution, not knowing what to do next. It was as if she had become hypnotised by a sense of life’s vastness and complexity. The world was far beyond all calculation; yet now she felt just the meanest thing in it.

However, she caught sight of Bus 56, wheeling round to the opposite kerb. It was about to return to Charing Cross. Mame lost no time in climbing to a seat on the roof. Bus 56, at that moment, was the one thing in her life that held the core and semblance of reality. All the rest was chaos and old night. But this prosaic vehicle meant something. Panic-stricken as Mame now was, it stood for will, volition, force.

Yes, she was panic-stricken. It was very absurd. In the most illogical and unexpected way, a subtle demon had sprung upon her for the second time. The first had been in that epic moment when she had driven in a cab to the police office in New York with the horrid Detective Addelsee sitting by her side. But on that occasion there had been some excuse for this feeling of dull and helpless terror. On the present occasion there was none.

The shrewd air of the bus top revived her a bit. Her fighting spirit began to rally. If once it deserted her she was done. Why this attack of cold feet? There was nothing to be afraid of. She still had money enough to get home. It would not be the Iowa farmhouse to which she knew now she could never return. Home, for her, must be one of the big and friendly cities of that republic of which she was proud to be a daughter.

Big indeed were those cities. But were they so very friendly? Mame had begun to ask herself that by the time Bus 56 had reached the Elephant and Castle. Frankly, in her experience of them, they were not. To a little hick, as raw as herself, New York, for example, had been quite the reverse. Apart from Aunt Lou’s dollars, it had no use for her. It had swallowed nine hundred of those dollars and lodged her in jail before you could say knife. No, friendly was not quite the word for New York.

Still, in this bleakly inhospitable island, which was gulping her dollars just as quickly, even if it had refrained from putting her in jail, it would not do to knock New York. It was where she belonged. America had treated her pretty rough but it was the land she loved and admired. She might hate her stepmother and deplore her father, yet after all it was the home of her mother’s memory. No, in spite of failures and bad breaks, it would not do to knock little old New York.

This sentiment, which she knew to be no more logical than the others, was so vividly upon her by the time she left the bus at Charing Cross, that she crossed at once to the office of the shipping company in Cockspur Street. If a boat, by which she could afford to travel, was leaving at the end of the week, she would book a passage. Better say good-bye to London a week too soon, than stay a week too long and find yourself stranded.

When, however, she reached the offices of the shipping company she felt bound to pause before she went in. Was it wise to act so precipitately? Why surrender to wild impulses? It was a big decision to make on the spur of the moment. What she did now could not be undone later. She had figured on staying another week in London. Every day’s experience was valuable. Any day she might hear from Elmer Dobree, telling her that her stuff was O.K., asking for more, enforcing his demands with a cheque.

Unreasoningly as her cinema panic, an odd wave of optimism flowed over Mame as she stood gazing into the shipping company’s window. She had always yielded to this recurring wave that seemed to spring from her higher nature. Had she not done so from the beginning she would still be eating out her heart on her father’s farm. What could have seemed more hopeless than for Mame Durrance to thirst after Culture? Yet that craving, in the end, had taken her to the county town, to the office of the _Independent_. And this simple faith in the future had carried her to New York and finally three thousand miles across the Atlantic as far as Europe. Was this the hour to go back on the urge of nature?

“If only you can stick it, the clouds will lift.” She didn’t know where the voice came from, but those familiar words sounded clear as a bell. Yes, she must stick it. That was what life was for: to keep a stiff upper lip; to face your luck; to go down fighting.

While she stood gazing at a model of a Cunarder in the window of the shipping company, she was quickened by new power. Whence it came there was no means of knowing; but just behind her was Trafalgar Square, and the lions, and the mighty column a grateful nation had raised to the memory of a Nelson even more remarkable than the brother of her grandmother. Sure, it must have been from the top of that monument the thought wave had come.

She appeared to be borne on the wings of inspiration. The time was not yet to give in. She would stay another week. But an effort of the will was needed to leave that too-enticing window. She crossed the road as leisurely as the taxis and the buses would permit; yet brain and heart were in conflict as she entered Pall Mall.

Outside the Carlton she paused. A line of smart cars was disgorging brilliant occupants. Mame stood wistfully in the shadow of the portico, observing, as she had done so many times in the last seven months, the life of ease, luxury and wealth from the outside. She felt like a peri at the gates of Paradise. If once she could gain a footing within those charméd portals, the capacity was surely hers to enjoy their delights.

This evening her thoughts seemed to make her desperate. Never had the spirit of adventure burned so high. It was her duty to count every dime, but this day, take it altogether, was the worst she had met since landing in England. She was fed to the teeth with disappointment and the sense of just being out of things. There had been too much cold shoulder. But there was money still in her purse.

Before she realized what she was doing, she was mingling with the smart mob and passing through the revolving doors. As the delicate strains of an orchestra caught her ear, her little head went up and she began to move more freely. She considered herself to be very well dressed, if a little “tossed” from a series of rides on the roof of divers plebeian buses. Even if she was down on her luck she was free, white and twenty-one. And she could pay her shot; therefore she had a right to show her nose among the plutes.

The large room, on whose threshold Mame found herself, without quite knowing how she got there, seemed to be full already. Very distinguished-looking females and equally distinguished-looking males were standing around, in twos and threes. They were scanning, as it were, the far horizon for vacant tables.

Vacant tables, however, there were none. It was the hour when the theatre matinées yield up their tea-thirsty patrons. Standing room only appeared to be the order of the moment. And truth to tell, Mame did not feel altogether displeased. If she found a seat at one of those seductive little tables, it would mean half a crown at the very least. And in the present state of Wall Street half a crown was money.

This was pusillanimity. She was out for adventure. And she really wanted tea. Something in the much-abused British climate seems to call for tea at five o’clock. Therefore Mame’s slim little body began to insinuate itself nearer the cups and saucers and the elegant confectionery; whereas bodies less slim and not so little remained outside the sphere of their influence.

Gazing around on the crowded scene, Mame awoke to the fact that an extremely smart-looking girl, seated alone some two tables off, and smoking a cigarette in a long meerschaum holder, had fixed a demure eye upon her. Some little time it had been there, but Mame did not know that. Every detail was taken in already by a glance candid yet wary. Clothes, hat, eyes, chin, the face of wistful emotion: Mame was a rare butterfly with quaint markings, a new specimen for the net of a collector. Suddenly the girl’s eye caught Mame’s. She coolly signalled with the meerschaum holder that there was room at her table.

As Mame moved towards it she was ready to believe, such was this smart girl’s easy air, that she had been mistaken for one of her friends. Mame felt that she must bear a likeness to somebody else. But no, this was not the case. The girl at once began to treat her choice “find” with the off-hand courtesy which seemed to be her attitude towards the world at large.

She lifted a muff, a real sable affair, from a seat near by in order to free a chair. As Mame subsided into it with her politest thanks, the girl looked at her shrewdly and then said in a casual voice, “You want a waiter.”

Before Mame could take steps to get a waiter, her new friend, who was full of cheery competence, had attracted one. Her manner of doing so was in nowise aggressive, yet it was quite successful. The last word in waiters, all smiles and all ears, soon materialised at Mame’s elbows.

“I can recommend the crumpets. They’re very good to-day.” The girl followed her genial information with something in Italian or French to the waiter which Mame did not understand. It was probably Italian, for the waiter was an undoubted Wop. He crisply brushed the tablecloth with his napkin, arranged cup and saucer, knife and plate upon it, and then went smilingly off to execute Mame’s order.