awfully nice."
"Who? Oh, you mean old Uncle Whiskers. Forget him--think about me a
spell. Why not be reasonable now, like I was just now saying?" He
scrooged in closer.
She edged away, keeping distance between them. Mr. Daly caught a flash
of her quick grimace. From wheedling, his tone changed to a rasping
one of rising temper. "Maybe he's nice," he said, "but even so I
noticed you sort of run out on him a while ago." He let a little grit
of satire sift into the next sentence: "What's the matter--don't you
real Southerners like to get together when you get a chance and hold
hands and sing Dixie Land? Or is it you was scared of something?"
"Say, look her-r-r-e, you lay off that stuff." If the truth must be
known Miss Clayton was a child of Pittsburgh. And in Pittsburgh to
r-r-r is human, to forgive almost impossible--if you're a purist in the
matter of phonetics. And in moments of stress this native was prone
to forget things which laboriously she had learned, and revert to the
native idioms.
"Well, then, all I got to say is that if you're Southern I'm a Swede
watchmaker." He shrugged, then got on his legs. "Say, little one, if
you want to get huffy and act standoffish I'm pretty well up on the
huff stuff myself. But stick around here awhile longer and you'll see
how far a head of taffy hair and a doll-baby face will get you without
you got somebody on the inside of one of the big plants to plug your
game." Young Mr. Daly, camera-man by profession and skirt-chaser on the
side, tipped his hat brim the fractional part of an inch. "So long; and
think it over."
The dusk gathering under the pepper trees along the sidewalk absorbed
his runty but swaggering shape. Left alone, Miss Clayton put her elbows
on her knees and her chin on her fisted hands and thought it over.
She took stock of herself and her prospects, social and artistic, also
financial. On the whole she didn't have such a very cheerful evening
sitting there all by herself.
It was next morning when the California pathways of those two
Southerners--the seventy-nine-year-old regular and the twenty-year-old
volunteer--really met and joined. It started at the breakfast table,
which they had now to themselves. The disgruntled Mr. Daly had come
down earlier. Mrs. Scofield would come down later. Between engagements
in small mother rôles--not necessarily small mothers but nearly always
small rôles--she was resting, which is a professional term signifying
restlessness.
Captain Teal had eaten his prunes--Native Sons, Tobe would have called
them--and was waiting for his bacon with an egg, when Miss Clayton
entered. At sight of her he instantly was on his feet, much to the
surprise of Katie, the other dining-room girl, who thought she knew
boarding-house manners but was always willing to learn something; and
he made a featly bow of greeting in which the paternal was blended with
a court chamberlain's best flourish, and drew out Miss Clayton's chair
for her. Katie perceived that the old gentleman was not welcoming his
fellow lodger to a place at Mrs. H. Spicer's board so much as he seemed
to be welcoming her to his own. For the moment, he was the entertainer,
Miss Clayton his honored guest. There was a trick about it, someway.
He waited in a silence which throbbed with the pulse of a considerate
gallantry until the lady had stated her wishes to Katie, she choosing
the apple sauce in preference to the prunes. Then he took up at the
point where he had left off on the interruption of her flight the
evening before.
"I hardly dared hope I should have the esteemed pleasure of meeting a
fellow Southerner--and one so charming--so soon after my advent into
this far Western city," he said. "When our delightful hostess mentioned
the fact I was agreeably surprised, most agreeably. You will pardon me
the liberty I take in paying you compliments at so early a stage of our
mutual acquaintance. But between Southerners meeting so far from home
there is bound to be a bond, as you know." His antique stilted language
had a pleasant flavor for the show girl. She wanted to giggle and yet
she was flattered. "I was on the point of putting more questions last
evening when something intervened--I believe you were called away.
Pardon me again, but might I inquire from what part of our beloved
South you hail?"
"From Georgia," she answered, more or less on a venture. Back in
New York it usually had sufficed when she announced that she was a
Southerner.
"Why, then, that does indeed strengthen the tie between us," he said.
"By birth I am a Carolinian but my dear mother was a Georgian of the
Georgians. She was a Colquit--one of the Savannah Colquits." So, in
another century, a descendant of a Tudor or a Percy might have spoken.
"From what part of that noble old state do you come?"
"Well, not from any place in particular," she parried desperately. "I
mean, not from any regular town, you understand. I was born out in the
country, on a kind of a country place--a farm, sort of."
"Ah, a plantation," he corrected her gently. "In our country we call
them plantations. But near where? And in what county?"
To gain time she spooned her mouth full of apple sauce. This was like
filling in a blank for a census taker, only worse. In a panic she cast
about in that corner of her mind where her knowledge of geography
should have been. She thought of Columbus. There ought to be a Columbus
in Georgia; there just must he. There was one in Ohio, she remembered:
she played it once with a Shubert road show. And one in Indiana, too.
She knew a fellow from there, a chorus man in the Follies. So she took
a chance:
"I was born out from a town called Columbus--about twenty miles out, I
think."
"Oh, Columbus--a lovely and a thriving little city," he said, and she
breathed easier but only for an instant. "I know it well; I know many
of the older families there. If you are from near Columbus you must
know the--"
She broke in on him. These waters grew steadily deeper.
"Well, you see, I left there when I was only just a little thing. All
I can remember is a big white house and a lot of colored peop--" she
caught herself--"a lot of darkies. My parents both died and my--my aunt
took me. That is to say, she wasn't my real aunt; just a close friend
of the family." Swiftly she continued to improvise. "But I always
called her Auntie. She moved up North to live and brought me along with
her. Her name was Smith." (That much was pure inspiration, Smith being
such a good safe common name.) "So that's where I've lived most of my
life--in the North. I don't know scarcely anything about my relatives.
But at heart I've always been a very intense Southerner."
"I can well understand that," he said, and the badgered fictionist
hoped she had steered him back into safer shallows. "A real Southerner
never ceases to be one. But I might have guessed that you had been
reared among Northern influences and Northern surroundings. Your voice,
in speaking, seems to betray the fact."
She experienced a disconcerting shock. Until now, she had thought
practice had made perfect. Besides, she had studied under what she
regarded as first-rate schooling. At the outset of her stage career,
when she first decided to be a Southern girl because being a Southern
girl was popular and somehow had romance in it, she had copied her
dialectics from a leading lady in a musical production, who in turn
had copied the intonations of a stage director who once had been a
successful black-face comedian. And if a man who had been an end man in
a minstrel show for years didn't know how Southerners talked, who did?
For months, now, barring only that nosey Tobe Daly, nobody had shown
suspicion. Possibly Captain Teal read the flustered look on her face
and mistook its purport, for he hastened to add:
"I mean to say that the North has contaminated--or perhaps I should
say, affected--your Southern pronunciation. My hearing is not the
best in the world but, as well as I may hear, it would seem that you
speak certain words with--shall we say, an alien inflection. Pardon me
again--the fault lies with my partial deafness--but I am afraid I did
not quite catch your name last evening?"
She told him.
He bent toward her across the slopped breakfast dishes. He was as eager
and happy as a child with a bright new toy. That was what he would have
put you in mind of--a bearded octogenarian débutante in that pitiable
state we call second childhood, but for the moment tremendously
uplifted by a disclosure held to be of the utmost importance.
"Why, my dear child," he said, "you don't mean to tell me! Where did
you get your middle name? Was Lamar, by any chance, your mother's
maiden name."
She nodded dubiously. As well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. But she
had not hanged herself; in another minute she was to find that out.
She had soundly strengthened herself.
"Then we are related, you and I, my dear. Not closely related, but
even so, there is a relationship. I suppose you might say we are very
distant cousins. Now--"
"I never was the one to bother much about family."
"Ah, but you would have bothered, as you call it, had you but known.
Why, my dear child, you are related to some of the finest and oldest
families in the South. Let me tell you who you are."
They sat there then, she listening and secretly amused at first and
on the whole rather pleased with herself, and he all afire with the
enthusiasm which the aging so often give to trivialities. While his
bacon grew stiffer and his egg grew limper, each according to its
own special chemistry, in the nest of their pooled cold greases, he
ramified a luxuriant family tree, trunk, branch and twig, dowering her
with a vast wealth of kinspeople whose names she knew she never would
be able to remember--Waltours, Bullochs, Gordons, Telfairs, Hustouns.
It seemed that among her forbears commonplace persons had found mighty
few places. They had been statesmen, educators, railroad builders,
gracious belles, warriors, orators, noble mothers, racers of fast
horses, owners of broad fertile acres, kindly masters and mistresses of
hundreds of black slaves, and their memories were a noble inheritance
for her to carry onward with her. Just trying to keep track of the
main lines almost made her head ache.
"My dear young lady," he was saying as they got up together to quit the
dining-room, emptied now of all except them, "we must see more of each
other while we both are in this strange city. We who are of the old
South will never lack for a congenial topic of conversation when we are
thrown together. Northerners might not understand it, but you, with the
legacy of blood that is in your veins--you will understand. After you,
my dear; after you, please." This was when they had gone as far as the
door into the hallway. "And now then," he was saying, as they passed
along the hall, "let me tell you something more about your Grandfather
Lamar's estate and domestic establishment. The house itself I remember
very clearly, as a youth. The Yankee general, Sherman, burnt it. It was
white with...."
That was the proper beginning of as freakish a companionship as that
habitat for curious intimacies and spiteful enmities, Mrs. H. Spicer's,
had ever seen. Of a younger man, of a man who had been indubitable
flesh and blood, Tobe Daly might have felt, in a way of speaking,
jealous. At least he would have been annoyed that an interloper should
all of a sudden come between him and his desires upon this casual
little Doll Tearsheet of the theater who called herself Blossom Lamar
Clayton. But of a man old enough to be the kid's grandfather, almost
old enough to be her great-grandfather--furthermore a pompous,
stilted, stupid, toploftical old dodo who behaved more like something
out of one of these old-timey before-the-war novels than a regular
honest-to-gracious human being--well, to be jealous of such a man would
be just plain downright foolish, that's all. For Tobe an attitude of
contemptuousness appeared to be the indicated mood. So he rode, as the
saying goes, the high horse, and only once did he take advantage of a
favoring opportunity openly to twit the girl regarding her choice of
beaux.
"That will be about all from you," she snapped at him, using back-stage
language. "I'm picking my own friends these days. And you lay off from
handing out your little digs at him across the table meal-times. He
may not be on to you--he's too decent and polite himself to suspect
anybody else of trying to razz him on the sly--but I'm on. So I'm
serving notice on you to quit it because if you don't, the first thing
you know you'll be in a jam with me. I know how to handle your kind. I
was raised that way. I guess it's a kind of a tip-off on the way I was
raised that I had to wait until I met a man who'll be eighty his next
birthday before I met somebody who knows how to treat a girl like she
was a lady."
Tobe, drawing off, flung a parting retort at her.
"Say, kiddo, how did you find out what it feels like to be a lady?"
"I never found out," she said. "I never knew before. But I'm taking
lessons now."
That precisely was what she was doing--taking lessons. For her it
was a new experience to be on terms of confidence with a man holding
her in somewhat the affectionate regard which he might have bestowed
upon a daughter, did he have one. Most of the men with whom she had
come in contact before this coveted to possess her. Here at last was
a relationship in which the carnal played no part; she somehow sensed
that had he been in his prime instead of, as he was, teetering toward
an onrushing senility, Captain Teal, believing her virginal--she
grimaced bitterly to herself at that--yet would have shown her no
fleshly side to his nature. In these present environments he was as
much out of place as Sir Roger de Coverley would be at a Tammany
clambake, but the thing she liked about him was that for all his
age and mental creakiness he nevertheless created out of himself an
atmosphere of innate chivalry in which he moved and by which he went
insulated against all unchaste and vulgarizing contacts. Not that she
put this conception of him in any such words as these. But she was a
woman reared in a business where observation counts, and she could feel
things which she might not always express.
Toward him her own attitude rapidly became more and more protecting as
a thwarted maternal complex in her--that same mothering instinct which
in one shape or another expresses itself in every woman--was roused
and quickened. She was pleased now that she had not obeyed an impulse
which had come to her more than once in that first week of their
acquaintance to confess to him that she was an imposter masquerading
under false colors, making believe to be something she had never been.
Confessing might have eased her conscience, but it would have wrecked
his faith in her and surely it would have marred their partnership,
might even have smashed it up entirely. And she didn't want that to
happen. Oddly, she felt that with each passing day she was going deeper
and deeper into debt to the Captain.
The obligation, though, was mutual; it fell both ways. If from him she
was absorbing a belated respect for the moralities and a desire to put
on certain small grace-notes of culture, she in return was giving the
antiquarian company for long hours which otherwise would have been
his hours of homesickness and loneliness. Probably he was used to
loneliness. He never had married--a fact which he had confided to her
in their first prolonged talk. But beyond question he would, lacking
her companionship, have been most woefully homesick. So she let him
bore her with interminable stories of a time which was to her more
ancient that the Stone Age, to the end that he should not be bored. It
cost her an effort, but from some heretofore unused reservoir of her
shallow being she pumped up the patience to lend a seemingly attentive
ear while he discoursed unendingly and with almost an infantile vanity
upon the glories of the stock from which he sprang. These repetitious
tales of grandeur were pitched in the past tense; she took due note of
that. She fully understood that his time of affluence was behind him.
He didn't tell her so. There was about him no guile. At seventy-nine
he was as innocent a babe as ever strayed in the Hollywood woods.
Nevertheless it would appear that by his code a gentleman did not plead
his poverty. Honorable achievement might be mentioned; but adversity,
even honorable adversity, was not a subject for conversation. But she
saw how threadbare his black frock coat had become and how shiny along
the seams, and how fragile and ready to fall apart his linen was. A
woman would see those things. Adversity was spreading over him like a
mold. But it was a clean mold. Soon, unless his fortunes mended, he
would be downright shabby; but never would he be squalid or careless of
the small niceties. That much was to be sensed as a certainty.
For sake of his peace of mind she secretly was glad that she had
never let him see her smoking cigarettes. It seemed that in his day
ladies had not smoked cigarettes. She sat up through most of one night
letting out hems in her skirts. She concealed from him that she used
a lip-stick and face paint. She derived a tardy satisfaction from the
circumstance that in a feminine world almost universally barbered and
bobbed she, months before she met him, had elected to keep her curls
unshorn. Then her intent had been to conform to the image she was
assuming. Flappers were common among the juveniles and some who could
not be rated among the juveniles likewise flapped; but who knew when
a casting director might require an old-fashioned type of girl for a
costume piece. Her present reward was the old Captain's praise for her
tawny poll. He was much given to saying that a woman's crowning glory
was her hair and deploring the tendency of the newer generation to
shear and shingle until the average woman's head was like the average
boy's.
When he chid her for some slip not in keeping with his venerated ideals
of womanhood on a pedestal he did it so gently that the reproof never
hurt. Frequently it helped. Besides, he never put the fault on her;
always he put it on the accident of her Northern upbringing.
There were lesser things that she learned from him. For instance, that
it was a crime against a noble foodstuff to put sweetening in corn
bread; that it was an even worse offense to the palate when one ate
boiled rice with sugar and milk on it; that a cantaloup never should
be regarded as a dessert but always as an appetizer; that hot biscuit
should be served while hot, not after the cold clamminess of _rigor
mortis_ had set in; that Robert E. Lee was the noblest figure American
life ever had produced or conceivably ever would.
To the Captain this last, though, was not to be numbered among the
lesser verities. It was a very great and outstanding fact and a
fact indisputable by any person inclined to be in the least degree
fair-minded. He had served four years as a soldier under General
Lee--a private at eighteen, a company commander at twenty-one. To have
been a Confederate soldier was a more splendid and a more gallant thing
even than being a member of one of the old families. He told her that
half a dozen times a day. He told her many men of her family had been
Confederate soldiers, too; some of them officers of high rank. She
began, without conscious effort, to think of them as members of her
family who belonged to her and to whom, through the binder of blood
ties, she belonged.
By virtue of a certain adaptability of temperament she did more than
this. That flexible mimetic quality which enabled her to slip easily
into any given rôle lent itself to the putting on of a passable
semblance to a full-flowered creation which might never have existed at
all excepting in Captain Teal's fancy, and one which we know probably
doesn't exist at all nowadays but which all the same was to him very
real, as being the typical well-bred Southern woman of all days and all
times--a sprigged-muslin, long-ringletted, soft-voiced, ultra-maidenly
vision. Physically she differed from this purely abstract picture;
concretely she strove to fit herself into the frame of that canvas. To
herself she had an acceptable excuse for the deception. For one thing,
it was good business. Her venerable admirer should know if anybody did
what real old-fashioned Southern girls were like. And to one who had
modeled after his pet pattern there must, sooner or later, come an
opportunity to play the rôle before the camera.
So, through three weeks of that Hollywood autumn, they waited, each
of them, for the call to work; and while their funds shrank, they met
regularly for meals and they took strolls together and she gave to
him most of her evenings. He spun his droning reminiscences of dusty
years and deplored the changes worked by a devastating modernism, and
she postured and posed and, bit by bit, built up and rounded out her
amended characterization--a self-adopted daughter of the Lamars and
Claytons--and constantly did her level best to look and act and be the
part.
This went on until the end of the third week, at which point Destiny,
operating through the agency of Mr. Andrew Gillespie, took a hand in
their commingled affairs.
Gillespie, coming in off the lot to the head offices, was pleasantly
excited over his new notion. He revealed it with no preamble:
"Say, you two, I've got an idea for livening up that big fight scene a
little bit."
The executive head gave a grunt which terminated in a groan. He craved
to swear; but not even Mr. M. Lobel, of Lobel's Superfilms, Inc., dared
swear now. Employees whose salaries ranged above a certain figure might
be groaned at but could not, with impunity, be sworn at. The ethics
forbade it; also such indulgence might result in the loss of a desired
director or a popular star. And Gillespie appertained to the polar list
of the high salaried. So Mr. Lobel merely groaned.
"What's the matter?" asked Gillespie sharply.
"Nothing, nothing at all, only I am thinking," rejoined Mr. Lobel, with
sorrowful resignation. "I am thinking that only two days ago right here
in this very room you promised me that positively without a question
you would keep down the expensives from now on on this here dam'
costume production which already it has run up into money something
frightful."
"Who said I was going to spend any more money?"
"An idea you just mentioned, Gillespie," stated Mr. Lobel, "and with
you I got to say it that ideas are usually always expensive."
"This thing won't cost anything--it won't cost a cent over a couple of
hundred for salary, costumes, props and all, if it costs that much. And
it'll put a little note of newness, a kind of different touch into that
battle scene; that's what I'm counting on."
"Oh, well, Gillespie, in that case--" The grief was lifting from Mr.
Lobel. He turned to his second in command. "Wasn't I only just now
saying to you, Milton, that Gillespie is the one always for novelties?"
The director chose to disregard the compliment.
"Do you recall that handsome-looking old scout that I brought back with
me here last month from the Southern trip?"
"Like a skinny Santa Claus, huh? Sure, I seen him," said Mr. Lobel,
"and wondered what you was maybe going to do with him."
"Me, too," said Mr. Liebermann, affectionately known among lesser
members of the staff as "Oh-yes-yes Milton." "The one with the w'ite
w'iskez, you mean. Also I wondered about him."
"Well, then, here's the answer," explained Gillespie. "Just a few
minutes ago it came to me. I'm going to give him a bit to play in the
Gettysburg stuff. Did either of you two ever happen to hear of John
Burns?"
"Let me think--the name comes familiar," said Mr. Lobel; "wasn't he a
middle-weight prize-fighter here some few years back? Let's see, who
was it licked that sucker?"
"No, no, no," Gillespie broke in on the revery. "I mean the John Burns
of the poem."
"Sure," assented Mr. Liebermann, who prided himself that although
somewhat handicapped by lack of education in his earlier days he had
broadened his acquaintance with literary subjects after he quit dress
findings and tailors' accessories. "What Gillespie means, Lobel, is the
notorious poet, John Burns."