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.”
“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.