Part 7

Immediately there was something about the newcomer to catch the fancy and set the mind to work. There was more than a something, there was a great deal. It was not so much that he wore white whiskers and wore his white hair rather long. Hollywood is one spot where whiskers--a vast number of them--command favorable attention and have a money value. The reckless partisan who swore never to trim until William Jennings Bryan had been elected president comes into his belated own there. After all these long and cumbered years he has at last his place in the sun--as a benevolent uncle, or a veteran mining prospector, or the shaggy but kind-hearted keeper of the lighthouse on the coast where the little child drifts ashore in the storm, lashed to a mast, or the aged wanderer of the waste-lands who in Reel Three turns up and in Reel Six turns out to be the long-lost father of the heroine. Or what not.

So it was not this new boarder's whiskers and his long hair which centered the collective eye of the dining-room so much as it was his tall, slim, almost straight old figure, his ruddy and distinguished but rather vacuous face, his high white collar and black string tie, his black frock coat with the three upper buttons of the waistcoat unfastened so that the genteel white pleated shirt bosom ballooned out of the vent, his slim "low quarter" shoes. More than these it was his bearing, so courtly, which meant so old-fashioned, and most of all it was the sweeping low salute he rendered to Mrs. Scofield and to Miss Clayton before he sat down and drew up. It was as though he said: "As examples of fair womanhood I render tribute to you both. Through you I honor all the gracious sex of which you two are such shining ornaments."

You almost could hear him saying it; your imagination told you this was precisely the sort of high-flown, hifalutin language he would use, and use it naturally, too. For here was a type come to life, a character bit in the flesh. And that's a rare bird to find even in Hollywood where types do so freely abound.

He asked Miss Clayton a question or two, and she made hurried and, one might have thought, confused answers before she escaped to the veranda where Tobe Daly, that canny squire of dames, was holding space for her alongside him on the top step.

"Gee," began Tobe, "did you make it?"

"Make what?" she asked, settling and smoothing her skirts.

"The old pappy guy, who else?"

"He's nice," said Miss Clayton, still engaged in the business of drawing the skirt down over her knees.

"He's a freak," said Mr. Daly. He cocked a shrewd appraising squint at her side face. "Say, I was piping it off through the front window when the old battle-ax towed him in and interduced him to you gals, and the way it looked to me you kind of ducked soon as he began shooting conversation at you."

"Never mind that part of it," she countered. "Who is he and where did he come from? Or, don't you know? All I caught was his name. Teal, something like that."

"Teal, huh? Swell name for an old duck, I'll claim. Jimmy Hoster yonder was just giving me the low-down on him. It seems like Chief Gillespie--you know, director with the Lobel outfit--well, Gillespie he piped him off down there in Alabama or wherever it was down South that he's had his bunch on location, shooting stuff for that new costume picture that Winifred Desiree and Basil Derby are being featured in. So Gil brought him along with 'em when they got back this morning, figuring, I guess, on using him in that picture or else in something else.

"They had him over on the Lobel lot this afternoon and they tell me he went big just on his looks. Well, you got to hand it to that Gillespie--he's some picker. If that old boy only had one of these here white goatees on his chin instead of those mountain-goat drapes, he'd be the most perfect Southern Colonel ever I saw in the fillums or on the talking stage, either one. But he's the first one ever I saw--you know what I mean, O. K. in every touch--outside of a book or a show shop. I figure quite a lot of 'em around here will be wanting him."

"I wish somebody would decide they wanted me," she said. "This just hanging round and hanging round gets on my nerves--not to speak of other reasons."

"Well, ain't I told you I'm on the look-out for something for you? Ain't I told you all about what I been doing 'specially on your account? But with a million of these janes from all over the country swarming in here and fighting for every chance that turns up, it's kind of hard making an opening for a new hand."

"If I could just get on once, even as an extra, I'd show 'em something."

"If you'd listen to reason, kid, and be good to me"--he sank his voice--"you know, be a real little cozy pal, I'll guarantee you'll be something better than an extra. A fella likes to be a good fella and a good sport and all, and go through for somebody, but what I say is he's due his reward. Now, ain't he?"

The girl seemed not to have heard him.

"He's nice," she said, as though to herself. "I'll bet anything he's 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.