“Tha’ gornless fule,” she said, “if tha’ doan’t kna’ th’ differ ’atween Lankysheer an’ t’other A’ll show thee. Me got an accent? Me that’s worked like a Fury these last two years to lose my accent? Let me tell you I’ve had the best teachers in Staithley and—”
“Yes,” he interrupted. “The difference is amazing. I realize how you must have worked. It is only a question now of, so to speak, a finishing school. The best teachers in Staithley are, after all, Staithley teachers. I am thinking of London and perhaps not so much of conscious work as unconscious imitation of the speech of the people who are around you.”
“London!” she said. “London! Who are you?”
“I’m a well-known theatrical agent, and I became well-known by making the right people famous. You are one of the right people, but there is work before you. You can’t act yet. You have it all to learn, acting, dancing—”
“Not all,” she said. “I can sing.”
“In a Choral Society,” he said.
“You go and ask Walter Pate,” she said, professing a faith in Walter’s judgment which might, in her circumstances, have been to her credit, but that all Staithley shared that faith.
All Staithley and Mr. Chown who was at once impressed by her giving Walter Pate so confidently as reference for her abilities. “Does Mr. Pate believe in you?” he asked.
“Ask him yourself. Ask him why he keeps me and teaches me and when he’s told you that, ask him a question for me. Ask why he wouldn’t let me go in for the solo competition to-night when he says I’m to sing solo in the ‘Messiah’ at Christmas, and if you get the answer to that, tell me, for I don’t know.”
Chown thought he could tell her without asking, and marked, gladly, her bitterness. If Pate was training this girl, it was because he believed in her. Pate did not take all who came, and wasted no time on fools, but he had not let her sing as a soloist to-night, though she was to sing “The Messiah” in a few months. Why? Because tonight was Chown’s night for being in Staithley and Pate was afraid of Chown. Pate (the dog) had found something in this girl and was keeping it to himself. He imagined he had hidden her safely in that choir, did he? But old Chown had the flair, Chown had spotted the girl’s possession of something Pate did not know her to possess. Pate only knew she had a voice: Chown knew she had the stuff in her that stars were made of. Certainly her voice, a Pate-approved, Pate-produced voice, put an even better complexion on the matter than Chown had suspected; it meant that here was immediate, and not merely future, exploitability. She was ripe at once for musical comedy on tour and when she had shed her accent and picked up some tricks of the trade, he would stun London with her—if he could filch her from the wary Mr. Pate.