The Lost Girl Part 24

Miss Pinnegar stayed last, waiting for Alvina. And Alvina, in her excitement, waited for Mr. May and her father.

Mr. May fairly pranced into the empty hall.

"Well!" he said, shutting both his fists and flourishing them in Miss Pinnegar's face. "How did it go?"

"I think it went very well," she said.

"Very well! I should think so, indeed. It went like a house on fire.

What? Didn't it?" And he laughed a high, excited little laugh.

James was counting pennies for his life, in the cash-place, and dropping them into a Gladstone bag. The others had to wait for him.

At last he locked his bag.

"Well," said Mr. May, "done well?"

"Fairly well," said James, huskily excited. "Fairly well."

"Only fairly? Oh-h!" And Mr. May suddenly picked up the bag. James turned as if he would s.n.a.t.c.h it from him. "Well! Feel that, for fairly well!" said Mr. May, handing the bag to Alvina.

"Goodness!" she cried, handing it to Miss Pinnegar.

"Would you believe it?" said Miss Pinnegar, relinquishing it to James. But she spoke coldly, aloof.

Mr. May turned off the gas at the meter, came talking through the darkness of the empty theatre, picking his way with a flash-light.

"C'est le premier pas qui coute," he said, in a sort of American French, as he locked the doors and put the key in his pocket. James tripped silently alongside, bowed under the weight of his Gladstone bag of pennies.

"How much have we taken, father?" asked Alvina gaily.

"I haven't counted," he snapped.

When he got home he hurried upstairs to his bare chamber. He swept his table clear, and then, in an expert fashion, he seized handfuls of coin and piled them in little columns on his board. There was an army of fat pennies, a dozen to a column, along the back, rows and rows of fat brown rank-and-file. In front of these, rows of slim halfpence, like an advance-guard. And commanding all, a stout column of half-crowns, a few stoutish and important florin-figures, like general and colonels, then quite a file of shillings, like so many captains, and a little cloud of silvery lieutenant sixpences. Right at the end, like a frail drummer boy, a thin stick of threepenny pieces.

There they all were: burly dragoons of stout pennies, heavy and holding their ground, with a screen of halfpenny light infantry, officered by the immovable half-crown general, who in his turn was flanked by all his staff of florin colonels and shilling captains, from whom lightly moved the nimble sixpenny lieutenants all ignoring the wan, frail Joey of the threepenny-bits.

Time after time James ran his almighty eye over his army. He loved them. He loved to feel that his table was pressed down, that it groaned under their weight. He loved to see the pence, like innumerable pillars of cloud, standing waiting to lead on into wildernesses of unopened resource, while the silver, as pillars of light, should guide the way down the long night of fortune. Their weight sank sensually into his muscle, and gave him gratification.

The dark redness of bronze, like full-blooded fleas, seemed alive and pulsing, the silver was magic as if winged.

CHAPTER VII

NATCHA-KEE-TAWARA

Mr. May and Alvina became almost inseparable, and Woodhouse buzzed with scandal. Woodhouse could not believe that Mr. May was absolutely final in his horror of any sort of coming-on-ness in a woman. It could not believe that he was only _so_ fond of Alvina because she was like a sister to him, poor, lonely, hara.s.sed soul that he was: a pure sister who really hadn't any body. For although Mr. May was rather fond, in an epicurean way, of his own body, yet other people's bodies rather made him shudder. So that his grand utterance on Alvina was: "She's not physical, she's mental."

He even explained to her one day how it was, in his nave fashion.

"There are two kinds of friendships," he said, "physical and mental.

The physical is a thing of the moment. Of cauce you quite _like_ the individual, you remain quite nice with them, and so on,--to keep the thing as decent as possible. It _is_ quite decent, so long as you keep it so. But it is a thing of the moment. Which you know. It may last a week or two, or a month or two. But you know from the beginning it is going to end--quite finally--quite soon. You take it for what it is. But it's so different with the mental friendships.

_They_ are lasting. They are eternal--if anything human (he said yuman) ever is eternal, ever _can_ be eternal." He pressed his hands together in an odd cherubic manner. He was quite sincere: if man ever _can_ be quite sincere.

Alvina was quite content to be one of his mental and eternal friends, or rather _friendships_--since she existed _in abstractu_ as far as he was concerned. For she did not find him at all physically moving. Physically he was not there: he was oddly an absentee. But his navete roused the serpent's tooth of her bitter irony.

"And your wife?" she said to him.

"Oh, my wife! Dreadful thought! _There_ I made the great mistake of trying to find the two in one person! And _didn't_ I fall between two stools! Oh dear, _didn't_ I? Oh, I fell between the two stools beautifully, beautifully! And _then_--she nearly set the stools on top of me. I thought I should never get up again. When I was physical, she was mental--Bernard Shaw and cold baths for supper!--and when I was mental she was physical, and threw her arms round my neck. In the morning, mark you. Always in the morning, when I was on the alert for business. Yes, invariably. What do you think of it? Could the devil himself have invented anything more trying?

Oh dear me, don't mention it. Oh, what a time I had! Wonder I'm alive. Yes, really! Although you smile."

Alvina did more than smile. She laughed outright. And yet she remained good friends with the odd little man.

He bought himself a new, smart overcoat, that fitted his figure, and a new velour hat. And she even noticed, one day when he was curling himself up cosily on the sofa, that he had pale blue silk underwear, and purple silk suspenders. She wondered where he got them, and how he afforded them. But there they were.

James seemed for the time being wrapt in his undertaking--particularly in the takings part of it. He seemed for the time being contented--or nearly so, nearly so. Certainly there was money coming in. But then he had to pay off all he had borrowed to buy his erection and its furnishings, and a bulk of pennies sublimated into a very small .s.d. account, at the bank.

The Endeavour was successful--yes, it was successful. But not overwhelmingly so. On wet nights Woodhouse did not care to trail down to Lumley. And then Lumley was one of those depressed, negative spots on the face of the earth which have no pull at all. In that region of sharp hills with fine hill-brows, and shallow, rather dreary ca.n.a.l-valleys, it was the places on the hill-brows, like Woodhouse and Hathersedge and Rapton which flourished, while the dreary places down along the ca.n.a.ls existed only for work-places, not for life and pleasure. It was just like James to have planted his endeavour down in the stagnant dust and rust of potteries and foundries, where no illusion could bloom.

He had dreamed of crowded houses every night, and of raised prices.

But there was no probability of his being able to raise his prices.

He had to figure lower than the Woodhouse Empire. He was second-rate from the start. His hope now lay in the tramway which was being built from Knarborough away through the country--a black country indeed--through Woodhouse and Lumley and Hathersedge, to Rapton.

When once this tramway-system was working, he would have a supply of youths and la.s.ses always on tap, as it were. So he spread his rainbow wings towards the future, and began to say:

"When we've got the trams, I shall buy a new machine and finer lenses, and I shall extend my premises."

Mr. May did not talk business to Alvina. He was terribly secretive with respect to business. But he said to her once, in the early year following their opening:

"Well, how do you think we're doing, Miss Houghton?"

"We're not doing any better than we did at first, I think," she said.

"No," he answered. "No! That's true. That's perfectly true. But why?

They seem to like the programs."

"I think they do," said Alvina. "I think they like them when they're there. But isn't it funny, they don't seem to want to come to them.

I know they always talk as if we were second-rate. And they only come because they can't get to the Empire, or up to Hathersedge.

We're a stop-gap. I know we are."

Mr. May looked down in the mouth. He c.o.c.ked his blue eyes at her, miserable and frightened. Failure began to frighten him abjectly.

"Why do you think that is?" he said.

"I don't believe they like the turns," she said.

"But _look_ how they applaud them! _Look_ how pleased they are!"

"I know. I know they like them once they're there, and they see them. But they don't come again. They crowd the Empire--and the Empire is only pictures now; and it's much cheaper to run."