"It"s no more easy to understand," said Alvina.
"Because there"s no need to understand it," said Miss Pinnegar.
"And is there need to understand the other?"
"Certainly. I can see nothing wrong with him," said Miss Pinnegar.
Alvina went away in silence. This was in the first months after she had given Albert his dismissal. He was at Oxford again--would not return to Woodhouse till Christmas. Between her and the Woodhouse Withams there was a decided coldness. They never looked at her now--nor she at them.
None the less, as Christmas drew near Alvina worked up her feelings.
Perhaps she would be reconciled to him. She would slip across and smile to him. She would take the plunge, once and for all--and kiss him and marry him and bear the little half-fishes, his children. She worked herself into quite a fever of antic.i.p.ation.
But when she saw him, the first evening, sitting stiff and staring flatly in front of him in Chapel, staring away from everything in the world, at heaven knows what--just as fishes stare--then his dishumanness came over her again like an arrest, and arrested all her flights of fancy. He stared flatly in front of him, and flatly set a wall of oblivion between him and her. She trembled and let be.
After Christmas, however, she had nothing at all to think forward to. And it was then she seemed to shrink: she seemed positively to shrink.
"You never spoke to Mr. Witham?" Miss Pinnegar asked.
"He never spoke to me," replied Alvina.
"He raised his hat to me."
"_You_ ought to have married him, Miss Pinnegar," said Alvina. "He would have been right for you." And she laughed rather mockingly.
"There is no need to make provision for me," said Miss Pinnegar.
And after this, she was a long time before she forgave Alvina, and was really friendly again. Perhaps she would never have forgiven her if she had not found her weeping rather bitterly in her mother"s abandoned sitting-room.
Now so far, the story of Alvina is commonplace enough. It is more or less the story of thousands of girls. They all find work. It is the ordinary solution of everything. And if we were dealing with an ordinary girl we should have to carry on mildly and dully down the long years of employment; or, at the best, marriage with some dull school-teacher or office-clerk.
But we protest that Alvina is not ordinary. Ordinary people, ordinary fates. But extraordinary people, extraordinary fates. Or else no fate at all. The all-to-one-pattern modern system is too much for most extraordinary individuals. It just kills them off or throws them disused aside.
There have been enough stories about ordinary people. I should think the Duke of Clarence must even have found malmsey nauseating, when he choked and went purple and was really asphyxiated in a b.u.t.t of it. And ordinary people are no malmsey. Just ordinary tap-water. And we have been drenched and deluged and so nearly drowned in perpetual floods of ordinariness, that tap-water tends to become a really hateful fluid to us. We loathe its out-of-the-tap tastelessness. We detest ordinary people. We are in peril of our lives from them: and in peril of our souls too, for they would d.a.m.n us one and all to the ordinary. Every individual should, by nature, have his extraordinary points. But nowadays you may look for them with a microscope, they are so worn-down by the regular machine-friction of our average and mechanical days.
There was no hope for Alvina in the ordinary. If help came, it would have to come from the extraordinary. Hence the extreme peril of her case. Hence the bitter fear and humiliation she felt as she drudged shabbily on in Manchester House, hiding herself as much as possible from public view. Men can suck the heady juice of exalted self-importance from the bitter weed of failure--failures are usually the most conceited of men: even as was James Houghton. But to a woman, failure is another matter. For her it means failure to live, failure to establish her own life on the face of the earth.
And this is humiliating, the ultimate humiliation.
And so the slow years crept round, and the completed coil of each one was a further heavy, strangling noose. Alvina had pa.s.sed her twenty-sixth, twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth and even her twenty-ninth year. She was in her thirtieth. It ought to be a laughing matter. But it isn"t.
Ach, schon zwanzig Ach, schon zwanzig Immer noch durch"s Leben tanz" ich
Jeder, Jeder will mich kussen Mir das Leben zu versussen.
Ach, schon dreissig Ach, schon dreissig Immer Madchen, Madchen heiss" ich.
In dem Zopf schon graue Harchen Ach, wie schnell vergehn die Jahrchen.
Ach, schon vierzig Ach, schon vierzig Und noch immer Keiner find "sich.
Im gesicht schon graue Flecken Ach, das muss im Spiegel stecken.
Ach, schon funfzig Ach, schon funfzig Und noch immer Keiner will "mich; Soll ich mich mit Banden zieren Soll ich einen Schleier fuhren?
Dann heisst"s, die Alte putzt sich, Sie ist fu"fzig, sie ist fu"fzig.
True enough, in Alvina"s pig-tail of soft brown the grey hairs were already showing. True enough, she still preferred to be thought of as a girl. And the slow-footed years, so heavy in pa.s.sing, were so imperceptibly numerous in their acc.u.mulation.
But we are not going to follow our song to its fatal and dreary conclusion. Presumably, the _ordinary_ old-maid heroine nowadays is destined to die in her fifties, she is not allowed to be the long-liver of the by-gone novels. Let the song suffice her.
James Houghton had still another kick in him. He had one last scheme up his sleeve. Looking out on a changing world, it was the popular novelties which had the last fascination for him. The Skating Rink, like another Charybdis, had all but entangled him in its swirl as he pushed painfully off from the rocks of Throttle-Ha"penny. But he had escaped, and for almost three years had lain obscurely in port, like a frail and finished bark, selling the last of his bits and bobs, and making little splashes in warehouse-oddments. Miss Pinnegar thought he had really gone quiet.
But alas, at that degenerated and shabby, down-at-heel club he met another tempter: a plump man who had been in the music-hall line as a sort of agent. This man had catered for the little shows of little towns. He had been in America, out West, doing shows there.
He had trailed his way back to England, where he had left his wife and daughter. But he did not resume his family life. Wherever he was, his wife was a hundred miles away. Now he found himself more or less stranded in Woodhouse. He had _nearly_ fixed himself up with a music-hall in the Potteries--as manager: he had all-but got such another place at Ickley, in Derbyshire: he had forced his way through the industrial and mining townlets, prospecting for any sort of music-hall or show from which he could get a picking. And now, in very low water, he found himself at Woodhouse.
Woodhouse had a cinema already: a famous Empire run-up by Jordan, the sly builder and decorator who had got on so surprisingly. In James"s younger days, Jordan was an obscure and illiterate n.o.body.
And now he had a motor car, and looked at the tottering James with sardonic contempt, from under his heavy, heavy-lidded dark eyes. He was rather stout, frail in health, but silent and insuperable, was A. W. Jordan.
"I missed a chance there," said James, fluttering. "I missed a rare chance there. I ought to have been first with a cinema."
He admitted as much to Mr. May, the stranger who was looking for some sort of "managing" job. Mr. May, who also was plump and who could hold his tongue, but whose pink, fat face and light-blue eyes had a loud look, for all that, put the speech in his pipe and smoked it. Not that he smoked a pipe: always cigarettes. But he seized on James"s admission, as something to be made the most of.
Now Mr. May"s mind, though quick, was pedestrian, not winged. He had come to Woodhouse not to look at Jordan"s "Empire," but at the temporary wooden structure that stood in the old Cattle Market--"Wright"s Cinematograph and Variety Theatre." Wright"s was not a superior show, like the Woodhouse Empire. Yet it was always packed with colliers and work-la.s.ses. But unfortunately there was no chance of Mr. May"s getting a finger in the Cattle Market pie.
Wright"s was a family affair. Mr. and Mrs. Wright and a son and two daughters with their husbands: a tight old lock-up family concern.
Yet it was the kind of show that appealed to Mr. May: pictures between the turns. The cinematograph was but an item in the program, amidst the more thrilling incidents--to Mr. May--of conjurors, popular songs, five-minute farces, performing birds, and comics. Mr.
May was too human to believe that a show should consist entirely of the dithering eye-ache of a film.
He was becoming really depressed by his failure to find any opening.
He had his family to keep--and though his honesty was of the variety sort, he had a heavy conscience in the direction of his wife and daughter. Having been so long in America, he had acquired American qualities, one of which was this heavy sort of private innocence, coupled with complacent and natural unscrupulousness in "matters of business." A man of some odd sensitiveness in material things, he liked to have his clothes neat and spick, his linen immaculate, his face clean-shaved like a cherub. But alas, his clothes were now old-fashioned, so that their rather expensive smartness was detrimental to his chances, in spite of their scrupulous look of having come almost new out of the bandbox that morning. His rather small felt hats still curved jauntily over his full pink face. But his eyes looked lugubrious, as if he felt he had not deserved so much bad luck, and there were bilious lines beneath them.
So Mr. May, in his room in the Moon and Stars, which was the best inn in Woodhouse--he must have a good hotel--lugubriously considered his position. Woodhouse offered little or nothing. He must go to Alfreton.
And would he find anything there? Ah, where, where in this hateful world was there refuge for a man saddled with responsibilities, who wanted to do his best and was given no opportunity? Mr. May had travelled in his Pullman car and gone straight to the best hotel in the town, like any other American with money--in America. He had done it smart, too. And now, in this grubby penny-picking England, he saw his boots being worn-down at the heel, and was afraid of being stranded without cash even for a railway ticket. If he had to clear out without paying his hotel bill--well, that was the world"s fault. He had to live. But he must perforce keep enough in hand for a ticket to Birmingham. He always said his wife was in London. And he always walked down to Lumley to post his letters. He was full of evasions.
So again he walked down to Lumley to post his letters. And he looked at Lumley. And he found it a d.a.m.n G.o.d-forsaken h.e.l.l of a hole. It was a long straggle of a dusty road down in the valley, with a pale-grey dust and spatter from the pottery, and big chimneys bellying forth black smoke right by the road. Then there was a short cross-way, up which one saw the iron foundry, a black and rusty place. A little further on was the railway junction, and beyond that, more houses stretching to Hathersedge, where the stocking factories were busy. Compared with Lumley, Woodhouse, whose church could be seen sticking up proudly and vulgarly on an eminence, above trees and meadow-slopes, was an idyllic heaven.
Mr. May turned in to the Derby Hotel to have a small whiskey. And of course he entered into conversation.
"You seem somewhat quiet at Lumley," he said, in his odd, refined-showman"s voice. "Have you _nothing at all_ in the way of amus.e.m.e.nt?"
"They all go up to Woodhouse, else to Hathersedge."
"But couldn"t you support some place of your own--some _rival_ to Wright"s Variety?"
"Ay--"appen--if somebody started it."
And so it was that James was inoculated with the idea of starting a cinema on the virgin soil of Lumley. To the women he said not a word. But on the very first morning that Mr. May broached the subject, he became a new man. He fluttered like a boy, he fluttered as if he had just grown wings.
"Let us go down," said Mr. May, "and look at a site. You pledge yourself to nothing--you don"t compromise yourself. You merely have a site in your mind."
And so it came to pa.s.s that, next morning, this oddly a.s.sorted couple went down to Lumley together. James was very shabby, in his black coat and dark grey trousers, and his cheap grey cap. He bent forward as he walked, and still nipped along hurriedly, as if pursued by fate. His face was thin and still handsome. Odd that his cheap cap, by incongruity, made him look more a gentleman. But it did. As he walked he glanced alertly hither and thither, and saluted everybody.
By his side, somewhat tight and tubby, with his chest out and his head back, went the prim figure of Mr. May, reminding one of a consequential bird of the smaller species. His plumbago-grey suit fitted exactly--save that it was perhaps a little tight. The jacket and waistcoat were bound with silk braid of exactly the same shade as the cloth. His soft collar, immaculately fresh, had a dark stripe like his shirt. His boots were black, with grey suede uppers: but a _little_ down at heel. His dark-grey hat was jaunty. Altogether he looked very spruce, though a _little_ behind the fashions: very pink faced, though his blue eyes were bilious beneath: very much on the spot, although the spot was the wrong one.