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-lasses. 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 hötel--lugubriously considered his
position. Woodhouse offered little or nothing. He must go to Alfreton.
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