He even explained to her one day how it was, in his naïve 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 naïveté 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 canal-valleys, it was the places on the hill-brows, like Woodhouse and Hathersedge and Rapton which flourished, while the dreary places down along the canals 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 lasses always on tap, as it were. So he spread his rainbow wings towards the future, and began to say: