The Lost Girl

by D. H. Lawrence

“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-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. 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 damn god-forsaken hell 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 amusement?”

“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?”