“Roofers, high-kickers: the Merry Wives. We begin with dancing and end with dancing. The puppets make their bow to the public before being put away in their boxes ... the curtain falls ... and good night!”
“And then you come!”
“Then I come,” said Jimmy. “Or she.”
“Your invention,” said Harrasford seriously, “is not a music-hall entertainment. It is, undoubtedly, the greatest of all scientific toys, a marvel of modern ingenuity. Do you really want a pair of tights on the top of that? And, first of all, where will you find the woman who will dare?”
“That’s the question, obviously,” admitted Jimmy.
Not that Jimmy must have been in love with Lily, to think of her! It had first just passed through his head, no more. But, on reflecting, it had appeared to him that, in the theater, the beauty of a Lily would add greatly to the success of his attraction. To work his invention in public was different from experimenting with it in his shed in London. It was leaving the laboratory to take its place in life; and it would be a triumph to see the daring trick succeed, every day, at the fixed hour, within a restricted compass; to see it go through the opening above; to see that machine worked by a young girl in whom one would have suspected neither the strength nor the nerve: it would make the public infer the excellence of the engine. Now Jimmy was possessed, above all, of scientific enthusiasm. His machine before everything; not his personal triumph, his machine. He dreamed of giving that added grace to his diagrams; and he considered that there was no disadvantage in allowing science to be introduced by youth and beauty. Moreover, Jimmy was a little heavy for an apparatus in which he had even suppressed the motor, in order to make it more easily manageable ... a lighter body would perhaps be better ... Lily, Lily was the ideal operator; but was she capable of it? Jimmy had confidence in her. Jimmy, certainly, did not allow sentiment to mix in his affairs; there was the weight of his responsibility to consider. But then there was also his meeting with Lily in the dressing-room passage. And he had understood her mental agony. He had seen the gleam in her eyes and so great a display of energy in her face that Jimmy had resolved to try her; and he would judge her much better by the way in which she should face death.
That is what Jimmy explained to the manager, leaving a good deal untold, of course, and Harrasford retired behind the smoke of his cigar, listened, approved.
“It’s your affair, when all is said and done. All you want is success, I suppose? And will you arrange with her ... with your ... what did you say her name was?”
“Lily.”
“There are so many Lilies; and, if somebody has to break his or her back, I had rather it was a Lily, one out of the bunch, than you.”