“The New Trickers are there,” said Jimmy, “and are going to remain. Listen to me, what I have to propose to you is very serious: it’s something else.”
“What else? You know that’s all I’m good for ... to go round and round ... you know it quite well!” cried Lily, her face drawn with impotent anger. “I know what you can do. Look here: would you like to be above the New Trickers? Would you like to top the bill? Are you ready to do everything for that?”
“May God forgive you for mocking at me!”
“Will you top the bill?” asked Jimmy again, in an accent that sent a thrill down her back. “Answer me: yes or no?”
“Yes,” cried Lily. “My life, everything, damn it!”
AMONG THE STARS
I
Jimmy was greatly excited when Lily had given him her answer and he led her to the Astrarium. To understand his feelings fully, one would have to know his life since the evening when, at Whitcomb Mansions, he had looked Lily in the face and told her no. He realized then, from the emotion which he experienced, how great a place Lily had filled in his heart, the little passenger from New York to Liverpool; the girl who came to see him in his shop in Gresse Street; the Lily whom he dreamed of “helping out of that” when he saw her on the stage, from up in the fly-galleries; the one whom he had tried to take away from Trampy; the poor sick girl in Berlin; those Lilies whom he felt moving inside him, around him, like a breath of April; all those Lilies, he had broken with them all! Oh, it was hard! Lily should never, never know what courage he had needed to keep silent, he, the man she thought so cold, nor what a tempest ... oh, if she could only have seen into him! And then ... he had not met her again....
He, after his engagement at the Hippodrome, went off to America; Lily traveled on her part. Also, he was a prey to his fixed idea, his great project, always: his ambition increased, the same longing for success which, formerly, in Gresse Street, had made him spend nights in study after days of toil, at the time when, under Lily’s influence, his roaming thoughts built castles in the air, when he felt awakening within himself his racial instinct as an heroic seeker after profitable adventures.
And his ambition took great strides forward, was not limited, as in Clifton’s case, to upsetting the fat freaks or training New Zealanders to spin round and round. He dreamed of a useful life, based upon his own efforts. He wished to found his future upon a discovery of his own, which had long haunted him and which had ripened in Berlin, between his flights in “Bridging the Abyss,” a thing at which he worked incessantly in Whitcomb Mansions; and, this time, the stage prowlers, should not steal his idea. To begin with, apart from a few pieces of technical advice which he received from a friend of his, an engineer, nobody knew about it; and Jimmy felt sure that, even when the apparatus was at work, he would not fall a victim to the confraternity who, ever on the watch for new tricks, study them, judge of the weak points, copy whatever suits them, including scenery and music, and, sometimes, succeed in earning more money than the inventor himself; he would have nothing to fear from the Trampies, the pirates, the plagiarists, those plagues of the profession. Certainly, there were great bill-toppers, creators of sensations who discovered new things—terrifying feats of gyroscopic balancing, or flights through space, based upon principles of ballistics, assisted by the spiral spring—daring risk-alls, nerve-shakers, purveyors of thrills, turning to intelligent account the seductive power which dangerous feats exercise upon the public. Jimmy knew all about that. He was not the only one; but, this time, it was a question of a scientific application which would, beyond a doubt, place him at the head of that pick of the music-hall. It would be pure science and patient calculation: an algebraical hippogriff, with pluck in the saddle.