Jimmy’s plans resulted from intuition rather than real knowledge; but learning has nothing to do with the creative spirit. Now Jimmy, although he was unaware of it, possessed the genius that invents; and his comparative ignorance did him no great harm: his imagination, unhampered by theories, was all the freer for it. Jimmy had the higher instinct of the born machinist, who is content to use a bit of string where a school-bred engineer will cram every manner of gear, chains, pulleys and windlasses. It is true that he was assisted in his research by many experiments already tried elsewhere; but he dreamed of something different and, in the calm of Whitcomb Mansions, had studied without respite.
“Pooh!” he reflected. “All those sails, all that weight! Boxes heaped one on the top of the other—cubes to catch the air—a man sitting inert in a basket, with his hand on a lever and a crank: it’s as though one tried to make a stuffed bird fly! And what becomes of the man in all that: the back push, the daring stroke? The man has got to be the backbone of the machine, with his quick balancings, his bendings, which are worth more than any wheelwork.”
And, always, his inventive imagination built on without respite, pulled down, built up again.
His daily success at the Hippodrome did not divert him from the end he had in view. “Bridging the Abyss,” for him, was but a means of making money, to enable him to climb higher. He thought of nothing but that: getting on, climbing higher; and this obsession of the future made him scorn or rather overlook the temptations of the stage. He would only have had to choose among the lot. All, down to the great Parisienne, would have jumped at a champagne supper with Jimmy, the famous bill-topper, the man who looked like the swells in the front boxes and who made such a “pile.” But Jimmy knew all about that: he left the theater in the quietest way, took a glass of ale with the boys or girls at the Crown, had a light supper and went home. And sometimes a frenzy for work made him rush to his table, as though the band of the Hippodrome were shaking his nerves:
“Get to work,” he would growl, “get to work, cheesy brain!”
“But, Pa, I can’t!”
“But you’ve got to, my little siree!” he insisted, with a flickering smile.
And he read treatises, made diagrams; took up his compasses again ... or else stayed as he was, with his chin in his hand, plunged in his thoughts, his mind soaring above London.... He seemed to fly over the huge city, whose distant rumbling rose up to him, similar to the roar of the sea.... Oh, he would succeed, he knew he would! And he felt within himself an increasing will of so tenacious a character that he could have swung it, so it seemed to him, like a battering-ram against the obstacle to be overcome and then:
“Damn it!” he would growl, banging his fist on the table. “That thief in the night! What a sweet wife he got hold of! Poor Lily, to fall into such hands! Ah, yes, she would have done better to stay at home!”
And Jimmy got to work again, to forget Lily; and he kept on thinking of her: