None the less he sallied out with all his old bright perkiness, the next time he had to meet James. He hadn’t yet broached the question of costs. When would he be able to get an advance from James? He must hurry the matter forward. He brushed his crisp, curly brown hair carefully before the mirror. How grey he was at the temples! No wonder, dear me, with such a life! He was in his shirtsleeves. His waistcoat, with its grey satin back, fitted him tightly. He had filled out—but he hadn’t developed a corporation. Not at all. He looked at himself sideways, and feared dismally he was thinner. He was one of those men who carry themselves in a birdie fashion, so that their tail sticks out a little behind, jauntily. How wonderfully the satin of his waistcoat had worn! He looked at his shirt-cuffs. They were going. Luckily, when he had had the shirts made he had secured enough material for the renewing of cuffs and neckbands. He put on his coat, from which he had flicked the faintest suspicion of dust, and again settled himself to go out and meet James on the question of an advance. He simply must have an advance.
He didn’t get it that day, none the less. The next morning he was ringing for his tea at six o’clock. And before ten he had already flitted to Lumley and back, he had already had a word with Mr. Bows, about that pitch, and, overcoming all his repugnance, a word with the quiet, frail, sad negro, about Alfreton fair, and the chance of buying some sort of collapsible building, for his cinematograph.
With all this news he met James—not at the shabby club, but in the deserted reading-room of the so-called Artisans Hall—where never an artisan entered, but only men of James’s class. Here they took the chessboard and pretended to start a game. But their conversation was rapid and secretive.
Mr. May disclosed all his discoveries. And then he said, tentatively:
“Hadn’t we better think about the financial part now? If we’re going to look round for an erection”—curious that he always called it an erection—“we shall have to know what we are going to spend.”
“Yes—yes. Well—” said James vaguely, nervously, giving a glance at Mr. May. Whilst Mr. May abstractedly fingered his black knight.
“You see at the moment,” said Mr. May, “I have no funds that I can represent in cash. I have no doubt a little later—if we need it—I can find a few hundreds. Many things are due—numbers of things. But it is so difficult to collect one’s dues, particularly from America.” He lifted his blue eyes to James Houghton. “Of course we can delay for some time, until I get my supplies. Or I can act just as your manager—you can employ me—”
He watched James’s face. James looked down at the chessboard. He was fluttering with excitement. He did not want a partner. He wanted to be in this all by himself. He hated partners.
“You will agree to be manager, at a fixed salary?” said James hurriedly and huskily, his fine fingers slowly rubbing each other, along the sides.
“Why yes, willingly, if you’ll give me the option of becoming your partner upon terms of mutual agreement, later on.”
James did not quite like this.
“What terms are you thinking of?” he asked.
“Well, it doesn’t matter for the moment. Suppose for the moment I enter an engagement as your manager, at a salary, let us say, of—of what, do you think?”
“So much a week?” said James pointedly.
“Hadn’t we better make it monthly?”
The two men looked at one another.
“With a month’s notice on either hand?” continued Mr. May.
“How much?” said James, avaricious.
Mr. May studied his own nicely kept hands.
“Well, I don’t see how I can do it under twenty pounds a month. Of course it’s ridiculously low. In America I never accepted less than three hundred dollars a month, and that was my poorest and lowest. But of cauce, England’s not America—more’s the pity.”
But James was shaking his head in a vibrating movement.
“Impossible!” he replied shrewdly. “Impossible! Twenty pounds a month? Impossible. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t think of it.”
“Then name a figure. Say what you can think of,” retorted Mr. May, rather annoyed by this shrewd, shaking head of a doddering provincial, and by his own sudden collapse into mean subordination.
“I can’t make it more than ten pounds a month,” said James sharply.
“What!” screamed Mr. May. “What am I to live on? What is my wife to live on?”
“I’ve got to make it pay,” said James. “If I’ve got to make it pay, I must keep down expenses at the beginning.”
“No—on the contrary. You must be prepared to spend something at the beginning. If you go in a pinch-and-scrape fashion in the beginning, you will get nowhere at all. Ten pounds a month! Why it’s impossible! Ten pounds a month! But how am I to live?”
James’s head still vibrated in a negative fashion. And the two men came to no agreement that morning. Mr. May went home more sick and weary than ever, and took his whiskey more biliously. But James was lit with the light of battle.
Poor Mr. May had to gather together his wits and his sprightliness for
