“Alvina!” Miss Pinnegar called discreetly down the shop. “Alvina! Quick!”
Alvina flew down to peep round the corner of the shop window. There stood the two men, Mr. May like a perky, pink-faced grey bird standing cocking his head in attention to James Houghton, and occasionally catching James by the lapel of his coat, in a vain desire to get a word in, whilst James’s head nodded and his face simply wagged with excited speech, as he skipped from foot to foot, and shifted round his listener.
“Who ever can that common-looking man be?” said Miss Pinnegar, her heart going down to her boots.
“I can’t imagine,” said Alvina, laughing at the comic sight.
“Don’t you think he’s dreadful?” said the poor elderly woman.
“Perfectly impossible. Did ever you see such a pink face?”
“And the braid binding!” said Miss Pinnegar in indignation.
“Father might almost have sold him the suit,” said Alvina.
“Let us hope he hasn’t sold your father, that’s all,” said Miss Pinnegar.
The two men had moved a few steps further towards home, and the women prepared to flee indoors. Of course it was frightfully wrong to be standing peeping in the high street at all. But who could consider the proprieties now?
“They’ve stopped again,” said Miss Pinnegar, recalling Alvina.
The two men were having a few more excited words, their voices just audible.
“I do wonder who he can be,” murmured Miss Pinnegar miserably.
“In the theatrical line, I’m sure,” declared Alvina.
“Do you think so?” said Miss Pinnegar. “Can’t be! Can’t be!”
“He couldn’t be anything else, don’t you think?”
“Oh I can’t believe it, I can’t.”
But now Mr. May had laid his detaining hand on James’s arm. And now he was shaking his employer by the hand. And now James, in his cheap little cap, was smiling a formal farewell. And Mr. May, with a graceful wave of his grey-suede-gloved hand, was turning back to the Moon and Stars, strutting, whilst James was running home on tiptoe, in his natural hurry.
Alvina hastily retreated, but Miss Pinnegar stood it out. James started as he nipped into the shop entrance, and found her confronting him.
“Oh—Miss Pinnegar!” he said, and made to slip by her.
“Who was that man?” she asked sharply, as if James were a child whom she could endure no more.
“Eh? I beg your pardon?” said James, starting back.
“Who was that man?”
“Eh? Which man?”
James was a little deaf, and a little husky.
“The man—” Miss Pinnegar turned to the door. “There! That man!”
James also came to the door, and peered out as if he expected to see a sight. The sight of Mr. May’s tight and perky back, the jaunty little hat and the grey suede hands retreating quite surprised him. He was angry at being introduced to the sight.
“Oh,” he said. “That’s my manager.” And he turned hastily down the shop, asking for his dinner.
Miss Pinnegar stood for some moments in pure oblivion in the shop entrance. Her consciousness left her. When she recovered, she felt she was on the brink of hysteria and collapse. But she hardened herself once more, though the effort cost her a year of her life. She had never collapsed, she had never fallen into hysteria.
She gathered herself together, though bent a little as from a blow, and, closing the shop door, followed James to the living room, like the inevitable. He was eating his dinner, and seemed oblivious of her entry. There was a smell of Irish stew.
“What manager?” said Miss Pinnegar, short, silent, and inevitable in the doorway.
But James was in one of his abstractions, his trances.
“What manager?” persisted Miss Pinnegar.
But he still bent unknowing over his plate and gobbled his Irish stew.
“Mr. Houghton!” said Miss Pinnegar, in a sudden changed voice. She had gone a livid yellow colour. And she gave a queer, sharp little rap on the table with her hand.
James started. He looked up bewildered, as one startled out of sleep.
“Eh?” he said, gaping. “Eh?”
“Answer me,” said Miss Pinnegar. “What manager?”
“Manager? Eh? Manager? What manager?”
She advanced a little nearer, menacing in her black dress. James shrank.
“What manager?” he reechoed. “My manager. The manager of my cinema.”
Miss Pinnegar looked at him, and looked at him, and did not speak. In that moment all the anger which was due to him from all womanhood was silently discharged at him, like a black bolt of silent electricity. But Miss Pinnegar, the engine of wrath, felt she would burst.
“Cinema! Cinema! Do you mean to tell me—” but she was really suffocated, the vessels of her heart and breast were bursting. She had to lean her hand on the table.
It was a terrible moment. She looked ghastly and terrible, with her mask-like face and her stony eyes and her bluish lips. Some fearful thunderbolt seemed to fall. James withered, and was still. There was silence for minutes, a suspension.
And in those minutes, she finished with him. She finished with him forever. When she had sufficiently recovered, she went to her chair, and sat down before her plate. And in a while she began to eat, as if she were alone.
Poor Alvina, for whom this had been a dreadful and uncalled-for moment, had looked from one to another, and had also dropped her head to her plate. James too, with bent head, had forgotten to eat. Miss Pinnegar ate very slowly, alone.
“Don’t you want your dinner, Alvina?” she said at length.
“Not as much as I did,” said Alvina.
“Why not?” said Miss Pinnegar. She sounded short, almost like Miss Frost. Oddly like Miss Frost.
Alvina took up her fork and began to eat automatically.
“I always think,” said Miss Pinnegar, “Irish stew is more tasty with a bit of Swede in it.”
“So do I, really,” said Alvina. “But Swedes aren’t come yet.”
“Oh! Didn’t we have some on Tuesday?”
“No, they were yellow turnips—but they weren’t Swedes.”
“Well then, yellow turnip. I like a little yellow turnip,” said Miss Pinnegar.
“I might have put some in, if I’d known,” said Alvina.
“Yes. We will another time,”
