of him, wheeling
her machine beside her.

CHAPTER VI

The fortnight that followed upon this meeting was such a strenuous one for
Jimmy, with eighteen hours out of the twenty-four spent at the Astrarium,
among the day and night gangs; his life was such a slavery that he had
hardly time to think of Lily. But he did think of her, for all that. He
seemed to hear her still. Yes, he confessed to himself, he had, perhaps,
believed ... he had, in fact, been told that Lily was Lily no longer ...
But he had just been admiring her magnificent anger. He had seen her eaten
up with ambition, quivering from head to foot, and that brave face lifted
up to his. Twenty times over he was on the point of saying something to
her; but he must see first ... Would she herself be willing? Even though
she had seemed resolved to do anything?

"Meanwhile," thought Jimmy, as on the former occasion, when she was ill,
in Berlin, "how are we to help her out of this ... how?"

And he was caught in the whirlwind again: it was Jimmy here, Jimmy there.
He had to be in ten places at once. Not that he was manager or
stage-manager: his was a special case. Since his return from America,
Jimmy possessed an even more thorough knowledge of all the machinery of
the theater. He had his memorandum-books filled with notes, his head
crammed with new ideas. He had a smattering of everything, a vast amount
of experience picked up in rushing about the world. After his triumphs
with "Bridging the Abyss," the managers, knowing that he had prepared
something different, something strange and terrible, without knowing
exactly what, the managers had bombarded him with offers: Chicago, Berlin,
London. A conversation with Harrasford, whom the Astrarium held body and
soul, had determined the matter otherwise: he would open the Astrarium
with Jimmy and remodel the theater from top to bottom in view of the new
trick, the most sensational that had ever been seen. And Jimmy should make
the necessary alterations, he should have a free hand.

Jimmy accepted. To open in a theater made for himself seemed preferable to
Jimmy to launching his new invention in a closed hall, such as the London
Hippodrome, for instance, which did not provide the aperture in the roof,
the door opening on to the stars, which he required to obtain his effect
upon the crowd. And that was why, in the work at the Astrarium, everything
turned upon Jimmy. He was responsible to both Harrasford and himself