CHAPTER II
I
W hen Bob introduced her to him Valerie saw the importance of Jimmy to the Dargaville News. Indeed, Jimmy did more than work with the energy of six boys. He cast a glamour over the littered office and the second-hand machinery and the smelly composing-room. His work was more to him than a job, those circumscribing four walls fell down before his roving eyes, and the cantankerous old printing machine was an enemy after his own heart.
Jimmy was a boy of uncertain fatherhood, and the eldest of a family of five. When he was an inconvenient infant his mother had come to Dargaville dressed as a young widow, and though obviously not of the servant class had begun to keep herself and her child by doing washing. Women who watched her suspected that she set her teeth on this work, and one day one of them asked her if she could sew, and offered to start her as a dressmaker. And Jimmy’s mother became one of the best sewers in the town. Then she married a decent youth employed in Roger Benton’s stores. They had four children, the youngest but a baby, when the father was killed in an accident. The town rallied to help the game little woman whose children were always clean and well behaved, a subscription was got up for her, and she started out again as a dressmaker.
Jimmy had known for years that a great responsibility rested on his shoulders. He had to show the town that it had not wasted its time when it had helped his mother.
17
