INTERMEZZO
I
The artistes’ special left Euston at noon that Sunday. The Three Graces were the first to arrive; then the waiting-rooms, until lately deserted, began to fill with silent groups of five or six persons at a time, who had, no doubt, arranged the night before, at the theater, to travel together and avail themselves of the reduction allowed to members of the M. H. A. R. A.: a reduction of at least a third, provided there were five in the party. They now swarmed into the station from every side: pale faces, under huge feathers; wrists hooped round with bangles; breasts bristling with gollywogs and lucky charms. There were little girls with bows over their ears, dressed in plush and velvet and following their Pas and Mas. There were troupes of carpet acrobats, with low foreheads, broad shoulders and bow legs; and profs, bosses and managers, recognizable by the richness of their watch-chains, looked after the luggage. Theater-vans discharged immense basket trunks, marked with letters a foot high—“Brothers This ... Sisters That ... So-and-so Trio ... Miss Such-and-such”—and bearing on the handles, on the yellow labels of the M. H. A. R. A., addresses of Empires and Palaces and of Grand Opera-Houses and Grand Theaters, too, for there were not only “artistes,” but singers, actresses, “chicken-necks,” “woolly-legs,” who rubbed shoulders with the muscular acrobats. All of them crowded round the booking-office; they handed in professional cards, helped one another, among pros; those who were traveling alone borrowed tickets to enable them to get their over-weight luggage labeled: complicated pieces of apparatus, nickel-plated rods wrapped up in sacking, equilibrists’ perches; the coaches, which were carried by assault, were encumbered with hand-luggage, bags, parcels, picture-frames containing photographs for the doors of the theaters, heaped up in the racks, under the seats, in the corridor; and there was a constant fire of “Hullo, girls! Hullo, boys!”
The Three Graces, standing before the carriage-door, now that their things were settled, watched this tumult sadly, especially Thea. What was it? Nunkie’s absence? No, but poor Lily had been kicked out by her husband, so they heard, and turned out by her mother as well: was it possible? Lily was dead or vanished, they didn’t know which; they were told about it at the theater; a stagehand had met her near St. Martin’s Lane, in a small street, with her hair undone and her hat on the back of her head, crying, biting her handkerchief, drunk, apparently, and running in the direction of the Thames. And, since then, they had had no news of her.
“Poor Lily, what can she have done, what can have happened?” sighed Thea. “Poor Lily, she was always so nice!”
Thea could have cried for sadness.
The start caused a diversion. The collector punched the tickets: