“Hullo, Mrs. Trampy!”
“Call me Miss Lily,” she said, in a vexed voice. “That’s the name I’m known by.”
And many of them did know her, in fact, from having talked about her in Fourteenth Street in New York, or in State Street at Sidney, or in the theaters in South Africa, for that story of the whippings had traveled all around the world, under the folds of the Union Jack. Some proposed to take her with them in their show, or to go with her to clean her bike, instead of Glass-Eye:
“Is it a bargain?”
“Yes, I don’t think!” said Lily.
Another, just off for Melbourne, told her that, in Australia, you could find fire-escapes to marry you for half-a-crown. They joked without constraint, in the pros’ smoking-room, a small and dark corner between the house and the stage.... All of them, all the pros, she had them all at her feet; but she didn’t care for that sort and she sent them all to eat coke.
The months all passed alike. She had finished the Bill and Boom tour. She continued in the private music-halls, from north to south, from east to west of England. In spite of Glass-Eye’s impossible cooking and the everlasting ham sandwiches and pork-pies of the railway station refreshment rooms, Lily grew plumper and plumper, her nervous leanness filled out, with pigeon’s eggs and ostrich’s eggs everywhere, in front and behind. She did not kill herself with work. Once, in Glasgow, at a music-hall where, a few weeks earlier, Laurence had had a terrible fall, lying unconscious for two whole hours, the frightened manager said:
“No dangerous tricks, mind! They only get us into trouble!”
Another time, she was given only seven minutes, watch in hand, on the stage.
“Couldn’t you cut that little trick? You know the one I mean,” said the manager.