He called a little trick a performance which it had cost her eighteen months’ hard practice and no end of bruises to learn. Lily did not wait to be asked twice. She cut as desired and thought it a jolly lot easier to trot round quietly, as though out for a ride, with pretty smiles to the audience. She ended by paying more attention to her dresses than to her work:
“It’s not so much what one does,” she said, “as the way one does it.”
The sympathy with which she was surrounded unmanned the Spartan in her. She strove to please, no longer gave her performance for herself, like a machine, unerring and exact. Already in a few months, she was spoiled. She looked for adventitious successes. She said, “The audience is very cold at Birmingham,” because she was not asked out to supper, and, “They do like artistes at Sheffield, gee!” because a gentleman had sent her champagne and flowers in her dressing-room.
In the towns where she played three times a day—a matinée and two night turns—she gave half of her performance, cut whatever was dangerous or tiring. She never practised now; just went down in the morning to fetch her letters at the theater, where she loved receiving them, post-cards especially, which any one could read. She said to the jossers:
“Send me lots; talk about motor-cars and champagne suppers: that drives the pros wild.”
She left them lying on the table, or else walked about on the stage, with her letters in her hand, like a lady overwhelmed with offers, with invitations. If, by any chance, she went to the practice at the end of the week, it was to display her hat, her new boots; and she laughed to herself when she saw the artistes, each on his carpet, fagging away like mad. She felt like a fine lady visiting a boarding-school, among those little girls practising their flip-flaps or gluing themselves to the wall to try their back-bendings. The pride of a Marjutti, who, they said, tortured her spinal column to achieve a double knot; the inordinate ambition of a Laurence, risking her life for the pleasure of risking it, were things which she did not understand. And then, all those accidents! Dolly Pawnee, the other day, had broken her arm at the New York Hippodrome; the Gilson girl had fallen on her head at Budapest. They were mad, thought Lily, to do all that without being obliged to! No, no; no more of that for her! The last thing she wanted was to spoil her face, seeing that she had nothing but her smile to keep her. And Lily grew timid, looked upon herself more and more as a very precious little thing. She gave herself terrible airs on rehearsal day; thought the stage too slippery, or too small. Lily wanted a stage thirty feet wide, no less; she who, in the old days, at a gesture from Pa, would have performed her whole turn, including the head-on-the-saddle, on the top of a cab or on the Stoke Newington pavement. Formerly, she used to think everything good, did not know what fatigue meant; now, in the middle of her turn, she would say to herself, sometimes with a feeling of discouragement:
“I’ve only done half. I’ve still got this and that to do.”
And the audience itself seemed to act as her confederate. When she missed one of her tricks, Lily would lay her bike on the stage, step down to the footlights, bow with a confused air, beg pardon with a smile and receive a reassuring round of applause. Lily loved these refined audiences: her audiences, as she said; not the matinée audiences, with seats at reduced prices: to see your grocer or your butcher in the front boxes was rotten; and those people gave themselves such airs. A cheap way of doing the grand!
And the landladies spoiled her, too; those worthy souls who treated her as their own daughter.
“And a jolly sight better!” thought Lily.