Oh, how she longed for revenge when she thought of that! Oh, if she could only have served them out somehow! If she could get The Performer Annual to send her those questions to answer: “Q. Your favorite town? Your favorite audience? Your idea of marriage? Your pet aversion?” wouldn’t she give it them hot, just! She thought of having her biography written, the real one. She herself sometimes jotted down things she remembered, on bits of paper, on the backs of envelopes, in her dressing-room; arranged her picture post-cards in order; called that writing her memoirs. She would crush them with her successes, give names and dates: that lord who wanted to travel with her, the fifty-pound diamond brooch he had given her. And bouquets, chocolates, sweets ... by the cart-load! That stage-manager who cried when she went away! All, all in love with her: yes, those and ever so many more!
She had so much to say that she did not know where to begin. She knocked up against too many people, men and women, without counting monkeys, parrots, dogs, cats, ponies, elephants; it all ended by getting mixed up in her head, like the theaters and the towns. She grew quite bewildered, among so many different things. She had seen everything and done everything. Once, during a week when she was “resting,” she had helped her landlady, who kept a public-house, to draw the beer and had waited on the customers, with her fifty-pound diamond brooch at her throat.
At a benefit performance, one night, when they were drinking champagne on the stage, actors, singers, artistes, all together, her pink tights had excited the dress-coats. Lily had been “pressed in company,” that is to say, surrounded till she did not know which way to turn, while her time was pretty well taken up with saying, “Paws off!” before, behind, on every side. She had triumphed at galas, above a tumult of heads and parasols: at Roundhay Park, among other places, beneath the motto, “Let Leeds flourish!” Feeling anxious about her future, she had consulted a “Zanzig” at Earl’s Court. Each week brought its surprises, its fresh knowledge. Lily learned something every day: “If you see a lamb in the fields with its head turned toward you, that’s lucky; if you see its tail first, it’s a sign of bad luck,” and the way of holding your hands, of placing your fingers, of whispering certain words in certain circumstances.
She collected halfpennies with holes in them. In Ireland, she had kissed the Blarney stone and picked shamrock in the ruins. She had lost her little mother-of-pearl hunchback in the labyrinth of underground passages at the Blackpool Tower Circus. The loss of this lucky charm had damped her spirits for a week. And her profits were small and her “exes” constantly increasing: tips to the call-boy, who cleaned her bike; tips to the stage-manager; half-crowns and five shillings in every direction. As soon as she had put a trifle by, a week without an engagement made her hard-up again. Though she traveled at reduced fares and contented herself with a ham sandwich or a slice of pork-pie on the road, she would never, never be able to repay Jimmy that money: she had not even paid Glass-Eye yet! Her dresses for on and off the stage swallowed up everything. And yet she couldn’t go about naked, like Lady Godiva!
And time passed and passed. Lily was growing old: she was eighteen! There were girls of her age who were already beyond work, used up, like that girl contortionist who had just been cut open for a tumor; and Lily had as yet achieved nothing! Oh, she ought to have signed for America or Australia, or else for Russia, of which she had heard wonders—Poland, the Parisienne, had just returned from there covered with diamonds—theaters that played all night and did not close till dawn, to the clicking of champagne-glasses. Lily dreamed of it, ecstatically: England was no good to her now. The New Trickers, with their own cheap Lily, were working her idea on the Bill and Boom Tour! If only she could have the continent! They were talking of a new music-hall which Harrasford was to open in Paris. He meant to make a palace of it, they said, and he was also stretching out his arm toward Antwerp, Cologne, Lyons, Marseilles, a continental trust....
“That’s what I ought to have,” thought Lily.
Her present life seemed empty, notwithstanding its excitement: it was like the sound of a band; nothing remained of it. Departures, constant departures from one town to another, always leaving, never staying. But for Glass-Eye’s company she would have cried, sometimes, for sheer melancholy, as at the sight of those really loving couples in the boarding-houses, on the stage itself; those babies in the arms of their Mas; it made her heart ache; the thought of it pursued her like the call of distant bells, while the train rushed into the darkness.