“Yes, dear.”
As for the apprentices, he would see to that to-morrow. Ma suggested that her sister-in-law’s daughter might do, but Pa wouldn’t have relatives at any price—blubbering for a smacking bestowed upon their daughters—he knew all about them, thank you. Let such sheep bleat elsewhere. No, give him strangers. He could be freer with them and get as many as he wished. An advertisement in The Daily Mail—“Wanted, young girls for trick cycling,” followed by the address—fetched them the same day. The pavement before the house was blocked with white aprons, sailor-hats and tam-o’-shanters. There were consumptive-looking girls, long hanks of girls, chunky girls, all crowding outside the door, until the landlady drove them away with her broom and threatened to do as much for Pa and Ma if all the street-arabs of London were to go on soiling her nice white steps.
Pa, for that matter, found nothing in the bunch, not one in twenty that was any good; or else they made exhorbitant demands—two shillings a day those guttersnipes expected—as though shillings were to be had for the asking! But why look so far? There were girls, sometimes, at the back entrances of the theaters: stage-struck kids who devoured Lily with their eyes and looked at Pa as though to say, “Take me, take me!” That’s what he wanted, damn it, girls who had the business in their blood and who wouldn’t go whining over a professional slap or two, which he dared say he’d have to distribute to make up for lost time.
“TAKE ME, TAKE ME!”
The first girl whom he engaged he had already seen gazing ecstatically at Lily, as they left the theater, far away down the Mile End Road, and he saw her again, one morning, in front of his house in the very heart of London! He could not believe his eyes. She must have followed his scent, slept on the threshold like a lost dog. Her Pa? Gone away. Her Ma? Dead. Her name? Maud. Her age? Didn’t know. Born somewhere in the immensity of Whitechapel, towheaded, round-faced. Nothing to eat for two days. She’d do! He would go to the police-court, get the license later; meantime, he netted her and that was one!
As regards the others, he had to make a selection. He chose them by preference in families which were overstocked with brats, so that one more or less, in the heap, made no difference. He got one this way; that made two! Next, a “local girl,” seized with ambition, came and offered herself. Three! He found two others: a little Beak Street shop-girl and a Shoreditch Jewess. That made five. It did not take him long to judge the girls. He gave them a few days’ trial before signing a contract; and what an anxiety for them, Mr. Clifton’s final decision! If one trembled too much, was caught holding Pa’s shoulder for no reason, for fear of falling, or blubbered because of a scratch on the skin, her fate was settled.
“Pack up, my lady,” Pa would say quite calmly.
There was no getting out of it: off she had to go, before dinner, and home she went, through the gloomy streets, after a brief glimpse of paradise.
He had to replace some of them: they were slack; or else, independent at times, they looked at him for the least push, as if they would fly at his throat. He asked himself whether he wouldn’t be compelled to get some over from Germany or else to pick up on the highroads, in the Gipsies’ caravans, children with skins tanned like donkeys’, a troupe of blackamoors on wheels, who, perched up on the handle-bars of the bikes, would have looked like cockroaches mounted as brooches, damn it!