“Hullo, wifie! How are you, darling? All right?”
Lily bristled with rage as she left Paris. Even when she was far away, she still felt that she was dragging a chain which lengthened out endlessly without breaking. Never, oh, nothing could ever get her out of that! Yes, a brilliant triumph. Then, at least, she could crush him from the height of her success, that footy rotter with his red-hot stove! Oh, what a grudge she bore him! Jimmy was different: that was a wound of her own and nobody would ever know; but Trampy, who laughed at her everywhere and called himself her husband! He would make her lose all her friends. To say nothing of the fact that those tales perhaps counted for much in her failure: they were repeated from mouth to mouth. Oh, her profession disgusted her at times! And to think that she, an English girl, was going to earn her bread among the Dagoes, instead of starring in England!
Her wandering life continued; her journeys from town to town, in the Spanish provinces, her arrival in the chill of the morning, her anxiety about her salary, the hustle and bustle of departure and—trot, trot, trot!—lugged about in the railway-carriage, like a performing dog in his box.
And what theaters! It was worse than Germany or even Paris. In England, on the Harrasford tour or the Bill and Boom, they had nice dressing-rooms, with a carpet, water hot and cold, quick attendance, stairs swept every day. Here, old plaster and those idiots who looked as if they understood nothing—it took three of them to shift a scene—Dagoes who asked her straight out, in Pidgin-English, if she was alone:
“No man viz you?”
It touched her on the raw. Lily lost all her cheerfulness: to begin with, that engagement was not a particularly brilliant one; it was not at all calculated to prompt her to do better, to introduce novelties into her turn. Besides, on stages not yet overrun with Roofers or fat freaks, an artiste performing by herself made an impression. Her old tricks sufficed; sometimes she topped the bill:
“Theaters are the same everywhere; artistes the same everywhere, from New York to Bilbao. Topping the bill in one means topping the bill in the others ... doesn’t it, Glass-Eye?”
But she knew quite well that it didn’t; and, besides, that satisfaction of her vanity put no money in her pocket. The amount she owed, my! She thought of the past, of what she had earned for “them” since Mexico. If she had only had half of it, a quarter, a quarter of a quarter, damn it!
Meantime, she had to make herself respected. In those countries, where people used gestures when they spoke to you, a lady could not be too careful. Why, the men treated an English girl just as they treated their own women. She could have flung her bike at their heads! And they kept it up all night, as in Russia, all except the jewels; you had to stay till morning and were expected to accept invitations for supper, so as to keep the customer there and push business! A little more and she would have had to sleep there! She had threatened to tear up her contract, to complain to the consul. And what annoyed her also was being in the same dressing-room with singers who undressed without shame, while receiving their friends, and made eyes at Lily worse than the impersonator.
And she had to have her food at the theater, no dessert, nothing but a biscuit or an apple; and, if she asked for a pear, it caused a terrible to-do. Rather than stand that, Lily went to the hotel, which put her to double expense, for the board at the theater was compulsory. She had to pay in any case; so that she went away without a farthing, thinking herself very lucky if the manager did not try to kiss her in his office. Oh, the things she saw, the things she rubbed shoulders with, the vice, the promiscuity, the rushes of girls in the passages before the onslaughts of footy rotters, direct propositions, with eyes looking straight into eyes, brief wooings on the stairs, behind the properties, between people just about to take the train, one east, the other west, and in a hurry to have done with it; a silent embrace in the dressing-room, a neigh, a kiss; and au revoir, ta-ta!