“Quicker, my Woolly-legs! No time to lose!”
He thought of the tricks which he had jotted down the evening before in his note-book. Lily would learn them quick enough: she was as clever as the Pawnees, when all was said, only less graceful. She had the balancing power all right; but grace, grace, damn it, to do a thing like that as though it were child’s play: that’s what she hadn’t got! You saw the effort. And the apprentices had no precision in their groupings. Now the fat freaks had. To combine German discipline with English gracefulness, that was the question; to have the troupe of troupes; to have a Lily who would be worth more by herself than Polly, Edith and Lillian put together. But that meant work and going through the mill! This last made Pa think of the old sheep and their bleatings. He gave a nervous little laugh and his hand had a convulsive movement, as though to strangle those pests.
Pa had recovered his good humor and was grinning by the time they reached the theater. Merely by his way of taking the key of his dressing-room from the stage-doorkeeper one recognized the owner of a troupe, the man with a “permanent address,” the manager, the boss, the prof, the Pa. On entering the lobby, he, with his six girls, took possession of the theater. He nodded to the staff; growled a “Lazybones!” as the Roofers passed out two by two, always two by two: a fair one with made-up eyes, a dark one with kiss-me-quick lips; sniffed their cheap perfumes amid the tarry smell of the packages marked Sidney, New York, Paris....
“QUICKER, MY WOOLLY-LEGS!”
On reaching the stage, Pa first gave a glance to make sure that there were no elephants, or ponies, or Merry Wives, that they could practise at their ease, without having to burrow in a corner, like rats. The stage was almost empty. After the live street, it was a pallid light, in which ghosts moved. The New Zealanders, it need not be said, no longer fancied themselves in the cavern of Bluebeard or Puss-in-Boots; they had seen too many stages during the past two years. The slant of the floor, the roughness or smoothness of the boards was what interested them, for fear of falls and barked shins. Pa hurried them to their dressing-room to get into their knickers, while he took off his jacket and turned up his trousers, so as to run better. No more time to lose, with his Lily! He was still in a fever from seeing those Pawnees last night. As for the stage and the boards, a lot he cared, slanting or straight, rough or smooth! To work! to work! And he got ready the bikes, which Tom had brought down, without a glance around him.
To a poet, to a painter, that glance would have been worth the taking. The iron curtain was raised, the house loomed vaguely; the balconies, covered with cloth, stood out like cliffs; the pit, with its seats under a gray drugget, because of the dust, lifted toward the stage its rows of motionless waves. The stage itself was strange: a sort of huge cave, with strips of scenery hanging like stalactites; near the wall, a metal pedestal, with a red velvet platform, looked like a blood-stained scaffold; one suspected the presence of properties: wheels, iron implements, tangled ropes, like so many instruments of torture. At the New Zealanders’ feet, half-naked bodies, suggesting the souls of the damned, were tumbling, practising falls; a woman in a white wrap hovered round; and, near the proscenium, a pack of trained seals, lying in their moist boxes, raised their frightened heads, as who should say corpses cast up on the shores of hell by the silent waves of the pit.
But three slender forms, spinning on their trapeze almost above Pa’s head, sprang lightly to the stage, near an old fellow in spectacles.