Trampy haunted the bazaars, bought children’s toys, took the stomachs out of the cardboard dogs and rabbits to make his quackers, sought about for his right note, pursued inspiration to the bottom of the glasses.
Lily was sometimes driven to exasperation. This tramp-cyclist, this sketch-comedian was making her, Lily Clifton, patch up his dresses! And her husband rewarded her for it by making love to the girls, poor idiot! Oh, if Pa and Ma had not been so harsh with her! Lily always harked back to that, stiffened herself with the thought, remembered the Marjutti girl, in whom love of art produced wonders and whose Pa and Ma were so gentle and kind.
“They should have treated me like that,” she concluded, “and I should have been at home still!”
She regretted her marriage. And there were some who pitied her for belonging to Trampy: they looked upon him as not worthy of her, blamed him for openly carrying on with girls. Others asked, as though it did not matter, was she really married or were they just “living together?”
“What? Am I married? Is that what they think about me?” she said, a little annoyed. “Of course I am! At the Kennington registry-office!”
And yet a doubt entered her mind too. Was she really married, after all? Lily did not know much about it. Had the banns been published? And those two witnesses picked up in the street ... a ceremony that took just five minutes ... like a conjuring trick. If it was true that they were “living together” without her knowing it, she would not stay with him. She would go back home at once. Marriage, certainly, was never intended for her. This she realized now. When she thought of the Gilson girl, mad on her man, and of others whom she sometimes caught in the dressing-rooms and passages eating each other up with kisses, she was at a loss to understand. How could they make so much fuss about it?
Poor little wife, with so little love for her husband and no admiration at all! As an artiste she thought him lamentable. Trampy, who had seemed so great to her in Mexico ... why, she had shot miles ahead of him since! She felt that he was getting second-rate. He himself was well aware of it, for that matter; blamed everybody: suspected a hoodoo somewhere: some son of a gun bringing him ill-luck. And he was always casting about for an easy means of success ... another new plan ... always something new ... a high-sounding title: “Rusty Bike,” an old jigger which, at each turn of the wheel, would grate like a cart, “Crrrra! Crrrra!” and bring the house down with laughter, while Lily, in the wings, was to sound an accompaniment on a grating rattle:
“Crrrra! Crrrra!”
“All that set-out for nothing!” said Lily to herself. “It would be much simpler to have a little talent.”
She felt herself overcome with contempt for her husband: what a sorry bread-winner he made! Why take a wife, when you had only that to keep her on? Lily did not know whether to laugh or to cry when she saw Trampy come down from his dressing-room, proud as a peacock, his chest swelling at the sight of so many girls at a time, a treat of which he never wearied. He was magnificent, was Trampy, against that background of shoulders, thighs and calves: in his element as a fish in water. Nor did he make any bones about smiling to them or monkey-clawing them as they came off the stage. The presence of his wife did not hinder him. He was sure of her love: he knew she must adore him, as all the others did. And, leaving Lily in a corner, in the shade of a pillar, with his eyes he devoured all that powdered flesh, all those coarse wigs.