But, if he was to succeed, it was necessary that Lily should supply him with money, more money, lots of money. The apparatus was incomplete and had probably got damaged in the London warehouse; it would need repairs, improvements. Now Lily seemed intractable. She was vexed at having to earn money for two, pretended to have none too much for herself; it was her costumes now: six sets of tights, one for each evening, pink, green, red, blue, gray, white and assorted ornaments, silk ribbons....
She didn’t want to kill herself with work for nothing, as she had been doing up to now:
“A lady isn’t a performing dog!” she said.
Trampy swallowed his bitterness when he heard that. Lily was escaping him altogether. Sometimes, he would go on the stage, sit down in a corner and, from there, see Lily, a shawl over her shoulders, her throat wrapped in a scarf, walk up and down, behind the back-drop, like a passenger on the deck of a ship, at one time with a monkey-faced, red-whiskered sketch-comedian; at others, according to the chances of the week, with the female-impersonator, the boy with the green eyes. There was no harm in that: they were at home, among themselves, Lily was no damned lalerperlooser, he wouldn’t have had her so. And Trampy did not dare say anything, for fear of being made a laughing stock and also lest he should offend “Miss Lily.” But he was tormented with jealousy nevertheless, merely at seeing her talk pleasantly with her acquaintances. And yet it was innocent enough, a mere “Hullo, Lily!” “Hullo, old boy!” by way of keeping herself in touch with the news, for Lily hardly ever looked into The Era or Das Program; all those names, all that competition frightened her!
THE BOY WITH THE GREEN EYES
She had learned nothing new about Pa, except that the troupe still existed, but in quite a small way, of course. Her Pa was in favor of soft treatment, now, so they said; he had changed his manner. “Too late!” murmured Lily thoughtfully; but she was much amused when she heard that Tom, in addition to keeping up his trade as a shoeblack, was learning boxing, with bulldog obstinacy, in order to give Pa back his blow on the nose and beat him in a square fight. And didn’t some one say that Tom was stage-struck, too? Tom, that dwarf, with his short arms, on the stage! Crazy! every one of them!
And then they were always talking of Jimmy: Jimmy here, Jimmy there. It was becoming serious, Lily couldn’t get over it. She wondered what old Martello would say if he heard that: Jimmy an artiste! Pooh! Nonsense! And it was true, mind you! It was repeated from mouth to mouth, his fame was spreading, his fame, that is to say, in the bars, in the wings, among pros; you heard his name mentioned together with a hundred others; but that already was a great deal, that one could say, Butt Snyders, Laurence, Jimmy, Marjutti, all mixed up, as though he were their equal, he who had done nothing! But he would “do,” it was in the air: some stroke of luck, who could tell? And Lily knew him to be ambitious. Lady or no lady, she was an artiste first and foremost and hated competition. She had been whipped for her rivals, Lillian, Edith and Polly, had caught it for Laurence and for the fat freaks, too, and she depended on her work for her bread. When she saw a new troupe come to the front it made her anxious: even children “that high,” who played bike in between the pillars of the stage, she felt inclined to stamp upon; and if people ever asked her advice, she did not hesitate to tell them wrong. Men especially were disastrous competitors, even the ignorant ones. You never knew where you were with them, they dared do anything! She could not help getting mad when she thought of it. One more to take the bread out of her mouth! For it was all very well to treat him as a simpleton, to talk of his crotchets—he had views concerning a stage-apprentices’ fund, a home of rest for superannuated artistes and so on—Lily considered him dangerous. He was not a silly Glass-Eye or a stage-struck Tom; he was an ambitious Jimmy. But all the same, how absurd! A hypocrite like that was fit to write to Pa and get a poor girl in trouble, but was not the man to risk his skin! She laughed, not a stage smile, no, a real laugh, head thrown back, full-throated. An artiste, O Lord! Yes, like a heap of bluffers who were to do this and that, all sorts of wonderful things! and who ended by making a laughing stock of themselves, the whole business was so childish, faked up with ropes and weights, nursery-toys, Punch-and-Judy rubbish. It would be just like that with Jimmy, sure: lots of noise and then ... nothing! And he would have lost his place as manager and he would starve, the josser: that would teach him to be spiteful! And where was Jimmy? He might be very clever, in his shed in London, swinging from his rope, like a monkey on a string, but to do that before an audience was different. There would be no Jimmy left!
She liked to talk to herself like that. Miss Lily avoided thinking of a possible stroke of luck, she who had taken such pains to attain so little, just to become Mrs. Trampy, to have the honor of working for Trampy and feeding Trampy. Oh, she was tired of it, did all she could to find him work, to spur him on! She even wanted him to practise. And she mentioned Tom and Jimmy to him, all those beginners, all the others who were coming on.
“She thinks more of him than of me,” he said to himself.