And time passed and passed. It was now eight months that they had been traveling through Germany: and then, at last, came Berlin, the center of the agencies, like the plunge into Chicago, after the Western Tour, or New York, after the Eastern, or Paris, or London. Lily asked herself for what part of the world she would sign contracts. She would have liked Australia, South Africa, the States, so as to leave her husband in Europe, sitting up on his hind-quarters, like a trained dog, waiting for his “missis” to come back:
“If I could have the Kolossal in the meantime,” Lily thought. “A month there would do me nicely! I’d like to beat the fat freaks in their own country and show Pa that I don’t need his old troupe to star with!”
And Lily had some hope: an agent had given her to understand that she would be engaged, without a doubt, at that famous music-hall. But no! She learned that the Kolossal was not wanting cyclists, it had an attraction for next month, something sensational, it was said. And, in fact, suddenly, in the space of a night, the walls of the capital were covered with huge posters—“Bridging the Abyss!”—at the Kolossal!
“What’s that?” Lily asked herself.
And she was thunderstruck when she learned that this was Jimmy’s new trick! She had no doubt left when, looking into a bookseller’s window, she saw Jimmy’s portrait in Die Illustrirte Zeitung, the popular illustrated paper in Berlin.
Her arms fell to her sides! What, she thought, already? All this advertisement for that Jimmy? She had lost the Kolossal because of him. Already Jimmy was taking the bread out of her mouth! She could have wrung his neck!
Never had the New Zealanders, or the Hauptmanns, or the Pawnees, or any one, or anybody known such advertising as that, except the great breakneck performers, Laurence, the Loopers, the Motor Girl; and even then the girl was packed up in her machine like a sausage. But “Bridging the Abyss,” the papers said, required art: everything depended on the exact impetus, the faultless balance. The press was filled with clever puffs, biographies, descriptions of the apparatus, the cool daring which it needed to try that without a rope, to risk the performer’s life six times in six seconds. London and Paris were both said to have wanted the attraction; and Berlin was to have it first; and hoch for the Kolossal!
Trampy also was flabbergasted, when he read about this:
“But ... but ... but it’s my apparatus and nothing else! Why, I patented it in America! Do you understand now,” he asked, without, however, entering into technical explanations, “do you understand now, when I wanted you to help me? It wasn’t a question of the rusty bike! You’ve made me miss fame and fortune! And to think that I have an apparatus rotting away in London, in a warehouse, and that, if you’d listened to me, I should have been at the Kolossal now ... and covering you with diamonds!”
“I like your style!” said Lily. “You’d have made me break my back in your stead! I know you!”