“Lyte as usyal! Two of the bloomin' turns not come, and me looking up and dahn the bloomin' street for you every minute and more!”
The girl's eyes blinked as if he had struck her, but she only tossed her head and stiffened her under lip, and said: “Jawing again, are ye? I'd chuck it for once, Charlie, if it was only for sake of company.”
With that she disappeared to the dressing-room, and Charlie took charge of Glory, crushed a way for her through the refreshment room, offered her a “glaws of somethink,” and with an obvious pride of possession introduced her to admiring acquaintances as “a friend o' mine.” “Like yer style, Charlie,” said one of them. “Oh, yus! Dare say!” said Charlie.
The proscenium was surmounted by the German and English flags intertwined, the walls were adorned with oleograph portraits of the Kaiser, his father and grandfather, Bismarck and Von Moltke, and the audience consisted largely of lively young German Jews and Jewesses in evening dress, some Polish Jews, and a sprinkling of other foreigners.
During Aggie's turn Glory was conscious that two strangers out of another world altogether had entered the club and were standing at the back.
“Toffs,” said Charlie, looking at them over her shoulder, and then, answering to himself the meaning of their looks, “No, my luds! 'Tain't the first we've seen of sech!”
Then Aggie came up with an oily person in a flowered waistcoat and said, “This is my friend, guv'nor, and she wouldn't mind doing a turn if you asked her.”
“If de miss vill oblige,” began the oily one, and then the blood rushed to Glory's face, and before she knew what else had happened, her hat and ulster were in Aggie's hands and she was walking up the steps to the stage.
There was some applause when she went on, but she was in a dazed condition and it all seemed to be taking place a hundred miles away. She heard her own voice saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, with your kind permission I will endeavour to give you an imitation——” and something more. Down to that moment her breath had been coming and going in hot gasps, and she had felt a dryness in her throat; but every symptom of nervousness suddenly disappeared, and she threw up her head like a charger in battle.
Then she sang. It was only a common street song, and everybody had heard it a thousand times. She sang “And her golden hair was hanging down her back” after the manner of a line of factory girls going home from work at night. Arm-in-arm, decked in their Vandyke hats, slashed with red ribbons and crowned with ostrich feathers, with their free step, their shrill voices—they were there before everybody's eyes, everybody could see them, everybody could recognise them, and before the end of the first verse there were shouts and squeals of laughter.