The Trial of Elizabeth Cree (11 page)

So I loved those early days, as I watched and listened to them gagging on the stage. “Tell me, officer,” Charlie was saying, “are you flying by the seat of your pantaloons or sitting on the fly of your pantaloons?”

“That’s too strong.” Dan always came down hard on that type of humor. “I’ll bring you round to your song, don’t you think? And then I’ll come down to the pit and start my monologue.” That song was Charlie’s speciality—“Yesterday She Gave Me Twins, Just to Show There’s No Hard Feelings”—and Dan took on the role of Charlie’s much put-upon, much harassed wife. “Yes, he took me to the hospital. Such a lovely place it was. Full of beds. The nurse comes up to me and says, ‘Are you here because of him?’ ‘Well, dear,’ I said, ‘he paid the bus fare.’ Didn’t we all laugh? Then I said to her, ‘If you’ll just relieve me of this little burden, I’ll be on my way.’ ‘When are you due?’ she says. ‘Not the baby, dear. Him.’ Oh, we laughed.” Dan stopped then, and looked over at me. “It hasn’t got that certain spark, has it?”

I shook my head. “It’s not quite motherly enough.”

Dan turned to Charlie, who was silently performing his favorite trick of walking backwards in perfect tempo. (I had once seen him on the stage of the Savoy Variety, trying to fool a constable on guard outside a grand party by walking backwards and pretending to leave rather than enter. It was memorable.) “What do you think, Charlie? Was I motherly?”

“Don’t ask me, dear.” He had become motherly himself, in sympathy. “I’ve had so many kids that I think Noah must have got to me. Something very old and hard, anyway.”

Of course there were often jokes and remarks which I pretended not to hear: it’s natural for hall folk to bring out the blue
bag, as they say, but I wanted to convince Dan that I was as innocent as any Columbine in the panto. I wanted to save myself for the stage. Doris, the goddess of wire-walking, was always very good to me. She had listened to my orphan’s story, and had decided to “keep an eye out” for me. We slept together on cold nights, and I would press up against her nightdress to get the beauty of her hot. And we used to talk as we snuggled—we used to dream of having the Prince of Wales out front, and how he would come round to shake hands with us after the performance, or of how some rich admirer would send us five carnations a day until we agreed to marry him. Our mutual friend Tottie Golightly, a warbler and funny female, sometimes joined us for a little bit of mash and sausage in our room. She was the most fashionably dressed creature, with high button boots that shone like diamonds in the gas lamp, but on stage she wore a battered yellow hat, a topcoat three sizes too big for her and a pair of ancient shoes. She always came on brandishing an old green umbrella like a gigantic lettuce leaf. “Now what about this?” she used to say, waving it about. “Stupendous, ain’t it? Magnificent, ain’t it? You could go into the Channel with this, and never get wet. Am I right, or is any other woman?” That was her catch phrase, and she could never begin it without the house shouting out the rest with her. Her famous song was “I’m a Woman of Very Few Words”; after she had finished it she would leave the stage for a few seconds, and then return in gleaming frock coat, trousers and monocle to warble “I Saw Her Once at the Window.” I noticed everything, you see, and remembered everything; I think that, even then, I was waiting impatiently for the day when I could put on makeup and costume as well.

Little Victor Farrell was another artist who, unfortunately, took a shine to me. He was no more than four feet in height, but he made a great impression on the public with his character of
“The Midshipmite.” He used to follow me about everywhere, but when I told him to blow away he would give one of his sarcastic little smiles and pretend to wipe his eyes on a handkerchief which was almost as big as he was. “Let’s go down to the Canteen for a chop,” he said one night after we had been playing at the Old Mo. “Do you feel like a bit of meat, Lizzie?” I had just finished cleaning out the green room, and I was too tired to give him the elbow; in any case, I was famished. So we went downstairs below the stage: it was like a refreshment cellar, but it was patronized only by artists and their friends. These “friends” were the usual stage-door Johnnies and swells who went after any female in the business—but they never came after me, not when they had taken one look at me and realized that I would no more lift my skirts for them than I would for the devil.

There were no fancy frescoes or flowers in the Canteen, just a few plain tables and chairs with a big cracked mirror against one wall where they could all reflect upon their bleary faces. It smelled of tobacco and mutton chops, with a bit of spilled gin and beer to add savor. I hated the place, to tell you the truth, but, as I said, I was hungry. Little Victor Farrell would not let go of my arm, just as if he wanted to put me on show like the stuffed parrot he used in his “Midshipmite” routine, and he steered me to a table where Harry Turner was brooding over a glass of stout. Harry rose from his chair when I came over—he always was a gentleman—and Victor asked if he would have another, to which he graciously assented. Harry was Statisticon, the Memory Man, and there was never a date or a fact which he couldn’t recall on the stage. He told me his story once—how he was almost crushed to death as a child in a street accident, by one of those old-fashioned postilions, and had to spend three months in bed. He decided to read everything he could and found himself memorizing history dates, just for the pleasure of it; he never
looked back. He still had a limp from where the wheel of the carriage went over his leg, but he had a sounder mind than anyone else I ever met. “Tell me, Harry,” I said, just to pass the time while Victor went over to the bar. “What was the date when the Old Mo was built?”

“Lizzie, you know I don’t like to do it off the stage.”

“Just the one?”

“It was opened on the 11th November, 1823, having previously seen service as a chapel for the Sisters of Mercy. The original foundations were dug up on the 5th October, 1820, when they were found to date from the sixteenth century. Happy now?”

Victor had come back with the needful, and was already exchanging a few silent gestures with his friends—a wink and a nod go a long way with hall folk. “Give us the use of that memory, Harry. Who’s the old file over there?” Victor was looking towards an elderly party sitting very close to a lady comique, and looking altogether snug. “Look at that ring,” he said. “He must be putrid with money. Rolling in loot.”

“The oldest man in the country,” Harry said, “was Thomas Parr who died in 1653 at the age of one hundred and fifty-three. You can’t put a good man down.”

“I know where you can put a good man up,” Victor whispered to me. I took his hand gently, and then pushed his finger so far back that you could hear him screaming all over the Canteen. I only relented when the others stopped and looked at us; Victor explained that I had trod on one of his corns.

“Will that learn you?” I whispered fiercely to him.

“For a woman, Lizzie, you’ve got a lot of strength.” He paused to examine his bruised fingers. “Do accept my most profound apologies. Do you think I put myself forward too much?”

“Don’t you ever forget that I am an innocent.”

“You
must
be over fifteen, Lizzie.”

“No, I
mustn’t
. Now go and order me a baked potato before I damage you again.”

Victor was one of those “have-another-with-me” boys. I knew he did the low halls and was paid with what we called “wet money”; he told me so himself, and he was proud of the fact that he could drink as much as any reasonably sized man—“putting a quart into a pint pot” was his way of expressing it. That night he did himself proud; he was pitching and tossing all over the place and, when he slipped under the table, I allowed him to look up me for a few moments. But when he felt my ankle I gave him such a savage kick that he came out on the other side. I was about to get up and kick him again, when a young man came hurrying over to the table. “Do you require any assistance?” he asked me. I recognized him at once: it was John Cree, the reporter from the
Era
who had come up to Doris when we were performing at the Washington.

“Please help me, sir,” I said. “I should never have been led into this dreadful place.”

He escorted me up the stairs and took me out into the little alley by the side of the theater. “Are you perfectly well?” He waited while I composed myself. “You look pale.”

“I have been very ill used,” I replied. “But I think I must have some guardian angel who saves me from evil.”

“Can I escort you anywhere? The streets, in such a place as this …”

“No, sir. I can find my own way. I am accustomed to the night.” And so he left me, while I purged the tobacco smoke with lungfulls of London air. What a strange night it had become, and it was as yet far from over. For, just a few hours after I had met John Cree, at first light, the body of Little Victor Farrell was found in a basement area two streets away: his neck had been broken, no doubt because of some drunken fall. He had left the
Canteen “highly schmozzled,” as one of his fellow inebriates had said, and it was believed that he had wandered through the night and somehow tripped down the stairs which led to the basement. “The Midshipmite” was no more.

We had a matinée the following day, and Uncle was acting the inconsolable. “He was a real mammoth comique,” he said to me, with a handkerchief poised in his hand, “even though he was just a little one. I thought he could hold his drink but, alas, as Shakespeare used to say, I was very much mistaken.” At that moment drink was holding Uncle, since he had already been given “just the one” out of sympathy by most of the artistes. “He started as a busker, Lizzie. He was busking and pitching by the time he was two feet and a half.” He raised his handkerchief, but only to blow his fat nose. “I remember when he first came on at the old Apollo in Marylebone. He was billed as ‘The Shrimp with Feeling.’ Did he ever sing you ‘The Lodging House Cat’?”

“Never you mind, Uncle.” I gave him a little kiss upon his damp forehead. “He was a great sparkler, and now he’s moved on to the great stage in the sky.”

“I doubt if there will be variety there, dear.” He gave a little snort, halfway between a laugh and a sigh. “Ah well, all flesh is grass.”

I sensed that my opportunity had come. “I was wondering, Uncle. You know that Victor was like a second father to me—”

“Yes indeed.”

“—and I was hoping to pay a little tribute to him?”

“Go on, dear.”

“I was wondering if you would let me take on his act this evening. I know all his songs by heart.” He looked earnestly at me for a moment, and so I carried on talking more quickly.
“There is a gap in the bill, I know, and as I wanted to give him a proper send-off …”

“But you’re a good few inches taller, Lizzie. Would it be right?”

“That would be the joke of it, you see. Wouldn’t Victor laugh?”

“I don’t know about that, dear. But I suppose you can show me.”

In fact I had studied Little Victor very carefully indeed, so I knew both the patter and the business. Even though I was not in costume I sang “If Ever There Was a Damned Scamp” in front of Uncle, and jumped up and down in the approved “Midshipmite” manner.

“You’ve got the right bounce,” he said.

“Victor was training me. He said I had such a funny dial it was a pity to waste it.”

“And you certainly manage a warble.”

“Thank you, Uncle. Do you think Victor would have wanted me to have the chance to show it?”

He was silent for a minute, and I could tell that he was speculating on the novelty of it: what if he could make a funny female or a legmania dancer out of me? “Do you think,” he said, “we could pretend that you were Little Victor’s daughter? Out of tiny acorns, you know …”

“I did always think of him as a second father. He was so good to me.”

“I know he was, my dear. He was very paternal.”

So, after a few tears were shed, it was agreed that I should go on that night with Little Victor’s routine. I think Dan disapproved of the scheme but, when he saw the enthusiasm shining from my face, he could not bring himself to forbid it; I had been banking on that. You can imagine my nervousness as I dressed
up for the first time: Little Victor’s clothes were too small for me, naturally, but that was the joke of it. As I said to Doris while we were changing, it’s a funny thing how seawater can shrink a midshipmite’s duds. We were in the green room with some of the other girls and boys, all milling about and laughing with the kind of gaiety that comes after a death. No one had loved, or even really liked, Little Victor—in any case hall folk mourn another’s passing by trying to be that little bit brighter.

“Quart-’ervn-’our.” It was the callboy.

Doris opened the door and shouted after him, “What’s the house, Sid?”

“All pudding. Easy as you like.”

I was going on between the ballet dancers and the Ethiopian serenaders; the property man saw me shaking in the corner, so he came over and put his arm around me. “You know what they say, Lizzie, don’t you? A bit of chaff sets you up. If they give you the bird, you whistle back at them.” It was not the most reassuring speech, but no doubt he meant well.

When I was announced as Little Victor’s daughter, the house went wild. Everyone knew about his accident—it was that kind of neighborhood—and when I came on in his old clothes singing “All for the Sake of Dear Father” I knew that I had got them. I milked the death a little, but then I put in some patter I had memorized from Victor’s act, as well as some old comic business on the subject of lost handkerchiefs. But I also had a trick of my own. I knew how strange my hands were still, so large and so scarred, so I had put on a pair of white gloves which served to emphasize their size. I held my hands out in front of me and sighed, “Look at them rotten cotton gloves!” They loved it, since it was one of those phrases which somehow strike a chord, and then I followed it up with that ditty which causes such a furor, “It’s Sunday All Over Again.” I suppose that I
could have gone on forever, but I saw Uncle beckoning to me from the wings. I hurried over to him while they were still whistling and banging their feet.