Under the Poppy Read Online Free PDF

never saw her, my fabled maman, whoever she might have been. He and Missus Potts, lord knows I saw plenty of that .
    And tears or no tears, she sent me packing from her lodging house just as soon as he was cool: This is no place for a boy alone , blotting her eyes with a bit of rag, a new renter in the room by sundown and me and the bucket out in the street where I sang the heartbreakers, “The Last-Flying Sparrow,” “Only a Bit of a Girl,” and let the tears trickle down: oh, people stopped, and a few of them sniffled along with me, but not so many pennies came my way. Why should they? Life makes us weep for free. So that was a good lesson, too.
    There were many paths I could have trod, from there. Stay on the streets, and find a protector: the city was full of them, all cities are; in the city, the weak need the strong, and vice versa. Or seek out a different kind of master, buckle down and learn an honest trade. Or hie myself to the ever-damned factory, like my dead old da: furious at sunrise, drunk by nightfall, trying to drown the one in the other…. Instead I consulted myself, grubby little orphan on the corner, tuppence in his pocket, and said, Guillame, messire, you’re free and clear now. What do you want to do? And the hunger gave me my answer.
    You see, that hunger inside us, that ambition, or whatever you may choose to call it, is a compass really, a compass of true desire. And if you will be happy, you must follow that desire, no matter which way the needle points. For me it was the train-yard, I don’t like to say what I did to get onto those trains! and banged-up, too, I’ve still got some lovely scars. Going east, always east, because I had heard in the lodging house that that was where the theatres were. I had never seen a proper theatre, never even seen anyone who had, but in my mind they were like the Ottoman’s palace, you know, velvet curtains and twinkling candles, lovely ladies with diamonds and low-cut gowns. What I found was something rather different, in my long apprenticeship—I am almost eight-and-twenty, after all, and have played, or stage-managed, or set up booths in many a city and town. What people will pay money to watch—why, you’d not believe it if I told you.
    But it was to me quite amazing—it is still amazing!—that one may conjure what is from what is not, crack an egg and make a pair of gilded rings appear, take wool and wire and paper and voila! a knight, a king, a fairy princess, alive and living for as long as the lights are low. The stage is not only a world apart, it is a myriad of worlds, and in those worlds a man can have anything he fancies, if only he believes in what he sees.
    One sees it here at the Poppy, every night: That Pearl can be a seraphim, or Laddie a Spanish grandee, that Spinning Jennie can make a man compete to spend money he barely has for the chance to stick it in her, lazy doped-up Jennie whom he would pass on the street for free! Or Jonathan Shopsine, poor mutilated bastard, hunching down at a spavined piano and calling Wolfgang Mozart back from the dead, how is that not miraculous? If there is any God in this world, He lives in a theatre. And it may as well be the Poppy as anyplace else.
    So when people say to me—and there are those who will say it, you’ll see them at the tables on Saturday night grasping after a bouncing tit, and on the Sunday streets with the missus in her walking-out suit— You seem, sir, very nearly a gentleman. How can you bear to toil in such an establishment? —wrinkling their bourgeois noses at the whores, the liquor, the utter baseness of it all.
    And I bow to them, a dancing master’s bow I learned from a man in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who was gaoled there for venery, and I smile a smile I made up myself, the one I used on the penny-throwing crowd, the one I’ll wear in my coffin, and I say Ah, but the spirit moves where it lists, messire! And then I offer the missus my primrose boutonniere, and she