With the end of the song a sharp rattle of applause ran round the square, marked by distinctive intervals, like the volley at a soldier’s funeral.
“Bravo, Bindo,” said Eastonville, “it would pay you to send the hat round to-night. Here’s a fiver, young ’un, to open the bank with, though why I should give it you passes my comprehension. A boy who can earn ten pounds a night at sixteen is a sight better off than I am. If you lose it, you’ll have to try the others. I’m pretty well cleared out. After all you’re detestable, Bindo. Just when we want you most, your voice will be gone, and you’ll have spoiled us for all other singing, precisely as the great Sarah has spoiled us for any acting but her own. If we could only forget and start fresh with each week, how nice and pleasant everything would be. I believe Nelly is right in ‘Cometh up,’ when she says that memory is often a cruel gift. No one would choose to remember a feeble show, or to spoil his enjoyment of average singing by a recollection of the best. Why are ‘Jack Sheppard’ and ‘Geneviève de Brabant’ practically withdrawn from the London stage? Because elderly playgoers cannot forget the days when Mrs. Keeley played ‘Jack,’ or when Emily Soldene and the Dolaro drew all Mayfair to Islington by the witchery of a serenade. But now for ‘A boy’s best friend’—we’re all in a domestic mood to-night—and then cards.”
II
Bindo was very docile as a rule, especially in the hands of those who loved and cared for him. But on some points he was obdurate as steel. For instance, I could never persuade him, try what I would, to invest his salary, nor could anything induce him to learn a profession against the day when his voice should fail him. Singing, he said, had come naturally to him; a good voice, a good ear, and a little training had done the trick; and he thought, or pretended to think, that the evil day, when it did come, would bring with it its own resource. “Sufficient unto the day is the good thereof” was Bindo’s motto throughout.
And it was impossible to teach him the value of money. He spent it royally on others, lavishly on himself. “Where have you been, Bindo?” I said to him one Monday, when he hadn’t turned up as usual on the previous afternoon. “Oh, I took Harry out of town. He’s been seedy, you know, and wanted change. So we went to Brighton.” “And you travelled first-class, and put up at the Bedford, and lost money to him at cards in the evening?” “You have hit it exactly, old man,” was the reply.
I believe that most of his money went on Quixotic kindnesses of this sort. One night when I was with him at the Queen’s Hall (he liked to run round to me between his “turns” and criticise the show from the front) his salary for two nights went before it was earned to the first violin, a blind little snuff-powdered man, but Bindo’s very particular friend, because he had stumbled in getting down from the stage and damaged his instrument.
When the end did come, it came suddenly. His voice cracked on an upper G—sudden and short like the string of a violin—in the very hall he had so emphatically abused for its acoustic deficiencies. Of course he came to me, if it can be said that he came to me, when he had always been with me for most of his time. But the life bored him. I had my own work to do in the evenings, and couldn’t go with him to restaurants, theatres, and concerts, the excitement of which had become a second nature to Bindo. And so we drifted, little by little, but still very surely, farther and farther apart.
It was about this time that his friend Harry, the same whom he had entertained so royally at Brighton, fell ill. Bindo had been anxious about him for a long while, and never passed a day without seeing him. But it was only quite lately that the doctors had begun to suspect a rapid form of consumption. Bindo was full of trouble. I think he liked Harry best of all his friends, perhaps excepting me.
One day he burst into my room, with something more akin to tears in his eyes than I had ever seen in them before. “What is to be done, Charlie? They’ve given Harry the sack at his office because he’s too ill to do his work properly. They won’t even keep it open for him for a week or two on the chance. What brutes they are! And, poor old chap, he’s got nothing. If it were only this time last year, and I had my voice again, we could do famously. I wish I’d taken your advice, old man, and saved my pile while I had the chance. By the way: happy thought! I have a heap of rings and pins and watches at home that the swells gave me last year for singing at their matinees and concerts—enough of them to stock a pawnshop. By Jove! they shall help to stock Attenborough’s; and we’ll live on the proceeds, at any rate till things look more rosy.” He was off then and there, and for the next six months, till Harry died, I scarcely saw him. One excitement in his case had cast out the others, and while Harry lived he hardly cared to be outside his room. Brother and nurse in one he was to him—with him night and day—and, whatever money or love could do, Bindo did for him.
Afterwards he came back to me, looking a trifle older, a trifle more depressed; but improved, or so it seemed to me, by the experience he had undergone. I forgot that there are natures receptive of vigorous and even intense impressions, but absolutely incapable of retaining them. So soon as one predominant idea has passed from the brain, its place must be occupied by another, for good or else for evil. Which of the two it may be, seems almost a matter of indifference; it is the law, so to speak, of their being that it should be indifferent.