Naturally I let them bid against one another for my services, and eventually I closed with the best offer, which came from an Italian, Signor Caroselli. He engaged me to go to the Eden Theatre, Milan, at a salary of one hundred francs a day for seven days a week, approximately £28 a week in our money. Of course I was as ignorant of Italian as I was of French, but I adopted the plan I had found so efficacious in Paris, translating my English into phonetic Italian, and it worked splendidly.
My original engagement with Signor Caroselli was for fifteen days, but I remained working in Milan for eight weeks straight off. During this period I did my show at the Eden in the evening, and at the Villa Giardino—an open-air café chantant—in the afternoon, and also at the Stablini Theatre; and during a part of my engagement I filled the triple bill at all three places, a thing never done before in Milan.
On the very first day of my engagement, however, I nearly came a cropper. It happened in this way. The Eden Theatre was a restaurant in the day time, and even in the evening there were little tables dotted about all over the place where people could come and eat a dinner while listening to the performance. Working at the restaurant there was an Italian waiter who had served for a long time at Pinoli’s Restaurant in London, and who started out to help me by teaching me a sufficiency of colloquial Italian for my business.
Well, I got there in the morning, and this waiter told me that the proper thing to eat for dinner was a dish of spaghetti (fine macaroni) washed down with a flask of chianti wine. I followed his advice, and then, feeling tired, and as my turn, a late one, was not until ten-thirty that night, I thought I would go home to my lodgings and rest awhile.
Now in Milan chianti wine is very cheap. It is also, but this is a detail, very potent. When serving it with a meal, it is the custom there to place upon the table a huge flagon of it, holding, I suppose, about a couple of quarts, and which is swung upon a pivot. The diner helps himself to as much as he wants of this by tilting up the flagon, thereby allowing the wine to run out into his glass, and he is charged for as much of it as he drinks, and no more.
But I, of course, knew nothing of all this. I thought the entire flagon was intended for my consumption, and the day being very hot, and myself feeling very thirsty, I drank the lot. The natural result was that when I reached my lodgings I felt horribly drowsy, so calling my landlady I told her to call me at “otto d’ora” (eight o’clock) and lay down to rest feeling quite proud at having been able so soon to air, to even that limited extent, my newly acquired knowledge of Italian.
Alas! I was presently to discover that mine was the pride that goes before a fall, for Italian time is reckoned right round the clock, and I ought by rights to have told her to call me at “venti d’ora” (twenty o’clock), eight o’clock there being in the morning. The result was that I overslept myself, and when I at length awoke, of my own accord, the performance at the theatre was over and done with for that evening.
I was in a terrible fever, and rushed round to find the manager and explain matters. I expected nothing less than instant dismissal, but instead, the manager, when I had explained matters, laughed heartily after the good-natured Italian fashion, as if the being obliged to do without his star turn for his opening performance was one of the best jokes imaginable. Needless to say I took care to be on time the next night. Also I was wary of the chianti for the future.
I thoroughly enjoyed my stay in the beautiful city of Milan, barring one terrible incident, the memory of which is indelibly engraven on my memory; and which I will now proceed to narrate. First, however, I must explain that in order to reach my apartment in the house I lodged in, I had to unlock no fewer than four separate doors. The first of these doors opened from the street into a sort of passage, or corridor, at the end of which was a second locked door giving admittance to a quadrangle. A third door, one of several, and also locked, led from this quadrangle to a common staircase, whence a fourth locked door led to my bedroom. For the purpose of unlocking all these four doors, I was provided with one key only, but that of the most peculiar construction. It was in effect, indeed, four keys in one, being shaped like an iron cross, the four separate arms fitting each its own separate individual lock, and none other.
I should imagine that it would be hard to invent a more bothersome key than this diabolical contrivance, especially to the roysterer returning home late at night, and in the dark. The ordinary single latchkey is sometimes sufficiently puzzling to the late comer at his own home who has dined not wisely but too well. Try and imagine the effect in similar circumstances of a fourfold key, each arm, or barrel, call it what you will, looking exactly alike, but each quite different, in that only one of the four is designed to unlock whichever particular lock you may be at the moment negotiating, the odds being, of course, exactly four to one against your picking out the right barrel in the first instance.