The confusion of tongues must have been a very tame and quiet affair as compared to the polyglot chattering which burst upon Bobby’s ears when he entered the small lobby of the Hotel Larken. The male members of the Neapolitan Grand Opera Company, almost to a man, were smoking cigarettes. There were swarthy little men and swarthy big men, there seeming to be no medium sizes among them, while the women were the most wooden-featured lot that Bobby had ever encountered, and the entire crowd was swathed in gay but dingy clothing of the most nondescript nature. Really, had Bobby not been assured that they were grand opera singers he would have taken them for a lot of immigrants, for they had that same unhappy expression of worry. The principals could be told from the chorus and the members of the orchestra from the fact that they stood aloof from the rest and from one another, gloomily nursing their grievances that they, each one the most illustrious member of the company, should thus be put to inconvenience! It was a monstrous thing that they, the possessors of glorious voices which the entire world should at once fall down and worship, should be actually hungry and out of money! It was, oh, unbelievable, atrocious, barbarous, positively inhuman!
With the entrance of the Signorina Caravaggio, bearing triumphantly with her the neatly-dressed and altogether money-like Bobby Burnit, one hundred and forty wistful eyes, mostly black and dark brown, were immediately focused in eager interest upon the possible savior. Behind the desk, perplexed and distracted but still grimly firm, stood frowzy Widow Larken herself, drawn and held to the post of duty by this vast and unusual emergency. Not one room had Madam Larken saved for all these alien warblers, not one morsel of food had she loosed from her capacious kitchen; and yet not one member of the company had she permitted to stray outside her doors while Signorina Caravaggio and Signor Ricardo and the Herr Professor Frühlingsvogel had gone out to secure an angel, two stout porters being kept at the front door to turn back the restless. If provision could be made to pay the bills of this caravan, the Widow Larken—who was shaped like a pillow with a string tied around it and wore a face like a huge, underdone apple dumpling—was too good a business woman to overlook that opportunity. Bobby took one sweeping glance at that advancing circle of one hundred and forty eyes and turned to Widow Larken.
“I will be responsible for the hotel bills of these people until further notice,” said he.
The Widow Larken, looking intently at Bobby’s scarf-pin, relented no whit in her uncompromising attitude.
“And who might you be?” she demanded, with a calm brow and cold determination.
“I am Robert J. Burnit,” said Bobby. “I’ll give you a written order if you like—or a check.”
The Widow Larken’s uncompromising expression instantly melted, but she did not smile—she grinned. Bobby knew precisely the cause of that amused expression, but if he had needed an interpreter, he had one at his elbow in the person of Biff Bates, who looked up at him with a reflection of the same grin.
“They’re all next to you, Bobby,” he observed. “The whole town knows that you’re the real village goat.”
The Widow Larken did not answer Bobby directly. She called back to a blue-overall-clad porter at the end of the lobby:
“Open the dining-room doors, Michael.”