“No gentleman would care to deny such a charming and attractive possibility, Madam Villenauve.”
But the gracious speech was of the lips alone, and spoken with a warning glare against “kidding” at the grinning Biff Bates, who had found business of urgent importance for that night in the city where the company was booked. Bobby, in fact, had begun to tire very much of the whole business. To begin with, he found the organization a much more expensive one to keep up than he had imagined. The route, badly laid out, was one of tremendous long jumps; of his singers, like other rare and expensive creatures, extravagant care must be taken, and not every place that they stopped was so eager for grand opera as it might have been. At the end of three weeks he was able to compute that he had lost about a thousand dollars a week, and in the fourth week they struck an engagement so fruitless that even the cheerful Caravaggio became dismal.
“It’s a sure enough frost,” she confided to Bobby; “but cheer up, for the worst is yet to come. Your route sheet for the next two months looks like a morgue to me, and unless you interpolate a few coon songs in Tannhäuser and some song and dance specialties between the acts of Les Huguenots you’re gone. You know I used to sing this route in musical comedy, and, on the level, I’ve got a fine part waiting for me right now in The Giddy Queen. I like this highbrow music all right, but the people that come to hear it make me so sad. You’re a good sport, though, and as long as you need me I’ll stick.”
“Thanks,” said Bobby sincerely. “It’s a pleasure to speak to a real human being once in a while, even if you don’t offer any encouragement. However, we’ll not be buried till we’re dead, notwithstanding that we now enter upon the graveyard route.”
Doleful experience, however, confirmed the Caravaggio’s gloomy prophecy. They embarked now upon a season of one and two and three night stands that gave Bobby more of the real discomforts of life than he had ever before dreamed possible. To close a performance at eleven, to pack and hurry for a twelve-thirty train, to ride until five o’clock in the morning—a distance too short for sleep and too long to stay awake—to tumble into a hotel at six and sleep until noon, this was one program; to close a performance at eleven, to wait up for a four-o’clock train, to ride until eight and get into a hotel at nine, with a vitally necessary rehearsal between that and the evening performance, was another program, either one of which wore on health and temper and purse alike. The losses now exceeded two thousand dollars a week. Moreover, the frequent visits of Biff Bates and his constant baiting of Signor Ricardo had driven that great tenor to such a point of distraction that one night, being near New York, he drew his pay and departed without notice. There was no use, in spite of Monsieur Noire’s frantic insistence, in trying to make the public believe that the lank Dulceo was the fat Ricardo; moreover, immediately upon his arrival in New York, Signor Ricardo let it be known that he had left the Neapolitan Company, so the prestige of the company fell off at once, for the “country” press pays sharp attention to these things.
A letter from Johnson at just this time also had its influence upon Bobby, who now was in an humble, not an antagonistic mood, and quite ripe for advice. Mr. Johnson had just conferred with Mr. Bates upon his return from a visit to the Neapolitan Company, and Mr. Bates had detailed to Mr. Johnson much that he had seen with his own eyes, and much that the Caravaggio had told him. Mr. Johnson, thereupon, begging pardon for the presumption, deemed this a fitting time, from what he had heard, to forward Bobby the inclosed letter, which, in its gray envelope, had been left behind by Bobby’s father:
To My Son in the Midst of a Losing Fight
“Determination is a magnificent quality, but bullheadedness is not. The most foolish kind of pride on earth is that which makes a man refuse to acknowledge himself beaten when he is beaten. It takes a pretty brave man, and one with good stuff in him, to let all his friends know that he’s been licked. Figure this out.”
Bobby wrestled with that letter all night. In the morning he received one from Agnes which served to increase and intensify the feeling of homesickness that had been overwhelming him. She, too, had seen Biff Bates. She had asked him out to the house expressly to talk with him, but she had written a pleasant, cheerful letter wherein she hoped that the end of the season would repay the losses she understood that he was enduring; but she admitted that she was very lonesome without him. She gave him quite a budget of gay gossip concerning all the young people of his set, and after he had read that letter he was quite prepared to swallow his grit and make the announcement that for a week had been almost upon his tongue.
Through Monsieur Noire, at rehearsal that afternoon, he declared his intention of closing the season, and offered them each two weeks’ advance pay and their fare to New York. It was Signorina Caravaggio who broke the hush that followed this announcement.