He reached the post-office and asked for a package addressed to Janin. The clerk delayed, regarded him with suspicion, but in the end surrendered a small precisely wrapped box. As he returned his mood changed; all he asked, he muttered bitterly, was a fair trial for his voice. He recognized obscurely that a singer's existence must be different from the constricted life of a country town; here were no stage, no audience, for the great harmonies he had imagined himself producing. He had that in his heart which would make mere security, content, forever impossible.
In the dilapidated camp French Janin eagerly clutched the box. He almost filled his palm with the crystalline powder and gulped it hastily. Its effect was produced slowly.... Janin waited rigidly for the release of the drug.
The evening following, under the fence on the hill, the blind man dozed while Harry Baggs exercised his voice.
“Good!” the former pronounced unexpectedly. “I know; heard all the great voices for twenty years; a violin in the Opera Comique. Once I led the finale of Hamlet. I saw the Director stop.... He handed me the baton. He died soon after, and that was the beginning of my bad luck. I should have been Director; but I was ignored, and came to America—Buenos Aires; then Washington, and—and morphia.”
There was a long silence and then he spoke again with a new energy:
“I'm done, but you haven't started. You're bigger than ever I was; you'll go on and on. I, Janin, will train you; when you sing the great roles I'll sit in a box, wear diamond studs. Afterward, as we roll in a carriage down the Grandes Boulevards, the people in front of the cafés will applaud; the voice is appreciated in Paris.”
“I have a lot to learn first,” Baggs put in practically.
The old man recovered his violin. “Ah!” He drew the note tenuous but correct from the uncertain strings. “Ah!” Harry Baggs vociferated to the inattentive frogs, busy with their own chorus.
VI
The practice proceeded with renewed vigor through the evenings that followed; then French Janin sank back into a torpor, varied by acute depression.