“Trouble is,” he broke out fretfully, “we've got nothing to sing. That about the 'damn old nigger' won't do. You ought to know something like the Serenade.
“Well,” he added after a moment, “why not? I could teach you the words—it's Italian; you've nearly got the air. It's all wrong and backward; but this isn't the Conservatoire. You can forget it when you have started; sing exercises again.”
“When can we begin?” Harry Baggs asked.
“We'll brush our clothes up best we can,” Janin proceeded, absorbed in his planning, “and go up to the porch of an evening. 'Mr. Brinton'—that's his name—I'll say, 'I'm M. Janin, once of the orchestra at the Opera Comique, and I'd like you to listen to a pupil of mine. I've heard them all and this boy is better——'” He stopped; took morphia.
“Can't you stop that for a day?” Harry Baggs demanded desperately. “Can't you?”
He watched with bitter rebellion the inevitable slackening of the other's being, the obfuscation of his mind. Janin hung over the fence, with hardly more semblance of life than an incredibly tattered and empty garment.
“Come on, you old fool!” Baggs exclaimed, burning with impatience, balked desire; he half carried him brusquely to his bed.
Yet, under the old man's fluctuating tuition, he actually began the Serenade within twenty-four hours. “Deh vieni alla finestra,” French Janin pronounced. “Deh vieni——” Harry Baggs struggled after him. His brow grew wet with the intensity of his effort; his tongue, it seemed to him, would never accomplish the desired syllables.
Janin made a determined effort to live without his drug; the abstinence emphasized his fragility and he was cold, even in the heart of the long sunny day; but the effort stayed him with a flickering vitality, bred visions, renewed hopes of the future. He repeated the names of places, opera houses—the San Carlo, in Naples; the Scala—unknown to Harry Baggs, but which came to him with a strange vividness. The learning of the Serenade progressed slowly; French Janin forgot whole phrases, some of which returned to memory; one entire line he was forced to supply from imagination.
At last the boy could sing it with a degree of intelligence; Janin translated and reconstructed the scene, the characters.