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Updated: June 2, 2025
You can be the first tenor of your age, if you please in three years you will sing anything you like, and go to London and Paris, and be a great man. Leave it to me." I protested that it was all nonsense, that Nino was meant for a scholar and not for the stage, and I was quite angry with De Pretis for putting such ideas into the boy's head. But it was of no use.
She lingered an instant, and tore herself away. De Pretis was playing loudly. Nino had to pass near him to go out, and the maestro nodded carelessly as he went by. "Excuse me, maestro," said Hedwig, as Nino bowed himself out; "it was a question of arranging certain lessons." "Do not mention it," said he, indifferently; "my time is yours, signorina.
I had not yet seen Nino, who was sound asleep, though I could not imagine why he did not wake. But De Pretis was in such a temper that he shook the room and everything in it, as he stamped about the brick floor. It was not long before he had told me the cause of his trouble.
De Pretis knew perfectly well that Nino had only asked for the extra lesson in order to get a chance of talking about the Contessina di Lira, and so, to tease him, as soon as he appeared, the maestro made a great bustle about singing scales, and insisted on beginning at once. Moreover, he pretended to be in a bad humour; and that is always pretence with him.
That is all; you see it is nothing you ask a mere politeness on her part oh, nothing, nothing." And De Pretis rubbed his hands and smiled, and seeing that Nino did not answer, he blew his nose with his great blue cotton handkerchief. "You have no heart at all, maestro," said Nino at last. "Let us sing."
"But meanwhile there are two of us, and perhaps I am the greater. You will do what I ask, maestro; is it not true? And it was not I who said it; it was the baroness." "The baroness yes and may the maledictions of the inferno overtake her," said De Pretis, casting up his eyes and feeling in his coat-tail pockets for his snuff-box.
"I will do all that if I may come," said Nino readily, though he would rather not sing at all, at most times, than sing Bordogni, De Pretis tells me. "Meglio cosi, so much the better. Good-night, Sor Conte. Good-night, Nino." And so he turned down the Via Paola, and Nino and I went our way. I stopped to buy a cigar at the little tobacco shop just opposite the Tordinona Theatre.
But he was forced to take some action at once, and he could think of nothing better to do than to consult De Pretis. To the maestro he poured out his woes and his plans. He exhibited to him his position toward the baroness and toward Hedwig in the clearest light.
But De Pretis is well-to-do, and he has a marble door plate, engraved in black with his name, and two sitting-rooms. They are not very large rooms, it is true, but in one of them he gives his lessons, and the grand piano fills it up entirely, so that you can only sit on the little black horsehair sofa at the end, and it is very hard to get past the piano on either side.
De Pretis must be old-fashioned, for I am sure I do not think in that way, and I know a hundred times as much as he a hundred times.
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