Having succeeded in this, de Basil emerged from his hiding place to hold me up once again by demanding money under duress. He had no money and had to have cash in advance before he would move the company to Mexico. Once there, he raised objections to the Baronova arrangements, did not want her to dance or as a member of the company; and there was a general air of sabotage, egged on, I have no doubt, by a domestic situation, wherein his wife wanted to dance leading roles. Somehow we managed to get through the Mexico City engagement and to get them to Cuba. There matters came to a head with a vengeance. Because of de Basil’s inability to pay salaries, he started cutting salaries, with a strike that has become a part of ballet history ensuing. Once more I dispatched my trusty right hand, Mae Frohman, to foreign parts to try to straighten matters out. There was nothing she could do. The mess was too involved, too complicated, and the only possible course was for me to drop the whole thing. De Basil, looking for new worlds to conquer, started for South America. His adventures in the Southern Hemisphere have no important place in this book, since the company was not then under my management. They would, moreover, fill another book. The de Basil South American venture, however, enters this story chronologically at a later point. Let it be said that the “Colonel’s” adventures there were as fantastic as the man himself. They included, among many other things, defection after defection, sometimes necessitating a recruiting of dancers almost from the streets; the performances of ballets with girls who had never heard of the works, much less seen them, having to rehearse them sketchily while the curtain was waiting to rise; the coincidence of performance with the outbreak of a local revolution; flying his little company in shifts, since only one jalopy plane, in a dubious state of repair, was available. I shall not go into his fantastic financing, this being one of the few times when, as I suggested at the beginning of this book, the curtain might be lowered for a few discreet moments, in order to spare the feelings of others rather than my own. In the quiet of the small hours of the morning, I would lie awake and compare the personalities of the two “organizers,” de Basil and Denham, reviewing their likenesses and their differences. As I dozed off, I came to the conclusion that most generalizations about personality are wrong. When you have spent hours, days, months, years in close association and have been bored and irritated by a flamboyant individual, you are apt to think that restraint and reticence are the only virtues. Until you meet a quiet fellow, who is quiet either because he has nothing to say or nothing to make a noise about, and then discover his stillness is merely a convenient mask for deceit.