The musicians were also a sorry lot. It was not rare that one or the other of them had pawned his instrument. Once a performance had to be postponed because the violinists had stayed over their time at a village dance where they were playing in order to add to their paltry income. The inspector, who was scene-shifter, promoter, ticket seller, and publicity agent all in one, and who was not equal to any of these positions, took French leave in the second year and ran off with one of the chorus girls, taking the box-office receipts for the evening with him. One time the costumes were sent to the wrong address, with the result that Boieldieu’s “La Dame Blanche” had to be played in woollen frocks, patched velvet skirts, filthy cotton blouses, and French wadding. Another time the mob in “Martha” consisted of a distempered woman, a waiter brought in at the last minute from a herring restaurant, and the door-keeper of an orphanage: the chorus had gone on a strike because their salaries had been held up. In Karlstadt the final act of the “Merry Wives of Windsor” could not be played, because during the intermission Falstaff and Mrs. Quickly had got into a fight, and the lady had scratched a huge piece of skin from the singer’s nose. If these musical strollers, as acting-director Wurzelmann called the company, nevertheless made some money, it was due to the superhuman efforts of Daniel. Wurzelmann was always mixed up in some kind of love affair, introduced in time a ruinous system of favouritism, and became lazier and lazier as the weeks passed by. Daniel had to pull the singers out of their beds to get them to go to rehearsals; Daniel had to help out with the singing when the chorus was too weak; Daniel had to distribute the rôles, tame down refractory women, and make brainless dilettants subordinate their noisy opinions to the demands of a work which he himself generally detested. He had to drill beginners, abbreviate scores, transpose voices, and produce effects with lamentably inadequate material. And from morning to night he had to wage war eternal against libellous action, inattention, and inability. Nobody loved him for this; they merely feared him. They swore they would take vengeance on him, but they knuckled under whenever they seemed to have a chance. He had a habit of treating them with crushing coldness, he could make them look like criminals. He had a look of icy contempt that made them clench their fists when his eye fell on them. But they bowed before a power which seemed uncanny to them, though it consisted in nothing more than the fact that he did his duty while they did not.