"It is the eat, the eat, the terrible eat which do this. And every night when we perform I shiver, I grow cold. I stand looking at her as she take her place on the board. And I see she have grow bigger. Perhaps it is nothing to you, a woman grown bigger. But to Salvini it is ruin.
"I throw the knife. Zip it goes and I close my eyes each time. I no longer dare give her the beautiful frame as before. But I must throw away. Because for eight years I have thrown at a target of 150 pounds. And my art cannot change.
"Some day she will be sorry. Yes, some day she will understand what she is doing to me. She will eat, eat until she grow so fat that it is all my target that I mastered on the honeymoon. And I will throw the knife over. She will no longer be Lucia, and it will hit. Name of God, it will hit her and sink in."
"Well, she will have learned a lesson then, signor."
"She will have learned. But me, I will be ruined. They will laugh. They will say, 'Salvini, the great Salvini, is done. He cannot throw the knives any more. Look, last night he hit his wife. Twice, three, times he threw the knives into her.' Sapristi! It is the stubbornness of womankind.
"I will tell you. Why does she eat, eat, eat? Why does she grow fat?
Because she no longer loves me. No, she do it on purpose to ruin me."
And the great Salvini covered his ears with his hands as the phonograph continued relentlessly, "one, two, one, two, higher, two."
LETTERS
One of the drawers in my desk is full of letters that people have sent in. Some of them are knocks or boosts, but most of them are tips. There are several hundred tips on stories in the drawer.
Today, while looking them over I thought that these tips were a story in themselves. To begin with, the different kinds of stationery and the different kinds of handwriting. You would think that stationery and handwriting so varied would contain varied suggestions and varied points of view.