A turn of the key and the apparatus struck up "La donna è móbile," the strikingly clear tones floating away on the evening air to blend with the wash of the sea on our bow. A hush fell over the forward deck; into the circle of faces illumed by the swinging ship's lantern crept the mirage of dreams; a sigh sounded in the black night of the outskirts.
"E Bonci, amici," whispered the Calabrian as the last note died away.
The announcement was superfluous; no one else could have sung the sprightly little lyric with such perfection.
Bits of other operas followed, plantation melodies, and the monologues of witty Irishmen; but always the catholic instrument came back to "La donna è móbile," and one could lean back on one's elbows and fancy the dapper little tenor standing in person on the corner of the hatch, pouring out his voice to his own appreciative people.
Thereafter as regularly as the twilight appeared the Calabrian with his "fonógrafo." The forward deck took to sleeping by day that the evening musicale might be prolonged into the small hours. Whatever its imperfections, the little black box did much to charm away the monotony of the voyage, in its early stages.
But good fortune is rarely perennial. One night in mid-Atlantic a first-class passenger of the type that adds, by contrast, to the attractiveness of the steerage, his arms about the waists of two damsels old enough to have known better, paused to hang over the rail. Bonci was singing. The promenader surveyed the oblivious multitude below in silence until the aria ended, then turned on his heel with a snort of contempt. The maidens giggled, the affectionate trio strolled aft, and a moment later the cabin piano was jangling a Broadway favorite. When I turned my head the Calabrian was closing his instrument.
"No, amici, no more," he said as protest rose; "We must not annoy the rich signori up there."
Nor could he be moved to open the apparatus again as long as the voyage lasted.
Amid the general merriment of home-coming was here and there a note of sadness in the caverns of the Prinzessin. On a hatch huddled day by day, when, the sun was high, a family of three, doomed to early extinction by the white-faced scourge of the north. Below, it was whispered, lay an actress once famous in the Italian quarter, matched in a race with death to her native village. A toil-worn Athenian, on life's down grade, who had been robbed on the very eve of sailing of seven years' earnings of pick and shovel, tramped the deck from dawn to midnight with sunken head, refusing either food or drink. Now and again he stepped to the rail to shake his knotted fist at the western horizon, stretched his arms on high, and took up again his endless march.
Then there were the deported--seven men whose berths were not far from my own. One had shown symptoms of trachoma; another bore the mark of a bullet through one hand; a third was a very Hercules, whom the port doctors had pronounced flawless, but who had landed with four dollars less than the twenty-five required. With this single exception, however, one could not but praise the judgment of Ellis Island. The remaining four were dwarfish Neapolitans, little more than wharf rats; and the best of Naples bring little that is desirable. Yet one could not but pity the unpleasing little wretches, who had risen so far above their environment as to save money in a place where money is bought dearly, and whose only reward for years of repression of every appetite had been a month of misery and frustration.