face and his curly black head in her white skirts; she might as well have shaken her finger at the scirocco.
The child put his hand in mine and avoiding the glare of the big streets, led me through narrow lanes to one of the gates of the town. There had been a storm the previous night, so sudden that our supper had been spoilt before we could get it under cover and we had to begin again inside the restaurant. The clouds had all cleared away and the panorama, as seen from the gate, was at its best with the sun beating down on the slopes of the mountain-side and sprinkling sapphires all over the sea.
Micio, however, had not come to admire the view; he turned from it to the books that were laid out on a shady ledge of the town-wall and began to consider those with the illustrated covers. He wanted them all, not simultaneously but one after the other. He paused before Uno Strano Delitto but, the crime being too strange to be comprehensible, we passed on to Guirlanda Sanguinosa, a lady dressed in bridal attire but, doubtless through exposure to the weather, the blood had faded off the wreath of orange blossoms, so we took up another.
Il Bacio del Cadavere was about a lady in evening dress who had got out of cab No. 3402 which was waiting for her in the moonlight while she conversed with the porter at the gates of the cemetery; Micio’s anxiety to ascertain whether the interview was preliminary or subsequent to the corpse’s kiss was not acute enough to induce him to buy the book. There was another about a kiss, Bacio Infame, on which a lady with a stiletto was defending herself from a bad man. All these were enticing, but we hoped to do better, and I began to blush for the somewhat thin plot of Tristram Shandy and to be thankful that my copy was not in Italian. Finally he took La Mano del Defunto: at the back of a sepulchral chamber in a violated coffin, from which the lid had been removed, lay the body of a woman, shockingly disarranged, over the edge hung her right arm, the hand had been cut off and was being carried away by a city gent in tall hat, unbuttoned frock coat, jaunty tie, yellow boots and streaky trousers; he had a dark lantern with the help of which he had committed the sacrilege—very horrible which attracted Micio, and only twenty-five centimes which attracted
me. We might possibly have done better, but we should have had to search a long time. So we bought it and thought we might take something else as well. Now, it seemed to me, was the time for Carlo Magno and the Paladins or the Life of Musolino, or Robinson Crusoe, or Don Quixote, or The Three Musketeers, but he had read them all, years ago. The Arabian Nights was new to him, but it was marked ten francs. In voluble Sicilian he expressed my views by telling the bookseller it was ridiculously too expensive and that he could give no more than two francs fifty centimes—he never gave more for a book. The man held out for five francs. The boy laughed at him. They declaimed and gesticulated and swore at each other until, at last, Micio, a baffled paladin, wiped his brow wearily as though there was no doing anything with these people, and told me to take three francs out of my purse and give them to the brigand, who politely wrapped up our purchases and we strolled off.
“Now,” said Micio as we approached the chocolate shop, “we did rather well over the Arabian Nights—saved seven francs—do you think it would be extravagant if we
were to have an ice to restore us after our struggles?”
Of course I agreed, though I had not myself done any struggling, and, as we sat at our little table eating our ices, we talked about the theatre. I said I had never seen such acting; leaving Giovanni out of consideration, all the company knew how to produce the illusion of reality even down to Lola. Micio had no opinion of Lola. She was not to be considered seriously as an actress; she might become one some day, but she was only a child. All the children of artists can do as well as she, but no one can really act who has not suffered. He himself used to act quite as well as Lola, but had not appeared on the stage for a long while—not since he had been at school. He could do better now.
“When I see the others acting,” he said, “I am not moved, it is like reading an index. But when I see Giovanni, it is all different, it is like reading a romance and it makes me cry.”
He found fault with some of the plays for not being worthy of the actor. Too many of them were little more than disconnected incidents, strung together to provide