One night he stepped before the curtain to make the momentous announcement. Before he could open his mouth a sailor-man, red as Hiawatha, reached over from the wicketed parapet of the gallery and cried:
“A clasp of the hand, comrade!”
With a gallery so low as that it were folly to court dignity, so the little man shook the big hand and then began his speech, which he punctuated with glances at a piece of white paper that he held. In glittering words he set forth the motives that animated him in deciding upon a change from the plan of amusement that had been so successful, so profitable to himself, and so agreeable to the signori of the company. But it was because he wished to serve better, to captivate even more the highly esteemed, the eminent, the generous Italian colony, that in the future there would be no five-act tragedies, but a veritable banquet every night of short comedies—oh, so laughable!—from the pens of the world’s greatest dramatists, in the true Italian as well as the dialect of sweet Naples.
“Bravoes!” from all over the theatre put a stop to the speech for a moment. Men in the orchestra pens leaned over the edge of the stage and lit their cigarettes at the footlights, and, taking advantage of the pause, the meal-cake man shouted his wares.
“But this is not all, my friends,” went on Signor Grabbini.
A fresh shower of bravoes.
“Keep your feet off my head!” cried a man in the pit to one in the gallery.
“Bah!” gave back the other, drawing in a huge boot between the wickets; “in this theatre one can not stretch his legs.”
“Silence! Hear the impresario!”
“Beginning on Sunday night,” said the man on the stage, “I shall have the distinct honour of presenting to the highly discriminating taste of the most esteemed and eminent patrons of La Scala an extraordinary singer of canzonets.”