“Evviva Juno the Superb!” piped one voice.
“And the oyster soup!” thundered a Sicilian hod-carrier.
At length the curtain was raised on the last act of the tragedy, and the knights and ladies, buffoons and sages, soldiers and huntsmen, began moving about the stage gingerly, with great skill avoiding collision as they crossed or ducking their heads when they made exits, hurried or slow, through the dollhouse doors.
On the Feast of Sunday a packed theatre bore witness to the wisdom of Signor Grabbini’s change of policy. From the base-board of the stage, which was fringed by a row of shrubby black heads, to the last tier of benches there was no vacant seat. The first of the short comedies was reeled off without a single toe trodden on, since it required only five dramatis personæ. Not a joke went begging, for the audience heard them all twice—first from the prompter, who bawled them from his little green coop at the footlights, and again from the mouths of the actors.
Next came the star of the evening, Juno the Superb. As the orchestra—blaring its brass—struck up the prelude of her song, Signor Di Bello entered the tiny proscenium box and dropped into a chair. The fame of her plethoric beauty had reached him, as the impresario had taken good care it should reach many an appreciative masculine ear. He was a very different-looking man to-night from the Signor Di Bello of business hours, clad in a long drab blouse, hacking Parmesan and weighing macaroni. Now he showed brave in snowy shirt front of bulging expanse, large diamond, black coat, white waistcoat, lavender trousers, and a gorgeous bouquet stuck under his left cheek.
When she appeared in the glare of the lights, draped frankly in the odd colours and tinsel frippery of the Campania peasant maid—as she is seen nowhere but on the stage—it was plain that the impresario had made an intelligent guess. Her exuberant charms were sufficient to deal even that audience a start. The men caught their breath, and the women made wry faces. Had they possessed eyes for anything but Juno, they would have seen that the grocer in the box was smitten hard by the sudden picture of billowing womanhood and glowing flesh tint. “Ah, what beauty!” he breathed, leaning farther over the rail, deep in the spell of her great hazel eyes, the peony of her cheeks, the soft tawn of her neck, and shoulders that shaded down to clearest amber. “Pomegranates and hidden rosebuds! By the egg of Columbus!”
And in truth she was, as every man had to own, as fine a woman as ever came out of Italy or any other country. But this did not keep their teeth off edge when she began to voice “Santa Lucia,” that evergreen canzonet of Naples. She pitched upon a key that baffled the orchestra. The leader stamped his foot and shifted tones in vain. Only deaf ears could have failed to perceive that it was her generous friend Nature and not art that had opened to her the stage door.
“Madonna Maria!” was the criticism of Luigia the Garlic Woman. “She has the voice of a hungry goat on a foggy morning.”
But there was one pair of eardrums on which her bleating did not grate. They belonged to Signor Di Bello, in calmer moments a man of very good hearing. But he was stone deaf now. Before the Levantine charms of this thrilling creature all his senses were absorbed in sight.
“Brava, bravissima!” he shouted at the interlude. “Oh, simpiaticone!”