JUNO THE SUPERB
“O dolce Napoli,
O suol beato,
Ove sorridere,
Voile il creato;
Tu sei l’impero
Dell ’armonia--
Santa Lucia!
Santa Lucia!”
SIGNOR GRABBINI, _impresario_ of the theatre of La Scala, resolved
to give up his valiant but ruinous fight for the legitimate drama.
Such pieces as Othello, Francesca da Rimini, The Count of Monte
Cristo, acted with a complete cast, had proved a strain too severe
for the treasury as well as for the capacity of his ten-foot stage.
In scenes where the entire company was “on,” the jam became so great
that spirited pushing set in, each actor aiming to hold that part of
the stage allotted to him by the playbook. In the struggle, conducted
sometimes with stealthy art, that the audience might not be aware,
toes were trodden upon and tempers badly stirred. Thus it happened
that after the curtain had rolled down, the ladies and gentlemen of
the company were likely to fall to shaking their fists at one another,
naturally to the delight of the audience, who could hear the wordy
battle very distinctly. Wherefore Signor Grabbini decided to change the
policy of his theatre.
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.”
“Bravo, Signor Grabbini!”
“Silence!”
“Meal cakes! A soldo each!”
“Silence, thou donkey!”
“With your permission, ladies and gentlemen,” the _impresario_ went
on, bowing low, “I will proceed. The artist to whom I have referred
is--ah! my friends--she is an angel of delight--a glorious type, a
creature magnificent. My word of honour, the most beautiful woman in
New York--nay, in all America. To the artistic world she is known as
Juno the Superb. Pay strict attention, my compatriots. The evening of
the Feast of Sunday will indeed be an occasion most extraordinary,
for it is my honoured privilege to inform you that in addition to the
famous comedies and the exquisite Juno, there will be an oyster cook in
the audience under the especial administration of the management, who
will prepare soups of sea fruit in true Neapolitan style and at prices
the most moderate.”
“_Bravissimo!_”
“Meal----”
“Silence! _Evviva_ the oyster cook!”
“With these my humble words, highly prized patrons, I will conclude,
and from the depth of my heart beg you to accept my most cordial
gratitude, and the assurance that in the future as well as the past you
will find me ever alert to serve faithfully and to the plenitude of my
power the highly esteemed, the eminent, the generous Italian colony.”
“Long live the _impresario_!” was rained from all parts as he backed
off, salaaming.
“_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!_”
“What a whale she is!” said a phthisic cigarette girl to her promised
husband, who heard her not.
“An ugly figure she makes, truly,” sneered a barber’s wife to her
husband. “A big cow like that in the frock of a child! No honest woman,
one sees easily. And look, Adriano! Her nose! I find it similar to the
snout of Signora Grametto’s little black-faced dog.”
There was no gainsaying this bold touch of the Supreme Sculptor’s
realism. Glorious her black tresses, delectable her form and colour,
uptilting and ample her nose.
The canzonet ended, she walked off without bowing to or glancing at the
audience, but the men, one and all, their eye thirst still unslaked,
joined in Signor Di Bello’s frantic demand for an _encore_. On she came
with stolid countenance and began the song all over again, although the
women had set up a hissing that matched the strength of the applause.
Signor Di Bello called the flower girl into the box, bought an armful
of her wares, and threw them wildly on the stage. They fell in a shower
on all sides of Juno. Instantly she stopped, put her arms akimbo, and
while the orchestra played on, glared blackly at her vehement admirer.
Flowers for a Neapolitan of the Porto! Blossoms that have poison in
their breath! Stupid Di Bello! Stupid Genovese! Twelve years in
Mulberry, and to forget the hatred that Neapolitans of Naples have for
natural blooms! Perhaps you thought she was from the country, like most
of the people there. Bah! In such a serious matter one ought to be sure.
It was the women’s golden chance. They started a titter of derisive
laughter that became a gale and swept through the theatre. Juno moved
toward the box, trampling the odious flowers, and spat in the face of
Signor Di Bello. Then she left the stage, followed by an outpour of
boorish gibes.
“_Infame! infame!_” It was the voice of Bertino, crying loudly from
the last row of benches, under the gallery hard by the door. With a
firing emotion that he did not know was the green fever, he had watched
the doings of his uncle, and when the bright colours rained about her,
brushing her cheeks and hair, and whisking her shoulders, he thought
with a heart-fall of the wretched blossom his hand had bestowed a week
before at the Wooden Bunch. _Madre Santissima!_ His uncle kissed her
with lovely flowers, and he, miserable soul, kissed her with a spot
of yellow paint. But when the people laughed and sneered, and he saw
her anger kindle, her cause was his own. The pigs and sons of pigs! To
laugh at her! At his queen, the _amorosa_ of his dreamland, by sunglow
and starshine, asleep or at work. Grander than the dames of Genoa
palaces, more beautiful than the peaches of California. And his uncle!
The old mooncalf! He was the cause of it all. Served him right that
kiss she gave him back. Ha-ha! But these jeers, these hounds yelping at
his queen! “_Infame! infame!_”
The people thought he meant it for Juno, and took up the cry, which did
not subside until the Bay of Naples and the cone of Vesuvius rolled
up from the bottom, and the second comedy began. Signor Di Bello
had no appetite for this, and he left the box, passing out amid the
nudges and snickers of the first families of the Genovesi, Milanesi,
and Torinesi, who were there in force along with the flower of the
Calabriani, Napolitani, and Siciliani. But he put a good face on the
matter, and at the door hailed the _impresario_:
“Ha, Signor Grabbini! Your singer has at least one liquid tone.” And he
disappeared, chuckling.