Page 16 - 1911 February - To Dragma

TO PRAGMA OF ALPHA OMICRON PI 87

A maiden fair, with curly hair or words to that effect.
He beats his breast (clanking mightily the while) staggers against
the rocking scenery, rubs his fine eyes with a mailed fist, and weeps
and wails over the body in an astonishingly deep bass voice. It was
a great surprise to see the mannikin click its own vizor open.

His heart-rending sobs at length arouse the lady and the flood of
tears is interrupted by a high soprano or perhaps a falsetto sigh.
She lifts her head, glares at him, and gradually 'comes to' a difficult
operation requiring so much manipulation that we caught sight of
the lower half of the man working the wires—perhaps as high as his
belt. It gave me quite a shock to see that our wonderfully life-like
puppets were only about three feet high. The illusion was so perfect
we forgot the real proportions of the actors.

The noble Rinaldo now kneels before the lady, offers his breast
to the cruel steel and begs to be killed. Garinda obediently advances
upon him. Twice she tries to spit him upon her sword's point and
twice she recoils, sobbing in falsetto what sounded to me like "non
mi puede" and which evidently meant " I can't do it!" Cupid at
work, you see. In a third attempt, she fails and finally stalks indig-
nantly off the stage, Rinaldo at her heels like a well-trained dog.

The curtain falls amid great applause from the strangers in the
'boxes' and the pumpkin-seed eaters below. Then the pit had leisure
to look us over and how they did stare! We felt even more con-
spicuous when the curtain rose again and a puppet-dwarf appeared,
doffing its derby-like hat with wonderous skill. He congratulated
the audience on having such distinguished foreigners in the boxes
and must have been witty in his allusions to us for the whole floor
roared with laughter and then grinned at us to see how we took it.
Referring to us successively as English, Americans, and Spaniards
he went on to announce that tomorrow night would be given the
first one in a series of Orlando's battles (these plays run on for
weeks with duels and heart-aches innumerable) but after 'dopo-
domani' I lost track, though I could follow the speeches and get the
gist of things far better than I had expected.

Between the acts, a boy went around among the benches with
immense glasses of water into which he shook something from a
bottle that made the contents milky. Later we learned that it was
a nice and a popular drink among the Italians. The men were
clean and nice though any one could see that they came from the
lower classes. The hall at which we now had a chance to glance,
was as poor as they for the walls were white-washed and bare except
for some festoons and bunches of dingy paper flowers and an
occasional design made by the application of many small wafers of
colored paper.