One day after rehearsal I had an appointment with a young man whose acquaintance I had made the previous evening behind the scenes. He was sitting on a packing-case, exchanging compliments with the head fireman, and inquired whether I was looking for anything; finding I wanted a seat he took me under his protection, scoured the theatre for a chair, and put it for me in a corner with a view of the stage. There was only room for one chair, so he sat on my knee and put his arm round my neck to keep himself in place. He was absorbed by the performance, but, while the curtain was down, had leisure to tell me that his name was Domenico, that he was nearly thirteen years old and brother to one of the ladies of the company; he was at school in the town and his sister had got him a week’s holiday and taken him to stay with her.

“And so they call you Domenico,” said I, just to keep things going.

“No,” he replied, “they call me Micio.”

“Why do they do that if your name is Domenico?”

“Because they are all very fond of me. Domenico is my name as I said, but Micio is a caress.”

“I see; then may I also call you Micio?”

“Of course you may, and I hope you will.”

He was very fond of reading and wanted me to lend him a story-book, but Tristram Shandy, which was the nearest approach to a story-book I had with me, was in English, so that would not do. Then he began searching my pockets for chocolate, but there, again, he was disappointed. It was to give me an opportunity of remedying these deficiencies in my equipment that we made our appointment, and he was to do the bargaining. During rehearsal I consulted his sister, which I suppose would have been the correct thing to do in England, but she only shook her finger at him, and he only laughed and played at hiding his fresh brown 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 N 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 Infâme, 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 opportunities for effects, but with no more plot than the doings of the paladins in the marionette theatres. They were like the Pietro Longo play, which I had told him about, and he said that, if that was really all of it, it began with one story and ended with another and cried aloud for a third act to hold it together.

“Pietro must escape from prison,” said Micio; “he must return home and we must know whether his sister died or went into a convent or married the policeman.”

“What is the stupid fellow to do?” I inquired, “the play was made for him.”

“He must escape too, Pietro will help him because they will become friends; besides, any one can escape from a stage prison, especially if the knives are not taken away from the convicts. And then he can do whatever the author likes.

“But it is always so in life,” he continued, with a sigh, “we must not be discontented because the best we can get is not the best we can imagine. I am still young, but not too young to have kn –­ Let us not talk about that. What did you think of the play last night?”

I replied that it was a fine play.

He agreed, saying it was “strepitosamente bello.” It opened with a state of things easily comprehensible and of great interest. There were no tedious explanatory speeches, but plenty of action leading naturally to a catastrophe which was at once seen to be inevitable, though no one could have predicted precisely that. And the conclusion sent the audience away feeling that something tremendous had happened, and that the state of things existing at the beginning could never exist again.

“That is how a play should be,” said Micio.

I took a leaf out of Giovanni’s book and patted him on the back.

“Bravo, Micio, bravo! No one has yet said anything like that at supper. This is the second time this morning that you have expressed my thoughts for me. We must get your sister to let you sit up with us one of these evenings. You would keep us straight.”

“They know all about it,” he replied, “especially Giovanni, he knows everything. But they don’t say it because they like to go on talking.”

“There! now you have done it a third time. You appear to me to know all about it too. How did you find it all out? They did not teach it you at school, did they?”

“I do not remember that any one ever taught it me,” he replied; “I seem to have known it always. It cannot be otherwise. It is like eating cheese with maccaroni.”

“We seldom eat maccaroni in England,” said I, in defence, “and when we do we usually eat sugar with it; perhaps that is why we are so slow.”

This was a mistake because I wanted him to talk more about the theatre, and there is something quicksilverish in Micio’s temperament; having got on the maccaroni he did not care to return to art.

“What do you eat in England if you do not eat maccaroni? Do you eat chocolate?”

Which reintroduced the original question, and when we had attended to that, it was nearly four o’clock, his sister’s dinner-hour and time for him to go home.

In the natural order of things, Micio, being the son of artists, will return to the stage. Should he fail as an adult actor, he will perhaps travel in tiles or in ecclesiastical millinery, or he may get employment on the railway, or as a clerk in the office of the cemetery. I should like to know when the time comes, for I feel towards him somewhat as he feels towards Pietro Longo. And there is a chance that he will tell me, for we promised to exchange postcards, and before parting he gave me his address

(Indirizzo)
ALL’ EGREGIO GIOVANOTTO MICIO BOCCADIFUOCO,
Casa Educativa Garibaldi,
Via Fata Morgana N, Castellinaria.

Four o’clock was also Giovanni’s dinner-hour, and this was the day he had promised to dine with me. I was in some fear lest I might choose the wrong restaurant or order something that would disagree with him; the evening’s entertainment, on which the whole town depended, was at stake. But I need not have worried about it. Giovanni lives so entirely among people who are devoted to him that he habitually takes the lead in everything. Consequently he chose the restaurant, and its name was Quo Vadis? He also brought a couple of friends, ordered the dinner and, as a matter of course, took me for a drive afterwards to the lighthouse and back.

As we drove through the town, he pointed out the municipio, the post-office, the old Saracen palace, and the other objects of interest. When we got into the country, it occurred to me that I might not again have Giovanni all to myself, it was the first time we had been alone. If I could now get him to talk about his art, he might tell me exactly how deeply he feels the emotions which he expresses with so much conviction. I considered how to begin. I had better ask him first which was his favourite character. I turned to put the question. He had fallen asleep, and gave me rather an anxious time, for he repeatedly seemed to be on the point of rolling out of the carriage. It was a relief when, at last, the clattering of the horse’s hoofs on the paved streets woke him up, and there was no longer any necessity to hold him in by the coat-tail.

“There now,” said Giovanni, as he helped me out, “we have had a delightful drive. Is this your umbrella?” he added, handing it to me; “if I had known you had brought that, I would have put it up to keep the sun off you while you were asleep.”

I had not expected this and looked into his eye for a twinkle, I saw nothing but grave politeness and the kindest consideration for my comfort. There are moments when one may regret not having been brought up on impromptu plays; Pietro would have known at once what to do. I could only ask, rather feebly

“Have I been to sleep?” a question to which, of course, he did not know the answer; he was quite capable of inventing one, however, so I hastily went on about the umbrella: “Thank you very much. I am afraid it would have been of no use. I intended to take it to be mended. I had an accident with it in the storm last night. Look,” and I opened it.

“You will never get that mended. You must buy a new one. Why, it is broken into as many pieces as the quarters of the globe. Ha, ha! The two parts of Enrico’s umbrella are three in number and they are the four following, viz. the handle, the ribs, the silk, most of the stick and and yes, and this little bit broken off from the end.”

“Bravo, Giovanni, bravo!”

“You are coming to see me act this evening?”

“Of course I am.”

“And to supper afterwards?”

“Certainly, if I may. I do not want to cause an eruption of Mount Etna, and I do not want you to leave off speaking to me.”

“Bravo, bravo!” And away he went, apologizing for leaving me by saying he really must try to get a little sleep before nine o’clock or he would be no good at the performance. And this time I fancied there was something of a twinkle in his eye.

Four o’clock P.M. is not such a bad dinner-hour when one is going to bed at four A.M. And four A.M. is not such a bad time for going to bed in Sicily. At some seasons it is better for getting up and then one takes one’s siesta during the heat of the day. Either way some alteration of one’s usual habits is a good thing on a holiday, and any one in want of a thorough change from the life of the ordinary Londoner might do worse or, as I should prefer to say, could hardly do better than spend a week with a Sicilian Dramatic Company.