Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 52.djvu/17

It was really not so long ago—only one year. The scirocco was blowing up and down the streets, and about the corners, with its sickening blast, making us all feel like dead people, and hiding away the sun from us. It is no use trying to do anything when it blows scirocco, at least for us who are born here. But I had been persuaded to go with Nino to the house of Sor Ercole to hear my boy sing the opera he had last studied, and so I put my cloak over my shoulders, and wrapped its folds over my breast, and covered my mouth, and we went out. For it was a cold scirocco, bringing showers of tepid rain from the south, and the drops seemed to chill themselves as they fell. One moment you are in danger of being too cold, and the next minute the perspiration stands on your forehead, and you are oppressed with a moist heat. Like the prophet, when it blows a real scirocco you feel as if you were poured out like water, and all your bones were out of joint. Foreigners do not feel it until they have lived with us a few years, but Romans are like dead men when the wind is in that quarter.

I went to the maestro's house and sat for two hours listening to the singing. Nino sang very creditably, I thought, but I allow that I was not as attentive as I might have been, for I was chilled and uncomfortable. Nevertheless, I tried to be very appreciative, and I complimented the boy on the great progress he had made. When I thought of it, it struck me that I had never heard any body sing like that before, but still there was something lacking; I thought it sounded a little unreal, and I said to myself that he would get admiration, but never any sympathy. So clear, so true, so rich it was, but wanting a ring to it, the little thrill that goes to the heart. He sings very differently now.

Maestro Ercole de Pretis lives in the Via Paola, close to the Ponte Sant' Angelo, in a most decent little house—that is, of course, on a floor of a house, as we all do. But De Pretis is well to do, and he has a marble door-plate, engraved in black with his name, and two sitting-rooms. They are not very large room, it is true, but in one of them he gives his lessons, and the grand piano fills it up entirely, so that you can only sit on the little black horsehair sofa at the end, and it is very hard to get past the piano on either side. Ercole is as broad as he is long, and takes snuff when he is not smoking. But it never hurts his voice.

It was Sunday, I remember, for he had to sing in St. Peter's in the afternoon; and it was so near, we walked over with him. Nino had never lost his love for church music, though he had made up his mind that it was a much finer thing to be a primo tenore assoluto at the Apollo Theatre than to sing in the Pope's choir for thirty scudi a month. We walked along over the bridge, and through the Borgo Nuovo, and across the Piazza Rusticucci, and then we skirted the colonnade on the left, and entered the church by the sacristy, leaving De Pretis there to put on his purple cassock and his white cotta. Then we went into the Capella del Coro to wait for the vespers.

All sorts of people go to St. Peter's on Sunday afternoon, but they are mostly foreigners, and bring strange little folding chairs, and arrange themselves to listen to the music as though it were a concert. Now and then one of the young gentlemen-in-waiting from the Vatican strolls in and says his prayers, and there is an old woman, very ragged and miserable, who has haunted the chapel of the choir for many years, and sits with perfect unconcern, telling her beads at the foot of the great reading-desk that stands out in the middle and is never used. Great ladies crowd in