Two
rival bands, one from a neighbouring village, had been performing at a
local _concerto_, and the two rival trumpeters had continued to blow
their own trumpets after business hours. "Fancy blowing with that little
mouth!" said one. "I'm glad I haven't your maw (_boccone_)!" retorted the
other.
From words it came to knives, and ere you could say Jacopo Robinson a
trumpeter lay weltering in his blood, or rather in his gore, and the
murderer was flying into the arms of the police, who incontinently turned
and fled the other way. When my friends passed by the house of the
victim, the midnight air was ringing with the horrible curses of his
bereaved sister, whose spasmodic face was visible at a window. But the
cold-blooded artistic English felt no answering throb of sympathy--it was
still a scene in a play to them, still a _coup de theatre_--they had lost
the primary human instincts, corrupted by a long course of melodrama and
comic opera. To-day I myself saw a carnival procession in the village
piazza--a veritable survival of the Middle Ages; a triumphal car wreathed
in flowers, driven by masquerading mummers and surrounded by Pierrots and
peasant buffoons, a thoroughly naive and primitive bit of religion. But
it needed a perceptible effort to shake off the sense of the operatic, to
accept the thing as genuine.
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