That morning she found a fairly comfortable room, more within her means, on the North Side in the boardinghouse district.She unpacked and hung up her clothes and drifted downtown again, idly.It was noon when she came to the corner of State and Madison Streets.It was a maelstrom that caught her up, and buffeted her about, and tossed her helplessly this way and that.
The thousands jostled Terry, and knocked her hat awry, and dug her with unheeding elbows, and stepped on her feet.
"Say, look here!" she said once futilely.They did not stop to listen.State and Madison has no time for Terrys from Wetona.It goes its way, pell-mell.If it saw Terry at all it saw her only as a prettyish person, in the wrong kind of suit and hat, with a bewildered, resentful look on her face.
Terry drifted on down the west side of State Street, with the hurrying crowd.State and Monroe.A sound came to Terry's ears.
A sound familiar, beloved.To her ear, harassed with the roar and crash, with the shrill scream of the whistle of the policeman at the crossing, with the hiss of feet shuffling on cement, it was a celestial strain.Shelooked up, toward the sound.A great second-story window opened wide to the street.In it a girl at a piano, and a man, red-faced, singing through a megaphone.And on a flaring red and green sign:
BERNIE GOTTSCHALK'S MUSIC HOUSE!
COME IN! HEAR BERNIE GOTTSCHALK'S LATEST HIT! THE HEART-THROB SONG THAT HAS GOT 'EM ALL! THE SONG THAT MADE THE SQUAREHEADS CRAWL!
"I COME FROM PARIS, ILLINOIS, BUT OH! YOU PARIS, FRANCE! I USED TO WEAR BLUE OVERALLS BUT NOW IT'S KHAKI PANTS."COME IN!COME IN!
Terry accepted,
She followed the sound of the music.Around the corner.Up a little flight of stairs.She entered the realm of Euterpe; Euterpe with her hair frizzed; Euterpe with her flowing white robe replaced by soiled white shoes; Euterpe abandoning her flute for jazz.She sat at the piano, a red- haired young lady whose familiarity with the piano had bred contempt.Nothing else could have accounted for her treatment of it.Her fingers, tipped with sharp-pointed and glistening nails, clawed the keys with a dreadful mechanical motion.There were stacks of music sheets on counters and shelves and dangling from overhead wires.The girl at the piano never ceased playing.She played mostly by request.
A prospective purchaser would mumble something in the ear of one of the clerks.The fat man with the megaphone would bawl out, "Hicky Boola, Miss Ryan!" And Miss Ryan would oblige.She made a hideous rattle and crash and clatter of sound.
Terry joined the crowds about the counter.The girl at the piano was not looking at the keys.Her head was screwed around over her left shoulder and as she played she was holding forth animatedly to a girl friend who had evidently dropped in from some store or office during the lunch hour.Now and again the fat man paused in his vocal efforts to reprimand her for her slackness.She paid no heed.There was something gruesome, uncanny, about the way her fingers went their own way over the defenseless keys.Her conversation with the frowzy littlegirl went on.
"Wha'd he say?"(Over her shoulder.) "Oh, he laffed.""Well, didja go?"
"Me!Well, whutya think I yam, anyway?" "I woulda took a chanst."The fat man rebelled.
"Look here! Get busy! What are you paid for? Talkin' or playin'? Huh?"The person at the piano, openly reproved thus before her friend, lifted her uninspired hands from the keys and spake.When she had finished she rose.
"But you can't leave now," the megaphone man argued."Right in the rush hour.""I'm gone," said the girl.The fat man looked about, helplessly.He gazed at the abandoned piano, as though it must go on of its own accord.Then at the crowd.
"Where's Miss Schwimmer?" he demanded of a clerk."Out to lunch."Terry pushed her way to the edge of the counter and leaned over."I can play for you," she said.
The man looked at her."Sight?" "Yes."
"Come on."
Terry went around to the other side of the counter, took off her hat and coat, rubbed her hands together briskly, sat down, and began to play.The crowd edged closer.
It is a curious study, this noonday crowd that gathers to sate its music hunger on the scraps vouchsafed it by Bernie Gottschalk's Music House.Loose-lipped, slope-shouldered young men with bad complexions and slender hands.Girls whose clothes are an unconscious satire on present- day fashions.On their faces, as they listen to the music, is a look of peace and dreaming.They stand about, smiling a wistful half smile.The music seems to satisfy a something within them.Faces dull, eyeslusterless, they listen in a sort of trance.
Terry played on.She played as Terry Sheehan used to play.She played as no music hack at Bernie Gottschalk's had ever played before.The crowd swayed a little to the sound of it.Some kept time with little jerks of the shoulder--the little hitching movement of the dancer whose blood is filled with the fever of syncopation.Even the crowd flowing down State Street must have caught the rhythm of it, for the room soon filled.
At two o'clock the crowd began to thin.Business would be slack, now, until five, when it would again pick up until closing time at six.The fat vocalist put down his megaphone, wiped his forehead, and regarded Terry with a warm blue eye.He had just finished singing "I've Wandered Far from Dear Old Mother's Knee." (Bernie Gottschalk Inc.Chicago.New York.You can't get bit with a Gottschalk hit.15 cents each.)"Girlie," he said, emphatically, "you sure--can--play!" He came over to her at the piano and put a stubby hand on her shoulder."Yessir! Those little fingers----"Terry just turned her head to look down her nose at the moist hand resting on her shoulder."Those little fingers are going to meet your face if you don't move on.""Who gave you your job?" demanded the fat man.
"Nobody.I picked it myself.You can have it if you want it." "Can't you take a joke?""Label yours."
