Chapter XI. Esthetic Adventures
made possible by a
Fifteen-Dollar Piano
IT was late in that winter that the trading instinct cropped out in my uncle and aunt. They decided to open a candy-store in the tenement where we lived. For this purpose the landlord was persuaded to allow them to use the bow window for display purposes. The parlor was fitted with a small counter, a large store lamp, and a various assortment of sodas, confectionery and pastry.
That was a prohibition year in city politics, and the tenement thirst was pronounced to be “something awful!” Desperate men were compelled to go away on holidays and Saturdays to get what refreshment they could. The police were on keen watch for illegal selling. They were making daily raids in different parts of the city. Liquors had been found in cellars, hidden under the floors, in flasks buried in the bodies of huge codfish, water-pipes had been cut off from the main pipes and tapped to barrels of whisky and beer; every trick possible to the imagination seemed to have been uncovered, yet my aunt undertook to let some chosen throats in the neighborhood know that she planned to keep a supply of intoxicants on hand.
I was asked, at night, to take a pint of whiskey here and there to some shut-in woman like Old Burnt Jane, a cripple from a fire, who always let tears fall in the food she was cooking as she said: “Wait, wait, little boy, dearie. I’ll get my mon-ey when I’ve got this taste of cheese off; wait like a good little boy!”
Our customers, who came for a drink at any time, had a secret sign whereby they could ask for intoxicants without mentioning them by name. On Sundays, our kitchen would be filled with men and women having their thirsts quenched. My Aunt Millie rubbed her hands with satisfaction over the prosperous business she did.
But one Sunday afternoon there came three plain-clothes men to the shop. The alarm had been given, and Aunt Millie waited for the raid with no outward traces of fear. There were some people at the rear of the house, and they were engaged in a very busy, “manufactured” conversation about “Charley’s throat trouble” when the officers came in the back to investigate. If they sniffed the air for traces of whisky, they only got a superabundance of “mint” and “musk,” “lozengers” half thrown into the customers’ mouths by Aunt Millie. A “complete” investigation was made, covering the back-yard, the cellar, the kitchen, the counter, and the bedrooms, but no illegal wares were found, and the officers left the shop in chagrin. As they left, my Aunt Millie bent her fond gaze towards a row of black bottles that stood in a row in the display window, marked, “Ginger,” “Spruce,” and “Birch.”
“You dear creatures,” she cried, “what a salvation you are!” Whereat, she took one to the back room, uncorked it, and poured out a noggin of whiskey apiece for each of her customers, and the “throat trouble” gave way to a discussion of, “What tasty stuff it is, this whiskey!”
Shortly after this, my uncle was discharged for staying out from work one morning, after a night of intoxication, and he finally secured a new position in the South End. Rather than have the fuss of going to his work on the street-cars, he rented a house, and we removed. This house was a cottage, the first one we had lived in since coming to America. It stood on a street corner, near a wide square, where the thousands of cyclists came after supper for road races, “runs,” and a circle around the neck of land which jutted out into Buzzards Bay. Ours was the show place of that neighborhood; from the branches of the rotting cherry tree in the front yard, I could watch the crowds come and go, without the trouble of going away from the house. Directly opposite us, buried in a maze of maple branches, with a high-fenced yard back of it, stood an Orphan’s Home. The street-car line terminated in front of our door. It was, to me, a very aristocratic neighborhood indeed. I felt somewhat puffed up about it. There were several saloons within a few minute’s walk. My aunt regarded that as a feature not to be despised. She had explained to uncle: “You see we can get it in cans, and not have to go and sit away from home and all its comforts.”
This change of residence meant also a change of work for me. I left the spinning-room, left Curley, Mallet, Mary, Zippy, and the others, and went into the mule-room to learn back-boying with my uncle.
The mule-room is generally the most skilled section of a cotton-mill. Its machinery is more human in its action than is a loom, or a carding machine, or a ring-spinning frame. There are no women or girls in a mule-spinning room. Men spin the yarn, and boys attend to the wants of the machines as back-boys, tubers, and doffers.
One Saturday afternoon, shortly after we had settled in our new home, aunt and uncle went cityward, entered a music store, and said, “We want to look over a piano.”
The clerk immediately took them in the direction of the high-priced, latest models.
“No,” said aunt, “them’s not the ones we want to buy. Mister, you haven’t got something cheaper, have you?”
“How cheap?” asked the clerk.
“Well,” said my aunt, “I shouldn’t care to go very high. Say a second-hander.”
The clerk took them to the rear of the store, to a dim corner. Here he turned on the light, and showed a row of table-pianos. Aunt and uncle stopped before one of them, a scratched, faded veteran, of many concert-hall and ballroom experiences. Its keys were yellow, with black, gaps where some were missing. One of the pedal rods was broken off, while the other was fastened with thin wire. Uncle, with professional nonchalance, whirled a creaky stool to the desired height, sat down, turned back his cuffs, and struck a handful of chords, like a warhorse in battle again, with a vivid reminiscence of old English public-house days. There came from the depths of the aged lyre a tinkling, tinpannish strain of mixed flats.
“It’s real good,” smiled my aunt.
“It needs tuning,” commented the clerk.
“How much is it worth, tuned?” asked my uncle.
“Fifteen dollars,” announced the clerk.
“On time, how much?” asked aunt eagerly. “We can only put in three dollars on this at first,” she said.
“Fifteen dollars on credit, at your own terms,” said the clerk, after a brief consultation with the manager in the office. “We need the room, and will be glad to get it out of the way.” “It’s ours, then,” said my uncle. “Send it down as soon as you get it tuned,” he directed.
When they told me about the purchase, uncle announced, “It will keep me at home, I hope, and away from the saloons. It will be fine to get to playing again. I miss it so. I must be all out of practise.”
When the piano did come, and it was established in the front room, I spent a whole evening in fingering it. There was only one defect about it,—when uncle played a tune, one of the keys had a fault of sticking, so that he had to lift it bodily into place, and that somewhat broke in on the melody he was engaged on.
“But what can you expect for fifteen dollars,” he commented, philosophically. “When folks are singing with it, I can skip it, an’ it won’t be noticed much.”
The advent of the piano made my days in the mill lighter to bear. My uncle had proposed to teach me to play on it at night if I would practise faithfully. He took pains to elaborate the truth that great musicians, who had come to fame in the earth, had done so only at the cost of infinite pains in practise.
“Never mind,” I responded, “I’ll learn, sure enough, and I may give lessons some day.” So, during work-hours, I was given the scale to memorize.
“F,a,c,e, is the name of the spaces,” he taught. “Face, it spells; you can remember that.” Then he had me memorize the notes on the lines, and then he let me try it on the piano, a night of joy to me. Day after day I would plan for these practises, and in three regular lessons, of two weeks’ duration, I had the joy of grinding out my first real four-part tune. I had been practising laboriously, with a strict regard for exact time, the selection he had set before me, when he called from the kitchen, “Hurry up the tune a bit, Al!” I did, and I was bewildered to find that the chaotic tangle of notes resolved itself, when played faster, into the simple, universal melody, “Home, Sweet Home!”
But I found not enough patience, after being in the mill all day, to isolate myself every night in the house when there was fresh air to enjoy outside, so I told uncle that I had better give up taking lessons. I could not keep them up. I wanted the fresh air more.
But uncle was loath for me to do that. “I want you to do something else besides work in the mill,” he remonstrated. About this time, I became acquainted with Alf Martin, a back-boy, who was playing the piano. His father worked on the mules next to my uncle. The two men talked the matter over, and one day Alf told me that the woman he was taking lessons from, a Miss Flaffer, had said she would give me fifty-cent lessons for thirty-five cents! My uncle said he would pay half of the cost, and in spite of my previous abandonment of music, I succumbed to this scheme, secretly, in my heart, glad of the opportunity of taking lessons from so fine a lady as Alf told me Miss Flaffer was.
“When you pay for lessons,” said my uncle, “you’ll think more of them. I could only take you as far as vamping, and you want to do more than that.”
Previous to this, I had gotten as much joy, during the week’s work, from anticipations of cream puffs, pork pies, and such minor Saturday joys, but now I had a piano lesson, a real music-lesson, to engage my mind, and that was a very cheerful week spent behind the mules. Alf and I spent much time, when we could get away from the eyes of the bosses, talking over Miss Flaffer, and I came to understand that she was a fine woman indeed.
The following Saturday afternoon, then, I took my Beginner’s Book, tied it in a roll and fastened it with twine, and went on the street-car to a very aristocratic part of the city. It was the part where, on first landing in America, I had gone on summer days, asking at the back doors if I might pick the pears that had fallen to the lawns from the trees.
Miss Flaffer’s house was a very small cottage, with a small piazza at its front, and with a narrow lawn, edged by a low fence, running around it. It was altogether a very pretty place, with its new paint, its neat windows, and the flowers between the curtains. The front steps had evidently never been trodden on by foot of man, for why did they shine so with paint! There was not a scratch on the porch, nor a pencil mark. I looked at the number, at the engraved door-plate, and found that “S. T. Flaffer” did reside within. A great, cold perspiration dripped from me as I put a trembling finger on the push-button. I heard an answering bell somewhere in the depths of the house, and then wished that I might run away. It seemed so bold a thing for me, a mill-boy, to be intruding myself on such aristocratic premises. But I could not move, and then Miss Flaffer herself opened the door!
Oh, dream of neatness, sweetness, and womanly kindness! Miss Flaffer was that to me at the moment. She was a picture, that put away my aunt and all the tenement women who came into our house for beer-drinking, put them away from memory entirely. I thought that she would send me home, and tell me to look tidy before I knocked at her door, or that I had made a mistake, and that such a woman, with her white hands, could not be giving thirty-five cent piano lessons to Al Priddy, a mill-boy!
Oh, how awkward, self-conscious, and afraid I felt as I went across that threshold and looked on comforts that were luxuries to me! There was a soft, loose rug on a hardwood, polished floor, on which, at first, I went on a voyage halfway, when the crumpled rug half tripped me and I caught desperately at a fragile chair and half wrenched it from position to stay myself, yet Miss Flaffer did not scold me, nor did she seem to notice me. Then, as we went through a luxurious dining-room (where they did nothing but eat meals!), I found myself bringing my foot down on the train of Miss Flaffer’s dress. Yet, when the confusion was over, she never made a single reference to it, though I felt that I ought to ask her if I had torn it. She led me to a little studio, where, in a curtained alcove, stood a black upright piano polished like a mirror, and before it a stool, which did not squeak like ours when turned into position.
When the preliminary examination was over, and I was seated at the piano, Miss Flaffer asked me to play “Home, Sweet Home” as I had learned under my uncle’s instruction. I had been so used to the hard, mechanical working of uncle’s instrument that I naturally pounded unduly on Miss Flaffer’s, until she politely and graciously said, “Please do not raise your fingers so high,” and to that end, she placed two coppers on my hand, and told me to play the tune without letting them drop.
After the tune, and while Miss Flaffer had left the room to get her notebook, I noted with chagrin that my perspiring fingers had left marks on the snowy keyboard where they would surely be seen. I listened, and heard Miss Flaffer rummaging among some books, and then desperately spat on my coat cuff and rubbed the keyboard vigorously until I thought that I had obliterated the traces of my fingers. Then Miss Flaffer returned, and I tried to act unconcernedly by whistling, under my breath, “After the Ball.”
By the time the lesson was over, it was raining outside, and Miss Flaffer said, “I have to go to the corner of the next street, Albert. (Albert!) I want you to share my umbrella with me so that you will not get wet.”
I mumbled, “All right, I don’t care if I do,” and prepared to go. Before we had left the house I had put on my hat twice and opened and shut the door once in my extreme excitement. Then we went out, and there rushed to my mind, from my reading, the startling question, “How to act when walking on the street with a fine woman, and there is an umbrella?” I said, when we were on the sidewalk, “Please let me carry that,” and pointed to the umbrella. “Certainly,” she said, and handed it to me. Before we had attained the corner, I had managed to poke the ends of the umbrella ribs down on Miss Flaffer’s hat, and to knock it somewhat askew. I found, also, that I was shielding myself to such an extent as to leave Miss Flaffer exposed to the torrents of rain. On the street corner, she took the umbrella, and, as my car came into view, she said, “Good-by, Albert. You did very well to-day. Practise faithfully, and be sure to come next week.” I called, “So long,” and ran for the car.
I only took two other lessons from Miss Flaffer. I never had the manners to send her word that I could no longer afford them. I was afraid that she would offer to teach me free, and I could not stand the confinement to the house after a hard day in the mill. But I had learned something besides piano-playing with her. I had seen fine manners contrasted against my own uncouth ways. I had seen a dustless house contrasted against my own ill-kept home. I had been called Albert!