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
back hair frizzed; Euterpe with her flowing white robe replaced by
soiled white boots that failed to touch the hem of an empire-waisted
blue serge; Euterpe abandoning her lyre 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 grey 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 Bloo!' Miss Ryan." And Miss Ryan would oblige. She made a
hideous rattle and crash and clatter of sound compared to which an
Indian tom-tom would have seemed as dulcet as the strumming of a lute in
a lady's boudoir.
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
defenceless keys. Her conversation with the frowzy little girl 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.