by Edna Ferber
“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. She looked 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 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.
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, eyes lusterless, 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.”
As the crowd dwindled she played less feverishly, but there was nothing slipshod about her performance. The chubby songster found time to proffer brief explanations in asides. “They want the patriotic stuff. It used to be all that Hawaiian dope, and Wild Irish Rose stuff, and songs about wanting to go back to every place from Dixie to Duluth. But now seems it’s all these here flag wavers. Honestly, I’m so sick of ‘em I got a notion to enlist to get away from it.”
Terry eyed him with withering briefness. “A little training wouldn’t ruin your figure.”
She had never objected to Orville’s embonpoint. But then, Orville was a different sort of fat man; pink-cheeked, springy, immaculate.
At four o’clock, as she was in the chorus of “Isn’t There Another Joan of Arc?” a melting masculine voice from the other side of the counter said “Pardon me. What’s that you’re playing?”
Terry told him. She did not look up. “I wouldn’t have known it. Played like that—a second `Marseillaise.’ If the words–-What are the words? Let me see a–-“
“Show the gentleman a `Joan,’” Terry commanded briefly, over her shoulder. The fat man laughed a wheezy laugh. Terry glanced around, still playing, and encountered the gaze of two melting masculine eyes that matched the melting masculine voice. The songster waved a hand uniting Terry and the eyes in informal introduction.
“Mr. Leon Sammett, the gentleman who sings the Gottschalk songs wherever songs are heard. And Mrs.—that is—and Mrs. Sammett–-“
Terry turned. A sleek, swarthy world-old young man with the fashionable concave torso, and alarmingly convex bone-rimmed glasses. Through them his darkly luminous gaze glowed upon Terry. To escape their warmth she sent her own gaze past him to encounter the arctic stare of the large blonde who had been included so lamely in the introduction. And at that the frigidity of that stare softened, melted, dissolved.
“Why, Terry Sheehan! What in the world!”
Terry’s eyes bored beneath the layers of flabby fat. “It’s—why, it’s Ruby Watson, isn’t it? Eccentric Song and Dance–-“
She glanced at the concave young man and faltered. He was not Jim, of the Bijou days. From him her eyes leaped back to the fur-bedecked splendor of the woman. The plump face went so painfully red that the make-up stood out on it, a distinct layer, like thin ice covering flowing water. As she
surveyed that bulk Terry realized that while Ruby might still claim eccentricity, her song-and-dance days were over. “That’s ancient history, m’ dear. I haven’t been working for three years. What’re you doing in this joint? I’d heard you’d done well for yourself. That you were married.”
“I am. That is I—well, I am. I–-“
At that the dark young man leaned over and patted Terry’s hand that lay on the counter. He smiled. His own hand was incredibly slender, long, and tapering.
“That’s all right,” he assured her, and smiled. “You two girls can have a reunion later. What I want to know is can you play by ear?”
“Yes, but–-“
He leaned far over the counter. “I knew it the minute I heard you play. You’ve got the touch. Now listen. See if you can get this, and fake the bass.”
He fixed his somber and hypnotic eyes on Terry. His mouth screwed up into a whistle. The tune—a tawdry but haunting little melody—came through his lips. Terry turned back to the piano. “Of course you know you flatted every note,” she said.
This time it was the blonde who laughed, and the man who flushed. Terry cocked her head just a little to one side, like a knowing bird, looked up into space beyond the piano top, and played the lilting little melody with charm and fidelity. The dark young man followed her with a wagging of the head and little jerks of both outspread hands. His expression was beatific, enraptured. He hummed a little under his breath and anyone who was music-wise would have known that he was just a half beat behind her all the way.
When she had finished he sighed deeply, ecstatically. He bent his lean frame over the counter and, despite his swart coloring, seemed to glitter upon her—his eyes, his teeth, his very fingernails.
“Something led me here. I never come up on Tuesdays. But something–-“
“You was going to complain,” put in his lady, heavily, “about that Teddy Sykes at the Palace Gardens singing the same songs this week that you been boosting at the Inn.”
He put up a vibrant, peremptory hand. “Bah! What does that matter now! What does anything matter now! Listen Miss—ah—Miss–-?”
“Pl-Sheehan. Terry Sheehan.”
He gazed off a moment into space. “Hm. `Leon Sammett in Songs.
Miss Terry Sheehan at the Piano.’ That doesn’t sound bad. Now listen, Miss Sheehan. I’m singing down at the University Inn. The Gottschalk song hits. I guess you know my work. But I want to talk to you, private. It’s something to your interest. I go on down at the Inn at six. Will you come and have a little something with Ruby and me? Now?”
“Now?” faltered Terry, somewhat helplessly. Things seemed to be moving rather swiftly for her, accustomed as she was to the peaceful routine of the past four years.
“Get your hat. It’s your life chance. Wait till you see your name in two-foot electrics over the front of every big-time house in the country. You’ve got music in you. Tie to me and you’re made.” He turned to the woman beside him. “Isn’t that so, Rube?”
“Sure. Look at ME!” One would not have thought there could be so much subtle vindictiveness in a fat blonde.
Sammett whipped out a watch. “Just three quarters of an hour. Come on, girlie.”
His conversation had been conducted in an urgent undertone, with side glances at the fat man with the megaphone. Terry approached him now.
“I’m leaving now,” she said.
“Oh, no, you’re not. Six o’clock is your quitting time.”
In which he touched the Irish in Terry. “Any time I quit is my quitting time. She went in quest of hat and coat much as the girl had done whose place she had taken early in the day. The fat man followed her, protesting. Terry, putting on her hat, tried to ignore him. But he laid one plump hand on her arm and kept it there, though she tried to shake him off.
“Now, listen to me. That boy wouldn’t mind grinding his heel on your face if he thought it would bring him up a step. I know’m. See that walking stick he’s carrying? Well, compared to the yellow stripe that’s in him, that cane is a Lead pencil. He’s a song tout, that’s all he is.” Then, more feverishly, as Terry tried to pull away: “Wait a minute. You’re a decent girl. I want to—Why, he can’t even sing a note without you give it to him first. He can put a song over, yes. But how? By flashing that toothy grin of his and talking every word of it. Don’t you–-“
But Terry freed herself with a final jerk and whipped around the counter. The two, who had been talking together in an undertone, turned to welcome her. “We’ve got a half-hour. Come on. It’s just over to Clark and up a block or so.”
The University Inn, that gloriously intercollegiate institution which welcomes any graduate of any school of experience, was situated in the basement, down a flight of stairs. Into the unwonted quiet that reigns during the hour of low potentiality, between five and six, the three went, and seated themselves at a table in an obscure corner. A waiter brought them things in little glasses, though no order had been given. The woman who had been Ruby Watson was so silent as to be almost wordless. But the man talked rapidly. He talked well, too. The same quality that enabled him, voiceless though he was, to boost a song to success was making his plea sound plausible in Terry’s ears now.
“I’ve got to go and make up in a few minutes. So get this. I’m not going to stick down in this basement eating house forever. I’ve got too much talent. If I only had a voice—I mean a singing voice. But I haven’t. But then, neither had Georgie Cohan, and I can’t see that it wrecked his life any. Now listen. I’ve got a song. It’s my own. That bit you played for me up at Gottschalk’s is part of the chorus. But it’s the words that’ll go big. They’re great. It’s an aviation song, see? Airplane stuff. They’re yelling that it’s the airyoplanes that’re going to win this war. Well, I’ll help ‘em. This song is going to put the aviator where he belongs. It’s going to be the big song of the war. It’s going to make `Tipperary’ sound like a Moody and Sankey hymn. It’s the–-“
Ruby lifted her heavy-lidded eyes and sent him a meaning look. “Get down to business, Leon. I’ll tell her how good you are while you’re making up.”
He shot her a malignant glance, but took her advice. “Now what I’ve been looking for for years is somebody who has got the music knack to give me the accompaniment just a quarter of a jump ahead of my voice, see? I can follow like a lamb, but I’ve got to have that feeler first. It’s more than a knack. It’s a gift. And you’ve got it. I know it when I see it. I want to get away from this night-club thing. There’s nothing in it for a man of my talent. I’m gunning for bigger game. But they won’t sign me without a tryout. And when they hear my voice they–- Well, if me and you work together we can fool ‘em. The song’s great. And my make-up’s one of these aviation costumes to go with the song, see? Pants tight in the knee and baggy on the hips. And a coat with one of those full-skirt whaddyoucall- ‘ems–-“
“Peplums,” put in Ruby, placidly.
“Sure. And the girls’ll be wild about it. And the words!” He began to sing, gratingly off key:
Put on your sky clothes, Put on your fly clothes, And take a trip with me. We’ll sail so high Up in the sky We’ll drop a bomb from Mercury.
“Why, that’s awfully cute!” exclaimed Terry. Until now her opinion of Mr. Sammett’s talents had not been on a level with his.
“Yeah, but wait till you hear the second verse. That’s only part of the chorus. You see, he’s supposed to be talking to a French girl. He says:
`I’ll parlez-vous in Francais plain You’ll answer, “Cher Americain,” We’ll both …’”
The six-o’clock lights blazed up suddenly. A sad-looking group of men trailed in and made for a corner where certain bulky, shapeless bundles were soon revealed as those glittering and tortuous instruments which go to make a jazz band.
“You better go, Lee. The crowd comes in awful early now, with all these buyers in town.”
Both hands on the table, he half rose, reluctantly, still talking. “I’ve got th
ree other songs. They make Gottschalk’s stuff look sick. All I want’s a chance. What I want you to do is accompaniment. On the stage, see? Grand piano. And a swell set. I haven’t quite made up my mind to it. But a kind of an army camp room, see? And maybe you dressed as Liberty. Anyway, it’ll be new, and a knockout. If only we can get away with the voice thing. Say, if Eddie Foy, all those years never had a–-“
The band opened with a terrifying clash of cymbal and thump of drum. “Back at the end of my first turn,” he said as he Red. Terry followed his lithe, electric figure. She turned to meet the heavy-lidded gaze of the woman seated opposite. She relaxed, then, and sat back with a little sigh. “Well! If he talks that way to the managers I don’t see–-“
Ruby laughed a mirthless little laugh. “Talk doesn’t get it over with the managers, honey. You’ve got to deliver.”
“Well, but he’s—that song is a good one. I don’t say it’s as good as he thinks it is, but it’s good.”
“Yes,” admitted the woman, grudgingly, “it’s good.”
“Well, then?”
The woman beckoned a waiter; he nodded and vanished, and reappeared with a glass that was twin to the one she had just emptied. “Does he look like he knew French? Or could make a rhyme?”
“But didn’t he? Doesn’t he?”
“The words were written by a little French girl who used to skate down here last winter, when the craze was on. She was stuck on a Chicago kid who went over to fly for the French.”
“But the music?”
“There was a Russian girl who used to dance in the cabaret and she–-“
Terry’s head came up with a characteristic little jerk. “I don’t believe it!”
“Better.” She gazed at Terry with the drowsy look that was so different from the quick, clear glance of the Ruby Watson who used to dance so nimbly in the old Bijou days. “What’d you and your husband quarrel about, Terry?”
Terry was furious to feel herself flushing. “Oh, nothing. He just—I—it was–- Say, how did you know we’d quarreled?”
And suddenly all the fat woman’s apathy dropped from her like a garment and some of the old sparkle and animation illumined her heavy face. She pushed her glass aside and leaned forward on her folded arms, so that her face was close to Terry’s.
