Short stories; United States -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction
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. 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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