“You oughtn’t to let him in.”
“Oh, I have to. This Mrs. Davis, from whom I rent these rooms, doesn’t know there’s any trouble, she thinks he’s a steward on a boat, and I never have told her differently. She thinks I’m with him when I go away on these trips. Last time he was here, he stayed half the night right on that couch. He had a wretched cold, and it was raining!”
“I should think you’d have been afraid.”
“That’s why I let him stay. He’d been harboring such jealous thoughts toward me. He—he has an idea that I like another man. And he has a terrific temper. You can’t imagine how it smolders and sulks. He wasn’t so bad about my sending him away, but since he’s had this suspicion I’ve really been afraid. I expect he’ll be really violent some day.”
“Well, Great Scott, won’t my coming to see you be dangerous? I was just thinking what good times we’d have.”
“We will. No, you’re all right. He wouldn’t be interested in you after he once knew who you were. And there’s Thomas Mason upstairs; he’s not bothered about him either, though Tom and his sister are in here all the time.”
Peter pushed his chair back. “That was a mighty good dinner, Maggie. Mind if I smoke?” He lit a cigarette. “Well, you’ve had hard luck, haven’t you? But never mind, it’s bound to break even, sooner or later. That’s what I keep saying to myself.”
“You in trouble too, Peter? I’ve been running on so about my affairs. Tell me about yours. Studying the way you have to must be an awful strain.”
He noticed gratefully how quick and ready was her sympathy. That was just it. Studying itself wasn’t so bad, working wasn’t bad. But the combination, the struggle to make ends meet, his few social obligations, and color!
“Why, it’s awful. I’m on the rack all the time.”
“If you could stop for a year or so and take a little rest, do something entirely different.”
He glanced at her, amused but touched. “Joanna ought to hear you say that. She’d faint away. She can’t understand anybody’s wanting to let up.”
Maggie said with a faint bitterness that you must always be top notch for Joanna.
“I should say so. Here, I’ll help you with the dishes. Well—if you really don’t want me.” She washed and wiped so fast that the room seemed cleared by magic. It had turned cooler and Maggie lit her little gas-stove.
Peter smoked and relapsed into a moody silence, which he broke now and then with an account of his struggles. His Uncle Peter had died during his third year and the house had been inherited by his daughter, Mrs. Boyd. Of course he couldn’t expect anything of her. Her father was only his great-uncle, and she had her own children to look after. He had moved to Mrs. Larrabee’s in West Philadelphia, with some of his fraternity brothers. Somehow his money sped. His books were expensive, the cost of his instruments pure robbery.
“I do what playing I can, but I confess I’m up against it,” he ended ruefully.
“Lots of the boys do waiting, don’t they?” asked Maggie. “Why don’t you do that?”
He just couldn’t, he told her.
“I never could endure standing around ‘grand white folks.’ ” Both of them smiled at the childhood’s phrase. “ ‘Yes, sir, thank you—Oh, no, sir.’ Then some lazy white banker, or some fat white woman that never did a day’s work in her life, puts a hand in a pocket and offers you a dime. God, how I hate it! I did it once at Asbury Park, Phil did, too. We both said, ‘Never again!’ ”
“Where do you play?”
“At different dance-halls. They don’t pay as well here as in New York, though. What’s that, Maggie?”
A thin stream of music, played on a violin, floated down to them.
“That’s good fiddling. Is it in this house?”
“Yes. It’s Tom Mason, the man I told you about. The very thing for you! He makes barrels of money. Come on, Peter.”
She led him, bewildered, up to the third floor, tapped on a door and was admitted to a room much like the one she had just left. A young woman with red crinkled hair and a yellow freckled face sat sewing on a white apron. The young man who let them in had been putting some resin on his bow. Against the wall stood a battered, timeworn piano.
“Hello, Annie,” said Maggie. “Hello, Tom. This is my friend Mr. Bye. I’ve brought him up to hear you play.”
“But I can’t, Miss Maggie. I’ve no accompanist.” He turned soft brown eyes upon her. “Unless your friend here plays the piano.”
“Well, I do admit to tickling the ivories occasionally,” laughed Peter. “Let’s see your score.”
He sat down to the piano, ran his brown limber fingers over the keys, and began to play the accompaniment to a typical syncopated melody, accenting the time with staccato nods of his well-shaped head.
“Oh, great, that’s great!” cried Tom after a few minutes. “Wait till I get my violin.”
Together they made some wonderful sounds. “Play that passage again, will you?” Tom pointed it out with his bow.
“That’s the best accompanist you’ve ever had, isn’t it, Tom?” Annie asked.
“I should say so. Don’t suppose you’d ever consent to doin’ this sort of thing in public, Mr. Bye?”
“That depends on the price and the hours,” said Peter.
Tom told him about himself. He played, had all the work he could do, for the wealthy folks of the town and suburbs. The pay was first-rate. Only he had never been able to keep a good accompanist.
“They’re so do-less,” he complained. “What’s your regular line?”
Peter explained that he was a student.
Mason liked that. “Then you’d be workin’ because you’d really need the fun’s. Nothin’ like having a purpose. Do you out to Sharon Hill with
