Page:Peter Whiffle (1922).djvu/112

 He has told me that it was the only work he ever enjoyed. He became a "professor" in a house of pretty ladies. His duty was to play the piano. Play us another tune, professor, the customers would say, as they ordered beer at a dollar a bottle, and Peter would play a tune. Occasionally one of the customers would ask him to take a drink and he would order a sloe gin fizz, which Alonzo, the sick-looking waiter, a consumptive with a wife and five children to support, would bring in a sticky glass, which he deposited with his long dirty fingers on the ledge of the piano. Occasionally some man, waiting for a girl, was left alone with him, and would talk with him about the suspender business or the base-ball game, subjects which perhaps might not have interested him elsewhere but which glowed with an enthralling fire in that incongruous environment. The men preferred tunes like Lucia, the current Hippodrome success from Neptune's Daughter, or songs from The Red Mill, in which Montgomery and Stone were appearing at the Knickerbocker, or I don't care. This last was always demanded when a certain girl, who imitated Eva Tanguay, was in the room. But the women, when they were alone in the house, just before dinner in the late afternoon, or on a dull evening, always asked him to play Hearts and Flowers, Massenet's Elégie, or the garden scene from Faust, and then they would drink whisky and cry and tell him lies about their innocent girlhood. There was even some literary conversation. One