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There sprang to Hodder's mind a sentence in a book he had recently read: "Our slums became filled with sick who need never have been sick; with derelicts who need never have been abandoned." Suddenly, out of the suffocating stillness of the afternoon a woman's voice was heard singing a concert-hall air, accompanied by a piano played with vigour and abandon.
Though McKann would not have admitted it, there were really a great many people in the concert-hall who knew what the prodigal daughter of their country was singing, and how well she was doing it. They thawed gradually under the beauty of her voice and the subtlety of her interpretation.
At 2 a.m. more soldiers were brought in from the battlefield, all caked with dirt, and we began to work again. These last blinked oddly at the concert-hall and nurses and doctors, but I think they do not question anything much. They only want to go to sleep. I suppose that women would always be tender-hearted towards deserters.
Then they said they would go to the toughest place in town, "Steve Casey's"; this was on a side-street. The walls were covered with yellowed photographs of once-famous pugilists and old-time concert-hall singers. There was sand on the floor, and in the dancing room at the back, where nobody danced, a jaded young man was banging out polkas and quick-steps at a cheap piano.
He had just received a newspaper from a kind friend in Massachusetts with a comic biography and dissipated wood-cut of himself in it. "I'm not starting a concert-hall, and I'm not going to put a row of lamps along the front of my place." "I quite agree with you," replied his mother-in-law. "It occurred to me we might put them, like hanging lanterns, on each of the chimneys. It would be odd."
A respectable capacity for marshaling facts was fortified in him by a copiousness of impressive language that made juries as clay in his hands and sometimes disguised a doubtful interpretation of the rules of evidence. The court was held in a long unfurnished room lately built onto the hotel, and intended to serve as a ball-room or concert-hall.
In the middle of the morning, when he was deep in his correspondence, his wife called him up to say the enterprising Mrs. Post had telephoned some musical friends in Sewickley and had found that two hundred folding-chairs were to be placed on the stage of the concert-hall, behind the piano, and that they would be on sale at noon. Would he please get seats in the front row?
One often witnessed long lines of motor-cars driving up to a theater, fashionable restaurant, or concert-hall, through the opening portals of which could be caught a glimpse of the dazzling illumination within, while, a few yards farther off, queues of anemic men and women were waiting to be admitted to the shop where milk or eggs or fuel could be had at the relatively low prices fixed by the state.
Howard, reading or writing at his window on his leisure days, heard the young men and young women laughing and shouting and making love under the trees where the Washington Arch glistened in the twilight. Later came the songs "I want you, my honey, yes I do," or "Lu, Lu, how I love my Lu!", or some other of the current concert-hall jingles. Many figures could be seen flitting about in the shadows.
On the first floor of a building on the Rue Montpensier, close at hand, was a cafe chantant, where many people entered. "Suppose we go in," said Planus, desirous of banishing his friend's melancholy at any cost, "the beer is excellent." Risler assented to the suggestion; he had not tasted beer for six months. It was a former restaurant transformed into a concert-hall.
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