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Dunstan's on Armistice Day, November 11th, 1918; on that day the band excelled itself, and played as if it meant that its music should be heard in Germany. This occasion is one that will live long in the memory of those of us who were at St. Dunstan's when the "scrap of paper" virtually ending the war was signed. Our Rag-time Band then really came into its own. Ask London.
Even by gaslight the diversions are melancholy i' the mouth drink and rag-time, and an occasional surprise when the waiter swabs the suds from under your sticky glass. There is an answer. Transmigration! The soul of Sir Walter Raleigh has traveled from beneath his slashed doublet to a kindred home under Rooney's visible plaid waistcoat. Rooney's is twenty years ahead of the times.
One in the form of a duck first took to human legs and capered about the square while its network of rockets, pin-wheels, sizzlers, twisters, cannon-like explosions, and jets of colored fire kept the multitude surging back and forth some twenty minutes, to the accompaniment of maudlin laughter and the dancing and screaming of children, while the band, frankly giving up its vain attempts to produce music, gazed with all eyes and blew an unattentive, never-ending rag-time of some two strains.
"I heard it first while we were working the wireless, when there was a rag-time tune for us, and the last I saw of the band, when I was floating, struggling in the icy water, it was still on deck, playing 'Autumn. How those brave fellows ever did it I cannot imagine." Perhaps that music, made in the face of death, would not have satisfied the exacting critical sense.
Reluctantly, after a week, Herr Kreutzer gave consent. He was afraid he might not hold the place in the beer-garden. He hated the cheap rag-time music which the man insisted on and had held his temper with much difficulty, when he had been reproved for playing "hymns" because he had, for solos, interspersed a worthy number now and then.
In addition, Carl was swamped by campus affairs by students, many of whom seemed to consider him an oasis in a desert of otherwise-to-be-deplored, unhuman professors. Every student organization to which he had belonged as an undergraduate opened its arms to welcome him as a faculty member; we chaperoned student parties till we heard rag-time in our sleep.
We saw the professor off the premises in his dried clothes, and I turned back to put the fowls to bed in a happier frame of mind than I had known for a long time. I whistled rag-time airs as I worked. "Rum old buffer," said Ukridge meditatively, pouring himself out another whisky and soda. "My goodness, I should have liked to have seen him in the water. Why do I miss these good things?"
Having taken his small public into his confidence in regard to his belated ambition to get an education, he was surprised to find how ready everybody was to help him. Mr. Chester not only assisted him with his mathematics, but insisted upon taking him to hear good music, in the vain effort to reclaim an ear hopelessly attuned to jazz and rag-time. Mr.
We felt flattered, especially as the band struck up our own national airs, giving us a medley of "Yankee Doodle," "America," "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp," and "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." They felt constrained, however, to wind up with "Sweet Marie," and rag-time dances, one old fellow in slouch hat and with a few drinks too many, stepping the jigs off in lively and comical fashion.
Simple-hearted children of nature, progress has never condemned them to accept the work of a can-opener as an overture, and rag-time might incite them to a bloody revolution. But you can try the experiment. The best chance you have is that the populace may not wake up when you play. There's two ways, says the consul, 'they may take it.
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