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"What was the first one, I wonder? One of those that you have just been playing?" "The first one?" he returned with a smile. "No, it was a sort of rag-time jingle. I thought it very pretty then, but I played it over the other day, the first time in years, and I didn't seem to like it at all. In fact, I wonder how I ever did like it." Rag-time!
But she knew many of the solos from "Faust," "Rigoletto," and "Carmen"; surely, among musical people, there would be some appreciation of her skill if tested by this class of composition, as compared with the latest rag-time melody or gushing cabaret ballad. Busy with such thoughts, she hastened along the road, until she awoke with a start to the knowledge that she was opposite Gateway House.
Caps and puttees are distributed with like impartiality, and we dismiss, the unfortunate ones growling and grumbling in discreet undertones until the platoon commander is out of hearing, whereupon the murmurs of discontent become loudly articulate. "Kitchener's Rag-Time Army I calls it!" growls the veteran of South African fame. "Ain't we a 'andsome lot o' pozzie wallopers? Service?
Skaggs, of the New York Universe, was one of the former class and a constant visitor, he and a "lady friend" called "Maudie," who had a penchant for dancing to "Rag-time" melodies as only the "puffessor" of such a club can play them. Of course, the place was a social cesspool, generating a poisonous miasma and reeking with the stench of decayed and rotten moralities.
There was not a dull moment in that dinner for me nor afterwards when the boys and girls at the piano played the rag-time tunes of their own land, while their elders, inexhaustibly interested, replunged into the discussion of that land's future, till there was talk of coon-can.
And there's many a one worse off than we are today!" "Any luck at the agent's, daddy?" Mr. Mackwayte shook his head. "These revues are fair killing the trade, my dear, and that's a fact. They don't want art to-day, only rag-time and legs and all that. Our people are being cruelly hit by it and that's a fact. Why, who do you think I ran into at Harris' this morning?
True, that numbing sense of the uncanny had ceased to grip her, for Reason told her that spectres do not sing rag-time songs. On the other hand, owners of apartments do, and she would almost as readily have faced a spectre as the owner of this apartment. Dizzily, she wandered how in the world she was to explain her presence.
His pulse caught up its beat like the rest. His personality lost outline merging itself into the cumbrous uncouth being of the audience. Though it was a rhythm rather than a tune it was not rag-time. Rag-time Stonehouse appreciated.
This bewilderment lasted but a moment, and he rose from his chair with a spring. "Well, now, play something else give us a bit of rag-time; that last piece has left us all a little dashed try a cake-walk." Clarke interposed. "Miss Lambert does not play those trashy melodies. I consider them essentially irreligious."
It was misty and raining on the occasion of my visit to the Maverick Deep-Sea Hotel, a liner anchored in the East River; and Miss McCray conducted me into the cabin to a large party of boys, elderly women, and children, most of them visitors like myself, and all listening to a powerful-wristed youth happily playing, "You'll Come Back and Hang Around," with heavily accented rag-time, on an upright piano.
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