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Updated: May 28, 2025
This smug in-between town, which had exchanged "Money Musk" for phonographs grinding out ragtime, it was neither the heroic old nor the sophisticated new. Couldn't she somehow, some yet unimagined how, turn it back to simplicity? She herself knew two of the pioneers: the Perrys. Champ Perry was the buyer at the grain-elevator.
There revealed before him was a great cozy room, with many easy-chairs and tables, a piano at which a young soldier sat playing ragtime, and at the farther end a long white counter on which shone two bright steaming urns that sent forth a delicious odor of coffee.
He rode in private cars and ate antelope steak grilled by Glover's own darky boy, who had roasted buffalo hump for the Grand Duke Alexis as far back as 1871, and still hashed his browned potatoes in ragtime; and with the sun breaking clear over the frosty table-lands, a ravenous appetite, and a day's shooting in prospect, the rhythm had a particularly cheerful sound.
At the casino, after a hard round of tennis, and while waiting for cakes and lemonade to be served, she would hammer ragtime on the piano or sing the latest lyrical offerings of Broadway. Quiet, elderly gentlemen from Cincinnati, Louisville, and Indianapolis, who went to the casino to read the newspapers or to play bridge, grinned when Marian turned things upside down.
"Exactly so; you are really remarkable, madam," he added, in a tone of cold astonishment. After dinner the guests took their coffee in the music room, where Schemetzkin sat down at the piano to drum ragtime, and give his celebrated imitation of the boardingschool girl's execution of Chopin.
By January the complex social mechanism of the metropolis was whirling smoothly again; the last ultra-fashionable December lingerer had returned from the country; those of the same caste outward bound for a Southern or exotic winter had departed; and the glittering machine, every part assembled, refurbished, repolished, and connected, having been given preliminary speed-tests at the horse show, and a tuning up at the opera, was now running under full velocity; and its steady, subdued whir quickened the clattering pulse of the city, keying it to a sublimely syncopated ragtime.
Heineman, his face crimson, bowed to all sides, more like a Chinese porcelain figure than ever, and started singing in all solemnity this time. "Hulas and hulas would pucker up their lips, He fell for their ball-bearing hips For they were pips ..." His chunky body swayed to the ragtime. The woman in the corner kept time with long white arms raised above her head.
The evening ended with a cake-walk, for the musical artists had by rare wines been mellowed from their classic reserve into a mood of ragtime abandon. And if Monsieur the Baron with his ceremonious grace was less exuberant than the Crown Prince of Cripple Creek, who sang as he stepped the sensuous measure, his pleasure was not less.
La bonne compagnie they found in the lounges of great hotels, on transatlantic liners, in wagons-lits, in music-halls, and in expensive motor-cars and restaurants. La bonne compagnie was dancing one-steps to ragtime music. This, they said, is the thing.
My stint was over for a few hours at least and I enjoyed the luxury of pitying poor Mott, who was shut up in a stuffy cabin with our prisoner. Yeager, too, was off duty. We could hear him pounding away at the piano in the saloon. Ragtime floated to us, and presently a snatch from "The Sultan of Sulu."
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