"Take it and come right back."
"You disappoint me, Funny-face. Go to the piano and hit the notes. That's all you're fit for."
It was a baby grand, much out of tune, but Howard, bulging over the stool, made it sound like an orchestra,—a cabaret orchestra, and ran from Grieg to Jerome Kern and back to Gounod, syncopating everything with the gusto and the sense of time that is almost peculiar to a colored professional. Then he suddenly burst into song and sang about a baby in the soft round high baritone of all men who run to fat and with the same quite charming sympathy. A useful, excellent fellow, amazingly unself-conscious and gifted.
Martin was infinitely content to listen and lie back in a deep straw chair with a pipe between his teeth, the memories of good evenings at Yale curling up in his smoke. And Tootles, thinking and thinking, sat, Puck-like, at his feet, with her warm shoulders against his knees. Not in her memory could she delve for pleasant things, not yet. Eh, but some day she might be among the lucky ones, if—if her plan went through—
Howard lit another cigarette at the end of the song, but before he could get his hands on the notes again Irene bounded to her feet and went over to the piano. "Say, can you play 'Love's Epitome'?" she pronounced it "Eppy-tomy."
"Can a duck swim?" asked Howard, resisting a temptation to emit a howl of mirth. She was too good a sort to chaff about her frequent maltreatment of the language.
"Go ahead, then, and I'll give you all a treat." He played the sentimental prelude of this characteristic product of the vaudeville stage, every note of which was plagiarized from a thousand plagiarisms and which imagined that eternity rhymed with serenity and mother with weather. With gestures that could belong to no other school than that of the twice-dailies and the shrill nasal voice that inevitably goes with them, Irene, with the utmost solemnity, went solidly through the whole appalling thing, making the frequent yous "yee-ooo" in the true "vawdville" manner.
To Tootles it was very moving, and she was proud of her friend. Martin almost died of it, and Howard was weak from suppressed laughter. It was the first time that Irene had shown the boys what she could do, and she was delighted at their enthusiastic applause. She would have rendered another of the same sort gladly enough,—she knew dozens of them, if Tootles had not given her a quick look and risen to her feet.
"Us for the downey," she said, and put the palm of her hand on Martin's lips. He kissed it.
"Not yet," said Howard. "It's early."