But it didn't end so, of course. Women like Mrs. Tome Gallien were not created to end things but to start 'em. Of such is the kingdom of Leaven.
It was on the following Thursday that the grand piano arrived at the Young Doctor's office.
Now the Young Doctor's office might easily have accommodated more patients than it did. But piano movers are almost always so fat. Puffing, blowing, swearing, tugging,—the whole dingy room seemed suddenly packed with brawn. 37
"But it isn't my piano!" protested the Young Doctor from every chair, desk, table, of his ultimate retreat. "It isn't my piano!" he yelled from the doorway. "It isn't my piano!" he scolded through the window.
But it was his piano, of course! The piano movers swore that it was. The piano warerooms telephoned that it was. . . Worst of all, the piano itself on one plump ankle flaunted a tag which proclaimed that it was. And the proclamation was most distinctly in Mrs. Tome Gallien's handwriting.
"For Dr. Sam Kendrue," it said. "As a slight token of my appreciation and esteem."
"'Appreciation?'" groaned the Young Doctor. "'Esteem?'" In the first venom of his emotion he sat right down and wrote Mrs. Gallien just exactly what he thought of her. And of it. "It" being of course the piano.
"Whatever in the world," he demanded, "would I do with a piano? Oh, of course it's very kind of you and all that," he conceded with crass sarcasm. "But I have no possible floor space, you understand, beyond my office and the very meager bedroom adjoining it. 38And with a quarter of a ton's worth of wood and wire plunked down thus in the exact center of my office it leaves me, I assure you, an extraordinarily limited amount of elbow-space unless it be a sort of running track that still survives around the extreme edges of the room. And moreover the piano is of rosewood, as you doubtless already know, and all inlaid with cherubim and seraphim snarled up in wreaths of lavender roses. Now Botany I admit, is distinctly out of my line. But the cherubim and seraphim are certainly very weird anatomically.
"And not knowing one note from another,—as indeed I remember telling you quite plainly at an earlier date, well,—excuse me if I seem harsh," he exploded all over again, "but whatever in the world would I do with a piano?"
As ingenuously insolent as a child's retort came Mrs. Tome Gallien's almost immediate reply.