Blue at once voiced his thought. “That man was a big liar!”
“Look out!” reproved his mother.
“You know he was!” he insisted. “He wanted to get hold of that fiddle, so’s to sell it—I bet he did!”
Doodles paid no attention to the talk. He was in another world—the world of music and rapture.
“He ought to take lessons,” Blue told himself over and over, and even tried to save up his spare nickels for a possible teacher. Once he appealed to his mother, but she shook her head with such sad finality that he ventured no more.
ONE STORMY EVENING HE BEGAN TO PLAY
If Doodles ever longed for knowledge beyond his own rare gifts and the little that Christarchus had taught him, the wish never left his heart; and Blue declared that he played “better and better every day.”
The Flatiron took the violin as thoughtlessly as it took many other things, and few comments were made concerning the acquisition of the instrument. That the playing was enjoyed by all within hearing was manifest by open doors up and down the corridors, as well as from the homely bits of approval that came by diverse ways to the Stickney kitchen. These short, dark days were Caruso’s silent season. Thus the violin became Doodles’s work, play, comrade, and comforter, during the long hours while his mother and Blue were away.