“F,a,c,e, is the name of the spaces,” he taught. “Face, it spells; you can remember that.” Then he had me memorize the notes on the lines, and then he let me try it on the piano, a night of joy to me. Day after day I would plan for these practises, and in three regular lessons, of two weeks’ duration, I had the joy of grinding out my first real four-part tune. I had been practising laboriously, with a strict regard for exact time, the selection he had set before me, when he called from the kitchen, “Hurry up the tune a bit, Al!” I did, and I was bewildered to find that the chaotic tangle of notes resolved itself, when played faster, into the simple, universal melody, “Home, Sweet Home!”
But I found not enough patience, after being in the mill all day, to isolate myself every night in the house when there was fresh air to enjoy outside, so I told uncle that I had better give up taking lessons. I could not keep them up. I wanted the fresh air more.
But uncle was loath for me to do that. “I want you to do something else besides work in the mill,” he remonstrated. About this time, I became acquainted with Alf Martin, a back-boy, who was playing the piano. His father worked on the mules next to my uncle. The two men talked the matter over, and one day Alf told me that the woman he was taking lessons from, a Miss Flaffer, had said she would give me fifty-cent lessons for thirty-five cents! My uncle said he would pay half of the cost, and in spite of my previous abandonment of music, I succumbed to this scheme, secretly, in my heart, glad of the opportunity of taking lessons from so fine a lady as Alf told me Miss Flaffer was.
“When you pay for lessons,” said my uncle, “you’ll think more of them. I could only take you as far as vamping, and you want to do more than that.”
Previous to this, I had gotten as much joy, during the week’s work, from anticipations of cream puffs, pork pies, and such minor Saturday joys, but now I had a piano lesson, a real music-lesson, to engage my mind, and that was a very cheerful week spent behind the mules. Alf and I spent much time, when we could get away from the eyes of the bosses, talking over Miss Flaffer, and I came to understand that she was a fine woman indeed.
The following Saturday afternoon, then, I took my Beginner’s Book, tied it in a roll and fastened it with twine, and went on the street-car to a very aristocratic part of the city. It was the part where, on first landing in America, I had gone on summer days, asking at the back doors if I might pick the pears that had fallen to the lawns from the trees.
Miss Flaffer’s house was a very small cottage, with a small piazza at its front, and with a narrow lawn, edged by a low fence, running around it. It was altogether a very pretty place, with its new paint, its neat windows, and the flowers between the curtains. The front steps had evidently never been trodden on by foot of man, for why did they shine so with paint! There was not a scratch on the porch, nor a pencil mark. I looked at the number, at the engraved door-plate, and found that “S. T. Flaffer” did reside within. A great, cold perspiration dripped from me as I put a trembling finger on the push-button. I heard an answering bell somewhere in the depths of the house, and then wished that I might run away. It seemed so bold a thing for me, a mill-boy, to be intruding myself on such aristocratic premises. But I could not move, and then Miss Flaffer herself opened the door!
Oh, dream of neatness, sweetness, and womanly kindness! Miss Flaffer was that to me at the moment. She was a picture, that put away my aunt and all the tenement women who came into our house for beer-drinking, put them away from memory entirely. I thought that she would send me home, and tell me to look tidy before I knocked at her door, or that I had made a mistake, and that such a woman, with her white hands, could not be giving thirty-five cent piano lessons to Al Priddy, a mill-boy!
Oh, how awkward, self-conscious, and afraid I felt as I went across that threshold and looked on comforts that were luxuries to me! There was a soft, loose rug on a hardwood, polished floor, on which, at first, I went on a voyage halfway, when the crumpled rug half tripped me and I caught desperately at a fragile chair and half wrenched it from position to stay myself, yet Miss Flaffer did not scold me, nor did she seem to notice me. Then, as we went through a luxurious dining-room (where they did nothing but eat meals!), I found myself bringing my foot down on the train of Miss Flaffer’s dress. Yet, when the confusion was over, she never made a single reference to it, though I felt that I ought to ask her if I had torn it. She led me to a little studio, where, in a curtained alcove, stood a black upright piano polished like a mirror, and before it a stool, which did not squeak like ours when turned into position.
When the preliminary examination was over, and I was seated at the piano, Miss Flaffer asked me to play “Home, Sweet Home” as I had learned under my uncle’s instruction. I had been so used to the hard, mechanical working of uncle’s instrument that I naturally pounded unduly on Miss Flaffer’s, until she politely and graciously said, “Please do not raise your fingers so high,” and to that end, she placed two coppers on my hand, and told me to play the tune without letting them drop.