XVI
TCHAIKOVSKY
A day in musical New York!
Not a bad idea, was it? I hated to leave the country, with its rich after-glow of Summer, its color-haunted dells, and its pure, searching October air, but a paragraph in a New York daily, which I read quite by accident, decided me, and I dug out some good clothes from their fastness and spent an hour before my mirror debating whether I should wear the coat with the C-sharp minor colored collar or the one with the velvet cuffs in the sensuous key of E-flat minor. Being an admirer of Kapellmeister Kreisler (there's a writer for you, that crazy Hoffmann!), I selected the former. I went over on the 7.30 A. M., P. R. R., and reached New York in exactly two hours. There's a tempo for you! I mooned around looking for old landmarks that had vanished—twenty years since I saw Gotham, and then Theodore Thomas was king.
I felt quite miserable and solitary, and, being hungry, went to a much-talked-of café, Lüchow's by name, on East Fourteenth Street. I saw Steinway and Sons across the street and reflected with sadness that the glorious days of Anton Rubinstein were over, and I still a useless encumberer of the earth. Then an arm was familiarly passed through mine and I was saluted by name.
"You! why I thought you had passed away to the majority where Dussek reigns in ivory splendor."
I turned and discovered my young friend—I knew his grandfather years ago—Sledge, a pianist, a bad pianist, and an alleged critic of music. He calls himself "a music critic." Pshaw! I was not wonderfully warm in my greeting, and the lad noticed it.
"Never mind my fun, Mr. Fogy. Grandpa and you playing Moscheles' Hommage à Fromage, or something like that, is my earliest and most revered memory. How are you? What can I do for you? Over for a day's music? Well, I represent the Weekly Whiplash and can get you tickets for anything from hell to Hoboken."