[MY FAIR NEIGHBOUR'S PIANO, AND WHAT CAME OF IT.]
By Henry Martley.
Illustrated by F. H. Townsend.
When I heard that a lady had taken the flat over mine, I feared the worst. The worst had come. Dum-dum-dum went the throbbing piano above. The former occupants of that flat has possessed a baby which I used to anathematise, but even its merry crowings or midnight howls were better than this.
The lady—an elderly lady of the spinster persuasion—had passed me several times on the stairs, and I heartily wished that Providence had blessed her with a husband and several children to occupy her spare time. If I ever wanted to go into Parliament, I should have only one item in my programme, and that would be to make a licence as necessary for music in a private as in a public house. There it went—dum-dum-dum—with intervals in which that detestable old maid picked up dropped bars as though she were picking up dropped stitches.
Three times I sat down to tackle the Settled Land Acts, and three times I angrily shut the book without having comprehended a single section.
I was going in for my final at the end of six weeks, and the result of the examination would be of considerable importance to me.
My uncle had paid for most of my education, and held out prospects of a partnership, but as time went on his beneficent intentions had lost their keenness, and a failure would produce considerably less likelihood of those prospects becoming actual facts. He was an old gentleman who judged by results, and the creditable results of my life had hitherto been few. A decent place in the Honours List would mean a probability, a prize would mean a certainty, of a comfortable income for life; and if I was to work, that infernal noise must stop. Legal redress I had none, nor would complaint to the landlord be of any use. There were clauses in the leases against keeping canaries, or even window-boxes, but none forbidding pianos. There was only one course open to me, and that was to appeal to the better feelings of the elderly spinster.
At first I thought of writing a note, and made some attempts at composing one, but they were either too violent or too unconvincing, and I felt that in dealing with a person of her description a personal interview would produce better fruit. On considering the matter, I decided that the interview had better take place at once. It was an unconventional hour to call, but I was not certain that I should have the courage to protest except in the heat of indignation, and I had decided on an effective rôle. I intended to appeal to her as a hard-working young man whom she was depriving of a livelihood, and to a certain extent to be appealingly distressed.