Mary Wollaston | Page 9

the bass.
"What a piano!" he said. "What a damned piano!" He made a sort of
effort to pull himself up; apologized (she thought that was what he
meant to do) for the damn. But as he turned back to the piano and
struck another chord or two, she could see that his sense of outrage was
mounting steadily all the time.
"You can't tune a piano like this."--He pushed up the cover and stared
gloomily at the strings. "A mincing sickly thing like this. It's all wrong.
The scale is all wrong. The man who designed it ought to be hung. But
he called it a piano and sold it for a piano and I'm expected to come in
and tune it. Slick and smear it over and leave it sounding sicklier and
tubbier and more generally disgusting than ever. You might as well
take a painted harlot off the streets"--he glared at the ornate
extravagance of the case--"and expect to make a gentlewoman of her

with one lesson in deportment. I won't tune it. It's better left as it is. In
its shame."
"Well," said Paula, letting go a long breath, "you've said it."
Then she dropped into a chair and began to laugh. Never again, she felt
sure, would the drawing-room piano be able to cause her a moment's
irritation. This astonishing piano tuner of Lucile's had converted it, with
his new christening, into a source of innocent merriment. "The painted
harlot" covered the ground. Clear inspiration was what that was. The
way he went on glowering at it, digging every now and then a new and
more abominable chord out of its entrails made her mirth the more
uncontrollable.
"It isn't funny, you know, a thing like this," he remonstrated at last. "It's
serious."
"It would be serious," she retorted with sudden severity, "if you had
said all that or anything in the least like that to Miss Wollaston.
Because she really loves it. She has adopted it."
"Was she the lady who spoke to me in the park?" His evident
consternation over this aspect of the case made Paula smile as she
nodded yes.
"That was an act of real kindness," he said earnestly. "Not mere good
nature. It doesn't grow on every bush."
To this she eagerly agreed. "She is kind; she's a dear." But when she
saw him looking unhappily at the piano again, she said (for she hadn't
the slightest intention of abandoning him now), "There's another one,
quite a different sort of one, in the music room up-stairs. Would you
like to come along and look at that?"
He followed her tractably enough, but up in her studio before looking
at the piano, he asked her a question or two. Had he the name right?
And was the lady related to Doctor Wollaston?

"She's his sister," said Paula, adding, "and I am his wife. Why, do you
know him?"
"I talked with him once. He came out to the factory to see my father
and I happened to be there. Two or three years ago, that was. He did an
operation on my sister that saved her life. He is a great man." He added,
"My name's Anthony March, but he wouldn't remember me."
He sat down at the instrument, went over the keyboard from bottom, to
top and back again with a series of curious modulations. Then opening
his bag and beginning to get out his tools, he said, "Before I went into
the army, there was a man named Bernstein in these parts, who used to
perpetrate outrages like this on pianos."
"Yes," said Paula, "he tuned this one two weeks ago."
Without so much as a by your leave, Anthony March went to work.
It was Paula's childlike way to take any pleasurable event simply as a
gift from heaven without any further scrutiny of its source; with no
labored attempt to explain its arrival and certainly with no misgivings
as to whether or not she was entitled to it. Anthony March was such a
gift. By the time he had got to work on her own piano, she knew he was
pure gold and settled down joyously to make the most of him.
It was not until she attempted to give an account to the Wollastons at
dinner that night, of the day they had spent together--for they had made
a day of it--that she realized there was anything odd, not to say
astonishing, about the episode. How in the first place did it happen that
it was Paula's piano he tuned instead of the one in the drawing-room?
This was, of course, inexplicable until she could get John by himself
and tell him about it. One couldn't report to Lucile his phrase about the
painted harlot. She had