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Page 53
His mother had told him over and over how his master would give him to the
big mastiff if he ever found him `meddling.' Samson had got too near the
mastiff's kennel once, and had felt his terrible breath in his face. He
thought about that, but he pulled in his other foot.
Through the dark he found his way to the Thing, to its mouth. He touched
it softly, and it answered softly, kindly. He shivered and stood still.
Then he began to feel it all over, ran his finger-tips along the slippery
sides, embraced the carved legs, tried to get some conception of its shape
and size, of the space it occupied in primeval night. It was cold and
hard, and like nothing else in his black universe. He went back to its
mouth, began at one end of the keyboard and felt his way down into the
mellow thunder, as far as he could go. He seemed to know that it must be
done with the fingers, not with the fists or the feet. He approached this
highly artificial instrument through a mere instinct, and coupled himself
to it, as if he knew it was to piece him out and make a whole creature of
him. After he had tried over all the sounds, he began to finger out
passages from things Miss Nellie had been practising, passages that were
already his, that lay under the bone of his pinched, conical little skull,
definite as animal desires.
The door opened; Miss Nellie and her music-master stood behind it, but
blind Samson, who was so sensitive to presences, did not know they were
there. He was feeling out the pattern that lay all ready-made on the big
and little keys. When he paused for a moment, because the sound was wrong
and he wanted another, Miss Nellie spoke softly. He whirled about in a
spasm of terror, leaped forward in the dark, struck his head on the open
window, and fell screaming and bleeding to the floor. He had what his
mother called a fit. The doctor came and gave him opium.
When Samson was well again, his young mistress led him back to the piano.
Several teachers experimented with him. They found he had absolute pitch,
and a remarkable memory. As a very young child he could repeat, after a
fashion, any composition that was played for him. No matter how many wrong
notes he struck, he never lost the intention of a passage, he brought the
substance of it across by irregular and astonishing means. He wore his
teachers out. He could never learn like other people, never acquired any
finish. He was always a Negro prodigy who played barbarously and
wonderfully. As piano-playing, it was perhaps abominable, but as music it
was something real, vitalized by a sense of rhythm that was stronger than
his other physical senses--that not only filled his dark mind, but worried
his body incessantly. To hear him, to watch him, was to see a Negro
enjoying himself as only a Negro can. It was as if all the agreeable
sensations possible to creatures of flesh and blood were heaped up on those
black-and-white keys, and he were gloating over them and trickling them
through his yellow fingers.
In the middle of a crashing waltz, d'Arnault suddenly began to play softly,
and, turning to one of the men who stood behind him, whispered, `Somebody
dancing in there.' He jerked his bullet-head toward the dining-room. `I
hear little feet--girls, I spect.'
Anson Kirkpatrick mounted a chair and peeped over the transom. Springing
down, he wrenched open the doors and ran out into the dining-room. Tiny and
Lena, Antonia and Mary Dusak, were waltzing in the middle of the floor.
They separated and fled toward the kitchen, giggling.
Kirkpatrick caught Tiny by the elbows. `What's the matter with you girls?
Dancing out here by yourselves, when there's a roomful of lonesome men on
the other side of the partition! Introduce me to your friends, Tiny.'
The girls, still laughing, were trying to escape. Tiny looked alarmed.
`Mrs. Gardener wouldn't like it,' she protested. `She'd be awful mad if
you was to come out here and dance with us.'
`Mrs. Gardener's in Omaha, girl. Now, you're Lena, are you?-- and you're
Tony and you're Mary. Have I got you all straight?'
O'Reilly and the others began to pile the chairs on the tables. Johnnie
Gardener ran in from the office.
`Easy, boys, easy!' he entreated them. `You'll wake the cook, and there'll
be the devil to pay for me. She won't hear the music, but she'll be down
the minute anything's moved in the dining-room.'
`Oh, what do you care, Johnnie? Fire the cook and wire Molly to bring
another. Come along, nobody'll tell tales.'
Johnnie shook his head. `'S a fact, boys,' he said confidentially. `If I
take a drink in Black Hawk, Molly knows it in Omaha!'
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