Miss Feldman turned back to her typewriter.  “You’re too smart for your age, you are.”

“I know it,” Wallie had agreed, humbly.

There’s no telling where or how he learned to play the piano.  He probably never did learn.  He played it, though, as he whistled—­brilliantly.  No doubt it was as imitative and as unconscious, too, as his whistling had been.  They say he didn’t know one note from another, and doesn’t to this day.

At twenty, when he should have been in love with at least three girls, he had fixed in his mind an image, a dream.  And it bore no resemblance to twenty’s accepted dreams.  At that time he was living in one room (rear) of a shabby rooming house in Thirty-ninth Street.  And this was the dream:  By the time he was—­well, long before he was thirty—­he would have a bachelor apartment with a Jap, Saki.  Saki was the perfect servant, noiseless, unobtrusive, expert.  He saw little dinners just for four—­or, at the most, six.  And Saki, white-coated, deft, sliding hot plates when plates should be hot; cold plates when plates should be cold.  Then, other evenings, alone, when he wanted to see no one—­when, in a silken lounging robe (over faultless dinner clothes, of course, and wearing the kind of collar you see in the back of the magazines) he would say, “That will do, Saki.”  Then, all evening, he would play softly to himself those little, intimate, wistful Schumanny things in the firelight with just one lamp glowing softly—­almost sombrely—­at the side of the piano (grand).

His first real meeting with Sid Hahn had had much to do with the fixing of this image.  Of course he had seen Hahn hundreds of times in the office and about the theatre.  They had spoken, too, many times.  Hahn called him vaguely, “Heh, boy!” but he grew to know him later as Wallie.  From errand-boy, office-boy, call-boy he had become, by that time, a sort of unofficial assistant stage manager.  No one acknowledged that he was invaluable about the place, but he was.  When a new play was in rehearsal at the Thalia, Wallie knew more about props, business, cues, lights, and lines than the director himself.  For a long time no one but Wallie and the director were aware of this.  The director never did admit it.  But that Hahn should find it out was inevitable.

He was nineteen or thereabouts when he was sent, one rainy November evening, to deliver a play manuscript to Hahn at his apartment.  Wallie might have refused to perform an errand so menial, but his worship of Hahn made him glad of any service, however humble.  He buttoned his coat over the manuscript, turned up his collar, and plunged into the cold drizzle of the November evening.

Hahn’s apartment—­he lived alone—­was in the early fifties, off Fifth Avenue.  For two days he had been ill with one of the heavy colds to which he was subject.  He was unable to leave the house.  Hence Wallie’s errand.

It was Saki—­or Saki’s equivalent—­who opened the door.  A white-coated, soft-stepping Jap, world-old looking like the room glimpsed just beyond.  Someone was playing the piano with one finger, horribly.