Читать книгу All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography онлайн

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A side of my life which moves me deeply now, as I think back, was the continuous effort of my father and mother to give me what were called advantages, to use their increasing income to awaken and develop in me a taste for things which they had always been denied. They wanted music in the household and our grandest possession became a splendid Bradbury square piano—a really noble instrument—with one of the finest, mellowest tones that I have ever heard in a piano.

A music teacher turned up in the community and I was at once set at five-finger exercises, and I was kept at them and all that follows them for many years; but I found no joy in what I was doing. It is possible that with different teachers from those available there might have been a spring touched, for untrained as I am I am not without a certain appreciation of music.

I mastered the mechanics of piano playing well enough, however, to become later one of the regular performers in the high school in the town to which we were to move—Titusville, Pennsylvania. I remembered nothing of this until two of my old friends in Titusville, school chums, told me that I was one of the three or four who played the piano for the morning exercises, that I sometimes played my show pieces, and that on one occasion I was an actor in a scene which they recalled with glee. They told me I was playing a duet with a classmate. We either lost our place or did not agree as to time—stopped entirely, argued the matter out, began over, and this time went through without dissension; but I have only this secondhand memory of my contribution to the musical life of the Titusville High School.