The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [170]
At Virgie's words, Miss Eckhart quickly—it almost seemed that was what she'd wanted to hear—stopped the hand and slammed the little door, bang. The metronome was never set before Virgie again.
Of course all the rest of them still got it. It came out of the safe every morning, as regularly as the canary was uncovered in his cage. Miss Eckhart had made an exception of Virgie Rainey; she had first respected Virgie Rainey, and now fell humble before her impudence.
A metronome was an infernal machine, Cassie's mother said when Cassie told on Virgie. "Mercy, you have to keep moving, with that infernal machine. I want a song to dip."
"What do you mean, dip? Could you have played the piano, Mama?"
"Child, I could have sung" and she threw her hand from her, as though all music might as well now go jump off the bridge.
***
As time went on, Virgie Rainey showed her bad manners to Miss Eckhart still more, since she had won about the metronome. Once she had a little Rondo her way, and Miss Eckhart was so beset about it that the lesson was not like a real lesson at all. Once she unrolled the new Étude and when it kept rolling back up, as the Étude always did, she threw it on the floor and jumped on it, before Miss Eckhart had even seen it; that was heartless. After such showing off, Virgie would push her hair behind her ears and then softly lay her hands on the keys, as she would take up a doll.
Miss Eckhart would sit there blotting out her chair in the same way as ever, but inside her she was listening to every note. Such listening would have made Cassie forget. And half the time, the piece was only Für Elise, which Miss Eckhart could probably have played blindfolded and standing up with her back to the keys. Anybody could tell that Virgie was doing something to Miss Eckhart. She was turning her from a teacher into something lesser. And if she was not a teacher, what was Miss Eckhart?
At times she could not bring herself to swat a summer fly. And as little as Virgie, of them all, cared if her hand was rapped, Miss Eckhart would raise her swatter and try to bring it down and could not. You could see torment in her regard of the fly. The smooth clear music would move on like water, beautiful and undisturbed, under the hanging swatter and Miss Eckhart's red-rimmed thumb. But even boys hit Virgie, because she liked to fight.
There were times when Miss Eckhart's Yankeeness, if not her very origin, some last quality to fade, almost faded. Before some caprice of Virgie's, her spirit drooped its head. The child had it by the lead. Cassie saw Miss Eckhart's spirit as a terrifyingly gentle water-buffalo cow in the story of "Peasie and Beansie" in the reader. And sooner or later, after taming her teacher, Virgie was going to mistreat her. Most of them expected some great scene.
There was in the house itself, soon, a daily occurrence to distress Miss Eckhart. There was now a second roomer at Miss Snowdie's. While Miss Eckhart listened to a pupil, Mr. Voight would walk over their heads and come down to the turn of the stairs, open his bathrobe, and flap the skirts like an old turkey gobbler. They all knew Miss Snowdie never suspected she housed a man like that: he was a sewing machine salesman. When he flapped his maroon-colored bathrobe, he wore no clothes at all underneath.
It would be plain to Miss Eckhart or to anybody that he wanted, first, the music lesson to stop. They could not close the door, there was no door, there were beads. They could not tell Miss Snowdie even that he objected; she would have been agonized. All the little girls and the one little boy were afraid of Mr. Voight's appearance at every lesson and felt nervous until it had happened and got over with. The one little boy was Scooter MacLain, the twin that took the free lessons;