“You’re to give this to Mr. Hahn.  He’s waiting for it.”

“Genelmun come in,” said the Jap, softly.

“No, he don’t want to see me.  Just give it to him, see?”

“Genelmun come in.”  Evidently orders.

“Oh, all right.  But I know he doesn’t want—­”

Wallie turned down his collar with a quick flip, looked doubtfully at his shoes, and passed through the glowing little foyer into the room beyond.  He stood in the doorway.  He was scarcely twenty then, but something in him sort of rose, and gathered, and seethed, and swelled, and then hardened.  He didn’t know it then but it was his great resolve.

Sid Hahn was seated at the piano, a squat, gnomelike little figure, with those big ears, and that plump face, and those soft eyes—­the kindest eyes in the world.  He did not stop playing as Wallie appeared.  He glanced up at him, ever so briefly, but kindly, too, and went on playing the thing with one short forefinger, excruciatingly.  Wallie waited.  He had heard somewhere that Hahn would sit at the piano thus, for hours, the tears running down his cheeks because of the beauty of the music he could remember but not reproduce; and partly because of his own inability to reproduce it.

The stubby little forefinger faltered, stopped.  He looked up at Wallie.

“God, I wish I could play!”

“Helps a lot.”

“You play?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Oh, most anything I’ve heard once.  And some things I kind of make up.”

“Compose, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Play one of those.”

So Wallie Ascher played one of those.  Of course you know “Good Night—­Pleasant Dreams.”  He hadn’t named it then.  It wasn’t even published until almost two years later, but that was what he played for Sid Hahn.  Since “After The Ball” no popular song has achieved the success of that one.  No doubt it was cheap, and no doubt it was sentimental, but so, too, are “The Suwanee River” and “My Old Kentucky Home,” and they’ll be singing those when more classical songs have long been forgotten.  As Wallie played it his dark, thin face seemed to gleam and glow in the lamplight.

When he had finished Sid Hahn was silent for a moment.  Then, “What’re you going to do with it?”

“With what?”

“With what you’ve got.  You know.”

Wallie knew that he did not mean the song he had just played.  “I’m going to—­I’m going to do a lot with it.”

“Yeh, but how?”

Wallie was looking down at his two lean brown hands on the keys.  For a long minute he did not answer.  Then:  “By thinking about it all the time.  And working like hell....  And you’ve got to be selfish ...  You’ve got to be selfish ...”

As Sid Hahn stared at him, as though hypnotized, the Jap appeared in the doorway.  Sid Hahn said, “Stay and have dinner with me,” instead of what he had meant to say.