Here she made another effort with the corner of her apron; but it was even more unsuccessful than the first. She gave it up and went on acidly.
"Mr. Spatola came here almost three years ago. He was engaged in one of the vaudeville theaters near here--in the orchestra--and he rented my second story front at six dollars a week. Except for the fact that he _would_ play awfully shivery music at all hours of the night, I was glad to have him. He was quiet and polite; he paid regularly and," smoothing back the untidy hair, "he gave a kind of tone to the house.
"But then he lost his position. Had a fight, I understand, with somebody. For a long time he had no work; he moved from the second story-front at six dollars a week into the attic at two. When he could get no place, he went on the street and played; afterwards he got the trained birds. I didn't like this much. It didn't do the house no good to have a street fiddler living in it; and then the birds were a regular nuisance with their noise. But he paid regular, and after a while he took to keeping the birds in a box in the loft, so I put up with it."
"We'll look at his room, if you please," said the investigator.
Complainingly, the woman led the way up the infirm staircase. At the fourth floor she pushed open a door and showed them into a long loft-like room with high ceiling and mansard windows. There came a squawking and fluttering from somewhere above as they entered.
"Them's the cockatoos," said the landlady. "They miss Mr. Spatola very much. When I go to feed them with the stale bread and seed he has here for them, would you believe it, they'll hardly eat a thing."
The room was without a floor covering. Upon some rough shelves, nailed to the wall, were heaps of music. A violin case also lay there. There were a few chairs, a cot-bed, and a neat pile of books upon a table. Ashton-Kirk ran over these quickly; they were mostly upon musical subjects, and in Italian. But some were Spanish, English, German and French.
"He was the greatest hand for talking and reading languages," said Mrs. Marx, wonderingly. "I don't think there was any kind of a nationality that he couldn't converse with. Mr. Sagon that lives on the floor below says that his French was elegant, and Mr. Hertz, my parlor lodger, used to just love to talk German with him. He said his German was so _high_."