path: root/1214-0.txt

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1214 ***

THE STREET OF SEVEN STARS

By Mary Roberts Rinehart




CHAPTER I

The old stucco house sat back in a garden, or what must once have been
a garden, when that part of the Austrian city had been a royal game
preserve. Tradition had it that the Empress Maria Theresa had used the
building as a hunting-lodge, and undoubtedly there was something royal
in the proportions of the salon. With all the candles lighted in the
great glass chandelier, and no sidelights, so that the broken paneling
was mercifully obscured by gloom, it was easy to believe that the great
empress herself had sat in one of the tall old chairs and listened to
anecdotes of questionable character; even, if tradition may be believed,
related not a few herself.

The chandelier was not lighted on this rainy November night. Outside
in the garden the trees creaked and bent before the wind, and the
heavy barred gate, left open by the last comer, a piano student named
Scatchett and dubbed “Scatch”--the gate slammed to and fro monotonously,
giving now and then just enough pause for a hope that it had latched
itself, a hope that was always destroyed by the next gust.

One candle burned in the salon. Originally lighted for the purpose of
enabling Miss Scatchett to locate the score of a Tschaikowsky concerto,
it had been moved to the small center table, and had served to give
light if not festivity to the afternoon coffee and cakes. It still
burned, a gnarled and stubby fragment, in its china holder; round it the
disorder of the recent refreshment, three empty cups, a half of a
small cake, a crumpled napkin or two,--there were never enough to go
round,--and on the floor the score of the concerto, clearly abandoned
for the things of the flesh.

The room was cold. The long casement windows creaked in time with the
slamming of the gate and the candle flickered in response to a draft
under the doors. The concerto flapped and slid along the uneven old
floor. At the sound a girl in a black dress, who had been huddled
near the tile stove, rose impatiently and picked it up. There was no
impatience, however, in the way she handled the loose sheets. She put
them together carefully, almost tenderly, and placed them on the top of
the grand piano, anchoring them against the draft with a china dog from
the stand.

The room was very bare--a long mirror between two of the windows, half
a dozen chairs, a stand or two, and in a corner the grand piano. There
were no rugs--the bare floor stretched bleakly into dim corners and
was lost. The crystal pendants of the great chandelier looked like
stalactites in a cave. The girl touched the piano keys; they were ice
under her fingers.

In a sort of desperation she drew a chair underneath the chandelier, and
armed with a handful of matches proceeded to the unheard-of extravagance
of lighting it, not here and there, but throughout as high as she could
reach, standing perilously on her tiptoes on the chair.

The resulting illumination revealed a number of things: It showed that
the girl was young and comely and that she had been crying; it revealed
the fact that the coal-pail was empty and the stove almost so; it let
the initiated into the secret that the blackish fluid in the cups had
been made with coffee extract that had been made of Heaven knows what;
and it revealed in the cavernous corner near the door a number of
trunks. The girl, having lighted all the candles, stood on the chair and
looked at the trunks. She was very young, very tragic, very feminine. A
door slammed down the hall and she stopped crying instantly. Diving into
one of those receptacles that are a part of the mystery of the sex, she
rubbed a chamois skin over her nose and her reddened eyelids.

The situation was a difficult one, but hardly, except to Harmony Wells,
a tragedy. Few of us are so constructed that the Suite “Arlesienne”
 will serve as a luncheon, or a faulty fingering of the Waldweben from
“Siegfried” will keep us awake at night. Harmony had lain awake more
than once over some crime against her namesake, had paid penances of
early rising and two hours of scales before breakfast, working with
stiffened fingers in her cold little room where there was no room for a
stove, and sitting on the edge of the bed in a faded kimono where once
pink butterflies sported in a once blue-silk garden. Then coffee, rolls,
and honey, and back again to work, with little Scatchett at the piano in
the salon beyond the partition, wearing a sweater and fingerless gloves
and holding a hot-water bottle on her knees. Three rooms beyond, down
the stone hall, the Big Soprano, doing Madama Butterfly in bad German,
helped to make an encircling wall of sound in the center of which one
might practice peacefully.

Only the Portier objected. Morning after morning, crawling out at dawn
from under his featherbed in the lodge below, he opened his door and
listened to Harmony doing penance above; and morning after morning he
shook his fist up the stone staircase.

“Gott im Himmel!” he would say to his wife, fumbling with the knot of
his mustache bandage, “what a people, these Americans! So much noise and
no music!”

“And mad!” grumbled his wife. “All the day coal, coal to heat; and at
night the windows open! Karl the milkboy has seen it.”

And now the little colony was breaking up. The Big Soprano was going
back to her church, grand opera having found no place for her. Scatch
was returning to be married, her heart full, indeed, of music, but her
head much occupied with the trousseau in her trunks. The Harmar sisters
had gone two weeks before, their funds having given out. Indeed, funds
were very low with all of them. The “Bitte zum speisen” of the little
German maid often called them to nothing more opulent than a stew of
beef and carrots.

Not that all had been sordid. The butter had gone for opera tickets, and
never was butter better spent. And there had been gala days--a fruitcake
from Harmony's mother, a venison steak at Christmas, and once or twice
on birthdays real American ice cream at a fabulous price and worth it.
Harmony had bought a suit, too, a marvel of tailoring and cheapness, and
a willow plume that would have cost treble its price in New York. Oh,
yes, gala days, indeed, to offset the butter and the rainy winter and
the faltering technic and the anxiety about money. For that they all
had always, the old tragedy of the American music student abroad--the
expensive lessons, the delays in getting to the Master himself, the
contention against German greed or Austrian whim. And always back in
one's mind the home people, to whom one dares not confess that after
nine months of waiting, or a year, one has seen the Master once or not
at all.

Or--and one of the Harmar girls had carried back this scar in her
soul--to go back rejected, as one of the unfit, on whom even the
undermasters refuse to waste time. That has been, and often. Harmony
stood on her chair and looked at the trunks. The Big Soprano was calling
down the hall.

“Scatch,” she was shouting briskly, “where is my hairbrush?”

A wail from Scatch from behind a closed door.

“I packed it, Heaven knows where! Do you need it really? Haven't you got
a comb?”

“As soon as I get something on I'm coming to shake you. Half the teeth
are out of my comb. I don't believe you packed it. Look under the bed.”

Silence for a moment, while Scatch obeyed for the next moment.

“Here it is,” she called joyously. “And here are Harmony's bedroom
slippers. Oh, Harry, I found your slippers!” The girl got down off the
chair and went to the door.

“Thanks, dear,” she said. “I'm coming in a minute.”

She went to the mirror, which had reflected the Empress Maria Theresa,
and looked at her eyes. They were still red. Perhaps if she opened the
window the air would brighten them.

Armed with the brush, little Scatchett hurried to the Big Soprano's
room. She flung the brush on the bed and closed the door. She held her
shabby wrapper about her and listened just inside the door. There were
no footsteps, only the banging of the gate in the wind. She turned to
the Big Soprano, heating a curling iron in the flame of a candle, and
held out her hand.

“Look!” she said. “Under my bed! Ten kronen!”

Without a word the Big Soprano put down her curling-iron, and
ponderously getting down on her knees, candle in hand, inspected the
dusty floor beneath her bed. It revealed nothing but a cigarette, on
which she pounced. Still squatting, she lighted the cigarette in the
candle flame and sat solemnly puffing it.

“The first for a week,” she said. “Pull out the wardrobe, Scatch; there
may be another relic of my prosperous days.”

But little Scatchett was not interested in Austrian cigarettes with a
government monopoly and gilt tips. She was looking at the ten-kronen
piece.

“Where is the other?” she asked in a whisper.

“In my powder-box.”

Little Scatchett lifted the china lid and dropped the tiny gold-piece.

“Every little bit,” she said flippantly, but still in a whisper, “added
to what she's got, makes just a little bit more.”

“Have you thought of a place to leave it for her? If Rosa finds it,
it's good-bye. Heaven knows it was hard enough to get together, without
losing it now. I'll have to jump overboard and swim ashore at New
York--I haven't even a dollar for tips.”

“New York!” said little Scatchett with her eyes glowing. “If Henry meets
me I know he will--”

“Tut!” The Big Soprano got up cumbrously and stood looking down. “You
and your Henry! Scatchy, child, has it occurred to your maudlin young
mind that money isn't the only thing Harmony is going to need? She's
going to be alone--and this is a bad town to be alone in. And she is not
like us. You have your Henry. I'm a beefy person who has a stomach, and
I'm thankful for it. But she is different--she's got the thing that you
are as well without, the thing that my lack of is sending me back to
fight in a church choir instead of grand opera.”

Little Scatchett was rather puzzled.

“Temperament?” she asked. It had always been accepted in the little
colony that Harmony was a real musician, a star in their lesser
firmament.

The Big Soprano sniffed.

“If you like,” she said. “Soul is a better word. Only the rich ought to
have souls, Scatchy, dear.”

This was over the younger girl's head, and anyhow Harmony was coming
down the hall.

“I thought, under her pillow,” she whispered. “She'll find it--”

Harmony came in, to find the Big Soprano heating a curler in the flame
of a candle.



CHAPTER II

Harmony found the little hoard under her pillow that night when, having
seen Scatch and the Big Soprano off at the station, she had come back
alone to the apartment on the Siebensternstrasse. The trunks were
gone now. Only the concerto score still lay on the piano, where little
Scatchett, mentally on the dock at New York with Henry's arms about her,
had forgotten it. The candles in the great chandelier had died in tears
of paraffin that spattered the floor beneath. One or two of the sockets
were still smoking, and the sharp odor of burning wickends filled the
room.

Harmony had come through the garden quickly. She had had an uneasy sense
of being followed, and the garden, with its moaning trees and slamming
gate and the great dark house in the background, was a forbidding place
at best. She had rung the bell and had stood, her back against the door,
eyes and ears strained in the darkness. She had fancied that a figure
had stopped outside the gate and stood looking in, but the next moment
the gate had swung to and the Portier was fumbling at the lock behind
her.

The Portier had put on his trousers over his night garments, and his
mustache bandage gave him a sinister expression, rather augmented
when he smiled at her. The Portier liked Harmony in spite of the early
morning practicing; she looked like a singer at the opera for whom he
cherished a hidden attachment. The singer had never seen him, but it was
for her he wore the mustache bandage. Perhaps some day--hopefully! One
must be ready!

The Portier gave Harmony a tiny candle and Harmony held out his tip, the
five Hellers of custom. But the Portier was keen, and Rosa was a niece
of his wife and talked more than she should. He refused the tip with a
gesture.

“Bitte, Fraulein!” he said through the bandage. “It is for me a pleasure
to admit you. And perhaps if the Fraulein is cold, a basin of soup.”

The Portier was not pleasant to the eye. His nightshirt was open over
his hairy chest and his feet were bare to the stone floor. But to
Harmony that lonely night he was beautiful. She tried to speak and could
not but she held out her hand in impulsive gratitude, and the Portier in
his best manner bent over and kissed it. As she reached the curve of the
stone staircase, carrying her tiny candle, the Portier was following her
with his eyes. She was very like the girl of the opera.

The clang of the door below and the rattle of the chain were comforting
to Harmony's ears. From the safety of the darkened salon she peered out
into the garden again, but no skulking figure detached itself from the
shadows, and the gate remained, for a marvel, closed.

It was when--having picked up her violin in a very passion of
loneliness, only to put it down when she found that the familiar sounds
echoed and reechoed sadly through the silent rooms--it was when she was
ready for bed that she found the money under her pillow, and a scrawl
from Scatchy, a breathless, apologetic scrawl, little Scatchett having
adored her from afar, as the plain adore the beautiful, the mediocre the
gifted:--

DEAREST HARRY [here a large blot, Scatchy being addicted to blots]: I am
honestly frightened when I think what we are doing. But, oh, my dear, if
you could know how pleased we are with ourselves you'd not deny us this
pleasure. Harry, you have it--the real thing, you know, whatever it
is--and I haven't. None of the rest of us had. And you must stay. To go
now, just when lessons would mean everything--well, you must not think
of it. We have scads to take us home, more than we need, both of us, or
at least--well, I'm lying, and you know it. But we have enough, by being
careful, and we want you to have this. It isn't much, but it may help.
Ten Kronen of it I found to-night under my bed, and it may be yours
anyhow.

“Sadie [Sadie was the Big Soprano] keeps saying awful things about our
leaving you here, and she has rather terrified me. You are so beautiful,
Harry,--although you never let us tell you so. And Sadie says you have
a soul and I haven't, and that souls are deadly things to have. I feel
to-night that in urging you to stay I am taking the burden of your soul
on me! Do be careful, Harry. If any one you do not know speaks to you
call a policeman. And be sure you get into a respectable pension. There
are queer ones.

“Sadie and I think that if you can get along on what you get from
home--you said your mother would get insurance, didn't you?--and will
keep this as a sort of fund to take you home if anything should go
wrong--. But perhaps we are needlessly worried. In any case, of course
it's a loan, and you can preserve that magnificent independence of yours
by sending it back when you get to work to make your fortune. And if you
are doubtful at all, just remember that hopeful little mother of yours
who sent you over to get what she had never been able to have for
herself, and who planned this for you from the time you were a kiddy and
she named you Harmony.

“I'm not saying good-bye. I can't.

“SCATCH.”

That night, while the Portier and his wife slept under their crimson
feather beds and the crystals of the chandelier in the salon shook in
the draft as if the old Austrian court still danced beneath, Harmony
fought her battle. And a battle it was. Scatchy and the Big Soprano had
not known everything. There had been no insurance on her father's life;
the little mother was penniless. A married sister would care for her,
but what then? Harmony had enough remaining of her letter of credit to
take her home, and she had--the hoard under the pillow. To go back and
teach the violin; or to stay and finish under the master, be presented,
as he had promised her, at a special concert in Vienna, with all the
prestige at home that that would mean, and its resulting possibility of
fame and fortune--which?

She decided to stay. There might be a concert or so, and she could
teach English. The Viennese were crazy about English. Some of the stores
advertised “English Spoken.” That would be something to fall back on, a
clerkship during the day.

Toward dawn she discovered that she was very cold, and she went into the
Big Soprano's deserted and disordered room. The tile stove was warm and
comfortable, but on the toilet table there lay a disreputable comb with
most of the teeth gone. Harmony kissed this unromantic object! Which
reveals the fact that, genius or not, she was only a young and rather
frightened girl, and that every atom of her ached with loneliness.

She did not sleep at all, but sat curled up on the bed with her feet
under her and thought things out. At dawn the Portier, crawling out
into the cold from under his feathers, opened the door into the hall
and listened. She was playing, not practicing, and the music was the
barcarolle from the “Tales” of Hoffmann. Standing in the doorway in
his night attire, his chest open to the frigid morning air, his face
upraised to the floor above, he hummed the melody in a throaty tenor.

When the music had died away he went in and closed the door sheepishly.
His wife stood over the stove, a stick of firewood in her hand. She eyed
him.

“So! It is the American Fraulein now!”

“I did but hum a little. She drags out my heart with her music.” He
fumbled with his mustache bandage, which was knotted behind, keeping one
eye on his wife, whose morning pleasure it was to untie it for him.

“She leaves to-day,” she announced, ignoring the knot.

“Why? She is alone. Rosa says--”

“She leaves to-day!”

The knot was hopeless now, double-tied and pulled to smooth compactness.
The Portier jerked at it.

“No Fraulein stays here alone. It is not respectable. And what saw I
last night, after she entered and you stood moon-gazing up the stair
after her! A man in the gateway!”

The Portier was angry. He snarled something through the bandage, which
had slipped down over his mouth, and picked up a great knife.

“She will stay if she so desire,” he muttered furiously, and, raising
the knife, he cut the knotted string. His mustache, faintly gray and
sweetly up-curled, stood revealed.

“She will stay!” he repeated. “And when you see men at the gate, let me
know. She is an angel!”

“And she looks like the angel at the opera, hein?”

This was a crushing blow. The Portier wilted. Such things come from
telling one's cousin, who keeps a brushshop, what is in one's heart.
Yesterday his wife had needed a brush, and to-day--Himmel, the girl must
go!

Harmony knew also that she must go. The apartment was large and
expensive; Rosa ate much and wasted more. She must find somewhere a tiny
room with board, a humble little room but with a stove. It is folly
to practice with stiffened fingers. A room where her playing would not
annoy people, that was important.

She paid Rosa off that morning out of money left for that purpose. Rosa
wept. She said she would stay with the Fraulein for her keep, because it
was not the custom for young ladies to be alone in the city--young girls
of the people, of course; but beautiful young ladies, no!

Harmony gave her an extra krone or two out of sheer gratitude, but she
could not keep her. And at noon, having packed her trunk, she went down
to interview the Portier and his wife, who were agents under the owner
for the old house.

The Portier, entirely subdued, was sweeping out the hallway. He looked
past the girl, not at her, and observed impassively that the lease was
up and it was her privilege to go. In the daylight she was not so like
the angel, and after all she could only play the violin. The angel had
a voice, such a voice! And besides, there was an eye at the crack of the
door.

The bit of cheer of the night before was gone; it was with a heavy heart
that Harmony started on her quest for cheaper quarters.

Winter, which had threatened for a month, had come at last. The
cobblestones glittered with ice and the small puddles in the gutters
were frozen. Across the street a spotted deer, shot in the mountains the
day before and hanging from a hook before a wild-game shop, was frozen
quite stiff. It was a pretty creature. The girl turned her eyes away. A
young man, buying cheese and tinned fish in the shop, watched after her.

“That's an American girl, isn't it?” he asked in American-German.

The shopkeeper was voluble. Also Rosa had bought much from him, and Rosa
talked. When the American left the shop he knew everything of Harmony
that Rosa knew except her name. Rosa called her “The Beautiful One.”
 Also he was short one krone four beliers in his change, which is readily
done when a customer is plainly thinking of a “beautiful one.”

Harmony searched all day for the little room with board and a stove and
no objection to practicing. There were plenty--but the rates! The
willow plume looked prosperous, and she had a way of making the plainest
garments appear costly. Landladies looked at the plume and the suit and
heard the soft swish of silk beneath, which marks only self-respect in
the American woman but is extravagance in Europe, and added to their
regular terms until poor Harmony's heart almost stood still. And then
at last toward evening she happened on a gloomy little pension near the
corner of the Alserstrasse, and it being dark and the plume not showing,
and the landlady missing the rustle owing to cotton in her ears for
earache, Harmony found terms that she could meet for a time.

A mean little room enough, but with a stove. The bed sagged in the
center, and the toilet table had a mirror that made one eye appear
higher than the other and twisted one's nose. But there was an odor
of stewing cabbage in the air. Also, alas, there was the odor of many
previous stewed cabbages, and of dusty carpets and stale tobacco.
Harmony had had no lunch; she turned rather faint.

She arranged to come at once, and got out into the comparative purity
of the staircase atmosphere and felt her way down. She reeled once or
twice. At the bottom of the dark stairs she stood for a moment with her
eyes closed, to the dismay of a young man who had just come in with a
cheese and some tinned fish under his arm.

He put down his packages on the stone floor and caught her arm.

“Not ill, are you?” he asked in English, and then remembering. “Bist du
krank?” He colored violently at that, recalling too late the familiarity
of the “du.”

Harmony smiled faintly.

“Only tired,” she said in English. “And the odor of cabbage--“.

Her color had come back and she freed herself from his supporting hand.
He whistled softly. He had recognized her.

“Cabbage, of course!” he said. “The pension upstairs is full of it.
I live there, and I've eaten so much of it I could be served up with
pork.”

“I am going to live there. Is it as bad as that?”

He waved a hand toward the parcels on the floor.

“So bad,” he observed, “that I keep body and soul together by buying
strong and odorous food at the delicatessens--odorous, because only
rugged flavors rise above the atmosphere up there. Cheese is the only
thing that really knocks out the cabbage, and once or twice even cheese
has retired defeated.”

“But I don't like cheese.” In sheer relief from the loneliness of the
day her spirits were rising.

“Then coffee! But not there. Coffee at the coffee-house on the corner. I
say--” He hesitated.

“Yes?”

“Would you--don't you think a cup of coffee would set you up a bit?”

“It sounds attractive,”--uncertainly.

“Coffee with whipped cream and some little cakes?”

Harmony hesitated. In the gloom of the hall she could hardly see
this brisk young American--young, she knew by his voice, tall by his
silhouette, strong by the way he had caught her. She could not see his
face, but she liked his voice.

“Do you mean--with you?”

“I'm a doctor. I am going to fill my own prescription.”

That sounded reassuring. Doctors were not as other men; they were
legitimate friends in need.

“I am sure it is not proper, but--”

“Proper! Of course it is. I shall send you a bill for professional
services. Besides, won't we be formally introduced to-night by the
landlady? Come now--to the coffee-house and the Paris edition of the
'Herald'!” But the next moment he paused and ran his hand over his chin.
“I'm pretty disreputable,” he explained. “I have been in a clinic all
day, and, hang it all, I'm not shaved.”

“What difference does that make?”

“My dear young lady,” he explained gravely, picking up the cheese and
the tinned fish, “it makes a difference in me that I wish you to realize
before you see me in a strong light.”

He rapped at the Portier's door, with the intention of leaving his
parcels there, but receiving no reply tucked them under his arm. A
moment later Harmony was in the open air, rather dazed, a bit excited,
and lovely with the color the adventure brought into her face. Her
companion walked beside her, tall, slightly stooped. She essayed a
fugitive little side-glance up at him, and meeting his eyes hastily
averted hers.

They passed a policeman, and suddenly there flashed into the girl's mind
little Scatchett's letter.

“Do be careful, Harry. If any one you do not know speaks to you, call a
policeman.”



CHAPTER III

The coffee-house was warm and bright. Round its small tables were
gathered miscellaneous groups, here and there a woman, but mostly
men--uniformed officers, who made of the neighborhood coffee-house a
sort of club, where under their breath they criticized the Government
and retailed small regimental gossip; professors from the university,
still wearing under the beards of middle life the fine horizontal scars
of student days; elderly doctors from the general hospital across the
street; even a Hofrath or two, drinking beer and reading the “Fliegende
Blaetter” and “Simplicissimus”; and in an alcove round a billiard table
a group of noisy Korps students. Over all a permeating odor of coffee,
strong black coffee, made with a fig or two to give it color. It rose
even above the blue tobacco haze and dominated the atmosphere with
its spicy and stimulating richness. A bustle of waiters, a hum of
conversation, the rattle of newspapers and the click of billiard
balls--this was the coffee-house.

Harmony had never been inside one before. The little music colony had
been a tight-closed corporation, retaining its American integrity, in
spite of the salon of Maria Theresa and three expensive lessons a week
in German. Harmony knew the art galleries and the churches, which were
free, and the opera, thanks to no butter at supper. But of that backbone
of Austrian life, the coffee-house, she was profoundly ignorant.

Her companion found her a seat in a corner near a heater and disappeared
for an instant on the search for the Paris edition of the “Herald.” The
girl followed him with her eyes. Seen under the bright electric lights,
he was not handsome, hardly good-looking. His mouth was wide, his nose
irregular, his hair a nondescript brown,--but the mouth had humor, the
nose character, and, thank Heaven, there was plenty of hair. Not that
Harmony saw all this at once. As he tacked to and fro round the tables,
with a nod here and a word there, she got a sort of ensemble effect--a
tall man, possibly thirty, broadshouldered, somewhat stooped, as tall
men are apt to be. And shabby, undeniably shabby!

The shabbiness was a shock. A much-braided officer, trim from the points
of his mustache to the points of his shoes, rose to speak to him. The
shabbiness was accentuated by the contrast. Possibly the revelation
was an easement to the girl's nervousness. This smiling and unpressed
individual, blithely waving aloft the Paris edition of the “Herald” and
equally blithely ignoring the maledictions of the student from whom
he had taken it--even Scatchy could not have called him a vulture or
threatened him with the police.

He placed the paper before her and sat down at her side, not to
interfere with her outlook over the room.

“Warmer?” he asked.

“Very much.”

“Coffee is coming. And cinnamon cakes with plenty of sugar. They know me
here and they know where I live. They save the sugariest cakes for me.
Don't let me bother you; go on and read. See which of the smart set is
getting a divorce--or is it always the same one? And who's President
back home.”

“I'd rather look round. It's curious, isn't it?”

“Curious? It's heavenly! It's the one thing I am going to take back
to America with me--one coffee-house, one dozen military men for local
color, one dozen students ditto, and one proprietor's wife to sit in the
cage and shortchange the unsuspecting. I'll grow wealthy.”

“But what about the medical practice?”

He leaned over toward her; his dark-gray eyes fulfilled the humorous
promise of his mouth.

“Why, it will work out perfectly,” he said whimsically. “The great
American public will eat cinnamon cakes and drink coffee until the
feeble American nervous system will be shattered. I shall have an office
across the street!”

After that, having seen how tired she looked, he forbade conversation
until she had had her coffee. She ate the cakes, too, and he watched her
with comfortable satisfaction.

“Nod your head but don't speak,” he said. “Remember, I am prescribing,
and there's to be no conversation until the coffee is down. Shall I or
shall I not open the cheese?”

But Harmony did not wish the cheese, and so signified. Something
inherently delicate in the unknown kept him from more than an occasional
swift glance at her. He read aloud, as she ate, bits of news from the
paper, pausing to sip his own coffee and to cast an eye over the crowded
room. Here and there an officer, gazing with too open admiration on
Harmony's lovely face, found himself fixed by a pair of steel-gray eyes
that were anything but humorous at that instant, and thought best to
shift his gaze.

The coffee finished, the girl began to gather up her wraps. But the
unknown protested.

“The function of a coffee-house,” he explained gravely, “is twofold.
Coffee is only the first half. The second half is conversation.”

“I converse very badly.”

“So do I. Suppose we talk about ourselves. We are sure to do that well.
Shall I commence?”

Harmony was in no mood to protest. Having swallowed coffee, why choke
over conversation? Besides, she was very comfortable. It was warm
there, with the heater at her back; better than the little room with the
sagging bed and the doors covered with wall paper. Her feet had stopped
aching, too, She could have sat there for hours. And--why evade it?--she
was interested. This whimsical and respectful young man with his absurd
talk and his shabby clothes had roused her curiosity.

“Please,” she assented.

“Then, first of all, my name. I'm getting that over early, because it
isn't much, as names go. Peter Byrne it is. Don't shudder.”

“Certainly I'm not shuddering.”

“I have another name, put in by my Irish father to conciliate a German
uncle of my mother's. Augustus! It's rather a mess. What shall I put on
my professional brassplate? If I put P. Augustus Byrne nobody's fooled.
They know my wretched first name is Peter.”

“Or Patrick.”

“I rather like Patrick--if I thought it might pass as Patrick! Patrick
has possibilities. The diminutive is Pat, and that's not bad. But
Peter!”

“Do you know,” Harmony confessed half shyly, “I like Peter as a name.”

“Peter it shall be, then. I go down to posterity and fame as Peter
Byrne. The rest doesn't amount to much, but I want you to know it, since
you have been good enough to accept me on faith. I'm here alone, from
a little town in eastern Ohio; worked my way through a coeducational
college in the West and escaped unmarried; did two years in a drygoods
store until, by saving and working in my vacations, I got through
medical college and tried general practice. Didn't like it--always
wanted to do surgery. A little legacy from the German uncle, trying to
atone for the 'Augustus,' gave me enough money to come here. I've got a
chance with the Days--surgeons, you know--when I go back, if I can hang
on long enough. That's all. Here's a traveler's check with my name on
it, to vouch for the truth of this thrilling narrative. Gaze on it with
awe; there are only a few of them left!”

Harmony was as delicately strung, as vibratingly responsive as the
strings of her own violin, and under the even lightness of his tone she
felt many things that met a response in her--loneliness and struggle,
and the ever-present anxiety about money, grim determination, hope and
fear, and even occasional despair. He was still young, but there were
lines in his face and a hint of gray in his hair. Even had he been less
frank, she would have known soon enough--the dingy little pension, the
shabby clothes--

She held out her hand.

“Thank you for telling me,” she said simply. “I think I understand very
well because--it's music with me: violin. And my friends have gone, so I
am alone, too.”

He leaned his elbows on the table and looked out over the crowd without
seeing it.

“It's curious, isn't it?” he said. “Here we are, you and I, meeting
in the center of Europe, both lonely as the mischief, both working our
heads off for an idea that may never pan out! Why aren't you at home
to-night, eating a civilized beefsteak and running upstairs to get ready
for a nice young man to bring you a box of chocolates? Why am I not
measuring out calico in Shipley & West's? Instead, we are going to
Frau Schwarz', to listen to cold ham and scorched compote eaten in six
different languages.”

Harmony made no immediate reply. He seemed to expect none. She was
drawing on her gloves, her eyes, like his, roving over the crowd.

Far back among the tables a young man rose and yawned. Then,
seeing Byrne, he waved a greeting to him. Byrne's eyes, from being
introspective, became watchful.

The young man was handsome in a florid, red-checked way, with black hair
and blue eyes. Unlike Byrne, he was foppishly neat. He was not alone. A
slim little Austrian girl, exceedingly chic, rose when he did and threw
away the end of a cigarette.

“Why do we go so soon?” she demanded fretfully in German. “It is early
still.”

He replied in English. It was a curious way they had, and eminently
satisfactory, each understanding better than he spoke the other's
language.

“Because, my beloved,” he said lightly, “you are smoking a great many
poisonous and highly expensive cigarettes. Also I wish to speak to
Peter.”

The girl followed his eyes and stiffened jealously.

“Who is that with Peter?”

“We are going over to find out, little one. Old Peter with a woman at
last!”

The little Austrian walked delicately, swaying her slim body with a slow
and sensuous grace. She touched an officer as she passed him, and paused
to apologize, to the officer's delight and her escort's irritation. And
Peter Byrne watched and waited, a line of annoyance between his brows.
The girl was ahead; that complicated things.

When she was within a dozen feet of the table he rose hastily, with a
word of apology, and met the couple. It was adroitly done. He had taken
the little Austrian's arm and led her by the table while he was still
greeting her. He held her in conversation in his absurd German until
they had reached the swinging doors, while her companion followed
helplessly. And he bowed her out, protesting his undying admiration for
her eyes, while the florid youth alternately raged behind him and stared
back at Harmony, interested and unconscious behind her table.

The little Austrian was on the pavement when Byrne turned, unsmiling, to
the other man.

“That won't do, you know, Stewart,” he said, grave but not unfriendly.

“The Kid wouldn't bite her.”

“We'll not argue about it.”

After a second's awkward pause Stewart smiled.

“Certainly not,” he agreed cheerfully. “That is up to you, of course. I
didn't know. We're looking for you to-night.”

A sudden repulsion for the evening's engagement rose in Byrne, but the
situation following his ungraciousness was delicate.

“I'll be round,” he said. “I have a lecture and I may be late, but I'll
come.”

The “Kid” was not stupid. She moved off into the night, chin in air,
angrily flushed.

“You saw!” she choked, when Stewart had overtaken her and slipped a hand
through her arm. “He protects her from me! It is because of you. Before
I knew you--”

“Before you knew me, little one,” he said cheerfully, “you were exactly
what you are now.”

She paused on the curb and raised her voice.

“So! And what is that?”

“Beautiful as the stars, only--not so remote.”

In their curious bi-lingual talk there was little room for subtlety. The
“beautiful” calmed her, but the second part of the sentence roused her
suspicion.

“Remote? What is that?”

“I was thinking of Worthington.”

The name was a signal for war. Stewart repented, but too late.

In the cold evening air, to the amusement of a passing detail of
soldiers trundling a breadwagon by a rope, Stewart stood on the pavement
and dodged verbal brickbats of Viennese idioms and German epithets. He
drew his chin into the up-turned collar of his overcoat and waited, an
absurdly patient figure, until the hail of consonants had subsided
into a rain of tears. Then he took the girl's elbow again and led her,
childishly weeping, into a narrow side street beyond the prying ears and
eyes of the Alserstrasse.

Byrne went back to Harmony. The incident of Stewart and the girl was
closed and he dismissed it instantly. That situation was not his, or
of his making. But here in the coffee-house, lovely, alluring, rather
puzzled at this moment, was also a situation. For there was a situation.
He had suspected it that morning, listening to the delicatessen-seller's
narrative of Rosa's account of the disrupted colony across in the old
lodge; he had been certain of it that evening, finding Harmony in the
dark entrance to his own rather sordid pension. Now, in the bright
light of the coffee-house, surmising her poverty, seeing her beauty, the
emotional coming and going of her color, her frank loneliness, and God
save the mark!--her trust in him, he accepted the situation and adopted
it: his responsibility, if you please.

He straightened under it. He knew the old city fairly well--enough to
love it and to loathe it in one breath. He had seen its tragedies and
passed them by, or had, in his haphazard way, thrown a greeting to them,
or even a glass of native wine. And he knew the musical temperament;
the all or nothing of its insistent demands; its heights that are higher
than others, its wretchednesses that are hell. Once in the Hofstadt
Theater, where he had bought standing room, he had seen a girl he had
known in Berlin, where he was taking clinics and where she was cooking
her own meals. She had been studying singing. In the Hofstadt Theater
she had worn a sable coat and had avoided his eyes.

Perhaps the old coffee-house had seen nothing more absurd, in its years
of coffee and billiards and Munchener beer, than Peter's new resolution
that night: this poverty adopting poverty, this youth adopting youth,
with the altruistic purpose of saving it from itself.

And this, mind you, before Peter Byrne had heard Harmony's story or knew
her name, Rosa having called her “The Beautiful One” in her narrative,
and the delicatessen-seller being literal in his repetition.

Back to “The Beautiful One” went Peter Byrne, and, true to his new part
of protector and guardian, squared his shoulders and tried to look much
older than he really was, and responsible. The result was a grimness
that alarmed Harmony back to the forgotten proprieties.

“I think I must go,” she said hurriedly, after a glance at his
determinedly altruistic profile. “I must finish packing my things. The
Portier has promised--”

“Go! Why, you haven't even told me your name!”

“Frau Schwarz will present you to-night,” primly and rising.

Peter Byrne rose, too.

“I am going back with you. You should not go through that lonely yard
alone after dark.”

“Yard! How do you know that?”

Byrne was picking up the cheese, which he had thoughtlessly set on the
heater, and which proved to be in an alarming state of dissolution. It
took a moment to rewrap, and incidentally furnished an inspiration. He
indicated it airily.

“Saw you this morning coming out--delicatessen shop across the street,”
 he said glibly. And then, in an outburst of honesty which the girl's
eyes seemed somehow to compel: “That's true, but it's not all the truth.
I was on the bus last night, and when you got off alone I--I saw you
were an American, and that's not a good neighborhood. I took the liberty
of following you to your gate!”

He need not have been alarmed. Harmony was only grateful, and said so.
And in her gratitude she made no objection to his suggestion that he see
her safely to the old lodge and help her carry her hand-luggage and her
violin to the pension. He paid the trifling score, and followed by many
eyes in the room they went out into the crisp night together.

At the lodge the doors stood wide, and a vigorous sound of scrubbing
showed that the Portier's wife was preparing for the inspection of
possible new tenants. She was cleaning down the stairs by the light of
a candle, and the steam of the hot water on the cold marble invested her
like an aura. She stood aside to let them pass, and then went cumbrously
down the stairs to where, a fork in one hand and a pipe in the other,
the Portier was frying chops for the evening meal.

“What have I said?” she demanded from the doorway. “Your angel is here.”

“So!”

“She with whom you sing, old cracked voice! Whose money you refuse,
because she reminds you of your opera singer! She is again here, and
with a man!”

“It is the way of the young and beautiful--there is always a man,” said
the Portier, turning a chop.

His wife wiped her steaming hands on her apron and turned away,
exasperated.

“It is the same man whom I last night saw at the gate,” she threw back
over her shoulder. “I knew it from the first; but you, great booby, can
see nothing but red lips. Bah!”

Upstairs in the salon of Maria Theresa, lighted by one candle and
freezing cold, in a stiff chair under the great chandelier Peter Byrne
sat and waited and blew on his fingers. Down below, in the Street of
Seven Stars, the arc lights swung in the wind.



CHAPTER IV

The supper that evening was even unusually bad. Frau Schwarz, much
crimped and clad in frayed black satin, presided at the head of the long
table. There were few, almost no Americans, the Americans flocking to
good food at reckless prices in more fashionable pensions; to the Frau
Gallitzenstein's, for instance, in the Kochgasse, where there was to
be had real beefsteak, where turkeys were served at Thanksgiving and
Christmas, and where, were one so minded, one might revel in whipped
cream.

The Pension Schwarz, however, was not without adornment. In the center
of the table was a large bunch of red cotton roses with wire stems and
green paper leaves, and over the side-table, with its luxury of compote
in tall glass dishes and its wealth of small hard cakes, there hung
a framed motto which said, “Nicht Rauchen,” “No Smoking,”--and which
looked suspiciously as if it had once adorned a compartment of a
railroad train.

Peter Byrne was early in the dining-room. He had made, for him, a
careful toilet, which consisted of a shave and clean linen. But he had
gone further: He had discovered, for the first time in the three months
of its defection, a button missing from his coat, and had set about to
replace it. He had cut a button from another coat, by the easy method
of amputating it with a surgical bistoury, and had sewed it in its new
position with a curved surgical needle and a few inches of sterilized
catgut. The operation was slow and painful, and accomplished only with
the aid of two cigarettes and an artery clip. When it was over he tied
the ends in a surgeon's knot underneath and stood back to consider the
result. It seemed neat enough, but conspicuous. After a moment or two of
troubled thought he blacked the white catgut with a dot of ink and went
on his way rejoicing.

Peter Byrne was entirely untroubled as to the wisdom of the course he
had laid out for himself. He followed no consecutive line of thought as
he dressed. When he was not smoking he was whistling, and when he was
doing neither, and the needle proved refractory in his cold fingers,
he was swearing to himself. For there was no fire in the room. The
materials for a fire were there, and a white tile stove, as cozy as an
obelisk in a cemetery, stood in the corner. But fires are expensive,
and hardly necessary when one sleeps with all one's windows open--one
window, to be exact, the room being very small--and spends most of the
day in a warm and comfortable shambles called a hospital.

To tell the truth he was not thinking of Harmony at all, except
subconsciously, as instance the button. He was going over, step by
step, the technic of an operation he had seen that afternoon, weighing,
considering, even criticizing. His conclusion, reached as he brushed
back his hair and put away his sewing implements, was somewhat to the
effect that he could have done a better piece of work with his eyes
shut and his hands tied behind his back; and that if it were not for the
wealth of material to work on he'd pack up and go home. Which brought
him back to Harmony and his new responsibility. He took off the necktie
he had absently put on and hunted out a better one.

He was late at supper--an offense that brought a scowl from the head
of the table, a scowl that he met with a cheerful smile. Harmony was
already in her place. Seated between a little Bulgarian and a Jewish
student from Galicia, she was almost immediately struggling in a sea of
language, into which she struck out now and then tentatively, only to
be again submerged. Byrne had bowed to her conventionally, even coldly,
aware of the sharp eyes and tongues round the table, but Harmony did
not understand. She had expected moral support from his presence, and
failing that she sank back into the loneliness and depression of the
day. Her bright color faded; her eyes looked tragic and rather aloof.
She ate almost nothing, and left the table before the others had
finished.

What curious little dramas of the table are played under unseeing eyes!
What small tragedies begin with the soup and end with dessert! What
heartaches with a salad! Small tragedies of averted eyes, looking
away from appealing ones; lips that tremble with wretchedness nibbling
daintily at a morsel; smiles that sear; foolish bits of talk that mean
nothing except to one, and to that one everything! Harmony, freezing at
Peter's formal bow and gazing obstinately ahead during the rest of the
meal, or no nearer Peter than the red-paper roses, and Peter, showering
the little Bulgarian next to her with detestable German in the hope of a
glance. And over all the odor of cabbage salad, and the “Nicht Rauchen”
 sign, and an acrimonious discussion on eugenics between an American
woman doctor named Gates and a German matron who had had fifteen
children, and who reduced every general statement to a personal insult.

Peter followed Harmony as soon as he dared. Her door was closed, and she
was playing very softly, so as to disturb no one. Defiantly, too, had he
only known it, her small chin up and her color high again; playing the
“Humoresque,” of all things, in the hope, of course, that he would
hear it and guess from her choice the wild merriment of her mood. Peter
rapped once or twice, but obtained no answer, save that the “Humoresque”
 rose a bit higher; and, Dr. Gates coming along the hall just then, he
was forced to light a cigarette to cover his pausing.

Dr. Gates, however, was not suspicious. She was a smallish woman of
forty or thereabout, with keen eyes behind glasses and a masculine
disregard of clothes, and she paused by Byrne to let him help her into
her ulster.

“New girl, eh?” she said, with a birdlike nod toward the door. “Very
gay, isn't she, to have just finished a supper like that! Honestly,
Peter, what are we going to do?”

“Growl and stay on, as we have for six months. There is better food, but
not for our terms.”

Dr. Gates sighed, and picking a soft felt hat from the table put it on
with a single jerk down over her hair.

“Oh, darn money, anyhow!” she said. “Come and walk to the corner with
me. I have a lecture.”

Peter promised to follow in a moment, and hurried back to his room.
There, on a page from one of his lecture notebooks, he wrote--

“Are you ill? Or have I done anything?”

“P. B.”

This with great care he was pushing under Harmony's door when the little
Bulgarian came along and stopped, smiling. He said nothing, nor did
Peter, who rose and dusted his knees. The little Bulgarian spoke no
English and little German. Between them was the wall of language. But
higher than this barrier was the understanding of their common sex. He
held out his hand, still smiling, and Peter, grinning sheepishly, took
it. Then he followed the woman doctor down the stairs.

To say that Peter Byrne was already in love with Harmony would be
absurd. She attracted him, as any beautiful and helpless girl attracts
an unattracted man. He was much more concerned, now that he feared he
had offended her, than he would have been without this fillip to his
interest. But even his concern did not prevent his taking copious and
intelligent notes at his lecture that night, or interfere with his
enjoyment of the Stein of beer with which, after it was over, he washed
down its involved German.

The engagement at Stewart's irked him somewhat. He did not approve of
Stewart exactly, not from any dislike of the man, but from a lack of
fineness in the man himself--an intangible thing that seems to be a
matter of that unfashionable essence, the soul, as against the clay; of
the thing contained, by an inverse metonymy, for the container.

Boyer, a nerve man from Texas, met him on the street, and they walked
to Stewart's apartment together. The frosty air and the rapid exercise
combined to drive away Byrne's irritation; that, and the recollection
that it was Saturday night and that to-morrow there would be no clinics,
no lectures, no operations; that the great shambles would be closed down
and that priests would read mass to convalescents in the chapels. He was
whistling as he walked along.

Boyer, a much older man, whose wife had come over with him, stopped
under a street light to consult his watch.

“Almost ten!” he said. “I hope you don't mind, Byrne; but I told Jennie
I was going to your pension. She detests Stewart.”

“Oh, that's all right. She knows you're playing poker?”

“Yes. She doesn't object to poker. It's the other. You can't make a good
woman understand that sort of thing.”

“Thank God for that!”

After a moment of silence Byrne took up his whistling again. It was the
“Humoresque.”

Stewart's apartment was on the third floor. Admission at that hour was
to be gained only by ringing, and Boyer touched the bell. The lights
were still on, however, in the hallways, revealing not overclean stairs
and, for a wonder, an electric elevator. This, however, a card announced
as out of order. Boyer stopped and examined the card grimly.

“'Out of order'!” he observed. “Out of order since last spring, judging
by that card. Vorwarts!”

They climbed easily, deliberately. At home in God's country Boyer played
golf, as became the leading specialist of his county. Byrne, with a
driving-arm like the rod of a locomotive, had been obliged to
forswear the more expensive game for tennis, with a resulting muscular
development that his slight stoop belied. He was as hard as nails,
without an ounce of fat, and he climbed the long steep flights with an
elasticity that left even Boyer a step or so behind.

Stewart opened the door himself, long German pipe in hand, his coat
replaced by a worn smoking-jacket. The little apartment was thick with
smoke, and from a room on the right came the click of chips and the
sound of beer mugs on wood.

Marie, restored to good humor, came out to greet them, and both men
bowed ceremoniously over her hand, clicking their heels together and
bowing from the waist. Byrne sniffed.

“What do I smell, Marie?” he demanded. “Surely not sausages!”

Marie dimpled. It was an old joke, to be greeted as one greets an old
friend. It was always sausages.

“Sausages, of a truth--fat ones.'

“But surely not with mustard?”

“Ach, ja--englisch mustard.”

Stewart and Boyer had gone on ahead. Marie laid a detaining hand on
Byrne's arm.

“I was very angry with you to-day.”

“With me?”

Like the others who occasionally gathered in Stewart's unconventional
menage, Byrne had adopted Stewart's custom of addressing Marie in
English, while she replied in her own tongue.

“Ja. I wished but to see nearer the American Fraulein's hat, and
you--She is rich, so?”

“I really don't know. I think not.”

“And good?”

“Yes, of course.”

Marie was small; she stood, her head back, her eyes narrowed, looking
up at Byrne. There was nothing evil in her face, it was not even hard.
Rather, there was a sort of weariness, as of age and experience. She
had put on a white dress, cut out at the neck, and above her collarbones
were small, cuplike hollows. She was very thin.

“I was sad to-night,” she said plaintively. “I wished to jump out the
window.”

Byrne was startled, but the girl was smiling at the recollection.

“And I made you feel like that?”

“Not you--the other Fraulein. I was dirt to her. I--” She stopped
tragically, then sniffled.

“The sausages!” she cried, and gathering up her skirts ran toward the
kitchen. Byrne went on into the sitting-room.

Stewart was a single man spending two years in post-graduate work in
Germany and Austria, not so much because the Germans and Austrians could
teach what could not be taught at home, but because of the wealth of
clinical material. The great European hospitals, filled to overflowing,
offered unlimited choice of cases. The contempt for human life of
overpopulated cities, coupled with the extreme poverty and helplessness
of the masses, combined to form that tragic part of the world which dies
that others may live.

Stewart, like Byrne, was doing surgery, and the very lack of fineness
which Byrne felt in the man promised something in his work, a sort of
ruthlessness, a singleness of purpose, good or bad, an overwhelming
egotism that in his profession might only be a necessary self-reliance.

His singleness of purpose had, at the beginning of his residence in
Vienna, devoted itself to making him comfortable. With the narrow means
at his control he had the choice of two alternatives: To live, as Byrne
was living, in a third-class pension, stewing in summer, freezing in
winter, starving always; or the alternative he had chosen.

The Stewart apartment had only three rooms, but it possessed that luxury
of luxuries, a bath. It was not a bath in the usual sense of water
on tap, and shining nickel plate, but a bath for all that, where with
premeditation and forethought one might bathe. The room had once been
a fuel and store room, but now boasted a tin tub and a stove with a
reservoir on top, where water might be heated to the boiling point, at
the same time bringing up the atmosphere to a point where the tin tub
sizzled if one touched it.

Behind the bathroom a tiny kitchen with a brick stove; next, a bedroom;
the whole incredibly neat. Along one side of the wall a clothespress,
which the combined wardrobes of two did not fill. And beyond that again,
opening through an arch with a dingy chenille curtain, the sitting-room,
now in chaotic disorder.

Byrne went directly to the sitting-room. There were four men already
there: Stewart and Boyer, a pathology man named Wallace Hunter, doing
research work at the general hospital, and a young piano student from
Tennessee named MacLean. The cards had been already dealt, and Byrne
stood by waiting for the hand to be played.

The game was a small one, as befitted the means of the majority. It was
a regular Saturday night affair, as much a custom as the beer that sat
in Steins on the floor beside each man, or as Marie's boiled Wiener
sausages.

The blue chips represented a Krone, the white ones five Hellers.
MacLean, who was hardly more than a boy, was winning, drawing in chips
with quick gestures of his long pianist's fingers.

Byrne sat down and picked up his cards. Stewart was staying out, and so,
after a glance, did he. The other three drew cards and fell to betting.
Stewart leaned back and filled his long pipe, and after a second's
hesitation Byrne turned to him.

“I don't know just what to say, Stewart,” he began in an undertone. “I'm
sorry. I didn't want to hurt Marie, but--”

“Oh, that's all right.” Stewart drew at his pipe and bent forward to
watch the game with an air of ending the discussion.

“Not at all. I did hurt her and I want to explain. Marie has been kind
to me, and I like her. You know that.”

“Don't be an ass!” Stewart turned on him sharply. “Marie is a little
fool, that's all. I didn't know it was an American girl.”

Byrne played in bad luck. His mind was not on the cards. He stayed
out of the last hand, and with a cigarette wandered about the room. He
glanced into the tidy bedroom and beyond, to where Marie hovered over
the stove.

She turned and saw him.

“Come,” she called. “Watch the supper for me while I go down for more
beer.”

“But no,” he replied, imitating her tone. “Watch the supper for me while
I go down for more beer.”

“I love thee,” she called merrily. “Tell the Herr Doktor I love thee.
And here is the pitcher.”

When he returned the supper was already laid in the little kitchen. The
cards were put away, and young MacLean and Wallace Hunter were replacing
the cover and the lamp on the card-table. Stewart was orating from a
pinnacle of proprietorship.

“Exactly,” he was saying, in reply to something gone before; “I used
to come here Saturday nights--used to come early and take a bath.
Worthington had rented it furnished for a song. Used to sit in a corner
and envy Worthington his bathtub, and that lamp there, and decent food,
and a bed that didn't suffer from necrosis in the center. Then when he
was called home I took it.”

“Girl and all, wasn't it?”

“Girl and all. Old Worth said she was straight, and, by Jove, she is. He
came back last fall on his wedding trip--he married a wealthy girl and
came to see us. I was out, but Marie was here. There was the deuce to
pay.”

He lowered his voice. The men had gathered about him in a group.

“Jealous, eh?” from Hunter.

“Jealous? No! He tried to kiss her and she hit him--said he didn't
respect her!”

“It's a curious code of honor,” said Boyer thoughtfully. And indeed to
none but Stewart did it seem amusing. This little girl of the streets,
driven by God knows what necessity to make her own code and, having made
it, living up to it with every fiber of her.

“Bitte zum speisen!” called Marie gayly from her brick stove, and the
men trooped out to the kitchen.

The supper was spread on the table, with the pitcher of beer in the
center. There were Swiss cheese and cold ham and rolls, and above all
sausages and mustard. Peter drank a great deal of beer, as did the
others, and sang German songs with a frightful accent and much vigor and
sentiment, as also did the others.

Then he went back to the cold room in the Pension Schwarz, and told
himself he was a fool to live alone when one could live like a prince
for the same sum properly laid out. He dropped into the hollow center of
his bed, where his big figure fitted as comfortably as though it lay in
a washtub, and before his eyes there came a vision of Stewart's flat and
the slippers by the fire--which was eminently human.

However, a moment later he yawned, and said aloud, with considerable
vigor, that he'd be damned if he would--which was eminently Peter Byrne.
Almost immediately, with the bed coverings, augmented by his overcoat,
drawn snug to his chin, and the better necktie swinging from the gasjet
in the air from the opened window, Peter was asleep. For four hours he
had entirely forgotten Harmony.



CHAPTER V

The peace of a gray Sunday morning hung like a cloud over the little
Pension Schwarz. In the kitchen the elderly maid, with a shawl over her
shoulders and stiffened fingers, made the fire, while in the dining-room
the little chambermaid cut butter and divided it sparingly among a dozen
breakfast trays--on each tray two hard rolls, a butter pat, a plate,
a cup. On two trays Olga, with a glance over her shoulder, placed two
butter pats. The mistress yet slept, but in the kitchen Katrina had a
keen eye for butter--and a hard heart.

Katrina came to the door.

“The hot water is ready,” she announced. “And the coffee also. Hast thou
been to mass?”

“Ja.”

“That is a lie.” This quite on general principle, it being one of the
cook's small tyrannies to exact religious observance from her underling,
and one of Olga's Sunday morning's indulgences to oversleep and avoid
the mass. Olga took the accusation meekly and without reply, being
occupied at that moment in standing between Katrina and the extra pats
of butter.

“For the lie,” said Katrina calmly, “thou shalt have no butter this
morning. There, the Herr Doktor rings for water. Get it, wicked one!”

Katrina turned slowly in the doorway.

“The new Fraulein is American?”

“Ja.”

Katrina shrugged her shoulders.

“Then I shall put more water to heat,” she said resignedly. “The
Americans use much water. God knows it cannot be healthy!”

Olga filled her pitcher from the great copper kettle and stood with it
poised in her thin young arms.

“The new Fraulein is very beautiful,” she continued aloud. “Thinkest
thou it is the hot water?”

“Is an egg more beautiful for being boiled?” demanded Katrina. “Go, and
be less foolish. See, it is not the Herr Doktor who rings, but the new
American.”

Olga carried her pitcher to Harmony's door, and being bidden, entered.
The room was frigid and Harmony, at the window in her nightgown, was
closing the outer casement. The inner still swung open. Olga, having put
down her pitcher, shivered.

“Surely the Fraulein has not slept with open windows?”

“Always with open windows.” Harmony having secured the inner casement,
was wrapping herself in the blue silk kimono with the faded butterflies.
Merely to look at it made Olga shiver afresh. She shook her head.

“But the air of the night,” she said, “it is full of mists and
illnesses! Will you have breakfast now?”

“In ten minutes, after I have bathed.”

Olga having put a match to the stove went back to the kitchen, shaking
her head.

“They are strange, the Americans!” she said to latrine. “And if to be
lovely one must bathe daily, and sleep with open windows--”

Harmony had slept soundly after all. Her pique at Byrne had passed
with the reading of his note, and the sensation of his protection and
nearness had been almost physical. In the virginal little apartment in
the lodge of Maria Theresa the only masculine presence had been that
of the Portier, carrying up coals at ninety Hellers a bucket, or of the
accompanist who each alternate day had played for the Big Soprano to
practice. And they had felt no deprivation, except for those occasional
times when Scatchy developed a reckless wish to see the interior of a
dancing-hall or one of the little theaters that opened after the opera.

But, as calmly as though she had never argued alone with a cabman or
disputed the bill at the delicatessen shop, Harmony had thrown herself
on the protection of this shabby big American whom she had met but
once, and, having done so, slept like a baby. Not, of course, that
she realized her dependence. She had felt very old and experienced and
exceedingly courageous as she put out her light the night before and
took a flying leap into the bed. She was still old and experienced, if a
trifle less courageous, that Sunday morning.

Promptly in ten minutes Olga brought the breakfast, two rolls, two pats
of butter--shades of the sleeping mistress and Katrina the thrifty--and
a cup of coffee. On the tray was a bit of paper torn from a notebook:--

“Part of the prescription is an occasional walk in good company. Will
you walk with me this afternoon? I would come in person to ask you, but
am spending the morning in my bathrobe, while my one remaining American
suit is being pressed.

“P. B.”

Harmony got the ink and her pen from her trunk and wrote below:--

“You are very kind to me. Yes, indeed.

“H. W.”

When frequent slamming of doors and steps along the passageway told
Harmony that the pension was fully awake, she got out her violin.
The idea of work obsessed her. To-morrow there would be the hunt for
something to do to supplement her resources, this afternoon she had
rashly promised to walk. The morning, then, must be given up to work.
But after all she did little.

For an hour, perhaps, she practiced. The little Bulgarian paused outside
her door and listened, rapt, his eyes closed. Peter Byrne, listening
while he sorted lecture memoranda at his little table in bathrobe and
slippers, absently filed the little note with the others--where he came
across it months later--next to a lecture on McBurney's Point, and spent
a sad hour or so over it. Over all the sordid little pension, with its
odors of food and stale air, its spotted napery and dusty artificial
flowers, the music hovered, and made for the time all things lovely.

In her room across from Harmony's, Anna Gates was sewing, or preparing
to sew. Her hair in a knob, her sleeves rolled up, the room in violent
disorder, she was bending over the bed, cutting savagely at a roll of
pink flannel. Because she was working with curved surgeon's scissors,
borrowed from Peter, the cut edges were strangely scalloped. Her method
as well as her tools was unique. Clearly she was intent on a body
garment, for now and then she picked up the flannel and held it to her.
Having thus, as one may say, got the line of the thing, she proceeded to
cut again, jaw tight set, small veins on her forehead swelling, a small
replica of Peter Byrne sewing a button on his coat.

After a time it became clear to her that her method was wrong. She
rolled up the flannel viciously and flung it into a corner, and
proceeded to her Sunday morning occupation of putting away the garments
she had worn during the week, a vast and motley collection.

On the irritability of her mood Harmony's music had a late but certain
effect. She made a toilet, a trifle less casual than usual, seeing that
she put on her stays, and rather sheepishly picked up the bundle from
the corner. She hunted about for a thimble, being certain she had
brought one from home a year before, but failed to find it. And finally,
bundle under her arm and smiling, she knocked at Harmony's door.

“Would you mind letting me sit with you?” she asked. “I'll not stir. I
want to sew, and my room is such a mess!”

Harmony threw the door wide. “You will make me very happy, if only my
practicing does not disturb you.”

Dr. Gates came in and closed the door.

“I'll probably be the disturbing element,” she said. “I'm a noisy
sewer.”

Harmony's immaculate room and radiant person put her in good humor
immediately. She borrowed a thimble--not because she cared whether
she had one or not, but because she knew a thimble was a part of the
game--and settled herself in a corner, her ragged pieces in her lap. For
an hour she plodded along and Harmony played. Then the girl put down her
bow and turned to the corner. The little doctor was jerking at a knot in
her thread.

“It's in the most damnable knot!” she said, and Harmony was suddenly
aware that she was crying, and heartily ashamed of it.

“Please don't pay any attention to me,” she implored. “I hate to sew.
That's the trouble. Or perhaps it's not all the trouble. I'm a fool
about music.”

“Perhaps, if you hate to sew--”

“I hate a good many things, my dear, when you play like that. I hate
being over here in this place, and I hate fleas and German cooking and
clinics, and I hate being forty years old and as poor as a church-mouse
and as ugly as sin, and I hate never having had any children!”

Harmony was very uncomfortable and just a little shocked. But the next
moment Dr. Gates had wiped her eyes with a scrap of the flannel and was
smiling up through her glasses.

“The plain truth really is that I have indigestion. I dare say I'm
really weeping in anticipation over the Sunday dinner! The food's bad
and I can't afford to live anywhere else. I'd take a room and do my own
cooking, but what time have I?” She spread out the pieces of flannel on
her knee. “Does this look like anything to you?”

“A petticoat, isn't it?”

“I didn't intend it as a petticoat.”

“I thought, on account of the scallops--”

“Scallops!” Dr. Gates gazed at the painfully cut pink edges and from
them to Harmony. Then she laughed, peal after peal of joyous mirth.

“Scallops!” she gasped at last. “Oh, my dear, if you'd seen me cutting
'em! And with Peter Byrne's scissors!”

Now here at last they were on common ground. Harmony, delicately
flushed, repeated the name, clung to it conversationally, using little
adroitnesses to bring the talk back to him. All roads of talk led to
Peter--Peter's future, Peter's poverty, Peter's refusing to have his
hair cut, Peter's encounter with a major of the guards, and the duel
Peter almost fought. It developed that Peter, as the challenged, had had
the choice of weapons, and had chosen fists, and that the major had been
carried away. Dr. Gates grew rather weary of Peter at last and fell back
on the pink flannel. She confided to Harmony that the various pieces,
united, were to make a dressing-gown for a little American boy at the
hospital. “Although,” she commented, “it looks more like a chair cover.”

Harmony offered to help her, and got out a sewing-box that was lined
with a piece of her mother's wedding dress. And as she straightened the
crooked edges she told the doctor about the wedding dress, and about the
mother who had called her Harmony because of the hope in her heart.
And soon, by dint of skillful listening, which is always better than
questioning, the faded little woman doctor knew all the story.

She was rather aghast.

“But suppose you cannot find anything to do?”

“I must,” simply.

“It's such a terrible city for a girl alone.”

“I'm not really alone. I know you now.”

“An impoverished spinster! Much help I shall be!”

“And there is Peter Byrne.”

“Peter!” Dr. Gates sniffed. “Peter is poorer than I am, if there is any
comparison in destitution!”

Harmony stiffened a trifle.

“Of course I do not mean money,” she said. “There are such things as
encouragement, and--and friendliness.”

“One cannot eat encouragement,” retorted Dr. Gates sagely. “And
friendliness between you and any man--bah! Even Peter is only human, my
dear.”

“I am sure he is very good.”

“So he is. He is very poor. But you are very attractive. There, I'm a
skeptic about men, but you can trust Peter. Only don't fall in love with
him. It will be years before he can marry. And don't let him fall in
love with you. He probably will.”

Whereupon Dr. Gates taking herself and her pink flannel off to prepare
for lunch, Harmony sent a formal note to Peter Byrne, regretting that
a headache kept her from taking the afternoon walk as she had promised.
Also, to avoid meeting him, she did without dinner, and spent the
afternoon crying herself into a headache that was real enough.

Anna Gates was no fool. While she made her few preparations for dinner
she repented bitterly what she had said to Harmony. It is difficult for
the sophistry of forty to remember and cherish the innocence of twenty.
For illusions it is apt to substitute facts, the material for the
spiritual, the body against the soul. Dr. Gates, from her school of
general practice, had come to view life along physiological lines.

With her customary frankness she approached Peter after the meal.

“I've been making mischief, Peter. I been talking too much, as usual.”

“Certainly not about me, Doctor. Out of my blameless life--”

“About you, as a representative member of your sex. I'm a fool.”

Peter looked serious. He had put on the newly pressed suit and his best
tie, and was looking distinguished and just now rather stern.

“To whom?”

“To the young Wells person. Frankly, Peter, I dare say at this moment
she thinks you are everything you shouldn't be, because I said you were
only human. Why it should be evil to be human, or human to be evil--”

“I cannot imagine,” said Peter slowly, “the reason for any conversation
about me.”

“Nor I, when I look back. We seemed to talk about other things, but it
always ended with you. Perhaps you were our one subject in common. Then
she irritated me by her calm confidence. The world was good, everybody
was good. She would find a safe occupation and all would be well.”

“So you warned her against me,” said Peter grimly.

“I told her you were human and that she was attractive. Shall I make
'way with myself?”

“Cui bono?” demanded Peter, smiling in spite of himself. “The mischief
is done.”

Dr. Gates looked up at him.

“I'm in love with you myself, Peter!” she said gratefully. “Perhaps it
is the tie. Did you ever eat such a meal?”



CHAPTER VI

A very pale and dispirited Harmony it was who bathed her eyes in cold
water that evening and obeyed little Olga's “Bitte sum speisen.” The
chairs round the dining-table were only half occupied--a free concert
had taken some, Sunday excursions others. The little Bulgarian, secretly
considered to be a political spy, was never about on this one evening of
the week. Rumor had it that on these evenings, secreted in an attic room
far off in the sixteenth district, he wrote and sent off reports of what
he had learned during the week--his gleanings from near-by tables in
coffee-houses or from the indiscreet hours after midnight in the cafe,
where the Austrian military was wont to gather and drink.

Into the empty chair beside Harmony Peter slid his long figure, and met
a tremulous bow and silence. From the head of the table Frau Schwarz was
talking volubly--as if, by mere sound, to distract attention from the
scantiness of the meal. Under cover of the Babel Peter spoke to the
girl. Having had his warning his tone was friendly, without a hint of
the intimacy of the day before.

“Better?”

“Not entirely. Somewhat.”

“I wish you had sent Olga to me for some tablets. No one needs to suffer
from headache, when five grains or so of powder will help them.”

“I am afraid of headache tablets.”

“Not when your physician prescribes them, I hope!”

This was the right note. Harmony brightened a little. After all, what
had she to do with the man himself? He had constituted himself her
physician. That was all.

“The next time I shall send Olga.”

“Good!” he responded heartily; and proceeded to make such a meal as
he might, talking little, and nursing, by a careful indifference, her
new-growing confidence.

It was when he had pushed his plate away and lighted a
cigarette--according to the custom of the pension, which accorded the
“Nicht Rauchen” sign the same attention that it did to the portrait of
the deceased Herr Schwarz--that he turned to her again.

“I am sorry you are not able to walk. It promises a nice night.”

Peter was clever. Harmony, expecting an invitation to walk, had nerved
herself to a cool refusal. This took her off guard.

“Then you do not prescribe air?”

“That's up to how you feel. If you care to go out and don't mind my
going along as a sort of Old Dog Tray I haven't anything else to do.”

Dr. Gates, eating stewed fruit across the table, gave Peter a swift
glance of admiration, which he caught and acknowledged. He was rather
exultant himself; certainly he had been adroit.

“I'd rather like a short walk. It will make me sleep,” said Harmony,
who had missed the by-play. “And Old Dog Tray would be a very nice
companion, I'm sure.”

It is doubtful, however, if Anna Gates would have applauded Peter
had she followed the two in their rambling walk that night. Direction
mattering little and companionship everything, they wandered on, talking
of immaterial things--of the rough pavements, of the shop windows, of
the gray medieval buildings. They came to a full stop in front of the
Votivkirche, and discussed gravely the twin Gothic spires and the
Benk sculptures on the facade. And there in the open square, casting
diplomacy to the winds, Peter Byrne turned to Harmony and blurted out
what was in his heart.

“Look here,” he said, “you don't care a rap about spires. I don't
believe you know anything about them. I don't. What did that idiot of a
woman doctor say to you to-day?”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“You do very well. And I'm going to set you right. She starts out with
two premises: I'm a man, and you're young and attractive. Then she draws
some sort of fool deduction. You know what I mean?”

“I don't see why we need discuss it,” said poor Harmony. “Or how you
know--”

“I know because she told me. She knew she had been a fool, and she
came to me. I don't know whether it makes any difference to you or not,
but--we'd started out so well, and then to have it spoiled! My dear
girl, you are beautiful and I know it. That's all the more reason why,
if you'll stand for it, you need some one to look after you--I'll not
say like a brother, because all the ones I ever knew were darned poor
brothers to their sisters, but some one who will keep an eye on you and
who isn't going to fall in love with you.”

“I didn't think you were falling in love with me; nor did I wish you
to.”

“Certainly not. Besides, I--” Here Peter Byrne had another inspiration,
not so good as the first--“Besides, there is somebody at home, you
understand? That makes it all right, doesn't it?”

“A girl at home?”

“A girl,” said Peter, lying manfully.

“How very nice!” said Harmony, and put out her hand. Peter, feeling all
sorts of a cheat, took it, and got his reward in a complete restoral of
their former comradely relations. From abstractions of church towers
and street paving they went, with the directness of the young, to
themselves. Thereafter, during that memorable walk, they talked
blissful personalities, Harmony's future, Peter's career, money--or
its lack--their ambitions, their hopes, even--and here was intimacy,
indeed!--their disappointments, their failures of courage, their
occasional loss of faith in themselves.

The first real snow of the year was falling as they turned back toward
the Pension Schwarz, a damp snow that stuck fast and melted with a
chilly cold that had in it nothing but depression. The upper spires of
the Votivkirche were hidden in a gray mist; the trees in the park took
on, against the gloom of the city hall, a snowy luminosity. Save for
an occasional pedestrian, making his way home under an umbrella, the
streets were deserted. Byrne and Harmony had no umbrella, but the girl
rejected his offer of a taxicab.

“We should be home too quickly,” she observed naively. “And we have
so much to say about me. Now I thought that perhaps by giving English
lessons in the afternoon and working all morning at my music--”

And so on and on, square after square, with Peter listening gravely,
his head bent. And square after square it was borne in on him what
a precarious future stretched before this girl beside him, how very
slender her resources, how more than dubious the outcome.

Poverty, which had only stimulated Peter Byrne in the past, ate deep
into his soul that night.

Epochmaking as the walk had been, seeing that it had reestablished a
friendship and made a working basis for future comradely relations, they
were back at the corner of the Alserstrasse before ten. As they turned
in at the little street, a man, lurching somewhat, almost collided
with Harmony. He was a short, heavy-set person with a carefully curled
mustache, and he was singing, not loudly, but with all his maudlin
heart in his voice, the barcarolle from the “Tales” of Hoffmann. He saw
Harmony, and still singing planted himself in her path. When Byrne would
have pushed him aside Harmony caught his arm.

“It is only the Portier from the lodge,” she said.

The Portier, having come to rest on a throaty and rather wavering note,
stood before Harmony, bowing.

“The Fraulein has gone and I am very sad,” he said thickly. “There is no
more music, and Rosa has run away with a soldier from Salzburg who has
only one lung.”

“But think!” Harmony said in German. “No more practicing in the early
dawn, no young ladies bringing mud into your newscrubbed hall! It is
better, is it not? All day you may rest and smoke!”

Byrne led Harmony past the drunken Portier, who turned with caution and
bowed after them.

“Gute Nacht,” he called. “Kuss die Hand, Fraulein. Four rooms and the
salon and a bath of the finest.”

As they went up the Hirschengasse they could hear him pursuing his
unsteady way down the street and singing lustily. At the door of the
Pension Schwarz Harmony paused.

“Do you mind if I ask one question?”

“You honor me, madam.”

“Then--what is the name of the girl back home?”

Peter Byrne was suddenly conscious of a complete void as to feminine
names. He offered, in a sort of panic, the first one he recalled:--

“Emma.”

“Emma! What a nice, old-fashioned name!” But there was a touch of
disappointment in her voice.

Harmony had a lesson the next day. She was a favorite pupil with the
master. Out of so much musical chaff he winnowed only now and then a
grain of real ability. And Harmony had that. Scatchy and the Big Soprano
had been right--she had the real thing.

The short half-hour lesson had a way with Harmony of lengthening itself
to an hour or more, much to the disgust of the lady secretary in the
anteroom. On that Monday Harmony had pleased the old man to one of his
rare enthusiasms.

“Six months,” he said, “and you will go back to your America and show
them how over here we teach violin. I will a letter--letters--give you,
and you shall put on the programme, of your concerts that you are my
pupil, is it not so?”

Harmony was drawing on her worn gloves; her hands trembled a little with
the praise and excitement.

“If I can stay so long,” she answered unsteadily.

“You must stay. Have I so long labored, and now before it is finished
you talk of going! Gott im Himmel!”

“It is a matter of money. My father is dead. And unless I find something
to do I shall have to go back.”

The master had heard many such statements. They never ceased to rouse
his ire against a world that had money for everything but music. He
spent five minutes in indignant protest, then:--

“But you are clever and young, child. You will find a way to stay.
Perhaps I can now and then find a concert for you.” It was a lure he
had thrown out before, a hook without a bait. It needed no bait, being
always eagerly swallowed. “And no more talk of going away. I refuse to
allow. You shall not go.”

Harmony paid the lady secretary on her way out. The master was
interested. He liked Harmony and he believed in her. But fifty Kronen
is fifty Kronen, and South American beef is high of price. He followed
Harmony into the outer room and bowed her out of his studio.

“The Fraulein has paid?” he demanded, turning sharply to the lady
secretary.

“Always.”

“After the lesson?”

“Ja, Herr Professor.”

“It is better,” said the master, “that she pay hereafter before the
lesson.”

“Ja, Herr Professor.”

Whereupon the lady secretary put a red-ink cross before Harmony's name.
There were many such crosses on the ledger.



CHAPTER VII

For three days Byrne hardly saw Harmony. He was off early in the
morning, hurried back to the midday meal and was gone again the moment
it was over. He had lectures in the evenings, too, and although he
lingered for an hour or so after supper it was to find Harmony taken
possession of by the little Bulgarian, seized with a sudden thirst for
things American.

On the evening of the second day he had left Harmony, enmeshed and
helpless in a tangle of language, trying to explain to the little
Bulgarian the reason American women wished to vote. Byrne flung down the
stairs and out into the street, almost colliding with Stewart.

They walked on together, Stewart with the comfortably rolling gait of
the man who has just dined well, Byrne with his heavy, rather solid
tread. The two men were not congenial, and the frequent intervals
without speech between them were rather for lack of understanding than
for that completeness of it which often fathers long silences. Byrne was
the first to speak after their greeting.

“Marie all right?”

“Fine. Said if I saw you to ask you to supper some night this week.”

“Thanks. Does it matter which night?”

“Any but Thursday. We're hearing 'La Boheme.'”

“Say Friday, then.”

Byrne's tone lacked enthusiasm, but Stewart in his after-dinner mood
failed to notice it.

“Have you thought any more about our conversation of the other night?”

“What was that?”

Stewart poked him playfully in the ribs.

“Wake up, Byrne!” he said. “You remember well enough. Neither the Days
nor any one else is going to have the benefit of your assistance if you
go on living the way you have been. I was at Schwarz's. It is the double
drain there that tells on one--eating little and being eaten much. Those
old walls are full of vermin. Why don't you take our apartment?”

“Yours?”

“Yes, for a couple of months. I'm through with Schleich and Breidau
can't take me for two months. It's Marie's off season and we're going to
Semmering for the winter sports. We're ahead enough to take a holiday.
And if you want the flat for the same amount you are spending now, or
less, you can have it, and--a home, old man.”

Byrne was irritated, the more so that he realized that the offer tempted
him. To his resentment was added a contempt of himself.

“Thanks,” he said. “I think not.”

“Oh, all right.” Stewart was rather offended. “I can't do more than give
you a chance.”

They separated shortly after and Byrne went on alone. The snow of Sunday
had turned to a fine rain which had lasted all of Monday and Tuesday.
The sidewalks were slimy; wagons slid in the ooze of the streets; and
the smoke from the little stoves in the street-cars followed them in
depressing horizontal clouds. Cabmen sat and smoked in the interior of
musty cabs. The women hod-carriers on a new building steamed like horses
as they worked.

Byrne walked along, his head thrust down into his up-turned collar;
moisture gathered on his face like dew, condensed rather than
precipitated. And as he walked there came before him a vision of the
little flat on the Hochgasse, with the lamp on the table, and the
general air of warmth and cheer, and a figure presiding over the brick
stove in the kitchen. Byrne shook himself like a great dog and turned in
at the gate of the hospital. He was thoroughly ashamed of himself.

That week was full of disappointments for Harmony. Wherever she turned
she faced a wall of indifference or, what was worse, an interest that
frightened her. Like a bird in a cage she beat helplessly against
barriers of language, of strange customs, of stolidity that were not far
from absolute cruelty.

She held to her determination, however, at first with hope, then, as
the pension in advance and the lessons at fifty Kronen--also in
advance,--went on, recklessly. She played marvelously those days, crying
out through her violin the despair she had sealed her lips against. On
Thursday, playing for the master, she turned to find him flourishing
his handkerchief, and went home in a sort of daze, incredulous that she
could have moved him to tears.

The little Bulgarian was frankly her slave now. He had given up the
coffee-houses that he might spend that hour near her, on the chance of
seeing her or, failing that, of hearing her play. At night in the Cafe
Hungaria he sat for hours at a time, his elbows on the table, a bottle
of native wine before him, and dreamed of her. He was very fat, the
little Georgiev, very swarthy, very pathetic. The Balkan kettle was
simmering in those days, and he had been set to watch the fire. But
instead he had kindled a flame of his own, and was feeding it with stray
words, odd glances, a bit of music, the curve of a woman's hair behind
her ears. For reports he wrote verses in modern Greek, and through one
of those inadvertences which make tragedy, the Minister of War down in
troubled Bulgaria once received between the pages of a report in cipher
on the fortifications of the Danube a verse in fervid hexameter that
made even that grim official smile.

Harmony was quite unconscious. She went on her way methodically: so
many hours of work, so many lessons at fifty Kronen, so many afternoons
searching for something to do, making rounds of shops where her English
might be valuable.

And after a few weeks Peter Byrne found time to help. After one
experience, when Harmony left a shop with flaming face and tears in her
eyes, he had thought it best to go with her. The first interview,
under Peter's grim eyes, was a failure. The shopkeeper was obviously
suspicious of Peter. After that, whenever he could escape from clinics,
Peter went along, but stayed outside, smoking his eternal cigarette, and
keeping a watchful eye on things inside the shop.

Only once was he needed. At that time, suspecting that all was not
well, from the girl's eyes and the leer on the shopkeeper's face, he
had opened the door in time to hear enough. He had lifted the proprietor
bodily and flung him with a crash into a glass showcase of ornaments
for the hair. Then, entirely cheerful and happy, and unmolested by the
frightened clerks, he led Harmony outside and in a sort of atavistic
triumph bought her a bunch of valley lilies.

Nevertheless, in his sane moments, Peter knew that things were very
bad, indeed. He was still not in love with the girl. He analyzed his own
feeling very carefully, and that was his conclusion. Nevertheless he did
a quixotic thing--which was Peter, of course, all over.

He took supper with Stewart and Marie on Friday, and the idea came to
him there. Hardly came to him, being Marie's originally. The little flat
was cozy and bright. Marie, having straightened her kitchen, brought in
a waist she was making and sat sewing while the two men talked. Their
conversation was technical, a new extirpation of the thyroid gland, a
recent nephrectomy.

In her curious way Marie liked Peter and respected him. She struggled
with the technicalities of their talk as she sewed, finding here and
there a comprehensive bit. At those times she sat, needle poised,
intelligent eyes on the speakers, until she lost herself again in the
mazes of their English.

At ten o'clock she rose and put away her sewing. Peter saw her get the
stone pitcher and knew she was on her way for the evening beer. He took
advantage of her absence to broach the matter of Harmony.

“She's up against it, as a matter of fact,” he finished. “It ought to be
easy enough for her to find something, but it isn't.”

“I hardly saw her that day in the coffee-house; but she's rather
handsome, isn't she?”

“That's one of the difficulties. Yes.”

Stewart smoked and reflected. “No friends here at all?”

“None. There were three girls at first. Two have gone home.”

“Could she teach violin?”

“I should think so.”

“Aren't there any kids in the American colony who want lessons? There's
usually some sort of infant prodigy ready to play at any entertainments
of the Doctors' Club.”

“They don't want an American teacher, I fancy; but I suppose I could put
a card up in the club rooms. Damn it all!” cried Peter with a burst of
honest resentment, “why do I have to be poor?”

“If you were rolling in gold you could hardly offer her money, could
you?”

Peter had not thought of that before. It was the only comfort he found
in his poverty. Marie had brought in the beer and was carefully filling
the mugs. “Why do you not marry her?” she asked unexpectedly. “Then you
could take this flat. We are going to Semmering for the winter sports. I
would show her about the stove.”

“Marry her, of course!” said Peter gravely. “Just pick her up and carry
her to church! The trifling fact that she does not wish to marry me need
have nothing to do with it.”

“Ah, but does she not wish it?” demanded Marie. “Are you so certain,
stupid big one? Do not women always love you?”

Ridiculous as the thought was, Peter pondered it as he went back to the
Pension Schwarz. About himself he was absurdly modest, almost humble. It
had never occurred to him that women might care for him for himself.
In his struggling life there had been little time for women. But about
himself as the solution of a problem--that was different.

He argued the thing over. In the unlikely contingency of the girl's
being willing, was Stewart right--could two people live as cheaply as
one? Marie was an Austrian and knew how to manage--that was different.
And another thing troubled him. He dreaded to disturb the delicate
adjustment of their relationship; the terra incognita of a young
girl's mind daunted him. There was another consideration which he put
resolutely in the back of his mind--his career. He had seen many a
promising one killed by early marriage, men driven to the hack work of
the profession by the scourge of financial necessity. But that was a
matter of the future; the necessity was immediate.

The night was very cold. Gusts of wind from the snow-covered Schneeberg
drove along the streets, making each corner a fortress defended by the
elements, a battlement to be seized, lost, seized again. Peter Byrne
battled valiantly but mechanically. And as he fought he made his
decision.

He acted with characteristic promptness. Possibly, too, he was afraid of
the strength of his own resolution. By morning sanity might prevail, and
in cold daylight he would see the absurdity of his position. He almost
ran up the winding staircase. At the top his cold fingers fumbled the
key and he swore under his breath. He slammed the door behind him. Peter
always slammed doors, and had an apologetic way of opening the door
again and closing it gently, as if to show that he could. Harmony's room
was dark, but he had surprised her once into a confession that when
she was very downhearted she liked to sit in the dark and be very blue
indeed. So he stopped and knocked. There was no reply, but from Dr.
Gates's room across there came a hum of conversation. He knew at once
that Harmony was there.

Peter hardly hesitated. He took off his soft hat and ran a hand over his
hair, and he straightened his tie. These preliminaries to a proposal of
marriage being disposed of, he rapped at the door.

Anna Gates opened it. She wore a hideous red-flannel wrapper, and in
deference to Harmony a thimble. Her flat breast was stuck with pins, and
pinkish threads revealed the fact that the bathrobe was still under way.

“Peter!” she cried. “Come in and get warm.”

Harmony, in the blue kimono, gave a little gasp, and flung round her
shoulders the mass of pink on which she had been working.

“Please go out!” she said. “I am not dressed.”

“You are covered,” returned Anna Gates. “That's all that any sort of
clothing can do. Don't mind her, Peter, and sit on the bed. Look out for
pins!”

Peter, however, did not sit down. He stood just inside the closed door
and stared at Harmony--Harmony in the red light from the little
open door of the stove; Harmony in blue and pink and a bit of white
petticoat; Harmony with her hair over her shoulders and tied out of her
eyes with an encircling band of rosy flannel.

“Do sit!” cried Anna Gates. “You fill the room so. Bless you, Peter,
what a collar!”

No man likes to know his collar is soiled, especially on the eve of
proposing marriage to a pink and blue and white vision. Peter, seated
now on the bed, writhed.

“I rapped at Miss Wells's door,” he said. “You were not there.”

This last, of course, to Harmony.

Anna Gates sniffed.

“Naturally!”

“I had something to say to you. I--I dare say it is hardly pension
etiquette for you to go over to your room and let me say it there?”

Harmony smiled above the flannel.

“Could you call it through the door?”

“Hardly.”

“Fiddlesticks!” said Dr. Gates, rising. “I'll go over, of course, but
not for long. There's no fire.”

With her hand on the knob, however, Harmony interfered.

“Please!” she implored. “I am not dressed and I'd rather not.” She
turned to Peter. “You can say it before her, can't you? She--I have told
her all about things.”

Peter hesitated. He felt ridiculous for the second time that night.
Then:--

“It was merely an idea I had. I saw a little apartment furnished--you
could learn to use the stove, unless, of course, you don't like
housekeeping--and food is really awfully cheap. Why, at these
delicatessen places and bakeshops--”

Here he paused for breath and found Dr. Gates's quizzical glance fixed
on him, and Harmony's startled eyes.

“What I am trying to say,” he exploded, “is that I believe if you would
marry me it would solve some of your troubles anyhow.” He was talking
for time now, against Harmony's incredulous face. “You'd be taking on
others, of course. I'm not much and I'm as poor--well, you know. It--it
was the apartment that gave me the idea--”

“And the stove!” said Harmony; and suddenly burst into joyous laughter.
After a rather shocked instant Dr. Gates joined her. It was real mirth
with Harmony, the first laugh of days, that curious laughter of women
that is not far from tears.

Peter sat on the bed uncomfortably. He grinned sheepishly and made a
last feeble attempt to stick to his guns.

“I mean it. You know I'm not in love with you or you with me, of course.
But we are such a pair of waifs, and I thought we might get along. Lord
knows I need some one to look after me!”

“And Emma?”

“There is no Emma. I made her up.”

Harmony sobered at that.

“It is only”--she gasped a little for breath--“it is only your--your
transparency, Peter.” It was the first time she had called him Peter.
“You know how things are with me and you want to help me, and out of
your generosity you are willing to take on another burden. Oh, Peter!”

And here, Harmony being an emotional young person, the tears beat the
laughter to the surface and had to be wiped away under the cover of
mirth.

Anna Gates, having recovered herself, sat back and surveyed them both
sternly through her glasses.

“Once for all,” she said brusquely, “let such foolishness end. Peter,
I am ashamed of you. Marriage is not for you--not yet, not for a dozen
years. Any man can saddle himself with a wife; not every man can be what
you may be if you keep your senses and stay single. And the same is true
for you, girl. To tide over a bad six months you would sacrifice the
very thing you are both struggling for?”

“I'm sure we don't intend to do it,” replied Harmony meekly.

“Not now. Some day you may be tempted. When that time comes, remember
what I say. Matrimonially speaking, each of you is fatal to the other.
Now go away and let me alone. I'm not accustomed to proposals of
marriage.”

It was in some confusion of mind that Peter Byrne took himself off
to the bedroom with the cold tiled stove and the bed that was as
comfortable as a washtub. Undeniably he was relieved. Also Harmony's
problem was yet unsolved. Also she had called him Peter.

Also he had said he was not in love with her. Was he so sure of that?

At midnight, just as Peter, rolled in the bedclothing, had managed to
warm the cold concavity of his bed and had dozed off, Anna Gates knocked
at his door.

“Yes?” said Peter, still comfortably asleep.

“It is Dr. Gates.”

“Sorry, Doctor--have to 'xcuse me,” mumbled Peter from the blanket.

“Peter!”

Peter roused to a chilled and indignant consciousness and sat up in bed.

“Well?”

“Open the door just a crack.”

Resignedly Peter crawled out of bed, carefully turning the coverings up
to retain as much heat as possible. An icy blast from the open window
blew round him, setting everything movable in the little room to
quivering. He fumbled in the dark for his slippers, failed to find them,
and yawning noisily went to the door.

Anna Gates, with a candle, was outside. Her short, graying hair was out
of its hard knot, and hung in an equally uncompromising six-inch plait
down her back. She had no glasses, and over the candle-frame she peered
shortsightedly at Peter.

“It's about Jimmy,” she said. “I don't know what's got into me, but I've
forgotten for three days. It's a good bit more than time for a letter.”

“Great Scott!”

“Both yesterday and to-day he asked for it and to-day he fretted a
little. The nurse found him crying.”

“The poor little devil!” said Peter contritely. “Overdue, is it? I'll
fix it to-night.”

“Leave it under the door where I can get it in the morning. I'm off at
seven.”

“The envelope?”

“Here it is. And take my candle. I'm going to bed.”

That was at midnight or shortly after. Half after one struck from the
twin clocks of the Votivkirche and echoed from the Stephansplatz across
the city. It found Peter with the window closed, sitting up in bed, a
candle balanced on one knee, a writing-tablet on the other.

He was writing a spirited narrative of a chamois hunt in which he had
taken part that day, including a detailed description of the quarry,
which weighed, according to Peter, two hundred and fifty pounds, Peter
being strong on imagination and short on facts as regards the Alpine
chamois. Then, trying to read the letter from a small boy's point of
view and deciding that it lacked snap, he added by way of postscript a
harrowing incident of avalanche, rope, guide, and ice axe. He ended in a
sort of glow of authorship, and after some thought took fifty pounds off
the chamois.

The letter finished, he put it in a much-used envelope addressed to
Jimmy Conroy--an envelope that stamped the whole episode as authentic,
bearing as it did an undecipherable date and the postmark of a tiny
village in the Austrian Tyrol.

It was almost two when Peter put out the candle and settled himself to
sleep.

It was just two o'clock when the night nurse, making rounds in her
ward in the general hospital, found a small boy very much awake on his
pillow, and taking off her felt slipper shook it at him in pretended
fury.

“Now, thou bad one!” she said. “Awake, when the Herr Doktor orders
sleep! Shall I use the slipper?”

The boy replied in German with a strong English accent.

“I cannot sleep. Yesterday the Fraulein Elisabet said that in the
mountains there are accidents, and that sometimes--”

“The Fraulein Elisabet is a great fool. Tomorrow comes thy letter of a
certainty. The post has been delayed with great snows. Thy father has
perhaps captured a great boar, or a--a chamois, and he writes of it.”

“Do chamois have horns?”

“Ja. Great horns--so.”

“He will send them to me! And there are no accidents?”

“None. Now sleep, or--the slipper.”



CHAPTER VIII

So far Harmony's small world in the old city had consisted of Scatchy
and the Big Soprano, Peter, and Anna Gates, with far off in the
firmament the master. Scatchy and the Big Soprano had gone, weeping
anxious postcards from every way station it is true, but nevertheless
gone. Peter and Anna Gates remained, and the master as long as her funds
held out. To them now she was about to add Jimmy.

The bathrobe was finished. Out of the little doctor's chaos of pink
flannel Harmony had brought order. The result, masculine and complete
even to its tassels and cord of pink yarn, was ready to be presented. It
was with mingled emotions that Anna Gates wrapped it up and gave it to
Harmony the next morning.

“He hasn't been so well the last day or two,” she said. “He doesn't
sleep much--that's the worst of those heart conditions. Sometimes, while
I've been working on this thing, I've wondered--Well, we're making a
fight anyhow. And better take the letter, too, Harry. I might forget and
make lecture notes on it, and if I spoil that envelope--”

Harmony had arranged to carry the bathrobe to the hospital, meeting the
doctor there after her early clinic. She knew Jimmy's little story quite
well. Anna Gates had told it to her in detail.

“Just one of the tragedies of the world, my dear,” she had finished.
“You think you have a tragedy, but you have youth and hope; I think I
have my own little tragedy, because I have to go through the rest of
life alone, when taken in time I'd have been a good wife and mother.
Still I have my work. But this little chap, brought over here by a
father who hoped to see him cured, and spent all he had to bring him
here, and then--died. It gets me by the throat.”

“And the boy does not know?” Harmony had asked, her eyes wide.

“No, thanks to Peter. He thinks his father is still in the mountains.
When we heard about it Peter went up and saw that he was buried. It took
about all the money there was. He wrote home about it, too, to the place
they came from. There has never been any reply. Then ever since Peter
has written these letters. Jimmy lives for them.”

Peter! It was always Peter. Peter did this. Peter said that. Peter
thought thus. A very large part of Harmony's life was Peter in those
days.

She was thinking of him as she waited at the gate of the hospital for
Anna Gates, thinking of his shabby gray suit and unkempt hair, of his
letter that she carried to Jimmy Conroy, of his quixotic proposal of
the night before. Of the proposal, most of all--it was so eminently
characteristic of Peter, from the conception of the plan to its
execution. Harmony's thought of Peter was very tender that morning
as she stood in the arched gateway out of reach of the wind from the
Schneeberg. The tenderness and the bright color brought by the wind made
her very beautiful. Little Marie, waiting across the Alserstrasse for
a bus, and stamping from one foot to the other to keep warm, recognized
and admired her. After all, the American women were chic, she decided,
although some of the doctors had wives of a dowdiness--Himmel! And she
could copy the Fraulein's hat for two Kronen and a bit of ribbon she
possessed.

The presentation of the bathrobe was a success. Six nurses and a Dozent
with a red beard stood about and watched Jimmy put into it, and the
Dozent, who had been engaged for five years and could not marry because
the hospital board forbade it, made a speech for Jimmy in awe-inspiring
German, ending up with a poem that was intended to be funny, but that
made the nurses cry. From which it will be seen that Jimmy was a great
favorite.

During the ceremony, for such it was, the Germans loving a ceremony,
Jimmy kept his eyes on the letter in Anna Gates's hand and waited. That
the letter had come was enough. He lay back in anticipatory joy, and
let himself be talked over, and bathrobed, and his hair parted Austrian
fashion and turned up over a finger, which is very Austrian indeed.
He liked Harmony. The girl caught his eyes on her more than once. He
interrupted the speech once to ask her just what part of the robe she
had made, and whether she had made the tassel. When she admitted the
tassel, his admiration became mixed with respect.

It was a bright day, for a marvel. Sunlight came through the barred
window behind Jimmy's bed, and brought into dazzling radiance the pink
bathrobe, and Harmony's eyes, and fat Nurse Elisabet's white apron. It
lay on the bedspread in great squares, outlined by the shadows of the
window bars. Now and then the sentry, pacing outside, would advance as
far as Jimmy's window, and a warlike silhouette of military cap and
the upper end of a carbine would appear on the coverlet. These events,
however, were rare, the sentry preferring the shelter of the gateway and
the odor of boiling onions from the lodge just inside.

The Dozent retired to his room for the second breakfast; the nurses went
about the business of the ward; Dr. Anna Gates drew a hairpin from her
hair and made a great show of opening the many times opened envelope.

“The letter at last!” she said. “Shall I read it or will you?”

“You read it. It takes me so long. I'll read it all day, after you are
gone. I always do.”

Anna Gates read the letter. She read aloud poor Peter's first halting
lines, when he was struggling against sleep and cold. They were mainly
an apology for the delay. Then forgetting discomfort in the joy of
creation, he became more comfortable. The account of the near-accident
was wonderfully graphic; the description of the chamois was fervid, if
not accurate. But consternation came with the end.

The letter apparently finished, there was yet another sheet. The doctor
read on.

“For Heaven's sake,” said Peter's frantic postscript, “find out how much
a medium-sized chamois--”

Dr. Gates stopped “--ought to weigh,” was the rest of it, “and fix it
right in the letter. The kid's too smart to be fooled and I never saw a
chamois outside of a drug store. They have horns, haven't they?”

“That's funny!” said Jimmy Conway.

“That was one of my papers slipped in by mistake,” remarked Dr. Gates,
with dignity, and flashing a wild appeal for help to Harmony.

“How did one of your papers get in when it was sealed?”

“I think,” observed Harmony, leaning forward, “that little boys must
not ask too many questions, especially when Christmas is only six weeks
off.”

“I know! He wants to send me the horns the way he sent me the boar's
tusks.”

For Peter, having in one letter unwisely recorded the slaughter of a
boar, had been obliged to ransack Vienna for a pair of tusks. The tusks
had not been so difficult. But horns!

Jimmy was contented with his solution and asked no more questions. The
morning's excitement had tired him, and he lay back. Dr. Gates went to
hold a whispered consultation with the nurse, and came back, looking
grave.

The boy was asleep, holding the letter in his thin hands.

The visit to the hospital was a good thing for Harmony--to find some one
worse off than she was, to satisfy that eternal desire of women to do
something, however small, for some one else. Her own troubles looked
very small to her that day as she left the hospital and stepped out into
the bright sunshine.

She passed the impassive sentry, then turned and went back to him.

“Do you wish to do a very kind thing?” she asked in German.

Now the conversation of an Austrian sentry consists of yea, yea, and
nay, nay, and not always that. But Harmony was lovely and the sun was
moderating the wind. The sentry looked round; no one was near.

“What do you wish?”

“Inside that third window is a small boy and he is very ill. I do not
think--perhaps he will never be well again. Could you not, now and then,
pass the window? It pleases him.”

“Pass the window! But why?”

“In America we see few of our soldiers. He likes to see you and the
gun.”

“Ah, the gun!” He smiled and nodded in comprehension, then, as an
officer appeared in the door of a coffee-house across the street, he
stiffened into immobility and stared past Harmony into space. But the
girl knew he would do as she had desired.

That day brought good luck to Harmony. The wife of one of the professors
at the hospital desired English conversation at two Kronen an hour.

Peter brought the news home at noon, and that afternoon Harmony was
engaged. It was little enough, but it was something. It did much more
than offer her two Kronen an hour; it gave her back her self-confidence,
although the immediate result was rather tragic.

The Frau Professor Bergmeister, infatuated with English and with
Harmony, engaged her, and took her first two Kronen worth that
afternoon. It was the day for a music-lesson. Harmony arrived five
minutes late, panting, hat awry, and so full of the Frau Professor
Bergmeister that she could think of nothing else.

Obedient to orders she had placed the envelope containing her fifty
Kronen before the secretary as she went in. The master was out of humor.
Should he, the teacher of the great Koert, be kept waiting for a chit
of a girl--only, of course, he said “das Kindchen” or some other German
equivalent for chit--and then have her come into the sacred presence
breathless, and salute him between gasps as the Frau Professor
Bergmeister?

Being excited and now confused by her error, and being also rather
tremulous with three flights of stairs at top speed, Harmony dropped
her bow. In point of heinousness this classes with dropping one's infant
child from an upper window, or sitting on the wrong side of a carriage
when with a lady.

The master, thus thrice outraged, rose slowly and glared at Harmony.
Then with a lordly gesture to her to follow he stalked to the outer
room, and picking up the envelope with the fifty Kronen held it out to
her without a word.

Harmony's world came crashing about her ears. She stared stupidly at the
envelope in her hand, at the master's retreating back.

Two girl students waiting their turn, envelopes in hand, giggled
together. Harmony saw them and flushed scarlet. But the lady secretary
touched her arm.

“It does not matter, Fraulein. He does so sometimes. Always he is sorry.
You will come for your next lesson, not so? and all will be well. You
are his well-beloved pupil. To-night he will not eat for grief that he
has hurt you.”

The ring of sincerity in the shabby secretary's voice was unmistakable.
Her tense throat relaxed. She looked across at the two students who
had laughed. They were not laughing now. Something of fellowship and
understanding passed between them in the glance. After all, it was in
the day's work--would come to one of them next, perhaps. And they had
much in common--the struggle, their faith, the everlasting loneliness,
the little white envelopes, each with its fifty Kronen.

Vaguely comforted, but with the light gone out of her day of days,
Harmony went down the three long flights and out into the brightness of
the winter day.

On the Ring she almost ran into Peter. He was striding toward her,
giving a definite impression of being bound for some particular
destination and of being behind time. That this was not the case was
shown by the celerity with which, when he saw Harmony, he turned about
and walked with her.

“I had an hour or two,” he explained, “and I thought I'd walk. But
walking is a social habit, like drinking. I hate to walk alone. How
about the Frau Professor?”

“She has taken me on. I'm very happy. But, Dr. Byrne--”

“You called me Peter last night.”

“That was different. You had just proposed to me.”

“Oh, if that's all that's necessary--” He stopped in the center of the
busy Ring with every evident intention of proposing again.

“Please, Peter!”

“Aha! Victory! Well, what about the Frau Professor Bergmeister?”

“She asks so many questions about America; and I cannot answer them.”

“For instance?”

“Well, taxes now. She's very much interested in taxes.”

“Never owned anything taxable except a dog--and that wasn't a tax
anyhow; it was a license. Can't you switch her on to medicine or
surgery, where I'd be of some use?”

“She says to-morrow we'll talk of the tariff and customs duties.”

“Well, I've got something to say on that.” He pulled from his overcoat
pocket a largish bundle--Peter always bulged with packages--and held
it out for her to see. “Tell the Frau Professor Bergmeister with my
compliments,” he said, “that because some idiot at home sent me five
pounds of tobacco, hearing from afar my groans over the tobacco here,
I have passed from mere financial stress to destitution. The Austrian
customs have taken from me to-day the equivalent of ten dollars in duty.
I offered them the tobacco on bended knee, but they scorned it.”

“Really, Peter?”

“Really.”

Under this lightness Harmony sensed the real anxiety. Ten dollars was
fifty Kronen, and fifty Kronen was a great deal of money. She reached
over and patted his arm.

“You'll make it up in some way. Can't you cut off some little
extravagance?”

“I might cut down on my tailor bills.” He looked down at himself
whimsically. “Or on ties. I'm positively reckless about ties!”

They walked on in silence. A detachment of soldiery, busy with that
eternal military activity that seems to get nowhere, passed on a
dog-trot. Peter looked at them critically.

“Bosnians,” he observed. “Raw, half-fed troops from Bosnia, nine out
of ten of them tubercular. It's a rotten game, this military play of
Europe. How's Jimmy?”

“We left him very happy with your letter.”

Peter flushed. “I expect it was pretty poor stuff,” he apologized. “I've
never seen the Alps except from a train window, and as for a chamois--”

“He says his father will surely send him the horns.”

Peter groaned.

“Of course!” he said. “Why, in Heaven's name, didn't I make it an eagle?
One can always buy a feather or two. But horns? He really liked the
letter?”

“He adored it. He went to sleep almost at once with it in his hands.”

Peter glowed. The small irritation of the custom-house forgotten, he
talked of Jimmy; of what had been done and might still be done, if only
there were money; and from Jimmy he talked boy. He had had a boys' club
at home during his short experience in general practice. Boys were his
hobby.

“Scum of the earth, most of them,” he said, his plain face glowing.
“Dirty little beggars off the street. At first they stole my tobacco;
and one of them pawned a medical book or two! Then they got to playing
the game right. By Jove, Harmony, I wish you could have seen them!
Used to line 'em up and make 'em spell, and the two best spellers were
allowed to fight it out with gloves--my own method, and it worked.
Spell! They'd spell their heads off to get a chance at the gloves. Gee,
how I hated to give them up!”

This was a new Peter, a boyish individual Harmony had never met before.
For the first time it struck her that Peter was young. He had always
seemed rather old, solid and dependable, the fault of his elder brother
attitude to her, no doubt. She was suddenly rather shy, a bit aloof.
Peter felt the change and thought she was bored. He talked of other
things.

A surprise was waiting for them in the cold lower hallway of the Pension
Schwarz. A trunk was there, locked and roped, and on the trunk, in
ulster and hat, sat Dr. Gates. Olga, looking rather frightened, was
coming down with a traveling-bag. She put down the bag and scuttled up
the staircase like a scared rabbit. The little doctor was grim. She eyed
Peter and Harmony with an impersonal hostility, referable to her humor.

“I've been waiting for you two,” she flung at them. “I've had a terrific
row upstairs and I'm going. That woman's a devil!”

It had been a bad day for Harmony, and this new development, after
everything else, assumed the proportions of a crisis. She had clung,
at first out of sheer loneliness and recently out of affection, to the
sharp little doctor with her mannish affectations, her soft and womanly
heart.

“Sit down, child.” Anna Gates moved over on the trunk. “You are fagged
out. Peter, will you stop looking murderous and listen to me? How much
did it cost the three of us to live in this abode of virtue?”

It was simple addition. The total was rather appalling.

“I thought so. Now this is my plan. It may not be conventional, but it
will be respectable enough to satisfy anybody. And it will be cheaper,
I'm sure of that: We are all going out to the hunting-lodge of Maria
Theresa, and Harmony shall keep house for us!”



CHAPTER IX

It was the middle of November when Anna Gates, sitting on her trunk in
the cold entrance hall on the Hirschengasse, flung the conversational
bomb that left empty three rooms in the Pension Schwarz.

Mid-December found Harmony back and fully established in the lodge of
Maria Theresa on the Street of Seven Stars--back, but with a difference.
True, the gate still swung back and forward on rusty hinges, obedient to
every whim of the December gales; but the casement windows in the salon
no longer creaked or admitted drafts, thanks to Peter and a roll of
rubber weather-casing. The grand piano, which had been Scatchy's rented
extravagance, had gone never to return, and in its corner stood a
battered but still usable upright. Under the great chandelier sat a
table with an oil lamp, and evening and morning the white-tiled stove
gleamed warm with fire. On the table by the lamp were the combined
medical books of Peter and Anna Gates, and an ash-tray which also they
used in common.

Shabby still, of course, bare, almost denuded, the salon of Maria
Theresa. But at night, with the lamp lighted and the little door of the
stove open, and perhaps, when the dishes from supper had been washed,
with Harmony playing softly, it took resolution on Peter's part to
put on his overcoat and face a lecture on the resection of a rib or a
discussion of the function of the pituitary body.

The new arrangement had proved itself in more ways than one not only
greater in comfort, but in economy. Food was amazingly cheap. Coal,
which had cost ninety Hellers a bucket at the Pension Schwarz, they
bought in quantity and could afford to use lavishly. Oil for the lamp
was a trifle. They dined on venison now and then, when the shop across
boasted a deer from the mountains. They had other game occasionally,
when Peter, carrying home a mysterious package, would make them guess
what it might contain. Always on such occasions Harmony guessed rabbits.
She knew how to cook rabbits, and some of the other game worried her.

For Harmony was the cook. It had taken many arguments and much coaxing
to make Peter see it that way. In vain Harmony argued the extravagance
of Rosa, now married to the soldier from Salzburg with one lung, or the
tendency of the delicatessen seller to weigh short if one did not watch
him. Peter was firm.

It was Dr. Gates, after all, who found the solution.

“Don't be too obstinate, Peter,” she admonished him. “The child needs
occupation; she can't practice all day. You and I can keep up the
financial end well enough, reduced as it is. Let her keep house to her
heart's content. That can be her contribution to the general fund.”

And that eventually was the way it settled itself, not without demur
from Harmony, who feared her part was too small, and who irritated Anna
almost to a frenzy by cleaning the apartment from end to end to make
certain of her usefulness.

A curious little household surely, one that made the wife of the Portier
shake her head, and speak much beneath her breath with the wife of
the brushmaker about the Americans having queer ways and not as the
Austrians.

The short month had seen a change in all of them. Peter showed it least
of all, perhaps. Men feel physical discomfort less keenly than women,
and Peter had been only subconsciously wretched. He had gained a pound
or two in flesh, perhaps, and he was unmistakably tidier. Anna Gates was
growing round and rosy, and Harmony had trimmed her a hat. But the real
change was in Harmony herself.

The girl had become a woman. Who knows the curious psychology by which
such changes come--not in a month or a year; but in an hour, a breath.
One moment Harmony was a shy, tender young creature, all emotion,
quivering at a word, aloof at a glance, prone to occasional
introspection and mysterious daydreams; the next she was a young woman,
tender but not shyly so, incredibly poised, almost formidably dignified
on occasion, but with little girlish lapses into frolic and high
spirits.

The transition moment with Harmony came about in this wise: They had
been settled for three weeks. The odor of stewing cabbages at the
Pension Schwarz had retired into the oblivion of lost scents, to be
recalled, along with its accompanying memory of discomfort, with every
odor of stewing cabbages for years to come. At the hospital Jimmy had
had a bad week again. It had been an anxious time for all of them. In
vain the sentry had stopped outside the third window and smiled and
nodded through it; in vain--when the street was deserted and there
was none to notice--he went through a bit of the manual of arms on the
pavement outside, ending by setting his gun down with a martial and
ringing clang.

In vain had Peter exhausted himself in literary efforts, climbing
unheard-of peaks, taking walking-tours through such a Switzerland as
never was, shooting animals of various sorts, but all hornless, as he
carefully emphasized.

And now Jimmy was better again. He was propped up in bed, and with the
aid of Nurse Elisabet he had cut out a paper sentry and set it in the
barred window. The real sentry had been very much astonished; he had
almost fallen over backward. On recovering he went entirely through the
manual of arms, and was almost seen by an Oberst-lieutenant. It was all
most exciting.

Harmony had been to see Jimmy on the day in question. She had taken
him some gelatin, not without apprehension, it being her first essay in
jelly and Jimmy being frank with the candor of childhood. The jelly had
been a great success.

It was when she was about to go that Jimmy broached a matter very near
his heart.

“The horns haven't come, have they?” he asked wistfully.

“No, not yet.”

“Do you think he got my letter about them?”

“He answered it, didn't he?”

Jimmy drew a long breath. “It's very funny. He's mostly so quick. If I
had the horns, Sister Elisabet would tie them there at the foot of the
bed. And I could pretend I was hunting.”

Harmony had a great piece of luck that day. As she went home she saw
hanging in front of the wild-game shop next to the delicatessen store
a fresh deer, and this time it was a stag. Like the others it hung head
down, and as it swayed on its hook its great antlers tapped against the
shop door as if mutely begging admission.

She could not buy the antlers. In vain she pleaded, explained, implored.
Harmony enlisted the Portier, and took him across with her. The
wild-game seller was obdurate. He would sell the deer entire, or he
would mount head and antlers for his wife's cousin in Galicia as a
Christmas gift.

Harmony went back to the lodge and climbed the stairs. She was
profoundly depressed. Even the discovery that Peter had come home early
and was building a fire in the kitchen brought only a fleeting smile.
Anna was not yet home.

Peter built the fire. The winter dusk was falling and Harmony made a
movement to light the candles. Peter stopped her.

“Can't we have the firelight for a little while? You are always
beautiful, but--you are lovely in the firelight, Harmony.”

“That is because you like me. We always think our friends are
beautiful.”

“I am fond of Anna, but I have never thought her beautiful.”

The kitchen was small. Harmony, rolling up her sleeves by the table,
and Peter before the stove were very close together. The dusk was fast
fading into darkness; to this tiny room at the back of the old house few
street sounds penetrated. Round them, shutting them off together from
the world of shops with lighted windows, rumbling busses and hurrying
humanity, lay the old lodge with its dingy gardens, its whitewashed
halls, its dark and twisting staircases.

Peter had been very careful. He had cultivated a comradely manner with
the girl that had kept her entirely at her ease with him. But it had
been growing increasingly hard. He was only human after all. And he was
very comfortable. Love, healthy human love, thrives on physical ease.
Indigestion is a greater foe to it than poverty. Great love songs are
written, not by poets starving in hall bedrooms, with insistent hunger
gnawing and undermining all that is of the spirit, but by full-fed
gentlemen who sing out of an overflowing of content and wide fellowship,
and who write, no doubt, just after dinner. Love, being a hunger, does
not thrive on hunger.

Thus Peter. He had never found women essential, being occupied in the
struggle for other essentials. Women had had little part in his busy
life. Once or twice he had seen visions, dreamed dreams, to waken
himself savagely to the fact that not for many years could he afford the
luxury of tender eyes looking up into his, of soft arms about his neck.
So he had kept away from women with almost ferocious determination. And
now!

He drew a chair before the stove and sat down. Standing or sitting, he
was much too large for the kitchen. He sat in the chair, with his hands
hanging, fingers interlaced between his knees.

The firelight glowed over his strong, rather irregular features.
Harmony, knife poised over the evening's potatoes, looked at him.

“I think you are sad to-night, Peter.”

“Depressed a bit. That's all.”

“It isn't money again?”

It was generally money with any of the three, and only the week before
Peter had found an error in his bank balance which meant that he was a
hundred Kronen or so poorer than he had thought. This discovery had been
very upsetting.

“Not more than usual. Don't mind me. I'll probably end in a roaring bad
temper and smash something. My moody spells often break up that way!”

Harmony put down the paring-knife, and going over to where he sat rested
a hand on his shoulder. Peter drew away from it.

“I have hurt you in some way?”

“Of course not.”

“Could--could you talk about whatever it is? That helps sometimes.”

“You wouldn't understand.”

“You haven't quarreled with Anna?” Harmony asked, real concern in her
voice.

“No. Good Lord, Harmony, don't ask me what's wrong! I don't know
myself.”

He got up almost violently and set the little chair back against the
wall. Hurt and astonished, Harmony went back to the table. The kitchen
was entirely dark, save for the firelight, which gleamed on the bare
floor and the red legs of the table. She was fumbling with a match and
the candle when she realized that Peter was just behind her, very close.

“Dearest,” he said huskily. The next moment he had caught her to him,
was kissing her lips, her hair.

Harmony's heart beat wildly. There was no use struggling against him.
The gates of his self-control were down: all his loneliness, his starved
senses rushed forth in tardy assertion.

After a moment Peter kissed her eyelids very gently and let her go.
Harmony was trembling, but with shock and alarm only. The storm that had
torn him root and branch from his firm ground of self-restraint left
her only shaken. He was still very close to her; she could hear him
breathing. He did not attempt to speak. With every atom of strength that
was left in him he was fighting a mad desire to take her in his arms
again and keep her there.

That was the moment when Harmony became a woman.

She lighted the candle with the match she still held. Then she turned
and faced him.

“That sort of thing is not for you and me, Peter,” she said quietly.

“Why not?”

“There isn't any question about it.”

He was still reckless, even argumentative; the crying need of her still
obsessed him. “Why not? Why should I not take you in my arms? If
there is a moment of happiness to be had in this grind of work and
loneliness--”

“It has not made me happy.”

Perhaps nothing else she could have said would have been so effectual.
Love demands reciprocation; he could read no passion in her voice. He
knew then that he had left her unstirred. He dropped his outstretched
arms.

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do it.”

“I would rather not talk about it, please.”

The banging of a door far off told them that Anna Gates had arrived and
was taking off her galoshes in the entry. Peter drew a long breath, and,
after his habit, shook himself.

“Very well, we'll not talk of it. But, for Heaven's sake, Harmony, don't
avoid me. I'm not a cad. I'll let you alone.”

There was only time for a glance of understanding between them, of
promise from Peter, of acceptance from the girl. When Anna Gates entered
the kitchen she found Harmony peeling potatoes and Peter filling up an
already overfed stove.

That night, during that darkest hour before the dawn when the thrifty
city fathers of the old town had shut off the street lights because two
hours later the sun would rise and furnish light that cost the taxpayers
nothing, the Portier's wife awakened.

The room was very silent, too silent. On those rare occasions when the
Portier's wife awakened in the night and heard the twin clocks of the
Votivkirche strike three, and listened, perhaps, while the delicatessen
seller ambled home from the Schubert Society, singing beerily as he
ambled, she was wont to hear from the bed beside hers the rhythmic
respiration that told her how safe from Schubert Societies and such like
evils was her lord. There was no sound at all.

The Portier's wife raised herself on her elbow and reached over. Owing
to the width of the table that stood between the beds and to a sweeping
that day which had left the beds far apart she met nothing but empty
air. Words had small effect on the Portier, who slept fathoms deep in
unconsciousness. Also she did not wish to get up--the floor was cold
and a wind blowing. Could she not hear it and the creaking of the deer
across the street, as it swung on its hook?

The wife of the Portier was a person of resource. She took the iron
candlestick from the table and flung it into the darkness at the
Portier's pillow. No startled yell followed.

Suspicion thus confirmed, the Portier's wife forgot the cold floor and
the wind, and barefoot felt her way into the hall.

Suspicion was doubly confirmed. The chain was off the door; it even
stood open an inch or two.

Armed with a second candlestick she stationed herself inside the door
and waited. The stone floor was icy, but the fury of a woman scorned
kept her warm. The Votivkirche struck one, two, three quarters of an
hour. The candlestick in her hand changed from iron to ice, from ice
to red-hot fire. Still the Portier had not come back and the door chain
swung in the wind.

At four o'clock she retired to the bedroom again. Indignation had
changed to fear, coupled with sneezing. Surely even the Schubert
Society--What was that?

From the Portier's bed was coming a rhythmic respiration!

She roused him, standing over him with the iron candlestick, now
lighted, and gazing at him with eyes in which alarm struggled with
suspicion.

“Thou hast been out of thy bed!”

“But no!”

“An hour since the bed was empty.”

“Thou dreamest.”

“The chain is off the door.”

“Let it remain so and sleep. What have we to steal or the Americans
above? Sleep and keep peace.”

He yawned and was instantly asleep again. The Portier's wife crawled
into her bed and warmed her aching feet under the crimson feather
comfort. But her soul was shaken.

The Devil had been known to come at night and take innocent ones out to
do his evil. The innocent ones knew it not, but it might be told by the
soles of the feet, which were always soiled.

At dawn the Portier's wife cautiously uncovered the soles of her
sleeping lord's feet, and fell back gasping. They were quite black, as
of one who had tramped in garden mould.

Early the next morning Harmony, after a restless night, opened the door
from the salon of Maria Theresa into the hall and set out a pitcher for
the milk.

On the floor, just outside, lay the antlers from the deer across the
street. Tied to them was a bit of paper, and on it was written the one
word, “Still!”



CHAPTER X

In looking back after a catastrophe it is easy to trace the steps by
which the inevitable advanced. Destiny marches, not by great leaps but
with a thousand small and painful steps, and here and there it leaves
its mark, a footprint on a naked soul. We trace a life by its scars, as
a tree by its rings.

Anna Gates was not the best possible companion for Harmony, and this
with every allowance for her real kindliness, her genuine affection for
the girl. Life had destroyed her illusions, and it was of illusions
that Harmony's veil had been woven. To Anna Gates, worn with a thousand
sleepless nights, a thousand thankless days, withered before her time
with the struggling routine of medical practice, sapped with endless
calls for sympathy and aid, existence ceased to be spiritual and became
physiological.

Life and birth and death had lost their mysteries. The veil was rent.

To fit this existence of hers she had built herself a curious creed,
a philosophy of individualism, from behind which she flung strange
bombshells of theories, shafts of distorted moralities, personal
liberties, irresponsibilities, a supreme scorn for modern law and the
prophets. Nature, she claimed, was her law and her prophet.

In her hard-working, virginal life her theories had wrought no mischief.
Temptation had been lacking to exploit them, and even in the event of
the opportunity it was doubtful whether she would have had the strength
of her convictions. Men love theories, but seldom have the courage of
them, and Anna Gates was largely masculine. Women, being literal, are
apt to absorb dangerous doctrine and put it to the test. When it is
false doctrine they discover it too late.

Harmony was now a woman.

Anna would have cut off her hand sooner than have brought the girl to
harm; but she loved to generalize. It amused her to see Harmony's eyes
widen with horror at one of her radical beliefs. Nothing pleased
her more than to pit her individualism against the girl's rigid and
conventional morality, and down her by some apparently unanswerable
argument.

On the day after the incident in the kitchen such an argument took
place--hardly an argument, for Harmony knew nothing of mental fencing.
Anna had taken a heavy cold, and remained at home. Harmony had been
practicing, and at the end she played a little winter song by some
modern composer. It breathed all the purity of a white winter's day; it
was as chaste as ice and as cold; and yet throughout was the thought of
green things hiding beneath the snow and the hope of spring.

Harmony, having finished, voiced some such feeling. She was rather
ashamed of her thought.

“It seems that way to me,” she finished apologetically. “It sounds
rather silly. I always think I can tell the sort of person who composes
certain things.”

“And this gentleman who writes of winter?”

“I think he is very reserved. And that he has never loved any one.”

“Indeed!”

“When there is any love in music, any heart, one always feels it,
exactly as in books--the difference between a love story and--and--”

“--a dictionary!”

“You always laugh,” Harmony complained

“That's better than weeping. When I think of the rotten way things go in
this world I want to weep always.”

“I don't find it a bad world. Of course there are bad people, but there
are good ones.”

“Where? Peter and you and I, I suppose.”

“There are plenty of good men.”

“What do you call a good man?”

Harmony hesitated, then went on bravely:--

“Honorable men.”

Anna smiled. “My dear child,” she said, “you substitute the code of a
gentleman for the Mosaic Law. Of course your good man is a monogamist?”

Harmony nodded, puzzled eyes on Anna.

“Then there are no 'good' people in the polygamous countries, I suppose!
When there were twelve women to every man, a man took a dozen wives.
To-day in our part of the globe there is one woman--and a fifth
over--for every man. Each man gets one woman, and for every five couples
there is a derelict like myself, mateless.”

Anna's amazing frankness about herself often confused Harmony. Her
resentment at her single condition, because it left her childless,
brought forth theories that shocked and alarmed the girl. In the
atmosphere in which Harmony had been reared single women were always
presumed to be thus by choice and to regard with certain tolerance those
weaker sisters who had married. Anna, on the contrary, was frankly
a derelict, frankly regretted her maiden condition and railed with
bitterness against her enforced childlessness. The near approach of
Christmas had for years found her morose and resentful. There are, here
and there, such women, essentially mothers but not necessarily wives,
their sole passion that of maternity.

Anna, argumentative and reckless, talked on. She tore away, in her
resentment, every theory of existence the girl had ever known, and
offered her instead an incredible liberty in the name of the freedom of
the individual. Harmony found all her foundations of living shaken, and
though refusing to accept Anna's theories, found her faith in her own
weakened. She sat back, pale and silent, listening, while Anna built up
out of her discontent a new heaven and a new earth, with liberty written
high in its firmament.

When her reckless mood had passed Anna was regretful enough at the
girl's stricken face.

“I'm a fool!” she said contritely. “If Peter had been here he'd have
throttled me. I deserve it. I'm a theorist, pure and simple, and
theorists are the anarchists of society. There's only one comfort about
us--we never live up to our convictions. Now forget all this rot I've
been talking.”

Peter brought up the mail that afternoon, a Christmas card or two for
Anna, depressingly early, and a letter from the Big Soprano for Harmony
from New York. The Big Soprano was very glad to be back and spent two
pages over her chances for concert work.

“... I could have done as well had I stayed at home. If I had had the
money they wanted, to go to Geneva and sing 'Brunnhilde,' it would have
helped a lot. I could have said I'd sung in opera in Europe and at least
have had a hearing at the Met. But I didn't, and I'm back at the church
again and glad to get my old salary. If it's at all possible, stay until
the master has presented you in a concert. He's quite right, you haven't
a chance unless he does. And now I'll quit grumbling.

“Scatchy met her Henry at the dock and looked quite lovely, flushed with
excitement and having been up since dawn curling her hair. He was rather
a disappointment--small and blond, with light blue eyes, and almost
dapper. But oh, my dear, I wouldn't care how pale a man's eyes were if
he looked at me the way Henry looked at her.

“They asked me to luncheon with them, but I knew they wanted to be alone
together, and so I ate a bite or two, all I could swallow for the lump
in my throat, by myself. I was homesick enough in old Wien, but I am
just as homesick now that I am here, for we are really homesick only for
people, not places. And no one really cared whether I came back or not.”

Peter had been miserable all day, not with regret for the day before,
but with fear. What if Harmony should decide that the situation was
unpleasant and decide to leave? What if a reckless impulse, recklessly
carried out, were to break up an arrangement that had made a green oasis
of happiness and content for all of them in the desert of their common
despair?

If he had only let her go and apologized! But no, he had had to argue,
to justify himself, to make an idiot of himself generally. He almost
groaned aloud as he opened the gate end crossed the wintry garden.

He need not have feared. Harmony had taken him entirely at his word.
“I am not a beast. I'll let you alone,” he had said. She had had a bad
night, as nights go. She had gone through the painful introspection
which, in a thoroughly good girl, always follows such an outburst as
Peter's. Had she said or done anything to make him think--Surely she had
not! Had she been wrong about Peter after all? Surely not again.

While the Portier's wife, waked, as may happen, by an unaccustomed
silence, was standing guard in the hall below, iron candlestick in
hand, Harmony, having read the Litany through in the not particularly
religious hope of getting to sleep, was dreaming placidly. It was Peter
who tossed and turned almost all night. Truly there had been little
sleep that night in the old hunting-lodge of Maria Theresa.

Peter, still not quite at ease, that evening kept out of the kitchen
while supper was preparing. Anna, radical theories forgotten and wearing
a knitted shawl against drafts, was making a salad, and Harmony, all
anxiety and flushed with heat, was broiling a steak.

Steak was an extravagance, to be cooked with clear hot coals and prayer.

“Peter,” she called, “you may set the table. And try to lay the cloth
straight.”

Peter, exiled in the salon, came joyously. Obviously the wretched
business of yesterday was forgiven. He came to the door, pipe in mouth.

“Suppose I refuse?” he questioned. “You--you haven't been very friendly
with me to-day, Harry.”

“I?”

“Don't quarrel, you children,” cried Anna, beating eggs vigorously.
“Harmony is always friendly, too friendly. The Portier loves her.”

“I'm sure I said good-evening to you.”

“You usually say, 'Good-evening, Peter.'”

“And I did not?”

“You did not.”

“Then--Good-evening, Peter.”

“Thank you.”

His steady eyes met hers. In them there was a renewal of his yesterday's
promise, abasement, regret. Harmony met him with forgiveness and
restoration.

“Sometimes,” said Peter humbly, “when I am in very great favor, you say,
'Good-evening, Peter, dear.'”

“Good-evening, Peter, dear,” said Harmony.



CHAPTER XI

The affairs of young Stewart and Marie Jedlicka were not moving
smoothly. Having rented their apartment to the Boyers, and through
Marie's frugality and the extra month's wages at Christmas, which was
Marie's annual perquisite, being temporarily in funds the sky seemed
clear enough, and Walter Stewart started on his holiday with a
comfortable sense of financial security.

Mrs. Boyer, shown over the flat by Stewart during Marie's temporary
exile in the apartment across the hall, was captivated by the comfort of
the little suite and by its order. Her housewifely mind, restless with
long inactivity in a pension, seized on the bright pans of Marie's
kitchen and the promise of the brick-and-sheetiron stove. She
disapproved of Stewart, having heard strange stories of him, but there
was nothing bacchanal or suspicious about this orderly establishment.
Mrs. Boyer was a placid, motherly looking woman, torn from her church
and her card club, her grown children, her household gods of thirty
years' accumulation, that “Frank” might catch up with his profession.

She had explained it rather tremulously at home.

“Father wants to go,” she said. “You children are big enough now to be
left. He's always wanted to do it, but we couldn't go while you were
little.”

“But, mother!” expostulated the oldest girl. “When you are so afraid of
the ocean! And a year!”

“What is to be will be,” she had replied. “If I'm going to be drowned
I'll be drowned, whether it's in the sea or in a bathtub. And I'll not
let father go alone.”

Fatalism being their mother's last argument and always final, the
children gave up. They let her go. More, they prepared for her so
elaborate a wardrobe that the poor soul had had no excuse to purchase
anything abroad. She had gone through Paris looking straight ahead lest
her eyes lead her into the temptation of the shops. In Vienna she wore
her home-town outfit with determination, vaguely conscious that the
women about her had more style, were different. She priced unsuitable
garments wistfully, and went home to her trunks full of best materials
that would never wear out. The children, knowing her, had bought the
best.

To this couple, then, Stewart had rented his apartment. It is hard to
say by what psychology he found their respectability so satisfactory. It
was as though his own status gained by it. He had much the same feeling
about the order and decency with which Marie managed the apartment, as
if irregularity were thus regularized.

Marie had met him once for a walk along the Graben. She had worn an
experimental touch of rouge under a veil, and fine lines were drawn
under her blue eyes, darkening them. She had looked very pretty, rather
frightened. Stewart had sent her home and had sulked for an entire
evening.

So curious a thing is the mind masculine, such an order of disorder, so
conventional its defiance of convention. Stewart breaking the law and
trying to keep the letter!

On the day they left for Semmering Marie was up at dawn. There was
much to do. The house must be left clean and shining. There must be no
feminine gewgaws to reveal to the Frau Doktor that it was not a purely
masculine establishment. At the last moment, so late that it sent her
heart into her mouth, she happened on the box of rouge hidden from
Stewart's watchful eyes. She gave it to the milk girl.

Finally she folded her meager wardrobe and placed it in the Herr
Doktor's American trunk: a marvel, that trunk, so firm, so heavy,
bound with iron. And with her own clothing she packed Stewart's, the
dress-suit he had worn once to the Embassy, a hat that folded, strange
American shoes, and books--always books. The Herr Doktor would study
at Semmering. When all was in readiness and Stewart was taking a final
survey, Marie ran downstairs and summoned a cab. It did not occur to her
to ask him to do it. Marie's small life was one of service, and besides
there was an element in their relationship that no one but Marie
suspected, and that she hid even from herself. She was very much in
love with this indifferent American, this captious temporary god of her
domestic altar. Such a contingency had never occurred to Stewart; but
Peter, smoking gravely in the little apartment, had more than once
caught a look in Marie's eyes as she turned them on the other man, and
had surmised it. It made him uncomfortable.

When the train was well under way, however, and he found no disturbing
element among the three others in the compartment, Stewart relaxed.
Semmering was a favorite resort with the American colony, but not until
later in the winter. In December there were rains in the mountains, and
low-lying clouds that invested some of the chalets in constant fog.
It was not until the middle of January that the little mountain train
became crowded with tourists, knickerbockered men with knapsacks, and
jaunty feathers in their soft hats, boys carrying ski, women with Alpine
cloaks and iron-pointed sticks.

Marie was childishly happy. It was the first real vacation of her life,
and more than that she was going to Semmering, in the very shadow of the
Raxalpe, the beloved mountain of the Viennese.

Marie had seen the Rax all her life, as it towered thirty miles or
so away above the plain. On peaceful Sundays, having climbed the cog
railroad, she had seen its white head turn rosy in the setting sun, and
once when a German tourist from Munich had handed her his fieldglass she
had even made out some of the crosses that showed where travelers had
met their deaths. Now she would be very close. If the weather were good,
she might even say a prayer in the chapel on its crest for the souls of
those who had died. It was of a marvel, truly; so far may one go when
one has money and leisure.

The small single-trucked railway carriages bumped and rattled up the
mountain sides, always rising, always winding. There were moments when
the track held to the cliffs only by gigantic fingers of steel, while
far below were peaceful valleys and pink-and-blue houses and churches
with gilded spires. There were vistas of snow-peak and avalanche shed,
and always there were tunnels. Marie, so wise in some things, was a
child in others; she slid close to Stewart in the darkness and touched
him for comfort.

“It is so dark,” she apologized, “and it frightens me, the mountain
heart. In your America, have you so great mountains?”

Stewart patted her hand, a patronizing touch that sent her blood racing.

“Much larger,” he said magnificently. “I haven't seen a hill in Europe
I'd exchange for the Rockies. And when we cross the mountains there we
use railway coaches. These toy railroads are a joke. At home we'd use
'em as street-cars.”

“Really! I should like to see America.”

“So should I.”

The conversation was taking a dangerous trend. Mention of America was
apt to put the Herr Doktor in a bad humor or to depress him, which was
even worse. Marie, her hand still on his arm and not repulsed, became
silent.

At a small way station the three Germans in the compartment left the
train. Stewart, lowering a window, bought from a boy on the platform
beer and sausages and a bag of pretzels. As the train resumed its
clanking progress they ate luncheon, drinking the beer from the bottles
and slicing the sausage with a penknife. It was a joyous trip, a
red-letter day in the girl's rather sordid if not uneventful life. The
Herr Doktor was pleased with her. He liked her hat, and when she
flushed with pleasure demanded proof that she was not rouged. Proof was
forthcoming. She rubbed her cheeks vigorously with a handkerchief and
produced in triumph its unreddened purity.

“Thou suspicious one!” she pouted. “I must take off the skin to assure
thee! When the Herr Doktor says no rouge, I use none.”

“You're a good child.” He stooped over and kissed one scarlet cheek and
then being very comfortable and the beer having made him drowsy, he put
his head in her lap and slept.

When he awakened they were still higher. The snow-peak towered above
and the valleys were dizzying! Semmering was getting near. They were
frequently in darkness; and between the tunnels were long lines of
granite avalanche sheds. The little passage of the car was full of
tourists looking down.

“We are very close, I am sure,” an American girl was saying just outside
the doorway. “See, isn't that the Kurhaus? There, it is lost again.”

The tourists in the passage were Americans and the girl who had spoken
was young and attractive. Stewart noticed them for the first time and
moved to a more decorous distance from Marie.

Marie Jedlicka took her cue and lapsed into silence, but her thoughts
were busy. Perhaps this girl was going to Semmering also and the Herr
Doktor would meet her. But that was foolish! There were other resorts
besides Semmering, and in the little villa to which they went there
would be no Americans. It was childish to worry about a girl whose back
and profile only she had seen. Also profiles were deceptive; there was
the matter of the ears. Marie's ears were small and set close to her
head. If the American Fraulein's ears stuck out or her face were only
short and wide! But no. The American Fraulein turned and glanced once
swiftly into the compartment. She was quite lovely.

Stewart thought so, too. He got up with a great show of stretching and
yawning and lounged into the passage. He did not speak to the girl;
Marie noted that with some comfort. But shortly after she saw him
conversing easily with a male member of the party. Her heart sank again.
Life was moving very fast for Marie Jedlicka that afternoon on the
train.

Stewart was duly presented to the party of Americans and offered his own
cards, bowing from the waist and clicking his heels together, a German
custom he had picked up. The girl was impressed; Marie saw that. When
they drew into the station at Semmering Stewart helped the American
party off first and then came back for Marie. Less keen eyes than
the little Austrian's would have seen his nervous anxiety to escape
attention, once they were out of the train and moving toward the gate
of the station. He stopped to light a cigarette, he put down the
hand-luggage and picked it up again, as though it weighed heavily,
whereas it was both small and light. He loitered through the gate and
paused to exchange a word with the gateman.

The result was, of course, that the Americans were in a sleigh and well
up the mountainside before Stewart and Marie were seated side by side in
a straw-lined sledge, their luggage about them, a robe over their knees,
and a noisy driver high above them on the driving-seat. Stewart spoke to
her then, the first time for half an hour.

Marie found some comfort. The villas at Semmering were scattered wide
over the mountain breast, set in dense clumps of evergreens, hidden
from the roads and from each other by trees and shrubbery separated by
valleys. One might live in one part of Semmering for a month and never
suspect the existence of other parts, or wander over steep roads and
paths for days and never pass twice over the same one. The Herr Doktor
might not see the American girl again--and if he did! Did he not see
American girls wherever he went?

The sleigh climbed on. It seemed they would never stop climbing. Below
in the valley twilight already reigned, a twilight of blue shadows, of
cows with bells wandering home over frosty fields, of houses with dark
faces that opened an eye of lamplight as one looked.

Across the valley and far above--Marie pointed without words. Her small
heart was very full. Greater than she had ever dreamed it, steeper, more
beautiful, more deadly, and crowned with its sunset hue of rose was the
Rax. Even Stewart lost his look of irritation as he gazed with her. He
reached over and covered both her hands with his large one under the
robe.

The sleigh climbed steadily. Marie Jedlicka, in a sort of ecstasy,
leaned back and watched the mountain; its crown faded from rose to gold,
from gold to purple with a thread of black. There was a shadow on the
side that looked like a cross. Marie stopped the sleigh at a wayside
shrine, and getting out knelt to say a prayer for the travelers who had
died on the Rax. They had taken a room at a small villa where board was
cheap, and where the guests were usually Germans of the thriftier
sort from Bavaria. Both the season and the modest character of the
establishment promised them quiet and seclusion.

To Marie the house seemed the epitome of elegance, even luxury. It clung
to a steep hillside. Their room, on the third floor, looked out from the
back of the building over the valley, which fell away almost sheer from
beneath their windows. A tiny balcony outside, with access to it by a
door from the bedroom, looked far down on the tops of tall pines. It
made Marie dizzy.

She was cheerful again and busy. The American trunk was to be unpacked
and the Herr Doktor's things put away, his shoes in rows, as he liked
them, and his shaving materials laid out on the washstand. Then there
was a new dress to put on, that she might do him credit at supper.

Stewart's bad humor had returned. He complained of the room and the
draft under the balcony door; the light was wrong for shaving. But the
truth came out at last and found Marie not unprepared.

“The fact is,” he said, “I'm not going to eat with you to-night, dear.
I'm going to the hotel.”

“With the Americans?”

“Yes. I know a chap who went to college with the brother--with the young
man you saw.”

Marie glanced down at her gala toilet. Then she began slowly to take
off the dress, reaching behind her for a hook he had just fastened and
fighting back tears as she struggled with it.

“Now, remember, Marie, I will have no sulking.”

“I am not sulking.”

“Why should you change your clothes?”

“Because the dress was for you. If you are not here I do not wish to
wear it.”

Stewart went out in a bad humor, which left him before he had walked for
five minutes in the clear mountain air. At the hotel he found the party
waiting for him, the women in evening gowns. The girl, whose name was
Anita, was bewitching in pale green.

That was a memorable night for Walter Stewart, with his own kind once
more--a perfect dinner, brisk and clever conversation, enlivened by a
bit of sweet champagne, an hour or two on the terrace afterward with the
women in furs, and stars making a jeweled crown for the Rax.

He entirely forgot Marie until he returned to the villa and opening the
door of the room found her missing.

She had not gone far. At the sound of his steps she moved on the balcony
and came in slowly. She was pale and pinched with cold, but she was wise
with the wisdom of her kind. She smiled.

“Didst thou have a fine evening?”

“Wonderful!”

“I am sorry if I was unpleasant. I was tired, now I am rested.”

“Good, little Marie!”



CHAPTER XII

The card in the American Doctors' Club brought a response finally.
It was just in time. Harmony's funds were low, and the Frau Professor
Bergmeister had gone to St. Moritz for the winter. She regretted the
English lessons, but there were always English at St. Moritz and it cost
nothing to talk with them. Before she left she made Harmony a present.
“For Christmas,” she explained. It was a glass pin-tray, decorated
beneath with labels from the Herr Professor's cigars and in the center a
picture of the Emperor.

The response came in this wise. Harmony struggling home against an east
wind and holding the pin-tray and her violin case, opened the old
garden gate by the simple expedient of leaning against it. It flew back
violently, almost overthrowing a stout woman in process of egress down
the walk. The stout woman was Mrs. Boyer, clad as usual in the best
broadcloth and wearing her old sable cape, made over according to her
oldest daughter's ideas into a staid stole and muff. The muff lay on the
path now and Mrs. Boyer was gasping for breath.

“I'm so sorry!” Harmony exclaimed. “It was stupid of me; but the
wind--Is this your muff?”

Mrs. Boyer took the muff coldly. From its depths she proceeded to
extract a handkerchief and with the handkerchief she brushed down the
broadcloth. Harmony stood apologetically by. It is explanatory of Mrs.
Boyer's face, attitude, and costume that the girl addressed her in
English.

“I backed in,” she explained. “So few people come, and no Americans.”

Mrs. Boyer, having finished her brushing and responded to this humble
apology in her own tongue, condescended to look at Harmony.

“It really is no matter,” she said, still coolly but with indications of
thawing. “I am only glad it did not strike my nose. I dare say it would
have, but I was looking up to see if it were going to snow.” Here she
saw the violin case and became almost affable.

“There was a card in the Doctors' Club, and I called--” She hesitated.

“I am Miss Wells. The card is mine.”

“One of the women here has a small boy who wishes to take violin lessons
and I offered to come. The mother is very busy.”

“I see. Will you come in? I can make you a cup of tea and we can talk
about it.”

Mrs. Boyer was very willing, although she had doubts about the tea.
She had had no good tea since she had left England, and was inclined to
suspect all of it.

They went in together, Harmony chatting gayly as she ran ahead,
explaining this bit of the old staircase, that walled-up door, here
an ancient bit of furniture not considered worthy of salvage, there
a closed and locked room, home of ghosts and legends. To Harmony this
elderly woman, climbing slowly behind her, was a bit of home. There
had been many such in her life; women no longer young, friends of her
mother's who were friends of hers; women to whom she had been wont to
pay the courtesy of a potted hyacinth at Easter or a wreath at Christmas
or a bit of custard during an illness. She had missed them all cruelly,
as she had missed many things--her mother, her church, her small
gayeties. She had thought at first that Frau Professor Bergmeister
might allay her longing for these comfortable, middle-aged, placid-eyed
friends of hers. But the Frau Professor Bergmeister had proved to be a
frivolous and garrulous old woman, who substituted ease for comfort,
and who burned a candle on the name-day of her first husband while her
second was safely out of the house.

So it was with something of excitement that Harmony led the way up the
stairs and into the salon of Maria Theresa.

Peter was there. He was sitting with his back to the door, busily
engaged in polishing the horns of the deer. Whatever scruples Harmony
had had about the horns, Peter had none whatever, save to get them
safely out of the place and to the hospital. So Peter was polishing the
horns. Harmony had not expected to find him home, and paused, rather
startled.

“Oh, I didn't know you were home.”

Peter spoke without turning.

“Try to bear up under it,” he said. “I'm home and hungry, sweetheart!”

“Peter, please!”

Peter turned at that and rose instantly. It was rather dark in the salon
and he did not immediately recognize Mrs. Boyer. But that keen-eyed
lady had known him before he turned, had taken in the domesticity of the
scene and Peter's part in it, and had drawn the swift conclusion of the
pure of heart.

“I'll come again,” she said hurriedly. “I--I must really get home. Dr.
Boyer will be there, and wondering--”

“Mrs. Boyer!” Peter knew her.

“Oh, Dr. Byrne, isn't it? How unexpected to find you here!”

“I live here.”

“So I surmised.”

“Three of us,” said Peter. “You know Anna Gates, don't you?”

“I'm afraid not. Really I--”

Peter was determined to explain. His very eagerness was almost damning.

“She and Miss Wells are keeping house here and have kindly taken me in
as a boarder. Please sit down.”

Harmony found nothing strange in the situation and was frankly puzzled
at Peter. The fact that there was anything unusual in two single women
and one unmarried man, unrelated and comparative strangers, setting up
housekeeping together had never occurred to her. Many a single woman
whom she knew at home took a gentleman into the house as a roomer, and
thereafter referred to him as “he” and spent hours airing the curtains
of smoke and even, as “he” became a member of the family, in sewing on
his buttons. There was nothing indecorous about such an arrangement;
merely a concession to economic pressure.

She made tea, taking off her jacket and gloves to do it, but bustling
about cheerfully, with her hat rather awry and her cheeks flushed with
excitement and hope. Just now, when the Frau Professor had gone, the
prospect of a music pupil meant everything. An American child, too!
Fond as Harmony was of children, the sedate and dignified youngsters who
walked the parks daily with a governess, or sat with folded hands and
fixed eyes through hours of heavy music at the opera, rather daunted
her. They were never alone, those Austrian children--always under
surveillance, always restrained, always prepared to kiss the hand of
whatever relative might be near and to take themselves of to anywhere so
it were somewhere else.

“I am so glad you are going to talk to me about an American child,” said
Harmony, bringing in the tea.

But Mrs. Boyer was not so sure she was going to talk about the American
child. She was not sure of anything, except that the household looked
most irregular, and that Peter Byrne was trying to cover a difficult
situation with much conversation. He was almost glib, was Peter. The tea
was good; that was one thing.

She sat back with her muff on her knee, having refused the concession
of putting it on a chair as savoring too much of acceptance if not
approval, and sipped her tea out of a spoon as becomes a tea-lover.
Peter, who loathed tea, lounged about the room, clearly in the way, but
fearful to leave Harmony alone with her. She was quite likely, at the
first opportunity, to read her a lesson on the conventions, if nothing
worse; to upset the delicate balance of the little household he was
guarding. So he stayed, praying for Anna to come and bear out his story,
while Harmony toyed with her spoon and waited for some mention of the
lessons. None came. Mrs. Boyer, having finished her tea, rose and put
down her cup.

“That was very refreshing,” she said. “Where shall I find the
street-car? I walked out, but it is late.”

“I'll take you to the car.” Peter picked up his old hat.

“Thank you. I am always lost in this wretched town. I give the
conductors double tips to put me down where I want to go; but how can
they when it is the wrong car?” She bowed to Harmony without shaking
hands. “Thank you for the tea. It was really good. Where do you get it?”

“There is a tea-shop a door or two from the Grand Hotel.”

“I must remember that. Thank you again. Good-bye.”

Not a word about the lessons or the American child!

“You said something about my card in the Doctors' Club--”

Something wistful in the girl's eyes caught and held Mrs. Boyer.

After all she was the mother of daughters. She held out her hand and her
voice was not so hard.

“That will have to wait until another time. I have made a social visit
and we'll not spoil it with business.”

“But--”

“I really think the boy's mother must attend to that herself. But I
shall tell her where to find you, and”--here she glanced at Peter--“all
about it.”

“Thank you,” said Harmony gratefully.

Peter had no finesse. He escorted Mrs. Boyer across the yard and through
the gate with hardly a word. With the gate closed behind them he turned
and faced her:--

“You are going away with a wrong impression, Mrs. Boyer.”

Mrs. Boyer had been thinking hard as she crossed the yard. The result
was a resolution to give Peter a piece of her mind. She drew her ample
proportions into a dignity that was almost majesty.

“Yes?”

“I--I can understand why you think as you do. It is quite without
foundation.”

“I am glad of that.” There was no conviction in her voice.

“Of course,” went on Peter, humbling himself for Harmony's sake, “I
suppose it has been rather unconventional, but Dr. Gates is not a young
woman by any means, and she takes very good care of Miss Wells. There
were reasons why this seemed the best thing to do. Miss Wells was alone
and--”

“There is a Dr. Gates?”

“Of course. If you will come back and wait she'll be along very soon.”

Mrs. Boyer was convinced and defrauded in one breath; convinced that
there might be a Dr. Gates, but equally convinced that the situation was
anomalous and certainly suspicious; defrauded in that she had lost the
anticipated pleasure of giving Peter a piece of her mind. She walked
along beside him without speaking until they reached the street-car
line. Then she turned.

“You called her--you spoke to her very affectionately, young man,” she
accused him.

Peter smiled. The car was close. Some imp of recklessness, some
perversion of humor seized him.

“My dear Mrs. Boyer,” he said, “that was in jest purely. Besides, I did
not know that you were there!”

Mrs. Boyer was a literal person without humor. It was outraged American
womanhood incarnate that got into the street-car and settled its
broadcloth of the best quality indignantly on the cane seat. It was
outraged American womanhood that flung open the door of Marie Jedlicka's
flat, and stalking into Marie Jedlicka's sitting room confronted her
husband as he read a month-old newspaper from home.

“Did you ever hear of a woman doctor named Gates?” she demanded.

Boyer was not unaccustomed to such verbal attacks. He had learned to
meet domestic broadsides with a shield of impenetrable good humor, or at
the most with a return fire of mild sarcasm.

“I never hear of a woman doctor if it can be avoided.”

“Dr. Gates--Anna Gates?”

“There are a number here. I meet them in the hospital, but I don't know
their names.”

“Where does Peter Byrne live?”

“In a pension, I believe, my dear. Are we going to have anything to eat
or do we sup of Peter Byrne?”

Mrs. Boyer made no immediate reply. She repaired to the bedroom of Marie
Jedlicka, and placed her hat, coat and furs on one of the beds with the
crocheted coverlets. It is a curious thing about rooms. There was no
change in the bedroom apparent to the eye, save that for Marie's tiny
slippers at the foot of the wardrobe there were Mrs. Boyer's substantial
house shoes. But in some indefinable way the room had changed. About it
hung an atmosphere of solid respectability, of impeccable purity that
soothed Mrs. Boyer's ruffled virtue into peace. Is it any wonder that
there is a theory to the effect that things take on the essential
qualities of people who use them, and that we are haunted by things, not
people? That when grandfather's wraith is seen in his old armchair it
is the chair that produces it, while grandfather himself serenely haunts
the shades of some vast wilderness of departed spirits?

Not that Mrs. Boyer troubled herself about such things. She was
exceedingly orthodox, even in the matter of a hereafter, where the most
orthodox are apt to stretch a point, finding no attraction whatever in
the thing they are asked to believe. Mrs. Boyer, who would have regarded
it as heterodox to substitute any other instrument for the harp of her
expectation, tied on her gingham apron before Marie Jedlicka's mirror,
and thought of Harmony and of the girls at home.

She told her husband over the supper-table and found him less shocked
than she had expected.

“It's not your affair or mine,” he said. “It's Byrne's business.”

“Think of the girl!”

“Even if you are right it's rather late, isn't it?”

“You could tell him what you think of him.”

Dr. Boyer sighed over a cup of very excellent coffee. Much living with a
representative male had never taught his wife the reserves among members
of the sex masculine.

“I might, but I don't intend to,” he said. “And if you listen to me
you'll keep the thing to yourself.”

“I'll take precious good care that the girl gets no pupils,” snapped
Mrs. Boyer. And she did with great thoroughness.

We trace a life by its scars. Destiny, marching on by a thousand painful
steps, had left its usual mark, a footprint on a naked soul. The soul
was Harmony's; the foot--was it not encased at that moment in Mrs.
Boyer's comfortable house shoes?

Anna was very late that night. Peter, having put Mrs. Boyer on her car,
went back quickly. He had come out without his overcoat, and with the
sunset a bitter wind had risen, but he was too indignant to be cold. He
ran up the staircase, hearing on all sides the creaking and banging with
which the old house resented a gale, and burst into the salon of Maria
Theresa.

Harmony was sitting sidewise in a chair by the tea-table with her face
hidden against its worn red velvet. She did not look up when he entered.
Peter went over and put a hand on her shoulder. She quivered under it
and he took it away.

“Crying?”

“A little,” very smothered. “Just dis-disappointment. Don't mind me,
Peter.”

“You mean about the pupil?”

Harmony sat up and looked at him. She still wore her hat, now more than
ever askew, and some of the dye from the velvet had stained her cheek.
She looked rather hectic, very lovely.

“Why did she change so when she saw you?”

Peter hesitated. Afterward he thought of a dozen things he might have
said, safe things. Not one came to him.

“She--she is an evil-thinking old woman, Harry,” he said gravely.

“She did not approve of the way we are living here, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“But Anna?”

“She did not believe there was an Anna. Not that it matters,” he added
hastily. “I'll make Anna go to her and explain. It's her infernal
jumping to a conclusion that makes me crazy.”

“She will talk, Peter. I am frightened.”

“I'll take Anna to-night and we'll go to Boyer's. I'll make that woman
get down on her knees to you. I'll--”

“You'll make bad very much worse,” said Harmony dejectedly. “When a
thing has to be explained it does no good to explain it.”

The salon was growing dark. Peter was very close to her again. As in the
dusky kitchen only a few days before, he felt the compelling influence
of her nearness. He wanted, as he had never wanted anything in his life
before, to take her in his arms, to hold her close and bid defiance to
evil tongues. He was afraid of himself. To gain a moment he put a chair
between them and stood, strong hands gripping its back, looking down at
her.

“There is one thing we could do.”

“What, Peter?”

“We could marry. If you cared for me even a little it--it might not be
so bad for you.”

“But I am not in love with you. I care for you, of course, but--not that
way, Peter. And I do not wish to marry.”

“Not even if I wish it very much?”

“No.”

“If you are thinking of my future--”

“I'm thinking for both of us. And although just now you think you care
a little for me, you do not care enough, Peter. You are lonely and I
am the only person you see much, so you think you want to marry me. You
don't really. You want to help me.”

Few motives are unmixed. Poor Peter, thus accused, could not deny his
altruism.

And in the face of his poverty and the little he could offer, compared
with what she must lose, he did not urge what was the compelling motive
after all, his need of her.

“It would be a rotten match for you,” he agreed. “I only thought,
perhaps--You are right, of course; you ought not to marry.”

“And what about you?”

“I ought not, of course.”

Harmony rose, smiling a little.

“Then that's settled. And for goodness' sake, Peter, stop proposing to
me every time things go wrong.” Her voice changed, grew grave and older,
much older than Peter's. “We must not marry, either of us, Peter. Anna
is right. There might be an excuse if we were very much in love: but we
are not. And loneliness is not a reason.”

“I am very lonely,” said Peter wistfully.



CHAPTER XIII

Peter took the polished horns to the hospital the next morning and
approached Jimmy with his hands behind him and an atmosphere of mystery
that enshrouded him like a cloak. Jimmy, having had a good night and
having taken the morning's medicine without argument, had been allowed
up in a roller chair. It struck Peter with a pang that the boy looked
more frail day by day, more transparent.

“I have brought you,” said Peter gravely, “the cod-liver oil.”

“I've had it!”

“Then guess.”

“Dad's letter?”

“You've just had one. Don't be a piggy.”

“Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

“Vegetable,” said Peter shamelessly.

“Soft or hard!”

“Soft.”

This was plainly a disappointment. A pair of horns might be vegetable;
they could hardly be soft.

“A kitten?”

“A kitten is not vegetable, James.”

“I know. A bowl of gelatin from Harry!” For by this time Harmony was his
very good friend, admitted to the Jimmy club, which consisted of Nurse
Elisabet, the Dozent with the red beard, Anna and Peter, and of course
the sentry, who did not know that he belonged.

“Gelatin, to be sure,” replied Peter, and produced the horns.

It was a joyous moment in the long low ward, with its triple row of
beds, its barred windows, its clean, uneven old floor. As if to add a
touch of completeness the sentry outside, peering in, saw the wheeled
chair with its occupant, and celebrated this advance along the road to
recovery by placing on the window-ledge a wooden replica of himself,
bayonet and all, carved from a bit of cigar box.

“Everybody is very nice to me,” said Jimmy contentedly. “When my father
comes back I shall tell him. He is very fond of people who are kind to
me. There was a woman on the ship--What is bulging your pocket, Peter?”

“My handkerchief.”

“That is not where you mostly carry your handkerchief.”

Peter was injured. He scowled ferociously at being doubted and stood
up before the wheeled chair to be searched. The ward watched joyously,
while from pocket after pocket of Peter's old gray suit came Jimmy's
salvage--two nuts, a packet of figs, a postcard that represented a stout
colonel of hussars on his back on a frozen lake, with a private soldier
waiting to go through the various salutations due his rank before
assisting him. A gala day, indeed, if one could forget the grave in the
little mountain town with only a name on the cross at its head, and if
one did not notice that the boy was thinner than ever, that his hands
soon tired of playing and lay in his lap, that Nurse Elisabet, who was
much inured to death and lived her days with tragedy, caught him to her
almost fiercely as she lifted him back from the chair into the smooth
white bed.

He fell asleep with Peter's arm under his head and the horns of the deer
beside him. On the bedside stand stood the wooden sentry, keeping
guard. As Peter drew his arm away he became aware of the Nurse Elisabet
beckoning to him from a door at the end of the ward Peter left the
sentinel on guard and tiptoed down the room. Just outside, round a
corner, was the Dozent's laboratory, and beyond the tiny closet where
he slept, where on a stand was the photograph of the lady he would marry
when he had become a professor and required no one's consent.

The Dozent was waiting for Peter. In the amiable conspiracy which
kept the boy happy he was arch-plotter. His familiarity with Austrian
intrigue had made him invaluable. He it was who had originated the idea
of making Jimmy responsible for the order of the ward, so that a burly
Trager quarreling over his daily tobacco with the nurse in charge, or
brawling over his soup with another patient, was likely to be hailed in
a thin soprano, and to stand, grinning sheepishly, while Jimmy, in
mixed English and German, restored the decorum of the ward. They were a
quarrelsome lot, the convalescents. Jimmy was so busy some days settling
disputes and awarding decisions that he slept almost all night. This was
as it should be.

The Dozent waited for Peter. His red beard twitched and his white coat,
stained from the laboratory table, looked quite villainous. He held out
a letter.

“This has come for the child,” he said in quite good English. He was
obliged to speak English. Day by day he taught in the clinics Americans
who scorned his native tongue, and who brought him the money with
which some day he would marry. He liked the English language; he liked
Americans because they learned quickly. He held out an envelope with a
black border and Peter took it.

“From Paris!” he said. “Who in the world--I suppose I'd better open it.”

“So I thought. It appears a letter of--how you say it? Ah, yes,
condolence.”

Peter opened the letter and read it. Then without a word he gave it open
to the Dozent. There was silence in the laboratory while the Dozent
read it, silence except for his canary, which was chipping at a lump of
sugar. Peter's face was very sober.

“So. A mother! You knew nothing of a mother?”

“Something from the papers I found. She left when the boy was a
baby--went on the stage, I think. He has no recollection of her, which
is a good thing. She seems to have been a bad lot.”

“She comes to take him away. That is impossible.”

“Of course it is impossible,” said Peter savagely. “She's not going
to see the child if I can help it. She left because--she's the boy's
mother, but that's the best you can say of her. This letter--Well,
you've read it.”

“She is as a stranger to him?”

“Absolutely. She will come in mourning--look at that black border--and
tell him his father is dead, and kill him. I know the type.”

The canary chipped at his sugar; the red beard of the Dozent twitched,
as does the beard of one who plots. Peter re-read the gushing letter in
his hand and thought fiercely.

“She is on her way here,” said the Dozent. “That is bad. Paris to Wien
is two days and a night. She may hourly arrive.”

“We might send him away--to another hospital.”

The Dozent shrugged his shoulders.

“Had I a home--” he said, and glanced through the door to the portrait
on the stand. “It would be possible to hide the boy, at least for a
time. In the interval the mother might be watched, and if she proved a
fit person the boy could be given to her. It is, of course, an affair of
police.”

This gave Peter pause. He had no money for fines, no time for
imprisonment, and he shared the common horror of the great jail. He read
the letter again, and tried to read into the lines Jimmy's mother,
and failed. He glanced into the ward. Still Jimmy slept. A burly
convalescent, with a saber cut from temple to ear and the general
appearance of an assassin, had stopped beside the bed and was drawing up
the blanket round the small shoulders.

“I can give orders that the woman be not admitted to-day,” said the
Dozent. “That gives us a few hours. She will go to the police, and
to-morrow she will be admitted. In the mean time--”

“In the mean time,” Peter replied, “I'll try to think of something. If I
thought she could be warned and would leave him here--”

“She will not. She will buy him garments and she will travel with him
through the Riviera and to Nice. She says Nice. She wishes to be there
for carnival, and the boy will die.”

Peter took the letter and went home. He rode, that he might read it
again in the bus. But no scrap of comfort could he get from it. It spoke
of the dead father coldly, and the father had been the boy's idol. No
good woman could have been so heartless. It offered the boy a seat in
one of the least reputable of the Paris theaters to hear his mother
sing. And in the envelope, overlooked before, Peter found a cutting
from a French newspaper, a picture of the music-hall type that made him
groan. It was indorsed “Mamma.”

Harmony had had a busy morning. First she had put her house in order,
working deftly, her pretty hair pinned up in a towel--all in order but
Peter's room. That was to have a special cleaning later. Next, still
with her hair tied up, she had spent two hours with her violin, standing
very close to the stove to save fuel and keep her fingers warm. She
played well that morning: even her own critical ears were satisfied,
and the Portier, repairing a window lock in an empty room below, was
entranced. He sat on the window sill in the biting cold and listened.
Many music students had lived in the apartment with the great salon;
there had been much music of one sort and another, but none like this.

“She tears my heart from my bosom,” muttered the Portier, sighing, and
almost swallowed a screw that he held in his teeth.

After the practicing Harmony cleaned Peter's room. She felt very tender
toward Peter that day. The hurt left by Mrs. Boyer's visit had died
away, but there remained a clear vision of Peter standing behind the
chair and offering himself humbly in marriage, so that a bad situation
might be made better. And as with a man tenderness expresses itself in
the giving of gifts, so with a woman it means giving of service. Harmony
cleaned Peter's room.

It was really rather tidy. Peter's few belongings did not spread to any
extent and years of bachelorhood had taught him the rudiments of order.
Harmony took the covers from washstand and dressing table and washed and
ironed them. She cleaned Peter's worn brushes and brought a pincushion
of her own for his one extra scarfpin. Finally she brought her own
steamer rug and folded it across the foot of the bed. There was no stove
in the room; it had been Harmony's room once, and she knew to the full
how cold it could be.

Having made all comfortable for the outer man she prepared for the
inner. She was in the kitchen, still with her hair tied up, when Anna
came home.

Anna was preoccupied. Instead of her cheery greeting she came somberly
back to the kitchen, a letter in her hand. History was making fast that
day.

“Hello, Harry,” she said. “I'm going to take a bite and hurry off. Don't
bother, I'll attend to myself.” She stuffed the letter in her belt and
got a plate from a shelf. “How pretty you look with your head tied up!
If stupid Peter saw you now he would fall in love with you.”

“Then I shall take it off. Peter must be saved!”

Anna sat down at the tiny table and drank her tea. She felt rather
better after the tea. Harmony, having taken the towel off, was busy over
the brick stove. There was nothing said for a moment. Then:--

“I am out of patience with Peter,” said Anna.

“Why?”

“Because he hasn't fallen in love with you. Where are his eyes?”

“Please, Anna!”

“It's better as it is, no doubt, for both of you. But it's superhuman of
Peter. I wonder--”

“Yes?”

“I think I'll not tell you what I wonder.”

And Harmony, rather afraid of Anna's frank speech, did not insist.

As she drank her tea and made a pretense at eating, Anna's thoughts
wandered from Peter to Harmony to the letter in her belt and back again
to Peter and Harmony. For some time she had been suspicious of Peter.
From her dozen years of advantage in age and experience she looked down
on Peter's thirty years of youth, and thought she knew something that
Peter himself did not suspect. Peter being unintrospective, Anna did his
heart-searching for him. She believed he was madly in love with Harmony
and did not himself suspect it. As she watched the girl over her teacup,
revealing herself in a thousand unposed gestures of youth and grace, a
thousand lovelinesses, something of the responsibility she and Peter had
assumed came over her. She sighed and felt for her letter.

“I've had rather bad news,” she said at last.

“From home?”

“Yes. My father--did you know I have a father?”

“You hadn't spoken of him.”

“I never do. As a father he hasn't amounted to much. But he's very ill,
and--I 've a conscience.”

Harmony turned a startled face to her.

“You are not going back to America?”

“Oh, no, not now, anyhow. If I become hag ridden with remorse and do go
I'll find some one to take my place. Don't worry.”

The lunch was a silent meal. Anna was hurrying off as Peter came in, and
there was no time to discuss Peter's new complication with her. Harmony
and Peter ate together, Harmony rather silent. Anna's unfortunate
comment about Peter had made her constrained. After the meal Peter, pipe
in mouth, carried the dishes to the kitchen, and there it was that he
gave her the letter. What Peter's slower mind had been a perceptible
time in grasping Harmony comprehended at once--and not only the
situation, but its solution.

“Don't let her have him!” she said, putting down the letter. “Bring him
here. Oh, Peter, how good we must be to him!”

And that after all was how the thing was settled. So simple, so obvious
was it that these three expatriates, these waifs and estrays, banded
together against a common poverty, a common loneliness, should share
without question whatever was theirs to divide. Peter and Anna gave
cheerfully of their substance, Harmony of her labor, that a small boy
should be saved a tragic knowledge until he was well enough to bear it,
or until, if God so willed, he might learn it himself without pain.

The friendly sentry on duty again that night proved singularly blind.
Thus it happened that, although the night was clear when the twin dials
of the Votivkirche showed nine o'clock, he did not notice a cab that
halted across the street from the hospital.

Still more strange that, although Peter passed within a dozen feet of
him, carrying a wriggling and excited figure wrapped in a blanket and
insisting on uncovering its feet, the sentry was able the next day to
say that he had observed such a person carrying a bundle, but that
it was a short stocky person, quite lame, and that the bundle was
undoubtedly clothing going to the laundry.

Perhaps--it is just possible--the sentry had his suspicions. It is
undeniable that as Jimmy in the cab on Peter's knee, with Peter's arm
close about him, looked back at the hospital, the sentry was going
through the manual of arms very solemnly under the stars and facing
toward the carriage.



CHAPTER XIV

For two days at Semmering it rained. The Raxalpe and the Schneeberg
sulked behind walls of mist. From the little balcony of the Pension
Waldheim one looked out over a sea of cloud, pierced here and there
by islands that were crags or by the tops of sunken masts that were
evergreen trees. The roads were masses of slippery mud, up which the
horses steamed and sweated. The gray cloud fog hung over everything; the
barking of a dog loomed out of it near at hand where no dog was to be
seen. Children cried and wild birds squawked; one saw them not.

During the second night a landslide occurred on the side of the mountain
with a rumble like the noise of fifty trains. In the morning, the rain
clouds lifting for a moment, Marie saw the narrow yellow line of the
slip.

Everything was saturated with moisture. It did no good to close the
heavy wooden shutters at night: in the morning the air of the room was
sticky and clothing was moist to the touch. Stewart, confined to the
house, grew irritable.

Marie watched him anxiously. She knew quite well by what slender
tenure she held her man. They had nothing in common, neither speech nor
thought. And the little Marie's love for Stewart, grown to be a part of
her, was largely maternal. She held him by mothering him, by keeping him
comfortable, not by a great reciprocal passion that might in time have
brought him to her in chains.

And now he was uncomfortable. He chafed against the confinement; he
resented the food, the weather. Even Marie's content at her unusual
leisure irked him. He accused her of purring like a cat by the fire,
and stamped out more than once, only to be driven in by the curious
thunderstorms of early Alpine winter.

On the night of the second day the weather changed. Marie, awakening
early, stepped out on to the balcony and closed the door carefully
behind her. A new world lay beneath her, a marvel of glittering
branches, of white plain far below; the snowy mane of the Raxalpe was
become a garment. And from behind the villa came the cheerful sound of
sleigh-bells, of horses' feet on crisp snow, of runners sliding easily
along frozen roads. Even the barking of the dog in the next yard had
ceased rumbling and become sharp staccato.

The balcony extended round the corner of the house. Marie, eagerly
discovering her new world, peered about, and seeing no one near ventured
so far. The road was in view, and a small girl on ski was struggling to
prevent a collision between two plump feet. Even as Marie saw her the
inevitable happened and she went headlong into a drift. A governess who
had been kneeling before a shrine by the road hastily crossed herself
and ran to the rescue.

It was a marvelous morning, a day of days. The governess and the child
went on out of vision. Marie stood still, looking at the shrine. A drift
had piled about its foot, where the governess had placed a bunch of
Alpine flowers. Down on her knees on the balcony went the little
Marie, regardless of the snow, and prayed to the shrine of the Virgin
below--for what? For forgiveness? For a better life? Not at all. She
prayed that the heels of the American girl would keep her in out of the
snow.

The prayer of the wicked availeth nothing; even the godly at times must
suffer disappointment. And when one prays of heels, who can know of
the yearning back of the praying? Marie, rising and dusting her chilled
knees, saw the party of Americans on the road, clad in stout boots
and swinging along gayly. Marie shrugged her shoulders resignedly. She
should have gone to the shrine itself; a balcony was not a holy
place. But one thing she determined--the Americans went toward the
Sonnwendstein. She would advise against the Sonnwendstein for that day.

Marie's day of days had begun wrong after all. For Stewart rose with the
Sonnwendstein in his mind, and no suggestion of Marie's that in another
day a path would be broken had any effect on him. He was eager to be
off, committed the extravagance of ordering an egg apiece for breakfast,
and finally proclaimed that if Marie feared the climb he would go alone.

Marie made many delays: she dressed slowly, and must run back to see
if the balcony door was securely closed. At a little shop where they
stopped to buy mountain sticks she must purchase postcards and send them
at once. Stewart was fairly patient: air and exercise were having their
effect.

It was eleven o'clock when, having crossed the valley, they commenced to
mount the slope of the Sonnwendstein. The climb was easy; the road wound
back and forward on itself so that one ascended with hardly an effort.
Stewart gave Marie a hand here and there, and even paused to let her
sit on a boulder and rest. The snow was not heavy; he showed her the
footprints of a party that had gone ahead, and to amuse her tried
to count the number of people. When he found it was five he grew
thoughtful. There were five in Anita's party. Thanks to Marie's delays
they met the Americans coming down. The meeting was a short one: the
party went on down, gayly talking. Marie and Stewart climbed silently.
Marie's day was spoiled; Stewart had promised to dine at the hotel.

Even the view at the tourist house did not restore Marie's fallen
spirits. What were the Vienna plain and the Styrian Alps to her, with
this impatient and frowning man beside her consulting his watch and
computing the time until he might see the American again? What was
prayer, if this were its answer?

They descended rapidly, Stewart always in the lead and setting a pace
that Marie struggled in vain to meet. To her tentative and breathless
remarks he made brief answer, and only once in all that time did he
volunteer a remark. They had reached the Hotel Erzherzog in the valley.
The hotel was still closed, and Marie, panting, sat down on an edge of
the terrace.

“We have been very foolish,” he said.

“Why?”

“Being seen together like that.”

“But why? Could you not walk with any woman?”

“It's not that,” said Stewart hastily. “I suppose once does not matter.
But we can't be seen together all the time.”

Marie turned white. The time had gone by when an incident of the sort
could have been met with scorn or with threats; things had changed
for Marie Jedlicka since the day Peter had refused to introduce her to
Harmony. Then it had been vanity; now it was life itself.

“What you mean,” she said with pale lips, “is that we must not be seen
together at all. Must I--do you wish me to remain a prisoner while
you--” she choked.

“For Heaven's sake,” he broke out brutally, “don't make a scene. There
are men cutting ice over there. Of course you are not a prisoner. You
may go where you like.”

Marie rose and picked up her muff.

Marie's sordid little tragedy played itself out in Semmering. Stewart
neglected her almost completely; he took fewer and fewer meals at the
villa. In two weeks he spent one evening with the girl, and was so
irritable that she went to bed crying. The little mountain resort was
filling up; there were more and more Americans. Christmas was drawing
near and a dozen or so American doctors came up, bringing their families
for the holidays. It was difficult to enter a shop without encountering
some of them. To add to the difficulty, the party at the hotel, finding
it crowded there, decided to go into a pension and suggested moving to
the Waldheim.

Stewart himself was wretchedly uncomfortable. Marie's tragedy was his
predicament. He disliked himself very cordially, loathing himself and
his situation with the new-born humility of the lover. For Stewart was
in love for the first time in his life. Marie knew it. She had not lived
with him for months without knowing his every thought, every mood. She
grew bitter and hard those days, sitting alone by the green stove in
the Pension Waldheim, or leaning, elbows on the rail, looking from the
balcony over the valley far below. Bitter and hard, that is, during his
absences; he had but to enter the room and her rage died, to be
replaced with yearning and little, shy, tentative advances that he only
tolerated. Wild thoughts came to Marie, especially at night, when the
stars made a crown over the Rax, and in the hotel an orchestra played,
while people dined and laughed and loved.

She grew obstinate, too. When in his desperation Stewart suggested that
they go back to Vienna she openly scoffed.

“Why?” she demanded. “That you may come back here to her, leaving me
there?”

“My dear girl,” he flung back exasperated, “this affair was not a
permanent one. You knew that at the start.”

“You have taken me away from my work. I have two months' vacation. It is
but one month.”

“Go back and let me pay--”

“No!”

In pursuance of the plan to leave the hotel the American party came to
see the Waldheim, and catastrophe almost ensued. Luckily Marie was on
the balcony when the landlady flung open the door, and announced it as
Stewart's apartment. But Stewart had a bad five minutes and took it out,
manlike, on the girl.

Stewart had another reason for not wishing to leave Semmering. Anita
was beautiful, a bit of a coquette, too; as are most pretty women. And
Stewart was not alone in his devotion. A member of the party, a New
Yorker named Adam, was much in love with the girl and indifferent who
knew it. Stewart detested him.

In his despair Stewart wrote to Peter Byrne. It was characteristic of
Peter that, however indifferent people might be in prosperity, they
always turned to him in trouble. Stewart's letter concluded:--

“I have made out a poor case for myself; but I'm in a hole, as you can
see. I would like to chuck everything here and sail for home with these
people who go in January. But, confound it, Byrne, what am I to do with
Marie? And that brings me to what I 've been wanting to say all along,
and haven't had the courage to. Marie likes you and you rather liked
her, didn't you? You could talk her into reason if anybody could. Now
that you know how things are, can't you come up over Sunday? It's asking
a lot, and I know it; but things are pretty bad.”

Peter received the letter on the morning of the day before Christmas. He
read it several times and, recalling the look he had seen more than once
in Marie Jedlicka's eyes, he knew that things were very bad, indeed.

But Peter was a man of family in those days, and Christmas is a family
festival not to be lightly ignored. He wired to Stewart that he would
come up as soon as possible after Christmas. Then, because of the look
in Marie's eyes and because he feared for her a sad Christmas, full of
heartaches and God knows what loneliness, he bought her a most hideous
brooch, which he thought admirable in every way and highly ornamental
and which he could not afford at all. This he mailed, with a cheery
greeting, and feeling happier and much poorer made his way homeward.



CHAPTER XV

Christmas-Eve in the saloon of Maria Theresa! Christmas-Eve, with the
great chandelier recklessly ablaze and a pig's head with cranberry eyes
for supper! Christmas-Eve, with a two-foot tree gleaming with candles on
the stand, and beside the stand, in a huge chair, Jimmy!

It had been a busy day for Harmony. In the morning there had been
shopping and marketing, and such a temptation to be reckless, with the
shops full of ecstasies and the old flower women fairly overburdened.
There had been anxieties, too, such as the pig's head, which must be
done a certain way, and Jimmy, who must be left with the Portier's wife
as nurse while all of them went to the hospital. The house revolved
around Jimmy now, Jimmy, who seemed the better for the moving, and whose
mother as yet had failed to materialize.

In the afternoon Harmony played at the hospital. Peter took her as the
early twilight was falling in through the gate where the sentry kept
guard and so to the great courtyard. In this grim playground men
wandered about, smoking their daily allowance of tobacco and moving to
keep warm, offscourings of the barracks, derelicts of the slums, with
here and there an honest citizen lamenting a Christmas away from home.
The hospital was always pathetic to Harmony; on this Christmas-Eve she
found it harrowing. Its very size shocked her, that there should be so
much suffering, so much that was appalling, frightful, insupportable.
Peter felt her quiver under his hand. A hospital in festivity is very
affecting. It smiles through its tears. And in every assemblage there
are sharply defined lines of difference. There are those who are going
home soon, God willing; there are those who will go home some time after
long days and longer nights. And there are those who will never go home
and who know it. And because of this the ones who are never going home
are most festively clad, as if, by way of compensation, the nurses
mean to give them all future Christmasses in one. They receive an
extra orange, or a pair of gloves, perhaps,--and they are not the less
grateful because they understand. And when everything is over they lay
away in the bedside stand the gloves they will never wear, and divide
the extra orange with a less fortunate one who is almost recovered.
Their last Christmas is past.

“How beautiful the tree was!” they say. Or, “Did you hear how the
children sang? So little, to sing like that! It made me think--of
angels.”

Peter led Harmony across the courtyard, through many twisting corridors,
and up and down more twisting staircases to the room where she was to
play. There were many Christmas trees in the hospital that afternoon;
no one hall could have held the thousands of patients, the doctors, the
nurses. Sometimes a single ward had its own tree, its own entertainment.
Occasionally two or three joined forces, preempted a lecture-room, and
wheeled or hobbled or carried in their convalescents. In such case an
imposing audience was the result.

Into such a room Peter led Harmony. It was an amphitheater, the seats
rising in tiers, half circle above half circle, to the dusk of the
roof. In the pit stood the tree, candle-lighted. There was no other
illumination in the room. The semi-darkness, the blazing tree, the
rows of hopeful, hoping, hopeless, rising above, white faces over white
gowns, the soft rustle of expectancy, the silence when the Dozent with
the red beard stepped out and began to read an address--all caught
Harmony by the throat. Peter, keenly alive to everything she did, felt
rather than heard her soft sob.

Peter saw the hospital anew that dark afternoon, saw it through
Harmony's eyes. Layer after layer his professional callus fell away,
leaving him quick again. He had lived so long close to the heart of
humanity that he had reduced its throbbing to beats that might be
counted. Now, once more, Peter was back in the early days, when a heart
was not a pump, but a thing that ached or thrilled or struggled, that
loved or hated or yearned.

The orchestra, insisting on sadly sentimental music, was fast turning
festivity into gloom. It played Handel's “Largo”; it threw its whole
soul into the assurance that the world, after all, was only a poor
place, that Heaven was a better. It preached resignation with every deep
vibration of the cello. Harmony fidgeted.

“How terrible!” she whispered. “To turn their Christmas-Eve into
mourning! Stop them!”

“Stop a German orchestra?”

“They are crying, some of them. Oh, Peter!”

The music came to an end at last. Tears were dried. Followed
recitations, gifts, a speech of thanks from Nurse Elisabet for the
patients. Then--Harmony.

Harmony never remembered afterward what she had played. It was joyous,
she knew, for the whole atmosphere changed. Laughter came; even the
candles burned more cheerfully. When she had finished, a student in a
white coat asked her to play a German Volkspiel, and roared it out to
her accompaniment with much vigor and humor. The audience joined in, at
first timidly, then lustily.

Harmony stood alone by the tree, violin poised, smiling at the applause.
Her eyes, running along the dim amphitheater, sought Peter's, and
finding them dwelt there a moment. Then she began to play softly and as
softly the others sang.

“Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,”--they sang, with upturned eyes.

“Alles schlaeft, einsam wacht...”

Visions came to Peter that afternoon in the darkness, visions in
which his poverty was forgotten or mattered not at all. Visions of a
Christmas-Eve in a home that he had earned, of a tree, of a girl-woman,
of a still and holy night, of a child.

“Nur das traute, hoch heilige Paar Holder Knabe im lockigen Haar Schlaf'
in himmlischer Ruh', Schlaf' in himmlischer Ruh',” they sang.

There was real festivity at the old lodge of Maria Theresa that night.

Jimmy had taken his full place in the household. The best room, which
had been Anna's, had been given up to him. Here, carefully tended, with
a fire all day in the stove, Jimmy reigned from the bed. To him Harmony
brought her small puzzles and together they solved them.

“Shall it be a steak to-night?” thus Harmony humbly. “Or chops?”

“With tomato sauce?”

“If Peter allows, yes.”

Much thinking on Jimmy's part, and then:--

“Fish,” he would decide. “Fish with egg dressing.”

They would argue for a time, and compromise on fish.

The boy was better. Peter shook his head over any permanent improvement,
but Anna fiercely seized each crumb of hope. Many and bitter were the
battles she and Peter fought at night over his treatment, frightful the
litter of authorities Harmony put straight every morning.

The extra expense was not much, but it told. Peter's carefully
calculated expenditures felt the strain. He gave up a course in X-ray on
which he had set his heart and cut off his hour in the coffee-house as
a luxury. There was no hardship about the latter renunciation. Life for
Peter was spelling itself very much in terms of Harmony and Jimmy those
days. He resented anything that took him from them.

There were anxieties of a different sort also. Anna's father was
failing. He had written her a feeble, half-senile appeal to let bygones
be bygones and come back to see him before he died. Anna was Peter's
great prop. What would he do should she decide to go home? He had built
his house on the sand, indeed.

So far the threatened danger of a mother to Jimmy had not materialized.
Peter was puzzled, but satisfied. He still wrote letters of marvelous
adventure; Jimmy still watched for them, listened breathless, treasured
them under his pillow. But he spoke less of his father. The open page of
his childish mind was being written over with new impressions. “Dad” was
already a memory; Peter and Harmony and Anna were realities. Sometimes
he called Peter “Dad.” At those times Peter caught the boy to him in an
agony of tenderness.

And as the little apartment revolved round Jimmy, so was this
Christmas-Eve given up to him. All day he had stayed in bed for the
privilege of an extra hour propped up among pillows in the salon. All
day he had strung little red berries that looked like cranberries for
the tree, or fastened threads to the tiny cakes that were for trimming
only, and sternly forbidden to eat.

A marvelous day that for Jimmy. Late in the afternoon the Portier, with
a collar on, had mounted the stairs and sheepishly presented him with a
pair of white mice in a wooden cage. Jimmy was thrilled. The cage was
on his knees all evening, and one of the mice was clearly ill of a cake
with pink icing. The Portier's gift was a stealthy one, while his wife
was having coffee with her cousin, the brushmaker. But the spirit Of
Christmas does strange things. That very evening, while the Portier was
roistering in a beer hall preparatory to the midnight mass, came the
Portier's wife, puffing from the stairs, and brought a puzzle book that
only the initiated could open, and when one succeeded at last there was
a picture of the Christ-Child within.

Young McLean came to call that evening--came to call and remained to
worship. It was the first time since Mrs. Boyer that a visitor had
come. McLean, interested with everything and palpably not shocked, was
a comforting caller. He seemed to Harmony, who had had bad moments since
the day of Mrs. Boyer's visit, to put the hallmark of respectability on
the household, to restore it to something it had lost or had never had.

She was quite unconscious of McLean's admiration. She and Anna put Jimmy
to bed. The tree candles were burned out; Peter was extinguishing
the dying remnants when Harmony came back. McLean was at the piano,
thrumming softly. Peter, turning round suddenly, surprised an expression
on the younger man's face that startled him.

For that one night Harmony had laid aside her mourning, and wore white,
soft white, tucked in at the neck, short-sleeved, trailing. Peter had
never seen her in white before.

It was Peter's way to sit back and listen: his steady eyes were always
alert, good-humored, but he talked very little. That night he was
unusually silent. He sat in the shadow away from the lamp and watched
the two at the piano: McLean playing a bit of this or that, the girl
bending over a string of her violin. Anna came in and sat down near him.

“The boy is quite fascinated,” she whispered. “Watch his eyes!”

“He is a nice boy.” This from Peter, as if he argued with himself.

“As men go!” This was a challenge Peter was usually quick to accept.
That night he only smiled. “It would be a good thing for her: his people
are wealthy.”

Money, always money! Peter ground his teeth over his pipestem. Eminently
it would be a good thing for Harmony, this nice boy in his well-made
evening clothes, who spoke Harmony's own language of music, who was
almost speechless over her playing, and who looked up at her with eyes
in which admiration was not unmixed with adoration.

Peter was restless. As the music went on he tiptoed out of the room and
took to pacing up and down the little corridor. Each time as he passed
the door he tried not to glance in; each time he paused involuntarily.
Jealousy had her will of him that night, jealousy, when he had never
acknowledged even to himself how much the girl was to him.

Jimmy was restless. Usually Harmony's music put him to sleep; but that
night he lay awake, even after Peter had closed all the doors. Peter
came in and sat with him in the dark, going over now and then to cover
him, or to give him a drink, or to pick up the cage of mice which Jimmy
insisted on having beside him and which constantly slipped off on to the
floor. After a time Peter lighted the night-light, a bit of wick on a
cork floating in a saucer of lard oil, and set it on the bedside table.
Then round it he arranged Jimmy's treasures, the deer antlers, the cage
of mice, the box, the wooden sentry. The boy fell asleep. Peter sat in
the room, his dead pipe in his teeth, and thought of many things.

It was very late when young McLean left. The two had played until they
stopped for very weariness. Anna had yawned herself off to bed. From
Jimmy's room Peter could hear the soft hum of their voices.

“You have been awfully good to me,” McLean said as he finally rose to
go. “I--I want you to know that I'll never forget this evening, never.”

“It has been splendid, hasn't it? Since little Scatchy left there has
been no one for the piano. I have been lonely sometimes for some one to
talk music to.”

Lonely! Poor Peter!

“Then you will let me come back?”

“Will I, indeed! I--I'll be grateful.”

“How soon would be proper? I dare say to-morrow you'll be
busy--Christmas and all that.”

“Do you mean you would like to come to-morrow?”

“If old Peter wouldn't be fussed. He might think--”

“Peter always wants every one to be happy. So if you really care--”

“And I'll not bore you?”

“Rather not!”

“How--about what time?”

“In the afternoon would be pleasant, I think. And then Jimmy can listen.
He loves music.”

McLean, having found his fur-lined coat, got into it as slowly as
possible. Then he missed a glove, and it must be searched for in all
the dark corners of the salon until found in his pocket. Even then he
hesitated, lingered, loath to break up this little world of two.

“You play wonderfully,” he said.

“So do you.”

“If only something comes of it! It's curious, isn't it, when you think
of it? You and I meeting here in the center of Europe and both of us
working our heads off for something that may never pan out.”

There was something reminiscent about that to Harmony. It was not until
after young McLean had gone that she recalled. It was almost word for
word what Peter had said to her in the coffee-house the night they met.
She thought it very curious, the coincidence, and pondered it, being
ignorant of the fact that it is always a matter for wonder when the
man meets the woman, no matter where. Nothing is less curious, more
inevitable, more amazing. “You and I,” forsooth, said Peter!

“You and I,” cried young McLean!



CHAPTER XVI

Quite suddenly Peter's house, built on the sand, collapsed. The shock
came on Christmas-Day, after young McLean, now frankly infatuated, had
been driven home by Peter.

Peter did it after his own fashion. Harmony, with unflagging enthusiasm,
was looking tired. Suggestions to this effect rolled off McLean's back
like rain off a roof. Finally Peter gathered up the fur-lined coat, the
velours hat, gloves, and stick, and placed them on the piano in front of
the younger man.

“I'm sorry you must go,” said Peter calmly, “but, as you say, Miss Wells
is tired and there is supper to be eaten. Don't let me hurry you.”

The Portier was at the door as McLean, laughing and protesting, went
out. He brought a cablegram for Anna. Peter took it to her door and
waited uneasily while she read it.

It was an urgent summons home; the old father was very low. He was
calling for her, and a few days or week' would see the end. There were
things that must be looked after. The need of her was imperative.
With the death the old man's pension would cease and Anna was the
bread-winner.

Anna held the paper out to Peter and sat down. Her nervous strength
seemed to have deserted her. All at once she was a stricken, elderly
woman, with hope wiped out of her face and something nearer resentment
than grief in its place.

“It has come, Peter,” she said dully. “I always knew it couldn't last.
They've always hung about my neck, and now--”

“Do you think you must go? Isn't there some way? If things are so bad
you could hardly get there in time, and--you must think of yourself a
little, Anna.”

“I am not thinking of anything else. Peter, I'm an uncommonly selfish
woman, but I--”

Quite without warning she burst out crying, unlovely, audible weeping
that shook her narrow shoulders. Harmony heard the sound and joined
them. After a look at Anna she sat down beside her and put a white
arm over her shoulders. She did not try to speak. Anna's noisy grief
subsided as suddenly as it came. She patted Harmony's hand in mute
acknowledgment and dried her eyes.

“I'm not grieving, child,” she said; “I'm only realizing what a selfish
old maid I am. I'm crying because I'm a disappointment to myself. Harry,
I'm going back to America.”

And that, after hours of discussion, was where they ended. Anna must go
at once. Peter must keep the apartment, having Jimmy to look after and
to hide. What was a frightful dilemma to him and to Harmony Anna took
rather lightly.

“You'll find some one else to take my place,” she said. “If I had a day
I could find a dozen.”

“And in the interval?” Harmony asked, without looking at Peter.

“The interval! Tut! Peter is your brother, to all intents and purposes.
And if you are thinking of scandal-mongers, who will know?”

Having determined to go, no arguments moved Anna, nor could either of
the two think of anything to urge beyond a situation she refused to
see, or rather a situation she refused to acknowledge. She was not as
comfortable as she pretended. During all that long night, while snow
sifted down into the ugly yard and made it beautiful, while Jimmy slept
and the white mice played, while Harmony tossed and tried to sleep and
Peter sat in his cold room and smoked his pipe, Anna packed her untidy
belongings and added a name now and then to a list that was meant
for Peter, a list of possible substitutes for herself in the little
household.

She left early the next morning, a grim little person who bent over the
sleeping boy hungrily, and insisted on carrying her own bag down the
stairs. Harmony did not go to the station, but stayed at home, pale and
silent, hovering around against Jimmy's awakening and struggling against
a feeling of panic. Not that she feared Peter or herself. But she
was conventional; shielded girls are accustomed to lean for a certain
support on the proprieties, as bridgeplayers depend on rules.

Peter came back to breakfast, but ate little. Harmony did not even sit
down, but drank her cup of coffee standing, looking down at the snow
below. Jimmy still slept.

“Won't you sit down?” said Peter.

“I'm not hungry, thank you.”

“You can sit down without eating.”

Peter was nervous. To cover his uneasiness he was distinctly gruff. He
pulled a chair out for her and she sat down. Now that they were face
to face the tension was lessened. Peter laid Anna's list on the table
between them and bent over it toward her.

“You are hurting me very much, Harry,” he said. “Do you know why?”

“I? I am only sorry about Anna. I miss her. I--I was fond of her.”

“So was I. But that isn't it, Harry. It's something else.”

“I'm uncomfortable, Peter.”

“So am I. I'm sorry you don't trust me. For that's it.”

“Not at all. But, Peter, what will people say?”

“A great deal, if they know. Who is to know? How many people know about
us? A handful, at the most, McLean and Mrs. Boyer and one or two others.
Of course I can go away until we get some one to take Anna's place, but
you'd be here alone at night, and if the youngster had an attack--”

“Oh, no, don't leave him!”

“It's holiday time. There are no clinics until next week. If you'll put
up with me--”

“Put up with you, when it is your apartment I use, your food I eat!” She
almost choked. “Peter, I must talk about money.”

“I'm coming to that. Don't you suppose you more than earn everything?
Doesn't it humiliate me hourly to see you working here?”

“Peter! Would you rob me of my last vestige of self-respect?”

This being unanswerable, Peter fell back on his major premise.

“If you'll put up with me for a day or so I'll take this list of Anna's
and hunt up some body. Just describe the person you desire and I'll find
her.” He assumed a certainty he was far from feeling, but it reassured
the girl. “A woman, of course?”

“Of course. And not young.”

“'Not young,'” wrote Peter. “Fat?”

Harmony recalled Mrs. Boyer's ample figure and shook her head.

“Not too stout. And agreeable. That's most important.”

“'Agreeable,'” wrote Peter. “Although Anna was hardly agreeable, in the
strict sense of the word, was she?”

“She was interesting, and--and human.”

“'Human!'” wrote Peter. “Wanted, a woman, not young, not too stout,
agreeable and human. Shall I advertise?”

The strain was quite gone by that time. Harmony was smiling. Jimmy,
waking, called for food, and the morning of the first day was under way.

Peter was well content that morning, in spite of an undercurrent of
uneasiness. Before this Anna had shared his proprietorship with him. Now
the little household was his. His vicarious domesticity pleased him. He
strutted about, taking a new view of his domain; he tightened a doorknob
and fastened a noisy window. He inspected the coal-supply and grumbled
over its quality. He filled the copper kettle on the stove, carried
in the water for Jimmy's morning bath, cleaned the mouse cage. He even
insisted on peeling the little German potatoes, until Harmony cried
aloud at his wastefulness and took the knife from him.

And afterward, while Harmony in the sickroom read aloud and Jimmy put
the wooden sentry into the cage to keep order, he got out his books and
tried to study. But he did little work. His book lay on his knee, his
pipe died beside him. The strangeness of the situation came over him,
sitting there, and left him rather frightened. He tried to see it
from the viewpoint of an outsider, and found himself incredulous and
doubting. McLean would resent the situation. Even the Portier was a
person to reckon with. The skepticism of the American colony was a thing
to fear and avoid.

And over all hung the incessant worry about money; he could just manage
alone. He could not, by any method he knew of, stretch his resources
to cover a separate arrangement for himself. But he had undertaken to
shield a girl-woman and a child, and shield them he would and could.

Brave thoughts were Peter's that snowy morning in the great salon of
Maria Theresa, with the cat of the Portier purring before the fire;
brave thoughts, cool reason, with Harmony practicing scales very softly
while Jimmy slept, and with Anna speeding through a white world, to the
accompaniment of bitter meditation.

Peter had meant to go to Semmering that day, but even the urgency of
Marie's need faded before his own situation. He wired Stewart that he
would come as soon as he could, and immediately after lunch departed for
the club, Anna's list in his pocket, Harmony's requirements in mind. He
paused at Jimmy's door on his way out.

“What shall it be to-day?” he inquired. “A postcard or a crayon?”

“I wish I could have a dog.”

“We'll have a dog when you are better and can take him walking. Wait
until spring, son.”

“Some more mice?”

“You will have them--but not to-day.”

“What holiday comes next?”

“New Year's Day. Suppose I bring you a New Year's card.”

“That's right,” agreed Jimmy. “One I can send to Dad. Do you think he
will come back this year?” wistfully.

Peter dropped on his baggy knees beside the bed and drew the little
wasted figure to him.

“I think you'll surely see him this year, old man,” he said huskily.

Peter walked to the Doctors' Club. On the way he happened on little
Georgiev, the Bulgarian, and they went on together. Peter managed to
make out that Georgiev was studying English, and that he desired to know
the state of health and the abode of the Fraulein Wells. Peter evaded
the latter by the simple expedient of pretending not to understand. The
little Bulgarian watched him earnestly, his smouldering eyes not without
suspicion. There had been much talk in the Pension Schwarz about the
departure together of the three Americans. The Jew from Galicia still
raved over Harmony's beauty.

Georgiev rather hoped, by staying by Peter, to be led toward his star.
But Peter left him at the Doctors' Club, still amiable, but absolutely
obtuse to the question nearest the little spy's heart.

The club was almost deserted. The holidays had taken many of the members
out of town. Other men were taking advantage of the vacation to see the
city, or to make acquaintance again with families they had hardly seen
during the busy weeks before Christmas. The room at the top of the
stairs where the wives of the members were apt to meet for chocolate and
to exchange the addresses of dressmakers was empty; in the reading room
he found McLean. Although not a member, McLean was a sort of honorary
habitue, being allowed the privilege of the club in exchange for a
dependable willingness to play at entertainments of all sorts.

It was in Peter's mind to enlist McLean's assistance in his
difficulties. McLean knew a good many people. He was popular,
goodlooking, and in a colony where, unlike London and Paris, the great
majority were people of moderate means, he was conspicuously well
off. But he was also much younger than Peter and intolerant with the
insolence of youth. Peter was thinking hard as he took off his overcoat
and ordered beer.

The boy was in love with Harmony already; Peter had seen that, as he
saw many things. How far his love might carry him, Peter had no idea. It
seemed to him, as he sat across the reading-table and studied him over
his magazine, that McLean would resent bitterly the girl's position, and
that when he learned it a crisis might be precipitated.

One of three things might happen: He might bend all his energies to
second Peter's effort to fill Anna's place, to find the right person; he
might suggest taking Anna's place himself, and insist that his presence
in the apartment would be as justifiable as Peter's; or he might do at
once the thing Peter felt he would do eventually, cut the knot of
the difficulty by asking Harmony to marry him. Peter, greeting him
pleasantly, decided not to tell him anything, to keep him away if
possible until the thing was straightened out, and to wait for an hour
at the club in the hope that a solution might stroll in for chocolate
and gossip.

In any event explanation to McLean would have required justification.
Peter disliked the idea. He could humble himself, if necessary, to a
woman; he could admit his asininity in assuming the responsibility of
Jimmy, for instance, and any woman worthy of the name, or worthy of
living in the house with Harmony, would understand. But McLean was
young, intolerant. He was more than that, though Peter, concealing from
himself just what Harmony meant to him, would not have admitted a rival
for what he had never claimed. But a rival the boy was. Peter, calmly
reading a magazine and drinking his Munich beer, was in the grip of the
fiercest jealousy. He turned pages automatically, to recall nothing of
what he had read.

McLean, sitting across from him, watched him surreptitiously. Big Peter,
aggressively masculine, heavy of shoulder, direct of speech and eye, was
to him the embodiment of all that a woman should desire in a man. He,
too, was jealous, but humbly so. Unlike Peter he knew his situation, was
young enough to glory in it. Shameless love is always young; with years
comes discretion, perhaps loss of confidence. The Crusaders were youths,
pursuing an idea to the ends of the earth and flaunting a lady's
guerdon from spear or saddle-bow. The older men among them tucked the
handkerchief or bit of a gauntleted glove under jerkin and armor near
the heart, and flung to the air the guerdon of some light o' love.
McLean would have shouted Harmony's name from the housetops. Peter did
not acknowledge even to himself that he was in love with her.

It occurred to McLean after a time that Peter being in the club, and
Harmony being in all probability at home, it might be possible to see
her alone for a few minutes. He had not intended to go back to the house
in the Siebensternstrasse so soon after being peremptorily put out; he
had come to the club with the intention of clinching his resolution with
a game of cribbage. But fate was playing into his hands. There was no
cribbage player round, and Peter himself sat across deeply immersed in a
magazine. McLean rose, not stealthily, but without unnecessary noise.

So far so good. Peter turned a page and went on reading. McLean
sauntered to a window, hands in pockets. He even whistled a trifle,
under his breath, to prove how very casual were his intentions. Still
whistling, he moved toward the door. Peter turned another page, which
was curiously soon to have read two columns of small type without
illustrations.

Once out in the hall McLean's movements gained aim and precision. He got
his coat, hat and stick, flung the first over his arm and the second on
his head, and--

“Going out?” asked Peter calmly.

“Yes, nothing to do here. I've read all the infernal old magazines until
I'm sick of them.” Indignant, too, from his tone.

“Walking?”

“Yes.”

“Mind if I go with you?”

“Not at all.”

Peter, taking down his old overcoat from its hook, turned and caught the
boy's eye. It was a swift exchange of glances, but illuminating--Peter's
whimsical, but with a sort of grim determination; McLean's sheepish, but
equally determined.

“Rotten afternoon,” said McLean as they started for the stairs. “Half
rain, half snow. Streets are ankle-deep.”

“I'm not particularly keen about walking, but--I don't care for this
tomb alone.”

Nothing was further from McLean's mind than a walk with Peter that
afternoon. He hesitated halfway down the upper flight.

“You don't care for cribbage, do you?”

“Don't know anything about it. How about pinochle?”

They had both stopped, equally determined, equally hesitating.

“Pinochle it is,” acquiesced McLean. “I was only going because there was
nothing to do.”

Things went very well for Peter that afternoon--up to a certain point.
He beat McLean unmercifully, playing with cold deliberation. McLean
wearied, fidgeted, railed at his luck. Peter played on grimly.

The club filled up toward the coffee-hour. Two or three women, wives of
members, a young girl to whom McLean had been rather attentive before
he met Harmony and who bridled at the abstracted bow he gave her. And,
finally, when hope in Peter was dead, one of the women on Anna's list.

Peter, laying down pairs and marking up score, went over Harmony's
requirements. Dr. Jennings seemed to fit them all, a woman, not young,
not too stout, agreeable and human. She was a large, almost bovinely
placid person, not at all reminiscent of Anna. She was neat where Anna
had been disorderly, well dressed and breezy against Anna's dowdiness
and sharpness. Peter, having totaled the score, rose and looked down at
McLean.

“You're a nice lad,” he said, smiling. “Sometime I shall teach you the
game.”

“How about a lesson to-night in Seven-Star Street?”

“To-night? Why, I'm sorry. We have an engagement for to-night.”

The “we” was deliberate and cruel. McLean writhed. Also the statement
was false, but the boy was spared that knowledge for the moment.

Things went well. Dr. Jennings was badly off for quarters. She would
make a change if she could better herself. Peter drew her off to a
corner and stated his case. She listened attentively, albeit not without
disapproval.

She frankly discredited the altruism of Peter's motives when he told
her about Harmony. But as the recital went on she found herself rather
touched. The story of Jimmy appealed to her. She scolded and lauded
Peter in one breath, and what was more to the point, she promised to
visit the house in the Siebensternstrasse the next day.

“So Anna Gates has gone home!” she reflected. “When?”

“This morning.”

“Then the girl is there alone?”

“Yes. She is very young and inexperienced, and the boy--it's
myocarditis. She's afraid to be left with him.”

“Is she quite alone?”

“Absolutely, and without funds, except enough for her lessons. Our
arrangement was that she should keep the house going; that was her
share.”

Dr. Jennings was impressed. It was impossible to talk to Peter and not
believe him. Women trusted Peter always.

“You've been very foolish, Dr. Byrne,” she said as she rose; “but you've
been disinterested enough to offset that and to put some of us to shame.
To-morrow at three, if it suits you. You said the Siebensternstrasse?”

Peter went home exultant.



CHAPTER XVII

Christmas-Day had had a softening effect on Mrs. Boyer. It had opened
badly. It was the first Christmas she had spent away from her children,
and there had been little of the holiday spirit in her attitude as she
prepared the Christmas breakfast. After that, however, things happened.

In the first place, under her plate she had found a frivolous chain and
pendant which she had admired. And when her eyes filled up, as they did
whenever she was emotionally moved, the doctor had come round the table
and put both his arms about her.

“Too young for you? Not a bit!” he said heartily. “You're better-looking
then you ever were, Jennie; and if you weren't you're the only woman for
me, anyhow. Don't you think I realize what this exile means to you and
that you're doing it for me?”

“I--I don't mind it.”

“Yes, you do. To-night we'll go out and make a night of it, shall we?
Supper at the Grand, the theater, and then the Tabarin, eh?”

She loosened herself from his arms.

“What shall I wear? Those horrible things the children bought me--”

“Throw 'em away.”

“They're not worn at all.”

“Throw them out. Get rid of the things the children got you. Go out
to-morrow and buy something you like--not that I don't like you in
anything or without--”

“Frank!”

“Be happy, that's the thing. It's the first Christmas without the
family, and I miss them too. But we're together, dear. That's the big
thing. Merry Christmas.”

An auspicious opening, that, to Christmas-Day. And they had carried
out the program as outlined. Mrs. Boyer had enjoyed it, albeit a bit
horrified at the Christmas gayety at the Tabarin.

The next morning, however, she awakened with a keen reaction. Her head
ached. She had a sense of taint over her. She was virtue rampant
again, as on the day she had first visited the old lodge in the
Siebensternstrasse.

It is hardly astonishing that by association of ideas Harmony came
into her mind again, a brand that might even yet be snatched from the
burning. She had been a bit hasty before, she admitted to herself. There
was a woman doctor named Gates, although her address at the club was
given as Pension Schwarz. She determined to do her shopping early and
then to visit the house in the Siebensternstrasse. She was not a hard
woman, for all her inflexible morality, and more than once she had
had an uneasy memory of Harmony's bewildered, almost stricken face
the afternoon of her visit. She had been a watchful mother over a not
particularly handsome family of daughters. This lovely young girl needed
mothering and she had refused it. She would go back, and if she found
she had been wrong and the girl was deserving and honest, she would see
what could be done.

The day was wretched. The snow had turned to rain. Mrs. Boyer, shopping,
dragged wet skirts and damp feet from store to store. She found nothing
that she cared for after all. The garments that looked chic in the
windows or on manikins in the shops, were absurd on her. Her insistent
bosom bulged, straight lines became curves or tortuous zigzags, plackets
gaped, collars choked her or shocked her by their absence. In the mirror
of Marie Jedlicka, clad in familiar garments that had accommodated
themselves to the idiosyncrasies of her figure, Mrs. Boyer was a plump,
rather comely matron. Here before the plate glass of the modiste, under
the glare of a hundred lights, side by side with a slim Austrian girl
who looked like a willow wand, Mrs. Boyer was grotesque, ridiculous,
monstrous. She shuddered. She almost wept.

It was bad preparation for a visit to the Siebensternstrasse. Mrs.
Boyer, finding her vanity gone, convinced that she was an absurdity
physically, fell back for comfort on her soul. She had been a good wife
and mother; she was chaste, righteous. God had been cruel to her in the
flesh, but He had given her the spirit.

“Madame wishes not the gown? It is beautiful--see the embroidery! And
the neck may be filled with chiffon.”

“Young woman,” she said grimly, “I see the embroidery; and the neck
may be filled with chiffon, but not for me! And when you have had five
children, you will not buy clothes like that either.”

All the kindliness was gone from the visit to the Siebensternstrasse;
only the determination remained. Wounded to the heart of her
self-esteem, her pride in tatters, she took her way to the old lodge and
climbed the stairs.

She found a condition of mild excitement. Jimmy had slept long after his
bath. Harmony practiced, cut up a chicken for broth, aired blankets for
the chair into which Peter on his return was to lift the boy.

She was called to inspect the mouse-cage, which, according to Jimmy, had
strawberries in it.

“Far back,” he explained. “There in the cotton, Harry.”

But it was not strawberries. Harmony opened the cage and very tenderly
took out the cotton nest. Eight tiny pink baby mice, clean washed by the
mother, lay curled in a heap.

It was a stupendous moment. The joy of vicarious parentage was Jimmy's.
He named them all immediately and demanded food for them. On Harmony's
delicate explanation that this was unnecessary, life took on a new
meaning for Jimmy. He watched the mother lest she slight one. His
responsibility weighed on him. Also his inquiring mind was very busy.

“But how did they get there?” he demanded.

“God sent them, just as he sends babies of all sorts.”

“Did he send me?”

“Of course.”

“That's a good one on you, Harry. My father found me in a hollow tree.”

“But don't you think God had something to do with it?”

Jimmy pondered this.

“I suppose,” he reflected, “God sent Daddy to find me so that I would be
his little boy. You never happened to see any babies when you were out
walking, did you, Harry?”

“Not in stumps--but I probably wasn't looking.”

Jimmy eyed her with sympathy.

“You may some day. Would you like to have one?”

“Very much,” said Harmony, and flushed delightfully.

Jimmy was disposed to press the matter, to urge immediate maternity on
her.

“You could lay it here on the bed,” he offered, “and I'd watch it. When
they yell you let 'em suck your finger. I knew a woman once that had a
baby and she did that. And it could watch Isabella.” Isabella was the
mother mouse. “And when I'm better I could take it walking.”

“That,” said Harmony gravely, “is mighty fine of you, Jimmy boy. I--I'll
think about it.” She never denied Jimmy anything, so now she temporized.

“I'll ask Peter.”

Harmony had a half-hysterical moment; then:

“Wouldn't it be better,” she asked, “to keep anything of that sort a
secret? And to surprise Peter?”

The boy loved a secret. He played with it in lieu of other occupation.
His uncertain future was sown thick with secrets that would never flower
into reality. Thus Peter had shamelessly promised him a visit to the
circus when he was able to go, Harmony not to be told until the tickets
were bought. Anna had similarly promised to send him from America a
pitcher's glove and a baseball bat. To this list of futurities he now
added Harmony's baby.

Harmony brought in her violin and played softly to him, not to disturb
the sleeping mice. She sang, too, a verse that the Big Soprano had been
fond of and that Jimmy loved. Not much of a voice was Harmony's, but
sweet and low and very true, as became her violinist's ear.

  “Ah, well! For us all some sweet hope lies
   Deeply buried from human eyes,”

she sang, her clear eyes luminous.

  “And in the hereafter, angels may
   Roll the stone from its grave away!”

Mrs. Boyer mounted the stairs. She was in a very bad humor. She had
snagged her skirt on a nail in the old gate, and although that very
morning she had detested the suit, her round of shopping had again
endeared it to her. She told the Portier in English what she thought
of him, and climbed ponderously, pausing at each landing to examine the
damage.

Harmony, having sung Jimmy to sleep, was in the throes of an experiment.
She was trying to smoke.

A very human young person was Harmony, apt to be exceedingly wretched
if her hat were of last year's fashion, anxious to be inconspicuous by
doing what every one else was doing, conventional as are the very young,
fearful of being an exception.

And nearly every one was smoking. Many of the young women whom she met
at the master's house had yellowed fingers and smoked in the anteroom;
the Big Soprano had smoked; Anna and Scatchy had smoked; in the
coffee-houses milliners' apprentices produced little silver mouth-pieces
to prevent soiling their pretty lips and smoked endlessly. Even Peter
had admitted that it was not a vice, but only a comfortable bad habit.
And Anna had left a handful of cigarettes.

Harmony was not smoking; she was experimenting. Peter and Anna had
smoked together and it had looked comradely. Perhaps, without reasoning
it out, Harmony was experimenting toward the end of establishing her
relations with Peter still further on friendly and comradely grounds.
Two men might smoke together; a man and a woman might smoke together
as friends. According to Harmony's ideas, a girl paring potatoes might
inspire sentiment, but smoking a cigarette--never!

She did not like it. She thought, standing before her little mirror,
that she looked fast, after all. She tried pursing her lips together,
as she had seen Anna do, and blowing out the smoke in a thin line. She
smoked very hard, so that she stood in the center of a gray nimbus. She
hated it, but she persisted. Perhaps it grew on one; perhaps, also,
if she walked about it would choke her less. She practiced holding the
thing between her first and second fingers, and found that easier than
smoking. Then she went to the salon where there was more air, and tried
exhaling through her nose. It made her sneeze.

On the sneeze came Mrs. Boyer's ring. Harmony thought very fast. It
might be the bread or the milk, but again--She flung the cigarette into
the stove, shut the door, and answered the bell.

Mrs. Boyer's greeting was colder than she had intended. It put Harmony
on the defensive at once, made her uncomfortable. Like all the innocent
falsely accused she looked guiltier than the guiltiest. Under Mrs.
Boyer's searching eyes the enormity of her situation overwhelmed her.
And over all, through salon and passage, hung the damning odor of the
cigarette. Harmony, leading the way in, was a sheep before her shearer.

“I'm calling on all of you,” said Mrs. Boyer, sniping. “I meant to bring
Dr. Boyer's cards for every one, including Dr. Byrne.”

“I'm sorry. Dr. Byrne is out.”

“And Dr. Gates?”

“She--she is away.”

Mrs. Boyer raised her eyebrows and ostentatiously changed the subject,
requesting a needle and thread to draw the rent together. It had been in
Harmony's mind to explain the situation, to show Jimmy to Mrs. Boyer,
to throw herself on the older woman's sympathy, to ask advice. But
the visitor's attitude made this difficult. To add to her discomfort,
through the grating in the stove door was coming a thin thread of smoke.

It was, after all, Mrs. Boyer who broached the subject again. She had
had a cup of tea, and Harmony, sitting on a stool, had mended the rent
so that it could hardly be seen. Mrs. Boyer, softened by the tea and by
the proximity of Harmony's lovely head bent over her task, grew slightly
more expansive.

“I ought to tell you something, Miss Wells,” she said. “You remember my
other visit?”

“Perfectly.” Harmony bent still lower.

“I did you an injustice at that time. I've been sorry ever since. I
thought that there was no Dr. Gates. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to
deny it. People do things in this wicked city that they wouldn't do at
home. I confess I misjudged Peter Byrne. You can give him my apologies,
since he won't see me.”

“But he isn't here or of course he'd see you.”

“Then,” demanded Mrs. Boyer grimly, “if Peter Byrne is not here, who has
been smoking cigarettes in this room? There is one still burning in that
stove!”

Harmony's hand was forced. She was white as she cut the brown-silk
thread and rose to her feet.

“I think,” she said, “that I'd better go back a few weeks, Mrs. Boyer,
and tell you a story, if you have time to listen.”

“If it is disagreeable--”

“Not at all. It is about Peter Byrne and myself, and--some others. It
is really about Peter. Mrs. Boyer, will you come very quietly across the
hall?”

Mrs. Boyer, expecting Heaven knows what, rose with celerity. Harmony
led the way to Jimmy's door and opened it. He was still asleep, a wasted
small figure on the narrow bed. Beside him the mice frolicked in their
cage, the sentry kept guard over Peter's shameless letters from the
Tyrol, the strawberry babies wriggled in their cotton.

“We are not going to have him very long,” said Harmony softly. “Peter is
making him happy for a little while.”

Back in the salon of Maria Theresa she told the whole story. Mrs. Boyer
found it very affecting. Harmony sat beside her on a stool and she kept
her hand on the girl's shoulder. When the narrative reached Anna's
going away, however, she took it away. From that point on she sat
uncompromisingly rigid and listened.

“Then you mean to say,” she exploded when Harmony had finished, “that
you intend to stay on here, just the two of you?”

“And Jimmy.”

“Bah! What has the child to do with it?”

“We will find some one to take Anna's place.”

“I doubt it. And until you do?”

“There is nothing wicked in what we are doing. Don't you see, Mrs.
Boyer, I can't leave the boy.”

“Since Peter is so altruistic, let him hire a nurse.”

Bad as things were, Harmony smiled.

“A nurse!” she said. “Why, do you realize that he is keeping three
people now on what is starvation for one?”

“Then he's a fool!” Mrs. Boyer rose in majesty. “I'm not going to leave
you here.”

“I'm sorry. You must see--”

“I see nothing but a girl deliberately putting herself in a compromising
portion and worse.”

“Mrs. Boyer!”

“Get your things on. I guess Dr. Boyer and I can look after you until we
can send you home.”

“I am not going home--yet,” said poor Harmony, biting her lip to steady
it.

Back and forth waged the battle, Mrs. Boyer assailing, Harmony offering
little defense but standing firm on her refusal to go as long as Peter
would let her remain.

“It means so much to me,” she ventured, goaded. “And I earn my lodging
and board. I work hard and--I make him comfortable. It costs him very
little and I give him something in exchange. All men are not alike. If
the sort you have known are--are different--”

This was unfortunate. Mrs. Boyer stiffened. She ceased offensive
tactics, and retired grimly into the dignity of her high calling of
virtuous wife and mother. She washed her hands of Harmony and Peter. She
tied on her veil with shaking hands, and prepared to leave Harmony to
her fate.

“Give me your mother's address,” she demanded.

“Certainly not.”

“You absolutely refuse to save yourself?”

“From what? From Peter? There are many worse people than Peter to save
myself from, Mrs. Boyer--uncharitable people, and--and cruel people.”

Mrs. Boyer shrugged her plump shoulders.

“Meaning me!” she retorted. “My dear child, people are always cruel who
try to save us from ourselves.”

Unluckily for Harmony, one of Anna's specious arguments must pop into
her head at that instant and demand expression.

“People are living their own lives these days, Mrs. Boyer; old standards
have gone. It is what one's conscience condemns that is wrong, isn't
it? Not merely breaking laws that were made to fit the average, not the
exception.”

Anna! Anna!

Mrs. Boyer flung up her hands.

“You are impossible!” she snapped. “After all, I believe it is Peter who
needs protection! I shall speak to him.”

She started down the staircase, but turned for a parting volley.

“And just a word of advice: Perhaps the old standards have gone. But if
you really expect to find a respectable woman to chaperon YOU, keep your
views to yourself.”

Harmony, a bruised and wounded thing, crept into Jimmy's room and sank
on her knees beside the bed. One small hand lay on the coverlet; she
dared not touch it for fear of waking him--but she laid her cheek close
to it for comfort. When Peter came in, much later, he found the boy wide
awake and Harmony asleep, a crumpled heap beside the bed.

“I think she's been crying,” Jimmy whispered. “She's been sobbing in her
sleep. And strike a match, Peter; there may be more mice.”



CHAPTER XVIII

Mrs. Boyer, bursting with indignation, went to the Doctors' Club. It was
typical of the way things were going with Peter that Dr. Boyer was not
there, and that the only woman in the clubrooms should be Dr. Jennings.
Young McLean was in the reading room, eating his heart out with jealousy
of Peter, vacillating between the desire to see Harmony that night and
fear lest Peter forbid him the house permanently if he made the attempt.
He had found a picture of the Fraulein Engel, from the opera, in a
magazine, and was sitting with it open before him. Very deeply and
really in love was McLean that afternoon, and the Fraulein Engel and
Harmony were not unlike. The double doors between the reading room and
the reception room adjoining were open. McLean, lost in a rosy future in
which he and Harmony sat together for indefinite periods, with no Peter
to scowl over his books at them, a future in which life was one long
piano-violin duo, with the candles in the chandelier going out one by
one, leaving them at last alone in scented darkness together--McLean
heard nothing until the mention of the Siebensternstrasse roused him.

After that he listened. He heard that Dr. Jennings was contemplating
taking Anna's place at the lodge, and he comprehended after a moment
that Anna was already gone. Even then the significance of the situation
was a little time in dawning on him. When it did, however, he rose with
a stifled oath.

Mrs. Boyer was speaking.

“It is exactly as I tell you,” she was saying. “If Peter Byrne is trying
to protect her reputation he is late doing it. Personally I have been
there twice. I never saw Anna Gates. And she is registered here at the
club as living in the Pension Schwarz. Whatever the facts may be, one
thing remains, she is not there now.”

McLean waited to hear no more. He was beside himself with rage. He found
a “comfortable” at the curb. The driver was asleep inside the carriage.
McLean dragged him out by the shoulder and shouted an address to him.
The cab bumped along over the rough streets to an accompaniment of
protests from its frantic passenger.

The boy was white-lipped with wrath and fear. Peter's silence that
afternoon as to the state of affairs loomed large and significant. He
had thought once or twice that Peter was in love with Harmony; he knew
it now in the clearer vision of the moment. He recalled things that
maddened him: the dozen intimacies of the little menage, the caress
in Peter's voice when he spoke to the girl, Peter's steady eyes in the
semi-gloom of the salon while Harmony played.

At a corner they must pause for the inevitable regiment. McLean cursed,
bending out to see how long the delay would be. Peter had been gone for
half an hour, perhaps, but Peter would walk. If he could only see the
girl first, talk to her, tell her what she would be doing by remaining--

He was there at last, flinging across the courtyard like a madman. Peter
was already there; his footprints were fresh in the slush of the path.
The house door was closed but not locked. McLean ran up the stairs. It
was barely twilight outside, but the staircase well was dark. At the
upper landing he was compelled to fumble for the bell.

Peter admitted him. The corridor was unlighted, but from the salon came
a glow of lamplight. McLean, out of breath and furious, faced Peter.

“I want to see Harmony,” he said without preface.

Peter eyed him. He knew what had happened, had expected it when the bell
rang, had anticipated it when Harmony told him of Mrs. Boyer's visit. In
the second between the peal of the bell and his opening the door he had
decided what to do.

“Come in.”

McLean stepped inside. He was smaller than Peter, not so much shorter as
slenderer. Even Peter winced before the look in his eyes.

“Where is she?”

“In the kitchen, I think. Come into the salon.”

McLean flung off his coat. Peter closed the door behind him and stood
just inside. He had his pipe as usual. “I came to see her, not you,
Byrne.”

“So I gather. I'll let you see her, of course, but don't you want to see
me first?”

“I want to take her away from here.”

“Why? Are you better able to care for her than I am?”

McLean stood rigid. He had thrust his clenched hands into his pockets.

“You're a scoundrel, Byrne,” he said steadily. “Why didn't you tell me
this this afternoon?”

“Because I knew if I did you'd do just what you are doing.”

“Are you going to keep her here?”

Peter changed color at the thrust, but he kept himself in hand.

“I'm not keeping her here,” he said patiently. “I'm doing the best I can
under the circumstances.”

“Then your best is pretty bad.”

“Perhaps. If you would try to remember the circumstances, McLean,--that
the girl has no place else to go, practically no money, and that I--”

“I remember one circumstance, that you are living here alone with her
and that you're crazy in love with her.”

“That has nothing to do with you. As long as I treat her--”

“Bah!”

“Will you be good enough to let me finish what I am trying to say? She's
safe with me. When I say that I mean it. She will not go away from
here with you or with any one else if I can prevent it. And if you care
enough about her to try to keep her happy you'll not let her know you
have been here. I've got a woman coming to take Anna's place. That ought
to satisfy you.”

“Dr. Jennings?”

“Yes.”

“She'll not come. Mrs. Boyer has been talking to her. Inside of an hour
the whole club will have it--every American in Vienna will know about it
in a day or so. I tell you, Byrne, you're doing an awful thing.”

Peter drew a long breath. He had had his bad half-hour before McLean
came; had had to stand by, wordless, and see Harmony trying to smile,
see her dragging about, languid and white, see her tragic attempts
to greet him on the old familiar footing. Through it all he had been
sustained by the thought that a day or two days would see the old
footing reestablished, another woman in the house, life again worth the
living and Harmony smiling up frankly into his eyes. Now this hope had
departed.

“You can't keep me from seeing her, you know,” McLean persisted. “I've
got to put this thing to her. She's got to choose.”

“What alternative have you to suggest?”

“I'd marry her if she'd have me.”

After all Peter had expected that. And, if she cared for the boy
wouldn't that be best for her? What had he to offer against that? He
couldn't marry. He could only offer her shelter, against everything
else. Even then he did not dislike McLean. He was a man, every slender
inch of him, this boy musician. Peter's heart sank, but he put down his
pipe and turned to the door.

“I'll call her,” he said. “But, since this concerns me very vitally, I
should like to be here while you put the thing to her. After that if you
like--”

He called Harmony. She had given Jimmy his supper and was carrying out a
tray that seemed hardly touched.

“He won't eat to-night,” she said miserably. “Peter, if he stops eating,
what can we do? He is so weak!”

Peter, took the tray from her gently.

“Harry dear,” he said, “I want you to come into the salon. Some one
wishes to speak to you.”

“To me?”

“Yes. Harry, do you remember that evening in the kitchen when--Do you
recall what I promised?”

“Yes, Peter.”

“You are sure you know what I mean?”

“Yes.”

“That's all right, then. McLean wants to see you.”

She hesitated, looking up at him.

“McLean? You look so grave, Peter. What is it?”

“He will tell you. Nothing alarming.”

Peter gave McLean a minute alone after all, while he carried the tray
to the kitchen. He had no desire to play watchdog over the girl, he told
himself savagely; only to keep himself straight with her and to save
her from McLean's impetuosity. He even waited in the kitchen to fill and
light his pipe.

McLean had worked himself into a very fair passion. He was intense,
almost theatrical, as he stood with folded arms waiting for Harmony. So
entirely did the girl fill his existence that he forgot, or did not care
to remember, how short a time he had known her. As Harmony she dominated
his life and his thoughts; as Harmony he addressed her when, rather
startled, she entered the salon and stood just inside the closed door.

“Peter said you wanted to speak to me.”

McLean groaned. “Peter!” he said. “It is always Peter. Look here,
Harmony, you cannot stay here.”

“It is only for a few hours. To-morrow some one is coming. And, anyhow,
Peter is going to Semmering. We know it is unusual, but what can we do?”

“Unusual! It's--it's damnable. It's the appearance of the thing, don't
you see that?”

“I think it is rather silly to talk of appearance when there is no one
to care. And how can I leave? Jimmy needs me all the time--”

“That's another idiocy of Peter's. What does he mean by putting you in
this position?”

“I am one of Peter's idiocies.”

Peter entered on that. He took in the situation with a glance, and
Harmony turned to him; but if she had expected Peter to support her, she
was disappointed. Whatever decision she was to make must be her own,
in Peter's troubled mind. He crossed the room and stood at one of the
windows, looking out, a passive participant in the scene.

The day had been a trying one for Harmony. What she chose to consider
Peter's defection was a fresh stab. She glanced from McLean, flushed and
excited, to Peter's impassive back. Then she sat down, rather limp, and
threw out her hands helplessly.

“What am I to do?” she demanded. “Every one comes with cruel things to
say, but no one tells me what to do.”

Peter turned away from the window.

“You can leave here,” ventured McLean. “That's the first thing. After
that--”

“Yes, and after that, what?”

McLean glanced at Peter. Then he took a step toward the girl.

“You could marry me, Harmony,” he said unsteadily. “I hadn't expected
to tell you so soon, or before a third person.” He faltered before
Harmony's eyes, full of bewilderment. “I'd be very happy if you--if you
could see it that way. I care a great deal, you see.”

It seemed hours to Peter before she made any reply, and that her voice
came from miles away.

“Is it really as bad as that?” she asked. “Have I made such a mess of
things that some one, either you or Peter, must marry me to straighten
things out? I don't want to marry any one. Do I have to?”

“Certainly you don't have to,” said Peter. There was relief in his
voice, relief and also something of exultation. “McLean, you mean well,
but marriage isn't the solution. We were getting along all right until
our friends stepped in. Let Mrs. Boyer howl all over the colony; there
will be one sensible woman somewhere to come and be comfortable here
with us. In the interval we'll manage, unless Harmony is afraid. In that
case--”

“Afraid of what?”

The two men exchanged glances, McLean helpless, Peter triumphant.

“I do not care what Mrs. Boyer says, at least not much. And I am not
afraid of anything else at all.”

McLean picked up his overcoat.

“At least,” he appealed to Peter, “you'll come over to my place?”

“No!” said Peter.

McLean made a final appeal to Harmony.

“If this gets out,” he said, “you are going to regret it all your life.”

“I shall have nothing to regret,” she retorted proudly.

Had Peter not been there McLean would have made a better case, would
have pleaded with her, would have made less of a situation that roused
her resentment and more of his love for her. He was very hard hit, very
young. He was almost hysterical with rage and helplessness; he wanted
to slap her, to take her in his arms. He writhed under the restraint of
Peter's steady eyes.

He got to the door and turned, furious.

“Then it's up to you,” he flung at Peter. “You're old enough to know
better; she isn't. And don't look so damned superior. You're human, like
the rest of us. And if any harm comes to her--”

Here unexpectedly Peter held out his hand, and after a sheepish moment
McLean took it.

“Good-night, old man,” said Peter. “And--don't be an ass.”

As was Peter's way, the words meant little, the tone much. McLean knew
what in his heart he had known all along--that the girl was safe enough;
that all that was to fear was the gossip of scandal-lovers. He took
Peter's hand, and then going to Harmony stood before her very erect.

“I suppose I've said too much; I always do,” he said contritely. “But
you know the reason. Don't forget the reason, will you?”

“I am only sorry.”

He bent over and kissed her hand lingeringly. It was a tragic moment for
him, poor lad! He turned and went blindly out the door and down the dark
stone staircase. It was rather anticlimax, after all that, to have Peter
discover he had gone without his hat and toss it down to him a flight
below.

All the frankness had gone out of the relationship between Harmony and
Peter. They made painful efforts at ease, talked during the meal of
careful abstractions, such as Jimmy, and Peter's proposed trip to
Semmering, avoided each other's eyes, ate little or nothing. Once when
Harmony passed Peter his coffee-cup their fingers touched, and between
them they dropped the cup. Harmony was flushed and pallid by turns,
Peter wretched and silent.

Out of the darkness came one ray of light. Stewart had wired from
Semmering, urging Peter to come. He would be away for two days. In two
days much might happen; Dr. Jennings might come or some one else. In two
days some of the restraint would have worn off. Things would never be
the same, but they would be forty-eight hours better.

Peter spent the early part of the evening with Jimmy, reading aloud to
him. After the child had dropped to sleep he packed a valise for the
next day's journey and counted out into an envelope half of the money he
had with him. This he labeled “Household Expenses” and set it up on
his table, leaning against his collar-box. There was no sign of Harmony
about. The salon was dark except for the study lamp turned down.

Peter was restless. He put on his shabby dressing-gown and worn slippers
and wandered about. The Portier had brought coal to the landing; Peter
carried it in. He inspected the medicine bottles on Jimmy's stand
and wrote full directions for every emergency he could imagine. Then,
finding it still only nine o'clock, he turned up the lamp in the salon
and wrote an exciting letter from Jimmy's father, in which a lost lamb,
wandering on the mountain-side, had been picked up by an avalanche and
carried down into the fold and the arms of the shepherd. And because
he stood so in loco parentis, and because it seemed so inevitable that
before long Jimmy would be in the arms of the Shepherd, and, of course,
because it had been a trying day all through, Peter's lips were none too
steady as he folded up the letter.

The fire was dead in the stove; Peter put out the salon lamp and closed
the shutters. In the warm darkness he put out his hand to feel his way
through the room. It touched a little sweater coat of Harmony's, hanging
over the back of a chair. Peter picked it up in a very passion of
tenderness and held it to him.

“Little girl!” he choked. “My little girl! God help me!”

He was rather ashamed, considerably startled. It alarmed him to find
that the mere unexpected touch of a familiar garment could rouse such a
storm in him. It made him pause. He put down the coat and pulled himself
up sharply. McLean was right; he was only human stuff, very poor human
stuff. He put the little coat down hastily, only to lift it again gently
to his lips.

“Good-night, dear,” he whispered. “Goodnight, Harmony.”

Frau Schwarz had had two visitors between the hours of coffee and
supper that day. The reason of their call proved to be neither rooms nor
pension. They came to make inquiries.

The Frau Schwarz made this out at last, and sat down on the edge of
the bed in the room that had once been Peter's and that still lacked an
occupant.

Mrs. Boyer had no German; Dr. Jennings very little and that chiefly
medical. There is, however, a sort of code that answers instead of
language frequently, when two or three women of later middle life
are gathered together, a code born of mutual understanding, mutual
disillusion, mutual distrust, a language of outspread hands, raised
eyebrows, portentous shakings of the head. Frau Schwarz, on the edge of
Peter's tub-shaped bed, needed no English to convey the fact that Peter
was a bad lot. Not that she resorted only to the sign language.

“The women were also wicked,” she said. “Of a man what does one expect?
But of a woman! And the younger one looked--Herr Gott! She had the eyes
of a saint! The little Georgiev was mad for her. When the three of them
left, disgraced, as one may say, he came to me, he threatened me. The
Herr Schwarz, God rest his soul, was a violent man, but never spoke he
so to me!”

“She says,” interpreted Dr. Jennings, “that they were a bad lot--that
the younger one made eyes at the Herr Schwarz!”

Mrs. Boyer drew her ancient sables about her and put a tremulous hand on
the other woman's arm.

“What an escape for you!” she said. “If you had gone there to live and
then found the establishment--queer!”

From the kitchen of the pension, Olga was listening, an ear to the door.
Behind her, also listening, but less advantageously, was Katrina.

“American ladies!” said Olga. “Two, old and fat.”

“More hot water!” growled Katrina. “Why do not the Americans stay in
their own country, where the water, I have learned, comes hot from the
earth.”

Olga, bending forward, opened the door a crack wider.

“Sh! They do not come for rooms. They inquire for the Herr Doktor Byrne
and the others!”

“No!”

“Of a certainty.”

“Then let me to the door!”

“A moment. She tells them everything and more. She says--how she is
wicked, Katrina! She says the Fraulein Harmony was not good, that she
sent them all away. Here, take the door!”

Thus it happened that Dr. Jennings and Mrs. Boyer, having shaken off the
dust of a pension that had once harbored three malefactors, and having
retired Peter and Anna and Harmony into the limbo of things best
forgotten or ignored, found themselves, at the corner, confronted by a
slovenly girl in heelless slippers and wearing a knitted shawl over her
head. “The Frau Schwarz is wrong,” cried Olga passionately in Vienna
dialect. “They were good, all of them!”

“What in the world--”

“And, please, tell me where lives the Fraulein Harmony. The Herr
Georgiev eats not nor sleeps that he cannot find her.”

Dr. Jennings was puzzled.

“She wishes to know where the girl lives,” she interpreted to Mrs.
Boyer. “A man wishes to know.”

“Naturally!” said Mrs. Boyer. “Well, don't tell her.”

Olga gathered from the tone rather than the words that she was not to
be told. She burst into a despairing appeal in which the Herr Georgiev,
Peter, a necktie Peter had forgotten, open windows, and hot water were
inextricably confused. Dr. Jennings listened, then waved her back with a
gesture.

“She says,” she interpreted as they walked on, “that Dr. Peter--by which
I suppose she means Dr. Byrne--has left a necktie, and that she'll be in
hot water if she does not return it.”

Mrs. Boyer sniffed.

“In love with him, probably, like the others!” she said.



CHAPTER XIX

Peter went to Semmering the next morning, tiptoeing out very early and
without breakfast. He went in to cover Jimmy, lying diagonally across
his small bed amid a riot of tossed blankets. The communicating door
into Harmony's room was open. Peter kept his eyes carefully from it,
but his ears were less under control. He could hear her soft breathing.
There were days coming when Peter would stand where he stood then and
listen, and find only silence.

He tore himself away at last, closing the outer door carefully behind
him and lighting a match to find his way down the staircase. The Portier
was not awake. Peter had to rouse him, and to stand by while he donned
the trousers which he deemed necessary to the dignity of his position
before he opened the street door.

Reluctant as he had been to go, the change was good for Peter. The dawn
grew rosy, promised sunshine, fulfilled its promise. The hurrying crowds
at the depot interested him: he enjoyed his coffee, taken from a bare
table in the station. The horizontal morning sunlight, shining in
through marvelously clean windows, warmed the marble of the floor, made
black shadows beside the heaps of hand luggage everywhere, turned into
gold the hair of a toddling baby venturing on a tour of discovery. The
same morning light, alas! revealed to Peter a break across the toe of
one of his shoes. Peter sighed, then smiled. The baby was catching at
the bits of dust that floated in the sunshine.

Suddenly a great wave of happiness overwhelmed Peter. It was a passing
thing, born of nothing, but for the instant that it lasted Peter was a
king. Everything was well. The world was his oyster. Life was his,
to make it what he would--youth and hope and joy. Under the beatific
influence he expanded, grew, almost shone. Youth and hope and joy--that
cometh in the morning.

The ecstasy passed away, but without reaction. Peter no longer shone;
he still glowed. He picked up the golden-haired baby and hugged it. He
hunted out a beggar he had passed and gave him five Hellers. He helped a
suspicious old lady with an oilcloth-covered bundle; he called the guard
on the train “son” and forced a grin out of that dignitary.

Peter traveled third-class, which was quite comfortable, and no bother
about “Nicht Rauchen” signs. His unreasonable cheerfulness persisted as
far as Gloggnitz. There, with the increasing ruggedness of the scenery
and his first view of the Raxalpe, came recollection of the urgency of
Stewart's last message, of Marie Jedlicka, of the sordid little tragedy
that awaited him at the end of his journey.

Peter sobered. Life was rather a mess, after all, he reflected. Love
was a blessing, but it was also a curse. After that he sat back in
his corner and let the mountain scenery take care of itself, while he
recalled the look he had surprised once or twice in Marie's eyes when
she looked at Stewart. It was sad, pitiful. Marie was a clever little
thing. If only she'd had a chance!--Why wasn't he rich enough to help
the ones who needed help. Marie could start again in America, with no
one the wiser, and make her way.

“Smart as the devil, these Austrian girls!” Peter reflected. “Poor
little guttersnipe!”

The weather was beautiful. The sleet of the previous day in Vienna had
been a deep snowfall on the mountains. The Schwarza was frozen, the
castle of Liechtenstein was gray against a white world. A little
pilgrimage church far below seemed snowed in against the faithful. The
third-class compartment filled with noisy skiing parties. The old woman
opened her oilcloth bundle, and taking a cat out of a box inside fed it
a sausage.

Up and up, past the Weinzettelwand and the Station Breitenstein, across
the highest viaduct, the Kalte Rinne, and so at last to Semmering.

The glow had died at last for Peter. He did not like his errand, was
very vague, indeed, as to just what that errand might be. He was stiff
and rather cold. Also he thought the cat might stifle in the oilcloth,
but the old woman too clearly distrusted him to make it possible
to interfere. Anyhow, he did not know the German for either cat or
oilcloth.

He had wired Stewart; but the latter was not at the station. This made
him vaguely uneasy, he hardly knew why. He did not know Stewart well
enough to know whether he was punctilious in such matters or not: as a
matter of fact he hardly knew him at all. It was because he had appealed
to him that Peter was there, it being only necessary to Peter to be
needed, and he was anywhere.

The Pension Waldheim was well up the mountains. He shouldered his valise
and started up--first long flights of steps through the pines, then a
steep road. Peter climbed easily. Here and there he met groups coming
down, men that he thought probably American, pretty women in “tams” and
sweaters. He watched for Marie, but there was no sign of her.

He was half an hour, perhaps, in reaching the Waldheim. As he turned
in at the gate he noticed a sledge, with a dozen people following it,
coming toward him. It was a singularly silent party. Peter, with his
hand on the door-knocker, watched its approach with some curiosity.

It stopped, and the men who had been following closed up round it.
Even then Peter did not understand. He did not understand until he
saw Stewart, limp and unconscious, lifted out of the straw and carried
toward him.

Suicide may be moral cowardice; but it requires physical bravery.
And Marie was not brave. The balcony had attracted her: it opened
possibilities of escape, of unceasing regret and repentance for Stewart,
of publicity that would mean an end to the situation. But every inch of
her soul was craven at the thought. She crept out often and looked down,
and as often drew back, shuddering. To fall down, down on to the tree
tops, to be dropped from branch to branch, a broken thing, and perhaps
even not yet dead--that was the unthinkable thing, to live for a time
and suffer!

Stewart was not ignorant of all that went on in her mind. She had
threatened him with the balcony, just as, earlier in the winter, it had
been a window-ledge with which she had frightened him. But there was
this difference, whereas before he had drawn her back from the window
and clapped her into sanity, now he let her alone. At the end of one of
their quarrels she had flung out on to the balcony, and then had watched
him through the opening in the shutter. He had lighted a cigarette!

Stewart spent every daylight hour at the hotel, or walking over the
mountain roads, seldom alone with Anita, but always near her. He left
Marie sulking or sewing, as the case might be. He returned in the
evening to find her still sulking, still sewing.

But Marie did not sulk all day, or sew. She too was out, never far from
Stewart, always watching. Many times she escaped discovery only by a
miracle, as when she stooped behind an oxcart, pretending to tie her
shoe, or once when they all met face to face, and although she lowered
her veil Stewart must have known her instantly had he not been so intent
on helping Anita over a slippery gutter.

She planned a dozen forms of revenge and found them impossible of
execution. Stewart himself was frightfully unhappy. For the first
time in his life he was really in love, with all the humility of the
condition. There were days when he would not touch Anita's hand, when
he hardly spoke, when the girl herself would have been outraged at
his conduct had she not now and then caught him watching her, seen the
wretchedness in his eyes.

The form of Marie's revenge was unpremeditated, after all. The light
mountain snow was augmented by a storm; roads were ploughed through
early in the morning, leaving great banks on either side. Sleigh-bells
were everywhere. Coasting parties made the steep roads a menace to
the pedestrian; every up-climbing sleigh carried behind it a string of
sleds, going back to the starting-point.

Below the hotel was the Serpentine Coast, a long and dangerous course,
full of high-banked curves, of sudden descents, of long straightaway
dashes through the woodland. Two miles, perhaps three, it wound its
tortuous way down the mountain. Up by the highroad to the crest again,
only a mile or less. Thus it happened that the track was always clear,
except for speeding sleds. No coasters, dragging sleds back up the
slide, interfered.

The track was crowded. Every minute a sled set out, sped down the
straightaway, dipped, turned, disappeared. A dozen would be lined up,
waiting for the interval and the signal. And here, watching from the
porch of the church, in the very shadow of the saints, Marie found her
revenge.

Stewart had given her a little wrist watch. Stewart and Anita
were twelfth in line. By the watch, then, twelve minutes down the
mountain-side, straight down through the trees to a curve that Marie
knew well, a bad curve, only to be taken by running well up on the
snowbank. Beyond the snowbank there was a drop, fifteen feet, perhaps
more, into the yard of a Russian villa. Stewart and Anita were twelfth;
a man in a green stocking-cap was eleventh. The hillside was steep.
Marie negotiated it by running from tree to tree, catching herself,
steadying for a second, then down again. Once she fell and rolled a
little distance. There was no time to think; perhaps had she thought she
would have weakened. She had no real courage, only desperation.

As she reached the track the man in the green stocking-cap was in
sight. A minute and a half she had then, not more. She looked about her
hastily. A stone might serve her purpose, almost anything that would
throw the sled out of its course. She saw a tree branch just above the
track and dragged at it frantically. Some one was shouting at her from
an upper window of the Russian villa. She did not hear. Stewart and
Anita had made the curve above and were coming down at frantic speed.
Marie stood, her back to the oncoming rush of the sled, swaying
slightly. When she could hear the singing of the runners she stooped and
slid the tree branch out against the track.

She had acted almost by instinct, but with devilish skill. The sled
swung to one side up the snowbank, and launched itself into the air.
Marie heard the thud and the silence that followed it. Then she turned
and scuttled like a hunted thing up the mountain side.

Peter put in a bad day. Marie was not about, could not be located.
Stewart, suffering from concussion, lay insensible all day and all of
the night. Peter could find no fracture, but felt it wise to get another
opinion. In the afternoon he sent for a doctor from the Kurhaus and
learned for the first time that Anita had also been hurt--a broken arm.
“Not serious,” said the Kurhaus man. “She is brave, very brave, the
young woman. I believe they are engaged?” Peter said he did not know and
thought very hard. Where was Marie? Not gone surely. Here about him lay
all her belongings, even her purse.

Toward evening Stewart showed some improvement. He was not conscious,
but he swallowed better and began to toss about. Peter, who had had a
long day and very little sleep the night before, began to look jaded. He
would have sent for a nurse from the Kurhaus, but he doubted Stewart's
ability to stand any extra financial strain, and Peter could not help
any.

The time for supper passed, and no Marie.

The landlady sent up a tray to Peter, stewed meat and potatoes, a
salad, coffee. Peter sat in a corner with his back to Stewart and ate
ravenously. He had had nothing since the morning's coffee. After that he
sat down again by the bed to watch. There was little to do but watch.

The meal had made him drowsy. He thought of his pipe. Perhaps if he got
some fresh air and a smoke! He remembered the balcony.

It was there on the balcony that he found Marie, a cowering thing that
pushed his hands away when he would have caught her and broke into
passionate crying.

“I cannot! I cannot!”

“Cannot what?” demanded Peter gently, watching her. So near was the
balcony rail!

“Throw myself over. I've tried, Peter. I cannot!”

“I should think not!” said Peter sternly. “Just now when we need you,
too! Come in and don't be a foolish child.”

But Marie would not go in. She held back, clinging tight to Peter's big
hand, moaning out in the dialect of the people that always confused him
her story of the day, of what she had done, of watching Stewart brought
back, of stealing into the house and through an adjacent room to the
balcony, of her desperation and her cowardice.

She was numb with cold, exhaustion, and hunger, quite childish,
helpless. Peter stood out on the balcony with his arm round her, while
the night wind beat about them, and pondered what was best to do. He
thought she might come in and care for Stewart, at least, until he was
conscious. He could get her some supper.

“How can I?” she asked. “I was seen. They are searching for me now. Oh,
Peter! Peter!”

“Who is searching for you? Who saw you?”

“The people in the Russian villa.”

“Did they see your face?”

“I wore a veil. I think not.”

“Then come in and change your clothes. There is a train down at
midnight. You can take it.”

“I have no money.”

This raised a delicate question. Marie absolutely refused to take
Stewart's money. She had almost none of her own. And there were other
complications--where was she to go? The family of the injured girl did
not suspect her since they did not know of her existence. She might get
away without trouble. But after that, what?

Peter pondered this on the balcony, while Marie in the bedroom was
changing her clothing, soaked with a day in the snow. He came to the
inevitable decision, the decision he knew at the beginning that he was
going to make.

“If I could only put it up to Harmony first!” he reflected. “But she
will understand when I tell her. She always understands.”

Standing there on the little balcony, with tragedy the thickness of
a pine board beyond him, Peter experienced a bit of the glow of the
morning, as of one who stumbling along in a dark place puts a hand on a
friend.

He went into the room. Stewart was lying very still and breathing
easily. On her knees beside the bed knelt Marie. At Peter's step she
rose and faced him.

“I am leaving him, Peter, for always.”

“Good!” said Peter heartily. “Better for you and better for him.”

Marie drew a long breath. “The night train,” she said listlessly, “is an
express. I had forgotten. It is double fare.”

“What of that, little sister?” said Peter. “What is a double fare when
it means life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? And there will be
happiness, little sister.”

He put his hand in his pocket.



CHAPTER XX

The Portier was almost happy that morning. For one thing, he had won
honorable mention at the Schubert Society the night before; for another,
that night the Engel was to sing Mignon, and the Portier had spent his
Christmas tips for a ticket. All day long he had been poring over the
score.

“'Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluhen?'” he sang with feeling
while he polished the floors. He polished them with his feet, wearing
felt boots for the purpose, and executing in the doing a sort of
ungainly dance--a sprinkle of wax, right foot forward and back, left
foot forward and back, both feet forward and back in a sort of double
shuffle; more wax, more vigorous polishing, more singing, with longer
pauses for breath. “'Knowest thou the land where the lemon trees
bloom?'” he bellowed--sprinkle of wax, right foot, left foot, any foot
at all. Now and then he took the score from his pocket and pored over
it, humming the air, raising his eyebrows over the high notes, dropping
his chin to the low ones. It was a wonderful morning. Between greetings
to neighbors he sang--a bit of talk, a bit of song.

“'Kennst du das Land'--Good-morning, sir--the old Rax wears a crown. It
will snow soon. 'Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen'--Ah, madam the milk
Frau, and are the cows frozen up to-day like the pump? No? Marvelous!
Dost thou know that to-night is Mignon at the Opera, and that the Engel
sings? 'Kennst du das Land'--”

At eleven came Rosa with her husband, the soldier from Salzburg with one
lung. He was having a holiday from his sentry duty at the hospital,
and the one lung seemed to be a libel, for while the women had coffee
together and a bit of mackerel he sang a very fair bass to the Portier's
tenor. Together they pored over the score, and even on their way to the
beer hall hummed together such bits as they recalled.

On one point they differed. The score was old and soiled with much
thumbing. At one point, destroyed long since, the sentry sang A sharp:
the Portier insisted on A natural. They argued together over three
Steins of beer; the waiter, referred to, decided for A flat. It was a
serious matter to have one's teeth set, as one may say, for a natural
and then to be shocked with an unexpected half-tone up or down! It
destroyed the illusion; it disappointed; it hurt.

The sentry stuck to the sharp--it was sung so at the Salzburg opera.
The Portier snapped his thumb at the Salzburg opera. Things were looking
serious; they walked back to the locale in silence. The sentry coughed.
Possibly there was something, after all, in the one-lung rumor.

It was then that the Portier remembered Harmony. She would know; perhaps
she had the score.

Harmony was having a bad morning. She had slept little until dawn, and
Peter's stealthy closing of the outer door had wakened her by its very
caution. After that there had been no more sleep. She had sat up in bed
with her chin in her hands and thought.

In the pitiless dawn, with no Peter to restore her to cheerfulness,
things looked black, indeed. To what had she fallen, that first one man
and then another must propose marriage to her to save her. To save her
from what? From what people thought, or--each from the other?

Were men so evil that they never trusted each other? McLean had frankly
distrusted Peter, had said so. Or could it be that there was something
about her, something light and frivolous? She had been frivolous. She
always laughed at Peter's foolishnesses. Perhaps that was it. That
was it. They were afraid for her. She had thrown herself on Peter's
hands--almost into his arms. She had made this situation.

She must get away, of course. If only she had some one to care for Jimmy
until Peter returned! But there was no one. The Portier's wife was fond
of Jimmy, but not skillful. And suppose he were to wake in the night and
call for her and she would not come. She cried a little over this. After
a time she pattered across the room in her bare feet and got from a
bureau drawer the money she had left. There was not half enough to take
her home. She could write; the little mother might get some for her, but
at infinite cost, infinite humiliation. That would have to be a final,
desperate resort.

She felt a little more cheerful when she had had a cup of coffee. Jimmy
wakened about that time, and she went through the details of his morning
toilet with all the brightness she could assume--bath blankets, warm
bath, toenails, finger-nails, fresh nightgown, fresh sheets, and--final
touch of all--a real barber's part straight from crown to brow. After
that ten minutes under extra comforters while the room aired.

She hung over the boy that morning in an agony of tenderness--he was so
little, so frail, and she must leave him. Only one thing sustained her.
The boy loved her, but it was Peter he idolized. When he had Peter he
needed nothing else. In some curious process of his childish mind Peter
and Daddy mingled in inextricable confusion. More than once he had
recalled events in the roving life he and his father had led.

“You remember that, don't you?” he would say.

“Certainly I remember,” Peter would reply heartily.

“That evening on the steamer when I ate so many raisins.”

“Of course. And were ill.”

“Not ill--not that time. But you said I'd make a good pudding! You
remember that, don't you?”

And Peter would recall it all.

Peter would be left. That was the girl's comfort.

She made a beginning at gathering her things together that morning,
while the boy dozed and the white mice scurried about the little cage.
She could not take her trunk, or Peter would trace it. She would have
to carry her belongings, a few at a time, to wherever she found a room.
Then when Peter came back she could slip away and he would never find
her.

At noon came the Portier and the sentry, now no longer friends, and rang
the doorbell. Harmony was rather startled. McLean and Mrs. Boyer had
been her only callers, and she did not wish to see either of them. But
after a second ring she gathered her courage in her hands and opened the
door.

She turned pale when she saw the sentry in his belted blue-gray tunic
and high cap. She thought, of course, that Jimmy had been traced and
that now he would be taken away. If the sentry knew her, however, he
kept his face impassive and merely touched his cap. The Portier stated
their errand. Harmony's face cleared. She even smiled as the Portier
extended to her the thumbed score with its missing corner. What,
after all, does it matter which was right--whether it was A sharp or A
natural? What really matters is that Harmony, having settled the dispute
and clinched the decision by running over the score for a page or two,
turned to find the Portier, ecstatic eyes upturned, hands folded on
paunch, enjoying a delirium of pleasure, and the sentry nowhere in
sight.

He was discovered a moment later in the doorway of Jimmy's room, where,
taciturn as ever, severe, martial, he stood at attention, shoulders
back, arms at his sides, thumbs in. In this position he was making, with
amazing rapidity, a series of hideous grimaces for the benefit of the
little boy in the bed: marvelous faces they were, in which nose, mouth,
and eyes seemed interchangeable, where features played leapfrog with
one another. When all was over--perhaps when his repertoire was
exhausted--the sentry returned his nose to the center of his face,
replaced eyes and mouth, and wiped the ensemble with a blue cotton
handkerchief. Then, still in silence, he saluted and withdrew, leaving
the youngster enraptured, staring at the doorway.

Harmony had decided the approximate location of her room. In the
higher part of the city, in the sixteenth district, there were many
unpretentious buildings. She had hunted board there and she knew. It
was far from the Stadt, far from the fashionable part of town, a
neighborhood of small shops, of frank indigence. There surely she could
find a room, and perhaps in one of the small stores what she failed to
secure in the larger, a position.

Rosa having taken her soldier away, Harmony secured the Portier's wife
to sit with Jimmy and spent two hours that afternoon looking about for
a room. She succeeded finally in finding one, a small and wretchedly
furnished bedroom, part of the suite of a cheap dressmaker. The approach
was forbidding enough. One entered a cavelike, cobble-paved court
under the building, filled with wagons, feeding horses, quarrelsome and
swearing teamsters. From the side a stone staircase took off and led,
twisting from one landing cave to another, to the upper floor.

Here lived the dressmaker, amid the constant whirring of
sewing-machines, the Babel of workpeople. Harmony, seeking not a
home but a hiding-place, took the room at once. She was asked for no
reference. In a sort of agony lest this haven fail her she paid for a
week in advance. The wooden bed, the cracked mirror over the table, even
the pigeons outside on the windowsill were hers for a week.

The dressmaker was friendly, almost garrulous.

“I will have it cleaned,” she explained. “I have been so busy: the
masquerade season is on. The Fraulein is American, is she not?”

“Yes.”

“One knows the Americans. They are chic, not like the English. I have
some American customers.”

Harmony started. The dressmaker was shrewd. Many people hid in the
sixteenth district. She hastened to reassure the girl.

“They will not disturb you. And just now I have but one, a dancer. I
shall have the room cleaned. Good-bye, Fraulein.”

So far, good. She had a refuge now, one spot that the venom of scandal
could not poison, where she could study and work--work hard, although
there could be no more lessons--one spot where Peter would not have to
protect her, where Peter, indeed, would never find her. This thought,
which should have brought comfort, brought only new misery. Peace seemed
dearly bought all at once; shabby, wholesome, hearty Peter, with his
rough hair and quiet voice, his bulging pockets and steady eyes--she was
leaving Peter forever, exchanging his companionship for that of a row
of pigeons on a window-sill. He would find some one, of course; but who
would know that he liked toast made hard and plenty of butter, or to
leave his bed-clothing loose at the foot, Peter being very long and apt
to lop over? The lopping over brought a tear or two. A very teary and
tragic young heroine, this Harmony, prone to go about for the last day
or two with a damp little handkerchief tucked in her sleeve.

She felt her way down the staircase and into the cave below. Fate hangs
by a very slender thread sometimes. If a wagon had not lumbered by as
she reached the lowest step, so that she must wait and thus had time
to lower her veil, she would have been recognized at once by the little
Georgiev, waiting to ascend. But the wagon was there, Harmony lowered
her veil, the little Georgiev, passing a veiled young woman in the
gloom, went up the staircase with even pulses and calm and judicial
bearing, up to the tiny room a floor or two below Harmony's, where he
wrote reports to the Minister of War and mixed them with sonnets--to
Harmony.

Harmony went back to the Siebensternstrasse, having accomplished what
she had set out to do and being very wretched in consequence. Because
she was leaving the boy so soon she strove to atone for her coming
defection by making it a gala evening. The child was very happy. She
tucked him up in the salon, lighted all the candles, served him the
daintiest of suppers there. She brought in the mice and tied tiny bows
on their necks; she played checkers with him while the supper dishes
waited, and went down to defeat in three hilarious games; and last of
all she played to him, joyous music at first, then slower, drowsier
airs, until his heavy head dropped on his shoulder and she gathered him
up in tender arms and carried him to bed.

It was dawn when Marie arrived. Harmony was sleeping soundly when the
bell rang. Her first thought was that Peter had come back--but Peter
carried a key. The bell rang again, and she slipped on the old kimono
and went to the door.

“Is it Peter?” she called, hand on knob.

“I come from Peter. I have a letter,” in German.

“Who is it?”

“You do not know me--Marie Jedlicka. Please let me come in.”

Bewildered, Harmony opened the door, and like a gray ghost Marie slipped
by her and into the hall.

There was a gaslight burning very low; Harmony turned it up and faced
her visitor. She recognized her at once--the girl Dr. Stewart had been
with in the coffee-house.

“Something has happened to Peter!”

“No. He is well. He sent this to the Fraulein Wells.”

“I am the Fraulein Wells.”

Marie held out the letter and staggered. Harmony put her in a chair; she
was bewildered, almost frightened. Crisis of some sort was written on
Marie's face. Harmony felt very young, very incapable. The other girl
refused coffee, would not even go into the salon until Peter's letter
had been read. She was a fugitive, a criminal; the Austrian law is
severe to those that harbor criminals. Let Harmony read:--

“DEAR HARRY,--Will you forgive me for this and spread the wings of your
splendid charity over this poor child? Perhaps I am doing wrong in
sending her to you, but just now it is all I can think of. If she wants
to talk let her talk. It will probably help her. Also feed her, will
you? And if she cannot sleep, give her one of the blue powders I fixed
for Jimmy. I'll be back later to-day if I can make it.

“PETER”

Harmony glanced up from the letter. Marie sat drooping in her chair. Her
eyes were sunken in her head. She had recognized her at once, but any
surprise she may have felt at finding Harmony in Peter's apartment was
sunk in a general apathy, a compound of nervous reaction and fatigue.
During the long hours in the express she had worn herself out with
fright and remorse: there was nothing left now but exhaustion.

Harmony was bewildered, but obedient. She went back to the cold kitchen
and lighted a fire. She made Marie as comfortable as she could in the
salon, and then went into her room to dress. There she read the letter
again, and wondered if Peter had gone through life like this, picking up
waifs and strays and shouldering their burdens for them. Decidedly, life
with Peter was full of surprises.

She remembered, as she hurried into her clothes; the boys' club back
in America and the spelling-matches. Decidedly, also, Peter was an
occupation, a state of mind, a career. No musician, hoping for a career
of her own, could possibly marry Peter.

That was a curious morning in the old lodge of Maria Theresa, while
Stewart in the Pension Waldheim struggled back to consciousness, while
Peter sat beside him and figured on an old envelope the problem of
dividing among four enough money to support one, while McLean ate his
heart out in wretchedness in his hotel.

Marie told her story over the early breakfast, sitting with her thin
elbows on the table, her pointed chin in her palms.

“And now I am sorry,” she finished. “It has done no good. If it had only
killed her but she was not much hurt. I saw her rise and bend over him.”

Harmony was silent. She had no stock of aphorisms for the situation, no
worldly knowledge, only pity.

“Did Peter say he would recover?”

“Yes. They will both recover and go to America. And he will marry her.”

Perhaps Harmony would have been less comfortable, Marie less frank, had
Marie realized that this establishment of Peter's was not on the same
basis as Stewart's had been, or had Harmony divined her thought.

The presence of the boy was discovered by his waking. Marie was taken
in and presented. She looked stupefied. Certainly the Americans were a
marvelous people--to have taken into their house and their hearts this
strange child--if he were strange. Marie's suspicious little slum mind
was not certain.

In the safety and comfort of the little apartment the Viennese expanded,
cheered. She devoted herself to the boy, telling him strange folk tales,
singing snatches of songs for him. The youngster took a liking to her at
once. It seemed to Harmony, going about her morning routine, that Marie
was her solution and Peter's.

During the afternoon she took a package to the branch post-office and
mailed it by parcel-post to the Wollbadgasse. On the way she met Mrs.
Boyer face to face. That lady looked severely ahead, and Harmony passed
her with her chin well up and the eyes of a wounded animal.

McLean sent a great box of flowers that day. She put them, for lack of a
vase, in a pitcher beside Jimmy's bed.

At dusk a telegram came to say that Stewart was better and that Peter
was on his way down to Vienna. He would arrive at eight. Time was
very short now--seconds flashed by, minutes galloped. Harmony stewed
a chicken for supper, and creamed the breast for Jimmy. She fixed the
table, flowers in the center, the best cloth, Peter's favorite cheese.
Six o'clock, six-thirty, seven; Marie was telling Jimmy a fairy tale and
making the fairies out of rosebuds. The studylamp was lighted, the stove
glowing, Peter's slippers were out, his old smoking-coat, his pipe.

A quarter past seven. Peter would be near Vienna now and hungry. If he
could only eat his supper before he learned--but that was impossible.
He would come in, as he always did, and slam the outer door, and open it
again to close it gently, as he always did, and then he would look for
her, going from room to room until he found her--only to-night he would
not find her.

She did not say good-bye to Jimmy. She stood in the doorway and said a
little prayer for him. Marie had made the flower fairies on needles, and
they stood about his head on the pillow--pink and yellow and white elves
with fluffy skirts. Then, very silently, she put on her hat and jacket
and closed the outer door behind her. In the courtyard she turned and
looked up. The great chandelier in the salon was not lighted, but from
the casement windows shone out the comfortable glow of Peter's lamp.



CHAPTER XXI

Peter had had many things to think over during the ride down the
mountains. He had the third-class compartment to himself, and sat in a
corner, soft hat over his eyes. Life had never been particularly simple
to Peter--his own life, yes; a matter of three meals a day--he had had
fewer--a roof, clothing. But other lives had always touched him closely,
and at the contact points Peter glowed, fused, amalgamated. Thus he had
been many people--good, indifferent, bad, but all needy. Thus, also,
Peter had committed vicarious crimes, suffered vicarious illnesses,
starved, died, loved--vicariously.

And now, after years of living for others, Peter was living at last for
himself--and suffering.

Not that he understood exactly what ailed him. He thought he was tired,
which was true enough, having had little sleep for two or three
nights. Also he explained to himself that he was smoking too much, and
resolutely--lighted another cigarette.

Two things had revealed Peter's condition to himself: McLean had said:
“You are crazy in love with her.” McLean's statement, lacking subtlety,
had had a certain quality of directness. Even then Peter, utterly
miserable, had refused to capitulate, when to capitulate would have
meant the surrender of the house in the Siebensternstrasse. And the
absence from Harmony had shown him just where he stood.

He was in love, crazy in love. Every fiber of his long body glowed with
it, ached with it. And every atom of his reason told him what mad folly
it was, this love. Even if Harmony cared--and at the mere thought his
heart pounded--what madness for her, what idiocy for him! To ask her to
accept the half of--nothing, to give up a career to share his struggle
for one, to ask her to bury her splendid talent and her beauty under a
bushel that he might wave aloft his feeble light!

And there was no way out, no royal road to fortune by the route he had
chosen; nothing but grinding work, with a result problematical and years
ahead. There were even no legacies to expect, he thought whimsically.
Peter had known a chap once, struggling along in gynecology, who had
had a fortune left him by a G. P., which being interpreted is Grateful
Patient. Peter's patients had a way of living, and when they did drop
out, as happened now and then, had also a way of leaving Peter an unpaid
bill in token of appreciation; Peter had even occasionally helped to
bury them, by way, he defended himself, of covering up his mistakes.

Peter, sitting back in his corner, allowed the wonderful scenery to slip
by unnoticed. He put Harmony the Desirable out of his mind, and took
to calculating on a scrap of paper what could be done for Harmony the
Musician. He could hold out for three months, he calculated, and still
have enough to send Harmony home and to get home himself on a slow boat.
The Canadian lines were cheap. If Jimmy lived perhaps he could take him
along: if not--

He would have to put six months' work in the next three. That was not so
hard. He had got along before with less sleep, and thrived on it. Also
there must be no more idle evenings, with Jimmy in the salon propped in
a chair and Harmony playing, the room dark save for the glow from the
stove and for the one candle at Harmony's elbow.

All roads lead to Rome. Peter's thoughts, having traveled in a circle,
were back again to Harmony the Desirable--Harmony playing in the
firelight, Harmony Hushed over the brick stove, Harmony paring potatoes
that night in the kitchen when he--Harmony! Harmony!

Stewart knew all about the accident and its cause. Peter had surmised as
much when the injured man failed to ask for Marie.

He tested him finally by bringing Marie's name into the conversation.
Stewart ignored it, accepted her absence, refused to be drawn.

That was at first. During the day, however, as he gained strength, he
grew restless and uneasy. As the time approached for Peter to leave, he
was clearly struggling with himself. The landlady had agreed to care
for him and was bustling about the room. During one of her absences he
turned to Peter.

“I suppose Marie hasn't been round?”

“She came back last night.”

“Did she tell you?”

“Yes, poor child.”

“She's a devil!” Stewart said, and lay silent. Then: “I saw her shoot
that thing out in front of us, but there was no time--Where is she now?”

“Marie? I sent her to Vienna.”

Stewart fell back, relieved, not even curious.

“Thank Heaven for that!” he said. “I don't want to see her again. I'd do
something I'd be sorry for. The kindest thing to say for her is that she
was not sane.”

“No,” said Peter gravely, “she was hardly sane.”

Stewart caught his steady gaze and glanced away. For him Marie's little
tragedy had been written and erased. He would forget it magnanimously.
He had divided what he had with her, and she had repaid him by
attempting his life. And not only his life, but Anita's. Peter followed
his line of reasoning easily.

“It's quite a frequent complication, Stewart,” he said, “but every man
to whom it happens regards himself more or less as a victim. She fell in
love with you, that's all. Her conduct is contrary to the ethics of the
game, but she's been playing poor cards all along.”

“Where is she?”

“That doesn't matter, does it?”

Stewart had lain back and closed his eyes. No, it didn't matter. A sense
of great relief overwhelmed him. Marie was gone, frightened into hiding.
It was as if a band that had been about him was suddenly loosed: he
breathed deep, he threw out his arms and laughed from sheer reaction.
Then, catching Peter's not particularly approving eyes, he colored.

“Good Lord, Peter!” he said, “you don't know what I've gone through with
that little devil. And now she's gone!” He glanced round the disordered
room, where bandages and medicines crowded toilet articles on the
dressing-table, where one of Marie's small slippers still lay where it
had fallen under the foot of the bed, where her rosary still hung over
the corner of the table. “Ring for the maid, Peter, will you! I've got
to get this junk out of here. Some of Anita's people may come.”

During that afternoon ride, while the train clump-clumped down the
mountains, Peter thought of all this. Some of Marie's “junk” was in his
bag; her rosary lay in his breastpocket, along with the pin he had sent
her at Christmas. Peter happened on it, still in its box, which looked
as if it had been cried over. He had brought it with him. He admired it
very much, and it had cost money he could ill afford to spend.

It was late when the train drew into the station. Peter, encumbered with
Marie's luggage and his own, lowered his window and added his voice
to the chorus of plaintive calls: “Portier! Portier!” they shouted.
“Portier!” bawled Peter.

He was obliged to resort to the extravagance of a taxicab. Possibly
a fiacre would have done as well, but it cost almost as much and was
slower. Moments counted now: a second was an hour, an hour a decade. For
he was on his way to Harmony. Extravagance became recklessness. As soon
die for a sheep as a lamb! He stopped the taxicab and bought a bunch of
violets, stopped again and bought lilies of the valley to combine with
the violets, went out of his way to the American grocery and bought a
jar of preserved fruit.

By that time he was laden. The jar of preserves hung in one shabby
pocket, Marie's rosary dangled from another; the violets were buttoned
under his overcoat against the cold.

At the very last he held the taxi an extra moment and darted into the
delicatessen shop across the Siebensternstrasse. From there, standing
inside the doorway, he could see the lights in the salon across the way,
the glow of his lamp, the flicker that was the fire. Peter whistled,
stamped his cold feet, quite neglected--in spite of repeated warnings
from Harmony--to watch the Herr Schenkenkaufer weigh the cheese,
accepted without a glance a ten-Kronen piece with a hole in it.

“And how is the child to-day?” asked the Herr Schenkenkaufer, covering
the defective gold piece with conversation.

“I do not know; I have been away,” said Peter. He almost sang it.

“All is well or I would have heard. Wilhelm the Portier was but just now
here.”

“All well, of course,” sang Peter, eyes on the comfortable Floor of
his lamp, the flicker that was the fire. “Auf wiedersehen, Herr
Schenkenkaufer.”

“Auf wiedersehen, Herr Doktor.”

Violets, lilies-of-the-valley, cheese, rosary, luggage--thus Peter
climbed the stairs. The Portier wished to assist him, but Peter
declined. The Portier was noisy. There was to be a moment when Peter,
having admitted himself with extreme caution, would present himself
without so much as a creak to betray him, would stand in a doorway until
some one, Harmony perhaps--ah, Peter!--would turn and see him. She had a
way of putting one slender hand over her heart when she was startled.

Peter put down the jar of preserved peaches outside. It was to be a
second surprise. Also he put down the flowers; they were to be brought
in last of all. One surprise after another is a cumulative happiness.
Peter did not wish to swallow all his cake in one bite.

For once he did not slam the outer door, although he very nearly did,
and only caught it at the cost of a bruised finger. Inside he listened.
There was no clatter of dishes, no scurrying back and forth from table
to stove in the final excitement of dishing up. There was, however,
a highly agreeable odor of stewing chicken, a crisp smell of baking
biscuit.

In the darkened hall Peter had to pause to steady himself. For he had
a sudden mad impulse to shout Harmony's name, to hold out his arms, to
call her to him there in the warm darkness, and when she had come, to
catch her to him, to tell his love in one long embrace, his arms about
her, his rough cheek against her soft one. No wonder he grew somewhat
dizzy and had to pull himself together.

The silence rather surprised him, until he recalled that Harmony was
probably sewing in the salon, as she did sometimes when dinner was ready
to serve. The boy was asleep, no doubt. He stole along on tiptoe, hardly
breathing, to the first doorway, which was Jimmy's.

Jimmy was asleep. Round him were the pink and yellow and white flower
fairies with violet heads. Peter saw them and smiled. Then, his eyes
growing accustomed to the light, he saw Marie, face down on the floor,
her head on her arms. Still as she was, Peter knew she was not sleeping,
only fighting her battle over again and losing.

Some of the joyousness of his return fled from Peter, never to come
back. The two silent figures were too close to tragedy. Peter, with a
long breath, stole past the door and on to the salon. No Harmony there,
but the great room was warm and cheery. The table was drawn near the
stove and laid for Abendessen. The white porcelain coffee-pot had
boiled and extinguished itself, according to its method, and now gently
steamed.

On to the kitchen. Much odor of food here, two candles lighted
but burning low, a small platter with money on it, quite a little
money--almost all he had left Harmony when he went away.

Peter was dazed at first. Even when Marie, hastily summoned, had
discovered that Harmony's clothing was gone, when a search of the rooms
revealed the absence of her violin and her music, when at last the fact
stared them, incontestable, in the face, Peter refused to accept it. He
sat for a half-hour or even more by the fire in the salon, obstinately
refusing to believe she was gone, keeping the supper warm against her
return. He did not think or reason, he sat and waited, saying nothing,
hardly moving, save when a gust of wind slammed the garden gate. Then he
was all alive, sat erect, ears straining for her hand on the knob of the
outer door.

The numbness of the shock passed at last, to be succeeded by alarm.
During all the time that followed, that condition persisted, fright,
almost terror. Harmony alone in the city, helpless, dependent,
poverty-stricken. Harmony seeking employment under conditions Peter knew
too well. But with his alarm came rage.

Marie had never seen Peter angry. She shrank from this gaunt and
gray-faced man who raved up and down the salon, questioning the
frightened Portier, swearing fierce oaths, bringing accusation after
accusation against some unnamed woman to whom he applied epithets that
Marie's English luckily did not comprehend. Not a particularly heroic
figure was Peter that night: a frantic, disheveled individual, before
whom the Portier cowered, who struggled back to sanity through a berserk
haze and was liable to swift relapses into fury again.

To this succeeded at last the mental condition that was to be Peter's
for many days, hopelessness and alarm and a grim determination to keep
on searching.

There were no clues. The Portier made inquiries of all the cabstands in
the neighborhood. Harmony had not taken a cab. The delicatessen seller
had seen her go out that afternoon with a bundle and return without it.
She had been gone only an hour or so. That gave Peter a ray of hope that
she might have found a haven in the neighborhood--until he recalled the
parcel-post.

One possibility he clung to: Mrs. Boyer had made the mischief, but she
had also offered the girl a home. She might be at the Boyers'. Peter,
flinging on a hat and without his overcoat, went to the Boyers'. Time
was valuable, and he had wasted an hour, two hours, in useless rage. So
he took a taxicab, and being by this time utterly reckless of cost let
it stand while he interviewed the Boyers.

Boyer himself, partially undressed, opened the door to his ring. Peter
was past explanation or ceremonial.

“Is Harmony here?” he demanded.

“Harmony?”

“Harmony Wells. She's disappeared, missing.”

“Come in,” said Boyer, alive to the strain in Peter's voice. “I don't
know, I haven't heard anything. I'll ask Mrs. Boyer.”

During the interval it took for a whispered colloquy in the bedroom, and
for Mrs. Boyer to don her flannel wrapper, Peter suffered the tortures
of the damned. Whatever Mrs. Boyer had meant to say by way of protest at
the intrusion on the sacred privacy of eleven o'clock and bedtime died
in her throat. Her plump and terraced chin shook with agitation, perhaps
with guilt. Peter, however, had got himself in hand. He told a quiet
story; Boyer listened; Mrs. Boyer, clutching her wrapper about her
unstayed figure, listened.

“I thought,” finished Peter, “that since you had offered her a
refuge--from me--she might have come here.”

“I offered her a refuge--before I had been to the Pension Schwarz.”

“Ah!” said Peter slowly. “And what about the Pension Schwarz?”

“Need you ask? I learned that you were all put out there. I am obliged
to say, Dr. Byrne, that under the circumstances had the girl come here I
could hardly--Frank, I will speak!--I could hardly have taken her in.”

Peter went white and ducked as from a physical blow, stumbling out
into the hall again. There he thought of something to say in reply,
repudiation, thought better of it, started down the stairs.

Boyer followed him helplessly. At the street door, however, he put his
hand on Peter's shoulder. “You know, old man, I don't believe that.
These women--”

“I know,” said Peter simply. “Thank you. Good-night.”



CHAPTER XXII

Harmony's only thought had been flight, from Peter, from McLean, from
Mrs. Boyer. She had devoted all her energies to losing herself,
to cutting the threads that bound her to the life in the
Siebensternstrasse. She had drawn all her money, as Peter discovered
later. The discovery caused him even more acute anxiety. The city was
full of thieves; poverty and its companion, crime, lurked on every
shadowy staircase of the barracklike houses, or peered, red-eyed, from
every alleyway.

And into this city of contrasts--of gray women of the night hugging
gratings for warmth and accosting passers-by with loathsome gestures, of
smug civilians hiding sensuous mouths under great mustaches, of dapper
soldiers to whom the young girl unattended was potential prey, into
this night city of terror, this day city of frightful contrasts, ermine
rubbing elbows with frost-nipped flesh, destitution sauntering along
the fashionable Prater for lack of shelter, gilt wheels of royalty and
yellow wheels of courtesans--Harmony had ventured alone for the second
time.

And this time there was no Peter Byrne to accost her cheerily in the
twilight and win her by sheer friendliness. She was alone. Her funds
were lower, much lower. And something else had gone--her faith. Mrs.
Boyer had seen to that. In the autumn Harmony had faced the city
clear-eyed and unafraid; now she feared it, met it with averted eyes,
alas! understood it.

It was not the Harmony who had bade a brave farewell to Scatchy and the
Big Soprano in the station who fled to her refuge on the upper floor of
the house in the Wollbadgasse. This was a hunted creature, alternately
flushed and pale, who locked her door behind her before she took off
her hat, and who, having taken off her hat and surveyed her hiding-place
with tragic eyes, fell suddenly to trembling, alone there in the
gaslight.

She had had no plans beyond flight. She had meant, once alone, to think
the thing out. But the room was cold, she had had nothing to eat,
and the single slovenly maid was a Hungarian and spoke no German. The
dressmaker had gone to the Ronacher. Harmony did not know where to find
a restaurant, was afraid to trust herself to the streets alone. She went
to bed supperless, with a tiny picture of Peter and Jimmy and the wooden
sentry under her cheek.

The pigeons, cooing on the window-sill, wakened her early. She was
confused at first, got up to see if Jimmy had thrown off his blankets,
and wakened to full consciousness with the sickening realization that
Jimmy was not there.

The dressmaker, whose name was Monia Reiff, slept late after her evening
out. Harmony, collapsing with hunger and faintness, waited as long as
she could. Then she put on her things desperately and ventured out.
Surely at this hour Peter would not be searching, and even if he were he
would never think of the sixteenth district. He would make inquiries, of
course--the Pension Schwarz, Boyers', the master's.

The breakfast brought back her strength and the morning air gave her
confidence. The district, too, was less formidable than the neighborhood
of the Karntnerstrasse and the Graben. The shops were smaller. The
windows exhibited cheaper goods. There was a sort of family atmosphere
about many of them; the head of the establishment in the doorway, the
wife at the cashier's desk, daughters, cousins, nieces behind the
wooden counters. The shopkeepers were approachable, instead of familiar.
Harmony met no rebuffs, was respectfully greeted and cheerfully listened
to. In many cases the application ended in a general consultation,
shopkeeper, wife, daughters, nieces, slim clerks with tiny mustaches.
She got addresses, followed them up, more consultations, more addresses,
but no work. The reason dawned on her after a day of tramping, during
which she kept carefully away from that part of the city where Peter
might be searching for her.

The fact was, of course, that her knowledge of English was her sole
asset as a clerk. And there were few English and no tourists in the
sixteenth district. She was marketing a commodity for which there was no
demand.

She lunched at a Konditorei, more to rest her tired body than because
she needed food. The afternoon was as the morning. At six o'clock,
long after the midwinter darkness had fallen, she stumbled back to the
Wollbadgasse and up the whitewashed staircase.

She had a shock at the second landing. A man had stepped into the angle
to let her pass. A gasjet dared over his head, and she recognized the
short heavy figure and ardent eyes of Georgiev. She had her veil down
luckily, and he gave no sign of recognition. She passed on, and she
heard him a second later descending. But there had been something
reminiscent after all in her figure and carriage. The little Georgiev
paused, halfway down, and thought a moment. It was impossible, of
course. All women reminded him of the American. Had he not, only the
day before, followed for two city blocks a woman old enough to be
his mother, merely because she carried a violin case? But there was
something about the girl he had just passed--Bah!

A bad week for Harmony followed, a week of weary days and restless
nights when she slept only to dream of Peter--of his hurt and
incredulous eyes when he found she had gone; of Jimmy--that he needed
her, was worse, was dying. More than once she heard him sobbing and
wakened to the cooing of the pigeons on the window-sill. She grew thin
and sunken-eyed; took to dividing her small hoard, half of it with her,
half under the carpet, so that in case of accident all would not be
gone.

This, as it happened, was serious. One day, the sixth, she came back wet
to the skin from an all-day rain, to find that the carpet bank had been
looted. There was no clue. The stolid Hungarian, startled out of her
lethargy, protested innocence; the little dressmaker, who seemed honest
and friendly, wept in sheer sympathy. The fact remained--half the small
hoard was gone.

Two days more, a Sunday and a Monday. On Sunday Harmony played, and
Georgiev in the room below, translating into cipher a recent conference
between the Austrian Minister of War and the German Ambassador, put
aside his work and listened. She played, as once before she had played
when life seemed sad and tragic, the “Humoresque.” Georgiev, hands
behind his head and eyes upturned, was back in the Pension Schwarz that
night months ago when Harmony played the “Humoresque” and Peter stooped
outside her door. The little Bulgarian sighed and dreamed.

Harmony, a little sadder, a little more forlorn each day, pursued her
hopeless quest. She ventured into the heart of the Stadt and paid a
part of her remaining money to an employment bureau, to teach English
or violin, whichever offered, or even both. After she had paid they told
her it would be difficult, almost impossible without references. She had
another narrow escape as she was leaving. She almost collided with Olga,
the chambermaid, who, having clashed for the last time with Katrina, was
seeking new employment. On another occasion she saw Marie in the crowd
and was obsessed with a longing to call to her, to ask for Peter, for
Jimmy. That meeting took the heart out of the girl. Marie was white and
weary--perhaps the boy was worse. Perhaps Peter--Her heart contracted.
But that was absurd, of course, Peter was always well and strong.

Two things occurred that week, one unexpected, the other inevitable.
The unexpected occurrence was that Monia Reiff, finding Harmony being
pressed for work, offered the girl a situation. The wage was small, but
she could live on it.

The inevitable was that she met Georgiev on the stairs without her veil.

It was the first day in the workroom. The apprentices were carrying home
boxes for a ball that night. Thread was needed, and quickly. Harmony,
who did odds and ends of sewing, was most easily spared. She slipped on
her jacket and hat and ran down to the shop near by.

It was on the return that she met Georgiev coming down. The afternoon
was dark and the staircase unlighted. In the gloom one face was as
another. Georgiev, listening intently, hearing footsteps, drew back
into the embrasure of a window and waited. His swarthy face was tense,
expectant. As the steps drew near, were light feminine instead of
stealthy, the little spy relaxed somewhat. But still he waited,
crouched.

It was a second before he recognized Harmony, another instant before he
realized his good fortune. She had almost passed. He put out an unsteady
hand.

“Fraulein!”

“Herr Georgiev!”

The little Bulgarian was profoundly stirred. His fervid eyes gleamed.
He struggled against the barrier of language, broke out in passionate
Bulgar, switched to German punctuated with an English word here and
there. Made intelligible, it was that he had found her at last. Harmony
held her spools of thread and waited for the storm of languages to
subside. Then:--

“But you are not to say you have seen me, Herr Georgiev.”

“No?”

Harmony colored.

“I am--am hiding,” she explained. “Something very uncomfortable happened
and I came here. Please don't say you have seen me.”

Georgiev was puzzled at first. She had to explain very slowly, with his
ardent eyes on her. But he understood at last and agreed of course. His
incredulity was turning to certainty. Harmony had actually been in the
same building with him while he sought her everywhere else.

“Then,” he said at last, “it was you who played Sunday.”

“I surely.”

She made a move to pass him, but he held out an imploring hand.

“Fraulein, I may see you sometimes?”

“We shall meet again, of course.”

“Fraulein,--with all respect,--sometime perhaps you will walk out with
me?”

“I am very busy all day.”

“At night, then? For the exercise? I, with all respect, Fraulein!”

Harmony was touched.

“Sometime,” she consented. And then impulsively: “I am very lonely, Herr
Georgiev.”

She held out her hand, and the little Bulgarian bent over it and kissed
it reverently. The Herr Georgiev's father was a nobleman in his own
country, and all the little spy's training had been to make of a girl
in Harmony's situation lawful prey. But in the spy's glowing heart there
was nothing for Harmony to fear. She knew it. He stood, hat in hand,
while she went up the staircase. Then:--

“Fraulein!” anxiously.

“Yes?”

“Was there below at the entrance a tall man in a green velours hat?”

“I saw no one there.”

“I thank you, Fraulein.”

He watched her slender figure ascend, lose itself in the shadows,
listened until she reached the upper floors. Then with a sigh he clapped
his hat on his head and made his cautious way down to the street. There
was no man in a green velours hat below, but the little spy had an
uneasy feeling that eyes watched him, nevertheless. Life was growing
complicated for the Herr Georgiev.

Life was pressing very close to Harmony also in those days, a life she
had never touched before. She discovered, after a day or two in the
work-room, that Monia Reiff's business lay almost altogether among the
demi-monde. The sewing-girls, of Marie's type many of them, found in
the customers endless topics of conversation. Some things Harmony was
spared, much of the talk being in dialect. But a great deal of it she
understood, and she learned much that was not spoken. They talked
freely of the women, their clothes, and they talked a great deal about
a newcomer, an American dancer, for whom Monia was making an elaborate
outfit. The American's name was Lillian Le Grande. She was dancing at
one of the variety theaters.

Harmony was working on a costume for the Le Grande woman--a gold brocade
slashed to the knee at one side and with a fragment of bodice made of
gilt tissue. On the day after her encounter with Georgiev she met her.

There was a dispute over the gown, something about the draping. Monia,
flushed with irritation, came to the workroom door and glanced over the
girls. She singled out Harmony finally and called her.

“Come and put on the American's gown,” she ordered. “She wishes--Heaven
knows what she wishes!”

Harmony went unwillingly. Nothing she had heard of the Fraulein Le
Grande had prepossessed her. Her uneasiness was increased when she found
herself obliged to shed her gown and to stand for one terrible moment
before the little dressmaker's amused eyes.

“Thou art very lovely, very chic,” said Monia. The dress added to
rather than relieved Harmony's discomfiture. She donned it in one of the
fitting-rooms, made by the simple expedient of curtaining off a corner
of the large reception room. The slashed skirt embarrassed her; the low
cut made her shrink. Monia was frankly entranced. Above the gold tissue
of the bodice rose Harmony's exquisite shoulders. Her hair was gold;
even her eyes looked golden. The dressmaker, who worshiped beauty, gave
a pull here, a pat there. If only all women were so beautiful in the
things she made!

She had an eye for the theatrical also. She posed Harmony behind the
curtain, arranged lights, drew down the chiffon so that a bit more of
the girl's rounded bosom was revealed. Then she drew the curtain aside
and stood smiling.

Le Grande paid the picture the tribute of a second's silence. Then:--

“Exquisite!” she said in English. Then in halting German: “Do not change
a line. It is perfect.”

Harmony must walk in the gown, turn, sit. Once she caught a glimpse of
herself and was startled. She had been wearing black for so long, and
now this radiant golden creature was herself. She was enchanted and
abashed. The slash in the skirt troubled her: her slender leg had a way
of revealing itself.

The ordeal was over at last. The dancer was pleased. She ordered another
gown. Harmony, behind the curtain, slipped out of the dress and into
her own shabby frock. On the other side of the curtain the dancer
was talking. Her voice was loud, but rather agreeable. She smoked a
cigarette. Scraps of chatter came to Harmony, and once a laugh.

“That is too pink--something more delicate.”

“Here is a shade; hold it to your cheek.”

“I am a bad color. I did not sleep last night.”

“Still no news, Fraulein?”

“None. He has disappeared utterly. That isn't so bad, is it? I could use
more rouge.”

“It is being much worn. It is strange, is it not, that a child could be
stolen from the hospital and leave no sign!”

The dancer laughed a mirthless laugh. Her voice changed, became nasal,
full of venom.

“Oh, they know well enough,” she snapped. “Those nurses know, and
there's a pig of a red-bearded doctor--I'd like to poison him.
Separating mother and child! I'm going to find him, if only to show them
they are not so smart after all.”

In her anger she had lapsed into English. Harmony, behind her curtain,
had clutched at her heart. Jimmy's mother!



CHAPTER XXIII

Jimmy was not so well, although Harmony's flight had had nothing to do
with the relapse. He had found Marie a slavishly devoted substitute, and
besides Peter had indicated that Harmony's absence was purely temporary.
But the breaking-up was inevitable. All day long the child lay in the
white bed, apathetic but sleepless. In vain Marie made flower fairies
for his pillow, in vain the little mice, now quite tame, played
hide-and-seek over the bed, in vain Peter paused long enough in his
frantic search for Harmony to buy colored postcards and bring them to
him.

He was contented enough; he did not suffer at all; and he had no
apprehension of what was coming. He asked for nothing, tried obediently
to eat, liked to have Marie in the room. But he did not beg to be
taken into the salon, as he once had done. There was a sort of mental
confusion also. He liked Marie to read his father's letters; but as
he grew weaker the occasional confusing of Peter with his dead father
became a fixed idea. Peter was Daddy.

Peter took care of him at night. He had moved into Harmony's adjacent
room and dressed there. But he had never slept in the bed. At night he
put on his shabby dressing-gown and worn slippers and lay on a haircloth
sofa at the foot of Jimmy's bed--lay but hardly slept, so afraid was he
that the slender thread of life might snap when it was drawn out to its
slenderest during the darkest hours before the dawn. More than once in
every night Peter rose and stood, hardly breathing, with the tiny lamp
in his hand, watching for the rise and fall of the boy's thin little
chest. Peter grew old these days. He turned gray over the ears and
developed lines about his mouth that never left him again. He felt gray
and old, and sometimes bitter and hard also. The boy's condition could
not be helped: it was inevitable, hopeless. But the thing that was
eating his heart out had been unnecessary and cruel.

Where was Harmony? When it stormed, as it did almost steadily, he
wondered how she was sheltered; when the occasional sun shone he hoped
it was bringing her a bit of cheer. Now and then, in the night, when the
lamp burned low and gusts of wind shook the old house, fearful thoughts
came to him--the canal, with its filthy depths. Daylight brought reason,
however. Harmony had been too rational, too sane for such an end.

McLean was Peter's great support in those terrible days. He was young
and hopeful. Also he had money. Peter could not afford to grease the
machinery of the police service; McLean could and did. In Berlin Harmony
could not have remained hidden for two days. In Vienna, however, it
was different. Returns were made to the department, but irregularly.
An American music student was missing. There were thousands of American
music students in the city: one fell over them in the coffee-houses.
McLean offered a reward and followed up innumerable music students.

The alternating hope and despair was most trying. Peter became old and
haggard; the boy grew thin and white. But there was this difference,
that with Peter the strain was cumulative, hour on hour, day on day.
With McLean each night found him worn and exhausted, but each following
morning he went to work with renewed strength and energy. Perhaps, after
all, the iron had not struck so deep into his soul. With Peter it was a
life-and-death matter.

Clinics and lectures had begun again, but he had no heart for work. The
little household went on methodically. Marie remained; there had seemed
nothing else to do. She cooked Peter's food--what little he would eat;
she nursed Jimmy while Peter was out on the long search; and she kept
the apartment neat. She was never intrusive, never talkative. Indeed,
she seemed to have lapsed into definite silence. She deferred absolutely
to Peter, adored him, indeed, from afar. She never ate with him, in
spite of his protests.

The little apartment was very quiet. Where formerly had been music and
Harmony's soft laughter, where Anna Gates had been wont to argue with
Peter in loud, incisive tones, where even the prisms of the chandelier
had once vibrated in response to Harmony's violin, almost absolute
silence now reigned. Even the gate, having been repaired, no longer
creaked, and the loud altercations between the Portier and his wife had
been silenced out of deference to the sick child.

On the day that Harmony, in the gold dress, had discovered Jimmy's
mother in the American dancer Peter had had an unusually bad day. McLean
had sent him a note by messenger early in the morning, to the effect
that a young girl answering Harmony's description had been seen in the
park at Schonbrunn and traced to an apartment near by.

Harmony had liked Schonbrunn, and it seemed possible. They had gone out
together, McLean optimistic, Peter afraid to hope. And it had been as he
feared--a pretty little violin student, indeed, who had been washing her
hair, and only opened the door an inch or two.

McLean made a lame apology, Peter too sick with disappointment to speak.
Then back to the city again.

He had taken to making a daily round, to the master's, to the Frau
Professor Bergmeister's, along the Graben and the Karntnerstrasse,
ending up at the Doctors' Club in the faint hope of a letter. Wrath
still smouldered deep in Peter; he would not enter a room at the club
if Mrs. Boyer sat within. He had had a long hour with Dr. Jennings,
and left that cheerful person writhing in abasement. And he had held
a stormy interview with the Frau Schwarz, which left her humble for
a week, and exceedingly nervous, being of the impression from Peter's
manner that in the event of Harmony not turning up an American gunboat
would sail up the right arm of the Danube and bombard the Pension
Schwarz.

Schonbrunn having failed them, McLean and, Peter went back to the city
in the street-car, neither one saying much. Even McLean's elasticity was
deserting him. His eyes, from much peering into crowds, had taken on a
strained, concentrated look.

Peter was shabbier than ever beside the other man's ultrafashionable
dress. He sat, bent forward, his long arms dangling between his knees,
his head down. Their common trouble had drawn the two together, or had
drawn McLean close to Peter, as if he recognized that there were degrees
in grief and that Peter had received almost a death-wound. His old
rage at Peter had died. Harmony's flight had proved the situation as no
amount of protestation would have done. The thing now was to find the
girl; then he and Peter would start even, and the battle to the best
man.

They had the car almost to themselves. Peter had not spoken since he sat
down. McLean was busy over a notebook, in which he jotted down from day
to day such details of their search as might be worth keeping. Now and
then he glanced at Peter as if he wished to say something, hesitated,
fell to work again over the notebook. Finally he ventured.

“How's the boy?”

“Not so well to-day. I'm having a couple of men in to see him to-night.
He doesn't sleep.”

“Do you sleep?”

“Not much. He's on my mind, of course.”

That and other things, Peter.

“Don't you think--wouldn't it be better to have a nurse. You can't go
like this all day and be up all night, you know. And Marie has him most
of the day.” McLean, of course, had known Marie before. “The boy ought
to have a nurse, I think.”

“He doesn't move without my hearing him.”

“That's an argument for me. Do you want to get sick?”

Peter turned a white face toward McLean, a face in which exasperation
struggled with fatigue.

“Good Lord, boy,” he rasped, “don't you suppose I'd have a nurse if I
could afford it?”

“Would you let me help? I'd like to do something. I'm a useless cub in
a sick-room, but I could do that. Who's the woman he liked in the
hospital?”

“Nurse Elisabet. I don't know, Mac. There's no reason why I shouldn't
let you help, I suppose. It hurts, of course, but--if he would be
happier--”

“That's settled, then,” said McLean. “Nurse Elisabet, if she can come.
And--look here, old man. I 've been trying to say this for a week and
haven't had the nerve. Let me help you out for a while. You can send it
back when you get it, any time, a year or ten years. I'll not miss it.”

But Peter refused. He tempered the refusal in his kindly way.

“I can't take anything now,” he said. “But I'll remember it, and if
things get very bad I'll come to you. It isn't costing much to live.
Marie is a good manager, almost as good as--Harmony was.” This with
difficulty. He found it always hard to speak of Harmony. His throat
seemed to close on the name.

That was the best McLean could do, but he made a mental reservation to
see Marie that night and slip her a little money. Peter need never know,
would never notice.

At a cross-street the car stopped, and the little Bulgarian, Georgiev,
got on. He inspected the car carefully before he came in from the
platform, and sat down unobtrusively in a corner. Things were not going
well with him either. His small black eyes darted from face to face
suspiciously, until they came to a rest on Peter.

It was Georgiev's business to read men. Quickly he put together the bits
he had gathered from Harmony on the staircase, added to them Peter's
despondent attitude, his strained face, the abstraction which required a
touch on the arm from his companion when they reached their destination,
recalled Peter outside the door of Harmony's room in the Pension
Schwarz--and built him a little story that was not far from the truth.

Peter left the car without seeing him. It was the hour of the promenade,
when the Ring and the larger business streets were full of people,
when Demel's was thronged with pretty women eating American ices, with
military men drinking tea and nibbling Austrian pastry, the hour when
the flower women along the Stephansplatz did a rousing business in
roses, when sterile women burned candles before the Madonna in the
Cathedral, when the lottery did the record business of the day.

It was Peter's forlorn hope that somewhere among the crowd he might
happen on Harmony. For some reason he thought of her always as in a
crowd, with people close, touching her, men staring at her, following
her. He had spent a frightful night in the Opera, scanning seat after
seat, not so much because he hoped to find her as because inaction was
intolerable.

And so, on that afternoon, he made his slow progress along the
Karntnerstrasse, halting now and then to scrutinize the crowd. He even
peered through the doors of shops here and there, hoping while he feared
that the girl might be seeking employment within, as she had before in
the early days of the winter.

Because of his stature and powerful physique, and perhaps, too, because
of the wretchedness in his eyes, people noticed him. There was one place
where Peter lingered, where a new building was being erected, and where
because of the narrowness of the passage the dense crowd was thinned as
it passed. He stood by choice outside a hairdresser's window, where a
brilliant light shone on each face that passed.

Inside the clerks had noticed him. Two of them standing together by the
desk spoke of him: “He is there again, the gray man!”

“Ah, so! But, yes, there is his back!”

“Poor one, it is the Fraulein Engel he waits to see, perhaps.”

“More likely Le Grande, the American. He is American.”

“He is Russian. Look at his size.”

“But his shoes!” triumphantly. “They are American, little one.”

The third girl had not spoken; she was wrapping in tissue a great golden
rose made for the hair. She placed it in a box carefully.

“I think he is of the police,” she said, “or a spy. There is much talk
of war.”

“Foolishness! Does a police officer sigh always? Or a spy have such
sadness in his face? And he grows thin and white.”

“The rose, Fraulein.”

The clerk who had wrapped up the flower held it out to the customer.
The customer, however, was not looking. She was gazing with strange
intentness at the back of a worn gray overcoat. Then with a curious
clutch at her heart she went white. Harmony, of course, Harmony come to
fetch the golden rose that was to complete Le Grande's costume.

She recovered almost at once and made an excuse to leave by another
exit.

She took a final look at the gray sleeve that was all she could see of
Peter, who had shifted a bit, and stumbled out into the crowd, walking
along with her lip trembling under her veil, and with the slow and
steady ache at her heart that she had thought she had stilled for good.

It had never occurred to Harmony that Peter loved her. He had proposed
to her twice, but that had been in each case to solve a difficulty for
her. And once he had taken her in his arms, but that was different. Even
then he had not said he loved her--had not even known it, to be exact.
Nor had Harmony realized what Peter meant to her until she had put him
out of her life.

The sight of the familiar gray coat, the scrap of conversation, so
enlightening as to poor Peter's quest, that Peter was growing thin and
white, made her almost reel. She had been too occupied with her own
position to realize Peter's. With the glimpse of him came a great
longing for the house on the Siebensternstrasse, for Jimmy's arms about
her neck, for the salon with the lamp lighted and the sleet beating
harmlessly against the casement windows, for the little kitchen with the
brick stove, for Peter.

Doubts of the wisdom of her course assailed her. But to go back meant,
at the best, adding to Peter's burden of Jimmy and Marie, meant the
old situation again, too, for Marie most certainly did not add to the
respectability of the establishment. And other doubts assailed her. What
if Jimmy were not so well, should die, as was possible, and she had not
let his mother see him!

Monia Reiff was very busy that day. Harmony did not leave the workroom
until eight o'clock. During all that time, while her slim fingers worked
over fragile laces and soft chiffons, she was seeing Jimmy as she had
seen him last, with the flower fairies on his pillow, and Peter, keeping
watch over the crowd in the Karntnerstrasse, looking with his steady
eyes for her.

No part of the city was safe for a young girl after night, she knew; the
sixteenth district was no better than the rest, rather worse in places.
But the longing to see the house on the Siebensternstrasse grew on her,
became from an ache a sharp and insistent pain. She must go, must see
once again the comfortable glow of Peter's lamp, the flicker that was
the fire.

She ate no supper. She was too tired to eat, and there was the pain. She
put on her wraps and crept down the whitewashed staircase.

The paved courtyard below was to be crossed and it was poorly lighted.
She achieved the street, however, without molestation. To the street-car
was only a block, but during that block she was accosted twice. She was
white and frightened when she reached the car.

The Siebensternstrasse at last. The street was always dark; the
delicatessen shop was closed, but in the wild-game store next a light
was burning low, and a flame flickered before the little shrine over the
money drawer. The gameseller was a religious man.

The old stucco house dominated the neighborhood. From the time she left
the car Harmony saw it, its long flat roof black against the dark sky,
its rows of unlighted windows, its long wall broken in the center by
the gate. Now from across the street its whole facade lay before her.
Peter's lamp was not lighted, but there was a glow of soft firelight
from the salon windows. The light was not regular--it disappeared at
regular intervals, was blotted out. Harmony knew what that meant. Some
one beyond range of where she stood was pacing the floor, back and
forward, back and forward. When he was worried or anxious Peter always
paced the door.

She did not know how long she stood there. One of the soft rains was
falling, or more accurately, condensing. The saturated air was hardly
cold. She stood on the pavement unmolested, while the glow died lower
and lower, until at last it was impossible to trace the pacing figure.
No one came to any of the windows. The little lamp before the shrine in
the wild-game shop burned itself out; the Portier across the way came to
the door, glanced up at the sky and went in. Harmony heard the rattle of
the chain as it was stretched across the door inside.

Not all the windows of the suite opened on the street. Jimmy's
windows--and Peter's--opened toward the back of the house, where in
a brick-paved courtyard the wife of the Portier hung her washing, and
where the Portier himself kept a hutch of rabbits. A wild and reckless
desire to see at least the light from the child's room possessed
Harmony. Even the light would be something; to go like this, to carry
with her only the memory of a dark looming house without cheer was
unthinkable. The gate was never locked. If she but went into the garden
and round by the spruce tree to the back of the house, it would be
something.

She knew the garden quite well. Even the darkness had no horror for
her. Little Scatchy had had a habit of leaving various articles on her
window-sill and of instigating searches for them at untimely hours
of night. Once they had found her hairbrush in the rabbit hutch! So
Harmony, ashamed but unalarmed, made her way by the big spruce to the
corner of the old lodge and thus to the courtyard.

Ah, this was better! Lights all along the apartment floor and moving
shadows; on Jimmy's window-sill a jar of milk. And voices--some one was
singing.

Peter was singing, droning softly, as one who puts a drowsy child to
sleep. Slower and slower, softer and softer, over and over, the little
song Harmony had been wont to sing:--

“Ah well! For us all some sweet hope lies Deeply buried from human
eyes. And in the--hereafter--angels may

    Roll--the--stone--from--its--grave--away.”

Slower and slower, softer and softer, until it died away altogether.
Peter, in his old dressing-gown, came to the window and turned down
the gaslight beside it to a blue point. Harmony did not breathe. For a
minute, two minutes, he stood there looking out. Far off the twin clocks
of the Votivkirche struck the hour. All about lay the lights of the old
city, so very old, so wise, so cunning, so cold.

Peter stood looking out, as he had each night since Harmony went away.
Each night he sang the boy to sleep, turned down the light and stood
by the window. And each night he whispered to the city that sheltered
Harmony somewhere, what he had whispered to the little sweater coat the
night before he went away:--

“Good-night, dear. Good-night, Harmony.”

The rabbits stirred uneasily in the hutch; a passing gust shook the
great tree overhead and sent down a sharp shower on to the bricks below.
Peter struck a match and lit his pipe; the flickering light illuminated
his face, his rough hair, his steady eyes.

“Good-night, Peter,” whispered Harmony. “Good-night, dear.”



CHAPTER XXIV

Walter Stewart had made an uncomplicated recovery, helped along by
relief at the turn events had taken. In a few days he was going about
again, weak naturally, rather handsomer than before because a little
less florid. But the week's confinement had given him an opportunity to
think over many things. Peter had set him thinking, on the day when he
had packed up the last of Marie's small belongings and sent them down to
Vienna.

Stewart, lying in bed, had watched him. “Just how much talk do you
suppose this has made, Byrne?” he asked.

“Haven't an idea. Some probably. The people in the Russian villa saw it,
you know.”

Stewart's brows contracted.

“Damnation! Then the hotel has it, of course!”

“Probably.”

Stewart groaned. Peter closed Marie's American trunk of which she had
been so proud, and coming over looked down at the injured man.

“Don't you think you'd better tell the girl all about it?”

“No,” doggedly.

“I know, of course, it wouldn't be easy, but--you can't get away with
it, Stewart. That's one way of looking at it. There's another.”

“What's that?”

“Starting with a clean slate. If she's the sort you want to marry, and
not a prude, she'll understand, not at first, but after she gets used to
it.”

“She wouldn't understand in a thousand years.”

“Then you'd better not marry her. You know, Stewart, I have an idea
that women imagine a good many pretty rotten things about us, anyhow.
A sensible girl would rather know the truth and be done with it. What a
man has done with his life before a girl--the right girl--comes into
it isn't a personal injury to her, since she wasn't a part of his life
then. You know what I mean. But she has a right to know it before she
chooses.”

“How many would choose under those circumstances?” he jibed.

Peter smiled. “Quite a few,” he said cheerfully. “It's a wrong system,
of course; but we can get a little truth out of it.”

“You can't get away with it” stuck in Stewart's mind for several days.
It was the one thing Peter said that did stick. And before Stewart had
recovered enough to be up and about he had made up his mind to tell
Anita. In his mind he made quite a case for himself; he argued the
affair against his conscience and came out victorious.

Anita's party had broken up. The winter sports did not compare, they
complained, with St. Moritz. They disliked German cooking. Into the
bargain the weather was not good; the night's snows turned soft by
midday; and the crowds that began to throng the hotels were solid
citizens, not the fashionables of the Riviera. Anita's arm forbade her
traveling. In the reassembling of the party she went to the Kurhaus in
the valley below the pension with one of the women who wished to take
the baths.

It was to the Kurhaus, then, that Stewart made his first excursion after
the accident. He went to dinner. Part of the chaperon's treatment called
for an early retiring hour, which was highly as he had wished it and
rather unnerving after all. A man may decide that a dose of poison is
the remedy for all his troubles, but he does not approach his hour with
any hilarity. Stewart was a stupid dinner guest, ate very little, and
looked haggard beyond belief when the hour came for the older woman to
leave.

He did not lack courage however. It was his great asset, physical and
mental rather than moral, but courage nevertheless. The evening was
quiet, and they elected to sit on the balcony outside Anita's sitting
room, the girl swathed in white furs and leaning back in her steamer
chair.

Below lay the terrace of the Kurhaus, edged with evergreen trees. Beyond
and far below that was the mountain village, a few scattered houses
along a frozen stream. The townspeople retired early; light after light
was extinguished, until only one in the priest's house remained. A train
crept out of one tunnel and into another, like a glowing worm crawling
from burrow to burrow.

The girl felt a change in Stewart. During the weeks he had known her
there had been a curious restraint in his manner to her. There were
times when an avowal seemed to tremble on his lips, when his eyes looked
into hers with the look no women ever mistakes; the next moment he would
glance away, his face would harden. They were miles apart. And perhaps
the situation had piqued the girl. Certainly it had lost nothing for her
by its unusualness.

To-night there was a difference in the man. His eyes met hers squarely,
without evasion, but with a new quality, a searching, perhaps, for
something in her to give him courage. The girl had character, more than
ordinary decision. It was what Stewart admired in her most, and the
thing, of course, that the little Marie had lacked. Moreover, Anita,
barely twenty, was a woman, not a young girl. Her knowledge of the
world, not so deep as Marie's, was more comprehensive. Where Marie would
have been merciful, Anita would be just, unless she cared for him. In
that case she might be less than just, or more.

Anita in daylight was a pretty young woman, rather incisive of speech,
very intelligent, having a wit without malice, charming to look at,
keenly alive. Anita in the dusk of the balcony, waiting to hear she knew
not what, was a judicial white goddess, formidably still, frightfully
potential. Stewart, who had embraced many women, did not dare a finger
on her arm.

He had decided on a way to tell the girl the story--a preamble about his
upbringing, which had been indifferent, his struggle to get to Vienna,
his loneliness there, all leading with inevitable steps to Marie. From
that, if she did not utterly shrink from him, to his love for her.

It was his big hour, that hour on the balcony. He was reaching, through
love, heights of honesty he had never scaled before. But as a matter of
fact he reversed utterly his order of procedure. The situation got him,
this first evening absolutely alone with her. That and her nearness, and
the pathos of her bandaged, useless arm. Still he had not touched her.

The thing he was trying to do was more difficult for that. General
credulity to the contrary, men do not often make spoken love first. How
many men propose marriage to their women across the drawing-room or from
chair to chair? Absurd! The eyes speak first, then the arms, the lips
last. The woman is in his arms before he tells his love. It is by her
response that he gauges his chances and speaks of marriage. Actually the
thing is already settled; tardy speech only follows on swift instinct.
Stewart, wooing as men woo, would have taken the girl's hand, gained
an encouragement from it, ventured to kiss it, perhaps, and finding no
rebuff would then and there have crushed her to him; What need of words?
They would follow in due time, not to make a situation but to clarify
it.

But he could not woo as men woo. The barrier of his own weakness stood
between them and must be painfully taken down.

“I'm afraid this is stupid for you,” said Anita out of the silence.
“Would you like to go to the music-room?”

“God forbid. I was thinking.”

“Of what?” Encouragement this, surely.

“I was thinking how you had come into my life, and stirred it up.”

“Really? I?”

“You know that.”

“How did I stir it up?”

“That's hardly the way I meant to put it. You've changed everything for
me. I care for you--a very great deal.”

He was still carefully in hand, his voice steady. And still he did not
touch her. Other men had made love to her, but never in this fashion, or
was he making love?

“I'm very glad you like me.”

“Like you!” Almost out of hand that time. The thrill in his voice was
unmistakable. “It's much more than that, Anita, so much more that I'm
going to try to do a hideously hard thing. Will you help a little?”

“Yes, if I can.” She was stirred, too, and rather frightened.

Stewart drew his chair nearer to her and sat forward, his face set and
dogged.

“Have you any idea how you were hurt? Or why?”

“No. There's a certain proportion of accidents that occur at all these
places, isn't there?”

“This was not an accident.”

“No?”

“The branch of a tree was thrown out in front of the sled to send us
over the bank. It was murder, if intention is crime.”

After a brief silence--

“Somebody who wished to kill you, or me?”

“Both of us, I believe. It was done by a woman--a girl, Anita. A girl I
had been living with.”

A brutal way to tell her, no doubt, but admirably courageous. For he was
quivering with dread when he said it--the courage of the man who faces
a cannon. And here, where a less-poised woman would have broken into
speech, Anita took the refuge of her kind and was silent. Stewart
watched her as best he could in the darkness, trying to gather further
courage to go on. He could not see her face, but her fingers, touching
the edge of the chair, quivered.

“May I tell you the rest?”

“I don't think I want to hear it.”

“Are you going to condemn me unheard?”

“There isn't anything you can say against the fact?”

But there was much to say, and sitting there in the darkness he made
his plea. He made no attempt to put his case. He told what had happened
simply; he told of his loneliness and discomfort. And he emphasized the
lack of sentiment that prompted the arrangement.

Anita spoke then for the first time: “And when you tried to terminate it
she attempted to kill you!”

“I was acting the beast. I brought her up here, and then neglected her
for you.”

“Then it was hardly only a business arrangement for her.”

“It was at first. I never dreamed of any thing else. I swear that,
Anita. But lately, in the last month or two, she--I suppose I should
have seen that she--”

“That she had fallen in love with you. How old is she?”

“Nineteen.”

A sudden memory came to Anita, of a slim young girl, who had watched her
with wide, almost childish eyes.

“Then it was she who was in the compartment with you on the train coming
up?”

“Yes.”

“Where is she now?”

“In Vienna. I have not heard from her. Byrne, the chap who came up
to see me after the--after the accident, sent her away. I think he's
looking after her. I haven't heard from him.”

“Why did you tell me all this?”

“Because I love you, Anita. I want you to marry me.”

“What! After that?”

“That, or something similar, is in many men's lives. They don't tell it,
that's the difference. I 'm not taking any credit for telling you this.
I'm ashamed to the bottom of my soul, and when I look at your bandaged
arm I'm suicidal. Peter Byrne urged me to tell you. He said I couldn't
get away with it; some time or other it would come out. Then he said
something else. He said you'd probably understand, and that if you
married me it was better to start with a clean slate.”

No love, no passion in the interview now. A clear statement of fact, an
offer--his past against hers, his future with hers. Her hand was steady
now. The light in the priest's house had been extinguished. The chill of
the mountain night penetrated Anita's white furs; and set her--or was it
the chill?--to shivering.

“If I had not told you, would you have married me?”

“I think so. I'll be honest, too. Yes.”

“I am the same man you would have married. Only--more honest.”

“I cannot argue about it. I am tired and cold.”

Stewart glanced across the valley to where the cluster of villas hugged
the mountain-side There was a light in his room; outside was the little
balcony where Marie had leaned against the railing and looked down,
down. Some of the arrogance of his new virtue left the man. He was
suddenly humbled. For the first time he realized a part of what Marie
had endured in that small room where the light burned.

“Poor little Marie!” he said softly.

The involuntary exclamation did more for him than any plea he could have
made. Anita rose and held out her hand.

“Go and see her,” she said quietly. “You owe her that. We'll be leaving
here in a day or so and I'll not see you again. But you've been honest,
and I will be honest, too. I--I cared a great deal, too.”

“And this has killed it?”

“I hardly comprehend it yet. I shall have to have time to think.”

“But if you are going away--I'm afraid to leave you. You'll think this
thing over, alone, and all the rules of life you've been taught will
come--”

“Please, I must think. I will write you, I promise.”

He caught her hand and crushed it between both of his.

“I suppose you would rather I did not kiss you?” humbly.

“I do not want you to kiss me.”

He released her hand and stood looking down at her in the darkness. If
he could only have crushed her to him, made her feel the security of his
love, of his sheltering arms! But the barrier of his own building was
between them. His voice was husky.

“I want you to try to remember, past what I have told you, to the thing
that concerns us both--I love you. I never loved the other woman. I
never pretended I loved her. And there will be nothing more like that.”

“I shall try to remember.”

Anita left Semmering the next day, against the protests of the doctor
and the pleadings of the chaperon. She did not see Stewart again. But
before she left, with the luggage gone and the fiacre at the door, she
went out on the terrace, and looked across to the Villa Waldheim, rising
from among its clustering trees. Although it was too far to be certain,
she thought she saw the figure of a man on the little balcony standing
with folded arms, gazing across the valley to the Kurhaus.

Having promised to see Marie, Stewart proceeded to carry out his promise
in his direct fashion. He left Semmering the evening of the following
day, for Vienna. The strain of the confession was over, but he was a
victim of sickening dread. To one thing only he dared to pin his hopes.
Anita had said she cared, cared a great deal. And, after all, what else
mattered? The story had been a jolt, he told himself. Girls were full of
queer ideas of right and wrong, bless them! But she cared. She cared!

He arrived in Vienna at nine o'clock that night. The imminence of
his interview with Marie hung over him like a cloud. He ate a hurried
supper, and calling up the Doctors' Club by telephone found Peter's
address in the Siebensternstrasse. He had no idea, of course, that Marie
was there. He wanted to see Peter to learn where Marie had taken refuge,
and incidentally to get from Peter a fresh supply of moral courage for
the interview. For he needed courage. In vain on the journey down had he
clothed himself in armor of wrath against the girl; the very compartment
in the train provoked softened memories of her. Here they had bought a
luncheon, there Marie had first seen the Rax. Again at this station she
had curled up and put her head on his shoulder for a nap. Ah, but again,
at this part of the journey he had first seen Anita!

He took a car to the Siebensternstrasse. His idea of Peter's manner
of living those days was exceedingly vague. He had respected Peter's
reticence, after the manner of men with each other. Peter had once
mentioned a boy he was looking after, in excuse for leaving so soon
after the accident. That was all.

The house on the Siebensternstrasse loomed large and unlighted. The
street was dark, and it was only after a search that Stewart found the
gate. Even then he lost the path, and found himself among a group of
trees, to touch the lowest branches of any of which resulted in a shower
of raindrops. To add to his discomfort some one was walking in the
garden, coming toward him with light, almost stealthy steps.

Stewart by his tree stood still, waiting. The steps approached, were
very close, were beside him. So intense was the darkness that even then
all he saw was a blacker shadow, and that was visible only because it
moved. Then a hand touched his arm, stopped as if paralyzed, drew back
slowly, fearfully.

“Good Heavens!” said poor Harmony faintly.

“Please don't be alarmed. I have lost the path.” Stewart's voice was
almost equally nervous. “Is it to the right or the left?”

It was a moment before Harmony had breath to speak. Then:--

“To the right a dozen paces or so.”

“Thank you. Perhaps I can help you to find it.”

“I know it quite well. Please don't bother.”

The whole situation was so unexpected that only then did it dawn on
Stewart that this blacker shadow was a countrywoman speaking God's own
language. Together, Harmony a foot or so in advance, they made the path.

“The house is there. Ring hard, the bell is out of order.”

“Are you not coming in?”

“No. I--I do not live here.”

She must have gone just after that. Stewart, glancing at the dark facade
of the house, turned round to find her gone, and a moment later heard
the closing of the gate. He was bewildered. What sort of curious place
was this, a great looming house that concealed in its garden a fugitive
American girl who came and went like a shadow, leaving only the memory
of a sweet voice strained with fright?

Stewart was full of his encounter as he took the candle the Portier
gave him and followed the gentleman's gruff directions up the staircase.
Peter admitted him, looking a trifle uneasy, as well he might with Marie
in the salon.

Stewart was too preoccupied to notice Peter's expression. He shook the
rain off his hat, smiling.

“How are you?” asked Peter dutifully.

“Pretty good, except for a headache when I'm tired. What sort of a place
have you got here anyhow, Byrne?”

“Old hunting-lodge of Maria Theresa,” replied Peter, still preoccupied
with Marie and what was coming. “Rather interesting old place.”

“Rather,” commented Stewart, “with goddesses in the garden and all the
usual stunts.”

“Goddesses?”

“Ran into one just now among the trees. 'A woman I forswore, but thou
being a goddess I forswore not thee.' English-speaking goddess, by
George!”

Peter was staring at him incredulously; now he bent forward and grasped
his arm in fingers of steel.

“For Heaven's sake, Stewart, tell me what you mean! Who was in the
garden?”

Stewart was amused and interested. It was not for him to belittle a
situation of his own making, an incident of his own telling.

“I lost my way in your garden, wandered among the trees, broke through a
hedgerow or two, struck a match and consulted the compass--”

Peter's fingers closed.

“Quick,” he said.

Stewart's manner lost its jauntiness.

“There was a girl there,” he said shortly. “Couldn't see her. She spoke
English. Said she didn't live here, and broke for the gate the minute I
got to the path.”

“You didn't see her?”

“No. Nice voice, though. Young.”

The next moment he was alone. Peter in his dressing-gown was running
down the staircase to the lower floor, was shouting to the Portier to
unlock the door, was a madman in everything but purpose. The Portier let
him out and returned to the bedroom.

“The boy above is worse,” he said briefly. “A strange doctor has just
come, and but now the Herr Doktor Byrne runs to the drug store.”

The Portier's wife shrugged her shoulders even while tears filled her
eyes.

“What can one expect?” she demanded. “The good Herr Gott has forbidden
theft and Rosa says the boy was stolen. Also the druggist has gone to
visit his wife's mother.”

“Perhaps I may be of service; I shall go up.”

“And see for a moment that hussy of the streets! Remain here. I shall
go.”

Slowly and ponderously she climbed the stairs.

Stewart, left alone, wandered along the dim corridor. He found Peter's
excitement rather amusing. So this was where Peter lived, an old house,
isolated in a garden where rambled young women with soft voices. Hello,
a youngster asleep! The boy, no doubt.

He wandered on toward the lighted door of the salon and Marie. The place
was warm and comfortable, but over it all hung the indescribable odor of
drugs that meant illness. He remembered that the boy was frail.

Marie turned as he stopped in the salon doorway, and then rose,
white-faced. Across the wide spaces of the room they eyed each other.
Marie's crisis had come. Like all crises it was bigger than speech. It
was after a distinct pause that she spoke.

“Hast thou brought the police?”

Curiously human, curiously masculine at least was Stewart's mental
condition at that moment. He had never loved the girl; it was with
tremendous relief he had put her out of his life. And yet--

“So it's old Peter now, is it?”

“No, no, not that, Walter. He has given me shelter, that is all. I swear
it. I look after the boy.”

“Who else is here?”

“No one else; but--”

“Tell that rot to some one who does not know you.”

“It is true. He never even looks at me. I am wicked, but I do not lie.”
 There was a catch of hope in her voice. Marie knew men somewhat, but she
still cherished the feminine belief that jealousy is love, whereas it is
only injured pride. She took a step toward him. “Walter, I am sorry. Do
you hate me?” She had dropped the familiar “thou.”

Stewart crossed the room until only Peter's table and lamp stood between
them.

“I didn't mean to be brutal,” he said, rather largely, entirely
conscious of his own magnanimity. “It was pretty bad up there and I
know it. I don't hate you, of course. That's hardly possible
after--everything.”

“You--would take me back?”

“No. It's over, Marie. I wanted to know where you were, that's all; to
see that you were comfortable and not frightened. You're a silly child
to think of the police.”

Marie put a hand to her throat.

“It is the American, of course.”

“Yes.”

She staggered a trifle, recovered, threw up her head. “Then I wish I had
killed her!”

No man ever violently resents the passionate hate of one woman for her
rival in his affections. Stewart, finding the situation in hand and
Marie only feebly formidable, was rather amused and flattered by the
honest fury in her voice. The mouse was under his paw; he would play a
bit. “You'll get over feeling that way, kid. You don't really love me.”

“You were my God, that is all.”

“Will you let me help you--money, I mean?”

“Keep it for her.”

“Peter will be here in a minute.” He bent over the table and eyed her
with his old, half-bullying, half-playful manner. “Come round here and
kiss me for old times.”

“No!”

“Come.”

She stood stubbornly still, and Stewart, still smiling, took a step or
two toward her. Then he stopped, ceased smiling, drew himself up.

“You are quite right and I'm a rotter.” Marie's English did not
comprehend “rotter,” but she knew the tone. “Listen, Marie, I've told
the other girl, and there's a chance for me, anyhow. Some day she may
marry me. She asked me to see you.”

“I do not wish her pity.”

“You are wasting your life here. You cannot marry, you say, without a
dot. There is a chance in America for a clever girl. You are clever,
little Marie. The first money I can spare I'll send you--if you'll take
it. It's all I can do.”

This was a new Stewart, a man she had never known. Marie recoiled from
him, eyed him nervously, sought in her childish mind for an explanation.
When at last she understood that he was sincere, she broke down.
Stewart, playing a new part and raw in it, found the situation
irritating. But Marie's tears were not entirely bitter. Back of them her
busy young mind was weaving a new warp of life, with all of America for
its loom. Hope that had died lived again. Before her already lay that
great country where women might labor and live by the fruit of their
labor, where her tawdry past would be buried in the center of distant
Europe. New life beckoned to the little Marie that night in the old
salon of Maria Theresa, beckoned to her as it called to Stewart,
opportunity to one, love and work to the other. To America!

“I will go,” she said at last simply. “And I will not trouble you
there.”

“Good!” Stewart held out his hand and Marie took it. With a quick
gesture she held it to her cheek, dropped it.

Peter came back half an hour later, downcast but not hopeless. He had
not found Harmony, but life was not all gray. She was well, still in
Vienna, and--she had come back! She had cared then enough to come back.
To-morrow he would commence again, would comb the city fine, and when
he had found her he would bring her back, the wanderer, to a marvelous
welcome.

He found Stewart gone, and Marie feverishly overhauling her few
belongings by the salon lamp. She turned to him a face still stained
with tears but radiant with hope.

“Peter,” she said gravely, “I must prepare my outfit. I go to America.”

“With Stewart?”

“Alone, Peter, to work, to be very good, to be something. I am very
happy, although--Peter, may I kiss you?”

“Certainly,” said Peter, and took her caress gravely, patting her thin
shoulder. His thoughts were in the garden with Harmony, who had cared
enough to come back.

“Life,” said Peter soberly, “life is just one damned thing after
another, isn't it?”

But Marie was anxiously examining the hem of a skirt.

The letter from Anita reached Stewart the following morning. She said:--

“I have been thinking things over, Walter, and I am going to hurt you
very much--but not, believe me, without hurting myself. Perhaps my
uppermost thought just now is that I am disappointing you, that I am not
so big as you thought I would be. For now, in this final letter, I can
tell you how much I cared. Oh, my dear, I did care!

“But I will not marry you. And when this reaches you I shall have gone
very quietly out of your life. I find that such philosophy as I have
does not support me to-night, that all my little rules of life are
inadequate. Individual liberty was one--but there is no liberty of the
individual. Life--other lives--press too closely. You, living your life
as seemed best and easiest, and carrying down with you into shipwreck
the little Marie and--myself!

“For, face to face with the fact, I cannot accept it, Walter. It is not
only a question of my past against yours. It is of steady revolt
and loathing of the whole thing; not the flash of protest before one
succumbs to the inevitable, but a deep-seated hatred that is a part of
me and that would never forget.

“You say that you are the same man I would have married, only more
honest for concealing nothing. But--and forgive me this, it insists on
coming up in my mind--were you honest, really? You told me, and it took
courage, but wasn't it partly fear? What motive is unmixed? Honesty--and
fear, Walter. You were preparing against a contingency, although you may
not admit this to yourself.

“I am not passing judgment on you. God forbid that I should! I am only
trying to show you what is in my mind, and that this break is final. The
revolt is in myself, against something sordid and horrible which I will
not take into my life. And for that reason time will make no difference.

“I am not a child, and I am not unreasonable. But I ask a great deal of
this life of mine that stretches ahead, Walter--home and children, the
love of a good man, the fulfillment of my ideals. And you ask me to
start with a handicap. I cannot do it. I know you are resentful, but--I
know that you understand.

“ANITA.”



CHAPTER XXV

The little Georgiev was in trouble those days. The Balkan engine was
threatening to explode, but continued to gather steam, with Bulgaria
sitting on the safety-valve. Austria was mobilizing troops, and there
were long conferences in the Burg between the Emperor and various
bearded gentlemen, while the military prayed in the churches for war.

The little Georgiev hardly ate or slept. Much hammering went on all day
in the small room below Harmony's on the Wollbadgasse. At night,
when the man in the green velours hat took a little sleep, mysterious
packages were carried down the whitewashed staircase and loaded into
wagons waiting below. Once on her window-sill Harmony found among the
pigeons a carrier pigeon with a brass tube fastened to its leg.

On the morning after Harmony's flight from the garden in the Street
of Seven Stars, she received a visit from Georgiev. She had put in
a sleepless night, full of heart-searching. She charged herself with
cowardice in running away from Peter and Jimmy when they needed her, and
in going back like a thief the night before. The conviction that the boy
was not so well brought with it additional introspection--her sacrifice
seemed useless, almost childish. She had fled because two men thought
it necessary, in order to save her reputation, to marry her; and she
did not wish to marry. Marriage was fatal to the career she had promised
herself, had been promised. But this career, for which she had given up
everything else--would she find it in the workroom of a dressmaker?

Ah, but there was more to it than that. Suppose--how her cheeks burned
when she thought of it!--suppose she had taken Peter at his word and
married him? What about Peter's career? Was there any way by which
Peter's poverty for one would be comfort for two? Was there any
reason why Peter, with his splendid ability, should settle down to the
hack-work of general practice, the very slough out of which he had so
painfully climbed?

Either of two things--go back to Peter, but not to marry him, or stay
where she was. How she longed to go back only Harmony knew. There in
the little room, with only the pigeons to see, she held out her arms
longingly. “Peter!” she said. “Peter, dear!”

She decided, of course, to stay where she was, a burden to no one.
The instinct of the young girl to preserve her good name at any cost
outweighed the vision of Peter at the window, haggard and tired, looking
out. It was Harmony's chance, perhaps, to do a big thing; to prove
herself bigger than her fears, stronger than convention. But she was
young, bewildered, afraid. And there was this element, stronger than
any of the others--Peter had never told her he loved her. To go back,
throwing herself again on his mercy, was unthinkable. On his love--that
was different. But what if he did not love her? He had been good to her;
but then Peter was good to every one.

There was something else. If the boy was worse what about his mother?
Whatever she was or had been, she was his mother. Suppose he were to die
and his mother not see him? Harmony's sense of fairness rebelled. In the
small community at home mother was sacred, her claims insistent.

It was very early, hardly more than dawn. The pigeons cooed on the sill;
over the ridge of the church roof, across, a luminous strip foretold the
sun. An oxcart, laden with vegetables for the market, lumbered along the
streets. Puzzled and unhappy, Harmony rose and lighted her fire, drew on
her slippers and the faded silk kimono with the pink butterflies.

In the next room the dressmaker still slept, dreaming early morning
dreams of lazy apprentices, overdue bills, complaining customers.

Harmony moved lightly not to disturb her. She set her room in order, fed
the pigeons,--it was then she saw the carrier with its message,--made
her morning coffee by setting the tiny pot inside the stove. And all the
time, moving quietly through her morning routine, she was there in that
upper room in body only.

In soul she was again in the courtyard back of the old lodge, in the
Street of Seven Stars, with the rabbits stirring in the hutch, and
Peter, with rapt eyes, gazing out over the city. Bed, toilet-table,
coffee-pot, Peter; pigeons, rolls, Peter; sunrise over the church roof,
and Peter again. Always Peter!

Monia Reiff was stirring in the next room. Harmony could hear her,
muttering and putting coal on the stove and calling to the Hungarian
maid for breakfast. Harmony dressed hastily. It was one of her new
duties to prepare the workroom for the day. The luminous streak above
the church was rose now, time for the day to begin.

She was not certain at once that some one had knocked at the door, so
faint was the sound.

She hesitated, listened. The knob turned slightly. Harmony, expecting
Monia, called “Come in.”

It was the little Georgiev, very apologetic, rather gray of face. He
stood in the doorway with his finger on his lips, one ear toward the
stairway. It was very silent. Monia was drinking her coffee in bed,
whither she had retired for warmth.

“Pardon!” said the Bulgarian in a whisper. “I listened until I heard you
moving about. Ah, Fraulein, that I must disturb you!”

“Something has happened!” exclaimed Harmony, thinking of Peter, of
course.

“Not yet. I fear it is about to happen. Fraulein, do me the honor to
open your window. My pigeon comes now to you to be fed, and I fear--on
the sill, Fraulein.”

Harmony opened the window. The wild pigeons scattered at once, but the
carrier, flying out a foot or two, came back promptly and set about its
breakfast.

“Will he let me catch him?”

“Pardon, Fraulein, If I may enter--”

“Come in, of course.”

Evidently the defection of the carrier had been serious. A handful of
grain on a wrong window-sill, and kingdoms overthrown! Georgiev caught
the pigeon and drew the message from the tube. Even Harmony grasped the
seriousness of the situation. The little Bulgarian's face, from gray
became livid; tiny beads of cold sweat came out on his forehead.

“What have I done?” cried Harmony. “Oh, what have I done? If I had known
about the pigeon--”

Georgiev recovered himself.

“The Fraulein can do nothing wrong,” he said. “It is a matter of an
hour's delay, that is all. It may not be too late.”

Monia Reiff, from the next room, called loudly for more coffee. The
sulky Hungarian brought it without a glance in their direction.

“Too late for what?”

“Fraulein, if I may trouble you--but glance from the window to the
street below. It is of an urgency, or I--Please, Fraulein!”

Harmony glanced down into the half-light of the street. Georgiev, behind
her, watched her, breathless, expectant. Harmony drew in her head.

“Only a man in a green hat,” she said. “And down the street a group of
soldiers.”

“Ah!”

The situation dawned on the girl then, at least partially.

“They are coming for you?”

“It is possible. But there are many soldiers in Vienna.”

“And I with the pigeon--Oh, it's too horrible! Herr Georgiev, stay here
in this room. Lock the door. Monia will say that it is mine--”

“Ah no, Fraulein! It is quite hopeless. Nor is it a matter of the
pigeon. It is war, Fraulein. Do not distress yourself. It is but a
matter of--imprisonment.”

“There must be something I can do,” desperately. “I hear them below. Is
there no way to the roof, no escape?”

“None, Fraulein. It was an oversight. War is not my game; I am a man of
peace. You have been very kind to me, Fraulein. I thank you.”

“You are not going down!”

“Pardon, but it is better so. Soldiers they are of the provinces mostly,
and not for a lady to confront.”

“They are coming up!”

He listened. The clank of scabbards against the stone stairs was
unmistakable. The little Georgiev straightened, threw out his chest,
turned to descend, faltered, came back a step or two.

His small black eyes were fixed on Harmony's face.

“Fraulein,” he said huskily, “you are very lovely. I carry always in my
heart your image. Always so long as I live. Adieu.”

He drew his heels together, gave a stiff little bow and was gone down
the staircase. Harmony was frightened, stricken. She collapsed in a heap
on the floor of her room, her fingers in her ears. But she need not have
feared. The little Georgiev made no protest, submitted to the inevitable
like a gentleman and a soldier, went out of her life, indeed, as
unobtrusively as he had entered it.

The carrier pigeon preened itself comfortably on the edge of the
washstand. Harmony ceased her hysterical crying at last and pondered
what was best to do. Monia was still breakfasting so incredibly brief
are great moments. After a little thought Harmony wrote a tiny message,
English, German, and French, and inclosed it in the brass tube.

“The Herr Georgiev has been arrested,” she wrote. An hour later the
carrier rose lazily from the window-sill, flapped its way over
the church roof and disappeared, like Georgiev, out of her life.
Grim-visaged war had touched her and passed on.

The incident was not entirely closed, however. A search of the building
followed the capture of the little spy. Protesting tenants were turned
out, beds were dismantled, closets searched, walls sounded for hidden
hollows. In one room on Harmony's floor was found stored a quantity of
ammunition.

It was when the three men who had conducted the search had finished,
when the boxes of ammunition had been gathered in the hall, and the
chattering sewing-girls had gone back to work, that Harmony, on her way
to her dismantled room, passed through the upper passage.

She glanced down the staircase where little Georgiev had so manfully
descended.

“I carry always in my heart your image. Always so long as I live.”

The clatter of soldiers on their way down to the street came to her
ears; the soft cooing of the pigeons, the whirr of sewing-machines from
the workroom. The incident was closed, except for the heap of ammunition
boxes on the landing, guarded by an impassive soldier.

Harmony glanced at him. He was eying her steadily, thumbs in, heels in,
toes out, chest out. Harmony put her hand to her heart.

“You!” she said.

The conversation of a sentry, save on a holiday is, “Yea, yea,” and
“Nay, nay.”

“Yes, Fraulein.”

Harmony put her hands together, a little gesture of appeal, infinitely
touching.

“You will not say that you have found, have seen me?”

“No, Fraulein.”

It was in Harmony's mind to ask all her hungry heart craved to learn--of
Peter, of Jimmy, of the Portier, of anything that belonged to the old
life in the Siebensternstrasse. But there was no time. The sentry's
impassive face became rigid; he looked through her, not at her. Harmony
turned.

The man in the green hat was coming up the staircase. There was no
further chance to question. The sentry was set to carrying the boxes
down the staircase.

Full morning now, with the winter sun shining on the beggars in the
market, on the crowds in the parks, on the flower sellers in the
Stephansplatz; shining on Harmony's golden head as she bent over a bit
of chiffon, on the old milkwoman carrying up the whitewashed staircase
her heavy cans of milk; on the carrier pigeon winging its way to the
south; beating in through bars to the exalted face of Herr Georgiev;
resting on Peter's drooping shoulders, on the neglected mice and the
wooden soldier, on the closed eyes of a sick child--the worshiped sun,
peering forth--the golden window of the East.



CHAPTER XXVI

Jimmy was dying. Peter, fighting hard, was beaten at last. All through
the night he had felt it; during the hours before the dawn there had
been times when the small pulse wavered, flickered, almost ceased. With
the daylight there had been a trifle of recovery, enough for a bit of
hope, enough to make harder Peter's acceptance of the inevitable.

The boy was very happy, quite content and comfortable. When he opened
his eyes he smiled at Peter, and Peter, gray of face, smiled back. Peter
died many deaths that night.

At daylight Jimmy fell into a sleep that was really stupor. Marie,
creeping to the door in the faint dawn, found the boy apparently
asleep and Peter on his knees beside the bed. He raised his head at
her footstep and the girl was startled at the suffering in his face. He
motioned her back.

“But you must have a little sleep, Peter.”

“No. I'll stay until--Go back to bed. It is very early.”

Peter had not been able after all to secure the Nurse Elisabet, and now
it was useless. At eight o'clock he let Marie take his place, then he
bathed and dressed and prepared to face another day, perhaps another
night. For the child's release came slowly. He tried to eat breakfast,
but managed only a cup of coffee.

Many things had come to Peter in the long night, and one was
insistent--the boy's mother was in Vienna and he was dying without her.
Peter might know in his heart that he had done the best thing for the
child, but like Harmony his early training was rising now to accuse
him. He had separated mother and child. Who was he to have decided the
mother's unfitness, to have played destiny? How lightly he had taken the
lives of others in his hand, and to what end? Harmony, God knows where;
the boy dying without his mother. Whatever that mother might be, her
place that day was with her boy. What a wreck he had made of things! He
was humbled as well as stricken, poor Peter!

In the morning he sent a note to McLean, asking him to try to trace the
mother and inclosing the music-hall clipping and the letter. The letter,
signed only “Mamma,” was not helpful. The clipping might prove valuable.

“And for Heaven's sake be quick,” wrote Peter. “This is a matter of
hours. I meant well, but I've done a terrible thing. Bring her, Mac, no
matter what she is or where you find her.” The Portier carried the note.
When he came up to get it he brought in his pocket a small rabbit and
a lettuce leaf. Never before had the combination failed to arouse and
amuse the boy. He carried the rabbit down again sorrowfully. “He saw
it not,” he reported sadly to his wife. “Be off to the church while
I deliver this letter. And this rabbit we will not cook, but keep in
remembrance.”

At eleven o'clock Marie called Peter, who was asleep on the horsehair
sofa.

“He asks for you.”

Peter was instantly awake and on his feet. The boy's eyes were open and
fixed on him.

“Is it another day?” he asked.

“Yes, boy; another morning.”

“I am cold, Peter.”

They blanketed him, although the room was warm. From where he lay he
could see the mice. He watched them for a moment. Poor Peter, very
humble, found himself wondering in how many ways he had been remiss. To
see this small soul launched into eternity without a foreword, without a
bit of light for the journey! Peter's religion had been one of life and
living, not of creed.

Marie, bringing jugs of hot water, bent over Peter.

“He knows, poor little one!” she whispered.

And so, indeed, it would seem. The boy, revived by a spoonful or two of
broth, asked to have the two tame mice on the bed. Peter, opening the
cage, found one dead, very stiff and stark. The catastrophe he kept from
the boy.

“One is sick, Jimmy boy,” he said, and placed the mate, forlorn and
shivering, on the pillow. After a minute:--

“If the sick one dies will it go to heaven?”

“Yes, honey, I think so.”

The boy was silent for a time. Thinking was easier than speech. His mind
too worked slowly. It was after a pause, while he lay there with closed
eyes, that Peter saw two tears slip from under his long lashes. Peter
bent over and wiped them away, a great ache in his heart.

“What is it, dear?”

“I'm afraid--it's going to die!”

“Would that be so terrible, Jimmy boy?” asked Peter gently. “To go to
heaven, where there is no more death or dying, where it is always summer
and the sun always shines?”

No reply for a moment. The little mouse sat up on the pillow and rubbed
its nose with a pinkish paw. The baby mice in the cage nuzzled their
dead mother.

“Is there grass?”

“Yes--soft green grass.”

“Do--boys in heaven--go in their bare feet?” Ah, small mind and heart,
so terrified and yet so curious!

“Indeed, yes.” And there on his knees beside the white bed Peter painted
such a heaven as no theologue has ever had the humanity to paint--a
heaven of babbling brooks and laughing, playing children, a heaven of
dear departed puppies and resurrected birds, of friendly deer, of trees
in fruit, of speckled fish in bright rivers. Painted his heaven with
smiling eyes and death in his heart, a child's heaven of games and
friendly Indians, of sunlight and rain, sweet sleep and brisk awakening.

The boy listened. He was silent when Peter had finished. Speech was
increasingly an effort.

“I should--like--to go there,” he whispered at last.

He did not speak again during all the long afternoon, but just at dusk
he roused again.

“I would like--to see--the sentry,” he said with difficulty.

And so again, and for the last time, Rosa's soldier from Salzburg with
one lung.

Through all that long day, then, Harmony sat over her work, unaccustomed
muscles aching, the whirring machines in her ears. Monia, upset over the
morning's excitement, was irritable and unreasonable. The gold-tissue
costume had come back from Le Grande with a complaint. Below in the
courtyard all day curious groups stood gaping up the staircase, where
the morning had seen such occurrences.

At the noon hour, while the girls heated soup and carried in pails of
salad from the corner restaurant, Harmony had fallen into the way of
playing for them. To the music-loving Viennese girls this was the hour
of the day. To sit back, soup bowl on knee, the machines silent, Monia
quarreling in the kitchen with the Hungarian servant, and while the
pigeons ate crusts on the window-sills, to hear this American girl play
such music as was played at the opera, her slim figure swaying, her
whole beautiful face and body glowing with the melody she made, the
girls found the situation piquant, altogether delightful. Although she
did not suspect it, many rumors were rife about Harmony in the workroom.
She was not of the people, they said--the daughter of a great American,
of course, run away to escape a loveless marriage. This was borne out
by the report of one of them who had glimpsed the silk petticoat. It
was rumored also that she wore no chemise, but instead an infinitely
coquettish series of lace and nainsook garments--of a fineness!

Harmony played for them that day, played, perhaps, as she had not played
since the day she had moved the master to tears, played to Peter as she
had seen him at the window, to Jimmy, to the little Georgiev as he went
down the staircase. And finally with a choke in her throat to the little
mother back home, so hopeful, so ignorant.

In the evening, as was her custom, she took the one real meal of the day
at the corner restaurant, going early to avoid the crowd and coming back
quickly through the winter night. The staircase was always a peril, to
be encountered and conquered night after night and even in the daytime
not to be lightly regarded. On her way up this night she heard steps
ahead, heavy, measured steps that climbed steadily without pauses. For
an instant Harmony thought it sounded like Peter's step and she went
dizzy.

But it was not Peter. Standing in the upper hall, much as he had stood
that morning over the ammunition boxes, thumbs in, heels in, toes out,
chest out, was the sentry.

Harmony's first thought was of Georgiev and more searching of the
building. Then she saw that the sentry's impassive face wore lines of
trouble. He saluted. “Please, Fraulein.”

“Yes?”

“I have not told the Herr Doktor.”

“I thank you.”

“But the child dies.”

“Jimmy?”

“He dies all of last night and to-day. To-night, it is, perhaps, but of
moments.”

Harmony clutched at the iron stair-rail for support. “You are sure? You
are not telling me so that I will go back?”

“He dies, Fraulein. The Herr Doktor has not slept for many hours. My
wife, Rosa, sits on the stair to see that none disturb, and her cousin,
the wife of the Portier, weeps over the stove. Please, Fraulein, come
with me.”

“When did you leave the Siebensternstrasse?”

“But now.”

“And he still lives?”

“Ja, Fraulein, and asks for you.”

Now suddenly fell away from the girl all pride, all fear, all that was
personal and small and frightened, before the reality of death. She
rose, as women by divine gift do rise, to the crisis; ceased trembling,
got her hat and coat and her shabby gloves and joined the sentry again.
Another moment's delay--to secure the Le Grande's address from Monia.
Then out into the night, Harmony to the Siebensternstrasse, the tall
soldier to find the dancer at her hotel, or failing that, at the
Ronacher Music-Hall.

Harmony took a taxicab--nothing must be spared now--bribed the chauffeur
to greater speed, arrived at the house and ran across the garden, still
tearless, up the stairs, past Rosa on the upper flight, and rang the
bell.

Marie admitted her with only a little gasp of surprise. There was
nothing to warn Peter. One moment he sat by the bed, watch in hand,
alone, drear, tragic-eyed. The next he had glanced up, saw Harmony and
went white, holding to the back of his chair. Their eyes met, agony
and hope in them, love and death, rapture and bitterness. In Harmony's,
pleading, promise, something of doubt; in Peter's, only yearning, as of
empty arms. Then Harmony dared to look at the bed and fell on her knees
in a storm of grief beside it. Peter bent over and gently stroked her
hair.

Le Grande was singing; the boxes were full. In the body of the immense
theater waiters scurried back and forward among the tables. Everywhere
was the clatter of silver and steel on porcelain, the clink of glasses.
Smoke was everywhere--pipes, cigars, cigarettes. Women smoked between
bites at the tables, using small paper or silver mouthpieces, even a
gold one shone here and there. Men walked up and down among the diners,
spraying the air with chemicals to clear it. At a table just below the
stage sat the red-bearded Dozent with the lady of the photograph. They
were drinking cheap native wines and were very happy.

From the height of his worldly wisdom he was explaining the people to
her.

“In the box--don't stare, Liebchen, he looks--is the princeling I have
told you of. Roses, of course. Last night it was orchids.”

“Last night! Were you here?” He coughed.

“I have been told, Liebchen. Each night he sits there, and when she
finishes her song he rises in the box, kisses the flowers and tosses
them to her.”

“Shameless! Is she so beautiful?”

“No. But you shall see. She comes.”

Le Grande was very popular. She occupied the best place on the program;
and because she sang in American, which is not exactly English and more
difficult to understand, her songs were considered exceedingly risque.
As a matter of fact they were merely ragtime melodies, with a lilt to
them that caught the Viennese fancy, accustomed to German sentimental
ditties and the artificial forms of grand opera. And there was another
reason for her success. She carried with her a chorus of a dozen
pickaninnies.

In Austria darkies were as rare as cats, and there were no cats! So the
little chorus had made good.

Each day she walked in the Prater, ermine from head to foot, and behind
her two by two trailed twelve little Southern darkies in red-velvet
coats and caps, grinning sociably. When she drove a pair sat on the
boot.

Her voice was strong, not sweet, spoiled by years of singing against
dishes and bottles in smoky music halls; spoiled by cigarettes and
absinthe and foreign cocktails that resembled their American prototypes
as the night resembles the day.

She wore the gold dress, decolletee, slashed to the knee over
rhinestone-spangled stockings. And back of her trailed the twelve little
darkies.

She sang “Dixie,” of course, and the “Old Folks at Home”; then a ragtime
medley, with the chorus showing rows of white teeth and clogging with
all their short legs. Le Grande danced to that, a whirling, nimble
dance. The little rhinestones on her stockings flashed; her opulent
bosom quivered. The Dozent, eyes on the dancer, squeezed his companion's
hand.

“I love thee!” he whispered, rather flushed.

And then she sang “Doan ye cry, mah honey.” Her voice, rather coarse but
melodious, lent itself to the negro rhythm, the swing and lilt of the
lullaby. The little darkies, eyes rolling, preternaturally solemn,
linked arms and swayed rhythmically, right, left, right, left. The
glasses ceased clinking; sturdy citizens forgot their steak and beer
for a moment and listened, knife and fork poised. Under the table the
Dozent's hand pressed its captive affectionately, his eyes no longer
on Le Grande, but on the woman across, his sweetheart, she who would
be mother of his children. The words meant little to the audience; the
rich, rolling Southern lullaby held them rapt:--

     “Doan ye Cry, mah honey--
     Doan ye weep no mo',
     Mammy's gwine to hold her baby,
     All de udder black trash sleepin' on the flo',”

The little darkies swayed; the singer swayed, empty arms cradled.

She picked the tiniest darky up and held him, woolly head against her
breast, and crooned to him, rocking on her jeweled heels. The crowd
applauded; the man in the box kissed his flowers and flung them. Glasses
and dishes clinked again.

The Dozent bent across the table.

“Some day--” he said.

The girl blushed.

Le Grande made her way into the wings, surrounded by her little troupe.
A motherly colored woman took them, shooed them off, rounded them up
like a flock of chickens.

And there in the wings, grimly impassive, stood a private soldier of the
old Franz Josef, blocking the door to her dressing room. For a moment
gold dress and dark blue-gray uniform confronted each other. Then the
sentry touched his cap.

“Madam,” he said, “the child is in the Riebensternstrasse and to-night
he dies.”

“What child?” Her arms were full of flowers.

“The child from the hospital. Please to make haste.”

Jimmy died an hour after midnight, quite peacefully, died with one hand
in Harmony's and one between Peter's two big ones.

Toward the last he called Peter “Daddy” and asked for a drink. His eyes,
moving slowly round the room, passed without notice the grayfaced woman
in a gold dress who stood staring down at him, rested a moment on the
cage of mice, came to a stop in the doorway, where stood the sentry,
white and weary, but refusing rest.

It was Harmony who divined the child's unspoken wish.

“The manual?” she whispered.

The boy nodded. And so just inside the door of the bedroom across from
the old salon of Maria Theresa the sentry, with sad eyes but no lack of
vigor, went again through the Austrian manual of arms, and because he
had no carbine he used Peter's old walking-stick.

When it was finished the boy smiled faintly, tried to salute, lay still.



CHAPTER XXVII

Peter was going back to America and still he had not told Harmony he
loved her. It was necessary that he go back. His money had about given
out, and there was no way to get more save by earning it. The drain of
Jimmy's illness, the inevitable expense of the small grave and the tiny
stone Peter had insisted on buying, had made retreat his only course.
True, Le Grande had wished to defray all expenses, but Peter was
inexorable. No money earned as the dancer earned hers should purchase
peaceful rest for the loved little body. And after seeing Peter's eyes
the dancer had not insisted.

A week had seen many changes. Marie was gone. After a conference between
Stewart and Peter that had been decided on. Stewart raised the money
somehow, and Peter saw her off, palpitant and eager, with the pin he had
sent her to Semmering at her throat. She kissed Peter on the cheek in
the station, rather to his embarrassment. From the lowered window, as
the train pulled out, she waved a moist handkerchief.

“I shall be very good,” she promised him. The last words he heard above
the grinding of the train were her cheery: “To America!”

Peter was living alone in the Street of Seven Stars, getting food
where he might happen to be, buying a little now and then from the
delicatessen shop across the street. For Harmony had gone back to the
house in the Wollbadgasse. She had stayed until all was over and until
Marie's small preparations for departure were over. Then, while Peter
was at the station, she slipped away again. But this time she left her
address. She wrote:--

“You will come to visit me, dear Peter, because I was so lonely before
and that is unnecessary now. But you must know that I cannot stay in
the Siebensternstrasse. We have each our own fight to make, and you have
been trying to fight for us all, for Marie, for dear little Jimmy, for
me. You must get back to work now; you have lost so much time. And I
am managing well. The Frau Professor is back and will take an evening
lesson, and soon I shall have more money from Fraulein Reiff. You can
see how things are looking up for me. In a few months I shall be able to
renew my music lessons. And then, Peter,--the career!

“HARMONY.”

Her address was beneath.

Peter had suffered much. He was thinner, grayer, and as he stood with
the letter in his hand he felt that Harmony was right. He could offer
her nothing but his shabby self, his problematic future. Perhaps,
surely, everything would have been settled, without reason, had he only
once taken the girl in his arms, told her she was the breath of life
itself to him. But adversity, while it had roused his fighting spirit in
everything else, had sapped his confidence.

He had found the letter on his dressing-table, and he found himself
confronting his image over it, a tall, stooping figure, a tired, lined
face, a coat that bore the impress of many days with a sick child's head
against its breast.

So it was over. She had come back and gone again, and this time he must
let her go. Who was he to detain her? She would carry herself on to
success, he felt; she had youth, hope, beauty and ability. And she had
proved the thing he had not dared to believe, that she could take care
of herself in the old city. Only--to go away and leave her there!

McLean would remain. No doubt he already had Harmony's address in the
Wollbadgasse. Peter was not subtle, no psychologist, but he had seen
during the last few days how the boy watched Harmony's every word, every
gesture. And, perhaps, when loneliness and hard work began to tell on
her, McLean's devotion would win its reward. McLean's devotion, with
all that it meant, the lessons again, community of taste, their common
youth! Peter felt old, very tired.

Nevertheless he went that night to the Wollbadgasse. He sent his gray
suit to the Portier's wife to be pressed, and getting out his surgical
case, as he had once before in the Pension Schwarz, he sewed a button
on his overcoat, using the curved needle and the catgut and working with
surgeon's precision. Then, still working very carefully, he trimmed the
edges of graying hair over his ears, trimmed his cuffs, trimmed his best
silk tie, now almost hopeless. He blacked his shoes, and the suit not
coming, he donned his dressing-gown and went into Jimmy's room to feed
the mice. Peter stood a moment beside the smooth white bed with his face
working. The wooden sentry still stood on the bedside table.

It was in Peter's mind to take the mice to Harmony, confess his defeat
and approaching retreat, and ask her to care for them. Then he decided
against this palpable appeal for sympathy, elected to go empty-handed
and discover merely how comfortable she was or was not. When the time
came he would slip out of her life, sending her a letter and leaving
McLean on guard.

Harmony was at home. Peter climbed the dark staircase--where Harmony
had met the little Georgiev, and where he had gone down to his
death--climbed steadily, but without his usual elasticity. The place
appalled him--its gloom, its dinginess, its somber quiet. In the
daylight, with the pigeons on the sills and the morning sunlight
printing the cross of the church steeple on the whitewashed wall, it was
peaceful, cloisterlike, with landings that were crypts. But at night it
was almost terrifying, that staircase.

Harmony was playing. Peter heard her when he reached the upper landing,
playing a sad little strain that gripped his heart. He waited outside
before ringing, heard her begin something determinedly cheerful, falter,
cease altogether. Peter rang.

Harmony herself admitted him. Perhaps--oh, certainly she had expected
him! It would be Peter, of course, to come and see how she was getting
on, how she was housed. She held out her hand and Peter took it. Still
no words, only a half smile from her and no smile at all from Peter, but
his heart in his eyes.

“I hoped you would come, Peter. We may have the reception room.”

“You knew I would come,” said Peter. “The reception room?”

“Where customers wait.” She still carried her violin, and slipped back
to her room to put it away. Peter had a glimpse of its poverty and its
meagerness. He drew a long breath.

Monia was at the opera, and the Hungarian sat in the kitchen knitting a
stocking. The reception room was warm from the day's fire, and in order.
All the pins and scraps of the day had been swept up, and the portieres
that made fitting-rooms of the corners were pushed back. Peter saw
only a big room with empty corners, and that at a glance. His eyes were
Harmony's.

He sat down awkwardly on a stiff chair, Harmony on a velvet settee. They
were suddenly two strangers meeting for the first time. In the squalor
of the Pension Schwarz, in the comfortable intimacies of the Street of
Seven Stars, they had been easy, unconstrained. Now suddenly Peter was
tongue-tied. Only one thing in him clamored for utterance, and that he
sternly silenced.

“I--I could not stay there, Peter. You understood?”

“No. Of course, I understood.”

“You were not angry?”

“Why should I be angry? You came, like an angel of light, when I needed
you. Only, of course,--”

“Yes?”

“I'll not say that, I think.”

“Please say it, Peter!”

Peter writhed; looked everywhere but at her.

“Please, Peter. You said I always came when you needed me, only--”

“Only--I always need you!” Peter, Peter!

“Not always, I think. Of course, when one is in trouble one needs a
woman; but--”

“Well, of course--but--I'm generally in trouble, Harry dear.”

Frightfully ashamed of himself by that time was Peter, ashamed of his
weakness. He sought to give a casual air to the speech by stooping for a
neglected pin on the carpet. By the time he had stuck it in his lapel he
had saved his mental forces from the rout of Harmony's eyes.

His next speech he made to the center table, and missed a most
delectable look in the aforesaid eyes.

“I didn't come to be silly,” he said to the table. “I hate people who
whine, and I've got into a damnable habit of being sorry for myself!
It's to laugh, isn't it, a great, hulking carcass like me, to be--”

“Peter,” said Harmony softly, “aren't you going to look at me?”

“I'm afraid.”

“That's cowardice. And I've fixed my hair a new way. Do you like it?”

“Splendid,” said Peter to the center table.

“You didn't look!”

The rout of Harmony's eyes was supplemented by the rout of Harmony's
hair. Peter, goaded, got up and walked about. Harmony was half
exasperated; she would have boxed Peter's ears with a tender hand had
she dared.

His hands thrust savagely in his pockets, Peter turned and faced her at
last.

“First of all,” he said, “I am going back to America, Harmony. I've
got all I can get here, all I came for--” He stopped, seeing her face.
“Well, of course, that's not true, I haven't. But I'm going back,
anyhow. You needn't look so stricken: I haven't lost my chance. I'll
come back sometime again and finish, when I've earned enough to do it.”

“You will never come back, Peter. You have spent all your money on
others, and now you are going back just where you were, and--you are
leaving me here alone!”

“You are alone, anyhow,” said Peter, “making your own way and getting
along. And McLean will be here.”

“Are you turning me over to him?”

No reply. Peter was pacing the floor.

“Peter!”

“Yes, dear?”

“Do you remember the night in Anna's room at the Schwartz when you
proposed to me?”

No reply. Peter found another pin.

“And that night in the old lodge when you proposed to me again?”

Peter turned and looked at her, at her slender, swaying young figure,
her luminous eyes, her parted, childish lips.

“Peter, I want you to--to ask me again.”

“No!”

“Why?”

“Now, listen to me, Harmony. You're sorry for me, that's all; I don't
want to be pitied. You stay here and work. You'll do big things. I had a
talk with the master while I was searching for you, and he says you
can do anything. But he looked at me--and a sight I was with worry and
fright--and he warned me off, Harmony. He says you must not marry.”

“Old pig!” said Harmony. “I will marry if I please.”

Nevertheless Peter's refusal and the master's speech had told somewhat.
She was colder, less vibrant. Peter came to her, stood close, looking
down at her.

“I've said a lot I didn't mean to,” he said. “There's only one thing I
haven't said, I oughtn't to say it, dear. I'm not going to marry you--I
won't have such a thing on my conscience. But it doesn't hurt a woman
to know that a man loves her. I love you, dear. You're my heaven and my
earth--even my God, I'm afraid. But I will not marry you.”

“Not even if I ask you to?”

“Not even then, dear. To share my struggle--”

“I see,” slowly. “It is to be a struggle?”

“A hard fight, Harmony. I'm a pauper practically.”

“And what am I?”

“Two poverties don't make a wealth, even of happiness,” said Peter
steadily. “In the time to come, when you would think of what you might
have been, it would be a thousand deaths to me, dear.”

“People have married, women have married and carried on their work, too,
Peter.”

“Not your sort of women or your sort of work. And not my sort of man,
Harry. I'm jealous--jealous of every one about you. It would have to be
the music or me.”

“And you make the choice!” said Harmony proudly. “Very well, Peter, I
shall do as you say. But I think it is a very curious sort of love.”

“I wonder,” Peter cried, “if you realize what love it is that loves you
enough to give you up.”

“You have not asked me if I care, Peter.”

Peter looked at her. She was very near to tears, very sad, very
beautiful.

“I'm afraid to ask,” said Peter, and picking up his hat he made for the
door. There he turned, looked back, was lost.

“My sweetest heart!” he cried, and took her in his hungry arms. But even
then, with her arms about his neck at last, with her slender body held
to him, her head on his shoulder, his lips to her soft throat, Peter put
her from him as a starving man might put away food.

He held her off and looked at her.

“I'm a fool and a weakling,” he said gravely. “I love you so much that I
would sacrifice you. You are very lovely, my girl, my girl! As long as I
live I shall carry your image in my heart.”

Ah, what the little Georgiev had said on his way to the death that
waited down the staircase. Peter, not daring to look at her again, put
away her detaining hand, squared his shoulders, went to the door.

“Good-bye, Harmony,” he said steadily. “Always in my heart!”

Very near the end now: the little Marie on the way to America, with
the recording angel opening a new page in life's ledger for her and
a red-ink line erasing the other; with Jimmy and his daddy wandering
through the heaven of friendly adventure and green fields, hand in hand;
with the carrier resting after its labors in the pigeon house by the
rose-fields of Sofia; with the sentry casting martial shadows through
the barred windows of the hospital; and the little Georgiev, about to
die, dividing his heart, as a heritage, between his country and a young
girl.

Very near the end, with the morning light of the next day shining into
the salon of Maria Theresa and on to Peter's open trunk and shabby
wardrobe spread over chairs. An end of trunks and departure, as was the
beginning.

Early morning at the Gottesacker, or God's acre, whence little Jimmy had
started on his comfortable journey. Early morning on the frost-covered
grass, the frozen roads, the snap and sparkle of the Donau. Harmony had
taken her problem there, in the early hour before Monia would summon her
to labor--took her problem and found her answer.

The great cemetery was still and deserted. Harmony, none too warmly
clad, walked briskly, a bunch of flowers in oiled paper against the
cold. Already the air carried a hint of spring; there was a feeling of
resurrection and promise. The dead earth felt alive under-foot.

Harmony knelt by the grave and said the little prayer the child had
repeated at night and morning. And, because he had loved it, with some
vague feeling of giving him comfort, she recited the little verse:--

“Ah well! For us all some sweet hope lies Deeply buried from human eyes:
And in the hereafter, angels may Roll the stone from its grave away.”

When she looked up Le Grande was standing beside her.

There was no scene, hardly any tears. She had brought out a great bunch
of roses that bore only too clearly the stamp of whence they came. One
of the pickaninnies had carried the box and stood impassively by, gazing
at Harmony.

Le Grande placed her flowers on the grave. They almost covered it, quite
eclipsed Harmony's.

“I come here every morning,” she said simply.

She had a cab waiting, and offered to drive Harmony back to the city.
Her quiet almost irritated Harmony, until she had looked once into the
woman's eyes. After that she knew. It was on the drive back, with the
little darky on the box beside the driver, that Harmony got her answer.

Le Grande put a hand over Harmony's.

“I tried to tell you before how good I know you were to him.”

“We loved him.”

“And I resented it. But Dr. Byrne was right--I was not a fit person
to--to have him.”

“It was not that--not only that--”

“Did he ever ask for me? But of course not.”

“No, he had no remembrance.”

Silence for a moment. The loose windows of the cab clattered.

“I loved him very much when he came,” said Le Grande, “although I did
not want him. I had been told I could have a career on the stage. Ah,
my dear, I chose the career--and look at me! What have I? A grave in
the cemetery back there, and on it roses sent me by a man I loathe! If I
could live it over again!”

The answer was very close now:--

“Would you stay at home?”

“Who knows, I being I? And my husband did not love me. It was the boy
always. There is only one thing worth while--the love of a good man. I
have lived, lived hard. And I know.”

“But supposing that one has real ability--I mean some achievement
already, and a promise--”

Le Grande turned and looked at Harmony shrewdly.

“I see. You are a musician, I believe?”

“Yes.”

“And--it is Dr. Byrne?”

“Yes.”

Le Grande bent forward earnestly.

“My child,” she said, “if one man in all the world looked at me as your
doctor looks at you, I--I would be a better woman.”

“And my music?”

“Play for your children, as you played for my little boy.”

Peter was packing: wrapping medical books in old coats, putting clean
collars next to boots, folding pajamas and such-like negligible garments
with great care and putting in his dresscoat in a roll. His pipes took
time, and the wooden sentry he packed with great care and a bit of
healthy emotion. Once or twice he came across trifles of Harmony's, and
he put them carefully aside--the sweater coat, a folded handkerchief,
a bow she had worn at her throat. The bow brought back the night before
and that reckless kiss on her white throat. Well for Peter to get away
if he is to keep his resolution, when the sight of a ribbon bow can
bring that look of suffering into his eyes.

The Portier below was polishing floors, right foot, left foot, any foot
at all. And as he polished he sang in a throaty tenor.

“Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluhen,” he sang at the top of his
voice, and coughed, a bit of floor wax having got into the air. The
antlers of the deer from the wild-game shop hung now in his bedroom.
When the wildgame seller came over for coffee there would be a
discussion probably. But were not the antlers of all deer similar?

The Portier's wife came to the doorway with a cooking fork in her hand.

“A cab,” she announced, “with a devil's imp on the box. Perhaps it is
that American dancer. Run and pretty thyself!”

It was too late for more than an upward twist of a mustache. Harmony
was at the door, but not the sad-eyed Harmony of a week before or the
undecided and troubled girl of before that. A radiant Harmony, this, who
stood in the doorway, who wished them good-morning, and ran up the old
staircase with glowing eyes and a heart that leaped and throbbed. A
woman now, this Harmony, one who had looked on life and learned; one
who had chosen her fate and was running to meet it; one who feared only
death, not life or anything that life could offer.

The door was not locked. Perhaps Peter was not up--not dressed. What did
that matter? What did anything matter but Peter himself?

Peter, sorting out lectures on McBurney's Point, had come across a bit
of paper that did not belong there, and was sitting by his open trunk,
staring blindly at it:--

“You are very kind to me. Yes, indeed.

“H. W.”

Quite the end now, with Harmony running across the room and dropping
down on her knees among a riot of garments--down on her knees, with one
arm round Peter's neck, drawing his tired head lower until she could
kiss him.

“Oh, Peter, Peter, dear!” she cried. “I'll love you all my life if only
you'll love me, and never, never let me go!”

Peter was dazed at first. He put his arms about her rather unsteadily,
because he had given her up and had expected to go through the rest of
life empty of arm and heart. And when one has one's arms set, as one may
say, for loneliness and relinquishment it is rather difficult--Ah, but
Peter got the way of it swiftly.

“Always,” he said incoherently; “forever the two of us. Whatever comes,
Harmony?”

“Whatever comes.”

“And you'll not be sorry?”

“Not if you love me.”

Peter kissed her on the eyes very solemnly.

“God helping me, I'll be good to you always. And I'll always love you.”

He tried to hold her away from him for a moment after that, to tell her
what she was doing, what she was giving up. She would not be reasoned
with.

“I love you,” was her answer to every line. And it was no divided
allegiance she promised him. “Career? I shall have a career. Yours!”

“And your music?”

She colored, held him closer.

“Some day,” she whispered, “I shall tell you about that.”

Late winter morning in Vienna, with the school-children hurrying home,
the Alserstrasse alive with humanity--soldiers and chimney-sweeps,
housewives and beggars. Before the hospital the crowd lines up along the
curb; the head waiter from the coffee-house across comes to the doorway
and looks out. The sentry in front of the hospital ceases pacing and
stands at attention.

In the street a small procession comes at the double quick--a handful of
troopers, a black van with tiny, high-barred windows, more troopers.

Inside the van a Bulgarian spy going out to death--a swarthy little man
with black eyes and short, thick hands, going out like a gentleman and a
soldier to meet the God of patriots and lovers.

The sentry, who was only a soldier from Salzburg with one lung, was also
a gentleman and a patriot. He uncovered his head.





End of Project Gutenberg's The Street of Seven Stars, by Mary Roberts Rinehart

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1214 ***