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.