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.”