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.