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!