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.