The Street of Seven Stars Part 13

Peter flushed. "I expect it was pretty poor stuff," he apologized. "I've never seen the Alps except from a train window, and as for a chamois--"

"He says his father will surely send him the horns."

Peter groaned.

"Of course!" he said. "Why, in Heaven's name, didn't I make it an eagle?

One can always buy a feather or two. But horns? He really liked the letter?"

"He adored it. He went to sleep almost at once with it in his hands."

Peter glowed. The small irritation of the custom-house forgotten, he talked of Jimmy; of what had been done and might still be done, if only there were money; and from Jimmy he talked boy. He had had a boys' club at home during his short experience in general practice. Boys were his hobby.

"Sc.u.m of the earth, most of them," he said, his plain face glowing.

"Dirty little beggars off the street. At first they stole my tobacco; and one of them p.a.w.ned a medical book or two! Then they got to playing the game right. By Jove, Harmony, I wish you could have seen them!

Used to line 'em up and make 'em spell, and the two best spellers were allowed to fight it out with gloves--my own method, and it worked.

Spell! They'd spell their heads off to get a chance at the gloves. Gee, how I hated to give them up!"

This was a new Peter, a boyish individual Harmony had never met before.

For the first time it struck her that Peter was young. He had always seemed rather old, solid and dependable, the fault of his elder brother att.i.tude to her, no doubt. She was suddenly rather shy, a bit aloof.

Peter felt the change and thought she was bored. He talked of other things.

A surprise was waiting for them in the cold lower hallway of the Pension Schwarz. A trunk was there, locked and roped, and on the trunk, in ulster and hat, sat Dr. Gates. Olga, looking rather frightened, was coming down with a traveling-bag. She put down the bag and scuttled up the staircase like a scared rabbit. The little doctor was grim. She eyed Peter and Harmony with an impersonal hostility, referable to her humor.

"I've been waiting for you two," she flung at them. "I've had a terrific row upstairs and I'm going. That woman's a devil!"

It had been a bad day for Harmony, and this new development, after everything else, a.s.sumed the proportions of a crisis. She had clung, at first out of sheer loneliness and recently out of affection, to the sharp little doctor with her mannish affectations, her soft and womanly heart.

"Sit down, child." Anna Gates moved over on the trunk. "You are f.a.gged out. Peter, will you stop looking murderous and listen to me? How much did it cost the three of us to live in this abode of virtue?"

It was simple addition. The total was rather appalling.

"I thought so. Now this is my plan. It may not be conventional, but it will be respectable enough to satisfy anybody. And it will be cheaper, I'm sure of that: We are all going out to the hunting-lodge of Maria Theresa, and Harmony shall keep house for us!"

CHAPTER IX

It was the middle of November when Anna Gates, sitting on her trunk in the cold entrance hall on the Hirschenga.s.se, flung the conversational bomb that left empty three rooms in the Pension Schwarz.

Mid-December found Harmony back and fully established in the lodge of Maria Theresa on the Street of Seven Stars--back, but with a difference.

True, the gate still swung back and forward on rusty hinges, obedient to every whim of the December gales; but the cas.e.m.e.nt windows in the salon no longer creaked or admitted drafts, thanks to Peter and a roll of rubber weather-casing. The grand piano, which had been Scatchy's rented extravagance, had gone never to return, and in its corner stood a battered but still usable upright. Under the great chandelier sat a table with an oil lamp, and evening and morning the white-tiled stove gleamed warm with fire. On the table by the lamp were the combined medical books of Peter and Anna Gates, and an ash-tray which also they used in common.

Shabby still, of course, bare, almost denuded, the salon of Maria Theresa. But at night, with the lamp lighted and the little door of the stove open, and perhaps, when the dishes from supper had been washed, with Harmony playing softly, it took resolution on Peter's part to put on his overcoat and face a lecture on the resection of a rib or a discussion of the function of the pituitary body.

The new arrangement had proved itself in more ways than one not only greater in comfort, but in economy. Food was amazingly cheap. Coal, which had cost ninety h.e.l.lers a bucket at the Pension Schwarz, they bought in quant.i.ty and could afford to use lavishly. Oil for the lamp was a trifle. They dined on venison now and then, when the shop across boasted a deer from the mountains. They had other game occasionally, when Peter, carrying home a mysterious package, would make them guess what it might contain. Always on such occasions Harmony guessed rabbits.

She knew how to cook rabbits, and some of the other game worried her.

For Harmony was the cook. It had taken many arguments and much coaxing to make Peter see it that way. In vain Harmony argued the extravagance of Rosa, now married to the soldier from Salzburg with one lung, or the tendency of the delicatessen seller to weigh short if one did not watch him. Peter was firm.

It was Dr. Gates, after all, who found the solution.

"Don't be too obstinate, Peter," she admonished him. "The child needs occupation; she can't practice all day. You and I can keep up the financial end well enough, reduced as it is. Let her keep house to her heart's content. That can be her contribution to the general fund."

And that eventually was the way it settled itself, not without demur from Harmony, who feared her part was too small, and who irritated Anna almost to a frenzy by cleaning the apartment from end to end to make certain of her usefulness.

A curious little household surely, one that made the wife of the Portier shake her head, and speak much beneath her breath with the wife of the brushmaker about the Americans having queer ways and not as the Austrians.

The short month had seen a change in all of them. Peter showed it least of all, perhaps. Men feel physical discomfort less keenly than women, and Peter had been only subconsciously wretched. He had gained a pound or two in flesh, perhaps, and he was unmistakably tidier. Anna Gates was growing round and rosy, and Harmony had trimmed her a hat. But the real change was in Harmony herself.

The girl had become a woman. Who knows the curious psychology by which such changes come--not in a month or a year; but in an hour, a breath.

One moment Harmony was a shy, tender young creature, all emotion, quivering at a word, aloof at a glance, p.r.o.ne to occasional introspection and mysterious daydreams; the next she was a young woman, tender but not shyly so, incredibly poised, almost formidably dignified on occasion, but with little girlish lapses into frolic and high spirits.

The transition moment with Harmony came about in this wise: They had been settled for three weeks. The odor of stewing cabbages at the Pension Schwarz had retired into the oblivion of lost scents, to be recalled, along with its accompanying memory of discomfort, with every odor of stewing cabbages for years to come. At the hospital Jimmy had had a bad week again. It had been an anxious time for all of them. In vain the sentry had stopped outside the third window and smiled and nodded through it; in vain--when the street was deserted and there was none to notice--he went through a bit of the manual of arms on the pavement outside, ending by setting his gun down with a martial and ringing clang.

In vain had Peter exhausted himself in literary efforts, climbing unheard-of peaks, taking walking-tours through such a Switzerland as never was, shooting animals of various sorts, but all hornless, as he carefully emphasized.

And now Jimmy was better again. He was propped up in bed, and with the aid of Nurse Elisabet he had cut out a paper sentry and set it in the barred window. The real sentry had been very much astonished; he had almost fallen over backward. On recovering he went entirely through the manual of arms, and was almost seen by an Oberst-lieutenant. It was all most exciting.

Harmony had been to see Jimmy on the day in question. She had taken him some gelatin, not without apprehension, it being her first essay in jelly and Jimmy being frank with the candor of childhood. The jelly had been a great success.

It was when she was about to go that Jimmy broached a matter very near his heart.

"The horns haven't come, have they?" he asked wistfully.

"No, not yet."

"Do you think he got my letter about them?"

"He answered it, didn't he?"

Jimmy drew a long breath. "It's very funny. He's mostly so quick. If I had the horns, Sister Elisabet would tie them there at the foot of the bed. And I could pretend I was hunting."

Harmony had a great piece of luck that day. As she went home she saw hanging in front of the wild-game shop next to the delicatessen store a fresh deer, and this time it was a stag. Like the others it hung head down, and as it swayed on its hook its great antlers tapped against the shop door as if mutely begging admission.

She could not buy the antlers. In vain she pleaded, explained, implored.

Harmony enlisted the Portier, and took him across with her. The wild-game seller was obdurate. He would sell the deer entire, or he would mount head and antlers for his wife's cousin in Galicia as a Christmas gift.

Harmony went back to the lodge and climbed the stairs. She was profoundly depressed. Even the discovery that Peter had come home early and was building a fire in the kitchen brought only a fleeting smile.

Anna was not yet home.

Peter built the fire. The winter dusk was falling and Harmony made a movement to light the candles. Peter stopped her.

"Can't we have the firelight for a little while? You are always beautiful, but--you are lovely in the firelight, Harmony."

"That is because you like me. We always think our friends are beautiful."

"I am fond of Anna, but I have never thought her beautiful."

The kitchen was small. Harmony, rolling up her sleeves by the table, and Peter before the stove were very close together. The dusk was fast fading into darkness; to this tiny room at the back of the old house few street sounds penetrated. Round them, shutting them off together from the world of shops with lighted windows, rumbling busses and hurrying humanity, lay the old lodge with its dingy gardens, its whitewashed halls, its dark and twisting staircases.