The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  "Please don't pay any attention to me," she implored. "I hate to sew. That's the trouble. Or perhaps it's not all the trouble. I'm a fool about music."

  "Perhaps, if you hate to sew—"

  "I hate a good many things, my dear, when you play like that. I hate being over here in this place, and I hate fleas and German cooking and clinics, and I hate being forty years old and as poor as a church-mouse and as ugly as sin, and I hate never having had any children!"

  Harmony was very uncomfortable and just a little shocked. But the next moment Dr. Gates had wiped her eyes with a scrap of the flannel and was smiling up through her glasses.

  "The plain truth really is that I have indigestion. I dare say I'm really weeping in anticipation over the Sunday dinner! The food's bad and I can't afford to live anywhere else. I'd take a room and do my own cooking, but what time have I?" She spread out the pieces of flannel on her knee. "Does this look like anything to you?"

  "A petticoat, isn't it?"

  "I didn't intend it as a petticoat."

  "I thought, on account of the scallops—"

  "Scallops!" Dr. Gates gazed at the painfully cut pink edges and from them to Harmony. Then she laughed, peal after peal of joyous mirth.

  "Scallops!" she gasped at last. "Oh, my dear, if you'd seen me cutting 'em! And with Peter Byrne's scissors!"

  Now here at last they were on common ground. Harmony, delicately flushed, repeated the name, clung to it conversationally, using little adroitnesses to bring the talk back to him. All roads of talk led to Peter—Peter's future, Peter's poverty, Peter's refusing to have his hair cut, Peter's encounter with a major of the guards, and the duel Peter almost fought. It developed that Peter, as the challenged, had had the choice of weapons, and had chosen fists, and that the major had been carried away. Dr. Gates grew rather weary of Peter at last and fell back on the pink flannel. She confided to Harmony that the various pieces, united, were to make a dressing-gown for a little American boy at the hospital. "Although," she commented, "it looks more like a chair cover."

  Harmony offered to help her, and got out a sewing-box that was lined with a piece of her mother's wedding dress. And as she straightened the crooked edges she told the doctor about the wedding dress, and about the mother who had called her Harmony because of the hope in her heart. And soon, by dint of skillful listening, which is always better than questioning, the faded little woman doctor knew all the story.

  She was rather aghast.

  "But suppose you cannot find anything to do?"

  "I must," simply.

  "It's such a terrible city for a girl alone."

  "I'm not really alone. I know you now."

  "An impoverished spinster! Much help I shall be!"

  "And there is Peter Byrne."

  "Peter!" Dr. Gates sniffed. "Peter is poorer than I am, if there is any comparison in destitution!"

  Harmony stiffened a trifle.

  "Of course I do not mean money," she said. "There are such things as encouragement, and—and friendliness."

  "One cannot eat encouragement," retorted Dr. Gates sagely. "And friendliness between you and any man—bah! Even Peter is only human, my dear."

  "I am sure he is very good."

  "So he is. He is very poor. But you are very attractive. There, I'm a skeptic about men, but you can trust Peter. Only don't fall in love with him. It will be years before he can marry. And don't let him fall in love with you. He probably will."

  Whereupon Dr. Gates taking herself and her pink flannel off to prepare for lunch, Harmony sent a formal note to Peter Byrne, regretting that a headache kept her from taking the afternoon walk as she had promised. Also, to avoid meeting him, she did without dinner, and spent the afternoon crying herself into a headache that was real enough.

  Anna Gates was no fool. While she made her few preparations for dinner she repented bitterly what she had said to Harmony. It is difficult for the sophistry of forty to remember and cherish the innocence of twenty. For illusions it is apt to substitute facts, the material for the spiritual, the body against the soul. Dr. Gates, from her school of general practice, had come to view life along physiological lines.

  With her customary frankness she approached Peter after the meal.

  "I've been making mischief, Peter. I been talking too much, as usual."

  "Certainly not about me, Doctor. Out of my blameless life—"

  "About you, as a representative member of your sex. I'm a fool."

  Peter looked serious. He had put on the newly pressed suit and his best tie, and was looking distinguished and just now rather stern.

  "To whom?"

  "To the young Wells person. Frankly, Peter, I dare say at this moment she thinks you are everything you shouldn't be, because I said you were only human. Why it should be evil to be human, or human to be evil—"

  "I cannot imagine," said Peter slowly, "the reason for any conversation about me."

  "Nor I, when I look back. We seemed to talk about other things, but it always ended with you. Perhaps you were our one subject in common. Then she irritated me by her calm confidence. The world was good, everybody was good. She would find a safe occupation and all would be well."

  "So you warned her against me," said Peter grimly.

  "I told her you were human and that she was attractive. Shall I make 'way with myself?"

  "Cui bono?" demanded Peter, smiling in spite of himself. "The mischief is done."

  Dr. Gates looked up at him.

  "I'm in love with you myself, Peter!" she said gratefully. "Perhaps it is the tie. Did you ever eat such a meal?"

  CHAPTER VI

  A very pale and dispirited Harmony it was who bathed her eyes in cold water that evening and obeyed little Olga's "Bitte sum speisen." The chairs round the dining-table were only half occupied—a free concert had taken some, Sunday excursions others. The little Bulgarian, secretly considered to be a political spy, was never about on this one evening of the week. Rumor had it that on these evenings, secreted in an attic room far off in the sixteenth district, he wrote and sent off reports of what he had learned during the week—his gleanings from near-by tables in coffee-houses or from the indiscreet hours after midnight in the cafe, where the Austrian military was wont to gather and drink.

  Into the empty chair beside Harmony Peter slid his long figure, and met a tremulous bow and silence. From the head of the table Frau Schwarz was talking volubly—as if, by mere sound, to distract attention from the scantiness of the meal. Under cover of the Babel Peter spoke to the girl. Having had his warning his tone was friendly, without a hint of the intimacy of the day before.

  "Better?"

  "Not entirely. Somewhat."

  "I wish you had sent Olga to me for some tablets. No one needs to suffer from headache, when five grains or so of powder will help them."

  "I am afraid of headache tablets."

  "Not when your physician prescribes them, I hope!"

  This was the right note. Harmony brightened a little. After all, what had she to do with the man himself? He had constituted himself her physician. That was all.

  "The next time I shall send Olga."

  "Good!" he responded heartily; and proceeded to make such a meal as he might, talking little, and nursing, by a careful indifference, her new-growing confidence.

  It was when he had pushed his plate away and lighted a cigarette—according to the custom of the pension, which accorded the "Nicht Rauchen" sign the same attention that it did to the portrait of the deceased Herr Schwarz—that he turned to her again.

  "I am sorry you are not able to walk. It promises a nice night."

  Peter was clever. Harmony, expecting an invitation to walk, had nerved herself to a cool refusal. This took her off guard.

  "Then you do not prescribe air?"

  "That's up to how you feel. If you care to go out and don't mind my going along as a sort of Old Dog Tray I haven't anything else to do."

  Dr. Gates, eating stewed fruit across the table
, gave Peter a swift glance of admiration, which he caught and acknowledged. He was rather exultant himself; certainly he had been adroit.

  "I'd rather like a short walk. It will make me sleep," said Harmony, who had missed the by-play. "And Old Dog Tray would be a very nice companion, I'm sure."

  It is doubtful, however, if Anna Gates would have applauded Peter had she followed the two in their rambling walk that night. Direction mattering little and companionship everything, they wandered on, talking of immaterial things—of the rough pavements, of the shop windows, of the gray medieval buildings. They came to a full stop in front of the Votivkirche, and discussed gravely the twin Gothic spires and the Benk sculptures on the facade. And there in the open square, casting diplomacy to the winds, Peter Byrne turned to Harmony and blurted out what was in his heart.

  "Look here," he said, "you don't care a rap about spires. I don't believe you know anything about them. I don't. What did that idiot of a woman doctor say to you to-day?"

  "I don't know what you mean."

  "You do very well. And I'm going to set you right. She starts out with two premises: I'm a man, and you're young and attractive. Then she draws some sort of fool deduction. You know what I mean?"

  "I don't see why we need discuss it," said poor Harmony. "Or how you know—"

  "I know because she told me. She knew she had been a fool, and she came to me. I don't know whether it makes any difference to you or not, but—we'd started out so well, and then to have it spoiled! My dear girl, you are beautiful and I know it. That's all the more reason why, if you'll stand for it, you need some one to look after you—I'll not say like a brother, because all the ones I ever knew were darned poor brothers to their sisters, but some one who will keep an eye on you and who isn't going to fall in love with you."

  "I didn't think you were falling in love with me; nor did I wish you to."

  "Certainly not. Besides, I—" Here Peter Byrne had another inspiration, not so good as the first—"Besides, there is somebody at home, you understand? That makes it all right, doesn't it?"

  "A girl at home?"

  "A girl," said Peter, lying manfully.

  "How very nice!" said Harmony, and put out her hand. Peter, feeling all sorts of a cheat, took it, and got his reward in a complete restoral of their former comradely relations. From abstractions of church towers and street paving they went, with the directness of the young, to themselves. Thereafter, during that memorable walk, they talked blissful personalities, Harmony's future, Peter's career, money—or its lack—their ambitions, their hopes, even—and here was intimacy, indeed!—their disappointments, their failures of courage, their occasional loss of faith in themselves.

  The first real snow of the year was falling as they turned back toward the Pension Schwarz, a damp snow that stuck fast and melted with a chilly cold that had in it nothing but depression. The upper spires of the Votivkirche were hidden in a gray mist; the trees in the park took on, against the gloom of the city hall, a snowy luminosity. Save for an occasional pedestrian, making his way home under an umbrella, the streets were deserted. Byrne and Harmony had no umbrella, but the girl rejected his offer of a taxicab.

  "We should be home too quickly," she observed naively. "And we have so much to say about me. Now I thought that perhaps by giving English lessons in the afternoon and working all morning at my music—"

  And so on and on, square after square, with Peter listening gravely, his head bent. And square after square it was borne in on him what a precarious future stretched before this girl beside him, how very slender her resources, how more than dubious the outcome.

  Poverty, which had only stimulated Peter Byrne in the past, ate deep into his soul that night.

  Epochmaking as the walk had been, seeing that it had reestablished a friendship and made a working basis for future comradely relations, they were back at the corner of the Alserstrasse before ten. As they turned in at the little street, a man, lurching somewhat, almost collided with Harmony. He was a short, heavy-set person with a carefully curled mustache, and he was singing, not loudly, but with all his maudlin heart in his voice, the barcarolle from the "Tales" of Hoffmann. He saw Harmony, and still singing planted himself in her path. When Byrne would have pushed him aside Harmony caught his arm.

  "It is only the Portier from the lodge," she said.

  The Portier, having come to rest on a throaty and rather wavering note, stood before Harmony, bowing.

  "The Fraulein has gone and I am very sad," he said thickly. "There is no more music, and Rosa has run away with a soldier from Salzburg who has only one lung."

  "But think!" Harmony said in German. "No more practicing in the early dawn, no young ladies bringing mud into your newscrubbed hall! It is better, is it not? All day you may rest and smoke!"

  Byrne led Harmony past the drunken Portier, who turned with caution and bowed after them.

  "Gute Nacht," he called. "Kuss die Hand, Fraulein. Four rooms and the salon and a bath of the finest."

  As they went up the Hirschengasse they could hear him pursuing his unsteady way down the street and singing lustily. At the door of the Pension Schwarz Harmony paused.

  "Do you mind if I ask one question?"

  "You honor me, madam."

  "Then—what is the name of the girl back home?"

  Peter Byrne was suddenly conscious of a complete void as to feminine names. He offered, in a sort of panic, the first one he recalled:—

  "Emma."

  "Emma! What a nice, old-fashioned name!" But there was a touch of disappointment in her voice.

  Harmony had a lesson the next day. She was a favorite pupil with the master. Out of so much musical chaff he winnowed only now and then a grain of real ability. And Harmony had that. Scatchy and the Big Soprano had been right—she had the real thing.

  The short half-hour lesson had a way with Harmony of lengthening itself to an hour or more, much to the disgust of the lady secretary in the anteroom. On that Monday Harmony had pleased the old man to one of his rare enthusiasms.

  "Six months," he said, "and you will go back to your America and show them how over here we teach violin. I will a letter—letters—give you, and you shall put on the programme, of your concerts that you are my pupil, is it not so?"

  Harmony was drawing on her worn gloves; her hands trembled a little with the praise and excitement.

  "If I can stay so long," she answered unsteadily.

  "You must stay. Have I so long labored, and now before it is finished you talk of going! Gott im Himmel!"

  "It is a matter of money. My father is dead. And unless I find something to do I shall have to go back."

  The master had heard many such statements. They never ceased to rouse his ire against a world that had money for everything but music. He spent five minutes in indignant protest, then:—

  "But you are clever and young, child. You will find a way to stay. Perhaps I can now and then find a concert for you." It was a lure he had thrown out before, a hook without a bait. It needed no bait, being always eagerly swallowed. "And no more talk of going away. I refuse to allow. You shall not go."

  Harmony paid the lady secretary on her way out. The master was interested. He liked Harmony and he believed in her. But fifty Kronen is fifty Kronen, and South American beef is high of price. He followed Harmony into the outer room and bowed her out of his studio.

  "The Fraulein has paid?" he demanded, turning sharply to the lady secretary.

  "Always."

  "After the lesson?"

  "Ja, Herr Professor."

  "It is better," said the master, "that she pay hereafter before the lesson."

  "Ja, Herr Professor."

  Whereupon the lady secretary put a red-ink cross before Harmony's name. There were many such crosses on the ledger.

  CHAPTER VII

  For three days Byrne hardly saw Harmony. He was off early in the morning, hurried back to the midday meal and was gone again the moment it was over. He had lectures in the eveni
ngs, too, and although he lingered for an hour or so after supper it was to find Harmony taken possession of by the little Bulgarian, seized with a sudden thirst for things American.

  On the evening of the second day he had left Harmony, enmeshed and helpless in a tangle of language, trying to explain to the little Bulgarian the reason American women wished to vote. Byrne flung down the stairs and out into the street, almost colliding with Stewart.

  They walked on together, Stewart with the comfortably rolling gait of the man who has just dined well, Byrne with his heavy, rather solid tread. The two men were not congenial, and the frequent intervals without speech between them were rather for lack of understanding than for that completeness of it which often fathers long silences. Byrne was the first to speak after their greeting.

  "Marie all right?"

  "Fine. Said if I saw you to ask you to supper some night this week."

  "Thanks. Does it matter which night?"

  "Any but Thursday. We're hearing 'La Boheme.'"

  "Say Friday, then."

  Byrne's tone lacked enthusiasm, but Stewart in his after-dinner mood failed to notice it.

  "Have you thought any more about our conversation of the other night?"

  "What was that?"

  Stewart poked him playfully in the ribs.

  "Wake up, Byrne!" he said. "You remember well enough. Neither the Days nor any one else is going to have the benefit of your assistance if you go on living the way you have been. I was at Schwarz's. It is the double drain there that tells on one—eating little and being eaten much. Those old walls are full of vermin. Why don't you take our apartment?"

  "Yours?"

  "Yes, for a couple of months. I'm through with Schleich and Breidau can't take me for two months. It's Marie's off season and we're going to Semmering for the winter sports. We're ahead enough to take a holiday. And if you want the flat for the same amount you are spending now, or less, you can have it, and—a home, old man."

  Byrne was irritated, the more so that he realized that the offer tempted him. To his resentment was added a contempt of himself.

  "Thanks," he said. "I think not."