The Street of Seven Stars

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  CHAPTER XV

  Christmas-Eve in the saloon of Maria Theresa! Christmas-Eve, with thegreat chandelier recklessly ablaze and a pig's head with cranberry eyesfor supper! Christmas-Eve, with a two-foot tree gleaming with candles onthe stand, and beside the stand, in a huge chair, Jimmy!

  It had been a busy day for Harmony. In the morning there had beenshopping and marketing, and such a temptation to be reckless, with theshops full of ecstasies and the old flower women fairly overburdened.There had been anxieties, too, such as the pig's head, which must bedone a certain way, and Jimmy, who must be left with the Portier's wifeas nurse while all of them went to the hospital. The house revolvedaround Jimmy now, Jimmy, who seemed the better for the moving, and whosemother as yet had failed to materialize.

  In the afternoon Harmony played at the hospital. Peter took her as theearly twilight was falling in through the gate where the sentry keptguard and so to the great courtyard. In this grim playground menwandered about, smoking their daily allowance of tobacco and moving tokeep warm, offscourings of the barracks, derelicts of the slums, withhere and there an honest citizen lamenting a Christmas away from home.The hospital was always pathetic to Harmony; on this Christmas-Eve shefound it harrowing. Its very size shocked her, that there should be somuch suffering, so much that was appalling, frightful, insupportable.Peter felt her quiver under his hand. A hospital in festivity is veryaffecting. It smiles through its tears. And in every assemblage thereare sharply defined lines of difference. There are those who are goinghome soon, God willing; there are those who will go home some time afterlong days and longer nights. And there are those who will never go homeand who know it. And because of this the ones who are never going homeare most festively clad, as if, by way of compensation, the nursesmean to give them all future Christmasses in one. They receive anextra orange, or a pair of gloves, perhaps,--and they are not the lessgrateful because they understand. And when everything is over they layaway in the bedside stand the gloves they will never wear, and dividethe 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 thechildren sang? So little, to sing like that! It made me think--ofangels."

  Peter led Harmony across the courtyard, through many twisting corridors,and up and down more twisting staircases to the room where she was toplay. There were many Christmas trees in the hospital that afternoon;no one hall could have held the thousands of patients, the doctors, thenurses. Sometimes a single ward had its own tree, its own entertainment.Occasionally two or three joined forces, preempted a lecture-room, andwheeled or hobbled or carried in their convalescents. In such case animposing audience was the result.

  Into such a room Peter led Harmony. It was an amphitheater, the seatsrising in tiers, half circle above half circle, to the dusk of theroof. In the pit stood the tree, candle-lighted. There was no otherillumination in the room. The semi-darkness, the blazing tree, therows of hopeful, hoping, hopeless, rising above, white faces over whitegowns, the soft rustle of expectancy, the silence when the Dozent withthe red beard stepped out and began to read an address--all caughtHarmony by the throat. Peter, keenly alive to everything she did, feltrather than heard her soft sob.

  Peter saw the hospital anew that dark afternoon, saw it throughHarmony's eyes. Layer after layer his professional callus fell away,leaving him quick again. He had lived so long close to the heart ofhumanity that he had reduced its throbbing to beats that might becounted. Now, once more, Peter was back in the early days, when a heartwas not a pump, but a thing that ached or thrilled or struggled, thatloved or hated or yearned.

  The orchestra, insisting on sadly sentimental music, was fast turningfestivity into gloom. It played Handel's "Largo"; it threw its wholesoul into the assurance that the world, after all, was only a poorplace, that Heaven was a better. It preached resignation with every deepvibration of the cello. Harmony fidgeted.

  "How terrible!" she whispered. "To turn their Christmas-Eve intomourning! 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. Followedrecitations, gifts, a speech of thanks from Nurse Elisabet for thepatients. Then--Harmony.

  Harmony never remembered afterward what she had played. It was joyous,she knew, for the whole atmosphere changed. Laughter came; even thecandles burned more cheerfully. When she had finished, a student in awhite coat asked her to play a German Volkspiel, and roared it out toher accompaniment with much vigor and humor. The audience joined in, atfirst 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, andfinding them dwelt there a moment. Then she began to play softly and assoftly 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 inwhich his poverty was forgotten or mattered not at all. Visions of aChristmas-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, whichhad been Anna's, had been given up to him. Here, carefully tended, witha fire all day in the stove, Jimmy reigned from the bed. To him Harmonybrought 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 thebattles she and Peter fought at night over his treatment, frightful thelitter of authorities Harmony put straight every morning.

  The extra expense was not much, but it told. Peter's carefullycalculated expenditures felt the strain. He gave up a course in X-ray onwhich he had set his heart and cut off his hour in the coffee-house asa luxury. There was no hardship about the latter renunciation. Life forPeter was spelling itself very much in terms of Harmony and Jimmy thosedays. He resented anything that took him from them.

  There were anxieties of a different sort also. Anna's father wasfailing. He had written her a feeble, half-senile appeal to let bygonesbe bygones and come back to see him before he died. Anna was Peter'sgreat prop. What would he do should she decide to go home? He had builthis 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 marvelousadventure; Jimmy still watched for them, listened breathless, treasuredthem under his pillow. But he spoke less of his father. The open page ofhis childish mind was being written over with new impressions. "Dad" wasalready a memory; Peter and Harmony and Anna were realities. Sometimeshe called Peter "Dad." At those times Peter caught the boy to him in anagony of tenderness.

  And as the little apartment revolved round Jimmy, so was thisChristmas-Eve given up to him. All day he had stayed in bed for theprivilege of an extra hour propped up among pillows in the salon. Allday he had strung little red berries that looked like cranberries forthe tree, or fastened threads to the tiny cakes that were for trimmingonly, and sternly forbidden to eat.

  A marvelous day that for Jimmy. Late in the afternoon the Portier, witha collar on, had mounted the stairs and sheepishly presented him with apair of white mice in a wooden cage. Jimmy was thrilled. The cage wason his knees all evening, and one of the mice
was clearly ill of a cakewith pink icing. The Portier's gift was a stealthy one, while his wifewas having coffee with her cousin, the brushmaker. But the spirit OfChristmas does strange things. That very evening, while the Portier wasroistering in a beer hall preparatory to the midnight mass, came thePortier's wife, puffing from the stairs, and brought a puzzle book thatonly the initiated could open, and when one succeeded at last there wasa picture of the Christ-Child within.

  Young McLean came to call that evening--came to call and remained toworship. It was the first time since Mrs. Boyer that a visitor hadcome. McLean, interested with everything and palpably not shocked, wasa comforting caller. He seemed to Harmony, who had had bad moments sincethe day of Mrs. Boyer's visit, to put the hallmark of respectability onthe 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 Jimmyto bed. The tree candles were burned out; Peter was extinguishingthe dying remnants when Harmony came back. McLean was at the piano,thrumming softly. Peter, turning round suddenly, surprised an expressionon 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 hadnever seen her in white before.

  It was Peter's way to sit back and listen: his steady eyes were alwaysalert, good-humored, but he talked very little. That night he wasunusually silent. He sat in the shadow away from the lamp and watchedthe two at the piano: McLean playing a bit of this or that, the girlbending 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 peopleare wealthy."

  Money, always money! Peter ground his teeth over his pipestem. Eminentlyit would be a good thing for Harmony, this nice boy in his well-madeevening clothes, who spoke Harmony's own language of music, who wasalmost speechless over her playing, and who looked up at her with eyesin which admiration was not unmixed with adoration.

  Peter was restless. As the music went on he tiptoed out of the room andtook to pacing up and down the little corridor. Each time as he passedthe door he tried not to glance in; each time he paused involuntarily.Jealousy had her will of him that night, jealousy, when he had neveracknowledged even to himself how much the girl was to him.

  Jimmy was restless. Usually Harmony's music put him to sleep; but thatnight he lay awake, even after Peter had closed all the doors. Petercame in and sat with him in the dark, going over now and then to coverhim, or to give him a drink, or to pick up the cage of mice which Jimmyinsisted on having beside him and which constantly slipped off on to thefloor. After a time Peter lighted the night-light, a bit of wick on acork 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 cageof mice, the box, the wooden sentry. The boy fell asleep. Peter sat inthe 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 theystopped for very weariness. Anna had yawned herself off to bed. FromJimmy's room Peter could hear the soft hum of their voices.

  "You have been awfully good to me," McLean said as he finally rose togo. "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 hasbeen no one for the piano. I have been lonely sometimes for some one totalk 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 bebusy--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 aspossible. Then he missed a glove, and it must be searched for in allthe dark corners of the salon until found in his pocket. Even then hehesitated, 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 thinkof it? You and I meeting here in the center of Europe and both of usworking our heads off for something that may never pan out."

  There was something reminiscent about that to Harmony. It was not untilafter young McLean had gone that she recalled. It was almost word forword what Peter had said to her in the coffee-house the night they met.She thought it very curious, the coincidence, and pondered it, beingignorant of the fact that it is always a matter for wonder when theman meets the woman, no matter where. Nothing is less curious, moreinevitable, more amazing. "You and I," forsooth, said Peter!

  "You and I," cried young McLean!