great deal of money. She reached over and patted his arm.
“You’ll make it up in some way. Can’t you cut off some little extravagance?”
“I might cut down on my tailor bills.” He looked down at himself whimsically. “Or on ties. I’m positively reckless about ties!”
They walked on in silence. A detachment of soldiery, busy with that eternal military activity that seems to get nowhere, passed on a dog-trot. Peter looked at them critically.
“Bosnians,” he observed. “Raw, half-fed troops from Bosnia, nine out of ten of them tubercular. It’s a rotten game, this military play of Europe. How’s Jimmy?”
“We left him very happy with your letter.”
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.
“Scum 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 pawned 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 attitude 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, assumed 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 fagged 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 Hirschengasse, 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 casement 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 Hellers a bucket at the Pension Schwarz, they bought in quantity 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.”
