one hall could have held the thousands of patients, the doctors, the nurses. Sometimes a single ward had its own tree, its own entertainment. Occasionally two or three joined forces, preempted a lecture-room, and wheeled or hobbled or carried in their convalescents. In such case an imposing audience was the result.
Into such a room Peter led Harmony. It was an amphitheater, the seats rising in tiers, half circle above half circle, to the dusk of the roof. In the pit stood the tree, candle-lighted. There was no other illumination in the room. The semi-darkness, the blazing tree, the rows of hopeful, hoping, hopeless, rising above, white faces over white gowns, the soft rustle of expectancy, the silence when the Dozent with the red beard stepped out and began to read an address—all caught Harmony by the throat. Peter, keenly alive to everything she did, felt rather than heard her soft sob.
Peter saw the hospital anew that dark afternoon, saw it through Harmony’s eyes. Layer after layer his professional callus fell away, leaving him quick again. He had lived so long close to the heart of humanity that he had reduced its throbbing to beats that might be counted. Now, once more, Peter was back in the early days, when a heart was not a pump, but a thing that ached or thrilled or struggled, that loved or hated or yearned.
The orchestra, insisting on sadly sentimental music, was fast turning festivity into gloom. It played Handel’s “Largo”; it threw its whole soul into the assurance that the world, after all, was only a poor place, that Heaven was a better. It preached resignation with every deep vibration of the cello. Harmony fidgeted.
“How terrible!” she whispered. “To turn their Christmas-Eve into mourning! 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. Followed recitations, gifts, a speech of thanks from Nurse Elisabet for the patients. Then—Harmony.
Harmony never remembered afterward what she had played. It was joyous, she knew, for the whole atmosphere changed. Laughter came; even the candles burned more cheerfully. When she had finished, a student in a white coat asked her to play a German Volkspiel, and roared it out to her accompaniment with much vigor and humor. The audience joined in, at first 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, and finding them dwelt there a moment. Then she began to play softly and as softly 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 in which his poverty was forgotten or mattered not at all. Visions of a Christmas-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, which had been Anna’s, had been given up to him. Here, carefully tended, with a fire all day in the stove, Jimmy reigned from the bed. To him Harmony brought 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 the battles she and Peter fought at night over his treatment, frightful the litter of authorities Harmony put straight every morning.
The extra expense was not much, but it told. Peter’s carefully calculated expenditures felt the strain. He gave up a course in X-ray on which he had set his heart and cut off his hour in the coffee-house as a luxury. There was no hardship about the latter renunciation. Life for Peter was spelling itself very much in terms of Harmony and Jimmy those days. He resented anything that took him from them.
There were anxieties of a different sort also. Anna’s father was failing. He had written her a feeble, half-senile appeal to let bygones be bygones and come back to see him before he died. Anna was Peter’s great prop. What would he do should she decide to go home? He had built his 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 marvelous adventure; Jimmy still watched for them, listened breathless, treasured them under his pillow. But he spoke less of his father. The open page of his childish mind was being written over with new impressions. “Dad” was already a memory; Peter and Harmony and Anna were realities. Sometimes he called Peter “Dad.” At those times Peter caught the boy to him in an agony of tenderness.
And as the little apartment revolved round Jimmy, so was this Christmas-Eve given up to him. All day he had stayed in bed for the privilege of an extra hour propped up among pillows in the salon. All day he had strung little red berries that looked like cranberries for the tree, or fastened threads to the tiny cakes that were for trimming only, and sternly forbidden to eat.
A marvelous day that for Jimmy. Late in the afternoon the Portier, with a collar on, had mounted the stairs and sheepishly presented him with a pair of white mice in a wooden cage. Jimmy was thrilled. The cage was on his knees all evening, and one of the mice was clearly ill of a cake with pink icing. The Portier’s gift was a stealthy one, while his wife was having coffee with her cousin, the brushmaker. But the spirit Of Christmas does strange things. That very evening, while the Portier was roistering in a beer hall preparatory to the midnight mass, came the Portier’s wife, puffing from the stairs, and brought a puzzle book that only the initiated could open, and when one succeeded at last there was a picture of the Christ-Child within.
