But Peter refused. He tempered the refusal in his kindly way.
“I can’t take anything now,” he said. “But I’ll remember it, and if things get very bad I’ll come to you. It isn’t costing much to live. Marie is a good manager, almost as good as—Harmony was.” This with difficulty. He found it always hard to speak of Harmony. His throat seemed to close on the name.
That was the best McLean could do, but he made a mental reservation to see Marie that night and slip her a little money. Peter need never know, would never notice.
At a cross-street the car stopped, and the little Bulgarian, Georgiev, got on. He inspected the car carefully before he came in from the platform, and sat down unobtrusively in a corner. Things were not going well with him either. His small black eyes darted from face to face suspiciously, until they came to a rest on Peter.
It was Georgiev’s business to read men. Quickly he put together the bits he had gathered from Harmony on the staircase, added to them Peter’s despondent attitude, his strained face, the abstraction which required a touch on the arm from his companion when they reached their destination, recalled Peter outside the door of Harmony’s room in the Pension Schwarz—and built him a little story that was not far from the truth.
Peter left the car without seeing him. It was the hour of the promenade, when the Ring and the larger business streets were full of people, when Demel’s was thronged with pretty women eating American ices, with military men drinking tea and nibbling Austrian pastry, the hour when the flower women along the Stephansplatz did a rousing business in roses, when sterile women burned candles before the Madonna in the Cathedral, when the lottery did the record business of the day.
It was Peter’s forlorn hope that somewhere among the crowd he might happen on Harmony. For some reason he thought of her always as in a crowd, with people close, touching her, men staring at her, following her. He had spent a frightful night in the Opera, scanning seat after seat, not so much because he hoped to find her as because inaction was intolerable.
And so, on that afternoon, he made his slow progress along the Karntnerstrasse, halting now and then to scrutinize the crowd. He even peered through the doors of shops here and there, hoping while he feared that the girl might be seeking employment within, as she had before in the early days of the winter.
Because of his stature and powerful physique, and perhaps, too, because of the wretchedness in his eyes, people noticed him. There was one place where Peter lingered, where a new building was being erected, and where because of the narrowness of the passage the dense crowd was thinned as it passed. He stood by choice outside a hairdresser’s window, where a brilliant light shone on each face that passed.
Inside the clerks had noticed him. Two of them standing together by the desk spoke of him: “He is there again, the gray man!”
“Ah, so! But, yes, there is his back!”
“Poor one, it is the Fraulein Engel he waits to see, perhaps.”
“More likely Le Grande, the American. He is American.”
“He is Russian. Look at his size.”
“But his shoes!” triumphantly. “They are American, little one.”
The third girl had not spoken; she was wrapping in tissue a great golden rose made for the hair. She placed it in a box carefully.
“I think he is of the police,” she said, “or a spy. There is much talk of war.”
“Foolishness! Does a police officer sigh always? Or a spy have such sadness in his face? And he grows thin and white.”
“The rose, Fraulein.”
The clerk who had wrapped up the flower held it out to the customer. The customer, however, was not looking. She was gazing with strange intentness at the back of a worn gray overcoat. Then with a curious clutch at her heart she went white. Harmony, of course, Harmony come to fetch the golden rose that was to complete Le Grande’s costume.
She recovered almost at once and made an excuse to leave by another exit.
She took a final look at the gray sleeve that was all she could see of Peter, who had shifted a bit, and stumbled out into the crowd, walking along with her lip trembling under her veil, and with the slow and steady ache at her heart that she had thought she had stilled for good.
It had never occurred to Harmony that Peter loved her. He had proposed to her twice, but that had been in each case to solve a difficulty for her. And once he had taken her in his arms, but that was different. Even then he had not said he loved her—had not even known it, to be exact. Nor had Harmony realized what Peter meant to her until she had put him out of her life.
The sight of the familiar gray coat, the scrap of conversation, so enlightening as to poor Peter’s quest, that Peter was growing thin and white, made her almost reel. She had been too occupied with her own position to realize Peter’s. With the glimpse of him came a great longing for the house on the Siebensternstrasse, for Jimmy’s arms about her neck, for the salon with the lamp lighted and the sleet beating harmlessly against the casement windows, for the little kitchen with the brick stove, for Peter.
Doubts of the wisdom of her course assailed her. But to go back meant, at the best, adding to Peter’s burden of Jimmy and Marie, meant the old situation again, too, for Marie most certainly did not add to the respectability of the establishment. And other doubts assailed her. What if Jimmy were not so well, should die, as was possible, and she had not let his mother see him!
Monia Reiff was very busy that day. Harmony did not leave the workroom until eight o’clock. During all that time, while her slim fingers worked over fragile laces and soft chiffons, she was seeing Jimmy as she had seen him last, with the flower fairies on his pillow, and Peter, keeping watch over the crowd in the Karntnerstrasse, looking with his steady eyes for her.
No part of the city was safe for a young girl after night, she knew; the sixteenth district was no better than the rest, rather worse in places. But the longing to see the house on the Siebensternstrasse grew on her, became from an ache a sharp and insistent pain. She must go, must see once again the comfortable glow of Peter’s lamp, the flicker that was the fire.
She ate no supper. She was too tired to eat, and there was the pain. She put on her wraps and crept down the
