The Street of Seven Stars
M >>
Mary Roberts Rinehart >> The Street of Seven Stars
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 This etext was prepared by Michael Delaney of Laurel, MD.
THE STREET OF SEVEN STARS
BY
MARY ROBERTS RINEHART
CHAPTER I
The old stucco house sat back in a garden, or what must once have
been a garden, when that part of the Austrian city had been a
royal game preserve. Tradition had it that the Empress Maria
Theresa had used the building as a hunting-lodge, and undoubtedly
there was something royal in the proportions of the salon. With
all the candles lighted in the great glass chandelier, and no
sidelights, so that the broken paneling was mercifully obscured
by gloom, it was easy to believe that the great empress herself
had sat in one of the tall old chairs and listened to anecdotes
of questionable character; even, if tradition may be believed,
related not a few herself.
The chandelier was not lighted on this rainy November night.
Outside in the garden the trees creaked and bent before the wind,
and the heavy barred gate, left open by the last comer, a piano
student named Scatchett and dubbed "Scatch"--the gate slammed to
and fro monotonously, giving now and then just enough pause for a
hope that it had latched itself, a hope that was always destroyed
by the next gust.
One candle burned in the salon. Originally lighted for the
purpose of enabling Miss Scatchett to locate the score of a
Tschaikowsky concerto, it had been moved to the small center
table, and had served to give light if not festivity to the
afternoon coffee and cakes. It still burned, a gnarled and stubby
fragment, in its china holder; round it the disorder of the
recent refreshment, three empty cups, a half of a small cake, a
crumpled napkin or two,--there were never enough to go
round,--and on the floor the score of the concerto, clearly
abandoned for the things of the flesh.
The room was cold. The long casement windows creaked in time with
the slamming of the gate and the candle flickered in response to
a draft under the doors. The concerto flapped and slid along the
uneven old floor. At the sound a girl in a black dress, who had
been huddled near the tile stove, rose impatiently and picked it
up. There was no impatience, however, in the way she handled the
loose sheets. She put them together carefully, almost tenderly,
and placed them on the top of the grand piano, anchoring them
against the draft with a china dog from the stand.
The room was very bare--a long mirror between two of the windows,
half a dozen chairs, a stand or two, and in a corner the grand
piano. There were no rugs--the bare floor stretched bleakly into
dim corners and was lost. The crystal pendants of the great
chandelier looked like stalactites in a cave. The girl touched
the piano keys; they were ice under her fingers.
In a sort of desperation she drew a chair underneath the
chandelier, and armed with a handful of matches proceeded to the
unheard-of extravagance of lighting it, not here and there, but
throughout as high as she could reach, standing perilously on her
tiptoes on the chair.
The resulting illumination revealed a number of things: It showed
that the girl was young and comely and that she had been crying;
it revealed the fact that the coal-pail was empty and the stove
almost so; it let the initiated into the secret that the blackish
fluid in the cups had been made with coffee extract that had been
made of Heaven knows what; and it revealed in the cavernous
corner near the door a number of trunks. The girl, having lighted
all the candles, stood on the chair and looked at the trunks. She
was very young, very tragic, very feminine. A door slammed down
the hall and she stopped crying instantly. Diving into one of
those receptacles that are a part of the mystery of the sex, she
rubbed a chamois skin over her nose and her reddened eyelids.
The situation was a difficult one, but hardly, except to Harmony
Wells, a tragedy. Few of us are so constructed that the Suite
"Arlesienne" will serve as a luncheon, or a faulty fingering of
the Waldweben from "Siegfried" will keep us awake at night.
Harmony had lain awake more than once over some crime against her
namesake, had paid penances of early rising and two hours of
scales before breakfast, working with stiffened fingers in her
cold little room where there was no room for a stove, and sitting
on the edge of the bed in a faded kimono where once pink
butterflies sported in a once blue-silk garden. Then coffee,
rolls, and honey, and back again to work, with little Scatchett
at the piano in the salon beyond the partition, wearing a sweater
and fingerless gloves and holding a hot-water bottle on her
knees. Three rooms beyond, down the stone hall, the Big Soprano,
doing Madama Butterfly in bad German, helped to make an
encircling wall of sound in the center of which one might
practice peacefully.
Only the Portier objected. Morning after morning, crawling out at
dawn from under his featherbed in the lodge below, he opened his
door and listened to Harmony doing penance above; and morning
after morning he shook his fist up the stone staircase.
"Gott im Himmel!" he would say to his wife, fumbling with the
knot of his mustache bandage, "what a people, these Americans! So
much noise and no music!"
"And mad!" grumbled his wife. "All the day coal, coal to heat;
and at night the windows open! Karl the milkboy has seen it."
And now the little colony was breaking up. The Big Soprano was
going back to her church, grand opera having found no place for
her. Scatch was returning to be married, her heart full, indeed,
of music, but her head much occupied with the trousseau in her
trunks. The Harmar sisters had gone two weeks before, their funds
having given out. Indeed, funds were very low with all of them.
The "Bitte zum speisen" of the little German maid often called
them to nothing more opulent than a stew of beef and carrots.
Not that all had been sordid. The butter had gone for opera
tickets, and never was butter better spent. And there had been
gala days--a fruitcake from Harmony's mother, a venison steak at
Christmas, and once or twice on birthdays real American ice cream
at a fabulous price and worth it. Harmony had bought a suit, too,
a marvel of tailoring and cheapness, and a willow plume that
would have cost treble its price in New York. Oh, yes, gala days,
indeed, to offset the butter and the rainy winter and the
faltering technic and the anxiety about money. For that they all
had always, the old tragedy of the American music student
abroad--the expensive lessons, the delays in getting to the
Master himself, the contention against German greed or Austrian
whim. And always back in one's mind the home people, to whom one
dares not confess that after nine months of waiting, or a year,
one has seen the Master once or not at all.
Or--and one of the Harmar girls had carried back this scar in her
soul--to go back rejected, as one of the unfit, on whom even the
undermasters refuse to waste time. That has been, and often.
Harmony stood on her chair and looked at the trunks. The Big
Soprano was calling down the hall.
"Scatch," she was shouting briskly, "where is my hairbrush?"
A wail from Scatch from behind a closed door.
"I packed it, Heaven knows where! Do you need it really? Haven't
you got a comb?"
"As soon as I get something on I'm coming to shake you. Half the
teeth are out of my comb. I don't believe you packed it. Look
under the bed."
Silence for a moment, while Scatch obeyed for the next moment.
"Here it is," she called joyously. "And here are Harmony's
bedroom slippers. Oh, Harry, I found your slippers!" The girl
got down off the chair and went to the door.
"Thanks, dear," she said. "I'm coming in a minute."
She went to the mirror, which had reflected the Empress Maria
Theresa, and looked at her eyes. They were still red. Perhaps if
she opened the window the air would brighten them.
Armed with the brush, little Scatchett hurried to the Big
Soprano's room. She flung the brush on the bed and closed the
door. She held her shabby wrapper about her and listened just
inside the door. There were no footsteps, only the banging of the
gate in the wind. She turned to the Big Soprano, heating a
curling iron in the flame of a candle, and held out her hand.
"Look!" she said. "Under my bed! Ten kronen!"
Without a word the Big Soprano put down her curling-iron, and
ponderously getting down on her knees, candle in hand, inspected
the dusty floor beneath her bed. It revealed nothing but a
cigarette, on which she pounced. Still squatting, she lighted the
cigarette in the candle flame and sat solemnly puffing it.
"The first for a week," she said. "Pull out the wardrobe, Scatch;
there may be another relic of my prosperous days."
But little Scatchett was not interested in Austrian cigarettes
with a government monopoly and gilt tips. She was looking at the
ten-kronen piece.
"Where is the other?" she asked in a whisper.
"In my powder-box."
Little Scatchett lifted the china lid and dropped the tiny
gold-piece.
"Every little bit," she said flippantly, but still in a whisper,
"added to what she's got, makes just a little bit more."
"Have you thought of a place to leave it for her? If Rosa finds
it, it's good-bye. Heaven knows it was hard enough to get
together, without losing it now. I'll have to jump overboard and
swim ashore at New York--I haven't even a dollar for tips."
"New York!" said little Scatchett with her eyes glowing. "If
Henry meets me I know he will--"
"Tut!" The Big Soprano got up cumbrously and stood looking down.
"You and your Henry! Scatchy, child, has it occurred to your
maudlin young mind that money isn't the only thing Harmony is
going to need? She's going to be alone--and this is a bad town to
be alone in. And she is not like us. You have your Henry. I'm a
beefy person who has a stomach, and I'm thankful for it. But she
is different--she's got the thing that you are as well without,
the thing that my lack of is sending me back to fight in a church
choir instead of grand opera."
Little Scatchett was rather puzzled.
"Temperament?" she asked. It had always been accepted in the
little colony that Harmony was a real musician, a star in their
lesser firmament.
The Big Soprano sniffed.
"If you like," she said. "Soul is a better word. Only the rich
ought to have souls, Scatchy, dear."
This was over the younger girl's head, and anyhow Harmony was
coming down the hall.
"I thought, under her pillow," she whispered. "She'll find it--"
Harmony came in, to find the Big Soprano heating a curler in the
flame of a candle.
CHAPTER II
Harmony found the little hoard under her pillow that night when,
having seen Scatch and the Big Soprano off at the station, she
had come back alone to the apartment on the Siebensternstrasse.
The trunks were gone now. Only the concerto score still lay on
the piano, where little Scatchett, mentally on the dock at New
York with Henry's arms about her, had forgotten it. The candles
in the great chandelier had died in tears of paraffin that
spattered the floor beneath. One or two of the sockets were still
smoking, and the sharp odor of burning wickends filled the room.
Harmony had come through the garden quickly. She had had an
uneasy sense of being followed, and the garden, with its moaning
trees and slamming gate and the great dark house in the
background, was a forbidding place at best. She had rung the bell
and had stood, her back against the door, eyes and ears strained
in the darkness. She had fancied that a figure had stopped
outside the gate and stood looking in, but the next moment the
gate had swung to and the Portier was fumbling at the lock behind
her.
The Portier had put on his trousers over his night garments, and
his mustache bandage gave him a sinister expression, rather
augmented when he smiled at her. The Portier liked Harmony in
spite of the early morning practicing; she looked like a singer
at the opera for whom he cherished a hidden attachment. The
singer had never seen him, but it was for her he wore the
mustache bandage. Perhaps some day--hopefully! One must be ready!
The Portier gave Harmony a tiny candle and Harmony held out his
tip, the five Hellers of custom. But the Portier was keen, and
Rosa was a niece of his wife and talked more than she should. He
refused the tip with a gesture.
"Bitte, Fraulein!" he said through the bandage. "It is for me a
pleasure to admit you. And perhaps if the Fraulein is cold, a
basin of soup."
The Portier was not pleasant to the eye. His nightshirt was open
over his hairy chest and his feet were bare to the stone floor.
But to Harmony that lonely night he was beautiful. She tried to
speak and could not but she held out her hand in impulsive
gratitude, and the Portier in his best manner bent over and
kissed it. As she reached the curve of the stone staircase,
carrying her tiny candle, the Portier was following her with his
eyes. She was very like the girl of the opera.
The clang of the door below and the rattle of the chain were
comforting to Harmony's ears. From the safety of the darkened
salon she peered out into the garden again, but no skulking
figure detached itself from the shadows, and the gate remained,
for a marvel, closed.
It was when--having picked up her violin in a very passion of
loneliness, only to put it down when she found that the familiar
sounds echoed and reechoed sadly through the silent rooms--it was
when she was ready for bed that she found the money under her
pillow, and a scrawl from Scatchy, a breathless, apologetic
scrawl, little Scatchett having adored her from afar, as the
plain adore the beautiful, the mediocre the gifted:--
DEAREST HARRY [here a large blot, Scatchy being addicted to
blots]: I am honestly frightened when I think what we are doing.
But, oh, my dear, if you could know how pleased we are with
ourselves you'd not deny us this pleasure. Harry, you have
it--the real thing, you know, whatever it is--and I haven't. None
of the rest of us had. And you must stay. To go now, just when
lessons would mean everything--well, you must not think of it. We
have scads to take us home, more than we need, both of us, or at
least--well, I'm lying, and you know it. But we have enough, by
being careful, and we want you to have this. It isn't much, but
it may help. Ten Kronen of it I found to-night under my bed, and
it may be yours anyhow.
"Sadie [Sadie was the Big Soprano] keeps saying awful things
about our leaving you here, and she has rather terrified me. You
are so beautiful, Harry,--although you never let us tell you so.
And Sadie says you have a soul and I haven't, and that souls are
deadly things to have. I feel to-night that in urging you to stay
I am taking the burden of your soul on me! Do be careful, Harry.
If any one you do not know speaks to you call a policeman. And be
sure you get into a respectable pension. There are queer ones.
"Sadie and I think that if you can get along on what you get from
home--you said your mother would get insurance, didn't you?--and
will keep this as a sort of fund to take you home if anything
should go wrong--. But perhaps we are needlessly worried. In any
case, of course it's a loan, and you can preserve that
magnificent independence of yours by sending it back when you get
to work to make your fortune. And if you are doubtful at all,
just remember that hopeful little mother of yours who sent you
over to get what she had never been able to have for herself, and
who planned this for you from the time you were a kiddy and she
named you Harmony.
"I'm not saying good-bye. I can't.
SCATCH."
That night, while the Portier and his wife slept under their
crimson feather beds and the crystals of the chandelier in the
salon shook in the draft as if the old Austrian court still
danced beneath, Harmony fought her battle. And a battle it was.
Scatchy and the Big Soprano had not known everything. There had
been no insurance on her father's life; the little mother was
penniless. A married sister would care for her, but what then?
Harmony had enough remaining of her letter of credit to take her
home, and she had--the hoard under the pillow. To go back and
teach the violin; or to stay and finish under the master, be
presented, as he had promised her, at a special concert in
Vienna, with all the prestige at home that that would mean, and
its resulting possibility of fame and fortune--which?
She decided to stay. There might be a concert or so, and she
could teach English. The Viennese were crazy about English. Some
of the stores advertised "English Spoken." That would be
something to fall back on, a clerkship during the day.
Toward dawn she discovered that she was very cold, and she went
into the Big Soprano's deserted and disordered room. The tile
stove was warm and comfortable, but on the toilet table there lay
a disreputable comb with most of the teeth gone. Harmony kissed
this unromantic object! Which reveals the fact that, genius or
not, she was only a young and rather frightened girl, and that
every atom of her ached with loneliness.
She did not sleep at all, but sat curled up on the bed with her
feet under her and thought things out. At dawn the Portier,
crawling out into the cold from under his feathers, opened the
door into the hall and listened. She was playing, not practicing,
and the music was the barcarolle from the "Tales" of Hoffmann.
Standing in the doorway in his night attire, his chest open to
the frigid morning air, his face upraised to the floor above, he
hummed the melody in a throaty tenor.
When the music had died away he went in and closed the door
sheepishly. His wife stood over the stove, a stick of firewood in
her hand. She eyed him.
"So! It is the American Fraulein now!"
"I did but hum a little. She drags out my heart with her music."
He fumbled with his mustache bandage, which was knotted behind,
keeping one eye on his wife, whose morning pleasure it was to
untie it for him.
"She leaves to-day," she announced, ignoring the knot.
"Why? She is alone. Rosa says--"
"She leaves to-day!"
The knot was hopeless now, double-tied and pulled to smooth
compactness. The Portier jerked at it.
"No Fraulein stays here alone. It is not respectable. And what
saw I last night, after she entered and you stood moon-gazing up
the stair after her! A man in the gateway!"
The Portier was angry. He snarled something through the bandage,
which had slipped down over his mouth, and picked up a great
knife.
"She will stay if she so desire," he muttered furiously, and,
raising the knife, he cut the knotted string. His mustache,
faintly gray and sweetly up-curled, stood revealed.
"She will stay!" he repeated. "And when you see men at the gate,
let me know. She is an angel!"
"And she looks like the angel at the opera, hein?"
This was a crushing blow. The Portier wilted. Such things come
from telling one's cousin, who keeps a brushshop, what is in
one's heart. Yesterday his wife had needed a brush, and
to-day--Himmel, the girl must go!
Harmony knew also that she must go. The apartment was large and
expensive; Rosa ate much and wasted more. She must find somewhere
a tiny room with board, a humble little room but with a stove. It
is folly to practice with stiffened fingers. A room where her
playing would not annoy people, that was important.
She paid Rosa off that morning out of money left for that
purpose. Rosa wept. She said she would stay with the Fraulein for
her keep, because it was not the custom for young ladies to be
alone in the city--young girls of the people, of course; but
beautiful young ladies, no!
Harmony gave her an extra krone or two out of sheer gratitude,
but she could not keep her. And at noon, having packed her trunk,
she went down to interview the Portier and his wife, who were
agents under the owner for the old house.
The Portier, entirely subdued, was sweeping out the hallway. He
looked past the girl, not at her, and observed impassively that
the lease was up and it was her privilege to go. In the daylight
she was not so like the angel, and after all she could only play
the violin. The angel had a voice, such a voice! And besides,
there was an eye at the crack of the door.
The bit of cheer of the night before was gone; it was with a
heavy heart that Harmony started on her quest for cheaper
quarters.
Winter, which had threatened for a month, had come at last. The
cobblestones glittered with ice and the small puddles in the
gutters were frozen. Across the street a spotted deer, shot in
the mountains the day before and hanging from a hook before a
wild-game shop, was frozen quite stiff. It was a pretty creature.
The girl turned her eyes away. A young man, buying cheese and
tinned fish in the shop, watched after her.
"That's an American girl, isn't it?" he asked in American-German.
The shopkeeper was voluble. Also Rosa had bought much from him,
and Rosa talked. When the American left the shop he knew
everything of Harmony that Rosa knew except her name. Rosa called
her "The Beautiful One." Also he was short one krone four beliers
in his change, which is readily done when a customer is plainly
thinking of a "beautiful one."
Harmony searched all day for the little room with board and a
stove and no objection to practicing. There were plenty--but the
rates! The willow plume looked prosperous, and she had a way of
making the plainest garments appear costly. Landladies looked at
the plume and the suit and heard the soft swish of silk beneath,
which marks only self-respect in the American woman but is
extravagance in Europe, and added to their regular terms until
poor Harmony's heart almost stood still. And then at last toward
evening she happened on a gloomy little pension near the corner
of the Alserstrasse, and it being dark and the plume not showing,
and the landlady missing the rustle owing to cotton in her ears
for earache, Harmony found terms that she could meet for a time.
A mean little room enough, but with a stove. The bed sagged in
the center, and the toilet table had a mirror that made one eye
appear higher than the other and twisted one's nose. But there
was an odor of stewing cabbage in the air. Also, alas, there was
the odor of many previous stewed cabbages, and of dusty carpets
and stale tobacco. Harmony had had no lunch; she turned rather
faint.
She arranged to come at once, and got out into the comparative
purity of the staircase atmosphere and felt her way down. She
reeled once or twice. At the bottom of the dark stairs she stood
for a moment with her eyes closed, to the dismay of a young man
who had just come in with a cheese and some tinned fish under his
arm.
He put down his packages on the stone floor and caught her arm.
"Not ill, are you?" he asked in English, and then remembering.
"Bist du krank?" He colored violently at that, recalling too late
the familiarity of the "du."
Harmony smiled faintly.
"Only tired," she said in English. "And the odor of cabbage--".
Her color had come back and she freed herself from his supporting
hand. He whistled softly. He had recognized her.
"Cabbage, of course!" he said. "The pension upstairs is full of
it. I live there, and I've eaten so much of it I could be served
up with pork."
"I am going to live there. Is it as bad as that?"
He waved a hand toward the parcels on the floor.
"So bad," he observed, "that I keep body and soul together by
buying strong and odorous food at the delicatessens--odorous,
because only rugged flavors rise above the atmosphere up there.
Cheese is the only thing that really knocks out the cabbage, and
once or twice even cheese has retired defeated."
"But I don't like cheese." In sheer relief from the loneliness of
the day her spirits were rising.
"Then coffee! But not there. Coffee at the coffee-house on the
corner. I say--" He hesitated.
"Yes?"
"Would you--don't you think a cup of coffee would set you up a
bit?"
"It sounds attractive,"--uncertainly.
"Coffee with whipped cream and some little cakes?"
Harmony hesitated. In the gloom of the hall she could hardly see
this brisk young American--young, she knew by his voice, tall by
his silhouette, strong by the way he had caught her. She could
not see his face, but she liked his voice.
"Do you mean--with you?"
"I'm a doctor. I am going to fill my own prescription."
That sounded reassuring. Doctors were not as other men; they were
legitimate friends in need.
"I am sure it is not proper, but--"
"Proper! Of course it is. I shall send you a bill for
professional services. Besides, won't we be formally introduced
to-night by the landlady? Come now--to the coffee-house and the
Paris edition of the 'Herald'!" But the next moment he paused and
ran his hand over his chin. "I'm pretty disreputable," he
explained. "I have been in a clinic all day, and, hang it all,
I'm not shaved."
"What difference does that make?"
"My dear young lady," he explained gravely, picking up the cheese
and the tinned fish, "it makes a difference in me that I wish you
to realize before you see me in a strong light."
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17