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Page 13

"The Kid wouldn't bite her."

"We'll not argue about it."

After a second's awkward pause Stewart smiled.

"Certainly not," he agreed cheerfully. "That is up to you, of
course. I didn't know. We're looking for you to-night."

A sudden repulsion for the evening's engagement rose in Byrne,
but the situation following his ungraciousness was delicate.

"I'll be round," he said. "I have a lecture and I may be late,
but I'll come."

The "Kid" was not stupid. She moved off into the night, chin in
air, angrily flushed.

"You saw!" she choked, when Stewart had overtaken her and slipped
a hand through her arm. "He protects her from me! It is because
of you. Before I knew you--"

"Before you knew me, little one," he said cheerfully, "you were
exactly what you are now."

She paused on the curb and raised her voice.

"So! And what is that?"

"Beautiful as the stars, only--not so remote."

In their curious bi-lingual talk there was little room for
subtlety. The "beautiful" calmed her, but the second part of the
sentence roused her suspicion.

"Remote? What is that?"

"I was thinking of Worthington."

The name was a signal for war. Stewart repented, but too late.

In the cold evening air, to the amusement of a passing detail of
soldiers trundling a breadwagon by a rope, Stewart stood on the
pavement and dodged verbal brickbats of Viennese idioms and
German epithets. He drew his chin into the up-turned collar of
his overcoat and waited, an absurdly patient figure, until the
hail of consonants had subsided into a rain of tears. Then he
took the girl's elbow again and led her, childishly weeping, into
a narrow side street beyond the prying ears and eyes of the
Alserstrasse.

Byrne went back to Harmony. The incident of Stewart and the girl
was closed and he dismissed it instantly. That situation was not
his, or of his making. But here in the coffee-house, lovely,
alluring, rather puzzled at this moment, was also a situation.
For there was a situation. He had suspected it that morning,
listening to the delicatessen-seller's narrative of Rosa's
account of the disrupted colony across in the old lodge; he had
been certain of it that evening, finding Harmony in the dark
entrance to his own rather sordid pension. Now, in the bright
light of the coffee-house, surmising her poverty, seeing her
beauty, the emotional coming and going of her color, her frank
loneliness, and God save the mark!--her trust in him, he accepted
the situation and adopted it: his responsibility, if you please.

He straightened under it. He knew the old city fairly
well--enough to love it and to loathe it in one breath. He had
seen its tragedies and passed them by, or had, in his haphazard
way, thrown a greeting to them, or even a glass of native wine.
And he knew the musical temperament; the all or nothing of its
insistent demands; its heights that are higher than others, its
wretchednesses that are hell. Once in the Hofstadt Theater, where
he had bought standing room, he had seen a girl he had known in
Berlin, where he was taking clinics and where she was cooking her
own meals. She had been studying singing. In the Hofstadt Theater
she had worn a sable coat and had avoided his eyes.

Perhaps the old coffee-house had seen nothing more absurd, in its
years of coffee and billiards and Munchener beer, than Peter's
new resolution that night: this poverty adopting poverty, this
youth adopting youth, with the altruistic purpose of saving it
from itself.

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Books | Photos | Paul Mutton | Tue 16th Dec 2025, 23:33

The Street of Seven Stars by Mary Roberts Rinehart