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Page 37

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.

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Books | Photos | Paul Mutton | Mon 22nd Dec 2025, 11:05

The Street of Seven Stars by Mary Roberts Rinehart