Americans -- Austria -- Fiction; Love stories; Vienna (Austria) -- Fiction; Violinists -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
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 whitewashed staircase.
The paved courtyard below was to be crossed and it was poorly lighted.
She achieved the street, however, without molestation. To the street-car
was only a block, but during that block she was accosted twice. She was
white and frightened when she reached the car.
The Siebensternstrasse at last. The street was always dark; the
delicatessen shop was closed, but in the wild-game store next a light
was burning low, and a flame flickered before the little shrine over the
money drawer. The gameseller was a religious man.
The old stucco house dominated the neighborhood. From the time she left
the car Harmony saw it, its long flat roof black against the dark sky,
its rows of unlighted windows, its long wall broken in the center by
the gate. Now from across the street its whole facade lay before her.
Peter's lamp was not lighted, but there was a glow of soft firelight
from the salon windows. The light was not regular--it disappeared at
regular intervals, was blotted out. Harmony knew what that meant. Some
one beyond range of where she stood was pacing the floor, back and
forward, back and forward. When he was worried or anxious Peter always
paced the door.
She did not know how long she stood there. One of the soft rains was
falling, or more accurately, condensing. The saturated air was hardly
cold. She stood on the pavement unmolested, while the glow died lower
and lower, until at last it was impossible to trace the pacing figure.
No one came to any of the windows. The little lamp before the shrine in
the wild-game shop burned itself out; the Portier across the way came to
the door, glanced up at the sky and went in. Harmony heard the rattle of
the chain as it was stretched across the door inside.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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