Americans -- Austria -- Fiction; Love stories; Vienna (Austria) -- Fiction; Violinists -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
“There must be something I can do,” desperately. “I hear them below. Is
there no way to the roof, no escape?”
“None, Fraulein. It was an oversight. War is not my game; I am a man of
peace. You have been very kind to me, Fraulein. I thank you.”
“You are not going down!”
“Pardon, but it is better so. Soldiers they are of the provinces mostly,
and not for a lady to confront.”
“They are coming up!”
He listened. The clank of scabbards against the stone stairs was
unmistakable. The little Georgiev straightened, threw out his chest,
turned to descend, faltered, came back a step or two.
His small black eyes were fixed on Harmony's face.
“Fraulein,” he said huskily, “you are very lovely. I carry always in my
heart your image. Always so long as I live. Adieu.”
He drew his heels together, gave a stiff little bow and was gone down
the staircase. Harmony was frightened, stricken. She collapsed in a heap
on the floor of her room, her fingers in her ears. But she need not have
feared. The little Georgiev made no protest, submitted to the inevitable
like a gentleman and a soldier, went out of her life, indeed, as
unobtrusively as he had entered it.
The carrier pigeon preened itself comfortably on the edge of the
washstand. Harmony ceased her hysterical crying at last and pondered
what was best to do. Monia was still breakfasting so incredibly brief
are great moments. After a little thought Harmony wrote a tiny message,
English, German, and French, and inclosed it in the brass tube.
“The Herr Georgiev has been arrested,” she wrote. An hour later the
carrier rose lazily from the window-sill, flapped its way over
the church roof and disappeared, like Georgiev, out of her life.
Grim-visaged war had touched her and passed on.
The incident was not entirely closed, however. A search of the building
followed the capture of the little spy. Protesting tenants were turned
out, beds were dismantled, closets searched, walls sounded for hidden
hollows. In one room on Harmony's floor was found stored a quantity of
ammunition.
It was when the three men who had conducted the search had finished,
when the boxes of ammunition had been gathered in the hall, and the
chattering sewing-girls had gone back to work, that Harmony, on her way
to her dismantled room, passed through the upper passage.
She glanced down the staircase where little Georgiev had so manfully
descended.
“I carry always in my heart your image. Always so long as I live.”
The clatter of soldiers on their way down to the street came to her
ears; the soft cooing of the pigeons, the whirr of sewing-machines from
the workroom. The incident was closed, except for the heap of ammunition
boxes on the landing, guarded by an impassive soldier.
Harmony glanced at him. He was eying her steadily, thumbs in, heels in,
toes out, chest out. Harmony put her hand to her heart.
“You!” she said.
The conversation of a sentry, save on a holiday is, “Yea, yea,” and
“Nay, nay.”
“Yes, Fraulein.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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