Americans -- Austria -- Fiction; Love stories; Vienna (Austria) -- Fiction; Violinists -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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