The Street of Seven Stars | Page 4

down the hall and she stopped crying instantly. Diving
into one of those receptacles that are a part of the mystery of the sex,
she rubbed a chamois skin over her nose and her reddened eyelids.
The situation was a difficult one, but hardly, except to Harmony Wells,
a tragedy. Few of us are so constructed that the Suite "Arlesienne" will
serve as a luncheon, or a faulty fingering of the Waldweben from
"Siegfried" will keep us awake at night. Harmony had lain awake more
than once over some crime against her namesake, had paid penances of
early rising and two hours of scales before breakfast, working with
stiffened fingers in her cold little room where there was no room for a
stove, and sitting on the edge of the bed in a faded kimono where once
pink butterflies sported in a once blue-silk garden. Then coffee, rolls,
and honey, and back again to work, with little Scatchett at the piano in
the salon beyond the partition, wearing a sweater and fingerless gloves
and holding a hot-water bottle on her knees. Three rooms beyond,
down the stone hall, the Big Soprano, doing Madama Butterfly in bad
German, helped to make an encircling wall of sound in the center of
which one might practice peacefully.
Only the Portier objected. Morning after morning, crawling out at dawn
from under his featherbed in the lodge below, he opened his door and
listened to Harmony doing penance above; and morning after morning
he shook his fist up the stone staircase.

"Gott im Himmel!" he would say to his wife, fumbling with the knot of
his mustache bandage, "what a people, these Americans! So much
noise and no music!"
"And mad!" grumbled his wife. "All the day coal, coal to heat; and at
night the windows open! Karl the milkboy has seen it."
And now the little colony was breaking up. The Big Soprano was going
back to her church, grand opera having found no place for her. Scatch
was returning to be married, her heart full, indeed, of music, but her
head much occupied with the trousseau in her trunks. The Harmar
sisters had gone two weeks before, their funds having given out. Indeed,
funds were very low with all of them. The "Bitte zum speisen" of the
little German maid often called them to nothing more opulent than a
stew of beef and carrots.
Not that all had been sordid. The butter had gone for opera tickets, and
never was butter better spent. And there had been gala days--a fruitcake
from Harmony's mother, a venison steak at Christmas, and once or
twice on birthdays real American ice cream at a fabulous price and
worth it. Harmony had bought a suit, too, a marvel of tailoring and
cheapness, and a willow plume that would have cost treble its price in
New York. Oh, yes, gala days, indeed, to offset the butter and the rainy
winter and the faltering technic and the anxiety about money. For that
they all had always, the old tragedy of the American music student
abroad--the expensive lessons, the delays in getting to the Master
himself, the contention against German greed or Austrian whim. And
always back in one's mind the home people, to whom one dares not
confess that after nine months of waiting, or a year, one has seen the
Master once or not at all.
Or--and one of the Harmar girls had carried back this scar in her
soul--to go back rejected, as one of the unfit, on whom even the
undermasters refuse to waste time. That has been, and often. Harmony
stood on her chair and looked at the trunks. The Big Soprano was
calling down the hall.
"Scatch," she was shouting briskly, "where is my hairbrush?"

A wail from Scatch from behind a closed door.
"I packed it, Heaven knows where! Do you need it really? Haven't you
got a comb?"
"As soon as I get something on I'm coming to shake you. Half the teeth
are out of my comb. I don't believe you packed it. Look under the bed."
Silence for a moment, while Scatch obeyed for the next moment.
"Here it is," she called joyously. "And here are Harmony's bedroom
slippers. Oh, Harry, I found your slippers!" The girl got down off the
chair and went to the door.
"Thanks, dear," she said. "I'm coming in a minute."
She went to the mirror, which had reflected the Empress Maria Theresa,
and looked at her eyes. They were still red. Perhaps if she opened the
window the air would brighten them.
Armed with the brush, little Scatchett hurried to the Big Soprano's
room. She flung the brush on the bed and closed the door. She held her
shabby wrapper about her and listened just inside the