The Street of Seven Stars | Page 7

of the teeth gone. Harmony kissed this unromantic
object! Which reveals the fact that, genius or not, she was only a young
and rather frightened girl, and that every atom of her ached with
loneliness.
She did not sleep at all, but sat curled up on the bed with her feet under
her and thought things out. At dawn the Portier, crawling out into the
cold from under his feathers, opened the door into the hall and listened.
She was playing, not practicing, and the music was the barcarolle from
the "Tales" of Hoffmann. Standing in the doorway in his night attire,
his chest open to the frigid morning air, his face upraised to the floor
above, he hummed the melody in a throaty tenor.
When the music had died away he went in and closed the door
sheepishly. His wife stood over the stove, a stick of firewood in her
hand. She eyed him.
"So! It is the American Fraulein now!"
"I did but hum a little. She drags out my heart with her music." He
fumbled with his mustache bandage, which was knotted behind,
keeping one eye on his wife, whose morning pleasure it was to untie it
for him.
"She leaves to-day," she announced, ignoring the knot.
"Why? She is alone. Rosa says--"
"She leaves to-day!"

The knot was hopeless now, double-tied and pulled to smooth
compactness. The Portier jerked at it.
"No Fraulein stays here alone. It is not respectable. And what saw I last
night, after she entered and you stood moon-gazing up the stair after
her! A man in the gateway!"
The Portier was angry. He snarled something through the bandage,
which had slipped down over his mouth, and picked up a great knife.
"She will stay if she so desire," he muttered furiously, and, raising the
knife, he cut the knotted string. His mustache, faintly gray and sweetly
up-curled, stood revealed.
"She will stay!" he repeated. "And when you see men at the gate, let me
know. She is an angel!"
"And she looks like the angel at the opera, hein?"
This was a crushing blow. The Portier wilted. Such things come from
telling one's cousin, who keeps a brushshop, what is in one's heart.
Yesterday his wife had needed a brush, and to-day--Himmel, the girl
must go!
Harmony knew also that she must go. The apartment was large and
expensive; Rosa ate much and wasted more. She must find somewhere
a tiny room with board, a humble little room but with a stove. It is folly
to practice with stiffened fingers. A room where her playing would not
annoy people, that was important.
She paid Rosa off that morning out of money left for that purpose. Rosa
wept. She said she would stay with the Fraulein for her keep, because it
was not the custom for young ladies to be alone in the city--young girls
of the people, of course; but beautiful young ladies, no!
Harmony gave her an extra krone or two out of sheer gratitude, but she
could not keep her. And at noon, having packed her trunk, she went
down to interview the Portier and his wife, who were agents under the

owner for the old house.
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