Peter had been very careful. He had cultivated a comradely manner with the girl that had kept her entirely at her ease with him. But it had been growing increasingly hard. He was only human after all. And he was very comfortable. Love, healthy human love, thrives on physical ease.
Indigestion is a greater foe to it than poverty. Great love songs are written, not by poets starving in hall bedrooms, with insistent hunger gnawing and undermining all that is of the spirit, but by full-fed gentlemen who sing out of an overflowing of content and wide fellowship, and who write, no doubt, just after dinner. Love, being a hunger, does not thrive on hunger.
Thus Peter. He had never found women essential, being occupied in the struggle for other essentials. Women had had little part in his busy life. Once or twice he had seen visions, dreamed dreams, to waken himself savagely to the fact that not for many years could he afford the luxury of tender eyes looking up into his, of soft arms about his neck.
So he had kept away from women with almost ferocious determination. And now!
He drew a chair before the stove and sat down. Standing or sitting, he was much too large for the kitchen. He sat in the chair, with his hands hanging, fingers interlaced between his knees.
The firelight glowed over his strong, rather irregular features.
Harmony, knife poised over the evening"s potatoes, looked at him.
"I think you are sad to-night, Peter."
"Depressed a bit. That"s all."
"It isn"t money again?"
It was generally money with any of the three, and only the week before Peter had found an error in his bank balance which meant that he was a hundred Kronen or so poorer than he had thought. This discovery had been very upsetting.
"Not more than usual. Don"t mind me. I"ll probably end in a roaring bad temper and smash something. My moody spells often break up that way!"
Harmony put down the paring-knife, and going over to where he sat rested a hand on his shoulder. Peter drew away from it.
"I have hurt you in some way?"
"Of course not."
"Could--could you talk about whatever it is? That helps sometimes."
"You wouldn"t understand."
"You haven"t quarreled with Anna?" Harmony asked, real concern in her voice.
"No. Good Lord, Harmony, don"t ask me what"s wrong! I don"t know myself."
He got up almost violently and set the little chair back against the wall. Hurt and astonished, Harmony went back to the table. The kitchen was entirely dark, save for the firelight, which gleamed on the bare floor and the red legs of the table. She was fumbling with a match and the candle when she realized that Peter was just behind her, very close.
"Dearest," he said huskily. The next moment he had caught her to him, was kissing her lips, her hair.
Harmony"s heart beat wildly. There was no use struggling against him.
The gates of his self-control were down: all his loneliness, his starved senses rushed forth in tardy a.s.sertion.
After a moment Peter kissed her eyelids very gently and let her go.
Harmony was trembling, but with shock and alarm only. The storm that had torn him root and branch from his firm ground of self-restraint left her only shaken. He was still very close to her; she could hear him breathing. He did not attempt to speak. With every atom of strength that was left in him he was fighting a mad desire to take her in his arms again and keep her there.
That was the moment when Harmony became a woman.
She lighted the candle with the match she still held. Then she turned and faced him.
"That sort of thing is not for you and me, Peter," she said quietly.
"Why not?"
"There isn"t any question about it."
He was still reckless, even argumentative; the crying need of her still obsessed him. "Why not? Why should I not take you in my arms? If there is a moment of happiness to be had in this grind of work and loneliness--"
"It has not made me happy."
Perhaps nothing else she could have said would have been so effectual.
Love demands reciprocation; he could read no pa.s.sion in her voice. He knew then that he had left her unstirred. He dropped his outstretched arms.
"I"m sorry. I didn"t mean to do it."
"I would rather not talk about it, please."
The banging of a door far off told them that Anna Gates had arrived and was taking off her galoshes in the entry. Peter drew a long breath, and, after his habit, shook himself.
"Very well, we"ll not talk of it. But, for Heaven"s sake, Harmony, don"t avoid me. I"m not a cad. I"ll let you alone."
There was only time for a glance of understanding between them, of promise from Peter, of acceptance from the girl. When Anna Gates entered the kitchen she found Harmony peeling potatoes and Peter filling up an already overfed stove.
That night, during that darkest hour before the dawn when the thrifty city fathers of the old town had shut off the street lights because two hours later the sun would rise and furnish light that cost the taxpayers nothing, the Portier"s wife awakened.
The room was very silent, too silent. On those rare occasions when the Portier"s wife awakened in the night and heard the twin clocks of the Votivkirche strike three, and listened, perhaps, while the delicatessen seller ambled home from the Schubert Society, singing beerily as he ambled, she was wont to hear from the bed beside hers the rhythmic respiration that told her how safe from Schubert Societies and such like evils was her lord. There was no sound at all.
The Portier"s wife raised herself on her elbow and reached over. Owing to the width of the table that stood between the beds and to a sweeping that day which had left the beds far apart she met nothing but empty air. Words had small effect on the Portier, who slept fathoms deep in unconsciousness. Also she did not wish to get up--the floor was cold and a wind blowing. Could she not hear it and the creaking of the deer across the street, as it swung on its hook?
The wife of the Portier was a person of resource. She took the iron candlestick from the table and flung it into the darkness at the Portier"s pillow. No startled yell followed.
Suspicion thus confirmed, the Portier"s wife forgot the cold floor and the wind, and barefoot felt her way into the hall.
Suspicion was doubly confirmed. The chain was off the door; it even stood open an inch or two.
Armed with a second candlestick she stationed herself inside the door and waited. The stone floor was icy, but the fury of a woman scorned kept her warm. The Votivkirche struck one, two, three quarters of an hour. The candlestick in her hand changed from iron to ice, from ice to red-hot fire. Still the Portier had not come back and the door chain swung in the wind.
At four o"clock she retired to the bedroom again. Indignation had changed to fear, coupled with sneezing. Surely even the Schubert Society--What was that?
From the Portier"s bed was coming a rhythmic respiration!
She roused him, standing over him with the iron candlestick, now lighted, and gazing at him with eyes in which alarm struggled with suspicion.
"Thou hast been out of thy bed!"
"But no!"
"An hour since the bed was empty."
"Thou dreamest."