“Now, thou bad one!” she said. “Awake,
when the Herr Doktor orders sleep! Shall I use
the slipper?”
The boy replied in German with a strong English accent.
“I cannot sleep. Yesterday the Fraulein
Elisabet said that in the mountains there are accidents,
and that sometimes—”
“The Fraulein Elisabet is a great fool.
Tomorrow comes thy letter of a certainty. The
post has been delayed with great snows. Thy father
has perhaps captured a great boar, or a—a
chamois, and he writes of it.”
“Do chamois have horns?”
“Ja. Great horns—so.”
“He will send them to me! And there are
no accidents?”
“None. Now sleep, or—the slipper.”
So far Harmony’s small world in the old city
had consisted of Scatchy and the Big Soprano, Peter,
and Anna Gates, with far off in the firmament the
master. Scatchy and the Big Soprano had gone,
weeping anxious postcards from every way station it
is true, but nevertheless gone. Peter and Anna
Gates remained, and the master as long as her funds
held out. To them now she was about to add Jimmy.
The bathrobe was finished. Out of the little
doctor’s chaos of pink flannel Harmony had brought
order. The result, masculine and complete even
to its tassels and cord of pink yarn, was ready to
be presented. It was with mingled emotions that
Anna Gates wrapped it up and gave it to Harmony the
next morning.
“He hasn’t been so well the last day or
two,” she said. “He doesn’t
sleep much—that’s the worst of those
heart conditions. Sometimes, while I’ve
been working on this thing, I’ve wondered—Well,
we’re making a fight anyhow. And better
take the letter, too, Harry. I might forget and
make lecture notes on it, and if I spoil that envelope—”
Harmony had arranged to carry the bathrobe to the
hospital, meeting the doctor there after her early
clinic. She knew Jimmy’s little story quite
well. Anna Gates had told it to her in detail.
“Just one of the tragedies of the world, my
dear,” she had finished. “You think
you have a tragedy, but you have youth and hope; I
think I have my own little tragedy, because I have
to go through the rest of life alone, when taken in
time I’d have been a good wife and mother.
Still I have my work. But this little chap, brought
over here by a father who hoped to see him cured,
and spent all he had to bring him here, and then—died.
It gets me by the throat.”
“And the boy does not know?” Harmony had
asked, her eyes wide.
“No, thanks to Peter. He thinks his father
is still in the mountains. When we heard about
it Peter went up and saw that he was buried.
It took about all the money there was. He wrote
home about it, too, to the place they came from.
There has never been any reply. Then ever since
Peter has written these letters. Jimmy lives
for them.”
