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.
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