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Heaven knows it was hard enough to get together, without losing it now. I'll have to jump overboard and swim ashore at New York I haven't even a dollar for tips." "New York!" said little Scatchett with her eyes glowing. "If Henry meets me I know he will " "Tut!" The Big Soprano got up cumbrously and stood looking down. "You and your Henry!
She was looking at the ten-kronen piece. "Where is the other?" she asked in a whisper. "In my powder-box." Little Scatchett lifted the china lid and dropped the tiny gold-piece. "Every little bit," she said flippantly, but still in a whisper, "added to what she's got, makes just a little bit more." "Have you thought of a place to leave it for her? If Rosa finds it, it's good-bye.
It revealed nothing but a cigarette, on which she pounced. Still squatting, she lighted the cigarette in the candle flame and sat solemnly puffing it. "The first for a week," she said. "Pull out the wardrobe, Scatch; there may be another relic of my prosperous days." But little Scatchett was not interested in Austrian cigarettes with a government monopoly and gilt tips.
Originally lighted for the purpose of enabling Miss Scatchett to locate the score of a Tschaikowsky concerto, it had been moved to the small center table, and had served to give light if not festivity to the afternoon coffee and cakes.
Outside in the garden the trees creaked and bent before the wind, and the heavy barred gate, left open by the last comer, a piano student named Scatchett and dubbed "Scatch" the gate slammed to and fro monotonously, giving now and then just enough pause for a hope that it had latched itself, a hope that was always destroyed by the next gust. One candle burned in the salon.
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 door.
But she is different she's got the thing that you are as well without, the thing that my lack of is sending me back to fight in a church choir instead of grand opera." Little Scatchett was rather puzzled. "Temperament?" she asked. It had always been accepted in the little colony that Harmony was a real musician, a star in their lesser firmament. The Big Soprano sniffed. "If you like," she said.
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.
It was when having picked up her violin in a very passion of loneliness, only to put it down when she found that the familiar sounds echoed and reechoed sadly through the silent rooms it was when she was ready for bed that she found the money under her pillow, and a scrawl from Scatchy, a breathless, apologetic scrawl, little Scatchett having adored her from afar, as the plain adore the beautiful, the mediocre the gifted:
Harmony found the little hoard under her pillow that night when, having seen Scatch and the Big Soprano off at the station, she had come back alone to the apartment on the Siebensternstrasse. The trunks were gone now. Only the concerto score still lay on the piano, where little Scatchett, mentally on the dock at New York with Henry's arms about her, had forgotten it.
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