It was the week following this feat of fasting that two things happened
to Fanny Brandeis--two seemingly unimportant and childish things--that
were to affect the whole tenor of her life. It is pleasant to
predict thus. It gives a certain weight to a story and a sense of
inevitableness. It should insure, too, the readers's support to the
point, at least, where the prediction is fulfilled. Sometimes a careless
author loses sight altogether of his promise, and then the tricked
reader is likely to go on to the very final page, teased by the
expectation that that which was hinted at will be revealed.
Fanny Brandeis had a way of going to the public library on Saturday
afternoons (with a bag of very sticky peanut candy in her pocket, the
little sensualist!) and there, huddled in a chair, dreamily and almost
automatically munching peanut brittle, her cheeks growing redder and
redder in the close air of the ill-ventilated room, she would read,
and read, and read. There was no one to censor her reading, so she
read promiscuously, wading gloriously through trash and classic and
historical and hysterical alike, and finding something of interest in
them all.
She read the sprightly “Duchess” novels, where mad offers of marriage
were always made in flower-scented conservatories; she read Dickens, and
Thelma, and old bound Cosmopolitans, and Zola, and de Maupassant, and
the “Wide, Wide World,” and “Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates,”
and “Jane Eyre.” All of which are merely mentioned as examples of her
catholicism in literature. As she read she was unaware of the giggling
boys and girls who came in noisily, and made dates, and were coldly
frowned on by the austere Miss Perkins, the librarian. She would read
until the fading light would remind her that the short fall or winter
day was drawing to a close.
She would come, shivering a little after the fetid atmosphere of
the overheated library, into the crisp, cold snap of the astringent
Wisconsin air. Sometimes she would stop at the store for her mother.
Sometimes she would run home alone through the twilight, her heels
scrunching the snow, her whole being filled with a vague and unchildish
sadness and disquiet as she faced the tender rose, and orange, and
mauve, and pale lemon of the winter sunset. There were times when her
very heart ached with the beauty of that color-flooded sky; there were
times, later, when it ached in much the same way at the look in the eyes
of a pushcart peddler; there were times when it ached, seemingly, for no
reason at all--as is sometimes the case when one is a little Jew girl,
with whole centuries of suffering behind one.
On this day she had taken a book from the library Miss Perkins, at sight
of the title, had glared disapprovingly, and had hesitated a moment
before stamping the card.
“Is this for yourself?” she had asked.
“Yes'm.”
“It isn't a book for little girls,” snapped Miss Perkins.
“I've read half of it already,” Fanny informed her sweetly. And went out
with it under her arm. It was Zola's “The Ladies' Paradise” (Au Bonheur
des Dames). The story of the shop girl, and the crushing of the little
dealer by the great and moneyed company had thrilled and fascinated her.
Her mind was full of it as she turned the corner on Norris Street and
ran full-tilt, into a yowling, taunting, torturing little pack of boys.
They were gathered in close formation about some object which they were
teasing, and knocking about in the mud, and otherwise abusing with the
savagery of their years. Fanny, the fiery, stopped short. She pushed
into the ring. The object of their efforts was a weak-kneed and
hollow-chested little boy who could not fight because he was cowardly
as well as weak, and his name (oh, pity!) was Clarence--Clarence Heyl.
There are few things that a mischievous group of small boys cannot
do with a name like Clarence. They whined it, they catcalled it,
they shrieked it in falsetto imitation of Clarence's mother. He was a
wide-mouthed, sallow and pindling little boy, whose pipe-stemmed legs
looked all the thinner for being contrasted with his feet, which were
long and narrow. At that time he wore spectacles, too, to correct a
muscular weakness, so that his one good feature--great soft, liquid
eyes--passed unnoticed. He was the kind of little boy whose mother
insists on dressing him in cloth-top, buttoned, patent-leather shoes for
school. His blue serge suit was never patched or shiny. His stockings
were virgin at the knee. He wore an overcoat on cool autumn days. Fanny
despised and pitied him. We ask you not to, because in this puny, shy
and ugly little boy of fifteen you behold Our Hero.
He staggered to his feet now, as Fanny came up. His school reefer was
mud-bespattered. His stockings were torn. His cap was gone and his hair
was wild. There was a cut or scratch on one cheek, from which the blood
flowed.
“I'll tell my mother on you!” he screamed impotently, and shook with
rage and terror. “You'll see, you will! You let me alone, now!”
Fanny felt a sick sensation at the pit of her stomach and in her throat.
Then:
“He'll tell his ma!” sneered the boys in chorus. “Oh, mamma!” And called
him the Name. And at that a she wildcat broke loose among them. She
pounced on them without warning, a little fury of blazing eyes and
flying hair, and white teeth showing in a snarl. If she had fought
fair, or if she had not taken them so by surprise, she would have been
powerless among them. But she had sprung at them with the suddenness
of rage. She kicked, and scratched, and bit, and clawed and spat. She
seemed not to feel the defensive blows that were showered upon her in
turn. Her own hard little fists were now doubled for a thump or opened,
like a claw, for scratching.
“Go on home!” she yelled to Clarence, even while she fought. And
Clarence, gathering up his tattered school books, went, and stood not on
the order of his going. Whereupon Fanny darted nimbly to one side, out
of the way of boyish brown fists. In that moment she was transformed
from a raging fury into a very meek and trembling little girl, who
looked shyly and pleadingly out from a tangle of curls. The boys were
for rushing at her again.
“Cowardy-cats! Five of you fighting one girl,” cried Fanny, her lower
lip trembling ever so little. “Come on! Hit me! Afraid to fight anything
but girls! Cowardy-cats!” A tear, pearly, pathetic, coursed down her
cheek.
The drive was broken. Five sullen little boys stood and glared at her,
impotently.
“You hit us first,” declared one boy. “What business d' you have
scratching around like that, I'd like to know! You old scratch cat!”
“He's sickly,” said Fanny. “He can't fight. There's something the matter
with his lungs, or something, and they're going to make him quit school.
Besides, he's a billion times better than any of you, anyway.”
At once, “Fanny's stuck on Clar-ence! Fanny's stuck on Clar-ence!”
Fanny picked up her somewhat battered Zola from where it had flown at
her first onslaught. “It's a lie!” she shouted. And fled, followed by
the hateful chant.
She came in at the back door, trying to look casual. But Mattie's keen
eye detected the marks of battle, even while her knife turned the frying
potatoes.
“Fanny Brandeis! Look at your sweater! And your hair!”
Fanny glanced down at the torn pocket dangling untidily. “Oh, that!” she
said airily. And, passing the kitchen table, deftly filched a slice of
cold veal from the platter, and mounted the back stairs to her room. It
was a hungry business, this fighting. When Mrs. Brandeis came in at six
her small daughter was demurely reading. At supper time Mrs. Brandeis
looked up at her daughter with a sharp exclamation.
“Fanny! There's a scratch on your cheek from your eye to your chin.”
Fanny put up her hand. “Is there?”
“Why, you must have felt it. How did you get it?”
Fanny said nothing. “I'll bet she was fighting,” said Theodore with the
intuitive knowledge that one child has of another's ways.
“Fanny!” The keen brown eyes were upon her. “Some boys were picking on
Clarence Heyl, and it made me mad. They called him names.”
“What names?”
“Oh, names.”
“Fanny dear, if you're going to fight every time you hear that name----”
Fanny thought of the torn sweater, the battered Zola, the scratched
cheek. “It is pretty expensive,” she said reflectively.
After supper she settled down at once to her book. Theodore would labor
over his algebra after the dining-room table was cleared. He stuck his
cap on his head now, and slammed out of the door for a half-hour's play
under the corner arc-light. Fanny rarely brought books from school, and
yet she seemed to get on rather brilliantly, especially in the studies
she liked. During that winter following her husband's death Mrs.
Brandeis had a way of playing solitaire after supper; one of the
simpler forms of the game. It seemed to help her to think out the day's
problems, and to soothe her at the same time. She would turn down the
front of the writing desk, and draw up the piano stool.
All through that winter Fanny seemed to remember reading to the
slap-slap of cards, and the whir of their shuffling. In after years she
was never able to pick up a volume of Dickens without having her mind
hark back to those long, quiet evenings. She read a great deal of
Dickens at that time. She had a fine contempt for his sentiment, and his
great ladies bored her. She did not know that this was because they were
badly drawn. The humor she loved, and she read and reread the passages
dealing with Samuel Weller, and Mr. Micawber, and Sairey Gamp, and Fanny
Squeers. It was rather trying to read Dickens before supper, she had
discovered. Pickwick Papers was fatal, she had found. It sent one to the
pantry in a sort of trance, to ransack for food--cookies, apples, cold
meat, anything. But whatever one found, it always fell short of the
succulent sounding beefsteak pies, and saddles of mutton, and hot
pineapple toddy of the printed page.
To-night Mrs. Brandeis, coming in from the kitchen after a conference
with Mattie, found her daughter in conversational mood, though book in
hand.
“Mother, did you ever read this?” She held up “The Ladies' Paradise.”
“Yes; but child alive, what ever made you get it? That isn't the kind of
thing for you to read. Oh, I wish I had more time to give----”
Fanny leaned forward eagerly. “It made me think a lot of you. You
know--the way the big store was crushing the little one, and everything.
Like the thing you were talking to that man about the other day. You
said it was killing the small-town dealer, and he said some day it would
be illegal, and you said you'd never live to see it.”
“Oh, that! We were talking about the mail-order business, and how hard
it was to compete with it, when the farmers bought everything from a
catalogue, and had whole boxes of household goods expressed to them. I
didn't know you were listening, Fanchen.”
“I was. I almost always do when you and some traveling man or somebody
like that are talking. It--it's interesting.”
Fanny went back to her book then. But Molly Brandeis sat a moment,
eyeing her queer little daughter thoughtfully. Then she sighed, and laid
out her cards for solitaire. By eight o'clock she was usually so sleepy
that she would fall, dead-tired, asleep on the worn leather couch in the
sitting-room. She must have been fearfully exhausted, mind and body. The
house would be very quiet, except for Mattie, perhaps, moving about in
the kitchen or in her corner room upstairs. Sometimes the weary woman
on the couch would start suddenly from her sleep and cry out, choked
and gasping, “No! No! No!” The children would jump, terrified, and come
running to her at first, but later they got used to it, and only looked
up to say, when she asked them, bewildered, what it was that wakened
her, “You had the no-no-nos.”
She had never told of the thing that made her start out of her sleep and
cry out like that. Perhaps it was just the protest of the exhausted
body and the overwrought nerves. Usually, after that, she would sit
up, haggardly, and take the hairpins out of her short thick hair, and
announce her intention of going to bed. She always insisted that the
children go too, though they often won an extra half hour by protesting
and teasing. It was a good thing for them, these nine o'clock bed hours,
for it gave them the tonic sleep that their young, high-strung natures
demanded.
“Come, children,” she would say, yawning.
“Oh, mother, please just let me finish this chapter!”
“How much?”
“Just this little bit. See? Just this.”
“Well, just that, then,” for Mrs. Brandeis was a reasonable woman, and
she had the book-lover's knowledge of the fascination of the unfinished
chapter.
Fanny and Theodore were not always honest about the bargain. They would
gallop, hot-cheeked, through the allotted chapter. Mrs. Brandeis would
have fallen into a doze, perhaps. And the two conspirators would read
on, turning the leaves softly and swiftly, gulping the pages, cramming
them down in an orgy of mental bolting, like naughty children stuffing
cake when their mother's back is turned. But the very concentration of
their dread of waking her often brought about the feared result. Mrs.
Brandeis would start up rather wildly, look about her, and see the two
buried, red-cheeked and eager, in their books.
“Fanny! Theodore! Come now! Not another minute!”
Fanny, shameless little glutton, would try it again. “Just to the end of
this chapter! Just this weenty bit!”
“Fiddlesticks! You've read four chapters since I spoke to you the last
time. Come now!”
Molly Brandeis would see to the doors, and the windows, and the clock,
and then, waiting for the weary little figures to climb the stairs,
would turn out the light, and, hairpins in one hand, corset in the
other, perhaps, mount to bed.
By nine o'clock the little household would be sleeping, the children
sweetly and dreamlessly, the tired woman restlessly and fitfully, her
overwrought brain still surging with the day's problems. It was not like
a household at rest, somehow. It was like a spirited thing standing,
quivering for a moment, its nerves tense, its muscles twitching.
Perhaps you have quite forgotten that here were to be retailed two
epochal events in Fanny Brandeis's life. If you have remembered, you
will have guessed that the one was the reading of that book of social
protest, though its writer has fallen into disfavor in these fickle
days. The other was the wild and unladylike street brawl in which she
took part so that a terrified and tortured little boy might escape his
tormentors.