If Fanny Brandeis, the deliberately selfish, the calculatingly
ambitious, was aghast at the trick fate had played her, she kept her
thoughts to herself. Knowing her, I think she must have been grimly
amused at finding herself saddled with a helpless baby, a bewildered
peasant woman, and an artist brother both helpless and bewildered.
It was out of the question to house them in her small apartment. She
found a furnished apartment near her own, and installed them there, with
a working housekeeper in charge. She had a gift for management, and she
arranged all these details with a brisk capability that swept everything
before it. A sunny bedroom for Mizzi. But then, a bright living room,
too, for Theodore's hours of practice. No noise. Chicago's roar maddened
him. Otti shied at every new contrivance that met her eye. She had to
be broken in to elevators, electric switches, hot and cold faucets,
radiators.
“No apartment ever built could cover all the requirements,” Fanny
confided to Fenger, after the first harrowing week. “What they really
need is a combination palace, houseboat, sanatorium, and creche.”
“Look here,” said Fenger. “If I can help, why--” a sudden thought struck
him. “Why don't you bring 'em all down to my place in the country? We're
not there half the time. It's too cool for my wife in September. Just
the thing for the child, and your brother could fiddle his head off.”
The Fengers had a roomy, wide-verandaed house near Lake Forest; one
of the many places of its kind that dot the section known as the north
shore. Its lawn sloped gently down to the water's edge. The house was
gay with striped awnings, and scarlet geraniums, and chintz-covered
chairs. The bright, sparkling, luxurious little place seemed to satisfy
a certain beauty-sense in Fenger, as did the etchings on the walls in
his office. Fanny had spent a week-end there in July, with three or four
other guests, including Fascinating Facts. She had been charmed with it,
and had announced that her energies thereafter would be directed solely
toward the possession of just such a house as this, with a lawn that was
lipped by the lake, awnings and geraniums to give it a French cafe air;
books and magazines enough to belie that.
“And I'll always wear white,” she promised, gayly, “and there'll be
pitchers on every table, frosty on the outside, and minty on the inside,
and you're all invited.”
They had laughed at that, and so had she, but she had been grimly in
earnest just the same.
She shook her head now at Fenger's suggestion. “Imagine Mrs. Fenger's
face at sight of Mizzi, and Theodore with his violin, and Otti with her
shawls and paraphernalia. Though,” she added, seriously, “it's mighty
kind of you, and generous--and just like a man.”
“It isn't kindness nor generosity that makes me want to do things for
you.”
“Modest,” murmured Fanny, wickedly, “as always.”
Fenger bent his look upon her. “Don't try the ingenue on me, Fanny.”
Theodore's manager, Kurt Stein, was to have followed him in ten days.
The war changed that. The war was to change many things. Fanny seemed to
sense the influx of musicians that was to burst upon the United States
following the first few weeks of the catastrophe, and she set about
forestalling it. Advertising. That was what Theodore needed. She had
faith enough in his genius. But her business sense told her that this
genius must be enhanced by the proper setting. She set about creating
this setting. She overlooked no chance to fix his personality in the
kaleidoscopic mind of the American public--or as much of it as she could
reach. His publicity man was a dignified German-American whose methods
were legitimate and uninspired. Fanny's enthusiasm and superb confidence
in Theodore's genius infected Fenger, Fascinating Facts, even Nathan
Haynes himself. Nathan Haynes had never posed as a patron of the arts,
in spite of his fantastic millions. But by the middle of September there
were few of his friends, or his wife's friends, who had not heard of
this Theodore Brandeis. In Chicago, Illinois, no one lives in houses, it
is said, except the city's old families, and new millionaires. The rest
of the vast population is flat-dwelling. To say that Nathan Haynes'
spoken praise reached the city's house-dwellers would carry with it a
significance plain to any Chicagoan.
As for Fanny's method; here is a typical example of her somewhat crude
effectiveness in showmanship. Otti had brought with her from Vienna
her native peasant costume. It is a costume seen daily in the Austrian
capital, on the Ring, in the Stadt Park, wherever Viennese nurses
convene with their small charges. To the American eye it is a musical
comedy costume, picturesque, bouffant, amazing. Your Austrian takes
it quite for granted. Regardless of the age of the nurse, the skirt is
short, coming a few inches below the knees, and built like a lamp shade,
in color usually a bright scarlet, with rows of black velvet ribbon at
the bottom. Beneath it are worn skirts and skirts, and skirts, so that
the opera-bouffe effect is complete. The bodice is black velvet, laced
over a chemise of white. The head-gear a soaring winged affair of
stiffly starched white, that is a pass between the Breton peasant
woman's cap and an aeroplane. Black stockings and slippers finish the
costume.
Otti and Mizzi spent the glorious September days in Lincoln park,
Otti garbed in staid American stripes and apron, Mizzi resplendent in
smartest of children's dresses provided for her lavishly by her aunt.
Her fat and dimpled hands smoothed the blue, or pink or white folds with
a complacency astonishing in one of her years. “That's her mother in
her,” Fanny thought.
One rainy autumn day Fanny entered her brother's apartment to find Otti
resplendent in her Viennese nurse's costume. Mizzi had been cross and
fretful, and the sight of the familiar scarlet and black and white, and
the great winged cap seemed to soothe her.
“Otti!” Fanny exclaimed. “You gorgeous creature! What is it? A dress
rehearsal?” Otti got the import, if not the English.
“So gehen wir im Wien,” she explained, and struck a killing pose.
“Everybody? All the nurses? Alle?”
“Aber sure,” Otti displayed her half dozen English words whenever
possible.
Fanny stared a moment. Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “To-morrow's
Saturday,” she said, in German. “If it's fair and warm you put on that
costume and take Mizzi to the park.... Certainly the animal cages, if
you want to. If any one annoys you, come home. If a policeman asks you
why you are dressed that way tell him it is the costume worn by nurses
in Vienna. Give him your name. Tell him who your master is. If he
doesn't speak German--and he won't, in Chicago--some one will translate
for you.”
Not a Sunday paper in Chicago that did not carry a startling picture of
the resplendent Otti and the dimpled and smiling Mizzi. The omnipresent
staff photographer seemed to sniff his victim from afar. He pounced on
Theodore Brandeis' baby daughter, accompanied by her Viennese nurse
(in costume) and he played her up in a Sunday special that was worth
thousands of dollars, Fanny assured the bewildered and resentful
Theodore, as he floundered wildly through the billowing waves of the
Sunday newspaper flood. Theodore's first appearance was to be in Chicago
as soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in the season's opening
program in October. Any music-wise Chicagoan will tell you that
the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is not only a musical organization
functioning marvelously (when playing Beethoven). It is an institution.
Its patrons will admit the existence, but not the superiority of
similar organizations in Boston, Philadelphia and New York. On Friday
afternoons, during the season, Orchestra Hall, situate on Michigan
Boulevard, holds more pretty girls and fewer men than one might expect
to see at any one gathering other than, perhaps, a wholesale debutante
tea crush. A Friday afternoon ticket is as impossible of attainment for
one not a subscriber as a seat in heaven for a sinner. Saturday night's
audience is staider, more masculine, less staccato. Gallery, balcony,
parquet, it represents the city's best. Its men prefer Beethoven to
Berlin. Its women could wear pearl necklaces, and don't. Between the
audience and the solemn black-and-white rows on the platform there
exists an entente cordiale. The Konzert-Meister bows to his friend in
the third row, as he tucks his violin under his chin. The fifth row,
aisle, smiles and nods to the sausage-fingered 'cellist.
“Fritz is playing well to-night.”
In a rarefied form, it is the atmosphere that existed between audience
and players in the days of the old and famous Daly stock company.
Such was the character of the audience Theodore was to face on his first
appearance in America. Fanny explained its nature to him. He shrugged
his shoulders in a gesture as German as it was expressive.
Theodore seemed to have become irrevocably German during the years of
his absence from America. He had a queer stock of little foreign tricks.
He lifted his hat to men acquaintances on the street. He had learned to
smack his heels smartly together and to bow stiffly from the waist,
and to kiss the hand of the matrons--and they adored him for it. He was
quite innocent of pose in these things. He seemed to have imbibed
them, together with his queer German haircut, and his incredibly German
clothes.
Fanny allowed him to retain the bow, and the courtly hand-kiss, but she
insisted that he change the clothes and the haircut.
“You'll have to let it grow, Ted. I don't mean that I want you to have a
mane, like Ysaye. But I do think you ought to discard that convict
cut. Besides, it isn't becoming. And if you're going to be an American
violinist you'll have to look it--with a foreign finish.” He let his
hair grow. Fanny watched with interest for the appearance of the unruly
lock which had been wont to straggle over his white forehead in
his schoolboy days. The new and well-cut American clothes effected
surprisingly little change. Fanny, surveying him, shook her head.
“When you stepped off the ship you looked like a German in German
clothes. Now you look like a German in American clothes. I don't know--I
do believe it's your face, Ted. I wouldn't have thought that ten years
or so in any country could change the shape of one's nose, and mouth and
cheekbones. Do you suppose it's the umlauts?”
“Cut it out!” laughed Ted, that being his idea of modern American slang.
He was fascinated by these crisp phrases, but he was ten years or so
behind the times, and he sometimes startled his hearers by an exhibition
of slang so old as to be almost new. It was all the more startling in
contrast with his conversational English, which was as carefully correct
as a born German's.
As for the rest, it was plain that he was interested, but unhappy. He
practiced for hours daily. He often took Mizzi to the park and came back
storming about the dirt, the noise, the haste, the rudeness, the crowds,
the mismanagement of the entire city. Dummheit, he called it. They
profaned the lake. They allowed the people to trample the grass. They
threw papers and banana skins about. And they wasted! His years in
Germany had taught him to regard all these things as sacrilege, and the
last as downright criminal. He was lonesome for his Germany. That was
plain. He hated it, and loved it, much as he hated and loved the woman
who had so nearly spoiled his life. The maelstrom known as the southwest
corner of State and Madison streets appalled him.
“Gott!” he exclaimed. “Es ist unglaublich! Aber ganz unglaublich! Ich
werde bald veruckt.” He somehow lapsed into German when excited.
Fanny took him to the Haynes-Cooper plant one day, and it left
him dazed, and incredulous. She quoted millions at him. He was not
interested. He looked at the office workers, the mail-room girls, and
shook his head, dumbly. They were using bicycles now, with a bundle rack
in the front, in the vast stock rooms, and the roller skates had been
discarded as too slow. The stock boys skimmed around corners on these
lightweight bicycles, up one aisle, and down the next, snatching bundles
out of bins, shooting bundles into bins, as expertly as players in a
gymkhana.
Theodore saw the uncanny rapidity with which the letter-opening machines
did their work. He watched the great presses that turned out the
catalogue--the catalogue whose message meant millions; he sat in
Fenger's office and stared at the etchings, and said, “Certainly,” with
politeness, when Fenger excused himself in the midst of a conversation
to pick up the telephone receiver and talk to their shoe factory in
Maine. He ended up finally in Fanny's office, no longer a dingy and
undesirable corner, but a quietly brisk center that sent out vibrations
over the entire plant. Slosson, incidentally, was no longer of the
infants' wear. He had been transferred to a subordinate position in the
grocery section.
“Well,” said Fanny, seating herself at her desk, and smiling radiantly
upon her brother. “Well, what do you think of us?”
And then Theodore Brandeis, the careless, the selfish, the blind, said a
most amazing thing.
“Fanny, I'll work. I'll soon get some of these millions that are lying
about everywhere in this country. And then I'll take you out of this. I
promise you.”
Fanny stared at him, a picture of ludicrous astonishment.
“Why, you talk as if you were--sorry for me!”
“I am, dear. God knows I am. I'll make it up to you, somehow.”
It was the first time in all her dashing and successful career that
Fanny Brandeis had felt the sting of pity. She resented it, hotly. And
from Theodore, the groper, the--“But at any rate,” something within her
said, “he has always been true to himself.”
Theodore's manager arrived in September, on a Holland boat, on which he
had been obliged to share a stuffy inside cabin with three others. Kurt
Stein was German born, but American bred, and he had the American love
of luxurious travel. He was still testy when he reached Chicago and his
charge.
“How goes the work?” he demanded at once, of Theodore. He eyed him
sharply. “That's better. You have lost some of the look you had when you
left Wien. The ladies would have liked that look, here in America. But
it is bad for the work.”
He took Fanny aside before he left. His face was serious. It was
plain that he was disturbed. “That woman,” he began. “Pardon me, Mrs.
Brandeis. She came to me. She says she is starving. She is alone there,
in Vienna. Her--well, she is alone. The war is everywhere. They say it
will last for years. She wept and pleaded with me to take her here.”
“No!” cried Fanny. “Don't let him hear it. He mustn't know. He----”
“Yes, I know. She is a paradox, that woman. I tell you, she almost
prevailed on me. There is something about her; something that repels
and compels.” That struck him as being a very fine phrase indeed, and he
repeated it appreciatively.
“I'll send her money, somehow,” said Fanny.
“Yes. But they say that money is not reaching them over there. I don't
know what becomes of it. It vanishes.” He turned to leave. “Oh, a
message for you. On my boat was Schabelitz. It looks very much as if his
great fortune, the accumulation of years, would be swept away by this
war. Already they are tramping up and down his lands in Poland. His
money--much of it--is invested in great hotels in Poland and Russia, and
they are using them for barracks and hospitals.”
“Schabelitz! You mean a message for Theodore? From him? That's
wonderful.”
“For Theodore, and for you, too.”
“For me! I made a picture of him once when I was a little girl. I didn't
see him again for years. Then I heard him play. It was on his last tour
here. I wanted to speak to him. But I was afraid. And my face was red
with weeping.”
“He remembers you. And he means to see Theodore and you. He can do much
for Theodore in this country, and I think he will. His message for you
was this: `Tell her I still have the picture that she made of me, with
the jack-in-the-box in my hand, and that look on my face. Tell her I
have often wondered about that little girl in the red cap and the black
curls. I've wondered if she went on, catching that look back of people's
faces. If she did, she should be more famous than her brother.”'
“He said that! About me!”
“I am telling you as nearly as I can. He said, `Tell her it was a
woman who ruined Bauer's career, and caused him to end his days a music
teacher in--in--Gott! I can't remember the name of that town----”
“Winnebago.”
“Winnebago. That was it. `Tell her not to let the brother spoil his life
that way.' So. That is the message. He said you would understand.”
Theodore's face was ominous when she returned to him, after Stein had
left.
“I wish you and Stein wouldn't stand out there in the hall whispering
about me as if I were an idiot patient. What were you saying?”
“Nothing, Ted. Really.”
He brooded a moment. Then his face lighted up with a flash of intuition.
He flung an accusing finger at Fanny.
“He has seen her.”
“Ted! You promised.”
“She's in trouble. This war. And she hasn't any money. I know. Look
here. We've got to send her money. Cable it.”
“I will. Just leave it all to me.”
“If she's here, in this country, and you're lying to me----”
“She isn't. My word of honor, Ted.”
He relaxed.
Life was a very complicated thing for Fanny these days. Ted was
leaning on her; Mizzi, Otti, and now Fenger. Nathan Haynes was poking a
disturbing finger into that delicate and complicated mechanism of
System which Fenger had built up in the Haynes-Cooper plant. And Fenger,
snarling, was trying to guard his treasure. He came to Fanny with his
grievance. Fanny had always stimulated him, reassured him, given him the
mental readjustment that he needed.
He strode into her office one morning in late September. Ordinarily he
sent for her. He stood by her desk now, a sheaf of papers in his hand,
palpably stage props, and lifted significant eyebrows in the direction
of the stenographer busy at her typewriter in the corner.
“You may leave that, Miss Mahin,” Fanny said. Miss Mahin, a
comprehending young woman, left it, and the room as well. Fenger sat
down. He was under great excitement, though he was quite controlled.
Fanny, knowing him, waited quietly. His eyes held hers.
“It's come,” Fenger began. “You know that for the last year Haynes has
been milling around with a herd of sociologists, philanthropists, and
students of economics. He had some scheme in the back of his head, but I
thought it was just another of his impractical ideas. It appears that
it wasn't. Between the lot of them they've evolved a savings and
profit-sharing plan that's founded on a kind of practical universal
brotherhood dream. Haynes's millions are bothering him. If they actually
put this thing through I'll get out. It'll mean that everything I've
built up will be torn down. It will mean that any six-dollar-a-week
girl----”
“As I understand it,” interrupted Fanny, “it will mean that there will
be no more six-dollar-a-week girls.”
“That's it. And let me tell you, once you get the ignorant, unskilled
type to believing they're actually capable of earning decent money,
actually worth something, they're worse than useless. They're
dangerous.”
“You don't believe that.”
“I do.”
“But it's a theory that belongs to the Dark Ages. We've disproved it.
We've got beyond that.”
“Yes. So was war. We'd got beyond it. But it's here. I tell you, there
are only two classes: the governing and the governed. That has always
been true. It always will be. Let the Socialists rave. It has never got
them anywhere. I know. I come from the mucker class myself. I know what
they stand for. Boost them, and they'll turn on you. If there's anything
in any of them, he'll pull himself up by his own bootstraps.”
“They're not all potential Fengers.”
“Then let 'em stay what they are.”
Fanny's pencil was tracing and retracing a tortured and meaningless
figure on the paper before her. “Tell me, do you remember a girl named
Sarah Sapinsky?”
“Never heard of her.”
“That's fitting. Sarah Sapinsky was a very pretty, very dissatisfied
girl who was a slave to the bundle chute. One day there was a period
of two seconds when a bundle didn't pop out at her, and she had time to
think. Anyway, she left. I asked about her. She's on the streets.”
“Well?”
“Thanks to you and your system.”
“Look here, Fanny. I didn't come to you for that kind of talk. Don't,
for heaven's sake, give me any sociological drivel to-day. I'm not here
just to tell you my troubles. You know what my contract is here with
Haynes-Cooper. And you know the amount of stock I hold. If this scheme
of Haynes's goes in, I go out. Voluntarily. But at my own price. The
Haynes-Cooper plant is at the height of its efficiency now.” He dropped
his voice. “But the mail order business is in its infancy. There's no
limit to what can be done with it in the next few years. Understand?
Do you get what I'm trying to tell you?” He leaned forward, tense and
terribly in earnest.
Fanny stared at him. Then her hand went to her head in a gesture of
weariness. “Not to-day. Please. And not here. Don't think I'm ungrateful
for your confidence. But--this month has been a terrific strain.
Just let me pass the fifteenth of October. Let me see Theodore on the
way----”
Fenger's fingers closed about her wrist. Fanny got to her feet angrily.
They glared at each other a moment. Then the humor of the picture they
must be making struck Fanny. She began to laugh. Fenger's glare became a
frown. He turned abruptly and left the office. Fanny looked down at her
wrist ruefully. Four circlets of red marked its smooth whiteness. She
laughed again, a little uncertainly this time.
When she got home that night she found, in her mail, a letter for
Theodore, postmarked Vienna, and stamped with the mark of the censor.
Theodore had given her his word of honor that he would not write Olga,
or give her his address. Olga was risking Fanny's address. She stood
looking at the letter now. Theodore was coming in for dinner, as he did
five nights out of the week. As she stood in the hallway, she heard
the rattle of his key in the lock. She flew down the hall and into her
bedroom, her letters in her hand. She opened her dressing table drawer
and threw them into it, switched on the light and turned to face
Theodore in the doorway.
“'Lo, Sis.”
“Hello, Teddy. Kiss me. Phew! That pipe again. How'd the work go
to-day?”
“So--so. Any mail for me?”
“No.”
That night, when he had gone, she took out the letter and stood turning
it over and over in her hands. She had no thought of reading it. It was
its destruction she was contemplating. Finally she tucked it away in her
handkerchief box. Perhaps, after the fifteenth of October. Everything
depended on that.
And the fifteenth of October came. It had dragged for weeks, and then,
at the end, it galloped. By that time Fanny had got used to seeing
Theodore's picture and name outside Orchestra Hall, and in the musical
columns of the papers. Brandeis. Theodore Brandeis, the violinist. The
name sang in her ears. When she walked on Michigan Avenue during that
last week she would force herself to march straight on past Orchestra
Hall, contenting herself with a furtive and oblique glance at the
announcement board. The advance programs hung, a little bundle of them,
suspended by a string from a nail on the wall near the box office, so
that ticket purchasers might rip one off and peruse the week's musical
menu. Fanny longed to hear the comment of the little groups that were
constantly forming and dispersing about the box office window. She never
dreamed of allowing herself to hover near it. She thought sometimes of
the woman in the businesslike gray skirt and the black sateen apron who
had drudged so cheerfully in the little shop so that Theodore Brandeis'
name might shine now from the very top of the program, in heavy black
letters: