The injustice of it. Fanny had never ceased to rage at that.
In the years to come Theodore Brandeis was to have that adulation which
the American public, temperamentally so cold, gives its favorite, once
the ice of its reserve is thawed. He was to look down on that surging,
tempestuous crowd which sometimes packs itself about the foot of the
platform in Carnegie Hall, demanding more, more, more, after a generous
concert is concluded. He had to learn to protect himself from those
hysterical, enraptured, wholly feminine adorers who swarmed about him,
scaling the platform itself. But of all this there was nothing on that
Friday and Saturday in October. Orchestra Hall audiences are not, as
a rule, wildly demonstrative. They were no exception. They listened
attentively, appreciatively. They talked, critically and favorably, on
the way home. They applauded generously. They behaved as an Orchestra
Hall audience always behaves, and would behave, even if it were
confronted with a composite Elman-Kreisler-Ysaye soloist. Theodore's
playing was, as a whole, perhaps the worst of his career. Not that he
did not rise to magnificent heights at times. But it was what is known
as uneven playing. He was torn emotionally, nervously, mentally. His
playing showed it.
Fanny, seated in the auditorium, her hands clasped tight, her heart
hammering, had a sense of unreality as she waited for Theodore to appear
from the little door at the left. He was to play after the intermission.
Fanny had arrived late, with Theodore, that Friday afternoon. She felt
she could not sit through the first part of the program. They waited
together in the anteroom. Theodore, looking very slim and boyish in his
frock coat, walked up and down, up and down. Fanny wanted to straighten
his tie. She wanted to pick an imaginary thread off his lapel. She
wanted to adjust the white flower in his buttonhole (he jerked it out
presently, because it interfered with his violin, he said). She wanted
to do any one of the foolish, futile things that would have served to
relieve her own surcharged feelings. But she had learned control in
these years. And she yielded to none of them.
The things they said and did were, perhaps, almost ludicrous.
“How do I look?” Theodore demanded, and stood up before her.
“Beautiful!” said Fanny, and meant it.
Theodore passed a hand over his cheek. “Cut myself shaving, damn it!”
“It doesn't show.”
He resumed his pacing. Now and then he stopped, and rubbed his hands
together with a motion we use in washing. Finally:
“I wish you'd go out front,” he said, almost pettishly. Fanny rose,
without a word. She looked very handsome. Excitement had given her
color. The pupils of her eyes were dilated and they shone brilliantly.
She looked at her brother. He stared at her. They swayed together. They
kissed, and clung together for a long moment. Then Fanny turned and
walked swiftly away, and stumbled a little as she groped for the
stairway.
The bell in the foyer rang. The audience strolled to the auditorium.
They lagged, Fanny thought. They crawled. She told herself that she must
not allow her nerves to tease her like that. She looked about her, with
outward calm. Her eyes met Fenger's. He was seated, alone. It was he
who had got a subscription seat for her from a friend. She had said she
preferred to be alone. She looked at him now and he at her, and they did
not nod nor smile. The house settled itself flutteringly.
A man behind Fanny spoke. “Who's this Brandeis?”
“I don't know. A new one. German, I guess. They say he's good.
Kreisler's the boy who can play for me, though.”
The orchestra was seated now. Stock, the conductor, came out from
the little side door. Behind him walked Theodore. There was a little,
impersonal burst of applause. Stock mounted his conductor's platform and
glanced paternally down at Theodore, who stood at the left, violin and
bow in hand, bowing. The audience seemed to warm to his boyishness.
They applauded again, and he bowed in a little series of jerky bobs that
waggled his coat-tails. Heels close together, knees close together. A
German bow. And then a polite series of bobs addressed to Stock and his
orchestra. Stock's long, slim hands poised in air. His fingertips seemed
to draw from the men before him the first poignant strains of Theodore's
concerto. Theodore stood, slim and straight. Fanny's face, lifted toward
him, was a prayerful thing. Theodore suddenly jerked back the left lapel
of his coat in a little movement Fanny remembered as typical in his
boyish days, nuzzled his violin tenderly, and began to play.
It is the most excruciating of instruments, the violin, or the most
exquisite. I think Fanny actually heard very little of his playing. Her
hands were icy. Her cheeks were hot. The man before her was not Theodore
Brandeis, the violinist, but Teddy, the bright-haired, knickered
schoolboy who played to those people seated in the yellow wooden pews of
the temple in Winnebago. The years seemed to fade away. He crouched over
his violin to get the 'cello tones for which he was to become famous,
and it was the same hunched, almost awkward pose that the boy had used.
Fanny found herself watching his feet as his shifted his position. He
was nervous. And he was not taken out of himself. She knew that because
she saw the play of his muscles about the jaw-bone. It followed that he
was not playing his best. She could not tell that from listening to him.
Her music sense was dulled. She got it from these outward signs. The
woman next to her was reading a program absorbedly, turning the pages
regularly, and with care. Fanny could have killed her with her two
hands. She tried to listen detachedly. The music was familiar to her.
Theodore had played it for her, again and again. The last movement
had never failed to shake her emotionally. It was the glorious and
triumphant cry of a people tried and unafraid. She heard it now,
unmoved.
And then Theodore was bowing his little jerky bows, and he was shaking
hands with Stock, and with the First Violin. He was gone. Fanny sat with
her hands in her lap. The applause continued. Theodore appeared again.
Bowed. He bent very low now, with his arms hanging straight. There was
something gracious and courtly about him. And foreign. He must keep
that, Fanny thought. They like it. She saw him off again. More applause.
Encores were against the house rules. She knew that. Then it meant they
were pleased. He was to play again. A group of Hungarian dances this
time. They were wild, gypsy things, rising to frenzy at times. He played
them with spirit and poetry. To listen sent the blood singing through
the veins. Fanny found herself thinking clearly and exaltedly.
“This is what my mother drudged for, and died for, and it was worth it.
And you must do the same, if necessary. Nothing else matters. What he
needs now is luxury. He's worn out with fighting. Ease. Peace. Leisure.
You've got to give them to him. It's no use, Fanny. You lose.”
In that moment she reached a mark in her spiritual career that she was
to outdistance but once.
Theodore was bowing again. Fanny had scarcely realized that he had
finished. The concert was over.
“... the group of dances,” the man behind her was saying as he helped
the girl next him with her coat, “but I didn't like that first thing.
Church music, not concert.”
Fanny found her way back to the ante-room. Theodore was talking to the
conductor, and one or two others. He looked tired, and his eyes found
Fanny's with appeal and relief in them. She came over to him. There were
introductions, congratulations. Fanny slipped her hand over his with a
firm pressure.
“Come, dear. You must be tired.”
At the door they found Fenger waiting. Theodore received his well-worded
congratulations with an ill-concealed scowl.
“My car's waiting,” said Fenger. “Won't you let me take you home?”
A warning pressure from Theodore. “Thanks, no. We have a car. Theodore's
very tired.”
“I can quite believe that.”
“Not tired,” growled Theodore, like a great boy. “I'm hungry. Starved. I
never eat before playing.”
Kurt Stein, Theodore's manager, had been hovering over him solicitously.
“You must remember to-morrow night. I should advise you to rest now, as
quickly as possible.” He, too, glared at Fenger.
Fenger fell back, almost humbly. “I've great news for you. I must see
you Sunday. After this is over. I'll telephone you. Don't try to come to
work to-morrow.” All this is a hurried aside to Fanny.
Fanny nodded and moved away with Theodore.
Theodore leaned back in the car, but there was no hint of relaxation. He
was as tense and vibrant as one of his own violin strings.
“It went, didn't it? They're like clods, these American audiences.”
It was on the tip of Fanny's tongue to say that he had professed
indifference to audiences, but she wisely refrained. “Gad! I'm hungry.
What makes this Fenger hang around so? I'm going to tell him to keep
away, some day. The way he stares at you. Let's go somewhere to-night,
Fan. Or have some people in. I can't sit about after I've played. Olga
always used to have a supper party, or something.”
“All right, Ted. Would you like the theater?”
For the first time in her life she felt a little whisper of sympathy for
the despised Olga. Perhaps, after all, she had not been wholly to blame.
He was to leave Sunday morning for Cleveland, where he would play
Monday. He had insisted on taking Mizzi with him, though Fanny had
railed and stormed. Theodore had had his way.
“She's used to it. She likes to travel, don't you, Mizzi? You should
have seen her in Russia, and all over Germany, and in Sweden. She's a
better traveler than her dad.”
Saturday morning's papers were kind, but cool. They used words such as
promising, uneven, overambitious, gifted. Theodore crumpled the lot
into a ball and hurled them across the room, swearing horribly. Then he
smoothed them out, clipped them, and saved them carefully. His playing
that night was tinged with bravado, and the Saturday evening audience
rose to it. There was about his performance a glow, a spirit that had
been lacking on the previous day.
Inconsistently enough, he missed the antagonism of the European critics.
He was puzzled and resentful.
“They hardly say a word about the meaning of the concerto. They accept
it as a piece of music, Jewish in theme. It might as well be entitled
Springtime.”
“This isn't France or Russia,” said Fanny. “Antagonism here isn't
religious. It's personal, almost. You've been away so many years you've
forgotten. They don't object to us as a sect, or a race, but as a type.
That's the trouble, Clarence Heyl says. We're free to build as many
synagogues as we like, and worship in them all day, if we want to. But
we don't want to. The struggle isn't racial any more, but individual.
For some reason or other one flashy, loud-talking Hebrew in a restaurant
can cause more ill feeling than ten thousand of them holding a religious
mass meeting in Union Square.”
Theodore pondered a moment. “Then here each one of us is responsible. Is
that it?”
“I suppose so.”
“But look here. I've been here ten weeks, and I've met your friends, and
not one of them is a Jew. How's that?”
Fanny flushed a little. “Oh, it just worked out that way.”
Theodore looked at her hard. “You mean you worked it out that way?”
“Yes.”
“Fan, we're a couple of weaklings, both of us, to have sprung from
a mother like ours. I don't know which is worse; my selfishness,
or yours.” Then, at the hurt that showed in her face, he was all
contrition. “Forgive me, Sis. You've been so wonderful to me, and to
Mizzi, and to all of us. I'm a good-for-nothing fiddler, that's all.
You're the strong one.”
Fenger had telephoned her on Saturday. He and his wife were at their
place in the country. Fanny was to take the train out there Sunday
morning. She looked forward to it with a certain relief. The weather had
turned unseasonably warm, as Chicago Octobers sometimes do. Up to the
last moment she had tried to shake Theodore's determination to take
Mizzi and Otti with him. But he was stubborn.
“I've got to have her,” he said.
Michael Fenger's voice over the telephone had been as vibrant with
suppressed excitement as Michael Fenger's dry, hard tones could be.
“Fanny, it's done--finished,” he said. “We had a meeting to-day. This is
my last month with Haynes-Cooper.”
“But you can't mean it. Why, you ARE Haynes-Cooper. How can they let you
go?”
“I can't tell you now. We'll go over it all to-morrow. I've new plans.
They've bought me out. D'you see? At a price that--well, I thought I'd
got used to juggling millions at Haynes-Cooper. But this surprised even
me. Will you come? Early? Take the eight-ten.”
“That's too early. I'll get the ten.”
The mid-October country was a lovely thing. Fanny, with the strain of
Theodore's debut and leave-taking behind her, and the prospect of a
high-tension business talk with Fenger ahead, drank in the beauty of the
wayside woods gratefully.
Fenger met her at the station. She had never seen him so boyish, so
exuberant. He almost pranced.
“Hop in,” he said. He had driven down in a runabout. “Brother get off
all right? Gad! He CAN play. And you've made the whole thing possible.”
He turned to look at her. “You're a wonder.”
“In your present frame of mind and state of being,” laughed Fanny,
“you'd consider any one a wonder. You're so pleased with yourself you're
fairly gummy.”
Fenger laughed softly and sped the car on. They turned in at the gate.
There was scarlet salvia, now, to take the place of the red geraniums.
The gay awnings, too, were gone.
“This is our last week,” Fenger explained. “It's too cold out here for
Katherine. We're moving into town to-morrow. We're more or less camping
out here, with only the Jap to take care of us.”
“Don't apologize, please. I'm grateful just to be here, after the week
I've had. Let's have the news now.”
“We'll have lunch first. I'm afraid you'll have to excuse Katherine. She
probably won't be down for lunch.” The Jap had spread the luncheon table
on the veranda, but a brisk lake breeze had sprung up, and he was busy
now transferring his table from the porch to the dining room. “Would you
have believed it,” said Fenger, “when you left town? Good old lake. Mrs.
Fenger coming down?” to the man.
The Jap shook his head. “Nossa.”
Their talk at luncheon was all about Theodore and his future. Fenger
said that what Theodore needed was a firm and guiding hand. “A sort of
combination manager and slave-driver. An ambitious and intelligent wife
would do it. That's what we all need. A woman to work for, and to make
us work.”
Fanny smiled. “Mizzi will have to be woman enough, I'm afraid. Poor
Ted.”
They rose. “Now for the talk,” said Fenger. But the telephone had
sounded shrilly a moment before, and the omnipresent little Jap summoned
Fenger. He was back in a minute, frowning. “It's Haynes. I'm sorry. I'm
afraid it'll take a half hour of telephoning. Don't you want to take a
cat-nap? Or a stroll down to the lake?”
“Don't bother about me. I'll probably take a run outdoors.”
“Be back in half an hour.”
But when she returned he was still at the telephone. She got a book and
stretched luxuriously among the cushions of one of the great lounging
chairs, and fell asleep. When she awoke Fenger was seated opposite her.
He was not reading. He was not smoking. He evidently had been sitting
there, looking at her.
“Oh, gracious! Mouth open?”
“No.”
Fanny fought down an impulse to look as cross as she felt. “What time?
Why didn't you wake me?” The house was very quiet. She patted her hair
deftly, straightened her collar. “Where's everybody? Isn't Mrs. Fenger
down yet?”
“No. Don't you want to hear about my plans now?”
“Of course I do. That's what I came for. I don't see why you didn't tell
me hours ago. You're as slow in action as a Chinese play. Out with it.”
Fenger got up and began to pace the floor, not excitedly, but with an
air of repression. He looked very powerful and compelling, there in the
low-ceilinged, luxurious room. “I'll make it brief. We met yesterday in
Haynes's office. Of course we had discussed the thing before. You know
that. Haynes knew that I'd never run the plant under the new conditions.
Why, it would kill every efficiency rule I've ever made. Here I had
trimmed that enormous plant down to fighting weight. There wasn't a
useless inch or ounce about the whole enormous billionaire bulk of it.
And then to have Haynes come along, with his burdensome notions, and
his socialistic slop. They'd cripple any business, no matter how great
a start it had. I told him all that. We didn't waste much time on
argument, though. We knew we'd never get together. In half an hour we
were talking terms. You know my contract and the amount of stock I hold.
Well, we threshed that out, and Haynes is settling for two million and a
half.”
He came to a stop before Fanny's chair.
“Two million and a half what?” asked Fanny, feebly.
“Dollars.” He smiled rather grimly. “In a check.”
“One--check?” “One check.”
Fanny digested that in her orderly mind. “I thought I was used to
thinking in millions. But this--I'd like to touch the check, just once.”
“You shall.” He drew up a chair near her. “Now get this, Fanny. There's
nothing that you and I can't do with two millions and a half. Nothing.
We know this mail order game as no two people in the world know it. And
it's in its infancy. I know the technical side of it. You know the
human side of it. I tell you that in five years' time you and I can be
a national power. Not merely the heads of a prosperous mail order
business, but figures in finance. See what's happened to Haynes-Cooper
in the last five years! Why, it's incredible. It's grotesque. And it's
nothing to what you and I can do, working together. You know people,
somehow. You've a genius for sensing their wants, or feelings, or
emotions--I don't know just what it is. And I know facts. And we have
two million and a half--I can make it nearly three millions--to start
with. Haynes, fifteen years ago, had a couple of hundred thousand. In
five years we can make the Haynes-Cooper organization look as modern and
competent as a cross-roads store. This isn't a dream. These are facts.
You know how my mind works. Like a cold chisel. I can see this whole
country--and Europe, too, after the war--God, yes!--stretched out before
us like a patient before expert surgeons. You to attend to its heart,
and I to its bones and ligaments. I can put you where no other woman
has ever been. I've a hundred new plans this minute, and a hundred
more waiting to be born. So have you. I tell you it's just a matter of
buildings. Of bricks and stone, and machinery and people to make the
machinery go. Once we get those--and it's only a matter of months--we
can accomplish things I daren't even dream of. What was Haynes-Cooper
fifteen years ago? What was the North American Cloak and Suit Company?
The Peter Johnston Stores, of New York? Wells-Kayser? Nothing. They
didn't exist. And this year Haynes-Cooper is declaring a twenty-five per
cent dividend. Do you get what that means? But of course you do. That's
the wonder of it. I never need explain things to you. You've a genius
for understanding.”
Fanny had been sitting back in her chair, crouching almost, her
eyes fixed upon the man's face, so terrible in its earnestness and
indomitable strength. When he stopped talking now, and stood looking
down at her, she rose, too, her eyes still on his face. She was twisting
the fingers of one hand in the fingers of the other, in a frightened
sort of way.
“I'm not really a business woman. I--wait a minute, please--I have a
knack of knowing what people are thinking and wanting. But that isn't
business.” “It isn't, eh? It's the finest kind of business sense. It's
the thing the bugs call psychology, and it's as necessary to-day as
capital was yesterday. You can get along without the last. You can't
without the first. One can be acquired. The other you've got to be born
with.”
“But I--you know, of late, it's only the human side of it that has
appealed to me. I don't know why. I seem to have lost interest in the
actual mechanics of it.”
Fenger stood looking at her, his head lowered. A scarlet stripe, that
she had never noticed before, seemed to stand out suddenly, like a
welt, on his forehead. Then he came toward her. She raised her hand in
a little futile gesture. She took an involuntary step backward,
encountered the chair she had just left, and sank into it coweringly.
She sat there, looking up at him, fascinated. His hand, on the wing of
the great chair, was shaking. So, too, was his voice.
“Fanny, Katherine's not here.”
Fanny still looked up at him, wordlessly.
“Katherine left here yesterday. She's in town.” Then, at the look in
her face, “She was here when I telephoned you yesterday. Late yesterday
afternoon she had one of her fantastic notions. She insisted that she
must go into town. It was too cold for her here. Too damp. Too--well,
she went. And I let her go. And I didn't telephone you again. I wanted
you to come.”
Fanny Brandeis, knowing him, must have felt a great qualm of terror
and helplessness. But she was angry, too, a wholesome ingredient in a
situation such as this. The thing she said and did now was inspired. She
laughed--a little uncertainly, it is true--but still she laughed. And
she said, in a matter-of-fact tone:
“Well, I must say that's a rather shabby trick. Still, I suppose the
tired business man has got to have his little melodrama. What do I do?
H'm? Beat my breast and howl? Or pound on the door panel?”
Fenger stood looking at her. “Don't laugh at me, Fanny.”
She stood up, still smiling. It was rather a brilliant piece of work.
Fenger, taken out of himself though he was, still was artist enough to
appreciate it.
“Why not laugh,” she said, “if I'm amused? And I am. Come now, Mr.
Fenger. Be serious. And let's get back to the billions. I want to catch
the five-fifteen.”
“I AM serious.” “Well, if you expect me to play the hunted heroine,
I'm sorry.” She pointed an accusing finger at him. “I know now. You're
quitting Haynes-Cooper for the movies. And this is a rehearsal for a
vampire film.”
“You nervy little devil, you!” He reached out with one great,
irresistible hand and gripped her shoulder. “You wonderful, glorious
girl!” The hand that gripped her shoulder swung her to him. She saw his
face with veins she had never noticed before standing out, in knots,
on his temples, and his eyes were fixed and queer. And he was talking,
rather incoherently, and rapidly. He was saying the same thing over and
over again: “I'm crazy about you. I've been looking for a woman like
you--all my life. I'm crazy about you. I'm crazy----”
And then Fanny's fine composure and self control fled, and she thought
of her mother. She began to struggle, too, and to say, like any other
girl, “Let me go! Let me go! You're hurting me. Let me go! You! You!”
And then, quite clearly, from that part of her brain where it had been
tucked away until she should need it, came Clarence Heyl's whimsical bit
of advice. Her mind released it now, complete.
“If you double your fist this way, and tuck your thumb alongside, like
that, and aim for this spot right here, about two inches this side of
the chin, bringing your arm back and up quickly, like a piston, the
person you hit will go down, limp. There's a nerve right here that
communicates with the brain. The blow makes you see stars, and bright
lights----”
She went limp in his arms. She shut her eyes, flutteringly. “All
men--like you--have a yellow streak,” she whispered, and opened her
eyes, and looked up at him, smiling a little. He relaxed his hold, in
surprise and relief. And with her eyes on that spot barely two inches
to the side of the chin she brought her right arm down, slowly, slowly,
fist doubled, and then up like a piston--snap! His teeth came together
with a sharp little crack. His face, in that second, was a comic mask,
surprised, stunned, almost idiotic. Then he went down, as Clarence Heyl
had predicted, limp. Not with a crash, but slowly, crumpingly, so that
he almost dragged her with him.
Fanny stood looking down at him a moment. Then she wiped her mouth with
the back of her hand. She walked out of the room, and down the hall. She
saw the little Jap dart suddenly back from a doorway, and she stamped
her foot and said, “S-s-cat!” as if he had been a rat. She gathered up
her hat and bag from the hall table, and so, out of the door, and down
the walk, to the road. And then she began to run. She ran, and ran, and
ran. It was a longish stretch to the pretty, vine-covered station. She
seemed unconscious of fatigue, or distance. She must have been at least
a half hour on the way. When she reached the station the ticket agent
told her there was no train until six. So she waited, quietly. She put
on her hat (she had carried it in her hand all the way) and patted her
hair into place. When the train came she found a seat quite alone, and
sank into its corner, and rested her head against her open palm. It was
not until then that she felt a stab of pain. She looked at her hand, and
saw that the skin of her knuckles was bruised and bleeding.
“Well, if this,” she said to herself, “isn't the most idiotic thing that
ever happened to a woman outside a near-novel.”
She looked at her knuckles, critically, as though the hand belonged to
some one else. Then she smiled. And even as she smiled a great lump came
into her throat, and the bruise blurred before her eyes, and she was
crying rackingly, relievedly, huddled there in her red plush corner.