HUMORESQUE

On either side of the Bowery, which cuts through like a drain to catch

its sewage, Every Man's Land, a reeking march of humanity and humidity,

steams with the excrement of seventeen languages, flung in _patois_ from

tenement windows, fire escapes, curbs, stoops, and cellars whose walls

are terrible and spongy with fungi.

By that impregnable chemistry of race whereby the red blood of the

Mongolian and the red blood of the Caucasian become as oil and water in

the mingling, Mulberry Street, bounded by sixteen languages, runs its

intact Latin length of pushcarts, clotheslines, naked babies, drying

vermicelli; black-eyed women in rhinestone combs and perennially big

with child; whole families of buttonhole-makers, who first saw the

blue-and-gold light of Sorrento, bent at home work round a single gas

flare; pomaded barbers of a thousand Neapolitan amours. And then, just

as suddenly, almost without osmosis and by the mere stepping down from

the curb, Mulberry becomes Mott Street, hung in grillwork balconies, the

moldy smell of poverty touched up with incense. Orientals whose feet

shuffle and whose faces are carved out of satinwood. Forbidden women,

their white, drugged faces behind upper windows. Yellow children,

incongruous enough in Western clothing. A draughty areaway with an

oblique of gaslight and a black well of descending staircase.

Show-windows of jade and tea and Chinese porcelains.

More streets emanating out from Mott like a handful of crooked rheumatic

fingers, then suddenly the Bowery again, cowering beneath Elevated

trains, where men burned down to the butt end of soiled lives pass in

and out and out and in of the knee-high swinging doors, a veiny-nosed,

acid-eaten race in themselves.

Allen Street, too, still more easterly, and half as wide, is straddled

its entire width by the steely, long-legged skeleton of Elevated

traffic, so that its third-floor windows no sooner shudder into silence

from the rushing shock of one train than they are shaken into chatter by

the passage of another. Indeed, third-floor dwellers of Allen Street,

reaching out, can almost touch the serrated edges of the Elevated

structure, and in summer the smell of its hot rails becomes an actual

taste in the mouth. Passengers, in turn, look in upon this horizontal of

life as they whiz by. Once, in fact, the blurry figure of what might

have been a woman leaned out, as she passed, to toss into one Abrahm

Kantor's apartment a short-stemmed pink carnation. It hit softly on

little Leon Kantor's crib, brushing him fragrantly across the mouth and

causing him to pucker up.

Beneath, where even in August noonday, the sun cannot find its way by a

chink, and babies lie stark naked in the cavernous shade, Allen Street

presents a sort of submarine and greenish gloom, as if its humanity were

actually moving through a sea of aqueous shadows, faces rather bleached

and shrunk from sunlessness as water can bleach and shrink. And then,

like a shimmering background of orange-finned and copper-flanked marine

life, the brass-shops of Allen Street, whole rows of them, burn

flamelessly and without benefit of fuel.

To enter Abrahm Kantor's--Brasses, was three steps down, so that his

casement show-window, at best filmed over with the constant rain of dust

ground down from the rails above, was obscure enough, but crammed with

copied loot of khedive and of czar. The seven-branch candlestick so

biblical and supplicating of arms. An urn, shaped like Rebecca's, of

brass, all beaten over with little pocks. Things--cups, trays, knockers,

ikons, gargoyles, bowls, and teapots. A symphony of bells in graduated

sizes. Jardinières with fat sides. A pot-bellied samovar. A

swinging-lamp for the dead, star-shaped. Against the door, an octave of

tubular chimes, prisms of voiceless harmony and of heatless light.

Opening this door, they rang gently, like melody heard through water and

behind glass. Another bell rang, too, in tilted singsong from a pulley

operating somewhere in the catacomb rear of this lambent vale of things

and things and things. In turn, this pulley set in toll still another

bell, two flights up in Abrahm Kantor's tenement, which overlooked the

front of whizzing rails and a rear wilderness of gibbet-looking

clothes-lines, dangling perpetual specters of flapping union suits in a

mid-air flaky with soot.

Often at lunch, or even the evening meal, this bell would ring in on

Abrahm Kantor's digestive well-being, and while he hurried down, napkin

often bib-fashion still about his neck, and into the smouldering lanes

of copper, would leave an eloquent void at the head of his

well-surrounded table.

This bell was ringing now, jingling in upon the slumber of a still newer

Kantor, snuggling peacefully enough within the ammoniac depths of a

cradle recently evacuated by Leon, heretofore impinged upon you.

On her knees before an oven that billowed forth hotly into her face,

Mrs. Kantor, fairly fat and not yet forty, and at the immemorial task of

plumbing a delicately swelling layer-cake with broom-straw, raised her

face, reddened and faintly moist.

"Isadore, run down and say your papa is out until six. If it's a

customer, remember the first asking-price is the two middle figures on

the tag, and the last asking-price is the two outside figures. See once,

with your papa out to buy your little brother his birthday present, and

your mother in a cake, if you can't make a sale for first price."

Isadore Kantor, aged eleven and hunched with a younger Kantor over an

oilcloth-covered table, hunched himself still deeper in a barter for a

large crystal marble with a candy stripe down its center.

"Izzie, did you hear me?"

"Yes'm."

"Go down this minute--do you hear? Rudolph, stop always letting your

big brother get the best of you in marbles. Iz-zie!"

"In a minute."

"Don't let me have to ask you again, Isadore Kantor!"

"Aw, ma, I got some 'rithmetic to do. Let Esther go!"

"Always Esther! Your sister stays right in the front room with her

spelling."

"Aw, ma, I got spelling, too."

"Every time I ask that boy he should do me one thing, right away he gets

lessons! With me, that lessons-talk don't go no more. Every time you get

put down in school, I'm surprised there's a place left lower where they

can put you. Working-papers for such a boy like you!"

"I'll woik--"

"How I worried myself! Violin lessons yet--thirty cents a lesson out of

your papa's pants while he slept! That's how I wanted to have in the

family a profession--maybe a musician on the violin! Lessons for you out

of money I had to lie to your papa about! Honest, when I think of it--my

own husband--it's a wonder I don't potch you just for remembering it.

Rudolph, will you stop licking that cake-pan? It's saved for your little

brother Leon. Ain't you ashamed even on your little brother's birthday

to steal from him?"

"Ma, gimme the spoon?"

"I'll give you the spoon, Isadore Kantor, where you don't want it. If

you don't hurry down, the way that bell is ringing, not one bite do you

get out of your little brother's birthday cake tonight!"

"I'm goin', ain't I?"

"Always on my children's birthdays a meanness sets into this house!

Rudolph, will you put down that bowl! Izzie--for the last time I ask

you--for the last time--"

Erect now, Mrs. Kantor lifted an expressive hand, letting it hover.

"I'm goin', ma; for golly sakes, I'm goin'!" said her recalcitrant one,

shuffling off toward the staircase, shuffling, shuffling.

Then Mrs. Kantor resumed her plumbing, and through the little apartment,

its middle and only bedroom of three beds and a crib lighted vicariously

by the front room and kitchen, began to wind the warm, the golden-brown

fragrance of cake in the rising.

By six o'clock the shades were drawn against the dirty dusk of Allen

Street and the oilcloth-covered table dragged out center and spread by

Esther Kantor, nine in years, in the sturdy little legs bulging over

shoe-tops, in the pink cheeks that sagged slightly of plumpness, and in

the utter roundness of face and gaze, but mysteriously older in the

little-mother lore of crib and knee-dandling ditties and in the ropy

length and thickness of the two brown plaits down her back.

There was an eloquence to that waiting, laid-out table, the print of the

family already gathered about it; the dynastic high chair, throne of

each succeeding Kantor; an armchair drawn up before the paternal

mustache-cup; the ordinary kitchen chair of Mannie Kantor, who spilled

things, an oilcloth sort of bib dangling from its back; the little chair

of Leon Kantor, cushioned in an old family album that raised his chin

above the table. Even in cutlery the Kantor family was not lacking in

variety. Surrounding a centerpiece of thick Russian lace were Russian

spoons washed in washed-off gilt; forks of one, two, and three tines;

steel knives with black handles; a hartshorn carving-knife. Thick-lipped

china in stacks before the armchair. A round four-pound loaf of black

bread waiting to be torn, and tonight, on the festive mat of cotton

lace, a cake of pinkly gleaming icing, encircled with five pink

little candles.

At slightly after six Abrahm Kantor returned, leading by a resisting

wrist Leon Kantor, his stemlike little legs, hit midship, as it were, by

not sufficiently cut-down trousers and so narrow and birdlike of face

that his eyes quite obliterated the remaining map of his features, like

those of a still wet nestling. All except his ears. They poised at the

sides of Leon's shaved head of black bristles, as if butterflies had

just lighted there, whispering, with very spread wings, their message,

and presently would fly off again. By some sort of muscular contraction

he could wiggle these ears at will, and would do so for a penny or a

whistle, and upon one occasion for his brother Rudolph's dead rat, so

devised as to dangle from string and window before the unhappy

passer-by. They were quivering now, these ears, but because the entire

little face was twitching back tears and gulp of sobs.

"Abrahm--Leon--what is it?" Her hands and her forearms instantly out

from the business of kneading something meaty and floury, Mrs. Kantor

rushed forward, her glance quick from one to the other of them. "Abrahm,

what's wrong?"

"I'll feedle him! I'll feedle him!"

The little pulling wrist still in clutch, Mr. Kantor regarded his wife,

the lower half of his face, well covered with reddish bristles,

undershot, his free hand and even his eyes violently lifted. To those

who see in a man a perpetual kinship to that animal kingdom of which he

is supreme, there was something undeniably anthropoidal about Abrahm

Kantor, a certain simian width between the eyes and long, rather agile

hands with hairy backs.

"Hush it!" cried Mr. Kantor, his free hand raised in threat of descent,

and cowering his small son to still more undersized proportions. "Hush

it or, by golly! I'll--"

"Abrahm--Abrahm--what is it?"

Then Mr. Kantor gave vent in acridity of word and feature.

"_Schlemmil!_" he cried. "_Momser! Ganef! Nebich!_" by which, in smiting

mother tongue, he branded his offspring with attributes of apostate and

ne'er-do-well, of idiot and thief.

"Abrahm!"

"Schlemmil!" repeated Mr. Kantor, swinging Leon so that he described a

large semicircle that landed him into the meaty and waiting embrace of

his mother. "Take him! You should be proud of such a little _momser_ for

a son! Take him, and here you got back his birthday dollar. A feedle!

Honest--when I think on it--a feedle!"

Such a rush of outrage seemed fairly to strangle Mr. Kantor that he

stood, hand still upraised, choking and inarticulate above the now

frankly howling huddle of his son.

"Abrahm, you should just once touch this child! How he trembles!

Leon--mamma's baby--what is it? Is this how you come back when papa

takes you out to buy your birthday present? Ain't you ashamed?"

Mouth distended to a large and blackly hollow O, Leon, between

terrifying spells of breath-holding, continued to howl.

"All the way to Naftel's toy-store I drag him. A birthday present for a

dollar his mother wants he should have, all right, a birthday present! I

give you my word till I'm ashamed for Naftel, every toy in his shelves

is pulled down. Such a cow--that shakes with his head--"

"No--no--no!" This from young Leon, beating at his mother's skirts.

Again the upraised but never quite descending hand of his father.

"By golly! I'll 'no--no' you!"

"Abrahm--go 'way! Baby, what did papa do?"

Then Mr. Kantor broke into an actual tarantella of rage, his hands palms

up and dancing.

"'What did papa do?' she asks. She's got easy asking. 'What did papa

do?' The whole shop, I tell you. A sheep with a baa inside when you

squeeze on him--games--a horn so he can holler my head off--such a knife

like Izzie's with a scissors in it. 'Leon,' I said, ashamed for Naftel,

'that's a fine knife like Izzie's so you can cut up with. All right,

then'--when I see how he hollers--'such a box full of soldiers to have

war with.' 'Dollar seventy-five,' says Naftel. 'All right, then,' I

says, when I seen how he keeps hollering. 'Give you a dollar fifteen for

'em.' I should make myself small for fifteen cents more. 'Dollar

fifteen,' I says--anything so he should shut up with his hollering for

what he seen in the window."

"He seen something in the window he wanted, Abrahm?"

"Didn't I tell you? A feedle! A four-dollar feedle! A moosicer, so we

should have another feedler in the family for some thirty-cents

lessons."

"Abrahm--you mean--he--our Leon--wanted a violin?"

"'Wanted,' she says. I could potch him again this minute for how he

wanted it! _Du_--you little bum you--_chammer_--_momser_--I'll

feedle you!"

Across Mrs. Kantor's face, as she knelt there in the shapeless

cotton-stuff uniform of poverty, through the very tenement of her body,

a light had flashed up into her eyes. She drew her son closer, crushing

his puny cheek up against hers, cupping his bristly little head in her

by no means immaculate palms.

"He wanted a violin! It's come, Abrahm! The dream of all my life--my

prayers--it's come! I knew it must be one of my children if I waited

long enough--and prayed enough. A musician! He wants a violin! He cried

for a violin! My baby! Why, darlink, mamma'll sell her clothes off her

back to get you a violin. He's a musician, Abrahm! I should have known

it the way he's fooling always around the chimes and the bells in

the store!"

Then Mr. Kantor took to rocking his head between his palms.

"Oi--oi! The mother is crazier as her son. A moosician! A _fresser_, you

mean. Such an eater, it's a wonder he ain't twice too big instead of

twice too little for his age."

"That's a sign, Abrahm; geniuses, they all eat big. For all we know,

he's a genius. I swear to you, Abrahm, all the months before he was born

I prayed for it. Each one before they came, I prayed it should be the

one. I thought that time the way our Isadore ran after the organ-grinder

he would be the one. How could I know it was the monkey he wanted? When

Isadore wouldn't take to it I prayed my next one, and then my next one,

should have the talent. I've prayed for it, Abrahm. If he wants a

violin, please, he should have it."

"Not with my money."

"With mine! I've got enough saved, Abrahm. Them three extra dollars

right here inside my own waist. Just that much for that cape down on

Grand Street. I wouldn't have it now, the way they say the wind blows

up them--"

"I tell you the woman's crazy--"

"I feel it! I know he's got talent! I know my children so well. A--a

father don't understand. I'm so next to them. It's like I can tell

always everything that will happen to them--it's like a pain--somewheres

here--like in back of my heart."

"A pain in the heart she gets."

"For my own children I'm always a prophet, I tell you! You think I

didn't know that--that terrible night after the pogrom after we got out

of Kief to across the border! You remember, Abrahm, how I predicted it

to you then--how our Mannie would be born too soon and--and not right

from my suffering! Did it happen on the ship to America just the way I

said it would? Did it happen just exactly how I predicted our Izzie

would break his leg that time playing on the fire-escape? I tell you,

Abrahm, I get a real pain here under my heart that tells me what comes

to my children. Didn't I tell you how Esther would be the first in her

confirmation-class and our baby Boris would be redheaded? At only five

years, our Leon all by himself cries for a fiddle--get it for him,

Abrahm--get it for him!"

"I tell you, Sarah, I got a crazy woman for a wife! It ain't enough we

celebrate eight birthdays a year with one-dollar presents each time and

copper goods every day higher. It ain't enough that right to-morrow I

got a fifty-dollar note over me from Sol Ginsberg; a four-dollar present

she wants for a child that don't even know the name of a feedle."

"Leon, baby, stop hollering. Papa will go back and get the fiddle for

you now before supper. See, mamma's got money here in her waist--"

"Papa will go back for the feedle _not_--three dollars she's saved for

herself he can holler out of her for a feedle!"

"Abrahm, he's screaming so he--he'll have a fit."

"He should have two fits."

"Darlink--"

"I tell you the way you spoil your children it will some day come back

on us."

"It's his birthday night, Abrahm--five years since his little head

first lay on the pillow next to me."

"All right--all right--drive me crazy because he's got a birthday."

"Leon baby--if you don't stop hollering you'll make yourself sick.

Abrahm, I never saw him like this--he's green--"

"I'll green him. Where is that old feedle from Isadore--that

seventy-five-cents one?"

"I never thought of that! You broke it that time you got mad at

Isadore's lessons. I'll run down. Maybe it's with the junk behind the

store. I never thought of that fiddle. Leon darlink--wait! Mamma'll run

down and look. Wait, Leon, till mamma finds you a fiddle."

The raucous screams stopped then, suddenly, and on their very lustiest

crest, leaving an echoing gash across silence. On willing feet of haste

Mrs. Kantor wound down backward the high, ladder-like staircase that led

to the brass-shop.

Meanwhile to a gnawing consciousness of dinner-hour had assembled the

house of Kantor. Attuned to the intimate atmosphere of the tenement

which is so constantly rent with cry of child, child-bearing, delirium,

delirium tremens, Leon Kantor had howled no impression into the motley

din of things. There were Isadore, already astride his chair, leaning

well into center table, for first vociferous tear at the four-pound

loaf; Esther, old at chores, settling an infant into the high chair,

careful of tiny fingers in lowering the wooden bib.

"Papa, Izzie's eating first again."

"Put down that loaf and wait until your mother dishes up, or you'll get

a potch you won't soon forget."

"Say, pop--"

"Don't 'say, pop' me! I don't want no street-bum freshness from you!"

"I mean, papa, there was an up-town swell in, and she bought one of them

seventy-five-cent candlesticks for the first price."

"_Schlemmil! Chammer!_" said Mr. Kantor, rinsing his hands at the sink.

"Didn't I always tell you it's the first price, times two, when you see

up-town business come in? Haven't I learned it to you often enough a

slummer must pay for her nosiness?"

There entered then, on poor, shuffling feet, Mannie Kantor, so marred in

the mysterious and ceramic process of life that the brain and the soul

had stayed back sooner than inhabit him. Seventeen in years, in the down

upon his face and in growth unretarded by any great nervosity of system,

his vacuity of face was not that of childhood, but rather as if his

light eyes were peering out from some hinterland and wanting so terribly

and so dumbly to communicate what they beheld to brain-cells closed

against himself.

At sight of Mannie, Leon Kantor, the tears still wetly and dirtily down

his cheeks, left off his black, fierce-eyed stare of waiting long enough

to smile, darkly, it is true, but sweetly.

"Giddy-app!" he cried. "Giddy-app!"

And then Mannie, true to habit, would scamper and scamper.

Up out of the traplike stair-opening came the head of Mrs. Kantor,

disheveled and a smudge of soot across her face, but beneath her arm,

triumphant, a violin of one string and a broken back.

"See, Leon--what mamma got! A violin! A fiddle! Look! The bow, too, I

found. It ain't much, baby, but it's a fiddle."

"Aw, ma--that's my old violin. Gimme. I want it. Where'd you find--"

"Hush up, Izzie! This ain't yours no more. See, Leon, what mamma brought

you. A violin!"

"Now, you little _chammer_, you got a feedle, and if you ever let me

hear you holler again for a feedle, by golly! if I don't--"

From his corner, Leon Kantor reached out, taking the instrument and

fitting it beneath his chin, the bow immediately feeling, surely and

lightly, for string.

"Look, Abrahm, he knows how to hold it! What did I tell you? A child

that never in his life seen a fiddle, except a beggar's on the street!"

Little Esther suddenly cantered down-floor, clapping her chubby hands.

"Lookie--lookie--Leon!"

The baby ceased clattering his spoon against the wooden bib. A silence

seemed to shape itself.

So black and so bristly of head, his little clawlike hands hovering over

the bow, Leon Kantor withdrew a note, strangely round and given up

almost sobbingly from the single string. A note of warm twining quality,

like a baby's finger.

"Leon--darlink!"

Fumbling for string and for notes the instrument could not yield up to

him, the birdlike mouth began once more to open widely and terribly into

the orificial O.

It was then Abrahm Kantor came down with a large hollow resonance of

palm against that aperture, lifting his small son and depositing him

plop upon the family album.

"Take that! By golly! one more whimper out of you and if I don't make

you black-and-blue, birthday or no birthday! Dish up, Sarah, quick, or

I'll give him something to cry about."

The five pink candles had been lighted, burning pointedly and with

slender little smoke wisps. Regarding them owlishly, the tears dried on

Leon's face, his little tongue licking up at them.

"Look how solemn he is, like he was thinking of something a million

miles away except how lucky he is he should have a pink birthday-cake.

Uh--uh--uh! Don't you begin to holler again. Here, I'm putting the

feedle next to you. Uh--uh--uh!"

To a meal plentifully ladled out directly from stove to table, the

Kantor family drew up, dipping first into the rich black soup of the

occasion. All except Mrs. Kantor.

"Esther, you dish up. I'm going somewhere. I'll be back in a minute."

"Where you going, Sarah? Won't it keep until--"

But even in the face of query, Sarah Kantor was two flights down and

well through the lambent aisles of the copper-shop. Outside, she broke

into run, along two blocks of the indescribable bazaar atmosphere of

Grand Street, then one block to the right.

Before Mattel's show-window, a jet of bright gas burned into a

jibberwock land of toys. There was that in Sarah Kantor's face that was

actually lyrical as, fumbling at the bosom of her dress, she entered.

To Leon Kantor, by who knows what symphonic scheme of things, life was a

chromatic scale, yielding up to him, through throbbing, living nerves of

sheep-gut, the sheerest semitones of man's emotions.

When he tucked his Stradivarius beneath his chin the book of life seemed

suddenly translated to him in melody. Even Sarah Kantor, who still

brewed for him, on a small portable stove carried from city to city and

surreptitiously unpacked in hotel suites, the blackest of soups, and,

despite his protestation, would incase his ears of nights in an old

home-made device against their flightiness, would oftentimes bleed

inwardly at this sense of his isolation.

There was a realm into which he went alone, leaving her as detached as

the merest ticket purchaser at the box-office.

At seventeen Leon Kantor had played before the crowned heads of Europe,

the aching heads of American capital, and even the shaved head of a

South Sea prince. There was a layout of anecdotal gifts, from the molar

tooth of the South Sea prince set in a South Sea pearl to a

blue-enameled snuff-box incrusted with the rearing-lion coat-of-arms of

a very royal house.

At eighteen came the purchase of a king's Stradivarius for a king's

ransom, and acclaimed by Sunday supplements to repose of nights in an

ivory cradle.

At nineteen, under careful auspices of press agent, the ten singing

digits of the son of Abrahm Kantor were insured at ten thousand dollars

the finger.

At twenty he had emerged surely and safely from the perilous quicksands

which have sucked down whole Lilliputian worlds of infant prodigies.

At twenty-one, when Leon Kantor played a Sunday-night concert, there was

a human queue curling entirely around the square block of the

operahouse, waiting its one, two, even three and four hours for the

privilege of standing room only.

Usually these were Leon Kantor's own people pouring up from the lowly

lands of the East Side to the white lands of Broadway, parched for

music, these burning brethren of his--old men in that line, frequently

carrying their own little folding camp-chairs, not against weariness of

the spirit, but of the flesh; youth with Slavic eyes and cheek-bones.

These were the six-deep human phalanx which would presently slant down

at him from tiers of steepest balconies and stand frankly emotional and

jammed in the unreserved space behind the railing which shut them off

from the three-dollar seats of the reserved.

At a very special one of these concerts, dedicated to the meager purses

of just these, and held in New York's super opera-house, the

Amphitheater, a great bowl of humanity, the metaphor made perfect by

tiers of seats placed upon the stage, rose from orchestra to dome. A

gigantic cup of a Colosseum lined in stacks and stacks of faces. From

the door of his dressing-room, leaning out, Leon Kantor could see a

great segment of it, buzzing down into adjustment, orchestra twitting

and tuning into it.

In the bare little room, illuminated by a sheaf of roses, just arrived,

Mrs. Kantor drew him back by the elbow.

"Leon, you're in a draught."

The amazing years had dealt kindly with Mrs. Kantor. Stouter, softer,

apparently even taller, she was full of small new authorities that could

shut out cranks, newspaper reporters, and autograph fiends. A

fitted-over-corsets black taffeta and a high comb in the graying hair

had done their best with her. Pride, too, had left its flush upon her

cheeks, like two round spots of fever.

"Leon, it's thirty minutes till your first number. Close that door. Do

you want to let your papa and his excitement in on you?"

The son of Sarah Kantor obeyed, leaning his short, rather narrow form in

silhouette against the closed door. In spite of slimly dark evening

clothes worked out by an astute manager to the last detail in boyish

effects, there was that about him which defied long-haired precedent.

Slimly and straightly he had shot up into an unmannered, a short, even a

bristly-haired young manhood, disqualifying by a close shave for the

older school of hirsute virtuosity.

But his nerves did not spare him. On concert nights they seemed to

emerge almost to the surface of him and shriek their exposure.

"Just feel my hands, ma. Like ice."

She dived down into her large silk what-not of a reticule.

"I've got your fleece-lined gloves here, son."

"No--no! For God's sake--not those things! No!"

He was back at the door again, opening it to a slit, peering through.

"They're bringing more seats on the stage. If they crowd me in I won't

go on. I can't play if I hear them breathe. Hi--out there--no more

chairs! Pa! Hancock--"

"Leon, Leon, ain't you ashamed to get so worked up? Close that door.

Have you got a manager who is paid just to see to your comfort? When

papa comes, I'll have him go out and tell Hancock you don't want chairs

so close to you. Leon, will you mind mamma and sit down?"

"It's a bigger house than the royal concert in Madrid, ma. Why, I never

saw anything like it! It's a stampede. God! this is real--this is what

gets me, playing for my own! I should have given a concert like this

three years ago. I'll do it every year now. I'd rather play before them

than all the crowned heads on earth. It's the biggest night of my life.

They're rioting out there, ma--rioting to get in."

"Leon, Leon, won't you sit down, if mamma begs you to?"

He sat then, strumming with all ten fingers upon his knees.

"Try to get quiet, son. Count--like you always do. One--two--three--"

"Please, ma--for God's sake--please--please!"

"Look--such beautiful roses! From Sol Ginsberg, an old friend of papa's

he used to buy brasses from eighteen years ago. Six years he's been away

with his daughter in Munich. Such a beautiful mezzo they say, engaged

already for Metropolitan next season."

"I hate it, ma, if they breathe on my neck."

"Leon darlink, did mamma promise to fix it? Have I ever let you play a

concert when you wouldn't be comfortable?"

His long, slim hands suddenly prehensile and cutting a streak of upward

gesture, Leon Kantor rose to his feet, face whitening.

"Do it now! Now, I tell you. I won't have them breathe on me. Do you

hear me? Now! Now! Now!"

Risen also, her face soft and tremulous for him, Mrs. Kantor put out a

gentle, a sedative hand upon his sleeve.

"Son," she said, with an edge of authority even behind her smile, "don't

holler at me!"

He grasped her hand with his two and, immediately quiet, lay a close

string of kisses along it.

"Mamma," he said, kissing again and again into the palm, "mamma--mamma."

"I know, son; it's nerves!"

"They eat me, ma. Feel--I'm like ice! I didn't mean it; you know I

didn't mean it!"

"My baby," she said, "my wonderful boy, it's like I can never get used

to the wonder of having you. The greatest one of them all should be

mine--a plain woman's like mine!"

He teased her, eager to conciliate and to ride down his own state of

quivering.

"Now, ma--now--now--don't forget Rimsky!"

"Rimsky! A man three times your age who was playing concerts before you

was born! Is that a comparison? From your clippings-books I can show

Rimsky who the world considers the greatest violinist. Rimsky he

rubs into me!"

"All right, then, the press-clippings, but did Elsass, the greatest

manager of them all, bring me a contract for thirty concerts at two

thousand a concert? Now I've got you! Now!"

She would not meet his laughter. "Elsass! Believe me, he'll come to you

yet! My boy should worry if he makes fifty thousand a year more or less.

Rimsky should have that honor--for so long as he can hold it. But he

won't hold it long. Believe me, I don't rest easy in my bed till Elsass

comes after you. Not for so big a contract like Rimsky's, but

bigger--not for thirty concerts, but for fifty!"

"_Brava! Brava!_ There's a woman for you. More money than she knows

what to do with, and then not satisfied!"

She was still too tremulous for banter. "'Not satisfied'? Why, Leon, I

never stop praying my thanks for you!"

"All right, then," he cried, laying his icy fingers on her cheek;

"to-morrow we'll call a _mignon_--a regular old-fashioned Allen Street

prayer-party."

"Leon, you mustn't make fun."

"Make fun of the sweetest girl in this room!"

"'Girl'! Ah, if I could only hold you by me this way, Leon. Always a

boy--with me--your poor old mother--your only girl. That's a fear I

suffer with, Leon--to lose you to a--girl. That's how selfish the mother

of such a wonder-child like mine can get to be."

"All right! Trying to get me married off again. Nice! Fine!"

"Is it any wonder I suffer, son? Twenty-one years to have kept you by me

a child. A boy that never in his life was out after midnight except to

catch trains. A boy that never has so much as looked at a girl and could

have looked at princesses. To have kept you all these years--mine--is it

any wonder, son, I never stop praying my thanks for you? You don't

believe Hancock, son, the way he keeps always teasing you that you

should have a--what he calls--affair--a love-affair? Such talk is not

nice, Leon--an affair!"

"Love-affair poppycock!" said Leon Kantor, lifting his mother's face and

kissing her on eyes about ready to tear. "Why, I've got something, ma,

right here in my heart for you that--"

"Leon, be careful your shirt-front!"

"That's so--so what you call 'tender,' for my best sweetheart that

I--Oh, love-affair--poppycock!"

She would not let her tears come.

"My boy--my wonder-boy!"

"There goes the overture, ma."

"Here, darlink--your glass of water."

"I can't stand it in here; I'm suffocating!"

"Got your mute in your pocket, son?"

"Yes, ma; for God's sake, yes! Yes! Don't keep asking things!"

"Ain't you ashamed, Leon, to be in such an excitement! For every concert

you get worse."

"The chairs--they'll breathe on nay neck."

"Leon, did mamma promise you those chairs would be moved?"

"Where's Hancock?"

"Say--I'm grateful if he stays out. It took me enough work to get this

room cleared. You know your papa how he likes to drag in the whole world

to show you off--always just before you play. The minute he walks in the

room right away he gets everybody to trembling just from his own

excitements. I dare him this time he should bring people. No dignity has

that man got, the way he brings every one."

Even upon her words came a rattling of door, Of door-knob, and a voice

through the clamor.

"Open--quick--Sarah! Leon!"

A stiffening raced over Mrs. Kantor, so that she sat rigid on her

chair-edge, lips compressed, eye darkly upon the shivering door.

"Open--Sarah!"

With a narrowing glance, Mrs. Kantor laid to her lips a forefinger of

silence.

"Sarah, it's me! Quick, I say!"

Then Leon Kantor sprang up, the old prehensile gesture of curving

fingers shooting up.

"For God's sake, ma, let him in! I can't stand that infernal battering."

"Abrahm, go away! Leon's got to have quiet before his concert."

"Just a minute, Sarah. Open quick!"

With a spring his son was at the door, unlocking and flinging it back.

"Come in, pa."

The years had weighed heavily upon Abrahm Kantor in avoirdupois only. He

was himself plus eighteen years, fifty pounds, and a new sleek pomposity

that was absolutely oleaginous. It shone roundly in his face, doubling

of chin, in the bulge of waistcoat, heavily gold-chained, and in eyes

that behind the gold-rimmed glasses gave sparklingly forth his estate of

well-being.

"Abrahm, didn't I tell you not to dare to--"

On excited balls of feet that fairly bounced him, Abrahm Kantor burst

in.

"Leon--mamma--I got out here an old friend--Sol Ginsberg. You remember,

mamma, from brasses--"

"Abrahm--not now--"

"Go 'way with your 'not now'! I want Leon should meet him. Sol, this is

him--a little grown up from such a _nebich_ like you remember

him--_nu_? Sarah, you remember Sol Ginsberg? Say--I should ask you if

you remember your right hand! Ginsberg & Esel, the firm. This is his

girl, a five years' contract signed yesterday--five hundred dollars an

opera for a beginner--six rôles--not bad--_nu_?"

"Abrahm, you must ask Mr. Ginsberg please to excuse Leon until after his

concert--"

"Shake hands with him, Ginsberg. He's had his hand shook enough in his

life, and by kings, to shake it once more with an old bouncer like you!"

Mr. Ginsberg, not unlike his colleague in rotundities, held out a short,

a dimpled hand.

"It's a proud day," he said, "for me to shake the hands from mine old

friend's son and the finest violinist livink to-day. My little

daughter--"

"Yes, yes, Gina. Here, shake hands with him. Leon, they say a voice like

a fountain. Gina Berg--eh, Ginsberg--is how you stage-named her? You

hear, mamma, how fancy--Gina Berg? We go hear her, eh?"

There was about Miss Gina Berg, whose voice could soar to the

tirra-lirra of a lark and then deepen to mezzo, something of the actual

slimness of the poor, maligned Elsa so long buried beneath the buxomness

of divas. She was like a little flower that in its crannied nook keeps

dewy longest.

"How do you do, Leon Kantor?"

There was a whir through her English of three acquired languages.

"How do _you_ do?"

"We--father and I--traveled once all the way from Brussels to Dresden to

hear you. It was worth it. I shall never forget how you played the

'Humoresque.' It made me laugh and cry."

"You like Brussels?"

She laid her little hand to her heart, half closing her eyes.

"I will never be so happy again as with the sweet little people of

Brussels."

"I, too, love Brussels. I studied there four years with Ahrenfest."

"I know you did. My teacher, Lyndahl, in Berlin, was his

brother-in-law."

"You have studied with Lyndahl?"

"He is my master."

"I--Will I some time hear you sing?"

"I am not yet great. When I am foremost like you, yes."

"Gina--Gina Berg; that is a beautiful name to make famous."

"You see how it is done? Gins--berg. Gina Berg."

"Clev--er!"

They stood then smiling across a chasm of the diffidence of youth, she

fumbling at the great fur pelt out of which her face flowered so dewily.

"I--Well--we--we--are in the fourth box--I guess we had better be

going--Fourth box, left."

He wanted to find words, but for consciousness of self, could not.

"It's a wonderful house out there waiting for you, Leon Kantor, and

you--you're wonderful, too!"

"The--flowers--thanks!"

"My father, he sent them. Come, father--quick!"

Suddenly there was a tight tensity seemed to crowd up the little room.

"Abrahm--quick--get Hancock. That first row of chairs--has got to be

moved. There he is, in the wings. See that the piano ain't dragged down

too far! Leon, got your mute in your pocket? Please, Mr. Ginsberg--you

must excuse--Here, Leon, is your glass of water; drink it, I say. Shut

that door out there, boy, so there ain't a draught in the wings. Here,

Leon, your violin. Got your neckerchief? Listen how they're shouting!

It's for you--Leon--darlink--Go!"

The center of that vast human bowl which had shouted itself out, slim,

boylike, and in his supreme isolation, Leon Kantor drew bow and a first

thin, pellucid, and perfect note into a silence breathless to

receive it.

Throughout the arduous flexuosities of the Mendelssohn E minor concerto,

singing, winding from tonal to tonal climax, and out of the slow

movement which is like a tourniquet twisting the heart into the spirited

_allegro molto vivace_, it was as if beneath Leon Kantor's fingers the

strings were living vein-cords, youth, vitality, and the very foam of

exuberance racing through them.

That was the power of him. The vichy and the sparkle of youth, so that,

playing, the melody poured round him like wine and went down seething

and singing into the hearts of his hearers.

Later, and because these were his people and because they were dark and

Slavic with his Slavic darkness, he played, as if his very blood were

weeping, the "Kol Nidre," which is the prayer of his race for

atonement.

And then the super-amphitheater, filled with those whose emotions lie

next to the surface and whose pores have not been closed over with a

water-tight veneer, burst into its cheers and its tears.

There were fifteen recalls from the wings, Abrahm Kantor standing

counting them off on his fingers and trembling to receive the

Stradivarius. Then, finally, and against the frantic negative pantomime

of his manager, a scherzo, played so lacily that it swept the house in

lightest laughter.

When Leon Kantor finally completed his program they were loath to let

him go, crowding down the aisles upon him, applauding up, down, around

him until the great disheveled house was like the roaring of a sea, and

he would laugh and throw out his arm in widespread helplessness, and

always his manager in the background gesticulating against too much of

his precious product for the money, ushers already slamming up chairs,

his father's arms out for the Stradivarius, and, deepest in the gloom of

the wings, Sarah Kantor, in a rocker especially dragged out for her, and

from the depths of the black-silk reticule, darning his socks.

"Bravo--bravo! Give us the 'Humoresque'--Chopin Nocturne--Polonaise

--'Humoresque.' Bravo--bravo!"

And even as they stood, hatted and coated, importuning and pressing in

upon him, and with a wisp of a smile to the fourth left box, Leon Kantor

played them the "Humoresque" of Dvorák, skedaddling, plucking,

quirking--that laugh on life with a tear behind it. Then suddenly,

because he could escape no other way, rushed straight back for his

dressing-room, bursting in upon a flood of family already there: Isadore

Kantor, blue-shaved, aquiline, and already graying at the temples; his

five-year-old son, Leon; a soft little pouter-pigeon of a wife, too,

enormous of bust, in glittering ear-drops and a wrist watch of diamonds

half buried in chubby wrist; Miss Esther Kantor, pink and pretty;

Rudolph; Boris, not yet done with growing-pains.

At the door Miss Kantor met her brother, her eyes as sweetly moist as

her kiss.

"Leon darling, you surpassed even yourself!"

"Quit crowding, children. Let him sit down. Here, Leon, let mamma give

you a fresh collar. Look how the child's perspired. Pull down that

window, Boris. Rudolph, don't let no one in. I give you my word if

to-night wasn't as near as I ever came to seeing a house go crazy. Not

even that time in Milan, darlink, when they broke down the doors, was it

like to-night--"

"Ought to seen, ma, the row of police outside--"

"Hush up, Roody! Don't you see your brother is trying to get his

breath?"

From Mrs. Isadore Kantor: "You should have seen the balconies, mother.

Isadore and I went up just to see the jam."

"Six thousand dollars in the house to-night, if there was a cent," said

Isadore Kantor.

"Hand me my violin, please, Esther. I must have scratched it, the way

they pushed."

"No, son, you didn't. I've already rubbed it up. Sit quiet, darlink!"

He was limply white, as if the vitality had flowed out of him.

"God! wasn't it--tremendous?"

"Six thousand, if there was a cent," repeated Isadore Kantor. "More than

Rimsky ever played to in his life!"

"Oh, Izzie, you make me sick, always counting--counting!"

"Your sister's right, Isadore. You got nothing to complain of if there

was only six hundred in the house. A boy whose fiddle has made already

enough to set you up in such a fine business, his brother Boris in such

a fine college, automobiles--style--and now because Vladimir Rimsky,

three times his age, gets signed up with Elsass for a few thousand more

a year, right away the family gets a long face--"

"Ma, please! Isadore didn't mean it that way!"

"Pa's knocking, ma! Shall I let him in?"

"Let him in, Roody. I'd like to know what good it will do to try to keep

him out."

In an actual rain of perspiration, his tie slid well under one ear,

Abrahm Kantor burst in, mouthing the words before his acute state of

strangulation would let them out.

"Elsass--it's Elsass outside! He--wants--to sign--Leon--fifty

concerts--coast to coast--two thousand--next season! He's got the

papers--already drawn up--the pen outside waiting--"

"Abrahm!"

"Pa!"

In the silence that followed, Isadore Kantor, a poppiness of stare and

a violent redness set in, suddenly turned to his five-year-old son,

sticky with lollipop, and came down soundly and with smack against the

infantile, the slightly outstanding and unsuspecting ear.

"_Momser!_" he cried. "_Chammer! Lump! Ganef_! You hear that? Two

thousand! Two thousand! Didn't I tell you--didn't I tell you to

practise?"

Even as Leon Kantor put pen to this princely document, Franz Ferdinand

of Serbia, the assassin's bullet cold, lay dead in state, and let slip

were the dogs of war.

* * * * *

In the next years, men, forty deep, were to die in piles; hayricks of

fields to become human hayricks of battle-fields; Belgium disemboweled,

her very entrails dragging, to find all the civilized world her

champion, and between the poppies of Flanders, crosses, thousand upon

thousand of them, to mark the places where the youth of her allies fell,

avenging outrage. Seas, even when calmest, were to become terrible, and

men's heart-beats, a bit sluggish with the fatty degeneration of a

sluggard peace, to quicken and then to throb with the rat-a-tat-tat, the

rat-a-tat-tat of the most peremptory, the most reverberating call to

arms in the history of the world.

In June, 1917, Leon Kantor, answering that rat-a-tat-tat, enlisted.

In November, honed by the interim of training to even a new leanness,

and sailing-orders heavy and light in his heart, Lieutenant Kantor, on

two days' home-leave, took leave of home, which can be crudest when it

is tenderest.

Standing there in the expensive, the formal, the enormous French parlor

of his up-town apartment de luxe, from not one of whose chairs would his

mother's feet touch floor, a wall of living flesh, mortared in blood,

was throbbing and hedging him in.

He would pace up and down the long room, heavy with the faces of those

who mourn, with a laugh too ready, too facetious, in his fear for them.

"Well, well, what is this, anyway, a wake? Where's the coffin? Who's

dead?"

His sister-in-law shot out her plump, watch-encrusted wrist. "Don't,

Leon!" she cried. "Such talk is a sin! It might come true."

"Rosie-posy-butter-ball," he said, pausing beside her chair to pinch her

deeply soft cheek. "Cry-baby-roly-poly, you can't shove me off in a

wooden kimono that way."

From his place before the white-and-gold mantel, staring steadfastly at

the floor tiling, Isadore Kantor turned suddenly, a bit whiter and older

at the temples.

"I don't get your comedy, Leon."

"'Wooden kimono'--Leon?"

"That's the way the fellows at camp joke about coffins, ma. I didn't

mean anything but fun! Great Scott! Can't any one take a joke!"

"O God! O God!" His mother fell to swaying softly, hugging herself

against shivering.

"Did you sign over power of attorney to pa, Leon?"

"All fixed, Izzie."

"I'm so afraid, son, you don't take with you enough money in your

pockets. You know how you lose it. If only you would let mamma sew that

little bag inside your uniform, with a little place for bills and a

little place for the asafoetida!"

"Now, please, ma--please! If I needed more, wouldn't I take it? Wouldn't

I be a pretty joke among the fellows, tied up in that smelling stuff!

Orders are orders, ma, I know what to take and what not to take."

"Please, Leon, don't get mad at me, but if you will let me put in your

suit-case just one little box of that salve, for your finger-tips, so

they don't crack--"

Pausing as he paced to lay cheek to her hair, he patted her. "Three

boxes, if you want. Now, how's that?"

"And you won't take it out so soon as my back is turned?"

"Cross my heart."

His touch seemed to set her trembling again, all her illy concealed

emotions rushing up. "I can't stand it! Can't! Can't! Take my life--take

my blood, but don't take my boy--don't take my boy--"

"Mamma, mamma, is that the way you're going to begin all over again,

after your promise?"

She clung to him, heaving against the rising storm of sobs. "I can't

help it--can't! Cut out my heart from me, but let me keep my boy--my

wonderboy--"

"Oughtn't she be ashamed of herself? Just listen to her, Esther! What

will we do with her? Talks like she had a guarantee I wasn't coming

back. Why, I wouldn't be surprised if by spring I wasn't tuning up again

for a coast-to-coast tour--"

"Spring! That talk don't fool me. Without my boy, the springs in my life

are over--"

"Why, ma, you talk like every soldier who goes to war was killed!

There's only the smallest percentage of them die in battle--"

"'Spring,' he says; 'spring'! Crossing the seas from me! To live through

months with that sea between us--my boy maybe shot--my--"

"Mamma, please!"

"I can't help it, Leon; I'm not one of those fine mothers that can be so

brave. Cut out my heart, but leave my boy! My wonder-boy--my child I

prayed for!"

"There's other mothers, ma, with sons!"

"Yes, but not wonder-sons! A genius like you could so easy get excused,

Leon. Give it up. Genius it should be the last to be sent to--the

slaughter-pen. Leon darlink--don't go!"

"Ma, ma--you don't mean what you're saying. You wouldn't want me to

reason that way! You wouldn't want me to hide behind my--violin."

"I would! Would! You should wait for the draft. With my Roody and even

my baby Boris enlisted, ain't it enough for one mother? Since they got

to be in camp, all right, I say, let them be there, if my heart breaks

for it, but not my wonder-child! You can get exemption, Leon, right away

for the asking. Stay with me, Leon! Don't go away! The people at home

got to be kept happy with music. That's being a soldier, too, playing

their troubles away. Stay with me, Leon! Don't go leave

me--don't--don't--"

He suffered her to lie, tear-drenched, back into his arms, holding her

close in his compassion for her, his own face twisting.

"God! ma, this--this is awful! Please--you make us ashamed--all of us! I

don't know what to say. Esther, come quiet her--for God's sake

quiet her!"

From her place in that sobbing circle Esther Kantor crossed to kneel

beside her mother.

"Mamma darling, you're killing yourself. What if every family went on

this way? You want papa to come in and find us all crying? Is this the

way you want Leon to spend his last hour with us--"

"Oh, God--God!"

"I mean his last hour until he comes back, darling. Didn't you just hear

him say, darling, it may be by spring?"

"'Spring'--'spring'--never no more springs for me--"

"Just think, darling, how proud we should be! Our Leon, who could so

easily have been excused, not even to wait for the draft."

"It's not too late yet--please--Leon--"

"Our Roody and Boris both in camp, too, training to serve their country.

Why, mamma, we ought to be crying for happiness. As Leon says, surely

the Kantor family, who fled out of Russia to escape massacre, should

know how terrible slavery can be. That's why we must help our boys,

mamma, in their fight to make the world free! Right, Leon?" trying to

smile with her red-rimmed eyes.

"We've got no fight with no one! Not a child of mine was ever raised to

so much as lift a finger against no one. We've got no fight with

no one!"

"We have got a fight with some one! With autocracy! Only this time it

happens to be Hunnish autocracy. You should know it, mamma--oh, you

should know it deeper down in you than any of us, the fight our family

right here has got with autocracy! We should be the first to want to

avenge Belgium!"

"Leon's right, mamma darling, the way you and papa were beaten out of

your country--"

"There's not a day in your life you don't curse it without knowing it!

Every time we three boys look at your son and our brother Mannie, born

an--an imbecile--because of autocracy, we know what we're fighting for.

We know. You know, too. Look at him over there, even before he was born,

ruined by autocracy! Know what I'm fighting for? Why, this whole family

knows! What's music, what's art, what's life itself in a world without

freedom? Every time, ma, you get to thinking we've got a fight with no

one, all you have to do is look at our poor Mannie. He's the answer.

He's the answer."

In a foaming sort of silence, Mannie Kantor smiled softly from his chair

beneath the pink-and-gold shade of the piano-lamp. The heterogeneous

sounds of women weeping had ceased. Straight in her chair, her great

shelf of bust heaving, sat Rosa Kantor, suddenly dry of eye; Isadore

Kantor head up. Erect now, and out from the embrace of her daughter,

Sarah looked up at her son.

"What time do you leave, Leon?" she asked, actually firm of lip.

"Any minute, ma. Getting late."

This time she pulled her lips to a smile, waggling her forefinger.

"Don't let them little devils of French girls fall in love with my dude

in his uniform."

Her pretense at pleasantry was almost more than he could bear.

"Hear! Hear! Our mother thinks I'm a regular lady-killer! Hear that,

Esther?" pinching her cheek.

"You are, Leon--only--only, you don't know it!"

"Don't you bring down too many beaux while I'm gone, either, Miss

Kantor!"

"I--won't, Leon."

_Sotto voce_ to her: "Remember, Esther, while I'm gone, the royalties

from the discaphone records are yours. I want you to have them for

pin-money and--maybe a dowry?"