"When?"
"In the spring?"
"That's it--in the spring."
Then they smiled, these two, who had never felt more than the merest
butterfly wings of love brushing them, light as lashes. No word between
them, only an unfinished sweetness, waiting to be linked up.
Suddenly there burst in Abrahm Kantor, in a carefully rehearsed gale of
bluster.
"Quick, Leon! I got the car down-stairs. Just fifteen minutes to make
the ferry. Quick! The sooner we get him over there the sooner we get him
back! I'm right, mamma? Now, now! No waterworks! Get your brother's
suit-case, Isadore. Now, now! No nonsense! Quick--quick--"
With a deftly manoeuvered round of good-bys, a grip-laden dash for the
door, a throbbing moment of turning back when it seemed as though Sarah
Kantor's arms could not unlock their deadlock of him, Leon Kantor was
out and gone, the group of faces point-etched into the silence
behind him.
The poor, mute face of Mannie, laughing softly. Rosa Kantor crying into
her hands. Esther, grief-crumpled, but rich in the enormous hope of
youth. The sweet Gina, to whom the waiting months had already begun
their reality.
Not so Sarah Kantor. In a bedroom adjoining, its high-ceilinged vastness
as cold as a cathedral to her lowness of stature, sobs dry and terrible
were rumbling up from her, only to dash against lips tightly
restraining them.
On her knees beside a chest of drawers, and unwrapping it from
swaddling-clothes, she withdrew what at best had been a sorry sort
of fiddle.
Cracked of back and solitary of string, it was as if her trembling arms,
raising it above her head, would make of themselves and her swaying body
the tripod of an altar.
The old twisting and prophetic pain was behind her heart. Like the
painted billows of music that the old Italian masters loved to do,
there wound and wreathed about her clouds of song:
But I've a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.