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 lollypop, 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, Francis Ferdinand
of Austria, the assassin's bullet true, 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 battlefields; Belgium disembowelled,
her very entrails dragging to find all the civilized world her champion,
and between the poppies of Flanders, crosses, thousands upon thousands
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 day's home-leave, took leave of his home, which can be cruelest when
it is tenderest.
Standing there in the expensive, the formal, the enormous French parlour
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-incrusted 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.
"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 anyone 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, Izzy."
"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 asfitidy!"
"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
suitcase 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 wonder-boy--"
"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 get the 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, his--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 the 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--"
"O 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!"
"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 beaus 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?"
She turned from him.
"Don't, Leon--don't--"
"I like him! Nice fellow, but too slow! Why, if I were in his shoes, I'd
have popped long ago."
She smiled with her lashes dewy.
There entered then, in a violet-scented little whirl, Miss Gina Berg,
rosy with the sting of a winter's night, and, as usual, swathed in the
high-napped furs.
"Gina!"
She was for greeting everyone, a wafted kiss to Mrs. Kantor, and then
arms wide, a great bunch of violets in one outstretched hand, her glance
straight sure and sparkling for Leon Kantor.
"Surprise--everybody--surprise!"
"Why, Gina--we read--we thought you were singing in Philadelphia
to-night!"
"So did I, Esther darling, until a little bird whispered to me that
Lieutenant Kantor was home on farewell leave."
He advanced to her down the great length of room, lowering his head over
her hand, his puttee-clad legs clicked together.
"You mean, Miss Gina--Gina--you didn't sing?"
"Of course I didn't! Hasn't every prima donna a larynx to hid behind?"
She lifted off her fur cap, spilling curls.
"Well, I--I'll be hanged!" said Lieutenant Kantor, his eyes lakes of her
reflected loveliness.
She let her hand linger in his.
"Leon--you--really going--how--terrible--how--how--wonderful!"
"How wonderful--your coming!"
"I--you think it was not nice of me--to come?"
"I think it was the nicest thing that ever happened in the world."
"All the way here in the train, I kept saying--crazy--crazy--running to
tell Leon--Lieutenant--Kantor good-bye--when you haven't even seen him
three times in three years--"
"But each--each of those three times we--we've remembered, Gina."
"But that's how I feel toward all the boys, Leon--our fighting
boys--just like flying to them to kiss them each one good-bye."
"Come over, Gina. You'll be a treat to our mother. I--well, I'm
hanged--all the way from Philadelphia!"
There was even a sparkle to talk then, and a let-up of pressure. After
a while, Sarah Kantor looked up at her son, tremulous but smiling.
"Well, son, you going to play--for your old mother before--you go? It'll
be many a month--spring--maybe longer before I hear my boy again except
on the discaphone."
He shot a quick glance to his sister.
"Why, I--I don't know. I--I'd love it, ma if--if you think, Esther, I'd
better."
"You don't need to be afraid of me, darlink. There's nothing can give me
strength to bear--what's before me like--like my boy's music. That's my
life, his music."
"Why, yes; if mamma is sure she feels that way, play for us, Leon."
He was already at the instrument, where it lay swathed, atop the grand
piano.
"What'll it be, folks?"
"Something to make ma laugh, Leon--something light, something funny."
"'Humoresque'?" he said, with a quick glance for Miss Berg.
"'Humoresque,'" she said, smiling back at him.
He capered through, cutting and playful of bow, the melody of Dvorak's,
which is as ironic as a grinning mask.
Finished, he smiled at his parent, her face still untearful.
"How's that?"
"It's like life, son, that piece. Laughing and making fun of--the way
just as we think we got--we ain't got."
"Play that new piece, Leon, the one you set to music. You know. The
words by that young boy in the war who wrote such grand poetry before he
was killed. The one that always makes poor Mannie laugh. Play it for
him, Leon."
Her plump little unlined face innocent of fault, Mrs. Isadore Kantor
ventured her request, her smile tired with tears."
"No, no--Rosa--not now--ma wouldn't want that."
"I do, son; I do! Even Mannie should have his share of good-bye."
To Gina Berg: "They want me to play that little setting of mine of
Allan Seeger's poem, 'I have a rendezvous.'"
"It--it's beautiful, Leon! I was to have sung it on my program
to-night--only, I'm afraid you had better not--"
"Please, Leon! Nothing you play can ever make me as sad as it makes me
glad. Mannie should have too his good-bye."
"All right then, ma, if--if you're sure you want it. Will you sing it,
Gina?"
She had risen.
"Why, yes, Leon."
She sang it then, quite purely, her hands clasped simply together and
her glance mistily off, the beautiful, the heroic, the lyrical prophecy
of a soldier-poet and a poet-soldier.
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.
In the silence that followed, a sob burst out stifled from Esther
Kantor, this time her mother holding her in arms that were strong.
"That, Leon, is the most beautiful of all your compositions. What does
it mean, son, that word, 'rondy-voo'?"
"Why, I--I don't exactly know. A rendezvous--it's a sort of meeting, an
engagement, isn't it, Miss Gina? Gina?"
"That's it, Leon--an engagement."
"Have I an engagement with you, Gina?"
"Oh, how--how I hope you have, Leon!"
"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.
"Quick, Leon! I got the car downstairs. 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 water-works! Get your brother's
suitcase, Isadore. Now--now--no nonsense--quick!"
With a deftly manoeuvred round of good-byes, a grip-laden dash for 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.
THE LUBBENY KISS
BY LOUISE RICE
From _Ainslee's Magazine_
For many hours the hot July sun had beaten down upon the upland meadows
and the pine woods of the lower New Jersey hills. So, when the dew began
to fall, there arose from them a heady brew, distilled from blossoming
milkweed and fruiting wild raspberry canes and mountain laurel and dried
pine needles.
The Princess Dora Parse took this perfume into her lusty young lungs and
blew it out again in a long sigh, after which she bent her first finger
over her thumb as one must when one returns what all Romanys know to be
"the breath of God." She did this almost unconsciously, for all her
faculties were busied in another matter.
The eyes of a gorgio, weakened by an indoor life, would never have been
able to distinguish the small object for which the princess looked, for
she was perched up on the high seat of the red Romany _wardo_, and she
drove her two strong, shaggy horses with a free and careless hand. But
to Dora Parse the blur of vague shadows gliding by each wheel was not
vague at all. Suddenly she checked her horses and sprang down.
The patteran for which she was looking was laid beneath a clump of the
flowering weed which the Romanys call "stars in the sky." The gorgios
know it as Queen Ann's lace, and the farmers curse it by the name of the
wild carrot. The patteran was like a miniature log cabin without a roof,
and across the top one large stick was laid, pointing upward along the
mountain road.
Two brown and slender fingers on the big braid which dropped over her
shoulder, the princess meditated, a shiver of fear running through her.
What, she asked herself, could this mean? Why, for the first time in
years, were the wagons to go to the farm of Jan Jacobus? Even if it were
only a chance happening, it was a most unfortunate one, for young Jan,
the fair-haired, giant son of old Jacobus, with his light blue eyes and
his drawling, insolent speech, was the last person in the world that she
wanted to see, especially with her man near.
For she had meant no harm. Many and many a time she had smiled into the
eyes of men and felt pride in her power over them. Still--and yet--The
princess scattered the patteran with her foot, for she knew that all the
wagons must be ahead of her, since she had lagged so, and she leaped to
her seat with one easy, lithe swing and drove on up the darkening road.
Jan Jacobus, like several other descendants of the Dutch settlers of New
Jersey, held his upland farm on shares with John Lane's tribe of
gypsies. Jacobuses and Bantas and Koppfs, they made no bones about
having business dealings with the tribe of English Romanys which had
followed a regular route, twice a year, from Maryland to the upper part
of New Jersey, since before the beginning of the Revolutionary days. The
descendants of the English settlers, the Hardys, the Lesters, the
Vincents, and the Farrands, looked with still persisting English reserve
upon the roamers of the woods and would have no traffic with them,
though a good many of their sons and daughters had to know the few
Romany young people who were left, by twos and threes in the towns for
occasional years of schooling.
The tribe, trading in land in the two States which they frequented, and
breeding horses, was very rich, but not very many people knew that.
However, they were conceded to be shrewd bargainers, and when old John
bought Martin Debbins' upland and rocky farm one year, with the money
that he had made by a lucky purchase of a gangling colt whose owner had
failed rightly to appraise its possibilities as a racer, Boonton and
Dover and Morristown laughed.
"_Sal_ away," old John retorted pleasantly to the cashier of the bank in
Boonton, where the tube had deposited its surplus funds for many years,
"but you won't _sal_ so much when you _dik_ what I will make out of
that joke."
The cashier thereupon looked thoughtful. It might well be that he and
others would not laugh when they saw good fortune which might have been
theirs following this genial old outlaw.
That summer the wagons camped on the Debbins place, and old John stocked
it with a lot of fine hogs, for which the land was especially adapted.
They fattened on the many acres, wooded with wild nut trees, and
Jacobus--as keen a bargainer as any Romany, upon whom John Lane had had
his eye all the time--took the farm on shares, and every year thereafter
the cashier at the bank added a neat little total to the big balance
which the tribe was rolling up.
And every year, as the wagons beat up toward Dover in July, old John
would drive on ahead and spend a night of mingled business and pleasure
with old Jan, reckoning up the profits on the Berkshires for which the
farm was now famous, and putting down big mugs of the "black drink" for
which Aunty Alice Lee, John Lane's ancient cousin, was equally famous.
The amount of this fiery and head-splitting liquor which the two old men
thus got away with was afterward gleefully recounted in the wagons and
fearfully whispered of in the little Dutch church at Horse's Neck which
the Jacobuses had attended for over a hundred years.
But never, as wagon after wagon had gone up the turning that led to the
upward farm, had there been a patteran pointing that way. Always, it had
shown the way onward and downward, to the little hamlet of Rockaway,
where there was an old and friendly camping place, back of the
blacksmith shop beyond the church. Old John never encouraged the wagons
to visit any of the properties held by the tribe.
"Silver blackens the salt of friendship," he would say.
Dora Parse was driving her own _wardo_, a very fine one which had
belonged to her mother. Lester Montague, of Sea Tack, Maryland, who
makes the wagons of Romanys for all the Atlantic coast tribes, like his
father before him, had done an especially good job of it. The princess
had been certified, by the Romany rites, to old John's eldest son,
George, for she had flatly refused to be married according to the gorgio
ways. Not having been married a full year, he was not yet entitled to
carry the heavy, silver-topped stick which is the badge of the married
man, nor could he demand a place in his wife's tent or wagon unless she
expressly invited him. Dora Parse and George Lane were passionately in
love with each other, and their meeting and mating had been the
flowering romance of the tribe, the previous summer.
The princess, being descended from a very old Romany family, as her name
showed, was far higher in rank than any one in the Lane tribe. Her
aristocratic lineage showed in the set of her magnificent head, in the
small, delicate fingers of her hand, and in the fire and richness of her
eyes. Also, her skin was of the colour of old ivory upon which is cast a
distant, faint reflection of the sunset, and her mouth, thinner than
those of most Romanys, was of the colour of a ripe pomegranate.
"A _rauni, a puro rauni_," all the tribes of the eastern coast murmured
respectfully, when Dora Parse's name was mentioned.
She was, indeed, a very great lady, but she was a flirtatious and
headstrong girl. She was one of the few modern gypsies who still hold to
the unadulterated worship of "those." All the members of John Lane's
tribe were Methodists--had been since before they had migrated from
England. In every wagon, save Dora's, a large illustrated Bible lay on a
little table, and those who could, read them aloud to the rest of a
Sunday afternoon. This did not mean, however, that the Romanys had
descended to gorgio ways, or that they had wholly left off their
attentions to "those". They combined the two. Old John was known as a
fervent and eloquent leader in prayer at the Wednesday-night prayer
meetings in the Maryland town where his church membership was held, but
he had not ceased to carry the "box of meanings," as befitted the chief
of the tribe.