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Humoresque

F >> Fannie Hurst >> Humoresque




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!"

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