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Humoresque

F >> Fannie Hurst >> Humoresque




"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?"

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 every one, 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 clicking together. "You mean, Miss
Gina--Gina--you didn't sing?"

"Of course I didn't! Hasn't every prima donna a larynx to hide 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-by--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-by."

"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 letup 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
the 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 Dvorák's,
which is as ironic as a grinning mask.

Finished, he smiled at his parent, her face still untearful.

"How's that?"

She nodded. "It's like life, son, that piece. Crying to hide its
laughing and laughing to hide its crying."

"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-by."

To Gina Berg: "They want me to play that little arrangement of mine from
Allan Seegar'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--here--now--"

"Please, Leon! Nothing you play can ever make me as sad as it makes me
glad. Mannie should have, too, his good-by."

"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? You're up on languages. As if I
had an appointment to meet you some place--at the opera-house, for
instance."

"That's it, Leon--an engagement."

"Have I an engagement with you, Gina?"

She let her lids droop. "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, 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.




OATS FOR THE WOMAN

That women who toil not neither do they spin might know the feel of
fabrics so cunningly devised that they lay to the flesh like the inner
petals of buds, three hundred and fifty men, women, and children
contrived, between strikes, to make the show-rooms of the Kessler
Costume Company, Incorporated, a sort of mauve and mirrored Delphi where
buyers from twenty states came to invoke forecast of the mood of skirts,
the caprice of sleeves, and the rumored flip to the train. Before these
flips and moods, a gigantic industry held semi-annual pause, destinies
of lace-factories trembling before a threatened season of strictly
tailor-mades, velvet-looms slowing at the shush of taffeta. When woman
would be sleazy, petticoat manufacturers went overnight into an oblivion
from which there might or might not be returning. The willow plume waved
its day, making and unmaking merchants.

Destiny loves thus to spring from acorn beginnings. Helen smiled, and
Troy fell. Roast pork, and I doubt not then and there the apple sauce,
became a national institution because a small boy burnt his fingers.

That is why, out from the frail love of women for the flesh and its
humors, and because for the webby cling of chiffon too often no price is
too high, the Kessler Costume Company employed, on the factory side of
the door, the three hundred and fifty sewers and cutters, not one of
whose monthly wage could half buy the real-lace fichu or the
painted-chiffon frock of his own handiwork.

On the show-room side of the door, painted mauve within and not without,
_mannequins_, so pink finger-tipped, so tilted of instep, and so bred in
the thrust to the silhouette, trailed these sleazy products of thick
ringers across mauve-colored carpet and before the appraising eyes of
twenty states.

Often as not, smoke rose in that room from the black cigar of the Omaha
Store, Omaha, or Ladies' Wear, Cleveland. In season, and particularly
during the frenzied dog-days of August, when the fate of the new
waist-line or his daring treatment of cloth of silver hung yet in the
balance, and the spirit of Detroit must be browbeaten by the dictum of
the sleeveless thing in evening frocks, Leon Kessler himself smoked a
day-long chain of cigarettes, lighting one off the other.

In the model-room, a long, narrow slit, roaringly ventilated by a
whirling machine, lined in frocks suspended from hangers, and just wide
enough for two very perfect thirty-sixes to stand abreast, August fell
heavily. So heavily that occasionally a cloak-model, her lot to show
next December's conceit in theater wraps, fainted on the show-dais; or a
cloth-of-gold evening gown, donned for the twentieth time that
sweltering day, would suddenly, with its model, crumple, a glittering
huddle, to the floor.

Upon Miss Hattie Becker, who within the narrow slit had endured eight of
these Augusts with only two casual faints and a swoon or two nipped in
the bud, this ninth August came in so furiously that, sliding out of her
sixth showing of a cloth-of-silver and blue-fox opera wrap, a shivering
that amounted practically to chill took hold of her.

"Br-r-r!" she said, full of all men's awe at the carbon-dioxide paradox.
"I'm so hot I'm cold!"

Miss Clarice Delehanty slid out of a shower of tulle-of-gold
dancing-frock and into an Avenue gown of rough serge. The tail of a very
arched eyebrow threatened, and then ran down in a black rill.

"If Niagara Falls was claret lemonade,
You'd see me beat it to a watery grave."

"That'll be enough canary-talk out of you, Clare. Hand me my shirt-waist
there off the hook."

"Didn't Kess say we had to show Keokuk the line before lunch?"

"If the King of England was buying ermine sport coats this morning, I
wouldn't show 'em before I had a cold cut and a long drink in me. Hurry!
Hand me my waist, Clare, before the girls come in from showing the
bridesmaid line."

Miss Delehanty flung the garment down the narrow length of the room.

"Minneapolis don't know it, but after this showing he's going to blow me
to the frappiest little lunch on the Waldorf roof."

Miss Becker buttoned her flimsy blouse with three pearl beads down its
front, wiping constantly at a constantly dampening brow.

"You'd shove over the Goddess of Liberty if you thought she had her foot
on a meal ticket."

"Yes; and if I busted her, you could build a new one on the lunch money
you've saved in your time."

"Waldorf! You've got a fine chance with Minneapolis. You mean the
Automat, and two spoons for the ice-cream."

Miss Delehanty adjusted a highly eccentric hat, a small green velvet,
outrageously tilted off the rear of its _bandeau_, and a wide black
streamer flowing down over one shoulder. It was the match to the
explosive effect of the _trotteur_ gown. She was Fashion's humoresque,
except that Fashion has no sense of humor. Very presently Minneapolis
would appraise her at two hundred and seventy-five as is. Miss Delehanty
herself came cheaper.

"Say, Hattie, don't let being an old man's darling go to your head. The
grandchildren may issue an injunction."

A flare of crimson rushed immediately over Miss Becker's face, spreading
down into her neck.

"You let him alone! He's a darn sight better than anything I've seen you
girls picking for yourselves. You never met a man in your life whose
name wasn't Johnnie. You couldn't land a John in a million years."

Miss Delehanty raised her face from over a shoe-buckle. A stare began to
set in, as obviously innocent as a small boy's between spitballs.

"Well, who said anything about old St. Louis, I'd like to know?"

"You did, and you leave him alone! What do you know about a real man?
You'd pass up a Ford ride to sit still in a pasteboard limousine
every time!"

"Well, of all things! Did I say anything?"

"Yes, you did!"

"Why, for my part, he can show you a good time eight nights in the week
and Sundays, too."

"He 'ain't got grandchildren--if you want to know it."

"Did I say he had?"

"Yes, you did!"

"Why, I don't blame any girl for showing grandpa a good time."

"You could consider yourself darn lucky, Clarice Delehanty, if one half
as good ever--"

"Ask the girls if I don't always say old St. Louis is all to the good.
Three or four years ago, right after his wife died, I said to Ada,
I said--"

A head showed suddenly through the lining side of the mauve portières,
blue-eyed, blue-shaved, and with a triple ripple of black hair
trained backward.

"Hurry along there with fifty-seven, Delehanty! Heyman's got to see the
line and catch that six-two Chicago flier."

Miss Delehanty fell into pose, her profile turned back over one
shoulder.

"Tell him to chew a clove; it's good for breathless haste," she said,
disappearing through portières into the show-room.

Miss Becker thrust herself from a hastily-found-out aperture, patting,
with final touch, her belt into place.

"Have I been asking you for five years, Kess, to knock before you poke
your head in on us girls?"

Mr. Leon Kessler appeared then fully between the curtains, letting them
drape heavily behind him. Gotham garbs her poets and her brokers, her
employers and employees, in the national pin-stripes and sack coat.
Except for a few pins stuck upright in his coat lapel, Mr. Kessler might
have been his banker or his salesman. Typical New-Yorker is the pseudo,
half enviously bestowed upon his kind by _hinter_ America. It signifies
a bi-weekly manicure, femininely administered; a hotel lobbyist who can
outstare a seatless guest; the sang-froid to add up a dinner check;
spats. When Mr. Kessler tipped, it did not clink; it rustled. In
theater, at each interval between acts, he piled out over ladies' knees
and returned chewing a mint. He journeyed twice a year to a famous
Southern spa, and there won or lost his expenses. He regarded Miss
Becker, peering at her around the fluff of a suspended frock of
pink tulle.

"What's the idea, Becker? Keokuk wants to see you in the wrap line."

Miss Becker swallowed hard, jamming down and pinning into a small
taffy-colored turban, her hair, the exact shade of it, escaping in
scallops. Carefully powdered-out lines of her face seemed to emerge
suddenly through the conserved creaminess of her skin. Thirty-four, in
its unguarded moments, will out. Miss Becker had almost detained
twenty's waistline and twenty-two's ardent thrust of face. It was only
the indentures of time that had begun to tell slightly--indentures that
powder could not putty out. There was a slight bagginess of throat where
the years love to eat in first, and out from the eyes a spray of fine
lines. It was these lines that came out now indubitably.

"If you want me to lay down on you, Kess, for sure, just ask me to show
the line again before lunch. I'm about ready to keel. And you can't put
me off again. I'm ready, and you got to come now."

He dug so deeply into his pockets that his sleeves crawled up.

"Say, look here. I've got my business to attend to, and, when my trade's
in town, my trade comes first. See? Take off and show Keokuk a few
numbers. I want him to see that chinchilla drape."

She reached out, closing her hand over his arm.

"I'll show him the whole line, Kess, when we're back from lunch. I got
to talk to you, I tell you. You put me off yesterday and the day before,
and this--this is the last."

"The last what?"

"Please, Kess, if you only run over to Rinehardt's with me. I got to
tell you something. Something about me and--and--"

He regarded her in some perplexity. "Tell it to me here. Now!"

"I can't. The girls'll be swarming in any minute. I can't get you
anywheres but lunch. It's the first thirty minutes of your time I've
asked in five years, Kess--is that little enough? Let Cissie show
Keokuk the blouses till we get back. It's something, Kess, I can't put
off. Kess, please!"

Her face was so close to him and so eager that he turned to back out.

"Wait for me at the Thirty-first Street entrance," he said, "and I'll
shoot you across to Rinehardt's."

She caught up her small silk hand-bag and ran out toward the elevators.
Down in Thirty-first Street a wave of heat met, almost overpowering her.
New York, enervated from sleepless nights on fire-escapes and in
bedrooms opening on areaways, moved through it at half-speed, hugging
the narrow shade of buildings. Infant mortality climbed with the
thermometer. In Fifth Avenue, cool, high bedrooms were boarded and
empty. In First Avenue, babies lay naked on the floor, snuffing out for
want of oxygen.

Across that man-made Grand Cañon men leap sometimes, but seldom. Mothers
whose babies lie naked on the floor look out across it, damning.

Out into this flaying heat Miss Becker stepped gingerly, almost
immediately rejoined by Mr. Leon Kessler, crowningly touched with the
correct thing in straw sailors.

"Get a move on," he said, guiding her across the soft asphalt.

In Rinehardt's, one of a thousand such _Rathskeller_ retreats designed
for a city that loves to dine in fifteen languages, the noonday cortège
of summer widowers had not yet arrived. Waiters moved through the dim,
pink-lit gloom, dressing their tables temptingly cool and white,
dipping ice out from silver buckets into thin tumblers.

They seated themselves beneath a ceiling fan, Miss Becker's
taffy-colored scallops stirring in the scurry of air.

"Lordy!" she said, closing her eyes and pressing her finger-tips against
them, "I wish I could lease this spot for the summer!"

He pushed a menu-card toward her. "What'll you have? There's plenty
under the 'ready to serve.'"

She peeled out of her white-silk gloves.

"Some cold cuts and a long ice-tea."

He ordered after her and more at length, then lighted a cigarette.

"Well?" he said, waving out a match.

She leaned forward, already designing with her fork on the table-cloth.

"Kess, can you guess?"

"Come on with it!"

"Have you--noticed anything?"

"Say, I'd have a sweet time keeping up with you girls!"

She looked at him now evenly between the eyes.

"You kept up with me pretty close for three years, didn't you?"

"Say, you knew what you were doing!"

"I--I'm not so sure of that by a long shot. I--I was fed up with the
most devilish kind of promises there are. The kind you was too smart to
put in words or--or in writing. You--you only looked 'em."

"I suppose you was kidnapped one dark and stormy night while the
villain pursued you, eh? Is that it?"

"Oh, what's the use--rehashing! After that time at Atlantic City
and--and then the--flat, it--it just seemed the way I felt about you
then--that nothing you wanted could be wrong. I guess I knew what I was
doing all right, or, if I didn't, I ought to have. I was rotten--or I
couldn't have done it, I guess. Only, deep inside of me I was waiting
and banking on you like--like poor little Cissie is now. And you knew
it; you knew it all them three years."

"Say, did you get me over here to--"

"I only hope to God when you're done with Cissie you'll--"

"You let me take care of my own affairs. If it comes right down to it,
there's a few things I could tell you, girl, that ain't so easy to
listen to. Let's get off the subject while the going's good."

"Oh, anybody that plays as safe as you--"

He raised his voice, shoving back his chair. "Well, if you want me to
clear out of this place quicker than you can bat your eye, you just--"

"No, no, Kess! 'Sh-h-h-h!"

"If there ever was a girl in my place had a square deal, that girl's
been you."

"'Square deal!' Because after I held on and--ate out my heart for three
years, you didn't--take away my job, too? Somebody ought to pin a
Carnegie medal on you!"

"You've held down a twenty-dollar-a-week job season in and season out,
when there've been times it didn't even pay for the ink it took to
write you on the pay-roll."

"There's nothing I ever got out of you I didn't earn three times over."

"A younger figure than yours is getting to be wouldn't hurt the line
any, you know. It's because I make it a rule not to throw off the old
girls when their waist-lines begin to spread that makes you so grateful,
is it? There's not a firm in town keeps on a girl after she begins to
heavy up. If you got to know why I took you off the dress line and put
you in the wraps, it's because I seen you widening into a thirty-eight,
and a darn poor one at that. I can sell two wraps off Cissie to one off
you. You're getting hippy, girl, and, since you started the subject, you
can be darn glad you know where your next week's salary's coming from."

She was reddening so furiously that even her earlobes, their tips
escaping beneath the turban, were tinged.

"Maybe I--I'm getting hippy, Kess; but it'll take more than anything you
can ever do for me to make up for--"

"Gad!" he said, flipping an ash in some disgust, "I wish I had a
ten-cent piece for every one since!"

"Oh," she cried, her throat jerking, "you eat what you just said! You
eat it, because you know it ain't so!"

"Now look here," he said, straightening up suddenly, "I don't know what
your game is, but if you're here to stir up the old dust that's been
laid for five years--"

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