Chapter 15

"'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 honour--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's 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 teasing you always 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 mothers 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 my 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 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 everyone."

Even upon her words came a rattling of door, of door-knob and a voice through the clamour.

"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, too--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 living 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--travelled once all the way from Brussels to Dresden to hear you play. 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 sometime 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 that seemed to crowd up the little room.

"Abrahm--quick--get Hancock--that first rows of chairs has got to be moved--there he is, in the wings--see the piano ain't dragged down too far! Leon, got your mute on 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 draft in the wings. Here, Leon, your violin. Got neckerchief? Listen how they're shouting--it's for you--Leon--darlink--go!"

In the center of that vast human bowl which had finally 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, round him, until the great disheveled house was like the roaring of a sea, and he would laugh and throw out his arm in wide-spread 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 Dvorak, 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 before him. Isadora Kantor, blue-shaven, aquiline, and already greying 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 ought to 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, Izzy, 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 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.