_ You could not have lived a week in Winnebago without being
aware of Mrs. Brandeis. In a town of ten thousand, where
every one was a personality, from Hen Cody, the drayman, in
blue overalls (magically transformed on Sunday mornings into
a suave black-broadcloth usher at the Congregational
Church), to A. J. Dawes, who owned the waterworks before the
city bought it. Mrs. Brandeis was a super-personality.
Winnebago did not know it. Winnebago, buying its dolls, and
china, and Battenberg braid and tinware and toys of Mrs.
Brandeis, of Brandeis' Bazaar, realized vaguely that here
was some one different.
When you entered the long, cool, narrow store on Elm Street,
Mrs. Brandeis herself came forward to serve you, unless she
already was busy with two customers. There were two
clerks--three, if you count Aloysius, the boy--but to Mrs.
Brandeis belonged the privilege of docketing you first. If
you happened in during a moment of business lull, you were
likely to find her reading in the left-hand corner at the
front of the store, near the shelf where were ranged the
dolls' heads, the pens, the pencils, and school supplies.
You saw a sturdy, well-set-up, alert woman, of the kind that
looks taller than she really is; a woman with a long,
straight, clever nose that indexed her character, as did
everything about her, from her crisp, vigorous, abundant
hair to the way she came down hard on her heels in
walking. She was what might be called a very definite
person. But first you remarked her eyes. Will you concede
that eyes can be piercing, yet velvety? Their piercingness
was a mental quality, I suppose, and the velvety softness a
physical one. One could only think, somehow, of wild
pansies--the brown kind. If Winnebago had taken the trouble
to glance at the title of the book she laid face down on the
pencil boxes as you entered, it would have learned that the
book was one of Balzac's, or, perhaps, Zangwill's, or
Zola's. She never could overcome that habit of snatching a
chapter here and there during dull moments. She was too
tired to read when night came.
There were many times when the little Wisconsin town lay
broiling in the August sun, or locked in the January drifts,
and the main business street was as silent as that of a
deserted village. But more often she came forward to you
from the rear of the store, with bits of excelsior clinging
to her black sateen apron. You knew that she had been
helping Aloysius as he unpacked a consignment of chamber
sets or a hogshead of china or glassware, chalking each
piece with the price mark as it was dug from its nest of
straw and paper.
"How do you do!" she would say. "What can I do for you?"
And in that moment she had you listed, indexed, and filed,
were you a farmer woman in a black shawl and rusty bonnet
with a faded rose bobbing grotesquely atop it, or one of the
patronizing East End set who came to Brandeis' Bazaar
because Mrs. Brandeis' party favors, for one thing, were of
a variety that could be got nowhere else this side of
Chicago. If, after greeting you, Mrs. Brandeis called,
"Sadie! Stockings!" (supposing stockings were your quest),
you might know that Mrs. Brandeis had weighed you and found
you wanting.
There had always been a store--at least, ever since Fanny
could remember. She often thought how queer it would seem
to have to buy pins, or needles, or dishes, or soap, or
thread. The store held all these things, and many more.
Just to glance at the bewildering display outside gave you
promise of the variety within. Winnebago was rather ashamed
of that display. It was before the day of repression in
decoration, and the two benches in front of the windows
overflowed with lamps, and water sets, and brooms, and
boilers and tinware and hampers. Once the Winnebago
Courier had had a sarcastic editorial about what they
called the Oriental bazaar (that was after the editor, Lem
Davis, had bumped his shin against a toy cart that protruded
unduly), but Mrs. Brandeis changed nothing. She knew that
the farmer women who stood outside with their husbands on
busy Saturdays would not have understood repression in
display, but they did understand the tickets that marked the
wares in plain figures--this berry set, $1.59; that lamp,
$1.23. They talked it over, outside, and drifted away, and
came back, and entered, and bought.
She knew when to be old-fashioned, did Mrs. Brandeis, and
when to be modern. She had worn the first short walking
skirt in Winnebago. It cleared the ground in a day before
germs were discovered, when women's skirts trailed and
flounced behind them in a cloud of dust. One of her
scandalized neighbors (Mrs. Nathan Pereles, it was) had
taken her aside to tell her that no decent woman would dress
that way.
"Next year," said Mrs. Brandeis, "when you are wearing one,
I'll remind you of that." And she did, too. She had worn
shirtwaists with a broad "Gibson" shoulder tuck, when other
Winnebago women were still encased in linings and bodices.
Do not get the impression that she stood for emancipation,
or feminism, or any of those advanced things. They had
scarcely been touched on in those days. She was just an
extraordinarily alert woman, mentally and physically,
with a shrewd sense of values. Molly Brandeis never could
set a table without forgetting the spoons, or the salt, or
something, but she could add a double column of figures in
her head as fast as her eye could travel.
There she goes, running off with the story, as we were
afraid she would. Not only that, she is using up whole
pages of description when she should be giving us dialogue.
Prospective readers, running their eyes over a printed page,
object to the solid block formation of the descriptive
passage. And yet it is fascinating to weave words about
her, as it is fascinating to turn a fine diamond this way
and that in the sunlight, to catch its prismatic hues.
Besides, you want to know--do you not?--how this woman who
reads Balzac should be waiting upon you in a little general
store in Winnebago, Wisconsin?
In the first place, Ferdinand Brandeis had been a dreamer,
and a potential poet, which is bad equipment for success in
the business of general merchandise. Four times, since her
marriage, Molly Brandeis had packed her household goods,
bade her friends good-by, and with her two children, Fanny
and Theodore, had followed her husband to pastures new. A
heart-breaking business, that, but broadening. She knew
nothing of the art of buying and selling at the time of her
marriage, but as the years went by she learned unconsciously
the things one should not do in business, from watching
Ferdinand Brandeis do them all. She even suggested this
change and that, but to no avail. Ferdinand Brandeis was a
gentle and lovable man at home; a testy, quick-tempered one
in business.
That was because he had been miscast from the first, and yet
had played one part too long, even though unsuccessfully,
ever to learn another. He did not make friends with the
genial traveling salesmen who breezed in, slapped him on
the back, offered him a cigar, inquired after his health,
opened their sample cases and flirted with the girl clerks,
all in a breath. He was a man who talked little, listened
little, learned little. He had never got the trick of
turning his money over quickly--that trick so necessary to
the success of the small-town business.
So it was that, in the year preceding Ferdinand Brandeis'
death, there came often to the store a certain grim visitor.
Herman Walthers, cashier of the First National Bank of
Winnebago, was a kindly-enough, shrewd, small-town banker,
but to Ferdinand Brandeis and his wife his visits, growing
more and more frequent, typified all that was frightful,
presaged misery and despair. He would drop in on a bright
summer morning, perhaps, with a cheerful greeting. He would
stand for a moment at the front of the store, balancing
airily from toe to heel, and glancing about from shelf to
bin and back again in a large, speculative way. Then he
would begin to walk slowly and ruminatively about, his
shrewd little German eyes appraising the stock. He would
hum a little absent-minded tune as he walked, up one aisle
and down the next (there were only two), picking up a piece
of china there, turning it over to look at its stamp,
holding it up to the light, tapping it a bit with his
knuckles, and putting it down carefully before going
musically on down the aisle to the water sets, the lamps,
the stockings, the hardware, the toys. And so, his hands
behind his back, still humming, out the swinging screen door
and into the sunshine of Elm Street, leaving gloom and fear
behind him.
One year after Molly Brandeis took hold, Herman Walthers'
visits ceased, and in two years he used to rise to greet her
from his little cubbyhole when she came into the bank.
Which brings us to the plush photograph album. The plush
photograph album is a concrete example of what makes
business failure and success. More than that, its brief
history presents a complete characterization of Ferdinand
and Molly Brandeis.
Ten years before, Ferdinand Brandeis had bought a large bill
of Christmas fancy-goods--celluloid toilette sets, leather
collar boxes, velvet glove cases. Among the lot was a
photograph album in the shape of a huge acorn done in
lightning-struck plush. It was a hideous thing, and
expensive. It stood on a brass stand, and its leaves were
edged in gilt, and its color was a nauseous green and blue,
and it was altogether the sort of thing to grace the chill
and funereal best room in a Wisconsin farmhouse. Ferdinand
Brandeis marked it at six dollars and stood it up for the
Christmas trade. That had been ten years before. It was
too expensive; or too pretentious, or perhaps even too
horrible for the bucolic purse. At any rate, it had been
taken out, brushed, dusted, and placed on its stand every
holiday season for ten years. On the day after Christmas it
was always there, its lightning-struck plush face staring
wildly out upon the ravaged fancy-goods counter. It would
be packed in its box again and consigned to its long
summer's sleep. It had seen three towns, and many changes.
The four dollars that Ferdinand Brandeis had invested in it
still remained unturned.
One snowy day in November (Ferdinand Brandeis died a
fortnight later) Mrs. Brandeis, entering the store, saw two
women standing at the fancy-goods counter, laughing in a
stifled sort of way. One of them was bowing elaborately to
a person unseen. Mrs. Brandeis was puzzled. She watched
them for a moment, interested. One of the women was known
to her. She came up to them and put her question, bluntly,
though her quick wits had already given her a suspicion of
the truth.
"What are you bowing to?"
The one who had done the bowing blushed a little, but
giggled too, as she said, "I'm greeting my old friend, the
plush album. I've seen it here every Christmas for five
years."
Ferdinand Brandeis died suddenly a little more than a week
later. It was a terrible period, and one that might have
prostrated a less resolute and balanced woman. There were
long-standing debts, not to speak of the entire stock of
holiday goods to be paid for. The day after the funeral
Winnebago got a shock. The Brandeis house was besieged by
condoling callers. Every member of the little Jewish
congregation of Winnebago came, of course, as they had come
before the funeral. Those who had not brought cakes, and
salads, and meats, and pies, brought them now, as was the
invariable custom in time of mourning.
Others of the townspeople called, too; men and women who had
known and respected Ferdinand Brandeis. And the shock they
got was this: Mrs. Brandeis was out. Any one could have
told you that she should have been sitting at home in a
darkened room, wearing a black gown, clasping Fanny and
Theodore to her, and holding a black-bordered handkerchief
at intervals to her reddened eyes. And that is what she
really wanted to do, for she had loved her husband, and she
respected the conventions. What she did was to put on a
white shirtwaist and a black skirt at seven o'clock the
morning after the funeral.
The store had been closed the day before. She entered it at
seven forty-five, as Aloysius was sweeping out with wet
sawdust and a languid broom. The extra force of holiday
clerks straggled in, uncertainly, at eight or after,
expecting an hour or two of undisciplined gossip. At eight-
ten Molly Brandeis walked briskly up to the plush photograph
album, whisked off its six-dollar price mark, and stuck
in its place a neatly printed card bearing these figures:
"To-day-- 79@!" The plush album went home in a farmer's
wagon that afternoon. _