_ By spring Mrs. Brandeis had the farmer women coming to her
for their threshing dishes and kitchenware, and the West End
Culture Club for their whist prizes. She seemed to realize
that the days of the general store were numbered, and she
set about making hers a novelty store. There was something
terrible about the earnestness with which she stuck to
business. She was not more than thirty-eight at this time,
intelligent, healthy, fun-loving. But she stayed at it all
day. She listened and chatted to every one, and learned
much. There was about her that human quality that invites
confidence.
She made friends by the hundreds, and friends are a business
asset. Those blithe, dressy, and smooth-spoken gentlemen
known as traveling men used to tell her their troubles,
perched on a stool near the stove, and show her the picture
of their girl in the back of their watch, and asked her to
dinner at the Haley House. She listened to their tale of
woe, and advised them; she admired the picture of the girl,
and gave some wholesome counsel on the subject of traveling
men's lonely wives; but she never went to dinner at the
Haley House.
It had not taken these debonair young men long to learn that
there was a woman buyer who bought quickly, decisively, and
intelligently, and that she always demanded a duplicate
slip. Even the most unscrupulous could not stuff an order
of hers, and when it came to dating she gave no quarter.
Though they wore clothes that were two leaps ahead of the
styles worn by the Winnebago young men--their straw
sailors were likely to be saw-edged when the local edges
were smooth, and their coats were more flaring, or their
trousers wider than the coats and trousers of the Winnebago
boys--they were not, for the most part, the gay dogs that
Winnebago's fancy painted them. Many of them were very
lonely married men who missed their wives and babies, and
loathed the cuspidored discomfort of the small-town hotel
lobby. They appreciated Mrs. Brandeis' good-natured
sympathy, and gave her the long end of a deal when they
could. It was Sam Kiser who had begged her to listen to his
advice to put in Battenberg patterns and braid, long before
the Battenberg epidemic had become widespread and virulent.
"Now listen to me, Mrs. Brandeis," he begged, almost
tearfully. "You're a smart woman. Don't let this get by
you. You know that I know that a salesman would have as
much chance to sell you a gold brick as to sell old John D.
Rockefeller a gallon of oil."
Mrs. Brandeis eyed his samples coldly. "But it looks so
unattractive. And the average person has no imagination. A
bolt of white braid and a handful of buttons--they wouldn't
get a mental picture of the completed piece. Now,
embroidery silk----"
"Then give 'em a real picture!" interrupted Sam. "Work up
one of these water-lily pattern table covers. Use No. 100
braid and the smallest buttons. Stick it in the window and
they'll tear their hair to get patterns."
She did it, taking turns with Pearl and Sadie at weaving the
great, lacy square during dull moments. When it was
finished they placed it in the window, where it lay like
frosted lace, exquisitely graceful and delicate, with its
tracery of curling petals and feathery fern sprays.
Winnebago gazed and was bitten by the Battenberg bug. It
wound itself up in a network of Battenberg braid, in all
the numbers. It bought buttons of every size; it stitched
away at Battenberg covers, doilies, bedspreads, blouses,
curtains. Battenberg tumbled, foamed, cascaded over
Winnebago's front porches all that summer. Listening to Sam
Kiser had done it.
She listened to the farmer women too, and to the mill girls,
and to the scant and precious pearls that dropped from the
lips of the East End society section. There was something
about her brown eyes and her straight, sensible nose that
reassured them so that few suspected the mischievous in her.
For she was mischievous. If she had not been I think she
could not have stood the drudgery, and the heartbreaks, and
the struggle, and the terrific manual labor.
She used to guy people, gently, and they never guessed it.
Mrs. G. Manville Smith, for example, never dreamed of the
joy that her patronage brought Molly Brandeis, who waited on
her so demurely. Mrs. G. Manville Smith (nee Finnegan)
scorned the Winnebago shops, and was said to send to Chicago
for her hairpins. It was known that her household was run
on the most niggardly basis, however, and she short-rationed
her two maids outrageously. It was said that she could
serve less real food on more real lace doilies than any
other housekeeper in Winnebago. Now, Mrs. Brandeis sold
Scourine two cents cheaper than the grocery stores, using it
as an advertisement to attract housewives, and making no
profit on the article itself. Mrs. G. Manville Smith always
patronized Brandeis' Bazaar for Scourine alone, and thus
represented pure loss. Also she my-good-womaned Mrs.
Brandeis. That lady, seeing her enter one day with her
comic, undulating gait, double-actioned like a giraffe's,
and her plumes that would have shamed a Knight of Pythias,
decided to put a stop to these unprofitable visits.
She waited on Mrs. G. Manville Smith, a dangerous gleam in
her eye.
"Scourine," spake Mrs. G. Manville Smith.
"How many?"
"A dozen."
"Anything else?"
"No. Send them."
Mrs. Brandeis, scribbling in her sales book, stopped, pencil
poised. "We cannot send Scourine unless with a purchase of
other goods amounting to a dollar or more."
Mrs. G. Manville Smith's plumes tossed and soared
agitatedly. "But my good woman, I don't want anything
else!"
"Then you'll have to carry the Scourine?"
"Certainly not! I'll send for it."
"The sale closes at five." It was then 4:57.
"I never heard of such a thing! You can't expect me to
carry them."
Now, Mrs. G. Manville Smith had been a dining-room girl at
the old Haley House before she married George Smith, and
long before he made his money in lumber.
"You won't find them so heavy," Molly Brandeis said
smoothly.
"I certainly would! Perhaps you would not. You're used to
that sort of thing. Rough work, and all that."
Aloysius, doubled up behind the lamps, knew what was coming,
from the gleam in his boss's eye.
"There may be something in that," Molly Brandeis returned
sweetly. "That's why I thought you might not mind taking
them. They're really not much heavier than a laden tray."
"Oh!" exclaimed the outraged Mrs. G. Manville Smith. And
took her plumes and her patronage out of Brandeis' Bazaar
forever.
That was as malicious as Molly Brandeis ever could be. And
it was forgivable malice.
Most families must be described against the background of
their homes, but the Brandeis family life was bounded and
controlled by the store. Their meals and sleeping hours and
amusements were regulated by it. It taught them much, and
brought them much, and lost them much. Fanny Brandeis
always said she hated it, but it made her wise, and
tolerant, and, in the end, famous. I don't know what more
one could ask of any institution. It brought her in contact
with men and women, taught her how to deal with them. After
school she used often to run down to the store to see her
mother, while Theodore went home to practice. Perched on a
high stool in some corner she heard, and saw, and absorbed.
It was a great school for the sensitive, highly-organized,
dramatic little Jewish girl, for, to paraphrase a well-known
stage line, there are just as many kinds of people in
Winnebago as there are in Washington.
It was about this time that Fanny Brandeis began to realize,
actively, that she was different. Of course, other little
Winnebago girls' mothers did not work like a man, in a
store. And she and Bella Weinberg were the only two in her
room at school who stayed out on the Day of Atonement, and
on New Year, and the lesser Jewish holidays. Also, she went
to temple on Friday night and Saturday morning, when the
other girls she knew went to church on Sunday. These things
set her apart in the little Middle Western town; but it was
not these that constituted the real difference. She played,
and slept, and ate, and studied like the other healthy
little animals of her age. The real difference was
temperamental, or emotional, or dramatic, or historic, or
all four. They would be playing tag, perhaps, in one of the
cool, green ravines that were the beauty spots of the little
Wisconsin town.
They nestled like exquisite emeralds in the embrace of the
hills, those ravines, and Winnebago's civic surge had not
yet swept them away in a deluge of old tin cans, ashes, dirt
and refuse, to be sold later for building lots. The Indians
had camped and hunted in them. The one under the Court
Street bridge, near the Catholic church and monastery, was
the favorite for play. It lay, a lovely, gracious thing,
below the hot little town, all green, and lush, and cool, a
tiny stream dimpling through it. The plump Capuchin
Fathers, in their coarse brown robes, knotted about the
waist with a cord, their bare feet thrust into sandals,
would come out and sun themselves on the stone bench at the
side of the monastery on the hill, or would potter about the
garden. And suddenly Fanny would stop quite still in the
midst of her tag game, struck with the beauty of the picture
it called from the past.
Little Oriental that she was, she was able to combine the
dry text of her history book with the green of the trees,
the gray of the church, and the brown of the monk's robes,
and evolve a thrilling mental picture therefrom. The tag
game and her noisy little companions vanished. She was
peopling the place with stealthy Indians. Stealthy,
cunning, yet savagely brave. They bore no relation to the
abject, contemptible, and rather smelly Oneidas who came to
the back door on summer mornings, in calico, and ragged
overalls, with baskets of huckleberries on their arm, their
pride gone, a broken and conquered people. She saw them
wild, free, sovereign, and there were no greasy, berry-
peddling Oneidas among them. They were Sioux, and
Pottawatomies (that last had the real Indian sound), and
Winnebagos, and Menomonees, and Outagamis. She made them
taciturn, and beady-eyed, and lithe, and fleet, and every
other adjectival thing her imagination and history book
could supply. The fat and placid Capuchin Fathers on the
hill became Jesuits, sinister, silent, powerful, with
France and the Church of Rome behind them. From the shelter
of that big oak would step Nicolet, the brave, first among
Wisconsin explorers, and last to receive the credit for his
hardihood. Jean Nicolet! She loved the sound of it. And
with him was La Salle, straight, and slim, and elegant, and
surely wearing ruffles and plumes and sword even in a canoe.
And Tonty, his Italian friend and fellow adventurer--Tonty
of the satins and velvets, graceful, tactful, poised, a
shadowy figure; his menacing iron hand, so feared by the
ignorant savages, encased always in a glove. Surely a
perfumed g--- Slap! A rude shove that jerked her head back
sharply and sent her forward, stumbling, and jarred her like
a fall.
"Ya-a-a! Tag! You're it! Fanny's it!"
Indians, priests, cavaliers, coureurs de bois, all
vanished. Fanny would stand a moment, blinking stupidly.
The next moment she was running as fleetly as the best of
the boys in savage pursuit of one of her companions in the
tag game.
She was a strange mixture of tomboy and bookworm, which was
a mercifully kind arrangement for both body and mind. The
spiritual side of her was groping and staggering and feeling
its way about as does that of any little girl whose mind is
exceptionally active, and whose mother is unusually busy.
It was on the Day of Atonement, known in the Hebrew as Yom
Kippur, in the year following her father's death that that
side of her performed a rather interesting handspring.
Fanny Brandeis had never been allowed to fast on this, the
greatest and most solemn of Jewish holy days Molly Brandeis'
modern side refused to countenance the practice of
withholding food from any child for twenty-four hours. So
it was in the face of disapproval that Fanny, making deep
inroads into the steak and fried sweet potatoes at
supper on the eve of the Day of Atonement, announced her
intention of fasting from that meal to supper on the
following evening. She had just passed her plate for a
third helping of potatoes. Theodore, one lap behind her in
the race, had entered his objection.
"Well, for the land's sakes!" he protested. "I guess you're
not the only one who likes sweet potatoes."
Fanny applied a generous dab of butter to an already buttery
morsel, and chewed it with an air of conscious virtue.
"I've got to eat a lot. This is the last bite I'll have
until to-morrow night."
"What's that?" exclaimed Mrs. Brandeis, sharply.
"Yes, it is!" hooted Theodore.
Fanny went on conscientiously eating as she explained.
"Bella Weinberg and I are going to fast all day. We just
want to see if we can."
"Betcha can't," Theodore said.
Mrs. Brandeis regarded her small daughter with a thoughtful
gaze. "But that isn't the object in fasting, Fanny--just to
see if you can. If you're going to think of food all
through the Yom Kippur services----"
"I sha'n't?" protested Fanny passionately. "Theodore would,
but I won't."
"Wouldn't any such thing," denied Theodore. "But if I'm
going to play a violin solo during the memorial service I
guess I've got to eat my regular meals."
Theodore sometimes played at temple, on special occasions.
The little congregation, listening to the throbbing rise and
fall of this fifteen-year-old boy's violin playing,
realized, vaguely, that here was something disturbingly,
harrowingly beautiful. They did not know that they were
listening to genius.
Molly Brandeis, in her second best dress, walked to
temple Yom Kippur eve, her son at her right side, her
daughter at her left. She had made up her mind that she
would not let this next day, with its poignantly beautiful
service, move her too deeply. It was the first since her
husband's death, and Rabbi Thalmann rather prided himself on
his rendition of the memorial service that came at three in
the afternoon.
A man of learning, of sweetness, and of gentle wit was Rabbi
Thalmann, and unappreciated by his congregation. He stuck
to the Scriptures for his texts, finding Moses a greater
leader than Roosevelt, and the miracle of the Burning Bush
more wonderful than the marvels of twentieth-century wizardy
in electricity. A little man, Rabbi Thalmann, with hands
and feet as small and delicate as those of a woman. Fanny
found him fascinating to look on, in his rabbinical black
broadcloth and his two pairs of glasses perched, in reading,
upon his small hooked nose. He stood very straight in the
pulpit, but on the street you saw that his back was bent
just the least bit in the world--or perhaps it was only his
student stoop, as he walked along with his eyes on the
ground, smoking those slender, dapper, pale brown cigars
that looked as if they had been expressly cut and rolled to
fit him.
The evening service was at seven. The congregation,
rustling in silks, was approaching the little temple from
all directions. Inside, there was a low-toned buzz of
conversation. The Brandeis' seat was well toward the rear,
as befitted a less prosperous member of the rich little
congregation. This enabled them to get a complete picture
of the room in its holiday splendor. Fanny drank it in
eagerly, her dark eyes soft and luminous. The bare, yellow-
varnished wooden pews glowed with the reflection from the
chandeliers. The seven-branched candlesticks on either side
of the pulpit were entwined with smilax. The red plush
curtain that hung in front of the Ark on ordinary days, and
the red plush pulpit cover too, were replaced by
gleaming white satin edged with gold fringe and finished at
the corners with heavy gold tassels. How the rich white
satin glistened in the light of the electric candles! Fanny
Brandeis loved the lights, and the gleam, and the music, so
majestic, and solemn, and the sight of the little rabbi,
sitting so straight and serious in his high-backed chair, or
standing to read from the great Bible. There came to this
emotional little Jewess a thrill that was not born of
religious fervor at all, I am afraid.
The sheer drama of the thing got her. In fact, the thing
she had set herself to do to-day had in it very little of
religion. Mrs. Brandeis had been right about that. It was
a test of endurance, as planned. Fanny had never fasted in
all her healthy life. She would come home from school to
eat formidable stacks of bread and butter, enhanced by brown
sugar or grape jelly, and topped off with three or four
apples from the barrel in the cellar. Two hours later she
would attack a supper of fried potatoes, and liver, and tea,
and peach preserve, and more stacks of bread and butter.
Then there were the cherry trees in the back yard, and the
berry bushes, not to speak of sundry bags of small, hard
candies of the jelly-bean variety, fitted for quick and
secret munching during school. She liked good things to
eat, this sturdy little girl, as did her friend, that blonde
and creamy person, Bella Weinberg.
The two girls exchanged meaningful glances during the
evening service. The Weinbergs, as befitted their station,
sat in the third row at the right, and Bella had to turn
around to convey her silent messages to Fanny. The evening
service was brief, even to the sermon. Rabbi Thalmann and
his congregation would need their strength for to-morrow's
trial.
The Brandeises walked home through the soft September
night, and the children had to use all their Yom Kippur
dignity to keep from scuffling through the piled-up drifts
of crackling autumn leaves. Theodore went to the cellar and
got an apple, which he ate with what Fanny considered an
unnecessary amount of scrunching. It was a firm, juicy
apple, and it gave forth a cracking sound when his teeth met
in its white meat. Fanny, after regarding him with gloomy
superiority, went to bed.
She had willed to sleep late, for gastronomic reasons, but
the mental command disobeyed itself, and she woke early,
with a heavy feeling. Early as it was, Molly Brandeis had
tiptoed in still earlier to look at her strange little
daughter. She sometimes did that on Saturday mornings when
she left early for the store and Fanny slept late. This
morning Fanny's black hair was spread over the pillow as she
lay on her back, one arm outflung, the other at her breast.
She made a rather startlingly black and white and scarlet
picture as she lay there asleep. Fanny did things very much
in that way, too, with broad, vivid, unmistakable splashes
of color. Mrs. Brandeis, looking at the black-haired, red-
lipped child sleeping there, wondered just how much
determination lay back of the broad white brow. She had
said little to Fanny about this feat of fasting, and she
told herself that she disapproved of it. But in her heart
she wanted the girl to see it through, once attempted.
Fanny awoke at half past seven, and her nostrils dilated to
that most exquisite, tantalizing and fragrant of smells--the
aroma of simmering coffee. It permeated the house. It
tickled the senses. It carried with it visions of hot,
brown breakfast rolls, and eggs, and butter. Fanny loved
her breakfast. She turned over now, and decided to go to
sleep again. But she could not. She got up and dressed
slowly and carefully. There was no one to hurry her this
morning with the call from the foot of the stairs of,
"Fanny! Your egg'll get cold!"
She put on clean, crisp underwear, and did her hair
expertly. She slipped an all-enveloping pinafore over her
head, that the new silk dress might not be crushed before
church time. She thought that Theodore would surely have
finished his breakfast by this time. But when she came
down-stairs he was at the table. Not only that, he had just
begun his breakfast. An egg, all golden, and white, and
crisply brown at the frilly edges, lay on his plate.
Theodore always ate his egg in a mathematical sort of way.
He swallowed the white hastily first, because he disliked
it, and Mrs. Brandeis insisted that he eat it. Then he
would brood a moment over the yolk that lay, unmarred and
complete, like an amber jewel in the center of his plate.
Then he would suddenly plunge his fork into the very heart
of the jewel, and it would flow over his plate, mingling
with the butter, and he would catch it deftly with little
mops of warm, crisp, buttery roll.
Fanny passed the breakfast table just as Theodore plunged
his fork into the egg yolk. She caught her breath sharply,
and closed her eyes. Then she turned and fled to the front
porch and breathed deeply and windily of the heady September
Wisconsin morning air. As she stood there, with her stiff,
short black curls still damp and glistening, in her best
shoes and stockings, with the all-enveloping apron covering
her sturdy little figure, the light of struggle and
renunciation in her face, she typified something at once
fine and earthy.
But the real struggle was to come later. They went to
temple at ten, Theodore with his beloved violin tucked
carefully under his arm. Bella Weinberg was waiting at the
steps.
"Did you?" she asked eagerly.
"Of course not," replied Fanny disdainfully. "Do you
think I'd eat old breakfast when I said I was going to fast
all day?" Then, with sudden suspicion, "Did you?"
"No!" stoutly.
And they entered, and took their seats. It was fascinating
to watch the other members of the congregation come in, the
women rustling, the men subdued in the unaccustomed dignity
of black on a week day. One glance at the yellow pews was
like reading a complete social and financial register. The
seating arrangement of the temple was the Almanach de Gotha
of Congregation Emanu-el. Old Ben Reitman, patriarch among
the Jewish settlers of Winnebago, who had come over an
immigrant youth, and who now owned hundreds of rich farm
acres, besides houses, mills and banks, kinged it from the
front seat of the center section. He was a magnificent old
man, with a ruddy face, and a fine head with a shock of
heavy iron-gray hair, keen eyes, undimmed by years, and a
startling and unexpected dimple in one cheek that gave him a
mischievous and boyish look.
Behind this dignitary sat his sons, and their wives, and his
daughters and their husbands, and their children, and so on,
back to the Brandeis pew, third from the last, behind which
sat only a few obscure families branded as Russians, as only
the German-born Jew can brand those whose misfortune it is
to be born in that region known as hinter-Berlin.
The morning flew by, with its music, its responses, its
sermon in German, full of four- and five-syllable German
words like Barmherzigkeit and Eigentumlichkeit. All
during the sermon Fanny sat and dreamed and watched the
shadow on the window of the pine tree that stood close to
the temple, and was vastly amused at the jaundiced look that
the square of yellow window glass cast upon the face of the
vain and overdressed Mrs. Nathan Pereles. From time to time
Bella would turn to bestow upon her a look intended to
convey intense suffering and a resolute though dying
condition. Fanny stonily ignored these mute messages. They
offended something in her, though she could not tell what.
At the noon intermission she did not go home to the tempting
dinner smells, but wandered off through the little city park
and down to the river, where she sat on the bank and felt
very virtuous, and spiritual, and hollow. She was back in
her seat when the afternoon service was begun. Some of the
more devout members had remained to pray all through the
midday. The congregation came straggling in by twos and
threes. Many of the women had exchanged the severely
corseted discomfort of the morning's splendor for the
comparative ease of second-best silks. Mrs. Brandeis,
absent from her business throughout this holy day, came
hurrying in at two, to look with a rather anxious eye upon
her pale and resolute little daughter.
The memorial service was to begin shortly after three, and
lasted almost two hours. At quarter to three Bella slipped
out through the side aisle, beckoning mysteriously and
alluringly to Fanny as she went. Fanny looked at her
mother.
"Run along," said Mrs. Brandeis. "The air will be good for
you. Come back before the memorial service begins."
Fanny and Bella met, giggling, in the vestibule.
"Come on over to my house for a minute," Bella suggested.
"I want to show you something." The Weinberg house, a
great, comfortable, well-built home, with encircling
veranda, and a well-cared-for lawn, was just a scant block
away. They skipped across the street, down the block, and
in at the back door. The big sunny kitchen was deserted.
The house seemed very quiet and hushed. Over it hung the
delicious fragrance of freshly-baked pastry. Bella, a
rather baleful look in her eyes, led the way to the
butler's pantry that was as large as the average kitchen.
And there, ranged on platters, and baking boards, and on
snowy-white napkins, was that which made Tantalus's feast
seem a dry and barren snack. The Weinberg's had baked.
It is the custom in the household of Atonement Day fasters
of the old school to begin the evening meal, after the
twenty-four hours of abstainment, with coffee and freshly-
baked coffee cake of every variety. It was a lead-pipe blow
at one's digestion, but delicious beyond imagining. Bella's
mother was a famous cook, and her two maids followed in the
ways of their mistress. There were to be sisters and
brothers and out-of-town relations as guests at the evening
meal, and Mrs. Weinberg had outdone herself.
"Oh!" exclaimed Fanny in a sort of agony and delight.
"Take some," said Bella, the temptress.
The pantry was fragrant as a garden with spices, and fruit
scents, and the melting, delectable perfume of brown,
freshly-baked dough, sugar-coated. There was one giant
platter devoted wholly to round, plump cakes, with puffy
edges, in the center of each a sunken pool that was all
plum, bearing on its bosom a snowy sifting of powdered
sugar. There were others whose centers were apricot, pure
molten gold in the sunlight. There were speckled expanses
of cheese kuchen, the golden-brown surface showing rich
cracks through which one caught glimpses of the lemon-yellow
cheese beneath--cottage cheese that had been beaten up with
eggs, and spices, and sugar, and lemon. Flaky crust rose,
jaggedly, above this plateau. There were cakes with jelly,
and cinnamon kuchen, and cunning cakes with almond slices
nestling side by side. And there was freshly-baked bread--
twisted loaf, with poppy seed freckling its braid, and its
sides glistening with the butter that had been liberally
swabbed on it before it had been thrust into the oven.
Fanny Brandeis gazed, hypnotized. As she gazed Bella
selected a plum tart and bit into it--bit generously, so
that her white little teeth met in the very middle of the
oozing red-brown juice and one heard a little squirt as they
closed on the luscious fruit. At the sound Fanny quivered
all through her plump and starved little body.
"Have one," said Bella generously. "Go on. Nobody'll ever
know. Anyway, we've fasted long enough for our age. I
could fast till supper time if I wanted to, but I don't want
to." She swallowed the last morsel of the plum tart, and
selected another--apricot, this time, and opened her moist
red lips. But just before she bit into it (the Inquisition
could have used Bella's talents) she selected its
counterpart and held it out to Fanny. Fanny shook her head
slightly. Her hand came up involuntarily. Her eyes were
fastened on Bella's face.
"Go on," urged Bella. "Take it. They're grand! M-m-m-m!"
The first bite of apricot vanished between her rows of sharp
white teeth. Fanny shut her eyes as if in pain. She was
fighting the great fight of her life. She was to meet other
temptations, and perhaps more glittering ones, in her
lifetime, but to her dying day she never forgot that first
battle between the flesh and the spirit, there in the sugar-
scented pantry--and the spirit won. As Bella's lips closed
upon the second bite of apricot tart, the while her eye
roved over the almond cakes and her hand still held the
sweet out to Fanny, that young lady turned sharply, like a
soldier, and marched blindly out of the house, down the back
steps, across the street, and so into the temple.
The evening lights had just been turned on. The little
congregation, relaxed, weary, weak from hunger, many of
them, sat rapt and still except at those times when the
prayer book demanded spoken responses. The voice of the
little rabbi, rather weak now, had in it a timbre that made
it startlingly sweet and clear and resonant. Fanny slid
very quietly into the seat beside Mrs. Brandeis, and slipped
her moist and cold little hand into her mother's warm, work-
roughened palm. The mother's brown eyes, very bright with
unshed tears, left their perusal of the prayer book to dwell
upon the white little face that was smiling rather wanly up
at her. The pages of the prayer book lay two-thirds or more
to the left. Just as Fanny remarked this, there was a
little moment of hush in the march of the day's long
service. The memorial hour had begun.
Little Doctor Thalmann cleared his throat. The congregation
stirred a bit, changed its cramped position. Bella, the
guilty, came stealing in, a pink-and-gold picture of angelic
virtue. Fanny, looking at her, felt very aloof, and clean,
and remote.
Molly Brandeis seemed to sense what had happened.
"But you didn't, did you?" she whispered softly.
Fanny shook her head.
Rabbi Thalmann was seated in his great carved chair. His
eyes were closed. The wheezy little organ in the choir loft
at the rear of the temple began the opening bars of
Schumann's Traumerei. And then, above the cracked voice of
the organ, rose the clear, poignant wail of a violin.
Theodore Brandeis had begun to play. You know the playing
of the average boy of fifteen--that nerve-destroying,
uninspired scraping. There was nothing of this in the
sounds that this boy called forth from the little wooden box
and the stick with its taut lines of catgut. Whatever it
was--the length of the thin, sensitive fingers, the turn of
the wrist, the articulation of the forearm, the something in
the brain, or all these combined--Theodore Brandeis
possessed that which makes for greatness. You realized
that as he crouched over his violin to get his cello tones.
As he played to-day the little congregation sat very still,
and each was thinking of his ambitions and his failures; of
the lover lost, of the duty left undone, of the hope
deferred; of the wrong that was never righted; of the lost
one whose memory spells remorse. It felt the salt taste on
its lips. It put up a furtive, shamed hand to dab at its
cheeks, and saw that the one who sat in the pew just ahead
was doing likewise. This is what happened when this boy of
fifteen wedded his bow to his violin. And he who makes us
feel all this has that indefinable, magic, glorious thing
known as Genius.
When it was over, there swept through the room that sigh
following tension relieved. Rabbi Thalmann passed a hand
over his tired eyes, like one returning from a far mental
journey; then rose, and came forward to the pulpit. He
began, in Hebrew, the opening words of the memorial service,
and so on to the prayers in English, with their words of
infinite humility and wisdom.
"Thou hast implanted in us the capacity for sin, but not sin
itself!"
Fanny stirred. She had learned that a brief half hour ago.
The service marched on, a moving and harrowing thing. The
amens rolled out with a new fervor from the listeners.
There seemed nothing comic now in the way old Ben Reitman,
with his slower eyes, always came out five words behind the
rest who tumbled upon the responses and scurried briskly
through them, so that his fine old voice, somewhat hoarse
and quavering now, rolled out its "Amen!" in solitary
majesty. They came to that gem of humility, the mourners'
prayer; the ancient and ever-solemn Kaddish prayer. There
is nothing in the written language that, for sheer drama and
magnificence, can equal it as it is chanted in the Hebrew.
As Rabbi Thalmann began to intone it in its monotonous
repetition of praise, there arose certain black-robed
figures from their places and stood with heads bowed over
their prayer books. These were members of the congregation
from whom death had taken a toll during the past year.
Fanny rose with her mother and Theodore, who had left the
choir loft to join them. The little wheezy organ played
very softly. The black-robed figures swayed. Here and
there a half-stifled sob rose, and was crushed. Fanny felt
a hot haze that blurred her vision. She winked it away, and
another burned in its place. Her shoulders shook with a
sob. She felt her mother's hand close over her own that
held one side of the book. The prayer, that was not of
mourning but of praise, ended with a final crescendo from
the organ, The silent black-robed figures were seated.
Over the little, spent congregation hung a glorious
atmosphere of detachment. These Jews, listening to the
words that had come from the lips of the prophets in Israel,
had been, on this day, thrown back thousands of years, to
the time when the destruction of the temple was as real as
the shattered spires and dome of the cathedral at Rheims.
Old Ben Reitman, faint with fasting, was far removed from
his everyday thoughts of his horses, his lumber mills, his
farms, his mortgages. Even Mrs. Nathan Pereles, in her
black satin and bugles and jets, her cold, hard face usually
unlighted by sympathy or love, seemed to feel something of
this emotional wave. Fanny Brandeis was shaken by it. Her
head ached (that was hunger) and her hands were icy. The
little Russian girl in the seat just behind them had ceased
to wriggle and squirm, and slept against her mother's side.
Rabbi Thalmann, there on the platform, seemed somehow very
far away and vague. The scent of clove apples and ammonia
salts filled the air. The atmosphere seemed strangely
wavering and luminous. The white satin of the Ark
curtain gleamed and shifted.
The long service swept on to its close. Suddenly organ and
choir burst into a paeon. Little Doctor Thalmann raised his
arms. The congregation swept to its feet with a mighty
surge. Fanny rose with them, her face very white in its
frame of black curls, her eyes luminous. She raised her
face for the words of the ancient benediction that rolled,
in its simplicity and grandeur, from the lips of the rabbi:
"May the blessing of the Lord our God rest upon you all.
God bless thee and keep thee. May God cause His countenance
to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee. May God lift
up His countenance unto thee, and grant thee peace."
The Day of Atonement had come to an end. It was a very
quiet, subdued and spent little flock that dispersed to
their homes. Fanny walked out with scarcely a thought of
Bella. She felt, vaguely, that she and this school friend
were formed of different stuff. She knew that the bond
between them had been the grubby, physical one of childhood,
and that they never would come together in the finer
relation of the spirit, though she could not have put this
new knowledge into words.
Molly Brandeis put a hand on her daughter's shoulder.
"Tired, Fanchen?"
"A little."
"Bet you're hungry!" from Theodore.
"I was, but I'm not now."
"M-m-m--wait! Noodle soup. And chicken!"
She had intended to tell of the trial in the Weinberg's
pantry. But now something within her--something fine, born
of this day--kept her from it. But Molly Brandeis, to whom
two and two often made five, guessed something of what had
happened. She had felt a great surge of pride, had Molly
Brandeis, when her son had swayed the congregation with
the magic of his music. She had kissed him good night with
infinite tenderness and love. But she came into her
daughter's tiny room after Fanny had gone to bed, and leaned
over, and put a cool hand on the hot forehead.
"Do you feel all right, my darling?"
"Umhmph," replied Fanny drowsily.
"Fanchen, doesn't it make you feel happy and clean to know
that you were able to do the thing you started out to do?"
"Umhmph."
"Only," Molly Brandeis was thinking aloud now, quite
forgetting that she was talking to a very little girl,
"only, life seems to take such special delight in offering
temptation to those who are able to withstand it. I don't
know why that's true, but it is. I hope--oh, my little
girl, my baby--I hope----"
But Fanny never knew whether her mother finished that
sentence or not. She remembered waiting for the end of it,
to learn what it was her mother hoped. And she had felt a
sudden, scalding drop on her hand where her mother bent over
her. And the next thing she knew it was morning, with
mellow September sunshine. _