_ Theodore had been gone six years. His letters, all too
brief, were events in the lives of the two women. They read
and reread them. Fanny unconsciously embellished them with
fascinating details made up out of her own imagination.
"They're really triumphs of stupidity and dullness," she
said one day in disgust, after one of Theodore's long-
awaited letters had proved particularly dry and sparse.
"Just think of it! Dresden, Munich, Leipsic, Vienna,
Berlin, Frankfurt! And from his letters you would never
know he had left Winnebago. I don't believe he actually
sees anything of these cities--their people, and the queer
houses, and the streets. I suppose a new city means nothing
to him but another platform, another audience, another
piano, all intended as a background for his violin. He
could travel all over the world and it wouldn't touch him
once. He's got his mental fingers crossed all the time."
Theodore had begun to play in concert with some success, but
he wrote that there was no real money in it yet. He was not
well enough known. It took time. He would have to get a
name in Europe before he could attempt an American tour.
Just now every one was mad over Greinert. He was drawing
immense audiences. He sent them a photograph at which they
gasped, and then laughed, surprisedly. He looked so awfully
German, so different, somehow.
"It's the way his hair is clipped, I suppose," said Fanny.
"High, like that, on the temples. And look at his clothes!
That tie! And his pants! And that awful collar!
Why, his very features look German, don't they? I suppose
it's the effect of that haberdashery."
A month after the photograph, came a letter announcing his
marriage. Fanny's quick eye, leaping ahead from line to
line, took in the facts that her mind seemed unable to
grasp. Her name was Olga Stumpf. (In the midst of her
horror some imp in Fanny's brain said that her hands would
be red, and thick, with a name like that.) An orphan. She
sang. One of the Vienna concert halls, but so different
from the other girls. And he was so happy. And he hated to
ask them for it, but if they could cable a hundred or so.
That would help. And here was her picture.
And there was her picture. One of the so-called vivacious
type of Viennese of the lower class, smiling a conscious
smile, her hair elaborately waved and dressed, her figure
high-busted, narrow-waisted; earrings, chains, bracelets.
You knew that she used a heavy scent. She was older than
Theodore. Or perhaps it was the earrings.
They cabled the hundred.
After the first shock of it Molly Brandeis found excuses for
him. "He must have been awfully lonely, Fanny. Often. And
perhaps it will steady him, and make him more ambitious.
He'll probably work all the harder now."
"No, he won't. But you will. And I will. I didn't mind
working for Theodore, and scrimping, and never having any of
the things I wanted, from blouses to music. But I won't
work and deny myself to keep a great, thick, cheap, German
barmaid, or whatever she is in comfort. I won't!"
But she did. And quite suddenly Molly Brandeis, of the
straight, firm figure and the bright, alert eye, and the
buoyant humor, seemed to lose some of those electric
qualities. It was an almost imperceptible letting down.
You have seen a fine race horse suddenly break and lose his
stride in the midst of the field, and pull up and try to
gain it again, and go bravely on, his stride and form still
there, but his spirit broken? That was Molly Brandeis.
Fanny did much of the buying now. She bought quickly and
shrewdly, like her mother. She even went to the Haley House
to buy, when necessary, and Winnebagoans, passing the hotel,
would see her slim, erect figure in one of the sample-rooms
with its white-covered tables laden with china, or
glassware, or Christmas goods, or whatever that particular
salesman happened to carry. They lifted their eye-brows at
first, but, somehow, it was impossible to associate this
girl with the blithe, shirt-sleeved, cigar-smoking traveling
men who followed her about the sample-room, order book in
hand.
As time went on she introduced some new features into the
business, and did away with various old ones. The
overflowing benches outside the store were curbed, and
finally disappeared altogether. Fanny took charge of the
window displays, and often came back to the store at night
to spend the evening at work with Aloysius. They would tack
a piece of muslin around the window to keep off the gaze of
passers-by, and together evolve a window that more than made
up for the absent show benches.
This, I suppose, is no time to stop for a description of
Fanny Brandeis. And yet the impulse to do so is
irresistible. Personally, I like to know about the hair,
and eyes, and mouth of the person whose life I am following.
How did she look when she said that? What sort of
expression did she wear when this happened? Perhaps the
thing that Fanny Brandeis said about herself one day, when
she was having one of her talks with Emma McChesney, who was
on her fall trip for the Featherbloom Petticoat Company,
might help.
"No ballroom would ever be hushed into admiring awe when I
entered," she said. "No waiter would ever drop his tray,
dazzled, and no diners in a restaurant would stop to gaze at
me, their forks poised halfway, their eyes blinded by my
beauty. I could tramp up and down between the tables for
hours, and no one would know I was there. I'm one of a
million women who look their best in a tailor suit and a hat
with a line. Not that I ever had either. But I have my
points, only they're blunted just now."
Still, that bit of description doesn't do, after all.
Because she had distinct charm, and some beauty. She was
not what is known as the Jewish type, in spite of her
coloring. The hair that used to curl, waved now. In a day
when coiffures were a bird's-nest of puffs and curls and
pompadour, she wore her hair straight back from her forehead
and wound in a coil at the neck. Her face in repose was apt
to be rather lifeless, and almost heavy. But when she
talked, it flashed into sudden life, and you found yourself
watching her mouth, fascinated. It was the key to her whole
character, that mouth. Mobile, humorous, sensitive, the
sensuousness of the lower lip corrected by the firmness of
the upper. She had large, square teeth, very regular, and
of the yellow-white tone that bespeaks health. She used to
make many of her own clothes, and she always trimmed her
hats. Mrs. Brandeis used to bring home material and styles
from her Chicago buying trips, and Fanny's quick mind
adapted them. She managed, somehow, to look miraculously
well dressed.
The Christmas following Theodore's marriage was the most
successful one in the history of Brandeis' Bazaar. And it
bred in Fanny Brandeis a lifelong hatred of the holiday
season. In years after she always tried to get away from
the city at Christmas time. The two women did the work of
four men. They had a big stock on hand. Mrs. Brandeis was
everywhere at once. She got an enormous amount of work
out of her clerks, and they did not resent it. It is a gift
that all born leaders have. She herself never sat down, and
the clerks unconsciously followed her example. She never
complained of weariness, she never lost her temper, she
never lost patience with a customer, even the tight-fisted
farmer type who doled their money out with that reluctance
found only in those who have wrung it from the soil.
In the midst of the rush she managed, somehow, never to fail
to grasp the humor of a situation. A farmer woman came in
for a doll's head, which she chose with incredible
deliberation and pains. As it was being wrapped she
explained that it was for her little girl, Minnie. She had
promised the head this year. Next Christmas they would buy
a body for it. Molly Brandeis's quick sympathy went out to
the little girl who was to lavish her mother-love on a
doll's head for a whole year. She saw the head, in ghastly
decapitation, staring stiffly out from the cushions of the
chill and funereal parlor sofa, and the small Minnie peering
in to feast her eyes upon its blond and waxen beauty.
"Here," she had said, "take this, and sew it on the head, so
Minnie'll have something she can hold, at least." And she
had wrapped a pink cambric, sawdust-stuffed body in with the
head.
It was a snowy and picturesque Christmas, and intensely
cold, with the hard, dry, cutting cold of Wisconsin. Near
the door the little store was freezing. Every time the door
opened it let in a blast. Near the big glowing stove it was
very hot.
The aisles were packed so that sometimes it was almost
impossible to wedge one's way through. The china plates,
stacked high, fairly melted away, as did the dolls piled on
the counters. Mrs. Brandeis imported her china and dolls,
and no store in Winnebago, not even Gerretson's big
department store, could touch them for value.
The two women scarcely stopped to eat in the last ten days
of the holiday rush. Often Annie, the girl who had taken
Mattie's place in the household, would bring down their
supper, hot and hot, and they would eat it quickly up in the
little gallery where they kept the sleds, and doll buggies,
and drums. At night (the store was open until ten or eleven
at Christmas time) they would trudge home through the snow,
so numb with weariness that they hardly minded the cold.
The icy wind cut their foreheads like a knife, and made the
temples ache. The snow, hard and resilient, squeaked
beneath their heels. They would open the front door and
stagger in, blinking. The house seemed so weirdly quiet and
peaceful after the rush and clamor of the store.
"Don't you want a sandwich, Mother, with a glass of beer?"
"I'm too tired to eat it, Fanny. I just want to get to
bed."
Fanny grew to hate the stock phrases that met her with each
customer. "I want something for a little boy about ten.
He's really got everything." Or, "I'm looking for a present
for a lady friend. Do you think a plate would be nice?"
She began to loathe them--these satiated little boys, these
unknown friends, for whom she must rack her brains.
They cleared a snug little fortune that Christmas. On
Christmas Eve they smiled wanly at each other, like two
comrades who have fought and bled together, and won. When
they left the store it was nearly midnight. Belated
shoppers, bundle-laden, carrying holly wreaths, with strange
handles, and painted heads, and sticks protruding from lumpy
brown paper burdens, were hurrying home.
They stumbled home, too spent to talk. Fanny, groping
for the keyhole, stubbed her toe against a wooden box
between the storm door and the inner door. It had evidently
been left there by the expressman or a delivery boy. It was
a very heavy box.
"A Christmas present!" Fanny exclaimed. "Do you think it
is? But it must be." She looked at the address, "Miss
Fanny Brandeis." She went to the kitchen for a crowbar, and
came back, still in her hat and coat. She pried open the
box expertly, tore away the wrappings, and disclosed a
gleaming leather-bound set of Balzac, and beneath that,
incongruously enough, Mark Twain.
"Why!" exclaimed Fanny, sitting down on the floor rather
heavily. Then her eye fell upon a card tossed aside in the
hurry of unpacking. She picked it up, read it hastily.
"Merry Christmas to the best daughter in the world. From
her Mother."
Mrs. Brandeis had taken off her wraps and was standing over
the sitting-room register, rubbing her numbed hands and
smiling a little.
"Why, Mother!" Fanny scrambled to her feet. "You darling!
In all that rush and work, to take time to think of me!
Why--" Her arms were around her mother's shoulders. She was
pressing her glowing cheek against the pale, cold one. And
they both wept a little, from emotion, and weariness, and
relief, and enjoyed it, as women sometimes do.
Fanny made her mother stay in bed next morning, a thing that
Mrs. Brandeis took to most ungracefully. After the holiday
rush and strain she invariably had a severe cold, the
protest of the body she had over-driven and under-nourished
for two or three weeks. As a patient she was as trying and
fractious as a man, tossing about, threatening to get up,
demanding hot-water bags, cold compresses, alcohol rubs.
She fretted about the business, and imagined that things
were at a stand-still during her absence.
Fanny herself rose early. Her healthy young body, after a
night's sleep, was already recuperating from the month's
strain. She had planned a real Christmas dinner, to banish
the memory of the hasty and unpalatable lunches they had had
to gulp during the rush. There was to be a turkey, and
Fanny had warned Annie not to touch it. She wanted to stuff
it and roast it herself. She spent the morning in the
kitchen, aside from an occasional tip-toeing visit to her
mother's room. At eleven she found her mother up, and no
amount of coaxing would induce her to go back to bed. She
had read the papers and she said she felt rested already.
The turkey came out a delicate golden-brown, and deliciously
crackly. Fanny, looking up over a drumstick, noticed, with
a shock, that her mother's eyes looked strangely sunken, and
her skin, around the jaws and just under the chin, where her
loose wrapper revealed her throat, was queerly yellow and
shriveled. She had eaten almost nothing.
"Mother, you're not eating a thing! You really must eat a
little."
Mrs. Brandeis began a pretense of using knife and fork, but
gave it up finally and sat back, smiling rather wanly. "I
guess I'm tireder than I thought I was, dear. I think I've
got a cold coming on, too. I'll lie down again after
dinner, and by to-morrow I'll be as chipper as a sparrow.
The turkey's wonderful, isn't it? I'll have some, cold, for
supper."
After dinner the house felt very warm and stuffy. It was
crisply cold and sunny outdoors. The snow was piled high
except on the sidewalks, where it had been neatly shoveled
away by the mufflered Winnebago sons and fathers. There was
no man in the Brandeis household, and Aloysius had been too
busy to perform the chores usually considered his work about
the house. The snow lay in drifts upon the sidewalk in
front of the Brandeis house, except where passing feet
had trampled it a bit.
"I'm going to shovel the walk," Fanny announced suddenly.
"Way around to the woodshed. Where are those old mittens of
mine? Annie, where's the snow shovel? Sure I am. Why
not?"
She shoveled and scraped and pounded, bending rhythmically
to the work, lifting each heaping shovelful with her strong
young arms, tossing it to the side, digging in again, and
under. An occasional neighbor passed by, or a friend, and
she waved at them, gayly, and tossed back their badinage.
"Merry Christmas!" she called, again and again, in reply to
a passing acquaintance. "Same to you!"
At two o'clock Bella Weinberg telephoned to say that a
little party of them were going to the river to skate. The
ice was wonderful. Oh, come on! Fanny skated very well.
But she hesitated. Mrs. Brandeis, dozing on the couch,
sensed what was going on in her daughter's mind, and roused
herself with something of her old asperity.
"Don't be foolish, child. Run along! You don't intend to
sit here and gaze upon your sleeping beauty of a mother all
afternoon, do you? Well, then!"
So Fanny changed her clothes, got her skates, and ran out
into the snap and sparkle of the day. The winter darkness
had settled down before she returned, all glowing and rosy,
and bright-eyed. Her blood was racing through her body.
Her lips were parted. The drudgery of the past three weeks
seemed to have been blotted out by this one radiant
afternoon.
The house was dark when she entered. It seemed very quiet,
and close, and depressing after the sparkle and rush of the
afternoon on the river. "Mother! Mother dear! Still
sleeping?"
Mrs. Brandeis stirred, sighed, awoke. Fanny flicked on the
light. Her mother was huddled in a kimono on the sofa.
She sat up rather dazedly now, and stared at Fanny.
"Why--what time is it? What? Have I been sleeping all
afternoon? Your mother's getting old."
She yawned, and in the midst of it caught her breath with a
little cry of pain.
"What is it? What's the matter?"
Molly Brandeis pressed a hand to her breast. "A stitch, I
guess. It's this miserable cold coming on. Is there any
asperin in the house? I'll dose myself after supper, and
take a hot foot bath and go to bed. I'm dead."
She ate less for supper than she had for dinner. She hardly
tasted the cup of tea that Fanny insisted on making for her.
She swayed a little as she sat, and her lids came down over
her eyes, flutteringly, as if the weight of them was too
great to keep up. At seven she was up-stairs, in bed,
sleeping, and breathing heavily.
At eleven, or thereabouts, Fanny woke up with a
start. She sat up in bed, wide-eyed, peering into the
darkness and listening. Some one was talking in a high,
queer voice, a voice like her mother's, and yet unlike. She
ran, shivering with the cold, into her mother's bedroom.
She switched on the light. Mrs. Brandeis was lying on the
pillow, her eyes almost closed, except for a terrifying slit
of white that showed between the lids. Her head was tossing
to and fro on the pillow. She was talking, sometimes
clearly, and sometimes mumblingly.
"One gross cups and saucers . . . and now what do you think
you'd like for a second prize . . . in the basement,
Aloysius . . . the trains . . . I'll see that they get there
to-day . . . yours of the tenth at hand . . ."
"Mother! Mother! Molly dear!" She shook her gently, then
almost roughly. The voice ceased. The eyes remained the
same. "Oh, God!" She ran to the back of the house.
"Annie! Annie, get up! Mother's sick. She's out of her
head. I'm going to 'phone for the doctor. Go in with her."
She got the doctor at last. She tried to keep her voice
under control, and thought, with a certain pride, that she
was succeeding. She ran up-stairs again. The voice had
begun again, but it seemed thicker now. She got into her
clothes, shaking with cold and terror, and yet thinking very
clearly, as she always did in a crisis. She put clean
towels in the bathroom, pushed the table up to the bed, got
a glass of water, straightened the covers, put away the
clothes that the tired woman had left about the room.
Doctor Hertz came. He went through the usual preliminaries,
listened, tapped, counted, straightened up at last.
"Fresh air," he said. "Cold air. All the windows open."
They rigged up a device of screens and sheets to protect the
bed from the drafts. Fanny obeyed orders silently, like a
soldier. But her eyes went from the face on the pillow to
that of the man bent over the bed. Something vague, cold,
clammy, seemed to be closing itself around her heart. It
was like an icy hand, squeezing there. There had suddenly
sprung up that indefinable atmosphere of the sick-room--a
sick-room in which a fight is being waged. Bottles on the
table, glasses, a spoon, a paper shade over the electric
light globe.
"What is it?" said Fanny, at last. "Grip?--grip?"
Doctor Hertz hesitated a moment. "Pneumonia."
Fanny's hands grasped the footboard tightly. "Do you think
we'd better have a nurse?"
"Yes."
The nurse seemed to be there, somehow, miraculously. And
the morning came. And in the kitchen Annie went about her
work, a little more quietly than usual. And yesterday
seemed far away. It was afternoon; it was twilight. Doctor
Hertz had been there for hours. The last time he
brought another doctor with him--Thorn. Mrs. Brandeis was
not talking now. But she was breathing. It filled the
room, that breathing; it filled the house. Fanny took her
mother's hand, that hand with the work-hardened palm and the
broken nails. It was very cold. She looked down at it.
The nails were blue. She began to rub it. She looked up
into the faces of the two men. She picked up the other
hand--snatched at it. "Look here!" she said. "Look here!"
And then she stood up. The vague, clammy thing that had
been wound about her heart suddenly relaxed. And at that
something icy hot rushed all over her body and shook her.
She came around to the foot of the bed, and gripped it with
her two hands. Her chin was thrust forward, and her eyes
were bright and staring. She looked very much like her
mother, just then. It was a fighting face. A desperate
face.
"Look here," she began, and was surprised to find that she
was only whispering. She wet her lips and smiled, and tried
again, forming the words carefully with her lips. "Look
here. She's dying--isn't she? Isn't she! She's dying,
isn't she?"
Doctor Hertz pursed his lips. The nurse came over to her,
and put a hand on her shoulder. Fanny shook her off.
"Answer me. I've got a right to know. Look at this!" She
reached forward and picked up that inert, cold, strangely
shriveled blue hand again.
"My dear child--I'm afraid so."
There came from Fanny's throat a moan that began high, and
poignant, and quavering, and ended in a shiver that seemed
to die in her heart. The room was still again, except for
the breathing, and even that was less raucous.
Fanny stared at the woman on the bed--at the long, finely-
shaped head, with the black hair wadded up so carelessly
now; at the long, straight, clever nose; the full,
generous mouth. There flooded her whole being a great,
blinding rage. What had she had of life? she demanded
fiercely. What? What? Her teeth came together grindingly.
She breathed heavily through her nostrils, as if she had
been running. And suddenly she began to pray, not with the
sounding, unctions thees and thous of the Church and Bible;
not elegantly or eloquently, with well-rounded phrases, as
the righteous pray, but threateningly, hoarsely, as a
desperate woman prays. It was not a prayer so much as a cry
of defiance---a challenge.
"Look here, God!" and there was nothing profane as she said
it. "Look here, God! She's done her part. It's up to You
now. Don't You let her die! Look at her. Look at her!"
She choked and shook herself angrily, and went on. "Is that
fair? That's a rotten trick to play on a woman that gave
what she gave! What did she ever have of life? Nothing!
That little miserable, dirty store, and those little
miserable, dirty people. You give her a chance, d'You hear?
You give her a chance, God, or I'll----"
Her voice broke in a thin, cracked quaver. The nurse turned
her around, suddenly and sharply, and led her from the room. _