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Fanny Herself

by Edna Ferber · English · Gutenberg #350 · 580,311 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Fanny Herself

Author: Edna Ferber


        
Release date: July 3, 2008 [eBook #350]
                Most recently updated: March 15, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/350

Credits: Produced by Mike Lough and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FANNY HERSELF ***




Produced by Mike Lough





FANNY HERSELF

By Edna Ferber


TO WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE




PREFACE

It has become the fashion among novelists to introduce their hero in
knee pants, their heroine in pinafore and pigtails. Time was when we
were rushed up to a stalwart young man of twenty-four, who was presented
as the pivot about whom the plot would revolve. Now we are led,
protesting, up to a grubby urchin of five and are invited to watch him
through twenty years of intimate minutiae. In extreme cases we have been
obliged to witness his evolution from swaddling clothes to dresses, from
dresses to shorts (he is so often English), from shorts to Etons.

The thrill we get for our pains is when, at twenty-five, he jumps over
the traces and marries the young lady we met in her cradle on page two.
The process is known as a psychological study. A publisher's note on
page five hundred and seventy-three assures us that the author is now at
work on Volume Two, dealing with the hero's adult life. A third volume
will present his pleasing senility. The whole is known as a trilogy.
If the chief character is of the other sex we are dragged through her
dreamy girlhood, or hoydenish. We see her in her graduation white, in
her bridal finery. By the time she is twenty we know her better than her
mother ever will, and are infinitely more bored by her.

Yet who would exchange one page in the life of the boy, David
Copperfield, for whole chapters dealing with Trotwood Copperfield, the
man? Who would relinquish the button-bursting Peggotty for the saintly
Agnes? And that other David--he of the slingshot; one could not love
him so well in his psalm-singing days had one not known him first as the
gallant, dauntless vanquisher of giants. As for Becky Sharp, with her
treachery, her cruelty, her vindicativeness, perhaps we could better
have understood and forgiven her had we known her lonely and neglected
childhood, with the drunken artist father and her mother, the French
opera girl.

With which modest preamble you are asked to be patient with Miss Fanny
Brandeis, aged thirteen. Not only must you suffer Fanny, but Fanny's
mother as well, without whom there could be no understanding Fanny. For
that matter, we shouldn't wonder if Mrs. Brandeis were to turn out the
heroine in the end. She is that kind of person.




FANNY HERSELF




CHAPTER ONE

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 cents!” The plush
album went home in a farmer's wagon that afternoon.




CHAPTER TWO

Right here there should be something said about Fanny Brandeis. And yet,
each time I turn to her I find her mother plucking at my sleeve. There
comes to my mind the picture of Mrs. Brandeis turning down Norris Street
at quarter to eight every morning, her walk almost a march, so firm and
measured it was, her head high, her chin thrust forward a little, as a
fighter walks, but not pugnaciously; her short gray skirt clearing the
ground, her shoulders almost consciously squared. Other Winnebago women
were just tying up their daughters' pigtails for school, or sweeping the
front porch, or watering the hanging baskets. Norris Street residents
got into the habit of timing themselves by Mrs. Brandeis. When she
marched by at seven forty-five they hurried a little with the tying of
the hair bow, as they glanced out of the window. When she came by again,
a little before twelve, for her hasty dinner, they turned up the fire
under the potatoes and stirred the flour thickening for the gravy.

Mrs. Brandeis had soon learned that Fanny and Theodore could manage
their own school toilettes, with, perhaps, some speeding up on the part
of Mattie, the servant girl. But it needed her keen brown eye to detect
corners that Aloysius had neglected to sweep out with wet sawdust, and
her presence to make sure that the counter covers were taken off and
folded, the outside show dusted and arranged, the windows washed, the
whole store shining and ready for business by eight o'clock. So Fanny
had even learned to do her own tight, shiny, black, shoulder-length
curls, which she tied back with a black bow. They were wet, meek, and
tractable curls at eight in the morning. By the time school was out
at four they were as wildly unruly as if charged with electric
currents--which they really were, when you consider the little dynamo
that wore them.

Mrs. Brandeis took a scant half hour to walk the six blocks between
the store and the house, to snatch a hurried dinner, and traverse the
distance to the store again. It was a program that would have killed a
woman less magnificently healthy and determined. She seemed to thrive on
it, and she kept her figure and her wit when other women of her age grew
dull, and heavy, and ineffectual. On summer days the little town often
lay shimmering in the heat, the yellow road glaring in it, the red
bricks of the high school reflecting it in waves, the very pine knots
in the sidewalks gummy and resinous with heat, and sending up a pungent
smell that was of the woods, and yet stifling. She must have felt an
almost irresistible temptation to sit for a moment on the cool, shady
front porch, with its green-painted flower boxes, its hanging fern
baskets and the catalpa tree looking boskily down upon it.

But she never did. She had an almost savage energy and determination.
The unpaid debts were ever ahead of her; there were the children to be
dressed and sent to school; there was the household to be kept up; there
were Theodore's violin lessons that must not be neglected--not after
what Professor Bauer had said about him.

You may think that undue stress is being laid upon this driving force
in her, upon this business ability. But remember that this was fifteen
years or more ago, before women had invaded the world of business by the
thousands, to take their place, side by side, salary for salary, with
men. Oh, there were plenty of women wage earners in Winnebago, as
elsewhere; clerks, stenographers, school teachers, bookkeepers. The
paper mills were full of girls, and the canning factory too. But here
was a woman gently bred, untrained in business, left widowed with two
children at thirty-eight, and worse than penniless--in debt.

And that was not all. As Ferdinand Brandeis' wife she had occupied a
certain social position in the little Jewish community of Winnebago.
True, they had never been moneyed, while the others of her own faith
in the little town were wealthy, and somewhat purse-proud. They had
carriages, most of them, with two handsome horses, and their houses
were spacious and veranda-encircled, and set in shady lawns. When the
Brandeis family came to Winnebago five years before, these people had
waited, cautiously, and investigated, and then had called. They were
of a type to be found in every small town; prosperous, conservative,
constructive citizens, clannish, but not so much so as their city
cousins, mingling socially with their Gentile neighbors, living well,
spending their money freely, taking a vast pride in the education of
their children. But here was Molly Brandeis, a Jewess, setting out
to earn her living in business, like a man. It was a thing to stir
Congregation Emanu-el to its depths. Jewish women, they would tell you,
did not work thus. Their husbands worked for them, or their sons, or
their brothers.

“Oh, I don't know,” said Mrs. Brandeis, when she heard of it. “I seem
to remember a Jewess named Ruth who was left widowed, and who gleaned in
the fields for her living, and yet the neighbors didn't talk. For that
matter, she seems to be pretty well thought of, to this day.”

But there is no denying that she lost caste among her own people. Custom
and training are difficult to overcome. But Molly Brandeis was too
deep in her own affairs to care. That Christmas season following her
husband's death was a ghastly time, and yet a grimly wonderful one, for
it applied the acid test to Molly Brandeis and showed her up pure gold.

The first week in January she, with Sadie and Pearl, the two clerks,
and Aloysius, the boy, took inventory. It was a terrifying thing,
that process of casting up accounts. It showed with such starkness how
hideously the Brandeis ledger sagged on the wrong side. The three women
and the boy worked with a sort of dogged cheerfulness at it, counting,
marking, dusting, washing. They found shelves full of forgotten stock,
dust-covered and profitless. They found many articles of what is known
as hard stock, akin to the plush album; glass and plated condiment
casters for the dining table, in a day when individual salts and
separate vinegar cruets were already the thing; lamps with straight
wicks when round wicks were in demand.

They scoured shelves, removed the grime of years from boxes, washed
whole battalions of chamber sets, bathed piles of plates, and bins of
cups and saucers. It was a dirty, back-breaking job, that ruined the
finger nails, tried the disposition, and caked the throat with
dust. Besides, the store was stove-heated and, near the front door,
uncomfortably cold. The women wore little shoulder shawls pinned over
their waists, for warmth, and all four, including Aloysius, sniffled for
weeks afterward. That inventory developed a new, grim line around Mrs.
Brandeis' mouth, and carved another at the corner of each eye. After it
was over she washed her hair, steamed her face over a bowl of hot water,
packed two valises, left minute and masterful instructions with Mattie
as to the household, and with Sadie and Pearl as to the store, and was
off to Chicago on her first buying trip. She took Fanny with her, as
ballast. It was a trial at which many men would have quailed. On the
shrewdness and judgment of that buying trip depended the future of
Brandeis' Bazaar, and Mrs. Brandeis, and Fanny, and Theodore.

Mrs. Brandeis had accompanied her husband on many of his trips to
Chicago. She had even gone with him occasionally to the wholesale houses
around La Salle Street, and Madison, and Fifth Avenue, but she had
never bought a dollar's worth herself. She saw that he bought slowly,
cautiously, and without imagination. She made up her mind that she would
buy quickly, intuitively. She knew slightly some of the salesmen in
the wholesale houses. They had often made presents to her of a vase,
a pocketbook, a handkerchief, or some such trifle, which she accepted
reluctantly, when at all. She was thankful now for these visits. She
found herself remembering many details of them. She made up her mind,
with a canny knowingness, that there should be no presents this time, no
theater invitations, no lunches or dinners. This was business, she told
herself; more than business--it was grim war.

They still tell of that trip, sometimes, when buyers and jobbers and
wholesale men get together. Don't imagine that she came to be a woman
captain of finance. Don't think that we are to see her at the head of
a magnificent business establishment, with buyers and department heads
below her, and a private office done up in mahogany, and stenographers
and secretaries. No, she was Mrs. Brandeis, of Brandeis' Bazaar, to the
end. The bills she bought were ridiculously small, I suppose, and the
tricks she turned on that first trip were pitiful, perhaps. But they
were magnificent too, in their way. I am even bold enough to think that
she might have made business history, that plucky woman, if she had had
an earlier start, and if she had not, to the very end, had a pack of
unmanageable handicaps yelping at her heels, pulling at her skirts.

It was only a six-hour trip to Chicago. Fanny Brandeis' eyes, big enough
at any time, were surely twice their size during the entire journey of
two hundred miles or more. They were to have lunch on the train! They
were to stop at an hotel! They were to go to the theater! She would have
lain back against the red plush seat of the car, in a swoon of joy, if
there had not been so much to see in the car itself, and through the car
window.

“We'll have something for lunch,” said Mrs. Brandeis when they were
seated in the dining car, “that we never have at home, shall we?”

“Oh, yes!” replied Fanny in a whisper of excitement.
“Something--something queer, and different, and not so very healthy!”

They had oysters (a New Yorker would have sniffed at them), and chicken
potpie, and asparagus, and ice cream. If that doesn't prove Mrs.
Brandeis was game, I should like to know what could! They stopped at
the Windsor-Clifton, because it was quieter and less expensive than the
Palmer House, though quite as full of red plush and walnut. Besides,
she had stopped at the Palmer House with her husband, and she knew how
buyers were likely to be besieged by eager salesmen with cards, and with
tempting lines of goods spread knowingly in the various sample-rooms.

Fanny Brandeis was thirteen, and emotional, and incredibly receptive
and alive. It is impossible to tell what she learned during that Chicago
trip, it was so crowded, so wonderful. She went with her mother to the
wholesale houses and heard and saw and, unconsciously, remembered. When
she became fatigued with the close air of the dim showrooms, with their
endless aisles piled with every sort of ware, she would sit on a
chair in some obscure corner, watching those sleek, over-lunched,
genial-looking salesmen who were chewing their cigars somewhat wildly
when Mrs. Brandeis finished with them. Sometimes she did not accompany
her mother, but lay in bed, deliciously, until the middle of the
morning, then dressed, and chatted with the obliging Irish chamber maid,
and read until her mother came for her at noon.

Everything she did was a delightful adventure; everything she saw had
the tang of novelty. Fanny Brandeis was to see much that was beautiful
and rare in her full lifetime, but she never again, perhaps, got
quite the thrill that those ugly, dim, red-carpeted, gas-lighted hotel
corridors gave her, or the grim bedroom, with its walnut furniture and
its Nottingham curtains. As for the Chicago streets themselves, with
their perilous corners (there were no czars in blue to regulate traffic
in those days), older and more sophisticated pedestrians experienced
various emotions while negotiating the corner of State and Madison.

That buying trip lasted ten days. It was a racking business, physically
and mentally. There were the hours of tramping up one aisle and down the
other in the big wholesale lofts. But that brought bodily fatigue only.
It was the mental strain that left Mrs. Brandeis spent and limp at the
end of the day. Was she buying wisely? Was she over-buying? What did
she know about buying, anyway? She would come back to her hotel at six,
sometimes so exhausted that the dining-room and dinner were unthinkable.
At such times they would have dinner in their room another delicious
adventure for Fanny. She would try to tempt the fagged woman on the bed
with bits of this or that from one of the many dishes that dotted the
dinner tray. But Molly Brandeis, harrowed in spirit and numbed in body,
was too spent to eat.

But that was not always the case. There was that unforgettable night
when they went to see Bernhardt the divine. Fanny spent the entire
morning following standing before the bedroom mirror, with her hair
pulled out in a wild fluff in front, her mother's old marten-fur
scarf high and choky around her neck, trying to smile that slow, sad,
poignant, tear-compelling smile; but she had to give it up, clever
mimic though she was. She only succeeded in looking as though a pin were
sticking her somewhere. Besides, Fanny's own smile was a quick, broad,
flashing grin, with a generous glint of white teeth in it, and she
always forgot about being exquisitely wistful over it until it was too
late.

I wonder if the story of the china religious figures will give a wrong
impression of Mrs. Brandeis. Perhaps not, if you will only remember this
woman's white-lipped determination to wrest a livelihood from the world,
for her children and herself. They had been in Chicago a week, and she
was buying at Bauder & Peck's. Now, Bauder & Peck, importers, are known
the world over. It is doubtful if there is one of you who has not been
supplied, indirectly, with some imported bit of china or glassware, with
French opera glasses or cunning toys and dolls, from the great New York
and Chicago showrooms of that company.

Young Bauder himself was waiting on Mrs. Brandeis, and he was frowning
because he hated to sell women. Young Bauder was being broken into the
Chicago end of the business, and he was not taking gracefully to the
process.

At the end of a long aisle, on an obscure shelf in a dim corner, Molly
Brandeis' sharp eyes espied a motley collection of dusty, grimy
china figures of the kind one sees on the mantel in the parlor of
the small-town Catholic home. Winnebago's population was two-thirds
Catholic, German and Irish, and very devout.

Mrs. Brandeis stopped short. “How much for that lot?” She pointed to the
shelf. Young Bauder's gaze followed hers, puzzled. The figures were from
five inches to a foot high, in crude, effective blues, and gold, and
crimson, and white. All the saints were there in assorted sizes, the
Pieta, the cradle in the manger. There were probably two hundred or
more of the little figures. “Oh, those!” said young Bauder vaguely. “You
don't want that stuff. Now, about that Limoges china. As I said, I can
make you a special price on it if you carry it as an open-stock pattern.
You'll find----”

“How much for that lot?” repeated Mrs. Brandeis.

“Those are left-over samples, Mrs. Brandeis. Last year's stuff. They're
all dirty. I'd forgotten they were there.”

“How much for the lot?” said Mrs. Brandeis, pleasantly, for the third
time.

“I really don't know. Three hundred, I should say. But----”

“I'll give you two hundred,” ventured Mrs. Brandeis, her heart in her
mouth and her mouth very firm.

“Oh, come now, Mrs. Brandeis! Bauder & Peck don't do business that way,
you know. We'd really rather not sell them at all. The things aren't
worth much to us, or to you, for that matter. But three hundred----”

“Two hundred,” repeated Mrs. Brandeis, “or I cancel my order, including
the Limoges. I want those figures.”

And she got them. Which isn't the point of the story. The holy figures
were fine examples of foreign workmanship, their colors, beneath
the coating of dust, as brilliant and fadeless as those found in the
churches of Europe. They reached Winnebago duly, packed in straw and
paper, still dusty and shelf-worn. Mrs. Brandeis and Sadie and Pearl sat
on up-ended boxes at the rear of the store, in the big barn-like room in
which newly arrived goods were unpacked. As Aloysius dived deep into the
crate and brought up figure after figure, the three women plunged them
into warm and soapy water and proceeded to bathe and scour the entire
school of saints, angels, and cherubim. They came out brilliantly fresh
and rosy.

All the Irish ingenuity and artistry in Aloysius came to the surface
as he dived again and again into the great barrel and brought up the
glittering pieces.

“It'll make an elegant window,” he gasped from the depths of the hay,
his lean, lengthy frame jack-knifed over the edge. “And cheap.” His
shrewd wit had long ago divined the store's price mark. “If Father
Fitzpatrick steps by in the forenoon I'll bet they'll be gone before
nighttime to-morrow. You'll be letting me do the trim, Mrs. Brandeis?”

He came back that evening to do it, and he threw his whole soul into it,
which, considering his ancestry and temperament, was very high voltage
for one small-town store window. He covered the floor of the window with
black crepe paper, and hung it in long folds, like a curtain, against
the rear wall. The gilt of the scepters, and halos, and capes showed up
dazzlingly against this background. The scarlets, and pinks, and blues,
and whites of the robes appeared doubly bright. The whole made a picture
that struck and held you by its vividness and contrast.

Father Fitzpatrick, very tall and straight, and handsome, with his
iron-gray hair and his cheeks pink as a girl's, did step by next morning
on his way to the post-office. It was whispered that in his youth Father
Fitzpatrick had been an actor, and that he had deserted the footlights
for the altar lights because of a disappointment. The drama's loss was
the Church's gain. You should have heard him on Sunday morning, now
flaying them, now swaying them! He still had the actor's flexible voice,
vibrant, tremulous, or strident, at will. And no amount of fasting or
praying had ever dimmed that certain something in his eye--the something
which makes the matinee idol.

Not only did he step by now; he turned, came back; stopped before the
window. Then he entered.

“Madam,” he said to Mrs. Brandeis, “you'll probably save more souls with
your window display than I could in a month of hell-fire sermons.” He
raised his hand. “You have the sanction of the Church.” Which was the
beginning of a queer friendship between the Roman Catholic priest and
the Jewess shopkeeper that lasted as long as Molly Brandeis lived.

By noon it seemed that the entire population of Winnebago had turned
devout. The figures, a tremendous bargain, though sold at a high profit,
seemed to melt away from the counter that held them.

By three o'clock, “Only one to a customer!” announced Mrs. Brandeis. By
the middle of the week the window itself was ravished of its show. By
the end of the week there remained only a handful of the duller and less
desirable pieces--the minor saints, so to speak. Saturday night Mrs.
Brandeis did a little figuring on paper. The lot had cost her two
hundred dollars. She had sold for six hundred. Two from six leaves four.
Four hundred dollars! She repeated it to herself, quietly. Her mind
leaped back to the plush photograph album, then to young Bauder and his
cool contempt. And there stole over her that warm, comfortable glow born
of reassurance and triumph. Four hundred dollars. Not much in these
days of big business. We said, you will remember, that it was a pitiful
enough little trick she turned to make it, though an honest one. And--in
the face of disapproval--a rather magnificent one too. For it gave to
Molly Brandeis that precious quality, self-confidence, out of which is
born success.




CHAPTER THREE

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.




CHAPTER FOUR

It was the week following this feat of fasting that two things happened
to Fanny Brandeis--two seemingly unimportant and childish things--that
were to affect the whole tenor of her life. It is pleasant to
predict thus. It gives a certain weight to a story and a sense of
inevitableness. It should insure, too, the readers's support to the
point, at least, where the prediction is fulfilled. Sometimes a careless
author loses sight altogether of his promise, and then the tricked
reader is likely to go on to the very final page, teased by the
expectation that that which was hinted at will be revealed.

Fanny Brandeis had a way of going to the public library on Saturday
afternoons (with a bag of very sticky peanut candy in her pocket, the
little sensualist!) and there, huddled in a chair, dreamily and almost
automatically munching peanut brittle, her cheeks growing redder and
redder in the close air of the ill-ventilated room, she would read,
and read, and read. There was no one to censor her reading, so she
read promiscuously, wading gloriously through trash and classic and
historical and hysterical alike, and finding something of interest in
them all.

She read the sprightly “Duchess” novels, where mad offers of marriage
were always made in flower-scented conservatories; she read Dickens, and
Thelma, and old bound Cosmopolitans, and Zola, and de Maupassant, and
the “Wide, Wide World,” and “Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates,”
 and “Jane Eyre.” All of which are merely mentioned as examples of her
catholicism in literature. As she read she was unaware of the giggling
boys and girls who came in noisily, and made dates, and were coldly
frowned on by the austere Miss Perkins, the librarian. She would read
until the fading light would remind her that the short fall or winter
day was drawing to a close.

She would come, shivering a little after the fetid atmosphere of
the overheated library, into the crisp, cold snap of the astringent
Wisconsin air. Sometimes she would stop at the store for her mother.
Sometimes she would run home alone through the twilight, her heels
scrunching the snow, her whole being filled with a vague and unchildish
sadness and disquiet as she faced the tender rose, and orange, and
mauve, and pale lemon of the winter sunset. There were times when her
very heart ached with the beauty of that color-flooded sky; there were
times, later, when it ached in much the same way at the look in the eyes
of a pushcart peddler; there were times when it ached, seemingly, for no
reason at all--as is sometimes the case when one is a little Jew girl,
with whole centuries of suffering behind one.

On this day she had taken a book from the library Miss Perkins, at sight
of the title, had glared disapprovingly, and had hesitated a moment
before stamping the card.

“Is this for yourself?” she had asked.

“Yes'm.”

“It isn't a book for little girls,” snapped Miss Perkins.

“I've read half of it already,” Fanny informed her sweetly. And went out
with it under her arm. It was Zola's “The Ladies' Paradise” (Au Bonheur
des Dames). The story of the shop girl, and the crushing of the little
dealer by the great and moneyed company had thrilled and fascinated her.

Her mind was full of it as she turned the corner on Norris Street and
ran full-tilt, into a yowling, taunting, torturing little pack of boys.
They were gathered in close formation about some object which they were
teasing, and knocking about in the mud, and otherwise abusing with the
savagery of their years. Fanny, the fiery, stopped short. She pushed
into the ring. The object of their efforts was a weak-kneed and
hollow-chested little boy who could not fight because he was cowardly
as well as weak, and his name (oh, pity!) was Clarence--Clarence Heyl.
There are few things that a mischievous group of small boys cannot
do with a name like Clarence. They whined it, they catcalled it,
they shrieked it in falsetto imitation of Clarence's mother. He was a
wide-mouthed, sallow and pindling little boy, whose pipe-stemmed legs
looked all the thinner for being contrasted with his feet, which were
long and narrow. At that time he wore spectacles, too, to correct a
muscular weakness, so that his one good feature--great soft, liquid
eyes--passed unnoticed. He was the kind of little boy whose mother
insists on dressing him in cloth-top, buttoned, patent-leather shoes for
school. His blue serge suit was never patched or shiny. His stockings
were virgin at the knee. He wore an overcoat on cool autumn days. Fanny
despised and pitied him. We ask you not to, because in this puny, shy
and ugly little boy of fifteen you behold Our Hero.

He staggered to his feet now, as Fanny came up. His school reefer was
mud-bespattered. His stockings were torn. His cap was gone and his hair
was wild. There was a cut or scratch on one cheek, from which the blood
flowed.

“I'll tell my mother on you!” he screamed impotently, and shook with
rage and terror. “You'll see, you will! You let me alone, now!”

Fanny felt a sick sensation at the pit of her stomach and in her throat.
Then:

“He'll tell his ma!” sneered the boys in chorus. “Oh, mamma!” And called
him the Name. And at that a she wildcat broke loose among them. She
pounced on them without warning, a little fury of blazing eyes and
flying hair, and white teeth showing in a snarl. If she had fought
fair, or if she had not taken them so by surprise, she would have been
powerless among them. But she had sprung at them with the suddenness
of rage. She kicked, and scratched, and bit, and clawed and spat. She
seemed not to feel the defensive blows that were showered upon her in
turn. Her own hard little fists were now doubled for a thump or opened,
like a claw, for scratching.

“Go on home!” she yelled to Clarence, even while she fought. And
Clarence, gathering up his tattered school books, went, and stood not on
the order of his going. Whereupon Fanny darted nimbly to one side, out
of the way of boyish brown fists. In that moment she was transformed
from a raging fury into a very meek and trembling little girl, who
looked shyly and pleadingly out from a tangle of curls. The boys were
for rushing at her again.

“Cowardy-cats! Five of you fighting one girl,” cried Fanny, her lower
lip trembling ever so little. “Come on! Hit me! Afraid to fight anything
but girls! Cowardy-cats!” A tear, pearly, pathetic, coursed down her
cheek.

The drive was broken. Five sullen little boys stood and glared at her,
impotently.

“You hit us first,” declared one boy. “What business d' you have
scratching around like that, I'd like to know! You old scratch cat!”

“He's sickly,” said Fanny. “He can't fight. There's something the matter
with his lungs, or something, and they're going to make him quit school.
Besides, he's a billion times better than any of you, anyway.”

At once, “Fanny's stuck on Clar-ence! Fanny's stuck on Clar-ence!”

Fanny picked up her somewhat battered Zola from where it had flown at
her first onslaught. “It's a lie!” she shouted. And fled, followed by
the hateful chant.

She came in at the back door, trying to look casual. But Mattie's keen
eye detected the marks of battle, even while her knife turned the frying
potatoes.

“Fanny Brandeis! Look at your sweater! And your hair!”

Fanny glanced down at the torn pocket dangling untidily. “Oh, that!” she
said airily. And, passing the kitchen table, deftly filched a slice of
cold veal from the platter, and mounted the back stairs to her room. It
was a hungry business, this fighting. When Mrs. Brandeis came in at six
her small daughter was demurely reading. At supper time Mrs. Brandeis
looked up at her daughter with a sharp exclamation.

“Fanny! There's a scratch on your cheek from your eye to your chin.”

Fanny put up her hand. “Is there?”

“Why, you must have felt it. How did you get it?”

Fanny said nothing. “I'll bet she was fighting,” said Theodore with the
intuitive knowledge that one child has of another's ways.

“Fanny!” The keen brown eyes were upon her. “Some boys were picking on
Clarence Heyl, and it made me mad. They called him names.”

“What names?”

“Oh, names.”

“Fanny dear, if you're going to fight every time you hear that name----”

Fanny thought of the torn sweater, the battered Zola, the scratched
cheek. “It is pretty expensive,” she said reflectively.

After supper she settled down at once to her book. Theodore would labor
over his algebra after the dining-room table was cleared. He stuck his
cap on his head now, and slammed out of the door for a half-hour's play
under the corner arc-light. Fanny rarely brought books from school, and
yet she seemed to get on rather brilliantly, especially in the studies
she liked. During that winter following her husband's death Mrs.
Brandeis had a way of playing solitaire after supper; one of the
simpler forms of the game. It seemed to help her to think out the day's
problems, and to soothe her at the same time. She would turn down the
front of the writing desk, and draw up the piano stool.

All through that winter Fanny seemed to remember reading to the
slap-slap of cards, and the whir of their shuffling. In after years she
was never able to pick up a volume of Dickens without having her mind
hark back to those long, quiet evenings. She read a great deal of
Dickens at that time. She had a fine contempt for his sentiment, and his
great ladies bored her. She did not know that this was because they were
badly drawn. The humor she loved, and she read and reread the passages
dealing with Samuel Weller, and Mr. Micawber, and Sairey Gamp, and Fanny
Squeers. It was rather trying to read Dickens before supper, she had
discovered. Pickwick Papers was fatal, she had found. It sent one to the
pantry in a sort of trance, to ransack for food--cookies, apples, cold
meat, anything. But whatever one found, it always fell short of the
succulent sounding beefsteak pies, and saddles of mutton, and hot
pineapple toddy of the printed page.

To-night Mrs. Brandeis, coming in from the kitchen after a conference
with Mattie, found her daughter in conversational mood, though book in
hand.

“Mother, did you ever read this?” She held up “The Ladies' Paradise.”

“Yes; but child alive, what ever made you get it? That isn't the kind of
thing for you to read. Oh, I wish I had more time to give----”

Fanny leaned forward eagerly. “It made me think a lot of you. You
know--the way the big store was crushing the little one, and everything.
Like the thing you were talking to that man about the other day. You
said it was killing the small-town dealer, and he said some day it would
be illegal, and you said you'd never live to see it.”

“Oh, that! We were talking about the mail-order business, and how hard
it was to compete with it, when the farmers bought everything from a
catalogue, and had whole boxes of household goods expressed to them. I
didn't know you were listening, Fanchen.”

“I was. I almost always do when you and some traveling man or somebody
like that are talking. It--it's interesting.”

Fanny went back to her book then. But Molly Brandeis sat a moment,
eyeing her queer little daughter thoughtfully. Then she sighed, and laid
out her cards for solitaire. By eight o'clock she was usually so sleepy
that she would fall, dead-tired, asleep on the worn leather couch in the
sitting-room. She must have been fearfully exhausted, mind and body. The
house would be very quiet, except for Mattie, perhaps, moving about in
the kitchen or in her corner room upstairs. Sometimes the weary woman
on the couch would start suddenly from her sleep and cry out, choked
and gasping, “No! No! No!” The children would jump, terrified, and come
running to her at first, but later they got used to it, and only looked
up to say, when she asked them, bewildered, what it was that wakened
her, “You had the no-no-nos.”

She had never told of the thing that made her start out of her sleep and
cry out like that. Perhaps it was just the protest of the exhausted
body and the overwrought nerves. Usually, after that, she would sit
up, haggardly, and take the hairpins out of her short thick hair, and
announce her intention of going to bed. She always insisted that the
children go too, though they often won an extra half hour by protesting
and teasing. It was a good thing for them, these nine o'clock bed hours,
for it gave them the tonic sleep that their young, high-strung natures
demanded.

“Come, children,” she would say, yawning.

“Oh, mother, please just let me finish this chapter!”

“How much?”

“Just this little bit. See? Just this.”

“Well, just that, then,” for Mrs. Brandeis was a reasonable woman, and
she had the book-lover's knowledge of the fascination of the unfinished
chapter.

Fanny and Theodore were not always honest about the bargain. They would
gallop, hot-cheeked, through the allotted chapter. Mrs. Brandeis would
have fallen into a doze, perhaps. And the two conspirators would read
on, turning the leaves softly and swiftly, gulping the pages, cramming
them down in an orgy of mental bolting, like naughty children stuffing
cake when their mother's back is turned. But the very concentration of
their dread of waking her often brought about the feared result. Mrs.
Brandeis would start up rather wildly, look about her, and see the two
buried, red-cheeked and eager, in their books.

“Fanny! Theodore! Come now! Not another minute!”

Fanny, shameless little glutton, would try it again. “Just to the end of
this chapter! Just this weenty bit!”

“Fiddlesticks! You've read four chapters since I spoke to you the last
time. Come now!”

Molly Brandeis would see to the doors, and the windows, and the clock,
and then, waiting for the weary little figures to climb the stairs,
would turn out the light, and, hairpins in one hand, corset in the
other, perhaps, mount to bed.

By nine o'clock the little household would be sleeping, the children
sweetly and dreamlessly, the tired woman restlessly and fitfully, her
overwrought brain still surging with the day's problems. It was not like
a household at rest, somehow. It was like a spirited thing standing,
quivering for a moment, its nerves tense, its muscles twitching.

Perhaps you have quite forgotten that here were to be retailed two
epochal events in Fanny Brandeis's life. If you have remembered, you
will have guessed that the one was the reading of that book of social
protest, though its writer has fallen into disfavor in these fickle
days. The other was the wild and unladylike street brawl in which she
took part so that a terrified and tortured little boy might escape his
tormentors.




CHAPTER FIVE

There was no hard stock in Brandeis' Bazaar now. The packing-room was
always littered with straw and excelsior dug from hogsheads and great
crates. Aloysius lorded it over a small red-headed satellite who
disappeared inside barrels and dived head first into huge boxes,
coming up again with a lamp, or a doll, or a piece of glassware, like
a magician. Fanny, perched on an overturned box, used to watch him,
fascinated, while he laboriously completed a water set, or a tea set.
A preliminary dive would bring up the first of a half dozen related
pieces, each swathed in tissue paper. A deft twist on the part of
the attendant Aloysius would strip the paper wrappings and disclose
a ruby-tinted tumbler, perhaps. Another dive, and another, until six
gleaming glasses stood revealed, like chicks without a hen mother. A
final dip, much scratching and burrowing, during which armfuls of hay
and excelsior were thrown out, and then the red-headed genie of the
barrel would emerge, flushed and triumphant, with the water pitcher
itself, thus completing the happy family.

Aloysius, meanwhile, would regale her with one of those choice bits of
gossip he had always about him, like a jewel concealed, and only to be
brought out for the appreciative. Mrs. Brandeis disapproved of store
gossip, and frowned on Sadie and Pearl whenever she found them, their
heads close together, their stifled shrieks testifying to his wit. There
were times when Molly Brandeis herself could not resist the spell of his
tongue. No one knew where Aloysius got his information. He had news that
Winnebago's two daily papers never could get, and wouldn't have dared to
print if they had.

“Did you hear about Myrtle Krieger,” he would begin, “that's marryin'
the Hempel boy next month? The one in the bank. She's exhibiting her
trewsow at the Outagamie County Fair this week, for the handwork and
embroid'ry prize. Ain't it brazen? They say the crowd's so thick around
the table that they had to take down the more pers'nal pieces. The first
day of the fair the grand-stand was, you might say, empty, even when
they was pullin' off the trottin' races and the balloon ascension. It's
funny--ain't it?--how them garmints that you wouldn't turn for a second
look at on the clothesline or in a store winda' becomes kind of wicked
and interestin' the minute they get what they call the human note. There
it lays, that virgin lawnjerie, for all the county to look at, with pink
ribbons run through everything, and the poor Krieger girl never dreamin'
she's doin' somethin' indelicate. She says yesterday if she wins the
prize she's going to put it toward one of these kitchen cabinets.”

I wish we could stop a while with Aloysius. He is well worth it.
Aloysius, who looked a pass between Ichabod Crane and Smike; Aloysius,
with his bit of scandal burnished with wit; who, after a long, hard
Saturday, would go home to scrub the floor of the dingy lodgings where
he lived with his invalid mother, and who rose in the cold dawn of
Sunday morning to go to early mass, so that he might return to cook the
dinner and wait upon the sick woman. Aloysius, whose trousers flapped
grotesquely about his bony legs, and whose thin red wrists hung
awkwardly from his too-short sleeves, had in him that tender, faithful
and courageous stuff of which unsung heroes are made. And he adored his
clever, resourceful boss to the point of imitation. You should have seen
him trying to sell a sled or a doll's go-cart in her best style. But we
cannot stop for Aloysius. He is irrelevant, and irrelevant matter halts
the progress of a story. Any one, from Barrie to Harold Bell Wright,
will tell you that a story, to be successful, must march.

We'll keep step, then, with Molly Brandeis until she drops out of the
ranks. There is no detouring with Mrs. Brandeis for a leader. She is the
sort that, once her face is set toward her goal, looks neither to right
nor left until she has reached it.

When Fanny Brandeis was fourteen, and Theodore was not quite sixteen,
a tremendous thing happened. Schabelitz, the famous violinist, came to
Winnebago to give a concert under the auspices of the Young Men's Sunday
Evening Club.

The Young Men's Sunday Evening Club of the Congregational Church prided
itself (and justifiably) on what the papers called its “auspices.” It
scorned to present to Winnebago the usual lyceum attractions--Swiss bell
ringers, negro glee clubs, and Family Fours. Instead, Schumann-Heink
sang her lieder for them; McCutcheon talked and cartooned for them;
Madame Bloomfield-Zeisler played. Winnebago was one of those wealthy
little Mid-Western towns whose people appreciate the best and set out to
acquire it for themselves.

To the Easterner, Winnebago, and Oshkosh, and Kalamazoo, and Emporia are
names invented to get a laugh from a vaudeville audience. Yet it is the
people from Winnebago and Emporia and the like whom you meet in Egypt,
and the Catalina Islands, and at Honolulu, and St. Moritz. It is in the
Winnebago living-room that you are likely to find a prayer rug got in
Persia, a bit of gorgeous glaze from China, a scarf from some temple in
India, and on it a book, hand-tooled and rare. The Winnebagoans seem to
know what is being served and worn, from salad to veilings, surprisingly
soon after New York has informed itself on those subjects. The
7:52 Northwestern morning train out of Winnebago was always pretty
comfortably crowded with shoppers who were taking a five-hour run down
to Chicago to get a hat and see the new musical show at the Illinois.

So Schabelitz's coming was an event, but not an unprecedented one.
Except to Theodore. Theodore had a ticket for the concert (his mother
had seen to that), and he talked of nothing else. He was going with his
violin teacher, Emil Bauer. There were strange stories as to why Emil
Bauer, with his gift of teaching, should choose to bury himself in this
obscure little Wisconsin town. It was known that he had acquaintance
with the great and famous of the musical world. The East End set fawned
upon him, and his studio suppers were the exclusive social events in
Winnebago.

Schabelitz was to play in the evening. At half past three that afternoon
there entered Brandeis' Bazaar a white-faced, wide-eyed boy who was
Theodore Brandeis; a plump, voluble, and excited person who was Emil
Bauer; and a short, stocky man who looked rather like a foreign-born
artisan--plumber or steam-fitter--in his Sunday clothes. This was Levine
Schabelitz.

Molly Brandeis was selling a wash boiler to a fussy housewife who, in
her anxiety to assure herself of the flawlessness of her purchase, had
done everything but climb inside it. It had early been instilled in the
minds of Mrs. Brandeis's children that she was never to be approached
when busy with a customer. There were times when they rushed into the
store bursting with news or plans, but they had learned to control
their eagerness. This, though, was no ordinary news that had blanched
Theodore's face. At sight of the three, Mrs. Brandeis quietly turned
her boiler purchaser over to Pearl and came forward from the rear of the
store.

“Oh, Mother!” cried Theodore, an hysterical note in his voice. “Oh,
Mother!”

And in that moment Molly Brandeis knew. Emil Bauer introduced them,
floridly. Molly Brandeis held out her hand, and her keen brown eyes
looked straight and long into the gifted Russian's pale blue ones.
According to all rules he should have started a dramatic speech,
beginning with “Madame!” hand on heart. But Schabelitz the great had
sprung from Schabelitz the peasant boy, and in the process he had
managed, somehow, to retain the simplicity which was his charm. Still,
there was something queer and foreign in the way he bent over Mrs.
Brandeis's hand. We do not bow like that in Winnebago.

“Mrs. Brandeis, I am honored to meet you.”

“And I to meet you,” replied the shopkeeper in the black sateen apron.

“I have just had the pleasure of hearing your son play,” began
Schabelitz.

“Mr. Bauer called me out of my economics class at school, Mother, and
said that----”

“Theodore!” Theodore subsided. “He is only a boy,” went on Schabelitz,
and put one hand on Theodore's shoulder. “A very gifted boy. I hear
hundreds. Oh, how I suffer, sometimes, to listen to their devilish
scraping! To-day, my friend Bauer met me with that old plea, `You must
hear this pupil play. He has genius.' `Bah! Genius!' I said, and I swore
at him a little, for he is my friend, Bauer. But I went with him to his
studio--Bauer, that is a remarkably fine place you have there, above
that drug store; a room of exceptional proportions. And those rugs, let
me tell you----”

“Never mind the rugs, Schabelitz. Mrs. Brandeis here----”

“Oh, yes, yes! Well, dear lady, this boy of yours will be a great
violinist if he is willing to work, and work, and work. He has what you
in America call the spark. To make it a flame he must work, always work.
You must send him to Dresden, under Auer.”

“Dresden!” echoed Molly Brandeis faintly, and put one hand on the table
that held the fancy cups and saucers, and they jingled a little.

“A year, perhaps, first, in New York with Wolfsohn.”

Wolfsohn! New York! Dresden! It was too much even for Molly Brandeis'
well-balanced brain. She was conscious of feeling a little dizzy. At
that moment Pearl approached apologetically. “Pardon me, Mis' Brandeis,
but Mrs. Trost wants to know if you'll send the boiler special this
afternoon. She wants it for the washing early to-morrow morning.”

That served to steady her.

“Tell Mrs. Trost I'll send it before six to-night.” Her eyes rested on
Theodore's face, flushed now, and glowing. Then she turned and faced
Schabelitz squarely. “Perhaps you do not know that this store is our
support. I earn a living here for myself and my two children. You see
what it is--just a novelty and notion store in a country town. I speak
of this because it is the important thing. I have known for a long
time that Theodore's playing was not the playing of the average boy,
musically gifted. So what you tell me does not altogether surprise me.
But when you say Dresden--well, from Brandeis' Bazaar in Winnebago,
Wisconsin, to Auer, in Dresden, Germany, is a long journey for one
afternoon.”

“But of course you must have time to think it over. It must be brought
about, somehow.”

“Somehow----” Mrs. Brandeis stared straight ahead, and you could almost
hear that indomitable will of hers working, crashing over obstacles,
plowing through difficulties. Theodore watched her, breathless, as
though expecting an immediate solution. His mother's eyes met his own
intent ones, and at that her mobile mouth quirked in a sudden smile.
“You look as if you expected pearls to pop out of my mouth, son. And,
by the way, if you're going to a concert this evening don't you think
it would be a good idea to squander an hour on study this afternoon? You
may be a musical prodigy, but geometry's geometry.”

“Oh, Mother! Please!”

“I want to talk to Mr. Schabelitz and Mr. Bauer, alone.” She patted his
shoulder, and the last pat ended in a gentle push. “Run along.”

“I'll work, Mother. You know perfectly well I'll work.” But he looked
so startlingly like his father as he said it that Mrs. Brandeis felt a
clutching at her heart.

Theodore out of the way, they seemed to find very little to discuss,
after all. Schabelitz was so quietly certain, Bauer so triumphantly
proud.

Said Schabelitz, “Wolfsohn, of course, receives ten dollars a lesson
ordinarily.”

“Ten dollars!”

“But a pupil like Theodore is in the nature of an investment,” Bauer
hastened to explain. “An advertisement. After hearing him play, and
after what Schabelitz here will have to say for him, Wolfsohn will
certainly give Theodore lessons for nothing, or next to nothing. You
remember”--proudly--“I offered to teach him without charge, but you
would not have it.”

Schabelitz smote his friend sharply on the shoulder “The true musician!
Oh, Bauer, Bauer! That you should bury yourself in this----”

But Bauer stopped him with a gesture. “Mrs. Brandeis is a busy woman.
And as she says, this thing needs thinking over.”

“After all,” said Mrs. Brandeis, “there isn't much to think about. I
know just where I stand. It's a case of mathematics, that's all. This
business of mine is just beginning to pay. From now on I shall be able
to save something every year. It might be enough to cover his musical
education. It would mean that Fanny--my daughter--and I would have to
give up everything. For myself, I should be only too happy, too proud.
But it doesn't seem fair to her. After all, a girl----”

“It isn't fair,” broke in Schabelitz. “It isn't fair. But that is the
way of genius. It never is fair. It takes, and takes, and takes. I know.
My mother could tell you, if she were alive. She sold the little farm,
and my sisters gave up their dowries, and with them their hopes of
marriage, and they lived on bread and cabbage. That was not to pay for
my lessons. They never could have done that. It was only to send me to
Moscow. We were very poor. They must have starved. I have come to know,
since, that it was not worth it. That nothing could be worth it.”

“But it was worth it. Your mother would do it all over again, if she had
the chance. That's what we're for.”

Bauer pulled out his watch and uttered a horrified exclamation. “Himmel!
Four o'clock! And I have a pupil at four.” He turned hastily to Mrs.
Brandeis. “I am giving a little supper in my studio after the concert
to-night.”

“Oh, Gott!” groaned Schabelitz.

“It is in honor of Schabelitz here. You see how overcome he is. Will you
let me bring Theodore back with me after the concert? There will be some
music, and perhaps he will play for us.”

Schabelitz bent again in his queer little foreign bow. “And you, of
course, will honor us, Mrs. Brandeis.” He had never lived in Winnebago.

“Oh, certainly,” Bauer hastened to say. He had.

“I!” Molly Brandeis looked down at her apron, and stroked it with her
fingers. Then she looked up with a little smile that was not so pleasant
as her smile usually was. There had flashed across her quick mind a
picture of Mrs. G. Manville Smith. Mrs. G. Manville Smith, in an evening
gown whose decolletage was discussed from the Haley House to Gerretson's
department store next morning, was always a guest at Bauer's studio
affairs. “Thank you, but it is impossible. And Theodore is only a
schoolboy. Just now he needs, more than anything else in the world,
nine hours of sleep every night. There will be plenty of time for studio
suppers later. When a boy's voice is changing, and he doesn't know what
to do with his hands and feet, he is better off at home.”

“God! These mothers!” exclaimed Schabelitz. “What do they not know!”

“I suppose you are right.” Bauer was both rueful and relieved. It
would have been fine to show off Theodore as his pupil and Schabelitz's
protege. But Mrs. Brandeis? No, that would never do. “Well, I must go.
We will talk about this again, Mrs. Brandeis. In two weeks Schabelitz
will pass through Winnebago again on his way back to Chicago. Meanwhile
he will write Wolfsohn. I also. So! Come, Schabelitz!”

He turned to see that gentleman strolling off in the direction of the
notion counter behind which his expert eye had caught a glimpse of Sadie
in her white shirtwaist and her trim skirt. Sadie always knew what they
were wearing on State Street, Chicago, half an hour after Mrs. Brandeis
returned from one of her buying trips. Shirtwaists had just come in, and
with them those neat leather belts with a buckle, and about the throat
they were wearing folds of white satin ribbon, smooth and high and
tight, the two ends tied pertly at the back. Sadie would never be the
saleswoman that Pearl was, but her unfailing good nature and her cheery
self-confidence made her an asset in the store. Besides, she was pretty.
Mrs. Brandeis knew the value of a pretty clerk.

At the approach of this stranger Sadie leaned coyly against the stocking
rack and patted her paper sleevelets that were secured at wrist and
elbow with elastic bands. Her method was sure death to traveling men.
She prepared now to try it on the world-famous virtuoso. The ease with
which she succeeded surprised even Sadie, accustomed though she was to
conquest.

“Come, come, Schabelitz!” said Bauer again. “I must get along.”

“Then go, my friend. Go along and make your preparations for that studio
supper. The only interesting woman in Winnebago--” he bowed to Mrs.
Brandeis--“will not be there. I know them, these small-town society
women, with their imitation city ways. And bony! Always! I am enjoying
myself. I shall stay here.”

And he did stay. Sadie, talking it over afterward with Pearl and
Aloysius, put it thus:

“They say he's the grandest violin player in the world. Not that I care
much for the violin, myself. Kind of squeaky, I always think. But it
just goes to show they're all alike. Ain't it the truth? I jollied him
just like I did Sam Bloom, of Ganz & Pick, Novelties, an hour before. He
laughed just where Sam did. And they both handed me a line of talk about
my hair and eyes, only Sam said I was a doll, and this Schabelitz, or
whatever his name is, said I was as alluring as a Lorelei. I guess he
thought he had me there, but I didn't go through the seventh reader for
nothing. `If you think I'm flattered,' I said to him, `you're mistaken.
She was the mess who used to sit out on a rock with her back hair down,
combing away and singing like mad, and keeping an eye out for sailors up
and down the river. If I had to work that hard to get some attention,'
I said, `I'd give up the struggle, and settle down with a cat and a
teakettle.' At that he just threw back his head and roared. And when
Mrs. Brandeis came up he said something about the wit of these American
women. `Work is a great sharpener of wit--and wits,' Mrs. Brandeis said
to him. `Pearl, did Aloysius send Eddie out with that boiler, special?'
And she didn't pay any more attention to him, or make any more fuss
over him, than she would to a traveler with a line of samples she wasn't
interested in. I guess that's why he had such a good time.”

Sadie was right. That was the reason. Fanny, coming into the store half
an hour later, saw this man who had swayed thousands with his music,
down on his hands and knees in the toy section at the rear of Brandeis'
Bazaar. He and Sadie and Aloysius were winding up toy bears, and clowns,
and engines, and carriages, and sending them madly racing across the
floor. Sometimes their careening career was threatened with disaster
in the form of a clump of brooms or a stack of galvanized pails. But
Schabelitz would scramble forward with a shout and rescue them just
before the crash came, and set them deftly off again in the opposite
direction.

“This I must have for my boy in New York.” He held up a miniature hook
and ladder. “And this windmill that whirls so busily. My Leo is seven,
and his head is full of engines, and motors, and things that run on
wheels. He cares no more for music, the little savage, than the son of a
bricklayer.”

“Who is that man?” Fanny whispered, staring at him.

“Levine Schabelitz.”

“Schabelitz! Not the--”

“Yes.”

“But he's playing on the floor like--like a little boy! And laughing!
Why, Mother, he's just like anybody else, only nicer.”

If Fanny had been more than fourteen her mother might have told her that
all really great people are like that, finding joy in simple things. I
think that is the secret of their genius--the child in them that keeps
their viewpoint fresh, and that makes us children again when we listen
to them. It is the Schabelitzes of this world who can shout over a toy
engine that would bore a Bauer to death.

Fanny stood looking at him thoughtfully. She knew all about him.
Theodore's talk of the past week had accomplished that. Fanny knew that
here was a man who did one thing better than any one else in the world.
She thrilled to that thought. She adored the quality in people that
caused them to excel. Schabelitz had got hold of a jack-in-the-box, and
each time the absurd head popped out, with its grin and its squawk, he
laughed like a boy. Fanny, standing behind the wrapping counter, and
leaning on it with her elbows the better to see this great man, smiled
too, as her flexible spirit and her mobile mind caught his mood. She did
not know she was smiling. Neither did she know why she suddenly frowned
in the intensity of her concentration, reached up for one of the pencils
on the desk next the wrapping counter, and bent over the topmost sheet
of yellow wrapping paper that lay spread out before her. Her tongue-tip
curled excitedly at one corner of her mouth. Her head was cocked to one
side.

She was rapidly sketching a crude and startling likeness of Levine
Schabelitz as he stood there with the ridiculous toy in his hand. It
was a trick she often amused herself with at school. She had drawn her
school-teacher one day as she had looked when gazing up into the eyes of
the visiting superintendent, who was a married man. Quite innocently
and unconsciously she had caught the adoring look in the eyes of Miss
McCook, the teacher, and that lady, happening upon the sketch later, had
dealt with Fanny in a manner seemingly unwarranted. In the same way it
was not only the exterior likeness of the man which she was catching
now--the pompadour that stood stiffly perpendicular like a brush; the
square, yellow peasant teeth; the strong, slender hands and wrists; the
stocky figure; the high cheek bones; the square-toed, foreign-looking
shoes and the trousers too wide at the instep to have been cut by an
American tailor. She caught and transmitted to paper, in some uncanny
way, the simplicity of the man who was grinning at the jack-in-the-box
that smirked back at him. Behind the veneer of poise and polish born of
success and adulation she had caught a glimpse of the Russian peasant
boy delighted with the crude toy in his hand. And she put it down
eagerly, wetting her pencil between her lips, shading here, erasing
there.

Mrs. Brandeis, bustling up to the desk for a customer's change, and with
a fancy dish to be wrapped, in her hand, glanced over Fanny's shoulder.
She leaned closer. “Why, Fanny, you witch!”

Fanny gave a little crow of delight and tossed her head in a way that
switched her short curls back from where they had fallen over her
shoulders. “It's like him, isn't it?”

“It looks more like him than he does himself.” With which Molly Brandeis
unconsciously defined the art of cartooning.

Fanny looked down at it, a smile curving her lips. Mrs. Brandeis, dish
in hand, counted her change expertly from the till below the desk, and
reached for the sheet of wrapping paper just beneath that on which Fanny
had made her drawing. At that moment Schabelitz, glancing up, saw her,
and came forward, smiling, the jack-in-the-box still in his hand.

“Dear lady, I hope I have not entirely disorganized your shop. I have
had a most glorious time. Would you believe it, this jack-in-the-box
looks exactly--but exactly--like my manager, Weber, when the box-office
receipts are good. He grins just--”

And then his eye fell on the drawing that Fanny was trying to cover with
one brown paw. “Hello! What's this?” Then he looked at Fanny. Then he
grasped her wrist in his fingers of steel and looked at the sketch that
grinned back at him impishly. “Well, I'm damned!” exploded Schabelitz in
amusement, and surprise, and appreciation. And did not apologize. “And
who is this young lady with the sense of humor?”

“This is my little girl, Fanny.”

He looked down at the rough sketch again, with its clean-cut satire, and
up again at the little girl in the school coat and the faded red tam o'
shanter, who was looking at him shyly, and defiantly, and provokingly,
all at once.

“Your little girl Fanny, h'm? The one who is to give up everything that
the boy Theodore may become a great violinist.” He bent again over the
crude, effective cartoon, then put a forefinger gently under the child's
chin and tipped her glowing face up to the light. “I am not so sure now
that it will work. As for its being fair! Why, no! No!”

Fanny waited for her mother that evening, and they walked home together.
Their step and swing were very much alike, now that Fanny's legs were
growing longer. She was at the backfisch age.

“What did he mean, Mother, when he said that about Theodore being a
great violinist, and its not being fair? What isn't fair? And how did he
happen to be in the store, anyway? He bought a heap of toys, didn't he?
I suppose he's awfully rich.”

“To-night, when Theodore's at the concert, I'll tell you what he meant,
and all about it.”

“I'd love to hear him play, wouldn't you? I'd just love to.”

Over Molly Brandeis's face there came a curious look. “You could hear
him, Fanny, in Theodore's place. Theodore would have to stay home if I
told him to.”

Fanny's eyes and mouth grew round with horror. “Theodore stay home! Why
Mrs.--Molly--Brandeis!” Then she broke into a little relieved laugh.
“But you're just fooling, of course.”

“No, I'm not. If you really want to go I'll tell Theodore to give up his
ticket to his sister.”

“Well, my goodness! I guess I'm not a pig. I wouldn't have Theodore stay
home, not for a million dollars.”

“I knew you wouldn't,” said Molly Brandeis as they swung down Norris
Street. And she told Fanny briefly of what Schabelitz had said about
Theodore.

It was typical of Theodore that he ate his usual supper that night. He
may have got his excitement vicariously from Fanny. She was thrilled
enough for two. Her food lay almost untouched on her plate. She
chattered incessantly. When Theodore began to eat his second baked apple
with cream, her outraged feelings voiced their protest.

“But, Theodore, I don't see how you can!”

“Can what?”

“Eat like that. When you're going to hear him play. And after what he
said, and everything.”

“Well, is that any reason why I should starve to death?”

“But I don't see how you can,” repeated Fanny helplessly, and looked
at her mother. Mrs. Brandeis reached for the cream pitcher and poured
a little more cream over Theodore's baked apple. Even as she did it
her eyes met Fanny's, and in them was a certain sly amusement, a
little gleam of fun, a look that said, “Neither do I.” Fanny sat back,
satisfied. Here, at least, was some one who understood.

At half past seven Theodore, looking very brushed and sleek, went off to
meet Emil Bauer. Mrs. Brandeis had looked him over, and had said, “Your
nails!” and sent him back to the bathroom, and she had resisted the
desire to kiss him because Theodore disliked demonstration. “He hated to
be pawed over,” was the way he put it. After he had gone, Mrs. Brandeis
went into the dining-room where Fanny was sitting. Mattie had cleared
the table, and Fanny was busy over a book and a tablet, by the light
of the lamp that they always used for studying. It was one of the rare
occasions when she had brought home a school lesson. It was arithmetic,
and Fanny loathed arithmetic. She had no head for mathematics. The set
of problems were eighth-grade horrors, in which A is digging a well 20
feet deep and 9 feet wide; or in which A and B are papering two rooms,
or building two fences, or plastering a wall. If A does his room in 9
1/2 days, the room being 12 feet high, 20 feet long, and 15 1/2 feet
wide, how long will it take B to do a room 14 feet high, 11 3/4 feet,
etc.

Fanny hated the indefatigable A and B with a bitter personal hatred.
And as for that occasional person named C, who complicated matters still
more--!

Sometimes Mrs. Brandeis helped to disentangle Fanny from the mazes of
her wall paper problems, or dragged her up from the bottom of the well
when it seemed that she was down there for eternity unless a friendly
hand rescued her. As a rule she insisted that Fanny crack her own
mathematical nuts. She said it was good mental training, not to speak
of the moral side of it. But to-night she bent her quick mind upon the
problems that were puzzling her little daughter, and cleared them up in
no time.

When Fanny had folded her arithmetic papers neatly inside her book and
leaned back with a relieved sigh Molly Brandeis bent forward in the
lamplight and began to talk very soberly. Fanny, red-cheeked and
bright-eyed from her recent mental struggles, listened interestedly,
then intently, then absorbedly. She attempted to interrupt, sometimes,
with an occasional, “But, Mother, how--” but Mrs. Brandeis shook her
head and went on. She told Fanny a few things about her early married
life--things that made Fanny look at her with new eyes. She had always
thought of her mother as her mother, in the way a fourteen-year-old
girl does. It never occurred to her that this mother person, who was
so capable, so confident, so worldly-wise, had once been a very young
bride, with her life before her, and her hopes stepping high, and her
love keeping time with her hopes. Fanny heard, fascinated, the story
of this girl who had married against the advice of her family and her
friends.

Molly Brandeis talked curtly and briefly, and her very brevity and lack
of embroidering details made the story stand out with stark realism. It
was such a story of courage, and pride, and indomitable will, and sheer
pluck as can only be found among the seemingly commonplace.

“And so,” she finished, “I used to wonder, sometimes, whether it
was worth while to keep on, and what it was all for. And now I know.
Theodore is going to make up for everything. Only we'll have to help
him, first. It's going to be hard on you, Fanchen. I'm talking to you as
if you were eighteen, instead of fourteen. But I want you to understand.
That isn't fair to you either--my expecting you to understand. Only I
don't want you to hate me too much when you're a woman, and I'm gone,
and you'll remember--”

“Why, Mother, what in the world are you talking about? Hate you!”

“For what I took from you to give to him, Fanny. You don't understand
now. Things must be made easy for Theodore. It will mean that you and
I will have to scrimp and save. Not now and then, but all the time.
It will mean that we can't go to the theater, even occasionally, or to
lectures, or concerts. It will mean that your clothes won't be as pretty
or as new as the other girls' clothes. You'll sit on the front porch
evenings, and watch them go by, and you'll want to go too.”

“As if I cared.”

“But you will care. I know. I know. It's easy enough to talk about
sacrifice in a burst of feeling; but it's the everyday, shriveling grind
that's hard. You'll want clothes, and books, and beaux, and education,
and you ought to have them. They're your right. You ought to have them!”
 Suddenly Molly Brandeis' arms were folded on the table, and her head
came down on her arms and she was crying, quietly, horribly, as a man
cries. Fanny stared at her a moment in unbelief. She had not seen her
mother cry since the day of Ferdinand Brandeis' death. She scrambled
out of her chair and thrust her head down next her mother's, so that her
hot, smooth cheek touched the wet, cold one. “Mother, don't! Don't Molly
dearie. I can't bear it. I'm going to cry too. Do you think I care for
old dresses and things? I should say not. It's going to be fun going
without things. It'll be like having a secret or something. Now stop,
and let's talk about it.”

Molly Brandeis wiped her eyes, and sat up, and smiled. It was a watery
and wavering smile, but it showed that she was mistress of herself
again.

“No,” she said, “we just won't talk about it any more. I'm tired, that's
what's the matter with me, and I haven't sense enough to know it. I'll
tell you what. I'm going to put on my kimono, and you'll make some
fudge. Will you? We'll have a party, all by ourselves, and if Mattie
scolds about the milk to-morrow you just tell her I said you could. And
I think there are some walnut meats in the third cocoa can on the shelf
in the pantry. Use 'em all.”




CHAPTER SIX

Theodore came home at twelve o'clock that night. He had gone to Bauer's
studio party after all. It was the first time he had deliberately
disobeyed his mother in a really big thing. Mrs. Brandeis and Fanny had
nibbled fudge all evening (it had turned out deliciously velvety) and
had gone to bed at their usual time. At half past ten Mrs. Brandeis had
wakened with the instinctive feeling that Theodore was not in the house.
She lay there, wide awake, staring into the darkness until eleven. Then
she got up and went into his room, though she knew he was not there.
She was not worried as to his whereabouts or his well-being. That same
instinctive feeling told her where he was. She was very angry, and a
little terrified at the significance of his act. She went back to bed
again, and she felt the blood pounding in her head. Molly Brandeis had a
temper, and it was surging now, and beating against the barriers of her
self-control.

She told herself, as she lay there, that she must deal with him coolly
and firmly, though she wanted to spank him. The time for spankings was
past. Some one was coming down the street with a quick, light step. She
sat up in bed, listening. The steps passed the house, went on. A half
hour passed. Some one turned the corner, whistling blithely. But, no, he
would not be whistling, she told herself. He would sneak in, quietly. It
was a little after twelve when she heard the front door open (Winnebago
rarely locked its doors). She was surprised to feel her heart beating
rapidly. He was trying to be quiet, and was making a great deal of
noise about it. His shoes and the squeaky fifth stair alone would have
convicted him. The imp of perversity in Molly Brandeis made her smile,
angry as she was, at the thought of how furious he must be at that
stair.

“Theodore!” she called quietly, just as he was tip-toeing past her room.

“Yeh.”

“Come in here. And turn on the light.”

He switched on the light and stood there in the doorway. Molly Brandeis,
sitting up in bed in the chilly room, with her covers about her, was
conscious of a little sick feeling, not at what he had done, but that
a son of hers should ever wear the sullen, defiant, hang-dog look that
disfigured Theodore's face now.

“Bauer's?”

A pause. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“I just stopped in there for a minute after the concert. I didn't mean
to stay. And then Bauer introduced me around to everybody. And then they
asked me to play, and--”

“And you played badly.”

“Well, I didn't have my own violin.”

“No football game Saturday. And no pocket money this week. Go to bed.”

He went, breathing hard, and muttering a little under his breath. At
breakfast next morning Fanny plied him with questions and was furious at
his cool uncommunicativeness.

“Was it wonderful, Theodore? Did he play--oh--like an angel?”

“Played all right. Except the `Swan' thing. Maybe he thought it was too
easy, or something, but I thought he murdered it. Pass the toast, unless
you want it all.”


It was not until the following autumn that Theodore went to New York.
The thing that had seemed so impossible was arranged. He was to live
in Brooklyn with a distant cousin of Ferdinand Brandeis, on a business
basis, and he was to come into New York three times a week for his
lessons. Mrs. Brandeis took him as far as Chicago, treated him to an
extravagant dinner, put him on the train and with difficulty stifled the
impulse to tell all the other passengers in the car to look after her
Theodore. He looked incredibly grown up and at ease in his new suit and
the hat that they had wisely bought in Chicago. She did not cry at all
(in the train), and she kissed him only twice, and no man can ask more
than that of any mother.

Molly Brandeis went back to Winnebago and the store with her shoulders a
little more consciously squared, her jaw a little more firmly set. There
was something almost terrible about her concentrativeness. Together she
and Fanny began a life of self-denial of which only a woman could be
capable. They saved in ways that only a woman's mind could devise; petty
ways, that included cream and ice, and clothes, and candy. It was rather
fun at first. When that wore off it had become a habit. Mrs. Brandeis
made two resolutions regarding Fanny. One was that she should have at
least a high school education, and graduate. The other that she should
help in the business of the store as little as possible. To the first
Fanny acceded gladly. To the second she objected.

“But why? If you can work, why can't I? I could help you a lot on
Saturdays and at Christmas time, and after school.”

“I don't want you to,” Mrs. Brandeis had replied, almost fiercely. “I'm
giving my life to it. That's enough. I don't want you to know about
buying and selling. I don't want you to know a bill of lading from a
sales slip when you see it. I don't want you to know whether f. o. b. is
a wireless signal or a branch of the Masons.” At which Fanny grinned. No
one appreciated her mother's humor more than she.

“But I do know already. The other day when that fat man was selling you
those go-carts I heard him say. `F. o. b. Buffalo,' and I asked Aloysius
what it meant and he told me.”

It was inevitable that Fanny Brandeis should come to know these things,
for the little household revolved about the store on Elm Street. By the
time she was eighteen and had graduated from the Winnebago high school,
she knew so many things that the average girl of eighteen did not know,
and was ignorant of so many things that the average girl of eighteen did
know, that Winnebago was almost justified in thinking her queer. She
had had a joyous time at school, in spite of algebra and geometry and
physics. She took the part of the heroine in the senior class play given
at the Winnebago opera house, and at the last rehearsal electrified
those present by announcing that if Albert Finkbein (who played the
dashing Southern hero) didn't kiss her properly when the curtain went
down on the first act, just as he was going into battle, she'd rather he
didn't kiss her at all.

“He just makes it ridiculous,” she protested. “He sort of gives a peck
two inches from my nose, and then giggles. Everybody will laugh, and
it'll spoil everything.”

With the rather startled elocution teacher backing her she rehearsed the
bashful Albert in that kiss until she had achieved the effect of realism
that she thought the scene demanded. But when, on the school sleighing
parties and hay rides the boy next her slipped a wooden and uncertain
arm about her waist while they all were singing “Jingle Bells, Jingle
Bells,” and “Good Night Ladies,” and “Merrily We Roll Along,” she sat
up stiffly and unyieldingly until the arm, discouraged, withdrew to its
normal position. Which two instances are quoted as being of a piece with
what Winnebago termed her queerness.

Not that Fanny Brandeis went beauless through school. On the contrary,
she always had some one to carry her books, and to take her to the
school parties and home from the Friday night debating society meetings.
Her first love affair turned out disastrously. She was twelve, and she
chose as the object of her affections a bullet-headed boy named Simpson.
One morning, as the last bell rang and they were taking their seats,
Fanny passed his desk and gave his coarse and stubbly hair a tweak. It
was really a love tweak, and intended to be playful, but she probably
put more fervor into it than she knew. It brought the tears of pain
to his eyes, and he turned and called her the name at which she shrank
back, horrified. Her shock and unbelief must have been stamped on her
face, for the boy, still smarting, had snarled, “Ya-as, I mean it.”

It was strange how she remembered that incident years after she had
forgotten important happenings in her life. Clarence Heyl, whose very
existence you will have failed to remember, used to hover about her
uncertainly, always looking as if he would like to walk home with her,
but never summoning the courage to do it. They were graduated from the
grammar school together, and Clarence solemnly read a graduation essay
entitled “Where is the Horse?” Automobiles were just beginning to
flash plentifully up and down Elm Street. Clarence had always been
what Winnebago termed sickly, in spite of his mother's noodle soup, and
coddling. He was sent West, to Colorado, or to a ranch in Wyoming, Fanny
was not quite sure which, perhaps because she was not interested. He had
come over one afternoon to bid her good-by, and had dangled about the
front porch until she went into the house and shut the door.

When she was sixteen there was a blond German boy whose taciturnity
attracted her volubility and vivacity. She mistook his stolidness for
depth, and it was a long time before she realized that his silence
was not due to the weight of his thoughts but to the fact that he
had nothing to say. In her last year at high school she found herself
singled out for the attentions of Harmon Kent, who was the Beau Nash
of the Winnebago high school. His clothes were made by Schwartze, the
tailor, when all the other boys of his age got theirs at the spring and
fall sales of the Golden Eagle Clothing Store. It was always nip and
tuck between his semester standings and his track team and football
possibilities. The faculty refused to allow flunkers to take part in
athletics.

He was one of those boys who have definite charm, and manner, and poise
at seventeen, and who crib their exams off their cuffs. He was always at
the head of any social plans in the school, and at the dances he rushed
about wearing in his coat lapel a ribbon marked Floor Committee. The
teachers all knew he was a bluff, but his engaging manner carried
him through. When he went away to the state university he made Fanny
solemnly promise to write; to come down to Madison for the football
games; to be sure to remember about the Junior prom. He wrote once--a
badly spelled scrawl--and she answered. But he was the sort of person
who must be present to be felt. He could not project his personality.
When he came home for the Christmas holidays Fanny was helping in the
store. He dropped in one afternoon when she was selling whisky glasses
to Mike Hearn of the Farmers' Rest Hotel.

They did not write at all during the following semester, and when he
came back for the long summer vacation they met on the street one day
and exchanged a few rather forced pleasantries. It suddenly dawned on
Fanny that he was patronizing her much as the scion of an aristocratic
line banters the housemaid whom he meets on the stairs. She bit an
imaginary apron corner, and bobbed a curtsy right there on Elm Street,
in front of the Courier office and walked off, leaving him staring.
It was shortly after this that she began a queer line of reading for
a girl--lives of Disraeli, Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Mozart--distinguished
Jews who had found their religion a handicap.

The year of her graduation she did a thing for which Winnebago felt
itself justified in calling her different. Each member of the graduating
class was allowed to choose a theme for a thesis. Fanny Brandeis called
hers “A Piece of Paper.” On Winnebago's Fox River were located a number
of the largest and most important paper mills in the country. There were
mills in which paper was made of wood fiber, and others in which paper
was made of rags. You could smell the sulphur as soon as you crossed the
bridge that led to the Flats. Sometimes, when the wind was right, the
pungent odor of it spread all over the town. Strangers sniffed it and
made a wry face, but the natives liked it.

The mills themselves were great ugly brick buildings, their windows
festooned with dust webs. Some of them boasted high detached tower-like
structures where a secret acid process went on. In the early days the
mills had employed many workers, but newly invented machinery had come
to take the place of hand labor. The rag-rooms alone still employed
hundreds of girls who picked, sorted, dusted over the great suction
bins. The rooms in which they worked were gray with dust. They wore caps
over their hair to protect it from the motes that you could see spinning
and swirling in the watery sunlight that occasionally found its way
through the gray-filmed window panes. It never seemed to occur to them
that the dust cap so carefully pulled down about their heads did not
afford protection for their lungs. They were pale girls, the rag-room
girls, with a peculiarly gray-white pallor.

Fanny Brandeis had once been through the Winnebago Paper Company's mill
and she had watched, fascinated, while a pair of soiled and greasy old
blue overalls were dusted and cleaned, and put through this acid vat,
and that acid tub, growing whiter and more pulpy with each process until
it was fed into a great crushing roller that pressed the moisture out
of it, flattened it to the proper thinness and spewed it out at last,
miraculously, in the form of rolls of crisp, white paper. On the first
day of the Easter vacation Fanny Brandeis walked down to the office of
the Winnebago Paper Company's mill and applied at the superintendent's
office for a job. She got it. They were generally shorthanded in the
rag-room. When Mrs. Brandeis heard of it there followed one of the few
stormy scenes between mother and daughter.

“Why did you do it?” demanded Mrs. Brandeis.

“I had to, to get it right.”

“Oh, don't be silly. You could have visited the mill a dozen times.”

Fanny twisted the fingers of her left hand in the fingers of her right
as was her way when she was terribly in earnest, and rather excited.

“But I don't want to write about the paper business as a process.”

“Well, then, what do you want?”

“I want to write about the overalls on some railroad engineer, perhaps;
or the blue calico wrapper that belonged, maybe, to a scrub woman. And
how they came to be spotted, or faded, or torn, and finally all worn
out. And how the rag man got them, and the mill, and how the girls
sorted them. And the room in which they do it. And the bins. And the
machinery. Oh, it's the most fascinating, and--and sort of relentless
machinery. And the acid burns on the hands of the men at the vats. And
their shoes. And then the paper, so white. And the way we tear it up,
or crumple it, and throw it in the waste basket. Just a piece of paper,
don't you see what I mean? Just a piece of paper, and yet all that--”
 she stopped and frowned a little, and grew inarticulate, and gave it up
with a final, “Don't you see what I mean, Mother? Don't you see what I
mean?”

Molly Brandeis looked at her daughter in a startled way, like one who,
walking tranquilly along an accustomed path, finds himself confronting a
new and hitherto unsuspected vista, formed by a peculiar arrangement of
clouds, perhaps, or light, or foliage, or all three blended. “I see
what you mean,” she said. “But I wish you wouldn't do it. I--I wish you
didn't feel that you wanted to do it.”

“But how can I make it real if I don't?”

“You can't,” said Molly Brandeis. “That's just it. You can't, ever.”

Fanny got up before six every morning of that Easter vacation, and went
to the mill, lunch box in hand. She came home at night dead-tired. She
did not take the street car to and from the mill, as she might have,
because she said the other girls in the rag-room walked, some of them
from the very edge of town. Mrs. Brandeis said that she was carrying
things too far, but Fanny stuck it out for the two weeks, at the end
of which period she spent an entire Sunday in a hair-washing,
face-steaming, and manicuring bee. She wrote her paper from notes she
had taken, and turned it in at the office of the high school principal
with the feeling that it was not at all what she had meant it to be. A
week later Professor Henning called her into his office. The essay lay
on his desk.

“I've read your thesis,” he began, and stopped, and cleared his throat.
He was not an eloquent man. “Where did you get your information, Miss
Brandeis?”

“I got it at the mill.”

“From one of the employees?”

“Oh, no. I worked there, in the rag-room.”

Professor Henning gave a little startled exclamation that he turned
hastily into a cough. “I thought that perhaps the editor of the Courier
might like to see it--it being local. And interesting.”

He brought it down to the office of the little paper himself, and
promised to call for it again in an hour or two, when Lem Davis should
have read it. Lem Davis did read it, and snorted, and scuffled with his
feet in the drift of papers under his desk, which was a way he had when
enraged.

“Read it!” he echoed, at Professor Henning's question. “Read it! Yes, I
read it. And let me tell you it's socialism of the rankest kind, that's
what! It's anarchism, that's what! Who's this girl? Mrs. Brandeis's
daughter--of the Bazaar? Let me tell you I'd go over there and tell her
what I think of the way she's bringing up that girl--if she wasn't an
advertiser. `A Piece of Paper'! Hell!” And to show his contempt for what
he had read he wadded together a great mass of exchanges that littered
his desk and hurled them, a crumpled heap, to the floor, and then spat
tobacco juice upon them.

“I'm sorry,” said Professor Henning, and rose; but at the door he turned
and said something highly unprofessorial. “It's a darn fine piece
of writing.” And slammed the door. At supper that night he told Mrs.
Henning about it. Mrs. Henning was a practical woman, as the wife of a
small-town high school principal must needs be. “But don't you know,”
 she said, “that Roscoe Moore, who is president of the Outagamie Pulp
Mill and the Winnebago Paper Company, practically owns the Courier?”

Professor Henning passed a hand over his hair, ruefully, like a school
boy. “No, Martha, I didn't know. If I knew those things, dear, I suppose
we wouldn't be eating sausage for supper to-night.” There was a little
silence between them. Then he looked up. “Some day I'm going to brag
about having been that Brandeis girl's teacher.”

Fanny was in the store a great deal now. After she finished high school
they sent Mattie away and Fanny took over the housekeeping duties, but
it was not her milieu. Not that she didn't do it well. She put a perfect
fury of energy and care into the preparation of a pot roast. After she
had iced a cake she enhanced it with cunning arabesques of jelly. The
house shone as it never had, even under Mattie's honest regime. But
it was like hitching a high-power engine to a butter churn. There were
periods of maddening restlessness. At such times she would set
about cleaning the cellar, perhaps. It was a three-roomed cellar,
brick-floored, cool, and having about it that indefinable cellar smell
which is of mold, and coal, and potatoes, and onions, and kindling wood,
and dill pickles and ashes.

Other girls of Fanny's age, at such times, cleaned out their bureau
drawers and read forbidden novels. Fanny armed herself with the third
best broom, the dust-pan, and an old bushel basket. She swept up chips,
scraped up ashes, scoured the preserve shelves, washed the windows,
cleaned the vegetable bins, and got gritty, and scarlet-cheeked and
streaked with soot. It was a wonderful safety valve, that cellar. A pity
it was that the house had no attic.

Then there were long, lazy summer afternoons when there was nothing to
do but read. And dream. And watch the town go by to supper. I think that
is why our great men and women so often have sprung from small towns, or
villages. They have had time to dream in their adolescence. No cars
to catch, no matinees, no city streets, none of the teeming, empty,
energy-consuming occupations of the city child. Little that is
competitive, much that is unconsciously absorbed at the most
impressionable period, long evenings for reading, long afternoons in the
fields or woods. With the cloth laid, and the bread cut and covered with
a napkin, and the sauce in the glass bowl, and the cookies on a blue
plate, and the potatoes doing very, very slowly, and the kettle steaming
with a Peerybingle cheerfulness, Fanny would stroll out to the front
porch again to watch for the familiar figure to appear around the corner
of Norris Street. She would wear her blue-and-white checked gingham
apron deftly twisted over one hip, and tucked in, in deference to the
passers-by. And the town would go by--Hen Cody's drays, rattling and
thundering; the high school boys thudding down the road, dog-tired and
sweaty in their football suits, or their track pants and jersies, on
their way from the athletic field to the school shower baths; Mrs.
Mosher flying home, her skirts billowing behind her, after a protracted
afternoon at whist; little Ernie Trost with a napkin-covered peach
basket carefully balanced in his hand, waiting for the six-fifteen
interurban to round the corner near the switch, so that he could hand up
his father's supper; Rudie Mass, the butcher, with a moist little packet
of meat in his hand, and lurching ever so slightly, and looking about
defiantly. Oh, Fanny probably never realized how much she saw and
absorbed, sitting there on Brandeis' front porch, watching Winnebago go
by to supper.

At Christmas time she helped in the store, afternoons and evenings.
Then, one Christmas, Mrs. Brandeis was ill for three weeks with grippe.
They had to have a helper in the house. When Mrs. Brandeis was able to
come back to the store Sadie left to marry, not one of her traveling-men
victims, but a steady person, in the paper-hanging way, whose suit had
long been considered hopeless. After that Fanny took her place. She
developed a surprising knack at selling. Yet it was not so surprising,
perhaps, when one considered her teacher. She learned as only a woman
can learn who is brought into daily contact with the outside world.
It was not only contact: it was the relation of buyer and seller. She
learned to judge people because she had to. How else could one gauge
their tastes, temperaments, and pocketbooks? They passed in and out
of Brandeis' Bazaar, day after day, in an endless and varied
procession--traveling men, school children, housewives, farmers, worried
hostesses, newly married couples bent on house furnishing, business men.

She learned that it was the girls from the paper mills who bought
the expensive plates--the ones with the red roses and green leaves
hand-painted in great smears and costing two dollars and a half, while
the golf club crowd selected for a gift or prize one of the little white
plates with the faded-looking blue sprig pattern, costing thirty-nine
cents. One day, after she had spent endless time and patience over the
sale of a nondescript little plate to one of Winnebago's socially elect,
she stared wrathfully after the retreating back of the trying customer.

“Did you see that? I spent an hour with her. One hour! I showed her
everything from the imported Limoges bowls to the Sevres cups and
saucers, and all she bought was that miserable little bonbon dish with
the cornflower pattern. Cat!”

Mrs. Brandeis spoke from the depths of her wisdom.

“Fanny, I didn't miss much that went on during that hour, and I was
dying to come over and take her away from you, but I didn't because I
knew you needed the lesson, and I knew that that McNulty woman never
spends more than twenty-five cents, anyway. But I want to tell you now
that it isn't only a matter of plates. It's a matter of understanding
folks. When you've learned whom to show the expensive hand-painted
things to, and when to suggest quietly the little, vague things, with
what you call the faded look, why, you've learned just about all there
is to know of human nature. Don't expect it, at your age.”

Molly Brandeis had never lost her trick of chatting with customers, or
listening to them, whenever she had a moment's time. People used to drop
in, and perch themselves on one of the stools near the big glowing base
burner and talk to Mrs. Brandeis. It was incredible, the secrets they
revealed of business, and love and disgrace; of hopes and aspirations,
and troubles, and happiness. The farmer women used to fascinate Fanny
by their very drabness. Mrs. Brandeis had a long and loyal following
of these women. It was before the day when every farmhouse boasted an
automobile, a telephone, and a phonograph.

A worn and dreary lot, these farmer women, living a skimmed milk
existence, putting their youth, and health, and looks into the soil.
They used often to sit back near the stove in winter, or in a cool
corner near the front of the store in summer, and reveal, bit by bit,
the sordid, tragic details of their starved existence. Fanny was often
shocked when they told their age--twenty-five, twenty-eight, thirty,
but old and withered from drudgery, and child-bearing, and coarse,
unwholesome food. Ignorant women, and terribly lonely, with the dumb,
lack-luster eyes that bespeak monotony. When they smiled they showed
blue-white, glassily perfect false teeth that flashed incongruously in
the ruin of their wrinkled, sallow, weather-beaten faces. Mrs. Brandeis
would question them gently.

Children? Ten. Living? Four. Doctor? Never had one in the house. Why? He
didn't believe in them. No proper kitchen utensils, none of the
devices that lighten the deadeningly monotonous drudgery of housework.
Everything went to make his work easier--new harrows, plows, tractors,
wind mills, reapers, barns, silos. The story would come out, bit by
bit, as the woman sat there, a worn, unlovely figure, her
hands--toil-blackened, seamed, calloused, unlovelier than any woman's
hands were ever meant to be--lying in unaccustomed idleness in her lap.

Fanny learned, too, that the woman with the shawl, and with her money
tied in a corner of her handkerchief, was more likely to buy the
six-dollar doll, with the blue satin dress, and the real hair and
eye-lashes, while the Winnebago East End society woman haggled over the
forty-nine cent kind, which she dressed herself.

I think their loyalty to Mrs. Brandeis might be explained by her honesty
and her sympathy. She was so square with them. When Minnie Mahler, out
Centerville way, got married, she knew there would be no redundancy of
water sets, hanging lamps, or pickle dishes.

“I thought like I'd get her a chamber set,” Minnie's aunt would confide
to Mrs. Brandeis.

“Is this for Minnie Mahler, of Centerville?”

“Yes; she gets married Sunday.”

“I sold a chamber set for that wedding yesterday. And a set of dishes.
But I don't think she's got a parlor lamp. At least I haven't sold one.
Why don't you get her that? If she doesn't like it she can change it.
Now there's that blue one with the pink roses.”

And Minnie's aunt would end by buying the lamp.

Fanny learned that the mill girls liked the bright-colored and expensive
wares, and why; she learned that the woman with the “fascinator” (tragic
misnomer!) over her head wanted the finest sled for her boy. She learned
to keep her temper. She learned to suggest without seeming to suggest.
She learned to do surprisingly well all those things that her mother did
so surprisingly well--surprisingly because both the women secretly hated
the business of buying and selling. Once, on the Fourth of July, when
there was a stand outside the store laden with all sorts of fireworks,
Fanny came down to find Aloysius and the boy Eddie absent on other work,
and Mrs. Brandeis momentarily in charge. The sight sickened her, then
infuriated her.

“Come in,” she said, between her teeth. “That isn't your work.”

“Somebody had to be there. Pearl's at dinner. And Aloysius and Eddie
were--”

“Then leave it alone. We're not starving--yet. I won't have you selling
fireworks like that--on the street. I won't have it! I won't have it!”

The store was paying, now. Not magnificently, but well enough. Most of
the money went to Theodore, in Dresden. He was progressing, though not
so meteorically as Bauer and Schabelitz had predicted. But that sort
of thing took time, Mrs. Brandeis argued. Fanny often found her mother
looking at her these days with a questioning sadness in her eyes. Once
she suggested that Fanny join the class in drawing at the Winnebago
university--a small fresh-water college. Fanny did try it for a few
months, but the work was not what she wanted; they did fruit pictures
and vases, with a book, on a table; or a clump of very pink and very
white flowers. Fanny quit in disgust and boredom. Besides, they were
busy at the store, and needed her.

There came often to Winnebago a woman whom Fanny Brandeis admired
intensely. She was a traveling saleswoman, successful, magnetic, and
very much alive. Her name was Mrs. Emma McChesney, and between her and
Mrs. Brandeis there existed a warm friendship. She always took dinner
with Mrs. Brandeis and Fanny, and they made a special effort to give her
all those delectable home-cooked dishes denied her in her endless round
of hotels.

“Noodle soup!” she used to say, almost lyrically.

“With real hand-made, egg noodles! You don't know what it means. You
haven't been eating vermicelli soup all through Illinois and Wisconsin.”

“We've made a dessert, though, that--”

“Molly Brandeis, don't you dare to tell me what you've got for dessert.
I couldn't stand it. But, oh, suppose, SUPPOSE it's homemade strawberry
shortcake!”

Which it more than likely was.

Fanny Brandeis used to think that she would dress exactly as Mrs.
McChesney dressed, if she too were a successful business woman earning a
man-size salary. Mrs. McChesney was a blue serge sort of woman--and her
blue serge never was shiny in the back. Her collar, or jabot, or tie,
or cuffs, or whatever relieving bit of white she wore, was always of the
freshest and crispest. Her hats were apt to be small and full of what is
known as “line.” She usually would try to arrange her schedule so as to
spend a Sunday in Winnebago, and the three alert, humor-loving women,
grown wise and tolerant from much contact with human beings, would have
a delightful day together.

“Molly,” Mrs. McChesney would say, when they were comfortably settled
in the living-room, or on the front porch, “with your shrewdness,
and experience, and brains, you ought to be one of those five or ten
thousand a year buyers. You know how to sell goods and handle people.
And you know values. That's all there is to the whole game of business.
I don't advise you to go on the road. Heaven knows I wouldn't advise my
dearest enemy to do that, much less a friend. But you could do bigger
things, and get bigger results. You know most of the big wholesalers,
and retailers too. Why don't you speak to them about a department
position? Or let me nose around a bit for you.”

Molly Brandeis shook her head, though her expressive eyes were eager
and interested. “Don't you think I've thought of that, Emma? A thousand
times? But I'm--I'm afraid. There's too much at stake. Suppose I
couldn't succeed? There's Theodore. His whole future is dependent on me
for the next few years. And there's Fanny here. No, I guess I'm too old.
And I'm sure of the business here, small as it is.”

Emma McChesney glanced at the girl. “I'm thinking that Fanny has the
making of a pretty capable business woman herself.”

Fanny drew in her breath sharply, and her face sparkled into sudden
life, as always when she was tremendously interested.

“Do you know what I'd do if I were in Mother's place? I'd take a great,
big running jump for it and land! I'd take a chance. What is there for
her in this town? Nothing! She's been giving things up all her life, and
what has it brought her?”

“It has brought me a comfortable living, and the love of my two
children, and the respect of my townspeople.”

“Respect? Why shouldn't they respect you? You're the smartest woman in
Winnebago, and the hardest working.”

Emma McChesney frowned a little, in thought. “What do you two girls do
for recreation?”

“I'm afraid we have too little of that, Emma. I know Fanny has. I'm so
dog-tired at the end of the day. All I want is to take my hairpins out
and go to bed.”

“And Fanny?”

“Oh, I read. I'm free to pick my book friends, at least.”

“Now, just what do you mean by that, child? It sounds a little bitter.”

“I was thinking of what Chesterfield said in one of his Letters to His
Son. `Choose always to be in the society of those above you,' he wrote.
I guess he lived in Winnebago, Wisconsin. I'm a working woman, and a
Jew, and we haven't any money or social position. And unless she's a
Becky Sharp any small town girl with all those handicaps might as
well choose a certain constellation of stars in the sky to wear as a
breastpin, as try to choose the friends she really wants.”

From Molly Brandeis to Emma McChesney there flashed a look that said,
“You see?” And from Emma McChesney to Molly Brandeis another that said,
“Yes; and it's your fault.”

“Look here, Fanny, don't you see any boys--men?”

“No. There aren't any. Those who have any sense and initiative leave
to go to Milwaukee, or Chicago, or New York. Those that stay marry the
banker's lovely daughter.”

Emma McChesney laughed at that, and Molly Brandeis too, and Fanny joined
them a bit ruefully. Then quite suddenly, there came into her face a
melting, softening look that made it almost lovely. She crossed swiftly
over to where her mother sat, and put a hand on either cheek (grown
thinner of late) and kissed the tip of her nose. “We don't care--really.
Do we Mother? We're poor wurkin' girruls. But gosh! Ain't we proud?
Mother, your mistake was in not doing as Ruth did.”

“Ruth?”

“In the Bible. Remember when What's-his-name, her husband, died? Did
she go back to her home town? No, she didn't. She'd lived there all
her life, and she knew better. She said to Naomi, her mother-in-law,
`Whither thou goest I will go.' And she went. And when they got to
Bethlehem, Ruth looked around, knowingly, until she saw Boaz, the
catch of the town. So she went to work in his fields, gleaning, and
she gleaned away, trying to look just as girlish, and dreamy, and
unconscious, but watching him out of the corner of her eye all the
time. Presently Boaz came along, looking over the crops, and he saw her.
`Who's the new damsel?' he asked. `The peach?'”

“Fanny Brandeis, aren't you ashamed?”

“But, Mother, that's what it says in the Bible, actually. `Whose damsel
is this?' They told him it was Ruth, the dashing widow. After that it
was all off with the Bethlehem girls. Boaz paid no more attention
to them than if they had never existed. He married Ruth, and she led
society. Just a little careful scheming, that's all.”

“I should say you have been reading, Fanny Brandeis,” said Emma
McChesney. She was smiling, but her eyes were serious. “Now listen to
me, child. The very next time a traveling man in a brown suit and a red
necktie asks you to take dinner with him at the Haley House--even one
of those roast pork, queen-fritter-with-rum-sauce, Roman punch Sunday
dinners--I want you to accept.”

“Even if he wears an Elks' pin, and a Masonic charm, and a diamond ring
and a brown derby?” “Even if he shows you the letters from his girl in
Manistee,” said Mrs. McChesney solemnly. “You've been seeing too much of
Fanny Brandeis.”


CHAPTER SEVEN

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.




CHAPTER EIGHT

“You can come down now. They're all here, I guess. Doctor Thalmann's
going to begin.” Fanny, huddled in a chair in her bedroom, looked up
into the plump, kindly face of the woman who was bending over her.
Then she stood up, docilely, and walked toward the stairs with a heavy,
stumbling step.

“I'd put down my veil if I were you,” said the neighbor woman. And
reached up for the black folds that draped Fanny's hat. Fanny's fingers
reached for them too, fumblingly. “I'd forgotten about it,” she said.
The heavy crape fell about her shoulders, mercifully hiding the swollen,
discolored face. She went down the stairs. There was a little stir,
a swaying toward her, a sibilant murmur of sympathy from the crowded
sitting-room as she passed through to the parlor where Rabbi Thalmann
stood waiting, prayer book in hand, in front of that which was covered
with flowers. Fanny sat down. A feeling of unreality was strong upon
her. Doctor Thalmann cleared his throat and opened the book.

After all, it was not Rabbi Thalmann's funeral sermon that testified to
Mrs. Brandeis's standing in the community. It was the character of the
gathering that listened to what he had to say. Each had his own opinion
of Molly Brandeis, and needed no final eulogy to confirm it. Father
Fitzpatrick was there, tall, handsome, ruddy, the two wings of white
showing at the temples making him look more than ever like a leading
man. He had been of those who had sat in what he called Mrs. Brandeis's
confessional, there in the quiet little store. The two had talked of
things theological and things earthy. His wit, quick though it was, was
no match for hers, but they both had a humor sense and a drama sense,
and one day they discovered, queerly enough, that they worshiped the
same God. Any one of these things is basis enough for a friendship.
Besides, Molly Brandeis could tell an Irish story inimitably. And you
should have heard Father Fitzpatrick do the one about Ikey and the
nickel. No, I think the Catholic priest, seeming to listen with such
respectful attention, really heard very little of what Rabbi Thalmann
had to say.

Herman Walthers was there, he of the First National Bank of Winnebago,
whose visits had once brought such terror to Molly Brandeis. Augustus G.
Gerretson was there, and three of his department heads. Emil Bauer sat
just behind him. In a corner was Sadie, the erstwhile coquette, very
subdued now, and months behind the fashions in everything but baby
clothes. Hen Cody, who had done all of Molly Brandeis's draying, sat,
in unaccustomed black, next to Mayor A. J. Dawes. Temple Emmanu-el
was there, almost a unit. The officers of Temple Emanu-el Ladies' Aid
Society sat in a row. They had never honored Molly Brandeis with office
in the society--she who could have managed its business, politics and
social activities with one hand tied behind her, and both her bright
eyes shut. In the kitchen and on the porch and in the hallway stood
certain obscure people--women whose finger tips stuck out of their
cotton gloves, and whose skirts dipped ludicrously in the back. Only
Molly Brandeis could have identified them for you. Mrs. Brosch, the
butter and egg woman, hovered in the dining-room doorway. She had
brought a pound of butter. It was her contribution to the funeral baked
meats. She had deposited it furtively on the kitchen table. Birdie
Callahan, head waitress at the Haley House, found a seat just next to
the elegant Mrs. Morehouse, who led the Golf Club crowd. A haughty young
lady in the dining-room, Birdie Callahan, in her stiffly starched white,
but beneath the icy crust of her hauteur was a molten mass of good humor
and friendliness. She and Molly Brandeis had had much in common.

But no one--not even Fanny Brandeis--ever knew who sent the great
cluster of American Beauty roses that had come all the way from
Milwaukee. There had been no card, so who could have guessed that they
came from Blanche Devine. Blanche Devine, of the white powder, and the
minks, and the diamonds, and the high-heeled shoes, and the plumes,
lived in the house with the closed shutters, near the freight depot.
She often came into Brandeis' Bazaar. Molly Brandeis had never allowed
Sadie, or Pearl, or Fanny or Aloysius to wait on her. She had attended
to her herself. And one day, for some reason, Blanche Devine found
herself telling Molly Brandeis how she had come to be Blanche Devine,
and it was a moving and terrible story. And now her cardless flowers, a
great, scarlet sheaf of them, lay next the chaste white roses that had
been sent by the Temple Emanu-el Ladies' Aid. Truly, death is a great
leveler.

In a vague way Fanny seemed to realize that all these people were
there. I think she must even have found a certain grim comfort in their
presence. Hers had not been the dry-eyed grief of the strong, such as
you read about. She had wept, night and day, hopelessly, inconsolably,
torturing herself with remorseful questions. If she had not gone
skating, might she not have seen how ill her mother was? Why hadn't
she insisted on the doctor when her mother refused to eat the Christmas
dinner? Blind and selfish, she told herself; blind and selfish. Her face
was swollen and distorted now, and she was thankful for the black veil
that shielded her. Winnebago was scandalized to see that she wore no
other black. Mrs. Brandeis had never wanted Fanny to wear it; she hadn't
enough color, she said. So now she was dressed in her winter suit of
blue, and her hat with the pert blue quill. And the little rabbi's voice
went on and on, and Fanny knew that it could not be true. What had all
this dust-to-dust talk to do with any one as vital, and electric, and
constructive as Molly Brandeis. In the midst of the service there was a
sharp cry, and a little stir, and the sound of stifled sobbing. It was
Aloysius the merry, Aloysius the faithful, whose Irish heart was quite
broken. Fanny ground her teeth together in an effort at self-control.

And so to the end, and out past the little hushed, respectful group
on the porch, to the Jewish cemetery on the state road. The snow of
Christmas week was quite virgin there, except for that one spot where
the sexton and his men had been at work. Then back at a smart jog trot
through the early dusk of the winter afternoon, the carriage wheels
creaking upon the hard, dry snow. And Fanny Brandeis said to herself
(she must have been a little light-headed from hunger and weeping):

“Now I'll know whether it's true or not. When I go into the house. If
she's there she'll say, `Well Fanchen! Hungry? Oh, but my little girl's
hands are cold! Come here to the register and warm them.' O God, let her
be there! Let her be there!”

But she wasn't. The house had been set to rights by brisk and
unaccustomed hands. There was a bustle and stir in the dining-room, and
from the kitchen came the appetizing odors of cooking food. Fanny went
up to a chair that was out of its place, and shoved it back against the
wall where it belonged. She straightened a rug, carried the waste basket
from the desk to the spot near the living-room table where it had always
served to hide the shabby, worn place in the rug. Fanny went up-stairs,
past The Room that was once more just a comfortable, old fashioned
bedroom, instead of a mysterious and awful chamber; bathed her face,
tidied her hair, came down-stairs again, ate and drank things hot and
revivifying. The house was full of kindly women.

Fanny found herself clinging to them--clinging desperately to these
ample, broad-bosomed, soothing women whom she had scarcely known before.
They were always there, those women, and their husbands too; kindly,
awkward men, who patted her shoulder, and who spoke of Molly Brandeis
with that sincerity of admiration such as men usually give only to men.
People were constantly popping in at the back door with napkin-covered
trays, and dishes and baskets. A wonderful and beautiful thing, that
homely small-town sympathy that knows the value of physical comfort in
time of spiritual anguish.

Two days after the funeral Fanny Brandeis went back to the store, much
as her mother had done many years before, after her husband's death. She
looked about at the bright, well-stocked shelves and tables with a new
eye--a speculative eye. The Christmas season was over. January was the
time for inventory and for replenishment. Mrs. Brandeis had always
gone to Chicago the second week in January for the spring stock. But
something was forming in Fanny Brandeis's mind--a resolve that grew so
rapidly as to take her breath away. Her brain felt strangely clear and
keen after the crashing storm of grief that had shaken her during the
past week.

“What are you going to do now?” people had asked her, curious and
interested. “Is Theodore coming back?”

“I don't know--yet.” In answer to the first. And, “No. Why should he? He
has his work.”

“But he could be of such help to you.”

“I'll help myself,” said Fanny Brandeis, and smiled a curious smile
that had in it more of bitterness and less of mirth than any smile has a
right to have.

Mrs. Brandeis had left a will, far-sighted business woman that she was.
It was a terse, clear-headed document, that gave “to Fanny Brandeis, my
daughter,” the six-thousand-dollar insurance, the stock, good-will and
fixtures of Brandeis' Bazaar, the house furnishings, the few pieces of
jewelry in their old-fashioned setting. To Theodore was left the sum of
fifteen hundred dollars. He had received his share in the years of his
musical education.

Fanny Brandeis did not go to Chicago that January. She took inventory
of Brandeis' Bazaar, carefully and minutely. And then, just as carefully
and minutely she took stock of Fanny Brandeis. There was something
relentless and terrible in the way she went about this self-analysis.
She walked a great deal that winter, often out through the drifts to the
little cemetery. As she walked her mind was working, working. She held
long mental conversations with herself during these walks, and once she
was rather frightened to find herself talking aloud. She wondered if she
had done that before. And a plan was maturing in her brain, while the
fight went on within herself, thus:

“You'll never do it, Fanny. You're not built that way.”

“Oh, won't I! Watch me! Give me time.”

“You'll think of what your mother would have done under the same
conditions, and you'll do that thing.”

“I won't. Not unless it's the long-headed thing to do. I'm through being
sentimental and unselfish. What did it bring her? Nothing!”

The weeks went by. Fanny worked hard in the store, and bought little.
February came, and with the spring her months of private thinking bore
fruit. There came to Fanny Brandeis a great resolve. She would put
herself in a high place. Every talent she possessed, every advantage,
every scrap of knowledge, every bit of experience, would be used toward
that end. She would make something of herself. It was a worldly, selfish
resolve, born of a bitter sorrow, and ambition, and resentment. She made
up her mind that she would admit no handicaps. Race, religion, training,
natural impulses--she would discard them all if they stood in her way.
She would leave Winnebago behind. At best, if she stayed there, she
could never accomplish more than to make her business a more than
ordinarily successful small-town store. And she would be--nobody. No,
she had had enough of that. She would crush and destroy the little girl
who had fasted on that Day of Atonement; the more mature girl who had
written the thesis about the paper mill rag-room; the young woman who
had drudged in the store on Elm Street. In her place she would mold a
hard, keen-eyed, resolute woman, whose godhead was to be success, and
to whom success would mean money and position. She had not a head for
mathematics, but out of the puzzling problems and syllogisms in geometry
she had retained in her memory this one immovable truth:

A straight line is the shortest distance between two points.

With her mental eye she marked her two points, and then, starting from
the first, made directly for the second. But she forgot to reckon with
the law of tangents. She forgot, too, how paradoxical a creature
was this Fanny Brandeis whose eyes filled with tears at sight of a
parade--just the sheer drama of it--were the marchers G. A. R. veterans,
school children in white, soldiers, Foresters, political marching clubs;
and whose eyes burned dry and bright as she stood over the white mound
in the cemetery on the state road. Generous, spontaneous, impulsive,
warm-hearted, she would be cold, calculating, deliberate, she told
herself.

Thousands of years of persecution behind her made her quick to
appreciate suffering in others, and gave her an innate sense of
fellowship with the downtrodden. She resolved to use that sense as a
searchlight aiding her to see and overcome obstacles. She told herself
that she was done with maudlin sentimentality. On the rare occasions
when she had accompanied her mother to Chicago, the two women had found
delight in wandering about the city's foreign quarters. When other
small-town women buyers snatched occasional moments of leisure for the
theater or personal shopping, these two had spent hours in the ghetto
around Jefferson and Taylor, and Fourteenth Streets. Something in
the sight of these people--alien, hopeful, emotional, often
grotesque--thrilled and interested both the women. And at sight of an
ill-clad Italian, with his slovenly, wrinkled old-young wife, turning
the handle of his grind organ whilst both pairs of eyes searched windows
and porches and doorsteps with a hopeless sort of hopefulness, she lost
her head entirely and emptied her limp pocketbook of dimes, and nickels,
and pennies. Incidentally it might be stated that she loved the cheap
and florid music of the hand organ itself.

It was rumored that Brandeis' Bazaar was for sale. In the spring
Gerretson's offered Fanny the position of buyer and head of the china,
glassware, and kitchenware sections. Gerretson's showed an imposing
block of gleaming plate-glass front now, and drew custom from a dozen
thrifty little towns throughout the Fox River Valley. Fanny refused the
offer. In March she sold outright the stock, good-will, and fixtures of
Brandeis' Bazaar. The purchaser was a thrifty, farsighted traveling
man who had wearied of the road and wanted to settle down. She sold the
household goods too--those intimate, personal pieces of wood and cloth
that had become, somehow, part of her life. She had grown up with them.
She knew the history of every nick, every scratch and worn spot. Her
mother lived again in every piece. The old couch went off in a farmer's
wagon. Fanny turned away when they joggled it down the front steps and
into the rude vehicle. It was like another funeral. She was furious to
find herself weeping again. She promised herself punishment for that.

Up in her bedroom she opened the bottom drawer of her bureau. That
bureau and its history and the history of every piece of furniture in
the room bore mute testimony to the character of its occupant; to her
protest against things as she found them, and her determination to
make them over to suit her. She had spent innumerable Sunday mornings
wielding the magic paint brush that had transformed the bedroom from
dingy oak to gleaming cream enamel. She sat down on the floor now,
before the bureau, and opened the bottom drawer.

In a corner at the back, under the neat pile of garments, was a
tightly-rolled bundle of cloth. Fanny reached for it, took it out, and
held it in her hands a moment. Then she unrolled it slowly, and the
bundle revealed itself to be a faded, stained, voluminous gingham apron,
blue and white. It was the kind of apron women don when they perform
some very special household ritual--baking, preserving, house cleaning.
It crossed over the shoulders with straps, and its generous fullness ran
all the way around the waist. It was discolored in many places with the
brown and reddish stains of fruit juices. It had been Molly Brandeis'
canning apron. Fanny had come upon it hanging on a hook behind the
kitchen door, after that week in December. And at sight of it all her
fortitude and forced calm had fled. She had spread her arms over the
limp, mute, yet speaking thing dangling there, and had wept so wildly
and uncontrollably as to alarm even herself.

Nothing in connection with her mother's death had power to call up such
poignant memories as did this homely, intimate garment. She saw again
the steamy kitchen, deliciously scented with the perfume of cooking
fruit, or the tantalizing, mouth-watering spiciness of vinegar and
pickles. On the stove the big dishpan, in which the jelly glasses and
fruit jars, with their tops and rubbers, bobbed about in hot water.
In the great granite kettle simmered the cooking fruit Molly Brandeis,
enveloped in the familiar blue-and-white apron, stood over it, like a
priestess, stirring, stirring, slowly, rhythmically. Her face would be
hot and moist with the steam, and very tired too, for she often came
home from the store utterly weary, to stand over the kettle until ten
or eleven o'clock. But the pride in it as she counted the golden or ruby
tinted tumblers gleaming in orderly rows as they cooled on the kitchen
table!

“Fifteen glasses of grape jell, Fan! And I didn't mix a bit of apple
with it. I didn't think I'd get more than ten. And nine of the quince
preserve. That makes--let me see--eighty-three, ninety-eight--one
hundred and seven altogether.”

“We'll never eat it, Mother.”

“You said that last year, and by April my preserve cupboard looked like
Old Mother Hubbard's.”

But then, Mrs. Brandeis was famous for her preserves, as Father
Fitzpatrick, and Aloysius, and Doctor Thalmann, and a dozen others could
testify. After the strain and flurry of a busy day at the store there
was something about this homely household rite that brought a certain
sense of rest and peace to Molly Brandeis.

All this moved through Fanny Brandeis's mind as she sat with the
crumpled apron in her lap, her eyes swimming with hot tears. The very
stains that discolored it, the faded blue of the front breadth, the
frayed buttonhole, the little scorched place where she had burned a hole
when trying unwisely to lift a steaming kettle from the stove with the
apron's corner, spoke to her with eloquent lips. That apron had become
a vice with Fanny. She brooded over it as a mother broods over the
shapeless, scuffled bit of leather that was a baby's shoe; as a woman,
widowed, clings to a shabby, frayed old smoking jacket. More than once
she had cried herself to sleep with the apron clasped tightly in her
arms.

She got up from the floor now, with the apron in her hands, and went
down the stairs, opened the door that led to the cellar, walked heavily
down those steps and over to the furnace. She flung open the furnace
door. Red and purple the coal bed gleamed, with little white flame
sprites dancing over it. Fanny stared at it a moment, fascinated. Her
face was set, her eyes brilliant. Suddenly she flung the tightly-rolled
apron into the heart of the gleaming mass. She shut her eyes then.
The fire seemed to hold its breath for a moment. Then, with a gasp, it
sprang upon its food. The bundle stiffened, writhed, crumpled, sank, lay
a blackened heap, was dissolved. The fire bed glowed red and purple as
before, except for a dark spot in its heart. Fanny shivered a little.
She shut the furnace door and went up-stairs again.

“Smells like something burning--cloth, or something,” called Annie, from
the kitchen.

“It's only an old apron that was cluttering up my--my bureau drawer.”

Thus she successfully demonstrated the first lesson in the cruel and
rigid course of mental training she had mapped out for herself.

Leaving Winnebago was not easy. There is something about a small town
that holds you. Your life is so intimately interwoven with that of your
neighbor. Existence is so safe, so sane, so sure. Fanny knew that when
she turned the corner of Elm Street every third person she met would
speak to her. Life was made up of minute details, too trivial for the
notice of the hurrying city crowds. You knew when Milly Glaenzer changed
the baby buggy for a go-cart. The youngest Hupp boy--Sammy--who was
graduated from High School in June, is driving A. J. Dawes's automobile
now. My goodness, how time flies! Doeppler's grocery has put in
plate-glass windows, and they're getting out-of-season vegetables every
day now from Milwaukee. As you pass you get the coral glow of tomatoes,
and the tender green of lettuces. And that vivid green? Fresh young
peas! And in February. Well! They've torn down the old yellow brick
National Bank, and in its place a chaste Greek Temple of a building
looks rather contemptuously down its classic columns upon the farmer's
wagons drawn up along the curb. If Fanny Brandeis' sense of proportion
had not been out of plumb she might have realized that, to Winnebago,
the new First National Bank building was as significant and epochal as
had been the Woolworth Building to New York.

The very intimacy of these details, Fanny argued, was another reason for
leaving Winnebago. They were like detaining fingers that grasped at your
skirts, impeding your progress.

She had early set about pulling every wire within her reach that might
lead, directly or indirectly, to the furtherance of her ambition. She
got two offers from Milwaukee retail stores. She did not consider them
for a moment. Even a Chicago department store of the second grade (one
of those on the wrong side of State Street) did not tempt her. She knew
her value. She could afford to wait. There was money enough on which to
live comfortably until the right chance presented itself. She knew every
item of her equipment, and she conned them to herself greedily:
Definite charm of manner; the thing that is called magnetism; brains;
imagination; driving force; health; youth; and, most precious of all,
that which money could not buy, nor education provide--experience.
Experience, a priceless weapon, that is beaten into shape only by
much contact with men and women, and that is sharpened by much rubbing
against the rough edges of this world.

In April her chance came to her; came in that accidental, haphazard way
that momentous happenings have. She met on Elm Street a traveling man
from whom Molly Brandeis had bought for years. He dropped both sample
cases and shook hands with Fanny, eying her expertly and approvingly,
and yet without insolence. He was a wise, road-weary, skillful member
of his fraternity, grown gray in years of service, and a little bitter.
Though perhaps that was due partly to traveling man's dyspepsia, brought
on by years of small-town hotel food.

“So you've sold out.”

“Yes. Over a month ago.”

“H'm. That was a nice little business you had there. Your ma built it up
herself. There was a woman! Gosh! Discounted her bills, even during the
panic.”

Fanny smiled a reflective little smile. “That line is a complete
characterization of my mother. Her life was a series of panics. But she
never lost her head. And she always discounted.”

He held out his hand. “Well, glad I met you.” He picked up his sample
cases. “You leaving Winn

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