Fanny Herself Part 34

She made him lie down while she attended to schedules, tickets, berths.

She was gone for two hours. When she returned she found him looking amused, terrified and helpless, all at once, while three men reporters and one woman special writer bombarded him with questions. The woman had brought a staff artist with her, and he was now engaged in making a bungling sketch of Theodore's face, with its ludicrous expression.

f.a.n.n.y sensed the situation and saved it. She hadn't sold goods all these years without learning the value of advertising. She came forward now, graciously (but not too graciously). Theodore looked relieved. Already he had learned that one might lean on this sister who was so capable, so bountifully alive.

"Teddy, you're much too tired to talk. Let me talk for you."

"My sister, Miss Brandeis," said Teddy, and waved a rather feeble hand in an inclusive gesture at the interrogatory five.

f.a.n.n.y smiled. "Do sit down," she said, "all of you. Tell me, how did you happen to get on my brother's trail?"

One of the men explained. "We had a list of ship's pa.s.sengers, of course. And we knew that Mr. Brandeis was a German violinist. And then the story of the ship being chased by a French boat. We just missed him down at the pier--"

"But he isn't a German violinist," interrupted f.a.n.n.y. "Please get that straight. He's American. He is THE American violinist--or will be, as soon as his concert tour here is well started. It was Schabelitz himself who discovered my brother, and predicted his brilliant career.

Here"--she had been glancing over the artist's shoulder--"will you let me make a sketch for you--just for the fun of the thing? I do that kind of thing rather decently. Did you see my picture called 'The Marcher,'

in the Star, at the time of the suffrage parade in May? Yes, that was mine. Just because he has what we call a butcher haircut, don't think he's German, because he isn't. You wouldn't call Winnebago, Wisconsin, Germany, would you?"

She was sketching him swiftly, daringly, masterfully. She was bringing out the distinction, the suffering, the boyishness in his face, and toning down the queer little foreign air he had. Toning it, but not omitting it altogether. She was too good a showman for that. As she sketched she talked, and as she talked she drew Theodore into the conversation, deftly, and just when he was needed. She gave them what they had come for--a story. And a good one. She brought in Mizzi and Otti, for color, and she saw to it that they spelled those names as they should be spelled. She managed to gloss over the question of Olga. Ill.

Detained. Last minute. Too brave to sacrifice her husband's American tour. She finished her sketch and gave it to the woman reporter. It was an amazingly compelling little piece of work--and yet, not so amazing, perhaps, when you consider the thing that f.a.n.n.y Brandeis had put into it. Then she sent them away, tactfully. They left, knowing all that f.a.n.n.y Brandeis had wanted them to know; guessing little that she had not wanted them to guess. More than that no human being can accomplish, without the advice of his lawyer.

"Whew!" from f.a.n.n.y, when the door had closed.

"Gott im Himmel!" from Theodore. "I had forgotten that America was like that."

"But America IS like that. And Teddy, we're going to make it sit up and take notice."

At that Theodore drooped again. f.a.n.n.y thought that he looked startlingly as she remembered her father had looked in those days of her childhood, when Brandeis' Bazaar was slithering downhill. The sight of him moved her to a sudden resolve. She crossed swiftly to him, and put one heartening hand on his shoulder.

"Come on, brother. Out with it. Let's have it all now."

He reached up for her hand and held it, desperately. "Oh, Fan!" began Theodore, "Fan, I've been through h.e.l.l."

f.a.n.n.y said nothing. She only waited, quietly, encouragingly. She had learned when not to talk. Presently he took up his story, plunging directly into it, as though sensing that she had already divined much.

"She married me for a living. You'll think that's a joke, knowing what I was earning there, in Vienna, and how you and mother were denying yourselves everything to keep me. But in a city that circulates a coin valued at a twentieth of a cent, an American dollar looms up big. Besides, two of the other girls had got married. Good for nothing officers. She was jealous, I suppose. I didn't know any of that. I was flattered to think she'd notice me. She was awfully popular. She has a kind of wit. I suppose you'd call it that. The other girls were just coa.r.s.e, and heavy, and--well--animal. You can't know the rottenness of life there in Vienna. Olga could keep a whole supper table laughing all evening. I can see, now, that that isn't difficult when your audience is made up of music hall girls, and stupid, bullet-headed officers, with their d.a.m.ned high collars, and their gold braid, and their silly swords, and their corsets, and their glittering shoes and their miserable petty poverty beneath all the show. I thought I was a lucky boy. I'd have pitied everybody in Winnebago, if I'd ever thought of anybody in Winnebago. I never did, except once in a while of you and mother when I needed money. I kept on with my music. I had sense enough left, for that. Besides, it was a habit, by that time. Well, we were married."

He laughed, an ugly, abrupt little laugh that ended in a moan, and turned his head and buried his face in f.a.n.n.y's breast. And f.a.n.n.y's arm was there, about his shoulder. "f.a.n.n.y, you don't--I can't--" He stopped.

Another silence. f.a.n.n.y's arm tightened its hold. She bent and kissed the top of the stubbly head, bowed so low now. "Fan, do you remember that woman in 'The Three Musketeers'? The h.e.l.lish woman, that all men loved and loathed? Well, Olga's like that. I'm not whining. I'm not exaggerating. I'm just trying to make you understand. And yet I don't want you to understand. Only you don't know what it means to have you to talk to. To have some one who"--he clutched her hand, fearfully--"You do love me, don't you, f.a.n.n.y? You do, don't you, Sis?"

"More than any one in the world," f.a.n.n.y rea.s.sured him, quietly. "The way mother would have, if she had lived."

A sigh escaped him, at that, as though a load had lifted from him. He went on, presently. "It would have been all right if I could have earned just a little more money." f.a.n.n.y shrank at that, and shut her eyes for a sick moment. "But I couldn't. I asked her to be patient. But you don't know the life there. There is no real home life. They live in the cafes.

They go there to keep warm, in the winter, and to meet their friends, and gossip, and drink that eternal coffee, and every coffee house--there are thousands--is a rendezvous. We had two rooms, comfortable ones, for Vienna, and I tried to explain to her that if I could work hard, and get into concert, and keep at the composing, we'd be rich some day, and famous, and happy, and she'd have clothes, and jewels. But she was too stupid, or too bored. Olga is the kind of woman who only believes what she sees. Things got worse all the time. She had a temper. So have I--or I used to have. But when hers was aroused it was--horrible. Words that--that--unspeakable words. And one day she taunted me with being a ----with my race. The first time she called me that I felt that I must kill her. That was my mistake. I should have killed her. And I didn't."

"Teddy boy! Don't, brother! You're tired. You're excited and worn out."

"No, I'm not. Just let me talk. I know what I'm saying. There's something clean about killing." He brooded a moment over that thought.

Then he went on, doggedly, not raising his voice. His hands were clasped loosely. "You don't know about the intolerance and the anti-Semitism in Prussia, I suppose. All through Germany, for that matter. In Bavaria it's bitter. That's one reason why Olga loathed Munich so. The queer part of it is that all that opposition seemed to fan something in me; something that had been smoldering for a long time." His voice had lost its dull tone now. It had in it a new timbre. And as he talked he began to interlard his English with bits of German, the language to which his tongue had accustomed itself in the past ten years. His sentences, too, took on a German construction, from time to time. He was plainly excited now. "My playing began to improve. There would be a ghastly scene with Olga--sickening--degrading. Then I would go to my work, and I would play, but magnificently! I tell you, it would be playing. I know. To fool myself I know better. One morning, after a dreadful quarrel I got the idea for the concerto, and the psalms. Jewish music. As Jewish as the Kol Nidre. I wanted to express the pa.s.sion, and fire, and history of a people. My people. Why was that? Tell me. Selbst, weiss ich nicht.

I felt that if I could put into it just a millionth part of their humiliation, and their glory; their tragedy and their triumph; their sorrow, and their grandeur; their persecution, their weldtschmerz.

Volkschmerz. That was it. And through it all, weaving in and out, one great underlying motif. Indestructibility. The great cry which says, 'We cannot be destroyed!'"

He stood up, uncertainly. His eyes were blazing. He began to walk up and down the luxurious little room. f.a.n.n.y's eyes matched his. She was staring at him, fascinated, trembling.

She moistened her lips a little with her tongue. "And you've done it?

Teddy! You've done--that!"

Theodore Brandeis stood up, very straight and tall. "Yes," he said, simply. "Yes, I've done that."

She came over to him then, and put her two hands on his shoulders.

"Ted--dear--will you ever forgive me? I'll try to make up for it now.

I didn't know. I've been blind. Worse than blind. Criminal." She was weeping now, broken-heartedly, and he was patting her with little comforting love pats, and whispering words of tenderness.

"Forgive you? Forgive you what?"

"The years of suffering. The years you've had to spend with her. With that horrible woman--"

"Don't--" He sucked his breath between his teeth. His face had gone haggard again. f.a.n.n.y, direct as always, made up her mind that she would have it all. And now.

"There's something you haven't told me. Tell me all of it. You're my brother and I'm your sister. We're all we have in the world." And at that, as though timed by some miraculous and supernatural stage manager, there came a cry from the next room; a sleepy, comfortable, imperious little cry. Mizzi had awakened. f.a.n.n.y made a step in the direction of the door. Then she turned back. "Tell me why Olga didn't come. Why isn't she here with her husband and baby?"

"Because she's with another man."

"Another--"

"It had been going on for a long time. I was the last to know about it.

It's that way, always, isn't it? He's an officer. A fool. He'll have to take off his silly corsets now, and his velvet collar, and his shiny boots, and go to war. d.a.m.n him! I hope they'll kill him with a hundred bayonets, one by one, and leave him to rot on the field. She had been fooling me all the time, and they had been laughing at me, the two of them. I didn't find it out until just before this American trip. And when I confronted her with it she laughed in my face. She said she hated me. She said she'd rather starve than leave him to come to America with me. She said I was a fiddling fool. She--" he was trembling and sick with the shame of it--"G.o.d! I can't tell you the things she said.

She wanted to keep Mizzi. Isn't that strange? She loves the baby. She neglects her, and spoils her, and once I saw her beat her, in a rage.

But she says she loves my Mizzi, and I believe she does, in her own dreadful way. I promised her, and lied to her, and then I ran away with Mizzi and her nurse."

"Oh, I thank G.o.d for that!" f.a.n.n.y cried. "I thank G.o.d for that! And now, Teddy boy, we'll forget all about those miserable years. We'll forget all about her, and the life she led you. You're going to have your chance here. You're going to be repaid for every minute of suffering you've endured. I'll make it up to you. And when you see them applauding you, calling for you, adoring you, all those hideous years will fade from your mind, and you'll be Theodore Brandeis, the successful, Theodore Brandeis, the gifted, Theodore Brandeis, the great! You need never think of her again. You'll never see her again. That beast! That woman!"

And at that Theodore's face became distorted and dreadful with pain. He raised two impotent, shaking arms high above his head. "That's just it!

That's just it! You don't know what love is. You don't know what hate is. You don't know how I hate myself. Loathe myself. She's all that's miserable, all that's unspeakable, all that's vile. And if she called me to-day I'd come. That's it." He covered his shamed face with his two hands, so that the words came from him s...o...b..ringly, sickeningly. "I hate her! I hate her! And I want her. I want her. I want her!"

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

If f.a.n.n.y Brandeis, the deliberately selfish, the calculatingly ambitious, was aghast at the trick fate had played her, she kept her thoughts to herself. Knowing her, I think she must have been grimly amused at finding herself saddled with a helpless baby, a bewildered peasant woman, and an artist brother both helpless and bewildered.

It was out of the question to house them in her small apartment. She found a furnished apartment near her own, and installed them there, with a working housekeeper in charge. She had a gift for management, and she arranged all these details with a brisk capability that swept everything before it. A sunny bedroom for Mizzi. But then, a bright living room, too, for Theodore's hours of practice. No noise. Chicago's roar maddened him. Otti shied at every new contrivance that met her eye. She had to be broken in to elevators, electric switches, hot and cold faucets, radiators.

"No apartment ever built could cover all the requirements," f.a.n.n.y confided to Fenger, after the first harrowing week. "What they really need is a combination palace, houseboat, sanatorium, and creche."

"Look here," said Fenger. "If I can help, why--" a sudden thought struck him. "Why don't you bring 'em all down to my place in the country? We're not there half the time. It's too cool for my wife in September. Just the thing for the child, and your brother could fiddle his head off."

The Fengers had a roomy, wide-verandaed house near Lake Forest; one of the many places of its kind that dot the section known as the north sh.o.r.e. Its lawn sloped gently down to the water's edge. The house was gay with striped awnings, and scarlet geraniums, and chintz-covered chairs. The bright, sparkling, luxurious little place seemed to satisfy a certain beauty-sense in Fenger, as did the etchings on the walls in his office. f.a.n.n.y had spent a week-end there in July, with three or four other guests, including Fascinating Facts. She had been charmed with it, and had announced that her energies thereafter would be directed solely toward the possession of just such a house as this, with a lawn that was lipped by the lake, awnings and geraniums to give it a French cafe air; books and magazines enough to belie that.

"And I'll always wear white," she promised, gayly, "and there'll be pitchers on every table, frosty on the outside, and minty on the inside, and you're all invited."