Fanny Herself Part 6

"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 advertis.e.m.e.nt. 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 f.a.n.n.y--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 ap.r.o.n, 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."

"G.o.d! 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.set 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. f.a.n.n.y, 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?" f.a.n.n.y 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 f.a.n.n.y 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.

f.a.n.n.y stood looking at him thoughtfully. She knew all about him.

Theodore's talk of the past week had accomplished that. f.a.n.n.y 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. f.a.n.n.y, 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 c.o.c.ked 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 f.a.n.n.y 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 f.a.n.n.y's shoulder.

She leaned closer. "Why, f.a.n.n.y, you witch!"

f.a.n.n.y 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.

f.a.n.n.y 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 f.a.n.n.y 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--"