O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 Part 31

With a spring, his son was at the door, unlocking and flinging it back.

"Come in, pa."

The years had weighed heavily upon Abrahm Kantor in avoirdupois only. He was himself plus eighteen years, fifty pounds, and a new sleek pomposity that was absolutely oleaginous. It shone roundly in his face, doubling of chin, in the bulge of waistcoat, heavily gold-chained, and in eyes that behind the gold-rimmed gla.s.ses gave sparklingly forth his estate of well-being.

"Abrahm, didn't I tell you not to dare to--"

On excited b.a.l.l.s of feet that fairly bounced him, Abrahm Kantor burst in.

"Leon--mamma--I got out here an old friend--Sol Ginsberg--you remember, mamma, from bra.s.ses--"

"Abrahm--not now--"

"Go way with your 'not now!' I want Leon should meet him. Sol, this is him--a little grown-up from such a _Nebich_ like you remember him--_nu_?

Sarah, you remember Sol Ginsberg? Say--I should ask you if you remember your right hand? Ginsberg & Esel, the firm. This is his girl, a five years' contract signed yesterday--five hundred dollars an opera for a beginner--six roles--not bad--_nu_?"

"Abrahm, you must ask Mr. Ginsberg please to excuse Leon until after his concert--"

"Shake hands with him, Ginsberg. He's had his hand shook enough in his life, and by kings, too--shake it once more with an old bouncer like you!"

Mr. Ginsberg, not unlike his colleague in rotundities, held out a short, a dimpled hand.

"It's a proud day," he said, "for me to shake the hands from mine old friend's son and the finest violinist living to-day. My little daughter--"

"Yes, yes, Gina. Here shake hands with him. Leon, they say a voice like a fountain. Gina Berg--eh, Ginsberg--is how you stage-named her? You hear, mamma, how fancy--Gina Berg? We go hear her, eh?"

There was about Miss Gina Berg, whose voice could soar to the tirra-lirra of a lark and then deepen to mezzo, something of the actual slimness of the poor, maligned Elsa so long buried beneath the buxomness of divas. She was like a little flower that in its crannied nook keeps dewy longest.

"How do you do, Leon Kantor?"

There was a whir through her English of three acquired languages.

"How do _you_ do?"

"We--father and I--travelled once all the way from Brussels to Dresden to hear you play. It was worth it. I shall never forget how you played the 'Humoresque.' It made me laugh and cry."

"You like Brussels?"

She laid her little hand to her heart, half closing her eyes.

"I will never be so happy again as with the sweet little people of Brussels."

"I, too, love Brussels. I studied there four years with Ahrenfest."

"I know you did. My teacher, Lyndahl, in Berlin, was his brother-in-law."

"You have studied with Lyndahl?"

"He is my master."

"I--will I sometime hear you sing?"

"I am not yet great. When I am foremost like you, yes."

"Gina--Gina Berg, that is a beautiful name to make famous."

"You see how it is done? Gins--Berg. Gina Berg.

"Clev-er!"

They stood then smiling across a chasm of the diffidence of youth, she fumbling at the great fur pelt out of which her face flowered so dewily.

"I--well--we--we are in the fourth box--I guess we had better be going--fourth box left." He wanted to find words, but for consciousness of self could not "It's a wonderful house out there waiting for you, Leon Kantor, and you--you're wonderful, too!"

"The--flowers--thanks!"

"My father, he sent them. Come, father--quick!"

Suddenly there was a tight tensity that seemed to crowd up the little room.

"Abrahm--quick--get Hanc.o.c.k--that first rows of chairs has got to be moved--there he is, in the wings--see the piano ain't dragged down too far! Leon, got your mute on your pocket? Please Mr. Ginsberg--you must excuse--Here, Leon, is your gla.s.s of water. Drink it, I say. Shut that door out there, boy, so there ain't a draft in the wings. Here, Leon, your violin. Got neckerchief? Listen how they're shouting--it's for you--Leon--darlink--go!"

In the center of that vast human bowl which had finally shouted itself out, slim, boylike, and in his supreme isolation, Leon Kantor drew bow and a first thin, pellucid, and perfect note into a silence breathless to receive it.

Throughout the arduous flexuosities of the Mendelssohn E-minor concerto, singing, winding from tonal to tonal climax, and out of the slow movement, which is like a tourniquet twisting the heart into the spirited _allegro molto vivace_, it was as if beneath Leon Kantor's fingers the strings were living vein-cords, youth, vitality, and the very foam of exuberance racing through them.

That was the power of him--the Vichy and the sparkle of youth, so that, playing, the melody poured round him like wine and went down seething and singing into the hearts of his hearers.

Later, and because these were his people and because they were dark and Slavic with his Slavic darkness, he played, as if his very blood were weeping, the "Kol Nidre," which is the prayer of his race for atonement.

And then the super-amphitheater, filled with those whose emotions lie next to the surface and whose pores have not been closed over with a water-tight veneer, burst into its cheers and its tears.

There were fifteen recalls from the wings, Abrahm Kantor standing counting them off on his fingers, and trembling to receive the Stradivarius. Then, finally, and against the frantic negative pantomime of his manager, a scherzo, played so lacily that it swept the house in lightest laughter.

When Leon Kantor finally completed his program, they were loath to let him go, crowding down the aisles upon him, applauding up, down, round him, until the great disheveled house was like the roaring of a sea, and he would laugh and throw out his arm in wide-spread helplessness, and always his manager in the background, gesticulating against too much of his precious product for the money, ushers already slamming up chairs, his father's arms out for the Stradivarius, and, deepest in the gloom of the wings, Sarah Kantor, in a rocker especially dragged out for her, and from the depths of the black-silk reticule, darning his socks.

"_Bravo_--_bravo_! Give us the 'Humoresque'--Chopin nocturne--polonaise--'Humoresque'! _Bravo_--_bravo_!"

And even as they stood, hatted and coated, importuning and pressing in upon him, and with a wisp of a smile to the fourth left box, Leon Kantor played them the "Humoresque" of Dvorak, skedaddling, plucking, quirking--that laugh on life with a tear behind it. Then suddenly, because he could escape no other way, rushed straight back for his dressing-room, bursting in upon a flood of family already there before him. Isadora Kantor, blue-shaven, aquiline, and already greying at the temples; his five-year-old son, Leon; a soft little pouter-pigeon of a wife, too, enormous of bust, in glittering ear-drops and a wrist-watch of diamonds half buried in chubby wrist; Miss Esther Kantor, pink and pretty; Rudolph; Boris, not yet done with growing-pains.

At the door, Miss Kantor met her brother, her eyes as sweetly moist as her kiss.

"Leon, darling, you surpa.s.sed even yourself!"

"Quit crowding, children! Let him sit down. Here, Leon, let mamma give you a fresh collar. Look how the child's perspired! Pull down that window, Boris. Rudolph, don't let no one in. I give you my word if to-night wasn't as near as I ever came to seeing a house go crazy. Not even that time in Milan, darlink--when they broke down the doors, was it like to-night--"

"Ought to seen, ma, the row of police outside--"