O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 Part 32

"Hush up, Roody! Don't you see your brother is trying to get his breath?"

From Mrs. Isadore Kantor: "You ought to seen the balconies, mother.

Isadore and I went up just to see the jam."

"Six thousand dollars in the house to-night if there was a cent," said Isadore Kantor.

"Hand me my violin please, Esther. I must have scratched it, the way they pushed."

"No, son; you didn't. I've already rubbed it up. Sit quiet, darlink!"

He was limply white, as if the vitality had flowed out of him.

"G.o.d! Wasn't it--tremendous?"

"Six thousand if there was a cent," repeated Isadore Kantor; "more than Rimsky ever played to in his life!"

"Oh, Izzy, you make me sick, always counting--counting."

"Your sister's right, Isadore. You got nothing to complain of if there was only six hundred in the house. A boy whose fiddle has made already enough to set you up in such a fine business, his brother Boris in such a fine college, automobiles--style--and now because Vladimir Rimsky, three times his age, gets signed up with Elsa.s.s for a few thousand more a year, right away the family gets a long face--"

"Ma, please; Isadore didn't mean it that way!"

"Pa's knocking, ma; shall I let him in?"

"Let him in, Roody. I'd like to know what good it will do to try to keep him out."

In an actual rain of perspiration, his tie slid well under one ear, Abrahm Kantor burst in, mouthing the words before his acute state of strangulation would let them out.

"Elsa.s.s--it's Elsa.s.s outside--he--wants--to sign--Leon--fifty concerts--coast to coast--two thousand--next season--he's got the papers--already drawn up--the pen outside waiting--"

"Abrahm!"

"Pa!"

In the silence that followed, Isadore Kantor, a poppiness of stare and a violent redness set in, suddenly turned to his five-year-old son, sticky with lollypop, and came down soundly and with smack against the infantile, the slightly outstanding, and unsuspecting ear.

"_Momser!_" he cried. "_Chammer! Lump! Ganef!_ You hear that? Two thousand! Two thousand! Didn't I tell you--didn't I tell you to practise?"

Even as Leon Kantor put pen to this princely doc.u.ment, Francis Ferdinand of Austria, the a.s.sa.s.sin's bullet true, lay dead in state, and let slip were the dogs of war.

In the next years, men, forty deep, were to die in piles; hayricks of fields to become human hayricks of battlefields; Belgium disembowelled, her very entrails dragging to find all the civilized world her champion, and between the poppies of Flanders, crosses, thousands upon thousands of them, to mark the places where the youth of her allies fell, avenging outrage. Seas, even when calmest, were to become terrible, and men's heart-beats, a bit sluggish with the fatty degeneration of a sluggard peace, to quicken and then to throb with the rat-a-tat-tat, the rat-a-tat-tat of the most peremptory, the most reverberating call to arms in the history of the world.

In June, 1917, Leon Kantor, answering that rat-a-tat-tat, enlisted.

In November, honed by the interim of training to even a new leanness, and sailing orders heavy and light in his heart, Lieutenant Kantor, on two day's home-leave, took leave of his home, which can be cruelest when it is tenderest.

Standing there in the expensive, the formal, the enormous French parlour of his up-town apartment de luxe, from not one of whose chairs would his mother's feet touch floor, a wall of living flesh, mortared in blood, was throbbing and hedging him in.

He would pace up and down the long room, heavy with the faces of those who mourn, with a laugh too ready, too facetious in his fear for them.

"Well, well, what is this, anyway, a wake? Where's the coffin? Who's dead?"

His sister-in-law shot out her plump, watch-incrusted wrist.

"Don't, Leon" she cried. "Such talk is a sin! It might come true."

"Rosie-Posy-b.u.t.ter-ball," he said pausing beside her chair to pinch her deeply soft cheek. "Cry-baby-roly-poly, you can't shove me off in a wooden kimono that way."

From his place before the white-and-gold mantel, staring steadfastly at the floor-tiling, Isadore Kantor turned suddenly, a bit whiter and older at the temples.

"Don't get your comedy, Leon.

"'Wooden kimono'--Leon?"

"That's the way the fellows at camp joke about coffins, ma. I didn't mean anything but fun. Great Scott--can't anyone take a joke?"

"O G.o.d! O G.o.d!" His mother fell to swaying, softly hugging herself against shivering.

"Did you sign over power of attorney to pa, Leon?"

"All fixed, Izzy."

"I'm so afraid, son, you don't take with you enough money in your pockets. You know how you lose it. If only you would let mamma sew that little bag inside your uniform with a little place for bills and a little place for the asfitidy!"

"Now, please, ma--please! If I needed more, wouldn't I take it? Wouldn't I be a pretty joke among the fellows, tied up in that smelling stuff?

Orders are orders, ma; I know what to take and what not to take."

"Please, Leon, don't get mad at me, but if you will let me put in your suitcase just one little box of that salve for your finger tips, so they don't crack--"

Pausing as he paced to lay cheek to her hair, he patted her.

"Three boxes if you want. Now, how's that?"

"And you won't take it out so soon as my back is turned?"

"Cross my heart."

His touch seemed to set her trembling again, all her illy concealed emotions rushing up.

"I can't stand it! Can't! Can't! Take my life--take my blood, but don't take my boy--don't take my boy--"

"Mamma, mamma, is that the way you're going to begin all over again after your promise?"

She clung to him, heaving against the rising storm of sobs.

"I can't help it--can't--cut out my heart from me, but let me keep my boy--my wonder-boy--"

"Oughtn't she be ashamed of herself? Just listen to her, Esther! What will we do with her? Talks like she had a guarantee I wasn't coming back. Why I wouldn't be surprised if by spring I wasn't tuning up again for a coast-to-coast tour--"