Chapter D: Mulehaus (2)

The amazing years had dealt kindly with Mrs. Kantor. Stouter, softer, apparently even taller, she was full of small new authorities that could shut out cranks, newspaper reporters, and autograph fiends. A fitted-over-corsets black taffeta and a high comb in the greying hair had done their best with her. Pride, too, had left its flush upon her cheeks, like two round spots of fever.

"Leon, it's thirty minutes till your first number. Close that door. Do you want to let your papa and his excitement in on you?"

The son of Sarah Kantor obeyed, leaning on his short, rather narrow form in silhouette against the closed door. In spite of slimly dark evening clothes worked out by an astute manager to the last detail in boyish effects, there was that about him which defied long-haired precedent. Slimly and straightly he had shot up into an unmannered, a short, even a bristly-haired young manhood, disqualifying by a close shave for the older school of hirsute virtuosity.

But his nerves did not spare him. On concert nights they seemed to emerge almost to the surface of him and shriek their exposure.

"Just feel my hands, ma. Like ice."

She dived down into her large silk what-not of a reticule.

"I've got your fleece-lined gloves here, son."

"No--no. For God's--sake--not those things! No!"

He was back at the door again, opening it to a slit, peering through.

"They're bringing more seats on the stage. If they crowd me in I won't go on. I can't play if I hear them breathe. Hi--out there--no more chairs--pa--Hancock--"

"Leon, Leon, ain't you ashamed to get so worked up? Close that door. Have you got a manager who is paid just to see to your comfort? When papa comes, I'll have him go out and tell Hancock you don't want chairs so close to you. Leon, will you mind mamma and sit down?"

"It's a bigger house than the royal concert in Madrid, ma. Why, I never saw anything like it! It's a stampede. God, this is real--this is what gets me, playing for my own! I should have given a concert like this three years ago. I'll do it every year now. I'd rather play before them than all the crowned heads on earth. It's the biggest night of my life--they're rioting out there, ma--rioting to get in."

"Leon, Leon, won't you sit down if mamma begs you to?"

He sat then, strumming with all ten fingers upon his knees.

"Try to get quiet, son. Count--like you always do. One--two--three--"

"Please ma--for God's sake--please--please!"

"Look--such beautiful roses! From Sol Ginsberg, an old friend of papa's he used to buy brasses from eighteen years ago. Six years he's been away with his daughter in Munich. Such a beautiful mezzo, they say, engaged already for Metropolitan next season."

"I hate it, ma, if they breathe on my neck."

"Leon darlink, did mamma promise to fix it? Have I ever let you plan a concert where you wouldn't be comfortable?"

His long, slim hands suddenly prehensile and cutting a long, upward gesture, Leon Kantor rose to his feet, face whitening.

"Do it now! Now, I tell you! I won't have them breathe on me. Do you hear me? Now! Now! Now!"

Risen also, her face soft and tremulous for him, Mrs. Kantor put out a gentle, a sedative hand upon his sleeve.

"Son," she said, with an edge of authority even behind her smile, "don't holler at me."

He grasped her hand with his two, and, immediately quiet, placed a close string of kisses along it.

"Mamma," he said, kissing them again and again into the palm, "mamma--mamma!"

"I know, son; it's nerves."

"They eat me, ma. Feel--I'm like ice. I didn't mean it; you know I didn't mean it."

"My baby," she said, "my wonderful boy, it's like I can never get used to the wonder of having you! The greatest one of them all should be mine--a plain woman's like mine!"

He teased her, eager to conciliate and ride down his own state of quivering.

"Now, ma--now--now--don't forget Rimsky!"

"'Rimsky!' A man three times your age who was playing concerts before you was born! Is that a comparison? From your clippings-books I can show Rimsky who the world considers the greatest violinist. Rimsky he rubs into me!"

"All right then, the press-clippings, but did Elsass, the greatest manager of them all, bring me a contract for thirty concerts at two thousand a concert? Now I've got you! Now!"

She would not meet his laughter.

"'Elsass!' Believe me, he'll come to you yet. My boy should worry if he makes fifty thousand a year more or less. Rimsky should have that honour--for so long as he can hold it. But he won't hold it long. Believe me, I don't rest easy in my bed till Elsass comes after you. Not for so big a contract like Rimsky's, but bigger--not for thirty concerts but for fifty!"

"_Brava! Brava!_ There's a woman for you. More money than she knows what to do with, and then not satisfied!"

She was still too tremulous for banter.

"'Not satisfied?' Why, Leon, I never stop praying my thanks for you!"

"All right then," he cried, laying his icy fingers on her cheek; "to-morrow we'll call a _Mignon_--a regular old-fashioned Allen Street prayer-party!"

"Leon, you mustn't make fun."

"Make fun of the sweetest girl in this room?"

"'Girl!' Ah, if I could only hold you by me this way, Leon! Always a boy--with me--your poor old mother--your only girl. That's a fear I suffer with, Leon--to lose you to a--girl! That's how selfish the mother of such a wonder-child like mine can get to be."

"All right. Trying to get me married off again. Nice! Fine!"

"Is it any wonder I suffer, son? Twenty-one years to have kept you by me a child. A boy that's never in his life was out after midnight except to catch trains. A boy that never has so much as looked at a girl and could have looked at princesses. To have kept you all these years--mine--is it any wonder, son, I never stop praying my thanks for you? You don't believe Hancock, son, the way he keeps teasing you always you should have a--what he calls--affair--a love-affair? Such talk is not nice, Leon--an affair!"

"Love-affair poppycock!" said Leon Kantor, lifting his mothers face and kissing her on eyes about ready to tear. "Why, I've got something, ma, right here in my heart for you that--"

"Leon, be careful your shirt-front!"

"That's so--so what you call 'tender,' for my best sweetheart that I--oh, love affair--poppycock!"

She would not let her tears come. "My boy--my wonder-boy!"

"There goes the overture, ma."

"Here, darlink--your glass of water."

"I can't stand it in here; I'm suffocating!"

"Got your mute in your pocket, son?"

"Yes, ma; for God's sake, yes! Yes! Don't keep asking things."

"Ain't you ashamed, Leon, to be in such an excitement? For every concert you get worse."

"The chairs--they'll breathe on my neck."

"Leon, did mamma promise you those chairs would be moved?"

"Where's Hancock?"

"Say--I'm grateful if he stays out. It took me enough work to get this room cleared. You know your papa he likes to drag in the whole world to show you off--always just before you play. The minute he walks in the room, right away he gets everybody to trembling just from his own excitements. I dare him this time he should bring people--no dignity has that man got, the way he brings everyone."

Even upon her words came a rattling of door, of door-knob and a voice through the clamour.

"Open--quick--Sarah! Leon!"

A stiffening raced over Mrs. Kantor, so that she sat rigid on her chair-edge, lips compressed, eye darkly upon the shivering door.

"Open--Sarah!"

With a narrowing glance, Mrs. Kantor laid to her lips a forefinger of silence.

"Sarah, it's me! Quick, I say!"

Then Leon Kantor sprang up, the old prehensile gesture of curving fingers shooting up.

"For God's sake, ma, let him in! I can't stand that infernal battering."

"Abrahm, go away! Leon's got to have quiet before his concert."

"Just a minute, Sarah. Open quick!"

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 glasses gave sparklingly forth his estate of well-being.

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

On excited balls 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 brasses--"

"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 rôles--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 Hancock--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 glass 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 surpassed 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--"

"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.

"God! 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 Elsass 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.

"Elsass--it's Elsass 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 document, Francis Ferdinand of Austria, the assassin'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-butter-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 God! O God!" 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--"

"'Spring'--that talk don't fool me--without my boy, the springs in my life are over--"

"Why, ma, you talk like every soldier who goes to war was killed. There's only the smallest percentage of them die in battle--"

"'Spring,' he says; 'spring!' Crossing the seas from me! To live through months with that sea between us--my boy maybe shot--my--"

"Mamma, please!"

"I can't help it, Leon; I'm not one of those fine mothers that can be so brave. Cut out my heart, but leave my boy--my wonder-boy--my child I prayed for!"

"There's other mothers, ma, with sons."

"Yes, but not wonder-sons! A genius like you could so easy get excused, Leon. Give it up. Genius it should be the last to be sent to--the slaughter-pen. Leon darlink--don't go!"

"Ma, ma--you don't mean what you're saying. You wouldn't want me to reason that way. You wouldn't want me to hide behind my--violin."

"I would! Would! You should wait for the draft. With my Roody and even my baby Boris enlisted, ain't it enough for one mother? Since they got to be in camp, all right I say, let them be there, if my heart breaks for it, but not my wonder-child! You get the exemption, Leon, right away for the asking. Stay with me Leon! Don't go away! The people at home got to be kept happy with music. That's being a soldier, too, playing their troubles away. Stay with me, Leon! Don't go leave me--don't--don't--"

He suffered her to lie, tear-drenched, back into his arms, holding her close in his compassion for her, his own face twisting.

"God, ma, his--is awful! Please--you make us ashamed--all of us! I don't know what to say. Esther, come quiet her--for God's sake quiet her!"

From her place in the sobbing circle, Esther Kantor crossed to kneel beside her mother.

"Mamma, darling, you're killing yourself! What if every family went on this way? You want papa to come in and find us all crying? Is this the way you want Leon to spend his last hour with us--"

"O God--God!"

"I mean his last hour until he comes back, darling. Didn't you just hear him say, darling, it may be by spring?"

"'Spring'--'spring'--never no more springs for me--"

"Just think, darling, how proud we should be. Our Leon, who could so easily have been excused, not even to wait for the draft."

"It's not too late yet--please, Leon--"

"Our Roody and Boris both in camp, too, training to serve their country. Why, mamma, we ought to be crying for happiness! As Leon says, surely the Kantor family who fled out of Russia to escape massacre should know how terrible slavery can be. That's why we must help our boys, mamma, in their fight to make the world free. Right, Leon?"--trying to smile with her red-rimmed eyes.

"We've got no fight with no one! Not a child of mine was ever raised to so much as lift a finger against no one. We've got no fight with no one."

"We have got a fight with some one. With autocracy! Only, this time it happens to be Hunnish autocracy. You should know it, mamma; oh, you should know it deeper down in you than any of us, the fight our family right here has got with autocracy!"

"Leon's right, mamma darling, the way you and papa were beaten out of your country--"

"There's not a day in your life you don't curse it without knowing it! Every time we three boys look at your son and our brother Mannie, born an--an imbecile--because of autocracy, we know what we're fighting for. We know. You know, too. Look at him over there, even before he was born, ruined by autocracy! Know what I'm fighting for? Why, this whole family knows! What's music, what's art, what's life itself in a world without freedom? Every time, ma, you get to thinking we've got a fight with no one, all you have to do is look at our poor Mannie. He's the answer! He's the answer!"

In a foaming sort of silence, Mannie Kantor smiled softly from his chair beneath the pink-and-gold shade of the piano-lamp. The heterogeneous sounds of women weeping had ceased. Straight in her chair, her great shelf of bust heaving, sat Rosa Kantor, suddenly dry of eye; Isadore Kantor head up. Erect now, and out from the embrace of her daughter, Sarah looked up at her son.

"What time do you leave, Leon?" she asked, actually firm of lip.

"Any minute, ma. Getting late."

This time she pulled her lips to a smile, waggling her forefinger.

"Don't let them little devils of French girls fall in love with my dude in his uniform."

Her pretense at pleasantry was almost more than he could bear.

"Hear! Hear! Our mother thinks I'm a regular lady-killer! Hear that, Esther?"--pinching her cheek.

"You are, Leon--only--only, you don't know it."

"Don't you bring down too many beaus while I'm gone, either, Miss Kantor!"

"I--won't, Leon."

_Sotto voce_ to her: "Remember, Esther, while I'm gone, the royalties from the Discaphone records are yours. I want you to have them for pin-money and--maybe a dowry?"

She turned from him.

"Don't, Leon--don't--"

"I like him! Nice fellow, but too slow! Why, if I were in his shoes, I'd have popped long ago."

She smiled with her lashes dewy.

There entered then, in a violet-scented little whirl, Miss Gina Berg, rosy with the sting of a winter's night, and, as usual, swathed in the high-napped furs.

"Gina!"

She was for greeting everyone, a wafted kiss to Mrs. Kantor, and then arms wide, a great bunch of violets in one outstretched hand, her glance straight sure and sparkling for Leon Kantor.

"Surprise--everybody--surprise!"

"Why, Gina--we read--we thought you were singing in Philadelphia to-night!"

"So did I, Esther darling, until a little bird whispered to me that Lieutenant Kantor was home on farewell leave."

He advanced to her down the great length of room, lowering his head over her hand, his puttee-clad legs clicked together.

"You mean, Miss Gina--Gina--you didn't sing?"

"Of course I didn't! Hasn't every prima donna a larynx to hid behind?" She lifted off her fur cap, spilling curls.

"Well, I--I'll be hanged!" said Lieutenant Kantor, his eyes lakes of her reflected loveliness.

She let her hand linger in his.

"Leon--you--really going--how--terrible--how--how--wonderful!"

"How wonderful--your coming!"

"I--you think it was not nice of me--to come?"

"I think it was the nicest thing that ever happened in the world."

"All the way here in the train, I kept saying--crazy--crazy--running to tell Leon--Lieutenant--Kantor good-bye--when you haven't even seen him three times in three years--"

"But each--each of those three times we--we've remembered, Gina."

"But that's how I feel toward all the boys, Leon--our fighting boys--just like flying to them to kiss them each one good-bye."

"Come over, Gina. You'll be a treat to our mother. I--well, I'm hanged--all the way from Philadelphia!"

There was even a sparkle to talk then, and a let-up of pressure. After a while, Sarah Kantor looked up at her son, tremulous but smiling.

"Well, son, you going to play--for your old mother before--you go? It'll be many a month--spring--maybe longer before I hear my boy again except on the discaphone."

He shot a quick glance to his sister.

"Why, I--I don't know. I--I'd love it, ma if--if you think, Esther, I'd better."

"You don't need to be afraid of me, darlink. There's nothing can give me strength to bear--what's before me like--like my boy's music. That's my life, his music."

"Why, yes; if mamma is sure she feels that way, play for us, Leon."

He was already at the instrument, where it lay swathed, atop the grand piano.

"What'll it be, folks?"

"Something to make ma laugh, Leon--something light, something funny."

"'Humoresque'?" he said, with a quick glance for Miss Berg.

"'Humoresque,'" she said, smiling back at him.

He capered through, cutting and playful of bow, the melody of Dvorak's, which is as ironic as a grinning mask.

Finished, he smiled at his parent, her face still untearful.

"How's that?"

"It's like life, son, that piece. Laughing and making fun of--the way just as we think we got--we ain't got."

"Play that new piece, Leon, the one you set to music. You know. The words by that young boy in the war who wrote such grand poetry before he was killed. The one that always makes poor Mannie laugh. Play it for him, Leon."

Her plump little unlined face innocent of fault, Mrs. Isadore Kantor ventured her request, her smile tired with tears."

"No, no--Rosa--not now--ma wouldn't want that."

"I do, son; I do! Even Mannie should have his share of good-bye."

To Gina Berg: "They want me to play that little setting of mine of Allan Seeger's poem, 'I have a rendezvous.'"

"It--it's beautiful, Leon! I was to have sung it on my program to-night--only, I'm afraid you had better not--"

"Please, Leon! Nothing you play can ever make me as sad as it makes me glad. Mannie should have too his good-bye."

"All right then, ma, if--if you're sure you want it. Will you sing it, Gina?"

She had risen.

"Why, yes, Leon."

She sang it then, quite purely, her hands clasped simply together and her glance mistily off, the beautiful, the heroic, the lyrical prophecy of a soldier-poet and a poet-soldier.

But I've a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

In the silence that followed, a sob burst out stifled from Esther Kantor, this time her mother holding her in arms that were strong.

"That, Leon, is the most beautiful of all your compositions. What does it mean, son, that word, 'rondy-voo'?"

"Why, I--I don't exactly know. A rendezvous--it's a sort of meeting, an engagement, isn't it, Miss Gina? Gina?"

"That's it, Leon--an engagement."

"Have I an engagement with you, Gina?"

"Oh, how--how I hope you have, Leon!"

"When?"

"In the spring?"

"That's it--in the spring."

Then they smiled, these two, who had never felt more than the merest butterfly wings of love brushing them, light as lashes. No word between them, only an unfinished sweetness, waiting to be linked up.

Suddenly there burst in Abrahm Kantor.

"Quick, Leon! I got the car downstairs. Just fifteen minutes to make the ferry. Quick! The sooner we get him over there the sooner we get him back! I'm right, mamma? Now--now--no water-works! Get your brother's suitcase, Isadore. Now--now--no nonsense--quick!"

With a deftly manoeuvred round of good-byes, a grip-laden dash for door, a throbbing moment of turning back when it seemed as though Sarah Kantor's arms could not unlock their deadlock of him, Leon Kantor was out and gone, the group of faces point-etched into the silence behind him. The poor mute face of Mannie, laughing softly. Rosa Kantor crying into her hands. Esther, grief-crumpled, but rich in the enormous hope of youth. The sweet Gina, to whom the waiting months had already begun their reality.

Not so, Sarah Kantor. In a bedroom adjoining, its high-ceilinged vastness as cold as a cathedral to her lowness of stature, sobs dry and terrible were rumbling up from her, only to dash against lips tightly restraining them.

On her knees beside a chest of drawers, and unwrapping it from swaddling-clothes, she withdrew what at best had been a sorry sort of fiddle. Cracked of back and solitary of string it was as if her trembling arms, raising it above her head, would make of themselves and her swaying body the tripod of an altar. The old twisting and prophetic pain was behind her heart. Like the painted billows of music that the old Italian masters loved to do, there wound and wreathed about her clouds of song.

But I've a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

THE LUBBENY KISS

BY LOUISE RICE

From _Ainslee's Magazine_

For many hours the hot July sun had beaten down upon the upland meadows and the pine woods of the lower New Jersey hills. So, when the dew began to fall, there arose from them a heady brew, distilled from blossoming milkweed and fruiting wild raspberry canes and mountain laurel and dried pine needles.

The Princess Dora Parse took this perfume into her lusty young lungs and blew it out again in a long sigh, after which she bent her first finger over her thumb as one must when one returns what all Romanys know to be "the breath of God." She did this almost unconsciously, for all her faculties were busied in another matter.

The eyes of a gorgio, weakened by an indoor life, would never have been able to distinguish the small object for which the princess looked, for she was perched up on the high seat of the red Romany _wardo_, and she drove her two strong, shaggy horses with a free and careless hand. But to Dora Parse the blur of vague shadows gliding by each wheel was not vague at all. Suddenly she checked her horses and sprang down.

The patteran for which she was looking was laid beneath a clump of the flowering weed which the Romanys call "stars in the sky." The gorgios know it as Queen Ann's lace, and the farmers curse it by the name of the wild carrot. The patteran was like a miniature log cabin without a roof, and across the top one large stick was laid, pointing upward along the mountain road.

Two brown and slender fingers on the big braid which dropped over her shoulder, the princess meditated, a shiver of fear running through her. What, she asked herself, could this mean? Why, for the first time in years, were the wagons to go to the farm of Jan Jacobus? Even if it were only a chance happening, it was a most unfortunate one, for young Jan, the fair-haired, giant son of old Jacobus, with his light blue eyes and his drawling, insolent speech, was the last person in the world that she wanted to see, especially with her man near.

For she had meant no harm. Many and many a time she had smiled into the eyes of men and felt pride in her power over them. Still--and yet--The princess scattered the patteran with her foot, for she knew that all the wagons must be ahead of her, since she had lagged so, and she leaped to her seat with one easy, lithe swing and drove on up the darkening road.

Jan Jacobus, like several other descendants of the Dutch settlers of New Jersey, held his upland farm on shares with John Lane's tribe of gypsies. Jacobuses and Bantas and Koppfs, they made no bones about having business dealings with the tribe of English Romanys which had followed a regular route, twice a year, from Maryland to the upper part of New Jersey, since before the beginning of the Revolutionary days. The descendants of the English settlers, the Hardys, the Lesters, the Vincents, and the Farrands, looked with still persisting English reserve upon the roamers of the woods and would have no traffic with them, though a good many of their sons and daughters had to know the few Romany young people who were left, by twos and threes in the towns for occasional years of schooling.

The tribe, trading in land in the two States which they frequented, and breeding horses, was very rich, but not very many people knew that. However, they were conceded to be shrewd bargainers, and when old John bought Martin Debbins' upland and rocky farm one year, with the money that he had made by a lucky purchase of a gangling colt whose owner had failed rightly to appraise its possibilities as a racer, Boonton and Dover and Morristown laughed.

"_Sal_ away," old John retorted pleasantly to the cashier of the bank in Boonton, where the tube had deposited its surplus funds for many years, "but you won't _sal_ so much when you _dik_ what I will make out of that joke."

The cashier thereupon looked thoughtful. It might well be that he and others would not laugh when they saw good fortune which might have been theirs following this genial old outlaw.

That summer the wagons camped on the Debbins place, and old John stocked it with a lot of fine hogs, for which the land was especially adapted. They fattened on the many acres, wooded with wild nut trees, and Jacobus--as keen a bargainer as any Romany, upon whom John Lane had had his eye all the time--took the farm on shares, and every year thereafter the cashier at the bank added a neat little total to the big balance which the tribe was rolling up.

And every year, as the wagons beat up toward Dover in July, old John would drive on ahead and spend a night of mingled business and pleasure with old Jan, reckoning up the profits on the Berkshires for which the farm was now famous, and putting down big mugs of the "black drink" for which Aunty Alice Lee, John Lane's ancient cousin, was equally famous. The amount of this fiery and head-splitting liquor which the two old men thus got away with was afterward gleefully recounted in the wagons and fearfully whispered of in the little Dutch church at Horse's Neck which the Jacobuses had attended for over a hundred years.

But never, as wagon after wagon had gone up the turning that led to the upward farm, had there been a patteran pointing that way. Always, it had shown the way onward and downward, to the little hamlet of Rockaway, where there was an old and friendly camping place, back of the blacksmith shop beyond the church. Old John never encouraged the wagons to visit any of the properties held by the tribe.

"Silver blackens the salt of friendship," he would say.

Dora Parse was driving her own _wardo_, a very fine one which had belonged to her mother. Lester Montague, of Sea Tack, Maryland, who makes the wagons of Romanys for all the Atlantic coast tribes, like his father before him, had done an especially good job of it. The princess had been certified, by the Romany rites, to old John's eldest son, George, for she had flatly refused to be married according to the gorgio ways. Not having been married a full year, he was not yet entitled to carry the heavy, silver-topped stick which is the badge of the married man, nor could he demand a place in his wife's tent or wagon unless she expressly invited him. Dora Parse and George Lane were passionately in love with each other, and their meeting and mating had been the flowering romance of the tribe, the previous summer.

The princess, being descended from a very old Romany family, as her name showed, was far higher in rank than any one in the Lane tribe. Her aristocratic lineage showed in the set of her magnificent head, in the small, delicate fingers of her hand, and in the fire and richness of her eyes. Also, her skin was of the colour of old ivory upon which is cast a distant, faint reflection of the sunset, and her mouth, thinner than those of most Romanys, was of the colour of a ripe pomegranate.

"A _rauni, a puro rauni_," all the tribes of the eastern coast murmured respectfully, when Dora Parse's name was mentioned.

She was, indeed, a very great lady, but she was a flirtatious and headstrong girl. She was one of the few modern gypsies who still hold to the unadulterated worship of "those." All the members of John Lane's tribe were Methodists--had been since before they had migrated from England. In every wagon, save Dora's, a large illustrated Bible lay on a little table, and those who could, read them aloud to the rest of a Sunday afternoon. This did not mean, however, that the Romanys had descended to gorgio ways, or that they had wholly left off their attentions to "those". They combined the two. Old John was known as a fervent and eloquent leader in prayer at the Wednesday-night prayer meetings in the Maryland town where his church membership was held, but he had not ceased to carry the "box of meanings," as befitted the chief of the tribe.

This was a very beautifully worked box of pure gold, made by the great Nikola of Budapest, whose boxes can be found inside the shirt of every gypsy chief, where they are always carried. In them are some grains of wheat, garnered by moonlight, a peacock's feather, and a small silver bell with a coiled snake for a handle. When anything is to be decided, a few of the grains are taken out and counted. If they are even, the omen is bad, but if they are odd, all is well. Old John had an elastic and accommodating mind, like all Romanys, so he never thought it strange that he should ask the "box of meanings" whether or not it was going to storm on prayer-meeting nights.

Dora Parse thought of the box now, and wished that she might have the peacock's feather for a minute, so that her uneasy sense of impending bad luck would leave her. Then she stopped beside a cross-barred gate where an old man was evidently waiting for her.

"Lane was gettin' troubled about yuh," he said, as he turned the horses and peered curiously up at her. He knew who she was, not only because John Lane had said who it was who was late, but because Dora Parse's appearance was well known to the whole countryside. She was the only member of the tribe who kept to the full Romany dress. There were big gold loops in her small ears, and on her arms, many gold bracelets, whose lightness testified to their freedom from alloy. Her skirt was of red, heavily embroidered in blue, and her waist, with short sleeves, was of sheer white cloth, with an embroidered bolero. Her hair she wore in the ancient fashion, in two braids on either side of her face. She could well afford to, the chis muttered among themselves. Any girl with hair like that--

There was a long lane leading to the barns and to the meadow back of them, and there, said Jan, the tribe was to camp. As the princess drove along the short distance, she swiftly snatched off her little bolero, put it on wrong side out, and then snatched it off and righted it. That much, at least, she could do to avert ill luck. And her heart bounded as she drove in among the other wagons, for her husband came running to meet her and held out his arms.

She dropped into them and laid each finger tip, delicately, in succession, upon his eyes and his ears and his mouth, the seal of a betrothal and the sign whereby a Romany chal may know that a chi intends to accept him when he speaks for her before the tribe; a sign that lovers repeat as a sacred and intimate caress. She leaned, hard, into his arms, and he held her, pressing the tender, confidential kiss that is given to children behind her little ear.

Dora Parse suddenly ran both hands through his thick hair and gave it a little pull. She always did that when her spirits rose. Then she turned and looked at the scene, and at once she knew that there was to be some special occasion. Aunty Alice Lee was seated by a cooking fire, on which stood the enormous iron pot in which the "big meals" were prepared, when the tribe was to eat together and not in separate groups, as it usually did. There were some boards laid on wooden horses, and Pyramus Lee, aunty's grandson, was bringing blocks of wood from the woodshed for seats. Dora Parse clapped her hands with delight and looked at her man.

"_Tetcho_!" she exclaimed, approvingly, using the word that spells all degrees of satisfaction. "And what is it for, stickless one? Is it a talk over silver?"

"Yes, it is some business," George Lane replied, "but first there will be a _gillie shoon_."

A _gillie shoon_ has its counterpart in the English word "singsong," as it is beginning to be used now, with this exception: Romanys have few "fixed" songs. They have strains which are set, which every one knows, but a _gillie shoon_ means that the performers improvise coninually; and in this sense it is a mystic ceremony, never held at an appointed time, except a "time of Mul-cerus," which really means a sort of religious wave of feeling, which strikes tribe after tribe, usually in the spring.

"Marda has come back," Aunty Lee called out to Dora Parse. No one ever called her by her full name of Marda Lee, because she was a Lee only by courtesy, having been adopted from a distant wagon when both her parents were killed in a thunderstorm. Marda, wearing the trim tailored skirt and waist that were her usual costume, was putting the big red tablecloth of the "big meals" on the boards. Dora went quickly toward the young girl and embraced her.

"How is our little scholar?" she asked affectionately.

"I am very well, Dora Parse, but a little tired," Marda answered.

"And did you receive another paper?"

"Yes. I passed my exams. It will save me half a year in Dover."

"That is good," Dora Parse replied, although she had only the dimmest idea of what Marda meant. The young girl knew that. She had just come from taking a special course in Columbia, and she was feeling the breach between herself and her people to be especially wide. Because of that, perhaps, she also felt more loving toward all of them than she ever had, and especially toward Dora about whom she knew something that was most alarming. Dora Parse noted the pale, grave face of her favourite friend with concern.

"Smile, bird of my heart," she entreated, "for we are to have a _gillie shoon_. Sit near me, that I may follow your heaven voice."

There was no flattery meant. The Romanys call the soprano "the heaven voice," the tenor "the sky voice," the contralto "the earth voice," and the basso "the sea voice." Dora had a really wonderful earth voice, almost as wonderful as Marda's heaven voice, which would have been remarkable even among opera singers, and the two were known everywhere for their improvisations. In answer to the remark of the princess, Marda gave her a strange look and said:

"I shall be near you, Dora Parse. Do not forget."

Her manner was certainly peculiar, the princess thought, as she walked away. But then one never knew what Marda was thinking about. Her great education set her apart from others. Any chi who habitually read herself to sleep over those most _puro libros_, "The Works of William Shakespeare, in Eight Volumes, Complete, with Glossary and Appendix," must not be judged by ordinary standards. The princess knew the full title of those _puro libros_, having painfully spelled it out, all one rainy afternoon, in Marda's mother's wagon, with repeated assitance and explanations from Marda, which had left the princess with a headache.

Now Aunty Lee took off the heavy iron cover of the pot and the odour of Romany duck stew, than which there is nothing in the world more appetizing, mingled with the sweet fragrance of the drying hay. Aunty thrust a fork as long as a poker into the bubbling mass and then gave the call that brings the tribe in a hurry.

"Empo!" she said in her shrill, cracked voice. "Empo! Empo!"

Laughing, teasing, jostling, talking, they all came, spilling out from the wagons, running from the barn, sauntering in, the lovers, by twos, and sat down before the plates heaped high with the duck and the vegetables with which it was cooked and the big loaves of Italian bread which the Romanys like and always buy as they pass through towns where there are Italian bakeries.

But they sat quiet then, and each one looked toward the princess, as politeness demanded, since she was the highest in rank among them.

She drew a sliver of meat from her plate and tossed it over her shoulder.

"To the great _ré_" she said.

"To the _shule_," each one murmured. Then, having paid their compliments to the sun and the moon, as all good Romanys must before eating, they fell to with heartiness.

When they were through, the mothers and the old men cleared away the tables and put the younger children to bed in the wagons, and the princess and George Lane and Marda and young Adam Lane, George's youngest brother, walked up and down, outside the glow from the cooking fire, taking the deep, full breaths which cleanse the mouth and prepare the soul for the ecstasy of song.

The men took away the table and the lanterns which had been standing about, and put out the cooking fire, for the big moon was rolling up over the treetops, and Romanys sing by her light alone, if they can. Frogs were calling in the shallow stretches of the Upper Rockaway. People began to sit down in a big circle.

Then Marda started the _gillie shoon_. At first you could not have been sure whether the sound was far or near, for she "covered" her tones, in a way that many a gorgio gives years and much silver to learn. Then the wonderful tone swelled out, as if an organ stop were being pulled open, and one by one, the four leaders cast in the dropping notes which followed and sustained the theme that Marda was weaving:

"Lal--la--ai--lala--lalu! Ai--l-a-a-a--lalu!"

Old John, who had not appeared before, slid into the circle, holding by the sleeve a giant of a man who seemed to come half unwillingly. Dora Parse saw him, and she could not repress the shiver that ran through her at the sight of young Jan Jacobus, yet she sang on. The deep, majestic basses throbbed out the foundation of the great fuguelike chorus, and the sopranos soared and soared until they were singing falsetto, according to gorgio standards, only it sounded like the sweetly piercing high notes of violins, and the tenors and contraltos wove a garland of glancing melody between the two. They were all singing now. Rocking back and forth a little, swaying gently from side to side, lovers clasped together, mothers in their young sons' arms, and fathers clasping their daughters, they sent out to the velvet arch above them the heart cry of a race, proud and humble, cleanly voluptuous, strong and cruel, passionate and loving, elemental like the north wind and subtle as the fragrance of the poppy.

"Ai--lallu! Ai--lala--lala! Ai--lallu!"

Jan Jacobus sat with his big jaw dropping. Stupid boor that he was, he could not have explained the terrifying effect which this wild music and those tense, uplifting faces had upon him, but he would have given anything to be back in his mother's kitchen, with the lamp lit and the dark, unfamiliar night shut out.

As suddenly as the singing had begun, it stopped. People coughed, moved a little, whispered to one another. Then George Lane stood upon his feet, pulling Dora Parse with him.

"You see her?" he asked them all, holding out his wife in his arms.

Dora Parse knew then, for he was beginning the ritual of the man or woman who accuses a partner, before the tribe, of unfaithfulness. He was using the most _puro_ Romany _jib_, for only so can the serious affairs of the tribe tribunal be conducted. Dora Parse struggled in the strong hands of her man.

"No! No!" she cried. "No--no!"

"You see her?" George Lane repeated to the circle.

"We see her," they answered in a murmur that ran around from end to end.

"She is mine?"

"She is yours."