Fanny Herself Part 37

"How do I look?" Theodore demanded, and stood up before her.

"Beautiful!" said f.a.n.n.y, and meant it.

Theodore pa.s.sed a hand over his cheek. "Cut myself shaving, d.a.m.n it!"

"It doesn't show."

He resumed his pacing. Now and then he stopped, and rubbed his hands together with a motion we use in was.h.i.+ng. Finally:

"I wish you'd go out front," he said, almost pettishly. f.a.n.n.y rose, without a word. She looked very handsome. Excitement had given her color. The pupils of her eyes were dilated and they shone brilliantly.

She looked at her brother. He stared at her. They swayed together. They kissed, and clung together for a long moment. Then f.a.n.n.y turned and walked swiftly away, and stumbled a little as she groped for the stairway.

The bell in the foyer rang. The audience strolled to the auditorium.

They lagged, f.a.n.n.y thought. They crawled. She told herself that she must not allow her nerves to tease her like that. She looked about her, with outward calm. Her eyes met Fenger's. He was seated, alone. It was he who had got a subscription seat for her from a friend. She had said she preferred to be alone. She looked at him now and he at her, and they did not nod nor smile. The house settled itself flutteringly.

A man behind f.a.n.n.y spoke. "Who's this Brandeis?"

"I don't know. A new one. German, I guess. They say he's good.

Kreisler's the boy who can play for me, though."

The orchestra was seated now. Stock, the conductor, came out from the little side door. Behind him walked Theodore. There was a little, impersonal burst of applause. Stock mounted his conductor's platform and glanced paternally down at Theodore, who stood at the left, violin and bow in hand, bowing. The audience seemed to warm to his boyishness.

They applauded again, and he bowed in a little series of jerky bobs that waggled his coat-tails. Heels close together, knees close together. A German bow. And then a polite series of bobs addressed to Stock and his orchestra. Stock's long, slim hands poised in air. His fingertips seemed to draw from the men before him the first poignant strains of Theodore's concerto. Theodore stood, slim and straight. f.a.n.n.y's face, lifted toward him, was a prayerful thing. Theodore suddenly jerked back the left lapel of his coat in a little movement f.a.n.n.y remembered as typical in his boyish days, nuzzled his violin tenderly, and began to play.

It is the most excruciating of instruments, the violin, or the most exquisite. I think f.a.n.n.y actually heard very little of his playing. Her hands were icy. Her cheeks were hot. The man before her was not Theodore Brandeis, the violinist, but Teddy, the bright-haired, knickered schoolboy who played to those people seated in the yellow wooden pews of the temple in Winnebago. The years seemed to fade away. He crouched over his violin to get the 'cello tones for which he was to become famous, and it was the same hunched, almost awkward pose that the boy had used.

f.a.n.n.y found herself watching his feet as his s.h.i.+fted his position. He was nervous. And he was not taken out of himself. She knew that because she saw the play of his muscles about the jaw-bone. It followed that he was not playing his best. She could not tell that from listening to him.

Her music sense was dulled. She got it from these outward signs. The woman next to her was reading a program absorbedly, turning the pages regularly, and with care. f.a.n.n.y could have killed her with her two hands. She tried to listen detachedly. The music was familiar to her.

Theodore had played it for her, again and again. The last movement had never failed to shake her emotionally. It was the glorious and triumphant cry of a people tried and unafraid. She heard it now, unmoved.

And then Theodore was bowing his little jerky bows, and he was shaking hands with Stock, and with the First Violin. He was gone. f.a.n.n.y sat with her hands in her lap. The applause continued. Theodore appeared again.

Bowed. He bent very low now, with his arms hanging straight. There was something gracious and courtly about him. And foreign. He must keep that, f.a.n.n.y thought. They like it. She saw him off again. More applause.

Encores were against the house rules. She knew that. Then it meant they were pleased. He was to play again. A group of Hungarian dances this time. They were wild, gypsy things, rising to frenzy at times. He played them with spirit and poetry. To listen sent the blood singing through the veins. f.a.n.n.y found herself thinking clearly and exaltedly.

"This is what my mother drudged for, and died for, and it was worth it.

And you must do the same, if necessary. Nothing else matters. What he needs now is luxury. He's worn out with fighting. Ease. Peace. Leisure.

You've got to give them to him. It's no use, f.a.n.n.y. You lose."

In that moment she reached a mark in her spiritual career that she was to outdistance but once.

Theodore was bowing again. f.a.n.n.y had scarcely realized that he had finished. The concert was over.

"... the group of dances," the man behind her was saying as he helped the girl next him with her coat, "but I didn't like that first thing.

Church music, not concert."

f.a.n.n.y found her way back to the ante-room. Theodore was talking to the conductor, and one or two others. He looked tired, and his eyes found f.a.n.n.y's with appeal and relief in them. She came over to him. There were introductions, congratulations. f.a.n.n.y slipped her hand over his with a firm pressure.

"Come, dear. You must be tired."

At the door they found Fenger waiting. Theodore received his well-worded congratulations with an ill-concealed scowl.

"My car's waiting," said Fenger. "Won't you let me take you home?"

A warning pressure from Theodore. "Thanks, no. We have a car. Theodore's very tired."

"I can quite believe that."

"Not tired," growled Theodore, like a great boy. "I'm hungry. Starved. I never eat before playing."

Kurt Stein, Theodore's manager, had been hovering over him solicitously.

"You must remember to-morrow night. I should advise you to rest now, as quickly as possible." He, too, glared at Fenger.

Fenger fell back, almost humbly. "I've great news for you. I must see you Sunday. After this is over. I'll telephone you. Don't try to come to work to-morrow." All this is a hurried aside to f.a.n.n.y.

f.a.n.n.y nodded and moved away with Theodore.

Theodore leaned back in the car, but there was no hint of relaxation. He was as tense and vibrant as one of his own violin strings.

"It went, didn't it? They're like clods, these American audiences."

It was on the tip of f.a.n.n.y's tongue to say that he had professed indifference to audiences, but she wisely refrained. "Gad! I'm hungry.

What makes this Fenger hang around so? I'm going to tell him to keep away, some day. The way he stares at you. Let's go somewhere to-night, Fan. Or have some people in. I can't sit about after I've played. Olga always used to have a supper party, or something."

"All right, Ted. Would you like the theater?"

For the first time in her life she felt a little whisper of sympathy for the despised Olga. Perhaps, after all, she had not been wholly to blame.

He was to leave Sunday morning for Cleveland, where he would play Monday. He had insisted on taking Mizzi with him, though f.a.n.n.y had railed and stormed. Theodore had had his way.

"She's used to it. She likes to travel, don't you, Mizzi? You should have seen her in Russia, and all over Germany, and in Sweden. She's a better traveler than her dad."

Sat.u.r.day morning's papers were kind, but cool. They used words such as promising, uneven, overambitious, gifted. Theodore crumpled the lot into a ball and hurled them across the room, swearing horribly. Then he smoothed them out, clipped them, and saved them carefully. His playing that night was tinged with bravado, and the Sat.u.r.day evening audience rose to it. There was about his performance a glow, a spirit that had been lacking on the previous day.

Inconsistently enough, he missed the antagonism of the European critics.

He was puzzled and resentful.

"They hardly say a word about the meaning of the concerto. They accept it as a piece of music, Jewish in theme. It might as well be ent.i.tled Springtime."

"This isn't France or Russia," said f.a.n.n.y. "Antagonism here isn't religious. It's personal, almost. You've been away so many years you've forgotten. They don't object to us as a sect, or a race, but as a type.

That's the trouble, Clarence Heyl says. We're free to build as many synagogues as we like, and wors.h.i.+p in them all day, if we want to. But we don't want to. The struggle isn't racial any more, but individual.

For some reason or other one flashy, loud-talking Hebrew in a restaurant can cause more ill feeling than ten thousand of them holding a religious ma.s.s meeting in Union Square."

Theodore pondered a moment. "Then here each one of us is responsible. Is that it?"

"I suppose so."

"But look here. I've been here ten weeks, and I've met your friends, and not one of them is a Jew. How's that?"

f.a.n.n.y flushed a little. "Oh, it just worked out that way."

Theodore looked at her hard. "You mean you worked it out that way?"