Fanny Herself

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She moistened her lips a little with her tongue. "And
you've done it? Teddy! You've done--that!"

Theodore Brandeis stood up, very straight and tall. "Yes,"
he said, simply. "Yes, I've done that."

She came over to him then, and put her two hands on his
shoulders. "Ted--dear--will you ever forgive me? I'll try
to make up for it now. I didn't know. I've been blind.
Worse than blind. Criminal." She was weeping now, broken-
heartedly, and he was patting her with little comforting
love pats, and whispering words of tenderness.

"Forgive you? Forgive you what?"

"The years of suffering. The years you've had to spend with
her. With that horrible woman--"

"Don't--" He sucked his breath between his teeth. His face
had gone haggard again. Fanny, direct as always, made
up her mind that she would have it all. And now.

"There's something you haven't told me. Tell me all of it.
You're my brother and I'm your sister. We're all we have in
the world." And at that, as though timed by some miraculous
and supernatural stage manager, there came a cry from the
next room; a sleepy, comfortable, imperious little cry.
Mizzi had awakened. Fanny made a step in the direction of
the door. Then she turned back. "Tell me why Olga didn't
come. Why isn't she here with her husband and baby?"

"Because she's with another man."

"Another--"

"It had been going on for a long time. I was the last to
know about it. It's that way, always, isn't it? He's an
officer. A fool. He'll have to take off his silly corsets
now, and his velvet collar, and his shiny boots, and go to
war. Damn him! I hope they'll kill him with a hundred
bayonets, one by one, and leave him to rot on the field.
She had been fooling me all the time, and they had been
laughing at me, the two of them. I didn't find it out until
just before this American trip. And when I confronted her
with it she laughed in my face. She said she hated me. She
said she'd rather starve than leave him to come to America
with me. She said I was a fiddling fool. She--" he was
trembling and sick with the shame of it--"God! I can't tell
you the things she said. She wanted to keep Mizzi. Isn't
that strange? She loves the baby. She neglects her, and
spoils her, and once I saw her beat her, in a rage. But she
says she loves my Mizzi, and I believe she does, in her own
dreadful way. I promised her, and lied to her, and then I
ran away with Mizzi and her nurse."

"Oh, I thank God for that!" Fanny cried. "I thank God for
that! And now, Teddy boy, we'll forget all about those
miserable years. We'll forget all about her, and the
life she led you. You're going to have your chance here.
You're going to be repaid for every minute of suffering
you've endured. I'll make it up to you. And when you see
them applauding you, calling for you, adoring you, all those
hideous years will fade from your mind, and you'll be
Theodore Brandeis, the successful, Theodore Brandeis, the
gifted, Theodore Brandeis, the great! You need never think
of her again. You'll never see her again. That beast!
That woman!"

And at that Theodore's face became distorted and dreadful
with pain. He raised two impotent, shaking arms high above
his head. "That's just it! That's just it! You don't know
what love is. You don't know what hate is. You don't know
how I hate myself. Loathe myself. She's all that's
miserable, all that's unspeakable, all that's vile. And if
she called me to-day I'd come. That's it." He covered his
shamed face with his two hands, so that the words came from
him slobberingly, sickeningly. "I hate her! I hate her!
And I want her. I want her. I want her!"

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

If Fanny Brandeis, the deliberately selfish, the
calculatingly ambitious, was aghast at the trick fate had
played her, she kept her thoughts to herself. Knowing her,
I think she must have been grimly amused at finding herself
saddled with a helpless baby, a bewildered peasant woman,
and an artist brother both helpless and bewildered.

It was out of the question to house them in her small
apartment. She found a furnished apartment near her own,
and installed them there, with a working housekeeper in
charge. She had a gift for management, and she arranged all
these details with a brisk capability that swept everything
before it. A sunny bedroom for Mizzi. But then, a bright
living room, too, for Theodore's hours of practice. No
noise. Chicago's roar maddened him. Otti shied at every
new contrivance that met her eye. She had to be broken in
to elevators, electric switches, hot and cold faucets,
radiators.

"No apartment ever built could cover all the requirements,"
Fanny confided to Fenger, after the first harrowing week.
"What they really need is a combination palace, houseboat,
sanatorium, and creche."

"Look here," said Fenger. "If I can help, why--" a sudden
thought struck him. "Why don't you bring 'em all down to my
place in the country? We're not there half the time. It's
too cool for my wife in September. Just the thing for the
child, and your brother could fiddle his head off."

The Fengers had a roomy, wide-verandaed house near
Lake Forest; one of the many places of its kind that dot the
section known as the north shore. Its lawn sloped gently
down to the water's edge. The house was gay with striped
awnings, and scarlet geraniums, and chintz-covered chairs.
The bright, sparkling, luxurious little place seemed to
satisfy a certain beauty-sense in Fenger, as did the
etchings on the walls in his office. Fanny had spent a
week-end there in July, with three or four other guests,
including Fascinating Facts. She had been charmed with it,
and had announced that her energies thereafter would be
directed solely toward the possession of just such a house
as this, with a lawn that was lipped by the lake, awnings
and geraniums to give it a French cafe air; books and
magazines enough to belie that.

"And I'll always wear white," she promised, gayly, "and
there'll be pitchers on every table, frosty on the outside,
and minty on the inside, and you're all invited."

They had laughed at that, and so had she, but she had been
grimly in earnest just the same.

She shook her head now at Fenger's suggestion. "Imagine
Mrs. Fenger's face at sight of Mizzi, and Theodore with his
violin, and Otti with her shawls and paraphernalia.
Though," she added, seriously, "it's mighty kind of you, and
generous--and just like a man."

"It isn't kindness nor generosity that makes me want to do
things for you."

"Modest," murmured Fanny, wickedly, "as always."

Fenger bent his look upon her. "Don't try the ingenue on
me, Fanny."

Theodore's manager, Kurt Stein, was to have followed him in
ten days. The war changed that. The war was to change many
things. Fanny seemed to sense the influx of musicians that
was to burst upon the United States following the first few
weeks of the catastrophe, and she set about forestalling it.
Advertising. That was what Theodore needed. She had
faith enough in his genius. But her business sense told her
that this genius must be enhanced by the proper setting.
She set about creating this setting. She overlooked no
chance to fix his personality in the kaleidoscopic mind of
the American public--or as much of it as she could reach.
His publicity man was a dignified German-American whose
methods were legitimate and uninspired. Fanny's enthusiasm
and superb confidence in Theodore's genius infected Fenger,
Fascinating Facts, even Nathan Haynes himself. Nathan
Haynes had never posed as a patron of the arts, in spite of
his fantastic millions. But by the middle of September
there were few of his friends, or his wife's friends, who
had not heard of this Theodore Brandeis. In Chicago,
Illinois, no one lives in houses, it is said, except the
city's old families, and new millionaires. The rest of the
vast population is flat-dwelling. To say that Nathan
Haynes' spoken praise reached the city's house-dwellers
would carry with it a significance plain to any Chicagoan.

As for Fanny's method; here is a typical example of her
somewhat crude effectiveness in showmanship. Otti had
brought with her from Vienna her native peasant costume. It
is a costume seen daily in the Austrian capital, on the
Ring, in the Stadt Park, wherever Viennese nurses convene
with their small charges. To the American eye it is a
musical comedy costume, picturesque, bouffant, amazing.
Your Austrian takes it quite for granted. Regardless of the
age of the nurse, the skirt is short, coming a few inches
below the knees, and built like a lamp shade, in color
usually a bright scarlet, with rows of black velvet ribbon
at the bottom. Beneath it are worn skirts and skirts, and
skirts, so that the opera-bouffe effect is complete. The
bodice is black velvet, laced over a chemise of white. The
head-gear a soaring winged affair of stiffly starched
white, that is a pass between the Breton peasant
woman's cap and an aeroplane. Black stockings and slippers
finish the costume.

Otti and Mizzi spent the glorious September days in Lincoln
park, Otti garbed in staid American stripes and apron, Mizzi
resplendent in smartest of children's dresses provided for
her lavishly by her aunt. Her fat and dimpled hands
smoothed the blue, or pink or white folds with a complacency
astonishing in one of her years. "That's her mother in
her," Fanny thought.

One rainy autumn day Fanny entered her brother's apartment
to find Otti resplendent in her Viennese nurse's costume.
Mizzi had been cross and fretful, and the sight of the
familiar scarlet and black and white, and the great winged
cap seemed to soothe her.

"Otti!" Fanny exclaimed. "You gorgeous creature! What is
it? A dress rehearsal?" Otti got the import, if not the
English.

"So gehen wir im Wien," she explained, and struck a killing
pose.

"Everybody? All the nurses? Alle?"

"Aber sure," Otti displayed her half dozen English words
whenever possible.

Fanny stared a moment. Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully.
"To-morrow's Saturday," she said, in German. "If it's fair
and warm you put on that costume and take Mizzi to the
park. . . . Certainly the animal cages, if you want to. If
any one annoys you, come home. If a policeman asks you why
you are dressed that way tell him it is the costume worn by
nurses in Vienna. Give him your name. Tell him who your
master is. If he doesn't speak German--and he won't, in
Chicago--some one will translate for you."

Not a Sunday paper in Chicago that did not carry a startling
picture of the resplendent Otti and the dimpled and smiling
Mizzi. The omnipresent staff photographer seemed to sniff
his victim from afar. He pounced on Theodore Brandeis'
baby daughter, accompanied by her Viennese nurse (in
costume) and he played her up in a Sunday special that was
worth thousands of dollars, Fanny assured the bewildered and
resentful Theodore, as he floundered wildly through the
billowing waves of the Sunday newspaper flood.
Theodore's first appearance was to be in Chicago as soloist
with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in the season's opening
program in October. Any music-wise Chicagoan will tell you
that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is not only a musical
organization functioning marvelously (when playing
Beethoven). It is an institution. Its patrons will admit
the existence, but not the superiority of similar
organizations in Boston, Philadelphia and New York. On
Friday afternoons, during the season, Orchestra Hall,
situate on Michigan Boulevard, holds more pretty girls and
fewer men than one might expect to see at any one gathering
other than, perhaps, a wholesale debutante tea crush. A
Friday afternoon ticket is as impossible of attainment for
one not a subscriber as a seat in heaven for a sinner.
Saturday night's audience is staider, more masculine, less
staccato. Gallery, balcony, parquet, it represents the
city's best. Its men prefer Beethoven to Berlin. Its women
could wear pearl necklaces, and don't. Between the audience
and the solemn black-and-white rows on the platform there
exists an entente cordiale. The Konzert-Meister bows to
his friend in the third row, as he tucks his violin under
his chin. The fifth row, aisle, smiles and nods to the
sausage-fingered 'cellist.

"Fritz is playing well to-night."

In a rarefied form, it is the atmosphere that existed
between audience and players in the days of the old and
famous Daly stock company.

Such was the character of the audience Theodore was to face
on his first appearance in America. Fanny explained
its nature to him. He shrugged his shoulders in a gesture
as German as it was expressive.

Theodore seemed to have become irrevocably German during the
years of his absence from America. He had a queer stock of
little foreign tricks. He lifted his hat to men
acquaintances on the street. He had learned to smack his
heels smartly together and to bow stiffly from the waist,
and to kiss the hand of the matrons--and they adored him for
it. He was quite innocent of pose in these things. He
seemed to have imbibed them, together with his queer German
haircut, and his incredibly German clothes.

Fanny allowed him to retain the bow, and the courtly hand-
kiss, but she insisted that he change the clothes and the
haircut.

"You'll have to let it grow, Ted. I don't mean that I want
you to have a mane, like Ysaye. But I do think you ought to
discard that convict cut. Besides, it isn't becoming. And
if you're going to be an American violinist you'll have to
look it--with a foreign finish."
He let his hair grow. Fanny watched with interest for the
appearance of the unruly lock which had been wont to
straggle over his white forehead in his schoolboy days. The
new and well-cut American clothes effected surprisingly
little change. Fanny, surveying him, shook her head.

"When you stepped off the ship you looked like a German in
German clothes. Now you look like a German in American
clothes. I don't know--I do believe it's your face, Ted. I
wouldn't have thought that ten years or so in any country
could change the shape of one's nose, and mouth and
cheekbones. Do you suppose it's the umlauts?"

"Cut it out!" laughed Ted, that being his idea of modern
American slang. He was fascinated by these crisp phrases,
but he was ten years or so behind the times, and he
sometimes startled his hearers by an exhibition of slang so
old as to be almost new. It was all the more startling in
contrast with his conversational English, which was as
carefully correct as a born German's.

As for the rest, it was plain that he was interested, but
unhappy. He practiced for hours daily. He often took Mizzi
to the park and came back storming about the dirt, the
noise, the haste, the rudeness, the crowds, the
mismanagement of the entire city. Dummheit, he called it.
They profaned the lake. They allowed the people to trample
the grass. They threw papers and banana skins about. And
they wasted! His years in Germany had taught him to regard
all these things as sacrilege, and the last as downright
criminal. He was lonesome for his Germany. That was plain.
He hated it, and loved it, much as he hated and loved the
woman who had so nearly spoiled his life. The maelstrom
known as the southwest corner of State and Madison streets
appalled him.

"Gott!" he exclaimed. "Es ist unglaublich! Aber ganz
unglaublich! Ich werde bald veruckt." He somehow lapsed
into German when excited.

Fanny took him to the Haynes-Cooper plant one day, and it
left him dazed, and incredulous. She quoted millions at
him. He was not interested. He looked at the office
workers, the mail-room girls, and shook his head, dumbly.
They were using bicycles now, with a bundle rack in the
front, in the vast stock rooms, and the roller skates had
been discarded as too slow. The stock boys skimmed around
corners on these lightweight bicycles, up one aisle, and
down the next, snatching bundles out of bins, shooting
bundles into bins, as expertly as players in a gymkhana.

Theodore saw the uncanny rapidity with which the letter-
opening machines did their work. He watched the great
presses that turned out the catalogue--the catalogue
whose message meant millions; he sat in Fenger's office and
stared at the etchings, and said, "Certainly," with
politeness, when Fenger excused himself in the midst of a
conversation to pick up the telephone receiver and talk to
their shoe factory in Maine. He ended up finally in Fanny's
office, no longer a dingy and undesirable corner, but a
quietly brisk center that sent out vibrations over the
entire plant. Slosson, incidentally, was no longer of the
infants' wear. He had been transferred to a subordinate
position in the grocery section.

"Well," said Fanny, seating herself at her desk, and smiling
radiantly upon her brother. "Well, what do you think of
us?"

And then Theodore Brandeis, the careless, the selfish, the
blind, said a most amazing thing.

"Fanny, I'll work. I'll soon get some of these millions
that are lying about everywhere in this country. And then
I'll take you out of this. I promise you."

Fanny stared at him, a picture of ludicrous astonishment.

"Why, you talk as if you were--sorry for me!"

"I am, dear. God knows I am. I'll make it up to you,
somehow."

It was the first time in all her dashing and successful
career that Fanny Brandeis had felt the sting of pity. She
resented it, hotly. And from Theodore, the groper, the--
"But at any rate," something within her said, "he has always
been true to himself."

Theodore's manager arrived in September, on a Holland boat,
on which he had been obliged to share a stuffy inside cabin
with three others. Kurt Stein was German born, but American
bred, and he had the American love of luxurious travel. He
was still testy when he reached Chicago and his charge.

"How goes the work?" he demanded at once, of Theodore. He
eyed him sharply. "That's better. You have lost some
of the look you had when you left Wien. The ladies would
have liked that look, here in America. But it is bad for
the work."

He took Fanny aside before he left. His face was serious.
It was plain that he was disturbed. "That woman," he began.
"Pardon me, Mrs. Brandeis. She came to me. She says she is
starving. She is alone there, in Vienna. Her--well, she is
alone. The war is everywhere. They say it will last for
years. She wept and pleaded with me to take her here."

"No!" cried Fanny. "Don't let him hear it. He mustn't
know. He----"

"Yes, I know. She is a paradox, that woman. I tell you,
she almost prevailed on me. There is something about her;
something that repels and compels." That struck him as
being a very fine phrase indeed, and he repeated it
appreciatively.

"I'll send her money, somehow," said Fanny.

"Yes. But they say that money is not reaching them over
there. I don't know what becomes of it. It vanishes." He
turned to leave. "Oh, a message for you. On my boat was
Schabelitz. It looks very much as if his great fortune, the
accumulation of years, would be swept away by this war.
Already they are tramping up and down his lands in Poland.
His money--much of it--is invested in great hotels in Poland
and Russia, and they are using them for barracks and
hospitals."

"Schabelitz! You mean a message for Theodore? From him?
That's wonderful."

"For Theodore, and for you, too."

"For me! I made a picture of him once when I was a little
girl. I didn't see him again for years. Then I heard him
play. It was on his last tour here. I wanted to speak to
him. But I was afraid. And my face was red with weeping."

"He remembers you. And he means to see Theodore and you.
He can do much for Theodore in this country, and I
think he will. His message for you was this: `Tell her I
still have the picture that she made of me, with the jack-
in-the-box in my hand, and that look on my face. Tell her I
have often wondered about that little girl in the red cap
and the black curls. I've wondered if she went on, catching
that look back of people's faces. If she did, she should be
more famous than her brother."'

"He said that! About me!"

"I am telling you as nearly as I can. He said, `Tell her it
was a woman who ruined Bauer's career, and caused him to end
his days a music teacher in--in--Gott! I can't remember the
name of that town----"

"Winnebago."

"Winnebago. That was it. `Tell her not to let the brother
spoil his life that way.' So. That is the message. He
said you would understand."

Theodore's face was ominous when she returned to him, after
Stein had left.

"I wish you and Stein wouldn't stand out there in the hall
whispering about me as if I were an idiot patient. What
were you saying?"

"Nothing, Ted. Really."

He brooded a moment. Then his face lighted up with a flash
of intuition. He flung an accusing finger at Fanny.

"He has seen her."

"Ted! You promised."

"She's in trouble. This war. And she hasn't any money. I
know. Look here. We've got to send her money. Cable it."

"I will. Just leave it all to me."

"If she's here, in this country, and you're lying to me----"

"She isn't. My word of honor, Ted."

He relaxed.

Life was a very complicated thing for Fanny these days.
Ted was leaning on her; Mizzi, Otti, and now Fenger. Nathan
Haynes was poking a disturbing finger into that delicate and
complicated mechanism of System which Fenger had built up in
the Haynes-Cooper plant. And Fenger, snarling, was trying
to guard his treasure. He came to Fanny with his grievance.
Fanny had always stimulated him, reassured him, given him
the mental readjustment that he needed.

He strode into her office one morning in late September.
Ordinarily he sent for her. He stood by her desk now, a
sheaf of papers in his hand, palpably stage props, and
lifted significant eyebrows in the direction of the
stenographer busy at her typewriter in the corner.

"You may leave that, Miss Mahin," Fanny said. Miss Mahin, a
comprehending young woman, left it, and the room as well.
Fenger sat down. He was under great excitement, though he
was quite controlled. Fanny, knowing him, waited quietly.
His eyes held hers.

"It's come," Fenger began. "You know that for the last year
Haynes has been milling around with a herd of sociologists,
philanthropists, and students of economics. He had some
scheme in the back of his head, but I thought it was just
another of his impractical ideas. It appears that it
wasn't. Between the lot of them they've evolved a savings
and profit-sharing plan that's founded on a kind of
practical universal brotherhood dream. Haynes's millions
are bothering him. If they actually put this thing through
I'll get out. It'll mean that everything I've built up will
be torn down. It will mean that any six-dollar-a-week
girl----"

"As I understand it," interrupted Fanny, "it will mean that
there will be no more six-dollar-a-week girls."

"That's it. And let me tell you, once you get the ignorant,
unskilled type to believing they're actually capable of
earning decent money, actually worth something, they're
worse than useless. They're dangerous."

"You don't believe that."

"I do."

"But it's a theory that belongs to the Dark Ages. We've
disproved it. We've got beyond that."

"Yes. So was war. We'd got beyond it. But it's here. I
tell you, there are only two classes: the governing and the
governed. That has always been true. It always will be.
Let the Socialists rave. It has never got them anywhere. I
know. I come from the mucker class myself. I know what
they stand for. Boost them, and they'll turn on you. If
there's anything in any of them, he'll pull himself up by
his own bootstraps."

"They're not all potential Fengers."

"Then let 'em stay what they are."

Fanny's pencil was tracing and retracing a tortured and
meaningless figure on the paper before her. "Tell me, do
you remember a girl named Sarah Sapinsky?"

"Never heard of her."

"That's fitting. Sarah Sapinsky was a very pretty, very
dissatisfied girl who was a slave to the bundle chute. One
day there was a period of two seconds when a bundle didn't
pop out at her, and she had time to think. Anyway, she
left. I asked about her. She's on the streets."

"Well?"

"Thanks to you and your system."

"Look here, Fanny. I didn't come to you for that kind of
talk. Don't, for heaven's sake, give me any sociological
drivel to-day. I'm not here just to tell you my troubles.
You know what my contract is here with Haynes-Cooper. And
you know the amount of stock I hold. If this scheme of
Haynes's goes in, I go out. Voluntarily. But at my own
price. The Haynes-Cooper plant is at the height of its
efficiency now." He dropped his voice. "But the mail order
business is in its infancy. There's no limit to what can be
done with it in the next few years. Understand? Do you get
what I'm trying to tell you?" He leaned forward, tense and
terribly in earnest.

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