Fanny Herself
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Edna Ferber >> Fanny Herself
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"I've read half of it already," Fanny informed her sweetly.
And went out with it under her arm. It was Zola's "The
Ladies' Paradise" (Au Bonheur des Dames). The story of
the shop girl, and the crushing of the little dealer by the
great and moneyed company had thrilled and fascinated her.
Her mind was full of it as she turned the corner on Norris Street
and ran full-tilt, into a yowling, taunting, torturing little pack
of boys. They were gathered in close formation about some object
which they were teasing, and knocking about in the mud, and
otherwise abusing with the savagery of their years. Fanny, the
fiery, stopped short. She pushed into the ring. The object of
their efforts was a weak-kneed and hollow-chested little boy
who could not fight because he was cowardly as well as weak,
and his name (oh, pity!) was Clarence--Clarence Heyl. There
are few things that a mischievous group of small boys cannot
do with a name like Clarence. They whined it, they
catcalled it, they shrieked it in falsetto imitation of
Clarence's mother. He was a wide-mouthed, sallow and
pindling little boy, whose pipe-stemmed legs looked all the
thinner for being contrasted with his feet, which were long
and narrow. At that time he wore spectacles, too, to
correct a muscular weakness, so that his one good feature--
great soft, liquid eyes--passed unnoticed. He was the kind
of little boy whose mother insists on dressing him in cloth-
top, buttoned, patent-leather shoes for school. His blue
serge suit was never patched or shiny. His stockings were
virgin at the knee. He wore an overcoat on cool autumn
days. Fanny despised and pitied him. We ask you not to,
because in this puny, shy and ugly little boy of fifteen you
behold Our Hero.
He staggered to his feet now, as Fanny came up. His school
reefer was mud-bespattered. His stockings were torn. His
cap was gone and his hair was wild. There was a cut or
scratch on one cheek, from which the blood flowed.
"I'll tell my mother on you!" he screamed impotently, and
shook with rage and terror. "You'll see, you will! You let
me alone, now!"
Fanny felt a sick sensation at the pit of her stomach and in
her throat. Then:
"He'll tell his ma!" sneered the boys in chorus. "Oh,
mamma!" And called him the Name. And at that a she wildcat
broke loose among them. She pounced on them without
warning, a little fury of blazing eyes and flying hair, and
white teeth showing in a snarl. If she had fought fair, or
if she had not taken them so by surprise, she would have
been powerless among them. But she had sprung at them with
the suddenness of rage. She kicked, and scratched, and bit,
and clawed and spat. She seemed not to feel the defensive
blows that were showered upon her in turn. Her own hard
little fists were now doubled for a thump or opened, like a
claw, for scratching.
"Go on home!" she yelled to Clarence, even while she fought.
And Clarence, gathering up his tattered school books, went,
and stood not on the order of his going. Whereupon Fanny
darted nimbly to one side, out of the way of boyish brown
fists. In that moment she was transformed from a raging
fury into a very meek and trembling little girl, who looked
shyly and pleadingly out from a tangle of curls. The boys
were for rushing at her again.
"Cowardy-cats! Five of you fighting one girl," cried Fanny,
her lower lip trembling ever so little. "Come on! Hit me!
Afraid to fight anything but girls! Cowardy-cats!" A tear,
pearly, pathetic, coursed down her cheek.
The drive was broken. Five sullen little boys stood and
glared at her, impotently.
"You hit us first," declared one boy. "What business d' you
have scratching around like that, I'd like to know! You old
scratch cat!"
"He's sickly," said Fanny. "He can't fight. There's
something the matter with his lungs, or something, and
they're going to make him quit school. Besides, he's a
billion times better than any of you, anyway."
At once, "Fanny's stuck on Clar-ence! Fanny's stuck on
Clar-ence!"
Fanny picked up her somewhat battered Zola from where it had
flown at her first onslaught. "It's a lie!" she shouted.
And fled, followed by the hateful chant.
She came in at the back door, trying to look casual. But
Mattie's keen eye detected the marks of battle, even while
her knife turned the frying potatoes.
"Fanny Brandeis! Look at your sweater! And your hair!"
Fanny glanced down at the torn pocket dangling untidily.
"Oh, that!" she said airily. And, passing the kitchen
table, deftly filched a slice of cold veal from the platter,
and mounted the back stairs to her room. It was a hungry
business, this fighting. When Mrs. Brandeis came in at six
her small daughter was demurely reading. At supper time
Mrs. Brandeis looked up at her daughter with a sharp
exclamation.
"Fanny! There's a scratch on your cheek from your eye to
your chin."
Fanny put up her hand. "Is there?"
"Why, you must have felt it. How did you get it?"
Fanny said nothing. "I'll bet she was fighting," said
Theodore with the intuitive knowledge that one child has of
another's ways.
"Fanny!" The keen brown eyes were upon her.
"Some boys were picking on Clarence Heyl, and it made me
mad. They called him names."
"What names?"
"Oh, names."
"Fanny dear, if you're going to fight every time you hear
that name----"
Fanny thought of the torn sweater, the battered Zola, the
scratched cheek. "It is pretty expensive," she said
reflectively.
After supper she settled down at once to her book. Theodore
would labor over his algebra after the dining-room table
was cleared. He stuck his cap on his head now, and slammed
out of the door for a half-hour's play under the corner arc-
light. Fanny rarely brought books from school, and yet she
seemed to get on rather brilliantly, especially in the
studies she liked. During that winter following her
husband's death Mrs. Brandeis had a way of playing solitaire
after supper; one of the simpler forms of the game. It
seemed to help her to think out the day's problems, and to
soothe her at the same time. She would turn down the front
of the writing desk, and draw up the piano stool.
All through that winter Fanny seemed to remember reading to
the slap-slap of cards, and the whir of their shuffling. In
after years she was never able to pick up a volume of
Dickens without having her mind hark back to those long,
quiet evenings. She read a great deal of Dickens at that
time. She had a fine contempt for his sentiment, and his
great ladies bored her. She did not know that this was
because they were badly drawn. The humor she loved, and she
read and reread the passages dealing with Samuel Weller, and
Mr. Micawber, and Sairey Gamp, and Fanny Squeers. It was
rather trying to read Dickens before supper, she had
discovered. Pickwick Papers was fatal, she had found. It
sent one to the pantry in a sort of trance, to ransack for
food--cookies, apples, cold meat, anything. But whatever
one found, it always fell short of the succulent sounding
beefsteak pies, and saddles of mutton, and hot pineapple
toddy of the printed page.
To-night Mrs. Brandeis, coming in from the kitchen after a
conference with Mattie, found her daughter in conversational
mood, though book in hand.
"Mother, did you ever read this?" She held up "The Ladies'
Paradise."
"Yes; but child alive, what ever made you get it? That
isn't the kind of thing for you to read. Oh, I wish I had
more time to give----"
Fanny leaned forward eagerly. "It made me think a lot of
you. You know--the way the big store was crushing the
little one, and everything. Like the thing you were talking
to that man about the other day. You said it was killing
the small-town dealer, and he said some day it would be
illegal, and you said you'd never live to see it."
"Oh, that! We were talking about the mail-order business,
and how hard it was to compete with it, when the farmers
bought everything from a catalogue, and had whole boxes of
household goods expressed to them. I didn't know you were
listening, Fanchen."
"I was. I almost always do when you and some traveling man
or somebody like that are talking. It--it's interesting."
Fanny went back to her book then. But Molly Brandeis sat a
moment, eyeing her queer little daughter thoughtfully. Then
she sighed, and laid out her cards for solitaire. By eight
o'clock she was usually so sleepy that she would fall, dead-
tired, asleep on the worn leather couch in the sitting-room.
She must have been fearfully exhausted, mind and body. The
house would be very quiet, except for Mattie, perhaps,
moving about in the kitchen or in her corner room upstairs.
Sometimes the weary woman on the couch would start suddenly
from her sleep and cry out, choked and gasping, "No! No!
No!" The children would jump, terrified, and come running
to her at first, but later they got used to it, and only
looked up to say, when she asked them, bewildered, what it
was that wakened her, "You had the no-no-nos."
She had never told of the thing that made her start out of
her sleep and cry out like that. Perhaps it was just the
protest of the exhausted body and the overwrought nerves.
Usually, after that, she would sit up, haggardly, and take
the hairpins out of her short thick hair, and announce her
intention of going to bed. She always insisted that the
children go too, though they often won an extra half hour by
protesting and teasing. It was a good thing for them, these
nine o'clock bed hours, for it gave them the tonic sleep
that their young, high-strung natures demanded.
"Come, children," she would say, yawning.
"Oh, mother, please just let me finish this chapter!"
"How much?"
"Just this little bit. See? Just this."
"Well, just that, then," for Mrs. Brandeis was a reasonable
woman, and she had the book-lover's knowledge of the
fascination of the unfinished chapter.
Fanny and Theodore were not always honest about the bargain.
They would gallop, hot-cheeked, through the allotted
chapter. Mrs. Brandeis would have fallen into a doze,
perhaps. And the two conspirators would read on, turning
the leaves softly and swiftly, gulping the pages, cramming
them down in an orgy of mental bolting, like naughty
children stuffing cake when their mother's back is turned.
But the very concentration of their dread of waking her
often brought about the feared result. Mrs. Brandeis would
start up rather wildly, look about her, and see the two
buried, red-cheeked and eager, in their books.
"Fanny! Theodore! Come now! Not another minute!"
Fanny, shameless little glutton, would try it again. "Just
to the end of this chapter! Just this weenty bit!"
"Fiddlesticks! You've read four chapters since I spoke to
you the last time. Come now!"
Molly Brandeis would see to the doors, and the windows, and
the clock, and then, waiting for the weary little figures to
climb the stairs, would turn out the light, and, hairpins in
one hand, corset in the other, perhaps, mount to bed.
By nine o'clock the little household would be sleeping, the
children sweetly and dreamlessly, the tired woman
restlessly and fitfully, her overwrought brain still surging
with the day's problems. It was not like a household at
rest, somehow. It was like a spirited thing standing,
quivering for a moment, its nerves tense, its muscles
twitching.
Perhaps you have quite forgotten that here were to be
retailed two epochal events in Fanny Brandeis's life. If
you have remembered, you will have guessed that the one was
the reading of that book of social protest, though its
writer has fallen into disfavor in these fickle days. The
other was the wild and unladylike street brawl in which she
took part so that a terrified and tortured little boy might
escape his tormentors.
CHAPTER FIVE
There was no hard stock in Brandeis' Bazaar now. The
packing-room was always littered with straw and excelsior
dug from hogsheads and great crates. Aloysius lorded it
over a small red-headed satellite who disappeared inside
barrels and dived head first into huge boxes, coming up
again with a lamp, or a doll, or a piece of glassware, like
a magician. Fanny, perched on an overturned box, used to
watch him, fascinated, while he laboriously completed a
water set, or a tea set. A preliminary dive would bring up
the first of a half dozen related pieces, each swathed in
tissue paper. A deft twist on the part of the attendant
Aloysius would strip the paper wrappings and disclose a
ruby-tinted tumbler, perhaps. Another dive, and another,
until six gleaming glasses stood revealed, like chicks
without a hen mother. A final dip, much scratching and
burrowing, during which armfuls of hay and excelsior were
thrown out, and then the red-headed genie of the barrel
would emerge, flushed and triumphant, with the water pitcher
itself, thus completing the happy family.
Aloysius, meanwhile, would regale her with one of those
choice bits of gossip he had always about him, like a jewel
concealed, and only to be brought out for the appreciative.
Mrs. Brandeis disapproved of store gossip, and frowned on
Sadie and Pearl whenever she found them, their heads close
together, their stifled shrieks testifying to his wit.
There were times when Molly Brandeis herself could not
resist the spell of his tongue. No one knew where Aloysius
got his information. He had news that Winnebago's
two daily papers never could get, and wouldn't have dared to
print if they had.
"Did you hear about Myrtle Krieger," he would begin, "that's
marryin' the Hempel boy next month? The one in the bank.
She's exhibiting her trewsow at the Outagamie County Fair
this week, for the handwork and embroid'ry prize. Ain't it
brazen? They say the crowd's so thick around the table that
they had to take down the more pers'nal pieces. The first
day of the fair the grand-stand was, you might say, empty,
even when they was pullin' off the trottin' races and the
balloon ascension. It's funny--ain't it?--how them garmints
that you wouldn't turn for a second look at on the
clothesline or in a store winda' becomes kind of wicked and
interestin' the minute they get what they call the human
note. There it lays, that virgin lawnjerie, for all the
county to look at, with pink ribbons run through everything,
and the poor Krieger girl never dreamin' she's doin'
somethin' indelicate. She says yesterday if she wins the
prize she's going to put it toward one of these kitchen
cabinets."
I wish we could stop a while with Aloysius. He is well
worth it. Aloysius, who looked a pass between Ichabod Crane
and Smike; Aloysius, with his bit of scandal burnished with
wit; who, after a long, hard Saturday, would go home to
scrub the floor of the dingy lodgings where he lived with
his invalid mother, and who rose in the cold dawn of Sunday
morning to go to early mass, so that he might return to cook
the dinner and wait upon the sick woman. Aloysius, whose
trousers flapped grotesquely about his bony legs, and whose
thin red wrists hung awkwardly from his too-short sleeves,
had in him that tender, faithful and courageous stuff of
which unsung heroes are made. And he adored his clever,
resourceful boss to the point of imitation. You should have
seen him trying to sell a sled or a doll's go-cart in
her best style. But we cannot stop for Aloysius. He is
irrelevant, and irrelevant matter halts the progress of a
story. Any one, from Barrie to Harold Bell Wright, will
tell you that a story, to be successful, must march.
We'll keep step, then, with Molly Brandeis until she drops
out of the ranks. There is no detouring with Mrs. Brandeis
for a leader. She is the sort that, once her face is set
toward her goal, looks neither to right nor left until she
has reached it.
When Fanny Brandeis was fourteen, and Theodore was not quite
sixteen, a tremendous thing happened. Schabelitz, the
famous violinist, came to Winnebago to give a concert under
the auspices of the Young Men's Sunday Evening Club.
The Young Men's Sunday Evening Club of the Congregational
Church prided itself (and justifiably) on what the papers
called its "auspices." It scorned to present to Winnebago
the usual lyceum attractions--Swiss bell ringers, negro glee
clubs, and Family Fours. Instead, Schumann-Heink sang her
lieder for them; McCutcheon talked and cartooned for them;
Madame Bloomfield-Zeisler played. Winnebago was one of
those wealthy little Mid-Western towns whose people
appreciate the best and set out to acquire it for
themselves.
To the Easterner, Winnebago, and Oshkosh, and Kalamazoo, and
Emporia are names invented to get a laugh from a vaudeville
audience. Yet it is the people from Winnebago and Emporia
and the like whom you meet in Egypt, and the Catalina
Islands, and at Honolulu, and St. Moritz. It is in the
Winnebago living-room that you are likely to find a prayer
rug got in Persia, a bit of gorgeous glaze from China, a
scarf from some temple in India, and on it a book, hand-
tooled and rare. The Winnebagoans seem to know what is
being served and worn, from salad to veilings,
surprisingly soon after New York has informed itself on
those subjects. The 7:52 Northwestern morning train out of
Winnebago was always pretty comfortably crowded with
shoppers who were taking a five-hour run down to Chicago to
get a hat and see the new musical show at the Illinois.
So Schabelitz's coming was an event, but not an
unprecedented one. Except to Theodore. Theodore had a
ticket for the concert (his mother had seen to that), and he
talked of nothing else. He was going with his violin
teacher, Emil Bauer. There were strange stories as to why
Emil Bauer, with his gift of teaching, should choose to bury
himself in this obscure little Wisconsin town. It was known
that he had acquaintance with the great and famous of the
musical world. The East End set fawned upon him, and his
studio suppers were the exclusive social events in
Winnebago.
Schabelitz was to play in the evening. At half past three
that afternoon there entered Brandeis' Bazaar a white-faced,
wide-eyed boy who was Theodore Brandeis; a plump, voluble,
and excited person who was Emil Bauer; and a short, stocky
man who looked rather like a foreign-born artisan--plumber
or steam-fitter--in his Sunday clothes. This was Levine
Schabelitz.
Molly Brandeis was selling a wash boiler to a fussy
housewife who, in her anxiety to assure herself of the
flawlessness of her purchase, had done everything but climb
inside it. It had early been instilled in the minds of Mrs.
Brandeis's children that she was never to be approached when
busy with a customer. There were times when they rushed
into the store bursting with news or plans, but they had
learned to control their eagerness. This, though, was no
ordinary news that had blanched Theodore's face. At sight
of the three, Mrs. Brandeis quietly turned her boiler
purchaser over to Pearl and came forward from the rear of
the store.
"Oh, Mother!" cried Theodore, an hysterical note in his
voice. "Oh, Mother!"
And in that moment Molly Brandeis knew. Emil Bauer
introduced them, floridly. Molly Brandeis held out her
hand, and her keen brown eyes looked straight and long into
the gifted Russian's pale blue ones. According to all rules
he should have started a dramatic speech, beginning with
"Madame!" hand on heart. But Schabelitz the great had
sprung from Schabelitz the peasant boy, and in the process
he had managed, somehow, to retain the simplicity which was
his charm. Still, there was something queer and foreign in
the way he bent over Mrs. Brandeis's hand. We do not bow
like that in Winnebago.
"Mrs. Brandeis, I am honored to meet you."
"And I to meet you," replied the shopkeeper in the black
sateen apron.
"I have just had the pleasure of hearing your son play,"
began Schabelitz.
"Mr. Bauer called me out of my economics class at school,
Mother, and said that----"
"Theodore!" Theodore subsided.
"He is only a boy," went on Schabelitz, and put one hand on
Theodore's shoulder. "A very gifted boy. I hear hundreds.
Oh, how I suffer, sometimes, to listen to their devilish
scraping! To-day, my friend Bauer met me with that old
plea, `You must hear this pupil play. He has genius.'
`Bah! Genius!' I said, and I swore at him a little, for he
is my friend, Bauer. But I went with him to his studio--
Bauer, that is a remarkably fine place you have there, above
that drug store; a room of exceptional proportions. And
those rugs, let me tell you----"
"Never mind the rugs, Schabelitz. Mrs. Brandeis here----"
"Oh, yes, yes! Well, dear lady, this boy of yours will be a
great violinist if he is willing to work, and work, and
work. He has what you in America call the spark. To make
it a flame he must work, always work. You must send him to
Dresden, under Auer."
"Dresden!" echoed Molly Brandeis faintly, and put one hand
on the table that held the fancy cups and saucers, and they
jingled a little.
"A year, perhaps, first, in New York with Wolfsohn."
Wolfsohn! New York! Dresden! It was too much even for
Molly Brandeis' well-balanced brain. She was conscious of
feeling a little dizzy. At that moment Pearl approached
apologetically. "Pardon me, Mis' Brandeis, but Mrs. Trost
wants to know if you'll send the boiler special this
afternoon. She wants it for the washing early to-morrow
morning."
That served to steady her.
"Tell Mrs. Trost I'll send it before six to-night." Her
eyes rested on Theodore's face, flushed now, and glowing.
Then she turned and faced Schabelitz squarely. "Perhaps you
do not know that this store is our support. I earn a living
here for myself and my two children. You see what it is--
just a novelty and notion store in a country town. I speak
of this because it is the important thing. I have known for
a long time that Theodore's playing was not the playing of
the average boy, musically gifted. So what you tell me does
not altogether surprise me. But when you say Dresden--well,
from Brandeis' Bazaar in Winnebago, Wisconsin, to Auer, in
Dresden, Germany, is a long journey for one afternoon."
"But of course you must have time to think it over. It must
be brought about, somehow."
"Somehow----" Mrs. Brandeis stared straight ahead, and you
could almost hear that indomitable will of hers working,
crashing over obstacles, plowing through difficulties.
Theodore watched her, breathless, as though expecting an
immediate solution. His mother's eyes met his own
intent ones, and at that her mobile mouth quirked in a
sudden smile. "You look as if you expected pearls to pop
out of my mouth, son. And, by the way, if you're going to a
concert this evening don't you think it would be a good idea
to squander an hour on study this afternoon? You may be a
musical prodigy, but geometry's geometry."
"Oh, Mother! Please!"
"I want to talk to Mr. Schabelitz and Mr. Bauer, alone."
She patted his shoulder, and the last pat ended in a gentle
push. "Run along."
"I'll work, Mother. You know perfectly well I'll work."
But he looked so startlingly like his father as he said it
that Mrs. Brandeis felt a clutching at her heart.
Theodore out of the way, they seemed to find very little to
discuss, after all. Schabelitz was so quietly certain,
Bauer so triumphantly proud.
Said Schabelitz, "Wolfsohn, of course, receives ten dollars
a lesson ordinarily."
"Ten dollars!"
"But a pupil like Theodore is in the nature of an
investment," Bauer hastened to explain. "An advertisement.
After hearing him play, and after what Schabelitz here will
have to say for him, Wolfsohn will certainly give Theodore
lessons for nothing, or next to nothing. You remember" --
proudly-- "I offered to teach him without charge, but you
would not have it."
Schabelitz smote his friend sharply on the shoulder "The
true musician! Oh, Bauer, Bauer! That you should bury
yourself in this----"
But Bauer stopped him with a gesture. "Mrs. Brandeis is a
busy woman. And as she says, this thing needs thinking
over."
"After all," said Mrs. Brandeis, "there isn't much to think
about. I know just where I stand. It's a case of
mathematics, that's all. This business of mine is just
beginning to pay. From now on I shall be able to save
something every year. It might be enough to cover his
musical education. It would mean that Fanny--my daughter--
and I would have to give up everything. For myself, I
should be only too happy, too proud. But it doesn't seem
fair to her. After all, a girl----"
"It isn't fair," broke in Schabelitz. "It isn't fair. But
that is the way of genius. It never is fair. It takes, and
takes, and takes. I know. My mother could tell you, if she
were alive. She sold the little farm, and my sisters gave
up their dowries, and with them their hopes of marriage, and
they lived on bread and cabbage. That was not to pay for my
lessons. They never could have done that. It was only to
send me to Moscow. We were very poor. They must have
starved. I have come to know, since, that it was not worth
it. That nothing could be worth it."
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