Читать книгу Fanny Herself - Edna Ferber - Страница 10

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It was the week following this feat of fasting that two things happened to Fanny Brandeis—two seemingly unimportant and childish things—that were to affect the whole tenor of her life. It is pleasant to predict thus. It gives a certain weight to a story and a sense of inevitableness. It should insure, too, the readers's support to the point, at least, where the prediction is fulfilled. Sometimes a careless author loses sight altogether of his promise, and then the tricked reader is likely to go on to the very final page, teased by the expectation that that which was hinted at will be revealed.

Fanny Brandeis had a way of going to the public library on Saturday afternoons (with a bag of very sticky peanut candy in her pocket, the little sensualist!) and there, huddled in a chair, dreamily and almost automatically munching peanut brittle, her cheeks growing redder and redder in the close air of the ill-ventilated room, she would read, and read, and read. There was no one to censor her reading, so she read promiscuously, wading gloriously through trash and classic and historical and hysterical alike, and finding something of interest in them all.

She read the sprightly “Duchess” novels, where mad offers of marriage were always made in flower-scented conservatories; she read Dickens, and Thelma, and old bound Cosmopolitans, and Zola, and de Maupassant, and the “Wide, Wide World,” and “Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates,” and “Jane Eyre.” All of which are merely mentioned as examples of her catholicism in literature. As she read she was unaware of the giggling boys and girls who came in noisily, and made dates, and were coldly frowned on by the austere Miss Perkins, the librarian. She would read until the fading light would remind her that the short fall or winter day was drawing to a close.

She would come, shivering a little after the fetid atmosphere of the overheated library, into the crisp, cold snap of the astringent Wisconsin air. Sometimes she would stop at the store for her mother. Sometimes she would run home alone through the twilight, her heels scrunching the snow, her whole being filled with a vague and unchildish sadness and disquiet as she faced the tender rose, and orange, and mauve, and pale lemon of the winter sunset. There were times when her very heart ached with the beauty of that color-flooded sky; there were times, later, when it ached in much the same way at the look in the eyes of a pushcart peddler; there were times when it ached, seemingly, for no reason at all—as is sometimes the case when one is a little Jew girl, with whole centuries of suffering behind one.

On this day she had taken a book from the library Miss Perkins, at sight of the title, had glared disapprovingly, and had hesitated a moment before stamping the card.

“Is this for yourself?” she had asked.

“Yes'm.”

“It isn't a book for little girls,” snapped Miss Perkins.

“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.