Humoresque | Page 6

palm against that aperture, lifting his small son and depositing him
plop upon the family album.
"Take that! By golly! one more whimper out of you and if I don't make
you black-and-blue, birthday or no birthday! Dish up, Sarah, quick, or
I'll give him something to cry about."
The five pink candles had been lighted, burning pointedly and with
slender little smoke wisps. Regarding them owlishly, the tears dried on
Leon's face, his little tongue licking up at them.
"Look how solemn he is, like he was thinking of something a million
miles away except how lucky he is he should have a pink birthday-cake.
Uh--uh--uh! Don't you begin to holler again. Here, I'm putting the
feedle next to you. Uh--uh--uh!"
To a meal plentifully ladled out directly from stove to table, the Kantor
family drew up, dipping first into the rich black soup of the occasion.
All except Mrs. Kantor.
"Esther, you dish up. I'm going somewhere. I'll be back in a minute."
"Where you going, Sarah? Won't it keep until--"
But even in the face of query, Sarah Kantor was two flights down and
well through the lambent aisles of the copper-shop. Outside, she broke
into run, along two blocks of the indescribable bazaar atmosphere of
Grand Street, then one block to the right.
Before Mattel's show-window, a jet of bright gas burned into a
jibberwock land of toys. There was that in Sarah Kantor's face that was
actually lyrical as, fumbling at the bosom of her dress, she entered.
To Leon Kantor, by who knows what symphonic scheme of things, life

was a chromatic scale, yielding up to him, through throbbing, living
nerves of sheep-gut, the sheerest semitones of man's emotions.
When he tucked his Stradivarius beneath his chin the book of life
seemed suddenly translated to him in melody. Even Sarah Kantor, who
still brewed for him, on a small portable stove carried from city to city
and surreptitiously unpacked in hotel suites, the blackest of soups, and,
despite his protestation, would incase his ears of nights in an old
home-made device against their flightiness, would oftentimes bleed
inwardly at this sense of his isolation.
There was a realm into which he went alone, leaving her as detached as
the merest ticket purchaser at the box-office.
At seventeen Leon Kantor had played before the crowned heads of
Europe, the aching heads of American capital, and even the shaved
head of a South Sea prince. There was a layout of anecdotal gifts, from
the molar tooth of the South Sea prince set in a South Sea pearl to a
blue-enameled snuff-box incrusted with the rearing-lion coat-of-arms
of a very royal house.
At eighteen came the purchase of a king's Stradivarius for a king's
ransom, and acclaimed by Sunday supplements to repose of nights in
an ivory cradle.
At nineteen, under careful auspices of press agent, the ten singing digits
of the son of Abrahm Kantor were insured at ten thousand dollars the
finger.
At twenty he had emerged surely and safely from the perilous
quicksands which have sucked down whole Lilliputian worlds of infant
prodigies.
At twenty-one, when Leon Kantor played a Sunday-night concert, there
was a human queue curling entirely around the square block of the
operahouse, waiting its one, two, even three and four hours for the
privilege of standing room only.

Usually these were Leon Kantor's own people pouring up from the
lowly lands of the East Side to the white lands of Broadway, parched
for music, these burning brethren of his--old men in that line,
frequently carrying their own little folding camp-chairs, not against
weariness of the spirit, but of the flesh; youth with Slavic eyes and
cheek-bones. These were the six-deep human phalanx which would
presently slant down at him from tiers of steepest balconies and stand
frankly emotional and jammed in the unreserved space behind the
railing which shut them off from the three-dollar seats of the reserved.
At a very special one of these concerts, dedicated to the meager purses
of just these, and held in New York's super opera-house, the
Amphitheater, a great bowl of humanity, the metaphor made perfect by
tiers of seats placed upon the stage, rose from orchestra to dome. A
gigantic cup of a Colosseum lined in stacks and stacks of faces. From
the door of his dressing-room, leaning out, Leon Kantor could see a
great segment of it, buzzing down into adjustment, orchestra twitting
and tuning into it.
In the bare little room, illuminated by a sheaf of roses, just arrived, Mrs.
Kantor drew him back by the elbow.
"Leon, you're in a draught."
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.