Part 11 (1/2)

After dinner the house felt very warm and stuffy. It was crisply cold and sunny outdoors. The snow was piled high except on the sidewalks, where it had been neatly shoveled away by the m.u.f.flered Winnebago sons and fathers. There was no man in the Brandeis household, and Aloysius had been too busy to perform the ch.o.r.es usually considered his work about the house. The snow lay in drifts upon the sidewalk in front of the Brandeis house, except where pa.s.sing feet had trampled it a bit.

”I'm going to shovel the walk,” f.a.n.n.y announced suddenly. ”Way around to the woodshed. Where are those old mittens of mine? Annie, where's the snow shovel? Sure I am. Why not?”

She shoveled and sc.r.a.ped and pounded, bending rhythmically to the work, lifting each heaping shovelful with her strong young arms, tossing it to the side, digging in again, and under. An occasional neighbor pa.s.sed by, or a friend, and she waved at them, gayly, and tossed back their badinage. ”Merry Christmas!” she called, again and again, in reply to a pa.s.sing acquaintance. ”Same to you!”

At two o'clock Bella Weinberg telephoned to say that a little party of them were going to the river to skate. The ice was wonderful. Oh, come on! f.a.n.n.y skated very well. But she hesitated. Mrs. Brandeis, dozing on the couch, sensed what was going on in her daughter's mind, and roused herself with something of her old asperity.

”Don't be foolish, child. Run along! You don't intend to sit here and gaze upon your sleeping beauty of a mother all afternoon, do you? Well, then!”

So f.a.n.n.y changed her clothes, got her skates, and ran out into the snap and sparkle of the day. The winter darkness had settled down before she returned, all glowing and rosy, and bright-eyed. Her blood was racing through her body. Her lips were parted. The drudgery of the past three weeks seemed to have been blotted out by this one radiant afternoon.

The house was dark when she entered. It seemed very quiet, and close, and depressing after the sparkle and rush of the afternoon on the river.

”Mother! Mother dear! Still sleeping?”

Mrs. Brandeis stirred, sighed, awoke. f.a.n.n.y flicked on the light. Her mother was huddled in a kimono on the sofa. She sat up rather dazedly now, and stared at f.a.n.n.y.

”Why--what time is it? What? Have I been sleeping all afternoon? Your mother's getting old.”

She yawned, and in the midst of it caught her breath with a little cry of pain.

”What is it? What's the matter?”

Molly Brandeis pressed a hand to her breast. ”A st.i.tch, I guess. It's this miserable cold coming on. Is there any asperin in the house? I'll dose myself after supper, and take a hot foot bath and go to bed. I'm dead.”

She ate less for supper than she had for dinner. She hardly tasted the cup of tea that f.a.n.n.y insisted on making for her. She swayed a little as she sat, and her lids came down over her eyes, flutteringly, as if the weight of them was too great to keep up. At seven she was up-stairs, in bed, sleeping, and breathing heavily.

At eleven, or thereabouts, f.a.n.n.y woke up with a start. She sat up in bed, wide-eyed, peering into the darkness and listening. Some one was talking in a high, queer voice, a voice like her mother's, and yet unlike. She ran, s.h.i.+vering with the cold, into her mother's bedroom. She switched on the light. Mrs. Brandeis was lying on the pillow, her eyes almost closed, except for a terrifying slit of white that showed between the lids. Her head was tossing to and fro on the pillow. She was talking, sometimes clearly, and sometimes mumblingly.

”One gross cups and saucers... and now what do you think you'd like for a second prize... in the bas.e.m.e.nt, Aloysius... the trains... I'll see that they get there to-day... yours of the tenth at hand...”

”Mother! Mother! Molly dear!” She shook her gently, then almost roughly.

The voice ceased. The eyes remained the same. ”Oh, G.o.d!” She ran to the back of the house. ”Annie! Annie, get up! Mother's sick. She's out of her head. I'm going to 'phone for the doctor. Go in with her.”

She got the doctor at last. She tried to keep her voice under control, and thought, with a certain pride, that she was succeeding. She ran up-stairs again. The voice had begun again, but it seemed thicker now.

She got into her clothes, shaking with cold and terror, and yet thinking very clearly, as she always did in a crisis. She put clean towels in the bathroom, pushed the table up to the bed, got a gla.s.s of water, straightened the covers, put away the clothes that the tired woman had left about the room. Doctor Hertz came. He went through the usual preliminaries, listened, tapped, counted, straightened up at last.

”Fresh air,” he said. ”Cold air. All the windows open.” They rigged up a device of screens and sheets to protect the bed from the drafts. f.a.n.n.y obeyed orders silently, like a soldier. But her eyes went from the face on the pillow to that of the man bent over the bed. Something vague, cold, clammy, seemed to be closing itself around her heart. It was like an icy hand, squeezing there. There had suddenly sprung up that indefinable atmosphere of the sick-room--a sick-room in which a fight is being waged. Bottles on the table, gla.s.ses, a spoon, a paper shade over the electric light globe.

”What is it?” said f.a.n.n.y, at last. ”Grip?--grip?”

Doctor Hertz hesitated a moment. ”Pneumonia.”

f.a.n.n.y's hands grasped the footboard tightly. ”Do you think we'd better have a nurse?”

”Yes.”

The nurse seemed to be there, somehow, miraculously. And the morning came. And in the kitchen Annie went about her work, a little more quietly than usual. And yesterday seemed far away. It was afternoon; it was twilight. Doctor Hertz had been there for hours. The last time he brought another doctor with him--Thorn. Mrs. Brandeis was not talking now. But she was breathing. It filled the room, that breathing; it filled the house. f.a.n.n.y took her mother's hand, that hand with the work-hardened palm and the broken nails. It was very cold. She looked down at it. The nails were blue. She began to rub it. She looked up into the faces of the two men. She picked up the other hand--s.n.a.t.c.hed at it.

”Look here!” she said. ”Look here!” And then she stood up. The vague, clammy thing that had been wound about her heart suddenly relaxed. And at that something icy hot rushed all over her body and shook her. She came around to the foot of the bed, and gripped it with her two hands.

Her chin was thrust forward, and her eyes were bright and staring. She looked very much like her mother, just then. It was a fighting face. A desperate face.

”Look here,” she began, and was surprised to find that she was only whispering. She wet her lips and smiled, and tried again, forming the words carefully with her lips. ”Look here. She's dying--isn't she? Isn't she! She's dying, isn't she?”