Fanny Herself Part 32

They had tea at Claremont, at a table overlooking the river and the Palisades. Fenger was the kind of man to whom waiters always give a table overlooking anything that should be overlooked. After tea they drove out along the river and came back in the cool of the evening.

f.a.n.n.y was very quiet now. Fenger followed her mood. Ella sustained the conversation, somewhat doggedly. It was almost seven when they reached the plaza exit. And there f.a.n.n.y, sitting forward suddenly, gave a little cry.

"Why--they're marching yet!" she said, and her voice was high with wonder. "They're marching yet! All the time we've been driving and teaing, they've been marching."

And so they had. Thousands upon thousands, they had flowed along as relentlessly, and seemingly as endlessly as a river. They were marching yet. For six hours the thousands had poured up that street, making it a moving ma.s.s of white. And the end was not yet. What pen, and tongue, and sense of justice had failed to do, they were doing now by sheer, crude force of numbers. The red-faced hooligan, who had stood next to f.a.n.n.y in the crowd hours before, had long ago ceased his jibes and slunk away, bored, if not impressed. After all, one might jeer at ten, or fifty, or a hundred women, or even five hundred. But not at forty thousand.

Their car turned down Madison Avenue, and Fenger twisted about for a last look at the throng in the plaza. He was plainly impressed. The magnitude of the thing appealed to him. To a Haynes-Cooper-trained mind, forty thousand women, marching for whatever the cause, must be impressive. Forty thousand of anything had the respect of Michael Fenger. His eyes narrowed, thoughtfully.

"They seem to have put it over," he said. "And yet, what's the idea?

Oh, I'm for suffrage, of course. Naturally. And all those thousands of women, in white--still, a thing as huge as this parade has to be reduced to a common denominator, to be really successful. If somebody could take the whole thing, boil it down, and make the country see what this huge demonstration stands for."

f.a.n.n.y leaned forward suddenly. "Tell the man to stop. I want to get out."

Fenger and Ella stared. "What for?" But Fenger obeyed.

"I want to get something at this stationer's shop." She had jumped down almost before the motor had stopped at the curb.

"But let me get it."

"No. You can't. Wait here." She disappeared within the shop. She was back in five minutes, a flat, loosely wrapped square under her arm.

"Cardboard," she explained briefly, in answer to their questions.

Fenger, about to leave them at their hotel, presented his plans for the evening. f.a.n.n.y, looking up at him, her head full of other plans, thought he looked and sounded very much like Big Business. And, for the moment at least, f.a.n.n.y Brandeis loathed Big Business, and all that it stood for.

"It's almost seven," Fenger was saying. "We'll be rubes in New York, this evening. You girls will just have time to freshen up a bit--I suppose you want to--and then we'll have dinner, and go to the theater, and to supper afterward. What do you want to see?"

Ella looked at f.a.n.n.y. And f.a.n.n.y shook her head, "Thanks. You're awfully kind. But--no."

"Why not?" demanded Fenger, gruffly.

"Perhaps because I'm tired. And there's something else I must do."

Ella looked relieved. Fenger's eyes bored down upon f.a.n.n.y, but she seemed not to feel them. She held out her hand.

"You're going back to-morrow?" Fenger asked. "I'm not leaving until Thursday."

"To-morrow, with Ella. Good-by. It's been a glorious drive. I feel quite rested."

"You just said you were tired."

The elevator door clanged, shutting out the sight of Fenger's resentful frown.

"He's as sensitive as a soubrette," said Ella. "I'm glad you decided not to go out. I'm dead, myself. A kimono for the rest of the evening."

f.a.n.n.y seemed scarcely to hear her. With a nod she left Ella, and entered her own room. There she wasted no time. She threw her hat and coat on the bed. Her suitcase was on the baggage stand. She turned on all the lights, swung the closed suitcase up to the table, shoved the table against the wall, up-ended the suitcase so that its leather side presented a smooth surface, and propped a firm sheet of white cardboard against the impromptu rack. She brought her chair up close, fumbled in her bag for the pens she had just purchased. Her eyes were on the blank white surface of the paper. The table was the kind that has a sub-shelf.

It prevented f.a.n.n.y from crossing her legs under it, and that bothered her. While she fitted her pens, and blocked her paper, she kept on barking her s.h.i.+ns in unconscious protest against the uncomfortable conditions under which she must work.

She sat staring at the paper now, after having marked it off into blocks, with a pencil. She got up, and walked across the room, aimlessly, and stood there a moment, and came back. She picked up a thread on the floor. Sat down again. Picked up her pencil, rolled it a moment in her palms, then, catching her toes behind either foreleg of her chair, in an att.i.tude that was as workmanlike as it was ungraceful, she began to draw, nervously, tentatively at first, but gaining in firmness and a.s.surance as she went on.

If you had been standing behind her chair you would have seen, emerging miraculously from the white surface under f.a.n.n.y's pencil, a thin, undersized little figure in sleazy black and white, whose face, under the cheap hat, was upturned and rapturous. Her skirts were wind-blown, and the wind tugged, too, at the banner whose pole she hugged so tightly in her arms. Dimly you could see the crowds that lined the street on either side. Vaguely, too, you saw the faces and stunted figures of the little group of girls she led. But she, the central figure, stood out among all the rest. f.a.n.n.y Brandeis, the artist, and f.a.n.n.y Brandeis, the salesman, combined shrewdly to omit no telling detail. The wrong kind of feet in the wrong kind of shoes; the absurd hat; the shabby skirt--every bit of grotesquerie was there, serving to emphasize the glory of the face. f.a.n.n.y Brandeis' face, as the figure grew, line by line, was a glorious thing, too.

She was working rapidly. She laid down her pencil, now, and leaned back, squinting her eyes critically. She looked grimly pleased. Her hair was rather rumpled, and her cheeks very pink. She took up her pen, now, and began to ink her drawing with firm black strokes. As she worked a little crow of delight escaped her--the same absurd crow of triumph that had sounded that day in Winnebago, years and years before, when she, a school girl in a red tam o' shanter, had caught the likeness of Schabelitz, the peasant boy, under the exterior of Schabelitz, the famous. There sounded a smart little double knock at her door. f.a.n.n.y did not heed it. She did not hear it. Her toes were caught behind the chair-legs again. She was slumped down on the middle of her spine. She had brought the table, with its ridiculously up-ended suitcase, very near, so that she worked with a minimum of effort. The door opened.

f.a.n.n.y did not turn her head. Ella Monahan came in, yawning. She was wearing an expensive looking silk kimono that fell in straight, simple folds, and gave a certain majesty to her ample figure.

"Well, what in the world--" she began, and yawned again, luxuriously.

She stopped behind f.a.n.n.y's chair and glanced over her shoulder. The yawn died. She craned her neck a little, and leaned forward. And the little girl went marching by, in her cheap and crooked shoes, and her short and sleazy skirt, with the banner tugging, tugging in the breeze.

f.a.n.n.y Brandeis had done her with that economy of line, and absence of sentimentality which is the test separating the artist from the draughtsman.

Silence, except for the scratching of f.a.n.n.y Brandeis's pen.

"Why--the poor little kike!" said Ella Monahan. Then, after another moment of silence, "I didn't know you could draw like that."

f.a.n.n.y laid down her pen. "Like what?" She pushed back her chair, and rose, stiffly. The drawing, still wet, was propped up against the suitcase. f.a.n.n.y walked across the room. Ella dropped into her chair, so that when f.a.n.n.y came back to the table it was she who looked over Ella's shoulder. Into Ella's shrewd and heavy face there had come a certain look.

"They don't get a square deal, do they? They don't get a square deal."

The two looked at the girl a moment longer, in silence. Then f.a.n.n.y went over to the bed, and picked up her hat and coat. She smoothed her hair, deftly, powdered her nose with care, and adjusted her hat at the smart angle approved by the Galeries Lafayette. She came back to the table, picked up her pen, and beneath the drawing wrote, in large print:

THE MARCHER.

She picked up the drawing, still wet, opened the door, and with a smile at the bewildered Ella, was gone.

It was after eight o'clock when she reached the Star building. She asked for Lasker's office, and sent in her card. Heyl had told her that Lasker was always at his desk at eight. Now, f.a.n.n.y Brandeis knew that the average young woman, standing outside the office of a man like Lasker, unknown and at the mercy of office boy or secretary, continues to stand outside until she leaves in discouragement. But f.a.n.n.y knew, too, that she was not an average young woman. She had, on the surface, an air of authority and distinction. She had that quiet a.s.surance of one accustomed to deference. She had youth, and beauty, and charm. She had a hat and suit bought in Paris, France; and a secretary is only human.

Carl Lasker's private office was the bare, bright, newspaper-strewn room of a man who is not only a newspaper proprietor, but a newspaper man.

There's a difference. Carl Lasker had sold papers on the street when he was ten. He had slept on burlap sacks, paper stuffed, in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a newspaper office. Ink flowed with the blood in his veins. He could operate a press. He could manipulate a linotype machine (that almost humanly intelligent piece of mechanism). He could make up a paper single handed, and had done it. He knew the newspaper game, did Carl Lasker, from the composing room to the street, and he was a very great man in his line. And so he was easy to reach, and simple to talk to, as are all great men.

A stocky man, decidedly handsome, surprisingly young, well dressed, smooth shaven, direct.

f.a.n.n.y entered. Lasker laid down her card. "Brandeis. That's a good name." He extended his hand. He wore evening clothes, with a white flower in his b.u.t.tonhole. He must have just come from a dinner, or he was to attend a late affair, somewhere. Perhaps f.a.n.n.y, taken aback, unconsciously showed her surprise, because Lasker grinned, as he waved her to a chair. His quick mind had interpreted her thought.

"Sit down, Miss Brandeis. You think I'm gotten up like the newspaper man in a Richard Harding Davis short story, don't you? What can I do for you?"

f.a.n.n.y wasted no words. "I saw the parade this afternoon. I did a picture. I think it's good. If you think so too, I wish you'd use it."

She laid it, face up, on Lasker's desk. Lasker picked it up in his two hands, held it off, and scrutinized it. All the drama in the world is concentrated in the confines of a newspaper office every day in the year, and so you hear very few dramatic exclamations in such a place.

Men like Lasker do not show emotion when impressed. It is too wearing on the mechanism. Besides, they are trained to self-control. So Lasker said, now:

"Yes, I think it's pretty good, too." Then, raising his voice to a sudden bellow, "Boy!" He handed the drawing to a boy, gave a few brief orders, and turned back to f.a.n.n.y. "To-morrow morning every other paper in New York will have pictures showing Mildred Inness, the beauty, on her snow-white charger, or Sophronisba A. Bannister, A.B., Ph.D., in her cap and gown, or Mrs. William Van der Welt as Liberty. We'll have that little rat with the banner, and it'll get 'em. They'll talk about it."

His eyes narrowed a little. "Do you always get that angle?"

"Yes."

"There isn't a woman cartoonist in New York who does that human stuff.

Did you know that?"

"Yes."