"Come over, Gina. You'll be a treat to our mother. I--well, I'm hanged--all the way from Philadelphia!"
There was even a sparkle to talk then, and a let-up of pressure. After a while, Sarah Kantor looked up at her son, tremulous but smiling.
"Well, son, you going to play--for your old mother before--you go? It'll be many a month--spring--maybe longer before I hear my boy again except on the discaphone."
"Why, I--I don't know. I--I'd love it, ma if--if you think, Esther, I'd better."
"You don't need to be afraid of me, darlink. There's nothing can give me strength to bear--what's before me like--like my boy's music. That's my life, his music."
"Why, yes; if mamma is sure she feels that way, play for us, Leon."
He was already at the instrument, where it lay swathed, atop the grand piano.
"Something to make ma laugh, Leon--something light, something funny."
"'Humoresque'?" he said, with a quick glance for Miss Berg.
"'Humoresque,'" she said, smiling back at him.
He capered through, cutting and playful of bow, the melody of Dvorak's, which is as ironic as a grinning mask.
Finished, he smiled at his parent, her face still untearful.
"It's like life, son, that piece. Laughing and making fun of--the way just as we think we got--we ain't got."
"Play that new piece, Leon, the one you set to music. You know. The words by that young boy in the war who wrote such grand poetry before he was killed. The one that always makes poor Mannie laugh. Play it for him, Leon."
Her plump little unlined face innocent of fault, Mrs. Isadore Kantor ventured her request, her smile tired with tears."
"No, no--Rosa--not now--ma wouldn't want that."
"I do, son; I do! Even Mannie should have his share of good-bye."
To Gina Berg: "They want me to play that little setting of mine of Allan Seeger's poem, 'I have a rendezvous.'"
"It--it's beautiful, Leon! I was to have sung it on my program to-night--only, I'm afraid you had better not--"
"Please, Leon! Nothing you play can ever make me as sad as it makes me glad. Mannie should have too his good-bye."
"All right then, ma, if--if you're sure you want it. Will you sing it, Gina?"
She sang it then, quite purely, her hands clasped simply together and her glance mistily off, the beautiful, the heroic, the lyrical prophecy of a soldier-poet and a poet-soldier.