“God!  Wasn’t it—­tremendous?”

“Six thousand if there was a cent,” repeated Isadore Kantor; “more than Rimsky ever played to in his life!”

“Oh, Izzy, you make me sick, always counting—­counting.”

“Your sister’s right, Isadore.  You got nothing to complain of if there was only six hundred in the house.  A boy whose fiddle has made already enough to set you up in such a fine business, his brother Boris in such a fine college, automobiles—­style—­and now because Vladimir Rimsky, three times his age, gets signed up with Elsass for a few thousand more a year, right away the family gets a long face—­”

“Ma, please; Isadore didn’t mean it that way!”

“Pa’s knocking, ma; shall I let him in?”

“Let him in, Roody.  I’d like to know what good it will do to try to keep him out.”

In an actual rain of perspiration, his tie slid well under one ear, Abrahm Kantor burst in, mouthing the words before his acute state of strangulation would let them out.

“Elsass—­it’s Elsass outside—­he—­wants—­to sign—­Leon—­fifty concerts—­coast to coast—­two thousand—­next season—­he’s got the papers—­already drawn up—­the pen outside waiting—­”

“Abrahm!”

“Pa!”

In the silence that followed, Isadore Kantor, a poppiness of stare and a violent redness set in, suddenly turned to his five-year-old son, sticky with lollypop, and came down soundly and with smack against the infantile, the slightly outstanding, and unsuspecting ear.

“Momser!” he cried. “Chammer!  Lump!  Ganef! You hear that?  Two thousand!  Two thousand!  Didn’t I tell you—­didn’t I tell you to practise?”

Even as Leon Kantor put pen to this princely document, Francis Ferdinand of Austria, the assassin’s bullet true, lay dead in state, and let slip were the dogs of war.

In the next years, men, forty deep, were to die in piles; hayricks of fields to become human hayricks of battlefields; Belgium disembowelled, her very entrails dragging to find all the civilized world her champion, and between the poppies of Flanders, crosses, thousands upon thousands of them, to mark the places where the youth of her allies fell, avenging outrage.  Seas, even when calmest, were to become terrible, and men’s heart-beats, a bit sluggish with the fatty degeneration of a sluggard peace, to quicken and then to throb with the rat-a-tat-tat, the rat-a-tat-tat of the most peremptory, the most reverberating call to arms in the history of the world.

In June, 1917, Leon Kantor, answering that rat-a-tat-tat, enlisted.

In November, honed by the interim of training to even a new leanness, and sailing orders heavy and light in his heart, Lieutenant Kantor, on two day’s home-leave, took leave of his home, which can be cruelest when it is tenderest.

Standing there in the expensive, the formal, the enormous French parlour of his up-town apartment de luxe, from not one of whose chairs would his mother’s feet touch floor, a wall of living flesh, mortared in blood, was throbbing and hedging him in.