Edna Ferber: Fanny Herself

8. CHAPTER EIGHT (continued)

"He's getting feeble, the old rabbi, h'm?"

"Not a bit of it. I've got all I can do to keep up with you. You set such a pace."

"I know. I know. They are not all so kind, Fanny. They are too prosperous, this congregation of mine. And some day, `Off with his head!' And in my place there will step a young man, with eye-glasses instead of spectacles. They are tired of hearing about the prophets. Texts from the Bible have gone out of fashion. You think I do not see them giggling, h'm? The young people. And the whispering in the choir loft. And the buzz when I get up from my chair after the second hymn. `Is he going to have a sermon? Is he? Sure enough!' Na, he will make them sit up, my successor. Sex sermons! Political lectures. That's it. Lectures." They were turning in at the temple now. "The race is to the young, Fanny. To the young. And I am old."

She squeezed the frail old arm in hers. "My dear!" she said. "My dear!" A second breaking of her new resolutions.

One by one, two by two, they straggled in for the Friday evening service, these placid, prosperous people, not unkind, but careless, perhaps, in their prosperity.

"He's worth any ten of them," Fanny said hotly to herself, as she sat in her pew that, after to-morrow, would no longer be hers. "The dear old thing. `Sex sermons.' And the race is to the young. How right he is. Well, no one can say I'm not getting an early start."

The choir had begun the first hymn when there came down the aisle a stranger. There was a little stir among the congregation. Visitors were rare. He was dark and very slim--with the slimness of steel wire. He passed down the aisle rather uncertainly. A traveling man, Fanny thought, dropped in, as sometimes they did, to say Kaddish for a departed father or mother. Then she changed her mind. Her quick eye noted his walk; a peculiar walk, with a spring in it. Only one unfamiliar with cement pavements could walk like that. The Indians must have had that same light, muscular step. He chose an empty pew halfway down the aisle and stumbled into it rather awkwardly. Fanny thought he was unnecessarily ugly, even for a man. Then he looked up, and nodded and smiled at Lee Kohn, across the aisle. His teeth were very white, and the smile was singularly sweet. Fanny changed her mind again. Not so bad-looking, after all. Different, anyway. And then--why, of course! Little Clarence Heyl, come back from the West. Clarence Heyl, the cowardy-cat.