Finished, he smiled at his parent, her face still untearful.
"How's that?"
She nodded. "It's like life, son, that piece. Crying to hide its
laughing and laughing to hide its crying."
"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-by."
To Gina Berg: "They want me to play that little arrangement of mine from
Allan Seegar'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--here--now--"
"Please, Leon! Nothing you play can ever make me as sad as it makes me
glad. Mannie should have, too, his good-by."
"All right, then, ma, if--if you're sure you want it. Will you sing it,
Gina?"
She had risen. "Why, yes, Leon."
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:
"But I've a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.
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