Fannie Hurst

“ My God! darling, wake up! I'll take you back. I'll find a way to take you. I'm a bad girl, darling, but I'll find a way to take you. I'll take you if—if I kill for it! I promise before God I'll take you. To-morrow—now—nobody can keep me from taking you. The wreaths, mama! Get ready the wreaths! Mama darling, wake up! Get ready the wreaths! The wreaths!" Shaking at that quiet form, sobs that were full of voice tearing raw from her throat, she fell to kissing the sunken face, enclosing it, stroking it, holding her streaming gaze closely and burningly against the closed lids. ”

“ Be the landlady's front parlor ever so permanently rented out, the motion-picture theater has brought to thousands of young city starvelings, if not the quietude of the home, then at least the warmth and a juxtaposition and a deep darkness that can lave the sub-basement throb of temples and is filled with music with a hum in it.
For two years and eight months of Saturday nights, each one of them a semaphore dropping out across the gray road of the week, Gertie Slayback and Jimmie Batch dined for one hour and sixty cents at the White Kitchen. ”

“ Men that have got close enough down to the facts of things to feel new realizations of what life means come over them. Men that have gotten back their pep, their ambitions, their unselfishness. That's what war can do for your men, you women who are helping them to foster the spirit of holding back, of cheating their government. That's what war can do for your men. Make of them the kind of men who some day can face their children without having to hang their heads. Men who can answer for their part in making the world a safe place for democracy. ”

“ There, there, girl, I don't blame any of you for feathering your nest." He was flushed now and above the soft collar, his face had relaxed into a not easily controllable smile. "Feather your nest, girl; you got the looks to do it. It's a far cry from Flamm Avenue to where a classy girl like you can land herself if she steers right. And I wish it to you, girl; the best isn't good enough."
"I—I dare you to ask me again, Charley!"
"Ask what?"
"You know. Throw your head up the way you do when you mean what you say and—ask." ”

“ Often, with the sun setting pink and whole above the Palisades, the very copper glow which was struck off the water would beat against her own west windows, and, as if smarting under the brilliance, tears would come, sometimes staggering and staggering down, long after the glow was cold. With such a sunset already waned, and the valley of unrest fifteen stories below popping out into electric signs and the red danger-lanterns of streets constantly in the remaking, Mrs. Harry Ross, from the corner window of her seventeen, looked down on it from under lids that were rimmed in red. ”

“ In what school does the great army of industry earn its first experience? Who first employs the untaught hand? Upon Ann 'Lisbeth, untrained in any craft, it was as if the workaday world turned its back, nettled at a philistine.
Once she sat resting on a stoop beneath the sign of a woman's-aid bureau. She read it, but, somehow, her mind would not register. The calves of her legs and the line where her shoe cut into her heel were hurting.
She supped in the family-entrance café again—the bowl of veal stew and two glasses of beer. ”

“ V GOLDEN FLEECE How saving a dispensation it is that men do not carry in their hearts perpetual ache at the pain of the world, that the body-thuds of the drink-crazed, beating out frantic strength against cell doors, cannot penetrate the beatitude of a mother bending, at that moment, above a crib. Men can sit in club windows while, even as they sit, are battle-fields strewn with youth dying, their faces in mud. ”

“ Even the notions and dry-goods, flanking the right wall in stacks and bolts, merge into blur, the outline of a white-sateen and corseted woman's torso surmounting the topmost of the shelves with bold curvature.
With spring sunshine even hot against the steel rails of Winchester Road, and awnings drawn against its inroads into the window display, Mrs. Shila Coblenz, routing gloom, reached up tiptoe across the haberdashery counter for the suspended chain of a cluster of bulbs, the red of exertion rising up the taut line of throat and lifted chin. ”

“ One-half of the world does not know or care how the other half lives or dies.
When, one summer, July came in like desert wind, West Cabanne Terrace and that part of residential St. Louis that is set back in carefully conserved, grove-like lawns did not sip its iced limeades with any the less refreshment because, down-town at the intersection of Broadway and West Street, a woman trundling a bundle of washing in an old perambulator suddenly keeled of heat, saliva running from her mouth-corners. ”

“ I know that nine men out of ten would call me crazy to—to let go of a woman like you. But what's the use trying to keep life in something that's dead? It's because you're too good for me, Millie. I know that. You know that it's not because I think any less of you, or that I've forgot it was you who gave me my start. I'd pay you back ten times more if I could. I'm going to settle on you and the boy so that you're fixed for life. When he's of age, he comes into the firm half interest. There won't even be no publicity the way I'm going to fix things. Money talks, Millie. ”

“ In her dark-blue dress, with the row of silver buttons down what was hip before the hipless age, the chest sufficiently concave and the silhouette a mere stroke of a hard pencil, Miss Selene Coblenz measured up and down to America's Venus de Milo, whose chief curvature is of the spine. Slim-etched, and that slimness enhanced by a conscious kind of collapse beneath the blue-silk girdle that reached up half-way to her throat, hers were those proportions which strong women, eschewing the sweet-meat, would earn by the sweat of the Turkish bath. ”

“ Ross, who had lost a saving sense of time and place, leaned after that ship receding in majesty, long after it had curved from view.
The crowd, not a dry-eyed one, women in spite of themselves with lips whitening, men grim with pride and an innermost bleeding, sagged suddenly, thinning and trickling back into the great, impersonal maw of the city. Apart from the rush of the exodus, a youth remained at the rail, gazing out and quivering for the smell of war. ”

“ HOTEL LIBERTY 96 An hour Ann 'Lisbeth sat there, with the key in her lax hand. Finally she rubbed the pink chamois across her features and adjusted her hat, pausing to scrape again with forefinger at the front of her, and moved on through the gloom, the wind blowing her skirt forward.
She boarded a Seventh Avenue street-car, extracting the ten-cent piece from her purse with a great show of well-being, sat back against the carpet-covered, lengthwise seat, her red hands, with the cut forefinger bound in rag, folded over her waist. ”

“ Finally that door swung open again; the wide-shouldered, slim-hipped silhouette of Miss Hassiebrock moved swiftly and surely through the kind of early darkness, finding out for itself a wall telephone hung in a small patch of hallway separating kitchen and front room. Her voice came tight, as if it were a tense coil in her throat that she held back from bursting into hysteria.
"Give me Olive, two-one-o." The toe of her boot beat a quick tattoo. "Stag?... Say, get me Charley Cox. He's out in front or down in the grill or somewhere around. Page him quick! Important!" ”

“ A china clock, the centerpiece of the mantel, ticked spang into the silence, enhancing it.
Hands in lap, head back against the mat of her chair, Mrs. Burkhardt looked straight ahead of her into this silence—at a closed door hung with a newspaper rack, at a black-walnut horsehair divan, a great sea-shell on the carpet beside it. A nickelplated warrior gleamed from the top of a baseburner that showed pink through its mica doors. He stood out against the chocolate-ocher wallpaper and a framed Declaration of Independence, hanging left. A coal fell. Mr. Burkhardt sat up, shook himself of sleep. ”

“ Sometimes climbing from floor to floor, a still warm supply of them looped over one arm, Mrs. Kaufman, who wore bombazine, but unspotted and with crisp net frills at the throat, and upon whose soft-looking face the years had written their chirography in invisible ink, would sit suddenly, there in the narrow gloom of her halls, head against the balustrade. Oftener than not the Katz boy from the third floor front would come lickety-clapping down the stairs and past her, jumping the last four steps of each flight. ”

“ At six o'clock Fourteenth Street pours up from its basements, down from its lofts, and out from its five-and-ten-cent stores, shows, and arcades, in a great homeward torrent—a sweeping torrent that flows full flush to the Subway, the Elevated, and the surface car, and then spreads thinly into the least pretentious of the city's homes—the five flights up, the two rooms rear, and the third floor back. ”

“ Mr. Vetsburg bit his cigar, slumped deeper; and inserted a thumb in the arm of his waistcoat.
"Why, Mrs. Kaufman, don't you and Ruby come down by Atlantic City with me to-morrow over Easter? Huh? A few more or less don't make no difference to my sister the way they get ready for crowds."
Miss Kaufman shot forward, her face vivid.
"Oh, Vetsy," she cried, and a flush rushed up, completely dyeing her face. ”

“ Connors; it spun the fuzz of frizz rising off her blond coiffure into a sort of golden fog and picked out the sequins of her bodice.
The dinner-hour descends glitteringly upon West Forty-seventh Street, its solid rows of long, lanky hotels, actors' clubs, and sixty-cent tables d'hôte adding each its candle-power.
From her brace of windows in the Hotel Metropolis, the street was not unlike a gully cut through mica, a honking tributary flowing into the great sea of Broadway. A low, high-power car, shaped like an ellipse, cut through the snarl of traffic, bleating. ”

“ Beside the stove, a base-burner with faint fire showing through its mica, the identity of her figure merged with the fat upholstery of the chair, except where the faint pink through the mica lighted up old flesh, Mrs. Miriam Horowitz, full of years and senile with them, wove with grasses, the écru of her own skin, wreaths that had mounted to a great stack in a bedroom cupboard.
A clock, with a little wheeze and burring attached to each chime, rang six, and upon it Mrs. Coblenz, breathing from a climb, opened the door. ”

“ I want you to go, Jimmie. I want you to beat the draft, too. Nothing on earth can make me not want you to go."
"Why, Gert—you're kiddin'!"
"Honey, you want to go, don't you? You want to square up those shoulders and put on khaki, don't you? Tell me you want to go!"
"Why—why, yes, Gert, if—"
"Oh, you're going, Jimmie! You're going!"
"Why, girl—you're crazy! Our flat! Our furniture—our—"
"What's a flat? What's furniture? What's anything? There's not a firm in business wouldn't take back a boy's furniture—a boy's everything—that's going out to fight for—for dem-o-cracy! What's a flat? ”

“ As she went out the side, Keeley's was closing its front doors.
Outside, not even to be gainsaid by Sixth Avenue, the night was like a moist flower held to the face. A spring shower, hardly fallen, was already drying on the sidewalks, and from the patch of Bryant Park across the maze of car-tracks there stole the immemorial scent of rain-water and black earth, a just-set-out crescent of hyacinths giving off their light steam of fragrance. How insidious is an old scent! It can creep into the heart like an ache. Who has not loved beside thyme or at the sweetness of dusk? ”

“ Suddenly, with a small catch of breath that was audible in her throat, Miss Slayback stepped out of that doorway, squirming her way across the tight congestion of the sidewalk to its curb, then in and out, brushing this elbow and that shoulder, worming her way in an absolutely supreme anxiety to keep in view a brown derby hat bobbing right briskly along with the crowd, a greenish-black bit of feather upright in its band. ”