Fannie Hurst

“ I—I could have stood up under it then, Becky, but—but—"
"Ach, my husband—for myself I don't care. Ach, my husband."
"I—I'm gone, Becky—gone."
He rose to his feet and shambled feebly to his bedroom, his fingers feeling of the furniture for support, and his breath coming in the long wheezes of dry tears. And in the cradle of her mother's arms Miss Binswanger wept the hot tears of black despair; they seeped through the showy lace yoke and scalded her mother's heart.
"Oh, my baby! Ach, my husband! A good man like him, a good man like him!"
"Don't cry, mamma, don't—cry." ”

“ THE OTHER CHEEK Romance has more lives than a cat. Crushed to earth beneath the double-tube, non-skiddable tires of a sixty-horse-power limousine, she allows her prancing steed to die in the dust of yesterday and elopes with the chauffeur.
Love has transferred his activities from the garden to the electric-heated taxi-cab and suffers fewer colds in the head. No, romance is not dead—only reincarnated; she rode away in divided skirt and side-saddle, and motored back in goggles. The tree-bark messages of the lovers of Arden are the fifty-word night letters of to-day. ”

“ Come on, Lil, and tell me what the guy to-night was like."
Lilly was pinning on her hat in an agony of haste.
"I left the note on the pincushion. If he goes in the kitchen for his milk first, like he does on hot nights, maybe I can beat him! He may be—"
Her voice trailed down the hall. She fumbled a little at the street door, hot flushes darting over her body.
In the street-car Lilly dug her nails through the silk palms of her gloves and sat on the edge of the seat, her pulse pounding in her ear. Her voiceless prayer beat against her brain. ”

“ The fireside of the Bronx is the steam-radiator. Its lullabies are sung before a gilded three-coil heater; its shaving-water and kettle are heated on that same contrivance. It is as much of an epic in apartment living as condensed milk and folding-davenports.
All of which has little enough to do with Miss Tillie Prokes, except that in her lifetime she had hammered probably a caskful of nails into the tops of condensed-milk cans. Also she could unfold her own red-velours davenport; cold-cream her face; sugar-water her hair and put it up in kids ”

“ Goldie's face softened as if a choir invisible was singing her ragtime from above her skylight. She lighted her fan of gas with fingers that trembled in a pleasant frenzy of anticipation, and the tears dried on her face and left little paths down her cheeks.
A fan of pink roses, fretted with maidenhair fern and caught with a sash of pink tulle, lay on her coarse cot coverlet, as though one of her dreams had ventured out of its long night.
What a witch is love! ”

“ The Imperial flyer swooped through the dun-colored village like the glance of a lovely coquette shoots through her victim's heart and leaves it bare.
At eight-one the far-off Imperial voice hallooed through the darkness like a conquering hero whose vanguard is a waving sword which flashes in the sunlight before he and his steed come up out of the horizon.
At eight-four a steam yodel shook the panes and lamp-chimneys of Slateville, a semaphore studded with a ruby stiffened out against the sky, and a white eye—the size of a bicycle-wheel—flashed down the tracks. ”

“ It was eleven o'clock when they entered the car for the homeward spin. The cool air blew color and verve into her face; and her hair, responding to the night damp, curled in little grape-vine tendrils round her face.
"You're some swell little goil," remarked Mr. Barker, a cigar hung idle from one corner of his mouth.
"And you are some driver!" she retorted. "You run a car like a real chauffeur."
"I wouldn't own a car if I couldn't run it myself," he said. "I ran this car all through France last fall. There ain't no fun bein' steered like a mollycoddle." ”

“ The tide of home-going New York caught them in its six-o'clock vortex. Shops emptied and street-cars filled. A newsboy fell beneath a car, and Broadway parted like a Red Sea for an overworked ambulance, the mission of which was futile. A lady in a fourteen-hundred-fifty-dollar unborn-lamb coat and a notorious dog-collar of pearls stepped out of a wine-colored limousine into the gold-leaf foyer of a hotel. A ten-story emporium ran an iron grating across its entrance, and ten watchmen reported for night duty. ”

“ A fire-boweled engine with a grimy-faced demon leaning out of his red-hot cab, and, on every alternate night, a green eye with a black pupil which winked a signal from that same heat-roaring cab and from a dirt-colored frame shanty in a dirt-brown yard, where a naked tree stretched its thin arms against the sky, an answering eye which gleamed through a bandana-bound lantern and outlined the Hebe-like silhouette of a woman in the window.
Then the flash of a mahogany-lined dining-car with nodding vis-à-vis, pink-shaded candles and white-coated, black-faded genii of the bowl and weal ”

“ Simon Leavitt; he says he sold you goods. Simon Leavitt. Know him?"
"No."
"One nice little fellow!"
Silence.
"I missed you lots, Miss Ruby. When Saturday came I said to mamma: 'How I miss that girl! Only one month she's been with us, but how I miss that girl!' Oh—eh, Miss Ruby!"
Miss Cohn adjusted a pair of tissue-paper sleevelets and smoothed her smooth tan hips as if she would erase them entirely; then she looked up at him delicately, and for the instant the pink aura of her hair and the rise and fall of her too high bosom gave her some of the fleshly beauty of a Flora. ”

“ You must excuse her, Max, so terrible upset she is. 'Sh-h-h-h, mamma—'sh-h-h-h! We're going back home and begin over again. 'Sh-h-h-h! You won't have to dress for supper no more like you hate. We'll be home in time for your strawberry-preserves season, mamma, and rhubarb stew out of the garden, like papa loves. 'Sh-h-h-h! You must excuse her, Max—you must excuse me, too, to-night—you—come some other time—please."
"Pearlie!" He came closer to the circle of light, and his large features came out boldly. "Pearlie, don't you cry neither, little girl—"
"I—I ain't." ”

“ Up to my neck I'm full. Like wolfs you are! On my neck I can feel your breath hot like a furnace. Like wolfs you drive me till I—I can't stand it no more. All what I ask is my peace—my little house, my little pipe, my little porch, and not even my peace can I have. You—you're a pack of wolfs, I tell you—even your fangs I can see, and—and I—I wish I was so far away as the bottom of the ocean."
He shambled toward the door on legs bent to the cruel curve of rheumatism. The sun had dropped into a bursting west, and was as red as a mist of blood. ”

“ Goldie picked her careful way round it. Fear and nausea and sickness at the heart made her dizzy.
The dresser, with its wavy mirror, was strewn with her husband's neckties; an uncorked bottle of bay-rum gave out its last faint fumes.
She opened the first long drawer with a quivering intake of breath and pulled out a shirt-waist, another, and yet another, and a coarse white petticoat with a large-holed embroidery flounce. Then she dragged a suit-case, which was wavy like the mirror, through the blur of her tears, out from under the bed ”

“ She turned into the embrace of the apartment house and ran up the three flights of stairs with limbs that trembled under her; her cold fingers groped about before she could muster strength to turn the key in the lock.
Lilly entered noiselessly. The bedroom was dark. Tears sprang to her eyes. For a moment she reeled; then she felt along the parlor wall to the middle room. By the shaft of light from the kitchen she could see the yellow note undisturbed, poised like a conspicuous butterfly. Her hand closed over it—she crushed it in her palm.
"Charley!" she called, and entered the kitchen. ”

“ Goldie Flint, beneath whose too-openwork shirt-waist fluttered a heart the tempo of which was love of life—and love of life on eight dollars a week and ninety per cent. impure food, and a hall-room, more specifically a standing room, is like a pink rose-bush that grows in a slack heap and begs its warmth from ashes. ”

“ Silence.
"You care if I wear yours to-night, Angie?"
Silence.
"Aw, Angie, if you're sick why don't you say so and not go spoilin' my evening? Gee! If a girl would listen to you she'd have a swell time of it—she would! A girl's gotta have life."
She fastened a slender gold chain with a dangling blue-enamel heart round her neck.
"Aw, I guess I'll stay home. There ain't no fun in anything, with you poutin' round like this."
Tillie appeared in the doorway, gloves in hand. Angie was still at the uncleared table; her cheek lay on the red-and-white table-cloth, and her face was turned away. ”

“ Little Goldie!"
"Oh, Addie! Addie!"
Youth has rebound like a rubber ball. Batted up against the back fence, she bounces back into the heart of a rose-bush or into the carefully weeded, radishless radish-bed of the kitchen garden.
Mrs. Trimp rose from the couch-bed davenport of the Bopp sitting-dining-sleeping-room, with something of the old lamps burning in her eyes and a full-lipped mouth to which clung the memory of smiles. Even Psyche, abandoned by love, smiled a specious smile when she posed for the scalpel. ”

“ Youth, even the fag-end of Youth, is like a red-blooded geranium that fights to bloom though transplanted from a garden bed to a tin can in a cellar window. A faint-as-dawn pink persisted in flowing underneath the indoor white of Miss Prokes's cheeks—the last rosy shadow of a maltreated girlhood, which too long had defied the hair-line wrinkles, the notion-counter with the not-to-be-used stool behind it, nine hours of arc-light substitute for the sunshine on the hillside and the green shade of the dell. ”

“ Take a boy like Max Teitlebaum. Yourself you said how grand and steady he is. Twice with Izzy he's been out here, and not once his eyes off Poil did he take."
"Teitlebaum, with a store twice so big as ours on Sixth Avenue, don't need to look for us—twice they can buy and sell us."
"Is—that—so! To me that makes not one difference. Put Poil in the city, where it don't take an hour to get to be, and, ach, almost anything could happen! Not once did he take his eyes off her—such a grand, quiet boy, too."
"When a young man's got thoughts, forty-five minutes' street-car ride don't keep him away." ”

“ Eddie was on his feet and beside Goldie's palpitating figure, as though he would lay his heart, a living stepping-stone, at her feet.
"We better go now, Addie; honest we had! Eddie'll wait outside for me."
"You poor kid! You want to get it over with, don't you? Get her coat, Eddie, and bring her my sweater to wear underneath. It's getting colder every minute." ”

“ Sobs trembled through her and set the bed-springs vibrating, and she buried her head under her flat pillow and fell to counting the immemorial procession of phantom sheep that graze the black grasses of the Land of Wakeful Hours and lead their sleepless shepherds through the long, long, long pastures of the night.
"Three hundred 'n' five; three hundred 'n' six; three hundred 'n' seven; three hundred 'n'—Jimmie?"
A key scratched at the outer lock, and she sprang two-thirds from the bed, dragging the coverlet from its moorings. ”

“ At the door she turned and nodded over one shoulder.
"Good night, Ethyl dear," she said, a trifle too sweetly.
A huge mahogany-colored touring-car caparisoned in nickel and upholstered in darker red panted and chugged at the Broadway curb. Mr. Barker helped her into the front seat, swung himself behind the steering-wheel, covered them over with a striped rug, and turned his shining monster into the flux of Broadway.
Miss Gertrude leaned her head back against the upholstery and breathed a deep-seated, satisfied sigh.
"This," she said, "is what I call living." ”

“ Forty dollars for a house like ours on the wrong side of town away from the improvements ain't so bad. A grand young couple, no children. Izzy thinks it's a grand idea, too, Julius. He says if we move to the city he don't have to live in such a dark little hall-room no more. To the hotel he can come with us on family rates just so cheap. Ain't it, Izzy?"
Mr. Isadore Binswanger broke his conspiracy of silence gently, like a skeptic at breakfast taps his candle-blown egg with the tip of a silver spoon once, twice, thrice, then opens it slowly, suspiciously. ”

“ Miss Binswanger caught her breath on the crest of a sob and pushed her untouched plate toward the center of the table; tears swam on a heavy film across her eyes and thickened her gaze and voice.
"This—ain't—no—hole for—for a girl to live in."
"All I wish is you should never live in a worse."
"I ain't got nothin' here, papa, but sit and sit and sit on the porch every night with you and mamma. When Izzy comes out once a week to take me to a show, how he fusses and fusses you hear for yourselves. For a girl nearly—twenty—it ain't no joke." ”

“ I always say to him, Ruby, a girl that ain't ashamed to work and knows the value of a dollar, and can help a young man save and get a start without such big ideas like apartments and dummy waiters—"
"Honest, wouldn't you think this was a funeral! Mamma, to-night we have a party—not? I go down and get up that bottle of wine!"
"Himmel! My Pfannküchen! Yes, Abie, run down in the cellar; on the top shelf it is, under the grape-jelly row—left yet from poor papa's last birthday. Ach, Ruby, you should have known poor papa—that such a man could have been taken before his time! ”

“ The most pungent essay in all literature is devoted to the succulency of roast pig; Sappho was most lyric after she had rubbed her wine goblet with garlic-flavored ewe meat. But such kindly reflection was not Lilly's—fleshpots and life alike were unsavory.
The Nottingham lace curtains hung limp and motionless round her, and waves of heat deflected from the asphalt came up heavy as fog. Three stories beneath, Third Avenue spluttered on the griddle of a merciless August—an exhausted day was duskening into a scarcely less kind twilight ”