Humoresque Esprios Classics PDF Download

HUMO RES O tJE A LAUGH ON LIFE WITH A TEAR BEHIND IT By FANNIE HURST NEW YORK PETER SMITH 1934 To Daniel Frohznan CONTENTS PAcr HUMORESQUB I OATS FOR THE WOMAN ......-, .... 45 A PETAL ON THE CURRENT, . . . . 85 WHITE GOODS 126 HEADS 170 A Boon SPELLED BACKWARD 220 EVEN AS You AND I 262 THE WRONG PEW 3 HUMORESQUE HUMORESQUE ON either side of the Bowery, which cuts through like a drain to catch its sewage, Every Mans Land, a reeking march of humanity and humidity, steams with the excrement of seventeen languages, flung in patois from tenement windows, fire-escapes, curbs, stoops, and cellars whose walls are terrible and spongy with fungi. By that impregnable chemistry of race whereby the red blood of the Mongolian and the red blood of the Caucasian become as oil and water in the mingling, Mulberry Street, bounded by sixteen lan guages, runs its intact Latin length of push-carts, clothes-lines, naked babies, drying vermicelli black eyed women in rhinestone combs and perennially big with child whole families of buttonhole-makers, who first saw the blue-and-gold light of Sorrento, bent at home work round a single gas flare pomaded barbers of a thousand Neapolitan amours. A d then, just as suddenly, almost without osmosis and by the mere stepping down from the curb, Mulberry becomes Mott Street, hung in grill-work balconies, the moldy smell of poverty touched up with incense. Orientals rljose feet shuffle - and whose faces are HUMORESQUE carved out of satinwood. Forbidden women, their white, drugged faces behind upper windows. Yellow children, incongruous enough in Western clothing. A draughty areaway with an oblique of gaslight and a black well of descending staircase. Show-windows of jadeand tea and Chinese porcelains. More streets emanating out from Mott like a hand ful of crooked rheumatic fingers, then suddenly the Bowery again, cowering beneath Elevated trains, where men burned down to the butt end of soiled lives pass in and out and out and in of the knee high swinging doors, a veiny-nosed, acid-eaten race in themselves. Allen Street, too, still more easterly, and half as wide, is straddled its entire width by the steely, long-legged skeleton of Elevated traffic, so that its third-floor windows no sooner shudder into silence from the rushing shock of one train than they are shaken into chatter by the passage of another. Indeed, third-floor dwellers of Allen Street, reaching out, can almost touch the serrated edges of the Elevated structure, and in summer the smell of its hot rails becomes an actual taste in the mouth. Passengers, in turn, look in upon this horizontal of life as they whiz by. Once, in fact, the blurry figure of what might have been a woman leaned out, as she passed, to toss into one Abrahm Kantors apartment a short-stemmed pink carnation. It hit softly on little Leon Kantors crib, brushing him fragrantly across the mouth and causing him to pucker up. Beneath, where even irr August rioonday, the