Humoresque

A free download from http://www.dertz.in


Humoresque

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Humoresque, by Fannie Hurst
Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.
Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how
the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since
1971**
*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of
Volunteers!*****
Title: Humoresque A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It
Author: Fannie Hurst
Release Date: February, 2006 [EBook #9864] [Yes, we are more than

one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on October 25,
2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
HUMORESQUE ***

Produced by Suzanne Shell, Charlie Kirschner and the PG Distributed
Proofreaders

[Illustration: HE CAPERED THROUGH THE MELODY OF
DVORÀK'S, WHICH IS AS IRONIC AS A GRINNING MASK]

HUMORESQUE
A LAUGH ON LIFE WITH A TEAR BEHIND IT
By FANNIE HURST
1920

CONTENTS
HUMORESQUE OATS FOR THE WOMAN A PETAL ON THE
CURRENT WHITE GOODS "HEADS" A BOOB SPELLED
BACKWARD EVEN AS YOU AND I THE WRONG PEW

HUMORESQUE
On either side of the Bowery, which cuts through like a drain to catch
its sewage, Every Man's 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 languages, runs
its intact Latin length of pushcarts, clotheslines, 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. And then,
just as suddenly, almost without osmosis and by the mere stepping
down from the curb, Mulberry becomes Mott Street, hung in grillwork
balconies, the moldy smell of poverty touched up with incense.
Orientals whose feet shuffle and whose faces are 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 jade and tea and Chinese
porcelains.
More streets emanating out from Mott like a handful 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
Kantor's apartment a short-stemmed pink carnation. It hit softly on little
Leon Kantor's crib, brushing him fragrantly across the mouth and
causing him to pucker up.
Beneath, where even in August noonday, the sun cannot find its way by
a chink, and babies lie stark naked in the cavernous shade, Allen Street
presents a sort of submarine and greenish gloom, as if its humanity
were actually moving through a sea of aqueous shadows, faces rather
bleached and shrunk from sunlessness as water can bleach and shrink.
And then, like a shimmering background of orange-finned and
copper-flanked marine life, the brass-shops of Allen Street, whole rows
of them, burn flamelessly and without benefit