A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

Humoresque

F >> Fannie Hurst >> Humoresque




"I'll make you up them five yards of pink mull for it, Stella. It's a
shame that pretty dress-pattern from your two birthdays ago has never
had the occasion to be made up. It's nice of Cora to be puttin'
herself out."

"Look at 'er, like I was asking her to a funeral!"

"There's such a pretty sash I been savin' to make up with that mull,
Cora. A handsome black-moiré length of ribbon off a beaded basque her
father gimme our first Christmas married."

"I'll lend her my pink pearls to wear. Honest, I never knew a girl could
wear pink like Stella."

Miss Schump leaned forward in the lamplight, the myriad of tight little
braids at angles, but her eyes widening to their astounding blueness.

"Not your--pink beads, Cora?"

"You heard me the first time, didn't you? 'Pink' was what I said."

"Ma!"

"Now ain't that nice of Cora?"

"Quick--are you game?"

"Why, yes--Cora."

* * * * *

There is a section of New York which rays out rather crazily from old
Jefferson Market and Night Court in spokes of small streets that seem
to run at haphazard angles each to the other--that less sooty part of
Greenwich not yet invaded by the Middle West in search of bohemia. An
indescribable smack of Soho here, tired old rows of tired old houses
going down year by year before the wrecker's ax, the model tenement
rising insolently before the scar is cold.

It is that part of the Latin Quarter which is literally just that, lying
slightly to the south and slightly to the west of that odd-fellow's land
of short-haired women and long-haired men. Free love, free verse, free
thought, free speech, and freed I.W.W.'s have no place here. For three
blocks a little Italy runs riot in terms of pastry, spaghetti, and
plaster-of-Paris shops, and quite as abruptly sobers and becomes Soho
again. A Greek church squats rather broadly at the intersection of three
of these streets.

There intervened between Stella Schump's and the six-story model
tenement adjoining the Greek church which Miss Gertrude Cobb called
home, a rhomboid of park, municipally fitted with playground apparatus,
the three-block riot of little Italy, the gloomy barracks of old
Jefferson Market and Night Court, and a few more blocks of still intact,
tired old rows of tired old houses.

On a spring night that was as insinuatingly sweet as the crush of a rose
to the cheek there walked through these lowly streets of lower Manhattan
Mr. Archie Sensenbrenner, bounded on the north by a checked,
deep-visored cap; on the south by a very bulldogged and very tan pair of
number nines; on the east by Miss Cora Kinealy, very much of the
occasion in a peaked hood faced in eider-down and a gay silk bag of
slippers dangling; on the west by Miss Stella Schump, a pink scarf
entwining her head like a Tanagra.

"Honest, Cora, I feel just like I'm intruding."

"'Intrudin'! Would I have invited her if we didn't want her, Arch?"

"Naw."

"'There's always room for one more,' is my motto. I believe it always
comes home to the girl that don't share her good times. If me and Arch
couldn't call by for a girl on our way to a party, I'd feel sorry for
us. Give her your arm, Arch."

"Here! I tried once to, and she wouldn't take it."

Miss Schump hooked a highly diffident hand into Mr. Sensenbrenner's
sharply jutted elbow.

"You two go on and talk together. I've chewed Arch's right ear off
already."

"It's a grand evenin'--ain't it, Mr. Sensenbrenner?"

At that from Miss Schump, Miss Kinealy executed a very soprano squeal
that petered out in a titter of remonstrances.

"Arch Sensenbrenner, if you don't stop pinching me! Honest, my arm's
black and blue! Honest! What'll Stella think we are? Now cut it out!"

They walked a block in silence, but, beside her, Miss Schump could feel
them shaking to a duet of suppressed laughter, and the red in her face
rose higher and a little mustache of the tiniest of perspiration beads
came out over her lip. The desire to turn back, the sudden ache for the
quietude of the little halo of lamplight and the swollen finger-joints
of her mother in and out at work, were almost not to be withstood.

"I--You--you and Mr. Sensenbrenner go on, Cora. I--me not knowin' Gertie
Cobb and all--I--I--feel I'm intruding. You and him go on. Please!"

Miss Kinealy crossed to her, kindly at once and sobered.

"Now, Stella Schump, you're coming right to this party with me and Arch.
We can't do more than tell her she's welcome, can we, Arch?"

"Sure."

"I promised your mother I'm going to see to it that you get away from
her apron-strings and out among young folks more, and you're coming
right to this party with me and Arch. Ain't I right, Arch?"

"Sure."

"You mustn't feel bad, honey, that Ed couldn't get John Gilly to come
around and call after you. Ed says he'd never get him to steam up his
nerve enough to call at a girl's house after her; but ain't it enough
he's coming to Gert's to-night just to meet you? You ought to heard him
when Ed got to telling him what kind of a girl you was. 'Gee!' Ed says
he says. 'Big blue eyes like saucers sounds good to me! Well,' he says,
Ed says he says, 'if my nerve don't lay down on me, I'll show up there
with you.' That's something, ain't it, for a fellow like John Gilly to
do just to meet a girl? Ain't it, Arch, for that fine, big fellow, Ed's
foreman, you seen up at our house that night? You know the one I mean,
the one with his arm scalded up from the explosion."

"Sure."

"Honest, if I wasn't already tagged and spoken for, I'd set my cap for
him myself."

"'Mother, mother, mother, pin a rose on me!'" cried Mr. Sensenbrenner,
with no great pertinence.

Miss Kinealy threw him a northwest glance. "Ain't he the cut-up,
Stella?"

"He sure is."

"Br-a-a-y!" said Mr. Sensenbrenner, again none too relevantly.

"Oh, show her the way the zebra in the Park goes on Sunday morning,
Arch!"

He inserted two fingers, splaying his mouth. "Heigh-ho!
He-e-e-e-e-e-e-e!"

"Ain't that lifelike, Stella?"

"It sure is."

"Oh, look! Up there--the third story--see--those are the Cobbs'
windows, all lit up! Oh, gee! I just can't make my feet behave. Waltz me
around again, Archie! No; you got to take the first dance with Stella."

"Oh no, Cora; he wants--"

"You hear, Arch?"

"Sure; only, I can't force her if she don't want to."

"Sure she wants to! Hurry! I hear Skinnay Flint's ukulele. Gee! I just
can't make my feet be-have!"

They entered an institutional, sanitary, and legislation-smelling box of
foyer and up three flights of fire-proof stairs. At each landing were
four fire-proof doors, lettered. The Cobbs' door, "H," stood open, an
epicene medley of voices and laughter floating down the long neck of
hallway on the syncopated whine of a ukulele.

There was an immediate parting of ways, Mr. Sensenbrenner hanging his
cap on an already well-filled rack of pegs and making straight for the
sound of revelry by night.

The girls made foray into a little side pocket of bedroom for the
changing of shoes, whitening of noses, and various curlicue preambles.

"Stella, your hair looks swell!"

"Ma plaited it up last night with sugar-water."

"Here, just this speck on your lips, just a little to match your
cheeks!--See--all the girls use it."

"Ugh--no--"

"There, just a stroke. Fine! Say, wasn't Arch killing to-night when he
called my cheeks naturally curly?"

"You look grand, Cora. Sure you don't want your pink beads?"

"I'll throw 'em down and step on 'em if you take 'em off."

"I just love that changeable silk on you."

"Does the split under the arm show?"

"Notta bit."

"Come on, then!"

"Oh, Cora--"

"Come on!"

In the Cobb front room a frightened exodus of furniture had taken place.
A leather-and-oak "davenbed" had obviously and literally been dragged to
the least conspicuous corner. An unpainted center of floor space showed
that there had been a rug. Camp-chairs had been introduced against all
available wall space. Only a fan-shaped, three-shelved cabinet of
knickknacks had been allowed its corner. Diagonal from it, the horn of a
talking-machine, in shape a large, a violent, a tin morning-glory, was
directed full against the company.

Not a brilliant scene, except by grace or gracelessness of state of
mind. But to Stella Schump, neither elected nor electing to walk in
greater glory, there was that about the Cobb front room thus lighted,
thus animated, that gave her a sense of function--a crowding around the
heart. The neck of hallway might have been a strip of purple, awninged.

There were greetings that rose in crescendo and falsetto.

"Cora Kinealy! Hello, Cora! How's every little thing?"
"Baby-shoes--tra-la-la!" "Oh, you changeable-silk kiddo! Turn green for
the ladies." "Come on over here, Cora, and make Arch tell fortunes!"

"Gertie, this is my girl friend, Stella, from the shoes, I brought.
Y'know? I told you about her. Ed's bringing down a gentleman friend
for her."

Miss Gertie Cobb, so blond, so small, so titillating that she resembled
nothing so much as one of those Dresden table-candelabra under a pink
glass-fringed shade with the fringe always atinkle, laughed upward in a
voice eons too old.

"Make yourself right at home. At our house, it's what you don't see ask
for. Skin-nay Flint, if you don't stop! Make him quit, Cora; he's been
ticklin' me something awful with that little old feather duster he
brought along. Whatta you think this is--Coney Island? E-e-e-e-e-e!"

There ensued a scramble down the length of the room, Miss Cobb with her
thin, bare little arms flung up over her head, Miss Kinealy tugging and
then riding in high buffoonery over the bare floor, firmly secured to
Mr. Flint's coattails.

"Leggo!"

"Quit--ouch--e-e-e-e-e! That's right; give it to him! Cora--go to
it--e-e-e-e-e--"

Lips lifted to belie a sinkage of heart, Miss Schump, left standing,
backed finally, sinking down to one of the camp-chairs against the wall.
The little glittering mustache had come out again, and, sitting there,
her smile so insistently lifted, the pink pearls at her throat rose and
fell. The ukulele was whanging again, and a couple or two, locked cheek
to cheek, were undulating in a low-lidded kind of ecstasy. Finally, Cora
Kinealy and Archie Sensenbrenner, rather uglily oblivious.

A youth, frantic to outdistance a rival for the dancing-hand of Miss
Gertie Cobb, stumbled across Miss Schump's carefully crossed ankles.

"'Scuse," he said, without glancing back.

"Certainly," said Miss Schump, through aching tonsils.

There was an encore, the raucous-throated morning-glory taking up where
the ukulele had left off. Miss Schump sat on, the smile drawn more and
more resolutely across her face. Occasionally, to indicate a state of
social ease, she caught an enforced yawn with her hand.

After a while Mrs. Cobb entered, quietly, almost furtively, hands
wrapped muff fashion in a checked apron, sitting down softly on the
first of the camp-chairs near the door. She had the dough look of the
comfortable and the uncorseted fat, her chin adding a scallop as,
watching, her smile grew.

"It's great to watch the young ones," she said, finally.

Miss Schump moved gratefully, oh, so gratefully, two chairs over.

"It sure is," she said, assuming an attitude of conversation.

"Like I tell Gert, it makes me young again myself."

"It sure does."

"Give it to 'em in the house, I say, and it keeps 'em in off the
street."

"Your daughter is sure one pretty girl."

"Gert's a good-enough girl, if I could keep her in. I tell 'er of all my
young ones she's the prettiest and the sassiest. Law, how that girl
can sass!"

"Like my mother always says to me about sass, sass never gets a girl
nowheres."

"Indeed it don't! It's lost her more places than my other two, married
now, ever lost put together. You work in the Criterion?"

"Yes'm. Children's shoes."

"I bet you're not the kind of a girl to change places every week."

"No'm. Criterion is the only place I ever worked at. I started there as
Cash."

"I bet you give up at home out of your envelop."

"Yes'm."

"Father?"

"No'm. He was a night watchman and got shot on duty."

"Mother?"

"Yes'm."

"Brother?"

"No'm."

"Sister?"

"No'm."

"Only child, huh?"

"Yes'm."

Then Miss Cobb blew up in a state of breathless haste and bobbing of
curls.

"Eats, maw--eats! The crowd's thirsty--spittin' cotton. What's the idea?
My tongue's out. Eats! Quick, for Gawsakes--eats!"

Mrs. Cobb, wide and quivery of hip, retreated precipitately into the
slit of hallway. Almost immediately there were refreshments, carried in
on portentous black tin trays by a younger Cobb in pigtails and by Mrs.
Cobb, swayback from a great outheld array of tumblers and bottles.

A shout went up.

The tray of sandwiches, piled to an apex, scarcely endured one round of
passing. The fluted tin tops of bottles were pried off. Tumblers
clicked. There were the sing of suds and foamy overflowings.

Enter Mr. Ed Kinealy, very brown and tight of suit, very black and
pomaded of hair.

"Oh, Ed!" This from Miss Kinealy between large mouthfuls of sandwich
and somewhat jerkily from being dandled on Mr. Sensenbrenner's knee,
"Where's your friend--where's John Gilly?"

"Oh, Ed!" "Naouw, Eh-ud!" "I'll give you a slap on the wrist." "Naouw,
Ed!" Delivered by those present in a chorus of catcalls and falsetto
impersonations of Miss Kinealy in plaintive vein.

"Now tell me--where is he, Ed? Shut up every body! Where is he, Ed?"

Mr. Kinealy shot a pair of very striped cuffs.

"That guy had sense. One whiff of this roughhouse and he bolted down
again, six steps at a jump. He slipped me so easy I was talking to
myself all the way up-stairs. That guy had sense. Petticoat shush-shush
can't put nothing over on him."

"Aw, Ed!"

CHORUS: Aw, Eh-ud! Aw, Eh-ud! Naouw--

"And him dated for Stella! Honest, it's a rotten shame!" Suddenly Miss
Kinealy flashed to her feet, her glance running quick. "Where is she?
Well, Stella Schump, sitting over there playing chums with yourself!
Honest, your name ought to be Chump! Whatta you think that is--the amen
corner? You're a fine bunch of social entertainers, you fellows are!
Bring her up a chair. Gee! you are! Honest, Gertie Cobb, I wouldn't want
my cat to be company to you! Bring 'er up a chair, Ed. Here, next to me!
Honest, it's a rotten shame! Give 'er a sandwich. Open 'er up a bottle.
Gee! you're a fine crowd of fish, you are!"

There was a general readjustment of circle and scraping of chairs. Miss
Schump, scarlet, drew up and in, Mr. Kinealy prying off a fluted
top for her.

"Have this one on me, Stella!" he cried. "Your guy bolted of stage
fright; but I'm here, and don't you forget it!"

"Aw--tee-hee!" she said, wiping at her upper lip.

"Here!"

She regarded the foam sing down into amber quiet.

"I'm on the water-wagon," she said, essaying to be light of vein,
crossing her hands and feet and tilting her glance at him.

"Say, here's a girl won't blow the foam off a fellow's glass for fear
she'll get soapsuds in her eyes!"

"Wash her face with 'em!"

MISS KINEALY: Aw, now, Stella; can't you be a good fellow for once? Do
it, if it hurts you. Honest, I hate to say it, but you're the limit, you
are! My God! limber up a little--limber up!

"Here, now--open your mouth and shut your eyes."

"Open it for her, Ed."

"Aw, no; don't force her if she don't want it."

"Gowann, Stella; be human, if it hurts you."

Redly and somewhat painfully, the observed of all observers, Miss Schump
tilted her head and drank, manfully and shudderingly, to the bitter end
of the glass.

"Attaboy! Say, tell it to the poodles and the great Danes! That Jane's
no amachure!"

Eyes stung to tears, pink tip of her tongue quickly circling her lips,
Miss Schump held out to Mr. Kinealy the empty tumbler.

"Now, there!"

"More?"

"I'm game."

"Don't give 'er a whole glass, Ed."

She drank, again at one whiff.

"That's more like it! Didn't kill you, did it? Now eat that Swiss-cheese
sandwich and come over next to me and Arch while he tells fortunes."

Miss Schump rose, rather high of head, the moment hers.

Miss Kinealy stretched her hand out into the center of the closing-in
circle of heads.

"I said palm-reading, Arch, not hand-holding. Leave that part to Ed and
Gert over there. Now quit squeezing--"

Mr. Sensenbrenner bent low, almost nose to her palm.

"I see," he began, his voice widening to a drawl--"I se-e a fellow about
my size and complexion entering your life--"

To Miss Schump, her hand on Miss Kinealy's shoulder and her head peering
over, the voice seemed to trail off somewhere out into infinitudes of
space, off into bogs of eternity, away and behind some beyond.

"Gee! it's hot in here!" she muttered, no one heeding or hearing. "Sure
hot. Whew!"

"Going on a long journey, and a fellow about my size and complexion is
going along with you, and there's money coming--"

"Sure hot!" It was then Miss Schump, with fear of a rather growing and
sickening sense of dizziness and of the wavy and unstable outline of
things, slipped quietly and unobtrusively out into the hallway, her
craving for air not to be gainsaid. The door to the little bedroom stood
open, her pink scarf uppermost on the cot-edge. She stood for an instant
in the doorway, regarding and wanting it, but quite as suddenly turned,
and down the three flights gained the dewy quiet of out-of-doors,
fighting muzziness.

The street had long since fallen tranquil, the Greek church casting
immense shadow. The air had immediate and sedative effect upon Miss
Schump's rather distressing symptoms of unrest, but not quite allaying a
certain state of mental upheaval. She had the distinct sensation of the
top of her head lifted off from the eyebrows up. Her state of
light-headedness took voice.

"Gimme," she said, lifting the pink-mull, ankle-length skirt as if it
trailed a train and marching off down-street; "now you gimme!"

An entirely new lack of self-consciousness enhanced her state of
giddiness. A titter seemed to run just a scratch beneath the surface
of her.

The passing figure of a woman in a black cape and a bulge of bundle
elicited a burst of laughter which her hand clapped to her mouth
promptly subdued. Awaiting the passing of a street-car, she was again
prone to easy laughter.

"Oh, you!" she said, quirking an eye to the motorman, who quirked back.

Crossing the street, she came down rather splashily in a pool of water,
wetting and staining the light slippers.

"Aw!" she repeated, scolding and stamping down at them. "Aw! Aw! You!"

Across from the gloomy pile of old Jefferson Market, she stood, reading
up at an illuminated tower-clock, softly, her lips moving.

"Nine--ten--e-lev-hun--"

A dark figure slowed behind her elbow; she turned with a sense of that
nearness and peered up under the lowering brim of a soft-felt hat.

"Hoddado?"

"Hello!" she answered, slyly.

"Hello!"

She peered closer.

"Got a girl?"

"Nope."

"Blow suds?"

"Where?"

"Cora's."

He flung back his coat, revealing a star.

"You're under arrest," he said, laconically. "Solicitin'. Come on; no
fuss."

Her comprehension was unplumbed.

"O Lord!" she said, pressing inward at her waistline to abet laughter,
following him voluntarily enough, and her voice rising. "You make me
laugh. You make me laugh."

"That'll do," he said.

"Whoop la-la!"

"Now, you get noisy and watch me."

He turned in rather abruptly at a side door of the dark-red pile of
building which boasted the illuminated tower-clock and a jutting ell
with barred windows.

She drew back.

"No, you don't! Aw, no, you don't! Whatta you think I yam? Cora's! Tell
it to the poodles and the great Danes!"

He shoved her with scant ceremony beyond the heavy door. She entered in
one of the uncontrollable gales of laughter, the indoor heat immediately
inducing the dizziness.

"Whatta you think I yam? Tell it to the poodles and the great Danes!"

Thirty minutes later, in a court-room as smeared of atmosphere as a
dirty window, a bridge officer, reading from a slip of paper, singsonged
to the sergeant-at-arms:

"Stella Schump. Officer Charles Costello."

How much more daringly than my poor pen would venture, did life, all of
a backhanded, flying leap of who knows what centrifugal force, transcend
for Stella Schump the vague boundaries of the probable.

The milky-fleshed, not highly sensitized, pinkly clean creature of an
innocence born mostly of ignorance and slow perceptions, who that
morning had risen sweet from eleven hours of unrestless sleep beside a
mother whose bed she had never missed to share, suddenly here in
slatternliness! A draggled night bird caught in the aviary of night
court, lips a deep vermilion scar of rouge, hair out of scallop and
dragging at the pins, the too ready laugh dashing itself against what
must be owned a hiccough.

Something congenital and sleeping subcutaneously beneath the surface of
her had scratched through. She was herself, strangely italicized.

A judge regarded her not unkindly. There were two of him, she would keep
thinking, one merging slightly into his prototype.

She stood, gazing up. Around her swam the court-room--rows of faces;
comings and goings within her railed area. And heat--the dizzying, the
exciting heat--and the desire to shake off the some one at her elbow.
That some one was up before her now, in a chair beside the judge, and
his voice was as far away as Archie Sensenbrenner's.

"And she says to me, she says, your Honor, 'Got a girl?'"

"Were those her exact words to you?"

"Yes, your Honor."

"Proceed."

"And I says to her, I says, 'No,' and then she comes up close and says
to me, she says, 'Buy me a drink?'"

"Were those her exact words?"

"Yes, your Honor, as near as I can remember."

"Go on."

"And I says to her, 'Where do you want to go?' and she says to me,
giving me a wink, 'Cora's.'"

"Cora's?"

"Yes, your Honor; the Cora Jones mulatto woman that was cleaned out last
week."

"She suggested that you accompany her to the house of the Jones woman?"

"Beg pardon, your Honor?"

"She suggested this resort?"

"Yes, your Honor. 'Cora Jones,' she said."

Through the smoke of her bewilderment something irate stirred within
Miss Schump, a smouldering sense of anger that burst out into a brief
tongue of flame.

"You! You! You're no amachure! Cora Jones! Cora Kinealy! Go tell it to
the great Danes! Say it again! Gimme leave! Gimme leave!" The immediate
peremptoriness of the gavel set her to blinking, but did not silence.
"'Gimme leave,' was what I said--"

"Come to order in the court!"

"Aw!"

A new presence at her elbow grasped her sharply. She subsided, but still
muttering.

"Proceed, officer."

"And then, when she starts off with me, I says to her, I says, 'You're
under arrest,' and brought her over."

"That'll do."

"Does the defendant wish to take the chair?"

From her elbow, "His Honor asks if you want to state your case."

"Huh?"

"Do you wish to state your case from the witness-chair? Since you did
not employ counsel, do you wish to state your own case?"

"Nit."

"Look up here, my girl. I am the judge, trying to help you."

"Aw!"

"Is this your first offense?"

"Well, it's my offense, ain't it?"

"Address the court properly. Are you intoxicated or only slightly
dizzy?"

"He lied about Cora Kinealy. He lied--that little skunk lied."

"Didn't you ask him to go there with you?"

"Sure; but he's no amachure."

"Are you?"

"What?"

"An amateur?"

"No, this Jane ain't."

"Will you go quietly into the next room with the matron and tell her all
about it? The court does not want to have to deal too harshly with a
girl like you. Do you want to engage counsel and have your case go over?
If there is a chance, I don't want to have to send a girl like
you away."

"Aw, you--you're a poodle and a great Dane!"

"Ten days," said the judge, rather wearily.

The bridge officer took up the next slip from the pile of them, his
voice the droning quality of a bee bumbling through sultry air:

"Maizie Smith. Officer Jerry Dinwiddie."

* * * * *

Spring and her annual epidemic of aching hearts and aching joints had
advanced ten days and ten degrees. The season's first straw replacement
of derby had been noted by press. The city itched in its last days of
woolens and drank sassafras tea for nine successive mornings. A commuter
wore the first sweet sprig of lilac. The slightly East Sixties took to
boarding up house-fronts into bland, eyeless masks. The very East
Sixties began to smell.

When a strangely larger-eyed, strangely thinner, a whitened and somehow
a tightened Stella Schump drew up, those ten days later, before the
little old row with the little old iron balconies, there was already in
the ridiculous patches of front yards a light-green powdering of grass,
and from the doorbell of her own threshold there hung quite a little
spray of roses, waxy white against a frond of fern and a fold of black.
Deeper within that threshold, at the business of flooding its floor with
a run of water from a tipped pail and sweeping harshly into it, was the
vigorous, bony silhouette of Mrs. O'Connor, landlady.

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.