The Best Short Stories of 1915 Part 11

At first Moisse could hardly make them out, but his eyes gradually grew accustomed to the sight. And as he watched he saw the hair swell like waves riding over the water, saw it drop and flutter, coil and uncoil of its own accord.

Vermin raised it up, pulled it out, streaming up and down tirelessly in vast armies.

They crawled furiously like dust specks blown thick through the white beard.

They streamed and shifted and were never still.

They moved in and out, from no place to no place, but always moving, frantic and frenzied.

An old woman pa.s.sed and with a shake of her head dropped two pennies into the upturned hat. Moisse hardly saw her. He saw only the palpitating swarms that were now facing, easily visible, through the gray white hair.

Some ventured down over the white ascetic face, crawling in every direction, traveling around the lips and over the closed eyes, emerging suddenly in thick streams from behind the covered ears and losing themselves under the ever moving beard.

And Moisse, his senses strained, thought he heard a noise--a faint crunching noise.

He listened.

The noise seemed to grow louder. He began to itch but he remained bending over the head. He could hear them, like a faraway murmur, a purring, uncertain sound.

"They're shouting and groaning, crying out, weeping and laughing," he mused. "It is life ... life...."

He looked up and down the crowded burning street with its frantic crowd, and smiled.

"Life," he repeated....

He walked away. Before him floated the hair of the beggar moving as if stirred by a slow wind, and he itched.

"But who was the old man?" he thought.

A young woman, plump and smiling, jostled him. He felt her soft hip pressing against him for a moment.

A child running barefoot through the street brushed against his legs. He felt its sticky fingers seize him for an instant and then the child was gone. On he walked.

Three young men confronted him for a second time. He pa.s.sed between two of them, squeezed by their shoulders.

A shapeless old woman b.u.mped him with her back as she shuffled past.

Two children dodged in and out screaming and seized his arm to turn on.

The young dramatist stopped and remained standing still, looking about him.

Then he laughed.

"Life," he murmured again; and

"I am the old man," he added, "I ... I...."

T.B.[8]

BY FANNIE HURST

From _The Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_

[8] Copyright, 1915, by The Curtis Publishing Company. Copyright, 1916, by Fannie Hurst.

The figurative underworld of a great city has no ventilation, housing or lighting problems. Rooks and crooks who live in the putrid air of crime are not denied the light of day, even though they loathe it.

Cadets, social skunks, whose carnivorous eyes love darkness, walk in G.o.d's sunshine and breathe G.o.d's air. Scarlet women turn over in wide beds and draw closer velvet curtains to shut out the morning. Gamblers curse the dawn.

But what of the literal underworld of the great city? What of the babes who cry in fetid cellars for the light and are denied it? What of the Subway trackwalker, purblind from gloom; the coalstoker, whose fiery tomb is the boiler room of a skysc.r.a.per; sweatshop workers, a flight below the sidewalk level, whose faces are the color of dead Chinese; six-dollar-a-week salesgirls in the arc-lighted subcellars of six-million-dollar corporations?

This is the literal underworld of the great city, and its sunless streets run literal blood--the blood of the babes who cried in vain; the blood from the lungs of the sweatshop workers whose faces are the color of dead Chinese; the blood from the cheeks of the six-dollar-a-week salesgirls in the arc-lighted subcellars. But these are your problems and my problems and the problems of the men who have found the strength or the fear not to die rich. The babe's mother, who had never known else, could not know that her cellar was fetid; she only cried out in her anguish and hated vaguely in her heart.

Sara Juke, in the bargain bas.e.m.e.nt of the t.i.tanic Department Store, did not know that lint from white goods clogs the lungs, and that the air she breathed was putrefied as from a noxious swamp. Sometimes a pain, sharp as a hatpin, entered between her shoulder blades. But what of that? When the heart is young the heart is bold, and Sara could laugh upward with the musical glee of a bird.

There were no seasons, except the spring and fall openings and semi-annual clearing sales, in the bargain bas.e.m.e.nt of the t.i.tanic store. On a morning when the white-goods counter was placing long-sleeve, high-neck nightgowns in its bargain bins, and knit underwear was supplanting the reduced muslins, Sara Juke drew her little pink knitted jacket closer about her narrow shoulders and shivered--shivered, but smiled. "Br-r-r! October never used to get under my skin like this."

Hattie Krakow, roommate and co-worker, shrugged her bony shoulders and laughed; but not with the upward glee of a bird--downward rather, until it died in a croak in her throat. But then Hattie Krakow was ten years older than Sara Juke; and ten years in the arc-lighted subcellar of the t.i.tanic Department Store can do much to m.u.f.fle the ring in a laugh.

"Gee, you're as funny as your own funeral--you are! You keep up the express pace you're going and there won't be another October left on your calendar."

"That's right; cheer me up a bit, dearie. What's the latest style in undertaking?"

"You'll know sooner 'n me if--"

"Aw, Hat, cut it! Wasn't I home in bed last night by eleven?"

"I ain't much on higher mathematics."

"Sure I was. I had to shove you over on your side of the bed; that's how hard you was sleeping."

"A girl can't gad round dancing and rough-housing every night and work eight hours on her feet, and put her lunch money on her back, and not pay up for it. I've seen too many blue-eyed dolls like you get broken.

I--"

"Amen!"

Sara Juke rolled her blue eyes upward, and they were full of points of light, as though stars were shining in them; and always her lips trembled to laugh.

"There ain't nothing funny, Sara."

"Oh, Hat, with you like a owl!"

"If I was a girl and had a cough like I've seen enough in this bas.e.m.e.nt get; if I was a girl and my skirtband was getting two inches too big, and I had to lie on my left side to breathe right, and my nightie was all soaked round the neck when I got up in the morning--I wouldn't just laugh and laugh. I'd cry a little--I would."

"That's right, Hat; step on the joy bug like it was a spider. Squash it!"