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[Illustration: Fannie Hurst]
EVERY SOUL HATH ITS SONG
BY
FANNIE HURST
AUTHOR OF
Just Around the Corner
"Oh, the melody in the simplest heart"
BOOKS BY FANNIE HURST
EVERY SOUL HATH ITS SONG
JUST AROUND THE CORNER
Every Soul Hath Its Song
1912, 1916
TO
J.S.D.
CONTENTS
SEA GULLIBLES
ROLLING STOCK
HOCHENHEIMER OF CINCINNATI
IN MEMORIAM
THE NTH COMMANDMENT
T.B.
SUMMER RESOURCES
SOB SISTER
THE NAME AND THE GAME
EVERY SOUL HATH ITS SONG
SEA GULLIBLES
In this age of prose, when men's hearts turn point-blank from blankverse to the business of chaining two worlds by cable and of daring tofly with birds; when scholars, ever busy with the dead, are sufferingcrick in the neck from looking backward to the good old days whenRomance wore a tin helmet on his head or lace in his sleeves—in suchan age Simon Binswanger first beheld the high-flung torch of GoddessLiberty from the fore of the steerage deck of a wooden ship, his smallbody huddled in the sag of calico skirt between his mother's knees, andthe sky-line and clothes-lines of the lower East Side dawning upon hisuncomprehending eyes.
Some decades later, and with an endurance stroke that far outclassedclassic Leander's, Simon Binswanger had swum the great Hellespontthat surged between the Lower East Side and the Upper West Side, and,trolling his family after, landed them in one of those stucco-fronted,elevator-service apartment-houses where home life is lived on the layer,and the sins of the extension sole and the self-playing piano arevisited upon the neighbor below. Landed them four stories high and dryin a strictly modern apartment of three dark, square bedrooms, a squaredining-room ventilated by an airshaft, and a square pocket of a kitchenthat looked out upon a zigzag of fire-escape. And last a squarefront-room-de-resistance, with a bay of four windows overlooking adistant segment of Hudson River, an imitation stucco mantelpiece, acrystal chandelier, and an air of complete detachment from its curtailedrear.
But even among the false creations of exterior architects and interiordecorators, home can find a way. Despite the square dining-room withthe stag-and-tree wall-paper design above the plate-rack and a gildedradiator that hissed loudest at mealtime, when Simon Binswanger and hisfamily relaxed round their after-dinner table, the invisible cricket onthe visible hearth fell to whirring.
With the oldest gesture of the shod age Mrs. Binswanger dived into herwork-basket, withdrew with a sock, inserted her five fingers into thefoot, and fell to scanning it this way and that with a furrow betweenher eyes.
"Ray, go in and tell your sister she should come out of her room andstop that crying nonsense. I tell you it's easier we should all go toEurope, even if we have to swim across, than every evening we shouldhave spoilt for us."
Ray Binswanger rose out of her sh