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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 blank
verse to the business of chaining two worlds by cable and of daring to
fly with birds; when scholars, ever busy with the dead, are suffering
crick in the neck from looking backward to the good old days when
Romance wore a tin helmet on his head or lace in his sleeves--in such
an age Simon Binswanger first beheld the high-flung torch of Goddess
Liberty from the fore of the steerage deck of a wooden ship, his small
body huddled in the sag of calico skirt between his mother's knees, and
the sky-line and clothes-lines of the lower East Side dawning upon his
uncomprehending eyes.

Some decades later, and with an endurance stroke that far outclassed
classic Leander's, Simon Binswanger had swum the great Hellespont
that 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 are
visited upon the neighbor below. Landed them four stories high and dry
in a strictly modern apartment of three dark, square bedrooms, a square
dining-room ventilated by an airshaft, and a square pocket of a kitchen
that looked out upon a zigzag of fire-escape. And last a square
front-room-de-resistance, with a bay of four windows overlooking a
distant segment of Hudson River, an imitation stucco mantelpiece, a
crystal chandelier, and an air of complete detachment from its curtailed
rear.

But even among the false creations of exterior architects and interior
decorators, home can find a way. Despite the square dining-room with
the stag-and-tree wall-paper design above the plate-rack and a gilded
radiator that hissed loudest at mealtime, when Simon Binswanger and his
family relaxed round their after-dinner table, the invisible cricket on
the visible hearth fell to whirring.

With the oldest gesture of the shod age Mrs. Binswanger dived into her
work-basket, withdrew with a sock, inserted her five fingers into the
foot, and fell to scanning it this way and that with a furrow between
her eyes.

"Ray, go in and tell your sister she should come out of her room and
stop that crying nonsense. I tell you it's easier we should all go to
Europe, even if we have to swim across, than every evening we should
have spoilt for us."

Ray Binswanger rose out of her shoulders, her eyes dazed with print,
then collapsed again to the pages of her book.

"Let her cry, mamma."

"It's not so nice, Ray, you should treat your sister like that."

"Can I help it, mamma, that all of a sudden she gets Europe on the
brain? You never heard me even holler for Arverne, much less Europe, as
long as the boats were running for Brighton, did you, mom?"

"She thinks, Ray, in Europe it's a finer education for you both. She
ain't all wrong the way she hates you should run to Brighton with them
little snips."

"Just the same you never heard me nag for trips. The going's too good at
home. Did you, pop, ever hear me nag?"

"Ja, it's a lot your papa worries about what's what! Look at him there
behind his paper, like it was a law he had to read every word! Ray, go
get me my glasses under the clock and call in your sister. Them novels
will keep. Mind me when I talk, Ray!"

Miss Ray Binswanger rose reluctantly, placing the book face downward on
the blue-and-white table coverlet. It was as if seventeen Indian summers
had laid their golden blush upon her. Imperceptibly, too, the lanky,
prankish years were folding back like petals, revealing the first bloom
of her, a suddenly cleared complexion and eyes that had newly learned to
drop upon occasion.

"Honest, mamma, do you think it would hurt Izzy to make a move once in a
while? He was the one made her cry, anyway, guying her about spaghetti
on the brain."

"Sure I did. Wasn't she running down my profesh? She's got to go to
Europe for the summer, because the traveling salesmen she meets at home
ain't good enough for her. Well, of all the nerve!"

"Just look at him, mamma, stretched out on the sofa there like he was a
king!"

Full flung and from a tufted leather couch Isadore Binswanger turned on
his pillow