American fiction -- 20th century; Short stories, American -- Periodicals
The coolie grinned foolishly.
"Him say fight. Him heap big man, alle same have Dlagon's blood. Him say
fight, we fight, _sabe_?" And he pointed to Kan Wong--Kan Wong, his head
bleeding from a wound, his eyes glowing with a green fury from between
their narrow lids, his long, strong hands, red with blood other than his
own, still clutching his rifle with a grip that had a tenderly savage
joy _in_ it.
The officer approached him.
"Are you the man who rallied the coolies and held the line?" he asked
shortly.
Kan Wong stiffened with a dignity to which he now felt he had a right.
"Me fight," he said quietly--"me fight, coolie fight, too. Me belong
Dlagon's blood. One time my people fighting men; long time I wait."
"You'll wait no longer," said the officer. He unpinned the cross from
his tunic and fastened it to the torn, bloody blouse of Kan Wong. "Off
to the east are men of your own race, fighting-men from China,
Cochin-China. That is the place for a man of the Dragon's blood--and
that is the tool that belongs in your hand till we're done with this
mess." He pointed to the rifle that Kan Wong still held with a stiff,
loving, lingering grip.
And so, on the other side of the world, the son of the Dragon came to
his own and realized the dreams of a glory he had missed.
"HUMORESQUE"
By FANNIE HURST
From _Cosmopolitan_
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 push-carts, clothes-lines, naked babies, drying
vermicelli; black-eyed women in rhinestone combs and perennially big
with child; whole families of button-hole makers, who first saw the
blue-and-gold light of Sorrento, bent at home work around 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 grill-work balconies,
the mouldy 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 drafty areaway with an oblique
of gaslight and a black well of descending staircase. Show-windows of
jade and tea and Chinese porcelains.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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