Transcriber’s Note:
Often, contracted words lack an apostrophe, two words are printed as one, and elipses and hyphens are used inconsistently. Words may have multiple spelling variations; all variations were retained as printed. Dialect, obsolete words, alternative spellings and misspelled words were not corrected.
Obvious printing errors, such as backwards, upside down, or partially printed letters and punctuation, were corrected. Unprinted final stops and quotation marks were added.
Manhattan Transfer
By John Dos Passos
One Man’s Initiation
Three Soldiers
Rosinante to the Road Again
A Pushcart at the Curb
Manhattan Transfer
Streets of Night
Manhattan Transfer
By
John Dos Passos
Harper & Brothers Publishers New York and London
MANHATTAN TRANSFER
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY JOHN DOS PASSOS
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.
TENTH PRINTING
CONTENTS
First Section
I. Ferryslip
Three gulls wheel above the broken boxes, orangerinds, spoiled cabbage heads that heave between the splintered plank walls, the green waves spume under the round bow as the ferry, skidding on the tide, crashes, gulps the broken water, slides, settles slowly into the slip. Handwinches whirl with jingle of chains. Gates fold upwards, feet step out across the crack, men and women press through the manuresmelling wooden tunnel of the ferryhouse, crushed and jostling like apples fed down a chute into a press.
The nurse, holding the basket at arm’s length as if it were a bedpan, opened the door to a big dry hot room with greenish distempered walls where in the air tinctured with smells of alcohol and iodoform hung writhing a faint sourish squalling from other baskets along the wall. As she set her basket down she glanced into it with pursed-up lips. The newborn baby squirmed in the cottonwool feebly like a knot of earthworms.
On the ferry there was an old man playing the violin. He had a monkey’s face puckered up in one corner and kept time with the toe of a cracked patent-leather shoe. Bud Korpenning sat on the rail watching him, his back to the river. The breeze made the hair stir round the tight line of his cap and dried the sweat on his temples. His feet were blistered, he was leadentired, but when the ferry moved out of the slip, bucking the little slapping scalloped waves of the river he felt something warm and tingling shoot suddenly through all his veins. “Say, friend, how fur is it into the city from where this ferry lands?” he asked a young man in a straw hat wearing a blue and white striped necktie who stood beside him.
The young man’s glance moved up from Bud’s road-swelled shoes to the red wrist that stuck out from the frayed sleeves of his coat, past the skinny turkey’s throat and slid up cockily into the intent eyes under the broken-visored cap.
“That depends where you want to get to.”
“How do I get to Broadway?... I want to get to the center of things.”
“Walk east a block and turn down Broadway and you’ll find the center of things if you walk far enough.”
“Thank you sir. I’ll do that.”
