VI
Jane sat beside Flora in their compartment on the Twentieth Century, watching Flora and Mr. Furness play cribbage. She was thinking how much Mr. Furness looked like her mother-in-law and how much he looked a venerable codfish and how much more feeble he had grown during his summer months abroad. His hands trembled terribly when he dealt the cards and fumbled as he fixed the little pegs in the holes in the cribbage board. The train had just passed Spuyten Duyvil and the Hudson stretched glittering, a river of steel, in the hazy September sunshine outside the window.
It was warm in the compartment, in spite of the whirring electric fan, and Jane was not particularly interested in cribbage. She thought she would go back to the observation car and read a magazine. She said as much and Flora looked up patiently from the cribbage board. Flora was not particularly interested in cribbage either, but Mr. Furness loved it. Jane could remember him playing it with Flora’s mother in the green-and-gold parlour of the Rush Street house. She could remember just how the rings had looked on Flora’s mother’s lovely listless hands as she moved the cribbage pegs. One of those rings, a sapphire between two diamonds, was on Flora’s hand that minute. And Flora’s hand was just as lovely and just as listless. Mr. Furness should have taken up solitaire early in life, thought Jane brutally.
She walked through the plush and varnished comfort of the Twentieth Century thinking idly that Flora’s life was terrible. Nothing ever happened in it. She wondered in how many trains, bound for what exotic destinations, Flora had played cribbage with Mr. Furness. Of course, on the Twentieth Century Limited, just passing through Spuyten Duyvil, you would not expect anything very surprising to happen in any case, but on those trains de luxe, en route, for Calcutta and Luxor and Moscow, had not Flora ever felt—Jane passed from the narrow corridor to the observation compartment and saw Jimmy Trent, stretched comfortably in an armchair, scanning the columns of the Evening World.
He saw her instantly and cast aside the paper.
“I was wondering when you would show up,” he said casually. Then, rising to his feet, “I saw you get aboard and took an upper on the same section. I was just about to page the train for you.”
Jane stared at him in astonishment. She could not believe her eyes.
“Did—did Agnes know you were coming?” she asked stupidly.
“Oh, yes,” said Jimmy. “I had lunch with her. I only decided to come this morning.”
“Oh!” said Jane. Then after a tiny pause, “I thought—”
“I’ve no doubt,” said Jimmy cheerfully, “that you shared all those thrifty thoughts of Agnes’s about that milk train. But I say anything that’s worth doing at all is worth doing well. And I haven’t been out of New York City for six years.”
“Oh!” said Jane again.
Jimmy continued to contemplate her with a sunny smile.
“I took this train,” he said presently, “because I thought we’d have fun on it together. Don’t you think it’s time we began? We’ve lost almost an hour already.”
“What—what do you want to do?” asked Jane, again rather stupidly. She felt totally unequal to coping with Jimmy.
“I want to talk to you,” said Jimmy disarmingly. “There’s nothing in all the world as much fun as talk. When you’re talking, that is, with the right person.”
Jane, still staring up at him, felt her features harden defensively.
Jimmy burst into gentle laughter.
“Jane,” he said, “you look like a startled faun! You needn’t. Would it have been more discreet of me to use the plural? Should I have said ‘the right people’? I don’t like that phrase. It has an unfortunate social significance.”
Jane began to feel a little foolish. She laughed in spite of herself. Her laughter seemed to cheer Jimmy immensely.
“Curious, isn’t it,” he went on airily, “that ‘talking with the right people’ means something so very different from ‘talking with the right person’? You are an awfully right person, Jane. No doubt you’re of the right people, too, but don’t let’s dwell on that aspect of your many charms. Do you want to stand here in the train aisle all afternoon?”
Having once laughed, Jane found it perfectly impossible to recapture her critical attitude.
“Where shall we go?” she asked.
“How about the back platform?” said Jimmy promptly. “Or will the dust spoil that pretty dress?”
“Mercy, no,” said Jane. “Nothing could spoil it.”
The back platform was rather sunny and quite deserted. Jimmy opened one of the little folding chairs and brushed off the green carpet-cloth seat and placed it in the shade for Jane. He opened another for himself and sat down beside her. Jane looked out over the sparkling river.
“Isn’t the Hudson beautiful?” she said.
“Don’t let’s talk about the Hudson,” said Jimmy.
Jane couldn’t keep from smiling as she met his twinkling eyes.
“What shall we talk about?” she said.
“I’ll give you your choice of two subjects,” said Jimmy promptly. “You or me!”
“In that case I think I’ll choose you,” said Jane.
“All right,” said Jimmy. “Shall I begin or do you, too, find the topic stimulating?”
“I think I’d like to hear what you have to say for it,” said Jane.
“It’s my favourite theme,” smiled Jimmy. “I’ll begin at the beginning. I was born in East St. Louis and I was raised in a tent.”
“A tent!” cried Jane. Vague visions of circuses rose in her mind.
“Not the kind you’re thinking of,” said Jimmy. “A revivalist’s tent. I’m the proverbial minister’s son. My father was a Methodist preacher.”
Jane looked up at him with wide eyes of astonishment.
“My mother,” went on Jimmy brightly, “was a brewer’s daughter. Not the kind of a brewer who draws dividends from the company, but the kind who brews beer. My grandfather—so I’m told—used to hang over the vats in person and in shirtsleeves and my mother used to bring him his lunch at the noon hour in a tin pail. My father was an itinerant revivalist. When my mother met him, he was running a camp meeting in town, crusading against the Demon Rum. She met him in a soft-drink parlour and promptly got religion and signed the pledge. After that my grandfather had to eat a cold lunch and carry his own pail when he went to work in the morning. Mother wouldn’t have anything more to do with the brewery. Father told her it was the Devil’s kitchen. That made quite a little trouble in the family, of course. My grandfather kicked my father out of the house a couple of times, but Mother was hell-bent to marry him, and so, of course, presently she ran off and did. That’s how I came to be raised in a tent.”
“I don’t believe a word of it,” said Jane. “You’re making it all up.”
“It’s Gawd’s truth,” said Jimmy, “and you don’t know the half of it! I’m just the kind of a young man that H. G. Wells writes novels about. I ought to get in touch with him. He’d pay me for the story of my life. I’d make him one of those wistful, thwarted, lower-middle-class heroes—”
“I know you’re lying,” said Jane cheerfully, “but go on with the story.”
“You see,” said Jimmy triumphantly, “it holds you! It would be worth good money to H. G. Wells. Well, I was raised in a tent, and before I was six I knew all about handing out tracts and passing the plate. All about hellfire, too. I believed in a God who was an irascible old gentleman with belligerent grey whiskers and in a bright red Devil with a tail and a pitchfork. I thought Father was God’s ablest lieutenant on earth and Mother was His most trusted handmaiden. Mother loved music and she learned to play the melodeon at the camp meetings. By the time I was ten, I was equally expert with the drum and the fiddle and the tambourine. We wandered up and down the Mississippi Valley with our tent, keeping up a guerilla warfare with the Devil, and, until I was fifteen, I really thought the chances were about a hundred to one that I’d burn through eternity for my sins.” There was a note of real emotion in his voice.
“Is this actually true?” asked Jane.
“You bet it is,” said Jimmy. “But at fifteen I met a girl. I met her on the mourner’s bench, singing ‘Hallelujah’ with the rest of the saved. She fell off it pretty soon and I kept on seeing her. She was a bad egg, but she taught me more than you can learn at a camp meeting.
“By the time we moved on to the next town, I’d lost all real interest in fighting the Devil. I took a pot shot at him now and then, but most of the time I declared a neutrality. I didn’t state my views to Father, of course, but he noticed a certain lassitude in my technique with the tracts and the plate. He began to row with me a good deal and ask me questions about what I was doing when I wasn’t in the tent. I’d skip a prayer meeting whenever I could and hang around the soda fountains and cigar stores. I used to long to steal money from the offering and run off to a burlesque show, but I never had the nerve to do it. Long after I’d lost my faith in the Irascible Old Gentleman, I used to feel a bolt would fall on me if I did a thing like that.
“When I was seventeen, I had my first real drink at a real bar, and when I came home Father smelled the whiskey on my breath. First he prayed over me and then he beat me. I snatched the cane away from him and broke it over my knee, and that night he prayed for me by name, in public, at the camp meeting. That finished religion for me. Mother tried to patch things up between us, but it was no use. After six months of family warfare she gave up. I travelled around with them after that in the position of Resident Atheist. I never went to any more prayer meetings, but I was useful putting up and taking down the tent and doing odd jobs backstage. Every now and then I’d consent to drop in and play a violin solo while they were collecting the offering.
“I was just nineteen when my father died of pneumonia, caught preaching in the rain. And my mother and I went back to East St. Louis. Jane—your eyes are as big as saucers.”
“Why wouldn’t they be?” cried Jane breathlessly. “It’s perfectly thrilling.”
“It wasn’t very thrilling while it was going on,” said Jimmy. “My grandfather was dead, but my grandmother took us in and my mother got me a job with my rich uncle. He lived across the river in St. Louis and he was a fashionable druggist. I worked in his shop for two years, making sodas and mixing prescriptions. At first I liked it. I had money of my own for the first time in my life and I didn’t have to hear any preaching. I went to night school at a settlement and I read all the books I could lay my hands on and pretty soon I turned socialist. That got my uncle’s goat right away. He was making a pretty good thing off the drug business and the established order was all right with him. He talked of Karl Marx just the way my father had of the Devil, and I was too young to have the sense to keep my face shut. I’d air my views and he’d call me an anarchist and I’d say there were worse things than anarchy. I used to like to get him on the run. Pretty soon he really got to believe I had a bomb up my sleeve, and he was afraid to let me mix prescriptions any longer for fear I’d add a little strychnine to the cough-mixture of a plutocratic customer. So he told Mother he guessed I wasn’t suited to the drug business.
“Mother thought I’d better learn to run an elevator, but I didn’t fancy a life in a cage and presently I got a job with my fiddle in a theatre orchestra. That nearly finished Mother, of course. She thought the stage was the Devil’s recruiting office. I lost the job pretty soon and got another through a man I knew at the settlement as a cub reporter on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. That didn’t last long either, but it made Mother’s last days happy to think I was through with the stage. She died when I was twenty-two and left me three thousand dollars saved from Father’s life insurance. The day after the funeral I took the train to New York and signed up with a vaudeville circuit as a ragtime accompanist for a blackface comedian. I guess I lost forty jobs in the next six years on newspapers and in orchestra pits. But I learned a lot about music and more about slinging the English language. I was just twenty-eight when I met Agnes. I thought she was a card. She was the only woman I’d ever met who was as good as my mother and as clever as I was. She took a fancy to reform me, though I told her at the time I’d been immunized to salvation from early childhood. After that, of course, it was all over but the shouting.”
“It is like a novel,” said Jane breathlessly. “It’s just like a novel.”
“But how does it end?” asked Jimmy, a trifle gloomily.
“It ended when you married Agnes,” said Jane promptly.
“It isn’t a fairy story,” said Jimmy gently. “H. G. Wells’s novels never end at the altar.”
Jane did not reply to that. She was watching the ruddy September sun sinking into the western haze behind Storm King. She was conscious of Jimmy’s eyes, fixed thoughtfully on her face. They sat a long time in silence. Jane could see the dim outline of the Catskills, pale lavender against an orange sky, before he spoke again.
“And your novel, Jane?” he asked gently. “Who wrote that?”
“Louisa M. Alcott,” said Jane promptly. “There’s nothing modern and morbid in my story.”
“Now it’s my turn to be disbelieving,” said Jimmy.
“Do I look morbid?” said Jane, turning to smile serenely into his admiring eyes.
“You look modern,” said Jimmy. “And you look very, very thoughtful. All people who think sooner or later go through hell.”
“Then my hell must be ahead of me,” said Jane steadfastly.
“You haven’t even experienced a purgatory?” smiled Jimmy. “Something you got in and got out of?”
“Not even a purgatory,” said Jane. “I’m a very naive person. I’ve never experienced much of anything.”
“Perhaps that will be your hell,” said Jimmy.
The door behind them opened suddenly and Flora stood on the platform.
“Oh, here you are, Jane!” she cried. “Papa wants to dine early. He’s pretty tired.” Then she recognized Jimmy. She had met him, of course, at that dinner at the Belmont. She looked very much astonished.
“Why—Mr. Trent—” she said uncertainly.
“Jimmy decided to come West on the Century,” said Jane, rising from her chair.
“How nice!” said Flora, in her best Dresden shepherdess manner. Then to Jimmy with a smile, “You’ll dine with us, of course?”
“I’d love to,” said Jimmy.
They all walked together into the observation car. Flora looked distinctly cheered at the thought of a little male companionship other than Mr. Furness’s. Jane was thinking of Jimmy’s story. How fairy-like and fantastic it was compared to her own! By what different roads they had travelled to reach that intimate moment of companionship on the back platform of the Twentieth Century Limited. Having met at last, it seemed very strange to Jane that they could speak the same language. But yet they did. Jimmy, holding open a heavy train door to let her pass in front of him, smiled down into her eyes. She thanked him with an answering smile. Jane felt as if she had known Jimmy for years.