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.
