“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
