When Ray went to see him, Jake laughed at his serious mien.
“Tha’s life, chappie. I goes way ovah yonder and wander and fools around and I hed no mind about nothing. Then I come back to mah own home town and, oh, you snakebite! When I was in the army, chappie, they useter give us all sorts o’ lechers about canshankerous nights and prophet-lactic days, but I nevah pay them no mind. Them things foh edjucated guys like you who lives in you’ head.”
“They are for you, too,” Ray said. “This is a new age with new methods of living. You can’t just go on like a crazy ram goat as if you were living in the Middle Ages.”
“Middle Ages! I ain’t seen them yet and don’t nevah wanta. All them things you talk about am killjoy things, chappie. The trute is they make me feel shame.”
Ray laughed until tears trickled down his cheeks. … He visualized Jake being ashamed and laughed again.
“Sure,” said Jake. “I’d feel ashame’ ef a chippie—No, chappie, them stuff is foh you book fellahs. I runs around all right, but Ise lak a sailor that don’t know nothing about using a compass, but him always hits a safe port.”
“You didn’t this time, though, Jakie. Those devices that you despise are really for you rather than for me or people like me, who don’t live your kind of free life. If you, and the whole strong race of workingman who live freely like you, don’t pay some attention to them, then you’ll all wither away and rot like weeds.”
“Let us pray!” said Jake.
“That I don’t believe in.”
“Awright, then, chappie.”
On the next trip, the dining-car was shifted off its scheduled run and returned to New York on the second day, late at night. It was ordered out again early the next day. Ray could not get round to see Jake, so he telephoned his girl and asked her to go.
Agatha had heard much of Ray’s best friend, but she had never met him. Men working on a train have something of the spirit of men working on a ship. They are, perforce, bound together in comradeship of a sort in that close atmosphere. In the stopover cities they go about in pairs or groups. But the camaraderie breaks up on the platform in New York as soon as the dining-car returns there. Every man goes his own way unknown to his comrades. Wife or sweetheart or some other magnet of the great magic city draws each off separately.
Agatha was a rich-brown girl, with soft amorous eyes. She worked as assistant in a beauty parlor of the Belt. She was a Baltimore girl and had been living in New York for two years. Ray had met her the year before at a basketball match and dance.
She went to see Jake in the afternoon. He was sitting in a Morris chair, reading the Negro newspaper, The Amsterdam News, with a pail of beer beside him, when Agatha rapped on the door.
Jake thought it was the landlady. He was thrown off his balance by the straight, beautiful girl who entered the room and quietly closed the door behind her.
“Oh, keep your seat, please,” she begged him. “I’ll sit there,” she indicated a brown chair by the cherrywood chiffonier.
“Ray asked me to come. He was doubled out this morning and couldn’t get around to see you. I brought these for you.”
She put a paper bag of oranges on the table. “Where shall I put these?” She showed him a charming little bouquet of violets. Jake’s drinking-glass was on the floor, half full, beside the pail of beer.
“It’s all right, here!” On the chipped, mildew-white washstand there was another glass with a toothbrush. She took the toothbrush out, poured some water in the glass, put the violets in, and set it on the chiffonier.
“There!” she said.
Jake thanked her. He was diffident. She was so different a girl from the many he had known. She was certainly one of those that Miss Curdy would have sneered at. She was so full of simple self-assurance and charm. Mah little sister down home in Petersburg, he thought, might have turned out something lak this ef she’d ’a’ had a chance to talk English like in books and wear class-top clothes. Nine years sence I quite home. She must be quite a li’l woman now herself.
Jake loved women’s pretty clothes. The plain nigger-brown coat Agatha wore, unbuttoned, showed a fresh peach-colored frock. He asked after Ray.
“I didn’t see him myself this trip,” she said. “He telephoned me about you.”
Jake praised Ray as his best pal.
“He’s a good boy,” she agreed. She asked Jake about the railroad, “It must be lots of fun to ride from one town to the other like that. I’d love it, for I love to travel. But Ray hates it.”
“It ain’t so much fun when youse working,” replied Jake.
“I guess you’re right. But there’s something marvelous about meeting people for a little while and serving them and never seeing them again. It’s romantic. You don’t have that awful personal everyday contact that domestic workers have to get along with. If I was a man and had to be in service, I wouldn’t want better than the railroad.”
“Some’n to that, yes,” agreed Jake. … “But it ain’t all peaches, neither, when all them passengers rush you like a herd of hungry swine.”
Agatha stayed twenty minutes.
“I wish you better soon,” she said, bidding Jake goodbye. “It was nice to know you. Ray will surely come to see you when he gets back this time.”
Jake drank a glass of beer and eased his back, full length on the little bed.
“She is sure some wonderful brown,” he mused. “Now I sure does understand why Ray is so scornful of them easy ones.” He gazed at the gray door. It seemed a shining panel of gold through which a radiant vision had passed.
“She
