Years of Grace

by Margaret Ayer Barnes

  'Oh — funny,' said Flora. 'He's gone frog. He had a little black beard and a wife who couldn't speak English.*

  *Nice-looking?' said Jane, after a pause.

  'The beard or the wife?' questioned Flora.

  'The wife,* said Jane.

  *Oh, very pretty,' said Flora. *A mere child.'

  Jane sat another moment in silence. She couldn't think
  any other question to ask and Flora evidently considered the subject finished.

  'Let's get some theatre tickets,' said Flora. 'I'd like a gay evening.'

  'So would I,' said Jane. She sprang up fi-om the bed. 'I'm here for a time and I mean to have it!'

  Flora took down the telephone receiver and called the ticket broker.

  'We'll make Papa stand us to a magnificent dinner,' she said.

  Jane did not answer. So Andre had gone fi:og and had a litde black beard. It seemed only yesterday to Jane that she had noticed that Andre had begun to shave. And Cypriennc couldn't speak English. She wondered if' Flora had told him that Gicily was fourteen. Somehow she hoped that she hadn't.

  'Well — I guess this is good-bye,' said Agnes.

  'I hate to say it,' said Jane.

  They were sitdng on two high stook in a Broadway Huy-ler's and had just finished a luncheon composed of a sandwich and a soda. Jane was going back to Chicago on the Twentieth Century Limited next day and that evening she and Flora and Mr. Furness were having a last whirl at the theatre.

  Jane had had a gay week in New York. She had seen six plays in seven days and all the picture exhibitions up and down Fifth Avenue and had gone twice to the Metropolitan, and had bought a new dress at Hollander's and a boxful of toys for the cliildren at Schwartz's, and had dined once again with Agnes and had had her and Jimmy to dine at the Bel« mont one evening before a symphony concert.

  This, of course, was Agnes's noon hour. She had to be back at Macy's in ten minutes. Jane seized the soda check and sKpped regretfully from her stool.

  'It has certainly been great to see you,' she sighed.

  'And you'll take care of Jimmy in the com belt,' said Agnes a little wistfully.

  'Of course I will,' said Jane, pushing the check through the cashier's cage. 'I think he's a darling. When wDl he show up?'

  'Oh — right away,' said Agnes. 'He would have loved to go with you, Jane, but he has to pay his own expenses, so the Twentieth Century seemed foolish. He'll loiter out on some milk train in a day or two and show up in Lakewood looking hungry for a square meal.'

  'Well, he'll get one!' Jane pocketed her change.

  'And now, darhng' — Agnes looked steadily in Jane's shining eyes — 'you are a darling, you know, Jane — wish me luck on the play!'

  'You know I do,' said Jane. *I hope it's bad enough to run forever.*

  'It won't be my fault if it isn't,' said Agnes. She put one arm around Jane's waist. Jane looked tenderly at her funny freckled face.

  'Agnes,* said Jane. 'You're the most gallant person I ever knew.*

  Agnes smiled in defensive mockery.

  'No,' said Agnes. 'You've forgotten. Dido was that'

  'Dido?' questioned Jane. Then she remembered. The memory of Agnes's Uttle front porch, 'west of Clark Street,' rose before her. The iEneid and Andre and the Thomas Concert.

  'No,' she Sciid earnestly, 'you beat Dido. I'm going to sec that the Eroica Symphony is played zXyour funeral pyre.'

  'Jimmy might whistle it,' suggested Agnes. Her lips met Jane's cheek.

  'Duty calls!' she said. 'Good-bye, old speed!* Jane watched her solid, slighdy shabby figure disappear in the Broadway traffic. ToJaneit looked very heroic. She was conscious, ciuiously enough, of a sHght sense of envy. Agnes's life, at least, was still an adventure. She was fighting odds and overcoming difficulties. She was struggling with life and love. Goodness! Jane jumped — that taxi had almost exterminated her! If it had, thought Jane, as she pushed her way through the hurrying crowd of Broadway pedestrians, Agnes would have rated that best of epitaphs — 'I have lived and accomplished the task that Destiny gave me, and now I shall pass beneath the earth no common shade.'

  VI

  Jane satbeside Flora in their compartment on the Twentieth Century, watching Flora and Mr. Furness play cribbage. She was thinking how much Mr. Furness looked Uke 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 fiimbled as he fixed the Httle pegs in the holes in the cribbage board. The train had just passed Spuyten Duyvil and the Hudson stretched ghttering, 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 fi-om 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 hstless. Mr. Fumess should have taken up soHtaire early in Hfe, thought Jane brutally.

  She walked through the plush and varnished comfort of the Twentieth Century thinking idly that Flora's Hfe was terrible. Nothing ever happened in it. She wondered in how many trains, bound for what exotic destinations, Flora had played cribbage with Mr. Fumess. 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 instandy and cast aside the paper.

  T was wondering when you would show up,' he said casually. Then, rising to his feet, T 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'vc 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 hke a startied 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 Utde fooUsh. 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 "talk
ing 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 smiUng as she met his twinkhng 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. 'ShaU 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 shirt-sleeves 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 rumiing a camp meeting in vown, crusading against the Demon Rum. She met him in a soft-drink pariour 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.'

  T don't beUeve 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. WeUs writes novels about. I ought to get in touch with him. He'd pay me for the story of my Hfe. I'd make him one of those wistfiil, 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. AH about hell-fire, too. I beheved 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 DevU, and, until I was fifteen, I really thought the chances were about a hundred to one that I'd bum 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 mc 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 fi^om 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 Ireiscible Old Gentleman I used to feel a bolt would fall on me if I did a thing Uke 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 reHgion 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 ir 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 fife 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 oflf the dinig business and the estabhshed 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 tilings 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 litde 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. Slie 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 black-face 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.'

  Tt is like a novel,' said Jane breathlessly. Tt's just like a novel.'

  *But how does it end?' asked Jimmy, a trifle gloomily.

  *It ended when you married Agnes,' said Jane promptly.

  Tt 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 sec 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?'

  TiOuisa M. Alcott,* said Jane promptly. 'There's nothing modem and morbid in nvp 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 modem,' 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 Jinmiy. 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.