He nodded cordially. “Rather a narrow squeak, wasn’t it?”
“You heard my panting breath close, close behind you! But if I can’t have you myself——”
“You can’t, darling,” he was gently adamant about it.
“Then there’s only one Jane in all the world I’ll root for! Peter, on the low down, we don’t amount to a terrible lot, you and I and the rest of our breed. And adding two of us together makes it twice as nothing. But if we can close in on something like that, either of us, both of us, though I’ve never yet met a he—one—well, old thing, think it over!”
He steered her into a rear pew. “Yours of the 18th ult. received and contents noted and in reply would say, shall take matter under immediate consideration and keep you advised on same,” he said briskly, just as the Reverend Romeo began to boom the announcements for the week.
Bellboys from the Bella Vista, smart housemaids in exuberant sport clothes, comfortable laundresses and cooks, grave men and women with yellow skins and tragic eyes, toothless old crones who swayed ceaselessly to and fro and kept up a constant wailing, clean and shining children with round and solemn eyes. It was singularly peaceful in the small brown house of the Lord ... it was a good place to think, and to feel things out.... The fervor of the rich, teary voices....
The Reverend Romeo prayed violently on a text of his own. “Yo’ mus’ go by de junction ob de church!” Tirelessly he pursued his simile home to its lair. On the journey through life whose terminals were Heaven and Hell they must go by the junction of the church, and they must keep their tickets—applied religion—in their hands. “Keep yo’ ticket in yo’ han’!” he thundered. “Ain’ I seen yo’ on de earf’ly train, when de conductor come atter yo’ ticket, an’ yo’ hunt in dis pocket an’ in dat pocket, an’ fumble an’ fuss and look in yo’ hat, an’ break out in col’ sweat? Das’ des’ de way wif yo’ religion. Yo’ ’low yo’ got hit, kaze yo’ sho had hit once, but tain’ whar yo’ kin fine hit easy!” He reinforced himself with a swelling breath. “Yo’ mus’ keep yo’ ticket in yo’ han’!”
All through the long and fervid sermon grizzled old negroes in the forward benches ejaculated their approval. “Now, yo’ say hit!”—“Das de Gawd’s trufe!” One aged man in the quaint high hat of another day sat leaning far forward, his ear cupped in his hand, and at a point which pleased him he would give vent to a strange, wild cry, beginning on a high, shrill note and ending on a bark—“Eeeeeee-OW!” A witch-like woman, bent almost double, chanted a psalm like a low dirge.
“Yo’ all come hyar to hyar ’bout Heaben,” boomed the shepherd, “but I des’ pintly don’ b’leeve yo’ raidy fo’ dat talk! Yo’ hone fo’ to hyar ’bout de Golden Streets, when de Police gotter lead yo’ froo de streets ob dis town. Yo’ crave to hyar ’bout de shinin’ robes ob white, an’ yo’ gwine pawn yo’ raggety coat fo’ er swig ob gin!”
“Eeeeee-OW!” barked the patriarch in the high hat.