JIM'S EXPERIMENT by Pansy

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Dec 24, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 52.

JIM'S EXPERIMENT.

By Pansy

He lived in a big city. In some parts of it there were churches on every corner; but down where Jim Bettson lived, churches were scarce and saloons filled all the corners. Jim had spent his seventeen years of life in such neighborhoods, and was as completely a heathen in that city full of churches as could be found in China. He knew the name of God, it is true, and heard it often; used it indeed, himself, always in profanity. It was the only kind of praying he ever heard.

On this day of which I tell you Jim was in a rage; not a quick flash of anger, soon over, but a slow, deep rage, that meant hatred and evil-doing. Jim had an enemy, Jack Doyle by name. Why he was an enemy would take too long to tell, but there was reason enough.

If Jim could have “got even with him” by giving him an “awful walloping,” his hatred would not have burned so deep, but the chances were that Jack would always be the one to “wallop” him, as he was older and stronger than Jim. Burning in Jim’s heart, therefore, was the desire for revenge, and he lived for the purpose of finding out how to get it.

It was a windy morning, and on Jim’s alley scraps of all sorts were being blown about. One of them, a torn and dirty bit of printed page, fluttered to Jim’s feet. He picked it up, caught by part of a picture on it; but it was words that held his attention.

“If I only knew how to get even with him!” thus the line read. No wonder that Jim stared; here was another who felt as he did. Stop! What was that next line?

“That’s easy enough,” said Jim, “You must heap coals of fire on his ——.” Then came the picture, and below it the paper was torn zigzag. More words, in the next column, but not one about “coals of fire.”

Jim was miserable. The sun was scorching him and the wind that was filling his mouth and eyes with dust felt as tho it came from a furnace. On such a day “coals of fire” sounded fierce enough even for Jim, but how was he to find how to use them? The story must have told how to do it. If he could set fire to Jack Doyle and make him howl and dance with pain he would do it in a minute; but to burn up the tenement where he lived wouldn’t do, because there was the “little kid” and lots of other folks, too. It wasn’t likely that that was the way; he had got to find out! That was the conclusion Jim reached. He was a boy who always did what he made up his mind he had GOT to do.

It took him three days to find the rest of that sentence; the people in his alley were not well up in literature. Finally “Old Pete,” the worst drunkard in their alley, helped him out.

“Sho! I know them words; learned ’em when I was a little chap and went to Sunday-school. He heaped coals of fire on his head, that fellow did.”

Jim’s eyes danced with delight; this sounded awful. “How did he do it?” was the eager question.

“Dunno,” said Old Pete; “dunno nothin’ about it; every word I remember is that about ‘coals of fire on his head.’ I’ll swear to that; and it’s in the Bible.”

Then was Jim dismayed. A Bible was harder to get than coals of fire; but he must find out how to use the coals. It was the wind that helped him again. It was Sunday, and a boy on his way home from Sunday-school, with a Bible under his arm, was having a brisk run for his hat that the wind had carried off. Jim looked on, and laughed, until he heard the boy call out to another across the street.

“Come hold my Bible for me, Charlie, while I give chase.” Then Jim made a dash for the hat, caught it, and passed it to its owner with an eager question: “Now will you let me look at that there Bible?”

The astonished boy without a word handed him the handsome book, and Jim turned the leaves in a perplexity that deepened; it was such a big book!

“What do you want to find?” asked the owner of the hat.

“Somethin’ about ‘coals of fire;’ I wanted to see the end of it.”

“All right,” said the boy, “I’ll show you the end and the beginning of that. It is one of the chapters I recited when I got this Bible for a prize.”

Imagine Jim’s amazement when he read the words pointed out: “If thine enemy hunger, feed him, if he thirst, give him drink; for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.”

“Thunder!” said Jim, and the boy with the hat may be thankful that he used no stronger word.

All day long these words stayed with Jim Bettson. Somewhere, somehow, he had got the belief that the Bible was to be trusted; that what it said was true. How there could be truth in a statement like that about the coals, he could not imagine, but he had a burning desire to try them.

Circumstances favored him. Two days after this he mowed a lawn for a woman who lived in the suburbs, and when she paid him she asked him if he was hungry. Jim was always hungry; he belonged to the class who rarely have what they call a “square meal.” He was taken to the kitchen and such food set before him as he had never eaten before in his life. When his hunger was satisfied the wistful look still stayed in his eyes. The woman, noting it, said: “Would you like to take some home with you?” And she filled a paper bag with cold chicken and rolls and cake and finally a great orange. “Perhaps you have a little sister at home?” she said inquiringly as she added the orange. Jim grinned. He had no little sister at home, and he had no home; but what was the use of telling that? The woman who filled the bag did not know she was preparing coals of fire!

All the afternoon Jim lay in wait for Jack Doyle; he had a chance to try his experiment. A better chance than he knew, for Jack, who had a home, and a little sister, had gone without his breakfast and dinner, in order to save his earnings for a liniment to rub the little sister’s lame and aching back. He was so hungry that evening that he had to shut his eyes and run past two bakeries for fear he should snatch something from the show windows. He sat on the lowest step of the tenement house front in which he and Janie and their generally drunken father had a back room on the fifth floor; he wondered if he should climb the stairs and try to go to sleep, with such a gnawing hunger? Just then there dropped into his lap two rolls and a huge piece of chicken. Jack looked up quickly, and on the steps above him stood Jim, the fellow to whom he had been mean, grinning at him.

“Are they pizened?” asked Jack, and then, with few bites, he had swallowed them. “Pizened” or not, the smell of the chicken was not to be resisted. Down dropped another roll, two more, and the leg of a chicken; then a cake, and then, as a climax, an orange! Jack ate like one starved, but when the orange rolled into his lap he turned and stared.

“Say?” he said, “Where’d you get ’em, and what does it mean? Be they stole?”

Jim shook his head. “Take a suck at the orange,” he said. Jack obeyed; never had there been anything so good; his thirst was almost equal to his hunger.

“Say,” he said again, “Be you doin’ it ’cause you know I ain’t had nothin’ to-day, honor bright? Did Janie tell you? If that’s what it’s for, it kind of burns me, Jim, it does so.”

“Does it?” said Jim, and he chuckled. His experiment had worked, then; and he never felt so good in his life as he did at that minute!

Jack took three tremendous “sucks” of the orange, then drew his lips resolutely away, and rose up from the steps.

“I’ll take it to Janie,” he said. “Say, Jim, it’s true I hadn’t had no breakfast, nor no dinner, but I didn’t want Janie to find it out; I dunno how she did. I b’lieve I was pretty nigh starved. But the whole thing kind of burns me for all that. I wouldn’t have b’lieved you’d ever do such a thing; but I’ll tell you what, Jack Doyle ain’t the feller to go and forget it. Let’s see any one dare to be mean to you agin, Jim, as long as I live in these here parts.”

“All right,” said Jim as he chuckled again. Jack had evidently been “burnt.” If not in the way he had imagined, yet certainly in a strange way that had had a most remarkable effect, not only upon Jack, but upon himself. He was amazed to find that he did not hate Jack Doyle a bit, and that to get rid of the hatred made a warm, pleasant glow in his heart.

Something very strange happened in that alley during the next few weeks. In the first place, Jack Doyle, who was so large and strong that the alley people called him The Giant, and Jim Bettson, who was small for his years and not over strong, and who had been “bullied” by Jack all his miserable life, became firm friends and allies. But that was not the strangest part. Jim, having become interested in the Bible and anxious to try more “experiments” with it, did not rest until he got a “piece of one” for his own. This was the Gospel of John, printed by itself in a little book. That book Jim read and studied and experimented with, and it transformed his life!

He doesn’t live in the alley any more. He is a business man and has a home of his own; but he goes often to the alley, for he spends all his leisure and much of his savings in planning “coals of fire” for those who used to be his enemies.

There is one thing more, stranger than all else. That is, that the boy with the Bible under his arm who helped Jim to the first verse from it that he ever knew, scarcely ever looks at that Bible, never thinks of ordering his life by it, and is walking every day in dangerous paths, and drawing near to the time when it will be said of him: “There goes a perfect wreck!” Yet there is transforming power for his life, too, in that Bible of his. Strange! isn’t it?—Pansy.