Piccadilly Jim P. G. Wodehouse (great book club books .TXT) 📖

“Do you live out West?”

“No.”

“Then why suggest my going there? Where do you live?”

“I live in New York.”

“I shall stay in New York, then.”

Ann was wary, but amused. Proposals of marriage⁠—and Jimmy seemed to be moving swiftly towards one⁠—were no novelty in her life. In the course of several seasons at Bar Harbor, Tuxedo, Palm Beach, and in New York itself, she had spent much of her time foiling and discouraging the ardour of a series of sentimental youths who had laid their unwelcome hearts at her feet.

“New York is open for staying in about this time, I believe.”

Jimmy was silent. He had done his best to fight a tendency to become depressed and had striven by means of a light tone to keep himself resolutely cheerful, but the girl’s apparently total indifference to him was too much for his spirits. One of the young men who had had to pick up the heart he had flung at Ann’s feet and carry it away for repairs had once confided to an intimate friend, after the sting had to some extent passed, that the feelings of a man who made love to Ann might be likened to the emotions which hot chocolate might be supposed to entertain on contact with vanilla ice-cream. Jimmy, had the comparison been presented to him, would have endorsed its perfect accuracy. The wind from the sea, until now keen and bracing, had become merely infernally cold. The song of the wind in the rigging, erstwhile melodious, had turned into a damned depressing howling.

“I used to be as sentimental as anyone a few years ago,” said Ann, returning to the dropped subject. “Just after I left college, I was quite maudlin. I dreamed of moons and Junes and loves and doves all the time. Then something happened which made me see what a little fool I was. It wasn’t pleasant at the time, but it had a very bracing effect. I have been quite different ever since. It was a man, of course, who did it. His method was quite simple. He just made fun of me, and Nature did the rest.”

Jimmy scowled in the darkness. Murderous thoughts towards the unknown brute flooded his mind.

“I wish I could meet him!” he growled.

“You aren’t likely to,” said Ann. “He lives in England. His name is Crocker. Jimmy Crocker. I spoke about him just now.”

Through the howling of the wind cut the sharp notes of a bugle. Ann turned to the saloon entrance.

“Dinner!” she said brightly. “How hungry one gets on board ship!” She stopped. “Aren’t you coming down, Mr. Bayliss?”

“Not just yet,” said Jimmy thickly.

The noonday sun beat down on Park Row. Hurrying mortals, released from a thousand offices, congested the sidewalks, their thoughts busy with the vision of lunch. Up and down the canyon of Nassau Street the crowds moved more slowly. Candy-selling aliens jostled newsboys, and huge dray-horses endeavoured to the best of their ability not to grind the citizenry beneath their hooves. Eastward, pressing on to the City Hall, surged the usual dense army of happy lovers on their way to buy marriage-licenses. Men popped in and out of the subway entrances like rabbits. It was a stirring, bustling scene, typical of this nerve-centre of New York’s vast body.

Jimmy Crocker, standing in the doorway, watched the throngs enviously. There were men in that crowd who chewed gum, there were men who wore white satin ties with imitation diamond stickpins, there were men who, having smoked seven-tenths of a cigar, were eating the remainder: but there was not one with whom he would not at that moment willingly have exchanged identities. For these men had jobs. And in his present frame of mind it seemed to him that no further ingredient was needed for the recipe of the ultimate human bliss.

The poet has said some very searching and unpleasant things about the man “whose heart has ne’er within him burned as home his footsteps he has turned from wandering on some foreign strand,” but he might have excused Jimmy for feeling just then not so much a warmth of heart as a cold and clammy sensation of dismay. He would have had to admit that the words “High though his titles, proud his name, boundless his wealth as wish can claim” did not apply to Jimmy Crocker. The latter may have been “concentred all on self,” but his wealth consisted of one hundred and thirty-three dollars and forty cents and his name was so far from being proud that the mere sight of it in the files of the New York Sunday Chronicle, the record-room of which he had just been visiting, had made him consider the fact that he had changed it to Bayliss the most sensible act of his career.

The reason for Jimmy’s lack of enthusiasm as he surveyed the portion of his native land visible from his doorway is not far to seek. The Atlantic had docked on Saturday night, and Jimmy, having driven to an excellent hotel and engaged an expensive room therein, had left instructions at the desk that breakfast should be served to him at ten o’clock and with it the Sunday issue of the Chronicle. Five years had passed since he had seen the dear old rag for which he had reported so many fires, murders, street-accidents, and weddings: and he looked forward to its perusal as a formal taking seisin of his long-neglected country. Nothing could be more fitting and symbolic than that the first morning of his return to America should find him propped up in bed reading the good old Chronicle. Among his final meditations as he dropped off to sleep was a gentle speculation as to who was City editor now and whether the comic supplement was still featuring the sprightly adventures of the Doughnut family.

A wave of not