Piccadilly Jim - P. G. Wodehouse (best romance ebooks TXT) 📗

New World, where dollar-bills grew on trees and no one asked or cared who anyone else’s father might be.

There was a lump in her throat. Bayliss would have been amazed if he could have known what a figure of pathetic fineness he seemed to her. And then her thoughts turned to Jimmy, and she was aware of a glow of kindliness towards him. His father had succeeded in his life’s ambition. He had produced a gentleman! How easily and simply, without a trace of snobbish shame, the young man had introduced his father. There was the right stuff in him. He was not ashamed of the humble man who had given him his chance in life. She found herself liking Jimmy amazingly.⁠ ⁠…

The hands of the clock pointed to three minutes to the hour. Porters skimmed to and fro like water-beetles.

“I can’t explain,” said Jimmy. “It wasn’t temporary insanity; it was necessity.”

“Very good, Mr. James. I think you had better be taking your seat now.”

“Quite right, I had. It would spoil the whole thing if they left me behind. Bayliss, did you ever see such eyes? Such hair! Look after my father while I am away. Don’t let the dukes worry him. Oh, and, Bayliss”⁠—Jimmy drew his hand from his pocket⁠—“as one pal to another⁠—”

Bayliss looked at the crackling piece of paper.

“I couldn’t, Mr. James, I really couldn’t! A five-pound note! I couldn’t!”

“Nonsense! Be a sport!”

“Begging your pardon, Mr. James, I really couldn’t. You cannot afford to throw away your money like this. You cannot have a great deal of it, if you will excuse me for saying so.”

“I won’t do anything of the sort. Grab it! Oh, Lord, the train’s starting! Goodbye, Bayliss!”

The engine gave a final shriek of farewell. The train began to slide along the platform, pursued to the last by optimistic boys offering buns for sale. It gathered speed. Jimmy, leaning out the window, was amazed at a spectacle so unusual as practically to amount to a modern miracle⁠—the spectacled Bayliss running. The butler was not in the pink of condition, but he was striding out gallantly. He reached the door of Jimmy’s compartment, and raised his hand.

“Begging your pardon, Mr. James,” he panted, “for taking the liberty, but I really couldn’t!”

He reached up and thrust something into Jimmy’s hand, something crisp and crackling. Then, his mission performed, fell back and stood waving a snowy handkerchief. The train plunged into the tunnel.

Jimmy stared at the five-pound note. He was aware, like Ann farther along the train, of a lump in his throat. He put the note slowly into his pocket.

The train moved on.

VII On the Boat-Deck

Rising waters and a fine flying scud that whipped stingingly over the side had driven most of the passengers on the Atlantic to the shelter of their staterooms or to the warm stuffiness of the library. It was the fifth evening of the voyage. For five days and four nights the ship had been racing through a placid ocean on her way to Sandy Hook: but in the early hours of this afternoon the wind had shifted to the north, bringing heavy seas. Darkness had begun to fall now. The sky was a sullen black. The white crests of the rollers gleamed faintly in the dusk, and the wind sang in the ropes.

Jimmy and Ann had had the boat-deck to themselves for half an hour. Jimmy was a good sailor: it exhilarated him to fight the wind and to walk a deck that heaved and dipped and shuddered beneath his feet; but he had not expected to have Ann’s company on such an evening. But she had come out of the saloon entrance, her small face framed in a hood and her slim body shapeless beneath a great cloak, and joined him in his walk.

Jimmy was in a mood of exaltation. He had passed the last few days in a condition of intermittent melancholy, consequent on the discovery that he was not the only man on board the Atlantic who desired the society of Ann as an alleviation of the tedium of an ocean voyage. The world, when he embarked on this venture, had consisted so exclusively of Ann and himself that, until the ship was well on its way to Queenstown, he had not conceived the possibility of intrusive males forcing their unwelcome attentions on her. And it had added bitterness to the bitter awakening that their attentions did not appear to be at all unwelcome. Almost immediately after breakfast on the very first day, a creature with a small black moustache and shining teeth had descended upon Ann and, vocal with surprise and pleasure at meeting her again⁠—he claimed, damn him!, to have met her before at Palm Beach, Bar Harbor, and a dozen other places⁠—had carried her off to play an idiotic game known as shuffleboard. Nor was this an isolated case. It began to be borne in upon Jimmy that Ann, whom he had looked upon purely in the light of an Eve playing opposite his Adam in an exclusive Garden of Eden, was an extremely well-known and popular character. The clerk at the shipping-office had lied absurdly when he had said that very few people were crossing on the Atlantic this voyage. The vessel was crammed till its sides bulged, it was loaded down in utter defiance of the Plimsoll law, with Rollos and Clarences and Dwights and Twombleys who had known and golfed and ridden and driven and motored and swum and danced with Ann for years. A ghastly being entitled Edgar Something or Teddy Something had beaten Jimmy by a short head in the race for the deck-steward, the prize of which was the placing of his deck-chair next to Ann’s. Jimmy had been driven from the promenade deck by the spectacle of this beastly creature lying swathed in rugs reading bestsellers to her.

He had scarcely seen her to speak to since the beginning of the voyage. When she was