Pelham Wodehouse - Piccadilly Jim

"Before they found me out and hauled me off to prison, I should have been near you for a time. I should have lived in the same house with you, spoken to you—!" Jimmy's voice shook.

Ann turned her head to address an imaginary companion.

"You must listen to this, my dear," she said in an undertone. "He speaks wonderfully! They used to call him the Boy Orator in his home-town. Sometimes that, and sometimes Eloquent Algernon!"

Jimmy eyed her fixedly. He disapproved of this frivolity.

"One of these days you will try me too high—!"

"Oh, you didn't hear what I was saying to my friend, did you?" she said in concern. "But I meant it, every word. I love to hear you talk. You have such feeling! "

Jimmy attuned himself to the key of the conversation.

"Have you no sentiment in you?" he demanded.

"I was just warming up, too! In another minute you would have heard something worth while. You've damped me now. Let's talk about my lifework again."

"Have you thought of anything?"

"I'd like to be one of those fellows who sit in offices, and sign checks, and tell the office-boy to tell Mr. Rockerfeller they can give him five minutes. But of course I should need a check-book, and I haven't got one. Oh well, I shall find something to do all right. Now tell me something about yourself. Let's drop the future for awhile."

An hour later Jimmy turned into Broadway. He walked pensively, for he had much to occupy his mind. How strange that the Petts should have come over to England to try to induce him to return to New York, and how galling that, now that he was in New York, this avenue to a prosperous future was closed by the fact that something which he had done five years ago—that he could remember nothing about it was quite maddening—had caused Ann to nurse this abiding hatred of him. He began to dream tenderly of Ann, bumping from pedestrian to pedestrian in a gentle trance.

From this trance the seventh pedestrian aroused him by uttering his name, the name which circumstances had compelled him to abandon.

"Jimmy Crocker!"

Surprise brought Jimmy back from his dreams to the hard world —surprise and a certain exasperation. It was ridiculous to be incognito in a city which he had not visited in five years and to be instantly recognised in this way by every second man he met. He looked sourly at the man. The other was a sturdy, square-shouldered, battered young man, who wore on his homely face a grin of recognition and regard. Jimmy was not particularly good at remembering faces, but this person's was of a kind which the poorest memory might have recalled. It was, as the advertisements say, distinctively individual. The broken nose, the exiguous forehead, and the enlarged ears all clamoured for recognition. The last time Jimmy had seen Jerry Mitchell had been two years before at the National Sporting Club in London, and, placing him at once, he braced himself, as a short while ago he had braced himself to confound immaculate Reggie.

"Hello!" said the battered one.

"Hello indeed!" said Jimmy courteously. "In what way can I brighten your life?"

The grin faded from the other's face. He looked puzzled.

"You're Jimmy Crocker, ain't you?"

"No. My name chances to be Algernon Bayliss."

Jerry Mitchell reddened.

"'Scuse me. My mistake."

He was moving off, but Jimmy stopped him. Parting from Ann had left a large gap in his life, and he craved human society.

"I know you now," he said. "You're Jerry Mitchell. I saw you fight Kid Burke four years ago in London."

The grin returned to the pugilist's face, wider than ever. He beamed with gratification.

"Gee! Think of that! I've quit since then. I'm working for an old guy named Pett. Funny thing, he's Jimmy Crocker's uncle that I mistook you for. Say, you're a dead ringer for that guy! I could have sworn it was him when you bumped into me. Say, are you doing anything?"

"Nothing in particular."

"Come and have a yarn. There's a place I know just round by here."

"Delighted."

They made their way to the place.

"What's yours?" said Jerry Mitchell. "I'm on the wagon myself," he said apologetically.

"So am I," said Jimmy. "It's the only way. No sense in always drinking and making a disgraceful exhibition of yourself in public!"

Jerry Mitchell received this homily in silence. It disposed definitely of the lurking doubt in his mind as to the possibility of this man really being Jimmy Crocker. Though outwardly convinced by the other's denial, he had not been able to rid himself till now of a nebulous suspicion. But this convinced him. Jimmy Crocker would never have said a thing like that nor would have refused the offer of alcohol. He fell into pleasant conversation with him. His mind eased.

At five o'clock in the afternoon some ten days after her return to America, Mrs. Pett was at home to her friends in the house on Riverside Drive. The proceedings were on a scale that amounted to a reception, for they were not only a sort of official notification to New York that one of its most prominent hostesses was once more in its midst, but were also designed to entertain and impress Mr. Hammond Chester, Ann's father, who had been spending a couple of days in the metropolis preparatory to departing for South America on one of his frequent trips. He was very fond of Ann in his curious, detached way, though he never ceased in his private heart to consider it injudicious of her not to have been born a boy, and he always took in New York for a day or two on his way from one wild and lonely spot to another, if he could manage it.

The large drawing-room overlooking the Hudson was filled almost to capacity with that strange mixture of humanity which Mrs. Pett chiefly affected. She prided herself on the Bohemian element in her parties, and had become during the past two years a human drag-net, scooping Genius from its hiding-place and bringing it into the open. At different spots in the room stood the six resident geniuses to whose presence in the home Mr. Pett had such strong objections, and in addition to these she had collected so many more of a like breed from the environs of Washington Square that the air was clamorous with the hoarse cries of futurist painters, esoteric Buddhists, vers libre poets, interior decorators, and stage reformers, sifted in among the more conventional members of society who had come to listen to them. Men with new religions drank tea with women with new hats. Apostles of Free Love expounded their doctrines to persons who had been practising them for years without realising it. All over the room throats were being strained and minds broadened.

Mr. Chester, standing near the door with Ann, eyed the assemblage with the genial contempt of a large dog for a voluble pack of small ones. He was a massive, weather-beaten man, who looked very like Ann in some ways and would have looked more like her but for the misfortune of having had some of his face clawed away by an irritable jaguar with whom he had had a difference some years back in the jungles of Peru.

"Do you like this sort of thing?" he asked.

"I don't mind it," said Ann.

"Well, I shall be very sorry to leave you, Ann, but I'm glad I'm pulling out of here this evening. Who are all these people?"

Ann surveyed the gathering.

"That's Ernest Wisden, the playwright, over there, talking to Lora Delane Porter, the feminist writer. That's Clara What's-her-name, the sculptor, with the bobbed hair. Next to her—"

Mr. Chester cut short the catalogue with a stifled yawn.

"Where's old Pete? Doesn't he come to these jamborees?"

Ann laughed.

"Poor uncle Peter! If he gets back from the office before these people leave, he will sneak up to his room and stay there till it's safe to come out. The last time I made him come to one of these parties he was pounced on by a woman who talked to him for an hour about the morality of Finance and seemed to think that millionaires were the scum of the earth."