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.

CHAPTER VIII

PAINFUL SCENE IN A CAFE

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 stick-pins, 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.