He had scarcely seen her to speak to since the beginning of the voyage. When she was not walking with Rolly or playing shuffle-board with Twombley, she was down below ministering to the comfort of a chronically sea-sick aunt, referred to in conversation as “poor aunt Nesta”. Sometimes Jimmy saw the little man–presumably her uncle–in the smoking-room, and once he came upon the stout boy recovering from the effects of a cigar in a quiet corner of the boat-deck: but apart from these meetings the family was as distant from him as if he had never seen Ann at all–let alone saved her life.
And now she had dropped down on him from heaven. They were alone together with the good clean wind and the bracing scud. Rollo, Clarence, Dwight, and Twombley, not to mention Edgar or possibly Teddy, were down below–he hoped, dying. They had the world to themselves.
“I love rough weather,” said Ann, lifting her face to the wind. Her eyes were very bright. She was beyond any doubt or question the only girl on earth. “Poor aunt Nesta doesn’t. She was bad enough when it was quite calm, but this storm has finished her. I’ve just been down below, trying to cheer her up.”
Jimmy thrilled at the picture. Always fascinating, Ann seemed to him at her best in the role of ministering angel. He longed to tell her so, but found no words. They reached the end of the deck, and turned. Ann looked up at him.
“I’ve hardly seen anything of you since we sailed,” she said. She spoke almost reproachfully. “Tell me all about yourself, Mr. Bayliss. Why are you going to America?”
Jimmy had had an impassioned indictment of the Rollos on his tongue, but she had closed the opening for it as quickly as she had made it. In face of her direct demand for information he could not hark back to it now. After all, what did the Rollos matter? They had no part in this little wind-swept world: they were where they belonged, in some nether hell on the C. or D. deck, moaning for death.
“To make a fortune, I hope,” he said.
Ann was pleased at this confirmation of her diagnosis. She had deduced this from the evidence at Paddington Station.
“How pleased your father will be if you do!”
The slight complexity of Jimmy’s affairs caused him to pause for a moment to sort out his fathers, but an instant’s reflection told him that she must be referring to Bayliss the butler.
“Yes.”
“He’s a dear old man,” said Ann. “I suppose he’s very proud of you?”
“I hope so.”
“You must do tremendously well in America, so as not to disappoint him. What are you thinking of doing?”
Jimmy considered for a moment.
“Newspaper work, I think.”
“Oh? Why, have you had any experience?”
“A little.”
Ann seemed to grow a little aloof, as if her enthusiasm had been damped.
“Oh, well, I suppose it’s a good enough profession. I’m not very fond of it myself. I’ve only met one newspaper man in my life, and I dislike him very much, so I suppose that has prejudiced me.”
“Who was that?”
“You wouldn’t have met him. He was on an American paper. A man named Crocker.”
A sudden gust of wind drove them back a step, rendering talk impossible. It covered a gap when Jimmy could not have spoken. The shock of the information that Ann had met him before made him dumb. This thing was beyond him. It baffled him.
Her next words supplied a solution. They were under shelter of one of the boats now and she could make herself heard.
“It was five years ago, and I only met him for a very short while, but the prejudice has lasted.”
Jimmy began to understand. Five years ago! It was not so strange, then, that they should not recognise each other now. He stirred up his memory. Nothing came to the surface. Not a gleam of recollection of that early meeting rewarded him. And yet something of importance must have happened then, for her to remember it. Surely his mere personality could not have been so unpleasant as to have made such a lasting impression on her!