by Hugh Walpole
When he had departed I looked at Westcott interrogatively.
“That’s a prince of a man,” said Peter enthusiastically. “I don’t know where I’d have been without him in France. Everyone loved him there, and they were right.”
“What an experience he must have had there,” I said, a little breathless.
“Oh, that!” said Peter laughing. “That was all lies from beginning to end.”
“Lies!” I exclaimed.
“Yes,” said Westcott. “He’s known among his friends as Bombastes Furioso. That’s an unfair name, really, to give him, because he’s gentle as any suckling dove, and all his wonderful stories are about somebody else’s great deeds, never about his own. Young Harper was saying the other day that if only he would tell of some of his stories about himself, his lies wouldn’t be so tremendous, but his natural modesty prevents him. He’s a dear fellow, and the biggest liar in Europe.”
“Well, of course,” I said, rather doubtfully, “if he always tells lies it isn’t so bad. You know that you need never believe him. It’s the half-and-half liars that are so tiresome—” —
“No,” Peter interrupted. “That isn’t quite fair. Lies isn’t the true word. He’s all imagination — far more imagination than either you or I will ever have, Lester. He simply can’t write it down. If he could he would be the greatest novelist of our time. I used to tell him to try, but I’ve given that up now. He can’t string three sentences together. He can’t write an ordinary letter without misspelling every other word. He never reads anything — that’s why his imagination is so untrammelled. And it isn’t all untrue either. He has been all the world over — South Seas, Africa, China, South America, Russia, anywhere you like. All sorts of wonderful things have happened to him, but it isn’t the real things he cares to tell of.”
“Does he know he’s lying?” I asked.
“Not the least in the world,” Peter answered, laughing. “And I fancy he’d be most indignant if you accused him of it And the really strange thing is that no one ever does accuse him. I can’t remember that a single man in France ever challenged his stories, and they’d pull anyone else up in a moment. You see, he never does any harm. He’s the most generous soul alive, thinks the best of everybody, and all his stories go to prove that people are better than they ever possibly could be. I confess, Lester, I have him here deliberately because he feeds my imagination. I’m beginning to feel that I may get back to writing again, and if I do it will be Bomb that will be responsible.”
“How did he do in France?” I asked.
“Very well,” Peter said. “But he never got the jobs that he ought to have had. Fellows distrusted him for responsible duty. They needn’t have: he is as efficient as he can be. His inventive fancy only works over ground that he’s never covered. In his own job he’s an absolute realist.”
“Is he married?” I asked.
“No. I don’t think that women have much use fear him. He doesn’t appeal to them. They like to have the story-telling field to themselves. He’s a man’s man absolutely. He had a pal in France to whom he was entirely devoted, and when the boy was killed I think something cracked in him that’s not been mended since. He’s a colossal sentimentalist: cynicism and irony make him sick. He thinks I’m a desperate cynic — so I am, perhaps....”
Well, I saw a lot of Bomb Jones. He loved Westcott more than I did, and admired him frantically. He knew, too, something about Westcott’s many troubles, and the maternal spirit that is in every Englishman and Scotchman came out beautifully in his attitude to him. His stories soon became part of the pattern of one’s life, and by no means the least interesting part. I quickly understood why it was that his friends allowed him to pursue his wild, untrammelled way without rudely pulling him up. In the first place, truth and fiction were curiously mingled. He had lived in San Francisco for a number of years, and many of his tales were drawn from that romantic city. He had obviously known well such men as Frank Norris and Jack London, and he had been in the place during the earthquake and fire. His picture of Caruso running out of his hotel in his night-shirt was a masterly one. He knew Russia well, had had tea with Witte, in the old days, and had once dined with Raspuun. He had shared in the Boxer rising, run for his life in Constantinople, and helped a revolution in Guatemala; and so on, and so on....
But as I have said, about his actual experiences he had very little to say. It was his fairy stories, his fantastic, fabricated romances, that gave him his remarkable quality — and it was about London that these were mostly invented. I say invented — but were they invented or no?
There will, I think, be more men and women than anyone now supposes who will look back to that year Nineteen-Nineteen in London as a strangely fantastic one. You might say with some justice that the years during the war, with their air-raids and alarms and excursions, newspaper rumours, and train-loads of wounded and dying at Charing Cross station, must have been infinitely more moving — I think not. In those years, at any rate the stage was set for a play in which we must all, as we knew, act our parts. That year that followed the Armistice was uncanny, uncertain, unaccountable. Many reports there were about cities during war time — none at all, so far as we knew, about cities just after war. London, contrary to all prophesy, was just twice as full after the war as it had been before it; there was nowhere to live, little place even for sleeping. Everyone who had had money had lost it — many who had been notoriously penniless now were rich. London was moving uncertainly into some new life whose forlorn form no one could foretell, and we were all conscious of this, and all, perhaps, frightened of it.
It was just this upon which Bomb Jones unwittingly seized. I say “unwittingly,” because he was the least self-conscious of men, and the things that came to him arrived without any deliberate agency on his part — his stories and anecdotes rising to his lips as naturally and inevitably as the sun rises above the hill. He did not, I think, care for me very greatly: I was dried up, desiccated with a humour that he could only find morbid and cynical.
He had too fine and open a nature to suffer greatly from jealousy, but I fancy that he very much preferred to be alone with Peter, and sighed a little when I made an appearance.
He very soon found himself most happily at home with all the staff of Hortons. Even Mr. Nix, the sacred and rubicund head of the establishment, liked him, and listened, wide-eyed, to his stories. Mr. Nix had met so many strange characters in London and seen so many odd sights that a story less or more did not affect him very deeply.
Certainly Captain Jones flung his net with greater success than was the general rule; never a day passed but he returned with some strange prize.
It was amusing to see them together in the green hall downstairs, with the grandfather clock ticking away at them sarcastically. The little man, round as a ball, neat and dapper, efficient, his bowler hat a little on one side of his head; Jones, his great legs apart, his red face ablaze with excitement, his large hands gesticulating. They were great friends.
In spite of his withdrawal from me, he continued to tell me his stories. I began to find it an amusing game to divide the true from the false. This was a difficult task, because he had a great love of circumstantial detail. He would begin— “Lester, what do you think of this? An hour ago I was going down John Street, Adelphi. You know the place behind the Strand there where the Little Theatre used to be. You know there’s an alley there cutting up into the Strand. They sell fruit there. Well, I was just climbing the steps when I heard a woman’s voice cry out for help. I looked back; there was not a soul there — the street was as empty as your hand. I heard the cry again, and there was a woman’s face at the open window. As I looked she vanished. I ran back to the door of the house—”
Now this may appear somewhat commonplace. How many stories in how many magazines have begun with just such an incident? This, you would say, is the cheapest invention. Not quite. Jones had always some unexpected circumstantial detail that clamped his tale down as his own. I
think that he was, in reality, on certain occasions involved in fights and quarrels that were actual enough. I have seen him with a black eye, and again with a long scratch down his cheek, and once with a torn hand. But what he did was to create behind him a completely new vision of the London scene. One could not listen to his stories for long without seeing London coloured, blazing with light, sinister with calculated darkness, ringed about with gigantic buildings that capped the clouds, inhabited by beings half human, half magical, half angel, half beast.
I remember when I was young and credulous, getting something of this impression from The New Arabian Nights, but for me, at any rate, Stevenson never quite joined the flats. I was never finally taken in by his invention, but felt to the last that he was having a game with me. Bomb Jones’s eloquence had the advantage over the written word of being direct and personal. Although you might be sure that what he was telling you was not true, nevertheless you felt that behind his stories some facts must be lying. I know that soon I began to discover that London was changing under my eyes. My own drab and dull flat in Kensington took a romantic glow. I would look from my window down the long street to the far distance filled by the solemn blocks of the museum, and would imagine that the figures that crossed the grey spaces were busied on errands about which fates of empires might hang — ludicrous for a man of my age who might be said to have experienced all the disillusionment of life. Well, ludicrous or no, I walked the streets with a new observation, a new expectation, a new pleasure, and to Bomb Jones I owed it However, it is not of his effect on myself that I want to speak. I was too far gone for any very permanent revival. It was Jones’s effect on Peter that was the important thing. I saw that a new life, a new interest, a new eagerness was coming into Peter’s life. He laughed at Jones, but he liked him and listened to him. Gradually, slowly, as stealthily as, after the rains, the water creeps back over the dry bed of the sun-baked river, so did Peter’s desire for life come back to him.
“I know that Bomb’s stories are all nonsense,” he said to me. “A hundred times a day I’m tempted to break out and ask him how he dares to put such stuff over on us, but, after all, there may be something in it Do you know, Lester, I can’t go through Leicester Square without wondering whether a murderer isn’t coming out of the Turkish Baths, an Eastern Prince out of ‘Thurston’s, or the Queen of the Genii peeping at me from a window of the Alhambra! I’ve tried several times to get back into things here. I tried the Vers Librists, and I tried the drunkards down in Adelphi, and I’ve tried the Solemn Ones up in Hampstead, and the good commonplace ones in Kensington, and it was all no use until Bomb came along. I hope to Heaven he won’t stop his stories for another month or two. There’s a book beginning to move in my head — again, after ten years! Just think of it, Lester! Dead for ten years — I never thought it would come back, and now Bomb and his stories —— —”
“It’s all right,” I said. “He’ll never stop till he dies.”
But I’d reckoned without one thing — something that had never entered my poor brain, and, as always happens in life, it was the one thing that occurred — Bomb fell in love.
It is, of course, a commonplace that you can never discover the reasons that drive human beings towards one another — even the good old law of the universal attraction of opposite for opposite does not always hold good, but I may say that both Peter and I had the surprise of our lives when we discovered that Bomb Jones cared for Helen Cather. Helen was a friend of Bobby Galleon’s, who was a friend of Peter’s. Alice Galleon, Bobby’s wife, had been with her on some War Committee, and the orderliness of her mind, her quiet when the other women were pushing and quarrelling, heir dean serenity upon which nothing, however violent, seemed to make the slightest stain, appealed to Alice. She took Helen home to dinner, and discovered that she was a very well-read, politically-minded, balanced woman. “Too blamed balanced for me,” said Bobby, who believed in spontaneity and rash mistakes and good red blood. He thought, however, that she would be good for Peter, so he took her to see him. Helen and Peter made friends, and this in itself was odd, because Helen at once asserted that all Peter’s ideas about modem literature were wrong. She said that Peter was a Romantic, and that to be a Romantic in these days was worse than being dead. She talked in her calm, incisive, clear-cut way about the Novel, and said that the only thing for any novelist to do to-day was to tell the truth; and when Peter asked her whether invention and imagination were to go for nothing, she said that they went for very little, because we’d got past them and grown too old for them; and Peter said thank God he hadn’t and never would, and he talked about Stevenson and Dumas until Helen was sick.
She dug up Peter’s poor old novels, and disembowelled their corpses and praised Miss Somebody or other Smith’s who wrote only about what it felt like to be out of a job on a wet day when you had only enough money in your pocket to eat a boiled egg in an A. B.C. shop.
“You’re sentimental, Westcott,” she said, “and you’re sloppy and worst of all, you’re sprightly. You’ve no artistic conscience at all.”
Peter laughed at her and liked her, and she liked him. I don’t think that I was at all taken with my first view of her. She was thin and pale, with pince-nez and a very faint moustache on her upper lip. Her best feature was her eyes, which were good, grey, steady, kindly, and even at times they twinkled. She was neatness and tidiness itself, and she sat in her chair, quite still, her hands folded on her lap, and her neat little shoes crossed obstinately in front of her.
I shall never, of course, forget the day when she first met Bomb. It was one evening in Peter’s flat A number of people sat about talking, smoking and drinking. The Galleons were there, Maradick, large and red-faced, an old friend of Peter’s, Robin Trojan and his wife, and so on. Bomb was late. He burst into the room, large, untidy and, as usual, excited.
“I say,” he began at once. “I’ve just come from renter’s. There’s been a fellow there who’s the most remarkable man I’ve ever seen. He’s going round England with a circus, and three of his elephants escaped this afternoon and were found examining Cleopatra’s Needle half an hour ago and being fed with buns by a lot of street boys. This chap wasn’t a bit alarmed, and said they’d be sure to turn up at Howarton or somewhere where he’s got his circus, if he gave them time. He says that one of the elephants is the most intelligent—”
Now this story happened, as we discovered in the morning, to be quite, or almost, true, but you can fancy how Helen Cather was struck with it.
“Elephants!” she said, turning round upon him.
“Oh, you don’t know one another,” said Peter, hastily. “Bomb, this is Miss Cather. Miss Gather — Captain Jones.”
Bomb has since declared that he fell in love with his Helen at first sight. Why? I can’t conceive. There was nothing romantic about her. She certainly looked upon him on that first occasion with eyes of extreme disapproval. Everything about him must have seemed dreadful to her. “A red-hot liar,” she described him to Alice Galleon afterwards. I remember on that very evening wishing that he had stopped for a moment before he came into the room and tidied himself up a little. His hair wasn’t brushed, his face was hot and perspiring, his waistcoat was minus a button, and his boots were soiled. He didn’t care, of course, but sat down quite close to Miss Gather, smiled upon her, and poured-into her ears all that evening a remarkable series of narratives, each one more tremendous than the last.
Peter was amused. Next day he said: “Wasn’t it fun seeing Helen Cather and Bomb together? Fire and water. She thought he’d drunk too much, I presume. She can look chilly when she likes, too.”
It was not more than three days after this eventful meeting that the great surprise was sprung upon me.
I had been given two tickets for the first night of Arnold Bennett’s Judith. We arrived late, and it was not until the first interval that Peter could deliver to me his astounding news.
“What do you think has happened?” he cried. “I give you thre
e guesses, but you may as well resign at once. If I gave you a hundred, you’d never guess:”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Bomb is in love with Helen Gather.”
I was, of course, incredulous.
“But that’s absurd,” I answered; “that’s worse than any of Bomb’s best stories.”
“It’s true, all the same,” he assured me. “He came in this afternoon. He can think of nothing else. His stories have for the moment all deserted him. He told me that he’s been awake three nights thinking of her. He says that he loved her the first moment he saw her. He says that he’s never loved a woman before, which is, I expect, true enough, and that he’s going to marry her.”
“Well, that last isn’t true, anyway,” I answered. “Miss Gather hated him at first sight.”
My impression that night was that this was simply one of Bomb’s exuberant, romantic fancies, and that it would pass away from his heart and brain as quickly as many of his stories had done. I was, of course, completely wrong.
He said very little about it to me, because he didn’t like me, and was less naturally himself with me, I think, than with anyone. But he talked to everyone else, and to Peter he never ceased pouring out his soul.
A week later he proposed to her. She refused him, of course. He was not in the least disturbed. He would propose to her again very shortly, and then again and again to the end of time....
I fancied, however, that that first refusal would he the end of it.
He would see in a little how absurd his pursuit was, and would abandon it. I must confess that I looked forward to that abandonment. This sudden passion had not from my point of view, improved him. It made him a little absurd, and it had checked absolutely for the moment the flow of his stories. I was surprised to find how seriously I missed them.
Then one morning my telephone rang, and, answering it, I recognised Miss Cather’s voice.
“May I come and have tea with you this afternoon?” she asked.