On an Odd Note Read online

  Time is a liar and a tease. Time is a confidence trickster. Time sells you that which is not, and which never has been. The Devil makes capital by selling Retrospect in three dimensions to fools like Faust who, at the cost of their immortal souls, want to capture their “youth.” How often have we heard the voice of ulcerated misery, wise with the wisdom of a quarter of a century of interoffice knife-play, groaning in one of those discreetly dim bars off Madison Avenue: If only I could have my time over again! . . . Or in Michael’s Pub off Fifth Avenue, or the Absinthe House on the West Side, about 12:45 any afternoon, watched it feeling the tatty fur on its tongue with its loose-fitting false teeth, and talking out of the corner of its mouth furthest away from you (for fear of offending you with bad breath) of what might have been perhaps, would be whether, and should have been if . . .

  Si la jeunesse savait! Si la vieillesse pouvait!—so yearns the catchword, meaning: “If youth had the experience of old age; and old age the vigor of youth!” These French epigrams go down smoothly, but stick in the discriminating craw; could anything be more repulsive than a teen-ager, in all his frenetic vigor, with the outlook, the libido, and the untickled appetites of a decadent old playboy? . . . The most incorrigible Time-Over-Againers are generally to be found in the self-huckstering professions—I mean advertising men, real estate speculators, moving picture men, journalists, and the like—people who are incredibly wise long after the event. These young-old-timers must necessarily be one jump behind competition; they are living on borrowed time.

  Some of the very worst offenders in this respect are the elderly, brilliant desk-men, features men, and editorial writers in newspaper row. They earn good money and are much looked up to; newspaper cubs are honored by their attention and, figuratively speaking, hang on their leaden or purple lips. More often than not they are generous with their money, and with their advice; and if there is one kind of person they like better than the worldly wise one whom they knew “when,” it is the eager youngster with ideals to denigrate. Their cynicism is sad, kindly, even paternal . . . but it is, nonetheless, the voice of weariness and disillusionment. Toward the end of the evening, when they are expected at home, where their friends are not welcome, they generally say, with a lingering, nostalgic, affectionate handshake, “Ah, my boy, if I were your age!” And when they leave you have a feeling of something lost, or rather mislaid; in some pyramidal shadow in one of the corners of the pub they have left something of themselves behind, something ragged with disuse. . . .

  When I was in Fleet Street—which is, in London, what newspaper row once was in New York—the night editor of The Daily Special was such a man. His name was Bohemund Raymond, and his incapacity for hard liquor had made him notorious from Blackfriars to Temple Bar. (I say “incapacity,” on the assumption that a capacious man can drink a lot without getting drunk.) I believe that his appearance of drunkenness was exaggerated by a peculiar habit of speech: he spoke with a Devon drawl, and had, moreover, that inability to pronounce two successive consonants which is supposed to be characteristic of the Arabs. Take, say, the word strong: Bohemund Raymond would pronounce it something like “issitirong.” Once, in the Punch Tavern, some old soldier, half-demented with malaria, who had been trying to sell an article about elephants’ tusks during the silly season, had the nerve to say, in Bohemund Raymond’s hearing, “No, I mean to say, blast it! Was in Palestine with Allenby, blast it! I talk Wog. That man talks with a chi-chi, like a confounded Wog. No, really, I mean to say, after all, what?” Whereupon Bohemund Raymond looked at the man steadily for a long time, and said, in his peculiarly resonant voice, “By ‘Wog’ I take it this derelict means ‘Arab.’ Why, of course! By God, my fathers took Antioch when this fellow’s people were herding swine! Damn it,” shouted Bohemund Raymond, pointing to one of the arteries in his throat, “in this vein flows the blood of Bohemund, of Richard Lion-Heart, of Godfrey de Bouillon! My ancestress was a Saracen princess. Damn your eyes, my own mother was named after her—Asia Raymond, short for Ayesha! . . . ‘Wog!’ ”

  The old soldier, fatuous with bottled beer, said, “No, but really, I mean to say, after all—what I mean, all those fathers, eh, and only one mother, what?” Then Bohemund Raymond said: “I’ll ‘Wog’ you,”—and so he did, with a pewter pot. And he saw to it that the article about elephants’ tusks was rejected the following day; threatened, indeed, to resign if it was accepted. . . . It was not that Bohemund Raymond was mean, or vindictive; in general, he was very generous and, in a quarrel, magnanimous. Only he could not bear to be touched in his ticklish spot: his ancestry.

  As everybody knows, Phoenician blood ran strong in the west of England, where his family came from, so that to this day you may see hawk-faced, black-avised, strangely clannish, subtle, proud and quarrelsome alien-looking men and women around Marazion. But Bohemund Raymond disclaimed descent from these Vikings of the Levant. No; he insisted that he was a lineal descendant of a great crusader and the Princess Ayesha who, he emphasized, was divinely inspired, a prophetess, something like Cassandra of Troy, only more so. He would recount with extraordinary vividness the circumstances of her prediction about the Battle of the Spear: It seems that Ayesha, after she was carried off, baptized out of hand, and married to his ancestor, had a revelation in a dream of a buried spearhead which, said Ayesha, was a holy relic; it had been used by a Roman soldier at the foot of the Cross, so that whoever followed it must be certain of victory. The spearhead was dug up, the crusaders followed it as a banner, and won a wonderful fight. Telling of this, with a wild, faraway look in his dark-pouched black eyes, Bohemund would say, “And I, too, my friends, shall perish by the ancient bronze spear in the right hand of my ancient hereditary enemy!”

  When he had drink taken—and when had he not?—Bohemund Raymond frequently made such cryptic oracular prophecies. We happened to remember this one, when he died of blood poisoning in the summer of 1939, having run a rusty brass paper fastener into his left thumb. He had drunk himself out of half a dozen important jobs in Fleet Street—gulped himself down; as I may say, swallowed himself—so that at the time of his death he was fiction editor of The Evening Special, a creature whom we fiction writers liked to whisper of as one of the lowest forms of life.

  The news of his death was received as the news of such deaths is generally received in the newspaper rows of all the cities in the world. There were the maudlin ones who, having made their reputations in other lines of the business, and seeing in this minor tragedy the handwriting on their own walls growled, “We won’t see his like again,” and went to the Press Club in search of more mourners of their generation. There were cubs, gnashing their milk-teeth among the umbles, the scattered guts of the big kills, who, hoping one day to pull down their own bull, watched for a forward movement in the pack. Some gloated: The elephant-tusk man maintained that it was his story that had caused the death of Bohemund Raymond; he said that it was still going the rounds, pinned together by the same paper fastener, which was covered with verdigris (his pension was not due until next Tuesday and, meanwhile, although he hated to accept a drink without being able to return it . . . et cetera . . .). An old advertising man, who had entertainment-expensed himself into the gutter of the small-ad peddlers, said that Bohemund Raymond had survived that long by blackmailing Lord Lovejoy, the baron who owned The Daily Special, The Evening Special, and The Sunday Special; trust Bohemund to know where the body was buried, he said, with a beery wink, nodding like a porcelain chinaman . . . until one of the old guard, “Swindle-sheet” Morris, gasping over half an inch of cigarette—mysteriously, he never had more or less than half an inch of cigarette—told him to be damned for a dirty little­ advertising man.

  Bohemund Raymond would never soil his hands on such, said “Swindle-sheet” Morris, “but I don’t mind if I do, you little mess, you! Bohemund was my friend, and I say so to the whole bleeding pub-load of you. You are not fit to drink the water he washed his socks in, and if any of you want to deny it, come on! Single-hande
d, or mob-handed, come on! . . . Will you stand by, Gerald?”

  I said, “Oh, sure, Morris.”

  Then, with emotion, “Swindle-sheet” Morris said, “We knew him in good times and bad, old Bohemund—didn’t we, Gerald? We were cubs under Bohemund; weren’t we, Gerald? Why, when the old World-Globe went bust and was bought by Lovejoy in 1929, who predicted it? Bohemund Raymond! Why, you little layabouts, I see him as plain as I see you here—plainer—saying: ‘Morris, the world is coming to an end, and the very globe will change.’ And that, mind you, was in 1917. . . . Bohemund was like a mother and father to me: he tore up every word I wrote, he treated me like a dog, he bashed me into shape, he made me what I am. Didn’t he, Gerald?”

  Since I could not very well say that I did not remember, and that, in any case, while “Swindle-sheet” Morris was what he was, I did not much care for his shape, I could only say, “You’ve got something there, Morris.”

  At this, Jack Cantwhistle, the old crime reporter, a kindly, sensitive man under the scar-tissue, said: “Yes, Bohemund was the ablest man in the Street. God knows what he might have got to be if it wasn’t for his ‘ifs and ans.’ Poor old Bohemund always had to foresee—no part of a newspaperman’s job, foreseeing; very dangerous practice. We’re all entitled to a bit of guesswork; but you keep your guesses to yourself. I’m not saying a word against my old friend Bohemund, Morris, and I won’t hear a word said against him—only, when he had one of his funny turns, especially after he’d been on a blind, he had to get prophetic. Made himself a laughing-stock, in fact.”

  “Swindle-sheet” Morris said, “Laugh if you like, Jack—his prophecies always came true, almost. When he first took me on, I worshiped the ground he trod on. But he said to me, ‘Get on the job. Keep your thanks. You will live to make a hissing and a mockery of me!’ And Lord forgive me, so I did. . . . And as for my old friend Bohemund’s having a glass of beer once in a while between meals; why, he had to, because he took things so much to heart. He got away from the world that way, and clarified his intellect.”

  The decayed advertising man sniggered. “Bohemund clarified his intellect all right, that time Lord Lovejoy sent him to Scotland for six months! Remember? The time he started seeing snakes and mermaids and midgets and things in the office?”

  “Swindle-sheet” Morris shouted: “Why, you lavatory! Bohemund’s intellect was never clearer than when he saw those snakes, et cetera. They said it was d.t.’s, but it wasn’t. I know, because I was his assistant, at the time, damn it all! . . .” Then he went on to say that, at that time, in the spring of 1930, Bohemund’s wife ran away from him. To her, as to everyone else, he had prophesied “You shall make a hissing and a mockery of me.” And so she did. He went on working, however, with deadly efficiency but like a man in a dream, souping himself up for the superhuman efforts of each new night with whisky—as a robber soups up an old stolen car for the few minutes of a mad dash between the smashing of the jeweler’s window and the hideout. So Bohemund Raymond blasted and rattled from sunset to sunrise, leaving behind him a trail of startled faces, shattered glass and shrill whistles.

  Now those who say that Lord Lovejoy tolerated Bohemund Raymond because that phenomenal newspaperman “had something on him” do the memory of the Press Baron an injustice. Everyone had something on Lord Lovejoy; those who hadn’t, invented something to have on him, and much he cared! Lord Lovejoy was a ruthless man, an unscrupulous man, a pig-headed and, at times, brutal man; but he was neither a coward nor a fool. He liked you or he didn’t, often for the wrong reasons; but he was as staunch a friend as he was implacable an enemy. One evening—you could never predict the movements of Lord Lovejoy—returning from Canada where he had just bought five hundred square miles of virgin forest to shred up and pulp for his newspapers, he looked in at the office, dressed in a mackinaw. The night doorman, who was drunk and new to the job, asked him who the devil he thought he was. “I am Lord Lovejoy,” said the little potentate. “Oh yes? And I am Bombardier Billy Wells,” said the doorman, using the name of the man who was at that time heavyweight boxing champion of England. . . . Lord Lovejoy then said, “And how do you like The Daily Special?” The doorman said, “Och, I wouldn’t use it to wrap tripe-and-chips in. Indade, I wouldn’t carry the damned rag away with me atall, atall, only my little bhoy likes to color in the fashion section, bless his heart, wid his little box o’ paints.”

  At this point, Lord Lovejoy’s secretary arrived, breathless, and took his master upstairs to the office with the onyx desk. There, Lord Lovejoy said, “That man Bombardier Billy Wells—take him off the door. Start a new children’s section; make him editor; get circulation. What we need is an Empire-wide print­ing competition for children under fourteen—five thousand pounds in prizes and scholarships. . . . You were three minutes late; you’re fired. . . . Where’s Bohemund Raymond? Never mind, I’ll go myself. . . .” So Lord Lovejoy walked into the news room, and there was Bohemund Raymond drinking a color­less liquid that smelled of juniper berries out of a teacup. The night’s work was nearly over. Poor Raymond’s right hand was bleeding—he had impaled it on the spike, that stake which is driven through the heart of rejected copy. Lord Lovejoy said to him, “Hello, Raymond! See anything new?” Then Bohemund replied, in his double-clipped sonorous voice, “Serpents! Mad­dened beasts! Yes, I see a Mermaid, and a tiger—and a giraffe looking in the window. Between his legs run little wizened dwarfs in—”

  “You’ve been on the booze, Bohemund, old man,” said Lord Lovejoy, “and you’d better lay off. Come on, after all, I bar seeing snakes in office hours. Take three months’ holiday with pay, and go to my place in Scotland. One more peep out of you, and I’ll fire you.” Then he called his secretary and said, “Oh, Spray—you were three minutes late tonight; losing grip; need vacation. So does Bohemund Raymond; pack up and go to Loch Lovejoy with him at once; but if I hear only one drop—one drop, mind!—of liquor has passed his lips in the next twelve weeks, as from this moment, you are fired this time once and for all. Get cracking!” After a few more serious words with Bohemund Raymond, the Press Baron concluded: “. . . I have your solemn word of honor then—no liquor for three months. Otherwise you’re through. Meet Spray, and scram; anything extraordinary happens, let me know. ’Bye now.”

  So Bohemund Raymond left for Scotland with the teetotal secretary, Spray. They had not been gone ten hours when one of Lord Lovejoy’s private phones rang, by one of his bedsides, and the voice of Bohemund Raymond, shaky but calm, said, “You said to tell you if anything extraordinary happens. Raymond calling from Dogworthy Junction. Listen, the mermaid is dying on the platform. One of the seven dwarfs has broken his leg, and his tiny wife is tying up his wounds with her spangled tights. Hold on! There is a tiger loose in the streets, and a rat with orange-colored teeth, five feet long, chewing tobacco—and the giraffe, poor beast, cut his neck on the glass of my window—” Abruptly, Lord Lovejoy rang off, got through to the office and said, “Fire Raymond and Spray.” Next morning, however, there was a report of the affair in all the other papers: Bohemund Raymond’s train had collided with a circus train, and for a few hours many of the side-show exhibits were loose around Dogworthy Junction.

  The Mermaid, an unhappy Manatee cow that was depicted on the posters as a voluptuous blonde with a fish’s tail, combing her hair at a hand-glass and singing melodiously, but that looked in fact like a sea-elephant with breasts, fell out of her tank of salt water and bellowed her last at the station-master’s feet. The Biggest Rat in the World—a capybara, or water-pig—ran away on its long legs and settled down in a nearby kitchen garden, the owner of which, a maiden lady who was afraid of mice, went out of her mind. One of a team of midget acrobats did, indeed, break his leg—The Daily Flash ran a big picture of his wife, thirty inches high, applying first aid. A spavined giraffe sustained injuries from broken glass, and a tiger, too old and broken-spirited to care, had to be carried back to its cage by six volunteers, led by the local policeman who directed operation
s with a pitchfork. Thus, Lord Lovejoy sent a Memo: Unfire Raymond and Spray; and Bohemund Raymond was back in the office within a week, drunker than ever. . . .

  . . . Although everyone in Fleet Street had been laughing over that story for years, now Morris found no pleasure in it; there was grief in his heart. He said to me, “Let’s get out of here, Gerald, and I’ll tell you how I made a hissing and a mockery of poor old Bohemund Raymond. God knows, it was all in fun. I might say, in fact, that the joke I played on him had a salubrious effect, because he didn’t touch drink in any form afterward until just before he died. But he found out about the trick I played on him, and I don’t think he ever forgave me for it . . . but confidentially, between us, you know, he did ask for it. . . . Walk back to my place and I’ll tell you. . . .”

  “Swindle-sheet” Morris had a three-room flat over a second-hand furniture shop in Red Lion Street. He found some bottled beer, two packets of potato-crisps and a jar of pickled red cabbage, and made room for them on the sitting-room table by pushing aside a typewriter, a hat and a little box of laundry ready for the wash. “It’s a little stuffy,” he said, “but I don’t like to open the window in case the papers get blown away.” He sniffed, and added: “Yes, I burned some kippers the day before yesterday; and all that junk, those sofas and mattresses downstairs, do have a bit of a pong. Miracle how the old crook finds a market for ’em. . . . See that typewriter? That’s the typewriter—”

  It was a big, old-fashioned desk model, badly battered, such as you may see in any newspaper office; a rakish, promiscuous, disreputable old typewriter, it had submitted to hard usage by a thousand pairs of heavy hands and adjusted itself to none. On the front of the frame, heavily stenciled, was the inscription: PROPERTY OF LOVEJOY PRESS—NOT TO BE TAKEN AWAY!

  “His typewriter, Bohemund’s typewriter,” said “Swindle-sheet” Morris. “He took a fancy to it and wouldn’t let anybody else use it—he said it knew him; said it practically typed of its own accord. So I pinched it for a keepsake, after he died. Of course, I daresay you know Bohemund Raymond really was a marvelous touch-typist, faster and more accurate than any girl in the office, and the funny thing is the tighter he got, the faster he got. Well, you remember Bohemund’s bragging about that so-called Saracen priestess and that crusader; and, sometimes, boasting about what he called his ‘Gift of Prophecy,’ and, then again, his ‘Infallible Accuracy’ on this typewriter. He called it ‘Rataplan’—which, according to his cock-and-bull story, was the name of an old war horse that belonged to this ancestor of his: it seems this here horse was stone-blind in both eyes, and still the best charger in the crusades because it couldn’t see danger. Well, you know Bohemund and I were always the best of friends; but there comes a time when even your best friend can get on your nerves a bit—especially in a year like 1938, when every lousy office boy went around prophesying like Isaiah, and doubting whether they had done wisely putting Chamberlain in power.