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-handed, 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.”