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 operations 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.