"No. I don't think that women have much use for 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 Rasputin. 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.