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, her clean 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 modern 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."