The Journeying Boy (41 page)

‘I wish to heaven Ivor were here!’ Cyril Bolderwood, by an association of ideas not altogether obscure, came out with this with considerable vehemence. ‘But I don’t see – I can’t for the life of me see – how it was going to help his father to – to–’

‘To come to Ireland and put his head into the lion’s jaws?’ And suddenly Mr Thewless brought out a handkerchief and mopped his brow. ‘Well, it’s here we come to the bit that’s really grim; to a point’ – for a moment Mr Thewless was vaguely magniloquent – ‘where all these personal issues, Humphrey’s fate and ours – are transcended. At this point the boy’s faculties – terribly at a stretch, after all – seem to have broken down. He makes an obscure, rather childish note to the effect that he has cheated, broken the rules, taken some underhand way of baffling his enemies. What he means by that isn’t quite clear, but I’m afraid it’s something pretty appalling. He had access to the plan.’

‘What
!’ Cyril Bolderwood was suddenly trembling all over.

‘With some sort of child’s cunning, and in the pursuance, one may suppose, of an innocent fantasy of secret service work and that sort of thing, he had possessed himself of the combination of a safe in which the thing is kept.’

‘I can’t believe it! It’s incredible! You mean – simply in Paxton’s own house?’

‘So it would appear. And the boy resolved that, before coming to Ireland and running the risks of which he’d had so odd a warning, he would put it out of his father’s power to comply with the demand that might be made on him. So he went straight home from the cinema, possessed himself of this vital document, and brought it along with him.’

Cyril Bolderwood made a choking noise in his throat, so that his companion positively thought for a moment that he had suffered an apoplexy. ‘Do you mean that – that it’s in this house now?’

‘It may be, if he has hidden it cunningly. I have come straight from ransacking his room – I took that responsibility at once – and I could find no sign of it. He may simply be carrying it on his person. The diary, you understand, breaks off without being specific on the point. It is only apparent that as he sat opposite me yesterday in the little train, scribbling this astounding matter in his notebook, the document may have been somewhere within a yard of us. Or that is how I read the matter. And you see how catastrophic is the situation that confronts us.’

‘Quite – oh, quite so, quite.’ Cyril Bolderwood was staring with an almost glassy eye into space. The sudden, enormous hope in the thing had actually dazed him. What would the disappearances of the South American magnate, the Irish squire, matter if he and Ivor, in disappearing, took the thing with them after all – the whole speculative business of the pressure upon Sir Bernard short-circuited, obviated, by his son’s crazy act? ‘Quite – it’s too terrible for words. But I still can’t see why the child did it. It’s quite mad.’

‘I judge that he is not capable of thinking in terms of a nation’s safety; that he has no realization of the vast public issues involved. His vision stops short with his father’s honour. And he
had
saved that. If caught – and he was going to do his best
not
to be caught – he had the document to hand over and cry quits with. The thing then could not be charged against his father’s weakness, but only against his own childish folly.’

‘I see. I see.’ Cyril Bolderwood was almost impressed.

‘And
I
see too.’

The voice was a weak whisper. Both men turned in surprise. The study door was open. And just inside it lay Ivor Bolderwood in a pool of blood.

With Humphrey the first flush of returning consciousness had been sheerly pleasurable, like waking up on his birthday. He had behaved in a heroical manner; he had been extremely clever; he had eluded, confounded, mocked his enemies. It was matter to compose a song about, full of thrasonical brag. Not Toad himself, when he had outwitted the barge-woman and sold her horse, was more outrageously pleased with himself than was Humphrey in these seconds during which his faculties were coming back to him.

But he was extremely cold, extremely bruised, extremely stiff. And there was something like a tiger gnawing at his right knee. Opening his eyes with some idea of investigating this phenomenon, Humphrey realized that it was dark.

Naturally
it was dark. Lying quite still, he summoned hasty argument on the matter. This was the little cave – the one into which the entrance was a mere slit – and beyond that was the big cave; and of the big cave there was perhaps as much as a hundred yards before its gentle curve admitted a first gleam of daylight… So
naturally
it was dark.

But this, although it located him, orientated him, really helped very little. A box of matches, or the nursery nightlight for which he had never entirely shed a lingering regard, would have helped a great deal more. He shut his eyes once more – it was absolutely his only means of
dealing
with the darkness – and thought again. His pursuers, if they had been outwitted and adequately insulted by himself, had yet been finally routed by some exterior agency. There had been a police whistle which had sent them, already rattled as they were, pell-mell to their motor-boat waiting at the other end of the cave. But what had happened after that? Not – his recollection, although it was dim, told him – any massive irruption of the blue-clad (or here, rather, green-clad) forces of the law. And certainly no comfortable tramp of constabulary feet echoed in the cavern now. There were noises – and noises reverberating so that he by no means had to strain his ears to hear them. But they were only the murmurs and lappings, the dull explosions, the odd and muted musical notes, that the place contrived, as it were, on its own steam.

He must wait. Quite simply, he must do that. He had suggested to his enemies that their best chance was to retire a little and lurk – and might they not be doing so now? Whatever had disturbed them was apparently departed, and the possibility that they were themselves still a force actively in the field was at least something too substantial to take chances with. He had practically told them so, given his assurance that he would in no circumstances emerge until substantial and authentic succour had appeared. And it
would
appear; there could be no doubt of that. Let a man and a boy disappear in this district, and such a cavern as this would suggest itself as one of the first places to be hunted through. Even were he to fall unconscious again where he lay – or, worse, in that corner of the little cave inaccessible to inspection from without – competent searchers would not neglect the possibility. Ultimately, he was entirely safe… And thus Humphrey comforted himself, as he was so frequently able to do, by the slightly complacent exercise of his own good brain. Only, of course, he was neglecting the factor of the dark.

And it
was
dark. Here in the little cave the very most attenuated quiver of the sense of sight was absent. This was something he did not at all like. And in a flash he realized that there was still danger. Or rather there was a choice of dangers. Another five minutes here and he would have lost his nerve, would be battering himself wildly against the rock in a panic so catastrophic as to deprive him of all chance of finding and negotiating the narrow cleft leading to ultimate sunlight. That was one, and a very horrid, danger. The other danger, of course, was simply that they
were
waiting. He had said that he would die rather than fall into their hands, and he had abundantly meant it. But to die was one thing; to buffet himself into madness against invisible rock was quite another… He got to his feet – it was an action surprisingly difficult of accomplishment – and felt his way cautiously round the little cave. It occurred to him that there might be bats. He resolved to keep on remembering this, because a bat when one was
thinking
of bats would be rather less upsetting than, as it were, a bat from the blue. And, now, here was the narrow slit.

It was the worst thing yet. When he had come through it from without it had been in blind escape from imminent seizure; and, although bruised and breathless, his fund of nervous energy had been sufficient to honour the draft. Now he was stiff all over; danger lay on either side of the cleft; and danger lay, too,
in
it. Surely, surely, it was now narrower by far! He squeezed and strained himself to a dead stop, crushed in a brutal vice of stone, with nothing but his sense of touch to help him, with even that sense hopelessly crippled as his arms, his wrists, his very fingers seemed no longer to have an inch’s play. Terror rose and lipped the threshold of his strained possession of himself. Panic
here
and he was done for. All that rescuers would find
here
– pinned in the rock – would be the wreck of a small boy, irretrievably insane. Or so it seemed to Humphrey, who was prone, as we know, to dramatic views. He gave a last shove – it would certainly mean one thing or the other – and found himself outside. He found himself, too,
seeing
something: the ghost of a glint of water. And this meant that he must be reeling crazily on the narrow ledge’s verge, the sea flowing between its fatally smooth walls below. He took a step backwards and sat down.

At least the bearded man and his associates had not simply been lurking there, ready to pounce. And, if they were still lurking at all, would it not be here rather than in the open air beyond the cavern – a place which, however lonely, was yet within possible observation from the cliff, and from the sea, and by possible wanderers on the shore? Humphrey, taking fresh heart from this, got to his feet again and groped his way painfully forward.

It was incredible that along this ledge, that through this utter darkness, he had actually run headlong less, as it must be, than a couple of hours ago. Now, he could achieve nothing that could be called a walk, a crawl; he edged his way forward, fumbling and shuffling, as his very grandmother, similarly placed, might have done. And his heart was in his mouth throughout every instant of his progress. It was almost as if he were enjoying the luxury of manageable, of assessable fear.

And then he saw the light. Incredibly, alarmingly almost, like the first appearing sliver of the sun’s orb after the long arctic night, it filtered in from distance and reached him; another moment only, and it distinguishably lit the remaining path before him. At this he paused, irresolution taking him like a strong hand. Would it not be best to wait at this spot – here, with the nursery nightlight comfortably glimmering in its corner? Then, should his enemies appear, he could retreat to the fastness from which he had just issued. But he had no sooner made this proposition to himself than he knew it to be nonsense; knew, that was to say, that he would never enter that little cave again. It had been the scene of his greatest triumph, of his most vulgar exultation. And it had been the scene of his life’s most staggering scare. That, decidedly, was enough. Humphrey walked rapidly forward and out of the cavern.

The sea had been silver and now it was blue, a deep, deep blue; it had stirred into life, moreover, and there were little ridges of dazzling foam, whiter than any white thing had ever been before. The sky, too, was blue and brilliant; it was dressed with incredible clouds; gulls in enormous freedom cut it with their passionate geometry. Humphrey ran forward, let himself be received again into the abundant world, tumbled himself out upon its bosom with the tears streaming down his cheeks. Straight before him was the gleaming, empty beach. Across it – the only sign of change he could discern – a double row of footprints led to and from the cavern, traversing the lovely sand that poor Ivor had deemed so treacherous. And where they had gone Humphrey could go. He took them as a line and ran – a limping run with a stab of pain in every stride. He would have shouted – why ever should he not? – had he not preferred to keep all his breath for joyous speed. The footprints – they were as small, almost, as a child’s – ended in a little eddy or sortie of others in a familiar spot. It was the place where he had himself made that brief dash across the sand before Ivor had called out to him to halt. And now before him there was only the path that slanted up the cliff. When he had climbed that the strange, the blessed populousness of rural Ireland would lie before him: tiny fields dotted with the bright homespuns of the labouring folk; dykes and hedgerows along which were strewn the same bright colours of the drying wool; white cottages with their open eyes and pricked ears; donkeys, sheep, goats; the absurd and suspect poultry of Killyboffin Hall.

He climbed, and that really hurt his knee badly. He braced himself against the pain by thinking, not very laudably, of the deep weal that must now lie across the bearded man’s face. Perhaps that would help the police to nobble him. And perhaps the man whom he had kicked – Humphrey, wallowing in atrocious satisfactions, reached the top of the cliff. Everything was as he had imagined it, with one addition. At the end of the commanding headland to which the cliff here rose there stood the solitary figure of his friend, Miss Margaret Liberty. He took to his heels and ran to her as if she offered all the security of the Brigade of Guards. Then, becoming aware that this was a childish performance, he slowed down to an exaggerated saunter. ‘Hullo,’ he said – and his tone was extravagantly casual. ‘It’s a lovely morning, isn’t it?’ He paused, reading in her faint amusement an indication that this had been a little overdone. He gave a sudden incongruous sob. ‘They’ve killed my cousin.’

But behind her moment’s relaxation Miss Liberty had been grave. And at this, indeed, her gravity scarcely increased; it merely became shot with surprise, with the rapid recasting of some picture with which she was preoccupied. ‘In the cave?’ she asked.

Humphrey looked at her with answering surprise. ‘You know about the cave?’

‘I have been watching you come across the sands from it. Why didn’t you answer me, Humphrey? Where were you hiding?’

The boy was now open-mouthed.
‘You
!’