The Journeying Boy (6 page)

Mr Thewless smiled. ‘I don’t think he would be allowed to take it, just like that. But if you don’t want it we can leave it here and make some arrangement when we get back.’

‘I don’t know that we
shall
get back.’ Humphrey’s glance as he uttered this dark absurdity was travelling rapidly over the people round about. ‘We’ll take it,’ he said abruptly. ‘Come on.’ And he tucked the shot-gun under his arm and strode forward.

Mr Thewless, had there been leisure for the action, might have paused to mop his brow. As it was, he hurried after the porter, who was trotting in sinister haste far in front of them. Their coach was A3, which meant right at the front of the interminable train. They gained it, however, with a good half-minute to spare. The man piled their luggage on the racks. Mr Thewless handed him a shilling and then, after rapid calculation, a further sixpence. The train was moving.

‘We’ve done it!’

Humphrey’s voice had rung out surprisingly. So might the earth’s first space-traveller exclaim as his rocket took off for the moon. The two other occupants of the compartment looked up, smiling. One was a bearded man with pebbly glasses. The other was the elderly lady who had been in the taxi behind Humphrey’s. On one side a towering brick wall was gliding past them; on the other were lines of sleeping-cars, themselves apparently fast asleep in the afternoon sunshine. Presently the whole sprawl of North London would be hurtling southwards. Then the Midlands. There would be no pause till Crewe.

Mr Thewless, tucking his gloves into a crevice on the rack above his head, heard a sigh behind him, and when he turned to his pupil it was to observe that some quick reaction had seized the boy. Humphrey was curled up in the corner seat opposite, his head just above the level of the window-frame, staring out with unseeing eyes. He had grown to a casual seeming smaller and younger, and yet at the same time he appeared to be supporting some unnatural burden of years. His brow was slightly puckered and for the first time Mr Thewless noticed that there were dark lines under his black eyes.

In fact, Humphrey Paxton had retired into a sort of infantile privacy, like some unhappy small boy being taken to his first private school. And into that privacy it was necessary to intrude. That, Mr Thewless saw with some misgiving, was a condition of getting anywhere. Somehow – and the sooner the better – he had to rap firmly on the door and walk in.

But it would assuredly be useless to force the lock. For the moment at least it might be best to leave Humphrey alone. Mr Thewless, therefore, got out his book – it was a volume of verse – and opened it. He read a page with reasonable concentration – it would never do to let his professional problem of the moment obsess him – and turned over to the next. And here his mind must a little have wandered, for it was some moments before the oddity of what had occurred came home to him. What he had stumbled on was in the form of a rhetorical question; and it was substantially the question that he now realized to be forming itself with some urgency in his own mind about his new pupil. Acting on impulse, he leant forward and handed Humphrey the book. ‘Do you know this?’ he asked. ‘The one called “Midnight on the Great Western”.’ And he pointed to the place on the page.

What past can be yours, O journeying boy,

Towards a world unknown,

Who calmly, as if incurious quite

On all at stake, can undertake

This plunge alone?

Humphrey read the lines, frowning. He read them again and abruptly sat up. ‘Is that by Shelley?’ he demanded.

‘No; it’s by Thomas Hardy.’

‘Was he as good a poet as Shelley?’

‘I happen to like some of his poetry better. But he was not nearly so good a poet. He kept on being depressed. And although you can write poetry out of despair, just as you can write it out of joy, it’s very hard to write it out of depression.’

‘I see.’ Humphrey sounded as if, in fact, he did see, and he was looking at his tutor wide-eyed. ‘I wasn’t told you knew about those things.’ His voice was, if anything, rather hostile, and he handed Mr Thewless back his book at once. ‘Have you been told to find out about
my
past?’ he demanded abruptly.

Mr Thewless smiled. ‘I’ve been told to give you a hand with your future. But if you care to tell me about your past I shall be quite interested.’

Humphrey ignored this. ‘Did you show me that poem because I look as if I’m taking a plunge into a world unknown?’

‘You do a little look as if you think you are.’

‘The poem says “calmly”. Do I look as if I’m doing it that way?’

Mr Thewless hesitated. ‘No, you don’t. You look as if you found it rather more exciting than is comfortable. But I think you could manage quite a lot of calmness at a pinch.’

Faintly but perceptibly, Humphrey Paxton blushed. ‘About poetry,’ he said abruptly. ‘Do you know the verse Mary Carruthers writes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think it good?’

‘No.’

Humphrey’s eyes widened further. He looked almost guiltily round him. ‘Not good! I – I know her quite well. She has me to tea. She’s awfully decent.’

‘As a person? Perhaps she is. But not her poetry. It’s awfully indecent, as a matter of fact.’

Humphrey gave a sudden whoop of wild laughter. ‘Do you mean because it makes you blush inside?’

‘Just that. You see, you know it’s no good, really.’

Humphrey gasped. It was an unambiguous gasp this time – like that of a person who has been lightened of at least one of many confusions. ‘I say,’ he said, ‘do we get tea?’

‘Yes. I think I hear the fellow coming now. Let’s go along. And we get dinner on the train, too.’

‘Wizard!’ And Humphrey Paxton tumbled himself into the corridor. He looked like any one of the innumerable small fry whom summer releases from English schools. Without any illusions, Mr Thewless followed him.

The first-class restaurant car was empty when they entered it; a minute later the elderly lady from their own compartment came in and sat down in a far corner. Humphrey picked up a printed card from the table and handed it politely to his tutor. Mr Thewless glanced at it. ‘I don’t think it tells one much.’

‘And not about the dinner either.’ Humphrey shook his head so that his gleaming black hair tossed on his forehead. ‘Some man in Whitehall sits and tells the railway just how many slices of bread and scrape it may give us, and just how thick to cut the railway slab. It’s tyranny.’

‘Is it? Suppose that we–’ Mr Thewless looked across at Humphrey. ‘Are you a Cavalier or a Roundhead?’

‘I’m a Roundhead.’ Humphrey spoke decidedly.

‘Very well. Suppose we were a group of Roundheads besieged in a castle and that there were only so many tins of biscuits–’

‘They didn’t have tins. And I don’t know that they had biscuits.’

‘Then say so many kegs of salted beef. Would it be tyranny in the man in charge to insist on a proper share-out?’

‘It would depend on how he was elected.’

Mr Thewless shook his head. ‘I don’t think it would. As long as he made a good job of it, the particular manner of his election would be irrelevant. Irrelevant, that is to say, to the particular point at issue. And if he worked very hard at his job–’

Humphrey gave his sudden peal of laughter. ‘You work terribly hard at
yours
,’ he said.

This was a disconcerting thrust. Mr Thewless was somewhat inclined to the doctrine that education should go on all the time. But now he abandoned the Roundheads and poured himself out a cup of tea. ‘Can you eat all right?’ he asked.

‘Eat all right? Why ever not?’

‘Because of the dentist. He sometimes leaves one a bit sore.’

‘Oh, that! Old Partridge is never too bad.’

Mr Thewless put down his cup. ‘Is that Mr Partridge in Devonshire Crescent?’

‘Yes. I always go to him.’ And Humphrey looked his tutor straight in the eye.

Mr Thewless felt a sudden sinking of the heart. For Mr Partridge happened to be his sister’s dentist and that very morning Mr Partridge’s nurse had rung up to cancel an appointment. When Humphrey claimed to have visited his dentist that dentist had been in bed with influenza.

Prevarication in a pupil is always tiresome. But in this instance, Mr Thewless found, it was also strangely disturbing. Why? He could discover no sufficient answer, and was aware only of the elements of some fantastic suspicion stirring anew in the depth of his mind. He decided on an obstinate return to education. ‘My point,’ he said, ‘was that England is rather like a besieged castle today. And that’s why we none of us get more than our share.’

‘I did. I just asked.’ And Humphrey pointed to his plate.

The boy had certainly managed to get two pieces of cake. ‘I imagine,’ said Mr Thewless austerely, ‘that you were given mine as well.’

‘No, sir. As a matter of fact you’ve eaten yours. Only you were thinking so much about the Roundheads – or Mr Partridge – that you didn’t notice.’

Looking down at his own plate, Mr Thewless saw sufficient crumby evidence to substantiate this. Humphrey Paxton, he realized, could be extremely annoying – and only the more so because he was not in the least impertinent. He had good manners. Or perhaps he had merely a natural and undisciplined charm which passed as these. Whatever he had – Mr Thewless reflected with sudden irritation – he abundantly needed. The world is never for long very patient with its Humphrey Paxtons. To get along at all, they must necessarily exploit whatever powers of pleasing they may possess. For a moment – and all inconsequently – Mr Thewless felt himself invaded by an unwholesome sense of pathos. Just so must Thomas Hardy have felt as he contemplated that journeying boy – docketing him both for a doleful poem and for the most shattering of his novels. But it was not Mr Thewless’ business to develop cosmic feelings about young Humphrey. What was required was some provisional analysis of the lad’s strength and weakness – and not merely in mathematics and Latin. How serious was this queer sense of surrounding conspiracy and danger amid which he moved?

Mr Thewless glanced across the table. Humphrey, having eaten all there was to eat, was showing a disposition to curl up once more and suck his thumb. This clearly was a species of retreating to the nursery and locking the door. But against what? Mr Thewless looked out at the window. Perched on a fence, two little girls were waving at the train and behind them on a long, dull canal a gaily painted barge was moving southwards; sitting on the deck in the level evening sunshine was a woman peeling potatoes. There could have been no more peaceful scene; all the security of England lay in it. But Humphrey, it was to be presumed, moved during much of his waking life in an invisible world, stubbornly sustaining nerve-racking roles. Humphrey Paxton, Special Agent… Humphrey Paxton, the Secret Service Boy. And all this had begun to usurp upon reality, as had been instanced by the absurdities at Euston. Yes – thought Mr Thewless, laboriously reassuring himself against unformulated alarms – that was how the matter stood. It was a state of affairs common enough, and nothing was more foolish than to make a profound psychological pother over it, as the boy’s father was perhaps unhappily prone to do. Yet –

And Mr Thewless frowned absently at the bill which had been laid in front of him. For something, he found, prompted him to distrust this simple diagnosis. About Humphrey when he was alert and aware there was a sense of covert calculation which was disturbingly of the waking world. He had been sizing Mr Thewless up. And he had been sizing up too a novel but perfectly actual situation – one which his day-dreams had perhaps helped in building, but which was itself by no means a day-dream. Or so some instinct in Mr Thewless declared. And instinct declared further – obscurely and most disturbingly – that more than one sort of danger would attend any disposition to deny that Humphrey Paxton knew a hawk from a handsaw. He did not simply spar with shadows in quite the way that Sir Bernard supposed. He was imaginative, unruly, ill-adjusted – an uncompromising problem at a dozen points. But to explain his conduct, his bearing, the essential impression he gave, by declaring that he was an incipient little lunatic suffering from delusions of persecution: this was to run counter to some powerful inner persuasion.

It would perhaps have been well had Mr Thewless, getting thus considerably far in his speculations in a novel field, as it were paused to take breath. As it was, his mind took a further leap, and found itself thereby on a perch so hazardous that mere vertigo was for a time the result. The impulse to scramble down again – only made the more overwhelming by a certain nightmarish power of reproduction with variation which the horrid eminence was henceforward to display: this must be held accountable for the deplorable muddle with which he was ever afterwards to associate the successive stages of his journey to the west of Ireland. It was as if the celebrated twilight with which that region is romantically associated were already a little clouding his intellectual processes.

What now at once came to him was a suspicion, a sudden and topsy-turvy suspicion having for the time much more of power than of precision. Something of the sort had come fleetingly into his mind earlier, when he had been perturbed by the tardy appearance of his charge at Euston. But his new speculation elaborated upon that. If the atmosphere of lurking melodrama which this totally unknown boy carried with him belonged somehow not to a fantastic but to an actual world, then what significance must attach to that extraordinary performance at the station whereby Mr Thewless’ first encounter with him had been entirely a matter of his, Mr Thewless’, having elaborately to establish
his
identity? And why had the boy told a lie about Mr Partridge the dentist? Why had he not known that Mr Partridge was ill? Why had the shot-gun taken him wholly by surprise? Why, above all, did he involuntarily give the impression of one embarking with full awareness upon a novel and hazardous adventure requiring constant wary calculation?

It is very possible that had Mr Thewless continued this surprising train of thought undisturbed he would have been able to lay out a number of alternative hypotheses in an orderly manner, and so have begun to see some way round the problem by which he was confronted. Unfortunately at this moment he looked up and caught the boy’s eye. It was this that gave him his sudden and disabling impression of being perched or poised as it were above some horrid precipice. For the boy’s gaze was no longer abstracted. It was directed upon Mr Thewless in naked distrust and fear. But just so – Mr Thewless realized with horror – was he looking at the boy. It was as if a nameless and corrosive suspicion had instantaneously propagated itself between them.