The Journeying Boy (11 page)

Having got so far in fantastic speculation, Mr Thewless felt his head begin to swim. It was just as the woman in the corner had said; distrust was spreading itself like a miasma around him; he had a nightmarish feeling that he could be certain of nobody; were he to summon the guard, even that official would presently suggest himself as an emissary of darkness. But Miss Liberty herself, although annoying, was at least genuine; there could be no doubt about
her
. And Mr Thewless glanced across at the elderly lady’s corner. As he did so he felt a queer stirring in his scalp, and this was immediately succeeded by an even more unpleasant pricking in the spine. The woman in the corner was
not
Miss Liberty…

Long ago Mr Thewless had been deeply impressed by a certain scientific romance. It told how (just as in H G Wells’ novel) the Martians wished to possess the earth. But they could do so only by projecting their own intelligences into human bodies – and this they had begun to do. No earthly being was safe. A man might turn to his wife – and in that instant the being who looked out through his eyes might be that of a malign invader from a distant planet… And now, as he looked at Miss Liberty, it was something of the same sort that Mr Thewless experienced. For a second – a mere fraction of time – the person answering his gaze
was someone else
. But this was madness! And even as he held the woman’s gaze the hallucination passed. More, it even explained itself. Miss Liberty had been at her exciting book again; its illusion had her in its grip; that absurd impression he had received of a cold mind grappling with a crisis was no more than a reflection of whatever absurdities were transacting themselves within its pages.

Nevertheless, Mr Thewless’ perturbation grew. He got to his feet, shoved at the sliding-door giving on the corridor, and scrambled out of the compartment. Doing this somewhat blindly, he collided with the bearded man, who was now returning to his seat. The impact would in any event have been not inconsiderable. But at this moment it happened that the train, now spurting like a seasoned runner down the final stretch of track to Morecambe and Heysham, swayed over some system of points – with the result that Mr Thewless found himself precipitated upon the bearded man with all the violence of a deliberate assault. And as a result, the bearded man’s glasses were knocked off. For a moment the two men looked at each other – and Mr Thewless realized with a fresh stab of apprehension that the eyes fixed upon his own were perfectly focused. Assuredly they were
not
the eyes of a man who has just been deprived of unusually strong lenses of a genuine sort. Moreover – and this completed Mr Thewless’ dismay – the glance which they fleetingly held had a fresh familiarity which it took only a fraction of time to place. It was that same glance of cold appraisal of some invisible situation that Mr Thewless had fantastically imagined himself to discern in the innocent Miss Liberty…

The bearded man picked up his glasses and rumbled an apology. Mr Thewless, who had been much more in fault, found himself without the power of reply; he edged past the bearded man in a mere impulse to get away, and found himself stumbling up the corridor. Outside, dusk had now fallen and was deepening rapidly. It was like an impalpable tunnel closing in upon the hurtling train, and already the flying wheels and pounding pistons were taking on the deeper note they seem to sound at night.

The boy was missing… Mr Thewless made his way up the corridor, peering into the succession of first-class compartments on his right. Business men, Army officers, dogs, expensive children: each held its appropriate quota of these. But of the boy there was, of course, no sign. Why should there be? Mr Thewless got to the end of the corridor and tried the lavatory. It was empty. He passed into the next coach. Here there were two lavatories and one was occupied. But even as Mr Thewless paused doubtfully the door opened and something cannoned unaccountably against his knees. Looking down, he had the shock of feeling that open madness had seized him at last. For what he saw was an elderly and rather intelligent-looking man – but put together on a scale of something like four inches to the foot. With a word of apology, this apparition scurried down the corridor, occasionally pausing to stand on tip-toe and peer into a compartment. And at almost the same moment a door opened halfway down the coach and there advanced upon Mr Thewless what appeared to be a schoolboy of about Humphrey Paxton’s age. Only this schoolboy was some eight feet high and correspondingly broad, and he came down the corridor only by a series of muscular exertions which made him pant as he moved… Mr Thewless glanced in a kind of despair into the first compartment upon which he came – and met the impassive gaze of a Chinese lady who was holding a white monkey on a chain. At the farther end of the compartment two Indians were playing cards, and in the middle an enormous Negro smoked a cigar. And the compartment held a fifth occupant – an inert figure entirely swathed in bandages…

The train swayed. The engine could not be far away, for its roar was very loud. Nevertheless, other sounds predominated. There was a buzz of excited chatter in half a dozen outlandish tongues; there was a further baffling babel of growls and hisses, snarls and chirps; there was an intermittent and wholly mysterious deep reverberation, as if some valve were being periodically opened in a vast and grating machine.

Upon all these appearances and sensations Mr Thewless did not pause to reflect. He was surrounded by a congeries of foreigners and prodigies; he saw in them only the massive menace which anything of the sort may occasion in a mind swayed by primitive impulse; here was the enemy, and that was that! Nor was Mr Thewless any longer very clear on the first promptings of his confusion. The boy was gone. He had vanished in a sinister way. And his genuineness or otherwise – which was really the crux of the matter – had for the moment passed out of focus.

Mr Thewless glanced again at the Negro, who was dressed with great ostentation as an Edwardian dandy. Had he been in possession of his customary lucidity of mind, it is doubtful whether this circumstance would have appeared to him as particularly suggestive of covert conspiracy. But now he had no hesitation. He pushed back the door and entered the compartment.

In the reading of Mr Thewless the romance about the Martians had been an early vagary representing something altogether out of the way. Moreover, with the possible exception of the episcopate and of His Majesty’s judges, he frequented the cinema as sparingly as any man in England. What now came to him, therefore, must be regarded as no matter of easy reminiscence, but rather as an exhibition of native intellectual vigour. Mr Thewless pointed sternly at the almost obliterated figure hunched opposite the Negro and pronounced the words, ‘Remove those bandages!’

For there could surely be no doubt of it. This swathed and limp figure was something below adult size. The boy had been drugged, and was now being thus ingeniously smuggled away. ‘Remove those bandages!’ repeated Mr Thewless, and glanced commandingly round the compartment.

The Indians desisted from their card-playing. ‘Please?’ they said simultaneously. Their eyes were moist; their linen was finical; they had shoes with very pointed toes.

The Chinese lady leant sideways and dived swiftly into a silk bag. Mr Thewless nerved himself for the emergence of a fire-arm. But what actually appeared was a nut, and this the Chinese lady handed to the white monkey. Then she looked at Mr Thewless. ‘Iss,’ she said – not very intelligibly but with perfect agreeableness. ‘Iss.’

The Negro, who had been more particularly addressed, took the cigar from his mouth, balanced it carefully on a newspaper beside him, and with the hand thus disengaged gravely took his hat off to Mr Thewless. It was a grey bowler and must, Mr Thewless thought, have been specially manufactured to encompass that enormous skull. And now, having completed this salute, the Negro spoke in a voice the depth of which would have made the bearded man’s rumblings sound like a thin falsetto. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I am this gentleman’s medical adviser. And I cannot agree to your proposal.’

Anger welled in Mr Thewless. ‘Remove those bandages!’ he thundered.

The Chinese lady reached for another nut. The Indians looked at each other wonderingly, and then at Mr Thewless. ‘Please?’ they said.

And the Negro considered. He appeared altogether unperturbed. ‘The fee,’ he said, ‘will be half a guinea.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘In the common way of business, and at regular hours, the sum required is sixpence, payable at the door. But here I cannot sanction anything of the sort under half a guinea – or, if it is more convenient to you, say a ten-shilling note.’

‘Release the boy!’ said Mr Thewless.

This time the Negro looked genuinely surprised. ‘My patient,’ he said, ‘is Mr Wambus. Professionally, he is known as the Great Elasto, the Indiarubber Man. I insist upon his travelling in this way because of the constant danger of lesion and infection. Technically, of course, his is a morbid condition of the skin. Allow me.’ Rapidly the Negro untied a bandage on the arm of the listless creature opposite. ‘Be so good as to pinch,’ he said; ‘pinch and pull.’

Mr Thewless pinched and pulled. The skin responded with a horrid spongy resilience. As a nasty sensation it would be uncommonly cheap at sixpence; Mr Thewless produced ten shillings, thrust them hastily upon the Edwardian Negro, and stumbled from the compartment feeling sick. The white monkey gibbered at him as he passed. ‘Iss,’ said the Chinese lady. He was again in the corridor.

Humphrey, the pseudo-Humphrey, the Great Elasto…in considerable confusion of mind Mr Thewless continued to plod towards the engine. This whole coach must have been reserved for the circus troupe – or whatever the abominable creatures might be – and in the remaining compartments there was nobody upon whom he was prompted to pause. It was now dark outside and he moved down his narrow shaft of swaying space – on one side of him a night grown indefinably ominous; on the other this nightmarish collection of freaks, the unaccomplished works of Nature’s hand, abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixed… To the human and sub-human gibbering there was now increasingly added a mere brute bellowing, with above this that deep periodic reverberation which one could almost feel it was beyond the power of the labouring engine itself to produce.

At the end of the coach was a single lavatory. Mr Thewless peered in and found it empty; he passed on and discovered himself to be in a guard’s van, dimly lit and full of tumultuous sound. For here in baskets and hutches and cages, or slumbering or straining at the ends of chains, were lemurs and Alsatians, goats and cockatoos, cobras and Shetland ponies, racoons and rabbits. Of the animal part of the circus there was missing only the horses, the elephants, and the larger carnivora. But even without the roar of lions the place was a pandemonium. For the rest, it was filled with the usual assortment of luggage: trunks, suitcases, baskets, a pair of drums, a cased and swathed double-bass looking unnaturally large in the dim light, a weighing-machine with some heavy weights, a couple of motor-mowers tied up in canvas. But it was neither the animals nor any of these objects that immediately caught and held Mr Thewless’ attention; it was the single human occupant of the van. Sitting plumb in the middle on a large steel and leather chair was a woman of gargantuan proportions, fast asleep and snoring. It was this snoring, indeed, that had been so mysteriously echoing down the train.

Here, in fact, was the Fat Lady. And there could be no doubt as to
why
she was here. Into no ordinary railway compartment could her bulk possibly be introduced; only the double doors of a luggage van would admit this mountain of humanity… Mr Thewless stared, fascinated. Despite himself, he had a sudden and acute vision of this creature stripped of the gaudy clothes in which she was swaddled – a vision of flesh piled upon flesh in continental vistas.

‘License my roving hands, and let them go,

Before, behind, between, above, below…’

Mr Thewless felt his brain reel. Not often did his well-ordered mind behave in this way.
O my America! my new-found-land!…
At this moment the engine hooted and the Fat Lady woke up.

She opened one eye – an operation involving the systematic redisposition of fold upon fold of puffy and proliferating tissue. She gave a single vast respiration under the influence of which her bosom heaved like a monstrous and straining dirigible
(the Sestos and Abydos of her breasts
, thought Mr Thewless wildly) and then she opened her other eye with the same laboriousness as the first. ‘’Ullo,’ she said suspiciously. ‘Wot are you after?’ And, much as if she divined the extreme impropriety of Mr Thewless’ disordered imaginings, she drew several yards of outer garment with a careful modesty more closely around herself. ‘If you come to water them dorgs,’ she said, ‘stop making passes and get on with it. ’Ere, where’s my tablets?’

‘I am looking for a schoolboy.’ Mr Thewless raised his voice to a shout in order to be heard above the animal noises around him. ‘A
schoolboy
, ma’am! You haven’t seen him pass through here?’

‘I ain’t seen no schoolboy. ’Aving my forty winks, I been. But likely enough ’e taken my tablets.’ The Fat Lady began systematically to shake and wobble the several parts of her person, apparently with the idea of dislodging and so discovering the missing articles. Mr Thewless followed the resulting undulations with horrid and unabated fascination; they were seismic or oceanic in character, or they suggested the sort of deep rubbery shudder which a passing bus may communicate to an adjacent building. Strangely, before this spectacle, the erotic imaginings of the poet Donne continued to possess him:

‘Succeeds a boundless sea, but yet thine eye

Some Island moles may scattered there descry;

And sailing towards her India, in that way

Shall at her fair Atlantick…’

‘’Ere they are!’ cried the Fat Lady, and held up a bottle triumphantly. ‘I don’t care to be without them – not between one forty winks and the next, I don’t. You ’ave to remember the night starvation orl right when you ’ave a domestic economy like mine.’ The Fat Lady tapped herself on what the poet would have described as the Hellespont of her bosom. ‘And ’ave you reckoned the turning over? The doctors calculate as ’ow we turn over thirty-five times in the night. Now, just consider what that means with me!’ And the Fat Lady shook her head darkly, so that her cheeks quivered like pallid jellies. ‘Burning up sugar all the time – that’s me!’