The Journeying Boy (18 page)

The hour was late; the ship, although sailing in calm waters, had a gentle motion which Mr Thewless was too poor a sailor to like; the day had produced a succession of obscure and exhausting alarms for which this boy’s fevered mind had been assuredly responsible. Moreover, the boy himself, although sometimes extremely young, had a certain intellectual precocity, receptive to mature ideas. Had it not been for all these facts Mr Thewless would scarcely have plunged in this reckless way into what he now supposed to be the well-head of Humphrey’s troubles. Naturally, he expected his pupil to be startled; and he was not without an uneasy suspicion that there is much hazard in abruptly exposing or controverting delusions that have painfully built themselves up in a distressed mind. What he hoped was that by this outspokenness there might rather be achieved some salutary shock. He looked at Humphrey warily and was far from reassured. The boy was now sitting very still. His breathing was short and the pupils of his eyes appeared dilated. But at least he was thinking. Indeed it was evident that some battle was going on between an emotional and an intellectual response to what his tutor had been saying.

And at length he spoke. ‘You don’t think that I could
really
be in possession of some dangerous secret?’

‘I think it quite likely that you believe yourself to have gained some guilty knowledge that you ought not to have. You see, Humphrey, having – um – made friends rather early with this girl–’

‘Oh,
that
!’ There was a disconcerting shade of intellectual impatience in Humphrey’s voice. ‘I’m not talking about that at all.’

‘It’s what sets you imagining things, nevertheless.’ Mr Thewless was tired, dogmatic. ‘And you must face the fact.’

‘I’m facing quite a lot of facts. For instance, the fact that you are right in quite a lot of the things you say. I
do
think that I am being plotted against by cunning enemies. And I
do
think that I am being shadowed by spies. And I
do
think that my father is mixed up in it. But that’s not the end, by any means.’ Humphrey was now looking at his tutor with an expression oddly compounded of desperation and malice. ‘What you called meeting oneself apparently involved in some obscure adventure. I’ve done that too. In fact, I saw myself this afternoon. It was terribly queer.’

Mr Thewless felt rather queer himself. He recalled with a twinge of particular uneasiness his own momentary impression of a second Humphrey on board the train. He recalled too that in folklore there is no more certain presage of disaster than to meet oneself face to face – to meet what the Germans call one’s
Doppelgänger
. And no doubt the superstition reflected some actual fact of mind. If Humphrey really believed that he had thus encountered himself his nervous condition must indeed be deplorable. ‘Nonsense!’ Mr Thewless said loudly to the empty smoke-room.

‘Actually, I ought to say that I
heard
myself – but I suppose it’s much the same thing. It was in a cinema. And you were there too – more or less.’

‘
I
was there!’ Mr Thewless’ dismay was now tempered with indignation.

‘You see, I didn’t really go to the dentist’s this afternoon. I took Beverley to see a rotten film called
Plutonium Blonde
. I dare say some people were quite amused. But with Daddy being the sort of person he is, I get quite enough about smashing the atom at home. And this one was just silly. There was a sort of tropical heroine, all bottom and breastworks–’

‘Um,’ said Mr Thewless.

‘And she had a revolver with a special bullet, so that in the end–’ Here Humphrey suddenly paused. ‘Only we didn’t wait for the end. Because when I found that I was sitting next to myself I got into a panic and bolted, dragging Beverley with me. She was terribly puzzled. And naturally I couldn’t explain to her. She’s quite, quite dumb.’

‘Of course, Humphrey, I am very glad that you are telling me all this. But are you quite sure that you were not acting rather extravagantly? You say you only
heard
this boy. And just because his voice sounded rather like your own–’

‘It didn’t. As it happened, I could be quite sure of that. Because, you see, this other boy had a lisp.’

‘Then if it was
not
–’

‘But it
was
. You see, they whispered a bit – and chiefly about a gun. And the boy was Humphrey Paxton. And the man was his new tutor. And they were going to Ireland.’

Humphrey paused again. The throb of the ship’s engines vibrated in the stale air of the empty smoking-room and very faintly they could hear the slap of water against the hull. Mr Thewless found it necessary to speak. ‘I am afraid–’ he began.

‘I know.’ Humphrey appeared to be quite calm now, and he was momentarily at his most mature. ‘It must be a great worry having been landed with so imaginative a child. What do you think of the story so far?’

‘I am more convinced than ever that we ought to be in bed.’ And Mr Thewless got to his feet with a firmness that somewhat belied his inner mind.

‘But the really odd part is still to come.’ Humphrey remained obstinately curled up in his chair. ‘I mean about your being so right on all the things I fancy to myself. Didn’t you say something about being imprisoned in dark, confined spaces?’

‘Possibly I did. But I realize now that these things are not to be discussed with any advantage at present.’

‘Well, that was what happened in the train.’ As Humphrey made this announcement, he looked straight at his tutor, and Mr Thewless was aware of what was surely an almost hypnotic power in the dark glance thus directed upon him. Before it, indeed, he felt the need of bracing himself to firm incredulity – for had not some emanation or aura from the boy already wrought havoc in his own plain common sense that day? Almost Mr Thewless would have stopped his ears. But this was something that dignity made impossible, and Humphrey talked on.

‘I imagined that I was imprisoned in a dark, confined space.
Very
confined. Would you expect it to be that?’

Mr Thewless, although he had for some time been moving in an intellectual fog, was nevertheless not without certain instinctive perceptions still. He recognized the irony; recognized that his pupil was making fun of him; and recognized too that in doing so Humphrey had found a sort of safety-valve for great emotional pressure. So he made no reply to the gibe, but simply knocked out his pipe and sat down again on the arm of a chair. The ship was now rolling slightly and the silence was punctuated by the intermittent creak of timber.

‘It was when I left the compartment and went along to the lavatory.’ Humphrey’s voice was suddenly casual. But at the same time it rose a note – and with an effect that Mr Thewless by no means cared for, since it suggested something like hysteria beneath the boy’s malicious calm. ‘I can’t tell you precisely what happened. I only know that I opened the lavatory door, and that it suddenly went dark, and that I was dizzy and quite powerless and being heaved or bundled somewhere – quite a short distance, I think. And then I found that I had been tied up – my hands, I mean – and packed into a box. It was a very frightening thing – well, to imagine.’

Once more Mr Thewless was silent, but his heart was sinking. With a young mind so disordered as this what could possibly be done? At the end of this exhausting and tragic journey to Ireland doctors must be called and Humphrey be taken home. There was nothing for it but that.

‘But then almost at once, and again without my really knowing how it happened, I was pulled out and set free, and a voice said: “There’s the lavatory. Stay in it till the train stops and starts again.” And I did. And there my – my imaginings ended. For the time, that is to say. Besides, of course, one can’t tell what tomorrow may bring.’ Humphrey reached for his gun. ‘And now that you know how right you were, I think we really had better go to bed.’

Mr Thewless, although he had now for some hours been devoutly desiring just this acquiescence on his charge’s part, nodded almost absently. Perhaps – he was doggedly thinking – perhaps it was not so
very
bad after all. The boy had undeniably a nervous intensity that made the communication of these fevered day-dreams an alarming experience. But, for all Mr Thewless knew, the actual confusion of fact and fantasy might be neither very uncommon nor very ominous in one of Humphrey’s years. Was it not, indeed, rather more disconcerting that he himself, a mature man, should quickly have been drawn into an identical insubstantial world on board the Heysham train? And yet one point in Humphrey’s rigmarole particularly worried him. The boy imagined not only that he had been
shut
up, but also that he had been
tied
up as well. And for some reason – the reading, perhaps, of one or another newspaper horror long ago – Mr Thewless regarded this as peculiarly unfortunate. Upon those who indulged in fantasies of fetters and bonds it was likely that the most dismal forms of madness would eventually pounce. If only, thought Mr Thewless, the boy had not persuaded himself of just
that
…

Humphrey’s hand had closed on the canvas-swathed gun. As it did so he winced slightly. ‘It still hurts, rather,’ he said.

‘Hurts?’

‘These.’ And Humphrey stretched out his arms so that the cuffs of his jacket shot backwards. And Mr Thewless’ head swam as he looked. Round each wrist was the red weal left by a cord drawn tight.

‘Tomorrow,’ said Humphrey, ‘it may be dragons or giants. Or pirates or smugglers or torture by Red Indian braves. Or, of course, it may just be spy stuff all over again.’

It is probable that, had Mr Thewless’ education been less extensive than it was, he could not have continued blind to the actual posture of his and Humphrey Paxton’s affairs for so long as he did. To be well informed is not in itself any more certain a blessing than to be rich in material endowment; similar risks in the misapplication of one’s resources have to be accepted in either case. And knowledge is really more dangerous than a bank balance. It will not stay put until we sign a cheque, but must ever, like an importunate child, be nudging us into an awareness of its existence, and encumbering us in whatever we may be about by tumbling at the wrong moment into the wrong place. Had a man of simple mind and circumscribed information rolled wearily into a bunk hard upon being afforded the spectacle of Humphrey’s chafed wrists it is unlikely that he would have got out again next morning without a tolerably firm conviction that the boy had been manhandled. But it was not so with Humphrey’s new tutor.

On the subject of Roman Britain Mr Thewless knew pretty well all that was to be known. In the field of School Certificate, Higher Certificate, Responsions, and Little-go he was almost equally omniscient. And on an enormous number of other matters he had a smattering of information that was both reasonably accurate and reasonably up to date. One of these was morbid psychology. And of this species of learning it is particularly true that slender draughts intoxicate the brain – though whether we are sobered again by large drinking is a matter still perhaps a little in doubt. However this may be, Mr Thewless had undoubtedly read quite a lot about the freakish powers and vagaries of the human mind. It thus came about that early next morning, and as he peered out of his porthole at the mouldering pile of Carrickfergus Castle, there rose fatally into his field of consciousness the beguiling topic of Hysterical Stigmatization.

In particular, Mr Thewless recalled, it is adolescents who are prone to putting up these strange performances. A young girl may be lying quite alone in bed; she will give a sharp cry of pain; and there will straightway be found upon her cheek or back the physical evidences of a bite or scratch or blow. But the mischievous spirits or goblins who are sometimes credited with inflicting these injuries have assuredly no objective existence, and the process illustrates nothing more than the mysterious power that a mind can exercise over the body it inhabits. And so it must be with poor Humphrey. If he was able to persuade himself that he had been pinioned he might well be perfectly able spontaneously to produce the stigmata that would support the fantasy.

As a logical approach to the facts involved there is little doubt that this could have been improved upon. But if the merit of a hypothesis is to be judged merely by the confidence it gives us in jogging through life’s diurnal bewilderments it must be admitted that Mr Thewless’ intelligence had functioned admirably. Walking down the gangway at Belfast, he felt in every sense that he was no longer at sea; and from this feeling of an adequate grasp of the situation he drew resolution to proceed with Sir Bernard Paxton’s holiday plans undisturbed. That his young charge would eventually require the help of medical science was a fact upon which, unhappily, he could now feel little doubt. But to abrupt his journey in a strange town and to announce himself in some bleak consulting room as the itinerant and helpless warden of a demented schoolboy was a procedure at once uncomfortable to contemplate and unnecessarily drastic in face of the immediate situation. It would be altogether wiser to travel straight on to the Paxtons’ relatives – persons of position and substance with whom the responsibility for any further decision might very properly be shared.

Meantime, he might, of course, send an immediate report to Humphrey’s father. But Mr Thewless rather shrank from announcing to Sir Bernard – and that with the baldness required by telegraphic communication – that his cherished son had announced encountering himself in a cinema and later being dramatically, if briefly, bound and shut up in a box. Mr Thewless decided therefore to go straight ahead, and to support the harassments of the coming day upon a resolutely buoyant, nervous tone. In all this he must by no means forfeit his claim to the reader’s sympathy. Nature had made Humphrey Paxton a decidedly odd child; circumstances had dictated that his revelations should be odder still; certain obscure purposes of his own had necessitated these revelations being partial and therefore singularly unconvincing. Moreover, Mr Thewless steadily remembered that this was Paxton’s boy; that genius in its weakness had turned to him for help; and that his obligations in this sad and exhausting affair were by no means to be measured in terms of fifteen guineas a week. An inspector of the CID (Cadover, for example – who was at this moment still being pursued by uneasy dreams in his semi-detached villa at Pinner) or a physician professionally versed in those psychological labyrinths into which Mr Thewless had with an unwary amateurism been dangerously drawn: either of these might have been more immediately useful to Humphrey. But neither could have been any more conscientious according to his lights.