The Journeying Boy (7 page)

Hence Mr Thewless’ hasty hunt, one may say, for a downward path. This would never do. In a moment of indiscipline (he told himself) he had allowed a bizarre and sinisterly-beckoning mistrust to seize him. And Humphrey Paxton, this nervous and unfortunate boy, was instantly aware of it. Almost irreparable damage to their tentative and insecure relationship might be the result. Mr Thewless, partly because he remembered that this was Paxton’s boy, and partly for reasons more immediately human, cursed himself heartily. It was essential that he should try to retrieve the situation as quickly as might be. And he must begin by sweeping his own mind clear of the penny-dreadful rubbish which – perhaps through the operation of some suggestive force from the teeming brain of Humphrey – had so unwontedly invaded it. Here – Mr Thewless in headlong downward scramble reluctantly asserted to himself – was a nervous boy who fancied things; who went in fear of all sorts of non-existent threats to his security. His confidence must be restored. These threats must be treated as the shadows they were.

Thus did Mr Thewless march his thoughts to the top of the hill and march them down again – or rather (to put it frankly) did he give them licence, which they were abundantly to take advantage of quite soon, to scurry up and down as they pleased. At the moment, however, he had them more or less quietly stowed – permitting them, indeed, but one more mild foray. In other words, one final flicker of queer distrust he did at this moment allow himself. ‘Humphrey,’ he asked, ‘have you ever met any of these cousins we are going to stay with?’

The boy shook his head. His gaze had gone blank and uncommunicative. ‘No,’ he said; ‘they’ve never set eyes on me.’ There was a long silence. Humphrey’s thumb stole towards his mouth. Then he checked himself and looked at his tutor steadily. With a movement as of abrupt decision he leant across the table. ‘Sir,’ he asked seriously, ‘have you ever been blackmailed?’

Mr Thewless, because now determined at all costs to be sedative, smiled indulgently and leisurely filled his pipe. ‘No,’ he said; ‘nothing of that sort has ever happened to me.’

‘It has to me.’

‘Has it, Humphrey? You must tell me about it.’ Mr Thewless paused. ‘But when I was a boy I used to get a good deal of fun out of telling myself stories in which things like that happened. Only sometimes the stories got a bit out of hand and worried me.’

‘I see.’

And Humphrey Paxton gave an odd sigh. Mr Thewless rose to return to their compartment. Once more something illusive and disturbing had invaded his consciousness. As he swayed down the corridor – following Humphrey and with the elderly lady behind him – he realized that it was the profound isolation of Hardy’s journeying boy.

While Mr Thewless and his charge were moving unsteadily down the corridor of the 4.55 from Euston Detective-Inspector Thomas Cadover was crossing a broad London thoroughfare with the unconcern of a man once accustomed to controlling the traffic in such places with a pair of large white gloves. Nowadays his attire was pervasively sombre and his hair the only thing that was white about him: it had gone that way as the result of thirty years of fighting Metropolitan crime. During this long period he had seen many men come to the same job and not a few of these leave again – promoted, demoted, retired, or resigned. The fanatical Hudspith was gone and so was the wayward Appleby. But Cadover himself hung on, his hair a little thinner each year as well as whiter, his expression a little grimmer, his eyes sadder, his mouth compressed in an ever firmer line. He had seen tide upon tide of vice and lawlessness rise and lap round the city. Of low life and criminal practice he had seen whole new kinds sprout and flourish; he had seen criminology, answering these, transform itself and transform itself again. Sometimes he thought it about time he was giving over. Still, he was not giving over yet.

He paused on the kerb and bought an evening paper. He turned to the stop press.
West End Cinema Tragedy,
he read.
Scotland Yard Suspects Foul Play.

Well,
he
was Scotland Yard – and the cinema was still a hundred yards off. Newspapers were wonderfully ahead with the news these days. He walked on and the Metrodrome rose before him. Across its monstrous façade sprawled a vast plywood lady. If erect, she would be perhaps fifty feet high; she was reclining, however, in an attitude of sultry abandon amid equatorial vegetation and in a garment the only prominent feature of which was a disordered shoulder-strap. As a background to the broadly accentuated charms of her person – pleasantly framed, indeed, between her six-foot, skyward-pointing breasts – was what appeared to be a two-ocean navy in process of sinking through tropical waters like a stone. One limp hand held a smoking revolver seemingly responsible for this extensive catastrophe. The other, supporting her head, was concealed in a spouting ectoplasm of flaxen hair. Her expression was languorous, provocative, and irradiated by a sort of sanctified lecherousness highly creditable to both the craft and the ardent soul of the unknown painter who had created her. Poised in air, and in curves boldly made to follow the line of her swelling hips, were the words AMOROUS, ARROGANT, ARMED! Above this, in letters ten feet high, was the title PLUTONIUM BLONDE. And higher still, and in rubric scarcely less gigantic, was the simple announcement: ART’S SUPREME ACHIEVEMENT TO DATE.

There were queues all round the cinema. The crowd could afford to be patient. Here, as at Eve’s first party in the Garden, there was no fear lest supper cool; within this monstrous temple of unreason the celluloid feast perpetually renewed itself. And aloft in her other Paradise that second Eve, a prodigal confusion of tropical flesh and nordic tresses, spread wide the snare of her loosened zone and grotesquely elongated limbs. She was like a vast mechanized idol sucking in to her own uses these slowly moving conveyor-belts of humanity… And the crowds were growing as Cadover watched. People were buying the evening paper, reading the stop press and lining up. For here was sensation within sensation.
Art’s supreme achievement to date. Scotland Yard suspects foul play
.

Another squalid crime… Circumstances had made Inspector Cadover a philosopher, and because he was a philosopher he was now depressed. This was the celebrated atom film. This was the manner in which his species chose to take its new command of natural law. Fifty thousand people had died at Hiroshima, and at Bikini ironclads had been tossed in challenge to those other disintegrating nuclei of the sun. The blood-red tide was loosed. And here it was turned to hog’s wash at five shillings the trough, and entertainment tax extra. That some wretched Londoner had met a violent death while taking his fill semed a very unimportant circumstance. To track down the murderer – if murderer there was – appeared a revoltingly useless task. Mere anarchy was loosed upon the world – so what the hell did it matter? Better step into a telephone-box and call the Yard. Then he could send in his resignation in the morning and join some crank movement demanding international sovereignty…

Inspector Cadover’s feet carried him automatically forward – as automatically as if he had been on his beat nearly forty years before. He was skirting the long queue for the cheaper seats. There was a woman clutching the hand of a fretful five-year-old boy with a chocolate-smeared mouth and sleep-heavy eyes. There were two lovers already beginning to cuddle in the crush. There was an apostate intellectual, furtive and embarrassed, caught by that scanty cincture overhead like a fly on a flypaper. Cadover went grimly forward and the vast building received him. Underfoot the padded carpet was heavy as desert sand.

Three constables stood in the foyer. They could be no manner of use there; the management had doubtless wangled their presence as a little extra advertisement for its latest, and unforeseen, sensation. Cadover was about to scowl when he remembered that this would dismay them, and that they were only doing what they were told. So he nodded briskly and passed on. A slinky young man had appeared and was proposing to conduct him to the manager. The slinky young man contrived to insinuate that this was a privilege. Cadover, smouldering, marched forward still. Banks of flowers floated past him, gilt and scarlet chairs on which no one had ever sat, little fountains playing beneath changing coloured lights. Hectically tinted photographs as big as tablecloths, each with a disconcerting tilt to its picture-plane, presented curly-headed young men with butterfly ties, sleek-haired not-so-young men with smeared moustaches, a Negro in a straw hat, a nude girl knock-kneed and simpering behind a muff, the members of an entire symphony orchestra dressed like circus clowns… A door was opened and Cadover was aware of bare boards and a good rug, of bare walls and Dürer’s
Apollo and Diana
. This was the manager’s room. Its conscious superiority to the wares peddled outside was very nasty. Cadover’s gloom increased.

The manager was sitting at a Chippendale table lightly scattered with objects suggesting administrative cares. On a couch at the far end of the room lay what was evidently a human body, covered with a sheet. By the window stood a glum, uniformed sergeant of police, staring out over London.

The manager rose. His manner appeared to aim at that of somebody very high up in a bank, and he received Cadover as if he came from among the middle reaches of his more substantial clients. ‘An unpleasant thing, this,’ he said. ‘But if we must show a film of which the highlight is a holocaust what can we honestly say of a mere solitary killing in the Grand Circle? “Irony,” I said to myself at once when they told me about it. “It’s like cheap irony.” And then I had them bring the body straight in here. Now we shall have nothing but standing room for a fortnight. The cinema industry, my dear Inspector, is nothing but a great whore. And you might call this the tart’s supreme achievement to date.’

The slinky young man giggled deferentially. Cadover, who did not care for this cynical travesty of his own responses, looked round the room. ‘The tart,’ he said, ‘would appear to treat her doorkeepers handsomely enough.’ There was a brief silence. The slinky young man giggled on another and an abruptly checked note. Cadover walked over to the body and twitched away the sheet. ‘Unknown?’ he asked.

The sergeant had come up beside him. ‘No identification yet, sir. It’s been made deliberately difficult.’

‘This happened in the auditorium?’ Cadover turned to the manager. ‘And you had the body hauled out on your own responsibility?’

‘Certainly. There was nothing else to do. And it wasn’t known that the fellow was dead until they had him out in the upper foyer.’ The manager returned to his desk and consulted a note. ‘Lights went up at the end of
Plutonium Blonde
, the time being three minutes past four. One of the girls we call usherettes’ – and the manager made a fastidious face over this barbarism – ‘saw the fellow slumped in his seat and went up to have a look at him. He didn’t look right, so she called the floor manager. That was the regular procedure. The floor manager gave him a shake, and then saw the blood. By that time there was a bit of a fuss round about, so he sent one of the girls for a couple of commissionaires and to call up a doctor. He supposed, you know, that the fellow had suffered a haemorrhage, or something like that. By this time the lights were due to go down, and he didn’t stop them, since he didn’t want more disturbance than need be. But as the body was lifted out he saw that it
was
a body – that the fellow was dead – and he tells me that the notion of foul play did enter his mind. He called two firemen to stand by where the thing had happened – fortunately it was right in the back row – and then he came straight up to me. I gave instructions for the body to be brought in here and for the police to be called up at once. Then I went in to see how it was with the seats where the thing had happened. The row immediately in front was full. But the dead man’s seat was, of course, still empty, and so was one seat on his right and three on his left. So I ordered the whole five to be roped off and guarded. Then your men arrived and my responsibility ended. Lights go up again in five minutes. Of course, if you want the theatre cleared and closed, I will have it done. Only you might put me through to your Assistant Commissioner first. I have to consider my directors, you know.’

Cadover made no reply. He turned to the sergeant. ‘Well?’

‘We arrived while they were still showing the short that follows
Plutonium Blonde
. There seemed no point in sealing the place. People had been pouring out and in during the previous interval – the one during which the discovery of the body was made. But, of course, there was the question of people nearby when the thing occurred who might still be in the theatre. There was that, and there was what the usherettes might know, and there was clearing a space round the spot where the thing had happened, and searching it in the interval after the short. Inspector Morton is on that now, sir, with half a dozen men from the district. But I understand they’ve come on nothing yet. The crime appears to have passed unnoticed.’

‘Unnoticed? But this man was shot. You can’t shoot a man in a public place without–’

The remainder of Cadover’s sentence was drowned in a sudden crashing explosion which made Dürer’s engraving rattle on the wall. The manager sighed resignedly. ‘Disgraceful,’ he murmured. ‘Do you know that between the auditorium and this room there are two supposedly soundproof walls? We shall have people calling quacks from Harley Street to swear that they’ve been deafened, and we shall have to pay thousands of pounds. And, of course, it’s indecent too. Much more indecent than rows of ghastly little trollops waggling their photogenic haunches. The Lord Chamberlain should intervene. When I was a young man I had idealism, Inspector, I assure you. I saw Film as a great new aesthetic form. Those were the days of the early Clairs, and of
Potemkin
and
Storm over Asia
. And to think that it should all come to this…! Would you care for a cigar?’

The slinky young man, looking awed, produced a box of Coronas from a drawer. Cadover petrified him with a scowl. ‘Was that meant to be an exploding bomb?’ he asked.