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 f
ather 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.
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.
5
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…
The Journeying Boy Page 5