The Journeying Boy

by Michael Innes

  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!’

  ‘You cannot tell whether a boy has passed through here?’

  ‘Of course I can. You can’t get no further than this van. Try and see.’

  Mr Thewless did so and found that the Fat Lady was right. Perhaps the engine was immediately ahead. Certainly the door at the end of the van was locked. ‘But you have been asleep?’

  ‘Of course I been asleep. It’s lonesome sitting in here among all them brutes. Makes you feel ’ardly ’uman.’ The Fat Lady was suddenly tearful. I can tell you, I sometimes feel I’d rather be a dwarf or a monster. Yes, a monster’ – reiterated the Fat Lady emphatically – ‘or a freak. I’d as soon be a freak, I often say, if in all this dratted travelling I could enjoy the society of my own kind. Two ’eads, I wouldn’t mind ’aving – or no arms and able to play the piano with my toes. Do you know what they ’ave to do with me tonight on the steamer? Do you know ’ow they ’as to stow my sort? Why–’ At this moment one of the Fat Lady’s eyes closed. ‘Why–’ she repeated – and her other eye closed too. ‘As if I were one of them Indian’s heffalumps,’ she murmured… The Fat Lady vastly respired, and was asleep.

  For a moment Mr Thewless paused, irresolute. A cream-coloured donkey, diminutive as if in a toyshop, began to bray in a corner. The sound, mingled with the Fat Lady’s snoring, the pounding of the engine, and the miscellaneous animal hullabaloo all around seemed for the moment to represent to him a final overthrow of all sanity; he hastily quitted the guard’s van and made his way down the train. The Chinese lady, he noticed, was still giving nuts to the white monkey, the Indians were still at their cards, the Great Elasto – Mr Wambus, in private life – lay back inert as before, the Edwardian Negro was puffing at his cigar again and perusing a copy of the British Medical Journal. Mr Thewless moved on, somewhat somnambulistically continuing to try the lavatories as he went. Near his own compartment he met Miss Liberty, who squeezed past him with every appearance of faint maidenly embarrassment. Perhaps he would find the boy back in his place, and this whole episode to have been mere eggs in moonshine.

  Eggs in moonshine, Mr Thewless repeated to himself – and dimly wondered from what odd corner of his reading the phrase had started up. Eggs…but the boy was not in the compartment. Nor was the bearded man. The compartment showed nothing but luggage and a litter of books and papers. In Mr Thewless’ excited imagination this void and upholstered space was hurtling through the night in an uncommonly sinister way.

  Moreover, it was no time since the bearded man had returned from a prowl in one direction; why should he now be off in another? And at once Mr Thewless felt that he knew the answer. He and the pseudo-Humphrey were accomplices; they had planned to confer in privacy; but by some misunderstanding the boy had gone the wrong way. At the moment of that odd collision in the doorway the bearded man had been returning from a false cast. He was off again now in the other direction – and it was in that direction too that the boy must have vanished.

  Once more Mr Thewless set out on his wanderings. But this time, he knew, a virtually endless succession of coaches lay before him, and most of them would be very crowded. In order to confer together, moreover, the pseudo-Humphrey and the bearded man could easily lock themselves in a lavatory – and unless he told his sensational story to a guard and invoked assistance it would be impossible to check up on this possibility.

  Nevertheless, Mr Thewless plunged down the train, for a sort of automatism now possessed him. Firsts and thirds were alike for the most part overflowing, and he marvelled at the number of people who had the ambition to sail for Belfast that night. Many were soldiers, sailors, and girls in uniform; it was deplorable, thought Mr Thewless vaguely, to see how England had become like any Continental country before the war, its railway stations and public places a perpetual filter of drifting and shabby conscripts. A small professional Army, decently clad in scarlet and black –

  The reflection, for what it was worth, remained unfinished. For at this moment, and at the farther end of the coach down which he was plunging, Mr Thewless descried the bearded man hurrying before him. But although evidently in haste, he was making an exact scrutiny of each compartment as he passed it – and even in the moment in which he was thus descried he turned round and his pebble glasses glinted as he cast a wary look behind him. Mr Thewless, with remarkable quickness for one not accustomed to this sort of thing, doubled up as if to tie a shoe-lace. The number of people lounging or squatting in the corridor was such that he had a confident belief that this manoeuvre had saved him from detection. But now he proceeded more cautiously. That the bearded man was making his way to an assignation he took to be established. If it was indeed with the boy, and if the two could be glimpsed together, the main point of doubt in this dreadful adventure would be resolved.

  The train was here increasingly crowded, each coach seemingly more crammed with travel-weary humanity than the last. It was that stage of a long journey that is consecrated to a haze of tobacco-smoke, the smell of orange-peel, and a litter and silt of abandoned periodicals and newspapers. Astonishing, thought Mr Thewless, how many people contrive to sleep amid these mild miseries; everywhere around him was the sprawl, the pathos, and the strange vulnerability of human bodies sagged and slumped into slumber. Did a large part of the adult population spend too little time in bed? Mr Thewless stepped carefully over a straying infant, negotiated a woman who was rummaging in a suitcase, and became aware that the bearded man had disappeared. Perhaps he had simply put on an extra turn of speed and gained the next coach. But Mr Thewless believed that he had at last dived into a lavatory. He therefore hurried forward to reconnoitre. Fortunately, the corridor was so crowded that one could squeeze oneself into virtually any position without exciting remark. He succeeded in getting himself close up to the suspected lavatory door – so close indeed that he could unobtrusively put his ear to it.

  That such a drab proceeding caused Mr Thewless some discomfort is a point requiring no emphasis. It was to this that the somewhat ineffective termination of the incident was due. That voices were to be heard behind the door was unquestionable, and that the second voice had a boy’s higher pitch Mr Thewless almost persuaded himself to believe, and his plain policy appeared to be to stand his ground and achieve a decisive exposé there and then. But, even as he decided upon this, there was a general stir and bustle in the corridor. Mr Thewless conjectured – inaccurately, as it happened – that the train was about to reach its destination. And he was alarmed.

  It may be that in this whole succession of episodes there was more of alarm than was altogether creditable to Mr Thewless’ nervous tone. It must be recalled, however, that he had most abruptly become involved in events – or in the suspicion of events – altogether remote from his common way of life, and that he was enduring a period of intensive acclimatization. Be this as it may, his alarm now was not discreditable, for it proceeded from a renewal of his power of judgement. Coolly regarded, it was surely overwhelmingly probable that he had merely in all this involved himself in fantasy after all, and that in twelve hours’ time he would be looking back on it with mingled amusement and embarrassment. But if this was so he was at present being most remiss in relation to his charge. Wherever Humphrey had strayed to on the train, he would presumably return to his own compartment – and his tutor should certainly not be absent from it as they ran into Heysham. If he were not at hand during what would probably be something of a rush for the steamer, the boy might be considerably upset.

  These were rational reflections
– but the answering behaviour of Mr Thewless was not wholly so. There is something in a whole train load of people beginning to stir that can communicate a mysterious inner sense of insecurity and the need for hurried action. It was this that had gripped him. And he turned now and began to hurry back towards his base. But as he reached the farther end of the corridor he turned, as it were, one longing, lingering look behind upon his late suspicions – and with a mildly catastrophic result. The bearded man had reappeared and was following him down the train. In this there was nothing sensational. The privy conference which had been held in the lavatory was over, and the bearded man was returning to his compartment. What was startling was the appearance of somebody whom Mr Thewless just glimpsed disappearing in the other direction. This was the back of just such a schoolboy as the lad calling himself Humphrey Paxton, and clad precisely as he.

  Once more, perhaps, cool reason would have been able to render Mr Thewless a somewhat different estimate of this incident to that which his agitated imagination formed. A psychologist would have spoken to him on the theme of eidetic imagery, and of the power of the mind to see the image of what painfully absorbs it, not within the brain but projected upon the world without. A critic not thus learnedly equipped but endowed with moderate common sense would have represented that schoolboys are frequent enough, that their formal attire varies little between individual and individual, and that the particular specimen thus glimpsed (not even as having been in any certain communication with the bearded man, but merely in a relation of simple contiguity) might well have been any one under the sun. But whatever promptings of this sort his own mind was capable of Mr Thewless was at the present moment deaf to. And to the marked facility of his suspicion now must be ascribed the fatal absoluteness of his revulsion later. In this mechanism of emotional recoil (the final lurch, as it were, of that seesaw upon which we have already seen him rather helplessly ride) lay the occasion of much disaster to follow.