The Journeying Boy

by Michael Innes

  An air of cheerful confidence, however, proved at first not easy to sustain. Belfast, grimly utilitarian and shrouded in rain, was very little evocative of any gateway to the holiday spirit; it suggested rather a various detritus from the less appealing parts of Glasgow washed across the Irish Sea during the darker years of the nineteenth century. But this may have been an unfairly coloured view, since no city looks at its best when observed on a wet morning from a four-wheeler cab the progress of which irresistibly hints at a destination not in a railway station but in a municipal cemetery. Nor did Humphrey help in any ready uplifting of the heart, since he was silent, withdrawn, and apparently indisposed to favour his sceptical guardian with further fantasies. This, although in a sense reassuring, was depressing as well. Mr Thewless could not quite forget that Humphrey was, among other things, a capable boy. It seemed deplorable that his temperamental troubles (to put the matter mildly) should stand in the way of those activities to which capable boys are rightly dedicated. The mental dexterity that he had put into the business of identifying his new tutor at Euston, the precocious subtlety with which he had analysed a father’s inner responses to adolescent behaviour in his son, the complex manner in which he had for a time checked his own irrational fears by an intellectually conceived mockery of his tutor: how fast and far these abilities would take a properly conducted boy into the recesses of the Greek and Latin languages! Peering out through the rain at the Great Northern railway terminus, and feeling in his pocket for half a crown, Mr Thewless fell for a moment into a weak nostalgia. The images of former pupils rose up before him – chubby-faced fourteen-year-olds solemnly construing from the immensely remote world of Juvenal, of the Alcestis; children learned in particles, lisping faultlessly in Sapphics and Alcaics… Mr Thewless glanced at Humphrey beside him – pale, mum, and refusing to be separated for a second from that shot-gun which he had been so anxious to repudiate less than twelve hours before. And momentarily he caught the dark glance of the boy – caught that slightly hypnotic gaze once more. It showed no response or recognition. In fact, it was fixed, Mr Thewless saw, upon some unseen goal or conception with quite as much concentration as any of those earlier pupils had ever brought to the ultimate mysteries of the Glyconic and Pherecratean metres… Mr Thewless, feeling the first stirrings of obscure doubt rising in him once more, jumped hastily from the cab and contrived his customary efficient capture of a porter. Humphrey followed. The railway station spread before them a classical portico nicely painted to look like milk chocolate. On one side stood an immobile policeman of gigantic size pro-portionately armed with truncheon and revolver.

  On the other a placard, equally generously conceived, announced:

  LIFE IS SHORT

  DEATH IS COMING

  ETERNITY – WHERE?

  And upon this brief glimpse of the cultural life of Belfast their train received them and they were presently hurtling west.

  There was one other passenger in their compartment, and presently Mr Thewless was eyeing her with considerable gloom. For she was none other than that tiresome Miss Liberty to whose futile chatter over her spy story he attributed a good deal of his own and Humphrey’s nervous follies on the previous afternoon.

  They breakfasted together. This was by Humphrey’s initiative and somewhat to the annoyance of Mr Thewless, who had planned to begin with his pupil a discussion – thoroughgoing but not unnecessarily solemn – on the nature and functions of deponent verbs. What – he heard himself asking Humphrey with a spice of harmless fun – was the difference between a deponent verb and the Prime Minister? Mr Thewless had achieved a good deal of success in his time along such lines as these. A deponent verb…

  ‘Not the kipper,’ Miss Liberty was saying. ‘They say kipper or sausage; but if one waits, the sausage turns out to be egg and tomato as well. Not that I am an experienced traveller’ – and Miss Liberty turned from Humphrey to Mr Thewless as if anxious that there should be no false pretences in the matter. ‘It is simply part of the advice that I was given before setting out by my brother, Sir Charles.’

  Mr Thewless bowed. Remembering that he had not been very polite to Miss Liberty on the previous day, he felt obliged to accept her advice himself – and this although kipper was a breakfast of which he was particularly fond. With suitable resignation, he watched the dish being borne away. A deponent verb looks harmless and passive –

  ‘When travelling on the Highland railway with my dear father, Sir Herbert,’ Miss Liberty was saying, ‘we commonly obtained a luncheon basket at Kingussie. The cold chicken was sometimes a little tough, but the moment was a romantic one, all the same.’

  Mr Thewless made an insincere noise, indicative of imaginative understanding of this remote thrill in Miss Liberty’s past. He had an uncomfortable feeling that the sausage, to the confusion of Miss Liberty and the discrediting of her brother Sir Charles, would prove to be only sausage, after all. This, of course, made it particularly necessary to continue being polite. ‘A journey into the Highlands, ma’am,’ he said, ‘must always be a romantic experience for an – um – capable child.’

  ‘Precisely so. And the west of Ireland, I am told, is almost equally beautiful. So I am so grateful for the kindness of my brother–’

  ‘Sir Charles?’ Humphrey asked.

  Mr Thewless was appalled. That his pupil should be on the verge of lunacy was one thing. But that he should suddenly become ill-bred was quite another. And there had undoubtedly been mockery in the boy’s tone. And yet there was something else as well. Into this dining-car there had crept a faint atmosphere which Mr Thewless found it impossible to define. It felt like conspiracy. But how could it possibly be that? Could Miss Liberty, like a deponent verb, be a wolf in sheep’s clothing? The idea was patently absurd.

  ‘Precisely so.’ Miss Liberty was helping herself with surprising lavishness to what had veritably proved to be sausage, egg, and tomato. ‘It was my brother who was so kind as to suggest this holiday at Killyboffin. The inn had been recommended to him as satisfactory. So often in hotels nowadays one cannot be sure of well-aired beds.’

  Mr Thewless was peering through a window. The train had slowed down and on the parapet of a stone bridge he could read the inscription:

  PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD.

  Now he turned back and regarded Miss Liberty with a heroic effort at pleased surprise. ‘Killyboffin? That happens to be where Humphrey and I are going too.’

  ‘How very odd.’

  ‘Very odd, indeed,’ echoed Humphrey, and gulped coffee. Perhaps because the train was gaining speed and rocking slightly, he gave a sudden squirm and splutter. ‘But then a lot of odd things do happen.’

  A sort of baffled uneasiness – now only too familiar to him – assailed Mr Thewless. He had the illusion of a momentary vivid penetration into the mind of this tiresome old chatterbox – and what he found there was a fixed determination to carry out some formidable task. But this was nonsense. It was a fancy hitching on to nothing whatever in the actual world; it belonged to last night’s nightmare on the express. What was desirable was to finish breakfast quickly and announce a frontal assault upon the Latin language. A deponent verb comes up to you looking quite harmless; then it throws off its fleece… Gazing through the window again in the direction of Lough Neigh, Mr Thewless frowned absently. What troubled him this time was a suspicion that Humphrey had in some way changed. He had planned a day in which his own cheerful common sense would do something to hearten this sadly possessed child; but now it was Humphrey’s spirits which were in some odd way rising, while Mr Thewless himself was becoming a prey to irrational foreboding and gloom. Was it possible that the presence of Miss Liberty had some subtle effect on the boy? Or was there a relationship more definite than that? Was it possible, for example, that they had held some conference on board ship in the small hours of the morning; that Humphrey had poured out the pernicious fantasies by which he was beset; and that Miss Liberty, instead of insisting upon their true character as mere figmen
ts, had irresponsibly accepted them as gospel, thereby gaining the lad’s confidence upon thoroughly reprehensible terms? If this were so, nothing, surely, could be more dangerous. For a time the boy’s confidence might rise at finding himself seriously taken as the hero of an adventure story. But Mr Thewless knew only too well the sort of nervous reaction that was likely to follow. All this was conceivable, and it would explain that sense of conspiracy which he felt was rising about him.

  Mr Thewless stared glumly at the remains of his sausage and then once more out across the landscape. The green and yellow fields were now flecked with sunshine, and a blue line of mountains lay far to the south. It was a deeply peaceful scene. The train rounded a bend and across a lush meadow a long whitewashed barn swung into view. Along its whole length it bore the words:

  BOAST NOT THYSELF OF TOMORROW.

  The habits of the Northern Irish, although godly, appeared scarcely gay. In Mr Thewless the sense of foreboding and bafflement irrationally grew; he had a feeling that he was being hurtled at sixty miles an hour into the threatening sickle of a vast question-mark formed by the bogs and mountains that he knew lay ahead of him. Humphrey and Miss Liberty were exchanging critical opinions on the works of ‘Sapper’ – and were apparently proposing to treat these one by one, in chronological order. In desperation, Mr Thewless opened the local paper he had bought at the railway station. It contained circumstantial accounts of several funerals, each ending with the information that the highly successful catering had been carried out by Messrs Tiffin and Tiffin. He turned to the back page and sought a meagre refuge in much incomprehensible information on horses and association footballers. Near the bottom somebody had bought quite a lot of space and caused to be printed:

  THOU FOOL THIS NIGHT

  THY SOUL SHALL BE

  REQUIRED OF THEE.

  Mr Thewless put down the paper, and as he did so Miss Liberty paused in her anatomy of one of the earlier exploits of Captain Hugh Drummond and smiled at him with maidenly cheer. ‘And soon,’ she said, ‘we shall be on this most entertaining little train.’

  But Mr Thewless’ reply was a mere mumble. For with his intermittent and always disturbing intuition he had, as it were, looked clean through that smile. He had looked into the grey eyes of the lady. And what he there encountered he recognized instantly, although to the best of his knowledge he had never seen it before. It was the clear light of battle.

  Those intuitions by which Humphrey’s tutor was occasionally troubled by no means extended to any form of prescience, and it is not possible that he can have foreseen the accident. Nevertheless, his heart undoubtedly sank a little further when he saw the entertaining little train to which Miss Liberty had referred. They encountered it after an indefinite wait at a junction during which they were subjected to a somewhat perfunctory Customs examination, and when it finally appeared it looked less like a train of any description than a stunted single-decker bus – or it would have so appeared had it not much more powerfully suggested one of the lower forms of organic life monstrously enlarged to some problematical but assuredly sinister end. Into the belly of this bug-like creature they were presently bundled, but not before Mr Thewless had cast a final lingering look behind. He possessed, it is necessary to admit, something of an urban mind; and all too plainly the entertaining little train spoke of a destination at the back of beyond. Moreover, at this point of the journey there ceased to be anything of that segregation of classes which the philosopher in him was accustomed to deplore but which the social man was apt to take as part of the order of nature. Three or four impoverished persons with bundles were already on board, and immediately behind him an embarrassingly undernourished old woman was singing in a dismal, surprising, and Celtic manner – although whether for monetary reward or the pleasures of self-expression was obscure. Presently the driver appeared. He was a melancholy man lost in reverie – and almost equally lost in an immensely old suit of Connemara cloth, evidently tailored for one of the giants before the Flood. He sat down before the controls, eyed them with that flicker of interest which a person of abstract mind may evince before some unfamiliar material thing, and presently pulled a lever with every appearance of random experiment. The bug instantly coughed violently, shuddered as if unkindly roused from sleep, gave a loud angry roar, and then abruptly fell silent and motionless once more. The driver again pulled the lever, but this time nothing happened at all. He tried several other controls with an equally negative result. Whereupon – but with the reluctance of one who is innately kindly – he reached for a large hammer, climbed down from his seat, and proceeded to beat the bug violently about the snout. At this the bug, as if far advanced in some horrid masochistic perversion, contentedly purred. The driver climbed back into his seat and settled himself with an air of deep metaphysical abstraction. The bug continued to purr. After this nothing happened for quite a long time.

  The bug purred and the August sun warmed both its entrails and that temporary ingestation represented by Mr Thewless and his fellow travellers. Further impoverished persons crowded on board, the majority carrying ill-wrapped brown-paper parcels or uncertainly clothed children. Somebody brought up a number of cardboard boxes and proceeded to hoist them on the roof; these apparently contained young pigs and were rather smelly. Humphrey and Miss Liberty were discussing some nice point in the character portrayal of their author’s middle period. The undernourished woman had stopped singing and was talking unintelligibly and uncomfortably down Mr Thewless’ neck. Probably she was soliciting alms. But as it was just possible that she was obligingly explaining some point of Hibernian scholarship germane to her minstrelsy he felt unable to take any action. Suddenly the purring deepened and the bug, without warning, shot off with a swaying and bouncing motion down the narrow-gauge line before it. At this the conductor, a fat boy with a squint who had been eating sandwiches at the back, showed much presence of mind by violently ringing a bell. Whereupon the driver, emerging in some degree from his abstract speculations, as also from his enveloping suit, looked about him in some perplexity and experimentally pressed a button. Immediately a siren whooped demoniacally in the bowels of the bug and amid a series of bumps and bucketings the creature made for the open country. Overhead the piglets in their cardboard boxes squealed in justifiable alarm. The undernourished woman continued to talk down Mr Thewless’ neck, but her tone had changed and was now quite evidently one of imprecation against a monster of parsimony. A number of people ate oranges and close to Mr Thewless a small boy announced what was evidently a most implacable intention to be sick. Everywhere the greatest good-humour prevailed. From a wayside hoarding Northern Ireland took a Parthian shot at the unregenerate:

  THEIR WORM DIETH NOT

  AND THE FIRE IS NOT QUENCHED.

  Through the early afternoon sunshine the bug trundled westwards and the landscape began to take upon itself with surprising fidelity the characteristics of those railway posters that celebrate the beauties of Erin. In the distance the mountains showed bluer and more blue; blue peat smoke rose from the whitewashed cottages; stacks of peat lay about the bogs or moved mysteriously down the lanes, superincumbent upon invisible donkeys. It was a natural scene in which poetry was steadily gaining upon prose, and Mr Thewless endeavoured, amid the perturbations still active within him, to assume that aesthetic mode of contemplation proper in the circumstances to a cultivated English traveller. The boy who had said he was going to be sick was sick.

  The bug stopped at a little whitewashed hut and there was another Customs examination. A pillar-box bearing the monogram of Queen Victoria had been painted a nice green. On the platform stood a policeman of normal proportions, and instead of a revolver and a truncheon he carried a copy of Ben Hur translated into Irish, which he was evidently studying for an examination important to his professional advancement. Mr Thewless realized that the imperial might of Great Britain lay behind him and that in front was the philosophic republic of Mr De Valera. He several times endeavoured to show his passport a
nd was somewhat hurt to find that the authorities took no interest in it. The attention of the policeman and the Customs officer was entirely given to the piglets, which they examined with many expressions of admiration and surprise. Contrary to popular supposition, it appeared that a pig was almost as much of a curiosity in Ireland as an armadillo would have been in Elizabethan London.

  The bug moved on – inexplicably on any merely mechanistic hypothesis regarding its constitution, since both the driver and conductor became aware of the fact only in time to race down the platform and leap on board as it rounded a bend and headed towards the Atlantic Ocean. For a couple of hours it purred and clanked from station to station, but these halts grew gradually more indeterminate in character as the afternoon advanced, and eventually it simply stopped whenever summoned to do so by agitated persons hurrying across an adjoining field. Once when the single track upon which it ran breasted a rise Mr Thewless was startled to see an identical bug rapidly advancing upon them in the middle distance. The driver, also by chance observing this appearance, called to the conductor, and the two engaged for some minutes in dispassionate conversation, bending curiously over the controls of the vehicle and pointing now to one lever and now to another. Meanwhile, the advancing bug hurtled towards them. The conductor made some suggestion which the driver upon consideration rejected; the conductor reflected and then urged some further argument; the driver, being plainly a man of open mind, agreed to give the suggestion a trial and depressed some object with his foot; with an agonizing jolt the bug came to a dead halt. Some ten yards away the second bug had done the same, and the two appeared to eye each other balefully, much like two fleas that have been taught to simulate pugilistic encounter. The drivers and conductors, however, climbing out to meet upon neutral ground, debated the situation in the friendliest spirit over cans of tea and a cigarette; eventually the oncoming bug was coaxed by its crew to back for half a mile into a siding which had been discovered by the enterprise of a reconnoitring conductor – whereon the journey was resumed. One other hitch occurred about an hour later, when the bug came to a halt, baffled by a bifurcation of the line before it. And this occasioned the only flaw in the complete harmony of the afternoon’s proceedings, for whereas the driver was in favour of taking the line to the left the conductor was obstinately wedded to the notion of taking the one to the right. Various passengers took part in the discussion, which presently re-echoed to a spirited bandying of the musical place-names of the district. Miss Liberty, hearing the driver several times enunciate in tones of disgust and repudiation the name of Killyboffin, joined in vigorously on the conductor’s side; and it was this opinion that eventually carried the day.