The Journeying Boy

by Michael Innes

  14

  There seemed to be no reason why Humphrey should have been taken by surprise, since Mr Thewless had most meticulously knocked on his door and waited to be called upon to enter. But Humphrey, who, since making his own reconnaissance, had sat down at a small desk by his window, had it seemed responded automatically, with the result that his tutor came upon him making a flurried attempt to thrust an exercise book into a drawer. The drawer, since it was a true Killyboffin drawer, resisted the attempt. Whereupon Humphrey, with considerable presence of mind, dropped the exercise book on the floor, edged it with a deft toe beneath the carpet, and turned to Mr Thewless with a charming smile. ‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘I’m so glad to see they didn’t handle you too roughly. Although they must have hit you on the head.’

  ‘I was certainly knocked unconscious for a time, my dear Humphrey, when things began falling about us in the tunnel. If it suits you to think that some villain was involved – why, I see no substantial reason why you should not do so.’

  As Mr Thewless delivered himself of this indulgent speech it struck him that here was precisely what did suit Humphrey. The boy was clearly surrounded still by his delusions; his eye and cheek spoke of considerable excitement; and at the same time he looked in much better trim than his tutor had yet known him. Moreover, Mr Thewless could feel a new element – it was a sort of easy benevolence rather reminiscent of Mr Bolderwood – in Humphrey’s attitude to him. The boy was no longer disturbed by the fact that his tutor was sceptical; he gave the impression of rather liking him that way. At the moment Mr Thewless was given no leisure to be more than briefly puzzled by this, since Humphrey was very wholesomely intent upon proceeding to dinner. He had changed circumspectly into a dark suit; an insufficiency of soap and water was seemingly not among his numerous personal indisciplines; at the moment he nicely displayed the extravagantly scrubbed and mildly cheerful features which are the orthodox insignia of the well-conducted public schoolboy. Mr Thewless, heartened by this sight and auguring well from it for much dutifully conned French and Latin in the coming quiet and ordered life that his host had promised, fell to teasing Humphrey about his immoderate expectations from the meal they were awaiting. It was Friday, he pointed out, and what had been projected was an omelette. But owing to the ill-regulated conduct of the Killyboffin hens nothing except boxty was likely to meet them below. Humphrey must by no means expect a whopping steak, misled by his insufficient erudition into supposing the word in any way connected with bulls; rather that peculiar species of sea-fish sacred to Hermes, the box or, βοαξ, so named because of its unfishlike ability to emit a short, plopping noise, gave the true derivation of the word. They would undoubtedly find that boxty was in every sense a wholly fishy dish.

  With such gamesome talk as this, immemorial to his kind, did Mr Thewless presently conduct his charge downstairs. An evening breeze had risen, blowing in from the ocean; its effect upon the respectable antiquity of Killyboffin was to set a hundred soft tongues whispering, a thousand tiny creatures moving, all around one in the bare, pervasively dilapidated house. Mr Thewless again remarked that it was a place of considerable size. Everywhere corridors ran off in a dimness of white walls and faded cream paint, with here and there the dark rectangle of an oil painting in which troops of hunters moved obscurely through Italian landscapes which time or the varnish bottle had umbered to a cavernous gloom. The house, moreover, had this peculiarity: that its contents, so soon as one should stray in person or in glance from, as it were, certain narrow channels leading from various inhabited corners to the living-rooms of the family, were for the most part swathed and sheeted after the fashion of large establishments from which the owner has taken his departure for the time. Mr Bolderwood had among his fancies, it appeared, that of living like a caretaker in his own rambling halls, and this although the confused multitude of his retainers would surely have been adequate to the dusting and polishing of the mansion several times over. Moreover, some past Bolderwood had owned a taste in statuary; another had collected armour; a third had been interested in grandfather clocks. All these objects, in common with the chairs, benches, tables, and the like which lined, after the common fashion of ornament rather than utility, the broad corridors of the house, were swathed in a white sheeting from which one could have puffed the dust in passing. The effect could not well be other than spectral. It was as if, in addition to the vociferous Denis and his rout, the place owned another body of inhabitants, who waited, shrouded and silent in the gathering dusk, the stroke of some hour that should release them to their own nocturnal offices. Nor indeed did their silence appear entire, since the wind as it sighed through Killyboffin had the effect of prompting them to sinister confabulation, the result of which was already an uneasy twitch and stir in their enveloping garments.

  Mr Thewless, when he remarked this rather uncanny effect, glanced in some anxiety at Humphrey. But at the moment, at least, the boy made nothing of it. He had paused, driven by hunger though he professed to be, by a window on a broad landing, attracted by an equal prospect of sea and mountain there revealed. The gentle declivities by which Killyboffin Hall was surrounded already lay for the most part in shadow, but, on higher ground beyond, the level light of late evening was still brilliant upon emerald fields, white or pink cottages, and, in the farther distance, dun bogs scarred by the darker brown of peat cuttings. Here and there along the dykes and hedges that demarcated the tiny fields lay inexplicable streaks and splashes of colour – orange and crimson and ultramarine – much as if, casually but to a happy effect, an artist had scattered his brightest pigments over the picture.

  ‘Wool,’ said Humphrey. ‘Isn’t that it? They dye it themselves and put it out like that to dry. And look! There’s an old woman boiling something up in a cauldron. That must be wool too. And those girls are taking it from her and carrying it on their heads in baskets. I’ve seen that in Italy. They’re taking it to those others to wash in the stream. And – I say! – just look at the hillsides. You’d think they were so empty, and yet there are people all over them. And in those same gorgeous colours too.’

  Mr Thewless looked, and saw that all these appearances were as Humphrey had remarked. Everywhere on the hillsides, and to distances that were almost remote, one could pick out slowly moving specks of brilliant colour.

  ‘There’s always something happening in an Irish countryside.’

  It was Ivor Bolderwood who spoke; he had come up behind them and was looking mildly out through his large glasses. Humphrey turned to him with an alacrity from which Mr Thewless gathered that the young man had substantially gained his pupil’s confidence. ‘Are these people very poor?’ Humphrey asked.

  Ivor nodded soberly. ‘Very poor indeed, most of them. They have to go miles and miles to the bogs where they can cut peat, and not all of them have even a donkey to bring it home on. And you will see them gathering seaweed as the only manure they can afford for their patches of potatoes. Still, they dye the cloth they make for themselves in those brave colours, and they know a lot of stories and poetry and songs. Some of those bright, moving specks are thinking of no more than their suppers, I expect – as you and I are doing.’ Ivor paused and chuckled as Humphrey faintly blushed. ‘But the minds of others are moving through old, old poems that nobody, perhaps, has ever written down – poems about kings and heroes and all the sad and splendid things that beautiful women have brought into the world.’

  ‘Is that really true?’ Humphrey was round-eyed. ‘Could I go among them, and would they tell me, and could I put it in a book?’

  Ivor Bolderwood laughed. ‘A good many people have tried to do that. And there is a difficult language you would have to learn before you could hope to understand a great deal. But I think some of them might tell you something.’

  Humphrey glanced from Ivor to his tutor, and Mr Thewless thought proper to offer an interested and approving murmur. Here, he judged, was a vein of interest altogether more wholesome than anything represented by the boy’s curre
nt reading, or by the matters on which he conversed with Miss Liberty. ‘We shall certainly,’ he said, ‘try to get into conversation with some of them.’

  ‘So long as they don’t suppose you to be folk off the trawlers.’ And Ivor pointed in the other direction, where from their present height they could just see the masts and funnel of a vessel anchored some way out from a little pier. ‘They dislike the way the foreigners, who don’t speak even English, often enough, come and eat out the country. But some of these sailors are interesting folk too. There’s Viking blood in some of them, and presently they will be off in their dirty little ships to the places from which their ancestors sailed to harry Ireland. In quite a short time that tub out there may have rounded the North Cape, and instead of these tiny Irish fields and cottages the sailors may be seeing the sort of things the Ancient Mariner saw: icebergs and the aurora borealis – or, at this time of year, the midnight sun.’

  ‘And ice mast-high came flowing by

  As green as emerald.’

  Humphrey, now staring out to sea, quoted the lines shyly but in a glow of pleasure. ‘But don’t you think the bit about the moon is the best? The moving moon went up the sky–’ He broke off suddenly. ‘Hullo, here’s something else. And – I say! – isn’t she wizard?’

  Round a precipitous headland which bounded the scene – the same from which Miss Liberty had conjectured that there must be a superlative view – there had appeared a vessel which Mr Thewless, unversed in maritime matters, could have defined only as an outsize motorboat. An affair of gleaming white paint and flashing brass, its thrusting bows, flowing lines, and flattened stern suggested formidable speed and power, while the scale upon which it was built seemed indicative of a craft built for blue water. Mr Thewless looked at it with mild but genuine interest, Humphrey with an enthusiasm which this time was a little conventional, Ivor Bolderwood in swift and knowledgeable appraisal. ‘She’s certainly rather grand,’ the last-named said. ‘We usually get only the most modest pleasure-craft bothering about Killyboffin.’ His fingers drummed for a moment on the window-pane. ‘Well, we had better go down, or Denis will have the triumph of announcing dinner before we’re all there, after all.’ He turned pleasantly to Mr Thewless. ‘I do hope that you will get more amusement than annoyance out of our way of things here. We can at least make some interesting expeditions. The pre-Celtic antiquities are numerous, and I have always wanted to go over them with an authority.’

  Mr Thewless was pleased. That an amateur in Roman archaeology was competent to pronounce upon the monuments of prehistoric Ireland was assuredly something that young Ivor Bolderwood was much too well informed to suppose. But the success of this sort of compliment lies all in its manner, and at the end of his exhausting day (or what he supposed to himself to be its end) Mr Thewless found himself sitting down to dinner with feelings of considerable pleasure in the society of his hosts.

  Nor, he presently discovered, was the dinner itself such as to depress the spirits. Although the boxty was certainly in evidence, it was given more prominence by the elder Mr Bolderwood in his conversation than by Denis as he handed the dishes; and Mr Thewless was more aware of the excellence of the salmon and the perfection of the hock. His host, it is true, was still much troubled about the eggs, and supposed that for breakfast it was impossible that they should have anything but siot or skirlie-mirlie.

  Ivor, while he refrained from disputing this, pointed to the sustaining fact that in four days they would undoubtedly be eating grouse – and grouse, moreover, which they should owe to Humphrey’s rapidly increasing skill with a shot-gun. And at this Humphrey, who not much more than twenty-four hours before had been repudiating with vast humanitarian indignation the suggestion that he should slaughter living things, and who after that again had been clutching the same weapon as a resource against imaginary spies and assassins, produced in high pleasure the modest disclaimers proper in well-mannered persons of his age. Mr Thewless felt eminently satisfied, and his various meaningless alarms, together with the absurd but harmless conduct of the men with the ambulance, altogether assumed their proper proportions in his mind. He had discovered that Killyboffin was on the telephone, and he had thus been able to send a telegram to Sir Bernard Paxton, informing him of the safe arrival of his son. And when he considered Humphrey’s present equable state, and remembered the sort of dire intelligence which at one time he had been persuaded it might be necessary to despatch to his father, he saw how much he himself must at one point have been thrown off his balance. Humphrey, it was true, was still going to be nervously disturbed and thoroughly difficult from time to time; Mr Thewless stood in no doubt as to that. But Ivor Bolderwood was going to be an excellent person to take part of the strain; already he was absorbing the boy’s interest with well-informed talk about remote places and peoples; he was much what Mr Thewless himself aspired to be: simultaneously instructive and entertaining.

  Nevertheless, Mr Thewless, despite his own sense of nervous relaxation, presently found himself wondering whether Humphrey was not up to his tricks again. There are children in whose presence small objects are liable to drop inexplicably off the mantelpiece, or to levitate in air and glide quaintly to another corner of the room. But in the presence of his pupil, Mr Thewless had come to believe, it was rather the furniture of the mind that was apt to suffer disconcerting small displacements; and he was by no means certain that something of the sort was not now beginning to tinge the consciousness of his elder companions. It was possible, again, that the boy had produced this effect not merely telepathically but by some direct communication to Ivor Bolderwood during their first ramble with the shot-gun. Perhaps he had assured his newly-found cousin that during his journey from London he had been the interesting centre of sundry alarming melodramatic adventures. And perhaps Ivor, abundantly sensible as he appeared to be, had been a little shaken by the odd conviction which Humphrey had the trick of importing into his fantasies.

  It was certainly true that Ivor, in spite of his competence as an entertainer, was unable to keep some part of his thoughts from straying elsewhere. It was as if he felt intermittently impelled to fine calculation on some state of affairs altogether unforeseen. Perhaps Humphrey had indeed told him a vast deal of nonsense and he was debating with himself whether the boy’s tutor was likely to have received the same absurd confidences; and, if not, whether he was the sort of man with whom a difficult situation might usefully be discussed. And this reading of the matter Mr Thewless was for a time the more inclined to in that he had very markedly the sense of being appraised. Miss Liberty herself in fact, fixing upon him her wholly enigmatical eye, had scarcely given him this uncomfortable feeling more strongly. He was reminded that he was, after all, a mere substitute for Captain Cox, that favoured young man whom some intimate bereavement had removed at the last moment from the scene. It was natural that his hosts should be disposed to wonder whether Sir Bernard Paxton’s second choice was a reliable man for his job.

  But this chastening reflection was presently replaced by another. It became evident as Mr Thewless’ perceptions sharpened themselves under the material recruitment afforded by Mr Bolderwood’s table that if considerations of this sort were active in Ivor’s mind so too were others of a different order. To what might be termed the atmospheric effects of Killyboffin – the genius of the place for disconcerting suggestions of murmured colloquy, stealthy movement, and all the imponderables commonly associated with edifices of much greater antiquity – the young man must be abundantly inured. It was natural, when the night wind, flapping the worn carpets in remote corridors or tinkling somewhere in abandoned candelabra, suggested the rapid tread and clinking accoutrements of some army of invading dwarves, or the rattle of some mouldering upper casement sounded like a discharge of small arms, that Mr Thewless himself should feel a certain irrational disposition to glance over his shoulder. But it was surprising that Ivor Bolderwood should indefinably betray a similar tendency, or convey, by a certain wariness of regard upon do
or and window, an obscure apprehension of physical insecurity. A poet, Humphrey had declared, should keep a sword upstairs; Ivor’s manner, even as he conversed absorbingly about the Sahara and the Caribbean, betrayed some sense that it might be useful to have one under the table. And at this a horrid doubt came to Mr Thewless. He feared that Ivor – whose talk, after all, hinted at an imagination romantic in cast – might, despite his appearance of eminent good sense, prove to be such another as Miss Liberty – one with whom he would have to wrestle in the task of keeping cobweb and chimera out of Humphrey’s head.

  But at least it was different with the elder Mr Bolderwood. Despite the strain of fancy revealed in his manner of life at Killyboffin, his mind appeared to be of a reassuringly solid cast, and the only disturbance to which it was at present subject was one still connected with his recalcitrant poultry. A fourth glass of hock had produced in this matter something like the dawn of illumination, and it was becoming clear to him that he was confronted, not with an unnatural and unseasonable continence on the part of the creatures concerned, but simply with a new and monstrous instance of the worthlessness and dishonesty of his retainers. It was his misfortune to be subjected by these to every species of robbery and extortion, and now they were taking the very eggs out of his guests’ mouths – doubtless to sell them at unreasonable prices to the black marketeers, smugglers, and bandits by whom the whole countryside was now overrun. Not since the heyday of the Troubles, indeed, had a wellnigh universal. lawlessness so prevailed; housebreaking had become common and arson might be expected to spring up again at any time. For two pins he would return to South America or settle in some atrocious part of Surrey.

  This comparatively harmless talk was for the most part directed to Mr Thewless. Humphrey, engaged with Ivor, clearly gave no heed to it. And thus dinner passed comfortably enough. It was followed, as a preliminary to packing Humphrey off to bed, by a stroll upon the terrace. Mr Thewless found the ritual a trifle chilly, and he judged that the tumbledown statuary, dimly revealed by a moon now in its last quarter, was depressing rather than picturesque. Behind the house the sough of the ocean could be faintly heard; sparsely on the hillsides, and to an effect of great loneliness, there gleamed a yellow light from cottage windows; periodically the beam from a lighthouse on some adjacent headland swept over the uppermost story of the house and passed on like a hunter’s noose that has failed to snare its prey. Humphrey was delighted with the effect, and at this Mr Thewless found himself being foolishly relieved. The truth was, he realized, that he had fallen into the way of being unnecessarily apprehensive as to what might alarm his pupil’s sensibilities and precipitate undesirable imaginative repercussions. He was the more startled, therefore, at the sudden starting up of what might well have proved disastrous in this regard.