The Journeying Boy

by Michael Innes

  And thus, with a smile of more than customary joviality, the master of Killyboffin left the room. Mr Thewless, before turning to his shaving water, remained for some moments staring out of the window. He was browbeaten, bewildered, worried. He was also, had he known it, on the verge of being extremely angry.

  The breakfast-table was generously appointed for four. But only the elder Mr Bolderwood and Mr Thewless faced each other across it. A massive silver contraption, which opened at a touch upon at least a dozen boiled eggs, emphasized the depleted condition of the company.

  ‘Ivor,’ said Mr Bolderwood, ‘must still be hunting Humphrey up. I took a turn in the grounds, but there was no sign of either of them. A bit odd, eh? One would expect two hungry young people – guns or no guns – to be waiting for the gong. I hope that egg isn’t too hard for your liking.’

  ‘It is quite excellent; a great treat.’ Having made this eminently conventional response, Mr Thewless was silent for some moments. Then, rather abruptly, he spoke again. ‘I suppose, sir, you will inform the police?’

  Cyril Bolderwood looked mildly startled. ‘You mean if Humphrey runs away? I hardly think so. It would be my inclination to get in touch with his father first.’

  ‘I certainly mean nothing of the sort.’ Mr Thewless was as emphatic as he was surprised. ‘What I refer to is last night’s housebreaking.’

  ‘Oh, that!’ Cyril Bolderwood’s laughter – and with a quality now really irritating to his auditor – rang out anew. ‘Yes, I suppose I better had. Yes, I must ring up Sean Cushin, and he must go round and give the horrible scoundrels a talking to.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I could do it in about ten minutes.’

  ‘Ten minutes?’

  ‘When the girl opens the telephone exchange in the village for the day. At night, you know, we are quite cut off from the world. In all these ways, my dear chap, we are shockingly unprogressive here in the south. This ruffianly Government in Dublin dislikes anything it can’t find an ancient Irish word for. Telephones must be included. For the purpose of getting news about the country those fellows would probably prefer beacons on the top of Slieve League and Ben Bulben.’ And Mr Thewless’ host, as he offered this political information, chipped the top off his second egg.

  There was silence for a minute. Mr Thewless was conscious that he was listening with some eagerness for the sound of approaching voices. The vehement tones of Humphrey Paxton, even if raised in some tiresome chronicle of fictitious perils, would at this juncture have been music to his ears.

  But were the perils with which Humphrey tortured or entertained himself indeed merely–? Mr Thewless, before the half-apprehended threat of something like a Copernican revolution in his thinking – or better, perhaps, of a return to the primitive, the monstrous, the Ptolemaic hypothesis, the Humphrey-centric theory, as it might be called, of his own first alarms on the Heysham train: Mr Thewless, confronted by this, wisely suspended speculation for a while and sought the material recruitment of another egg.

  Cyril Bolderwood, too, ate silently. There was now a slight frown, as of the first dawn of anxiety, on his normally candid brow. He rose, walked to the window, and stared out at the limited prospect commanded from the ground floor. Then he moved to the door, flung it open, and fell to his familiar shouting to invisible retainers. His instructions, it seemed, were for some sort of search to be made for the late-comers. Then he crossed to a sideboard, poured himself out a second cup of coffee, and returned to the table. But immediately he was back at the window. ‘Those foreign trawlers,’ he said abruptly. ‘Did you notice if they’ve sailed or not?’

  Mr Thewless looked up in surprise. His host’s tone forbade the supposition that this question was asked merely in a conversational way. ‘Why, yes,’ he answered. ‘I noticed that they had sailed.’

  ‘Um.’ Cyril Bolderwood reached gloomily for the marmalade. ‘And Ivor is usually so very discreet. If anything, he is a young man too much to the circumspect side. May I offer you the marmalade? I shouldn’t have thought it of him.’

  To Mr Thewless this was, for the moment, altogether mysterious. He possessed, however, very considerable intelligence – was he not eminently capable with capable boys? – and this fact (which conceivably had not become apparent to his host) did now result in a dim apprehension of being ‘got at’. But at least the marmalade was excellent, and he helped himself to a little more of it.

  ‘All that talk,’ pursued Cyril Bolderwood presently, ‘about the North Cape and the Midnight Sun. Unwise, I fear, with so imaginative and restless a boy.’

  ‘My dear sir’ – Mr Thewless was suddenly impatient – ‘I must say, quite frankly, that I judge you to be indulging a bee in your bonnet. For you are apparently apprehensive of Humphrey’s attempting to run away to sea, or something of the sort. And it seems to me entirely unlikely.’ Here Mr Thewless paused, abruptly visited by suspicion. ‘But your anxiety is really about that? You are not attempting to divert my mind from the consideration of risks of a different order? For a number of things that have happened do make me occasionally feel–’

  ‘Other risks?’ Cyril Bolderwood interrupted with brisk incredulity. ‘Of course not! Mere fancies, my dear fellow – like your odd notions about the whisky-thieves last night. But about Humphrey’s perhaps cutting and running I am a little anxious, I admit.’

  At this Mr Thewless felt so exasperated that he paused before framing a reply. And in the resulting silence the sound of a telephone bell was heard shrilling in the next room. Cyril Bolderwood jumped to his feet. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that worthless girl has opened her exchange at last. And here’s somebody been waiting to get through, I’ll be bound, this last half-hour. Excuse me, my dear Thewless, while I take the call myself.’

  Cyril Bolderwood hurried out. He was absent for a long time. Mr Thewless looked at his watch, looked out of the window, took another piece of toast. Could his host, conceivably, be right? His own acquaintance with Humphrey Paxton was brief – hardly sufficiently substantial, certainly, for the hazarding of any very confident opinion. But Cyril Bolderwood’s acquaintance with the boy was briefer still; and there was no sign that of this distant connexion he had previously known very much by hearsay. Yet Cyril Bolderwood had been talking as one might do from a settled familiarity with Humphrey’s character. There was surely something artificial in this; there was, as it were, a perceptible forcing of the pace…

  Mr Thewless paused on this conception, and as he did so his host returned to the breakfast-room. He looked, Mr Thewless thought, oddly pale – and moreover it was visibly with a trembling hand that he now poured himself out a third cup of coffee. Could he have had some calamitous news, and was he now nerving himself to break this to his guest? Mr Thewless took another look, and was convinced by indefinable but powerful signs, that he was in the presence of a man in a panic. And at this, inevitably enough, all his own repressed anxieties surged up in him. Could Humphrey really have run away to sea in a trawler? He nerved himself to speak. ‘Mr Bolderwood,’ he said, ‘I hope you have not had bad news?’

  ‘No, no – nothing of the sort.’ And the owner of Killyboffin Hall sat down heavily. ‘The telephone call was about something entirely trifling. A mere matter of domestic economy, nothing more. I must really apologize for having left you so abruptly. But none of the servants is reliable with the telephone. The miserable rascals–’ But here Cyril Bolderwood’s voice trailed off, as if he had not the heart for entering upon one of his familiar imprecations. ‘The fact is, I have been thinking.’ He broke off again, and stared into his cup. It was, Mr Thewless thought, demonstrably true that his host was thinking very hard indeed – much as if, on the issue, his whole life depended.

  ‘I beg your pardon. You struck me as rather upset.’ Mr Thewless hesitated. ‘For a moment I had a horrid feeling that you might have been right, and that Humphrey had really bolted.’

  ‘Dear me, no.’ In Cyril Bolderwood’s glance as he looked up there was a momentary gleam that told of swift dec
ision. ‘To tell you the honest truth, my dear fellow, I have never really been afraid of that. In fact you were more or less in the target area a few minutes ago. I have anxieties about Humphrey that I was anxious to conceal from you. And being unable altogether to conceal my feelings, I rather played up the runaway notion.’

  At this Mr Thewless set down his cup and presented his entertainer with an expression that was altogether new. ‘Explain yourself,’ he said sternly.

  ‘Well, my dear chap, we must admit, to begin with, that you had a deuced queer experience yesterday afternoon. The more I think of it, the odder does that affair in the railway tunnel appear to be. And then consider last night. Consider the fellows masquerading as whisky-thieves. I didn’t want to alarm you, you will understand, and I made light of it as far as I could. Still, it was a bit sinister, wasn’t it? Trailing you like that in order to get at the lad. And one of the criminals having been on your train the day before. I don’t like that – I don’t like it at all. It is suspicious, my dear Thewless; positively suspicious.’

  ‘Suspicious?’ Mr Thewless would probably have recognized within himself a rising tide of indignation had this not been overtopped for the moment by bewilderment and dismay. ‘You surely don’t think–’

  ‘Ivor and I noticed at once that your mind was quite at rest. The significance of your adventure had quite escaped you. And we were most anxious not to spoil your holiday. But we have ourselves been uneasy – very uneasy. It is why we shut up the house so carefully last night. But the criminals managed to break in. Had we not changed the boy’s room – an excellent thought of Ivor’s, since information of where he was first put no doubt leaked out through the servants – they would have got him, you know; they would infallibly have got him. Tell me – did anything else out-of-the-way happen on your journey?’

  ‘Humphrey certainly told me a very odd story. The suggestion seemed to be that he had been kidnapped on the train, shut up in a dark, confined space, and then in some mysterious fashion rescued or released again. It seemed an extremely tall tale.’

  ‘Not at all. It would be the fellow you saw last night, you know, when you made such an excellent shot with the candlestick.’

  ‘I see.’ Mr Thewless was a good deal put to a stand by this incontinent promotion to a secure reality-status of what his host had so lately aspersed as mere vinous imaginings. And now a thought struck him. ‘Good heavens! I’ll tell you rather a significant thing. The man who was with us in the carriage – a bearded man with glasses, whom I really am sure I saw again last night – left the train at Morecambe – the stop, that is, just before Heysham Harbour. He appeared to be a fisherman, and he had a rod and so forth with him in the compartment. But when he did get off, and I saw him on the platform, he had a case containing some enormous musical instrument. It seemed quite unnaturally heavy. It could almost–’

  ‘Have held Humphrey!’ Cyril Bolderwood, triumphant for a moment, paused perplexed. ‘But it didn’t hold Humphrey so how–?’

  Mr Thewless answered this abrupted question as by sudden inspiration. ‘In the luggage-van, when I come to think of it, as well as this double-bass or whatever it was, there was a weighing machine with a set of pretty heavy looking weights. So somebody–’

  ‘Exactly!’ Once more Cyril Bolderwood interrupted. ‘Somebody could have released Humphrey – it would tally perfectly with the story he told you – and tricked your friend for a time by shoving in the weights instead. I don’t like it – I don’t like it at all. The whole situation that is revealing itself, that is to say. Here is a responsibility that we ought positively not to have undertaken. Our invitation was ill-advised. And Bernard ought certainly not to have accepted it.’ Cyril Bolderwood shook a severe and judicial head. ‘The son of a man in his position, not only immensely wealthy, but doing secret work of the utmost national importance, ought not to have been sent off into the blue – not even to quiet relations like ourselves; not even under the guardianship of so responsible a person as you, my dear fellow. And I’m surprised – indeed I’m positively astounded – that the English authorities don’t provide a lad in such a position with a bodyguard. Now, in South America–’

  Mr Thewless had risen and taken yet another prowl to the window. ‘Still nobody to be seen,’ he said. ‘Oh dear, oh dear!’ He turned back again. ‘I fear I have been extremely remiss.’

  ‘And in this countryside, of all places in the world!’ Cyril Bolderwood spoke from out of the deepest gloom. ‘Full of lawless wretches, ready to cut your throat as soon as look at you. Danger on every side.’

  ‘On every side?’ Mr Thewless’ alarm grew greater still. ‘You think there might be more than one – gang, organization, or whatever it’s to be called – plotting against Humphrey?’

  ‘Oh, no – oh, dear me, no!’ Cyril Bolderwood was more swiftly emphatic than he had yet been. ‘That would be a most extravagant suggestion. One gang, my dear fellow, led by this abandoned desperado with the glasses and the beard. And quite enough, too, in all conscience. He probably had that motor-cruiser we saw in the bay. Any amount of resources, you know, agents of that sort have.’

  ‘Agents?’ Mr Thewless stared. ‘You mean emissaries of a foreign power?’

  ‘No, no – nothing of the sort.’ And Cyril Bolderwood violently shook his head. ‘Quite the wrong word. Straightforward kidnappers, I should say, out for a big ransom.’ He looked at his watch. ‘This is bad – really bad, is it not? I wish those two would come back. I wish I could contact Ivor and have his advice!’

  Mr Thewless, for whom the excellent Killyboffin marmalade had ceased to have any savour, pushed away his plate and looked in sudden, perplexed speculation at his host. It struck him that in this last cry of the elder of the Bolderwoods there had been more sincerity than had sounded in anything uttered to him for some time.

  21

  ‘I suppose you know,’ Ivor Bolderwood had said quietly as soon as he and Humphrey had gained the open air, ‘what those fellows in the night were after?’

  ‘Oh, yes – I know. Look, Ivor – is that a kestrel?’

  And Ivor Bolderwood had stared upwards at the small black shape poised above the dawn – but not before his glance had travelled curiously over the lad at his side. Humphrey, he thought, was in some uncertain stage of development, and ready to take a push either way. It would not, surely, take much to thrust him back into childhood and its helpless fears; correspondingly, it would not take so very much to make a man of him. ‘A sparrow-hawk,’ he said. ‘It’s looking for something small and defenceless to pounce on, and carry off, and deal with at leisure… I was talking about these men that are after you.’

  But Humphrey was still looking into the sky. ‘Did you ever,’ he asked, ‘see an eagle fighting with a snake – high up, like that?’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘Do you think Shelley did?’

  ‘Shelley!’ exclaimed Ivor. ‘And what has Shelley got to do with it?’

  Humphrey turned to him in surprise. ‘Got to do with what, Ivor?’

  ‘Why, this that you’re up against. This situation.’

  ‘Oh, that!’ Humphrey’s gaze went seawards. ‘Are there any gannets?’

  ‘Gannets? If we went along the cliffs we might see some now.’ And for some minutes Ivor obligingly talked about gannets – and only the more coherently because he was aware of the unexpected appearance of something imponderable in the situation. Was it possible that the boy’s fantasy life had led him to a point at which he was a little astray in his wits? Or – a totally contrary hypothesis – had somebody already been on that job of making a man of him? Ivor paused to fill a pipe. It was a disordered thing to do long before breakfast, but the last few minutes had made him feel oddly in need of steadying. Much more so than the mere fact that, as things had turned out, it was necessary to keep a revolver next to his tobacco-pouch, and to scan every hedgerow as he neared it. That sort of thing was part of the day’s work with him; he had made his life of it. But this…


  He let the subject of gannets, sufficiently explored, easily drop. ‘You are fond of Shelley?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a silence. The subject seemed one upon which Humphrey was indisposed to be communicative. But for a moment Ivor kept it up. ‘I don’t know much about him,’ he said. ‘But I seem to remember that he once lay down on the bottom of a pool just to see what it would be like to drown. And, if somebody hadn’t interfered, drowned he would in fact have been. I suppose people do sometimes court danger even of quite a deadly kind just to know what it feels like.’

  ‘Oh, yes – I’m sure they do.’ Humphrey’s reply was entirely ready. ‘In fact, Ivor, I’d say you were rather the type yourself.’

  ‘We go down this little path.’ Ivor glanced first warily about him, and then with an almost equal wariness at his companion. ‘But look here, Humphrey, would you like to go back? The truth is, you know, that we’re courting danger ourselves, and I don’t know that I ought to do it.’

  ‘Do you think this might be gold?’ Humphrey had picked up a stone and was pointing with childish naïveté at a streak of copper pyrites. With an inconsequence that was equally childish, he threw the stone away, and it bounded down the cliff they were now approaching. ‘But you are armed, aren’t you?’

  ‘I certainly am. I have a revolver in my pocket.’

  ‘Then I think we may perfectly reasonably go on. How green the sea is between the rocks!’

  ‘Good. That at least means that you trust me.’ Ivor paused for another of his wary reconnaissances. ‘You do trust me, don’t you?’