As he drove to Euston, Mr Thewless, having a tidy mind, endeavoured to sort out his misgivings. He did not believe that Sir Bernard Paxton had read his article on the Roman villa excavated at Little Slumber. Being anxious to secure his services after all, Sir Bernard had simply looked him up in the likelier bibliographies and added a postscript designed to please. Every summer, as Mr Thewless very well knew, scores of Thewlesses attach themselves to little archaeological enterprises and happily potter away their holidays in insignificant siftings of the rubbish-dumps of the legionaries… But in Ireland – thought Mr Thewless irrelevantly – the armies of Rome had never set foot. There the Imperial Eagles had never been borne along the unending arrow-like roads that were the arteries of Latin culture. And the island was the worse of it to this day. Because the praetors of Augustus had left it to the generals of Elizabeth, to the Earl of Essex and Lord Grey de Wilton…
But these scholastic reveries – thought Mr Thewless, bumped awake as his taxi jerked to a stop in a traffic-block – were off the present point. Sir Bernard was paying too much, too. For a residential holiday post five guineas would have been adequate and eight handsome. Fifteen was merely ominous. And along with the offer of it there had come fresh and disconcerting information. Humphrey Paxton was not merely difficult. There was now the suggestion that the unfortunate lad was a little off his head, and disposed to imagine conspiracies and dangers around him. It was with this that Mr Thewless was to be landed in the depths of Ireland and in a household of which he knew nothing.
Mr Thewless frowned at the humped back of the taxi-driver. These were merely the reactions of a new housemaid who learns that it is two miles to the nearest bus stop. Rightly regarded, if the job was difficult it thereby carried only the more dignity. This was Paxton’s boy – say Newton’s, Galileo’s boy. The child of genius… And it was up to the new tutor to see him through.
But there was the additional annoyance that Sir Bernard himself might not appear again. There had been the suggestion that the great man might be ‘urgently called away’. The quite childish suspicion came to Mr Thewless that he was really, in the vulgar phrase, being led up the garden path – or left holding the baby. Perhaps Sir Bernard had reason to avoid or dread a parting at a railway station. Perhaps in all innocence, but at the beckoning of the unconscious mind, he had contrived that the urgent calling away should happen. Perhaps here at Euston there would be immediate and embarrassing difficulty. Mr Thewless had a horrid vision of a lusty fifteen-year-old boy indulging in a hysterical fit on the platform… Various ineffective schemes occurred to him. They would see if any of the automatic machines were working. They would walk up and look at the engine. They would buy large numbers of banal illustrated journals. They would look for chocolate-coated ice-creams. Distraction was the proper technique.
The taxi-door was flung open and Mr Thewless, emerging, gave directions for the disposal of his luggage. Unlike many of those who excavate Roman villas, he never found small matters of this sort harassing and he seldom muddled them. It was already a couple of minutes after half past four as he made his way to the appointed rendezvous. There was nobody there.
Misgiving returned. If Sir Bernard was indeed not bringing the boy to the station, what reason was there to suppose that the boy would actually come? It was true that his father believed him anxious to go to Ireland – but what more likely than that when it came to the point panic might seize a nervous child? Mr Thewless paced up and down. He bought some tobacco and paced up and down once more. It was after twenty-five to five. Suddenly a fantastic thought – or rather a fantastic mental experience – came to him. Sir Bernard Paxton was one of the most important men in England – and not important in any insulated world of science merely. There no longer existed such an insulated world. He must be important – vastly important – to those who played for power. For ultimate power. For the very dominion of the earth. Was it not conceivable that his own child…?
Mr Thewless halted, amazed at himself. He never read gangster stories. He never even read that milder sensational fiction, nicely top-dressed with a compost of literature and the arts, which is produced by idle persons living in colleges and rectories. Whence, then, did this sudden vivid fantasy come? He found himself staring unseeingly at some unintelligible piece of machinery displayed in a glass case. He turned and hurried out into the main courtyard of the station.
A taxi was just drawing up. The door burst open and he saw untidy black hair and black eyes glancing slantwise from a pale face – with crowning these the sort of flattened bowler hat which some public schools still consider essential for young travellers. The boy jumped from the taxi, and as he did so hauled from an inner pocket a large watch on a leather strap. Mr Thewless went up to him. ‘Are you Humphrey Paxton?’
Startled eyes regarded him. ‘Yes.’
‘I thought’ – and Mr Thewless nodded at the watch – ‘that I recognized Master Humphrey’s Clock.’
The boy gave a yelp of laughter, instantly taking and joyously appreciating the unremarkable joke. Then his eyes narrowed and Mr Thewless saw them suddenly flood with anxiety, suspicion, distrust. ‘Are you Mr Thewless, my tutor?’ he asked abruptly.
‘I am. And you have arrived just in comfortable time.’
‘Let me see your passport, please.’
Mr Thewless opened his mouth – and checked himself. From an inner pocket he produced the document and handed it over.
And the boy scanned it with extraordinary intensity. Then he handed it back. ‘Excuse me.’ He turned away and tumbled some coins into the hands of the taxi-driver – and his own hands, Mr Thewless noticed, were trembling. Another taxi had drawn up behind. The boy spun round upon it. An elderly lady got out. The boy gave an odd gasp; it might have been of either relief or dismay. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘here I am. And I’m most terribly sorry to be late. I’ve got the tickets and my gear is in the Left Luggage. Daddy couldn’t come. It’s not too late?’
‘Not a bit. Did the dentist keep you?’
‘The dentist?’ The boy looked blank. ‘Oh, well – it was all horrid. And then I had to go home for something. I just had to go. I’m frightfully sorry. It was terrible cheek, keeping you waiting.’ He paused, and his eyes flashed again at Mr Thewless. ‘What’s the first line of the Aeneid?’
‘Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris.’ And Mr Thewless smiled. ‘Perhaps you can tell me the second?’
‘The second?’
‘Certainly. If you want to be sure it’s me, I want to be sure it’s you.’
‘I see.’ And Humphrey Paxton gave a quick and decisive nod. ‘Italiam fato profugus Laviniaque venit.’ He frowned. ‘Would we have time to make a short telephone call?’
‘Only just.’
‘Is there anyone in London that you know very well?’
‘I have a sister who lives in London.’
They had been walking through the station, and now Humphrey halted by a telephone box. ‘Will you ring her up and say just the words I tell you?’
Mr Thewless nodded gravely. ‘Unless they are quite unsuitable words, I have no objection at all. Come along.’ They entered the telephone box together and he produced twopence. ‘What is it that I am to say?’
Humphrey considered. ‘What is your sister’s name, please?’
‘Harriet.’
‘Then say “Hullo, Harriet, I hoped I’d find you in” – and hand the receiver to me.’
Mr Thewless did as he was bid. The lad, he thought, was quite unbalanced. Nevertheless, he was capable; he ought certainly to have got School Certificate long ago… He heard his sister’s voice. ‘Hullo, Harriet,’ he said, ‘I hoped I’d find you in.’ And he handed the receiver to Humphrey.
‘I’m so sorry.’ Humphrey’s voice was apologetic, but not exaggeratedly so. ‘Would you mind telling me who has just spoken to you?’ He listened. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Would you please hold on?’ He handed the receiver back to Mr Thewless. ‘You may care to explain,’ he said seriously. And he slipped from the telephone box.
Mr Thewless explained – briefly, for his eye was on his watch. He set down the receiver and emerged briskly. ‘And now we run for it, Humphrey. We have ten minutes, but there’s often a queue at the Left Luggage. Porter!’ And he hurried forward. Humphrey Paxton, it was clear, fought with phantoms, and a sympathetic understanding was necessary. After all, it was only in point of their intensity that such dire imaginings as apparently beset the boy were abnormal. Only a few minutes before his own well-ordered mind had been invaded by some sensational and alarming notion – fleetingly indeed, so that he no longer remembered what it had been about… At the moment he must simply show Humphrey that the phantoms had no power over the actual world; that the holiday upon which they were embarked went smoothly forward on its predetermined way. ‘What about the tickets?’ he asked briskly.
And Humphrey produced an envelope. ‘Everything is there, sir.’ His voice was meek and suddenly that of a much younger boy. Mr Thewless glanced at him. He was moving dreamily forward, sucking his thumb.
They still had seven minutes when Humphrey’s suitcases had been added to those of Mr Thewless on a barrow. Their porter was moving off when he was recalled by the man at the counter. ‘Paxton, was that? There’s something else came in later.’ And he pushed forward a heavy and slender object in a canvas case.
Humphrey’s thumb came out of his mouth; he turned and himself seized this new piece of luggage with quick curiosity. ‘It’s a gun!’ he cried – and so loudly that people turned to stare. His eyes blazed. To be young! thought Mr Thewless. To have so swift and passionate a capacity for pleasure, for exultation! A clatter disturbed this reflection. Humphrey had flung the swathed shot-gun back on the counter. ‘I don’t want the horrible thing,’ he said. ‘Take it away. It’s not mine.’
Mr Thewless looked at the label. ‘It’s addressed to you, Humphrey, and has been delivered here by special messenger. Your father must have meant it for a surprise.’
‘He wouldn’t do such a thing – unless prompted. Did you prompt him?’ And Humphrey looked at his tutor accusingly. ‘Do you think I want a horrible gun to go shooting living things with?’
‘I can see you don’t. And I certainly didn’t suggest a gun to your father. But there it is.’
Humphrey shot out a finger and pointed at the clerk behind the counter. The whole scene was uncomfortably dramatic, and there was now a little crowd to watch it. ‘Do you think he would like it? He could sell it and buy toys for his children.’
Mr Thewless smiled. ‘I don’t think he would be allowed to take it, just like that. But if you don’t want it we can leave it here and make some arrangement when we get back.’
‘I don’t know that we shall get back.’ Humphrey’s glance as he uttered this dark absurdity was travelling rapidly over the people round about. ‘We’ll take it,’ he said abruptly. ‘Come on.’ And he tucked the shot-gun under his arm and strode forward.
Mr Thewless, had there been leisure for the action, might have paused to mop his brow. As it was, he hurried after the porter, who was trotting in sinister haste far in front of them. Their coach was A3, which meant right at the front of the interminable train. They gained it, however, with a good half-minute to spare. The man piled their luggage on the racks. Mr Thewless handed him a shilling and then, after rapid calculation, a further sixpence. The train was moving.
‘We’ve done it!’
Humphrey’s voice had rung out surprisingly. So might the earth’s first space-traveller exclaim as his rocket took off for the moon. The two other occupants of the compartment looked up, smiling. One was a bearded man with pebbly glasses. The other was the elderly lady who had been in the taxi behind Humphrey’s. On one side a towering brick wall was gliding past them; on the other were lines of sleeping-cars, themselves apparently fast asleep in the afternoon sunshine. Presently the whole sprawl of North London would be hurtling southwards. Then the Midlands. There would be no pause till Crewe.
Mr Thewless, tucking his gloves into a crevice on the rack above his head, heard a sigh behind him, and when he turned to his pupil it was to observe that some quick reaction had seized the boy. Humphrey was curled up in the corner seat opposite, his head just above the level of the window-frame, staring out with unseeing eyes. He had grown to a casual seeming smaller and younger, and yet at the same time he appeared to be supporting some unnatural burden of years. His brow was slightly puckered and for the first time Mr Thewless noticed that there were dark lines under his black eyes.
In fact, Humphrey Paxton had retired into a sort of infantile privacy, like some unhappy small boy being taken to his first private school. And into that privacy it was necessary to intrude. That, Mr Thewless saw with some misgiving, was a condition of getting anywhere. Somehow – and the sooner the better – he had to rap firmly on the door and walk in.
But it would assuredly be useless to force the lock. For the moment at least it might be best to leave Humphrey alone. Mr Thewless, therefore, got out his book – it was a volume of verse – and opened it. He read a page with reasonable concentration – it would never do to let his professional problem of the moment obsess him – and turned over to the next. And here his mind must a little have wandered, for it was some moments before the oddity of what had occurred came home to him. What he had stumbled on was in the form of a rhetorical question; and it was substantially the question that he now realized to be forming itself with some urgency in his own mind about his new pupil. Acting on impulse, he leant forward and handed Humphrey the book. ‘Do you know this?’ he asked. ‘The one called “Midnight on the Great Western”.’ And he pointed to the place on the page.
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 father 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.