Very little reflection would have suggested to Mr Thewless that here was a circumstance in no way remarkable. On long-distance trains people do leave their compartments and potter down corridors. And as yet the boy who might, or might not, be Humphrey Paxton could not have been more than a couple of minutes gone – for certainly Mr Thewless’ troubled abstraction had lasted no longer. Moreover, on neither supposition was there strictly anything to be alarmed about. If this was the real Humphrey Paxton, then the whole fevered supposition which his tutor had been building up was a figment and there was no reason to suppose any sort of plot whatever. And correspondingly if this was a bogus Humphrey, then anything untoward – such as the lad’s losing his nerve for the imposture and bolting – could represent no more than a welcome clearing of the air.
But at this juncture Mr Thewless was in the grip not of rational calculation, but of instinct. The boy – very possibly the young criminal – was only two minutes gone, and on the mere score of this even the slightest uneasiness was absurd. Yet Mr Thewless was swept not so much by misgiving as by panic.
The man with the beard and the pebble glasses was gone too. On his seat, like the cast skin of some dingy reptile, lay the canvas case of his fishing-rod. Sections of the rod itself were propped in the corner, and beside them lay a gleaming brass-and-ivory reel. On the rack above was that sort of basket with an oblong hole through which one is supposed to drop fish like letters into a pillar-box. At all these things Mr Thewless absently stared – and as he did so his irrational alarm grew. Quite suddenly the bearded man had become in his heated imagination a figure wholly sinister. For he had never fished in his life. All these properties were entirely new – and what genuine fisherman ever renewed his entire outfit simultaneously? Moreover, there had been something in the way in which the fellow had fiddled with his rod –
Having got so far in fantastic speculation, Mr Thewless felt his head begin to swim. It was just as the woman in the corner had said; distrust was spreading itself like a miasma around him; he had a nightmarish feeling that he could be certain of nobody; were he to summon the guard, even that official would presently suggest himself as an emissary of darkness. But Miss Liberty herself, although annoying, was at least genuine; there could be no doubt about her. And Mr Thewless glanced across at the elderly lady’s corner. As he did so he felt a queer stirring in his scalp, and this was immediately succeeded by an even more unpleasant pricking in the spine. The woman in the corner was not Miss Liberty…
Long ago Mr Thewless had been deeply impressed by a certain scientific romance. It told how (just as in H G Wells’ novel) the Martians wished to possess the earth. But they could do so only by projecting their own intelligences into human bodies – and this they had begun to do. No earthly being was safe. A man might turn to his wife – and in that instant the being who looked out through his eyes might be that of a malign invader from a distant planet… And now, as he looked at Miss Liberty, it was something of the same sort that Mr Thewless experienced. For a second – a mere fraction of time – the person answering his gaze was someone else. But this was madness! And even as he held the woman’s gaze the hallucination passed. More, it even explained itself. Miss Liberty had been at her exciting book again; its illusion had her in its grip; that absurd impression he had received of a cold mind grappling with a crisis was no more than a reflection of whatever absurdities were transacting themselves within its pages.
Nevertheless, Mr Thewless’ perturbation grew. He got to his feet, shoved at the sliding-door giving on the corridor, and scrambled out of the compartment. Doing this somewhat blindly, he collided with the bearded man, who was now returning to his seat. The impact would in any event have been not inconsiderable. But at this moment it happened that the train, now spurting like a seasoned runner down the final stretch of track to Morecambe and Heysham, swayed over some system of points – with the result that Mr Thewless found himself precipitated upon the bearded man with all the violence of a deliberate assault. And as a result, the bearded man’s glasses were knocked off. For a moment the two men looked at each other – and Mr Thewless realized with a fresh stab of apprehension that the eyes fixed upon his own were perfectly focused. Assuredly they were not the eyes of a man who has just been deprived of unusually strong lenses of a genuine sort. Moreover – and this completed Mr Thewless’ dismay – the glance which they fleetingly held had a fresh familiarity which it took only a fraction of time to place. It was that same glance of cold appraisal of some invisible situation that Mr Thewless had fantastically imagined himself to discern in the innocent Miss Liberty…
The bearded man picked up his glasses and rumbled an apology. Mr Thewless, who had been much more in fault, found himself without the power of reply; he edged past the bearded man in a mere impulse to get away, and found himself stumbling up the corridor. Outside, dusk had now fallen and was deepening rapidly. It was like an impalpable tunnel closing in upon the hurtling train, and already the flying wheels and pounding pistons were taking on the deeper note they seem to sound at night.
The boy was missing… Mr Thewless made his way up the corridor, peering into the succession of first-class compartments on his right. Business men, Army officers, dogs, expensive children: each held its appropriate quota of these. But of the boy there was, of course, no sign. Why should there be? Mr Thewless got to the end of the corridor and tried the lavatory. It was empty. He passed into the next coach. Here there were two lavatories and one was occupied. But even as Mr Thewless paused doubtfully the door opened and something cannoned unaccountably against his knees. Looking down, he had the shock of feeling that open madness had seized him at last. For what he saw was an elderly and rather intelligent-looking man – but put together on a scale of something like four inches to the foot. With a word of apology, this apparition scurried down the corridor, occasionally pausing to stand on tip-toe and peer into a compartment. And at almost the same moment a door opened halfway down the coach and there advanced upon Mr Thewless what appeared to be a schoolboy of about Humphrey Paxton’s age. Only this schoolboy was some eight feet high and correspondingly broad, and he came down the corridor only by a series of muscular exertions which made him pant as he moved… Mr Thewless glanced in a kind of despair into the first compartment upon which he came – and met the impassive gaze of a Chinese lady who was holding a white monkey on a chain. At the farther end of the compartment two Indians were playing cards, and in the middle an enormous Negro smoked a cigar. And the compartment held a fifth occupant – an inert figure entirely swathed in bandages…
The train swayed. The engine could not be far away, for its roar was very loud. Nevertheless, other sounds predominated. There was a buzz of excited chatter in half a dozen outlandish tongues; there was a further baffling babel of growls and hisses, snarls and chirps; there was an intermittent and wholly mysterious deep reverberation, as if some valve were being periodically opened in a vast and grating machine.
Upon all these appearances and sensations Mr Thewless did not pause to reflect. He was surrounded by a congeries of foreigners and prodigies; he saw in them only the massive menace which anything of the sort may occasion in a mind swayed by primitive impulse; here was the enemy, and that was that! Nor was Mr Thewless any longer very clear on the first promptings of his confusion. The boy was gone. He had vanished in a sinister way. And his genuineness or otherwise – which was really the crux of the matter – had for the moment passed out of focus.
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.
Clambering over kit-bags and babies, Mr Thewless hurried back to his compartment – physically as mentally a shuttlecock in the swaying corridors of this interminable train. That the bearded man did stand to him in some profoundly malign relationship he was convinced; there was nothing shadowy or intermittent about this; he could feel as he stumbled and squeezed his way forward that the fellow’s eyes behind their bogus lenses were boring uncomfortably into his back. But around this there was only wild surmise. The boy was a fraud; with rather shaky logic, Mr Thewless felt him to be a traitor; the real Humphrey Paxton was in the hands of these same people who were plotting thus mysteriously around him and leading him this harassing and humiliating dance; action must be taken at once if he was not to be a mere cat’s-paw in the commission of an atrocious crime…
The compartment was still empty. Mr Thewless entered it and sat down heavily in his seat. He had now been in a state of more or less continuous agitation for more than five hours – and to this the last half hour had stood as a sort of mounting climax. Such excitement told upon an elderly man. Not that Mr Thewless felt himself beaten. Nothing indeed was to be more remarkable about the whole history of these days than that he never felt himself to be precisely that. He was slow; he was bewildered; he was even irresolute at times. But Nature did appear to have given him the obstinate feeling that it was always possible to fight back.
He took breath. And as he did so the bearded man entered the compartment. His expression was not easy to discern, but his manner had become amicable. ‘That’s done with, praise heaven!’ he rumbled, and fell to packing up his suspect fishing-rod.
What was done with, presumably, was the journey, and Mr Thewless felt called upon to make some reply. ‘We are coming into Heysham?’ he asked. It went against the grain thus casually to converse with the enemy, but it might be as well to give no appearance of suspicion.
‘No, sir – that’s some way off yet.’ The bearded man dumped his pillar-box basket on the seat beside him. ‘The train stops at Morecambe first, and I myself go no further.’ The bearded man paused. ‘Having no occasion to,’ he added. Mr Thewless seemed definitely to discern an inflexion of sinister triumph in this. ‘Capital place for fishing, Morecambe. You can make an uncommonly big catch there.’
Mr Thewless had no means of telling whether these words were literally true, but as pronounced by the bearded man he felt that they bore some sardonic secondary sense. And for a moment he found himself surprisingly near to random violence. Already, and by mere accident, he had knocked the bearded man’s glasses off. In this perhaps he had tasted blood. For he certainly felt now that it would be pleasing to set about this questionable fisherman and give him a bashing. It was a long time since he had cherished such an impulse towards a fellow man. Mr Thewless grabbed The Times and took shelter behind it once more. And in a matter of seconds the train had stopped and the bearded man had left the compartment.
Mr Thewless dropped his paper, lowered the window, and looked anxiously out. If his charge had been the real Humphrey Paxton, and he had gone into hiding on the train, what more likely than that he should now be proposing to make a bolt for it? And, correspondingly, if his charge had been an impostor, was it not possible that the same thing was taking place? There might have been no plan to maintain a long-continued deception in Ireland; the criminals might feel that they had already been given sufficient grace. And Mr Thewless peered up and down the platform for signs of an absconding boy. But all he saw was the bearded man once more. The fellow had been joined by what appeared to be a private chauffeur, and this retainer was assisting a porter to unload something from the van. The light was poor at just that point, and Mr Thewless had for a moment the absurd impression that what the two men were grappling with was a coffin… But the reality, when he succeeded in distinguishing it, surprised him scarcely less. The bearded man, it appeared, was the owner of that swathed double bass which had kept the Fat Lady and the various circus creatures company in the guard’s van. The instrument was being extricated with considerable difficulty – almost as if it were heavy as well as bulky – and the bearded man (whose piscatorial paraphernalia looked doubly absurd in one now revealed as a devotee not of the naiads, but the muses) was superintending the operation with some anxiety. Even as Mr Thewless watched, however, the thing was accomplished, and the bearded man and his retinue made their way to a waiting car. To do so they had to pass close by once more, and upon seeing his late travelling companion the bearded man gave a cordial wave. ‘I hope you’ll have a good crossing!’ he called cheerfully, and was about to pass on. But an afterthought appeared to strike him, and he turned. ‘You and the boy, that is to say. Good night!’ He was gone. And at the same moment Miss Liberty re-entered the compartment.
Mr Thewless had forgotten about her. But now he turned his eyes on her suspiciously – and noticed that hers were upon the retreating form of the bearded man. At once his suspicions grew. Between these people – and between these people and the boy – he felt some occult connexion. Perhaps this harmless-seeming female was being left as a sort of rearguard to keep an eye on him…
But this was insanity. A more harmless type than Miss Liberty, with her trepidations over an exciting novel, it would be impossible to conceive. And to break the ridiculous spell which he felt growing upon him Mr Thewless spoke out. ‘May I ask,’ he said, ‘if you have seen my young companion? He has been missing for some time, and I am getting quite worried about him.’
Miss Liberty withdrew her gaze into the compartment and directed it upon her interrogator. Since she wore no pebble glasses, it was possible to assess something of its quality. What Mr Thewless read in it was distrust. But it was not, he felt, a muzzy and generalized distrust, such as a mind seeped in sensational fiction might evince. It was rather the suspended judgement of one before whom he had by no means as yet passed some crucial examination. ‘Humphrey?’ said Miss Liberty. ‘I am sure he must be quite all right. Ah, we are moving again! A delightful boy, if I may say so, only perhaps a little highly-strung. He will be back any minute, I expect.’ She glanced towards the corridor. ‘Indeed, here he is.’
It was certainly Humphrey – whether the true or the feigned. Without a glance at either of his companions, he pushed the door to and tumbled into his seat. He was deathly pale, breathing hard, and – it seemed to Mr Thewless – oddly crumpled. His eyes between their dark eyebrows and dark shadows held a brighter glitter than they had yet shown – a piercing gleam which might have been of fear or excitement or even anger. He curled himself up and his thumb stole towards his mouth; suddenly he straightened himself with a jerk, sat up, and thrust his hands into his trouser pockets. ‘Is the next stop Heysham?’ he asked.
Mr Thewless, who had been about to make some reference to his unaccountable disappearance during the past half hour, was startled by the voice, which was at once unnecessarily loud and trembling beneath some uncontrollable agitation. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We shall be there in a few minutes now.’
‘And go straight on board the steamer?’ The boy laughed – and his laugh was more disturbing still. ‘Do you believe in tests?’
‘Tests?’ Mr Thewless looked at him blankly.
‘I believe in tests.’ It was Miss Liberty who spoke.
And the boy turned to her eagerly. ‘You don’t turn back?’
‘Not so long as something inside says to go forward.’
‘Not even if it’s all plainly going to be more than you bargained for?’
‘Not even then. To go on, you see, may make you. And to turn back may – well, may mar you quite.’
‘Is that from a poem?’
Miss Liberty smiled. ‘I believe it is.’
‘From Shelley?’
‘No. But it is something that Shelley thoroughly believed in, I should say.’
The boy peered out into the dark. As he did so the engine whistled, and the sound was eerie. He spoke without looking round, and in a strangely adult voice. ‘One may not be what one dreams,’ he said. ‘I think I shall turn back.’ He wheeled upon Mr Thewless. ‘You may as well know–’ He hesitated and his glance wandered to Miss Liberty. ‘Is that right?’ he asked her.
‘It entirely depends on your inner mind.’
‘I see.’ The boy was silent. The engine hooted again and the train began to slow down. ‘One should have a sword upstairs,’ he said.
Miss Liberty looked puzzled. ‘A sword upstairs?’
‘Yes. Even if one was going to be a poet one should have that.’ He sprang to his feet. ‘But at least I’ve got a gun!’ He climbed on the seat and brought down from the rack the mysterious parcel that had caused such perturbation at Euston. ‘The bump at the end must be some cartridges to be going on with. I say! We’ve stopped.’
‘This is Heysham.’
‘Then here goes.’ The boy’s face was lit up strangely. ‘Do you remember Protesilaus? He was first ashore at Troy, even though he’d had a warning. I think I’ll be first ashore at Heysham.’
And the boy thrust open the carriage door and leapt out. Mr Thewless, who had sat through this odd talk in a sort of misdoubting daze, reached for luggage. Had his mind been more actively working, the queer experience of the next few seconds might not have come to him – or if it had come at all must have done so with modified effect. But the fact is that by this time Mr Thewless’ thinking had set into a groove of deepening suspicion. And in this mood the boy’s dark conversation with this foolish old woman appeared to him as no more than the impudent mystery-mongering of a young rascal conscious of playing the central part in a successful conspiracy – one which had led him, only a little time before, into horrid confabulation with the sinister bearded man in a lavatory.
And so Mr Thewless’ mind was made up – so definitely so that he now opened his mouth and stretched out his arm with intent to denounce and apprehend the impostor. As he did so the boy, already on the platform, turned his head –
Sound died upon Mr Thewless’ lips; his gesture froze. For this – just this – he had seen before. The bare-headed boy set in a sort of deep chiaroscuro by the harsh station light; the bare-headed boy glancing slantwise at him from beneath raven hair; the boy, thus lit and thus standing, grasping a gun…all this he had seen, fixed for ever by Velazquez, in Sir Bernard Paxton’s Spanish library. And that was why Sir Bernard had such a library – as a setting for a picture acquired because of its overpowering likeness to his cherished son. Humphrey had produced a passport after all, and one authenticated far more certainly than by any photograph.
A sadder and a wiser man, Mr Thewless descended quietly to the platform. During these nightmarish five hours he had allowed the strange power of suggestion to carry him into a land of shadows, of figments as insubstantial as those in Miss Liberty’s romance. He had believed wonders. And now – and after a fashion strange enough – the simple truth had been restored to him. This was Sir Bernard Paxton’s son – a boy hopelessly submerged in highly-coloured fantasies, indeed, but in point of identity none other than he claimed to be. That the future held substantial difficulties was likely enough – but they were only those with which a competent leader of young bears might confidently look to cope.
Mr Thewless took his hat off to Miss Liberty, made an authoritative gesture which secured him one of the few porters in evidence, and with Humphrey Paxton proceeded to board the night steamer for Belfast.