The bearded man rumbled. ‘You’re not having me on, my boy. Do you know you have your pullover on inside-out? And there’s a tab that shows when you bend forward. It says “Humphrey Paxton” in neat red letters.’ And the bearded man chuckled, his eyes twinkling behind their massive lenses.
‘I’m
quite satisfied as to who you are.’
‘But that is altogether primitive!’ With a kindled eye, Miss Liberty was protesting warmly. ‘If he is pretending to be Humphrey Paxton – other, I mean, than as a mere passing joke –
of course
his things will be appropriately labelled. And he will know a great deal about the real Humphrey Paxton, too. It would probably be quite difficult for anyone not knowing the Paxtons well to catch him out.’
‘That’s right – I’m thoroughly well up in my part.’ Humphrey was now leaning forward in mounting excitement. He swung round upon Mr Thewless. ‘Can you catch me out?’
For a moment Mr Thewless was bereft of speech. For it was not the boy whom this detestable woman had unnerved; it was himself. This grotesque conversation, starting up out of nothing, had brought him face to face with that fantastic suspicion which – he realized it now – had been haunting the fringes of his mind for hours.
Was this Humphrey Paxton
?
What had the jabbering woman said? How often in our casual relationships with others we take their very identity for granted! That had been it… Well, the boy had certainly not so taken
his
identity for granted; he had authenticated it by scrutinizing a passport, by reference to the
Aeneid
, and by an ingenious use of the telephone. But why? Was it really because the boy, being the veritable Humphrey Paxton, had doubted the
bona fides
of his new tutor? Might it not rather have been a sort of bluff, an adroitly distracting turning of the tables designed to drive any answering doubts from Mr Thewless’ own mind? What of the boy’s scarcely controlled agitation and his recurrent air of rapid and furtive calculation? These might well be the signs of a clever youth playing a dangerous and difficult game. And the dentist! Had the youth an uneasy sense that over the dentist he had somehow given himself away, and was he now attempting to discover how the land lay when he jestingly challenged his tutor to catch him out? Was his queer and spasmodic behaviour an overplaying of the part of a nervous boy which he had been instructed to take up?
Mr Thewless, even as he sat silent and amazed at himself, let this jumble of speculations pour into consciousness. His suspicions were better out in the light of day, he realized, than lurking disturbingly in the depths of his mind. But what had planted them there in the first case? Not the foolish talk of Miss Liberty; that had merely precipitated a crisis. He had, he now saw, been worried from the first. The prospect of taking charge of the difficult son of the great Bernard Paxton had been more formidable than he had allowed himself to think. And the actual circumstances in which the responsibility was transferred to him had been disturbing too. Sir Bernard’s failure to appear; the boy’s belated arrival and odd behaviour; the queer business of the gun: all these things had contributed to the downright uneasiness he now felt.
And then in a flash Mr Thewless saw the full possibilities of the situation in which he had involved himself. He was conducting a boy who called himself Humphrey Paxton to a remote part of Ireland and upon a visit to relations
who would not know whether he was Humphrey Paxton or not
. If the boy was a fraud and played his part well, and if the ticklish matter of letters home were successfully coped with, there was not the least reason why the deception might not continue successfully for several weeks. And – supposing all this to be true – what end would it serve? The answer was starkly obvious. Humphrey Paxton – the real Humphrey Paxton – was the son of a very rich man from whom large sums of money might be extorted under threats. But he was also – and this leapt to Mr Thewless’ mind again at once – the son of one of the world’s most eminent scientists, so that it was conceivably something quite other than money that the criminals required. Yes! Criminals had kidnapped the real Humphrey Paxton and now had weeks in hand to get him safely away – out of the country, doubtless – while Mr Thewless with this abominable young villain went goose-chasing off to the wilds of western Ireland!
Quite suddenly Mr Thewless felt himself to be trembling in every limb. He had an irrational impulse to spring up and pull the communication cord, or to thrust out an arm and take the boy sitting opposite him by the collar. Had the bearded man and the fatal Miss Liberty not been in the compartment, he might actually have adopted this latter course out-of-hand. But for some seconds a mere sense of social decorum kept him immobile in his seat. And in those seconds his mind again began to work – began to work in the deplorable seesaw fashion to which it now seemed committed.
Certainly the boy had joined him in circumstances which would have made a kidnapping and substitution perfectly feasible. Humphrey, since he was under sixteen and travelling with an adult, required no passport to visit Ireland; there was therefore no photograph with which to check his identity. And the matter of the dentist was very striking indeed. But was it conclusive? This wayward boy might have given out that he was going to the dentist when he had some quite different plan for spending his last afternoon in Town. What, then, if Mr Thewless was wrong? What if here were the real Humphrey after all?
Two things seemed to follow. First, it must be admitted that he, Mr Thewless, was of a mind considerably more impressionable and erratic than it had ever occurred to him to own to before. For to have arrived so fast and so far in the spreading of a net of baseless suspicion was an achievement altogether surprising in him; indeed, he found himself obstinately reluctant to believe that nothing but fancy was responsible. Secondly, he had been on the verge of some act of almost criminal irresponsibility. For, supposing that this was in fact the genuine Humphrey, consider the lad’s case. He was a highly excitable creature who had surrounded himself with alarming, perhaps with terrifying, figments of conspiracy and persecution. These figments had by some obscure telepathic process communicated themselves to his new tutor; had perhaps served, too, to activate a similarly melodramatic strain in the mind of the fortuitously encountered Miss Liberty. Now these two grown-ups were playing up to Humphrey and building an atmosphere which was bound to intensify his fears. And Mr Thewless himself, although he had attempted a few minutes before to indicate this to the lady firmly enough, was now on the verge of seizing the unlucky lad by the collar and doing, maybe, irreparable nervous harm.
‘The technique of such yarns,’ Miss Liberty was saying brightly, ‘differs both from the detective story on the one hand and the simple thriller on the other. As I said, it is not primarily a matter of mystery, and not primarily a matter of violent action. What is aimed at is distrust…sometimes sudden and apparently fantastic distrust.’
The boy leant forward further still. ‘What about the other thing?’ he demanded. ‘Sudden confidence? Taking a chance?’
‘That is very true. It is also an excellent thing to bring in. We have always supposed
X
to be
X
– a thoroughly reliable man. But all at once there springs up the spine-chilling question: what if X is really
Y
…
Y
whom we know only to be our deadliest enemy? That is one of the possibilities. But the other is as you say.
Z
is wholly problematical. We have every reason to suspect him. But something obscurely prompts us and we take a chance.’ Miss Liberty laughed. ‘And, of course, it turns out well. He is revealed in the end as nothing less than the ace operator in our own Secret Service.’
Humphrey laughed too – his wild and sudden laugh. His eyes were still shining. It was hard to believe that he was the same boy who curled up brooding in a corner and sucked his thumb like a three-year-old. He turned to Mr Thewless. ‘You look glum,’ he said. ‘But I expect we’ll have a perfectly calm crossing.’
The harmless impudence of this juvenile sally ought to have cheered Mr Thewless up. But he was, he found, too extensively disturbed to be much encouraged by a momentary mood of confidence in his mercurial charge. He heartily wished the two strangers away. If they had the compartment to themselves he could surely have it out with the lad and come to a definite conclusion one way or another – and this without doing any great damage supposing him to be indeed the true Humphrey Paxton. But now there was no chance of that. Preston was behind them. Their two fellow passengers were seemingly bound for Ireland. Not till they were on the steamer would he have a chance of getting the boy to himself. And by the time he could come to any determination on his problem they would be at sea. Mr Thewless frowned. Then, recollecting himself, he smiled benevolently both on his pupil and on the calamitous Miss Liberty. For good measure, he even smiled on the bearded man, who was fiddling with a fishing-rod, and who received this gratuitous emotional display with some signs of confusion. Whereupon Mr Thewless looked out through the window, surveyed a landscape which was now just beginning to admit the shades of evening, and fell to a more mature consideration of his predicament.
Suppose, once more, that this was indeed Humphrey Paxton. The boy had been living in a world of oppressive fantasies, until he had reached a state of hallucinating himself with terrifying day-dreams. But now he was making a break; a change of environment lay before him; in his new tutor he had one who would at least handle the situation as intelligently and conscientiously as he could. Moreover, Miss Liberty had not, perhaps, been an unmitigated pest. Her cheerful talk about thrillers and spy stories had produced in Humphrey – if Humphrey it was! – what seemed a healthy response; it was as if he had succeeded for the time in reducing his fantasies to their original status of exciting make-believe. Perhaps, indeed, the lady had unconsciously provided something like a key for dealing with him. But now suppose that Mr Thewless broke through this make-believe with an actual and sober challenge so the lad’s identity – such a challenge as the lad on his part had uttered when at his most disturbed at Euston. Could he really do this without the risk of inflicting serious nervous shock? On second thoughts, and without the advantage of professional knowledge on such matters, Mr Thewless doubted it. It would be a step of the utmost gravity. And prompting it there might be nothing more solid than a vagary of his own mind – one induced by those very vagaries in his pupil which in accepting his present employment he had given an implied assurance of his ability to cope with!
But now consider again the other side of the picture. What if, in London, the first stages of an audacious and atrocious crime had indeed accomplished themselves? Humphrey Paxton was to be taken by a tutor who had never set eyes on him to visit relations who were in precisely the same case. His father had been prevented from accompanying him to the railway station; presumably, therefore, Humphrey had set out for it alone.
Had he ever got there?
Could more favourable circumstances for a ruthless kidnapping be conceived? For the criminals had only to be provided with a colourable pseudo-Humphrey and they had a chance of achieving something altogether out of the way – nothing less than a kidnapping unsuspected until they chose to reveal it at their own convenience; an abduction unsucceeded by the slightest hue-and-cry! And in this scheme Mr Thewless, the unsuspecting tutor pottering through Caesar or Virgil with the pseudo-Humphrey in the depths of Ireland, would be the prime if unconscious instrument.
It was an intolerable thought. Moreover, if he really believed his suspicions to have any substance he had a clear duty to act. Not to do so would be to concur weakly in a train of events leading to none could tell what degree of horror. But what could he do? Insist upon returning to London at once? Communicate his fantastic suspicion to Sir Bernard Paxton and request that somebody be sent to identify the boy? But Sir Bernard had been called away, and it might not be easy to get at once into touch with him. Should he hurry on to the Bolderwood cousins and explain the situation to them? Should he call in the police? Harassed thus by one disagreeable project and another, Mr Thewless heartily wished his problematical pupil to Jericho.
As he did so, he turned from the window to view the com-partment, and found that the boy had disappeared.
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 –