‘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.