‘Sometimes I could follow it like a dream.’
Ivor was silent for a moment. He found Humphrey’s unabashed – his positively monarchal – raids upon English poetry very little to his taste. ‘And all this,’ he said presently, ‘doesn’t that frighten you a bit?’
‘This?’
‘The fact of these desperate and unscrupulous people being on your trail.’
‘It frightened me most terribly.’
They moved on again mutely, Humphrey with some obtrusiveness offering no elucidation of the tense into which he had cast this statement. Presently, however, he did speak: ‘And I’m very glad I’m not taking this walk alone.’
There was a lurking appeal for reassurance in this. Ivor laughed. ‘We certainly can’t have you scouring the country by yourself just at present. That ambulance would roll up again, and away you’d go. They wouldn’t bag the tutor instead of the pupil a second time.’
‘It was odd they did that, wasn’t it?’
This brought Ivor up. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It
was
odd.’
‘And I had another escape on the Heysham train that was odd too.’
‘Did you, indeed?’ And Ivor’s eyes came swiftly upon his companion. ‘Tell me about it.’
But again prompting proved to be a mistake. Something – it seemed three parts mischief and one part caution – held Humphrey back from pursuing the theme. Instead, he returned to a confidence of another sort. ‘I suppose,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘that some people are brave and some cowardly in a settled way. I mean the one thing or the other all the time. They’re usually like that in books. But with me it’s intermittent.’ He paused on this impressive word. ‘Last night, you know, when I heard old Thewless yell, and I grabbed my gun in the dark and ran out, I think I was more terribly scared than I’ve ever been before. There seemed to be no safety…anywhere. But then, when I saw that he’d had a rough time again, poor old chap, and I was afraid he might be badly hurt, and I got my arm round him and told him to cheer up, I just stopped being frightened without so much as noticing that I
had
stopped. Of course you and your father were about by then. That must have been it.’
‘That must have been it. Mr Thewless is an excellent man. But I don’t think he’d cut much of a figure in a crisis.’
‘Oh, no – you’re wrong there.’ Humphrey’s eyes went off into distance, so that he looked for a moment very like Sir Bernard conversing with the ether. ‘You ought to be right, but I’m sure you’re wrong. Perhaps he really–’ Humphrey abruptly broke off. They had reached the bottom of the cliff, and beyond a strip of boulders, rockpools, and shingle the long beach stretched before them. ‘What wizard sands! I’ll race you, Ivor.’ And the boy went off at a bound.
For a second Ivor was irresolute, his eye on the firm, shining surface, printless save for the criss-cross tracks of gulls; he might have been a man recognizing in a situation some factor of which account ought to have been taken long ago. ‘Stop!’ he called. ‘Come back at once!’ And he himself advanced a few paces, as if meditating pursuit.
Humphrey turned back in surprise. ‘What’s wrong, Ivor? You – you haven’t spotted the enemy?’
‘No, not that. But those sands are dangerous. We must keep along the rocks. Rather a shame, isn’t it? This way! Look, the cave is over there.’
‘Dangerous! You mean it’s quicksand?’ Humphrey’s eye travelled swiftly over the long beach, and his intelligence was working swiftly behind it. ‘Why, it looks impossible! I’ve seen–’
‘Not all over, of course. Just in patches. And that makes it thoroughly treacherous.’
‘Treacherous?’
The word, as Humphrey echoed it, hung upon the air rather longer than Ivor liked, making him wish that he had phrased his warning differently. ‘But it’s rather fun going by these pools. There are crabs, and sea-anemones, and some astonishing seaweeds.’
Perceptibly, Humphrey hung back. Perhaps it was merely that the proffer of these interesting marine exhibits struck too juvenile a note – as if the graduate in Biggles, the student of Captain Hugh Drummond, the explorer of the pastoral loves of Daphnis and Chloe had been questioned on a forgotten command of the creations of Miss Enid Blyton. Or perhaps it was something else… ‘We’ll be there in five minutes now,’ Ivor said. ‘You can see the opening. It’s that dark patch just before the next headland.’
‘It’s going to be a long way back to breakfast. And I’m hungry. I’m tired, too.’ The corners of Humphrey’s mouth were dropping, and his mental age was clearly threatening to drop with them. For a moment he dragged one foot after another across the rock – a gesture very sufficiently childish. ‘I want to go–’ He checked himself, and was evidently confronting the fact that Killyboffin Hall was not precisely his native ground. His shoulders squared themselves. ‘Then come on!’ he said. ‘But straight to the cave. Never mind the beastly seaweeds and jellyfishes.’ And he scrambled his way forward, avoiding further talk – and also, perhaps, a little heartening himself – by whistling some altogether vulgar tune. But every now and then his glance went out across the empty sands, and his high forehead grew puckered under its crown of untidy black hair.
The gulls wheeled around them, crying out as if in some futile warning. The mouth of the cave, foreshortened to a jagged slit in the face of the cliff, lay in front – obscurely sinister, like an unsutured wound.
Humphrey Paxton’s doubts had grown as he walked. But when he entered the cave he knew at once that this was where the thing must act itself out. It was a cave such as adventure stories own – and must have owned, indeed, from the beginnings of story-telling, so familiar was it, so much part of the already existing furniture of the dreaming or day-dreaming mind. The low orifice; the vast twilight chamber, vaulted and silent, with further dark
penetralia
, forbidden thresholds, beyond; the deep waters flowing, mysteriously and excitingly, inwards: these were part of the archetypal cave, recognized at a glance. And orthodox too, if at a more superficial level, were the smooth ledges that ran, like narrow and sinuous quays, on either side of the darkly gleaming water. One of these, a resolute man might hold against a whole gang of smugglers, a whole nest of spies; from such a narrow footing, a well-directed blow might send some pirate captain, his cutlass helplessly flailing the air, sheer into his own element. Such fancies were the natural promptings of the place.
Such fancies, too, Ivor Bolderwood designed. Walking behind Humphrey, and glancing at his watch by the last clear light from the open sky, he saw that in just eight minutes’ time the boy was to be kidnapped. His tutor – and the world, should it be disposed to inquire – might believe for a time that he had run away to sea. His father might guess the whole truth if he had a mind to. But the boy himself must guess no more than half of it – and, in a manner, events had conspired to just this end. Humphrey, returned crumpled and scared to the paternal roof in so many days’ time – or weeks, if that were needed – must have no story other than that of his brutal snatching from kindly relatives in Ireland. The crux of the plan lay in that. And did not this unexpected complication of rivals at the game, although it introduced a fresh hazard formidable enough – marvellously second what was aimed at? Something had happened on the Heysham train; something more had happened on the light railway – yes, and something yet further at Killyboffin Hall in the small hours. And in none of these things was a Bolderwood implicated or implicatable. Decidedly it all went well. And Ivor smiled to himself in the growing darkness – unconscious of his father, at this very moment (the girl at the telephone-exchange having consented to begin her day’s duties), listening to calamity on the line from London; unconscious of
Bolderwood Hump,
of
gun for boy 1.15
, of the fact that the late husband of the indigent Mrs Standage had once coxed an eight at Cambridge, of the outraged moral feelings of Soapy Clodd, of Detective-Inspector Cadover now grim and silent in a police car hurrying out to Croydon. There had been ticklish moments, as in a design so fantastically intricate there were bound to be. The strange chance of Sir Bernard Paxton’s having chosen Cox for a tutor – Cox with whom he had had that uncomfortably revealing clash in Montevideo some years ago – that, as hurriedly revealed by Jollard, had required action swift, tricky, and nasty. But it had gone off very nicely indeed. There was great advantage in being after something really big. The resources one could draw upon were enormous.
‘Have you seen
Plutonium Blonde?’
The boy’s question came out of the near darkness like a pistol-shot, and was followed to Ivor’s ear by his own sharply indrawn breath, his own voice raised a pitch in too swift answer. ‘What do you mean?’
‘It just occurred to me to wonder… I say, Ivor, old man, I suppose you’ve brought a torch? Does the sea go right in? Is the air all right? Ought we to have a candle-flame to test it with?’
He knew by now Humphrey’s trick of rapidly fired questions. They covered hard thinking. But this time they covered too his own first alarmed sense that, after all, there might have been some flaw in the design. It was simply impossible that this inconsequent question could be coincidental. Humphrey had framed it, hoarded it, and at last fired it off with what had been, perhaps, triumphant success. The boy suspected something – and that was bad. The boy, reported as immature, unstable, and apt for his part in the plan, proved to have a clear head and an ability to go on using it – which was surely worse. And Ivor began to wonder – as his father, had he known it, was desperately wondering now – whether there were not some alternative way of going to work that would better meet the situation as it had come to stand. But yet he must not exaggerate his misgivings – nor, in the boy, what were still, perhaps, no more than drifts of suspicion, forming only to dissipate themselves moments later, like the pockets of mist still at play on the hillsides when they had begun to descend the cliff. Moreover, the little drama about to be enacted ought to be convincing enough even to the keenest-witted boy, the more especially as it had, all unexpectedly and thanks to the bearded and bespectacled rival desperado – the immense advantage of kindred incidents affording an ample ‘working up’ of the sort of responses required.
Ivor became aware that he had permitted a silence, conceivably sinister in effect, to fall upon the tail of Humphrey’s questions. ‘A candle?’ he said. ‘No, we need nothing like that. I’ve been through here scores of times. It was my favourite hide-out when I was a boy. But here’s a torch.’ He let the beam play past Humphrey’s bare legs. ‘Straight ahead.’
‘Am I to walk in front of you still?’ There was a touch of resignation in the boy’s voice.
‘Yes – straight forward. It’s a perfectly secure path. But, if you don’t want a ducking, don’t take too big a jump when anything startles you.’ Ivor was gay. ‘And one or two things
can
do that. Look’ – and he flashed the torch upwards – ‘the roof is stalactitic, as you can see. That means an occasional drop of very cold water on your nose or down the back of your neck. And do you notice how we have started whispering?’
‘I certainly do.’
‘It’s because any noise multiplies itself quite astoundingly. For instance, fish swim right in, and sometimes they leap. The row is quite surprising. It might be the body of the murdered man going overboard in a sack.’
‘I see.’ Humphrey’s tone acknowledged the perfect appropriateness of this image to the spirit of the place. He halted and peered down at the water a few feet below him. ‘What I don’t understand,’ he said, ‘is why it
flows
. It’s like a subterranean river.’
‘It’s the flow that makes a little current of air all through, and keeps the atmosphere pure. And it flows because the whole cave is in the form of a horseshoe, with a second, rather smaller, entrance at the other side of the headland. That the sea goes slowly through is some trick of the currents here.’
‘Don’t you feel that the whole place is a trick?’
‘The whole place?’ Ivor was again disconcerted.
‘A
papier-mâché
cave in a fun-fair. You pay sixpence to drift slowly through in a boat, and there are all sorts of prepared surprises. Romantic views of Venice behind dirty gauze, and luminous skeletons that drop down from the roof. I don’t think I’d feel it out of the way if we met one or two prepared effects here. It’s in the air, as you might say.’
‘I doubt the romantic view of Venice.’ Ivor answered readily, but he was now more conscious still of the boy’s power to set him guessing. He was relieved to think that in five minutes the present ticklish phase of the affair would be over.
‘Well, I think I’d have more stomach for the skeleton not on an
empty
stomach. Do we turn back presently, or go right through?’
‘I’m all for breakfast too. But it will be just as quick, now, to go right through, and up another track through the cliff. Only’ – Ivor’s voice was regretful – ‘we shan’t have time to look into any of the little caves.’
‘Little ones?’
‘They ramify out from this. We’ll pass several entrances presently. Some are quite long; others are odd little places, rather like side chapels in a cathedral. You must never explore them by yourself, though.’ Ivor delivered this caution with benevolent emphasis. ‘Not all of them are safe, as the main cave is. Some have crevasses you can’t easily see, with stalagmites like needles at the bottom. Others have deep pools, with smooth sides, like wells. And in some the roof is unsafe, and one might be walled up.’
Humphrey laughed softly. ‘To be entombed in
papier-mâché
– what a horrid fate!’ For the first time the boy glanced round. And Ivor, glimpsing his face, felt considerably relieved – for the boy’s expression was not that of one taking matters so lightly as his mocking words suggested. He was – rather magnificently, Ivor acknowledged – keeping up a part: a part out of some favourite book, perhaps, in which the hero marched insouciant upon his fate. But he was as pale as a sheet in the torch’s beam, and his lower lip faintly trembled. Better still, he was puzzled; he had found, in whatever conjecture he had formed, no absolute certainty. And, so long as his mind hung in the balance between one interpretation of his situation and another, the event now imminent could scarcely but take it down on the desired side in the end. Reassured as to this, Ivor could spare a little admiration for the boy’s performance. And how superb the intuition of the
papier-mâché
, the factitious and contrived, essence of the scene!