The Journeying Boy by Michael Innes Page B

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.

 
     
7
    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;