The Journeying Boy Read Free Page B

ramifying establishment – and indeed what appeared to issue faintly from the earpiece was the voice of the objectionable butler. Mr Thewless disapproved of a gentleman thus ordering matters as if his home were a laboratory or an office. But genius, he reflected, makes its own rules. And again he surveyed the noble brow and perpetually wondering eyes of the great scientist. It was really satisfactory – it was really very satisfactory, after all – to find oneself drawn into the affairs of one so eminent.
    ‘At once,’ said Sir Bernard. There was something like surprise and relief in his tone. He replaced the receiver, and in the same moment his hand went down in what might have been the action of pressing an electric bell. He looked at Mr Thewless in an abstraction so extreme as to suggest that some profound speculation on the structure of the physical universe had suddenly come to him from the void. And then he spoke. ‘I shall give myself the pleasure,’ he said, ‘of writing to you by this evening’s post. Should it be possible…’
    And thus in a matter of seconds – although not before achieving a full realization of what had happened – Mr Thewless found himself being shown out. Some more acceptable candidate for the distinction of tutoring young Humphrey Paxton had turned up. What manner of man was his successful rival? Mr Thewless had his answer as he stood in the hall waiting to be handed his suspect umbrella and his insufficient hat. For through the open door of the library he glimpsed a young man of athletic figure and confident bearing who was beguiling his brief period of waiting by turning over the pages of The Times . Mr Thewless knew the type.
    He walked down the broad steps of the Paxton mansion into London sunlight. The letter which Sir Bernard would write that evening already lay open in his mind. He had received it before. That it was a disconcerting letter to receive was a fact lying not at all in the economic sphere. Mr Thewless was never unable to obtain employment, and that on terms as good as it ever occurred to him to bargain for. No, the jolt lay elsewhere… Mr Thewless reached the pavement and took a deep breath of air – an air equally redolent of lime trees and petrol engines. He was, he tried to persuade himself, well out of it. The Paxton establishment had irritated him; Humphrey Paxton sounded a most unpromising boy; the proposed arrangement would have been altogether unsatisfactory from a working point of view. Nevertheless, Mr Thewless was disappointed. And this, since he was an honest man, he presently admitted to himself. Galileo, Bacon, Newton…that morning he had been with the gods. Genius had half turned to him in its frailty and he had been prepared to shoulder whatever responsibility followed. In his heart Mr Thewless believed that he would have done not badly. As he turned away from the Paxton portico and walked through the quiet, almost empty square, he felt the universe contracting about him and building up, not many inches from his nose, its old and familiar horizons. It was as if, while in the great man’s presence, he too had for a moment contrived to peer over that brick wall. But now – to put it less graphically – the humdrum was establishing itself once more as his natural environment. For some little time his life would feel the narrower as a result of this episode. And then he would forget all about it.
    But in this prognostication Mr Thewless was wrong. As a consequence of his visit to Sir Bernard Paxton, an altogether fuller life was presently to be his. And in this his fate was to contrast markedly with that of the young man whom he had glimpsed in the library.

 
     
2
    The Spanish library had a good deal impressed Captain Cox, and now the Chinese study impressed him too. Nevertheless, the marked deference with which he shook hands with Sir Bernard Paxton was only partly a tribute to wealth. Captain Cox, quite as much as Mr Thewless, respected