The Camera Fiend
By E. W. Hornung
London T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd. Adelphi Terrace
1911
Pocket Upton had come down late and panting, in spite of his daily exemption from first school, and the postcard on his plate had taken away his remaining modicum of breath. He could have wept over it in open hall, and would probably have done so in the subsequent seclusion of his own study, had not an obvious way out of his difficulty been bothering him by that time almost as much as the difficulty itself. For it was not a very honest way, and the unfortunate Pocket had been called “a conscientious ass” by some of the nicest fellows in his house. Perhaps he deserved the epithet for going even as straight as he did to his house-master, who was discovered correcting proses with a blue pencil and a briar pipe.
“Please, sir, Mr. Coverley can't have me, sir. He's got a case of chicken-pox, sir.”
“Then you must come back to-night, and I'm just as glad. It's all nonsense your staying the night whenever you go up to see that doctor of yours.”
“He makes a great point of it, sir. He likes to try some fresh stuff on me, and then see what sort of night I have.”
“You could go up again to-morrow.”
“Of course I could, sir,” replied Pocket Upton, with a delicate emphasis on his penultimate. At the moment he was perhaps neither so acutely conscientious nor such an ass as his critics considered him.
“What else do you propose?” inquired Mr. Spearman.
“Well, sir, I have plenty of other friends in town, sir. Either the Knaggses or Miss Harbottle would put me up in a minute, sir.”
“Who are the Knaggses?”
“The boys were with me at Mr. Coverley's, sir; they go to Westminster now. One of them stayed with us last holidays. They live in St. John's Wood Park.”
“And the lady you mentioned?”
“Miss Harbottle, sir, an old friend of my
Mr. Spearman smiled at the gratuitous explanation of an eagerness that other lads might have taken more trouble to conceal. But there was no guile in any Upton; in that one respect the third and last of them resembled the great twin brethren of whom he had been prematurely voted a “pocket edition” on his arrival in the school. He had few of their other merits, though he took a morbid interest in the games they played by light of nature, as well as in things both beyond and beneath his brothers and the average boy. You cannot sit up half your nights with asthma and be an average boy. This was obvious even to Mr. Spearman, who was an average man. He had never disguised his own disappointment in the youngest Upton, but had often made him the butt of outspoken and disastrous comparisons. Yet in his softer moments he had some sympathy with the failure of an otherwise worthy family; this fine June morning he seemed even to understand the joy of a jaunt to London for a boy who was getting very little out of his school life. He made a note of the two names and addresses.
“You're quite sure they'll put you up, are you?” “Absolutely certain, sir.”
“Rather, sir!”
“Then run away, and don't miss your train.”
Pocket interpreted the first part of the injunction so literally as to arrive very breathless in his study. That diminutive cell was garnished with more ambitious pictures than the generality of its order; but the best of them was framed in the ivy round the lattice window, and its foreground was the nasturtiums in the flower-box. Pocket glanced down into the quad, where the fellows were preparing construes for second school in sunlit groups on garden seats. At that moment the bell began. And by the time Pocket had changed his black tie for a green one with red spots, in which he had come back after the Easter holidays, the bell had stopped and the quad was empty; before it filled again he would be up in town and on his way to Welbeck Street in a hansom.
The very journey was a joy. It was such sport to be flying through a world of buttercups and
daisies in a train again, so refreshing to feel as good as anybody else in the third smoker;
for even the grown men in the corner seats did not dream of calling the youth an “old ass,”
much less a young one, to his face. His friends and contemporaries at school were in the habit
of employing the ameliorating adjective, but there were still a few fellows
Henry Dunbar, the
novel he had brought with him in his bag. There was something like a murder! It was so exciting
as to detach Pocket Upton from the flying buttercups and daisies, from the reek of the smoking
carriage, the real crimes
The asthma specialist was one of those enterprising practitioners whose professional standing is never quite on a par with their material success. The injurious discrepancy may have spoilt his temper, or it may be that his temper was at the root of the prejudice against him. He was never very amiable with Pocket Upton, a casual patient in every sense; but this morning Dr. Bompas had some call to complain.
“You mean to tell me,” he expostulated, “that you've gone back to the cigarettes in spite of what I said last time? If you weren't a stupid schoolboy I should throw up your case!”
Pocket did not wish to have his case thrown up; it would mean no more days and nights in town. So he accepted his rebuke without visible resentment.
“It's the only way I can stop an attack,” he mumbled.
“Nonsense!” snapped the specialist. “You can make yourself coffee in the night, as you've done before.”
“I can't at school. They draw the line at that.”
“Then a public school is no place for you. I've said so from the first. Your people should
have listened to me, and sent you on a long sea voyage
The patient made no remark; but he felt as sore as his physician on the subject of that long sea voyage. It would have meant a premature end to his undistinguished schooldays, and goodbye to all thought of following in his brothers' steps on the field of schoolboy glory. But he might have had adventures beyond the pale of that circumscribed arena, he might have been shipwrecked on a desert island, and lived to tell a tale beyond the dreams of envious athletes, if his people had but taken kindly to the scheme. But they had been so very far from taking to it at all, with the single exception of his only sister, that the boy had not the heart to discuss it now.
“If only there were some medicine one could take to stop an attack!” he sighed. “But there doesn't seem to be any.”
“There are plenty of preventives,” returned the doctor. “That's what we want. Smoking and inhaling all sorts of rubbish is merely a palliative that does more harm than good in the long run.”
“But it does you good when the preventives fail. If I could get a good night without smoking I should be thankful.”
“If you like.”
The doctor wrote a prescription while the boy produced the cardboard box from his bag.
“Thank you,” said Bompas, as they made an exchange. “I don't want you even to be tempted to smoke to-night, because I know what the temptation must be when you can't get your breath. You will get this prescription made up in two bottles; take the first before you go to bed to-night, and the second if you wake with an attack before five in the morning. You say you are staying the night with friends; better give me the name and let me see if they're on the telephone before you go. I want you to go to bed early, tell them not to call you in the morning, and come back to me the moment you've had your breakfast.”
They parted amicably after all, and Pocket went off only wondering whether he ought to have said positively that he was staying with friends when he might be going back to school. But Dr. Bompas had been so short with him at first as to discourage unnecessary explanations; besides, there could be no question of his going back that night. And the difficulty of the morning, which he had quite forgotten in the train, was not allowed to mar a moment of his day in town.
At 1.45, from the top of an Atlas omnibus in Baker Street, he espied a placard with “Collapse of Middlesex” in appalling capitals. And at the station he got down to learn the worst before going on to Lord's for nothing.
The worst was so hopelessly bad that Pocket wished himself nearer the theatres, and then it
was that the terra-cotta pile of Madame Tussaud's thrust itself seductively upon his vision. He
had not been there for years. He had often wanted to go again, and go alone. He remembered
being taken by his sister when a little boy at Coverley's, but she had refused to go into the
Chamber of Horrors, and he had been relieved at the time but sorry ever afterwards, because so
many of the boys of those days had seen everything and seemed none the worse for the adventure.
It was one of the things he had always wanted not so much to
Henry Dunbar formed his staple reading in the train? And yet the boy
had other sensibilities which made him hesitate outside the building, and enter eventually with
quite a nutter under the waistcoat.
A band in fantastic livery was playing away in the marble hall; but Pocket had no ear for their music, though he was fond enough of a band. And though history was one of his few strong points at school, the glittering galaxy of kings and queens appealed to him no more than the great writers at their little desks and the great cricketers in their unconvincing flannels. They were waxworks one and all. But when the extra sixpence had been paid at the inner turnstile, and he had passed down a dungeon stair into the dim vaults below, his imagination was at work upon the dreadful faces in the docks before he had brought his catalogue to bear on one of them.
Here were wretches whose vile deeds had long been familiar to the schoolboy through a work
on his father's shelves called Annals of Our Time. He recalled bad nights when certain
of those annals
Pocket was not sorry to be back in the adulterated sunshine and the comparatively fresh air
of the Marylebone Road. He was ashamed to find that it was after four o'clock. Guy and Vivian
Knaggs would be home from Westminster in another hour. Still it was no use getting there before
them, and he might as well walk as not; it was pleasant to rub shoulders with flesh and blood
once more, and to look in faces not made of wax in the devil's image. His way, which he knew of
old, would
In the Circus Road there happens to be a highly respectable pawnbroker's shop; in the
pawnbroker's window the chances are that you might still find a motley collection of umbrellas,
mandolines, family Bibles, ornaments and clocks, strings of watches, trays of purses,
opera-glasses, biscuit-boxes, photograph frames and cheap jewellery, all of which could not
tempt you less than they did Pocket Upton the other June. There were only two things in the
window that interested him at all, and they were not both temptations. One was an old rosewood
camera, and Pocket was interested in cameras old and new; but the thing that tempted him was a
little revolver at five-and-six, with what looked like a box of cartridges beside it,
apparently thrown in for the price. A revolver to take back to school! A revolver to fire in
picked places on the slow walks with a slow companion which were all the exercise this
unfortunate fellow could take! A revolver and cartridges complete, so that one could try it
now, in no time, with Guy and Vivian at the end of their garden in
Pocket took out his purse and saw what a hole the expenditure of any such sum would make. But what was that if it filled a gap in his life? Of coure it would have been breaking a school rule, but he was prepared to take the consequences if found out; it need not involve his notion of dishonour. Still, it must be recorded that the young or old as was conscientious enough to hesitate before making his fatal plunge into the pawnbroker's shop.
The young Westminsters had not come in when Pocket finally cast up in St. John's Wood Park.
But their mother was at home, and she gave the boy a cup of tepid tea out of a silver tea-pot
in the drawing-room. Mrs. Knaggs was a large lady who spoke her mind with much freedom, at all
events to the young. She remarked how much Upton (so she addressed him) had altered; but her
tone left Pocket in doubt as to whether any improvement was implied. She for one did not
approve of his luncheon in Oxford Street, much less of the way
Vivian and Guy were respectively rather older and rather younger than Pocket, and they came
in looking very spruce, the one in his Eton jacket, the
The revolver melted the last particle of ice, though Vivian Knaggs pronounced it an old pin-firer, and Guy said he would not fire it for a thousand pounds. This only made Pocket the more eager to show what he and his revolver were made of, then and there in the garden, and the more confident that it never would be heard in the house.
“It would,” answered Vivian, “and seen as well. No, if you want to have a shot let's stick up a target outside this window, and fire from just inside.”
The window was a French one leading into the back garden; but, unhappily, Mrs. Knaggs's bedroom was only two floors higher, and it also looked out on the back; and Mrs. Knaggs herself was in her room and near her window when the report startled her, and not less because she little dreamt what it was until she looked out in time to see a cloud of smoke escaping from the schoolroom window, and Pocket examining the target, weapon in hand.
There was a great scene about it. Mrs. Knaggs
“The mater's awfully sorry,” said Vivian, returning from a mission which Pocket had been obliged to instigate after all. “There's not a spare bed in the house.”
Guy incontinently declared there was. A fraternal frown alone prevented him from going into particulars.
“A sofa would do me all right,” suggested Pocket, who had long ago lost his last train, and would have preferred a bare plank where there were boys to fussy old Miss Harbottle's best bed. But Vivian Knaggs shook his head.
“The mater says she couldn't sleep with firearms in the house.”
“I'll bury them in the garden if she likes.”
“Then you smoke in the night, and at Coverley's you once walked in your sleep,” pursued
Vivian,
“I shouldn't do either to-night,” protested Pocket, with a grin. “I've not got anything to smoke, and I have got something to keep me quiet.”
And with further information on both points the son of the house went upstairs again, only to return in quicker time with a more embarrassed gravity.
“She's awfully sorry,” he said unconvincingly, “but she can't undertake the responsibility of putting you up with your asthma.”
Oddly enough, for he was only too sensitive on some points, Pocket was not really hurt by
his treatment at the hands of these people; he felt he had made rather a mistake, but not that
he had been most inhumanly cast adrift at sixteen among the shoals and quicksands of London.
Nor was this quite the case as yet; there was still old Miss Harbottle in Wellington Road. But
to her he was not going until decency compelled him; he was going to have another game of
bagatelle with Guy Knaggs first. It will be seen that with all his sensibilities the youngest
Upton was a most casual and sanguine youth. He took a great deal for granted, prepared only for
the best, and although inclined to worry over the irrevocable, took no thought for the morrow
until he was obliged. He was sorry he had been so
“What about your luggage?” asked the elder Knaggs, as he put on his hat to walk round with Pocket.
“Good Lord!” cried that worthy, standing still in the hall.
“Haven't you got any?”
“I left it at Madame Tussaud's!”
“Left your luggage there?”
“It was only a handbag. How long are they open?”
Young Knaggs looked in Whitaker and said they closed at ten. There was still time
to recover the bag with a taxicab, but in that case it was not much use his going too. So they
said goodbye at the Swiss Cottage, and the adventures of Pocket Upton began in earnest.
Old Miss Harbottle, his mother's great friend, would have none of him either! He stopped on
the way to Baker Street to make sure. The garden gate was one that only opened by a catch and a
cable manipulated indoors. The downstairs lights
His position was now quite serious. He had not many shillings in his purse. The only thing
to do was to put up at Shaw's Hotel, Trafalgar Square; that was where his people always stayed,
where every servant was supposed to know them all. He pushed on at once through the cool June
night, and paid away three of his last shillings for the drive. Alas! not a bed to be had at
Shaw's; it was the worst time of the year, they told him, and he
They were quite nice about it. They pointed out the big hotels opposite, and recommended more than one of the little ones in Craven Street. But the big hotels were all full to overflowing; and at the only little one he tried the boy lost his temper like a man on being requested to deposit six shillings before proceeding to his room. Pocket had not got it to deposit, and the galling reflection caused him to construe the demand as a deliberate reflection upon his outward respectability—as if he could not have borrowed the money from Dr. Bompas in the morning!
“I'll see you blowed,” was his muttered reply, and he caught up his bag in a passion.
“All right, little man! I shouldn't be rude about it,” said the dapper cashier. “If I couldn't pay my shot I should sleep in the Park, on a nice fine night like this.”
“I shall!” shouted Pocket through his teeth, as though that would prevent the brute of a cashier from sleeping soundly in his bed. And it was his own idle and childish threat that set him presently wondering what else he was to do. He had the spirit of adventure, as we have seen.
He had the timorous, or let us say, the imaginative temperament, which lends to adventure its very salt. He wished to have done dangerous or heroic things, if not to have to do them. He had so little to boast about; his brothers, and so many other fellows of his own age, had so much. It would make a great yarn some day, how he had come up from school to see a doctor—and slept in the Park!
Meanwhile he had only a vague idea of his way there; he knew hardly anything of London except St. John's Wood and his present landmark of the Nelson column and the Landseer lions. He knew them from having stayed some time (under another doctor) as a child at Shaw's Hotel. But, I say! What would Bompas say to his sleeping out, and what sort of night could he expect in the open air?
He had an overcoat. It had been in his way all day; it would come in more than handy for the night. And it suddenly struck Pocket, with all the force of a forgotten novelty, that he had a revolver and cartridges as well.
That decided him. Not that he seriously thought himself the kind of person to use a revolver
with resolution or effect; but it made him feel doughty and even truculent to find the means of
heroic defence all ready to his hand. He began to plume himself on his providential purchase.
He would sell his young life dearly if he fell among London thieves;
The man wanted to know if he meant Hyde Park Corner. “Yes,” said Pocket, hastily, because his heart was in his mouth and the policeman looked as though he had seen it there. And he overshot the mark in the motor omnibus through being ashamed to ask again, only alighting at Albert Gate; but here there was quite a little stream of decent people to follow without further tremors into the indubitable Park.
He followed them across the drive and across Rotten Row, gaining confidence as he went. In a minute it was all delightful; his eyes were turned outward by all there was to see; and now his chief fear was lest some one or other of the several passers should stand in his path and ask what he was doing there. He was still afraid of speaking or being spoken to, but no longer unreasonably so. Detection as an escaped schoolboy was his one great dread; he felt he was doing something for which he might be expelled.
But nobody took any notice of him; this gradually encouraged him to take more notice of other people, when he found, not altogether to his surprise, that the majority of those passing through the Park at that late hour were hardly of his own class. So much the more infinitesimal were the chances of his being recognised or even suspected for what he was. There were young men in straw hats, there were red-coated soldiers, and there were girls. They all filled the schoolboy with their fascinating possibilities. They were Life. The boy's heart beat at what he heard and saw. The couples were hilarious and unrefined. One wench, almost under his nose, gave her soldier a slap with such a remark as Pocket had never heard from a woman's lips before. He turned away, tingling, and leant upon the parapet of a bridge he had been in the act of crossing, and thought of school and home and Mr. Coverley.
It was not really a bridge at all. It was only the eastern extremity of the Serpentine; but
as the boy leant over the stone balustrade, and gazed upon the artificial flood, broadening out
indefinitely in the darkness, it might have been the noblest river in the world. Its banks were
muffled in a feather boa of trees, bedizened by a chain of many lights; the lights of a real
bridge made a diadem in the distance; and between these sped
It was here that he found the grass distinctly damp; this really was enough to deter an asthmatic, already beginning to feel asthmatical. Pocket Upton, however, belonged to the large class of people, weak and strong alike, who are more than loth to abandon a course of action once taken. It would have required a very severe attack to baulk him of his night out and its subsequent description to electrified ears. But when bad steering had brought him up at the bandstand, the deserted chairs seemed an ordained compromise between prudence and audacity, and he had climbed into the fenced enclosure when another enormous policeman rose up horribly in its midst.
“What are you doing here?” inquired this policeman, striding upon Pocket with inexorable tread.
“No harm, I hope,” replied our hero humbly, but with unusual readiness.
“Nor no good either, I'll be bound!” said the policeman, standing over him.
“I was only going to sit down,” protested Pocket, having satisfied his conscience that in the first place that was all he really had been going to do.
“There are plenty of places to sit down,” rejoined the policeman. “You're not allowed in
here.
“Why not?”
“The Park closes at twelve.”
“Closes?”
“At twelve o'clock, and it's half-past eleven now.” The boy's heart sank into his wet boots. Here was an end of all his dashing plans. He was certain he had heard or read of people sleeping in the Park; he had looked upon it as a vast dormitory of the houseless; that was the only reason he was there. The offensive clerk in the hotel had evidently entertained the same belief. This idiot of a policeman must be wrong. But he seemed quite clear about it.
“Did you think we were open all night?” he inquired with a grin.
“I did,” said Pocket; and he was inspired to add, “I even thought a lot of loafers used to sleep here all night!”
The policeman chuckled aloud.
“They may if they get up the trees; that's about their only chance,” said he.
“You search the whole place so thoroughly?”
“We keeps our eyes open,” said the policeman significantly, and Pocket asked no more
questions; he scaled the forbidden fence and made off with the alacrity of one who meant to go
out before he was
Meanwhile, to increase the irony of his dilemma, now that he was bent on quitting the Park he found himself striking deeper and deeper into its heart. He skirted a building, left it behind and out of sight, and drifted before the wind of destiny between an upright iron fence on one hand and a restricted open space upon the other. He could no longer see a single light; but the ground rose abruptly across the fence, and was thick with shrubs. Men might have been lying behind those shrubs, and Pocket could not possibly have seen them from the path. Did the policeman mean to tell him that he or his comrades were going to climb every fence and look behind every bush in Hyde Park?
Pocket came to anchor with a new flutter at his heart. This upright fence was not meant for
scaling; it was like a lot of area palings, as obvious and intentional an obstacle. And the
whole place closed at twelve, did it? The flutter became a serious agitation as Pocket saw
himself breaking the laws of the land as well as those of school, saw himself not only expelled
but put in prison! Well, so much the better for his story so long as those
No wonder his best friends called him disparaging names; he was living up to the hardest of them now, and he with asthma on him as it was! But the will was on him too, the obstinate and reckless will, and the way lay handy in the shape of a row of Park chairs which Pocket had just passed against the iron palings. He went back to them, mounted on the first chair, wedged his bag between two of the spikes, set foot on the back of the chair, and somehow found himself on the other side without rent or scratch. Then he listened; but not a step could he hear. So then the cunning dog put his handkerchief through the palings and wiped the grit from the chair on which he had stood. And they called him a conscientious ass at school!
But then none of these desperate deeds were against his conscience, and they had all been
thrust on Pocket Upton by circumstances over which he had lost control when the last train went
without him from St. Pancras. They did not prevent him from kneeling down behind the biggest
bush that I he could find, before curling up underneath it; neither did his prayers prevent him
from thinking—even on his knees—of his revolver, nor yet—by the force of untimely
association—of the other revolvers in the Chamber of Horrors. He saw those waxen
That was the last but one of the silly boy's proceedings under the bush; the last of all was to drain the number-one draught prescribed by Bompas in the morning, and to fling away the phial. The stuff was sweet and sticky in the mouth, and Pocket felt a singular and most grateful warmth at his extremities as he curled up in his overcoat. It was precisely then that he heard a measured tread approaching, and held his breath until it had passed without a pause. Yet the danger was still audible when the boy dropped off, thinking no more about it, but of Mr. Coverley and Charles Peace and his own people down in Leicestershire.
It so happened that his people in Leicestershire were thinking of him. They had been talking about him at the very time of the boy's inconceivable meanderings in Hyde Park. And two of them were at it still.
On a terrace outside lighted windows a powerful young fellow, in a butterfly collar and a corded smoking jacket, was walking up and down with a tall girl not unlike him in the face; but their faces were only to be seen in glimpses as they passed the drawing-room windows, and at not less regular intervals when a red light in the sky, the source of which was concealed by the garden foliage, became positively brilliant. The air was sweet with the scent of honeysuckle and musk-roses and mown grass; midges fretted in and out of the open windows. But for the lurid lighting of the sky, with its Cyclopean suggestion of some mammoth forge, you were in the heart of England undefiled.
“It's no use our talking about Tony,” the tall girl said. “I think you're frightfully down on him; we shall never agree.”
“Not as long as you make a fool of the fellow,” said the blunt young man.
“Tony's no fool,” remarked Lettice Upton, irrelevantly enough.
“You know what I mean,” snapped her brother Horace. “He's being absolutely spoilt, and you're at the bottom of it.”
“I didn't give him asthma!”
“Don't be childish, Letty.”
“But that's what's spoiling his life.”
“I wasn't talking about his life. I don't believe it, either.”
“You think he enjoys his bad nights?”
“I think he scores by them. He'd tell you himself that he never even thinks of getting up to first school now.”
“Would you if you'd been sitting up half the night with asthma?”
“Perhaps not; but I don't believe that happens so often as you think.”
“It happens often enough to justify him in making one good night pay for two or three bad ones.”
“I don't call that playing the game. I call it shamming.”
“Well, if it is, he makes up for it. They were doing Ancient Greek Geography in his form at early school last term. Tony tackled it in his spare time, and got most marks in the exam.”
“Beastly young swot!” quoth his elder
“I don't think there's much danger of his bucking to you,” said Lettice, smiling in the red light. She did not add as her obvious reason that Horace, like many another athletic young man, was quite incapable of sympathising with the non-athletic type. But he guessed that she meant something of the sort, and having sensibilities of his own, and a good heart somewhere in his mesh of muscles, he felt hurt. “I looked after him all right,” said Horace, “the one term we were there together. So did Fred for the next year. But it's rather rough on Fred and myself, who were both something in the school at his age, to hear and see for ourselves that Tony's nobody even in the house!”
Lettice slipped a sly hand under the great biceps of her eldest brother.
“But don't you see, old boy, that it makes it the worse for Tony that you and Fred were what you were at school? They measure him by the standard you two set up; it's natural enough, but it isn't fair.”
“He needn't be a flyer at games,” said Horace, duly softened by a little flattery. “But he might be a tryer!”
“Wait till we get a little more breath into his body.”
“A bag of oxygen wouldn't make him a cricketer.”
“Yet he's so keen on cricket!”
“I wish he wasn't so keen; he thinks and talks more about it than Fred or I did when we were in the eleven, yet he never looked like making a player.”
“I should say he thinks and talks more about most things; it's his nature, just as it's Fred's and yours to be men of action.”
“Well, I'm glad he's not allowed to cumber the crease this season,” said Horace, bowling his cigarette-end into the darkness with a distinct swerve in the air. “To have him called our “pocket edition,” on the cricket-field of all places, is a bit too thick.”
Lettice withdrew her sympathetic hand.
“He's as good a sportsman as either of you, at heart,” she said warmly. “And I hope he may make you see it before this doctor's done with him!”
“This doctor!” jeered Horace, quick to echo her change of tone as well. “You mean the fool who wanted to send that kid round the world on his own?”
“He's no fool, Horace, and you know nothing whatever about him.”
“No; but I know something about our Tony! If he took the least care of himself at home,
there
“I know he's casual.”
Lettice made the admission with reluctance; next moment she was sorry her sense of fairness had so misled her.
“Besides,” said Horace, “he wouldn't be cured if he could. Think what he'd miss!”
“Oh, if you're coming back to that, there's no more to be said.”
And the girl halted at the lighted windows.
“But I do come back to it. Isn't he up in town at this moment under this very doctor of yours?”
“He's not my doctor.”
“But you first heard about him; you're the innovator of the family, Letty, so it's no use trying to score off me. Isn't Tony up in London to-night?”
“I believe he is.”
“Then I'll tell you what he's doing at this moment,” cried Horace, with egregious
confidence, as he held his watch to the windows. “It's after eleven; he's in the act of
struggling out of some theatre, where the atmosphere's so good for asthma!” Lettice left the
gibe unanswered. It was founded on recent fact which she had been the first to deplore when
Tony made no secret of it in the holidays; indeed, she was by no means blind to his many and
obvious failings; but they interested
But she had no more to say to Horace about the matter, and would have gone indoors without another word if Mr. Upton had not come out hastily at that moment. He had been looking for her everywhere, he declared with some asperity. Her mother could not sleep, and wished to see her; otherwise it was time they were all in bed, and what there was to talk about till all hours was more than he could fathom. So he saw the pair before him through the lighted rooms, a heavy man with a flaming neck and a smouldering eye. Horace would be heavy, too, when his bowling days were over. The girl was on finer lines; but she looked like a woman at her worst; tired, exasperated, and clearly older than her brother, but of other clay.
That young man smoked a last cigarette in his
“I said he wasn't doing much good there,” he added, “and I don't think he is. Letty stood up for him, as she always does.”
“Do you mean that he's doing any harm?” asked Mr. Upton plainly.
“Not for a moment. I never said there was any harm in Tony. I—I sometimes wish there was more!”
“More manhood, I suppose you'd call it?”
Mr. Upton spoke with a disconcerting grimness.
“More go about him,” said Horace. He could not say as much to his father as he had to Letty. That was evident. But he was not the boy to bolt from his guns.
“Yet you know how much he has to take all that out of him?” continued Mr. Upton, with severity.
“I know,” said Horace hastily, “and of course that's really why he's doing no good; but I must say that doctor of his doesn't seem to be doing him any either.”
Mr. Upton got excitedly to his feet, and Horace made up his mind to the downright snub that he deserved. But by a lucky accident Horace had turned the wrath that had been gathering against himself into quite another quarter.
“I agree with you there!” cried his father vehemently. “I don't believe in the man myself; but he was recommended by the surgeon who has done so much for your poor mother, so what could one do but give him a trial? The lad wasn't having a fair chance at school. This looked like one. But I dislike his going up to town so often, and I dislike the letters the man writes me about him. He'd have me take him away from school altogether, and pack him off to Australia in a sailing ship. But what's to be done with a boy like that when we get him back again? He'd be too old to go to another school, and too young for the University: no use at the works, and only another worry to us all.”
Mr. Upton spoke from the full heart of an already worried man, not with intentional
unkindness, but yet with that unimaginative want of sympathy which is often the instinctive
attitude of the sound towards the unsound. He hated sickness, and seemed at present surrounded
by it. His wife had taken ill the year before, had undergone a grave operation in the winter,
and was still a great anxiety to him. But that was another and a far more serious matter; he
had patience and sympathy enough with his wife. The case of the boy was very different. Himself
a man of much bodily and mental vigour, Mr. Upton expected his own qualities of his own
children;
And what chance was there for a boy whose own father thought he posed, whose brothers
considered
The father had gone to bed at midnight, after an extra allowance of whisky-and-water to take the extra worry off his mind; it did so for a few hours only to stretch him tragically awake in the early morning. The birds were singing down in Leicestershire as in Hyde Park. The morning sun was slanting over town and country, and the father's thoughts were with his tiresome son in town. Suddenly a shrill cry came from the adjoining room.
In a trice the wakeful man was at his sick wife's side, supporting her in bed as she sat up wildly staring, trembling in his arms.
“Tony!” she gasped. “My Tony!”
“I was just thinking of him!” he cried. “What about him, dear?”
“I saw him,” she quavered. “I saw him plainer than I see you now. And I'm almost positive I heard—a shot!”
Though he afterwards remembered a shout as well, it actually was the sound of a shot that brought the boy to his senses in Hyde Park. He opened his eyes on a dazzle of broad daylight and sparkling grass. The air was strangely keen for the amount of sunshine, the sunshine curiously rarefied, and the grass swept grey where it did not sparkle.
Pocket's first sensation was an empty stomach, and his next a heavy head into which the puzzle of his position entered by laborious steps. He was not in bed. He was not at school. He was not even under the shrub he now remembered in a mental flash which lit up all his adventures overnight. He was wandering ankle deep in the dew, towards a belt of poplars like birch-rods on the skyline, and a row of spiked palings right in front of his nose. He had walked in his sleep for the first time for years, and some one had fired a shot to wake him.
Slow as these automatic discoveries had seemed, they had been in reality so swift that the
report was still ringing in his ears when he who must have made it sprang hideously into being
across the palings. A hand darted through them and caught Pocket's
“Do you know what you did?” the man demanded in the end. The question seemed an odd one, but a very slight foreign accent, not to be reproduced phonetically, corresponded with the peculiarity of tense, reminding Pocket of the music-masters at his school. It was less easy to account for the tone employed, which was low in pitch and tremulous with passion. And the man stood tall and dominant, with a silver stubble on an iron jaw, and a weird cloak and hat that helped to invest him with the goblin dignity of a Spanish inquisitor; no wonder his eyes were like cold steel in quivering flesh.
“I must have been walking in my sleep,” began Pocket, shakily; further explanations were cut very short.
“Sleep!” echoed the other, in bitter unbelief.
Pocket felt his prime quality impugned.
“Well? I can't help it! I've done it before to-day; you needn't believe me if you don't like! Do you mind letting go of my hand?”
“With that in it!”
The scornful tone made the boy look down, and there was the pistol he had strapped to his
wrist,
“You don't mean to say I let it off?” cried Pocket, horrified.
“Feel the barrel.”
The tall man had done so first. Pocket touched it with his left hand. The barrel was still warm.
“It was in my sleep,” protested Pocket, in a wheezy murmur.
“I'm glad to hear it.”
“I tell you it was!”
The tall man opened his lips impulsively, but shut them on a second impulse. The daggers in his eyes probed deeper into those of the boy, picking his brains, transfixing the secrets of his soul. No master's eye had ever delved so deep into his life; he felt as though the very worst of him at school was known in an instant to this dreadful stranger in the wilds of London. He writhed under the ordeal of that protracted scrutiny. He tugged to free his imprisoned wrist. His captor was meanwhile fumbling with a penknife in his unoccupied hand. A blade was slowly opened; the leather watch-guard was sliced through in a second; the revolver dropped harmlessly into the dew. The man swooped down and whipped it through the railings with a snarl of satisfaction.
“And now,” said he, releasing Pocket, but
The boy, already suffering from his humiliating exertions, gasped out, “I'm not the only one!” He had just espied a recumbent figure through the palings; it was that of a dilapidated creature lying prone, a battered hat beside him, on the open grass beyond the path. The tall man merely redoubled his scrutiny of the face in front of, him, without so much as a glance behind.
“That,” said he, “is the sort that staggers in as soon as the gates are open, and spends the day sleeping itself sober. But you are not that sort at all, and you have spent the night here contrary to the rules. Who are you, and what's the matter with you?”
“Asthma,” wheezed Pocket, clinging to the palings in dire distress.
“So I thought. Yet you spend your night on the wet grass!”
“I had nowhere else to go.”
“Have you come up from the country?”
“To see a doctor about it!” cried Pocket bitterly, and told the whole truth about himself in
a series of stertorous exclamations. It scarcely lessened the austerity of the eyes that still
ran him through and through; but the hard mouth did relax
“Well, we must get you out of this, my young fellow! Come to these chairs.”
Pocket crept along the palings towards the chairs by which he had climbed them. His breathing was pitiful now. The stranger accompanied him on the other side.
“If I lift one over, and lend you a hand, do you think you can manage it?”
“I did last night.”
“Here, then. Wait a bit! Can you tell me where you slept?”
Pocket looked round and pointed.
“Behind that bush.”
“Have you left nothing there?”
“Yes; my bag and hat!”
In his state it took him some time to go and fetch them; he was nearly suffocating when he came creeping back, his shoulders up to his ears.
“Stop! I see something else. Is that medicine-bottle yours? There—catching the sun.”
“It was.”
“Bring it.”
“It's empty.”
“Bring it!”
Pocket obeyed. The strange man was standing
His grim companion spoke first.
“Well, I'm sorry for you. But I feel for your doctor too. I am one myself.”
Pocket ignored the somewhat pointed statement.
“I'll never forgive the brute!” he panted.
“Come, come! He didn't send you to sleep in the Park.”
“But he took away the only thing that does me any good.”
“What's that?”
“Cigarettes d'Auvergne.”
“I never heard of them.”
“They're the only thing to stop it, and he took away every one I had.”
But even as he spoke Pocket remembered the cigarette he had produced from his bag, but
lacked
“And your doctor forbids a sovereign remedy!” said his companion. “I cannot understand him, and I'm a doctor myself.” His voice and look were deliberate even for him. “My name is Baumgartner,” he added, and made a pause. “I don't suppose you know it?”
“I'm not sure I don't,” replied Pocket, swelling with breath and gratitude; but in truth the name seemed vaguely familiar to him.
“A schoolboy in the country,” observed Dr. Baumgartner, “is scarcely likely to have heard of me; but if you inquire here in London you will find that I am not unknown. I propose to carry you off to my house for breakfast, and a little rest. That is,” added the doctor, with his first smile, “if you will trust yourself to me first and make your inquiries later.”
Pocket scouted the notion of inquiries in an
But the schoolboy had still to learn the lesson of naked personality as the one human force; and he learnt it now unknown to himself. The gaunt grey man stood up in his absurd and rusty raiment, and Pocket thought, “How the chaps would rag him at school!” because the dreadful old hat and cloak suggested a caricature of a master's cap and gown. But there was no master at Pocket's school whom he would not sooner have disobeyed than this shabby stranger with the iron-bound jaw and the wintry smile; there was no eye on the staff that had ever made him quail as he had quailed that morning before these penetrating eyes of steel. Baumgartner said they must hurry, and Pocket had his asthma back in the first few yards. Baumgartner said they could buy more cigarettes on the way, and Pocket kept up, panting, at his side.
In the cab Baumgartner said, “Try sitting with your head between your knees.” Pocket tried
it
The fifth house on the left was exactly like the fourth and the sixth from the little Pocket
saw
Within the doctor held up a finger and they both trod gently. The passage was dark and short. The stairs began abruptly on the right. Baumgartner led the way past a closed door on the left, into an unexpectedly bright and large room beyond it. “Sit down,” said he, and shut the door softly behind him.
Pocket took observations from the edge of his chair. The room was full of walnut
trivialities that looked aggressively obsolete in the sunshine that filled it and flooded a
green little garden at the back of the house. Dr. Baumgartner had pulled up a blind and opened
a window, and he stood looking out in thought while Pocket hurriedly completed his optical
round. A set of walnut chairs were dreadfully upholstered in faded tapestry; but a deep, worn
one looked comfortable enough,
Baumgartner met his visitor's eyes with the faint cold smile that scarcely softened the hoary harshness of his visage.
“I was present at some of those engagements,” said he. “They were not worse than disarming a man who has just fired a revolver in his sleep!”
He flung his cloak upon one of the walnut chairs, and Pocket heard the pistol inside it rattle against the back; but his attention was distracted before he had time to resent the forgotten fact of its forcible confiscation. Under his cloak the doctor had been carrying all this time, slung by a strap which the boy had noticed across his chest, a stereoscopic camera without a case. Pocket exclaimed upon it with the instructed interest of a keen photographer.
“Do you take photographs?” asked Baumgartner, a reciprocal note in his unemotional voice.
“Rather!” cried the schoolboy, with considerable enthusiasm. “It's the only thing I have to do instead of playing games. But I haven't got an instantaneous camera like that. I only wish I had!”
And he looked with longing eyes at the substantial oblong of wood and black morocco, and duplicate lenses like a pair of spectacles, which the doctor had set between them on one of the fussy little walnut tables.
Dr. Baumgartner produced a seasoned meerschaum, carved in the likeness of a most ferocious face, and put a pinch of dark tobacco through the turban into the bowl. “You see,” said he, “I must have my smoke like you! I can't do without it either, though what is your misfortune is my own fault. So you are also a photographer!” he added, as the fumes of a mixture containing latakia spiced the morning air.
“I am only a beginner,” responded Pocket, “but a very keen one.”
“You don't merely press the button and let
“Rather not! I develop, print, tone, and all the rest of it; that's half the fun.”
“Plates or films?” inquired Baumgartner, with an approving nod.
“Only plates, I'm afraid; you see, the apparatus is an old one of my father's.”
And honest Pocket was beginning to blush for it, when the other made a gesture more eloquent and far more foreign than his speech.
“It's none the worse for that,” said he. “So far we have much in common, for I always use plates myself. But what we put upon our plates, there's the difference, eh?”
“I should imagine so,” said Pocket, smiling.
Dr. Baumgartner was smiling too, and still less coldly than before, but yet darkly to himself, and at the boy rather than with him.
“You take portraits of your friends, perhaps?”
“Yes; often.”
“In the body, I presume?”
Pocket looked nonplussed.
“You only take them in the flesh?”
“Of course.”
“Exactly! I take the spirit,” said the doctor; “that's the difference.”
Pocket watched the now wonderfully genial
“I see,” he said, lukewarmly. “You go in for psychic photography.”
“Psychic,” said Baumgartner; for the public schoolboy, one regrets to report, had pronounced the word to rhyme with sly-chick. The doctor added, with more disdain: “And you don't believe in it?”
“I didn't say so.”
“But you looked and sounded it!”
“I don't set myself up as a believer or unbeliever,” said the boy, always at his ease on a
subject that attracted him. “But I do say I don't believe in the sort of thing I read somewhere
last holidays. It was in a review of a book on that sort of photography. The chap seemed to
have said you could get a negative of a spirit without exposing the plate at all; hide away
your plate, never mind your lens, only conjure up your spirit and see what happens. I'll swear
nothing ever happened like that! There may be ghosts, you may see them,
The youth had gone further and flown higher than he meant, under the stimulus of an encouragement impossible to have foreseen. And the doctor had come to his feet, waving eloquently with his pipe; his grey face beamed warmly; his eyes were lances tipped with fire.
“Well said, my young fellow!” cried he. “I agree with every syllable you have spoken.”
“It's a question of photography, not of spiritualism,” concluded Pocket, rounding off his argument in high excitement.
“I agree, I agree! All that is rubbish, pure moonshine; and you see it even at your age! But there's much more in it than that; you must see the rest as well, since you see so far so clearly.” The boy blushed with pleasure, determined to see as far as anybody. “You admit there may be such things as ghosts, as you call them?” he was asked as by an equal.
“Certainly, sir.”
“Visible shapes, in the likeness of man? As visible and yet as tangible as that sunbeam?”
“Rather!”
“You allow that the camera can see them if we can?”
Pocket allowed it like the man he was being made to feel; the concession gave him a generous glow. Promotion had come to him by giant leaps. He felt five years older in fewer minutes.
“Then,” cried the doctor, with further flattery in his air of triumph, “then you admit everything! You may not see these images, but I may. I may not see them, but my lens may! Think how much that glass eye throws already upon the retina of a sensitised film that our living lenses fail to throw upon ours; think of all that escapes the eye but the camera catches. Take two crystal vases, fill one with one acid and the other with another; one comes out like water as we see it; the other, though not less limpid in our sight, like ink. The eye sees through it, but not the lens. The eye sees emptiness as though the acid itself were pure crystal; the lens flings an inky image on the plate. The trouble is that, while you can procure that acid at the nearest chemist's, no money and no power on earth can summon or procure at will the spirit which once was man.”
His voice was vibrant and earnest as it had been when Pocket heard it first an hour earlier
in the Park. It was even as passionate, but this was the passion of enthusiastic endeavour. If
the man had a heart at all, it was in this wild question without a doubt. Even the schoolboy
Suddenly he exclaimed, “I knew I knew your name!”
“You do know it, do you?”
Baumgartner spoke ungraciously, as though the announcement was discounted by the interruption it entailed.
“It was in connection with the very book I mentioned. I knew I had come across it somewhere.”
“You read the correspondence that followed the review?”
“Some of it.”
“My letter among others?”
“Yes! I remember every word of it now.”
“Then you recall my view as to the alleged necessity of a medium's co-operation in these spirit-photographs?”
“You said it wasn't necessary, if I remember,” replied Pocket somewhat tentatively, despite his boast.
“It was the pith and point of my contention! I mentioned the two moments at which I hold
that a man's soul may be caught apart, may be cut off
“One,” said the boy, “was the moment of death.”
“The moment of dissolution,” the doctor corrected him. “But there is a far commoner moment than that, one that occurs constantly to us all, whereas dissolution comes but once.”
Pocket believed he remembered the other instance too, but was not sure about it, the fact being that the whole momentous letter had struck him as too fantastic for serious consideration. That, however, he could not and dared not say; and he was not the less frightened of making a mistake with those inspired eyes burning fanatically into his.
“The other moment,” the doctor said at last, with a pitying smile, “is when the soul returns
to its prison after one of those flights which men call dreams. You know that theory of the
dream?” Baumgartner asked abruptly. The answer was a nod as hasty, but the doctor seemed
unconvinced, for he went on didactically: “You visit far countries in your dreams; your soul is
the traveller. You speak to the absent or the dead; it is your soul again; and we dismiss the
miracle as a dream! I fix the moment as that of the soul's return because its departure on
these errands is imperceptible,
The boy murmured very earnestly that he saw; but he was more troubled than enlightened, and what he did see was that he had picked up a very eccentric acquaintance indeed. He was not a little scared by the man's hard face and molten eyes; but there was a fascination also that could not be lost upon an impressionable temperament, besides that force of will or character which had dominated the young mind from the first. He began to wish the interview at an end—to be able to talk about it as the extraordinary sequel of an extraordinary adventure—yet he would not have cut it short at this point if he could.
“I grant you,” continued the doctor, “that the final flight of soul from body is infinitely the more precious from my point of view. But how is one to be in a position to intercept that? When beloved spirits pass it would be cold-blooded desecration; and public opinion has still to be educated up to psychical vivisection! I have myself tried in vain to initiate such education. I have applied for perfectly private admission to hospital deathbeds, even to the execution-shed in prisons. My applications have been peremptorily refused.”
Pocket's thoughts went off at a gruesome tangent.
“You could see a man hanged!” he shuddered, and himself saw the little old effigy on the model drop in Marylebone Road.
“Why not?” asked the other in wide wonder. “But as I am not allowed,” he continued in lighter key, “I have to do the best I can. If I cannot be in at the death, I may still by luck be in at a dream or two! And now you may guess why I wander with my camera where men come in to sleep in broad daylight. I prowl among them; a word awakens them; and then I take my chance.”
“They're not all like that man this morning, then,” remarked Pocket, looking back on the inanimate clod reclining in the dew.
The doctor deliberated with half-shut eyes that seemed to burn the brighter for their partial eclipse.
“This morning,” he rejoined, “was like no other. I owe you some confidence in the matter. I had the chance of a lifetime this morning—thanks to you!”
“Thanks to me?” repeated Pocket. A flash enlightened him. “Do you mean to say I—you took me—walking——?”
“You shall see my meaning,” replied Baumgartner, rising. “Wait one minute.”
He was not gone longer. Pocket heard him on the other side of double doors in an alcove; but
he had gone out into the passage to get there. Running
Sharp to the left, at the end of the passage, was a door which would simply have been a second way into the drawing-room had the double doors within been is use; these being shut, the space behind made a separate chamber which again reminded the schoolboy of his study, that smallest of small rooms. This one was as narrow, only twice the length. One end was monopolised by the door that admitted them, the other by a window from floor to ceiling. And this window was in two great sheets of ruby glass, so that Pocket looked down red-hot iron steps into a crimson garden, and therefrom to his companion dyed from head to foot like Mephistopheles.
“This is something like a dark-room!” exclaimed the lad as the door was shut and locked
behind him. The folding doors were permanently barred by
Everything was perfection from a photographer's standpoint; the boy felt instantaneously spoilt for his darkened study and his jugs of water. All he had ever sighed for in the prosecution of his hobby was here in this little paradise of order and equipment. The actual work, he felt, would be a secondary consideration in such a workshop; the mere manipulation of such stoppered bottles as his host was handling now, the choice of graduated phials, the wealth of trays and dishes, would have been joy enough for him. He watched the favoured operator with a watering mouth. A crimson blind had been lowered to reduce the light; the doctor had turned up his shirt-cuffs; his wrists were muscular and furry, as it now seemed with a fiery fur, yet they trembled with excitement as he produced his plate. And Pocket remembered how extravagant an image was expected on that plain pink surface.
He did not know whether to expect it or not himself. It was difficult to believe in that
sort of thing, difficult to disbelieve in this sort of man, who entertained no shadow of doubt
himself, whose
Pocket said to himself, “Where am I, by the way?” and bent lower to see. His ear touched the doctor's; it heard the doctor breathing as though he were the asthmatic; and now a human shape was visible, but not walking in its sleep, lying in it like the man in the wet grass. “When did you get me?” asked Pocket aloud. But the tense crimson face paid no attention; in the ruby light it was glistening as though with beads of blood.
“There! there! there!” croaked a voice, husky and yet staccato. Pocket could scarcely believe it was the voice of his host—the one gentle thing about him. “You saw the figure? Surely you saw something else, hovering over it? I did, I swear I did! But now we shall have to wait.”
The plate had blackened all over, as though the uncanny thing had choked out its life. It was meticulously held under a tap, between fingers that most distinctly trembled now. Then he plunged it in the hyposulphite, and pulled up the blind. The sun shone again through the tall window, blood-red as before; grass and sky were as richly incarnadined. Baumgartner babbled while he waited for the fixing-bath to clear the plate. The chance of his life, he still pronounced it. “And I owe it to you, my young fellow!” This he said again and again, aloud but chiefly to himself. He picked up the plate at last and held it to the flaming window. He cried out in German to himself, a cry the schoolboy never forgot.
“Open the window!” he ordered. “It opens like a door.”
Pocket did as he was told. The pure white sunlight struck him momentarily blind. Baumgartner had the plate under the tap again. Pocket thought him careless with it, thought the tap on too full; it was held up an instant to the naked sun, and then dashed to a hundred fragments in the porcelain trough.
Pocket knew better than to ask a question. He followed his leader back into the
drawing-room, and watched him pick up his coat. It might have been a minute before their eyes
met again; the
It was a normal elderly gentleman, with certain simple habits, but no little distinction of address, who welcomed the schoolboy at his breakfast-table. The goblin inquisitor of Hyde Park had vanished with his hat and cloak. The excited empiric of the dark-room was a creature of that ruby light alone. Dr. Baumgartner was shaved and clad like other men, the iron-grey hair carefully brushed back from a lofty forehead, all traces of strong acids removed from his well-kept hands. There was a third person, and only a third, at table in the immature shape of a young lady whom the doctor introduced as his niece Miss Platts, and addressed as Phillida.
Pocket thought he had never heard of nobler atonement for unmitigable surname. He could not
help thinking that this Phillida did not look the one
Pocket made more valiant attempts. A parlour billiard-table, standing against the wall, supplied an irresistible topic. “We have a full-size table at home,” he said, and could have mutilated his tongue that instant. “I like a small one best,” he assured the doctor, who shook his head and smiled.
“Honestly, sir, and snob-cricket better than the real thing! I'm no good at real games.”
The statement was too true, but not the preference.
“That must be awkward for you, at an English public school,” was the doctor's comment.
Pocket heaved an ingenuous sigh. It was hateful. He blamed the asthma as far as modesty
would permit. He was modest enough in his breakfast-table talk, yet nervously egotistical, and
apt to involve himself in lengthy explanations. He had
“And they let you come up to London alone!” remarked Dr. Baumgartner when he got a chance.
“But it wasn't their fault that I——”
Pocket stopped at a glance from his host, and plunged into profuse particulars exonerating his house-master, but was cut short again. Evidently the niece was not to know where he had spent the night.
“I suppose there are a number of young men at your—establishment?” said the doctor, exchanging a glance with Miss Platts.
“There are over four hundred boys,” replied Pocket, a little puzzled.
“And how many keepers do they require?”
A grin apologised for the word.
“There must be over thirty masters,” returned Pocket more pointedly than before. He was not going to stand chaff about his public school from a mad German doctor.
“And they arm you for the battle of life with Latin and Greek, eh?”
“Not necessarily; there's a Modern Side. You can learn German if you like!” said Pocket, not without contempt.
“Do you?”
“I don't like,” said the boy gratuitously.
“Then we must stick to your excellent King's English.”
Pocket turned a trifle sulky. He felt he had not scored in this little passage. Then he reflected upon the essential and extraordinary kindness which had brought him to a decent breakfast-table that morning. That made him ashamed; nor could he have afforded to be too independent just yet, even had he been so disposed in his heart. His asthma was a beast that always growled in the background; he never knew when it would spring upon him with a roar. Breakfast pacified the brute; hot coffee always did; but the effects soon wore off, and the boy was oppressed again, yet deadly weary, long before it was time for him to go to Welbeck Street.
“Is there really nothing you can take?” asked Dr. Baumgartner, standing over him in the drawing-room, where Pocket sat hunched up in the big easy-chair.
“Nothing now, I'm afraid, unless I could get some of those cigarettes. And Dr. Bompas would kick up an awful row!”
“But it's inhuman. I'll go and get them myself. He should prescribe for such an emergency.”
“He has,” said Pocket. “I've got some stuff in my bag; but it's no use taking it now. It's
And he was going into more elaborate details than Dr. Bompas had done, when the other doctor cut him short once more.
“But why not now? You can sleep to your heart's content in that chair; nobody will come in.”
Pocket shook his head.
“I'm due in Welbeck Street at twelve.”
“Well, I'll wake you at quarter to, and have a taxi ready at the door. That will give you a good two hours.”
Pocket hesitated, remembering the blessed instantaneous effect of the first bottle under the bush.
“Would you promise to wake me, sir? You're not going out?”
“I shall be in again.”
“Then it is a promise?”
Pocket would have liked it in black and white.
“Certainly, my young fellow! Is the stuff in your bag?”
It was, and the boy took it with much the same results as overnight. It tasted sweeter and
acted quicker; that was the only difference. The skin seemed to tighten on his face. His
fingers tingled at the ends It was not at all an unpleasant sensation, especially as the labour
in his breast came to an end as if by magic. The faintly foreign
Yet they seemed to begin again directly, and this was a horrid crop! Of course he was back in Hyde Park; but the sky must have rained red paint in his absence, or else the earth was red-hot and the sky reflected it. No! the grass was too wet for that. It might have been wet with blood. Everything was as red as beet-root, as wet and red and one's body weltering in it like the slain! Reddest of all was the old photographer, who turned into Mr. Spearman in cap and gown, who turned into various members of the Upton family, one making more inconsequent remarks than the other, touching wildly on photography and the flitting soul, and between them working the mad race up to such a pace and pitch that Pocket woke with a dreadful start to find Dr. Baumgartner standing over him once more in the perfectly pallid flesh.
“I've had a beast of a dream!” said Pocket, waking thoroughly. “I'm in a cold perspiration, and I thought it was cold blood! What time is it?”
“A quarter to six,” said the doctor, who had invited the question by taking out his watch.
“A quarter to twelve, you mean!”
“No—six.”
And the boy was shown the dial, but would not believe it until he had gaped at his own watch, which had stopped at half-past three. Then he bounded to his feet in a puerile passion, and there lay the little garden, a lake of sunlight as he remembered it, swallowed up entirely in the shadow of the house.
“You promised to wake me!” gasped Pocket, almost speechless. “You've broken your word, sir!”
“Only in your own interest,” replied the other calmly.
“I believe you were waiting for me to wake—to catch my soul, or some rot!” cried the boy, with bitter rudeness; but he looked in vain for the stereoscopic or any other sort of camera, and Dr. Baumgartner only shrugged his shoulders as he opened an evening paper.
“I apologise for saying that,” the boy resumed, with a dignity that sounded near to tears. “I know you meant it for the best—to make up for my bad night—you've been very kind to me, I know! But I was due in Welbeck Street at twelve o'clock, and now I shall have to bolt to catch the six-thirty from St. Pancras.”
“You won't catch the six-thirty from St. Pancras,” replied Baumgartner, scarcely looking up from his paper.
“I will unless I'm in some outlandish part of London!” cried Pocket, reflecting for the first time that he had no idea in what part of London he was. “I must catch it. It's the last train back to school. I'll get into an awful row if I don't!”
“You'll get into a worse one if you do,” rejoined the doctor, looking over his paper, and not unfeelingly, at the boy.
“What about?”
Pocket held his breath instinctively as their eyes met. Baumgartner answered with increased compassion and restraint, a grey look on his grey face:
“Something that happened this morning. I fear you will be wanted here in town about it.”
“Do tell me what, sir!”
“Can you face things, my young fellow?”
“Is it about my people—my mother?” the boy cried wildly, at her funeral in a flash.
“No—yourself.”
“Then I can!”
The doctor overcame his final hesitation.
“Do you remember a man we left behind us on the grass?”
“Perfectly; the grass looked as wet as it felt just now in my dream.”
“Exactly. Didn't it strike you as strange that he should be lying there in the wet grass?”
“I thought he was drunk.”
“He was dead!”
Pocket was shocked; he was more than shocked, for he had never witnessed death before; but next moment the shock was uncontrollably mitigated by a sudden view of the tragic incident as yet another adventure of that adventurous night. No doubt one to retail in reverential tones, but a most thrilling adventure none the less. He only failed to see why it should affect him as much as the doctor suggested. True, he might be called as witness at the inquest; his very natural density was pierced with the awkward possibility of that. But then he had not even known the man was dead.
Had the doctor?
Yes.
Pocket wondered why he had not been told at the time, but asked another question first.
“What did he die of?”
“A bullet!”
“Suicide?”
“No.”
“Not murder?”
“This paper says so.”
“Does it say who did it?”
“It cannot.”
“Can you?”
“Yes!”
“Tell me.”
The doctor threw out both hands in a despairing gesture.
“Have I to tell you outright, my young fellow, that you did it yourself?”
His overwhelming horror was not alleviated by a moment's doubt. He marvelled rather that he
had never guessed what he had done. The walking in his sleep, the shot that woke him, the first
words of Dr. Baumgartner, his first swift action, and the warm pistol in his own unconscious
hand: these burning memories spoke more eloquently than any words. They would have told their
own tale at once, if only he had known the man was dead. Why had he been deceived? It was
cruel, it was infamous, to have kept the truth from him for a single instant. Thus wildly did
the stricken youth turn and rend his benefactor for the very benefaction of a day's rest in
ignorance of his deed. The doctor defended himself firmly, frankly, with much patience and some
cynicism. Pocket was reminded of the state he himself had been in at the time. He also might
have been a dying
How had he known the man was dead? Baumgartner smiled at the question. He was not only a
doctor, but an old soldier who had fought in one at least of the bloodiest battles in European
history. He had seen too many men fall shot through the heart to be mistaken for a moment; but
in point of fact he had confirmed his conviction by brief examination while Pocket was fetching
his things from behind the bush. Pocket pressed for earlier details with a morbid appetite
which was not gratified without reluctance, and out of a laconic interchange the deed was
gradually reconstructed with appealing verisimilitude. It was Baumgartner who had first caught
sight of the somnambulist, treading warily like the blind, yet waving the revolver as he went,
as though any moment he might let it off. The moment came with a wretched reeling man who
joined
The boy buried his face and wept; but even in his anguish he now recalled the shout before the shot. The enforced description had been so vivid in the end that he beheld the scene as plainly as though he had been wide awake. Then he dwelt upon the dead man, looking nothing else as he now remembered him, and that sent him off at a final tangent.
He cried, looking up with a shudder for all his tears, “What about that negative you smashed? It was the poor dead man all the time!”
“It was,” replied Baumgartner; “but it was never meant to be. I had you in focus when you fired. What I did was done instinctively, but with time to think I should have done just the same. You had given me the chance of a lifetime, though nothing has come of it so far. And that was another reason for saving you, ill as you were, from the immediate consequences of an innocent act.”
Pocket was passionately honest, as his worst friends knew; he had an instinctive admiration
“It's got to come out,” he groaned; “this will make it all the worse.”
“You mean the delay?”
“Yes! Who's to tell them I didn't do it on purpose, and run away, and then think better of it?”
Baumgartner smiled.
“Surely I am,” said he; but his smile went out with the words. “If only they believe me!” he added as though it was a new idea to him.
It was a terrifying one to Pocket.
“Why shouldn't they?” was his broken exclamation.
“I don't know. I never thought of it before. But what can I swear to, after all? I can swear you shot a man, but I can't swear you shot him in your sleep!”
“You said you saw I did!”
“So I did, my young fellow,” replied the doctor,
“Shall I be tried?” asked the schoolboy in a hoarse whisper.
“Perhaps only by the magistrate,” replied the other, soothingly; “let us hope it will stop at that.”
“But it must, it must!” cried Pocket wildly. “I'm absolutely innocent! You said so yourself a minute ago; you've only to swear it as a doctor? They can't do anything to me—they can't possibly!”
The doctor stood looking into the sunless garden with a troubled face.
“Dr. Baumgartner!”
“Yes, my young fellow?”
“They can't do anything to me, can they?”
Baumgartner returned to the fireside with his foreign shrug.
“It depends what you call anything,” said he. “They cannot hang you; after what I should
certainly have to say I doubt if they could even detain you in custody. But you would only be
released on bail; the case would be sent for trial; it would get into every paper in England;
your family could not stop it, your schoolfellows would
Pocket was not even bearing it like a manly boy; he had flung himself back into the big chair, and broken down for the first time utterly. One name became articulate through his sobs. “My mother!” he moaned. “It'll kill her! I know it will! Oh, that I should live to kill my mother too!”
“Mothers have more lives than that; they have more than most people,” remarked Baumgartner sardonically.
“You don't understand! She has had a frightful illness, bad news of any kind has to be kept from her, and can you imagine worse news than this? She mustn't hear it!” cried the boy, leaping to feet with streaming eyes. “For God's sake, sir, help me to hush it up!”
“It's in the papers already,” replied Baumgartner, with a forbearing shrug.
“But my part in it!”
“You said it had got to come out.”
“I didn't realise all it meant—to her!”
“I thought you meant to make a clean breast of it?”
“So I did; but now I don't!” cried Pocket, vehemently. “Now I would give my own life, cheerfully, rather than let her know what I've done—than drag them all through that!”
“Do you mean what you say?”
Baumgartner appeared to be forming some conditional intention.
“Every syllable!” said Pocket.
“Because, you know,” explained the doctor, “it is a case of now or never so far as going to Scotland Yard is concerned.”
“Then it's never!”
“I must put it plainly to you. It's not too late to do whatever you decide, but you must decide now. I would still go with you to Scotland Yard, and the chances are that they would still accept the true story of to-day. I have told you what I believe to be the worst that can happen to you; it may be that rather more may happen to me for harbouring you all day as I have done. I hope not, but I took the law into my own hands, and I I am prepared to abide by the law if you so decide this minute.”
“I have decided.”
“Mind you, it would mean putting yourself unreservedly in my hands, at any rate for the
“I shouldn't do that.”
“I'm not so sure,” replied the acute doctor. “I believe I know you better than you know yourself; one learns more of a person in an hour like this than in a whole humdrum lifetime. I believe you would find it very difficult not to tell somebody.”
Pocket admitted it with a natural outburst of his leading quality. In truth no previous act or word of Baumgartner's had inspired such confidence as this unerring piece of insight. It seemed to the boy a perfect miracle of discernment. He was not old enough to know that what he would have done, in his weakness, most grown-up men and women of his temperament would have done in theirs.
“Remember,” resumed the doctor, “you would have the whole of to-day to account for; it's not as though you wouldn't have some very awkward questions to answer the moment you got back to school.”
And again the lad marvelled at this intuition into public-school conditions on the part of
one who could have no first-hand knowledge of those
“I trust you, sir,” said he; “haven't you done enough for me to make me? I put myself, as you say, absolutely in your hands; and I'm grateful to you for all you've done and whatever you mean to do!”
“Even though it comes to hiding with us here in London?”
“No matter what it comes to,” cried Pocket, strangely exalted now, “so long as my people never know!”
“They may think you dead.” He thought of saying that he wished he was; but it would not have been true; even then it would have been a lie, and Pocket was not the boy to tell one if he knew it.
“That would be better than knowing what I have done,” was what he said; and in his exaltation he believed no less.
“You quite see that you are taking a step which must be final?”
“It is final—absolutely—so far as I am concerned.”
And it was meant to be, in all good faith; the very fulness and fairness of the doctor's
warnings served but to strengthen that resolve. But Baumgartner, as if to let well or ill
alone, dropped the
Pocket was a dab at brooding! That is the worst of your conscientious ass; he takes his decision like a man; he means to stick to it like a sportsman; but he cannot help wondering whether he has decided for the best, and what would have happened if he had decided otherwise, and what his world will say about him as it is.
This one went much further in the unique stress of his extraordinary position. He pictured his people dressing for dinner at home; he pictured his form sitting down to private-work in his form-master's hall; there was no end to his mental pictures, for they included one of himself on the scaffold in the broad-arrows of the little old waxwork at Madame Tassaud's! He could not help himself; his mind was crumbling with his dreadful deed and its awful possibilities. Now his heart bled honestly for the poor dead man, now for his own mother and sister, and now not less freely for himself. He had been so innocent in the whole matter; he had only been an innocent and rather sporting fool. And now one of these lives was ended by his hand, and all the rest would be darkened for ever after!
It was too great a burden for a boy to bear; but Pocket bore it far into the long June
twilight,
It was neither unimportant nor at first sight reassuring. The dead man had been identified by the police, who knew him of old, and were reported as hopeful of obtaining a clue through his identity. The clue was the point that stuck like a burr in the boyish brain; his idea of a clue was one leading straight to himself; it took Dr. Baumgartner to explain the true value of the identity clause, and bid the boy eat his meal.
“Trust the police!” said he. “They're on a false scent already; they may try at that end till it turns their hair grey!”
Pocket disliked this tone; he had begun to think almost as reverentially of his victim as of a dead member of his own family. It appeared thus early, however, that in life the defunct had been by no means worthy of respect. Rowton Houses had been his only home, except when his undistinguished offences got him into gaol; the surreptitious practices of the professional mendicant, his sole means of livelihood. So much was to be read between the few brief lines in the stop-press column of the latest evening paper. Again it required Baumgartner to extract comfort from such items.
“At all events,” said he, “you cannot reproach yourself with the destruction of a valuable life! The man was evidently the worthless creature that he looked. You talk about your undesirable aliens, but here in England you breed undesirables enough to manure the world! It's a public service to reduce their number.”
This pitch of nauseous cynicism had not been reached at a bound; the doctor had been working
up to it all the evening, and this was the climax of his cold-blooded consolation as the
schoolboy mechanically undressed himself for bed. His host had accompanied him up two pairs of
stairs, carrying
“You say his life was as much to him as yours to you? Is that it, my young fellow?”
Pocket acknowledged the interpretation, and watched the Turk's head wreathed in cool blue clouds.
“You might as well compare withered weed with budding flower!” cried the poetic doctor. “You
have an honourable life before you; he had a disreputable one behind him. You were bred and
But here even Baumgartner broke off abruptly. The boy was writhing in his bed; the man sat down on the end of it.
“You do such poor devils a service,” said he, “in sending them to a world that cannot use them worse than this one. They are better under the ground than lying on it drenched and drunk!”
“It was a human life,” groaned the boy, shutting his eyes in pain.
“Human life!” cried Baumgartner, leaping to his feet, his huge shadow guying him on the
ceiling. “What is this human life, and who are you and I, that we set such store by it? The
great men of this world never did; it's only the little people and the young who pule and whine
about human life. The ancient Roman sacrificed his weaklings as on an altar; there are some of
us in these days who would prescribe a Tarpeian Rock for modern decadence. So much in pious
parenthesis! Napoleon thought nothing of your human life. Von Moltke, Bismarck, and our staff
in Germany thought as little of it as Napoleon; the Empire of my countrymen was founded on a
proper appreciation of the infinitesimal value of human life, and your British Empire will be
lost through exaggerating its importance. Blood and Iron were our
The schoolboy was carried away. In the sudden eloquence of this strange outburst, with its poetic frenzy, its ruthless idealism, its wild bloodthirsty nobility, the youthful listener lost sight of its irrelevancy, or rather it was the irrevelant features that flared up first in his brain. It was a childish question, but here was a very child, and he could not help asking the fierce old soldier whether he had escaped without a wound.
“Without a scratch,” was the reply. “I come home. I leave the army. I ally my human life with one that is all but divine. My Queen is struck down dead at my side within a year. And you expect me to pity the veriest pawn in the game!”
The boy was never to forget these bitter speeches altogether; there was not a single sentence of them that he failed to recall at one time or another word for word. He would see a wild arm waving, wisps of smoke from a waving pipe, a core of nicotine in a curve of amber, and the Turk's face glistening in its heat like that of the hard old man himself. He would hear the cynical and scornful voice softening in a breath to the simple, tender, and domestic humanity of his race. The voice and the face were with him throughout that night of his own manifold misery; but the time had not come for so young a boy to realise that Dr. Baumgartner had begun to say one thing, and been carried away like his listener.
On the following morning, the ominous Friday of this disastrous week, there was a letter for Mr. Upton on the breakfast-table down in Leicestershire. This circumstance was not so usual as it sounds, because Mr. Upton conducted all his correspondence from his office at the works. If you simply put the name of the village, as he did on his stationery, to the works it went; it was necessary to direct your letter to the hall if you wished it to be delivered there; and few there were who had anything to say to Mr. Upton, on paper, unless it was on business too. His youngest son, however, had furnished the more impressive address to Dr. Bompas, whose hurried hand it was that dealt the first blow.
It so happened that a letter from Dr. Bompas had been expected; this made the letter he
wrote especially upsetting, and for the following reason. Mrs. Upton had been so shaken by her
vivid dream on the Thursday morning, that her husband had telegraphed to Bompas, somewhat
against his own judgment, to know how he found their son. The reply had been: “Better expecting
him again to-day will write”—which prepared the family for still more reassuring accounts in
the morning. Lettice
Mr. Upton read it more than once without a word; and it was not his way to keep a family matter to himself at his own table; but on this occasion he triumphed over temperament with an extraordinary instinct for what was in the air.
“The most infernal letter I ever had in my life!” was his only comment as he thrust it in his pocket out of sight. Lettice, however, might have seen that her father was far more distressed than angry had not Horace promptly angered him by saying he was not surprised. The young fellow's face and the old one's neck were redder before the last was heard of that remark. A garbled paraphrase of the letter was eventually vouchsafed; the boy had made very little improvement, and was not likely to make more while he remained at a school where he was allowed to use any remedy he liked; in fact, until he was taken away from school, and placed under his own immediate control in town, Dr. Bompas declined to persevere with the case.
“Blighter!” said Horace impartially, as though now there were two of them. Such was, in fact, the sum of his observations to Lettice when their father had taken himself and his letter upstairs. Young Tony was not “playing the game”; but then he never did play it to the expert satisfaction of Fred and Horace.
Upstairs the husband gave a more elaborate version of his letter, and told a lie. He said he had destroyed the letter in his indignation. He had destroyed it, but solely to escape any question of his showing it to his wife. He said a happier thing by chance; he said that for two pins he would motor over to the school and see for himself how the boy really was; then perhaps he would be in a position to consider the entreaty which Mrs. Upton added to the specialist's demand, that his patient should be placed under his eye in town. Mr. Upton went so far, however, without much immediate intention of taking so strong a measure.
He wished to discuss the matter with Horace; he might be quite justified in his fears. He was sorry he had let them lead to words with his eldest son. There were aspects of the case, as it presented itself to his mind, which he could hardly thresh out with Lettice, and her mother must not know of his anxiety on any account. Horace, however, had gone off earlier than usual in his dudgeon.
Mr. Upton was not long in following him to the works.
It was a charming garden that he passed through on his way; it charmed its owner all the more from his having made it himself out of a few rolling meadows. The rhododendrons were at the climax of their June glory. The new red gravel (his own colouring to a shade) appealed to an eye which had never looked longer than necessary in the glass. Lawn-tennis courts were marked out snowily on a shaven lawn; the only eyesore the good man encountered was poor Pocket's snob-wickets painted on a buttress in the back premises; his own belching blast-furnaces, corroding and defiling acres and acres within a few hundred yards of his garden wall, were but another form of beauty to the sturdy Briton who had made them too.
Horace was called into the private office and speedily propitiated. “I was more anxious than I could tell you at the time,” his father said; “the fact is, I concealed half the fellow's letter on account of Lettice. But it's a man's matter, and you ought to know.”
Of course the letter had stated that the erratic patient had failed to keep his appointment
on the morning of writing; but if it had drawn the line of information there, it is highly
improbable that Mr. Upton would have exercised so wise a discretion
“Exactly like young Tony!” quoth Horace, never afraid to say what he thought.
“What! Like a lad of sixteen to go and put up at some hotel?”
“Like Tony,” repeated Horace significantly. “Trust him to do what nobody else ever did.”
“But how could Spearman give him the chance?”
“Heaven knows! Fred and I never got it.”
“I thought he was to stay at Coverley's?”
“So I heard.”
“I don't like it! It's all wrong at his age,” said Mr. Upton. He had his notions of life and
its
And though Horace had “no use for” his so-called pocket edition, he answered without any hesitation at all: “Not for a moment, from what I know of Tony.”
Mr. Upton was sorry he had said so much. He excused himself by mentioning his wife's dream, now family property, which had been on his mind all this time. Horace, however, had no hesitation in informing him that nobody nowadays believed in dreams.
“Well, I never have, certainly,” said Mr. Upton. “But what can it be?”
“He probably went up to Lord's, and forgot all about his doctor.”
“I hope not! You're too down on him, Horace.”
“If there was nobody to put him up it was the game to go back to school.”
“But he's said to have gone to some hotel.”
“I don't suppose he did,” said Horace. “I expect he got back somehow.”
The question was still under discussion when a telegram from Mr. Spearman settled it. Where was Tony? He had not returned when due the day before, and his friends in London wired that they knew nothing about him.
“What friends?” cried Mr. Upton, in a fury. “Why the devil couldn't Spearman give their names or Bompas the addresses he talked about?”
Horace could only think of Mr. Coverley or “that Knaggs crowd.” Neither he nor Fred had been at Coverley's school, and young Tony's friends were by no means theirs.
Mr. Upton thought Lettice would know, and was going to speak to her on the telephone when Horace reminded him of his own remark about its being “a man's matter”; it was beginning to look, even to Horace, like a serious one as well, and in his opinion it was much better that neither his mother nor his sister should know anything at all about it before it was absolutely necessary. Horace now quoted his mother's dream as the devil did Scripture, but adduced sounder arguments besides; he was speaking quite nicely of them both, for instance, when he declared that Lettice was wrapped up in Tony, and would be beside herself if she thought any evil had overtaken him. It would be simply impossible for her to hide her anxiety from the mother on whom she also waited hand and foot. Mr. Upton disagreed a little there; he had good reason to believe in Lettice's power of suppressing her own feelings; but for her own sake, and particularly in view of that discredited dream, he now decided to keep his daughter in the dark as long as his wife.
It was his first decision; his next was to motor over to the school, as he had fortunately told his wife he might, and have a word with Mr. Spearman, who deserved hanging for the whole thing! The mischief was done, however, and it was now a matter in which home and school authorities must act together. A clerk was instructed to telephone to the garage for the car to come straight to the works. And the ironmaster stood waiting at his office window in a fever of anxiety.
The grimy scene on which he looked had a constant charm for him, and yet to-day it almost
added to the bitterness of his heart. His was the brain that had conceived those broad effects
of smoke and flame, and blackened faces lit by the light of molten metal; his the strong hand
and the stout heart which had brought his conception into being. Those were his trucks bringing
in his ore from his mines; that was his consequential little locomotive fussing in front of
them. His men, dwellers in his cottages on the brow of that hill, which was also his, happened
to be tapping one of his furnaces at the moment; that was his pig-iron running out into the
moulds as magically as an electric advertisement writes itself upon the London sky at night.
The sense of possession is the foible of many who have won all they have; the ironmaster almost
looked upon the hot air dancing over the
Yet he could think of nothing else, except his wife, even in the great green car that
whisked him westward in a dancing cloud of dust; for he did not drive himself, and the rush
through the iced fragrance of the summer's day was a mental stimulant that did its work only
too well. Now it recalled the ailing infancy of the missing boy—bronchitis it had been in the
early stages—and how his mother had taken him to Hastings three successive winters, and wrapped
him up far too much. Old family jokes cropped up in a new light, dimming the eyes without an
instant's warning. On one of those flittings south the solicitous mother had placed the
uncomplaining child on a footwarmer, and forgotten him until a cascade of perspiration apprised
her of the effect: poor Mr. Upton had never thought of the incident without laughter, until
to-day. Without
His mind harked back to his wife. In her sad case there was no uncertainty. He thought of thirty years ago when he had seen her first. There had been drama and colour in their meeting; the most celebrated of the neighbouring packs had run a fox to earth on his works, indeed in his very slag-heap! The author of cancerous furnaces in the green heart of a grass country had never been a popular personage with the hunting folk; but he was master of the situation that memorable day. It was his terrier that went into the slag-heap like a ferret, and came out bloody with a moribund fox; his pocket-knife that shore through the brush, his hand that presented it across the wall to the only young lady in at the death. The men in pink looking over, the hunt servants with their work cut out on the other side, the tongue of molten slag sticking out of the furnace mouth—the momentary contact of the industrial and the sporting world—it was that strange and yet significant scene which had first endeared its dingy setting to the ironmaster's heart. But he had made the contact permanent by falling in love with the young lady of the brush and marrying her under all the guns of her countified kith and kin. And now she was a stricken invalid, and their youngest-born was God knew where!
Of course there were no tidings of him at the school, where the now distracted father spent a more explosive hour than he cared to think about as he flew on to town in the car. He was afraid he had been very rude to Mr. Spearman; but then Spearman had been rash enough to repudiate his obvious responsibility in the matter. It was not his fault that the boy went up to town so often to see his doctor and stay the night. He had his own opinion of that arrangement, but it had become his business to see it carried out. Mr. Upton got in a sharp thrust here, to which the house-master retorted that if a boy of seventeen could not be trusted to keep his word, he should like to know who could! Tony had promised him faithfully to return that same night, failing friends whom he had mentioned as certain to put him up; their names Mr. Upton was able to demand at last as though they were so much blood; and he could not have cursed them more freely if Spearman had been a layman like himself. But that was all the information forthcoming from this quarter; for, happening to ask what the head master thought of the affair, Mr. Upton was calmly informed that it had still to reach his ears; at which he stared, and then merely remarked that he was not surprised, but in such a tone that Spearman sprang up and led him straight into the presence.
Now the Benevolent Despot of this particular seat of learning was an astute pedagogue who could handle men as well as boys. He explained to Mr. Upton that the safe-keeping of the unit was the house-master's concern, but agreed it was time that he himself was made acquainted with the present case. He took it as seriously, too, as Mr. Upton could have wished, but quite as frankly from his own point of view as his two visitors did from each of theirs. He had no doubt the boy would turn up, but when he did it would be necessary for him to give a satisfactory account of his proceedings before he could be received back into the school.
“Bother the school!” cried Mr. Upton, diluting the anathema with difficulty. “Let me find my lad alive and well; then you can do what you like.”
“But how do you propose to find him?” inquired the head master, with only a dry smile (which disappointed Spearman) by way of rejoinder.
“First I shall have a word with these infernal people who, on their own showing, refused the boy a bed. I'll give them a bit of my mind, I promise you! Then there's the hotel they seem to have driven him to; it may be the one we always stay at, or one they've recommended. If I can't hear anything of him there, I suppose there'll be nothing for it but to call in the police.”
“My dear sir,” exclaimed the head master,
“It's more so from mine!” cried Mr. Upton, in fresh alarm and indignation. “You think about your school. I think about my wife and boy; it might kill her to hear about this before he's found. But if I don't go to the police, who am I to go to?” The head master leant back in his chair, and joined his finger-tips judicially.
“There was a man we had down here to investigate an extraordinary case of dishonesty, in which I was actually threatened with legal proceedings on behalf of a certain boy. But this man Thrush came down and solved the mystery within twenty-four hours, and saved the school a public scandal.”
“He may save you another,” said Mr. Upton, “if he can find my boy. What did you say the name was?”
“Thrush—Eugene Thrush—quite a remarkable man, and, I think, a gentleman,” said the head master impressively. Further particulars, including an address in Glasshouse Street, were readily supplied from an advertisement in that day's
That was the very man for Mr. Upton, as he himself agreed. And he departed both on speaking terms with Mr. Spearman, who said a final word for his own behaviour in the matter, and grimly at one with the head master on the importance of keeping it out of the papers.
The remarkable Mr. Thrush was a duly qualified solicitor, who had never been the man for that orderly and circumscribed profession. The tide of events which had turned his talents into their present channel, was known to but few of his many boon companions, and much nonsense was talked about him and his first career. It was not the case (as anybody might have ascertained) that he had been struck off the rolls in connection with the first great scandal in which he was professionally concerned. Nor was there much more truth in the report that he drank, in the ordinary interpretation of the term.
It is true, however, that Mr. Thrush had a tall tumbler on his dressing-table, to help him
shave for the evening of that fateful Friday. He was
Mullins, with the expression of an undertaker's mute (a calling he had followed in his day), was laying out his master's clothes as mournfully as though his master were in them, instead of chatting genially as he shaved.
“I'm sorry to have missed your evidence, Mullins, but if we go into this case it's no use letting the police smell the competitive rat too soon. Inquests are not in my line, and they'd have wondered what the devil I was doing there, especially as you refrained from saying you were in my service.”
“I had no call, sir.”
“Quite right, Mullins! An ideal witness, I can see you were. So you'd only to describe the finding of the body?”
“That was all, sir.”
“And your description was really largely founded on fact?”
Mullins stood like a funereal grenadier at his gentleman's shaving elbow. “I told the truth,
“But not the whole truth, eh, Mullins! What about the little souvenirs you showed me yesterday?”
“There was no call to name them either, sir. The cheroot-end I must have picked up a hundred yards away, and even the medicine-cork wasn't on the actual scene of the murder.”
“That's all right, Mullins. I don't see what they could possibly have to do with it, myself; and really, but for the fluke of your being the one to find the body, and picking the first-fruits for what they're worth, it's the last kind of case that I should dream of touching with a ten-foot pole. By the way, I suppose they won't require you at the adjourned inquest?”
“They may not require me, sir, but I should like to attend, if quite convenient,” replied Mullins deferentially. “The police were very stingy with their evidence to-day; they've still to produce the fatal bullet, and I should like a sight of that, sir.”
Mr. Thrush did not continue the conversation, possibly because he took as little real
interest as he professed in the case which was being thrust upon him, but more obviously owing
to the necessary care in shaving the corners of a delightfuly long and mobile mouth. Indeed,
the whole face emerging from the lather, as a cast from its clay, would have
Mr. Upton, who arrived before Thrush was visible, was an essentially superficial and antipathetic observer of unfamiliar types; and being badly impressed by the forbidding staircase, he had determined on the landing to sound his man before trusting him. In the rank undergrowth of his prejudices there was no more luxuriant weed than an innate abhorrence of London and all Londoners, which neither the cause of his visit nor the murky mien of Mullins was calculated to abate. The library of books in solid bindings, many of them legal tomes, was the first reassuring feature; another was the large desk, made business-like with pigeon-holes and a telephone; but Mr. Upton was only beginning to recover confidence when Eugene Thrush shook it sadly at his first entry.
It might have been by his face, or his fat, or his evening clothes seen from the motorist's dusty tweeds, almost as much as by the misplaced joviality with which Thrush exclaimed: “I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, sir, and the worst of it is that I can't let you keep me!”
This touched a raw nerve in the ironmaster, as the kind of reception one had to come up to London to incur. “Then I'll clear out!” said he, and would have been as good as his word but for its instantaneous effect.
Thrush had pulled out a gold watch after a stare of kindly consternation.
“I really am rather rushed,” said he; “but I can give you four minutes, if that's any good to you.”
Now, at first sight, before a word was spoken, Mr. Upton would have said four hours or four days of that boiled salmon in spectacles would have been no good to him; but the precise term of minutes, together with a seemlier but not less decisive manner, had already quickened the business man's respect for another whose time was valuable. This is by no means to say that Thrush had won him over in a breath. But the following interchange took place rapidly.
“I understand you're a detective, Mr. Thrush?”
“Hardly that, Mr.——I've left your card in the other room.”
“Upton is my name, sir.”
“I don't aspire to the official designation, Mr. Upton, an inquiry agent is all I presume to call myself.”
“But you do inquire into mysteries?”
“I've dabbled in them.”
“As an amateur?”
“A paid amateur, I fear.”
“I come on a serious matter, Mr. Thrush—a very serious matter to me!”
“Pardon me if I seem anything else for a moment; as it happens, you catch me dabbling, or rather meddling, in a serious case which is none of my business, but strictly a matter for the police, only it happens to have come my way by a fluke. I am not a policeman, but a private inquisitor. If you want anything or anybody ferreted out, that's my job and I should put it first.”
“Mr. Thrush, that's exactly what I do want, if only you can do it for me! I had reason to fear, from what I heard this morning, that my youngest child, a boy of sixteen, had disappeared up here in London, or been decoyed away. And now there can be no doubt about it!”
So, in about one of the allotted minutes, Thrush was trusted on grounds which Mr. Upton could not easily have explained; but the time was up before he had concluded a briefly circumstantial report of the facts within his knowledge.
“When can I see you again?” he asked abruptly of Thrush.
“When? What do you mean, Mr. Upton?”
“The four minutes must be more than up.”
“Go on, my dear sir, and don't throw good time after bad. I'm only dining with a man at his club. He can wait.”
“Thank you, Mr. Thrush.”
“More good time! How do you know the boy hasn't turned up at school or at home while you've been fizzing in a cloud of dust?”
“I was to have a wire at the hotel I always stop at; there's nothing there; but the first thing they told me was that my boy had been for a bed which they couldn't give him the night before last. I did let them have it! But it seems the manager was out, and his understrappers had recommended other hotels; they've just been telephoning to them all in turn, but at every one the poor boy seems to have fared the same. Then I've been in communication with these infernal people in St. John's Wood, and with the doctor, but none of them have heard anything. I thought I'd like to do what I could before coming to you, Mr. Thrush, but that's all I've done or know how to do. Something must have happened!”
“It begins to sound like it,” said Thrush gravely.
“But there are happenings and happenings; it may be only a minor accident. One moment!”
And he returned to the powder-closet of its modish day, where Mullins was still pursuing his ostensibly menial avocation. What the master said was inaudible in the library, but the man hurried out in front of him, and was heard clattering down the evil stairs next minute.
“In less than an hour,” explained Thrush, “he will be back with a list of the admissions at the principal hospitals for the last forty-eight hours. I don't say there's much in it; your boy had probably some letter or other means of easier indentification about him; but it's worth trying.”
“It is, indeed!” murmured Mr. Upton, much impressed.
“And while he is trying it,” exclaimed Eugene Thrush, lighting up as with a really great idea, “you'll greatly oblige me by having a whisky-and-soda in the first place.”
“No, thank you! I haven't had a bite all day. It would fly to my head.”
“But that's its job; that's where it's meant to fly,” explained the convivial Mr. Thrush,
preparing the potion with practised hand. Baited with a biscuit it was eventually swallowed,
and a flagging giant refreshed by his surrender. It made
“Go to your dinner, man, and let me waylay you later!”
“Thank you, I prefer to keep you now I've got you, Mr. Upton! My man begins his round by going to tell my pal I can't dine with him at all. Not a word, I beg! I'll have a bite with you instead when Mullins gets back, and in a taxi that won't be long.”
“But do you think you can do anything?”
The question floated in pathetic evidence on a flood of inarticulate thanks.
“If you give me time, I hope so,” was the measured answer. “But the needle in the hay is nothing to the lost unit in London, and it will take time. I'm not a magazine detective, Mr. Upton; if you want a sixpenny solution for soft problems, don't come to me!”
At an earlier stage the ironmaster would have raised his voice and repeated that this was a serious matter; even now he looked rather reproachfully at Eugene Thrush, who came back to business on the spot.
“I haven't asked you for a description of the boy, Mr. Upton, because it's not much good if we've got to keep the matter to ourselves. But is there anything distinctive about him besides the asthma?”
“Nothing; he was never an athlete, like my other boys.”
“Come! I call that a distinction in itself,” said Mr. Thrush, smiling down his own unathletic waistcoat. “But as a matter of fact, nothing could be better than the very complaint which no doubt unfits him for games.”
“Nothing better, do you say?”
“Emphatically, from my point of view. It's harder to hide a man's asthma than to hide the man himself.”
“I never thought of that.”
It was impossible to tell whether Thrush had thought of it before that moment. The round glasses were levelled at Mr. Upton with an inscrutable stare of the marine eyes behind them.
“I suppose it has never affected his heart?” he inquired nonchalantly; but the nonchalance was a thought too deliberate for paternal perceptions quickened as were those of Mr. Upton.
“Is that why you sent round the hospitals, Mr. Thrush?”
“It was one reason, but honestly not the chief.”
“I certainly never thought of his heart!”
“Nor do I think you need now, in the case of so young a boy,” said Thrush earnestly. “On the other hand, I shouldn't be surprised if his asthma were to prove his best friend.”
“It owes him something!”
“Do you know what he does for it?”
“Yes, I do,” said Mr. Upton, remembering the annoying letter he seemed to have received some weeks before. “He smokes, against his doctor's orders.”
“Do you mean tobacco?”
“No—some stuff for asthma.”
“In cigarettes?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know the name?”
“I have it here.”
The offensive letter was not only produced, but offered for inspection after a precautionary glance. Thrush was on his feet to receive it in outstretched hand. Already he looked extraordinarily keen for his bulk, but the reading of the letter left him alive and alert to the last superfluous ounce.
“But this is magnificent!” he cried, with eyes as round as their glasses.
“I confess I don't see why.”
“Cigarettes d'Auvergne!”
“Some French rubbish.”
“The boy has evidently been dependent on them?”
“It looks like it.”
“And this man Bompas made him give them all up?”
“So he has the impudence to say.”
“Is it possible you don't see the importance of all this?”
Mr. Upton confessed incompetence unashamed.
“I never heard of these cigarettes before; they're an imported article; you can't get them everywhere, I'll swear! Your boy has got to rely on them; he's out of reach of the doctor who's forbidden them; he'll try to get them somewhere! If he's been trying in London, I'll find out where before I'm twenty-four hours older!”
“But how can you?” asked Mr. Upton, less impressed with the possibility than by this rapid if obvious piece of reasoning.
“A. V. M.!” replied Eugene Thrush, with cryptic smile.
“Who on earth is he?”
“Nobody; it's the principle on which I work.”
“A. V. M.?”
“Otherwise the old nursery game of Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral.”
Again Mr. Upton had to prevent himself by main force from declaring it all no laughing matter; but his silence was almost bellicose.
“You divide things into two,” explained Thrush, “and go on so dividing them until you come
down to the indivisible unit which is the answer to the riddle. Animal or Vegetable? Vegetable
or
Mr. Upton had shrugged an impatient recognition of the game.
“In this case it's Chemists Who Do Sell D'Auvergne Cigarettes and Chemists Who Don't. Then—Chemists Who Do and Did Yesterday, and Chemists Who Do but Didn't! But we can probably improve on the old game by playing both rounds at once.”
“I confess I don't quite follow,” said Mr. Upton, “though there seems some method in the madness.”
“It's all the method I've got,” rejoined Thrush frankly. “But you shall see it working, for unless I'm much mistaken this is Mullins back sooner than I expected.”
Mullins it was, and with the negative information expected and desired, though the
professional melancholy of his countenance might have been the precursor of the worst possible
news. The hospitals on his rapid round had included Charing Cross, St. Thomas's, St. George's,
and the Royal Free; but he had telephoned besides to St. Mary's and St. Bartholomew's. At none
of these institutions had a young gentleman of the name of Upton, or of unknown name, been
admitted in the last forty-eight hours. Mullins, however, looked as
“Don't go, Mullins! I've another job for you,” said Eugene Thrush. “Take the telephone directory and the London directory, and sit you down at my desk. Look up “chemists” under “trades”; there are pages of them. Work through the list with the telephone directory, and ring up every chemist who's on the telephone, beginning with the ones nearest in, to ask if he keeps d'Auvergne Cigarettes for asthma. Make a note of the first few who do; go round to them all in turn, and be back here at nine with a box from each. Complain to each of the difficulty of getting 'em elsewhere—say you wonder there's so little demand—and with any luck you should find out whether and to whom they've sold any since Wednesday evening.”
“But surely that's the whole point?” suggested the ironmaster.
“It's the next point,” said Thrush. “The first is to divide the chemists of London into the Animals who keep the cigarettes and the Vegetables who don't. I should really like to play the next round myself, but Mullins must do something while we're out.”
“While we're out, Mr. Thrush?”
“My dear Mr. Upton, you're going to step across into the Cafe Royal with me, and have a square meal before you crack up!”
“And what about your theatre?” asked Mr. Upton, to whom resistance was a physical impossibility, when they had left the sombre Mullins entrenched behind telephone and directories.
“The theatre! I was only going out of curiosity to see the sort of tripe that any manager has the nerve to serve up on a Friday in June; but I'm not going to chuck the drama that's come to me!”
The ironmaster dined with his head in a whirl. It was a remarkably good dinner that Thrush
ordered, if as inappropriate to the occasion as to his own weight. His guest, however, knew no
more what he was eating or drinking than he knew the names of the people in diamonds and white
waistcoats who stared at the distraught figure in the country clothes. It even escaped his
observation that the obese Thrush was an unblushing gourmet with a cynical lust for Burgundy.
The conscious repast of Mr. Upton consisted entirely of the conversation of Eugene Thrush, and
of that conversation only such portions as exploited his professional theories, and those
theories only as bearing on the case in hand. He was merely bored when Thrush tried to distract
“I don't see how your theory can work there,” he sighed, out of pure politeness, when Thrush paused to punish the wine.
“It should work all right,” returned Thrush. “You take an absolutely worthless life; what do you do it for? It must be one of two motives: either you have a grudge against the fellow or his existence is a menace to you. Revenge or fear; he wants your money, or he's taken your wife! But what revenge can there be upon a poor devil without the price of a bed on his indescribable person? He hasn't anything to bless himself with, and he makes it a bit too hot for somebody who has, eh? So you whittle it down. And then perhaps by sheer luck you run your blade into the root of the matter.”
Thrush gave up trying to take the other out of himself, since his boldest statements were allowed to pass unchallenged, unless they dealt with the one subject on the poor man's mind. The cessation of his voice, however, caused a twinge of conscience in the bad listener; he made a mental grab at the last phrase, and was astonished to find it germane to his own thoughts.
“That's the second time you've mentioned luck, Mr. Thrush!”
“When was the first?”
“You spoke of Friday as an unlucky day, as God knows this one is to me! Are you of a superstitious turn of mind?”
“Not seriously.”
“You don't believe in dreams, for example?”
“That's another question,” said Thrush, his spectacles twinkling to colossal rubies as he sipped his Santenay. “Why do you ask?”
“If you're a disbeliever it's no use my telling you.”
“Perhaps I'm neither one thing nor the other.”
“Have you ever known a mystery solved through a dream?”
“I've heard of one,” said Thrush, with a significant stress upon the verb; “that's the
famous old murder in the Red Barn a hundred years ago. The victim's mother dreamed three nights
running that her missing daughter was buried in the Red Barn, and there she was all the time.
There
“Cases in which a parent has dreamt of an absent child, at the very time at which something terrible has happened to that child?”
“Any amount of those.”
The father's voice had trembled with the question. Thrush put down his glass as he gave his
answer,
“Do you think they're all coincidences?” demanded Mr. Upton hoarsely.
“Some of them may be, but certainly not all,” was the reply. “That would be the greatest coincidence of the lot!”
“I hardly like to tell you why I ask,” said Mr. Upton, much agitated; for he could be as emotional as most irascible men.
“You've been dreaming about the boy?”
“Not I; but my poor wife has; that was one reason why I daren't tell her he had disappeared.”
“Why? What was the dream?”
“That she saw him—and heard a shot.”
“A shot!”
Thrush looked as though he had heard one himself, but only until he had time to think.
“She says she did hear one,” added Mr. Upton, “and that she wasn't dreaming at all.”
“But when was this?”
“Between six and seven yesterday morning.” This time Thrush did not move a muscle of his
face; it only lit up like a Chinese lantern, and again he was quick to quench the inner flame;
but now the coincidence was complete. Coincidences, however, had nothing to say to the A. V. M.
system, neither was Eugene Thrush the man to jump to
“Then that accounts for it,” said Thrush, when he had heard the whole sad story. There was the faintest ring of disappointment in his tone. “What do you mean?”
“That anybody as ill as that, more particularly a lady, is naturally fanciful, I'm afraid.”
“Then you think it a mere delusion, after all?”
“My dear Mr. Upton, it would be presumption to express an opinion either way. I only say, don't think too much about that dream. And since you won't keep me company in my cups, we may as well rejoin the faithful Mullins.”
They ran into Mullins, as it happened, in Glasshouse Street, and Mr. Upton for one would not
have recognised him as the same being. His sepulchral face was alight with news—it was the
transformation of the undertaker's mute into the
Thrush ordered his man upstairs, and took his late guest's hand as soon as ever he dared.
“You need a good night's rest, my dear sir, and it's no use climbing to my masthead for nothing. Mullins and I will do best if you don't mind leaving us to ourselves for the night; but first thing tomorrow morning I shall be at your service again, and I hope there will be some progress to report.”
Mullins was waiting for him with all the lights on, his solemn face still more strikingly illuminated.
“Look at this, sir, look at this! These are the d'Auvergne Cigarettes!”
“So I perceive.”
“This stump is the stump of a d'Auvergne Cigarette.”
“I hope you enjoyed it, Mullins.”
“I didn't smoke it, sir!”
“Who did?”
“That's for you to say, sir; but it's one of the little things I collected near the scene of the murder, but took for a common cheroot, yesterday morning in Hyde Park.”
“Near the actual place?”
Thrush had pounced upon the stump, and was holding it under the strongest of the electric lamps.
“Under a seat, sir, not above a hundred yards away!”
Pocket had been dreaming again. What else could he expect? Waking, he felt that he had got
off cheaply; that he might have been through the nightmare of battle, as described by one who
had, and depicted in the engravings downstairs, instead of on a mercifully hazy visit to the
Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's. The trouble was that he had seen the one and not the
other, and what he had seen continued to haunt him as he lay awake, but quite horribly when he
fell back into a doze. There was nothing nebulous about the vile place then; it was as light
and bright as the room in which he lay. The sinister figures in the panelled pens were swathed
in white, as he had somewhere read that they always were at nights. Their evil faces were
shrouded out of sight. But that only made their defiant, portly figures the more humanly
inhuman and terrifying; it was as though they had all risen, in their winding-sheets, from
their
There was no awaking from this dream: the dreamer was not positive that he had been asleep. The veiled sunlight in his room was just what it had seemed in that deserted dungeon of swaddled malefactors. The boy shuddered till the bed shook under him. But after that he still lay on, facing himself as he had seen himself, and his deed as others must see it soon or late. Not the actual accident in the Park; but this hiding in the heart of London, this skulking among strangers, this leaving his own people to mourn him as the dead!
The thought of them drew scalding tears. Never had they seemed so dear to him before. It was
not
Having made up his mind, however, as to the only thing to do, the boy behaved
characteristically in not hastening to do it. The ordeal in front of him, beginning in certain
conflict with Baumgartner, and ending in a blaze of wretched notoriety, was a severe one to
face; meanwhile he lay in such peace and safety as it was only human to prolong
“My accident may have done the same for me,” thought Pocket—and was bitterly ashamed next moment to catch himself thinking complacently of any aspect of his deed. Its other aspects were a sufficient punishment.
To get up, and raise the green linen blind, flooding with sunshine the plain upstairs room to which Baumgartner had conducted his guest, was to conjure uncomfortable visions of the eccentric doctor, with his ferocious meerschaum, his bloodthirsty battle-talk, and all his arguments in favour of the course which Pocket had now determined to abandon. The boy fully realised that he had been given his chance, and had refused it. And of all the interviews before him, that with Dr. Baumgartner was the one that he most dreaded, and would have given most to escape.
Could he escape it? That was an idea; others came of it. If he did escape, and did give
himself
He opened his window and looked out; but it was a back window, and the sunny little strip of
garden below was one of many in a row. Old discoloured walls divided them from each other and
from the gardens of a parallel block of bigger houses, whose slates and chimneys towered above
the intervening trees. The street in front of those houses was completely hidden, but the hum
of its traffic travelled pleasantly to the ear, and
Because such associations filled his eyes again, there seemed no end to them. Somebody was playing the piano near some open window, and playing almost as well as Lettice did, and playing one of her things! Pocket could not bear to listen or look out any longer, and he dressed as quietly as he could. He had almost resolved to slip out without a word, whatever else he did, if the opportunity offered. It simply never occurred to him, until he made the discovery, that anybody would dare to lock him in his room!
Yet they had done it; that infernal old German doctor had had the cheek to do it; and the
effect on the boy, who so expressed the situation to himself, was rather remarkable. A wholly
ineffectual tug or two told him he was on the wrong
Immediately underneath was another window, opening on a leaded balcony over the bow-window in the drawing-room. To shift his bedstead with the least possible noise, to tie a sheet to it, and to slide down the sheet till he had but a few feet to drop into the balcony, was the work of a very few minutes to one as excitedly determined as Pocket had become on finding himself a prisoner. Thought they would lock him in, did they? They would just find out their mistake! It was exactly the same mood in which he had scaled the upright palings in defiance of the policeman who said he might not sleep in the Park.
The balcony window was open, the room within empty. It was obviously Baumgartner's bedroom.
There was a camp bedstead worthy of an old campaigner, a large roll-top desk, and a waste-paper
basket which argued either a voluminous correspondence or imperfect domestic service; it would
have furnished scent for no short paper-chase. Otherwise the room was tidy enough, and
Baumgartner out. That was a bit of luck; and it was just like Pocket to lose a moment in
taking advantage of it; but the truth was that he had made an interesting discovery. It was in
that house the piano was being played. He heard it through the drawing-room door; he had heard
it on the balcony up above; it had never stopped once, so silent had he been. It was that
Phillida, with the large dark eyes, and she was playing something that Lettice sometimes
played, and very nearly, though naturally not quite, as well. Pocket would have said that it
was Mendelssohn, or Chopin, “or something,” for his love of music was greater than his
knowledge. But it was not exactly the music that detained him; he was thinking more of the
musician, who had shown him kindness, after all. It would be only decent to thank her before he
went, and the doctor himself through his niece. If she knew he had been locked in, and he had
to tell her how he had made his escape and yet not a sound—well, she would not think the less
of him at
The girl sprang from the music-stool in extraordinary excitement. Her large eyes were larger than ever, as it were with fear, and yet they blazed at the intruder. Pocket could not understand it, unless she already knew the truth.
“I'm so sorry for starting you,” he apologised. “I just came in to say goodbye.”
And he held out a hand which she never seemed to see.
“To say goodbye!” she gasped.
“Yes, I've got to go. I'm afraid the doctor's out?”
“Yes, he is. Won't you wait?”
“I'm afraid I can't.”
She was shrinking from him, shrinking round towards the door. He stood aside, to let her bolt if that was her desire. And then she in turn took her stand, back to the door.
“He'll be very sorry to miss you,” she said more firmly, and with a smile.
“And I'm very sorry to miss him,” said Pocket,
“I'm afraid he won't believe me,” the girl said dryly, “if he finds you gone.”
“I must go—really I must. I shall get into an awful row as it is. Do you mind giving him one other message?”
“As many as you like.”
“Well, you might tell him from me that I'll give myself away, but I'll never give him! He'll know what I mean.”
“Is that all?”
She was keeping him very cleverly, putting in her word always at the last moment, and again refusing to see his hand; but again it was the boy who helped to waste his own golden opportunity, this time through an indefensible bit of boyish braggadocio.
“No; you may tell the doctor that if he wanted to detain me he went the worst way about it by locking me into my room!”
She looked mystified at first, and then astounded.
“How did you get out?”
“How do you suppose?”
“I never heard anything!”
“I took care you shouldn't.”
And he described the successful adventure with
“I'm very sorry, but I can't let you go, Mr. Upton.”
“Can't let me?”
“I really am sorry—but you must wait to see my uncle.”
He stood aghast before the determined girl. She was obviously older than himself, yet she was only a slip of a girl, and if he forced his way past—but he was not the fellow to do it—and that maddened him, because he felt she knew it.
“Oh, very well!” he cried, sarcastically. “If you won't let me out that way, I'll go this!”
And he turned towards the tiny conservatory, which led down into the garden; but she was on him, and there was no hesitation about her; she held him firmly by the hand.
“If you do I'll blow a police-whistle!” she said. “We have one—it won't take an instant. You shan't come out the front way, and you'll be stopped if you climb the wall!”
“But why? Do you take me for a lunatic, or what?” he gasped out bitterly.
“Never mind what I take you for!”
“You're treating me as though I were one!”
“You've got to stay and see my uncle.”
“I shan't! Let me go, I tell you! You shall you shall! I hate your uncle, and you too!” But that was only half true, even then while he was struggling almost as passionately as though the girl had been another boy. He could not strike her; but that was the only line he drew, for she would grapple with him, and release himself he must. Over went walnut whatnots, and out came mutterings that made him hotter than ever for very shame. But he did not hate her even for what she made him say; all his hatred and all his fear were of the dreadful doctor whose will she was obeying; and both were at their highest pitch when the door burst open, and in he sprang to part them with a look. But it was a look that hurt more than word or blow; never had poor Pocket endured or imagined such a steady, silent downpour of indignation and contempt. It turned his hatred almost in a moment to hatred of himself; his fear it only increased.
“Leave us, Phillida,” said Baumgartner at last. Phillida was in tears, and Pocket had been hanging his head; but now he sprang towards her.
“Forgive me!” he choked, and held the door open for her, and shut it after her with all the gallantry the poor lad had left.
“So,” said Dr. Baumgartner, “you not only try to play me false, but you seize the first opportunity when my back is turned! Not only do you break your promise, but you break it with brutal violence to a young lady who has shown you nothing but kindness!”
Pocket might have replied with justice that the young lady had brought the violence upon herself; but that would have made him out a greater cad than ever, in his own eyes at any rate. He preferred to defend his honour as best he could, which was chiefly by claiming the right to change his mind about what was after all his own affair. But that was precisely what Baumgartner would not allow for a moment; it was just as much his affair as accessory after the fact, and in accordance with their mutual and final agreement overnight. Pocket could only rejoin that he had never meant to give the doctor away at all.
“I daresay not!” said Baumgartner sardonically. “It would have been dragged out of you all
the same. I told you so yesterday, and you agreed with me. I put it most plainly to you as a
case of then or never so far as owning up was concerned.
“Then why did you lock me in?” cried Pocket, pouncing on the one point on which he did not already feel grievously in the wrong. The doctor flattered him with a slight delay before replying.
“There were so many reasons,” he said, with a sigh; “you mustn't forget that you walk in your sleep, for one of them. We might have had you falling downstairs in the middle of the night; but I own that I was more prepared for the kind of relapse which appears to have overtaken you. I was afraid you had more on your soul than you could keep to yourself without my assistance, and that you would get brooding over what has happened until it drove you to make a clean breast of the whole thing. I tell you it's no good brooding or looking back; take one more look ahead, and what do you see if you have your way? Humiliating notoriety for yourself, calamitous consequences in your own family, certain punishment for me!”
“The consequences at home,” groaned Pocket, “will be bad enough whatever we do. I can't bear to think of them! If only they had taken Bompas's advice, and sent me round the world in the Seringapatam! I should have been at sea by this time, and out of harm's way for the next three months.”
“The Seringapatam?” repeated the doctor. “I never heard of her.”
“You wouldn't; she's only a sailing vessel, but she carries passengers and a doctor, a friend of Dr. Bompas's, who wanted to send me with him for a voyage round the world. But my people wouldn't let me go. She sails this very day, and touches nowhere till she gets to Melbourne. If I could only raise the passage-money, or even stow away on board, I could go out in her still, and that would be the last of me for years and years!”
It was not the last of him in his own mind; suddenly as the thought had come, and mad as it was, it flashed into the far future in the boy's brain; and he saw himself making his fortune in a far land, turning it up in a single nugget, and coming home to tell of his adventures, bearded like the pard, another “dead man come to life,” after about as many years as the dream took seconds to fashion. And Baumgartner looked on as though following the same wild train of thought, as though it did not seem so wild to him, but extremely interesting; so that Pocket was quite disappointed when he shook his head.
“A stowaway with an attack of asthma! I think I see my poor young fellow! Why, they'd hear
you wheezing in the hold, and you'd gasp out your whole story before you were in the Bay of
There was no mistaking the absolute intention in this threat; it was fixed and final, and the boy accepted it as he accepted his oppressor's power to make good his words. It was true that he might have escaped already; the nearer he had been to it, the less chance was he likely to be given again. So reasoned Pocket from the face and voice now dominating him more powerfully than ever; but it is an interesting fact that his conclusion neither cowed nor depressed him as it might have done. There was actually an element of relief in his discomfiture. He had done his best to do his duty. It was not his fault that responsibility had been wrested from his shoulders, and an evil hour delayed. And yet there was a certain, an immediate, a creature comfort in such delay, which was all the greater because unsought by him; it was a comfort that he had both ways, as the saying is, and from all points of view but that of his poor people wondering what had become of him.
“If only they knew!” he cried; “then I shouldn't care. Let me write to one of them! My
mother needn't know; but I must write to one of the
The doctor would not hear of it at first. Eventually he said he should have to inspect the letter before it went; and this proved the thin edge of consent. In the end it was arranged that Pocket should write what he liked to his sister only, and that Baumgartner should read and enclose it in a covering letter, so that everybody need not know it was a letter from the missing boy. Baumgartner was to have it posted from St. Martin's-le-Grand, to destroy all trace of a locality which he now refused point-blank to disclose even to the writer. And in return for the whole concession the schoolboy was to give his solemn word and sacred promise on the following points.
He was not to set foot outside the house without Baumgartner, nor to show himself for a moment at the windows back or front.
On no account was he to confide in the doctor's niece Phillida, to give her the slightest inkling of his connection with the latest of London mysteries, or even of the scene, or any of the circumstances of his first meeting with Baumgartner.
“You are bound to see something of each other; the less you say about yourself the better.”
“But what can she think?”
“What she likes, my young fellow! I am a medical man; medical men may bring patients to their houses even when they have ceased to practise in the ordinary way. It is no business of hers, and what she chooses to think is no affair of ours. She has seen you very ill, remember, and she had your doctor's orders not to let you out of the house in his absence.”
“She obeyed them like a little brick!” muttered Pocket, with a wistful heaviness.
“She did what she was told; think no more about it,” said the doctor. “Give me your hand on
these your promises, and die on your feet rather than break one of them! Now I trust you, my
young fellow; you will play the game, as you call it, even as the poor lads in these pictures
played it at Gravelotte, and die like them rather than go back an inch. Look at this one here.
No, not the one with the ridges, but here where we come to bayonets and the sword. See the poor
devils of the Prussian Guard! See the sheet-lightning pouring into us from the walls of St.
Privat! Look at that fellow with his head bound up, and this one with no head to bind. That's
meant for our colonel on the white horse. See him hounding us on to hell! And there's a drummer
drumming as though we could hear a single beat! Our very colours
Be it remembered that he was not a man at all, but a boy in many ways younger than most boys of sixteen and three quarters, albeit older in some few. He was old in imagination, but young in common sense. One may be imaginative and still have a level head, but it is least likely in one's teens. The particular temperament does not need a label; but none who know it when they see it, and who see it here, will be surprised to learn that this emotional writer for one was enormously relieved and lightened in spirit when he had got his letter off his mind and hands.
True to his warning, Dr. Baumgartner began to glance at it with a kindly gravity; it was with something else that he shook his head over the second leaf.
“This is not for me to read!” said he. “I'd rather run the risk of trusting your discretion.”
No words could have enslaved poor Pocket more completely; he clasped the hand that proceeded
to write the covering note, and then the address, all openly before his eyes. And while the
doctor was gone to the nearest messenger office to despatch the missive to the General Post
Office, ostensibly to catch a particular post, his prisoner
Phillida did not appear at dinner, but at supper she did, and Pocket was only less uncomfortable in her absence, which he felt he had caused, than when they were both at table and he unable to say another word to express his sorrow for the unseemly scene of the forenoon. She spoke to him once or twice as though nothing of the kind had happened, but he could scarcely look her in the face. Otherwise both meals interested him; they were German in their order, a light supper following the substantial middle-day repast; but it appeared that they both came from an Italian restaurant, and the English boy was much taken with the pagoda-like apparatus in which the dishes arrived smoking hot in tiers. It provided a further train of speculation when he remembered that he had never seen a servant in the house, and that the steps had struck him as dirty, and the doctor's waste-paper basket as very full. Pocket determined to make his own bed next morning. He had meanwhile an unpleasing suspicion that the young girl was clearing away, for the doctor took him back into the drawing-room after supper; and later, when they returned for a game of billiards on the toy board, which they placed between them on the dining-table, both Phillida and the fragments had disappeared.
The little billiards were a bond and a distraction. They brought out Baumgartner's simple side, and they emphasised the schoolboy's simplicity. Both played a strenuous game, the doctor a most deliberate one; his brows would knit, his mouth shut, his eyes calculate, and his hand obey, as though his cue were a surgical instrument cutting deep between life and death. It was a curious glimpse of disproportionate concentration; even the Turk's head was only lit to be laid aside as an obstruction. Pocket's one chance was to hit hard and trust to the fortune that accrues on a small table. Both played to win, and the boy forgot everything when he actually succeeded in the last game. They had played very late for him, and he slept without stirring until Baumgartner came to his room about eight o'clock next morning.
Now Pocket had not seen a newspaper all Friday, but it was the first thing he did see on the Saturday morning, for the doctor was waving one like a flag to wake him.
“Trust your vermin press to get hold of the wrong end of the stick!” he cried, with fierce amusement; “it only remains to be seen whether they succeed in putting your precious police on the wrong tack too. Really, it's almost worth being at the bottom of a popular mystery to watch the smartest men in this country making fools of themselves!”
“May I see?” asked Pocket; he had winced at more than one of these remarks.
“Certainly,” replied Baumgartner; “here's the journalistic wonder of the age, and there you are in its most important column. I brought it up for you to see.”
The boy bit his lips as he read. His deed had been promoted to leaded type and the highest
rank in headlines. It appeared, in the first place, that no arrest had yet been made; but it
was confidently asserted (by the omniscient butt of Teutonic sallies) that the police, wisely
guided by the hint in yesterday's issue (which Pocket had not seen), were already in possession
of a most important clue. In subsequent paragraphs of pregnant brevity the real homicide was
informed that his fatal act could only be the work of a totally different and equally definite
hand. Pocket gathered that there had been a certain commonplace tragedy, in a street called
Holland Walk, in the previous month of March. A licensed messenger named Charlton had been
found shot under circumstances so plainly indicative of suicide that a coroner's jury had
actually returned a verdict to that effect. There appeared, however, to have been an element of
doubt in the case. This the scribe of the leaded type sought to remove by begging the question
from beginning to end. It had not been a case of suicide at all, he declared,
“But we know he had nothing to do with the second one,” said the boy, looking up at last. “It wasn't a murder, either; neither was the first, according to the coroner's jury, who surely ought to know.”
“One would have thought so,” said Baumgartner, with his sardonic smile; “but the yellow pressman knows better still, apparently.”
“Do you suppose there's a word of truth in what he says? I don't mean about Charlton or—or poor Holdaway,” said Pocket, wincing over his victim's name, which he had just gleaned from the paper. “But do you think the police are really after anybody?”
“I don't know,” said Baumgartner. “What does it matter?”
“It would matter a great deal if they arrested somebody for what I did!”
The boy was no longer looking up; and his voice trembled.
“It would alter the whole thing,” he mumbled significantly.
“I don't see it,” returned the doctor, with grim good-nature. “The little wonder of the English reading world has nearly unearthed another mare's nest, as two of its readers know full well. No real harm can come of this typical farrago. Let it lead to an arrest! There are only two living souls who can't account for their time at that of this unfortunate affair.”
Pocket realised this; but it was put in a way that gave him goose-skin under the clothes. He was always seeing his accident in some new light, always encountering some new possibility, or natural consequence of his silence, which had not occurred to him before. But he was learning to keep his feelings under control, to set his face and his teeth against the regular reactions of his coward conscience and his fickle will. And once again did Dr. Baumgartner atone for an unintentional minor by striking a rousing chord on the very heart-strings of the boy.
“Eight o'clock!” cried the magician, with a glance at his watch and an ear towards the open
Eugene Thrush was a regular reader of the journal on which Dr. Baumgartner heaped heavy satire, its feats of compression, its genius for headlines, and the delicious expediency of all its views, which enabled its editorial column to face all ways and bow where it listed, in the universal joint of popularity, were points of irresistible appeal to a catholic and convivial sense of humour. He read the paper with his early cup of tea, and seldom without a fat internal chuckle between the sheets.
That Saturday morning, however, Mr. Thrush was not only up before the paper came, but for
once he took its opinion seriously on a serious matter. It said exactly what he wished to think
about the Hyde Park murder: that the murderer would prove to be the author of a similar crime,
committed in the previous month of March, when the Upton boy must have been safe at school. If
that were so, it
That much, though no more, had, however, been fairly established overnight. It was a
conclusion to which Mullins, with the facile conviction of his class, had jumped on the slender
evidence of the asthma cigarette alone; but before midnight Thrush himself had been forced to
admit its extreme probability. There was a medicine cork as well as an asthma cigarette; the
medicine cork had been found very much nearer the body; in fact, just across the pathway, under
a shrub on the other side of the fence. It was Mullins, who had made both discoveries, who also
craved permission to ring up Dr. Bompas, late at night, to ask if there was any particular
chemist to whom he sent his patients with their prescriptions. Dr. Bompas was not at home,
which perhaps was just as well but his man gave the name of Harben, in Oxford Street. Harbens,
rung up in their turn, found that they certainly had made up one of the doctor's prescriptions
on the Wednesday, for a young Mr. Upton, and, within half an hour, had positively identified
the cork found by Mullins in Hyde Park.
Yet Thrush could not or would not conceive any actual connection between a harmless schoolboy and an apparently cold-blooded crime. He resisted the idea on more grounds than he felt disposed to urge in argument with his now strangely animated factotum. It was still a wide jump to a detestable conclusion, but he confined his criticism to the width of the jump. The cork and the cigarette might be stepping-stones, but at least one more was wanted to justify the slightest suspicion against the missing boy. Let it be shown that he had carried firearms on the Wednesday night, and Thrush undertook to join his satellite on the other side; but his mental bias may be gauged from the fact that he made no mention of the boy's mother's dream.
Mullins found him not only up, shaved and booted, but already an enthusiastic convert to the startling theory of a sensation journalist, and consequently an irritable observer of the saturnine countenance which darkened to a tinge of distinct amusement over the leaded type.
“So you don't think there's much in it, Mullins?”
“I shouldn't say there was anything at all, sir.”
“Yet I suppose you remember the very similar occurrence in Holland Walk?”
“Oh yes, sir, but it was a case of suicide.”
“I don't agree.”
“But surely, sir, the jury brought it in suicide?”
“The coroner's jury did—in spite of the coroner—but it may come before another jury yet, Mullins! I remember the case perfectly; the medical evidence was that the shot had been fired at arm's length. That isn't the range at which we usually bring ourselves down! Then there was nothing to show that the man ever possessed a pistol, or even the price of one; he was so stony it would have gone up the spout long before. The very same point crops up in the case of this poor boy. Who says he ever had a revolver in his life? His father tells me explicitly that he never had; I happened to ask the question,” added Thrush, without explaining in what connection.
“Well, sir,” said Mullins, with respect enough in his tone, “you talk about jumping to conclusions, but it strikes me the gentleman who write for the papers could give me some yards and a licking, sir!”
This was a sprightly speech for Mullins; but it was delivered with the very faintest of deferential smiles, and Mr. Thrush shook his spectacles without one at all.
“The gentlemen on this paper have a knack of lighting on the truth, however,” he remarked;
“it
Mullins remarked with quiet confidence that they were not going to do it this time. His position was, briefly, that he could not bring himself to believe in two separate mysteries, at one and the same time and place, with no sort of connection between them.
“That would be too much of a coincidence,” said Mullins, sententiously.
Thrush looked at him for a moment.
“But life's one long collection of coincidences! That's what I'm always telling you; the mistake is to look on them as anything else. Don't you call it a bit of a coincidence that both these men should meet their death at the very hour of the morning when you're on your way over here from Netting Hill, and in much the same degree of latitude, which you've got to cross somewhere or other on your way? Yet who has the nerve to say you must have gone through Holland Walk that other morning, and been mixed up in that affair because you are in this?”
“I don't admit I'm mixed up in anything,” replied Mullins, with some warmth.
“I mean as a witness of sorts. I was merely reducing your argument to the absurd, Mullins;
you didn't take me literally, did you? It's no
Anything more genial than the garrulous banter of Eugene Thrush, at his best, it was impossible to encounter or incur; he had been, however, for a few minutes at his worst, and it was difficult to see why the pendulum should have swung so suddenly to the other extreme. Mullins went about his business with his usual sleek solemnity. But Thrush was yet another man the moment he was alone. His face was a sunny background for ideas, misgivings, and half-formed plans, one after the other, whirling like clouds across a crimson sky. But the sky was clear whenever Mullins was in the room. And at the breakfast-table there was not a cloud.
“To come back to those chemists, and this shop-to-shop canvassing,” resumed Thrush, as Mullins poured out his tea; “how many have you done, and how many have we still to do between us?”
Mullins produced a pocket-book that did him credit, and consulted notes as neat.
“Rung up when you were out at dinner—seventeen. Kept Cigarettes d'Auvergne—one. That was Thornycroft's in Shaftesbury Avenue, where I'd just been when I met you down below in the street. In the night I knocked up other eight-and-twenty, all either in the neighbourhood of Trafalgar Square or else on the line of the Park.”
“Poor devils! I suppose you urged a pretty bad case?”
“A matter of life or death.”
“Well?”
“Three more kept them, not counting Harbens: one in Knightsbridge, one in New Bond Street, and one a little way down the Brompton Road.”
“Much demand in any of those quarters?”
“Only in the Brompton Road; a literary gentleman has a box regularly every week, and two in the autumn. Pringle, his name is.”
“I know him; so he's as breathless as his own yarns, is he?” murmured Thrush, to his buttered egg. “But has one of these apothecaries sold a box of d'Auvergnes since Wednesday afternoon?”
“Two have,” said Mullins, “but one was to Mr. Pringle.”
Thrush levelled inquiring spectacles.
“How did you worm that out, Mullins?”
“By changing my tune a bit, sir. I started asking if they knew anybody who could recommend
“Very smart of you, Mullins! And one wheezy novelist is the only consumer?”
“That's right, sir, but the man in Knights-bridge sold a box on Thursday to a doctor.”
“Did you get the name?”
“Bone-Gardner, I think it was a Dr. Otto Bone-Gardner.”
“Baumgartner, I expect you mean!” cried Thrush, straightening a wry face to spell the name. “I've heard of an Otto Baumgartner, though I can't say when or where. What's his address?”
“He couldn't tell me, sir; or else he wouldn't. Suppose he thought I'd be turning the doctor out next. Old customer, I understood he was.”
“For d'Auvergne Cigarettes?”
“I didn't inquire.”
“My good fellow, that's the whole point! I'll go myself and ask for the asthma cigarettes that Dr. Baumgartner always has; if they say he never had them before, that'll be talking. His being a doctor looks well. But I'm certain I know his name; you might look it up in
And Mullins did so with due docility, albeit with queer gulps at barbaric mouthfuls such as
the list of battle-fields on which Dr. Baumgartner had fought
“Parthenon!” said Thrush, as though he had bitten on a nerve. “But what about his address?”
“There's no getting hold of that address,” said Mullins, demoralised and perspiring. “It's not given here either.”
“Well, the chemist or the directory will supply that if we want it, but I'm afraid he sounds a wheezy old bird. The author of “Peripatetic Psychology” deserves to have asthma all his nights, and “After this Life” smacks of the usual Schopenhauer and Lager. No, we won't build on Dr. Baumgartner, Mullins; but we'll go through the chemists of London with a small tooth-comb, from here to the four-mile radius.”
Thrush had finished breakfast, and Mullins was beginning to clear away, when a stormy step
was heard upon the stairs, and in burst Mr. Upton with
“Rather early, wasn't it?” suggested Thrush, whose manner was more softly sympathetic than it had been the night before. The change was slight, and yet marked. He was more solicitous.
“Early!” cried Mr. Upton. “Haven't I lost my boy, and wasn't it these Cockney cads who
turned him adrift in London? I ought to have gone to them last night. I wish I had, when my
blood was up after your dinner; for I don't mind telling you now, Mr. Thrush, that in spite of
your
The visitor paused to look harder than ever at Mullins, and Thrush seized the opportunity to offer an apology for his abrupt behaviour in the street.
“I confess I showed indecent haste,” said he; “but Mullins and I had our night's work cut out, and he at any rate has not had his boots off since you saw him.”
“Hasn't he?” cried Mr. Upton, in remorseful recognition of an unsuspected devotion; “then I'll say what I've got to say in front of him, for you're both my friends, and I'll unsay all I said just now. Bear with my temper, both of you, if you can, for I feel beside myself about the boy! It was all I could do to keep my hands off that smug little lump of London inhumanity! Kept me waiting while he finished his breakfast, he did, and then came in polishing a hat as sleek as himself, and saying “Rather early!”—just as you set me off by saying yourself a minute ago.”
“But he seems to have told you something, Mr. Upton?”
“Has he not! He began by telling me he was sorry for me, confound him! I could have made him sorrier for himself! He was sorry for me, but what could he do? London was a large place, and “we Londoners” were busy men. I told him so were some of us in the iron-trade, but not too busy to keep an eye on boys who were friends of our boys. He said London life was different; and I said so I could see. They never had spare beds at a moment's notice, much less for boys who might set fire to the house or—or shoot themselves——”
His two hearers uttered a simultaneous exclamation, and Mr. Upton stood glancing piteously from one to the other, as though his lad's death-warrant were written in their faces. Eugene Thrush, however, looked so genuinely distressed that the less legible handwriting on the face of Mullins also attracted less attention.
“Had he anything to shoot himself with?” inquired Thrush, in a curiously gentle voice.
Mr. Upton nodded violently as he moistened his lips.
“He had, after all!” he croaked. “Little as I dreamt it yesterday, my unhappy boy, who had never to my knowledge pulled a trigger in his life before, was going about London with a loaded revolver in his pocket!”
“Had he brought it from school?” asked Thrush, with a covert frown at the transfigured Mullins.
Mr. Upton repeated what he had heard through the young Westminsters, with their father's opinion of pawnbrokers' shops as resorts for young schoolboys, of young schoolboys who frequented them, and of parents and guardians who gave them the chance. How the two gentlemen had parted without fisticuffs became the latest mystery to Eugene Thrush, whose only comment was that it behoved him all the more to do something to redeem the capital in the other's eyes.
“Now we know why my poor wife heard a shot!” was the only rejoinder, in a voice not too broken to make Mullins prick up his ears; it was the first he had heard about the dream.
“I wouldn't say that, Mr. Upton. We know no more than we knew before. Yet I will own now,” exclaimed Thrush, catching Mullins's bright eye, “that the coincidence will be tremendous if there's nothing in it!”
But only half the coincidence was present in the father's mind; no thought of the murder had yet entered it in connection with his boy; and to hear so emphatic an echo to his foreboding was more than his fretted nerves could stand. In the same breath he pounced on Thrush for a pessimist—apologised—and humbly entreated him to take a more hopeful view.
“There may have been an accident, Thrush, but not necessarily a fatal one!”
An accident! Thrush had never thought of that explanation of the public mystery; but evidently Mullins had, judging by his almost fiendish grins and nods behind the poor father's back. Thrush looked at both men with the troubled frown of a strenuously reasoning being—looked and frowned again—frowned and reasoned afresh. And then, all in an instant, the trouble lifted from his face; light had come to him in an almost blinding flash, such as might well obscure the quality of the light; enough for Eugene Thrush that it lit him back to his mystery every bit as brightly as it lit him onward to its solution.
He was even man enough to refrain from reflecting it automatically in his face, as he put a number of apparently irrelevant questions to Mr. Upton about the missing boy. What was his character? what its chief points? Was he a boy with the moral courage of his acts? Would he face their consequences like a man?
“I never knew him tell a lie in his life,” said Mr. Upton, “either to save his own skin or any thing else; and it was a case of their young skins when they got into trouble with me! Poor Tony was the most conscientious of them all, and I hear that's what they say of him at school.”
Thrush put one or two further questions, and then said he had a clue, though a very slight one, which he was rather in a hurry to follow up himself; and this time the ironmaster went off quietly of his own accord, with a dejected undertaking to be at his hotel when he was wanted.
“I don't like the look of our friend,” remarked Thrush, looking hard at Mullins when at last they were alone. “He shapes none too well for the strain he's got to bear; if he cracks up there'll be a double tragedy, if not a triple one, in that family. We must catch our hare quickly, Mullins, or we may catch him too late.”
Mullins turned on the disagreeable grin that Thrush had so resented a few minutes before; he took no notice of it now.
“You'll find your man,” said Mullins significantly, “the very moment that I find mine, Mr. Thrush.”
“Meaning they're the same person?”
“To be sure.”
“That this lad is the actual slayer of the man Holdaway?”
“Surely, sir, it's as plain as a pikestaff now?”
“Not to me, Mullins—not to me.”
Thrush was twinkling behind his great round goggles.
“Then who do you think has done it, sir?” inquired Mullins, in deferential derision.
“Ah! that's another matter, my man; but I can tell you whom I hope to get arrested within another hour!”
Mullins looked as though he could hardly believe his ears; his jaw, black as a crape hat-band this morning, fell in front of his grimy collar.
“You're actually thinking of arresting some one else?”
“I am—with your permission, Mullins.”
“Tell me who it is, sir, for Heaven's sake!”
And with his fattest smile Thrush whispered into an ear that recoiled from his words as though they had been so many drops of boiling oil.
Pocket Upton was able to relieve his soul of one load that morning. Dr. Baumgartner had left
the schoolboy to his soap and water, taking the newspaper with him; but apparently Pocket had
followed him down in quicker time than the other anticipated. At any rate the little lady of
the house was all alone in the dining-room, where Pocket found her boiling eggs on the
gas-fire, and had her to himself for several seconds of which he wasted none. There was neither
grace nor tact in what he said, and his
The callow pair saw something more of each other during the morning; for Pocket hotly
resented being distrusted, and showed it by making up to the young girl under the doctor's
nose. He talked to her about books in the other room. He had the impertinence to invite her
into the dining-room for a game of billiards, but the sense next moment to include her uncle in
an amended form of more becoming suggestion. Baumgartner eventually countenanced a game, but
spent most of the time with his back to the players and his eye on the street. The boy and girl
got on very well now; they seemed frankly glad of each other, though he caught her more than
once with a large and furtive eye on him. But she seemed to enjoy her baptism of schoolboy
slang. And it was only when she
“You see he still believes in his public school,” said he to Phillida, in a tone which reminded their visitor of his first breakfast in the house.
“I should think I did!” cried Pocket, and did a little loyal boasting about the best of
schools, and the best house in that school, until memory took him by the throat and filled his
eyes. It was twelve o'clock, and a summer's Saturday. School was over for the week. Only your
verses to do in your own time, and get signed by Spearman before you went up to dormitory on
Saturday night; but meanwhile, Saturday afternoon! A match on the Upper, where you could lie on
your rug and watch the game you couldn't play; call-over at the match; ices and lemon-drinks in
a tent on the field; and for Saturday supper anything you liked to buy, cooked for you in the
kitchen and put piping hot at your place in hall, not even for the asking, but merely by
writing your name plainly on the eggs and leaving them on the slab outside! It was not these
simple luxuries that Pocket missed so sorely; it was the whole full life of ups and downs, and
no yesterdays and no to-morrows, that he had lost for ever since last Saturday. The heavy
midday meal came in smoking from
What was it? Phillida was listening, too, and watching her uncle as she listened. Pocket did both in his turn.
It was the voice of newspaper hawkers, shouting in couples, coming nearer with their shouts. Dr. Baumgartner jumped up from the table, and ran outside without his hat.
His promise alone prevented Pocket from following and outstripping the doctor. He knew what the shouting was about before he could have sworn to a single raucous word. But Phillida could not know, and she resumed at once where they had left off before breakfast.
“Of course I forgive you,” she whispered. “It was I began it!”
“Began what?”
“Our row yesterday.”
Phillida had a demure twinkle, after all; but it
“I haven't.”
Her voice made him remember better. “I hope to goodness I didn't hurt you?”
“Of course you didn't.”
“But you must have thought me mad!”
There was a slight but most significant pause.
“Well, I never shall again.”
“Then you did!” he gasped. Their eyes had met sharply; both young faces were flooded with light, and it was much the same light. There was no nonsense about it, but there was indignant horror on his side, and indignant shame on hers.
“You really are at school?” she whispered, not increduously, but as one seeking assurance in so many words; and in a flash he saw what she had thought, what she had been deliberately made to think, that his beloved school was not a school at all, but an Ayslum!
But at that moment Dr. Baumgartner was heard bargaining at the gate with one raucous voice, while the other went on roaring huskily, “Park murder—arrest! 'Rest o' de Park murderer! Park murder—Park murder—arrest!” And Pocket sprang up from the table in a state that swept his last thoughts clean from his mind.
The girl said something; he did not hear what. He was white and trembling, in pitiable case even to eyes that could only see skin-deep; but the doctor's step came beating like a drum to him, and he was solidly seated when the doctor entered—without any paper at all.
“It's that murder the papers are all exploiting,” he explained benignly. “They were shouting out something about an arrest; you would hear them, I daresay. But it's the usual swindle; the police are merely hoping to effect an arrest. I threatened to send for them unless the scoundrel took his paper back!”
He was in his lightest mood of sardonic gaiety. The sins of the vendors recalled those of “your vermin press itself”; the association was wilfully unfair, the favourite phrase a studied insult; but the English boy was either dense or indifferent, and Phillida's great eyes were in some other world. Baumgartner subjected them both to a jealous scrutiny, and suddenly cried out upon his own bad memory. It appeared there was a concert at the Albert Hall, where “the most popular and handsome pair in England” (the inverted commas were in the doctor's sneer) were being welcomed on their return from the ends of the earth. He had intended going to hear what they could do; but Phillida should go instead; she was not past the ballad stage.
And Phillida rose submissively, with unreal thanks which could not conceal her recognition of the impromptu pretext for getting rid of her; her uncle called a taxicab, and with harsh hilarity turned her off the premises in the frock she had been wearing all day.
“And now,” said he, returning with a scowl, “what the devil were you two talking about while my back was turned?”
“Yesterday,” replied Pocket, more than ready for him, though his heart beat fast.
“What about yesterday?”
“Our scuffle in the other room.”
“Is that all?”
“No—I found out something; she didn't tell me.”
“What did you find out?”
“That you let her think me mad!” cried Pocket, in monstrous earnest. He might have laughed at himself, could he have seen his own reproachful face. But he could have killed Baumgartner for laughing at him; it did not occur to him that the laugh was partly one of pure relief.
“Why, my young fellow, how else can I account for you?”
“You said she would think I was a patient.”
“Exactly! A mental case.”
“You had no business to make me out mad,” persisted Pocket, with dogged valour.
“Pardon me! I had all the business in the world; and I beg that you'll continue to foster the illusion as thoroughly as you did yesterday when I was out. It's no good shaking your head at me; listen to reason,” continued Baumgartner, with an adroit change of tone. “And try, my good young fellow, do try to think of somebody besides yourself; have some consideration for my niece, if you have none for me.”
Pocket was mystified, but still more incensed; for he felt himself being again put gently but clearly in the wrong.
“And I should like to know,” he cried, “what good it does her to think she's associating with a lunatic?”
“She would probably prefer the idea to that of a murderer,” was the suave reply. “I speak only of ideas; otherwise I should not make use of such an expression, even in jest. It's as ugly as it's ridiculous in your case. Yet you heard for yourself that others are applying the horrid term in all sobriety.”
“I heard more than that,” returned Pocket. “They've arrested somebody!”
“I thought I told you there was no truth in that?”
But Baumgartner had winced for once, and the boy had seen it, and his retort was a precocious inspiration.
“That was only to avoid a scene at table, Dr. Baumgartner!”
“Well, my young fellow,” said the doctor, after one of his wise pauses, “and what if it was?”
“I can't sit here and let an innocent man lie in prison.”
“He won't lie long.”
“It's absolutely wicked to let them keep him at all.”
“Nor will they, longer than another hour or two.”
“Well, if they do, you know what I shall do!”
Pocket had never displayed such determination, nor incurred quite the same measure or quality of wrath that Baumgartner poured upon him without a word for the next few moments. It was a devouring gaze of sudden and implacable animosity. The ruthless lips were shut out of sight, yet working as though the teeth were being ground behind them; the crow's footed face flushed up, and the crow's feet were no more; it was as though age was swallowed in that flood of speechless passion till the whole man was no older than the fiery eyes that blazed upon the boy. And yet the most menacing thing of all was the complete control with which the doctor broke this pregnant silence.
“You say that. I say otherwise. You had better find a book in the other room till you know your own mind again.”
“I know it now, unless they release that man,” said Pocket, through his teeth, although they chattered.
“Give them a chance, and give yourself one! It will be time to think of clearing other people when they fail to clear themselves. Have more patience! Think of your own friends, and give them time too.”
If the last allusion was to the lad's letter, due in Leicestershire that morning, it was as happy as all Baumgartner's last words. If he meant himself to be included among Pocket's friends, there was food for thought in the suggestion that a man of the doctor's obvious capacity was not idle in the boy's best interests. Pocket was made to feel rather ashamed of himself, as usual; but he could not forget the concentrated fury of the look which had not been weakened by infuriate words; and the recollection remained as an excuse, as well as a menace, in his mind. He had time enough to think it over. Dr. Baumgartner smoked his meerschaum in the gathering shade at the back of the house. The schoolboy sulked for some time in the big chair, but eventually took the doctor at his word about a book.
If it be ever true that a man may be known by his books, it was certainly so to some extent
in the case of Dr. Otto Baumgartner. His library
The two young people, but not their elder, were startled quite out of their almost inadvertent tranquillity; and the knocker was not still before Pocket realised that it was the first time he had heard it. No letters were delivered at that house; not a soul had he seen or heard at the door before. Even in his excitement, however, with its stunning recrudescence of every reality, its instantaneous visions of his people or the police, there was room for a measure of disgust when the girl got up, at an ungallant nod from the German, to go to the door.
“It's a huge fat man,” whispered Phillida, on her return to the big room at the back of the house. “Here's his card.”
“Thrush!” muttered Baumgartner as though he knew the name, and he glowered at the two young
faces on which it made no impression whatever. It was plain how he hated leaving them together;
but for once it must be done, and done
The young creatures, looking in each other's eyes, listened for raised voices and the slam of prompt expulsion; but the voices were pitched too low to reach their ears in words, and were only interrupted by the sound of footsteps in the hall, and the perfectly passive closing of an outer and an inner door in quick succession.
“He's taken him into the dining-room,” murmured Phillida. “Who can it be?”
“Hasn't he any friends?”
“None who ever come here; none of that name anywhere, I feel sure.” Her great eyes, without leaving his for an instant, filled with thought as a blank screen takes a shadow. “I wonder if it's about that!” she whispered.
“What?”
“What they were calling out with the newspapers while we were at table.”
There was a pause. The look in her eyes had changed. It was purely penetrating now.
“Why should it be?” asked Pocket, his own eyes falling.
“It's no use asking me, Mr. Upton.”
“But I don't understand the question.”
“Is that true?”
“No,” he muttered; “it isn't.”
She was leaning over to him; he felt it, without looking up.
“Mr. Upton,” she said, speaking quickly in the undertone they were both instinctively adopting, “you know now what I thought about you at first. I won't say what made me; but that was what I thought, but could hardly believe, and never will again. It makes it all the more a mystery, your being here. I can't ask my uncle—he tells me nothing—but there's something I can and must ask you.”
Pocket hung his head. He knew what was coming. It came.
“My uncle brought you here, Mr. Upton, on the very morning that thing happened they were calling out about to-day. In the Park. It is to the Park he goes so often in the early morning with his camera! How can I say what I want to say? But, if you think, you will see that everything points to it; especially the way he ran out for that paper—and hid the truth when he came in!”
Pocket looked up at last.
“I know the truth.”
“About the arrest?”
“Yes; it was quite obvious, and he admitted it when you'd gone.”
“Why not before?”
“I couldn't tax him about it in front of you,” he muttered, looking up and down quickly, unable to face her fierce excitement.
“Do tell me what it is you both know about this dreadful case!”
“I can't,” the boy said hoarsely; “don't ask me.”
“Then you know who did it. I can see you do.”
There was a new anguish even in her whisper; he could hear what she thought.
“It was nobody you care about,” he mumbled, hoarser than before, and his head lower.
“You don't mean——”
She stopped aghast.
“I can't say another word—and you won't say another to me!” he added, a bitter break in his muffled voice. He longed to tell her it had been an accident, to tell her all; but he had given his word to Baumgartner not to confide in her, and he did not think that he had broken it yet.
“You don't know me,” she whispered, and for a moment her hand lay warm in his; “trust me! I'm your friend in spite of all you've said—or done!”
Dr. Baumgartner might have been ten minutes getting rid of the intruder; before that he had
been first amazed and then relieved to hear the piano in the drawing-room; and that was all his
anxious ear had heard of either boy or girl during his absence.
But the doctor no longer looked suspiciously from him to Phillida, but stood beaming on them both, and rubbing his hands as though he had done something very clever indeed.
Sunday in London has got itself a bad name among those who occasionally spend one at their
hotel, and miss the band, their letters, and the theatre at night; but at Dr. Baumgartner's
there was little to distinguish the seventh day from the other six. The passover of the
postman, that boon to residents and grievance of the traveller, was a normal condition in the
dingy house of no address. More motor-horns were heard in the distance, and less heavy traffic;
the sound of church bells came as well through the open windows; then the street-door shut, and
there was a long period
Such was the Sunday morning. It was fine and warm. Dr. Baumgartner pottered about his untidy little garden, a sun-trap again as Pocket had seen it first; the Turk's head perspired from internal and external heat, but its rich yellow, shading into richer auburn, clashed rather with a red geranium which the doctor wore jauntily in the button-hole of his black alpaca jacket.
It was Phillida who had given him the flower at breakfast. She grew what she could in the
neglected garden; the plants in the miniature conservatory were also hers, though the doctor
took a perfunctory interest in them, obviously on her account. It was obvious at least to
Pocket Upton. He saw all these things, and what they meant. He was not without his little gifts
of observation and deduction. He noticed the difference in Baumgartner's voice when he
addressed his niece, the humane kindling of the inexorable eyes, and to-day he thought he saw a
reciprocal softening on the part of Phillida. There had been none to see yesterday or the day
before. It was her uncle whom the girl had seemed unable to forgive for the unseemly scuffle of
Friday morning.
Yet these two were together most of the day; all three were; and it was a strangely peaceful day, a day of natural hush, and the cessation of life's hostilities, such as is sometimes almost pointedly bestowed before or after a time of strain. It was a day on which Pocket certainly drew his spiritual breath more freely than on any other since the dire catastrophe. There were few fresh clouds; perhaps the only one before evening was the removal of the book on hallucinations in which Pocket had become interested on the Saturday afternoon. It was no longer lying about the room as he had left it. There was a gap in its place in the shelf. The book had been taken away from him; it made him feel as though he were back again at his very first dame's school.
And the church bells sent him back to the school he was at now! They were more mellow and
sedate then the chapel bells there, that rang you down the hill at the double if you were late
and not too
The Italian restaurant which sent in Dr. Baumgartner's meals certainly provided richer fare
than that. There was a top-floor of soup in the portable contrivance, and before the meat a
“Italy is a country where one can live,” said he. “Not that you must understand me to be altogether down on your own fatherland, my young fellow; there is something to be said for London, especially on a Sunday. No organs from my dear Italy, none of those so-called German bands which we in Germany would not tolerate for a moment; no postman every hour of the day, and no gaolbirds crying false news down the streets.”
Pocket looked for a grim twinkle in the speaker's eye, but found it fixed on Phillida, who had not looked up. Instinct prompted Pocket to say something quickly; that he had not seen a postman there, was the actual remark.
“That is because I conduct my correspondence at my club,” explained the doctor. “I give out no other address; then you only get your letters when you want them.”
“Do you often go there?” the boy ventured to inquire, devoutly wishing he would go that afternoon.
“Not when I have visitors,” replied Baumgartner, with a smiling bow. “And I look upon my patients in that light,” he added, with benevolent but futile hypocrisy, embarrassing enough to Phillida, but not more so than if she had still believed it to be the truth.
Silence ensued until they were all in the other room; then the niece took refuge at her
piano,
Besides, there was always one comfort to remember now: his letter home. Of course Lettice would show it to their father; of course something would be done at once. Shame and sorrow for the accident would be his for ever; but as for his present situation, there were moments when Pocket felt rather like a story-book cabin-boy luxuriously marooned, and already in communication with the mainland.
He wondered what steps had been taken so far. No doubt his father had come straight up to town; it was a moving thought that he might be within a mile of that very room at that very moment. Would all the known circumstances of his disappearance be published broadcast in the papers? Pocket felt he would have red ears all his life if that were done; and yet it had hurt him a little to gather from Baumgartner that so far there was nothing in the papers to say he had so much as disappeared. That fact must have been known since Thursday or Friday. Once it did cross his mind that to keep it from his mother they would have to keep it out of the papers. Well, as long as she did not know!
He pictured the blinds down in her room; it was the hour of her afternoon rest. If he were
at home, he would be going about quietly. Lettice would be reading or writing in the
morning-room,
Yet if anybody had told the boy he was beginning to gloat over the silver lining to the cloud that he was under, and that it was not silver at all but one of the baser metals of the human heart, how indignantly he would have denied it at first, how humbly seen it in the end!
When Phillida went off to make the tea her uncle sought his room and sponge, but did not
neglect to take Pocket with him. Pocket was for going higher up to his own room; but
Baumgartner said that would only make more work, in a tone
There was no mistaking the red book there; it was one of the first things Pocket noticed, while the doctor was stooping over his basin in the opposite corner; and the schoolboy's strongest point, be it remembered, was a stubborn tenacity of his own devices. He made a dive at the waste-paper basket, meaning to ask afterwards if the doctor minded his reading that book. But the question never was asked; the book was still in the basket when the doctor had finished drying his face; and the boy was staring and swaying as though he had seen the dead.
“Why, what's the matter with my young fellow?” inquired Baumgartner, solicitously.
“Nothing! I'll be all right soon,” muttered Pocket, wiping his forehead and then his hand.
“You look faint. Here's my sponge. No, lie flat down there first!”
But Pocket was not going to lie down on that bed.
“I do feel seedy,” he said, in a stronger voice with a new note in it, “but I'm not going to faint. I'm quite well able to go upstairs. I'd rather lie down on my own bed, if you don't mind.”
His own bed! The irony struck him even as he said the words. He was none the less glad to sit down on it; and so sitting he made his first close examination of two or three tiny squares of paper which he had picked out of the basket in the doctor's room instead of Boismont's book on hallucinations. There had been no hallucination about those scraps of paper; they were fragments of the boy's own letter to his sister, which Dr. Baumgartner had never posted at all.
At that moment help was as far away as it had been near the day before, when Eugene Thrush was closeted in the doctor's dining-room; for not only had Mr. Upton decamped for Leicestershire, without a word of warning to anybody, on the Saturday afternoon, but Thrush himself had followed by the only Sunday train.
A bell was ringing for evening service when he landed in a market town which reversed the
natural order by dozing all summer and waking up for the hunting season. And now the famous
grass country was lying in its beauty-sleep, under a gay counterpane of buttercups and daisies,
and leafy coverts,
A tall girl, pacing the walks with a terribly anxious face, was encountered and accosted before he reached the house.
“I believe Mr. Upton lives here. Can you tell me if he's at home? I want to see him about something.”
Lettice flushed and shrank.
“I know who you are! Have you found my brother?”
“No; not yet,” said Thrush, after a pause. “But you take my breath away, my dear young lady! How could you be so sure of me? Is it no longer to be kept a secret, and is that why your father bolted out of town without a word?”
“It's still a secret,” whispered Lettice, as though the shrubs had ears, “only I'm in it.
Nobody else is—nobody fresh—but I guessed, and my mother was beginning to suspect. My father
never stays away a Sunday unless he's out of England altogether; she couldn't understand it,
and was worrying so about him that I wired begging him to come back if only for the night. So
it's all my
“That's next to nothing,” he shrugged. “It's neither good nor bad. But if you can find your father I'll tell you both exactly what I have found out.”
In common with all his sex, he liked and trusted Lettice at sight, without bestowing on her a passing thought as a person capable of provoking any warmer feeling. She was the perfect sister—that he felt as instinctively as everybody else—and a woman to trust into the bargain. It would be cruel and quite unnecessary to hide anything from that fine and unselfish face. So he let her lead him to a little artificial cave, lined and pungent with pitch-pine, over against the rhododendrons, while she went to fetch her father quietly from the house.
The ironmaster amplified the excuses already made for him; he had rushed for the first train after getting his daughter's telegram, leaving but a line for Thrush with his telephone number, in the hopes that he would use it whether he had anything to report or not.
“As you didn't,” added Mr. Upton, in a still aggrieved voice, “I've been trying again and
again to ring you up instead; but of course you were never there, nor your man Mullins either.
I was
“Did you leave the motor behind?”
“Yes; it'll be there to meet me at St. Pancras.”
“It may have to do more than that,” said Thrush, spreading his full breadth on the pitch-pine seat. “I've found out something; how much or how little it's too soon to tell; but I wasn't going to discuss it through a dozen country exchanges as long as you wanted the thing a dead secret, Mr. Upton, and that's why I didn't ring you up. As for your last train, I'd have waited to meet it in town, only that wouldn't have given me time to say what I've got to say before one or other of us may have to rush off somewhere else by another last train.”
“Do for God's sake say what you've got to say!” cried Mr. Upton.
“Well, I've seen a man who thinks he may have seen the boy!”
“Alive?”
“And perfectly well—but for his asthma—on Thursday.”
The ironmaster thanked God in a dreadful voice; it was Lettice who calmed him, not he her. Her eyes only shone a little, but his were blinded by the first ray of light.
“Where was it?” he asked, when he could ask anything.
“I'll tell you in a minute. I want first to be convinced that it really was your son. Did the boy take any special interest in Australia?”
“Rather!” cried Lettice, the sister of three boys.
“What kind of interest?”
“He wanted to go out there. It had just been talked about.” She looked at her father. “I wouldn't let him go,” he said. “Why?”
“I want to know just how it came to be talked about.”
“A fool of a doctor in town recommended it.”
Lettice winced, but Thrush nodded as though that tallied.
“Did he recommend any particular vessel?”
“Yes, a sailing ship—the Seringapatam— an old East Indiaman they've turned into a
kind of floating hospital. I wouldn't hear of the beastly tub.”
“Do you know when she was to sail?”
“I did know,” said Lettice. “I believe it was just about now.”
“She sailed yesterday,” said Thrush, impressively; “and your brother, if it was your brother, talked a good deal about her to this man. He told him all about your having always been in favour of it, Miss Upton, and his father not. I'm bound to say it sounds as though it may have been the boy.”
Thrush seemed to be keeping something back; but the prime and absorbing question of identity prevented the others from noticing this.
“It must have been!” cried Mr. Upton. “Who was the man, and where exactly did he see him?”
“First on Thursday morning, and last on Thursday night. But perhaps I'd better tell you about my informant, since we've only his word for Thursday, and only his suspicions as to what has happened since. In the first place he's a semi-public man, though I don't suppose you know his name. It's Baumgartner—Dr. Otto Baumgartner—a German scientist of some distinction.”
The ironmaster made a remark which did him little credit, and Thrush continued with some
pride: “There was some luck in it, of course, for he was the very first man I struck who'd
bought d'Auvergne Cigarettes since Wednesday; but I was on his doorstep well within twenty-four
hours of hearing that your son was missing; and you may chalk that up to A. V. M.! I might have
been with him some hours sooner still, but I preferred to spend them getting to know something
about my man. I tried his nearest shops; perfect mines! One was a chemist, who didn't know him
by sight, and had never heard of the cigarettes, but remembered being asked for them by an
elderly gentleman last Thursday morning! That absolutely confirmed
“The nearest butcher was next door; but he was so short about Baumgartner that I scented a true-green vegetarian. It was a false scent, Mr. Upton; not to mention the baker and the candlestick-maker, there's a little restaurant in the same row, which was about the fifth place where I began by asking if they knew where a Dr. Baumgartner lived in that neighbourhood. The little Italian boss was all over me on the spot! The worthy doctor proved to be his most regular customer, having all his meals sent in hot from the restaurant in quite the Italian manner. I don't suppose you see how very valuable this was to me. Germans love Italy, the little man explained; but I said that was the one point on which I should never yield to Germany—and I thought I was going to be kissed across the counter! It seems the good doctor lives alone with his niece (not always even her), and keeps no servants and never entertains. Yet on Friday, for the first time since the arrangement was made, the old chap went to the restaurant himself to complain of short commons; there had not been enough for them to eat on the Thursday night!”
“Had they been alone?” asked Mr. Upton, with a puzzled face.
“That's the whole point! My little Florentine understood they were, but I deduced one extra, and then conceived a course that may astonish you. It was the bold course; but it nearly always pays. I lunched at my leisure (an excellent Chianti my little friend keeps) and afterwards went round and saw the doctor himself. The niece opened the door—I wish I'd seen more of her—but she fetched her uncle at once and I begged for an interview on an urgent matter. He consented in a way that, I must say, impressed me very favourably; and the moment we were alone I said, “I want to know, Doctor, who you bought those asthma cigarettes for last Thursday!””
“That took him aback, but not unduly; so then I added, “I'm an inquiry agent with a very delicate case in hand, and if you'll tell me it may solve at heart-breaking a mystery as I've ever handled.” Is was treating him like a gentleman, but I believe in that; there's no shorter cut to whether a man is one or not.”
“Well, his face had lit up, and a very fine face it is; it hadn't blackened for the fifth of
a second; but I had a disappointment in store. “I'd tell you his name with all my heart,” he
said, “only I don't really know it myself. He said it was
“Tony's initials!” cried Tony's father.
“But it never was Tony under a false name,” his sister vowed. “That settles it for me, Mr. Thrush.”
“Not even if he'd got into some scrape or adventure, Miss Upton?”
“He would never give a name that wasn't his.”
“Suppose he felt he had disgraced his name?”
“My brother Tony wouldn't do it!”
“He might feel he had?”
“He might,” the father agreed, “even if he'd done no such thing; in fact, he's just the kind of boy who would take an exaggerated view of some things.” His mind went back to his last talk with Horace on the subject.
“Or he might feel he was about to do something, shall we say, unworthy of you all?” Thrush made the suggestion with much delicacy.
“Then I don't think he'd do it,” declared loyal Lettice.
“Let us hear what you think he did,” said Mr. Upton.
“It's not what I think; it's what this man Baumgartner thinks, and his story that you ought to hear.”
And that which they now heard at second-hand
Baumgartner had actually described the boy's long sleep in his chair; it was with the conversation when he awoke that the creative work began in earnest.
“That's a good man!” said Mr. Upton, with unimaginable irony. “I'd like to take him by the hand—and those infernal Knaggses by the scruff of their dirty necks—and that old hag Harbottle by the hair!”
“I think of dear darling Tony,” said Lettice, in acute distress; “lying out all night with asthma—it was enough to kill him—or to send him out of his mind.”
“I wonder if it could have done that,” remarked Thrush, in a tone of serious speculation which he was instantly called upon to explain.
“What are you keeping back?” cried Lettice, the first to see that he had been keeping something all this time.
“Only something he'd kept back from them,” replied Thrush, with just a little less than his
usual aplomb. “It was a surprise he sprang on them after waking; it will probably surprise you
still
“I don't believe it, Thrush.”
“No more do I, father, for a single instant. Tony, of all people!”
Thrush looked from one to the other with a somewhat disingenuous eye. “I don't say I
altogether accept it myself; that's why I kept it to the end,” he explained. “But we must
balance the possibilities against the improbabilities, never losing sight of the one
incontestable fact that the boy has undoubtedly disappeared. And here's a man, a well-known
man, who makes no secret of the fact that he found him wandering in the Park, in the early
morning, breathless and dazed, and drove him home to his own house, where the boy spent the
day; they took a hansom, the doctor tells me, than which no statement is more quickly and
easily checked. Are we to believe this apparently unimpeachable and disinterested witness, or
are we not? He was most explicit about everything,
Lettice shook her head in scorn, but Mr. Upton observed, “Well, we may as well hear what the fellow had to say to you; we must be grateful to him for taking pity on our boy, and he was the last who saw him; he may have seen something that we shouldn't guess.”
“Exactly!” exclaimed Eugene Thrush; “he saw, or at any rate he now thinks he saw, enough to build up a pretty definite theory on the foundation of fact supplied by me. He didn't know the boy had come up to see a doctor and been refused a lodging for the night; he understood he had come up to join his ship, and suspected he had been on a sort of mild spree—if Miss Upton will forgive me!” And he turned deferential lenses on the indignant girl.
“I don't forgive the suggestion,” said she; “but it isn't yours, Mr. Thrush, so please go on.”
“It's an idea that Dr. Baumgartner continues to hold in spite of all I was able to tell him,
and we mustn't forget, as Mr. Upton says, that he was the last to see your brother. Briefly, he
believes
“My God!” cried Mr. Upton, “he's just the one to think of it. His head was full of those trashy adventure stories!”
But Lettice shook hers quietly.
“To think of it, but not to do it,” said she, with a quiet conviction that rather nettled Mr. Thrush.
“But really, Miss Upton, he must have done something, you know! And he actually talked to
Dr. Baumgartner about this; not of doing it himself, but of stowaways in general, à propos of
his voyage; and how many pounds of biscuit and how many
“And she only sailed yesterday?” cried Mr. Upton, coming furiously to his feet. “And you let her get through the Straits of Dover and out to sea while you came down here to tell me this by inches?”
Thrush blinked blandly through his port-hole glasses.
“I'm letting her go as far as Plymouth,” said he, “where one or both of us will board her tomorrow if she's up to time!”
“You said she didn't touch anywhere between the docks and Melbourne?”
“No; your son said that, Mr. Upton, and it was his one mistake. They don't usually touch,
but a son of one of the owners happens to have gone round in the ship to Plymouth for the trip.
I got it first from an old boatswain of the line who's caretaker at the office, and the only
man there, of course, yesterday afternoon; but I've since bearded one of the partners at his
place down the river, and had the statement confirmed and amplified. One or two pasengers are
only going aboard at
The ironmaster asked no more questions; that was good enough for him, he said, and went off
to tell a last lie to his wife, with the increasing confidence of one gradually mastering the
difficulties of an uncongenial game. He felt also that a happy issue was in sight, and after
that he could tell the truth and liberate his soul. He was pathetically sanguine of the
solution vicariously propounded by Eugene Thrush, and prepared to rejoice in a discovery which
would have filled him with dismay and chagrin if he had not been subconsciously prepared for
something worse. It never occurred to Mr. Upton to question the man's own belief in the theory
he had advanced; but Lettice did so the moment she had the visitor to herself in the
smoking-room, where it fell to her to do certain honours
Thrush eyed her over his tumbler's rim, but completed his draught before replying.
“It's not my province to believe or to disbelieve,
“Then I'll tell you just one thing for your guidance: my brother is absolutely incapable of the conduct you ascribe to him between you.”
Thrush did not look as though he were being guided by anybody or anything, beyond the dictates of his own appetites, as he sat by the window of the restaurant car, guzzling new potatoes and such Burgundy as could be had in a train. But he was noticeably less garrulous than usual, and his companion also had very little to say until the train was held up inexplicably outside Willesden, when he began to fume.
“I never knew such a thing on this line before,” he complained; “it's all the harder luck, for I never was on such an errand before, and it'll just make the difference to me.”
“You'll have time,” said Thrush, consulting his watch as the train showed signs of life at last.
“Not for what I want to do,” said Mr. Upton firmly. “I want to shake that man's hand, and to hear from his own lips about my boy!”
“I'm not sure that you'll find him at home,” Thrush said, after a contemplative pause.
“I'll take my chance of that.”
“He said something about their both going out of town to-day—meaning niece and self. I heard
“Well, Thrush, I mean to risk it.”
“And losing the train?”
“I can motor down to Plymouth; there's plenty of time. I might take him with me, as well as you?”
“Better,” said Thrush, after another slight pause. “I'd rather you didn't count on me for that trip, Mr. Upton.”
“Not count on you”?
“One of us will be quite enough.”
“Have you some other case to shove in front of mine, then?” cried the ironmaster, touched on the old raw spot.
“I shouldn't put it like that, Mr. Upton.”
“All right! I'll take your man Mullins instead; but I'll try my luck at that German doctor's first,” he growled, determined to have his own way in something.
“I'm afraid you can't have Mullins,” said Thrush, gently.
“Want him yourself do you?”
“I do; but I'm afraid neither of us can have him just now, Mr. Upton.”
“Why not? Where is he.”
Thrush leant across as they swam into the lighted terminus.
“In prison.”
“In prison! Your man Mullins?”
“Yes, Mr. Upton, he's the man they arrested yesterday on suspicion of complicity in this Hyde Park affair!”
Pocket had put the fragments of his poor letter together again, and was still poring over those few detached and mutilated words, which were the very ones his tears had blotted, when there came a warning chink of tea-things on the stairs. He was just able to thrust the pieces back into his pocket, and to fling himself at full length on the bed, before Dr. Baumgartner entered with a tray.
“There, my young fellow! This will make a man of you! Then we shall see you yourself again by supper-time.”
“I'm not coming down again,” said Pocket. “Don't force me, please”
“Force you?” Baumgartner cocked a keen eye at the open window. “What a tyrant you would make
me out! On the contrary, I think you show your wisdom in remaining quiet. Perhaps you would be
quieter still with the window shut—so—and
And he took to tiptoes there and then, gliding about with a smiling stealth that set Pocket shivering on the bed; he shivered the more when an admirable doctor's hand, cool and smooth as steel, was laid upon his forehead.
“A little fever, I'm afraid! I should get right into bed, if I were you. It's nothing to be alarmed about, much less astonished; you have been through so much, my poor young fellow.”
“I have indeed!” cried Pocket, with unguarded bitterness.
And Baumgartner paused between the foot of the bed and the door.
“But there's one consolation for you,” he said at length, in a sibilant whisper. “They've had that letter of yours at home quite a long time now—ever since yesterday morning, haven't they?”
The bed shook under Pocket when the door was shut—he only hoped it was not before. Up to the
last minute, he felt quite sure that Dr. Baumgartner, suspicious as he was, had suspected
nothing of the discovery downstairs behind his back. If he himself had betrayed anything it was
in the last few seconds, when it had been all that he could do to keep from screaming out his
knowledge of
Rage and disappointment seized him by turns, and both together; at first they bit deeper even than the fear of Baumgartner—a fear felt from the beginning, and naturally redoubled now. Disappointment had the sharper tooth: his letter had ever gone, not one of his people knew a thing about him yet, his tears had not drawn theirs, they had not hung in anxious conclave on his words! Not that he had recognised any such subtle consolations as factors in his temporary and comparative peace of mind; now that they were gone, he could not have said what it was he missed; he only knew that he could least forgive Baumgartner for this sudden sense of cruel and crushing disappointment.
The phase passed, for the boy had the temperament that sees the other side eventually, and
of course there was something to be said for the doctor's stratagem. He could understand it,
after all; the motive was not malevolent; it was to relieve his mind and keep him quiet. The
plan had succeeded perfectly, and nobody was really any the worse off. His people would have
known he was
His fears on that score were largely allayed by Baumgartner's manner when at length he
returned with another tray; for nothing could have been more considerate and sympathetic, and
even fatherly, than the doctor's behaviour then. Pocket had never touched his tea; he was very
gently chidden for that. Obstinately he declared he did not want any supper either: it was true
he did not want to want any, or another bite of that man's bread, but he was sorry as soon as
the words were out. It was against his reasoned policy to show
“Is there anything you could fancy, my young fellow?”
“Nothing to eat.”
“Is there any book?”
“Yes,” said Pocket, without a moment's premeditation. “There's the book I was reading yesterday.”
“What was that?”
“Some Frenchman on hallucinations.”
“So you were reading that book!” remarked the doctor, with detestable aplomb. “I wondered who had taken it down. It is a poor book. I have destroyed it.”
“I'm sorry,” said Pocket, and tried to look it rather than revolted.
“I am not,” rejoined Baumgartner. “Even if it were a good book, it is no book for you at the present time. It is morbid to dwell on what is done and over.”
“If it is over,” murmured the boy.
“It is over!” said Baumgartner, fiercely.
“Well,” said Pocket, “I'm glad I read what he'd got to say about somnambulism.”
“Why?”
Pocket did not say it was a satisfaction to have done anything in spite of such a despot as his questioner. But he did say it was a comfort to know that others besides himself had committed terrible deeds in their sleep.
“But,” he added, “they always seem to have dreamt the dreadful thing as well. Now, the funny thing is that I remember nothing until the shot woke me and I found myself where you saw me.”
“I'm glad you find it funny!”
The sneer seemed strangely unworthy of a keen intelligence; the increased asperity of Baumgartner's manner, and his whole conduct about a harmless book, altogether inexplicable.
“You know what I mean,” replied the boy, with spirit.
“Yes, I know what you mean! You mean to go out of your mind, and to do your best to drive me out of mine, for the sake of a technically human life less precious than the average dog's!”
And, much as it puzzled him, there was certainly something more human about this sudden
outburst than in anything Dr. Baumgartner had said since the scene between them in the bedroom
below. He even slammed the door behind him when he
“My young fellow!” he exclaimed in unctuous distress. “Not a bite eaten in all these hours! Do you know that it's nearly midnight?”
“I'm not hungry,” replied Pocket, lying gloriously for once. “I told you I wasn't well.”
“You'll be worse if you don't force yourself to eat.”
“I can't help that.”
“Well, well!” said the doctor, instead of the objurgation that seemed to tremble for an instant on his lips. He replaced between them the oval hook of clear amber enclosing the thin round one of black nicotine, and he puffed until the cruel carved face was hotter and more infuriate than ever, under the swirling smoke of mimic battle. To the boy it was all but a living face, and a vile one, capable of nameless atrocities; and the hard-frozen face of Baumgartner was capable of looking on.
“Well, well! If I am to have you ill on my hands it's my own fault. I take the
responsibility for everything that has happened since the very first moment we met. Remember
that, my young fellow! I took the law into my own hands, and
It did not. Pocket was not going to lie about that; he held his tongue stubbornly instead. He still believed in his own explanation, derived from one of his many doctors, and moreover already mentioned to this one, of the sudden cessation of his chronic complaint. He hated Baumgartner for forgetting that, and pretending for a moment to take any credit to himself. That again was not worthy of so cool and keen a brain, much less of the candid character with which Pocket had supposed himself to be dealing. The very young are pathetically apt to see their own virtues in those whom they trust at all; but the schoolboy's faith in Dr. Baumgartner had been shattered to its base; and now (as sure a symptom of his youth) he could see no virtue at all.
“You must trust me again,” said Baumgartner, as though he knew what he had forfeited. “I know what will do you good.”
“What?” asked Pocket, out of mere incredulous curiosity.
“Fresh air; some exercise; a glimpse of the
Pocket hardly knew what made him shudder at the proposition. It might have been the poignant picture of that other early morning, which came before him in a scorching flash. But there was something also in the way the doctor was bending over him in bed, holding his pipe nearer still, so that the two dreadful faces seemed of equal size. And Baumgartner's had become a dreadful face in the boy's eyes now; there was none among those cruel waxworks to match it in cold intellectual cruelty; and its smile—its new and strange smile it must have been that made him shudder and shake his head.
“But, my young fellow,” urged the doctor, “it will do you so much good. And not a soul will see us so early, early in the morning!”
Again that insinuating smile inspired a horror of which the boy himself could have offered no satisfactory explanation, especially as there was much to commend the proposal to his mind. But his face was white enough as he moved it from side to side on the pillow.
“I tell you I'm ill,” he whimpered. “How can I go out with you, when you see I can't eat a bite?”
Baumgartner gave it up for the night. He was coming back in the early, early lovely summer's
The night's immunity was meanwhile doubly precious; but it had been secured, or rather its
continuance could only be assured, at a price which he wondered even now if he could pay. He
was a growing, hungry boy, no longer ailing in wind or limb. Distress of mind was his one
remaining ill; the rest was sham; and distress of mind did not prevent him from feeling
ravenous after fasting ten or eleven hours. Here was food still within his reach, even at his
side; but he felt committed
Yet it meant more hours with the food beside him than he could endure lying still. He got
up, inch by inch, for he knew who lay underneath; and he opened the window, which Baumgartner
had broken his promise to open, by even slower and more laborious degrees. He leant out as he
had done that first morning, it might have been a month ago; and this scene must have
challenged comparison with that, had his mind been even as free from dread and terror as it had
been then. But all he saw was the few remaining lighted windows in the backs of those other
houses; he could not have sworn there was a moon. The moon poured no beam of comfort on his
aching head; but the lighted windows were as the open eyes of honest men, who would not see him
come to harm; and
Once a motor-horn blew a solo near at hand, and Pocket half recognised its note; but he did not connect it with quite another set of sounds, which grew but gradually on his ear out of the bowels of the house. Somebody was knocking and ringing at the doctor's door, not furiously, but with considerable pertinacity. Pocket was thrilled to the marrow just at first, and flew from the open window to the landing outside his door. The house was in perfect darkness, and still as death in the patient intervals between each measured attempt to rouse the inmates without disturbing the street. It came to Pocket that it must be Baumgartner himself, gone out for something without his key; and the boy was about to run down and let him in, when he distinctly heard the retreat of feet down the front steps, and then a chuckle on the next landing as the doctor closed his bedroom door.
Who could it have been? Baumgartner's chuckle suggested the police; but in that case it was
the boy upstairs who was going to have the last laugh, though a grim one, and very terribly at
his own expense. He could not close an eye for thinking of it, and listening for another
knocking and ringing down below. But nothing happened
“It is a pity,” said Baumgartner, standing at the window which Pocket had left open. “The air is like champagne at this hour, and not a cloud in the sky! It would do you more good than lying there. It is you who are making yourself ill. If I thought you were doing it on purpose ”—and his eyes blazed—“I'd feed you like a fowl!”
“It's so likely that I should do it on purpose,” muttered Pocket, with schoolboy sarcasm. His eyes, however, were purposely closed, and they had missed the old daggers in Baumgartner's.
“You know best,” said the doctor. “But you are missing the morning of your life! Not a cloud in the sky, only the golden rain in my little garden. I suppose you have not learnt what the golden rain is at your public school? You English call it laburnum; but we Germans have more imagination, thank God!”
Pocket did not open his eyes again till he had gone; next instant he had the door open too,
as the doctor's step was creaking down the lower flight of stairs. Once more Pocket ventured
out upon the landing, not quite to the banisters; he trusted to
It was neither very nice nor half enough for a famishing lad, that plate of cold mixed meats from the restaurant, with a hard stale roll to eke them out. But Pocket felt he had a fresh start in life when he had eaten every crumb and emptied his water-bottle. Nor was he without plan or purpose any longer; he was only doubtful whether to knock at Phillida's door and shout goodbye, or to leave her a note explaining all. Baumgartner would be out for hours; he always was, on these early jaunts of his; there would almost be time to wait and say goodbye properly when the girl came down. She would hardly hinder him a second time, and he longed to see her and speak to her again, especially if that was to be the end between them. He did not mean it to be the end, by any means; but any nonsense that might have been gathering in the schoolboy's head was, at this point, more than rudely dispelled by the discovery that Dr. Baumgartner had removed his clothes!
Pocket swore an oath that would have shocked him in a schoolfellow; it was a practice he
indeed
Entry was simple after that; he had only to be careful not to cut his hands or feet. Inside, he removed the broken glass, closed the window, and let the blind down as he had found it, without looking twice at his clothes. There they were for him to carry upstairs at his leisure. They were not his only property in that room either. His revolver was there somewhere under lock and key. He might want it, waking, if Dr. Baumgartner came back before his time.
It was easily located; of the lockers, built in
It had been honoured with a place beside a rack of special negatives; at least, there were other racks, in the other lockers, not locked up like that; and there was no other treasure that Pocket could see. He had his hand on his own treasure, was in the act of taking it, trembling a little, but more elated, as he stood in a ruby flood only partially diluted by the broken window behind the blind.
At that moment there came such a thunder of knuckles on the door beside him that the revolver caught in the rack of negatives, and brought the whole lot crashing about his toes.
The unseen knuckles renewed their assault upon the dark-room door; and Pocket wavered between its Yale lock, which opened on this side with a mere twist of the handle, and the broken red window behind the drawn red blind. Escape that way was easy enough; and if ever one could take the streets in pyjamas and overcoat, with the rest of one's clothes in a bundle under one's arm, it was before six o'clock in the morning. But it was not a course that vanity encouraged in an excited schoolboy with romantic instincts and a revolver which he perceived at a glance to be still loaded in most of its chambers. Pocket was not one of nature's heroes, but he had an overwhelming desire to behave like one, and time to feel how he should despise himself all his life if he bolted by the window instead of opening the door. So he did open it, trembling but determined. And there stood Phillida in her dressing-gown, her dark hair tumbling over her shoulders.
“It's you!” she cried, taking the exclamation out of his mouth.
“Yes,” he said, with a gust of relief; “did you think it was thieves?”
“Isn't it?” she demanded, pointing to the broken window visible through the blind. Then she saw his revolver, and drew back an inch.
“He took this from me,” said Pocket. “I had a right to it. Take it if you will!”
And he offered it, in the best romantic manner, by the barrel. But Phillida was too angry to look at revolvers.
“You had no business to break in to get it,” she told him, with considerable severity.
“I didn't! I broke in for my clothes; he took them, too, this morning before he went out. They're what I broke in for, and I'd a perfect right; you know I had! And while I'm about it I thought I might as well have this thing too. I knew it was in here somewhere. It was in there. And I'm glad I got it, and so should you be, because you and I are in the house of one of the greatest villains alive!”
The words tumbled over each other with quite hereditary heat. They were all out in a few seconds, and the boy left panting with his indignation, the girl's eyes flashing hers.
“I begin to think my uncle was right,” said she. “This is the act of what he said you were, if anything could be.”
“He lied to you, and he's been lying to me!”
“He may have been justified.”
“You wait till you hear all he's done! I don't mean taking my revolver from me; he was justified in that, if you like, after what I'd done with it. He may even have been justified in taking away my clothes, if he couldn't trust me to keep my word and stay in this awful house. But that isn't the worst. He encouraged me to write a letter home, to my own poor people who may think me dead——”
“Well?”
There was more sympathy in her voice, more anxiety; but his was breaking with his great grief and grievance.
“He took it out himself, to send it to the General Post Office to catch the country post. So he said; and I was so grateful to him! On Saturday morning he said they must have got it; he kept on saying so, and you don't know how thankful I was every time! But yesterday afternoon I found scraps of my letter in the waste-paper basket in his room; he'd never posted it at all!”
Phillida looked shocked and distressed enough at this; her liquid eyes filled with sympathy as they gazed upon the wretched youth.
“I'm a fool to blub about it—but—but that was the Limit!” he croaked, and worked the poor word till it came distinctly.
“It was cruel,” she allowed. “It must seem so,
“But you must know what I've done; you must guess?”
The revolver was still in his hand; he gave it a guilty glance, and she looked from it to him without recoiling.
“Of course I guessed on Saturday.” There was a studious absence of horror in her tone. “Yet I couldn't believe it, unless it was an accident. And if it was an accident——”
“It was one!” he choked. “It was the most absolute accident that ever happened; he saw it; he can tell you; but he never told me till hours afterwards. I was nearly dead with asthma; he brought me here, he was frightfully good to me, I'm grateful enough for all that. But he should have told me before the accident became a crime! When he did tell me I lost my head, and begged him to keep me here, and afterwards when I came to my senses he wouldn't let me go. I needn't remind you of that morning! After that I promised to stay on, and I'd have kept all my promises if only my letter had gone to my poor people!”
He told her what a guarded letter it had been, only written to let them know he was alive,
and that with the doctor's expressed approval. But
“Nothing shall make me give that,” said Pocket valiantly; “on your account, if not on his!”
Phillida encouraged his new resolution without comment on this last assurance. She had stooped, and was picking up the unbroken negatives and putting them back in the rack; he followed her example, and collected the broken bits, while she put the rack back in its place, and certain splinters in theirs, until the locker shut without showing much damage. Pocket was left with the fragmentary negatives on his hands.
“I should throw those away,” said Phillida. “And now, by the time you're ready to go, I'll have a cup of tea ready for you.”
They faced each other in the rosy light, now doubly diluted by the open door, and Pocket did
not move. He wanted to say something first, and he was too shy to say it. Shyness had come upon
him all at once; hitherto they had both been like young castaways, finely regardless of
appearances, he of his bare feet and throat, she of her dressing-gown and her bedroom slippers.
She was
“But—but I don't want to leave you!” he blurted out at last.
“But I want you to,” she returned promptly and firmly, though not without a faint smile.
It was leaving her with a villain that he minded; but he could not get that out, except thus
bluntly, nor could he denounce the doctor now as he had done when his blood was up. Besides,
the man was a different man to his niece; all that redeemed him went out to her. Pocket did not
think he was peculiar there; in fact, he thought romantically enough about the girl, with her
dark hair all over her pink dressing-gown, and ivory insteps peeping out of those soft slippers
especially when the vision was lost for ever, and he upstairs making himself as presentable as
he could in a few minutes. But it seemed she was busy in the same way, and she took longer over
it. He found the breakfast things on the table, the kettle on the gas-stove, but no Phillida to
make the tea. He could not help wishing she would be quick; if he was going, the sooner he went
the better, but he was terribly divided in his desires. He hated the thought of
The piecing of the plates was like a children's puzzle, only easier, because the pieces were not many. One of the reconstructed negatives was of painful interest; it reminded Pocket of the fatal one smashed to atoms by Baumgartner in the pink porcelain trough. There were trees again, only leafless, and larger, and there was a larger figure sprawling on a bench. Pocket felt he must have a print of this; he remembered having seen printing-frames and tubes of sensitised paper in the other room; and hardly had he filled his frame and placed it in position, than Phillida ran down stairs, and he told her what he had done.
“I wish you hadn't,” she said nervously, as she made mechanical preparations with pot and kettle. “It would only make matters worse if my uncle came in now.”
“But he wasn't back on Friday before ten or eleven.”
“You never know!”
Pocket spoke out with a truculence which his brothers had inherited, but not he, valiantly as he might try to follow a family example.
“I don't care! I can't help it if he does come. I'll tell him exactly what I've done, and why, and exactly what I'm going to do next. I give him leave to stop me if he can.”
“I'm afraid he won't wait for that. But I wish you had waited for his leave before printing his negative.”
Pocket jumped up from table, and ran to the printing-frame in the sunny room at the back. He had been reminded of it only just in time. It was a rather dark print that he first examined, one half at a time, and then extracted from the frame. It was meshed with white veils, showing the joins of the broken plate. But it had been an excellent negative originally. And it was still good enough to hold Pocket rooted to the carpet in the sunny room, until Phillida came in after him, and stood looking over his shoulder.
“I know that place!” said she at once. “It's Holland Walk, in Kensington.”
He turned to her quickly.
“The place where there was a suicide or something not long ago?”
“The very place!” exclaimed the girl, looking up from the darkening print.
“I remember my uncle would take me to see it next day. He's always so interested in mysteries. I'm sure that's the very spot he showed me as the one where it must have happened.”
“Did he take the photograph then?”
“No; he hadn't his camera with him.”
“Then this is the suicide, or whatever it was!” cried Pocket, in uncontrollable excitement. “It's not only the place; it's the thing itself. Look at that man on the bench!”
The girl took a long look nearer the window.
“How horrible!” she shuddered. “His head looks as though it were falling off! He might be dying.”
“Dying or dead,” said Pocket, “at the very second the plate was exposed!”
She looked at him in blank horror. His own horror was no less apparent, but it was more
understanding. He had Baumgartner's own confession of his attempts to secure admission to
hospital death-beds, even to executions; he expounded Baumgartner on the whole subject,
briefly, clumsily, inaccurately enough, and yet with a certain graphic power which brought
those incredible theories
“Then what do you think?” she asked at last; her voice was thin and strained with formless terrors.
“I think that Dr. Baumgartner has the strangest power of any human being I ever heard of; he can make you do anything he likes, whether you like it yourself or not. The newspapers have been raking up this case in connection with—mine—and I see that one theory was that the man in this broken negative committed suicide. Well, if he did, I firmly believe that Dr. Baumgartner was there and willed him to do it!”
“He must have been there if he took the photograph.”
“Is there another man alive who tries these
“Nor need you! He makes no secret of his opinion about that!”
“Then put the two things together, and where do they lead you? To these murders committed with the mad idea of taking the spirit in its flight from the flesh; that's his own way of putting it, not mine.”
“But I thought your case was an accident pure and simple?”
“On my part, certainly; but how do I know he couldn't get more power over me in my sleep than at any other time? He saw me walking in my sleep with this wretched revolver. He said himself I'd given him the chance of a lifetime. You may be sure he meant before that poor man's death, not after it.”
“It isn't possible,” declared Phillida, as though she had laid hold of one solid certainty in a sea of floating hypotheses. “And I know he hasn't a pistol of his own,” she added, lest he should simplify his charge.
But there they were agreed.
“He hadn't one on him that morning; that I can swear,” said Pocket, impartially disposing of
the idea. “Mine was the only one in that cape of
He had been fingering the recovered weapon in his pocket, almost fondling it, though with
mingled feelings, as the Prodigal Son of his small possessions; suddenly it leapt out like a
live thing in his hand, and clattered on the table between the girl and boy. It was a wonder
neither of them was shot dead in his excitement. His whole face
“Don't you see?” the words came pouring. “Not one of them's been fired—it's as I loaded it myself the other night! It can't have been this revolver at all!”
“But you must have known whether you fired or not?”
“I tell you I was walking in my sleep till the row woke me. I'd only heard it once before, in a room. It sounded loud enough for the open air, though I do remember wondering I hadn't felt any kick. But I was so dazed, and there was this beastly thing in my hand; and he took it from me in such a rage that of course I believed I'd let it off. But now I can see I can't have done. It wasn't my revolver and it wasn't me!”
“Yet you say yourself my uncle didn't carry one?”
“I'll swear he didn't; but there's another man in all this! There was the man they arrested on Saturday—the man I was so keen to set free!”
The boy's laugh grated; he was beside himself with righteous joy. What was it to him that
his innocence implied another's complicity? Only too
She asked if he had no more cartridges, and he said he had a few loose in his waistcoat pocket; he had thrown away the box. “Then my uncle might have put in a fresh one while you were asleep.”
“Why should he?”
“I don't know, but it sounds quite as possible as the other.”
“I'll soon tell you if he did!” cried Pocket. “There were fourteen in the box to start with, because I counted them, and we only shot away one at the Knaggses' before we were cobbed. That left thirteen—six in the revolver and seven in my pocket. There are your six, and here's one, two, three, four—and three's seven!”
He swept them over the cloth like crumbs, for her to count them for herself, while he looked
on with flaming cheeks and wagging tongue. He was beginning to see what it all meant now, but
still only what it meant to him and his. He could look his people in the face again; that was
the burden of his loud thanksgiving. He was as sure of his
“Very well,” said Phillida, briskly; “then it's all the more reason you should go this minute, and catch the very first train home.”
And in her sudden anxiety to see him safely off, she was for helping him on with the overcoat he had brought down again with his bag; but he followed her out slowly, and he would not turn his back.
“I can't leave you now,” he said; and she knew that he saw it from her side at last.
“Why not?”
“Because the whole thing's altered! I'm not going to leave you with a man like that!”
So Pocket, without a moment's thought either for her immediate feelings or the ultimate consequences to himself; and yet with an unconscious air of sacrifice more wounding than his actual words. She would have flung open the door, and ordered him out, but he got his back to it first. So her big eyes blazed at him instead.
“You're very kind!” she cried. “But suppose I don't believe a word you say against my uncle behind his back?”
“I shall wait and say it to his face. That's another reason for waiting.”
“Do you think you're the person to judge him—a boy like you?”
“I don't say I am. I only say that print——”
“How do you know he took the negative?”
“I don't, but——”
“But you jump to conclusions like a baby!” cried the girl, too quick for him in following up a confusing advantage. “I never heard anybody like you for flying from one wild notion to another; first you say he must have made you fire, though you own you were walking in your sleep with a loaded revolver, and then you're sure you never fired at all, simply because you find the revolver fully loaded after days and days! Then you find a photograph that needn't necessarily be what we thought it, that my uncle needn't have taken even if it was; but you jump to another conclusion about him, and you dare to speak of him to me as though you knew every horrid thing you chose to think! As if you knew him and I didn't! As if he hasn't been kind and good to me for years and years—and kind to you—far too kind——”
The strained voice broke, tears were running down her face, and in it and them there was
more sincerity. Grief, and not anger, was the well of those bitter tears. And it was in simple
supplication, not imperiously any more, that she pointed to the door when speech failed her.
The boy's answer was to go close up to her
She shook her head; she was past surprise as well as indignation; she could only shake her head.
“My people would be as good to you as ever he was,” urged Pocket extravagantly. “They'd understand, and you'd stay with us, Phillida! You might live with us altogether!”
She smiled very faintly at that.
“Oh, Phillida, can't you see that they'd do anything for you after all we've been through together? And I, oh! there's nothing I wouldn't do if only you'd come with me now this minute! I know there's a train about ten, and I know where we could borrow the money on the way. Come, Phillida, get on your things and come away from all this horror!”
He had gone on, even into details, encouraged by the tolerance or apathy which had allowed him to go on at all. He took it for indecision; but, whatever it was, she shook it off and declared once for all that she would never leave Dr. Baumgartner, even if everything was true about him, and he as mad as that would make him out.
“But he is!” cried Pocket, with most eager conviction. “That's the only possible
explanation, and you'd believe it fast enough if you'd heard all he said to me that first
night, and been with
“He would be as he's always been to me.”
“I believe he would,” said honest Pocket.
“Then why don't you go away and leave us?”
“Because I can't.”
“Because you won't!”
“Very well, because I won't and never will! But, mind you, it'll be your fault if anything happens to either of us after this!”
He only meant it as a last argument, though he did resent her fatal obstinacy, and all the obligations which it imposed upon himself. He stood chained in fetters of her forging, as it were to the stake, but he was prepared to stand there like a man, and he did not deserve the things she said to him in a fresh paroxysm of unreasonable wrath. He might be a baby, but he was not a complete coward, or simply trying to make her miserable, as she declared; neither, on this occasion, was he thinking only of himself. But Phillida seemed suddenly to realise that, for she broke off with a despairing little cry, and ran sobbing up the stairs.
In days to come, when the boy had schooled himself not to speak of these days, nor to let his mind dwell on their mystery and terror, it was as a day of dark hours and vivid moments that he remembered the one which Phillida and he began alone together in her uncle's house. Those endless hours were either mercifully forgotten or else contracted to an endurable minimum; but the unforgettable moments would light themselves up in his memory without a detail missing.
There was their first encounter at the dark-room door, and Phillida standing all but
barefoot in the ruby light, with her glorious hair about her shoulders, a picture that could
never fade. Then there was the moment of the incriminating print, which the sun wiped out even
as Phillida stood with it in her hands. That moment merged itself in the greater one of his
discovery that the revolver was fully loaded, his inspiration that neither it nor he had done
the fatal mischief in the Park. Then she was begging him to go (she who would keep him the time
before!) and he entreating her to come with him, and neither giving way an inch, so that they
quarrelled just when they should have stuck
That was the beginning of a black hour and more. Phillida was never to be forgiven, then; he was staying there at his peril, staying absolutely on her account, and so far from giving him the slightest credit for it, or a single word of encouragement, she said all sorts of things and was off before he could answer one of them. It was not for Pocket to see the many ironies of that moment, and not for him to recognise the tonic property of his heroic grievance. He could only see himself at the foot of those stairs, first gnashing his teeth and not sorry he had made her cry, then sitting down with his eye on the front door, revolver in hand, to await the click of the doctor's key. Another click was to answer it; and at the point of the cocked revolver Baumgartner was to have made a clean breast of his crimes, not only to the giant-killer at the foot of the stairs but to the girl he meant to call to witness with her own ears.
Pocket saw himself a desperate character just then, and one not incapable of desperate
action had the climax only come at once. But he had more than an hour of it alone at his post;
he had a whole hot forenoon of unmitigated suspense, of sickening alarms from tradesmen's
carts, boys
So it happened that the first significant sound was entirely lost upon him, because he was listening for one so much nearer at hand, until Phillida ran downstairs and almost over him where he sat.
He got up to make way stiffly, but a glance assured him that the quarrel was over on her side. The great eyes were fixed appealingly upon him, but with a distressing look which he had done nothing to provoke. Not before then was he aware of another duet between newsboys coming nearer and nearer, and shouting each other down as they came.
“You hear that?” she whispered, as if not to drown a note.
“I do now.”
“Do you hear what it is?”
Pocket listened, and caught a word he was not likely to miss.
“Something fresh about the murder,” said he grimly.
“No; it's another one,” she shuddered. “Can't you hear? “Another awful murder!” Now they're saying something else.”
“It is something about the Park.” Pocket stuck to his idea.
“And something else about some “well-known”—I can't hear what!”
“No more can I.”
“I'll open the door.”
She opened it on the chain as he had left it. That did not help them. The shouting had passed the end of their quiet road. It was dying away again in the distance.
“I must go out and get one,” said Phillida. “Some well-known man!”
“You're not thinking of the doctor, surely?”
“I don't know! I can't think where he is.”
“But you're worse than I am, if you jump to that!” said Pocket, smiling to reassure her. He did not smile when she had run out as she was; he had shut the door after her, and he was waiting to open it in a fever of impatience.
Dr. Baumgartner had left the house before six
“Who was it, then?” the schoolboy asked suspiciously.
“Sir Joseph Schelmerdine.”
“So he was the well-known man!”
He was well known even to the boy by name, but that was all. He had seen it in newspapers,
and he thought he had heard it execrated by Baumgartner himself in one of his little digs at
England. Pocket was not sure about this, but he
“Did the doctor know him?”
“Not personally; but he thought him a European danger.”
“Why?”
“I can't tell you. It was something to do with politics and gold-mines, and some financial paper. I never understood.”
“May I see the paper you've brought in?”
The girl held it tight in her hand, and tighter still as he held out his.
“I'd rather you didn't,” she said.
“Then there's something you haven't told me.”
“There is!”
“I shall know it sooner or later.”
“I know you will, and I know what you'll think! You may think what you like, and still be wrong!”
There was a pause between the sentences, and in the pause the boy found the paper at his
feet. There was no need to open it at the place; it was so folded already, the news standing
out in its leaded type, and more of it in the late corner. Sir Joseph Schelmerdine, Bart.,
M.P., the well-known proprietor of the Money-maker, had been shot dead in front of his
house in Park Lane. The murder had been committed in the early hours of the morning, before
anybody was about except
Such was the news which the young girl had shrunk from showing to her companion. She had left him, indeed, to read it by himself. And the next thing he remembered was finding her quite insensible in the big chair in the back room.
The afternoon was a blank broken by no more moments such as these. It was a period of dull
misery and gnawing dread; but the pair saw
Lovable, however, he had never been, though more than good and kind to her for all that. He
had never taken her into his life, or entered into hers, in the many years they had been more
or less together. All she really knew of him was from her mother, whose elder sister he had
married soon after the Franco-Prussian War, and lost soon after marriage. He must have been
settled in England many years before Phillida's mother, herself an Englishman's widow, came to
keep house for him. The girl could not remember her father, but her mother had lived to see her
in her teens, and in her lifetime Dr. Baumgartner had seemed much as other men. It was only of
late years that he had withdrawn from a world in which he was justly honoured, and buried
himself ever deeper in his books and his photographic experiments. His niece had never known
anything of these; he had told her nothing, and she had always gone in awe of him. But he had
sent her to school, he was going to send her
And Pocket could understand her now, though it was no consecutive tale that he heard, but a
very chaos of excuses and extenuations, regrets, suppositions, and not always revelant
recollections, of which he had to make what he could in his own mind. What he made was a
narrative so natural that he could not believe it was the life-story of a murderer. His own
convictions became preposterous in his own eyes. What had he been thinking about all
The mood passed, but it would recur as sure as Phillida thought of something else to be said for Dr. Baumgartner; it was the creature of her feeling for him, and of the schoolboy's feeling for her. If he could have convicted himself of the fatal affair in the Park, and so cleared Baumgartner of all blood-guiltiness whatsoever, in that or any other case, he would have done it for Phillida's sake that afternoon. But with every hour of the doctor's absence suspicions multiplied. Phillida herself was a prey to them. She was almost as ready to recall symptoms of incipient insanity as instances of personal kindness; if one lost one's reason, she broke a long silence to contend, there could be no question of regret and wrong. She was not so sure about crime and punishment. Pocket, of course, said there could be no question of that either; but in his heart he wondered how much method they must prove to hang a madman.
The evening meal had been taken in, but that was all. The girl and boy had no thought of sitting down to it; she had made tea not long before; and strong excitement is its own meat and drink. They were sitting silently together in the room at the back. The scented summer dusk was deepening every minute. Suddenly there was a sound of small branches breaking in the garden. Pocket peeped out, standing back from the window at her entreaty.
The laburnum by the wall was shaking violently, pouring its golden rain into both gardens, and the bush beneath it looked alive; a tall figure rose out of it, and came creeping towards the little conservatory, bent double, and brushing the soil from his clothes as he advanced with long and stealthy strides. It was Dr. Baumgartner, in a cap pulled down over his eyes, and the old alpaca jacket. He had a newspaper parcel under his arm.
The boy and girl were in the dark angle between the window and the door; but it was only
comparative darkness, and Baumgartner might have seen them; they were clasping hands as they
shrank away from him with one accord. But he did not seem to see them at all. He stretched
himself, as though he found it a relief to stand upright, and more mould trickled from his
garments in the act; he took off the alpaca jacket, and shook it as one shakes
And he passed through the room without taking the least notice of either of them, whether he saw them or not; and they heard him go upstairs, and shut the door, and then his footsteps overhead.
“I'll go up and tackle him at once,” said Pocket, through his set teeth; but Phillida would not hear of it.
“No! I must go first and see if there's nothing I can get him; he mayn't have had anything all day. There's no need for you to come at all—I believe he's forgotten all about us both!”
“Not he!” whispered Pocket, as the door opened overhead. “Here he comes!”
He could not help gripping his revolver as the stairs creaked again under Dr. Baumgartner;
he had gripped it more than once already with the hand that was not holding Phillida's. The
doctor was coming down in a hurry, as though he had indeed
Running water, and the chink of glass; the tapping of a stoppered bottle; the opening of the dark slide; these stages the younger photographer followed as though he were again looking on. Then there was a long period without a sound.
“He's developing now!” whispered Pocket, close to the folding-doors. He caught the sound of laboured breathing on the other side. “There it is—there it is—there it is!” cried the doctor's voice in mingled ecstasy and mad excitement. A deep sigh announced the blackening of the plate at the conclusion of the first process. A tap ran for a moment; interminable minutes ensued. “It's gone! It's gone again!” cried the wild voice, with a sob; “it's gone, gone, gone like all the rest!”
One listener waited for the passionate smashing of the negative as before; but that did not
happen again; and then he wondered if it was being put straight into the rack with the others,
if the damage
“I must go to him!” said Phillida in broken undertones, and her grief communicated itself to the other young sympathetic soul, for all the base fears he had to fight alone. Personal safety, little as she might think of it, was the essence of her position as opposed to his; and he was of the type that thinks of everything. She left him listening breathless in the dark. And in the dark she found him when at length she returned to report the doctor busy writing at his desk; but a pin's head of blue gas glimmered where there had been none before, and a paper which had been trodden underfoot now rustled in Pocket's hand.
“Does he know I'm here?” he asked.
“I don't think so. We never mentioned you. I believe he's forgotten your existence altogether; he began by looking at me as though he'd forgotten mine. He says he wants nothing, except time to write. He seems so strange—so old!”
Again the break in her voice, and again the
“I don't think so. What is it?”
“Something I saw in the paper he brought in with him. I lit the gas while you were upstairs.”
Phillida turned it out again without comment.
“Nothing that you saw can make any difference to me,” she sighed.
“Do you remember my saying there must be another man in these—mysteries?”
“I think I do. What difference does it make? Besides, the man you meant is in prison.”
“He isn't!”
“You said he was?”
“He was let out early this morning! Let me light the gas while you read it for yourself.”
But Phillida had no desire to read it for herself. “I doubt if there's anything in that,” she said; “but what if there were? Does it make it any better if a man has an accomplice in his crimes? If he's guilty at all, it makes it all the worse.”
The boy and girl sat long and late in the open window at the back of the house. The room would have been in darkness but for a flood of moonlight pouring over them. The only light in the house was in the room above, and they only saw its glimmer on the garden when a casual cloud hid the moon; but once Pocket had crept out into the garden to steal a look at the lighted window itself; and what he saw was the shadow of a huge bent head smoking a huge bent pipe, and dense clouds of shadow floating up the wall and over the ceiling.
It seemed hours since they had heard footstep or other sound upstairs or anywhere. There had been a brisk interval—and then an end—of more or less distant hansom-bells and motor-horns. There was no longer even a certain minute intermittent trembling of trifles on the walnut-tables, to which Pocket had become subconsciously accustomed in that house, so that he noticed its absence more than the thing itself. It was as though the whole town was at rest, and the tunnels under the town, and every single soul above or below ground, but those two white faces in the moonlight, and perhaps one other overhead.
Pocket wondered; it was so long since a single sound had come down to their ears. He wanted to steal out and look up again. Phillida was against it; perhaps she was wondering too. Pocket, as usual, saw what he did see so very vividly, in his mind's eye, that he shivered and was asked if he felt cold. The whispered debate that followed was the longest conversation they had that night. The window was not shut as a result of it, but Pocket fetched his overcoat on tiptoe, and it just went over both their shoulders, when the chairs were drawn as near together as they would go.
The ragged little garden was brimming over with moonlight from wall to wall. The unkempt
grass looked pale and ghostly, like the skin of some monstrous wolf. The moon rolled high in
the sky and clouds flew above and below the moon, varying in pace as well. Yet it was a still
night, and Pocket did not think that he had broken the stillness, until the door burst open
behind them, and Baumgartner stood there, holding his lamp aloft. The wick was turned too high,
the flame ran up the chimney in the draught, and for an instant a demoniac face flared up
behind it. Then the chimney cracked, and fell in a tinkling shower, and the doctor was seen
whirling a naked tongue of fire about his head. The boy drew back as the lamp flew through the
open window, within
The trio stood without a word in the moonbeams; but the doctor was breathing hard through his teeth, like a man wrestling with himself; and at last he laughed sardonically as though he had won.
“A lamp like that's a dangerous thing,” said he, with a kind of forced solemnity and a shake of the head; “you never know what may happen when a lamp does that! I'm glad the window was open; it didn't go very near my young fellow, I hope?”
And he took Pocket playfully by the ear, but pinched it so hard that the boy could have screamed with pain.
“It would have served you right,” continued the doctor, before Pocket could find his tongue, “for sitting up so late, and keeping a young lady from her bed to bear you company. Come, Phillida! I shall have another word with you, young fellow.”
The two words to the girl were in a different key from all the rest. They were tolerant, conciliatory, tenderly persuasive. The rest was suavely sinister; it made her hesitate; but Pocket had the presence of mind to bid her a cheery good-night, and she went, closely followed by Baumgartner.
Posted once more at the open door, the boy heard Baumgartner on the next flight, soothing
and affectionate still, allaying her fears; and his
The doctor came running into the moonlit room, but not for a minute; it looked as though he had run out first into the road. In the room he lit the gas, and Pocket saw him have a look in all the corners, but hardly the look of a seeker who expects to find. Some long moments he stood out horribly at the open window, gazing straight at the spot where the fugitive crouched a few inches out of the moonlight and hugged the revolver in his pocket. He seemed to see nothing to bring him out that way, for he closed that window and put out the gas. The trembling watcher heard the front door shut soon after, and saw another light in Baumgartner's room the minute after that, and the blind drawn down. But on the blind there lagged a cloud-capped shadow till the doctor's pipe was well in blast.
There were no more shadows after that. The moon moved round to the right, and set behind the
next house. The sky grew pale, and the lighted blind paler still, until Baumgartner drew it up
The front door shut again.
Down the garden ran Pocket without the least precaution now. There was a gravel passage between the tradesmen's entrance, on the detached side of the house, and the garden wall. This passage was closed by a gate, and the gate was locked, but Pocket threw himself over it almost in his stride and darted over into the open road.
Just then it was a perfectly empty road, but for a gaunt black figure stalking away in the
distance. An overwhelming curiosity urged the boy to follow, but an equal dread of detection
kept him cowering in gateways, until Baumgartner took the turning past the shops without a
backward glance. Pocket promptly raced to that corner, and got another glimpse of his leader
before he vanished round the next. So the spasmodic chase continued over a zigzag course; but
at every turn the distance between them was a little less. Neither looked round, and once the
boy's feet were actually on the man's shadow; for half the streets were raked with
Pocket drew back to let it pass, without looking twice at the car itself, which indeed was disguised out of knowledge in the promiscuous mire of many countries; but the red eyes behind the driver's goggles were not so slow. Down went his feet on clutch and brake without a second's interval; round spun the car in a skid that tore studs from the tyres, and fetched her up against the kerb with a shivered wheel. Pocket started forward with a cry; but at that moment a ponderous step fell close behind him; his arm was seized, and he was dragged in custody across the road.
“Your boy, I think!” cried one whom he had never seen before, and did not now, being locked already in the motorist's arms.
“When did you find him?” the father asked when he was man enough, still patting Pocket's shoulders as if he were a dog.
“Only last night when I wired.”
“And where?”
“In the house where you and I couldn't make ourselves heard.”
The schoolboy flared up through all his emotion.
“Why, I never saw you before this minute!”
“Well, I've had my eye on you, more or less, for a day or two.”
“Then why didn't you wire before?” demanded Mr. Upton, quite ready to mask his own emotion with a little heat. “I didn't get it till after nine o'clock—too late for the evening train—but I wasn't going to waste three hours with a forty-horser eating its head off! So here I am, on my way to the address you gave.”
“It was plumb opposite Baumgartner's. I mounted guard there the very night you left. He came out twenty minutes ago, and your boy after him!”
“But what does it all mean, Thrush? What on earth were you doing there, my dear boy?”
The notes of anger and affection were struck in ludicrously quick succession; but the first was repeated on the boy's hang-dog admission that he had been hiding.
“Hiding, Tony?”
Thrush himself seemed surprised at the expression. “But at all events we found you better employed,” he said to Pocket, “and the sooner we all take up the chase again the more chance we shall have of laying this rascal by the heels.”
“Take it up, then!” snapped Mr. Upton. “Jump into the motor, and bring the brute to me when you've got him! I want to speak to my boy.”
He did not realise the damage done to his car, or listen to a word that passed between Thrush and his chauffeur; he had eyes only for those of his child who had been lost but was found, and not a thought in his head outside the story he extracted piecemeal on the spot. Poor Pocket told it very volubly and ill; he would not confine himself to simple facts. He stated his suspicion of Baumgartner's complicity in the Hyde Park affair as though he knew it for a fact; cited the murders in Holland Walk and Park Lane as obvious pieces of the same handiwork, and yet declared his conviction that the actual hand was not Dr. Baumgartner's at all.
“But why should you think he had an accomplice, Tony?”
“He was unarmed the other morning. I'm quite positive of that. And his niece, who lives
“Well, he's villain enough to hang, if ever there was one! It's time we laid hold of him. Where's Mr. Thrush? I thought you'd taken him on in the car?”
This to the chauffeur, now the centre of the carrion crowd that gathers about the body of any disabled motor. The chauffeur, a countryman like his master, was enjoying himself vastly with a surreptitious cigarette and sardonic mutterings on the cause of his scattered spokes; the facts being that he had nearly fallen asleep at his wheel, which Mr. Upton had incontinently taken into his own less experienced hands.
“The car won't take anybody anywhere to-day,” explained the chauffeur, with his cigarette behind his back. “I shall have to get a lorry to take the car.” He held his head on one side suddenly. “There's a bit o' tyre trouble for somebody!” he cried, grimly.
Indeed, a sharp crack had come from the direction of the river, not unlike the bursting of a
heavy tyre; but Pocket Upton did not think it was that. He caught his father's arm, and
whispered in his father's ear, and they plunged together into a side street broader than the
asphalt thoroughfare, but with scarcely a break in either phalanx of drab
“P'lice!” screamed one of those bringing up the rear, and they easily spurted past father and son, each already contending with his own infirmity. Mr. Upton was dangerously scarlet in the neck, and Pocket panting as he had not done for days. In sad labour they drew near the suspension bridge, to a crescendo accompaniment on the police whistle. It was evidently being blown on the Embankment to the right of the bridge, and already with considerable effect. As the pair were about to pass an intermediate turning on the right, a constable flew across it on a parallel course, and they altered theirs with one accord. Pocket panted after the constable, and his father thundered after Pocket, into a narrow street debouching upon a fenced strip of greenery, not too dense to hide broad pavement and low parapet on its further side, with a strip of brown river beyond that, and a skyline of warehouses on the Surrey shore.
The narrow garden had not been opened for the day. There was a gate opposite the end of the
road,
“Is he dead?” he asked of one of the chimneysweeps, who was detaching himself from the group with the air of a man who had seen the best of the fun.
“Dead as an 'erring,” replied the sweep cheerfully. “Sooicide in the usual stite o' mind.”
“Rats!” said the other sweep over a sooty shoulder; “unless 'e shot 'isself first an' swallered the shooter afterwards! Some'un's done 'im in.”
Pocket set his teeth, and shouldered his way into the group. His father was already in the thick of it, talking to the stout man in spectacles, who had risen miraculously from the ground and was busy brushing his trouser-knees. Pocket forced himself on with much the same nutter he had taken into the Chamber of Horrors, but with an equal determination to look just once upon Dr. Baumgartner's latest victim. A loud cry escaped him when he did look; for the murdered man, and not the murderer, was Dr. Baumgartner himself.
Phillida was prepared for anything when she beheld a motor-car at the gate, and the escaped schoolboy getting out with a grown man of shaggy and embarrassed aspect; but she was not prepared for the news they brought her. She was intensely shocked and shaken by it. Her grief and horror were not the less overwhelming for the shame and fear which they replaced in her mind. Yet she remained instinctively on her guard, and a passionate curiosity was the only emotion she permitted herself to express in words.
“But have they no idea who did it? Are they quite sure he didn't do it himself?”
Mr. Upton broke through his heavy embarrassment with no little relief, to dispose of the question of suicide once and for all.
“It's the one thing they are sure about,” said he. “In the first place no weapon was to be
found, and we saw no sign of a camera either, though this boy tells me your uncle had his with
him when he went out. That's more or less conclusive in itself. But there was a doctor on the
spot before we left, and I heard him say the shot couldn't have been fired at very close
quarters, and that death must have
The girl was grateful for the covert sympathy of the last remark, and yet it startled her as an index of what must have passed already between father and son. It was a new humiliation that this big bluff man should know as much as the boy whom she had learnt to look upon as a comrade in calamity. Yet she could not expect it to be otherwise.
“What must you think!” she cried, and her great eyes filled and fell again. “Oh! what must you think?”
“It's no good thinking,” he rejoined, with almost a jovial kindness. “We're all three on the
edge of a mystery; we must see each other through before we think. Not that I've had time to
hear everything yet, but I own I can't make head or tail of what I have heard. I'm not sure
that I want to. I like a man's secrets to die with him; it's enough for me to have my boy back
again, and to know that you stood by him as you did. It's our turn to
They happened to be all three standing in the big back room, a haunted chamber if there was one in the house. With his battle-pictures on the walls, his tin of tobacco on the chimney-piece, and the scent of latakia rising from the carpet, the whole room remained redolent of the murdered man; and the window still open, the two chairs near it as they had been overnight, and the lamp lying in fragments on the path outside, brought the last scene back to the boy's mind in full and vivid detail. Yet the present one was in itself more desolate and depressing than any in which Dr. Baumgartner had figured. It might be that the constant menace of that portentous presence had thrown his simple middle-class surroundings, at the time, into a kind of reassuring relief. But it was the case that the morning had already clouded over; the sunshine of the other mornings was sadly missing; and Phillida looked only too eager to fly from the scene, until she declared she never could.
“But that's absurd!” cried Mr. Upton bluntly. “I'm not going to leave a young girl like you
alone
“None anywhere that I know much about.”
“That doesn't matter. It's time they knew more about you. I'll hunt them up in the motor, if they're anywhere within a hundred miles, but you simply must let me take their place meanwhile.”
He was a masterful man enough; it did not require the schoolboy's added supplications to bring about an eventual compromise. The idea had indeed been Pocket's originally, but his father had taken it up more warmly than he could have hoped. It was decided that they should return to their hotel without Phillida, but to send the car back for her later in the morning, as it would take her some time to pack her things and leave the deserted house in some semblance of order.
But her packing was a very small matter, and she left it to the end; most of the time at her
disposal was spent in a hurried investigation of the dead man's effects, more especially of his
store of negatives in the dark-room. The only incriminating plates, however, were the one she
had already seen on its discovery by Pocket the day before and another of a man lying in a heap
in the middle of a road. This one had been put to dry openly
That was a dread ordeal, and yet she expected a worse. She had steeled herself to look upon
a debased image of the familiar face, and she found it startlingly ennobled and refined. Death
had taken away nothing here, save the furrows of age and the fires of madness, and it had given
back the
“You do identify him, I suppose, miss?” the officer whispered, impressed by her strange stare.
“Oh, yes!” said Phillida. “But he looks as I have not seen him look for years. There are worse things than death!”
She said the same thing to Mr. Upton at luncheon in his private sitting-room at the hotel,
whereupon he again assured her that he had no desire to know a dead man's secrets. He had found
his boy; that was quite enough for him, and he was able to deliver himself the more freely on
the subject since Pocket was not at table, but in bed making up for lost sleep. Not only had he
succeeded in finding his son, but he had found him without the aid of police or press, and so
not more than a dozen people in the world knew that he had ever disappeared. Mr. Upton
explained why he had deemed it essential to keep the matter from his wife's ears, and added
almost equally good reasons for continuing to hush it up on the boy's account
“They never told me they hadn't got it,” explained Phillida to the coroner, who made her his courteous bow, and permitted her to leave the court on the conclusion of her evidence.
On the stairs Mr. Upton paid her compliments that made her wince as much as the crude grip of his hand; but he was tact itself compared with his friend Mr. Thrush, who sought an interview in order to ply the poor girl there and then with far more searching questions than she had been required to answer upon oath. She could only look at Mr. Upton in a way that secured his peppery intervention in a moment. The two men had scarcely seen each other since the morning, and the ironmaster thought they had enough to say to each other without bothering Miss Platts just then; they accordingly adjourned to Glasshouse Street, and Phillida was to have gone on to the hotel; but she made them drop her at a shop near Sloane Square on the pretext of seeing about her mourning.
Phillida had promised to drive straight back to Trafalgar Square and order tea for herself
if Tony had not appeared; but she did not drive straight back. She had a curious desire to see
the place where the murder had been committed. It had come upon her at the inquest, while
listening to the constable who had found the body, her predecessor
Such was the story which Phillida found so hard to credit that she proceeded to the spot in
order to go over the ground for her own satisfaction. This did not make it easier to
understand. It had come on to rain heavily while she was in the shop; the shining Embankment
was again practically deserted, and she was able to carry out her experiment without exciting
observation. She took a dozen steps up Cheyne Row, pretended she heard the shot, turned sharp
round, and quite realised that from where she was the body could not have been seen, hidden as
it must have been by the seat, which itself was almost hidden by the long and narrow island of
enclosed garden. But a running man could have been seen through the garden, even if he stooped
as he ran, and the murderer must have run like the wind to get away as he had done. The gates
through the garden, back and front of the statue, had not been opened for the day when the
murder took place, so Phillida in her turn made a half-circuit of the island to get to the spot
where the body had been found, but without taking her eyes off the spot until she reached it.
No! It was as she had thought all along; by nothing short of a miracle could the assassin have
escaped observation if the policeman had eyes in his head and had acted
The girl stood on the very spot where the murdered man must have fallen, and in her utter
perplexity it was no longer the tragedy but the problem which engrossed her mind. What had
happened, had happened; but how could it have happened? She raised her umbrella and peered
through the rain at a red pile of many-windowed flats; had that Argus of the hundred eyes been
sleeping without one of them open at the time? Her own eyes fell as far as the black statue in
the narrow garden, standing out hi the rain, like the greenery about its granite base, as
though the blackened bronze were polished marble. How lifelike the colossal scholar in his
homely garb! How scornful and how shrewd the fixed eternal gaze across his own old Father
Thames! It assumed another character as the girl gazed in her turn, she seemed to intercept
that stony stare, to distract it from the river to herself, and to
And Phillida turned her back towards the shiny statue, and looked over the wet parapet, almost expecting to see something, but never dreaming of what she actually saw. The tide, which must have been coming in that early morning, was now going out, and between the Embankment masonry and the river there was again a draggled ribbon of shelving foreshore, black as on some volcanic coast; and between land and water, at a point that would necessarily have been submerged for the last eight or nine hours, a small object was being laid more bare by every receding wavelet. It was black and square, perhaps the size of two large cigar-boxes side by side; and it had one long, thin, reddish tentacle, finishing in a bulb that moved about gently in the rain-pocked water.
Phillida felt the parapet strike cold and wet through her rain-coat sleeves as she leant far over to make doubly sure what she object was; but indeed she had not a moment's doubt but that it was the missing camera of the murdered man.
Mr. Upton was dumfoundered when the top-floor door in Glasshouse Street was opened before Eugene Thrush could insert his key; for it was the sombre Mullins who admitted the gentleman as though nothing had happened to him except a fairly recent shave.
“I thought he was in prison?” exclaimed the ironmaster when the two were closeted.
“Do you ever read your paper?”
“I haven't looked at one since Plymouth.”
“Well, I howked him out first thing yesterday morning.”
“
“Why not? I had need of the fellow, and that part of the game was up.”
Mr. Upton showed symptoms of his old irritability under the Thrush mannerism.
“My good fellow, I wish to goodness you'd explain yourself!”
“If I cared to be profane,” returned Thrush, mixing drinks in the corner, “I should refer you to the first chapter of the Book of Job. I provided the prisoner, and I'd a perfect right to take him away again. Blessed be the song of the Thrush!”
“You say you provided him?”
“In other words, I laid the information against my own man, but only with his own consent.”
“Well, well, you must have your joke, I suppose. I can afford to put up with it now.”
“It wasn't meant as a joke,” returned Thrush, and drank deep while his client sipped. “If it
had come off it would have been the
“Of course.”
“Would it surprise you to hear that one or two others thought the same thing?”
“Not you, Thrush?”
“Not I to quite the same positive extent as my rascal Mullins. He jumped to it from scratch!”
“He connected Tony with the Park murder?”
“From the word “go.””
“On the strength of an asthma cigarette and my poor wife's dream?”
“No; he didn't know about the dream. But he refused to believe in two independent mysteries at one time and on one spot. The eternal unities was too many measles for Mullins, though he never heard tell of 'em in his life.”
Mr. Upton was no longer irritated by the other's
“And you never told me what was in your minds!”
“It was poison even in mine; it would have been deadly poison to you, in the state you were in. I say! I'll wear batting-gloves the next time we shake hands!” and Thrush blew softly on his mangled fingers.
“You believed he'd done it, and you kept it to yourself,” murmured Mr. Upton, still much impressed. “Tell me, my dear fellow—did you believe it after that interview with Baumgartner in his house?”
Thrush emptied his glass at once.
“Don't remind me of that interview, Mr. Upton; there was the lad on the other side of so much lath-and-plaster, and I couldn't scent him through it! But he never made a sound, confound him!”
“Tony's told me about that; they were whispering, for reasons of their own.”
“I ought to have seen that old man listening! His ears must have grown before my purblind
eyes! But his story was an extraordinarily interesting and circumstantial effort. And to come
back to your question, it did fit in with the theory of a fatal accident on your boy's part; he
was frightened to show his face at school after sleeping in the Park,
“By Jove, and so it might! It wouldn't take much just now,” said Mr. Upton, sadly.
“So he thought of the ship you wouldn't let him go out in—and the whole thing fitted in! Of course he had told the old ruffian—saving his presence elsewhere—all about the forbidden voyage; and that gentleman of genius had it ready for immediate use. I'm bound to say he used it on me with excellent effect.”
“Same here,” said the ironmaster—“though I'd no idea what you suspected. I thought it a conceivable way out of any bad scrape, for that particular boy.”
“It imposed upon us all,” said Thrush, “but one. I was prepared to believe it if you did, and you believed it because you didn't know your boy as well as you do now. But Miss Upton, who seems to know him better than anybody else—do you remember how she wouldn't hear of it for a moment?”
“I do
“That shook me, or rather it prevented me from accepting what I never had quite accepted in
my heart. That's another story, and you're only in the mood for one at present; but after
seeing
“I don't see how you're going to prove it now,” remarked Mr. Upton, who hoped there would be no such proof, for the sake of the girl who had been good to his boy; but that was a private consideration which there was no necessity to express.
“I shall want another chat with your lad when he's had his sleep out,” replied Thrush,
significantly; “he's told me quite enough to make me eager for
And he got another drink to help him listen; for as a rule the ironmaster was only succinct when thoroughly irate. But now for once he was both brief and amiable.
“What have I to tell compared with you?” he asked. “Those damned old wooden walls only cleared the Thames on Sunday morning, and they weren't near Plymouth when I left last night; but my little aluminium lot broke all her records before I broke one of her wheels. What I want to know is what you did from the time I left on Sunday night to that great moment this morning.”
“I sat down to watch Baumgartner, his house,” replied Thrush. “The merit of those quiet
little streets is that there are always apartments of sorts, though not always the most
admirable sort, to be had in half the houses. There was quite a choice bang opposite
Baumgartner's, and I'd taken a front room before you were through Hammersmith. Of course I
explained that I had lost a last train, and the landlady's son embarrassed me with pyjamas of
inadequate dimensions. Well, I sat at the front window all night, for no better reasons than my
strong feeling about the doctor's writings, and your daughter's disbelief in his yarn about her
brother. Soon after five in the morning the old bird came out,
“That's proof positive,” said ingenuous Mr. Upton, under his breath.
“Well, I confess it's something like it in this case; but it was a very awkward moment for
me. I hadn't to let him see I knew him, nor yet that I was following him, and the only way was
to abandon the chase as openly as possible. It was then I decided that it was no use leaving
poor old Mullins in pawn to the police. I redeemed him without delay. We went back to my new
rooms together, which I needn't tell you I liked so much that I brought a suit-case and took
them for a week. Of course, as we had lost the run of Baumgartner, the next best thing was to
watch for his return. Mullins took that on while I got some sleep; when I awoke the Park Lane
murder was the latest, and I won't say I didn't suspect who'd done it. Perhaps I didn't tell
you he had his camera with him as
“But all this time you had no idea my boy was in the house?”
“None whatever; we saw the girl once or twice, but that was all until I wired last night. What I never saw myself was Baumgartner's return; but in the afternoon I sent Mullins round to another road to try and get a room overlooking the place from the back. Well, the houses were too much class for that; but one was empty, and he got the key and risked going back to prison for the cause! Suffice it that he set eyes on both man and boy before I sent that wire.”
“And you left my son in that murderer's clutches a minute longer than you could help?” It was a previous incarnation of Pocket's father that broke in with this.
“You must remember in the first place that I couldn't be in the least sure it was your son;
in the second, if murder had been intended, murder would have been done with as little delay in
his case as in the others; thirdly, that we've nothing to show that Dr. Baumgartner is an
actual murderer at all, but, fourthly, that to raid his place was the way to make him one. Poor
Mullins, too, as the original Sherlock of the show, was desperately against calling in the
police under any circumstances.
Thrush treated this part of his narrative with the peculiar confidence which most counsel reserve for the less satisfactory aspects of their case. But Mr. Upton was not in a mood to press a point of grievance against anybody. And the name of Mullins reminded him that his curiosity on a very different point had not been gratified.
“Why on earth did you have Mullins run in?” he inquired, with characteristic absence of finesse.
“I'm not very proud of it,” replied Thrush. “It didn't come off, you see.”
“But whatever could the object have been?”
“I must have a damn-it if I'm to tell you that,” said Thrush; and the ironmaster concluded that he meant a final drink, from the action which he suited to the oath. “It was one way that occurred to me of putting salt on the lad.”
“Tony?”
“Yes.”
“You puzzle me more and more.”
“Well, you see, I gathered that he was a particularly honourable boy, of fine sensibilities,
and
“It very nearly did! I can tell you that straight from Tony; he was going to give himself up yesterday morning, if he hadn't accidentally satisfied himself of his own innocence.”
Mr. Upton said more than this, but it was the explicit statement of fact that alone afforded Thrush real consolation. His spectacled eyes blinked keenly behind their flashing lenses; the button of a nose underneath twitched as though it scented battle once again; and the drink with the opprobrious name was suddenly put down unfinished.
“If only I could find that camera!” he cried. “It's the touchstone of the whole thing, mark my words. If it's an accomplice who did this thing, he's got it; even if not——”
He stood silenced by a sudden thought, a gleam of light that illumined his whole flushed face.
“Mullins!” he roared. Mullins was on the spot with somewhat suspicious alacrity. “Get the
He himself flopped down behind the telephone to ring up the cab-office in Bolton Street. But it takes time even for a Eugene Thrush to consume all but three large whiskies and sodas; and the afternoon was already far advanced.
The camera had been placed upon a folded newspaper, for the better preservation of the hotel table-cloth. Its apertures were still choked with mud; beads of slime kept breaking out along the joints. And Phillida was still explaining to Pocket how the thing had come into her possession.
“The rain was the greatest piece of luck, though another big slice was an iron gangway to
the foreshore about a hundred yards up-stream. It was coming down so hard at the time that I
couldn't see another creature out in it except myself. I don't believe a single soul saw me run
down that gangway and up again; but I dropped my purse over first for an excuse if anybody did.
I popped
“Why?”
“Because you know all about photography and I don't. Suppose he took a last photograph, and suppose that led directly to the murder!”
“That's an idea.”
“The man threw the camera into the river, but the plate would be in it still, and you could develop it!”
The ingenious hypothesis had appealed to the eager credulity of the boy; but at the final proposition he shook a reluctant head.
“I'm afraid there's not much chance of there being anything to develop; the slide's been open all this time, you see.”
“I know. I tried to shut it, but the wood must have swollen in the water. Yet the more it has swollen, the better it ought to keep out the light, oughtn't it?”
“I'm afraid there isn't a dog's chance,” he murmured, as he handled the camera again. Yet it
was not of the folding-bellows variety, but was one of the earlier and stronger models in box
form, and it had come through its ordeal wonderfully on the whole. Nothing was absolutely
broken; but
“That settles it,” remarked Phillida, resignedly. The exposed plate stared them in the face, a sickly yellow in the broad daylight. It was cracked across the middle, but almost dry and otherwise uninjured.
“I am sorry!” exclaimed Pocket, as they stood over the blank sheet of glass and gelatine; it was like looking at a slate from which some infinitely precious message had been expunged unread. “I'm not sure that you weren't right after all; what's water-tight must be more or less light-tight, when you come to think of it. I say, what's all this? The other side oughtn't to bulge like that!”
He picked the broken plate out of the side that was already open, and weighed the slide in his hand; it was not heavy enough to contain another plate, he declared with expert conviction; yet the side which had not been opened was a slightly bulging but distinctly noticeable convexity. Pocket opened it at a word from Phillida, and an over-folded packet of MS. leapt out.
“It's his writing!” cried the girl, with pain and awe in her excitement. She had dropped the document at once.
“It's in English,” said Pocket, picking it up.
“It must be what he was writing all last night!”
“It is.”
“You see what it is!” urged Phillida, feebly. But she watched him closely as he read to himself:—
“June 20,190-.”
“It is a grim coincidence that I should sit down to reveal the secret of my latter days on
what is supposed to be the shortest night of the year; for they must come to an end at sunrise,
viz., at 3.44 according to the almanac, and it is already after 10 p.m. Even if I sit at my
task till four I shall have less than six hours in which to do justice to the great
“What is it?” asked Phillida, for his eyes had dilated as he read, and he was breathing hard.
“He practically says he was going to commit suicide at daybreak! He's said so once already, but now he says it in so many words!”
“Well, we know he didn't do it,” said Phillida, as though she found a crumb of comfort in the thought.
“I'm not so sure about that.”
“Go on reading it aloud. I can bear it if that's the worst.”
“But it isn't, Phillida. I can see it isn't!”
“Then let us read it together. I'd rather face it with you than afterwards all by myself. We've seen each other through so much, surely we can—surely——”
Her words were swept away in a torrent of tears, and it was with dim eyes but a palpitating
heart that Pocket looked upon the forlorn drab figure of the slip of a girl; for as yet,
despite her pretext to Mr. Upton, she had taken no thought for her mourning, that unfailing
distraction to the normally bereaved, but had put on anything she could find of a neutral tint;
and yet it was just her dear disdain of appearance, the intimate tears gathering in her great
eyes, unchecked, and streaming down the fresh young face, the very shabbiness of her coat and
skirt, that made her what she was
This was the part they read together, now in silence, now one and now the other whispering a few sentences aloud:—.
“What I have called my life's ambition demands but little explanation here. I have never made any secret of it, but, on the contrary, I have given full and frank expression to my theories in places where they are still accessible to the curious. I refer to my signed articles on spirit photography in
“I say no more than “often” because there are special difficulties into which I need not
enter here; but they would disappear, or at least be minimised, if the practice received the
encouragement it deserves, instead of the forbidding ban of a sentimental generation. It would
hurt nobody; it would comfort and convince the millions who at present have only their
Churches' word for the existence of an eternal soul in their perishable bodies. It would prove
more, in the course of a few experiments, than all the Churches have proved between them in
nineteen centuries. Yet how are my earnest applications received, in hospitals where men die
daily, in prisons where they are still occasionally put to death? I am refused, rebuffed,
gratuitously reprimanded; in fact, I am driven ultimately to the extreme course of taking human
life, on my own account, in order to prove the life eternal. Call it murder, call it what you
will; in a civilisation which will not hear of a lethal chamber for congenital imbeciles it
would be waste of time to urge the inutility of a life as an excuse for taking it, or the
misery of an individual as a reason for sending him to a world which cannot use him worse than
this world. I can only say that I have not deprived the State of one conceivably profitable
servant, or cut short a single life of promise or repute. I have picked my few victims with
infinite care from
“To me it was a bitter disappointment on other grounds. I had lost very few seconds between
pulling the revolver trigger and pressing the bulb of my pneumatic shutter; but one had to get
back into position for this, and the fact remains that I was too late. The result may be found
among my negatives. It is dreadfully good of the dead man, if not a unique photograph of actual
death; but it lacks the least trace of the super-normal. The flight of the soul had been too
quick for me; it would be too quick again unless I hit upon some new method. I had not only
failed to leave convincing evidence of suicide, but the fatal pause between pistol-shot and
snap-shot was due entirely to my elaborate attempt in that direction. It was not worth making
again. The next case should be a more honest breach of the Sixth
There was a brief discussion here. The children could not understand about the pistol; but only one of them cared what had become of it. For Phillida it was enough to know that the writer of this shameless rigmarole, with its pompous periods and its callous gusto, must long ago have lost his reason. She had no doubt whatever about that, and already it had brought a new light into her eyes. She would pause to discuss nothing else. It was her finger that pointed the way through the next passages.
“The perfection or completion of my device was the secret work of many weeks; it brings me
down almost to the other day, and to what I have described as the supreme folly of my life. I
had everything in readiness for another attempt to
“I need hardly say that I had looked about me pretty thoroughly before firing, and my first act after taking the photograph was to make another wary survey of the scene. It had the advantage that one could see a considerable distance in three directions, and in none of these, neither right nor left along the path, nor yet straight ahead across the grass on the edge of which my victim lay, was a living creature to be seen. This was very reassuring, as I felt that I could see a good deal farther than the report of my small automatic pistol was likely to be heard; for it is a remarkable feature of most shooting cases, especially where a pistol has been used, and in the open air, how seldom it is that a witness can be found who has actually heard the fatal shot. In the fourth quarter, where there was a bank of shrubbery behind some iron palings, I looked last, for I was standing with my back that way. How shall I describe my sensations on turning round? There was a young lad within a few feet of me, on the other side of the palings; and this young lad was flourishing a revolver in his right hand!”
“At first I made certain he had seen everything; but his blank and frank bewilderment was
more reassuring at a second glance, and at a third I guessed what had happened to him. His
crumpled clothes were dank with dew. His eyes were puddles
There followed a few remarks on Pocket's character as the writer read it. They were not
uncomplimentary to Pocket personally, but they betrayed a profound disdain for the typically
British institution of which Pocket was too readily accepted as a representative product. His
general ignorance and credulity received a grim tribute; they were the very qualities the
doctor would have demanded in a chosen dupe. Yet he appeared to have enjoyed the youth's
society, his transparent honesty, his capacity for enthusiastic interest, whether in the
delights of photography or in the horrors of war. Baumgartner seemed aware that he had been
somewhat confidential on both subjects, and that either his contempt of human life, or his
ambitions in the matter of psychic photography, would have been better kept to himself; but, on
the other hand,
“The madness of keeping him prisoner, as he had been from the beginning, in spite of all pretences and persuasions to the contrary, was another thing to which Baumgartner had been thoroughly alive all along. He had regarded it from the first as “the certain beginning of the end”; from the first, he had been prepared with specious explanations for any such inquisitor as the one who had actually arrived no later than the Saturday afternoon. He wrote without elation of his interview with Thrush, whose name he knew; the doctor had not been deceived as to the transitory character of his own deception. It was the same with the letter which he had pretended to post, which could only have kept the boy quiet for a day or two, if he had posted it, but which the boy himself had discovered never to have been posted at all. There was a sufficiently cool description of the desperate mood into which Baumgartner's intuition of the boy's discovery had thrown him on the Sunday night.”
“It was then,” he wrote, “that I formed a
The readers shuddered over this long paragraph. More than once the boy broke in with his own impulsive version of the awful moments on the Sunday night and the Monday morning, in his bedroom at the top of the doctor's house. He declared that nothing short of main force would have dragged him out-of-doors that morning, that he felt it in his bones that he would never come back alive. Then he would be sorry he had said so much.
It only increased his companion's anguish. She was reading every word religiously, with a
most painful fascination; it was as though every word drew blood. There was a brief but
terrible account of the murder of Sir Joseph Schelmerdine outside his own house in Park Lane.
It was the rashest of all the crimes; but, apparently, the one occasion on which the doctor had
disguised himself before hand; and that only because Sir Joseph and he knew and disliked each
other so intensely that a “straight” interview was out of the question. As it was he had
escaped by a miracle, after lying all day in a straw-loft, creeping into a carriage at
nightfall, and getting out on the wrong side when it drove round to its house. Baumgartner
described the incident with a callous relish, as perhaps the most exciting in his long career;
he was going on to explain his subsequent return, in
“I thought the fool had cleared out long ago. The day's excitement must have driven him
clean out of my head. I never thought of him when I got back, never till I saw the damage to
the darkroom window and missed his clothes. I didn't
“Yes! I have made up my mind; it is better than leaving it to the common hangman of this
besotted country. I know what to expect in enlightened England: either a death unfit for a dog,
or existence worse than death in a criminal lunatic asylum. I prefer my own peculiar quietus;
it has stood on my table all night long, ready and pointed at my heart; a hand upon the door, a
step behind me, and I should have rolled over dead at their feet. So it will be if even now
they are waiting for me outside; but, if not, I know where to go,
There was a little more, but Phillida suddenly snatched the MS. away, and wept over the end, bitterly, and yet not altogether in bitterness, while Pocket picked up the camera and set it back in its place on the muddy newspaper. Phillida folded up the packet, and after a moment's hesitation went away with it, jingling keys in her other hand. On her return she stood petrified on the threshold.
Pocket was seated at the table, the red bulb of the pneumatic shutter between his finger and thumb; he pressed the bulb, and there was a loud metallic snap inside the camera; he released the pressure, and the shutter snapped like a shutter and nothing else. Phillida came forward with a cry. Pocket had taken the top off the camera; it was like a box without the lid, and on the one side there was nothing between the lens and the grooved carrier for the slide, but on the other there was an automatic pistol, fixed down with wires, as a wild beast might be lashed, and its muzzle pointing through the orifice intended for the second lens of the stereoscopic camera.
Pocket pressed again, and again the mild clash of the shutter was preceded by the vicious one that would have been an explosion if there had been another cartridge in the pistol.
“And we never guessed it!” said he. “That's why he went in for this sort of double camera,
He spoke as if it were only clever! Phillida stared at it and him without a word.
“The cleverest part is the way you aim. I do believe he relied altogether on that spot about the middle of the focussing screen. I've been trying it against the window, and where that spot comes the pistol's pointing every time. It's a fixed focus, about ten to fifteen feet, I fancy, and the spot isn't quite in the middle of the screen, but just enough to the left to allow. I don't quite see how the one bulb works everything, but these springs and things are a bit confusing. We shan't understand everything till we take it to pieces.”
“You mean the police won't!” said Phillida, bitterly.
“The police! I never thought of them.”
“What do you mean to do with this—this infernal machine?” the girl asked, her voice breaking over the perfectly applicable term.
“What do
“Burn it! I've asked for a fire in my room; it's locked away meanwhile.”
“Well, this is yours, too,” said Pocket, deliberately, “to do what you like with as well.”
“They wouldn't think so!”
“They'll never know.”
Phillida shook her head, and not without some scorn. “You couldn't keep it to yourself,” she
said. “You would
“Well, but not everybody,” said poor Pocket. “Only my father, if you like!” he added, valiantly.
“Mr. Upton would feel bound to tell.”
“I don't see that. Didn't you hear what he said about a man's secrets dying with him?”
“He's so kind! He says that; he said it again to me; but this is the mystery of the day. It'll be the talk for months, if not years. And as yet only you and I, in all the world, have found it out!”
She looked at him so wistfully, so sweetly and sadly and confidentially, that he would have
been either more or less than human boy if he had failed to see her heart's desire, and how it
was still in his power to save her the supreme humiliation and distress of sharing their secret
with the world. He made up his mind on the spot; and yet it was a mind that looked both ways at
every turn of affairs, and even then he saw what he was going to lose. Fred and Horace would
not sit nearly so spellbound as they might have done, would probably back their penetration of
the mystery against his! There would be no boasting about it in front of the
“Phillida, if you wish it, I'll never breathe a syllable of all this to a single soul on earth, I don't care who they are, or what they do to me!”
He wanted them to put him on the rack that moment.
“Oh, Tony, do you mean it?”
Her eyes had filled.
“Of course I mean it! I'll swear it more solemnly than I've ever sworn anything in my life so far.”
“No, no! Your word's enough. Don't I know what that's worth, after this terrible week?”
And she cried again at its hideous memories, so that Pocket turned away and put the camera together again, and wrapped it up in her waterproof, so that he might not see her tears.
“I'll never breathe a single word to a single soul,” he vowed, “except yourself.”
She caught at that through her tears. He could talk to her about it, always, as much as ever
he
But what were they to do with a stereoscopic camera containing an automatic pistol? It was not to be burnt in a grate like a sheaf of MS. They thought about it for some time with anxious faces; for it was getting on towards evening now, though the sun was out again, and it was lighter than the early afternoon; but Mr. Upton might be back any minute. It was Phillida who at last said she knew. She would not tell him what she meant to do; but she put on her waterproof again, little as it was wanted now, and the camera under it as before; and together they sallied forth into the noisy and crowded Strand.
Pocket did not know where he was, and Phillida would not tell him where she was going, neither could he question her in that alarming throng. He felt a frightful sense of guilt and danger, not so much to himself as to her, with that lethal weapon concealed about her; every man who looked at them was a detective in his eyes, and past the policemen at the corners he wanted to run. But they gained the middle of Waterloo Bridge undetected and ensconced themselves in a recess without creating a sensation.
“Now, then,” said Phillida, “will you focus Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament, or shall I?”
There they were before them against the sunset, the long lithe bridge, the stately towers. But Pocket could not see Phillida's drift until she aimed herself, and, aiming, let the square black box slip clean through her fingers into the depths of the river from which she had only retrieved it a couple of hours before, as a body is committed to the deep.
She bewailed her stupidity; he had the wit to echo her then, and in a loud voice, that any eye-witness or passer-by might be struck with the genuine severity of their loss. But there had been no eye-witness who thought it worth while to rally them on the occurrence, and the busy townsfolk hastening past were all too much engrossed in their own affairs to take any interest in those of the boy and girl who seemed themselves in something of a hurry to get back to the Strand.
And in the Strand the first thing they saw was a yellow poster bearing but four words in enormous black letters:—
CHELSEA INQUEST
CAMERA CLUE!
Phillida slipped her hand within Pocket's arm. Pocket was man enough to press it to his side.