The Camera Fiend Part 17

"Well, sir," said Mullins, with respect enough in his tone, "you talk about jumping to conclusions, but it strikes me the gentlemen 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 may be by fair means, or it may be by foul, but they have a way of getting there before the others start."

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 lat.i.tude, 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 use talking when we both seem to have made up our minds; but I'm always ready to unmake mine if you show me that young Mr. Upton carried a pistol, Mullins! Now I should like my breakfast, Mullins, and you must be roaring inside for yours. The man who's been knocking up chemists all night is the man to whom breakfast is due; get your own and then mine, and after that you can tell me how you got on."

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 canva.s.sing,"

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 Th.o.r.n.ycroft'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 b.u.t.tered 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 the cigarettes from personal experience, as we were only trying them on hearsay."

"Very smart of you, Mullins! And one wheezy novelist is the only consumer?"

"That's right, sir, but the man in Knightsbridge 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 _Who's Who,_ and read out what they say."

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 in his martial youth; the various Universities whereat he had studied psychology and theology in an evident reaction of later life; even the t.i.tles of his subsequent publications, which contained some long English words, but were given in German too. A copious contribution concluded with the information that photography and billiards were the doctor's recreations, and that he belonged to a polysyllabically unp.r.o.nounceable Berlin club, and to one in St. James's which Mullins more culpably miscalled the Parthenian.

"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 a panic-stricken face. He was colourless almost to the neck, but he denied that he had any news, though not without a pregnant glance at Mullins, and fell to abusing London and the Londoners, but City men above all others, till Thrush and he should be alone together. The incidental diatribe was no mere padding, either; it was the sincere utterance of a pa.s.sionately provincial soul. n.o.body in all London, he declared, and apparently without excepting Mr. Thrush, cared a twopenny curse what became of his poor boy. In view of the fact that the present company alone knew of his disappearance, and not so very many more of the boy's existence, this was an extravagantly sweeping statement. But the distracted man had a particular instance to bear him out; he had been to see his boy's friends' father, "a swine called Knaggs," that very morning at his house in St. John's Wood.

"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 c.o.c.kney 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 hospitality I was none too pleased at your anxiety to get rid of me afterwards. It made me feel like doing a little bit for the boy on my own; but I'd called once on my way into town, and only seen a servant then, so I thought I'd make sure of putting salt on somebody by waiting till this morning."

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.