The Camera Fiend Part 5

Pocket scouted the notion of inquiries in an impulsive outburst; but even as he proceeded to mumble out his thanks he could not help feeling it would have been less embarra.s.sing to know more exactly whom he was thanking and must needs accompany now. Dr. Baumgartner? Where was it he had come across that name? And when and where had anybody ever seen such a doctor as this unshaven old fellow in the cloak and hat of a conspirator by limelight?

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 like a lamb. They had encountered a young man or so hurrying into the Park with towels round the neck but no collar, an early cavalcade who never looked at them, and that was about all until the hansom had been hailed outside. During the drive, which seemed to Pocket interminable, his extraordinary att.i.tude prevented him from seeing anything but his own boots, and those only dimly owing to the ap.r.o.n being shut and indeed pressing uncomfortably against his head. Yet when Dr.

Baumgartner inquired whether that did not make him easier, he said it did.

It was not all imagination either; the posture did relieve him; but it was none the less disagreeable to be driven through London by an utter stranger, and not to see the names of the streets or a single landmark.

Pocket had not even heard the cabman's instructions where to drive; they had been given after he got in. His ear was more alert now. He noted the change from wood-paving to rough metal. Then more wood, and an indubitable omnibus blundering by; then more metal, in better repair; quieter streets, the tinkle of cans, the milkman's queer cry; and finally, "Next to the right and the fifth house on your left," in the voice with the almost imperceptibly foreign accent.

The fifth house on the left was exactly like the fourth and the sixth from the little Pocket saw of any of them. He was hurried up a tiled path, none too clean between swarthy and lack-l.u.s.tre laurels; the steps had not been "done"; the door wore the nondescript complexion of prehistoric paint debased by the caprices of the London climate. One touch of colour the lad saw before this unpromising portal opened and shut upon him: he had already pa.s.sed through a rank of pollard trees, sprouting emeralds in the morning sun, that seemed common to this side of the road, and effectually hid the other.

Within the doctor held up a finger and they both trod gently. The pa.s.sage 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, and a still more redeeming feature was the semi-grand piano. There were books, too, and in the far corner by the bow-window a gla.s.s door leading into a conservatory as minute as Pocket's study at school, and filled with geraniums. On the walls hung a series of battle engravings, one representing a b.l.o.o.d.y advance over ridged fields in murderously close formation, others the storming of heights and villages.

Baumgartner met his visitor's eyes with the faint cold smile that scarcely softened the h.o.a.ry 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.

THE GLa.s.s EYE

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 b.u.t.ton and let them do the rest?" suggested the doctor, smiling less coldly under the influence of his pipe.

"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 countenance of Baumgartner follow the brutal features of the meerschaum Turk through a melting cloud of smoke. The boy had been taken aback. But his bewilderment was of briefer duration than might have been the case with a less ardent photographer; for he took a technical interest in his hobby, and read the photographic year-books, nearly as ravenously as _Wisden's Almanacke_.

"I see," he said, lukewarmly. "You go in for psychic photography."

"Psychic," said Baumgartner; for the public schoolboy, one regrets to report, had p.r.o.nounced 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, and so may the camera, but not without focusing and exposing like you've got to do with ordinary flesh and blood!"

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?"