The Camera Fiend Part 6

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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sionate, but this was the pa.s.sion of enthusiastic endeavour. If the man had a heart at all, it was in this wild question without a doubt. Even the schoolboy perceived this dimly. There was something else which had become clearer to him with each of these later remarks. Striking as they seemed to him, they were not wholly unfamiliar. The ring of novelty was wanting to his ear.

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 from his body by no other medium than a good sound lens in a light-tight camera. You cannot have forgotten them if you read my letter."

"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, but with its return we awake. The theory is that in the moment of waking the whole experience happens like the flash of an electric spark."

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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sage to get there.

Running water and the c.h.i.n.k of porcelain were specially audible in his absence, but the boy was thinking of another sound. The doctor before leaving had discarded a black alpaca jacket, light as a pocket handkerchief, which had fallen so softly as to recall by contrast the noise made by the revolver in the pocket of the cloak. The lad was promptly seized with a strong desire to recover his property; he was within an ace of doing so, the cloak containing it being actually in his hands and only dropped as Baumgartner returned to announce that all was ready.

Sharp to the left, at the end of the pa.s.sage, was a door which would simply have been a second way into the drawing-room had the double doors within been in use; these being shut, the s.p.a.ce 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 gla.s.s, 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 shelves and lockers; opposite was a long porcelain trough, pink as the doctor's shirt-sleeves in the strong red light; racks of negatives and stoppered bottles glimmered over bra.s.s taps stained to an angry copper.

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 excitement and suspense were as infectious as everything else about him. Pocket had come into the dark-room wheezing almost as much as ever; he was not to be heard breathing as the plate was rocked to and fro as in raspberry-juice, and gradually the sky showed sharp and black. But the sky it was that puzzled Pocket first. It was broken by perpendicular objects like white torpedoes. He was photographer enough to know what these were almost at once; they were those poplars in the park. But how could Baumgartner have photographed Pocket with those poplars behind him when they had been behind Baumgartner all the time?

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 gra.s.s. "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; gra.s.s 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 doctor's were calm and cold and critical as in the earlier morning. It was another failure, he said, and nothing more. Breakfast would be ready soon; they would go upstairs; and if his young fellow felt equal to a warm bath, he thought as a physician it might do him good.

AN AWAKENING

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 n.o.bler atonement for unmitigable surname. He could not help thinking that this Phillida did not look the one to flout a fellow, after the fashion of the only other Phillida he had ever heard of, and then that it was beastly cheek to start thinking of her like that and by her Christian name. But he was of the age and temperament when thoughts will come of contact with young animals of the opposite s.e.x. He looked at her sidelong from time to time, but all four eyes dropped directly they met; she seemed as shy and uninteresting as himself; her conversation was confined to table attentions to her uncle and his guest.

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 a.s.sured the doctor, who shook his head and smiled.

"Honestly, sir, and sn.o.b-cricket better than the real thing! I'm no good at real games."

The statement was too true, but not the preference.