The Camera Fiend

A GRIM SAMARITAN

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 wrist as in a vice. And he looked up over the spikes into a gnarled face tinged with fear and fury, and working spasmodically at the suppression of some incomprehensible emotion.

“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, not only firm in his unconscious clasp, but his finger actually on the trigger.

“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 standing by with his weapon, “I suppose you know that, apart from everything else, you had no right to spend the night in here at all?”

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 a little; the lined face looked less deeply slashed and furrowed, and it was a less inhuman voice that uttered the next words.

“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 on a chair behind the palings, waiting to help him over, with a wary eye upon the path. But no third creature was in sight except the insensate sprawler in the dew. Pocket surmounted the obstacle, he knew not how; he was almost beside himself in the throes of his attack. Later, he feared he must have been lifted down like a child; but this was when he was getting his breath upon a seat. They had come some little distance very slowly, and Pocket had received such support from so muscular an arm as to lend colour to his humiliating suspicion.

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 the moral courage to light, in the train. He had slipped it into one of his pockets, not back into the box. He felt for it feverishly. He gave a husky cheer as his fingers closed upon the palpable thing, and he drew forth a flattened cylinder the size of a cigarette and the colour of a cigar. The boy had to bite off both ends; the man was ready with the match. Pocket drank the crude smoke down like water, coughed horribly, drank deeper, coughed the tears into his eyes, and was comparatively cured.

“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 impulsive outburst; but even as he proceeded to mumble out his thanks he could not help feeling it would have been less embarrassing 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 attitude prevented him from seeing anything but his own boots, and those only dimly owing to the apron 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-lustre 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 passed 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 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, 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 glass 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 bloody 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 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.

THE GLASS 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 button 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 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, 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?”

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 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 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 water and the chink 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.