Kitabı oku: «The Camera Fiend», sayfa 6

SECOND THOUGHTS

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 murderer's graves. Better by far their beastly faces, that you knew were wax! So he reasoned with himself, and screwed up his courage, and laid hands on one of the shorter figures that he could reach. It rocked stiffly in its place, a most palpable and reassuring waxwork. He unwound the cerements from the hollow and unyielding head; and the face was new to him; it had not been there the other afternoon. It was a young face like his own, as ill-mounted on high shoulders, with thickish lips ajar, and only a pair of intelligent eyes to redeem an apparent heaviness: one and all his own identical characteristics. And no wonder, for the last recruit to the waxen army of murderers was a faithful model of himself.

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 only Lettice and their parents. Fred and Horace, how good they had been to him at school, and how proud he had been of them! What would they think of him if he went on skulking like this? What would they have done in his place? Anything but lie low like that, thought Pocket, and resolved forthwith to play the game as preached and practised by his brothers. It was strange that he should have been so dense about so plain a duty overnight; this morning he saw it as sharp as an image in perfect focus on the ground-glass screen…To think that a mad photographer should have talked him into an attitude as mad as his own! This morning he saw the common sense of the situation as well as its right and wrong. Nothing would happen to him if he gave himself up, but anything might if he waited till he was caught. As for the consequences to his poor mother, surely in the end suspense and uncertainty would eat deeper into the slender cord of her life than the shock of the truth would cut.

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 a little. That night, for all his moral innocence, he might lie in prison; let him make the most of a good bed while he had one, especially as he was still mysteriously free from asthma. The last consideration took his mind off the ethical dilemma for quite a little time. He remembered the doctor at home telling him that he himself had suffered from chronic asthma, but had lost it after a carriage accident in which he was nearly killed.

“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 up for what he had done, there was no reason why he should involve Baumgartner in that voluntary confession. Suppose he hailed the first cab he saw, and drove over to St. John's Wood to borrow money (they could scarcely refuse him that), and then took the first train home to tell his father everything in the first instance, that father would never hear of his incriminating a stranger who had befriended him according to his lights. He himself need never say where he had spent the twenty-four hours after the tragedy, even if he were ever to know. And so far he had no notion, thanks to the ridiculous posture prescribed by Baumgartner in the cab; he could only suppose the motive had been to keep him out of sight, the benefit to his breathing a mere pretext; and yet it was a curious result that after a day and a night he should still be in total ignorance of his whereabouts.

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 there were other reassuring sights and sounds. In one of the contiguous gardens a very small boy was wheeling a doll's perambulator; on the other side, where the fine, warm gravel reminded Pocket of the carroty kind at home, a man was mowing an equally trim lawn. Pocket listened to the murmur of the machine, and watched the green spray playing over the revolving knives, and savoured the curiously countrified smell of cut grass; the combined effect was a still stronger reminiscence of his father's garden, where his own old pony pulled the machine in leather shoes.

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 side of the door for applying mere bodily strength, that either he must raise an ignominious shout for freedom or else achieve it for himself by way of the window. Unathletic as he always had been, he was sportsman enough not to hesitate an instant between the two alternatives; and on again looking out of the window, saw his way down at a glance.

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 so eloquent of Baumgartner himself, in its uncompromising severity, that Pocket breathed more freely on the landing. And in the hall he felt absolutely safe, for he had gained it without the creaking of a stair, and there on the pegs hung his hat, but neither the cloak nor the weird wide-awake affected by his host.

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 all events, and so they would part for ever. Or perhaps not for ever! The juvenile instinct for romance was not to be stifled at such a stimulating moment. The girl would be sorry for him when she knew all; she might know enough to be sorry for him as it was; in any case it was the game to say goodbye.

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, unconscientiously enough for anybody. “He's been most awfully good to me, and I wish you'd tell him how grateful I am.”

“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 pardonable unction in the end. After that he insisted on saying goodbye. And the young girl stood up to him like a little heroine.

“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.

ON PAROLE

“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. You made your own bed with your eyes open, and I left you last night under the impression that you were going to lie on it like a man.”

“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 Biscay! No, no, my fellow; you've taken your line, and you must stick to it, and stop with me till we can think of something better than a long sea voyage. If you say you won't, I say I'll make you – to save you from yourself – to save us both.”

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 others, and at least let them know I am alive and well. My sister would keep my secret; she'd play the game all right, I promise you! And I'd play any game you like if only you let me write a line to her!”

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 were blown to ribbons, you see, and we ourselves to shreds; but the shreds hung together, my young fellow, and so will you and I in our day of battle!” Baumgartner might have known his boy for years, so sure was his touch upon the strings of a responsive nature, to strike the chords of a generous enthusiasm, and to wake the echoes of noble deeds. Pocket attacked his letter with the heart of a soldier, hardened and yet uplifted for the fight; it was only when he found himself writing down vague words, which nevertheless brought his innocent deed home to him as nothing had done before, that the artificial frost broke up, and real tears ran with his ink. He begged Lettice not to think too hardly of him, still less to be anxious about him, or to make anybody else; they must not fret for him, he wrote more than once, without seeing the humour of the injunction. He was better than he had been for years, and in the best of hands. But something terrible had happened; something he could not help, but would bitterly repent all his days, especially as it might prevent him from ever seeing any of them again. It was this monstrous remark, and others to which it led, that were literally blotted with the writer's tears. But just then he saw himself in all vivid sincerity as an outcast who could never show himself at home or at school again. And it required the spell of Baumgartner's presence to make the prospect such as could be borne with the least degree of visible manhood.

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 would not have decamped for a hundred pounds, and the doctor knew it.

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 as wilful a murder as the one in Hyde Park, to which it bore a close and sinister resemblance. Both victims had been shot through the heart in the early hours of the morning; both belonged to one neighbourhood, and to the same dilapidated fringe of the community. A pothouse acquaintanceship was alleged between them; but the suggestion was that the link lay a good deal deeper than that, and that the two dead men were known to the police, who were busy searching for a third party of equal notoriety in connection with both murders.

“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?”