The Camera Fiend, E. W. Hornung [important of reading books txt] 📗

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 [pg 126] 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 [pg 127] 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 [pg 128] 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 [pg 129] 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 [pg 130] 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 [pg 131] 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