[Illustration]
The Camera Fiend
by E.W. Hornung
London
T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd.
Adelphi Terrace
1911
Contents
I. A CONSCIENTIOUS ASS
II. A BOY ABOUT TOWN
III. HIS PEOPLE
IV. A GRIM SAMARITAN
V. THE GLASS EYE
VI. AN AWAKENING
VII. BLOOD-GUILTY
VIII. POINTS OF VIEW
IX. MR. EUGENE THRUSH
X. SECOND THOUGHTS
XI. ON PAROLE
XII. HUNTING WITH THE HOUNDS
XIII. BOY AND GIRL
XIV. BEFORE THE STORM
XV. A LIKELY STORY
XVI. MALINGERING
XVII. ON THE TRACK OF THE TRUTH
XVIII. A THIRD CASE
XIX. THE FOURTH CASE
XX. WHAT THE THAMES GAVE UP
XXI. AFTER THE FAIR
XXII. THE SECRET OF THE CAMERA
CHAPTER I.
A CONSCIENTIOUS ASS
Pocket Upton had come down late and panting, in spite of his daily
exemption from first school, and the postcard on his plate had taken
away his remaining modicum of breath. He could have wept over it in
open hall, and would probably have done so in the subsequent seclusion
of his own study, had not an obvious way out of his difficulty been
bothering him by that time almost as much as the difficulty itself. For
it was not a very honest way, and the unfortunate Pocket had been
called “a conscientious ass” by some of the nicest fellows in his
house. Perhaps he deserved the epithet for going even as straight as he
did to his house-master, who was discovered correcting proses with a
blue pencil and a briar pipe.
“Please, sir, Mr. Coverley can’t have me, sir. He’s got a case of
chicken-pox, sir.”
The boy produced the actual intimation in a few strokes of an honoured
but laconic pen. The man poised his pencil and puffed his pipe.
“Then you must come back to-night, and I’m just as glad. It’s all
nonsense your staying the night whenever you go up to see that doctor
of yours.”
“He makes a great point of it, sir. He likes to try some fresh stuff on
me, and then see what sort of night I have.”
“You could go up again to-morrow.”
“Of course I could, sir,” replied Pocket Upton, with a delicate
emphasis on his penultimate. At the moment he was perhaps neither so
acutely conscientious nor such an ass as his critics considered him.
“What else do you propose?” inquired Mr. Spearman.
“Well, sir, I have plenty of other friends in town, sir. Either the
Knaggses or Miss Harbottle would put me up in a minute, sir.”
“Who are the Knaggses?”
“The boys were with me at Mr. Coverley’s, sir; they go to Westminster
now. One of them stayed with us last holidays. They live in St. John’s
Wood Park.”
“And the lady you mentioned?”
“Miss Harbottle, sir, an old friend of my mother’s; it was through her
I went to Mr. Coverley’s, and I’ve often stayed there. She’s in the
Wellington Road, sir, quite close to Lord’s.”
Mr. Spearman smiled at the gratuitous explanation of an eagerness that
other lads might have taken more trouble to conceal. But there was no
guile in any Upton; in that one respect the third and last of them
resembled the great twin brethren of whom he had been prematurely voted
a “pocket edition” on his arrival in the school. He had few of their
other merits, though he took a morbid interest in the games they played
by light of nature, as well as in things both beyond and beneath his
brothers and the average boy. You cannot sit up half your nights with
asthma and be an average boy. This was obvious even to Mr. Spearman,
who was an average man. He had never disguised his own disappointment
in the youngest Upton, but had often made him the butt of outspoken and
disastrous comparisons. Yet in his softer moments he had some sympathy
with the failure of an otherwise worthy family; this fine June morning
he seemed even to understand the joy of a jaunt to London for a boy who
was getting very little out of his school life. He made a note of the
two names and addresses.
“You’re quite sure they’ll put you up, are you?” “Absolutely certain,
sir.”
“But you’ll come straight back if they can’t?”
“Rather, sir!”
“Then run away, and don’t miss your train.”
Pocket interpreted the first part of the injunction so literally as to
arrive very breathless in his study. That diminutive cell was garnished
with more ambitious pictures than the generality of its order; but the
best of them was framed in the ivy round the lattice window, and its
foreground was the nasturtiums in the flower-box. Pocket glanced down
into the quad, where the fellows were preparing construes for second
school in sunlit groups on garden seats. At that moment the bell began.
And by the time Pocket had changed his black tie for a green one with
red spots, in which he had come back after the Easter holidays, the
bell had stopped and the quad was empty; before it filled again he
would be up in town and on his way to Welbeck Street in a hansom.
The very journey was a joy. It was such sport to be flying through a
world of buttercups and daisies in a train again, so refreshing to feel
as good as anybody else in the third smoker; for even the grown men in
the corner seats did not dream of calling the youth an “old ass,” much
less a young one, to his face. His friends and contemporaries at school
were in the habit of employing the ameliorating adjective, but there
were still a few fellows in Pocket’s house who made an insulting point
of the other. All, however, seemed agreed as to the noun; and it was
pleasant to cast off friend and foe for a change, to sit comfortably
unknown and unsuspected of one’s foibles in the train. It made Pocket
feel a bit of a man; but then he really was almost seventeen, and in
the Middle Fifth, and allowed to smoke asthma cigarettes in bed. He
took one out of a cardboard box in his bag, and thought it might do him
good to smoke it now. But an adult tobacco-smoker looked so curiously
at the little thin cross between cigar and cigarette, that it was
transferred to a pocket unlit, and the coward hid himself behind his
paper, in which there were several items of immediate interest to him.
Would the match hold out at Lord’s? If not, which was the best of the
Wednesday matinees? Pocket had received a pound from home for his
expenses, so that these questions took an adventitious precedence over
even such attractive topics as an execution and a murder that bade fair
to lead to one. But the horrors had their turn, and having supped on
the newspaper supply, he continued the feast in _Henry Dunbar_, the
novel he had brought with him in his bag. There was something like a
murder! It was so exciting as to detach Pocket Upton from the flying
buttercups and daisies, from the reek of the smoking carriage, the real
crimes in the paper, and all thoughts of London until he found himself
there too soon.
The asthma specialist was one of those enterprising practitioners whose
professional standing is never quite on a par with their material
success. The injurious discrepancy may have spoilt his temper, or it
may be that his temper was at the root of the prejudice against him. He
was never very amiable with Pocket Upton, a casual patient in every
sense; but this morning Dr. Bompas had some call to complain.
“You mean to tell me,” he expostulated, “that you’ve gone back to the
cigarettes in spite of what I said last time? If you weren’t a stupid
schoolboy I should throw up your case!”
Pocket did not wish to have his case thrown up; it would mean no more
days and nights in town. So he accepted his rebuke without visible
resentment.
“It’s the only way I can stop an attack,” he mumbled.
“Nonsense!” snapped the specialist. “You can make yourself coffee in
the night, as you’ve done before.”
“I can’t at school. They draw the line at that.”
“Then a public school is no place for you. I’ve said so from the first.
Your people should have listened to me, and sent you on a long sea
voyage under the man I recommended, in the ship I told them about. She
sails the day after to-morrow, and you should have sailed in her.”
The patient made no remark; but he felt as sore as his physician on the
subject of that long sea voyage. It would have meant a premature end to
his undistinguished schooldays, and goodbye to all thought of following
in his brothers’ steps on the field of schoolboy glory. But he might
have had adventures beyond the pale of that circumscribed arena, he
might have been shipwrecked on a desert island, and lived to tell a
tale beyond the dreams of envious athletes, if his people had but taken
kindly to the scheme. But they had been so very far from taking to it
at all, with the single exception of his only sister, that the boy had
not the heart to discuss it now.
“If only there were some medicine one could take to stop an attack!” he
sighed. “But there doesn’t seem to be any.”
“There are plenty of preventives,” returned the doctor. “That’s what we
want. Smoking and inhaling all sorts of rubbish is merely a palliative
that does more harm than good in the long run.”
“But it does you good when the preventives fail. If I could get a good
night without smoking I should be thankful.”
“If I promise you a good night will you give me your cigarettes to keep
until to-morrow?”
“If you like.”
The doctor wrote a prescription while the boy produced the cardboard
box from his bag.
“Thank you,” said Bompas, as they made an exchange. “I don’t want you
even to be tempted to smoke to-night, because I know what the
temptation must be when you can’t get your breath. You will get this
prescription made up in two bottles; take the first before you go to
bed to-night, and the second if you wake with an attack before five in
the morning. You say you are staying the night with friends; better
give me the name and let me see if they’re on the telephone before you
go. I want you to go to bed early, tell them not to call you in the
morning, and come back to me the moment you’ve had your breakfast.”
They parted amicably after all, and Pocket went off only wondering
whether he ought to have said positively that he was staying with
friends when he might be going back to school. But Dr. Bompas had been
so short with him at first as to discourage unnecessary explanations;
besides, there could be no question of his going back that night. And
the difficulty of the morning, which he had quite forgotten in the
train, was not allowed to mar a moment of his day in town.
The time-table of that boy’s day must speak for itself. It was already
one o’clock, and he was naturally hungry, especially after the way his
breakfast had been spoilt by Coverley’s card. At 1.15 he was munching
a sausage roll and sipping chocolate at a pastry-cook’s in Oxford
Street. The sausage roll, like the cup of chocolate, was soon followed
by another; and a big Bath bun completed a debauch of which Dr. Bompas
would undoubtedly have disapproved.
At 1.45, from the top of an Atlas omnibus in Baker Street, he espied a
placard with “Collapse of Middlesex” in appalling capitals. And at the
station he got down to learn the worst before going on to Lord’s for
nothing.
The worst was so hopelessly bad that Pocket wished himself nearer the
theatres, and then it was that the terra-cotta pile of Madame Tussaud’s
thrust itself seductively upon his vision. He had not been there for
years. He had often wanted to go again, and go alone. He remembered
being taken by his sister when a little boy at Coverley’s, but she had
refused to go into the Chamber of Horrors, and he had been relieved at
the time but sorry ever afterwards, because so many of the boys of
those days had seen everything and seemed none the worse for the
adventure. It was one of the things he had always wanted not so much to
do as to have done. The very name of the Chamber of Horrors had frozen
his infant blood when he first heard it on the lips of a criminological
governess. On the brink of seventeen there was something of the budding
criminologist about Pocket Upton himself; had not a real murder and
_Henry Dunbar_ formed his staple reading in the train? And yet the boy
had other sensibilities which made him hesitate outside the building,
and enter eventually with quite a nutter under the waistcoat.
A band in fantastic livery was playing away in the marble hall; but
Pocket had no ear for their music, though he was fond enough of a band.
And though history was one of his few strong points at school, the
glittering galaxy of kings and queens appealed to him no more than the
great writers at their little desks and the great cricketers in their
unconvincing flannels. They were waxworks one and all. But when the
extra sixpence had been paid at the inner turnstile, and he had passed
down a dungeon stair into the dim vaults below, his imagination was at
work upon the dreadful faces in the docks before he had brought his
catalogue to bear on one of them.
Here were wretches whose vile deeds had long been familiar to the
schoolboy through a work on his father’s shelves called _Annals of Our
Time_. He recalled bad nights when certain of those annals had kept
him awake long after his attack; and here were the actual monsters, not
scowling and ferocious as he had always pictured them, but far more
horribly demure and plump. Here were immortal malefactors like the
Mannings; here were Rush and Greenacre cheek by jowl, looking as though
they had stepped out of Dickens in their obsolete raiment, looking
anything but what they had been. Some wore the very clothes their quick
bodies had filled; here and there were authentic tools of death, rusty
pistols, phials of poison with the seals still bright, and a smug face
smirking over all in self-conscious infamy. There was not enough of the
waxwork about these creatures; in the poor light, and their own
clothes, and the veritable dock in which many of them had heard their
doom, they looked hideously human and alive. One, a little old man, sat
not in the dock but on the drop itself, the noose dangling in front of
him; and the schoolboy felt sorry for him, for his silver bristles, for
the broad arrows on his poor legs, until he found out who it was. Then
he shuddered. It was Charles Peace. He had first heard of Charles Peace
from the nice governess aforesaid; and here under his nose were the old
ruffian’s revolver, and the strap that strapped it to his wrist, with
the very spectacles he had wiped and worn. The hobbledehoy was almost
as timorously entranced as he had been in infancy by untimely tale of
crime. He stood gloating over the gruesome relics, over ropes which had
hanged men whose trials he had read for himself in later days, and yet
wondering with it all whether he would ever get these things out of his
mind again. They filled it to overflowing. He might have had the horrid
place to himself. Yet he had entered it with much amusement at the
heels of a whole family in deep mourning, a bereaved family drowning
their sorrow in a sea of gore, their pilot through the catalogue a
conscientious orphan with a monotonous voice and a genius for
mis-pronunciation. Pocket had soon ceased to see or hear him or any
other being not made of wax. And it was only when he was trying to
place a nice-looking murderer in a straw hat, who suddenly moved into a
real sightseer like himself, that the unwholesome spell was broken.
Pocket was not sorry to be back in the adulterated sunshine and the
comparatively fresh air of the Marylebone Road. He was ashamed to find
that it was after four o’clock. Guy and Vivian Knaggs would be home
from Westminster in another hour. Still it was no use getting there
before them, and he might as well walk as not; it was pleasant to rub
shoulders with flesh and blood once more, and to look in faces not made
of wax in the devil’s image. His way, which he knew of old, would
naturally have led him past Miss Harbottle’s door; but, as she was only
to be his second string for the night, he preferred not to be seen by
that old lady yet. Such was the tiny spring of an important action; it
led the wanderer into Circus Road and a quite unforeseen temptation.
In the Circus Road there happens to be a highly respectable
pawnbroker’s shop; in the pawnbroker’s window the chances are that you
might still find a motley collection of umbrellas, mandolines, family
Bibles, ornaments and clocks, strings of watches, trays of purses,
opera-glasses, biscuit-boxes, photograph frames and cheap jewellery,
all of which could not tempt you less than they did Pocket Upton the
other June. There were only two things in the window that interested
him at all, and they were not both temptations. One was an old rosewood
camera, and Pocket was interested in cameras old and new; but the thing
that tempted him was a little revolver at five-and-six, with what
looked like a box of cartridges beside it, apparently thrown in for the
price. A revolver to take back to school! A revolver to fire in picked
places on the slow walks with a slow companion which were all the
exercise this unfortunate fellow could take! A revolver and cartridges
complete, so that one could try it now, in no time, with Guy and Vivian
at the end of their garden in St. John’s Wood Park! And all very
likely for five bob if one bargained a bit!
Pocket took out his purse and saw what a hole the expenditure of any
such sum would make. But what was that if it filled a gap in his life?
Of coure it would have been breaking a school rule, but he was prepared
to take the consequences if found out; it need not involve his notion
of dishonour. Still, it must be recorded that the young or old as was
conscientious enough to hesitate before making his fatal plunge into
the pawnbroker’s shop.