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.