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.
Sharp to the left, at the end of the passage, was a door which would
simply have been a second way into the drawing-room had the double
doors within been is use; these being shut, the space behind made a
separate chamber which again reminded the schoolboy of his study, that
smallest of small rooms. This one was as narrow, only twice the length.
One end was monopolised by the door that admitted them, the other by a
window from floor to ceiling. And this window was in two great sheets
of ruby glass, so that Pocket looked down red-hot iron steps into a
crimson garden, and therefrom to his companion dyed from head to foot
like Mephistopheles.
“This is something like a dark-room!” exclaimed the lad as the door was
shut and locked behind him. The folding doors were permanently barred
by shelves and lockers; opposite was a long porcelain trough, pink as
the doctor’s shirt-sleeves in the strong red light; racks of negatives
and stoppered bottles glimmered over brass taps stained to an angry
copper.
Everything was perfection from a photographer’s standpoint; the boy
felt instantaneously spoilt for his darkened study and his jugs of
water. All he had ever sighed for in the prosecution of his hobby was
here in this little paradise of order and equipment. The actual work,
he felt, would be a secondary consideration in such a workshop; the
mere manipulation of such stoppered bottles as his host was handling
now, the choice of graduated phials, the wealth of trays and dishes,
would have been joy enough for him. He watched the favoured operator
with a watering mouth. A crimson blind had been lowered to reduce the
light; the doctor had turned up his shirt-cuffs; his wrists were
muscular and furry, as it now seemed with a fiery fur, yet they
trembled with excitement as he produced his plate. And Pocket
remembered how extravagant an image was expected on that plain pink
surface.
He did not know whether to expect it or not himself. It was difficult
to believe in that sort of thing, difficult to disbelieve in this sort
of man, who entertained no shadow of doubt himself, whose excitement
and suspense were as infectious as everything else about him. Pocket
had come into the dark-room wheezing almost as much as ever; he was not
to be heard breathing as the plate was rocked to and fro as in
raspberry-juice, and gradually the sky showed sharp and black. But the
sky it was that puzzled Pocket first. It was broken by perpendicular
objects like white torpedoes. He was photographer enough to know what
these were almost at once; they were those poplars in the park. But how
could Baumgartner have photographed Pocket with those poplars behind
him when they had been behind Baumgartner all the time?
Pocket said to himself, “Where am I, by the way?” and bent lower to
see. His ear touched the doctor’s; it heard the doctor breathing as
though he were the asthmatic; and now a human shape was visible, but
not walking in its sleep, lying in it like the man in the wet grass.
“When did you get me?” asked Pocket aloud. But the tense crimson face
paid no attention; in the ruby light it was glistening as though with
beads of blood.
“There! there! there!” croaked a voice, husky and yet staccato. Pocket
could scarcely believe it was the voice of his host—the one gentle
thing about him. “You saw the figure? Surely you saw something else,
hovering over it? I did, I swear I did! But now we shall have to wait.”
The plate had blackened all over, as though the uncanny thing had
choked out its life. It was meticulously held under a tap, between
fingers that most distinctly trembled now. Then he plunged it in the
hyposulphite, and pulled up the blind. The sun shone again through the
tall window, blood-red as before; grass and sky were as richly
incarnadined. Baumgartner babbled while he waited for the fixing-bath
to clear the plate. The chance of his life, he still pronounced it.
“And I owe it to you, my young fellow!” This he said again and again,
aloud but chiefly to himself. He picked up the plate at last and held
it to the flaming window. He cried out in German to himself, a cry the
schoolboy never forgot.
“Open the window!” he ordered. “It opens like a door.”
Pocket did as he was told. The pure white sunlight struck him
momentarily blind. Baumgartner had the plate under the tap again.
Pocket thought him careless with it, thought the tap on too full; it
was held up an instant to the naked sun, and then dashed to a hundred
fragments in the porcelain trough.
Pocket knew better than to ask a question. He followed his leader back
into the drawing-room, and watched him pick up his coat. It might have
been a minute before their eyes met again; the doctor’s were calm and
cold and critical as in the earlier morning. It was another failure, he
said, and nothing more. Breakfast would be ready soon; they would go
upstairs; and if his young fellow felt equal to a warm bath, he thought
as a physician it might do him good.