BEFORE THE STORM
Sunday in London has got itself a bad name among those who occasionally
spend one at their hotel, and miss the band, their letters, and the
theatre at night; but at Dr. Baumgartner’s there was little to
distinguish the seventh day from the other six. The passover of the
postman, that boon to residents and grievance of the traveller, was a
normal condition in the dingy house of no address. More motor-horns
were heard in the distance, and less heavy traffic; the sound of church
bells came as well through the open windows; then the street-door shut,
and there was a long period without Phillida, until it opened and shut
again, and in she peeped with her parasol and Prayer-book, as though
they were all quite ordinary people without a guilty secret among them!
Such was the Sunday morning. It was fine and warm. Dr. Baumgartner
pottered about his untidy little garden, a sun-trap again as Pocket had
seen it first; the Turk’s head perspired from internal and external
heat, but its rich yellow, shading into richer auburn, clashed rather
with a red geranium which the doctor wore jauntily in the button-hole
of his black alpaca jacket.
It was Phillida who had given him the flower at breakfast. She grew
what she could in the neglected garden; the plants in the miniature
conservatory were also hers, though the doctor took a perfunctory
interest in them, obviously on her account. It was obvious at least to
Pocket Upton. He saw all these things, and what they meant. He was not
without his little gifts of observation and deduction. He noticed the
difference in Baumgartner’s voice when he addressed his niece, the
humane kindling of the inexorable eyes, and to-day he thought he saw a
reciprocal softening on the part of Phillida. There had been none to
see yesterday or the day before. It was her uncle whom the girl had
seemed unable to forgive for the unseemly scuffle of Friday morning.
But now it was as though memory and common fairness had set years of
kindness against these days of unendurable mystery, and bidden her
endure them with a better grace. If she felt she had been disloyal to
him, she could not have made sweeter amends than she did by many an
unobtrusive little office. And she exchanged no more confidences with
poor Pocket.
Yet these two were together most of the day; all three were; and it was
a strangely peaceful day, a day of natural hush, and the cessation of
life’s hostilities, such as is sometimes almost pointedly bestowed
before or after a time of strain. It was a day on which Pocket
certainly drew his spiritual breath more freely than on any other since
the dire catastrophe. There were few fresh clouds; perhaps the only one
before evening was the removal of the book on hallucinations in which
Pocket had become interested on the Saturday afternoon. It was no
longer lying about the room as he had left it. There was a gap in its
place in the shelf. The book had been taken away from him; it made him
feel as though he were back again at his very first dame’s school.
And the church bells sent him back to the school he was at now! They
were more mellow and sedate then the chapel bells there, that rang you
down the hill at the double if you were late and not too asthmatical;
and Pocket saw and heard himself puffing up the opposite hill to take
his place for chapel call-over in the school quad. The fellows would be
forming in squads there now, all in their Sunday tails or Eton jackets
as the case might be; of course Pocket was in tails, though still
rather proud of them. The masters, in their silk hoods or their
rabbit-skins were prominent in his mind’s eye. Then came the cool and
spacious chapel, with its marble pulpit and its brazen candelabra, and
rows of chastened chapel faces, that he knew better than his own,
giving a swing to chants which ran in his head at the very thought. How
real it all was to him, and how unreal this Sunday morning, in the
sunny room with the battle engravings over the book-cases, and the
walnut chairs in front of them, and Dr. Baumgartner in and out in his
alpaca coat! After chapel he would have gone for a walk with Blundell
minor, most probably, or else written his letter home and got it over.
And that chapter would have ended with cold boiled beef and apple-pie
with cloves in it at Spearman’s.
The Italian restaurant which sent in Dr. Baumgartner’s meals certainly
provided richer fare than that. There was a top-floor of soup in the
portable contrivance, and before the meat a risotto, which the doctor
praised without a single patriotic reservation.
“Italy is a country where one can live,” said he. “Not that you must
understand me to be altogether down on your own fatherland, my young
fellow; there is something to be said for London, especially on a
Sunday. No organs from my dear Italy, none of those so-called German
bands which we in Germany would not tolerate for a moment; no postman
every hour of the day, and no gaolbirds crying false news down the
streets.”
Pocket looked for a grim twinkle in the speaker’s eye, but found it
fixed on Phillida, who had not looked up. Instinct prompted Pocket to
say something quickly; that he had not seen a postman there, was the
actual remark.
“That is because I conduct my correspondence at my club,” explained the
doctor. “I give out no other address; then you only get your letters
when you want them.”
“Do you often go there?” the boy ventured to inquire, devoutly wishing
he would go that afternoon.
“Not when I have visitors,” replied Baumgartner, with a smiling bow.
“And I look upon my patients in that light,” he added, with benevolent
but futile hypocrisy, embarrassing enough to Phillida, but not more so
than if she had still believed it to be the truth.
Silence ensued until they were all in the other room; then the niece
took refuge at her piano, and this time Pocket hung over her for an
hour or more. He went through her music, and asked for everything that
Lettice played or sang. Phillida would not sing to him, but she had the
makings of a pianist. The boy’s enthusiasm for the things he knew made
her play then as well as ever he had heard them played. Even the
doctor, dozing in the big chair with eyes that were never quite shut,
murmured his approval more than once; he loved his Mendelssohn and
Schubert, and had nothing to say against the Sousas and others that the
boy picked out as well, and mentioned with ingenuous fervour in the
same breath. Pocket would have sung himself if the doctor had not been
there, for he had a bit of a voice when he was free from asthma; and
once or twice he stopped listening to wonder at himself. Could he be
the boy who had killed a man, however innocently, three days before!
Could it be he whom the police might come and carry off to prison at
any moment? Was it true that he might never see his own people any
more? Such questions appalled and stunned him; he could neither answer
them nor realise their full import. They turned the old man in the
chair, who alone could answer them, back into the goblin he had seemed
at first. Yet they did give a certain shameful zest and excitement even
to this quiet hour of motley music in his presence.
Besides, there was always one comfort to remember now: his letter home.
Of course Lettice would show it to their father; of course something
would be done at once. Shame and sorrow for the accident would be his
for ever; but as for his present situation, there were moments when
Pocket felt rather like a story-book cabin-boy luxuriously marooned,
and already in communication with the mainland.
He wondered what steps had been taken so far. No doubt his father had
come straight up to town; it was a moving thought that he might be
within a mile of that very room at that very moment. Would all the
known circumstances of his disappearance be published broadcast in the
papers? Pocket felt he would have red ears all his life if that were
done; and yet it had hurt him a little to gather from Baumgartner that
so far there was nothing in the papers to say he had so much as
disappeared. That fact must have been known since Thursday or Friday.
Once it did cross his mind that to keep it from his mother they would
have to keep it out of the papers. Well, as long as she did not know!
He pictured the blinds down in her room; it was the hour of her
afternoon rest. If he were at home, he would be going about quietly.
Lettice would be reading or writing in the morning-room, most
probably. Father would be gloating over his rhododendrons with a strong
cigar; in his last letter the boy had heard how beautiful they were.
Horace might be with him, smoking a cigarette, if he and Fred were not
playing tennis. Their pocket edition had not to look very far ahead to
see himself smoking proper cigarettes with the others, to hear his own
voice telling them of his own experience—of this very hour at Dr.
Baumgartner’s. Even Fred and Horace would have to listen to that!
Pocket looked at the long lean figure in the chair, at the eyelids
never quite closed, and so imparting at once a softening and a sinister
effect. He noted the drooping geranium in his buttonhole, and grey ash
from the Turk’s head sprinkling the black alpaca coat. It brought the
very phrases of a graphic portrait almost to his lips.
Yet if anybody had told the boy he was beginning to gloat over the
silver lining to the cloud that he was under, and that it was not
silver at all but one of the baser metals of the human heart, how
indignantly he would have denied it at first, how humbly seen it in the
end!
When Phillida went off to make the tea her uncle sought his room and
sponge, but did not neglect to take Pocket with him. Pocket was for
going higher up to his own room; but Baumgartner said that would only
make more work, in a tone precluding argument. It struck Pocket that
the doctor really needed sleep, and was irritable after a continuous
struggle against it. If so, it served him right for not trusting a
fellow—and for putting Boismont in the waste-paper basket, by Jove!
There was no mistaking the red book there; it was one of the first
things Pocket noticed, while the doctor was stooping over his basin in
the opposite corner; and the schoolboy’s strongest point, be it
remembered, was a stubborn tenacity of his own devices. He made a dive
at the waste-paper basket, meaning to ask afterwards if the doctor
minded his reading that book. But the question never was asked; the
book was still in the basket when the doctor had finished drying his
face; and the boy was staring and swaying as though he had seen the
dead.
“Why, what’s the matter with my young fellow?” inquired Baumgartner,
solicitously.
“Nothing! I’ll be all right soon,” muttered Pocket, wiping his forehead
and then his hand.
“You look faint. Here’s my sponge. No, lie flat down there first!”
But Pocket was not going to lie down on that bed.
“I do feel seedy,” he said, in a stronger voice with a new note in it,
“but I’m not going to faint. I’m quite well able to go upstairs. I’d
rather lie down on my own bed, if you don’t mind.”
His own bed! The irony struck him even as he said the words. He was
none the less glad to sit down on it; and so sitting he made his first
close examination of two or three tiny squares of paper which he had
picked out of the basket in the doctor’s room instead of Boismont’s
book on hallucinations. There had been no hallucination about those
scraps of paper; they were fragments of the boy’s own letter to his
sister, which Dr. Baumgartner had never posted at all.