THE SECRET OF THE CAMERA
The camera had been placed upon a folded newspaper, for the better
preservation of the hotel table-cloth. Its apertures were still choked
with mud; beads of slime kept breaking out along the joints. And
Phillida was still explaining to Pocket how the thing had come into her
possession.
“The rain was the greatest piece of luck, though another big slice was
an iron gangway to the foreshore about a hundred yards up-stream. It
was coming down so hard at the time that I couldn’t see another
creature out in it except myself. I don’t believe a single soul saw me
run down that gangway and up again; but I dropped my purse over first
for an excuse if anybody did. I popped the camera under my waterproof,
and carried it up to the King’s Road before I could get a cab. But I
never expected to find you awake and about again; next to the rain
that’s the best luck of all!”
“Why?”
“Because you know all about photography and I don’t. Suppose he took a
last photograph, and suppose that led directly to the murder!”
“That’s an idea.”
“The man threw the camera into the river, but the plate would be in it
still, and you could develop it!”
The ingenious hypothesis had appealed to the eager credulity of the
boy; but at the final proposition he shook a reluctant head.
“I’m afraid there’s not much chance of there being anything to develop;
the slide’s been open all this time, you see.”
“I know. I tried to shut it, but the wood must have swollen in the
water. Yet the more it has swollen, the better it ought to keep out the
light, oughtn’t it?”
“I’m afraid there isn’t a dog’s chance,” he murmured, as he handled the
camera again. Yet it was not of the folding-bellows variety, but was
one of the earlier and stronger models in box form, and it had come
through its ordeal wonderfully on the whole. Nothing was absolutely
broken; but the swollen slide jammed obstinately, until in trying to
shut it by main force, Pocket lost his grip of the slimy apparatus, and
sent it flying to the floor, all but the slide which came out bodily in
his hand.
“That settles it,” remarked Phillida, resignedly. The exposed plate
stared them in the face, a sickly yellow in the broad daylight. It was
cracked across the middle, but almost dry and otherwise uninjured.
“I am sorry!” exclaimed Pocket, as they stood over the blank sheet of
glass and gelatine; it was like looking at a slate from which some
infinitely precious message had been expunged unread. “I’m not sure
that you weren’t right after all; what’s water-tight must be more or
less light-tight, when you come to think of it. I say, what’s all this?
The other side oughtn’t to bulge like that!”
He picked the broken plate out of the side that was already open, and
weighed the slide in his hand; it was not heavy enough to contain
another plate, he declared with expert conviction; yet the side which
had not been opened was a slightly bulging but distinctly noticeable
convexity. Pocket opened it at a word from Phillida, and an over-folded
packet of MS. leapt out.
“It’s his writing!” cried the girl, with pain and awe in her
excitement. She had dropped the document at once.
“It’s in English,” said Pocket, picking it up.
“It must be what he was writing all last night!”
“It is.”
“You see what it is!” urged Phillida, feebly. But she watched him
closely as he read to himself:—
“_June_ 20, 190—.”
“It is a grim coincidence that I should sit down to reveal the secret
of my latter days on what is supposed to be the shortest night of the
year; for they must come to an end at sunrise, viz., at 3.44 according
to the almanac, and it is already after 10 p.m. Even if I sit at my
task till four I shall have less than six hours in which to do justice
to the great _ambition_ and the crowning folly of my life. I used the
underlined word advisedly; some would substitute ‘monomania,’ but I
protest I am as sane as they are, fail as I may to demonstrate that
fact among so many others to be dealt with in the very limited time at
my disposal. Had I more time, or the pen of a readier writer, I should
feel surer of vindicating my head if not my heart. But I have been ever
deliberate in all things (excepting, certainly, the supreme folly
already mentioned), and I would be as deliberate over the last words I
shall ever write, as in my final preparations for death——”.
“What is it?” asked Phillida, for his eyes had dilated as he read, and
he was breathing hard.
“He practically says he was going to commit suicide at daybreak! He’s
said so once already, but now he says it in so many words!”
“Well, we know he didn’t do it,” said Phillida, as though she found a
crumb of comfort in the thought.
“I’m not so sure about that.”
“Go on reading it aloud. I can bear it if that’s the worst.”
“But it isn’t, Phillida. I can see it isn’t!”
“Then let us read it together. I’d rather face it with you than
afterwards all by myself. We’ve seen each other through so much, surely
we can—surely——”
Her words were swept away in a torrent of tears, and it was with dim
eyes but a palpitating heart that Pocket looked upon the forlorn drab
figure of the slip of a girl; for as yet, despite her pretext to Mr.
Upton, she had taken no thought for her mourning, that unfailing
distraction to the normally bereaved, but had put on anything she could
find of a neutral tint; and yet it was just her dear disdain of
appearance, the intimate tears gathering in her great eyes, unchecked,
and streaming down the fresh young face, the very shabbiness of her
coat and skirt, that made her what she was in his sight. Outside, the
rain had stopped, and Trafalgar Square was drying in the sun, that
streamed in through the open window of the hotel sitting-room, and
poured its warm blessing on the two young heads bent as one over the
dreadful document.
This was the part they read together, now in silence, now one and now
the other whispering a few sentences aloud:—.
“What I have called my life’s ambition demands but little explanation
here. I have never made any secret of it, but, on the contrary, I have
given full and frank expression to my theories in places where they are
still accessible to the curious. I refer to my signed articles on
spirit photography in _Light Human Nature_, _The Occult Review_ and
other periodicals, but particularly to the paper entitled ‘The Flight
of the Soul,’ in _The Nineteenth Century and After_ for January of last
year. The latter article contains my last published word on the matter
which has so long engrossed my mind. It took me some months to prepare
and to write, and its reception did much to drive me to the extreme
measures I have since employed. Treated to a modicum of serious
criticism by the scientific press, but more generally received with
ignorant and intolerant derision, which is the Englishman’s attitude
towards whatsoever is without his own contracted ken, my article, the
work of months, was dismissed and forgotten in a few days. I had
essayed the stupendous feat of awaking the British nation to a new
idea, and the British nation had responded with a characteristic snore
of unfathomable indifference. My name has not appeared in its vermin
press from that day to this; it was not mentioned in the paragraph
about the psychic photographer which went the rounds about a year ago.
Yet I was that photographer. I am the serious and accredited inquirer
to whom the London hospitals refused admittance to their pauper
deathbeds, thronged though those notoriously are by the raw material of
the British medical profession. Begin at the bottom of the British
medical ladder, and you are afforded the earliest and most frequent
opportunities of studying (if not accelerating) the phenomena of human
dissolution; but against the foreign scientist the door is closed,
without reference either to the quality of his credentials or the
purity of his aims. I can conceive no purer and no loftier aim than
mine. It is as high above that of your ordinary physician as heaven
itself is high above this earth. Your physician wrestles with death to
lengthen life, whereas I would sacrifice a million lives to prove that
there is no such thing as death; that this human life of ours, by which
we set such childish store, is but a fleeting phase of the permanent
life of the spirit. One shrinks from setting down so trite a truism; it
is the common ground of all religion, but I have reached it from the
opposite pole. Religion is to me the unworthy triumph of instinct over
knowledge, a lazy substitution of invention for discovery. Religion
invites us to take her postulates on trust; but a material age is
deserving of material proofs, and it is these proofs I have striven to
supply. Surely it is a higher aim, and not a lower, to appeal to the
senses that cannot deceive, rather than to the imagination which must
and does? But I am trenching after all upon ground which I myself have
covered before to-day; it is my function to-night to relate a personal
narrative rather than to reiterate personal views. Suffice it that to
me, for many years, the only path to the Invisible has been the path of
so-called spiritualism; the only lamp that illumined that path, so that
all who saw might follow it for themselves, the lamp of spirit
photography. It is a path with a bad name, a path infested with quacks
and charlatans, and by false guides who rival the religious fanatics in
the impudence of their appeal to man’s credulity. Even those who bear
the lamp I hold aloft are too often jugglers and rogues, to whose
wiles, unfortunately, the simple science of photography lends itself
all too readily. Nothing is easier than the production of impossible
pictures by a little manipulation of film or plate; if the spiritual
apparition is not to be enticed within range of the lens, nothing
easier than to fabricate an approximate effect. And what spiritualist
has yet succeeded in summoning spirits at will? It is the crux of the
whole problem of spiritualism, to establish any sort or form of
communication with disembodied spirits at the single will of the
embodied; hence the periodical exposure of the paid medium, the smug
scorn of the unbeliever, and the discouragement of genuine exploration
beyond the environment of the flesh. There is one moment, and only one,
at which a man may be sure that he stands, for however brief a particle
of time, in the presence of a disembodied soul. It is the moment at
which soul and body part company in what men call death. The human
watcher sees merely the collapse of the human envelope; but many a
phenomenon invisible to the human eye has been detected and depicted by
that of the camera, as everybody knows who has the slightest
acquaintance with the branch of physics known as ‘fluorescence.’ The
invisible spirit of man surely falls within this category. To the
crystal eye of science it is not so much invisible as elusive and
intractable. Once it has fled this earth, the sovereign opportunity is
gone; but photography may often intercept the actual flight of the
soul.”
“I say no more than ‘often’ because there are special difficulties into
which I need not enter here; but they would disappear, or at least be
minimised, if the practice received the encouragement it deserves,
instead of the forbidding ban of a sentimental generation. It would
hurt nobody; it would comfort and convince the millions who at present
have only their Churches’ word for the existence of an eternal soul in
their perishable bodies. It would prove more, in the course of a few
experiments, than all the Churches have proved between them in nineteen
centuries. Yet how are my earnest applications received, in hospitals
where men die daily, in prisons where they are still occasionally put
to death? I am refused, rebuffed, gratuitously reprimanded; in fact, I
am driven ultimately to the extreme course of taking human life, on my
own account, in order to prove the life eternal. Call it murder, call
it what you will; in a civilisation which will not hear of a lethal
chamber for congenital imbeciles it would be waste of time to urge the
inutility of a life as an excuse for taking it, or the misery of an
individual as a reason for sending him to a world which cannot use him
worse than this world. I can only say that I have not deprived the
State of one conceivably profitable servant, or cut short a single life
of promise or repute. I have picked my few victims with infinite care
from amid the moral or material wreckage of life; either they had
nothing to live for, or they had no right to live. Charlton, the
licensed messenger, had less to live for than any man I ever knew; in
the course of our brief acquaintance he frequently told me how he
wished he was dead. I came across him in Kensington, outside a house to
which an unseemly fracas had attracted my attention as I passed.
Charlton had just been ejected for being drunk and insolent, and
refusing to leave without an extra sixpence. I befriended him. He was
indeed saturated with alcohol and honeycombed with disease; repulsive
in appearance, and cantankerous in character, his earnings were so
slender that he was pitifully clad, and without a night’s lodging
oftener than not. He had not a friend in the world, and was suffering
from an incurable malady of which the end was certain agony. I resolved
to put him out of his misery, and at the same time to try to photograph
the escape of his soul. A favourable opportunity did not present itself
for some time, during which Charlton subsisted largely on my bounty; at
last one morning I found him asleep on a bench in Holland Walk, and not
another being in sight, and I shot him with a cheap pistol which I had
purchased second-hand for the purpose, and which I left beside him on
the seat. Yet the weapon it was that cast a doubt upon the
authenticity of the suicide, despite my final precaution of stuffing a
number of cartridges into the dead man’s pocket; pot-house associates
came forward to declare that he could never have possessed either the
revolver or its price without their knowledge. Hence the coroner’s
repudiation of the verdict at the inquest. Yet it is to be feared that
the fate of such as poor Charlton excites but little public interest in
its explanation, and that the police themselves never took more than an
academic interest in the case.”
“To me it was a bitter disappointment on other grounds. I had lost very
few seconds between pulling the revolver trigger and pressing the bulb
of my pneumatic shutter; but one had to get back into position for
this, and the fact remains that I was too late. The result may be found
among my negatives. It is dreadfully good of the dead man, if not a
unique photograph of actual death; but it lacks the least trace of the
super-normal. The flight of the soul had been too quick for me; it
would be too quick again unless I hit upon some new method. I had not
only failed to leave convincing evidence of suicide, but the fatal
pause between pistol-shot and snap-shot was due entirely to my
elaborate attempt in that direction. It was not worth making again. The
next case should be a more honest breach of the Sixth Commandment; the
shot to be fired, and the photograph taken, at the same range and all
but at the same instant. There would be no further point in leaving the
weapon behind, so I was free to choose the one best suited to my
purpose, and to adapt it at my leisure to my peculiar needs. Eventually
I evolved the ingenious engine which, no doubt, has already explained
itself better than I could possibly explain it; if not, the discoverer
of the camera need not hesitate to experiment with the pistol, as it
will not be loaded when found.”
There was a brief discussion here. The children could not understand
about the pistol; but only one of them cared what had become of it. For
Phillida it was enough to know that the writer of this shameless
rigmarole, with its pompous periods and its callous gusto, must long
ago have lost his reason. She had no doubt whatever about that, and
already it had brought a new light into her eyes. She would pause to
discuss nothing else. It was her finger that pointed the way through
the next passages.
“The perfection or completion of my device was the secret work of many
weeks; it brings me down almost to the other day, and to what I have
described as the supreme folly of my life. I had everything in
readiness for another attempt to liberate and photograph a human soul
in consecutive fractions of a second. But the right man was never in
the right place at the right time; one saw him by the dozen in a crowd,
but the people one met all by themselves, in the early summer mornings,
stayed one’s hand repeatedly by the eager brightness of their eyes or a
happy elasticity of step. Once an out-patient at the Brompton Hospital,
whom I had dogged all the way down to Richmond Park, was cheated of a
merciful end by dusk falling just as I had him to myself. No; the dawn
and the drunkard were still my best chance. So it was that the wretch
whose name I forget met with his death in Hyde Park last Tuesday
morning. I knew him by sight as a pot-house loafer of the Charlton
circle, but it was quite by chance that I followed his uncertain
footsteps through the Park, and saw him go deliberately to bed in the
drenching dew. His face filled in his tale; it was another farrago of
privation and excess. This was the type that caused me no compunction:
having aimed and focussed at the same time, as my invention provides, I
despatched the poor devil as he lay on his side, with his hat over his
eyes, and exposed my plate as he rolled over on his face. It may be
reckoned an offensive detail, but the click of my instantaneous shutter
coincided with the last clutter in his throat.
“I need hardly say that I had looked about me pretty thoroughly before
firing, and my first act after taking the photograph was to make
another wary survey of the scene. It had the advantage that one could
see a considerable distance in three directions, and in none of these,
neither right nor left along the path, nor yet straight ahead across
the grass on the edge of which my victim lay, was a living creature to
be seen. This was very reassuring, as I felt that I could see a good
deal farther than the report of my small automatic pistol was likely to
be heard; for it is a remarkable feature of most shooting cases,
especially where a pistol has been used, and in the open air, how
seldom it is that a witness can be found who has actually heard the
fatal shot. In the fourth quarter, where there was a bank of shrubbery
behind some iron palings, I looked last, for I was standing with my
back that way. How shall I describe my sensations on turning round?
There was a young lad within a few feet of me, on the other side of the
palings; and this young lad was flourishing a revolver in his right
hand!
“At first I made certain he had seen everything; but his blank and
frank bewilderment was more reassuring at a second glance, and at a
third I guessed what had happened to him. His crumpled clothes were
dank with dew. His eyes were puddles of utter stupefaction. He had
been sleeping in the Park, and walking in his sleep, and in all
probability it was my shot which had brought him to himself; of this,
however, I was less sure, and in my doubt I was disastrously inspired
to accuse him of having fired the shot himself. It never struck me that
he could mistake the body behind me for a living man; it was with a
wild idea of being the first to accuse the other, that I asked him if
he knew what he had done, and seized his revolver at the same moment. I
had the wit to grasp it in my hot hand until the barrel was just warm
enough to help me convince the child that he really had fired the shot;
but, since he could not see it for myself, I was not going out of my
way just then to tell him it was a fatal shot. Already I regretted that
I had gone so far, and yet already I saw myself committed to a course
of action as rash as it was now inevitable. The boy became convulsed
with asthma; I could not leave him there, to tell his story when the
body was discovered, to have it disproved perhaps on the spot, at the
latest on a comparison of bullets, and the truth brought home to me
through his description. Again, when I had taken him to my house, with
all sorts of foolish precautions, and still more foolish risks, I had
to keep him there. How could I let him loose to blurt out his story and
implicate me more readily than ever after what he had seen of me at
home? I had to keep him there—I repeat it—alive or dead. And I was not
the kind of murderer (if I am one at all) to take a young and innocent
life, if I could help it, to preserve my own; on the contrary, I had,
and I hope I always should have had, humanity enough at least to do
what I could for a fellow-creature battling with an attack which almost
threatened to remove him from my path without my aid.”
There followed a few remarks on Pocket’s character as the writer read
it. They were not uncomplimentary to Pocket personally, but they
betrayed a profound disdain for the typically British institution of
which Pocket was too readily accepted as a representative product. His
general ignorance and credulity received a grim tribute; they were the
very qualities the doctor would have demanded in a chosen dupe. Yet he
appeared to have enjoyed the youth’s society, his transparent honesty,
his capacity for enthusiastic interest, whether in the delights of
photography or in the horrors of war. Baumgartner seemed aware that he
had been somewhat confidential on both subjects, and that either his
contempt of human life, or his ambitions in the matter of psychic
photography, would have been better kept to himself; but, on the other
hand, he “greatly doubted whether they taught boys to put two and two
together, at these so-called public schools”; and, after all, it was
not detection by the boy, but through the boy, that he had to fear.
“The madness of keeping him prisoner, as he had been from the
beginning, in spite of all pretences and persuasions to the contrary,
was another thing to which Baumgartner had been thoroughly alive all
along. He had regarded it from the first as ‘the certain beginning of
the end’; from the first, he had been prepared with specious
explanations for any such inquisitor as the one who had actually
arrived no later than the Saturday afternoon. He wrote without elation
of his interview with Thrush, whose name he knew; the doctor had not
been deceived as to the transitory character of his own deception. It
was the same with the letter which he had pretended to post, which
could only have kept the boy quiet for a day or two, if he had posted
it, but which the boy himself had discovered never to have been posted
at all. There was a sufficiently cool description of the desperate mood
into which Baumgartner’s intuition of the boy’s discovery had thrown
him on the Sunday night.”
“It was then,” he wrote, “that I formed a project which I should have
been sorry indeed to carry out, though I should certainly have done so
if he had given me the chance I sought. It must be understood that my
second attempt to photograph the flight of the soul had proved as great
a fiasco as the first. Suddenly I hit upon a perfectly conceivable
(even though it seem a wilfully grotesque) explanation of my failure.
What if the human derelicts I had so far chosen for my experiments had
no souls to photograph? Sodden with drink, debauched, degraded, and
spiritually blurred or blunted to the last degree, these after all were
the least likely subjects to yield results to the spirit photographer.
I should have chosen saints instead of sinners such as these, entities
in which the soul was a major and not a minor factor. I thought of the
saintliest men I knew in London, of some Jesuit Fathers of my
acquaintance, of a ‘light’ specialist I know of who is destroying
himself by inches in the cause of science, of certain missioners in the
slums; but I did not think twice of any one of them; their lives are
much too valuable for me to cut them short on the mere chance of a
compensating benefit to mankind at large. Last, and longest, I thought
of the boy upstairs. I had not meant to sacrifice him; a young life, of
some promise, is only less sacred to me than a mature life rich in
beneficent activities. But this young fellow was going to be my ruin.
I could see it in his eyes. He had found me out about the letter; he
would be the means of my being found out and stopped for ever in the
work of my life. It was his life or mine; it should be his; but I was
not going to take it there in the house, for reasons I need not enter
into here, and I intended to take more than his life while I was about
it. But he never gave me the chance. I did my best to get him to go out
with me this morning. But he refused, as a horse refuses a jump, or a
dog the water. He said he was ill; he looked ill. But I have no doubt
he was well enough to make his escape soon after my back was turned. I
see he has broken into my dark-room for the clothes I took away from
him before I went out; he would scarcely remain after that; but, to
tell the truth, I have hardly given him a thought since my return.”
The readers shuddered over this long paragraph. More than once the boy
broke in with his own impulsive version of the awful moments on the
Sunday night and the Monday morning, in his bedroom at the top of the
doctor’s house. He declared that nothing short of main force would have
dragged him out-of-doors that morning, that he felt it in his bones
that he would never come back alive. Then he would be sorry he had said
so much. It only increased his companion’s anguish. She was reading
every word religiously, with a most painful fascination; it was as
though every word drew blood. There was a brief but terrible account of
the murder of Sir Joseph Schelmerdine outside his own house in Park
Lane. It was the rashest of all the crimes; but, apparently, the one
occasion on which the doctor had disguised himself before hand; and
that only because Sir Joseph and he knew and disliked each other so
intensely that a “straight” interview was out of the question. As it
was he had escaped by a miracle, after lying all day in a straw-loft,
creeping into a carriage at nightfall, and getting out on the wrong
side when it drove round to its house. Baumgartner described the
incident with a callous relish, as perhaps the most exciting in his
long career; he was going on to explain his subsequent return, in
propria persona, and yet by stealth, when he paused in the middle of a
sentence which was never finished. And his statement concluded as
follows, in less careful language and a more flowing hand:—
“I thought the fool had cleared out long ago. The day’s excitement must
have driven him clean out of my head. I never thought of him when I got
back, never till I saw the damage to the darkroom window and missed his
clothes. I didn’t waste two thoughts upon him then. I had my negative
to develop. A magnificent negative it was, too, yet another absolute
failure from the practical point of view, perhaps from the same reason
as its predecessors. South African mines may produce gold and diamonds
(licit and illicit!) but their yield in souls is probably the poorest
to the square mile anywhere on earth. Schelmerdine never had one in his
gross carcass. So there was an end of him, and a good riddance to
rotten clay. I have not thought of him again all night. I have thought
of nothing but this perhaps passionately dispassionate statement that I
have made up my mind to leave behind me. It has given me strange
pleasure to write, a satisfaction which I have no longer the time to
attempt to analyse; all night long my pen has scarcely paused, and I
not conscious of a moment’s weariness of mind, body, or hand. Only
sometimes have I paused to light my pipe. I had made such a pause,
perhaps half an hour ago, when in the terrible stillness of the night I
heard a footstep in the hall. My nerves were somewhat on edge with all
this writing; it might be my imagination. I stole to my door, and as I
opened it the one below shut softly. I waited some time, heard nothing
more, went down with my lamp, and threw open the drawing-room door.
There was my young fellow, not gone at all, but sitting in the dark
with one whose name there is no need to mention. I do not wish to be
misunderstood. It was all innocent enough, even I never doubted that.
But somehow the sight of that boy and girl, sitting there in the dark
without a word, afraid to go to bed—afraid of me—made the blood boil
over in my veins. I could have trampled on that lad, my Jonah whom I
had pictured overboard at last, and I did hurl the lamp at his head. I
am glad it missed him. I am glad he made good his escape while I was
seeing his companion safe upstairs. If I had found him where I left
him, God knows what violence I might not have done him after all. The
boy has good in him, and more courage than he knows himself; again I
say that I am glad he has escaped unscathed. His life was not safe, but
now I shall only take my own.
“Yes! I have made up my mind; it is better than leaving it to the
common hangman of this besotted country. I know what to expect in
enlightened England: either a death unfit for a dog, or existence worse
than death in a criminal lunatic asylum. I prefer my own peculiar
quietus; it has stood on my table all night long, ready and pointed at
my heart; a hand upon the door, a step behind me, and I should have
rolled over dead at their feet. So it will be if even now they are
waiting for me outside; but, if not, I know where to go, where already
it is broad daylight, where the wide open space will quicken and
enhance every ray, and the broad river multiply the sun by a million
facets of living fire. It is not the light that will fail me, there;
and as I have served others, so also will I serve myself, and it may be
with better fortune than they have brought me. Who knows? It would be
in keeping with the poetic ironies of this existence. At all events,
unless waylaid at once, I am giving it a chance. I shall place the
camera on the parapet of the Embankment. I have fitted the shutter with
a specially long pneumatic tube, and the bulb will do its double work
as usual when my fingers relax. I have long had it all in my mind. I
have written full instructions on the envelope which I shall stick by
the flap to the open slide; if we are found by a reasonably intelligent
person, the slide will be shut, and the camera handed over bodily to
the police. They, I think, may be trusted to honour one’s last
instructions, if only out of curiosity; their eyes will be the first to
read what I fear they will describe as my ‘full confession.’ Well, it
is ‘full,’ and the substantive must be left to them. So long as the
document does not fall into one little pair of gentle hands, I shall
lie easy in whatever ignominious grave they lay me. That is why I hide
it where I do: since, if it fell first into those hands, it would never
see the light at all.”
There was a little more, but Phillida suddenly snatched the MS. away,
and wept over the end, bitterly, and yet not altogether in bitterness,
while Pocket picked up the camera and set it back in its place on the
muddy newspaper. Phillida folded up the packet, and after a moment’s
hesitation went away with it, jingling keys in her other hand. On her
return she stood petrified on the threshold.
Pocket was seated at the table, the red bulb of the pneumatic shutter
between his finger and thumb; he pressed the bulb, and there was a loud
metallic snap inside the camera; he released the pressure, and the
shutter snapped like a shutter and nothing else. Phillida came forward
with a cry. Pocket had taken the top off the camera; it was like a box
without the lid, and on the one side there was nothing between the lens
and the grooved carrier for the slide, but on the other there was an
automatic pistol, fixed down with wires, as a wild beast might be
lashed, and its muzzle pointing through the orifice intended for the
second lens of the stereoscopic camera.
Pocket pressed again, and again the mild clash of the shutter was
preceded by the vicious one that would have been an explosion if there
had been another cartridge in the pistol.
“And we never guessed it!” said he. “That’s why he went in for this
sort of double camera, and rigged it up to take both kinds of shot in
quick succession. It’s the cleverest thing I ever heard of in my life.”
He spoke as if it were only clever! Phillida stared at it and him
without a word.
“The cleverest part is the way you aim. I do believe he relied
altogether on that spot about the middle of the focussing screen. I’ve
been trying it against the window, and where that spot comes the
pistol’s pointing every time. It’s a fixed focus, about ten to fifteen
feet, I fancy, and the spot isn’t quite in the middle of the screen,
but just enough to the left to allow. I don’t quite see how the one
bulb works everything, but these springs and things are a bit
confusing. We shan’t understand everything till we take it to pieces.”
“You mean the police won’t!” said Phillida, bitterly.
“The police! I never thought of them.”
“What do you mean to do with this—this infernal machine?” the girl
asked, her voice breaking over the perfectly applicable term.
“What do _you_ mean to do with—the writing?” demanded Pocket in his
turn.
“Burn it! I’ve asked for a fire in my room; it’s locked away
meanwhile.”
“Well, this is yours, too,” said Pocket, deliberately, “to do what you
like with as well.”
“They wouldn’t think so!”
“They’ll never know.”
Phillida shook her head, and not without some scorn. “You couldn’t keep
it to yourself,” she said. “You would _have_ to tell.”
“Well, but not everybody,” said poor Pocket. “Only my father, if you
like!” he added, valiantly.
“Mr. Upton would feel bound to tell.”
“I don’t see that. Didn’t you hear what he said about a man’s secrets
dying with him?”
“He’s so kind! He says that; he said it again to me; but this is the
mystery of the day. It’ll be the talk for months, if not years. And as
yet only you and I, in all the world, have found it out!”
She looked at him so wistfully, so sweetly and sadly and
confidentially, that he would have been either more or less than human
boy if he had failed to see her heart’s desire, and how it was still in
his power to save her the supreme humiliation and distress of sharing
their secret with the world. He made up his mind on the spot; and yet
it was a mind that looked both ways at every turn of affairs, and even
then he saw what he was going to lose. Fred and Horace would not sit
nearly so spellbound as they might have done, would probably back their
penetration of the mystery against his! There would be no boasting
about it in front of the hall fire at school, no breathing it even to
Smith minor out for a walk; no adventure to recount all his days; and
Pocket was one to whom the salt of an adventure would always be its
subsequent recital. But he could “play the game” as well as Horace
himself, when he happened to have no doubt as to the game to play. And
now he had none whatever.
“Phillida, if you wish it, I’ll never breathe a syllable of all this to
a single soul on earth, I don’t care who they are, or what they do to
me!”
He wanted them to put him on the rack that moment.
“Oh, Tony, do you mean it?”
Her eyes had filled.
“Of course I mean it! I’ll swear it more solemnly than I’ve ever sworn
anything in my life so far.”
“No, no! Your word’s enough. Don’t I know what that’s worth, after this
terrible week?”
And she cried again at its hideous memories, so that Pocket turned away
and put the camera together again, and wrapped it up in her waterproof,
so that he might not see her tears.
“I’ll never breathe a single word to a single soul,” he vowed, “except
yourself.”
She caught at that through her tears. He could talk to her about it,
always, as much as ever he liked; it would be a bond between them all
their lives. And not until she said it, to be just to Pocket, did he
think of a reward or look beyond those days.
But what were they to do with a stereoscopic camera containing an
automatic pistol? It was not to be burnt in a grate like a sheaf of MS.
They thought about it for some time with anxious faces; for it was
getting on towards evening now, though the sun was out again, and it
was lighter than the early afternoon; but Mr. Upton might be back any
minute. It was Phillida who at last said she knew. She would not tell
him what she meant to do; but she put on her waterproof again, little
as it was wanted now, and the camera under it as before; and together
they sallied forth into the noisy and crowded Strand.
Pocket did not know where he was, and Phillida would not tell him where
she was going, neither could he question her in that alarming throng.
He felt a frightful sense of guilt and danger, not so much to himself
as to her, with that lethal weapon concealed about her; every man who
looked at them was a detective in his eyes, and past the policemen at
the corners he wanted to run. But they gained the middle of Waterloo
Bridge undetected and ensconced themselves in a recess without creating
a sensation.
“Now, then,” said Phillida, “will you focus Westminster Bridge and the
Houses of Parliament, or shall I?”
There they were before them against the sunset, the long lithe bridge,
the stately towers. But Pocket could not see Phillida’s drift until she
aimed herself, and, aiming, let the square black box slip clean through
her fingers into the depths of the river from which she had only
retrieved it a couple of hours before, as a body is committed to the
deep.
She bewailed her stupidity; he had the wit to echo her then, and in a
loud voice, that any eye-witness or passer-by might be struck with the
genuine severity of their loss. But there had been no eye-witness who
thought it worth while to rally them on the occurrence, and the busy
townsfolk hastening past were all too much engrossed in their own
affairs to take any interest in those of the boy and girl who seemed
themselves in something of a hurry to get back to the Strand.
And in the Strand the first thing they saw was a yellow poster bearing
but four words in enormous black letters:—
CHELSEA INQUEST
CAMERA CLUE!
Phillida slipped her hand within Pocket’s arm. Pocket was man enough to
press it to his side.
THE END
Printed in Great Britain by Wyman & Sons, Ltd., London and Reading