The Camera Fiend

“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.

A LIKELY STORY

At that moment help was as far away as it had been near the day before, when Eugene Thrush was closeted in the doctor's dining-room; for not only had Mr. Upton decamped for Leicestershire, without a word of warning to anybody, on the Saturday afternoon, but Thrush himself had followed by the only Sunday train.

A bell was ringing for evening service when he landed in a market town which reversed the natural order by dozing all summer and waking up for the hunting season. And now the famous grass country was lying in its beauty-sleep, under a gay counterpane of buttercups and daisies, and leafy coverts, with but one blot in the sky-line, in the shape of a permanent plume of sluggish smoke. But the works lay hidden, and the hall came first; and Thrush, having ascertained that this was it, abandoned the decrepit vessel he had boarded at the station, and entered the grounds on foot.

A tall girl, pacing the walks with a terribly anxious face, was encountered and accosted before he reached the house.

“I believe Mr. Upton lives here. Can you tell me if he's at home? I want to see him about something.”

Lettice flushed and shrank.

“I know who you are! Have you found my brother?”

“No; not yet,” said Thrush, after a pause. “But you take my breath away, my dear young lady! How could you be so sure of me? Is it no longer to be kept a secret, and is that why your father bolted out of town without a word?”

“It's still a secret,” whispered Lettice, as though the shrubs had ears, “only I'm in it. Nobody else is – nobody fresh – but I guessed, and my mother was beginning to suspect. My father never stays away a Sunday unless he's out of England altogether; she couldn't understand it, and was worrying so about him that I wired begging him to come back if only for the night. So it's all my fault, Mr. Thrush; and I know everything but what you've come down to tell us!”

“That's next to nothing,” he shrugged. “It's neither good nor bad. But if you can find your father I'll tell you both exactly what I have found out.”

In common with all his sex, he liked and trusted Lettice at sight, without bestowing on her a passing thought as a person capable of provoking any warmer feeling. She was the perfect sister – that he felt as instinctively as everybody else – and a woman to trust into the bargain. It would be cruel and quite unnecessary to hide anything from that fine and unselfish face. So he let her lead him to a little artificial cave, lined and pungent with pitch-pine, over against the rhododendrons, while she went to fetch her father quietly from the house.

The ironmaster amplified the excuses already made for him; he had rushed for the first train after getting his daughter's telegram, leaving but a line for Thrush with his telephone number, in the hopes that he would use it whether he had anything to report or not.

“As you didn't,” added Mr. Upton, in a still aggrieved voice, “I've been trying again and again to ring you up instead; but of course you were never there, nor your man Mullins either. I was coming back by the last train, however, and should have been with you late to-night.”

“Did you leave the motor behind?”

“Yes; it'll be there to meet me at St. Pancras.”

“It may have to do more than that,” said Thrush, spreading his full breadth on the pitch-pine seat. “I've found out something; how much or how little it's too soon to tell; but I wasn't going to discuss it through a dozen country exchanges as long as you wanted the thing a dead secret, Mr. Upton, and that's why I didn't ring you up. As for your last train, I'd have waited to meet it in town, only that wouldn't have given me time to say what I've got to say before one or other of us may have to rush off somewhere else by another last train.”

“Do for God's sake say what you've got to say!” cried Mr. Upton.

“Well, I've seen a man who thinks he may have seen the boy!”

“Alive?”

“And perfectly well – but for his asthma – on Thursday.”

The ironmaster thanked God in a dreadful voice; it was Lettice who calmed him, not he her. Her eyes only shone a little, but his were blinded by the first ray of light.

“Where was it?” he asked, when he could ask anything.

“I'll tell you in a minute. I want first to be convinced that it really was your son. Did the boy take any special interest in Australia?”

“Rather!” cried Lettice, the sister of three boys.

“What kind of interest?”

“He wanted to go out there. It had just been talked about.” She looked at her father. “I wouldn't let him go,” he said. “Why?”

“I want to know just how it came to be talked about.”

“A fool of a doctor in town recommended it.”

Lettice winced, but Thrush nodded as though that tallied.

“Did he recommend any particular vessel?”

“Yes, a sailing ship – the Seringapatam — an old East Indiaman they've turned into a kind of floating hospital. I wouldn't hear of the beastly tub.”

“Do you know when she was to sail?”

“I did know,” said Lettice. “I believe it was just about now.”

“She sailed yesterday,” said Thrush, impressively; “and your brother, if it was your brother, talked a good deal about her to this man. He told him all about your having always been in favour of it, Miss Upton, and his father not. I'm bound to say it sounds as though it may have been the boy.”

Thrush seemed to be keeping something back; but the prime and absorbing question of identity prevented the others from noticing this.

“It must have been!” cried Mr. Upton. “Who was the man, and where exactly did he see him?”

“First on Thursday morning, and last on Thursday night. But perhaps I'd better tell you about my informant, since we've only his word for Thursday, and only his suspicions as to what has happened since. In the first place he's a semi-public man, though I don't suppose you know his name. It's Baumgartner – Dr. Otto Baumgartner – a German scientist of some distinction.”

The ironmaster made a remark which did him little credit, and Thrush continued with some pride: “There was some luck in it, of course, for he was the very first man I struck who'd bought d'Auvergne Cigarettes since Wednesday; but I was on his doorstep well within twenty-four hours of hearing that your son was missing; and you may chalk that up to A. V. M.! I might have been with him some hours sooner still, but I preferred to spend them getting to know something about my man. I tried his nearest shops; perfect mines! One was a chemist, who didn't know him by sight, and had never heard of the cigarettes, but remembered being asked for them by an elderly gentleman last Thursday morning! That absolutely confirmed my first suspicion that Baumgartner himself was not the asthmatic; if he had been, the nearest chemist would have known all about him. Yet he had gone to the nearest chemist first!”

“The nearest butcher was next door; but he was so short about Baumgartner that I scented a true-green vegetarian. It was a false scent, Mr. Upton; not to mention the baker and the candlestick-maker, there's a little restaurant in the same row, which was about the fifth place where I began by asking if they knew where a Dr. Baumgartner lived in that neighbourhood. The little Italian boss was all over me on the spot! The worthy doctor proved to be his most regular customer, having all his meals sent in hot from the restaurant in quite the Italian manner. I don't suppose you see how very valuable this was to me. Germans love Italy, the little man explained; but I said that was the one point on which I should never yield to Germany – and I thought I was going to be kissed across the counter! It seems the good doctor lives alone with his niece (not always even her), and keeps no servants and never entertains. Yet on Friday, for the first time since the arrangement was made, the old chap went to the restaurant himself to complain of short commons; there had not been enough for them to eat on the Thursday night!”

“Had they been alone?” asked Mr. Upton, with a puzzled face.

“That's the whole point! My little Florentine understood they were, but I deduced one extra, and then conceived a course that may astonish you. It was the bold course; but it nearly always pays. I lunched at my leisure (an excellent Chianti my little friend keeps) and afterwards went round and saw the doctor himself. The niece opened the door – I wish I'd seen more of her – but she fetched her uncle at once and I begged for an interview on an urgent matter. He consented in a way that, I must say, impressed me very favourably; and the moment we were alone I said, ‘I want to know, Doctor, who you bought those asthma cigarettes for last Thursday!’ ”

“That took him aback, but not unduly; so then I added, ‘I'm an inquiry agent with a very delicate case in hand, and if you'll tell me it may solve at heart-breaking a mystery as I've ever handled.’ Is was treating him like a gentleman, but I believe in that; there's no shorter cut to whether a man is one or not.”

“Well, his face had lit up, and a very fine face it is; it hadn't blackened for the fifth of a second; but I had a disappointment in store. ‘I'd tell you his name with all my heart,’ he said, ‘only I don't really know it myself. He said it was John Green – but his handkerchiefs were marked “A. A. U.” ’ ”

“Tony's initials!” cried Tony's father.

“But it never was Tony under a false name,” his sister vowed. “That settles it for me, Mr. Thrush.”

“Not even if he'd got into some scrape or adventure, Miss Upton?”

“He would never give a name that wasn't his.”

“Suppose he felt he had disgraced his name?”

“My brother Tony wouldn't do it!”

“He might feel he had?”

“He might,” the father agreed, “even if he'd done no such thing; in fact, he's just the kind of boy who would take an exaggerated view of some things.” His mind went back to his last talk with Horace on the subject.

“Or he might feel he was about to do something, shall we say, unworthy of you all?” Thrush made the suggestion with much delicacy.

“Then I don't think he'd do it,” declared loyal Lettice.

“Let us hear what you think he did,” said Mr. Upton.

“It's not what I think; it's what this man Baumgartner thinks, and his story that you ought to hear.”

And that which they now heard at second-hand was in fact a wonderfully true version – up to a point – of poor Pocket's condition and adventures – with the sleep-walking and the shooting left out – from the early morning of his meeting with Baumgartner until the late afternoon of that day.

Baumgartner had actually described the boy's long sleep in his chair; it was with the conversation when he awoke that the creative work began in earnest.

“That's a good man!” said Mr. Upton, with unimaginable irony. “I'd like to take him by the hand – and those infernal Knaggses by the scruff of their dirty necks – and that old hag Harbottle by the hair!”

“I think of dear darling Tony,” said Lettice, in acute distress; “lying out all night with asthma – it was enough to kill him – or to send him out of his mind.”

“I wonder if it could have done that,” remarked Thrush, in a tone of serious speculation which he was instantly called upon to explain.

“What are you keeping back?” cried Lettice, the first to see that he had been keeping something all this time.

“Only something he'd kept back from them,” replied Thrush, with just a little less than his usual aplomb. “It was a surprise he sprang on them after waking; it will probably surprise you still more, Mr. Upton. You may not believe it. I'm not certain that I do myself. In the morning he had spoken of the Australian voyage as though you'd opposed it, but withdrawn your opposition – one moment, if you don't mind! In the evening he suddenly explained that he was actually sailing in the Seringapatam, that his baggage was already on board, and he must get aboard himself that night!”

“I don't believe it, Thrush.”

“No more do I, father, for a single instant. Tony, of all people!”

Thrush looked from one to the other with a somewhat disingenuous eye. “I don't say I altogether accept it myself; that's why I kept it to the end,” he explained. “But we must balance the possibilities against the improbabilities, never losing sight of the one incontestable fact that the boy has undoubtedly disappeared. And here's a man, a well-known man, who makes no secret of the fact that he found him wandering in the Park, in the early morning, breathless and dazed, and drove him home to his own house, where the boy spent the day; they took a hansom, the doctor tells me, than which no statement is more quickly and easily checked. Are we to believe this apparently unimpeachable and disinterested witness, or are we not? He was most explicit about everything, offering to show me exactly where he found the boy, and never the least bit vague or unsatisfactory in any way. If you are prepared to believe him, if only for the sake of argument, you may care to hear Dr. Baumgartner's theory as to what has happened.”

Lettice shook her head in scorn, but Mr. Upton observed, “Well, we may as well hear what the fellow had to say to you; we must be grateful to him for taking pity on our boy, and he was the last who saw him; he may have seen something that we shouldn't guess.”

“Exactly!” exclaimed Eugene Thrush; “he saw, or at any rate he now thinks he saw, enough to build up a pretty definite theory on the foundation of fact supplied by me. He didn't know the boy had come up to see a doctor and been refused a lodging for the night; he understood he had come up to join his ship, and suspected he had been on a sort of mild spree – if Miss Upton will forgive me!” And he turned deferential lenses on the indignant girl.

“I don't forgive the suggestion,” said she; “but it isn't yours, Mr. Thrush, so please go on.”

“It's an idea that Dr. Baumgartner continues to hold in spite of all I was able to tell him, and we mustn't forget, as Mr. Upton says, that he was the last to see your brother. Briefly, he believes the boy did meet with some misadventure that night in town; that he had been ill-treated or intimidated by some unscrupulous person or persons; perhaps threatened with blackmail; at any rate imbued with the conviction that he is not more sinned against than sinning. That, I think, is only what one expects of these very conscientious characters, particularly in youth; he was taking something or somebody a thousandfold more seriously than a grown man would have done. Afraid to go back to school for fear of expulsion, ashamed to show his face at home! What's to be done? He thinks of the ship about to sail, the ship he hoped to sail in, and in his desperation he determines to sail in her still – even if he has to stow away!”

“My God!” cried Mr. Upton, “he's just the one to think of it. His head was full of those trashy adventure stories!”

But Lettice shook hers quietly.

“To think of it, but not to do it,” said she, with a quiet conviction that rather nettled Mr. Thrush.

“But really, Miss Upton, he must have done something, you know! And he actually talked to Dr. Baumgartner about this; not of doing it himself, but of stowaways in general, à propos of his voyage; and how many pounds of biscuit and how many ounces of water would carry one alive into blue water. There's another thing, by the way! He told Baumgartner the ship touched nowhere between the East India Docks and Melbourne; he would be out of the world for three whole months.”

“And she only sailed yesterday?” cried Mr. Upton, coming furiously to his feet. “And you let her get through the Straits of Dover and out to sea while you came down here to tell me this by inches?”

Thrush blinked blandly through his port-hole glasses.

“I'm letting her go as far as Plymouth,” said he, “where one or both of us will board her tomorrow if she's up to time!”

“You said she didn't touch anywhere between the docks and Melbourne?”

“No; your son said that, Mr. Upton, and it was his one mistake. They don't usually touch, but a son of one of the owners happens to have gone round in the ship to Plymouth for the trip. I got it first from an old boatswain of the line who's caretaker at the office, and the only man there, of course, yesterday afternoon; but I've since bearded one of the partners at his place down the river, and had the statement confirmed and amplified. One or two pasengers are only going aboard at Plymouth, so she certainly won't sail again before to-morrow noon, even if she's there by then. You will be in ample time to board her – and I've got a sort of search-warrant from the partner I saw – if you go down by the 12.15 from Paddington to-night.”

The ironmaster asked no more questions; that was good enough for him, he said, and went off to tell a last lie to his wife, with the increasing confidence of one gradually mastering the difficulties of an uncongenial game. He felt also that a happy issue was in sight, and after that he could tell the truth and liberate his soul. He was pathetically sanguine of the solution vicariously propounded by Eugene Thrush, and prepared to rejoice in a discovery which would have filled him with dismay and chagrin if he had not been subconsciously prepared for something worse. It never occurred to Mr. Upton to question the man's own belief in the theory he had advanced; but Lettice did so the moment she had the visitor to herself in the smoking-room, where it fell to her to do certain honours vice Horace, luckily engaged at the works. “And do you believe this astounding theory, Mr. Thrush?”