The Camera Fiend. E. W. Hornung
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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 [pg 47] 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 [pg 48] 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 [pg 49] 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 [pg 50] 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 [pg 51] 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 [pg 52] 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, [pg 53] 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