The Camera Fiend. E. W. Hornung
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in murderously close formation, others the storming of heights and villages.
Baumgartner met his visitor's eyes with the faint cold smile that scarcely softened the hoary harshness of his visage.
“I was present at some of those engagements,” said he. “They were not worse than disarming a man who has just fired a revolver in his sleep!”
He flung his cloak upon one of the walnut chairs, and Pocket heard the pistol inside it rattle against the back; but his attention was distracted before he had time to resent the forgotten fact of its forcible confiscation. Under his cloak the doctor had been carrying all this time, slung by a strap which the boy had noticed across his chest, a stereoscopic camera without a case. Pocket exclaimed upon it with the instructed interest of a keen photographer.
“Do you take photographs?” asked Baumgartner, a reciprocal note in his unemotional voice. [pg 54]
“Rather!” cried the schoolboy, with considerable enthusiasm. “It's the only thing I have to do instead of playing games. But I haven't got an instantaneous camera like that. I only wish I had!”
And he looked with longing eyes at the substantial oblong of wood and black morocco, and duplicate lenses like a pair of spectacles, which the doctor had set between them on one of the fussy little walnut tables.
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 [pg 55] 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 [pg 56] 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, [pg 57] 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?”
[pg 58]
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 [pg 59] 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