The Camera Fiend

by E. W. Hornung

Again that insinuating smile inspired a horror of which the boy himself could have offered no satisfactory explanation, especially as there was much to commend the proposal to his mind. But his face was white enough as he moved it from side to side on the pillow.

“I tell you I’m ill,” he whimpered. “How can I go out with you, when you see I can’t eat a bite?”

Baumgartner gave it up for the night. He was coming back in the early, early lovely summer’s morning; then they would see, would they not? Pocket had a last wave from the hideous meerschaum head, and a nod from the other. He was alone for the night. And he meant to be alone next morning when the doctor took his early walk; let him prowl by himself. Pocket was not going with him. He had never been more determined about anything than that. It was an animal instinct of fear and deep revulsion, an impulse quite distinct from a further determination to slip away in his turn as soon as the coast was clear. On this course he was equally decided, but on other and more palpable grounds. Baumgartner had broken his side of their treaty, so the treaty was torn up with the letter which had never gone. And Pocket was going instead of his letter—going straight to his people to tell them all, and have that poor innocent man set free before the day was out.

The night’s immunity was meanwhile doubly precious; but it had been secured, or rather its continuance could only be assured, at a price which he wondered even now if he could pay. He was a growing, hungry boy, no longer ailing in wind or limb. Distress of mind was his one remaining ill; the rest was sham; and distress of mind did not prevent him from feeling ravenous after fasting ten or eleven hours. Here was food still within his reach, even at his side; but he felt committed to his declaration that he could not eat. If the tray were still untouched in the morning, surely there could be no further question of his going out with Baumgartner; but there was an “if.” The boy was not used to being very stern with himself; his strongest point was not self-denial. Much of his moral stamina had been expended in nightly tussles for mere breath; he had grit enough there. But his temperament was self-indulgent, and that he triumphed over positive pangs only shows the power of that rival instinct not to accompany the doctor a yard from his door.

Yet it meant more hours with the food beside him than he could endure lying still. He got up, inch by inch, for he knew who lay underneath; and he opened the window, which Baumgartner had broken his promise to open, by even slower and more laborious degrees. He leant out as he had done that first morning, it might have been a month ago; and this scene must have challenged comparison with that, had his mind been even as free from dread and terror as it had been then. But all he saw was the few remaining lighted windows in the backs of those other houses; he could not have sworn there was a moon. The moon poured no beam of comfort on his aching head; but the lighted windows were as the open eyes of honest men, who would not see him come to harm; and the last rumble in the streets was a faint but cheering chorus for lonely ears.

Once a motor-horn blew a solo near at hand, and Pocket half recognised its note; but he did not connect it with quite another set of sounds, which grew but gradually on his ear out of the bowels of the house. Somebody was knocking and ringing at the doctor’s door, not furiously, but with considerable pertinacity. Pocket was thrilled to the marrow just at first, and flew from the open window to the landing outside his door. The house was in perfect darkness, and still as death in the patient intervals between each measured attempt to rouse the inmates without disturbing the street. It came to Pocket that it must be Baumgartner himself, gone out for something without his key; and the boy was about to run down and let him in, when he distinctly heard the retreat of feet down the front steps, and then a chuckle on the next landing as the doctor closed his bedroom door.

Who could it have been? Baumgartner’s chuckle suggested the police; but in that case it was the boy upstairs who was going to have the last laugh, though a grim one, and very terribly at his own expense. He could not close an eye for thinking of it, and listening for another knocking and ringing down below. But nothing happened until the doctor returned between five and six, still with his meerschaum pipe, still in his alpaca jacket, but wearing also the goblin hat and cloak of their first meeting, to renew and intensify the animal fear that glued the boy to his bed.

“It is a pity,” said Baumgartner, standing at the window which Pocket had left open. “The air is like champagne at this hour, and not a cloud in the sky! It would do you more good than lying there. It is you who are making yourself ill. If I thought you were doing it on purpose ”—and his eyes blazed—“I’d feed you like a fowl!”

“It’s so likely that I should do it on purpose,” muttered Pocket, with schoolboy sarcasm. His eyes, however, were purposely closed, and they had missed the old daggers in Baumgartner’s.

“You know best,” said the doctor. “But you are missing the morning of your life! Not a cloud in the sky, only the golden rain in my little garden. I suppose you have not learnt what the golden rain is at your public school? You English call it laburnum; but we Germans have more imagination, thank God!”