The Camera Fiend

by E. W. Hornung

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.”