The Camera Fiend

“You search the whole place so thoroughly?”

“We keeps our eyes open,” said the policeman significantly, and Pocket asked no more questions; he scaled the forbidden fence and made off with the alacrity of one who meant to go out before he was put out. Such was his then sincere and sound intention. But where next to turn, to what seat on the Embankment, or what arch in the slums, in his ignorance of London he had no idea.

Meanwhile, to increase the irony of his dilemma, now that he was bent on quitting the Park he found himself striking deeper and deeper into its heart. He skirted a building, left it behind and out of sight, and drifted before the wind of destiny between an upright iron fence on one hand and a restricted open space upon the other. He could no longer see a single light; but the ground rose abruptly across the fence, and was thick with shrubs. Men might have been lying behind those shrubs, and Pocket could not possibly have seen them from the path. Did the policeman mean to tell him that he or his comrades were going to climb every fence and look behind every bush in Hyde Park?

Pocket came to anchor with a new flutter at his heart. This upright fence was not meant for scaling; it was like a lot of area palings, as obvious and intentional an obstacle. And the whole place closed at twelve, did it? The flutter became a serious agitation as Pocket saw himself breaking the laws of the land as well as those of school, saw himself not only expelled but put in prison! Well, so much the better for his story so long as those penalties were not incurred; even if they were, so much the greater hero he!

No wonder his best friends called him disparaging names; he was living up to the hardest of them now, and he with asthma on him as it was! But the will was on him too, the obstinate and reckless will, and the way lay handy in the shape of a row of Park chairs which Pocket had just passed against the iron palings. He went back to them, mounted on the first chair, wedged his bag between two of the spikes, set foot on the back of the chair, and somehow found himself on the other side without rent or scratch. Then he listened; but not a step could he hear. So then the cunning dog put his handkerchief through the palings and wiped the grit from the chair on which he had stood. And they called him a conscientious ass at school!

But then none of these desperate deeds were against his conscience, and they had all been thrust on Pocket Upton by circumstances over which he had lost control when the last train went without him from St. Pancras. They did not prevent him from kneeling down behind the biggest bush that I he could find, before curling up underneath it; neither did his prayers prevent him from thinking – even on his knees – of his revolver, nor yet – by the force of untimely association – of the other revolvers in the Chamber of Horrors. He saw those waxen wretches huddled together in ghastly groups, but the thought of them haunted him less than it might have done in a feather bed; he had his own perils and adventures to consider now. One thing, however, did come of the remembrance; he detached the leather strap he wore as a watch-guard. And used it to strap a pin-fire revolver, loaded in every chamber, to his wrist instead.

That was the last but one of the silly boy's proceedings under the bush; the last of all was to drain the number-one draught prescribed by Bompas in the morning, and to fling away the phial. The stuff was sweet and sticky in the mouth, and Pocket felt a singular and most grateful warmth at his extremities as he curled up in his overcoat. It was precisely then that he heard a measured tread approaching, and held his breath until it had passed without a pause. Yet the danger was still audible when the boy dropped off, thinking no more about it, but of Mr. Coverley and Charles Peace and his own people down in Leicestershire.

HIS PEOPLE

It so happened that his people in Leicestershire were thinking of him. They had been talking about him at the very time of the boy's inconceivable meanderings in Hyde Park. And two of them were at it still.

On a terrace outside lighted windows a powerful young fellow, in a butterfly collar and a corded smoking jacket, was walking up and down with a tall girl not unlike him in the face; but their faces were only to be seen in glimpses as they passed the drawing-room windows, and at not less regular intervals when a red light in the sky, the source of which was concealed by the garden foliage, became positively brilliant. The air was sweet with the scent of honeysuckle and musk-roses and mown grass; midges fretted in and out of the open windows. But for the lurid lighting of the sky, with its Cyclopean suggestion of some mammoth forge, you were in the heart of England undefiled.

“It's no use our talking about Tony,” the tall girl said. “I think you're frightfully down on him; we shall never agree.”

“Not as long as you make a fool of the fellow,” said the blunt young man.

“Tony's no fool,” remarked Lettice Upton, irrelevantly enough.

“You know what I mean,” snapped her brother Horace. “He's being absolutely spoilt, and you're at the bottom of it.”

“I didn't give him asthma!”

“Don't be childish, Letty.”

“But that's what's spoiling his life.”

“I wasn't talking about his life. I don't believe it, either.”

“You think he enjoys his bad nights?”

“I think he scores by them. He'd tell you himself that he never even thinks of getting up to first school now.”

“Would you if you'd been sitting up half the night with asthma?”

“Perhaps not; but I don't believe that happens so often as you think.”

“It happens often enough to justify him in making one good night pay for two or three bad ones.”

“I don't call that playing the game. I call it shamming.”

“Well, if it is, he makes up for it. They were doing Ancient Greek Geography in his form at early school last term. Tony tackled it in his spare time, and got most marks in the exam.”

“Beastly young swot!” quoth his elder brother. “I'm glad he didn't buck to me about that.”

“I don't think there's much danger of his bucking to you,” said Lettice, smiling in the red light. She did not add as her obvious reason that Horace, like many another athletic young man, was quite incapable of sympathising with the non-athletic type. But he guessed that she meant something of the sort, and having sensibilities of his own, and a good heart somewhere in his mesh of muscles, he felt hurt. “I looked after him all right,” said Horace, “the one term we were there together. So did Fred for the next year. But it's rather rough on Fred and myself, who were both something in the school at his age, to hear and see for ourselves that Tony's nobody even in the house!”

Lettice slipped a sly hand under the great biceps of her eldest brother.

“But don't you see, old boy, that it makes it the worse for Tony that you and Fred were what you were at school? They measure him by the standard you two set up; it's natural enough, but it isn't fair.”

“He needn't be a flyer at games,” said Horace, duly softened by a little flattery. “But he might be a tryer!”

“Wait till we get a little more breath into his body.”

“A bag of oxygen wouldn't make him a cricketer.”

“Yet he's so keen on cricket!”

“I wish he wasn't so keen; he thinks and talks more about it than Fred or I did when we were in the eleven, yet he never looked like making a player.”

“I should say he thinks and talks more about most things; it's his nature, just as it's Fred's and yours to be men of action.”

“Well, I'm glad he's not allowed to cumber the crease this season,” said Horace, bowling his cigarette-end into the darkness with a distinct swerve in the air. “To have him called our ‘pocket edition,’ on the cricket-field of all places, is a bit too thick.”

Lettice withdrew her sympathetic hand.

“He's as good a sportsman as either of you, at heart,” she said warmly. “And I hope he may make you see it before this doctor's done with him!”

“This doctor!” jeered Horace, quick to echo her change of tone as well. “You mean the fool who wanted to send that kid round the world on his own?”

“He's no fool, Horace, and you know nothing whatever about him.”

“No; but I know something about our Tony! If he took the least care of himself at home, there might be something to be said for letting him go; but he's the most casual young hound I ever struck.”

“I know he's casual.”

Lettice made the admission with reluctance; next moment she was sorry her sense of fairness had so misled her.

“Besides,” said Horace, “he wouldn't be cured if he could. Think what he'd miss!”

“Oh, if you're coming back to that, there's no more to be said.”

And the girl halted at the lighted windows.

“But I do come back to it. Isn't he up in town at this moment under this very doctor of yours?”

“He's not my doctor.”

“But you first heard about him; you're the innovator of the family, Letty, so it's no use trying to score off me. Isn't Tony up in London to-night?”

“I believe he is.”