“Suicide?”
“No.”
“Not murder?”
“This paper says so.”
“Does it say who did it?”
“It cannot.”
“Can you?”
“Yes!”
“Tell me.”
The doctor threw out both hands in a despairing gesture.
“Have I to tell you outright, my young fellow, that you did it yourself?”
BLOOD-GUILTY
His overwhelming horror was not alleviated by a moment’s doubt. He marvelled rather that he had never guessed what he had done. The walking in his sleep, the shot that woke him, the first words of Dr. Baumgartner, his first swift action, and the warm pistol in his own unconscious hand: these burning memories spoke more eloquently than any words. They would have told their own tale at once, if only he had known the man was dead. Why had he been deceived? It was cruel, it was infamous, to have kept the truth from him for a single instant. Thus wildly did the stricken youth turn and rend his benefactor for the very benefaction of a day’s rest in ignorance of his deed. The doctor defended himself firmly, frankly, with much patience and some cynicism. Pocket was reminded of the state he himself had been in at the time. He also might have been a dying man, he was assured, and could well believe on looking back. Baumgartner had actually opened his lips to tell him the truth, but had checked himself in sheer humanity. Again the boy could confirm the outward detail out of his own recollection. To have told him later in the morning, the doctor went on to say, with an emphasis not immediately understood, could have undone nothing. He acknowledged a grave responsibility, but rightly or wrongly he had put the living before the dead.
How had he known the man was dead? Baumgartner smiled at the question. He was not only a doctor, but an old soldier who had fought in one at least of the bloodiest battles in European history. He had seen too many men fall shot through the heart to be mistaken for a moment; but in point of fact he had confirmed his conviction by brief examination while Pocket was fetching his things from behind the bush. Pocket pressed for earlier details with a morbid appetite which was not gratified without reluctance, and out of a laconic interchange the deed was gradually reconstructed with appealing verisimilitude. It was Baumgartner who had first caught sight of the somnambulist, treading warily like the blind, yet waving the revolver as he went, as though any moment he might let it off. The moment came with a wretched reeling man who joined Baumgartner on the path, and would not be warned. The poor man had raised a drunken shout and been shot pointblank through the heart. The doctor described him as leaping backward from the levelled barrel, then into the air and down in the dew upon his face.
The boy buried his face and wept; but even in his anguish he now recalled the shout before the shot. The enforced description had been so vivid in the end that he beheld the scene as plainly as though he had been wide awake. Then he dwelt upon the dead man, looking nothing else as he now remembered him, and that sent him off at a final tangent.
He cried, looking up with a shudder for all his tears, “What about that negative you smashed? It was the poor dead man all the time!”
“It was,” replied Baumgartner; “but it was never meant to be. I had you in focus when you fired. What I did was done instinctively, but with time to think I should have done just the same. You had given me the chance of a lifetime, though nothing has come of it so far. And that was another reason for saving you, ill as you were, from the immediate consequences of an innocent act.”
Pocket was passionately honest, as his worst friends knew; he had an instinctive admiration for downright honesty in another. His young soul was torn with grief and pity for the dead; he was already haunted by the inevitable and complex consequences of his fatal misadventure, and yet he could dimly appreciate the candid declaration of one who had attempted to turn that tragedy to instantaneous and inconceivable account. It was the mistaken kindness to himself that he still found most difficult to forgive.
“It’s got to come out,” he groaned; “this will make it all the worse.”
“You mean the delay?”
“Yes! Who’s to tell them I didn’t do it on purpose, and run away, and then think better of it?”
Baumgartner smiled.
“Surely I am,” said he; but his smile went out with the words. “If only they believe me!” he added as though it was a new idea to him.
It was a terrifying one to Pocket.
“Why shouldn’t they?” was his broken exclamation.
“I don’t know. I never thought of it before. But what can I swear to, after all? I can swear you shot a man, but I can’t swear you shot him in your sleep!”
“You said you saw I did!”
“So I did, my young fellow,” replied the doctor, with a kinder smile; “at least I can swear that you were walking with your eyes shut, and I thought you were walking in your sleep. It’s not quite the same thing. It is near it. But we are talking about my evidence on oath in a court of justice.”
“Shall I be tried?” asked the schoolboy in a hoarse whisper.
“Perhaps only by the magistrate,” replied the other, soothingly; “let us hope it will stop at that.”
“But it must, it must!” cried Pocket wildly. “I’m absolutely innocent! You said so yourself a minute ago; you’ve only to swear it as a doctor? They can’t do anything to me — they can’t possibly!”
The doctor stood looking into the sunless garden with a troubled face.
“Dr. Baumgartner!”
“Yes, my young fellow?”
“They can’t do anything to me, can they?”
Baumgartner returned to the fireside with his foreign shrug.
“It depends what you call anything,” said he. “They cannot hang you; after what I should certainly have to say I doubt if they could even detain you in custody. But you would only be released on bail; the case would be sent for trial; it would get into every paper in England; your family could not stop it, your schoolfellows would devour it, you would find it difficult to live down both at home and at school. In years to come it will mean at best a certain smile at your expense! That is what they can do to you,” concluded the doctor, apologetically. “You asked me to tell you. It is better to be candid. I hoped you would bear it like a man.”
Pocket was not even bearing it like a manly boy; he had flung himself back into the big chair, and broken down for the first time utterly. One name became articulate through his sobs. “My mother!” he moaned. “It’ll kill her! I know it will! Oh, that I should live to kill my mother too!”
“Mothers have more lives than that; they have more than most people,” remarked Baumgartner sardonically.
“You don’t understand! She has had a frightful illness, bad news of any kind has to be kept from her, and can you imagine worse news than this? She mustn’t hear it!” cried the boy, leaping to feet with streaming eyes. “For God’s sake, sir, help me to hush it up!”
“It’s in the papers already,” replied Baumgartner, with a forbearing shrug.
“But my part in it!”
“You said it had got to come out.”
“I didn’t realise all it meant — to her!”
“I thought you meant to make a clean breast of it?”
“So I did; but now I don’t!” cried Pocket, vehemently. “Now I would give my own life, cheerfully, rather than let her know what I’ve done — than drag them all through that!”
“Do you mean what you say?”
Baumgartner appeared to be forming some conditional intention.
“Every syllable!” said Pocket.
“Because, you know,” explained the doctor, “it is a case of now or never so far as going to Scotland Yard is concerned.”
“Then it’s never!”
“I must put it plainly to you. It’s not too late to do whatever you decide, but you must decide now. I would still go with you to Scotland Yard, and the chances are that they would still accept the true story of t
o-day. I have told you what I believe to be the worst that can happen to you; it may be that rather more may happen to me for harbouring you all day as I have done. I hope not, but I took the law into my own hands, and I am prepared to abide by the law if you so decide this minute.”
“I have decided.”
“Mind you, it would mean putting yourself unreservedly in my hands, at any rate for the present,” said Baumgartner, impressively. “Better come to Scotland Yard this minute than go back to school and blab about the whole thing there!”
“I shouldn’t do that.”
“I’m not so sure,” replied the acute doctor. “I believe I know you better than you know yourself; one learns more of a person in an hour like this than in a whole humdrum lifetime. I believe you would find it very difficult not to tell somebody.”
Pocket admitted it with a natural outburst of his leading quality. In truth no previous act or word of Baumgartner’s had inspired such confidence as this unerring piece of insight. It seemed to the boy a perfect miracle of discernment. He was not old enough to know that what he would have done, in his weakness, most grown-up men and women of his temperament would have done in theirs.
“Remember,” resumed the doctor, “you would have the whole of to-day to account for; it’s not as though you wouldn’t have some very awkward questions to answer the moment you got back to school.”
And again the lad marvelled at this intuition into public-school conditions on the part of one who could have no first-hand knowledge of those insular institutions. But this fresh display of understanding only confirmed him in his resolve.
“I trust you, sir,” said he; “haven’t you done enough for me to make me? I put myself, as you say, absolutely in your hands; and I’m grateful to you for all you’ve done and whatever you mean to do!”
“Even though it comes to hiding with us here in London?”
“No matter what it comes to,” cried Pocket, strangely exalted now, “so long as my people never know!”
“They may think you dead.” He thought of saying that he wished he was; but it would not have been true; even then it would have been a lie, and Pocket was not the boy to tell one if he knew it.
“That would be better than knowing what I have done,” was what he said; and in his exaltation he believed no less.
“You quite see that you are taking a step which must be final?”
“It is final — absolutely — so far as I am concerned.”
And it was meant to be, in all good faith; the very fulness and fairness of the doctor’s warnings served but to strengthen that resolve. But Baumgartner, as if to let well or ill alone, dropped the matter with a clinching shrug; and presently he left his visitor, less wisely, to brood on it alone.
Pocket was a dab at brooding! That is the worst of your conscientious ass; he takes his decision like a man; he means to stick to it like a sportsman; but he cannot help wondering whether he has decided for the best, and what would have happened if he had decided otherwise, and what his world will say about him as it is.
This one went much further in the unique stress of his extraordinary position. He pictured his people dressing for dinner at home; he pictured his form sitting down to private-work in his form-master’s hall; there was no end to his mental pictures, for they included one of himself on the scaffold in the broad-arrows of the little old waxwork at Madame Tassaud’s! He could not help himself; his mind was crumbling with his dreadful deed and its awful possibilities. Now his heart bled honestly for the poor dead man, now for his own mother and sister, and now not less freely for himself. He had been so innocent in the whole matter; he had only been an innocent and rather sporting fool. And now one of these lives was ended by his hand, and all the rest would be darkened for ever after!
It was too great a burden for a boy to bear; but Pocket bore it far into the long June twilight, scarcely stirring in the big soft chair, yet never leaning back in it again. He sat hunched up as though once more battling for breath, but curiously enough his bodily distress had flown before that of the mind. Pocket would thankfully have changed them back again, for his brain was as clear as his bronchial tubes, its capacity for suffering undimmed by a single physical preoccupation. Between seven and eight the young lady of the house came in with candles and a kind of high-tea on a tray; she also brought a box of d’Auvergne Cigarettes and the latest evening paper, which her uncle thought that Mr. Upton would like to see. That was how the girl addressed the boy, and the style always made him feel, and wish to seem, something of a man. But his present effort in that direction was sadly perfunctory: he almost ejected little Miss Platts in his eagerness to shut the door on her and see the news.
It was neither unimportant nor at first sight reassuring. The dead man had been identified by the police, who knew him of old, and were reported as hopeful of obtaining a clue through his identity. The clue was the point that stuck like a burr in the boyish brain; his idea of a clue was one leading straight to himself; it took Dr. Baumgartner to explain the true value of the identity clause, and bid the boy eat his meal.
“Trust the police!” said he. “They’re on a false scent already; they may try at that end till it turns their hair grey!”
Pocket disliked this tone; he had begun to think almost as reverentially of his victim as of a dead member of his own family. It appeared thus early, however, that in life the defunct had been by no means worthy of respect. Rowton Houses had been his only home, except when his undistinguished offences got him into gaol; the surreptitious practices of the professional mendicant, his sole means of livelihood. So much was to be read between the few brief lines in the stop-press column of the latest evening paper. Again it required Baumgartner to extract comfort from such items.
“At all events,” said he, “you cannot reproach yourself with the destruction of a valuable life! The man was evidently the worthless creature that he looked. You talk about your undesirable aliens, but here in England you breed undesirables enough to manure the world! It’s a public service to reduce their number.”
This pitch of nauseous cynicism had not been reached at a bound; the doctor had been working up to it all the evening, and this was the climax of his cold-blooded consolation as the schoolboy mechanically undressed himself for bed. His host had accompanied him up two pairs of stairs, carrying candles, and his meerschaum pipe in aromatic blast. Pocket felt a new chill through his veins, but he was not revolted as he would have been at first. This extraordinary man had shown him still more extraordinary kindness; the die was cast for them to stand or fall together; and there was something about the gaunt old visionary, a confidential candour, a dry intellectual plausibility, which could not but stimulate respect for his ungodliest views. Whether they really were his views, or only a tortuous attempt at comfort, the sympathy underlying their expression was undoubted and indubitable. But the doctor spoke as though he meant every word, and the boy only longed to agree with him: his conscientious failure to do so declared itself in a series of incoherent expostulations to which Baumgartner himself gave articulate shape in order to demolish them in the next breath.
“You say his life was as much to him as yours to you? Is that it, my young fellow?”
Pocket acknowledged the interpretation, and watched the Turk’s head wreathed in cool blue clouds.
“You might as well compare withered weed with budding flower!” cried the poetic doctor. “You have an honourable life before you; he had a disreputable one behind him. You were bred and nurtured in the lap of luxury; he finds it for the first time in his — —”
But here even Baumgartner broke off abruptly. The boy was writhing in his bed; the man sat down on the end of it.
“You do such poor devils a service,” said he, “in sending them to a world that cannot use them worse than this one. They are better under the ground than lying on it drenched and drunk!”
“It was a human life,” groaned the boy, shutting his eyes in pain.
“Human life!” cri
ed Baumgartner, leaping to his feet, his huge shadow guying him on the ceiling. “What is this human life, and who are you and I, that we set such store by it? The great men of this world never did; it’s only the little people and the young who pule and whine about human life. The ancient Roman sacrificed his weaklings as on an altar; there are some of us in these days who would prescribe a Tarpeian Rock for modern decadence. So much in pious parenthesis! Napoleon thought nothing of your human life. Von Moltke, Bismarck, and our staff in Germany thought as little of it as Napoleon; the Empire of my countrymen was founded on a proper appreciation of the infinitesimal value of human life, and your British Empire will be lost through exaggerating its importance. Blood and Iron were our our watchwords; they’re on the tip of every Fleet Street pen to-day, but I speak of what I know. I’ve heard the Iron shriek without ceasing, like the wind, and I’ve felt the Blood like spray from a hot spring! I fought at Gravelotte; as a public schoolboy you probably never heard the name before this minute. I fought in the Prussian Guard. I saw you looking at the pictures downstairs. I was in that charge across those hellish ridges. Over two thousand of us fell dead in half an hour, but we gained the victory. More Germans were killed that day — that sweltering August afternoon — than English in your whole South African War that took you years! The flower of Germany fell at Gravelotte; that was human life with a vengeance! But an Empire rose out of my comrades’ ashes. And that’s all it’s for, this human life of yours: for the master-builders to lay out in their wisdom on the upward road.”
The schoolboy was carried away. In the sudden eloquence of this strange outburst, with its poetic frenzy, its ruthless idealism, its wild bloodthirsty nobility, the youthful listener lost sight of its irrelevancy, or rather it was the irrevelant features that flared up first in his brain. It was a childish question, but here was a very child, and he could not help asking the fierce old soldier whether he had escaped without a wound.
“Without a scratch,” was the reply. “I come home. I leave the army. I ally my human life with one that is all but divine. My Queen is struck down dead at my side within a year. And you expect me to pity the veriest pawn in the game!”
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 321
