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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In E. W. Hornung's novel "The Camera Fiend," the author deftly intertwines elements of mystery, adventure, and psychological intrigue within a narrative centered around the obsession with photography. Set against the backdrop of an evolving technological landscape during the late 19th century, Hornung employs a keenly observant narrative style, rich with descriptive detail that captures both the excitement and existential dread associated with the burgeoning art of photography. The protagonist's journey is not merely one of capturing images but rather a profound exploration of identity, obsession, and the often blurry line between reality and representation. E. W. Hornung, renowned for his literary prowess and as the brother-in-law of the celebrated author Arthur Conan Doyle, draws upon his own experiences as a journalist and a writer deeply entrenched in the cultural shifts of his time. These influences are palpable in "The Camera Fiend," where Hornung's understanding of human psychology and social commentary heighten the narrative's tension and complexity, offering insight into the technological anxieties of an age on the brink of modernity. This compelling work is highly recommended for readers interested in the intersections of art and obsession, as well as those keen to explore the psychological depths of Hornung's characters. "The Camera Fiend" is not just a tale of mystery; it is a reflective examination of how technology shapes human desire and identity, making it an essential read for both literary enthusiasts and those intrigued by the evolving nature of creativity. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The Camera Fiend
Table of Contents
Introduction
In an era learning to love the thrill of mechanical sight, The Camera Fiend probes how the compulsion to look—and to fix others in an image—can blur moral boundaries, unsettle privacy, and turn curiosity into danger, following the enticing logic of a new technology that promises truth while tempting its users toward manipulation, exposure, and control, and revealing that the desire to capture reality is never neutral but charged with vanity, power, and fear, so that the lens becomes not only a tool of record but a catalyst for suspicion, obsession, and the quiet corrosion of trust among those who find themselves observed.
Written by E. W. Hornung, best known for creating the gentleman thief A. J. Raffles, The Camera Fiend belongs to the tradition of early twentieth-century crime and suspense fiction and reflects the anxieties and fascinations of the Edwardian period. First published in the early 1910s, it situates its intrigue in contemporary Britain, where portable cameras were becoming fixtures of leisure, journalism, and urban life. Hornung uses this milieu to craft a narrative that reads as both mystery and social study, attentive to how a modern device alters behavior, status, and the very texture of everyday encounters in streets, schools, and drawing rooms.
Without spoiling its turns, the novel builds from the simple fact of a camera—present, coveted, or distressingly pointed—into a chain of incidents that invite scrutiny, doubt, and risk. Readers encounter the suspense of partial knowledge and the unsettling feeling of being seen without consent, all filtered through Hornung’s crisp, economical narration. The experience is taut rather than baroque, trading labyrinthine puzzle-work for steadily mounting unease and moral pressure. It offers the satisfactions of a classic mystery while lingering on psychology and motive, balancing incident with atmosphere so that every click of the shutter seems to tighten the story’s web.
Central themes emerge with clarity: the ethics of looking, the seductions of technology, and the fragile border between documentation and intrusion. Hornung explores how images confer authority yet can mislead, how exposure promises justice yet risks humiliation, and how curiosity shades into control. Reputation, youth, and authority intersect with the camera’s capacity to confirm or distort what is believed. The novel invites readers to consider who owns an image, who is harmed or helped by its circulation, and how quickly a mechanical act can be moralized or criminalized when desire, ambition, and fear converge around a device that seems to see everything.
Context matters, and Hornung’s story arrives from a moment when photography was leaving studios for streets and parlors. Portable cameras were thinning the wall between private and public life, making candid capture newly possible and newly fraught. Newspapers were accelerating, celebrity and scandal were increasingly visual, and the idea of surveillance—whether casual or deliberate—was beginning to shape how people moved through the world. The Camera Fiend absorbs this cultural shift, not as an essay but as a lived predicament for its characters, dramatizing the excitement and unease of a society discovering that images travel faster than reputations can keep up.
Hornung’s craft will be familiar to readers of his crime fiction: quick scene-setting, dialogue that carries weight without ornament, and a preference for moral tension over mechanical trickery. The book is a non–Raffles venture, yet it benefits from the author’s practiced sense of chase, concealment, and reversal. Instead of leaning on a flamboyant mastermind, it emphasizes recognizable impulses—pride, curiosity, insecurity—heightened by a novel instrument. The prose favors pace and clarity, allowing motives to darken in the spaces between acts, and fostering a mood in which ordinary settings feel charged, as though any room might become a darkroom where truth develops or dissolves.
For contemporary readers surrounded by phones, feeds, and ceaseless documentation, The Camera Fiend feels freshly relevant. It asks what we owe those we photograph, what we sacrifice when we accept constant visibility, and how easily good intentions can be bent by envy, thrill-seeking, or fear. As a period mystery, it offers suspense and elegant economy; as a meditation on seeing, it invites reflection on today’s surveillance culture, consent, and the costs of exposure. Hornung’s novel rewards readers who value atmosphere as much as action and who relish stories that make a device more than a prop—turning it into the moral engine of the plot.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Camera Fiend is a suspense novel set in the early age of popular photography, when portable cameras and new techniques are transforming everyday life. The story follows a young enthusiast whose keen interest in taking and developing photographs becomes the lens through which a broader mystery unfolds. As he moves between family, school, and city streets, the fascination with images intersects with unexplained incidents that unsettle the community. Hornung presents a world captivated by new technology, yet wary of its power, establishing a tone of curiosity edged with unease that frames the coming investigation and the mounting personal stakes for the protagonist.
The narrative opens with an encounter that subtly tilts the familiar toward the ominous. On a routine journey, the young photographer meets a stranger whose questions about lenses, exposures, and faces linger after their parting. The exchange is polite and technically fluent, yet oddly intrusive, leaving an impression of someone who treats people as subjects rather than equals. This first brush with a charismatic, unnamed figure echoes through later chapters, seeding doubt about motives and methods. The encounter sets a pattern: ordinary moments are reframed by an eye that studies expressions and poses for ends that are not immediately clear.
Back among peers and mentors, the protagonist’s hobby becomes a defining trait. A small circle forms around darkrooms and developing trays, where plates are swapped and results compared. This local scene introduces friendly rivalry, minor rule-bending, and a practical education in focal lengths, light, and patience. Yet the very habits that mark dedication, such as late hours or solitary excursions to capture a certain subject, also create misunderstandings. A misplaced plate, an incomplete alibi, and a chance overlap with an incident in town turn harmless enthusiasm into a cause for suspicion. The social world narrows as rumors outpace explanations.
A troubling event nearby pushes the story into investigative mode. Someone is lured into being photographed under unusual circumstances, and what follows suggests a deliberate exploitation of trust. The authorities adopt a cautious posture, balancing scattered facts against public concern. Because the protagonist’s movements and images intersect with the timeline, he becomes both a potential witness and a person of interest. The camera, once a badge of curiosity, is treated as possible evidence. This tension propels him to account for his work and to notice patterns that others might miss, drawing him closer to the heart of the mystery.
An adult ally emerges, a practical observer who understands both procedures and people, and who treats the youth neither as a culprit nor a child. Together, they review negatives, journals, and supplies, translating technical details into leads. Transactions at chemists, the choice of plates, and the timing of development sessions reveal a careful operator who stages encounters and controls outcomes. The line between image-making and manipulation becomes central. By tracing how a photograph is made, they map intent: selection of subject, management of light, and calculated use of surprise. Slowly, the investigation identifies a consistent method without pinning down a name.
Sightings of an itinerant photographer surface in disparate places, each report sharing an unsettling blend of charm and urgency. Witnesses recall being coached to stand just so, to look this way, to hold still a moment longer. A second incident hardens suspicion into alarm, and community vigilance tightens. The protagonist, now mindful of how fascination can be weaponized, weighs his loyalty to friends against the need to act. A nighttime excursion in search of a missing negative leads to new clues: altered prints, a canceled appointment, and a recurring emblem on a camera case. The portrait of the unseen pursuer sharpens.
Following these threads leads to a hidden workspace devoted to elaborate experiments with focus, flash, and timing. Notes hint at a theory that the truest likeness emerges at the edge of fear or surprise, and the apparatus seems designed to provoke and seize that instant. Evidence suggests subjects were pressured into positions they did not freely choose. A confrontation nearly occurs, but the antagonist slips away, leaving only the trace of a perfected routine. The investigators recover partial records and faces caught mid-expression, enough to confirm a pattern and to anticipate a next move, but not to end the danger.
Armed with this understanding, the authorities and allies coordinate a careful plan. Public places are watched without causing panic, and those most likely to be approached are discreetly protected. The young photographer, having learned to think like the foe without imitating him, contributes by predicting settings and moments that favor the method in question. The climax arrives swiftly: a meeting, a pursuit, and an intervention that prevents further harm. When the dust settles, explanations replace rumors, responsibilities are assigned, and the protagonist’s name is cleared. The camera returns to being a tool in steady hands rather than an emblem of suspicion.
The novel closes by reflecting on the double-edged nature of new tools. Photography, presented as both marvel and temptation, demands judgment as well as skill. The story underscores how curiosity, unchecked by respect for others, can turn into fixation, and how communities negotiate the risks of innovation without rejecting progress. Through its sequence of encounters, clues, and controlled revelations, The Camera Fiend offers a cautionary tale about seeing and being seen. It affirms that intent matters as much as technique, and that responsibility and vigilance can reclaim a technology from those who would bend it to coercive ends.
Historical Context
E. W. Hornung’s The Camera Fiend is set in Edwardian England, roughly the first decade of the twentieth century, a moment saturated with new technologies, crowded cities, and stratified schools. The ambiance is London-centric—streets threaded by omnibuses, suburban railways, and growing electric lighting—yet it also moves through the cloistered world of the English public school, with boarding houses, prefects, and chapel. The period between the death of Queen Victoria (1901) and the eve of the First World War (1914) forms the temporal backdrop. It was a culture intoxicated by novelty—motorcars, telephones, and, crucially, portable cameras—alongside rigid social codes, a vigilant press, and an increasingly professional police force.
The decisive technological event underpinning the book’s obsessions is the democratization of photography. George Eastman’s Kodak system (1888) promised, “You press the button, we do the rest,” and, in 1900, the Kodak Brownie made snapshotting cheap and portable (sold for one dollar in the United States). Roll film (patented 1889) and fast dry plates turned photography from a studio craft into a casual pastime for clerks, students, and schoolboys. By the 1900s, tens of thousands of amateurs joined clubs, and cameras slipped easily into urban crowds. The novel converts this historical shift into narrative tension: a camera becomes not merely an instrument but a temptation, a mask, and a potential weapon.
Mass snapshotting provoked an early privacy panic. Newspapers in Britain and the United States caricatured the “Kodak fiend,” and resorts and institutions posted notices restricting photography on promenades, at bathing beaches, and inside private grounds around 1900–1905. British law offered only piecemeal protections—no general tort of privacy existed—so etiquette and local rules tried to contain candid photographing of women and children. Scandals over surreptitious images circulated via postcards and shop windows. Hornung’s story draws directly on this climate of anxiety: the camera-wielding figure distills fears of voyeurism, unauthorized capture, and the way a casual device could trespass upon reputations without ever breaking a window or a lock.
The postcard craze supercharged photographic circulation. After the United Kingdom authorized pictorial postcards and a halfpenny postcard rate (1894), hundreds of millions moved annually through the Royal Mail by the 1900s, aided by halftone printing and cheap real-photo cards. Institutions like the Royal Photographic Society (founded 1853) and periodicals such as Amateur Photographer (from 1884) normalized technical discourse—exposure times, shutters, lenses—that amateurs mastered. The Camera Fiend mirrors this technophilia: darkrooms, plates or films, and the ritual of developing serve as plot machinery and social markers. The novel explores how technical mastery without moral ballast could turn a desirable pastime into compulsion and, plausibly, crime.
Another shaping development was the fusion of photography and policing. In France, Alphonse Bertillon systematized anthropometric identification (1880s), pairing measurements with mugshots; Britain adopted a superior tool in 1901 when Scotland Yard established its Fingerprint Bureau under Edward Henry. Landmark cases followed: Harry Jackson’s 1902 conviction in London for burglary via fingerprints, and the 1905 Stratton brothers’ murder conviction in Deptford—the first British murder case secured by fingerprints left on a cash box. Crime-scene photography, rogues’ galleries, and evidentiary images entered routine practice. Hornung’s narrative harnesses this milieu, staging cameras as double-edged—aid to detection, yet also enabling stealth, misdirection, and new varieties of clandestine offense.
The ascendancy of the illustrated press and newsreels made cameras civic actors. Halftone printing (popularized from the 1880s) allowed photographs in daily papers; the Daily Mirror (1903) branded itself as a pictorial paper. Film newsreels by Pathé and Gaumont spread in Britain by 1909. The Siege of Sidney Street (Stepney, 3 January 1911), when Home Secretary Winston Churchill appeared at the scene during a gun battle with Latvian anarchists, was filmed and photographed, turning policing into spectacle. The book resonates with this visual public sphere: the presence of lenses—journalistic or amateur—transforms crime into performance, witnesses into audiences, and reputation into something capturable, reproducible, and dangerously manipulable.
The setting also intersects with reforms and anxieties around youth. The Balfour Education Act (1902) reorganized secondary education, while elite public schools retained prefect systems, housemasters, “fagging,” and strong codes of honor. Debates over discipline, bullying, and moral pedagogy ran alongside new movements such as the Boy Scouts (founded 1908 by Robert Baden-Powell) to channel adolescent energy into civic virtue. The Children Act (1908) established juvenile courts and strengthened protections for minors. In this climate, a technically adept schoolboy with a camera embodied both promise and peril. Hornung leverages that tension: youthful ingenuity courted by modern devices collides with porous supervision, secrecy, and the temptation to see what one ought not.
As social and political critique, the novel exposes a culture dazzled by technology yet slow to craft ethical guardrails. It interrogates classed spaces—public school privilege, respectable suburbs—and shows how a cheap camera can breach hierarchies, puncture privacy, and redistribute power through images. The narrative shadows the state’s growing visual gaze—mugshots, fingerprints, press photography—by suggesting that surveillance proliferates beyond official hands. In doing so, it criticizes legal lacunae around privacy, the sensationalism of modern media, and adults’ complacency in supervising youth. The Camera Fiend thus becomes an ethical case study in Edwardian modernity: progress without prudence, visibility without consent, and curiosity untethered from responsibility.
The Camera Fiend
A CONSCIENTIOUS ASS
Pocket Upton had come down late and panting, in spite of his daily exemption from first school, and the postcard on his plate had taken away his remaining modicum of breath. He could have wept over it in open hall, and would probably have done so in the subsequent seclusion of his own study, had not an obvious way out of his difficulty been bothering him by that time almost as much as the difficulty itself. For it was not a very honest way, and the unfortunate Pocket had been called “a conscientious ass” by some of the nicest fellows in his house. Perhaps he deserved the epithet for going even as straight as he did to his house-master, who was discovered correcting proses with a blue pencil and a briar pipe.
“Please, sir, Mr. Coverley can't have me, sir. He's got a case of chicken-pox, sir.”
[pg 4] The boy produced the actual intimation in a few strokes of an honoured but laconic pen. The man poised his pencil and puffed his pipe.
“Then you must come back to-night, and I'm just as glad. It's all nonsense your staying the night whenever you go up to see that doctor of yours.[1q]”
“He makes a great point of it, sir. He likes to try some fresh stuff on me, and then see what sort of night I have.”
“You could go up again to-morrow.”
“Of course I could, sir,” replied Pocket Upton, with a delicate emphasis on his penultimate. At the moment he was perhaps neither so acutely conscientious nor such an ass as his critics considered him.
“What else do you propose?” inquired Mr. Spearman.
“Well, sir, I have plenty of other friends in town, sir. Either the Knaggses or Miss Harbottle would put me up in a minute, sir.”
“Who are the Knaggses?”
“The boys were with me at Mr. Coverley's, sir; they go to Westminster now. One of them stayed with us last holidays. They live in St. John's Wood Park.”
“And the lady you mentioned?”
“Miss Harbottle, sir, an old friend of my [pg 5] mother's; it was through her I went to Mr. Coverley's, and I've often stayed there. She's in the Wellington Road, sir, quite close to Lord's.”
Mr. Spearman smiled at the gratuitous explanation of an eagerness that other lads might have taken more trouble to conceal. But there was no guile in any Upton; in that one respect the third and last of them resembled the great twin brethren of whom he had been prematurely voted a “pocket edition” on his arrival in the school. He had few of their other merits, though he took a morbid interest in the games they played by light of nature, as well as in things both beyond and beneath his brothers and the average boy. You cannot sit up half your nights with asthma and be an average boy.[2q] This was obvious even to Mr. Spearman, who was an average man. He had never disguised his own disappointment in the youngest Upton, but had often made him the butt of outspoken and disastrous comparisons. Yet in his softer moments he had some sympathy with the failure of an otherwise worthy family; this fine June morning he seemed even to understand the joy of a jaunt to London for a boy who was getting very little out of his school life. He made a note of the two names and addresses.
“You're quite sure they'll put you up, are you?”“Absolutely certain, sir.”
[pg 6]“But you'll come straight back if they can't?”
“Rather, sir!”
“Then run away, and don't miss your train.”
Pocket interpreted the first part of the injunction so literally as to arrive very breathless in his study. That diminutive cell was garnished with more ambitious pictures than the generality of its order; but the best of them was framed in the ivy round the lattice window, and its foreground was the nasturtiums in the flower-box. Pocket glanced down into the quad, where the fellows were preparing construes for second school in sunlit groups on garden seats. At that moment the bell began. And by the time Pocket had changed his black tie for a green one with red spots, in which he had come back after the Easter holidays, the bell had stopped and the quad was empty; before it filled again he would be up in town and on his way to Welbeck Street in a hansom.
The very journey was a joy. It was such sport to be flying through a world of buttercups and daisies in a train again, so refreshing to feel as good as anybody else in the third smoker; for even the grown men in the corner seats did not dream of calling the youth an “old ass,” much less a young one, to his face. His friends and contemporaries at school were in the habit of employing the ameliorating adjective, but there were still a few fellows [pg 7] in Pocket's house who made an insulting point of the other. All, however, seemed agreed as to the noun; and it was pleasant to cast off friend and foe for a change, to sit comfortably unknown and unsuspected of one's foibles in the train. It made Pocket feel a bit of a man; but then he really was almost seventeen, and in the Middle Fifth, and allowed to smoke asthma cigarettes in bed. He took one out of a cardboard box in his bag, and thought it might do him good to smoke it now. But an adult tobacco-smoker looked so curiously at the little thin cross between cigar and cigarette, that it was transferred to a pocket unlit, and the coward hid himself behind his paper, in which there were several items of immediate interest to him. Would the match hold out at Lord's? If not, which was the best of the Wednesday matinees? Pocket had received a pound from home for his expenses, so that these questions took an adventitious precedence over even such attractive topics as an execution and a murder that bade fair to lead to one. But the horrors had their turn, and having supped on the newspaper supply, he continued the feast in Henry Dunbar, the novel he had brought with him in his bag. There was something like a murder! It was so exciting as to detach Pocket Upton from the flying buttercups and daisies, from the reek of the smoking carriage, the real crimes [pg 8] in the paper, and all thoughts of London until he found himself there too soon.
The asthma specialist was one of those enterprising practitioners whose professional standing is never quite on a par with their material success. The injurious discrepancy may have spoilt his temper, or it may be that his temper was at the root of the prejudice against him. He was never very amiable with Pocket Upton, a casual patient in every sense; but this morning Dr. Bompas had some call to complain.
“You mean to tell me,” he expostulated, “that you've gone back to the cigarettes in spite of what I said last time? If you weren't a stupid schoolboy I should throw up your case!”
Pocket did not wish to have his case thrown up; it would mean no more days and nights in town. So he accepted his rebuke without visible resentment.
“It's the only way I can stop an attack,” he mumbled.
“Nonsense!” snapped the specialist. “You can make yourself coffee in the night, as you've done before.”
“I can't at school. They draw the line at that.”
“Then a public school is no place for you. I've said so from the first. Your people should have listened to me, and sent you on a long sea voyage [pg 9] under the man I recommended, in the ship I told them about. She sails the day after to-morrow, and you should have sailed in her.”
The patient made no remark; but he felt as sore as his physician on the subject of that long sea voyage. It would have meant a premature end to his undistinguished schooldays, and goodbye to all thought of following in his brothers' steps on the field of schoolboy glory. But he might have had adventures beyond the pale of that circumscribed arena, he might have been shipwrecked on a desert island, and lived to tell a tale beyond the dreams of envious athletes, if his people had but taken kindly to the scheme. But they had been so very far from taking to it at all, with the single exception of his only sister, that the boy had not the heart to discuss it now.
“If only there were some medicine one could take to stop an attack!” he sighed. “But there doesn't seem to be any.”
“There are plenty of preventives,” returned the doctor. “That's what we want. Smoking and inhaling all sorts of rubbish is merely a palliative that does more harm than good in the long run.”
“But it does you good when the preventives fail. If I could get a good night without smoking I should be thankful.”
[pg 10]“If I promise you a good night will you give me your cigarettes to keep until to-morrow?”
“If you like.”
The doctor wrote a prescription while the boy produced the cardboard box from his bag.
“Thank you,” said Bompas, as they made an exchange. “I don't want you even to be tempted to smoke to-night, because I know what the temptation must be when you can't get your breath. You will get this prescription made up in two bottles; take the first before you go to bed to-night, and the second if you wake with an attack before five in the morning. You say you are staying the night with friends; better give me the name and let me see if they're on the telephone before you go. I want you to go to bed early, tell them not to call you in the morning, and come back to me the moment you've had your breakfast.”
They parted amicably after all, and Pocket went off only wondering whether he ought to have said positively that he was staying with friends when he might be going back to school. But Dr. Bompas had been so short with him at first as to discourage unnecessary explanations; besides, there could be no question of his going back that night. And the difficulty of the morning, which he had quite forgotten in the train, was not allowed to mar a moment of his day in town.
[pg 11] The time-table of that boy's day must speak for itself. It was already one o'clock, and he was naturally hungry, especially after the way his breakfast had been spoilt by Coverley's card. At 1.15 he was munching a sausage roll and sipping chocolate at a pastry-cook's in Oxford Street. The sausage roll, like the cup of chocolate, was soon followed by another; and a big Bath bun completed a debauch of which Dr. Bompas would undoubtedly have disapproved.
At 1.45, from the top of an Atlas omnibus in Baker Street, he espied a placard with “Collapse of Middlesex” in appalling capitals. And at the station he got down to learn the worst before going on to Lord's for nothing.
The worst was so hopelessly bad that Pocket wished himself nearer the theatres, and then it was that the terra-cotta pile of Madame Tussaud's thrust itself seductively upon his vision. He had not been there for years. He had often wanted to go again, and go alone. He remembered being taken by his sister when a little boy at Coverley's, but she had refused to go into the Chamber of Horrors, and he had been relieved at the time but sorry ever afterwards, because so many of the boys of those days had seen everything and seemed none the worse for the adventure. It was one of the things he had always wanted not so much to [pg 12] do as to have done. The very name of the Chamber of Horrors had frozen his infant blood when he first heard it on the lips of a criminological governess. On the brink of seventeen there was something of the budding criminologist about Pocket Upton himself; had not a real murder and Henry Dunbar formed his staple reading in the train? And yet the boy had other sensibilities which made him hesitate outside the building, and enter eventually with quite a nutter under the waistcoat.
A band in fantastic livery was playing away in the marble hall; but Pocket had no ear for their music, though he was fond enough of a band. And though history was one of his few strong points at school, the glittering galaxy of kings and queens appealed to him no more than the great writers at their little desks and the great cricketers in their unconvincing flannels. They were waxworks one and all. But when the extra sixpence had been paid at the inner turnstile, and he had passed down a dungeon stair into the dim vaults below, his imagination was at work upon the dreadful faces in the docks before he had brought his catalogue to bear on one of them.
Here were wretches whose vile deeds had long been familiar to the schoolboy through a work on his father's shelves called Annals of Our Time. He recalled bad nights when certain of those annals [pg 13] had kept him awake long after his attack; and here were the actual monsters, not scowling and ferocious as he had always pictured them, but far more horribly demure and plump. Here were immortal malefactors like the Mannings; here were Rush and Greenacre cheek by jowl, looking as though they had stepped out of Dickens in their obsolete raiment, looking anything but what they had been. Some wore the very clothes their quick bodies had filled; here and there were authentic tools of death, rusty pistols, phials of poison with the seals still bright, and a smug face smirking over all in self-conscious infamy. There was not enough of the waxwork about these creatures; in the poor light, and their own clothes, and the veritable dock in which many of them had heard their doom, they looked hideously human and alive. One, a little old man, sat not in the dock but on the drop itself, the noose dangling in front of him; and the schoolboy felt sorry for him, for his silver bristles, for the broad arrows on his poor legs, until he found out who it was. Then he shuddered. It was Charles Peace. He had first heard of Charles Peace from the nice governess aforesaid; and here under his nose were the old ruffian's revolver, and the strap that strapped it to his wrist, with the very spectacles he had wiped and worn. The hobbledehoy was almost as timorously [pg 14] entranced as he had been in infancy by untimely tale of crime. He stood gloating over the gruesome relics, over ropes which had hanged men whose trials he had read for himself in later days, and yet wondering with it all whether he would ever get these things out of his mind again. They filled it to overflowing. He might have had the horrid place to himself. Yet he had entered it with much amusement at the heels of a whole family in deep mourning, a bereaved family drowning their sorrow in a sea of gore, their pilot through the catalogue a conscientious orphan with a monotonous voice and a genius for mis-pronunciation. Pocket had soon ceased to see or hear him or any other being not made of wax. And it was only when he was trying to place a nice-looking murderer in a straw hat, who suddenly moved into a real sightseer like himself, that the unwholesome spell was broken.
Pocket was not sorry to be back in the adulterated sunshine and the comparatively fresh air of the Marylebone Road. He was ashamed to find that it was after four o'clock. Guy and Vivian Knaggs would be home from Westminster in another hour. Still it was no use getting there before them, and he might as well walk as not; it was pleasant to rub shoulders with flesh and blood once more, and to look in faces not made of wax in the devil's image. His way, which he knew of old, would [pg 15] naturally have led him past Miss Harbottle's door; but, as she was only to be his second string for the night, he preferred not to be seen by that old lady yet. Such was the tiny spring of an important action; it led the wanderer into Circus Road and a quite unforeseen temptation.
In the Circus Road there happens to be a highly respectable pawnbroker's shop; in the pawnbroker's window the chances are that you might still find a motley collection of umbrellas, mandolines, family Bibles, ornaments and clocks, strings of watches, trays of purses, opera-glasses, biscuit-boxes, photograph frames and cheap jewellery, all of which could not tempt you less than they did Pocket Upton the other June. There were only two things in the window that interested him at all, and they were not both temptations. One was an old rosewood camera, and Pocket was interested in cameras old and new; but the thing that tempted him was a little revolver at five-and-six, with what looked like a box of cartridges beside it, apparently thrown in for the price. A revolver to take back to school![3q] A revolver to fire in picked places on the slow walks with a slow companion which were all the exercise this unfortunate fellow could take! A revolver and cartridges complete, so that one could try it now, in no time, with Guy and Vivian at the end of their garden in [pg 16] St. John's Wood Park! And all very likely for five bob if one bargained a bit!
Pocket took out his purse and saw what a hole the expenditure of any such sum would make. But what was that if it filled a gap in his life? Of coure it would have been breaking a school rule, but he was prepared to take the consequences if found out; it need not involve his notion of dishonour. Still, it must be recorded that the young or old as was conscientious enough to hesitate before making his fatal plunge into the pawnbroker's shop.
A BOY ABOUT TOWN
The young Westminsters had not come in when Pocket finally cast up in St. John's Wood Park. But their mother was at home, and she gave the boy a cup of tepid tea out of a silver tea-pot in the drawing-room. Mrs. Knaggs was a large lady who spoke her mind with much freedom, at all events to the young. She remarked how much Upton (so she addressed him) had altered; but her tone left Pocket in doubt as to whether any improvement was implied. She for one did not approve of his luncheon in Oxford Street, much less of the way [pg 17] he had spent a summer's afternoon; indeed, she rather wondered at his being allowed alone in London at all. Pocket, who could sometimes shine in conversation with his elders, at once reminded Mrs. Knaggs that her own Westminster boys were allowed alone in London every day of their lives. But Mrs. Knaggs said that was a very different thing, and that she thought Pocket's public school must be very different from Westminster. Pocket bridled, but behaved himself; he knew where he wanted to stay the night, and got as far towards inviting himself as to enlarge upon Mr. Coverley's misfortune and his own disappointment. Mrs. Knaggs in her turn did ask him where he meant to and even the conscientious Pocket caught himself declaring he had no idea. Then the boys were heard returning, and Mrs. Knaggs said of course he would stop to schoolroom supper, and Pocket thanked her as properly as though it were the invitation he made sure must follow. After all, Vivian Knaggs had stayed at Pocket's three weeks one Christmas, and Guy a fortnight at Easter; the boys themselves would think of that; it was not a matter to broach to them, or one to worry about, prematurely.
Vivian and Guy were respectively rather older and rather younger than Pocket, and they came in looking very spruce, the one in his Eton jacket, the [pg 18] other in tails, but both in shiny toppers that excited an unworthy prejudice in the wearer of the green tie with red spots. They seemed very glad to see him, however, and the stiffness was wearing off even before Pocket produced his revolver in the basement room where the two Westminsters prepared their lessons and had their evening meal.
The revolver melted the last particle of ice, though Vivian Knaggs pronounced it an old pin-firer, and Guy said he would not fire it for a thousand pounds. This only made Pocket the more eager to show what he and his revolver were made of, then and there in the garden, and the more confident that it never would be heard in the house.
“It would,” answered Vivian, “and seen as well. No, if you want to have a shot let's stick up a target outside this window, and fire from just inside.”
