Baumgartner

“ The ragged little garden was brimming over with moonlight from wall to wall. The unkempt grass looked pale and ghostly, like the skin of some monstrous wolf. The moon rolled high in the sky and clouds flew above and below the moon, varying in pace as well. Yet it was a still night, and Pocket did not think that he had broken the stillness, until the door burst open behind them, and Baumgartner stood there, holding his lamp aloft. The wick was turned too high, the flame ran up the chimney in the draught, and for an instant a demoniac face flared up behind it. ”

“ The little billiards were a bond and a distraction. They brought out Baumgartner’s simple side, and they emphasised the schoolboy’s simplicity. Both played a strenuous game, the doctor a most deliberate one; his brows would knit, his mouth shut, his eyes calculate, and his hand obey, as though his cue were a surgical instrument cutting deep between life and death. It was a curious glimpse of disproportionate concentration; even the Turk’s head was only lit to be laid aside as an obstruction. Pocket’s one chance was to hit hard and trust to the fortune that accrues on a small table. ”

“ For you must be told early concerning Old Baumgartner's longing for certain lands, tenements and hereditaments—using his own phrase—which were not his own, but which adjoined his. It had passed into a proverb of the vicinage; indeed, though the property in question belonged to one Sarah Pressel, it was known colloquially as "Baumgartner's Yearn."
And the reason of it was this: Between his own farm and the public road (and the railroad station when it came) lay the fairest meadow-land farmer's eye had ever rested upon. (I am speaking again for the father of Seffy and with his hyperbole.) ”

“ Dr. Baumgartner pottered about his untidy little garden, a sun-trap again as Pocket had seen it first; the Turk’s head perspired from internal and external heat, but its rich yellow, shading into richer auburn, clashed rather with a red geranium which the doctor wore jauntily in the button-hole of his black alpaca jacket.
It was Phillida who had given him the flower at breakfast. She grew what she could in the neglected garden; the plants in the miniature conservatory were also hers, though the doctor took a perfunctory interest in them, obviously on her account. ”

“ 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 ”

“ He noticed the difference in Baumgartner’s voice when he addressed his niece, the humane kindling of the inexorable eyes, and to-day he thought he saw a reciprocal softening on the part of Phillida. There had been none to see yesterday or the day before. It was her uncle whom the girl had seemed unable to forgive for the unseemly scuffle of Friday morning. But now it was as though memory and common fairness had set years of kindness against these days of unendurable mystery, and bidden her endure them with a better grace. ”

“ If he could have convicted himself of the fatal affair in the Park, and so cleared Baumgartner of all blood-guiltiness whatsoever, in that or any other case, he would have done it for Phillida’s sake that afternoon. But with every hour of the doctor’s absence suspicions multiplied. Phillida herself was a prey to them. She was almost as ready to recall symptoms of incipient insanity as instances of personal kindness; if one lost one’s reason, she broke a long silence to contend, there could be no question of regret and wrong. ”

“ He hated Baumgartner for forgetting that, and pretending for a moment to take any credit to himself. That again was not worthy of so cool and keen a brain, much less of the candid character with which Pocket had supposed himself to be dealing. The very young are pathetically apt to see their own virtues in those whom they trust at all; but the schoolboy’s faith in Dr. Baumgartner had been shattered to its base ”

“ 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 it required the spell of Baumgartner’s presence to make the prospect such as could be borne with the least degree of visible manhood.
Be it remembered that he was not a man at all, but a boy in many ways younger than most boys of sixteen and three quarters, albeit older in some few. He was old in imagination, but young in common sense. One may be imaginative and still have a level head, but it is least likely in one’s teens. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Baumgartner had figured. It might be that the constant menace of that portentous presence had thrown his simple middle-class surroundings, at the time, into a kind of reassuring relief. But it was the case that the morning had already clouded over; the sunshine of the other mornings was sadly missing; and Phillida looked only too eager to fly from the scene, until she declared she never could.
“But that’s absurd!” cried Mr. Upton bluntly. “I’m not going to leave a young girl like you alone in the day of battle, murder and sudden death! ”

“ Reddest of all was the old photographer, who turned into Mr. Spearman in cap and gown, who turned into various members of the Upton family, one making more inconsequent remarks than the other, touching wildly on photography and the flitting soul, and between them working the mad race up to such a pace and pitch that Pocket woke with a dreadful start to find Dr. Baumgartner standing over him once more in the perfectly pallid flesh. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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!” cried 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 goblin inquisitor of Hyde Park had vanished with his hat and cloak. The excited empiric of the dark-room was a creature of that ruby light alone. Dr. Baumgartner was shaved and clad like other men, the iron-grey hair carefully brushed back from a lofty forehead, all traces of strong acids removed from his well-kept hands. There was a third person, and only a third, at table in the immature shape of a young lady whom the doctor introduced as his niece Miss Platts, and addressed as Phillida. ”

“ It was neither very nice nor half enough for a famishing lad, that plate of cold mixed meats from the restaurant, with a hard stale roll to eke them out. But Pocket felt he had a fresh start in life when he had eaten every crumb and emptied his water-bottle. Nor was he without plan or purpose any longer; he was only doubtful whether to knock at Phillida’s door and shout goodbye, or to leave her a note explaining all. Baumgartner would be out for hours; he always was, on these early jaunts of his; there would almost be time to wait and say goodbye properly when the girl came down. ”

“ The ordeal in front of him, beginning in certain conflict with Baumgartner, and ending in a blaze of wretched notoriety, was a severe one to face; meanwhile he lay in such peace and safety as it was only human to prolong a little. That night, for all his moral innocence, he might lie in prison; let him make the most of a good bed while he had one, especially as he was still mysteriously free from asthma. ”

“ He was photographer enough to know what these were almost at once; they were those poplars in the park. But how could Baumgartner have photographed Pocket with those poplars behind him when they had been behind Baumgartner all the time?
Pocket said to himself, “Where am I, by the way?” and bent lower to see. His ear touched the doctor’s; it heard the doctor breathing as though he were the asthmatic; and now a human shape was visible, but not walking in its sleep, lying in it like the man in the wet grass. “When did you get me?” asked Pocket aloud. ”

“ Wilhelm Baumgartner, my old Zurich acquaintance, came to spend a few weeks in Lucerne out of kindness to me. And lastly Alexander Seroff from St. Petersburg came to stay some time in the neighbourhood. He was a remarkable man, of great intelligence, and openly prepossessed in favour of Liszt and myself. He had heard my Lohengrin in Dresden and wanted to know more of me—an ambition I was obliged to satisfy by playing Tristan to him in the rough-and-ready fashion which was peculiar to me. I went up Mount Pilatus with Drasecke, and again had to look after a companion who suffered from giddiness. ”

“ On no account was he to confide in the doctor’s niece Phillida, to give her the slightest inkling of his connection with the latest of London mysteries, or even of the scene, or any of the circumstances of his first meeting with Baumgartner.
“You are bound to see something of each other; the less you say about yourself the better.” ”

“ Pocket believed he remembered the other instance too, but was not sure about it, the fact being that the whole momentous letter had struck him as too fantastic for serious consideration. That, however, he could not and dared not say; and he was not the less frightened of making a mistake with those inspired eyes burning fanatically into his.
“The other moment,” the doctor said at last, with a pitying smile, “is when the soul returns to its prison after one of those flights which men call dreams. You know that theory of the dream?” Baumgartner asked abruptly. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Dr. Baumgartner might have been ten minutes getting rid of the intruder; before that he had been first amazed and then relieved to hear the piano in the drawing-room; and that was all his anxious ear had heard of either boy or girl during his absence. Yet the boy was not standing over the piano, as he might have been, for Phillida was trying to recall one of the concert songs he said his sister sang. Pocket, however, was staring out into the garden with a troubled face, which he turned abruptly, aggressively, and yet apprehensively to meet the doctor’s. ”

“ Baumgartner has the strangest power of any human being I ever heard of; he can make you do anything he likes, whether you like it yourself or not. The newspapers have been raking up this case in connection with—mine—and I see that one theory was that the man in this broken negative committed suicide. ”

“ Thrush.
“But really, Miss Upton, he must have done something, you know! And he actually talked to Dr. Baumgartner about this; not of doing it himself, but of stowaways in general, à propos of his voyage; and how many pounds of biscuit and how many ounces of water would carry one alive into blue water. There’s another thing, by the way! He told Baumgartner the ship touched nowhere between the East India Docks and Melbourne; he would be out of the world for three whole months.”
“And she only sailed yesterday?” cried Mr. Upton, coming furiously to his feet. ”

“ Baumgartner was there and willed him to do it!”
“He must have been there if he took the photograph.”
“Is there another man alive who tries these things? I’ve told you all he told me about it, but I haven’t told you all he said about the value of human life.” ”