none the worse for that,” said he. “So far we have much in common, for I always use plates myself. But what we put upon our plates, there's the difference, eh?”
“I should imagine so,” said Pocket, smiling.
Dr. Baumgartner was smiling too, and still less coldly than before, but yet darkly to himself, and at the boy rather than with him.
“You take portraits of your friends, perhaps?”
“Yes; often.”
“In the body, I presume?”
Pocket looked nonplussed.
“You only take them in the flesh?”
“Of course.”
“Exactly! I take the spirit,” said the doctor; “that's the difference.”
Pocket watched the now wonderfully genial [pg 56] countenance of Baumgartner follow the brutal features of the meerschaum Turk through a melting cloud of smoke. The boy had been taken aback. But his bewilderment was of briefer duration than might have been the case with a less ardent photographer; for he took a technical interest in his hobby, and read the photographic year-books, nearly as ravenously as Wisden's Almanacke.
“I see,” he said, lukewarmly. “You go in for psychic photography.”
“Psychic,” said Baumgartner; for the public schoolboy, one regrets to report, had pronounced the word to rhyme with sly-chick. The doctor added, with more disdain: “And you don't believe in it?”
“I didn't say so.”
“But you looked and sounded it!”
“I don't set myself up as a believer or unbeliever,” said the boy, always at his ease on a subject that attracted him. “But I do say I don't believe in the sort of thing I read somewhere last holidays. It was in a review of a book on that sort of photography. The chap seemed to have said you could get a negative of a spirit without exposing the plate at all; hide away your plate, never mind your lens, only conjure up your spirit and see what happens. I'll swear nothing ever happened like that! There may be ghosts, you may see them, [pg 57] and so may the camera, but not without focusing and exposing like you've got to do with ordinary flesh and blood!”
The youth had gone further and flown higher than he meant, under the stimulus of an encouragement impossible to have foreseen. And the doctor had come to his feet, waving eloquently with his pipe; his grey face beamed warmly; his eyes were lances tipped with fire.
“Well said, my young fellow!” cried he. “I agree with every syllable you have spoken.”
“It's a question of photography, not of spiritualism,” concluded Pocket, rounding off his argument in high excitement.
“I agree, I agree! All that is rubbish, pure moonshine; and you see it even at your age! But there's much more in it than that; you must see the rest as well, since you see so far so clearly.” The boy blushed with pleasure, determined to see as far as anybody. “You admit there may be such things as ghosts, as you call them?” he was asked as by an equal.
“Certainly, sir.”
“Visible shapes, in the likeness of man? As visible and yet as tangible as that sunbeam?”
“Rather!”
“You allow that the camera can see them if we can?”
[pg 58]
Pocket allowed it like the man he was being made to feel; the concession gave him a generous glow. Promotion had come to him by giant leaps. He felt five years older in fewer minutes.
“Then,” cried the doctor, with further flattery in his air of triumph, “then you admit everything! You may not see these images, but I may. I may not see them, but my lens may! Think how much that glass eye throws already upon the retina of a sensitised film that our living lenses fail to throw upon ours; think of all that escapes the eye but the camera catches. Take two crystal vases, fill one with one acid and the other with another; one comes out like water as we see it; the other, though not less limpid in our sight, like ink. The eye sees through it, but not the lens. The eye sees emptiness as though the acid itself were pure crystal; the lens flings an inky image on the plate. The trouble is that, while you can procure that acid at the nearest chemist's, no money and no power on earth can summon or procure at will the spirit which once was man.”
His voice was vibrant and earnest as it had been when Pocket heard it first an hour earlier in the Park. It was even as passionate, but this was the passion of enthusiastic endeavour. If the man had a heart at all, it was in this wild question without a doubt. Even the schoolboy [pg 59] perceived this dimly. There was something else which had become clearer to him with each of these later remarks. Striking as they seemed to him, they were not wholly unfamiliar. The ring of novelty was wanting to his ear.
Suddenly he exclaimed, “I knew I knew your name!”
“You do know it, do you?”
Baumgartner spoke ungraciously, as though the announcement was discounted by the interruption it entailed.
“It was in connection with the very book I mentioned. I knew I had come across it somewhere.”
“You read the correspondence that followed the review?”
“Some of it.”
“My letter among others?”
“Yes! I remember every word of it now.”
“Then you recall my view as to the alleged necessity of a medium's co-operation in these spirit-photographs?”
“You said it wasn't necessary, if I remember,” replied Pocket somewhat tentatively, despite his boast.
“It was the pith and point of my contention! I mentioned the two moments at which I hold that a man's soul may be caught apart, may be cut off [pg 60] from his body by no other medium than a good sound lens in a light-tight camera. You cannot have forgotten them if you read my letter.”
“One,” said the boy, “was the moment of death.”
“The moment of dissolution,” the doctor corrected him. “But there is a far commoner moment than that, one that occurs constantly to us all, whereas dissolution comes but once.”
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. The answer was a nod as hasty, but the doctor seemed unconvinced, for he went on didactically: “You visit far countries in your dreams; your soul is the traveller. You speak to the absent or the dead; it is your soul again; and we dismiss the miracle as a dream! I fix the moment as that of the soul's return
