Have you ever thought about what fiction is? Probably, such a question may seem surprising: and so everything is clear. Every person throughout his life has to repeatedly create the works he needs for specific purposes - statements, autobiographies, dictations - using not gypsum or clay, not musical notes, not paints, but just a word. At the same time, almost every person will be very surprised if he is told that he thereby created a work of fiction, which is very different from visual art, music and sculpture making. However, everyone understands that a student's essay or dictation is fundamentally different from novels, short stories, news that are created by professional writers. In the works of professionals there is the most important difference - excogitation. But, oddly enough, in a school literature course, you don’t realize the full power of fiction. So using our website in your free time discover fiction for yourself. The Camera Fiend by E. W. Hornung (sites to read books for free TXT) 📖
- Author: E. W. Hornung
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She asked if he had no more cartridges, and he said he had a few loose in his waistcoat pocket; he had thrown away the box. “Then my uncle might have put in a fresh one while you were asleep.”
“Why should he?”
“I don't know, but it sounds quite as possible as the other.”
“I'll soon tell you if he did!” cried Pocket. “There were fourteen in the box to start with, because I counted them, and we only shot away one at the Knaggses' before we were cobbed. That left thirteen—six in the revolver and seven in my pocket. There are your six, and here's one, two, three, four—and three's seven!”
He swept them over the cloth like crumbs, for her to count them for herself, while he looked on with flaming cheeks and wagging tongue. He was beginning to see what it all meant now, but still only what it meant to him and his. He could look his people in the face again; that was the burden of his loud thanksgiving. He was as sure of his [pg 236] innocence as though the dead man had risen to prove it.
“Very well,” said Phillida, briskly; “then it's all the more reason you should go this minute, and catch the very first train home.”
And in her sudden anxiety to see him safely off, she was for helping him on with the overcoat he had brought down again with his bag; but he followed her out slowly, and he would not turn his back.
“I can't leave you now,” he said; and she knew that he saw it from her side at last.
“Why not?”
“Because the whole thing's altered! I'm not going to leave you with a man like that!”
So Pocket, without a moment's thought either for her immediate feelings or the ultimate consequences to himself; and yet with an unconscious air of sacrifice more wounding than his actual words. She would have flung open the door, and ordered him out, but he got his back to it first. So her big eyes blazed at him instead.
“You're very kind!” she cried. “But suppose I don't believe a word you say against my uncle behind his back?”
“I shall wait and say it to his face. That's another reason for waiting.”
“Do you think you're the person to judge him—a boy like you?”
[pg 237]“I don't say I am. I only say that print——”
“How do you know he took the negative?”
“I don't, but——”
“But you jump to conclusions like a baby!” cried the girl, too quick for him in following up a confusing advantage. “I never heard anybody like you for flying from one wild notion to another; first you say he must have made you fire, though you own you were walking in your sleep with a loaded revolver, and then you're sure you never fired at all, simply because you find the revolver fully loaded after days and days! Then you find a photograph that needn't necessarily be what we thought it, that my uncle needn't have taken even if it was; but you jump to another conclusion about him, and you dare to speak of him to me as though you knew every horrid thing you chose to think! As if you knew him and I didn't! As if he hasn't been kind and good to me for years and years—and kind to you—far too kind——”
The strained voice broke, tears were running down her face, and in it and them there was more sincerity. Grief, and not anger, was the well of those bitter tears. And it was in simple supplication, not imperiously any more, that she pointed to the door when speech failed her. The boy's answer was to go close up to her [pg 238] instead. “Will you come with me?” he asked hoarsely.
She shook her head; she was past surprise as well as indignation; she could only shake her head.
“My people would be as good to you as ever he was,” urged Pocket extravagantly. “They'd understand, and you'd stay with us, Phillida! You might live with us altogether!”
She smiled very faintly at that.
“Oh, Phillida, can't you see that they'd do anything for you after all we've been through together? And I, oh! there's nothing I wouldn't do if only you'd come with me now this minute! I know there's a train about ten, and I know where we could borrow the money on the way. Come, Phillida, get on your things and come away from all this horror!”
He had gone on, even into details, encouraged by the tolerance or apathy which had allowed him to go on at all. He took it for indecision; but, whatever it was, she shook it off and declared once for all that she would never leave Dr. Baumgartner, even if everything was true about him, and he as mad as that would make him out.
“But he is!” cried Pocket, with most eager conviction. “That's the only possible explanation, and you'd believe it fast enough if you'd heard all he said to me that first night, and been with [pg 239] me in the dark-room when he developed his negative of the man he said I shot! You'd see how it all fits in, and how this other negative this morning simply shows he was at the bottom of that other affair as well! Of course he's mad; but that's the very reason why I can't go and leave you with him.”
“He would be as he's always been to me.”
“I believe he would,” said honest Pocket.
“Then why don't you go away and leave us?”
“Because I can't.”
“Because you won't!”
“Very well, because I won't and never will! But, mind you, it'll be your fault if anything happens to either of us after this!”
He only meant it as a last argument, though he did resent her fatal obstinacy, and all the obligations which it imposed upon himself. He stood chained in fetters of her forging, as it were to the stake, but he was prepared to stand there like a man, and he did not deserve the things she said to him in a fresh paroxysm of unreasonable wrath. He might be a baby, but he was not a complete coward, or simply trying to make her miserable, as she declared; neither, on this occasion, was he thinking only of himself. But Phillida seemed suddenly to realise that, for she broke off with a despairing little cry, and ran sobbing up the stairs.
[pg 240]In days to come, when the boy had schooled himself not to speak of these days, nor to let his mind dwell on their mystery and terror, it was as a day of dark hours and vivid moments that he remembered the one which Phillida and he began alone together in her uncle's house. Those endless hours were either mercifully forgotten or else contracted to an endurable minimum; but the unforgettable moments would light themselves up in his memory without a detail missing.
There was their first encounter at the dark-room door, and Phillida standing all but barefoot in the ruby light, with her glorious hair about her shoulders, a picture that could never fade. Then there was the moment of the incriminating print, which the sun wiped out even as Phillida stood with it in her hands. That moment merged itself in the greater one of his discovery that the revolver was fully loaded, his inspiration that neither it nor he had done the fatal mischief in the Park. Then she was begging him to go (she who would keep him the time before!) and he entreating her to come with him, and neither giving way an inch, so that they quarrelled just when they should have stuck [pg 241] together, and she ran away in tears, and he stayed below in a glow of anger which dissolved his fears like snow in May.
That was the beginning of a black hour and more. Phillida was never to be forgiven, then; he was staying there at his peril, staying absolutely on her account, and so far from giving him the slightest credit for it, or a single word of encouragement, she said all sorts of things and was off before he could answer one of them. It was not for Pocket to see the many ironies of that moment, and not for him to recognise the tonic property of his heroic grievance. He could only see himself at the foot of those stairs, first gnashing his teeth and not sorry he had made her cry, then sitting down with his eye on the front door, revolver in hand, to await the click of the doctor's key. Another click was to answer it; and at the point of the cocked revolver Baumgartner was to have made a clean breast of his crimes, not only to the giant-killer at the foot of the stairs but to the girl he meant to call to witness with her own ears.
Pocket saw himself a desperate character just then, and one not incapable of desperate action had the climax only come at once. But he had more than an hour of it alone at his post; he had a whole hot forenoon of unmitigated suspense, of sickening alarms from tradesmen's carts, boys [pg 242] whistling past the house as though they were not in a wicked world at all, and then a piano-organ that redoubled his watchfulness, and spoilt some tunes for him for ever. Once he did hear shambling feet on the very steps outside. Once was quite enough, though it was but an advertisement for cast-off clothing (and false teeth) that came fluttering through the letter-box. Pocket was left in such a state that he would not have backed himself to hit the door from the stairs; and he put the chain on it, thinking to interview the doctor over that, in the manner of old Miss Harbottle.
So it happened that the first significant sound was entirely lost upon him, because he was listening for one so much nearer at hand, until Phillida ran downstairs and almost over him where he sat.
He got up to make way stiffly, but a glance assured him that the quarrel was over on her side. The great eyes were fixed appealingly upon him, but with a distressing look which he had done nothing to provoke. Not before then was he aware of another duet between newsboys coming
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