A Case in Camera
want to make any bother. I couldn't help feeling sorry for him. I don't
know what's happened to us all."
I could have told him. It was the Case that had happened.
"Mrs. Esdaile too--she was just the same----"
Naturally. The Case was the same.
"I hadn't very much talk with her. Of course, I asked her how Joan
was----"
Yes, Joan was in the Case too.
"And she told me she'd seen Dawdy the night before. Dawdy was all a
bundle of nerves, and Mrs. Esdaile put her to bed. She told me that if
she were me she'd go round there at once and tell her--tell her----"
But here he broke down suddenly and completely. He sank on the edge of
his bed and buried his face in his hands. He shook with sobs.
"Oh," he broke out uncontrollably, "it's all that beast--that beast
Cunningham----"
"Oh no," I thought; "it wasn't Cunningham; it was the Case."
"You don't know the life that brute led her," he went on. "Drunken
blackguard--women all over the place--and Dawdy, Dawdy at home! I hope
he's in hell! Killed her heart he did. Can you blame her for not wanting
to chance it again? I hardly had the heart to beg her, I was so broken
up. She admitted she'd nothing against me. She just wanted to be right
away from all men. So I pay for that beast. Somebody always has to pay,
I expect. If only I'd seen her before he did----"
Presently he was better. He got up and began to move about again.
"Sorry," he said shortly. "But what would you do?"
"Well, I should shave for one thing," I said quietly. "And for another,
I don't think I'd make up my mind that everything was entirely hopeless.
You never know what'll happen. It may be all right presently."
"I suppose you're right," he admitted. "No good chucking your hand in
like this. Sorry. But it is a bit upsetting, you know."
Could I at that moment have added to his troubles by telling him about
Westbury, the ladder and the pistol in his pocket?
Perhaps I could have done. Anyway, I didn't.
VIII
I recognized the more readily the separate and inhuman vitality this
Case of ours was beginning to assume when I carefully considered its
action upon myself. My connection with it was slight by comparison with
that of some of the others, but I was aware of its operation. The
attitudes into which it began to constrain me were not quite natural
attitudes. It exercised pressure. What pressure?
Well, to begin with, this pressure--that I began to find it difficult to
leave it alone. Both at home and at the office of the _Daily Circus_ it
intruded between me and the work I ought to have been getting on with.
Little fleeting pictures began to interpose themselves. Sometimes I
would find myself looking fixedly at a galley-slip or a page still damp
from the proving-press and seeing, not the thing in my hand, but Joan
Merrow running in with the children from the garden again; at home my
page of manuscript would blur and there in a doorway Philip Esdaile
would stand, his eyes dancing with a stilly excitement, the curaçao and
the candle once more in his hands. And this, in my curious trade, is a
serious matter. Out of precisely these insubstantialities I have to
contrive to pay my rent and income-tax and to provide my
bread-and-butter. I will not go so far as to say that I dreamed of the
Case at night, but it began to play the dickens with my work. Unable to
settle down to it, I found the Park drawing me instead, and even in the
afternoons, which in ordinary commercial honesty were not my time at
all, I began to put in the briefest and most perfunctory appearances at
the office. I contented myself with the appearance of busyness, and
wondered how long it would be before my chief caught me out.
In this frame of mind I happened one afternoon, by the merest chance, to
run across Cecil Hubbard. I had dropped into a Technical and Scientific
Exhibition of some sort, and I had thought I had seen Hubbard's
white-topped cap and foursquare back in the downstairs rooms, but had
lost them again. It was upstairs, a quarter of an hour later, that I
found him.
He was watching another man, evidently an attendant or official of the
Exhibition, who wore a double telephone-receiver about his ears and was
slowly turning the handle of an instrument that at a first glance
resembled an overgrown typewriter. Hubbard was peering into the
mechanism. Then, at the invitation of the other man, he removed his cap
and clasped the receiver about his head. The official continued to turn
the handle.
"Hallo!" I said, coming up. "May one ask what it is?"
Hubbard turned. "Hallo, what are you doing here?" was his greeting. Then
to the attendant, "What do you say the thing's called?"
It was the optophone, and perhaps you may have seen, or rather heard it.
It is an instrument for enabling a totally blind man to read a page of
ordinary print. I myself had never heard of the thing, and am not sure
that I give a technically correct description of it now, but, as I
understand it, the page travels along the carriage in such a way that
each letter in turn passes over a tiny ray of light that is directed
through a morsel of selenium. The letter causes an interruption; a
lower-case "l," for example, which is a straight line, making one kind
of break, but an "i," which is the "l" with the dot cut off the top, a
different one; and so with the other letters. The transmutation is of
light into sound, and the official assured us that with a very little
practice the ear learns to distinguish the minute variations in the
telephonic receiver without difficulty.
Remembering Hubbard's former (to me lunatic) conjectures that day when I
had called on him at the Admiralty, I thought it an odd chance that I
should come upon him examining such a thing as this optophone seemed to
be; but our talk did not begin with that. Leaving the instrument, we
turned away between glass showcases of fabrics and British glass and
brilliant dyes and crystals and approached a window-bay that looked out
on a gray courtyard.
"Well, what are you doing here?" he said again cheerfully. "It's a long
time since you looked me up."
I told him that I went to all sorts of places in search of a little
clowning for the _Circus_, and added that it was precisely the same
distance from his place to mine as from mine to his. He laughed.
"I should have thought this was out of your line," he replied. "Well,
what's the news?"
It was not likely that Hubbard had forgotten incidents so remarkable as
those of that Lennox Street breakfast-party. Moreover, I could see he
was sorry he had met me at this dead hour of the afternoon; he always
talked better over lunch at Simpson's, with a Bronx or a Martini to
start off with. Failing these, there was nothing for it but a cup of tea
to wash down our chat, and as a matter of fact it was at a Slater's
place in the Strand, with a rather good little band of violin, 'cello
and piano that, a quarter of an hour later, we settled down.
"Well, Esdaile's taken your friend Chummy away," I observed when our
teapots had been brought.
"Oh, he has, has he?" said Hubbard. "Queer business that, wasn't it?
Have you made anything of it all yet?"
"I can't say I have; but then I'm rather at a disadvantage in not
knowing your friend. Tell me something about him."
"Well--what, for example?"
"As I know nothing you can't go far wrong," I replied.
Music is one of the Commander's passions, and, as I say, that Slater
band was not too bad. I think it was the "_Valse Triste_" that sent
him off into a reverie. The young creature who played the fiddle had
bobbed hair and was rather an attractive sort of sylph, and the
Commander's blue eyes with the dark dots in them were fixed on her
intricately-moving fingers.
Then he came out of his musing with a sudden jerk. What I especially
like about Hubbard is that he usually knows what you want to know, and
does not cease to feel the working of your mind even through a longish
silence.
"Extraordinary thing," were his words as he came out of that silence.
"It seems to be like the wind--blows whither it listeth. You look for it
where you'd expect it and it isn't there, and then up it pops in a place
you'd never think of looking for it."
This sounded to me rather like some of my own Publicity conclusions; but
"What does?" I prompted him.
"Oh, the fluence--the gism--the real stuff--the thing you know when you
see it but haven't got a name for," he replied off-handedly. "I suppose
you writer-fellows call it genius.... How old's Smith? Twenty-four I
should say, so it isn't a matter of accumulated experience. He couldn't
be more dead right if he was a hundred-and-four."
"Right about what?"
"Well, about his job. Aviation. What it's for, just as much as ever now
the War's over."
"Tell me--but remember I'm a journalist."
"All the better," he replied promptly. "The more you rub it in the
better. The War only ended a few months ago, but a good many people seem
to be trying to think there's never been one. That's right enough from
the economic point of view, of course--gets people back to work
again--but there is the other side, and I wish you would rub it in."
"Well, what do you want rubbed in?"
The eyes that had caught mine in Esdaile's studio rested on my face
again now. Then he pulled out a fat cigarette.
"Civil aviation's for War, of course--the next War," he said almost
contemptuously. "You're not one of those who think it's for
express-letters, are you? Or carrying a cheap-jack Bradford agent to
make a dicker in wool? That's where so many of you newspaper fellows
make the mistake. You're all so clever at disguising the truth. You
don't take people into your confidence enough."
Professionally this began to interest me. The public, its interests and
its confidence are supposed to be my business.
"Go on," I said.
"Well, you don't," Hubbard repeated. He has rather a rapid and abrupt
manner of speech that enables him better than anybody I know to carry
off the things men are usually a little shy about. "The Bradford man has
his affairs, I know, and it may sometimes be an advantage to get a
letter there a couple of hours quicker, but that's not the point. There
are two points, as a matter of fact. One's the training of your men, and
the other's continuity of manufacture. If this country forgets either of
'em it may as well chuck its hand in. Why," he exclaimed in a phrase
that arrested me in a quite remarkable way as chiming in so exactly with
my own private observations, "look at the Elizabethans! What did _they_
do? They wanted ships and they wanted sailors. So they developed the
North Sea fishing industry. Gave 'em all sorts of bonuses and rebates
and privileges. Not for the sake of a few dead fish. Not on your life.
It was to keep the men in training and the shipyards running and the
Spaniard out. And it's the same with civil aviation to-day."
I won't say that I had never thought of this before. But one thinks of
all sorts of things that evaporate in the thinking, so that for
practical purposes they might just as well never have been thought. It
was his energy and certitude and single-mindedness that gave it all its
force. And although I am a journalist, that is why I think that all our
print is dead and cold until it is vivified by the heard and passionate
voice. Oh, I know the stock argument--that for one that is reached by
the human voice a thousand are influenced by the printed word. Well, so
they are, until a contradictory word is printed and both messages jam to
a standstill. But you can't jam the pentecostal flames that give the
prophets utterance. I am inclined to think that if there is one
indestructible thing in the world it is the Uttered Word. Naturally I