ms. This one was as narrow, only twice the length. One end was
monopolised by the door that admitted them, the other by a window from
floor to ceiling. And this window was in two great sheets of ruby glass,
so that Pocket looked down red-hot iron steps into a crimson garden, and
therefrom to his companion dyed from head to foot like Mephistopheles.

"This is something like a dark-room!" exclaimed the lad as the door was
shut and locked behind him. The folding doors were permanently barred by
shelves and lockers; opposite was a long porcelain trough, pink as the
doctor's shirt-sleeves in the strong red light; racks of negatives and
stoppered bottles glimmered over brass taps stained to an angry copper.

Everything was perfection from a photographer's standpoint; the boy felt
instantaneously spoilt for his darkened study and his jugs of water. All
he had ever sighed for in the prosecution of his hobby was here in this
little paradise of order and equipment. The actual work, he felt, would
be a secondary consideration in such a workshop; the mere manipulation of
such stoppered bottles as his host was handling now, the choice of
graduated phials, the wealth of trays and dishes, would have been joy
enough for him. He watched the favoured operator with a watering mouth.
A crimson blind had been lowered to reduce the light; the doctor had
turned up his shirt-cuffs; his wrists were muscular and furry, as it now
seemed with a fiery fur, yet they trembled with excitement as he produced
his plate. And Pocket remembered how extravagant an image was expected on
that plain pink surface.

He did not know whether to expect it or not himself. It was difficult to
believe in that sort of thing, difficult to disbelieve in this sort of
man, who entertained no shadow of doubt himself, whose excitement and
suspense were as infectious as everything else about him. Pocket had
come into the dark-room wheezing almost as much as ever; he was not to be
heard breathing as the plate was rocked to and fro as in raspberry-juice,
and gradually the sky showed sharp and black. But the sky it was that
puzzled Pocket first. It was broken by perpendicular objects like white
torpedoes. 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,