Signs & Wonders. J. D. Beresford
of God. He was as beaten and battered by the personal threat of those cumulative explosions as if every gun sought him and him alone as the objective of its awful wrath.
But, by degrees, he began to grow accustomed even to that world-rocking pandemonium. He became aware of the undertones that laced the dominant roar and thunder of artillery. He could trace, he believed, beside the shriek of shell, the humming whirr of an aeroplane he could not see. And once something whizzed past him with a high singing hiss that ended abruptly with a sharp clip. He guessed that a fragment of shrapnel had buried itself in one of the plane-trees.
Yet the real danger of that warning did not terrify him as had the enormous onslaught of noise from the barrage. At the next intermission of the deafening bombardment he stood up, rested his hand on the plinth of the obelisk, and stared, wondering and unafraid, into the great arc of the sky. He could see no aeroplanes. … The stillness was so profound that he could hear with a grateful distinctness the soft clucking ripple of the rising flood.
Presently he dropped his regard for the heavens to the plain objective of deserted London. The mist had almost dispersed in some places, had thickened in others—churned and driven, perhaps, by the vast pressure of the sound waves. Across the road he could see the impending cliff of great buildings, pale and tall in the moonlight. At his feet the plane-trees threw trembling, skeleton shadows. All the town waited in suspense to know whether or not the bombardment would presently be renewed.
He had a presentiment that it was all over. He felt the quick exaltation and vigour of one who has suffered and escaped danger. But when he looked up the Embankment and saw what he took to be the silhouettes of three towering trams emerging with furtive silence from the mist, he was aware of a faint sense of disappointment. Nothing was left to him but to return to the common dreariness of life.
He took a step towards the trams that were advancing with such a stately, such a hushed and ponderous deliberation. …
Trams … ?
He held his breath, staring and gaping, and then backed nervously against the pedestal of the great Egyptian monument.
Had the shock of that awful bombardment broken his nerve? Was he mad? Bewitched by some ancient magic? Or was it, perhaps, that in one swift inappreciable moment he had been instantly killed by a fragment of shrapnel, and that, now, his emerging spirit could, even as it watched these familiar surroundings, peer back deep into the hidden mysteries of time?
He pressed himself, shivering and fascinated, against the hard, insistent reality of cold granite; but still in single file these three colossal shapes advanced, solemn and majestic, rocking magnificently with a slow and powerful gravity.
They were almost abreast of him now, sombre and stolid—three vast, prehistoric, unattended Elephants, imperturbably exploring the silences of this dead and lonely city.
They passed, and left him weak and trembling, but indescribably happy.
Two minutes later, a blind and insensible policeman, following the very path of those magical evocations of the thought of ancient Egypt, rode carelessly by, bearing the banal message that all was clear.
But the adventurer walked home in a dream of ecstasy. Whatever the future might hold for him, he had pierced the veil of the commonplace. He had seen and heard on the Thames Embankment that sacred, mystical procession of the Elephants.
He looked at Mrs. Gibson with something of contempt when she brought him his breakfast next morning. He could not respond to her chatter concerning the foolish detail of last night’s raid. She, poor woman, was afraid that she might, in some unknown way, have offended him. Her last effort was meant as an amiable diversion. One never knew whether people weren’t more scared than they chose to admit.
“There’s one amusin’ bit,” she said, laying his morning paper on the table, “as I just glanced at while I was waitin’ for the water to boil. It’s in Hincidents of the Raid. It seems as three performin’ elephunts goin’ ’ome from the ’Ippodrome or somewhere got loose—their keeper done a bolt, I suppose, when the guns began—and got walkin’ off by theirselves all down the Embankment. They must ’a been a comic sight, poor things. Terrified they was, no doubt. …”
Now, why should God explain his miracles through the mouth of a Mrs. Gibson?
THE PERFECT SMILE
THE REALISATION of it first came to Douglas Owen when he was not quite five years old.
From his babyhood he had been spoilt, more particularly by his father. He could be such a charming little boy, and his frequent outbreaks of real naughtiness were overlooked or gently reproved. They were even admired in private by his parents, who regarded these first signs of disobedience, temper, and selfishness as the marks of an independent and original spirit.
Nevertheless, when Douglas was nearly five years old, he achieved a minor climax that the most indulgent father could not overlook. Despite all warnings and commands, Douglas would steal from the larder. When there were cakes or tarts he took those for preference, but when there was nothing else he would steal bread, merely, as it seemed, for the pleasure of stealing it. His father had protested to his mother that everything should be kept under lock and key, but as Mrs. Owen explained: “You can’t expect a cook to be for ever locking things up.” And the little Douglas was ingenious in his depredations. He chose his moment with cunning. Also he knew, as the cook herself confessed, how “to get round her.”
Mr. Owen, who was a tender-hearted idealist, admitted at last that stern measures were called for, and he took Douglas into his study and remonstrated with him gently, even lovingly, but with great earnestness. The remonstrance gained strength from Mrs. Owen’s fear that Douglas might make himself seriously ill by his illicit feastings. Douglas, who was forward for his age, listened with attention to his father’s serious lecture and promised reform. “I won’t do it again, father. Promise,” he said with apparent sincerity. And his father, believing absolutely in his child’s truthfulness, and remembering his wife’s adjuration to be “really firm,” was tempted to clinch the thing once for all by issuing an ultimatum.
“I’m sure you won’t, little son,” he said, “because you see if you did, daddy would have to whack you. He’d hate doing it, but he’d have to do it all the same.”
Douglas’s expression was faintly speculative. He had heard something like this before, from his mother.
“But you’ve promised faithfully that you’ll never, never take anything out of the larder, or the kitchen, or the pantry again, haven’t you, darling?” Mr. Owen persisted, by way of having everything quite clear.
“Promised faithfully,” agreed Douglas; parted from his father with a hug of forgiveness; and was found a quarter of an hour later in the larder, eating jam with a spoon from a newly-opened jar.
“You threatened to whack him if he didn’t keep his promise, and you must do it,” Mrs. Owen said firmly to her husband. “If you don’t keep your promises, how can you expect him to keep his?”
“Damn!” murmured Mr. Owen with great intensity.
“I shall bring him in and leave him with you,” his wife said, correctly interpreting her husband’s method of reluctantly accepting the inevitable.
Douglas was brought, and it was evident that on this occasion he was truly conscious of sin and apprehensive of the result. All his nonchalance was gone from him. He did not cry, but his eyes were wide and terrified. He looked a thoroughly guilty and scared child.
Mr. Owen hardened his heart. He thought of the contempt shown for his authority, of the wilfully broken promise, and of the threat to his son’s future unless he were made to realise that sin cannot go unpunished.
Mrs. Owen, looking at her husband’s stern face, was satisfied that justice would be done.
And then, when father and son