The Project Gutenberg EBook of Signs & Wonders, by J. D. Beresford This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: Signs & Wonders Author: J. D. Beresford Release Date: May 19, 2019 [EBook #59549] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SIGNS & WONDERS *** Produced by Tim Lindell, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) By the same Author: THE EARLY HISTORY OF JACOB STAHL A CANDIDATE FOR TRUTH THE INVISIBLE TRUTH THE HAMPDENSHIRE WONDER GOSLINGS: A WORLD OF WOMEN THE HOUSE IN DEMETRIUS ROAD THESE LYNNEKERS HOUSEMATES NINETEEN IMPRESSIONS GOD’S COUNTERPOINT THE JERVAISE COMEDY AN IMPERFECT MOTHER REVOLUTION With Kenneth Richmond: W. E. FORD: A BIOGRAPHY Printed in Great Britain. SIGNS & WONDERS BY J. D. BERESFORD G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS NEW YORK . . . MCMXXI TO WALTER DE LA MARE “Hath serving nature, bidden of the gods, Thick-screened Man’s narrow sky, And hung these Stygian veils of fog To hide his dingied sty?— The gods who yet, at mortal birth, Bequeathed him fantasy?” ‘FOG’ by WALTER DE LA MARE CONTENTS PAGE PROLOGUE: THE APPEARANCE OF MAN 8 SIGNS AND WONDERS 12 THE CAGE 16 ENLARGEMENT 20 THE PERFECT SMILE 26 THE HIDDEN BEAST 34 THE BARRAGE 38 THE INTROVERT 44 THE BARRIER 50 THE CONVERT 54 A NEGLIGIBLE EXPERIMENT 68 THE MIRACLE 74 YOUNG STRICKLAND’S CAREER 80 A DIFFERENCE OF TEMPERAMENT 86 REFERENCE WANTED 92 AS THE CROW FLIES 96 THE NIGHT OF CREATION 102 PROLOGUE THE APPEARANCE OF MAN: A PLAY OUT OF TIME & SPACE. When the curtain rises, two men and a woman are discovered talking before an illimitable background. FIRST MAN [shaking hands with the man and the woman] Well! Who’d have thought of meeting you here! WOMAN. Or you, as far as that goes. We thought you were living in Putney. FIRST MAN. So I am. It just happened that I’d run over this morning. [Enter R. a nebula, spinning slowly. It passes majestically across the background as the scene proceeds.] SECOND MAN. The world’s a very small place. FIRST MAN. Ah! You’re right, it is. WOMAN. And how’s the family? FIRST MAN. Capital, thanks. Yours well, too, I hope? WOMAN. All except Johnnie. [Enter R. a group of prehistoric animals; a few brontosauri, titanotheres, mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers, and so on.] FIRST MAN. What’s wrong with him? WOMAN. He was bit by a dog. Nasty place he’s got. FIRST MAN. Did you have it cauterised? They’re nasty things, dog-bites. WOMAN. Oh, yes, we had it cauterised, you may be sure. SECOND MAN [reflectively] Dangerous things, dogs. FIRST MAN. If they’re not properly looked after, they are. Now I’ve got a little dog.... [At this point the speaker’s voice becomes inaudible owing to the passing of the brontosauri, which gradually move off L.] WOMAN [becoming audible and apparently interrupting in the middle of an anecdote] Though I tell Johnnie it’s his own fault. He shouldn’t have teased him. [Enter R. a few thousand savages with flat weapons.] SECOND MAN. Boys will be boys. WOMAN. Which is no reason, I say, that they shouldn’t learn to behave themselves. FIRST MAN. Can’t begin too soon, in my opinion. [Exeunt savages: enter the population of India.] WOMAN. He might have been killed if a man hadn’t come up and pulled the dog off him. A black man, he was, too. FIRST MAN. What? A nigger? WOMAN. Or a Turk, or something. I can’t never see the difference. [With a shiver.] Ugh! I hate black men, somehow. The look of ’em gives me the shudders. SECOND MAN [on a note of faint expostulation] My dear! FIRST MAN. I’ve heard others say the same thing. WOMAN. A pretty penny, Johnnie’ll cost us, with the Doctor and all. [Enter two armies engaged in a Civil War.] FIRST MAN [shaking his head, wisely] Ah! I daresay it will. SECOND MAN. I don’t know what we’re coming to, what with wages and prices and Lord knows what all? FIRST MAN. No more do I. Why, only yesterday.... [The rest of his sentence is drowned by the firing of a battery of heavy guns.] WOMAN. Oh! well, I suppose it’ll all come right in time. [The Civil War moves off L. Signs of the approaching end of the world become manifest.] FIRST MAN. We’ll hope for the best, I’m sure. [The Hosts of Heaven appear in the sky.] SECOND MAN [reflectively] On the whole, I should say that things looked a bit better than they did. [8] [9] [The Sea gives up its Dead.] WOMAN. We shall take Johnnie to Ramsgate, as soon as his arm’s well. FIRST MAN. We always go to Scarborough. SECOND MAN. We have to consider the expense of the journey, especially now there’s no cheap trains. [The universe bursts into flame. For a moment all is confusion; and then the Spirit of the First Man is heard speaking.] SPIRIT OF FIRST MAN. Well, I suppose I ought to be getting along. SPIRIT OF SECOND MAN. Glad to have met you, anyway. SPIRIT OF WOMAN. Funny our running up against you like this. As you said, the world’s a very small place. Remember me to the family. [They go out.] The nebula, still spinning slowly, passes of the stage L. CURTAIN AD LIB. [10] I SIGNS & WONDERS SIGNS & WONDERS DREAMED this in the dullness of a February day in London. I had been pondering the elements that go to the making of the human entity, and more particularly that new aspect of the theory of the etheric body which presents it as a visible, ponderable, tangible, highly organised, but almost incredibly tenuous, form of matter. From that I slid to the consideration of the possibility of some essence still more remote from our conception of the gross material of our objective experience; and then for a moment I held the idea of the imperceptible transition from this ultimately dispersing matter to thought or impulse—from the various bodies, etheric, astral, mental, causal, or Buddhistic, to the free and absolute Soul. I suppose that at this point I fell asleep. I was not aware of any change of consciousness, but I cannot otherwise explain the fact that in an instant I was transported from an open place in the North of London, and from all this familiar earth of ours, to some planet without the knowledge of the dwellers in the solar system. This amazing change was accomplished without the least shock. It was, indeed, imperceptible. The new world upon which I opened my eyes appeared at first sight to differ in no particular from that I had so recently left. I saw below me a perfect replica of the Hampstead Garden Suburb. The wind blew from the east with no loss of its characteristic quality. The occasional people who passed had the same air of tired foreboding and intense preoccupation with the miserable importance of their instant lives, that has seemed to me to mark the air of the middle-classes for the past few weeks. Also it was, I thought, beginning to rain. I shivered and decided that I might as well go home. I felt that it was not worth while to travel a distance unrecordable in any measure of earthly miles, only to renew my terrestrial experiences. And then, by an accident, possibly to verify my theory that it was certainly going to rain, I looked up and realised at once the unspeakable difference between that world and our own. For on this little earth of ours the sky makes no claim on our attention. It has its effects of cloud and light occasionally, and these effects no doubt may engage at times the interest of the poet or the artist. But to us, ordinary people, the sky is always pretty much the same, and we only look at it when we are expecting rain. Even then we often shut our eyes. In that other world which revolves round a sun so distant that the light of it has not yet reached the earth the sky is quite different. Things happen in it. As I looked up, for instance, I saw a great door open, and out of it there marched an immense procession that trailed its glorious length across the whole width of heaven. I heard no sound. The eternal host moved in silent dignity from zenith to horizon. And after the procession had passed the whole visible arch of the sky was parted like a curtain and there looked out from the opening the semblance of a vast, intent eye. But what immediately followed the gaze of that overwhelming watcher I do not know, for someone touched my arm, and a voice close at my shoulder said in the very tones of an earthly cockney: “What yer starin’ at, guv’nor? Airyplanes? I can’t see none.” I looked at him and found that he was just such a loafer as one may see any day in London. “Aeroplanes,” I repeated. “Great Heaven, can’t you see what’s up there? The procession and that eye?” He stared up then, and I with him, and the eye had gone; but between the still parted heavens I could see into the profundity of a space so rich with beauty and, as it seemed, with promise, that I held my breath in sheer wonder. “No! I can’t see nothin’, guv’nor,” my companion said. And I presume that as he spoke I must have waked from my dream, for the glory vanished and I found myself dispensing a small alms to a shabby man who was representing himself as most unworthily suffering through no fault of his own. As I walked home through the rain I reflected that the people of that incredibly distant world, walking, as they always do, with their gaze bent upon the ground, are probably unable to see the signs and wonders that blaze across the sky. They, like ourselves, are so preoccupied with the miserable importance of their instant lives. [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] I THE CAGE WAS not asleep. I have watched passengers who kept their eyes shut between the stations, but as yet I have not seen an indisputable case of anyone sound asleep on the Hampstead and Charing Cross Tube. Of the other passages that make up London’s greater intestine I have less experience, and it may be that some tubes are more conducive to slumber than the one most familiar to me. I have no ambition to make a dogmatic generalisation concerning either the stimulative or soporific action of the Underground. I merely wish it to be understood that I was not asleep, and that it was hardly possible that I could have been, with a small portmanteau permanently on one foot, and the owner of it—a little man who must have wished that the straps were rather longer—intermittently on the other. Against this, however, I have to put the fact that I could not say at which station the little man removed from me the burden of himself and his portmanteau. Nor could I give particulars of the appearance of such of my innumerable fellow-passengers as were most nearly presented to me, although I do know that most of them were reading—even the strap-hangers. It was, indeed, this observation that started my vision or train of thought or preoccupation—call it anything you like except a dream. The eyes in his otherwise repulsive face held a wistfulness, a hint of vague speculation that attracted me. He sat, hunched on the summit of the steeply rising ground overlooking the sea, the place where the forest comes so abruptly to an end that from a little distance it looks as if it had been gigantically planed to a hard edge. He was alone and ruminatively quiescent after food. He had fed well and carelessly. Some of the bones that lay near him had been very indifferently picked. He leaned forward clasping his hairy legs with his equally hairy arms, and stared out with that hint of speculation and wistfulness in his eyes over the placid magnificence of the Western Sea—just disturbed enough to reflect a gorgeous road of fire that laid a vanishing track across the waters up to the open goal of the low sun. A faint breeze blew up the hill, and it seemed as if he leant his face forward to drink the first refreshment of that sweet, cool air. I approached him more nearly, trying to read his thought, rejoicing in the knowledge that he could neither see nor apprehend me. For though a man may know something of the past, the future is hidden from him, and I represented to him a future that could only be reckoned in a vast procession of centuries. Yet as I came nearer, so near that I could rest my hands on his knees and gaze up closely into his eyes, he shrank a little and leaned slightly away from me, as if he were uncertainly aware of an unfamiliar, distasteful presence. I fancied that the mat of hair on his chest just perceptibly bristled. I could read his thought, now, and I was thrilled to discover that the expression of his eyes had not misled me. He had attained to a form of consciousness. He, alone, of all the beasts had received the gift of constructive imagination. He could look forward, make plans to meet a possible emergency. He knew already something of tomorrow. Even then he was deep in speculation. That day he had hunted a slow but cunning little beast which found a refuge among the great boulders that lay piled in gigantic profusion along the foreshore. And he had failed. Another quarry had been his, but that particular little beast had outwitted him. And now, longing for it, he ruminated clumsy lethargic plans for its capture. It may have been that the unusual effort tired him, for presently he slept, still hunched into the same compact heap, crouching with an effect of swift alertness as if he were ready at the least alarm to leap up and vanish into the cover of the forest. Then, a plan came to me, also. I would bring a vision to this primitive ancestor of mankind. I would merge myself with his being and he should dream a dream of the immensely distant future. Blessed and privileged above all the human race, he should know for an instant to what inconceivable developments, to what towering heights of intellectual and manipulative glory his descendants should one day be heir. I had no definite idea of the precise illustration I should choose to set forth the magnificence of man’s latest attainment. Nor did I pause to consider what I myself might suffer in the process of this infamous liaison between the ages. I acted on an impulse that I found irresistible. I have myself longed so often to read the distant future of mankind, that I felt as a god bestowing an inestimable gift. But I should have known that in the mystical union it is the god and not the man who suffers. I was wrapped in an awful darkness as we fell stupendously through time, but presently I knew that we were rising again, weighted with the burden of primitive flesh. Then in an instant came a strange yellow unnatural light, the roaring of a terrible sound—and the fearful vision. The horror of it was unendurable; the shock of it so great that spirit and flesh were rent asunder. I remained. He fell back to the sweetness of the cool air blowing up from the tranquil sea. Did he rush frantically into the forest or sit with dripping mouth and wide alarmed eyes, rigidly staring at the scarlet rim of the setting sun? Yet what could he have understood of the future in that moment of detestable revelation? Could he have recognised men and women in their strange disguise of modern dress, as being even of the same species as himself? And if he had, what could he have known of them, seeing them packed so closely together, immoveably wedged into the terror of that rocking roaring cage of unknown material; seeing them occupied in staring so intently and incomprehensibly at those amazing little black-dotted white sheets? Impossible for him to guess that those speckled sheets held a magic that transported his descendants from the misery of their cage into imaginations so extensive and so [16] [17] [18] [19] various that some of them might, however dimly and allusively, include himself, hunched and ruminant, regarding the vast tranquillity of the sea. The tunnel suddenly broke, the roaring gave place to a rattle that by contrast was gentle and soothing. I opened my eyes. We were under the sky again, slipping, with intermittent flashes of light, into the harbour of Golder’s Green Station. For a moment, I seemed to see the clumsy and violent shape of a beast that strove in panic to escape; and then I came back to my own world of the patient readers, with their white, controlled faces, forming now in solemn procession down the aisle of the carriage. But it was his dream, not mine. And I have been wondering whether, if I dreamed also, the distant future might not seem equally unendurable to me? W ENLARGEMENT HEN he heard the first signal, warning the people of London to take cover, his spirit revolted. He began to picture with a sick disgust the scene of his coming confinement in the dirty basement. Mrs. Gibson, his landlady, would welcome him with the air of forced cheerfulness he knew so well. She would make the same remarks about the noise of the guns. She would say again: “Well, there’s one thing, it drowns the noise of the bombs— if they’ve really got here this time.” Then Maunders from the first floor would say that you could always pick out the sound of the aerial torpedoes; and explain, elaborately, why. Mrs. Graham from the second floor would say that she’d rather enjoy it, if it weren’t for the children. And her eldest little prig of a boy would say, “I’m not afraid, mumma,” and expect everyone to praise his courage. Mrs. Gibson would praise him, of course. She would say: “There, now, I declare he’s the bravest of anyone.” She was obliged to do it. She would never be able to get new lodgers this winter. And when that preliminary talk was done with, they would all begin again on the endlessly tedious topic of reprisals; and keep it up until a pause in the barrage set them on to spasmodic ejaculations of wonder whether “they” had been driven off, or gone, or been shot down, or.... No; definitely, he would not stand it. He could better endure the simultaneous explosion of every gun in London than three hours of that conversation. Moreover, he could not face the horrible drip, drip, from the scullery sink. On the night of the last raid he had been very near the sink. And the thought of that steady plop ... plop ... of water into the galley- pot Mrs. Gibson kept under the tap for some idiotic reason, was as the thought of an inferno such as could not have been conceived by Dante, nor organised by the Higher German Command. Nerves? He shrugged his shoulders. In a sense, no doubt. Suspense, dread, a long exasperation of waiting had filled every commonplace experience—more particularly that dreadful dripping of the cold water tap—with all kinds of horrible associations. But if it was “nerves,” it was not nervousness, not fear of being killed, nothing in the least like panic. He was quite willing to face the possible danger of the open streets. But he could not and would not face Mrs. Gibson and the scullery sink. No; he must escape—a fugitive from protection. Men had fled from strange things, but had they ever fled from a stranger thing than refuge? He must go secretly. If Mrs. Gibson heard him she would stop him, begin an immense, unendurable argument. She could not afford to risk the loss of a lodger this winter. She would bring Maunders and Mrs. Graham to join her in persuasion and protest. Freedom was hard to win in London, in such times as these. He crept down the long three flights of stairs like some wary criminal feeling his cautious way to liberty. But once he had, with infinite deliberation, slipped back the ailing latch of the front door, he lifted his head and squared his shoulders with a great gasp of relief. He could have wept tears of exultation. He was filled with a deep thankfulness for this boon of his enlargement.... There was no sound of guns as yet; nor any sweep of searchlights tormenting the wide gloom of the sky. It was a wonderful, calm night; a little misty on the ground; but, above, the moon was serene and bright as a new guinea. He had no hesitation as to his direction. He desired the greatest possible expansion of outlook; and turned his face at once towards the river. On the Embankment he would be able to see a wide arc of the sky. He had a sense of setting about a prohibited adventure, full of the most daring and delicious excitements. His one dread was that he might be interfered with, stopped, sent home. The cycling policemen looked at him, he thought, with peculiar suspicion. They gruffly shouted at him to take cover, with a curt note of warning, as if he were breaking the law by indulging himself in this escapade. He tried to avoid notice by slinking into the shadows. That cold, inimical moonlight made everything so conspicuous.... Except for the policemen, the streets were vividly empty. He could feel the spirit of London crouched in expectancy. Behind every darkened window men, women, and children waited and longed for the relief of the first gun. And while they waited they chattered and smiled. And all their laughter and conversation was like these streets, vividly empty; their spirits had taken cover. He alone was free, exempt, rejoicing in his liberty.... The ground mist was thicker on the Embankment; and for a moment he was confused by the loom of a strange obelisk that had a curiously remote, exotic air in the midst of this familiar London. Then he recognised the outline as that of Cleopatra’s Needle, and went close up to the alien monument of another age and stared up at it in the proclamatory moonlight. He wondered if any magic lingered in those cryptic inscriptions? If they might not have endowed the very granite with curious, occult powers. He was still staring at the solemn portent of the obelisk when the barrage opened with unusual suddenness.... For a time he was crushed and overwhelmed by the pressure of that intimidating fury of sound. He cowered and winced like a naked soul exposed to the intimate vengeance 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. [20] [21] [22] [23] 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? [24] [25] T THE PERFECT SMILE HE 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 were alone and sentence had been pronounced, the smile came for the first time. Douglas did not know why or how it came. He was only conscious of it as something that illuminated his whole being, put him among the angels, and gave him immunity from all earthly terrors. To his father, the smile was simply blinding. It was so radiant, so tender, forgiving, and altogether godlike. It condescended to his weakness and mortality, and made him feel how unworthy he was of such splendid recognition. His little son’s face glowed with a perfect consciousness of power, and yet he seemed to surrender himself with a dignified humility to this threatened infamy of corporal punishment. Moreover, it was a smile that expressed the ultimate degree of innocence. It was impossible for anyone who saw it to believe that Douglas could have sinned in perversity, or with any evil intention. And there was one other amazing peculiarity about this rare smile of Douglas’s, for it not only permeated the finer feelings of those who witnessed it, but was also reflected weakly in their faces, as the outer and larger rainbow reflects the intensified beauty of the inner. So now Mr. Owen’s smile faintly echoed his son’s. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” said Douglas confidently. And Mrs. Owen waiting outside, listening in tremulous agitation for the wail that should announce her husband’s resolution, heard no sound. And presently Douglas came out, still wearing the last pale evidences of his recent halo. “But why didn’t you?” Mrs. Owen asked her husband, when their son was out of earshot. She would have overlooked [26] [27] [28] the essential omission, almost with gratitude, if she had not believed it her duty to reprove her husband’s characteristic weakness. “He—he smiled,” Mr. Owen said. “But Harold!” his wife protested. Mr. Owen wrinkled his forehead and looked exceedingly distressed. “I don’t know that I can explain,” he said. “It wasn’t an ordinary smile. I’ve never seen him do it before. I—I have never seen anything like it. I can only say that I would defy anyone to punish him when he smiled like that.” “I noticed as he came out....” began Mrs. Owen. “It was practically over then,” her husband interrupted, and added with a slightly literary turn of speech he sometimes adopted: “That was only the afterglow.” But it is worth recording that, from that time, Douglas, although he was naughty enough in other ways, never robbed the larder again. Nine years passed before Douglas’s great gift was once more manifested. There was undoubtedly something unusually charming about the boy that protected him from punishment; and as he had been spoilt by his father at home, so was he also treated rather too leniently at school. But Dr. Watson, his headmaster, came at last to the end of his weakness. Douglas was becoming a bad influence in the school. His careless evasions of discipline set an example of insubordination that was all too readily followed by the other boys. Dr. Watson braced himself to the inevitable. In his heart he regretted the necessity, but he knew that Douglas must be sacrificed for the good of the school. He had been warned and mildly punished a hundred times. Now he must pay the full penalty. The choice lay between expulsion and a public flogging, and when Douglas chose the latter, Dr. Watson resolved that the flogging should be of unusual severity. When the whole school was assembled, he made a very earnest and moving speech, deploring the causes that had given rise to the occasion, and showing how inevitable was the disgraceful result. Douglas, white and terrified, made ready in a trembling silence, then, turning his back on the tensely expectant audience, he faced his headmaster. Arthur Coburn, Douglas’s humanitarian house-master, was so upset by these preliminaries that for one moment he was tempted to leave the hall. Corporal punishment had always seemed to him a horrible thing, but never had it seemed quite so revolting as on this occasion. Yet he fought against the feeling. He knew that his chief was neither a stern nor a cruel man, and had been driven into the present position by the sheerly impudent persistence of Douglas’s disobedience. By way of alleviating as far as possible his own nervous distress, therefore, Coburn took up a position with his back to the rostrum, and faced the great crowd of just perceptibly intimidated boys. And waiting, much as Douglas’s mother had waited in shamed anxiety some nine years before, Coburn was amazed to see a sudden and incomprehensible change in the massed faces before him. The tensity, the look of half eager, half apprehensive expectation strangely relaxed. A wave of what looked like relief ran back in a long ripple of emotion from the front to the back of the many ranks of watching boys. In one instant everyone was wearing a faint smile of almost holy serenity. Coburn turned with a leap of astonishment and stared at Dr. Watson. And the smile he saw on the headmaster’s face outshone that on the faces of his audience as the sun outshines the moon. But no one save Dr. Watson saw the perfect radiance that flowed out from the face of Douglas Owen.... “I’m sorry, sir,” was all that Douglas said. Dr. Watson dropped his birch as if it had burnt him. His second address to the school was hesitating and apologetic. He tried to explain that when the clear signs of repentance and of reform were so evident as they were in the case of Owen, corporal punishment was superfluous and would be little short of criminal. Yet even Coburn, who so profoundly agreed with the principle expounded, found the explanation unsatisfying. He could not help feeling that Dr. Watson was concealing his true reason. Nevertheless, it is well to note that after this reprieve Douglas passed the remainder of his school-life without committing any other serious offence. He was only thirty-two when he came before the last and most terrible tribunal possible in our society. After he left Cambridge, he was taken into a city office by a friend of his father’s. Everyone liked him, and he might have made an excellent position for himself if he had not led such a loose life out of business hours. He seemed unable to resist any temptation, and the inevitable result was that he got into debt. When his father’s friend discovered the extent of Douglas’s thefts from the firm, he had no choice but to dismiss him; although for the young man’s sake not less than for the sake of his friendship with his father, he never even threatened [29] [30] [31] prosecution. For a time Douglas lived at home. Later he went to Canada for a couple of years. Then his father died, leaving him some five or six thousand pounds, and he came home again—to spend it. When that money was all gone, he lived on the charity of his many friends. They all knew him for an incorrigible scamp, but he still retained much of his old charm. The crime for which he came at last to be tried for his life at the Old Bailey was too disgraceful an affair to be reported in detail. The only possible defence was that Douglas was unquestionably drunk when the murder was actually committed. Yet despite the weakness of the case for the defending counsel, everyone in court including the jury and possibly even Lord Justice Ducie himself, could not restrain a feeling of sympathy for the prisoner. He had not lost, despite all his excesses, his engaging air of ingenuous youth. And his manner throughout the trial naturally evoked a strong sense of pity. The jury did all they could for him by bringing in a verdict of manslaughter. The judge leaned forward with a kindly, almost fatherly air, as he asked the prisoner if he had anything to say in his own defence. And at that supreme moment, as he stood white and terrified in the dock, Douglas was aware that once more, for the third time in his life, that wonderful glow of power, peace, and condescension was beginning to thrill through him. He straightened himself and raised his head. He looked the judge in the face. He believed that the perfect smile had come again to save him. But he looked in vain for the old response. The judge’s mouth had twitched as Douglas looked at him, and for one instant all those who were waiting so anxiously for the pronouncement of the sentence were astounded to see a look of horrible bestiality flicker across the face of the old man who was accounted the most gentle and philanthropic judge who had ever sat in the criminal court. It was only a momentary impression, for Lord Ducie at once put both hands before his face as if to shut off the sight of some terrible infamy; but Bateson, the defending counsel, who was watching the judge, says that he never afterwards could quite recover his old respect for him. It is unquestionably true that the hideous, depraved, and insulting grimace which had so unexpectedly revealed the soul of Douglas Owen, was solely responsible for the maximum sentence of twenty years’ penal servitude that was imposed upon him. If a man continually flouts the angels of grace, he must expect at last to be delivered over to the devil he so devotedly serves. [32] [33] H THE HIDDEN BEAST IS HOUSE is the last in the village. Towards the forest the houses become more and more scattered, reaching out to the wild of the wood as if they yearned to separate themselves from the swarm that clusters about the church and the inn. And his house has taken so long a stride from the others that it is held to the village by no more than the slender thread of a long footpath. Yet the house is set with its face towards us, and has an air of resolutely holding on to the safety of our common life, as if dismayed at its boldness in swimming so far it had turned and desperately grasped the life-line of that footpath. He lived alone, a strange man, surly and reticent. Some said that he had a sinister look; and on those rare occasions when he joined us at the inn, after sunset, he sat aside and spoke little. I was surprised when, as we came out of the inn one night, he took my arm and asked me if I would go home with him. The moon was at the full, and the black shadows of the dispersing crowd that lunged down the street seemed to gesticulate an alarm of weird dismay. The village was momentarily mad with the clatter of footsteps and the noise of laughter, and somewhere down towards the forest a dog was baying. I wondered if I had not misunderstood him. As he watched my hesitation his face pleaded with me. “There are times when a man is glad of company,” he said. We spoke little as we passed through the village towards the silences of his lonely house. But when we came to the footpath he stopped and looked back. “I live between two worlds,” he said, “the wild and ...”—he paused before he rejected the obvious antithesis, and concluded—“the restrained.” “Are we so restrained?” I asked, staring at the huddle of black-and-silver houses clinging to their refuge on the hill. He murmured something about a “compact,” and my thoughts turned to the symbol of the chalk-white church-tower that dominated the honeycomb of the village. “The compact of public opinion,” he said more boldly. My imagination lagged. I was thinking less of him than of the transfiguration of the familiar scene before me. I did not remember ever to have studied it thus under the reflections of a full moon. An echo of his word, differently accented, drifted through my mind. I saw our life as being in truth compact, little and limited. He took up his theme again when we had entered the house and were facing each other across the table, in a room that looked out over the forest. The shutters were unfastened, the window open, and I could see how, on the further shore of the waste-lands, the light feebly ebbed and died against the black cliff of the wood. “We have to choose between freedom and safety,” he said. “The individual is too wild and dangerous for the common life. He must make his agreement with the community; submit to become a member of the people’s body. But I”—he paused and laughed—“I have taken the liberty of looking out of the back window.” While he spoke I had been aware of a sound that seemed to come from below the floor of the room in which we were sitting. And when he laughed I fancied that I heard the response of a snuffling cry. He looked at me mockingly across the table. “It’s an echo from the jungle,” he said. “Some trick of reflected sound. I can always hear it in this room at night.” I shivered and stood up. “I prefer the safety of our common life,” I told him. “It may be that I have a limited mind and am afraid, but I find my happiness in the joys of security and shelter. The wild terrifies me.” “A limited mind?” he commented. “Probably it is rather that you lack a fire in the blood.” I was glad to leave him, and he on his part made no effort to detain me. It was not long after this visit of mine that the people first began to whisper about him in the village. At the beginning they brought no charge against him, talking only of his strangeness and of his separation from our common interests. But presently I heard a story of some fierce wild animal that he caged and tortured in the prison of his house. One said that he had heard it screaming in the night, and another that he had heard it beating against the door. And some argued that it was a threat to our safety, since the beast might escape and make its way into the village; and some that such brutality, even though it were to a wild animal, could not be tolerated. But I wondered inwardly whether the affair were any business of ours so long as he kept the beast to himself. I was a member of the Council that year, and so took part in the voting when presently the case was laid before us. But no vote of mine would have helped him if I had dared to overcome my reluctance and speak in his favour. For whatever reservations may have been secretly withheld by the members of the Council, they were unanimous in condemning him. We went, six of us, in full daylight, to search his house. He received us with a laugh, and told us that we might seek at our leisure. But though we sought high and low, peering and tapping, we found no evidence that any wild thing had ever been concealed there. And within a month of the day of our search he left the village. [34] [35] [36]