His Wonders to Perform

by Ethel Turner

HIS WONDERS TO PERFORM

By ETHEL TURNER

HE was opening tins of jam, and exercising solicitude to avoid letting any sand make a way in. The men said that they were not proud, but they had an inborn objection to spreading the dust of the Pharaohs on their bread.

Violet plum, Cape gooseberry, Passion fruit, lemon and melon, quince—his eyes quite gladdened at the infinite variety that had unexpectedly turned up out of one of the new cases. For three weeks nothing but raspberry had fallen the way of the entire battalion, and raspberry is a confection of which it is quite possible to get too much.

But Cape gooseberry! As he opened the tin, and the golden fruit, swimming in a syrup full of infinitesimal seeds, met his eyes, and the faintly pungent smell assailed his nostrils, his soul dipped and rose again, as does a sea-gull at the sudden sight of a floating morsel.

The desert faded, the Pyramid of Cheops the Glorious, the great Pyramid of Gizeh, was as if it had never been—the labour of millions of hands, raised to confront and to defy eternity, vanished at one faint whiff of sugar combined with fruit.

In its place was the huddle of grey slab buildings—the milking-sheds, the pumpkin loom, the dairy, and all the lost sweet homeliness of the squat place in the midst of it that stood for the foundations of his life.

He felt and smelt the gum trees to the right of it. To the left he saw the prickly pear patch that they were going to "have at"—he and his father—some day. The Cape gooseberries grew on the far side of the prickly pear, and there had been a summer—a thousand years ago, or eight, if counted by the calendar—when he had been ten years' old, and a snake had been seen one morning among the straggling undergrowth where the fruit hid itself.

His mother was bent on making the jam that day. His father was away, and he himself was the only one of his sex about the place. He could remember the sense of manhood that came to him when, overriding his mother's misgivings and his little sisters' squeaks of terror, he had armed himself with a great stick, and, basket over arm, had plunged boldly into the gathering. It was his first concrete realisation of the fact that the dangerous work of the world fell by Divine law to men. It was the definite moment when he passed from little boyhood to the heritage of sex. His joy was immensely heightened by the presence, at a very respectful distance, of those timorous little creatures his sisters, whose share in the fine enterprise was merely to strip the fruit of its husks and admire his own boldness. His mother's attitude, too, gave him much satisfaction: he was flattered by her recognition, expressed by many adjurations about carefulness of the danger he was facing, but more so by her tacit acknowledgment of the fact that he was of the superior sex, and must not be held back any longer, with little girls, when there was danger to be faced.

He had the tins of jam all opened now, this lance-corporal in Egypt. He made a careful load of them, and passed in front of the neighbouring tents to distribute them for tea. Mails were in, and the drill-weary men, just off duty, were stretched on the sand outside the tent doors in the attitudes and with the contented expressions of those who have nothing, further to ask of the kindly Fates, unless it were the jam that was needed to complete the tea preparations.

A cinematographic camera passed along, absorbing them. It would make a pleasant, a reassuring photograph for the weeklies—"Tea-Time in Egypt." The young lance-corporal went by with his burden of jam, but even yet the Pyramids had not reasserted themselves, even yet his thoughts were away in the huddle of grey slab buildings at home.

He was remembering a joke of his mother's. He had complained that she never made a certain plum cake, of which he was very fond, in a sufficiently large tin. Her joke was to make it one day in the big wide milk tin, and his answer to the joke was to stoutly maintain that it was not in the least too large, though for the next few days he had been in reality very hard pushed to keep up an appetite for it. As he passed along the front of the tents and before the camera, he smiled at the recollection—smiled what his mother called his "crinkly" smile, a whole-hearted affair that began slowly on his lips and crept into his warm young eyes and wrinkled the skin around them and down his cheeks. …

And when they took her the news that her boy had fallen at Gaba Tepe, one of the gallant rush of Australians who had dashed through the surf and plunged over the beach, and splendidly stormed the heights and shoutingly carried the trenches—when they broke the news to her, and his face rose before her, it was the vision of it wearing its crinkled smile that clutched most fiercely at her heart.

But as the days passed, and she read, still with the dry and glassy eyes with which she had met the news, all the War intelligence in the papers, all the sensational stories of the horrors suffered by wounded men in war, all the atrocities of which the Turks were capable, it was washed clean out of her memory that the boy had ever smiled at all, that his eyes had ever lightened with humour and merriment.

She saw him only with ghastly face, pain-twisted almost out of recognition. She visioned the very death damps on his forehead that, perhaps, there had been no hand, or even that of a strange nurse, to wipe away. She became obsessed by one thought—if only she could have a sign from him to know how it was with him.

Those who loved her watched her in fear and trembling, powerless, however, to help her. If prayer could not help her, how might they? They knew that she was praying half the time. They did not need to see her down on her knees by her bedside, or in her pew in the empty church, to know it. When she was separating in the dairy, washing the milk buckets, stirring saucepans on the fire, and that wild, far-away look came into her eyes, they knew that she was asking, demanding, beseeching, even though her lips were set in one rigid line.

*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*

She took to wandering away, sometimes in the bush, sometimes along the banks of a creek, sometimes to the football ground, the racecourse—places where he had had his boyish triumphs as a fine rider and jumper, places where he had sailed his little boats, shot his opossums, climbed for the nests of native bees. All the time her eyes, dry, restless, kept going from side to side as if seeking something.

She began to wander at night, followed always at a little distance by her wistful husband, lest any bodily harm should befall her.

There came a night when her restlessness carried her right into the township, quite three miles from the little farm. Behind her—fifty yards behind, perhaps—came the patient husband and the two little girls.

At the outskirts of the town she paused and seemed to waver. Here was the show ground, and it was lighted up for the annual show, which opened that day. Never a year before but her busy fingers had not been represented here—her jams, her pickles, her pot plants, her crochet work, her knitting, were famous all up and down the countryside. Could it be because her old, healthy interest in everyday activities was stirring again that she paused so long near the gate? Her husband watched her anxiously. Then she turned back to him; he had never been so sure before that she was conscious of his presence.

"I want a shilling to go in," she said. "No, don't come with me. I want to be alone."

The little girls watched her make her way into the crowd, somewhat distressed for her appearance. She was wearing a pink print dress and a hat with red flowers in it. More than once they had been told at school that the entire family, long ere this, should have been fitted out with the deepest mourning, but they had found it difficult to explain to the sticklers for etiquette that their mother's grief made her blind to all things near at hand, so intently was her gaze fixed on something far away.

But she turned back from the entrance, the pink print figure; she came to her husband's side again.

"I want sixpence more," she said. "It is sixpence to get in to the cocoa-nut booth."

And now he sadly understood. The boy had won high fame last show for cocoa-nut shying—ten times he had won a cocoa-nut, and the booth had clapped loudly at his amazing luck and deftness. But that she should insist on watching a similar scene again, her husband sorrowed profoundly, but did not set himself to make her desist.

Later, a neighbour suddenly touched his arm, a kindly woman who had known them all for years.

"Is it true what they say—that she's here to-night?" she asked sharply.

He nodded dejectedly.

"Get her home at once," said the woman. "There is something here would half kill her to see. None of you should see it, indeed; but, whatever happens, she mustn't."

"But where? What?" he asked, moving forward, impelled by her earnestness.

She only answered his first question.

"Near the windmill thing," she said. "Where is she?"

"In the cocoa-nut booth," he replied.

They went to the door of this booth to seek her, but there was no sign of her. Another acquaintance, however, who was in the booth, said that she had been there for a little time, but when a boy won a cocoa-nut three times in succession, she suddenly ran out.

This acquaintance was also full of anxious concern for this grief-stricken woman, but when the other neighbour whispered something to her, her concern turned to a look of alarm. She caught at the husband's arm.

"She mustn't go near the windmill, on any account. Do you hear? We've got to stop her at once! Quick—come along! You must get her home. How it has come, Heaven only knows! You must see the X Y Z firm and stop it."

The two women started forward, followed by the bewildered husband and the two little girls. They hurried about the ground, seeking the pink-clad figure that was so familiar to them, but nowhere could they see it. Then just as they reached the windmill themselves, they saw her.

She was coming towards it from the opposite direction to themselves. She was walking in the careless, laughing, jostling throng, a gaunt, bent figure, fearfully alone. Her eyes stared ahead of her—terrible eyes that had not yet shed one tear. Her lips moved—her husband knew that she was praying that eternal, and that eternally disregarded, prayer for a sign. Nothing would make her abandon it. If Christ had raised Lazarus from the dead, had given back to empty arms the ruler of the synagogue, let Him perform for her this infinitely smaller miracle—let Him just give her one sign that, though lost to her for ever, all was still well with him.

Flickering lights made her raise her eyes a little. Right alongside the windmill a moving picture advertisement for somebody's soap was being replaced by an advertisement for somebody's jam. "What our soldiers in Egypt are fighting on—X Y Z jam," said the lettering underneath.

And then something—something—drew her eyes back, and she found herself looking sombrely and intently at the scene.

She saw, looming on the sky of the background, the vast triangle that her boy's letters had taught her was the Pyramid, and on the desert, populous with a life exotic to it, the long, long line of tents. She saw Arabs wandering about the lines, offering their wares. She saw the drill-weary men stretched out in easy attitudes, letters in their hands, rough preparations for tea—loaves of bread, mugs, a packing-case broken open and marked in clear letters X Y Z jam.

And then there came into the scene a figure clearer than any of the others, and closer to her—a figure bulking large and grey, since it was right in the foreground, a figure walking slowly, carefully, his hands holding a burden of tins of jam.

Half-way across the screen it walked, and there rose up on the startled air a cry so sudden, so wild, so full of human anguish, that the hearts of those who heard it stood still with fear.

"My son!" was the exceeding bitter cry.

And, as if at the very sound, the figure, now in the middle of the screen, stopped dead one second and looked down at her, right down into her very eyes. And it smiled—smiled its slow, crinkled, happy smile, its smile of utter content. Then it had passed and was gone.

When they ran to her in terror, she was smiling too, although her tears gushed fast.

"And now let us go home," she said, and there was happiness in her voice, for all its trembling.

 

Copyright, 1916, by Ethel Turner, in the United States of America.