There were drums--big drums and little
drums--trumpets with crimson tassels, and in one corner a pyramid of balls,
balls of every colour, and at the top of the pyramid a tiny ball of peacock
blue, hanging, balancing, daintily, supremely right in pose and gesture.
It had gesture. It caught Peter's eye--Peter stood with his nose against
the pane, his heart hammering--"Oh! she is suffering--My God, how she is
suffering!"--and there the little blue ball caught him, held him,
encouraged him.
"I will belong to your boy one day" it seemed to say.
"It shall be the first thing I will buy for him--" thought Peter.
He turned now amongst the light and crowds of Piccadilly. He walked on
without seeing and hearing--always with that thought in his heart--"She is
in terrible pain. How can God be so cruel? And she was so happy--before I
came she was so happy--now--what have I done to her?"
Never, before to-night, had he felt so sharply, so irretrievably his
sense of responsibility. Here now, before him, at this birth of his
child, everything that he had done, thought, said--everything that he had
been--confronted him. He was only twenty-seven but his shoulders were heavy
with the confusion of his past. Looking back upon it, he saw a helpless
medley of indecisions, of sudden impulses, sudden refusals; into the skeins
of it, too, there seemed to be dragged the people that had made up his
life--they faced him, surrounded him, bewildered him!
What right had he, thus encompassed, to hand these things on to another?
His father, his grandfather .
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