“IN THE
TWINKLING
OF AN EYE”
By Sydney Watson
_Author of_
“The Mark of the Beast”
“Life’s Lookout”, “Wops, the Waif”,
Etc.
Copyright 1918
THE BIOLA BOOK ROOM
BIBLE INSTITUTE OF LOS ANGELES
536-558 South Hope Street
Los Angeles, Cal.
AUTHOR’S FOREWORD
[Illustration]
Some years ago, I received from an important Southern town, a letter
from a Ladies’ Temperance Committee, to this effect:—“Sir, We, the
undersigned, are a committee of Ladies, who, for many years, have
purchased your “Stories for the People” in very large numbers, for free
distribution and loan; always assuming that you were to be thoroughly
relied upon as an upholder of strict Total-abstinence principles. But
your latest story has sadly undeceived us, as regards your usefulness as
a worker in the great cause we are pledged to uphold and further. On _pp_
—— of your last story, you make your hero, returning from a day’s run
with the hounds, come upon a woman lying in a lonely place, who has been
injured in a trap accident. You say, speaking of your hero’s prompt help
to the woman, that “taking his hunting flask from his pocket, he forced
a few drops of the brandy between the woman’s lips, etc.” Now, sir, we
contend that had you had the cause of Total-abstinence fully at heart,
you would have made that huntsman’s flask to have contained _water_.”
So much for the letter. The moral of it lies on the surface. There are
some persons who seem unable to see anything from the side of _real,
actual_ life—that Ladies’ committee could not—whose vision is narrowed
down to the tiny slit of their own cramped, cabined life and thought,
they have no true _out_look upon life, as a whole.
I preface this foreword with the above incident, because I am perfectly
certain that the standpoint from which I have written this book will be
utterly, absolutely misunderstood by many earnest, loving-hearted people,
whose eyes, with my own, have caught the _up_ward gaze “from whence we
look for the return of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
I would at once acknowledge that the inceptive idea of writing such a
book as this was born within me from reading “Long Odds,” that wondrous
little half-penny booklet written by the late General Robertson, I
believe, a booklet that has been so marvellously “owned and blessed.”
For five or six years the idea for this present volume has been simmering
and seething in my mind. The first and only real problem I had to face in
the matter was that of the _principle_ involved in using the fictional
form to clothe so sacred a subject (for, to me, the near Return of our
Lord is the _most_ sacred of all subjects.) But the problem of the
_principle_ was speedily settled, as I remembered how wondrously God had
owned and blessed “Long Odds,” in which the fictional is the vehicle of
the teaching.
Then, too, there are, I know, myriads of people into whose hands “Long
Odds,” could never, by any chance, fall—for there are multitudes who
will not so much as glance at, or touch a tract, while a volume will
easily win its way among all classes. There is an enormous percentage of
attendants at our churches and chapels, and many otherwise very earnest
Christian workers, to whom the whole subject of the Lord’s Second Coming
is an absolutely unknown realm of Truth—and these I would fain reach and
arouse with the message of this book.
To those Christians who are looking for the Return of the Lord, to
whom the subject is the most tenderly sacred of all subjects, who will
at first sight condemn the use of the fictional element, the dramatic
colour in this book—and many good people will, I am assured—I would
say, first, that the book is not written for them, and second, that,
our Lord Himself, speaking of His own Return, used two very remarkable
illustrations from life’s strangest dramas. First, “_As it was in the
days of Noah, even so shall it be also in the days of the Son of Man.
They ate, they drank, they married, they were given in marriage, until
THE DAY_, etc.” Now, think what a myriad _dramas_ were being enacted
when the flood came. And had the disciples asked their Lord, privately,
after His utterance, to explain more fully what He meant, what thrilling
stories He _could_, He _doubtless WOULD have sketched_. If any Christian
cavils at the dramatic in this book, I would refer him or her to Christ’s
own pointing in the picture of Noah’s time, then bid them fill out, by
help of the feeblest, simplest imagination, the picture of the myriad
dramas that were being enacted when that flood came, of old time. Then,
if the objector is honest, and is _capable_ of the least imagination, he
will say “I see! and, now that I see this fact, my wonder is _not_ that
there is a certain dramatic freedom in this book, but that the writer has
kept so powerful a restraint upon his pen.”
Again, Christ said:—“_As it was in the days of LOT_,” etc. Now think over
_this_ saying of our Lord’s, and remembering what is actually recorded
in Genesis, of the _vice_ and _crime_ of Sodom, (and how, alas! even
when saved from the doomed city, Lot and his daughters brought away much
of the vicious, criminal essence of the place with them,) think how the
Return of our Lord, presently, will mean the snatching away of many of
His own out of scenes infinitely more awful than anything I have used
herein, or ever hinted at. A book written on the subject here chosen,
and written in the vein our Lord Himself suggests in the two passages
referred to above, could not have been written in any other way—to be
true to life, and to the subject.
Should any reader object to the expository lectures of Major H——, as
the chief vehicle for the doctrinal teaching, I would say that personal
experience has proved the style to be infinitely more acceptable to
readers than that of the dialogue mode.
I have purposely placed special emphasis on the Jewish side of the
subject, since the Jewish question is infinitely more closely enwrapped
with the fact of our Lord’s near return, than many speakers and writers
give prominence to.
SYDNEY WATSON.
“THE FIRE,” VERNHAM DEAN, HUNGERFORD, BERKS.
CONTENTS
[Illustration]
Chapter Page
I.—TAKEN AT THE FLOOD 11
II.—“THE COURIER” 20
III.—FLOTSAM 26
IV.—“I ONLY REAPED WHAT I SOWED” 33
V.—“LILY WORK” 38
VI.—AN INTERESTING TALK 44
VII.—“COMING” 55
VIII.—REVERIE 64
IX.—A THREAT 75
X.—IN THE NICK OF TIME 82
XI.—“LONG ODDS” 93
XII.—THE CENTER OF THE EARTH 101
XIII.—A DEMON 110
XIV.—MAJOR H—— ON “THE COMING!” 118
XV.—THE ADDRESS 124
XVI.—HER CABIN COMPANION 136
XVII.—CASTING A SHOE 142
XVIII.—TOLD IN A CAB 154
XIX.—TOM HAMMOND REVIEWING 164
XIXa.—“MY MENTOR” 176
XX.—THE PLACARD 185
XXI.—WAS HE MAD 189
XXII.—FROM THE PROPHET’S CHAMBER 195
XXIII.—PASSOVER! 200
XXIV.—“THIS SAYING SHALL COME TO PASS” 209
XXV.—FOILED! 218
XXVI.—A CASTAWAY 221
XXVII.—A STRICKEN CITY 226
XXVIII.—“HALLELUJAH LASS” 232
XXIX.—IN ST. PAUL’S 238
XXX.—CONCLUSION 246
“IN THE TWINKLING OF AN EYE”
[Illustration]
CHAPTER I.
TAKEN AT THE FLOOD.
The man walked aimlessly amid the thronging press. He was moody and
stern. His eyes showed his disappointment and perplexity. At times, about
his mouth there lurked an almost savage expression. As a rule he stood
and walked erect. Only the day before this incident one of a knot of
flower-girls in Drury Lane had drawn the attention of her companions to
him as he strode briskly along the pavement, and in a rollicking spirit
had sung, as he passed her:
“Stiff, starch, straight as a larch,
Every inch a soldier;
Fond o’ his country, fond o’ his queen,
An’ hawfully fond o’ me.”
But to-day there is nothing of the soldier in the pose or gait of Tom
Hammond.
Yet the time and place ought to have held his attention sufficiently to
have kept him alert to outward appearance. It was eleven in the forenoon.
The place was Piccadilly. He came abreast of Swan and Edgar’s. The
pavement was thronged with women on shopping bent. More than one of them
shot an admiring glance at him, for he had the face, the head, of a king
among men. But he had no eyes for these chance admirers.
Tom Hammond was thirty years of age, a journalist, and an exceptionally
clever one, at the time we make his acquaintance. He was a keen, shrewd
man, was gifted with a foresight and general prescience that were almost
remarkable, and hence was commonly regarded by his journalistic friends
as “a coming man.” He had strongly-fixed ideas of what a great daily
paper should be, but never having seen any attempt that came within
leagues of his ideal, he longed—lusted would not be too strong a term—for
the time and opportunity when, with practically unlimited capital behind
him, and with a perfectly free hand to use it, he could issue his ideal
journal.
This morning he seems farther from the goal of his hopes than ever. For
two years he had been sub-editor of a London daily that had made for
itself a great name—of a sort. There were certain reasons which had
prompted him to hope, to expect, the actual editorship before long. But
now his house of cards had suddenly tumbled about his ears.
A change had recently taken place in the composition of the syndicate
that financed the journal. There were wheels within wheels, the existence
of some of which he had never once guessed, and which in their whirling
had suddenly produced unexpected results. The editor-in-chief had
resigned, and the newly elected editor proved to be a man who had, years
before, done him, Tom Hammond, the foulest wrong one journalist can do to
another.
Under the present circumstances there had been no honourable course open
for Hammond but to resign. That morning he had found his resignation not
only accepted, but he found himself practically dismissed.
Enclosed in the letter of acceptance of his resignation was a cheque
covering the term of his notice, together with the intimation that his
services would cease from the time of his receipt of the cheque.
His dejection, at that moment when we meet him, was caused not so much at
finding himself out of employment as from the consciousness that the new
editor-elect had accomplished this move with a view to his degradation in
the eyes of his profession—in fact, out of sheer spite.
To escape the crowd that almost blocked the pavement in front of Swan and
Edgar’s windows, he turned sharply into the road, and literally ran into
the arms of a young man.
“Tom Hammond!”
“George Carlyon!”
The greeting flew simultaneously from the lips of the two men. They
gripped hands.
“By all that’s wonderful!” cried Carlyon, still wringing his friend’s
hand. “Do you know, Tom, I am actually up here in town for one purpose
only—to hunt you up.”
“To hunt me up!”
“Oh, let’s get out of this crush, old man,” interrupted Carlyon.
The pair steered their way through the traffic, crossed the Circus,
stopped for a moment at the beautiful Shaftesbury Fountain, then struck
across to the Avenue. In the comparative lull of that walk Carlyon went
on:
“Yes, I’ve run up to town this morning to find you out and ask you one
question: Are you so fixed up—excuse the Americanism, old boy. I’ve a
dashing little girl cousin, from the States, staying with my mother,
and—well, you know, old fellow, how it is. Man’s an imitative creature,
and all that, and absorbs dialect quicker than anything else under the
sun. But what I was going to say was this: are you too fixed up with your
present newspaper to forbid your entertaining the thought of a real plum
in the journalistic market?”
Hammond’s customary alert look returned to his face. He was now “every
inch a soldier,” as he cried, excitedly, “Don’t keep me in suspense,
Carlyon; tell me quickly what you mean.”
“Let’s jump into a gondola, Tom. I can talk better as we ride.”
Carlyon had caught the eye of a cab-driver, and the next moment the two
friends were being driven along riverwards.
“Someone, some Johnnie or other,” began Carlyon, as the two men settled
themselves back in the cab, “once called the hansom cab the gondola of
London’s streets——”
He caught the quick, impatient movement of Hammond’s face, and with a
light laugh went on:
“But you’re on thorns, old boy, to hear about the journalistic plum.
Well, here goes. You once met my uncle, Sir Archibald Carlyon?”
Hammond nodded.
“He is crazy to start a daily,” said Carlyon. “It is no new craze with
him; he has been itching to do it for years. And now that gold has been
discovered on that land of his in Western Australia, and he is likely to
be a multi-millionaire—the concessions he has already sold have given
him a clear million,—now that he is rich beyond all his dreams, he won’t
wait another day; he will be a newspaper proprietor. It’s a case of that
kiddie in the bath, Tom, doncher-know, that’s grabbing for the soap—‘he
won’t be happy till he gets it.’”
“He wants to find at once a good journalist, who is also a keen business
man; one who will take hold of the whole thing. To the right man he will
give a perfectly free hand, will interfere with nothing, but be content
simply to finance the affair.”
An almost fierce light was burning in the eyes of the eager, listening
Hammond. A thousand thoughts rioted through his brain, but he uttered no
word; he would not interrupt his friend.
“I told Nunkums last night, when he was bubbling and boiling over with
his project, that I had heard you say it was easier to drop a hundred or
two hundred thousand pounds over the starting of a new paper than perhaps
over any other venture in the world.
“Nunkums just smiled as I spoke, dropped a walnut into his port glass,
and said quietly, ‘Then I’ll drop them.’
“He hooked that walnut out of his wine with the miniature silver
boathook—he had the thing made for him for the purpose,—devoured the
wine-saturated nut, then smiled back into my face, as he said: ‘Yes,
Georgie, I am quite prepared to drop my hundred, two hundred, three
hundred thousand, if needs be, as I did my walnut. But I am equally
hopeful—if I can secure the right man to edit and manage my paper,—that I
shall eventually hook out an excellent dividend for my outlay. I want a
man who not only knows how to do his own work well, as an editor, but one
who has the true instinct in choosing his staff.’
“Of course, Tom, I trotted you out before him. He remembered you, of
course, and jumped at the idea of getting you, if you were to be got.
The upshot of it is, nothing would satisfy him but that I should come
up by an early train this morning—early bird catches the worm, and all
that kind of business, you know,—and now, in spite of the fact that my
particular worm had wriggled and squirmed miles from his usual habitat,
I’ve caught him. Now, tell me, are you open to treat with Sir Archibald?”
“Yes, and can begin business this very day!” Hammond laughed with the
abandon of a boy, as he told, in a few sentences, the story of his
dismissal.
“Good!” Carlyon, in his own exuberant glee, slapped his friend’s knee.
“Sir Archibald,” he went on, “was to come up by the 10:05 from our place,
due at Waterloo at 11:49. He’ll be fixed up—“Hail Columbia!” again—at the
hotel by this time. That’s where we are driving to now, and—ah! here we
are!”
A moment later the two men were mounting the hotel steps. One of the
servants standing in the vestibule recognized Carlyon, and saluted him.
“My uncle arrived, Bates?” Carlyon asked.
“Yes, sir, and a young lady with him!”
Carlyon turned quickly to Hammond.
“That’s Madge, my American cousin, Tom. I’m awfully glad she has come; I
should like you to know her.”
Turning to the servant, he asked, “Same old rooms, Bates?”
“Yes, sir.”
Three steps at a time, laughing and talking all the while, Carlyon,
ignoring the lift, raced up the staircase, followed more slowly by his
friend.
Hammond never wholly forgot the picture of the sitting-room and
its occupant, as he entered with Carlyon. The room was a large one,
exquisitely furnished, and flooded with a warm, mellow light. A small but
cheerful-looking wood fire burned upon the tiled hearth, the atmosphere
of the room fragrant with a soft, subtle odour, as though the burning
wood were scented. From a couch, as the two men entered, a girl rose
briskly, and faced them. She made a picture which Tom never forgot. The
warm, mellow light that filled the room seemed to clothe her as she stood
to meet them. “America” was stamped upon her and her dress, upon the
arrangement of her hair, upon the very droop of her figure. She was tall,
fair, with that exquisite colouring and smoothness of complexion that is
the product of an unartificial, hygienic life.
Her face could not be pronounced wholly beautiful, but it was a face that
was full of life and charm, her eyes being especially arrestive.
“Awfully glad you came up, Madge!” cried Carlyon. “I’ve run my quarry
down, and this is my own particular, Tom Hammond.”
He made a couple of mockingly-funny elaborate bows, saying: “Miss Madge
Finisterre, of Duchess County, New York. Mr. Tom Hammond, of—oh, shades
of Cosmopolitanism!—of everywhere, of London just at present.”—Tom bowed
to the girl.—She returned his salute, and then held forth her hand in a
frank, pleasant way, as she laughingly said, “I have heard so much of
Tom Hammond during the last few days, that I guess you seem like an old
acquaintance.”
Tom shook hands with the maiden, and for a moment or two they chatted as
freely and merrily as though they were old acquaintances.
The voice of Carlyon broke into their chat, asking: “Where’s Nunkums,
Madge?”
Before the girl could reply, the door opened and Sir Archibald entered
the room.
One glance into his face would have been sufficient to have told Tom the
type of man he had to deal with, even if he had not seen him before.
A warm-hearted, unconventional, impulsive man, a perfect gentleman in
appearance, but a merry, hail-fellow-well-met man in his dealings with
his fellows.
With a bit of mock drama in the gesture, Madge Finisterre flourished her
hand towards the newcomer, crying,
“Sir Archibald, George? Lo, he is here!” She flashed a quick glance to
the piano as she added, “If only I had known you were about to enter,
uncle, I would have treated you to a few crashing bars of stage-life
entree-music.”
“Go away with your nonsense!” laughed the old man.
“Nonsense, indeed!” the girl laughed as merrily as the old man. Then,
with a sudden, swift movement, she crossed to the piano, struck one sharp
note upon it, and whispered in well-feigned hoarseness, “Slow music for
the three conspirators as they retire to plot the destruction of London’s
press, and the accumulation of untold millions by their own special
journalistic production!”
Her fingers moved over the ivory keys, and low, weird, creepy music
filled the room with its eerie notes.
Sir Archibald and George Carlyon fell in with the girl’s mood, and crept
doorwards on tiptoe.
“Number three,” hissed the girl.
And Tom Hammond laughingly followed with the two other men.
“She is a treat, is Madge!” laughed George Carlyon, as the three men
passed through the doorway and made for the study-like room of Sir
Archibald.