‘I’d be frightened,’ she said, taking a reassuring peep at the placid blue that smiled above them. It showed no signs of cracking open, she thought.
‘Pooh,’ said Phil contemptuously. ‘I believe you had rather that the other God came—the Jesus God. He is quite different, and will not come the same way at all. I fancy He’d walk into the town: coming the Richmond way perhaps, about the blossomy time of the year. We would just be walking along Piccadilly perhaps, and we’d see every one turning to look, and . . .’
Phil’s imagination gave out here; he had not given enough of thought to the subject to visualise it perfectly, so he returned to his former and more favourite imagining—
‘Now what pleases me about t’other God coming would be the noise—drums, and bugles. Don’t you love ’em, Carrie? I went with my father to the Horse Guards t’other day. Oh, you should have heard it! Well, God will have gold bugles of course—the ones I heard were just tin, I think—and the gold bugles and God’s drums together, they’d make a noise no one could get away from. Now what do you suppose every one we know would do? I wonder what my father would do? Peter would come running up the back stair to look after me—I’m sure of that—in case I was afraid. Not that I would be,’ he added hastily.
‘When do you think it will happen?’ asked Carrie, very much awed, though Phil had finished off with a shrill little twirl of laughter.
‘Oh, perhaps next week, or perhaps to-night, Peter says. I believe God will come down on the gilt top of St. Paul’s myself. Such a fine place to land on from the sky,’ continued the little prophet, inspired as all prophets are by a credulous audience. ‘He’d—He’d—oh, I don’t know what I was going to say. Carrie, look round the tree and see if Peter is kissing Patty, for I want to climb the tree, and ’tis safe to begin if he’s doing that.’
Carrie obediently reconnoitred; ‘I think he’s going to,’ she reported. ‘He has his arm round her waist, and he always begins that way.’
‘Come on then,’ said the prophet, leaving the Second Advent unceremoniously behind him, as he addressed himself to the ascent of a very smutty tree-trunk, much to the detriment of his own and Carrie’s finery.
CHAPTER XIV
One day not very long after this Patty came into the nursery breathless and agitated.