Looking back on them afterwards, Peter saw the months that followed as a
time of waiting between two periods of stress. Not, of course, that
anyone can ever stand still, for even if one does but sit by a fire and
warm one's hands, things happen, and one is imperceptibly led forward. It
was so in this case, but, not unnaturally, Graham hardly noticed in what
way his mind was moving. He had been through a period of storm, and he
had to a certain extent emerged from it. The men he had met, and above
all Julie, had been responsible for the opening of his eyes to facts that
he had before passed over, and it was entirely to his credit that he
would not refuse to accept them and act upon them. But once he had
resolved to do so things, as it were, slowed down. He went about his work
in a new spirit, the spirit not of the teacher, but of the learner, and
ever since his talk with Louise he thought--or tried to think--more of
what love might mean to Julie than to himself. The result was a curious
change in their relations, of which the girl was more immediately and
continually conscious than Peter. She puzzled over it, but could not get
the clue, and her quest irritated her. Peter had always been the least
little bit nervous in her presence. She had known that he never knew what
she would do or say next, and her knowledge had amused and carried her
away. But now he was so self-possessed. Very friendly they were, and they
met often--in the ward for a few sentences that meant much to each of
them; down town by arrangement in a cafe, or once or twice for dinner;
and once for a day in the country, though not alone; and he was always
the same. Sometimes, on night duty, she would grope for an adjective to
fit him, and could only think of "tender." He was that. And she hated it,
or all but hated it. She did not want tenderness from him, for it seemed
to her that tenderness meant that he was, as it were, standing aloof from
her, considering, helping when he could. She demanded the fierce rush of
passion with which he would seize and shrine her in the centre of his
heart, deaf to her entreaties, careless of her pain. She would love then,
she thought, and sometimes, going to the window of the ward and staring
out over the harbour at the twinkling lights, she would bite her lip with
the pain of it. He had thought she dismissed love lightly when she called
it animal passion. Good God, if he only knew!...
Peter, for his part, did not realise so completely the change that had
come over him. For one thing, he saw himself all the time, and she did
not. She did not see him when he lay on his bed in a tense agony of
desire for her. She did not see him when life looked like a tumbled heap
of ruins to him and she smiled beyond. She all but only saw him when he
was staring at the images that had been presented to him during the past
months, or hearing in imagination Louise's quaintly accepted English and
her quick and vivid "La pauvre petite!"
For it was Louise, curiously enough, who affected him most in these days.
A friendship sprang up between them of which no one knew. Pennell and
Donovan, with whom he went everywhere, did not speak of it either to him
or to one another, with that real chivalry that is in most men, but if
they had they would have blundered, misunderstanding. Arnold, of whom
Peter saw a good deal, did not know, or, if he knew, Peter never knew
that he knew. Julie, who was well aware of his friendship with the two
first men, knew that he saw French girls, and, indeed, openly chaffed
him about it. But under her chaff was an anxiety, typical of her. She did
not know how far he went in their company, and she would have given
anything to know. She guessed that, despite everything, he had had no
physical relationship with any one of them, and she almost wished it
might be otherwise. She knew well that if he fell to them, he would the
more readily turn to her. There was a strength about him now that she
dreaded.
Whatever Louise thought she kept wonderfully hidden. He took her out to
dinner in quiet places, and she would take him home to coffee, and they
would chat, and there was an end. She was seemingly well content. She did
her business, and they would even speak of it. "I cannot come to-night,
mon ami," she would say; "I am busy." She would nod to him as she passed
out of the restaurant with someone else, and he would smile back at her.
Nor did he ever remonstrate or urge her to change her ways. And she
knew why. He had no key with which to open her cage.
Once, truly, he attempted it, and it was she who refused the glittering
thing. He rarely came uninvited to her flat, for obvious reasons; but one
night she heard him on the stairs as she got ready for bed. He was
walking unsteadily, and she thought at first that he had been drinking.
She opened to him with the carelessness her life had taught her, her
costume off, and her black hair all about her shoulders. "Go in and wait,
Peterr," she said; "I come."
She had slipped on a coloured silk wrap, and gone in to the sitting-room
to find him pacing up and down. She smiled. "Sit down, mon ami," she
said; "I will make the coffee. See, it is ready. Mais vraiment, you shall
drink café noir to-night. And one leetle glass of this--is it not so?"
and she took a green bottle of peppermint liqueur from the cupboard.
"Coffee, Louise," he said, "but not the other. I don't want it."
She turned and looked more closely at him then. "Non," she said, "pardon.
But sit you down. Am I to have the wild beast prowling up and down in my
place?"
"That's just it, Louise," he cried; "I am a wild beast to-night. I can't
stand it any longer. Kiss me."
He put his arms round her, and bent her head back, studying her French
and rather inscrutable eyes, her dark lashes, her mobile mouth, her long
white throat. He put his hand caressingly upon it, and slid his fingers
beneath the loose lace that the open wrap exposed. "Dear," he said, "I
want you to-night."
"To-night, chérie?" she questioned.
"Yes, now," he said hotly. "And why not? You give to other men--why not
to me, Louise?"
She freed herself with a quick gesture, and, brave heart, she laughed
merrily. The devil must have started at that laugh, and the angels of God
sung for joy. "Ah, non," she cried, "It is the mistake you make. I _sell_
myself to other men. But you--you are my friend; I cannot sell myself to
you."
He did not understand altogether why she quibbled; how should he have
done? But lie was ashamed. He slid into the familiar chair and ran his
fingers through his hair. "Forgive me, dear," he muttered. "I think I am
mad to-night, but I am not drunk, as you thought, except with worrying.
I feel lost, unclean, body and soul, and I thought you would help me to
forget--no, more than that, help me to feel a man. Can't you, won't you?"
he demanded, looking up. "I am tired of play-acting. I've a body, like
other men. Let me plunge down deep to-night, Louise. It will do me good,
and it doesn't matter. That girl was right after all. Oh, what a fool I
am!"
Then did the girl of the streets set out to play her chosen part. She did
not preach at all--how could she? Besides, neither had she any use for
the Ten Commandments. But if ever Magdalene broke an alabaster-box of
very precious ointment, Louise did so that night. She was worldly wise,
and she did not disdain to use her wisdom. And when he had gone she got
calmly into bed, and slept--not all at once, it is true, but as
resolutely as she had laughed and talked. It was only when she woke in
the morning that she found her pillow wet with tears.
It was a few days later that Louise took Peter to church. His ignorance
of her religion greatly amused her, or so at least she pretended, and
when he asked her to come out of town to lunch one morning, and she
refused because it was Corpus Christi, and she wanted to go to the sung
Mass, it was he who suggested that he should go with her. She looked at
him queerly a moment, and then agreed. They met outside the church and
went in together, as strange a pair as ever the meshes of that ancient
net which gathers of all kinds had ever drawn towards the shore.
Louise led him to a central seat, and found the place for him in her
Prayer-Book. The building was full, and Peter glanced about him
curiously. The detachment of the worshippers impressed him immensely.
There did not appear to be any proscribed procedure among them, and even
when the Mass began he was one of the few who stood and knelt as the
rubrics of the service directed. Louise made no attempt to do so. For the
most part she knelt, and her beads trickled ceaselessly through her
fingers.
Peter was, if anything, bored by the Mass, though he would not admit it
to himself. It struck him as being a ratherly poorly played performance.
True, the officiating ministers moved and spoke with a calm regularity
which impressed him, familiar as he was with clergymen who gave out hymns
and notices, and with his own solicitude at home that the singing should
go well or that the choirboys should not fidget. But there was a terrible
confusion with chairs, and a hideous kind of clapper that was used,
apparently, to warn the boys to sit and rise. The service, moreover, as a
reverential congregational act of worship such as he was used to hope
for, was marred by innumerable collections, and especially by the old
woman who came round even during the _Sanctus_ to collect the rent of the
chairs they occupied, and changed money or announced prices with all the
zest of the market-place.
But at the close there was a procession which is worth considerable
description. Six men with censers of silver lined up before the high
altar, and stood there, slowly swinging the fragrant bowls at the end of
their long chains. The music died down. One could hear the rhythmical,
faint clangour of the metal. And then, intensely sudden, away in the west
gallery, but almost as if from the battlements of heaven, pealed out
silver trumpets in a fanfare. The censers flew high in time with it, and
the sweet clouds of smoke, caught by the coloured sunlight of the rich
painted windows, unfolded in the air of the sanctuary. Lights moved and
danced, and the space before the altar filled with the white of the men
and boys who should move in the procession. Again and again those
trumpets rang out, and hardly had the last echoes died away than the
organ thundered the _Pange Lingua_, as a priest in cloth of gold turned
from the altar with the glittering monstrance in his hand. Even from
where he stood Peter could see the white centre of the Host for Whom
all this was enacted. Then the canopy, borne by four French laymen in
frock-coats and white gloves, hid It from his sight; and the high gold
cross, and its attendant tapers, swung round a great buttress into view.
Peter had never heard a hymn sung so before. First the organ would peal
alone; then the men's voices unaided would take up the refrain; then the
organ again; then the clear treble of the boys; then, like waves breaking
on immemorial cliffs, organ, trumpets, boys, men, and congregation would
thunder out together till the blood raced in his veins and his eyes were
too dim to see.
Down the central aisle at last they came, and Peter knelt with the rest.
He saw how the boys went before throwing flowers; how in pairs, as the
censers were recharged, the thurifers walked backward before the three
beneath the canopy, of whom one, white-haired and old, bore That in
the monstrance which all adored. In music and light and colour and scent
the Host went by, as It had gone for centuries in that ancient place, and
Peter knew, all bewildered as he was, there, by the side of the girl,
that a new vista was opening before his eyes.
It was not that he understood as yet, or scarcely so. In a few minutes
all had passed them, and he rose and turned to see the end. He watched
while, amid the splendour of that court, with singers and ministers and
thurifers arranged before, the priest ascended to enthrone the Sacrament
in the place prepared for It. With banks of flowers behind, and the
glitter of electric as well as of candle light, the jewelled rays of the
monstrance gleaming and the organ pealing note on note in a triumphant
ecstasy, the old, bent priest placed That he carried there, and sank down
before It. Then all sound of singing and of movement died away, and from
that kneeling crowd one lone, thin voice, but all unshaken, cried to
Heaven of the need of men. It was a short prayer and he could not
understand it, but it seemed to Peter to voice his every need, and to go
on and on till it reached the Throne. The "Amen" beat gently about him,
and he sank his face in his hands.
But only for a second. The next he was lifted to his feet. All that had
gone before was as nothing to this volume of praise that shook, it seemed
to him, the very carven roof above and swept the ancient walls in waves
of sound.
_Adoremus in aeternum Sanctissimum Sacramentum_, cried men on earth, and,
as it seemed to him, the very angels of God.
But outside he collected his thoughts. "Well," he said. "I'm glad I've
been, but I shan't go again."
"Why not?" demanded Louise. "It was most beautiful. I have never 'eard it
better."
"Oh yes, it was," said Peter; "the music and singing were wonderful,
but--forgive me if I hurt you, but I can't help saying it--I see now what
our people mean when they say it is nothing less than idolatry."
"Idolatry?" queried Louise, stumblingly and bewildered. "But what do you
mean?"
"Well," said Peter, "the Sacrament is, of course, a holy thing, a very
holy thing, the sign and symbol of Christ Himself, but in that church
sign and symbol were forgotten; the Sacrament was worshipped as if it
were very God."
"Oui, oui," protested Louise vehemently, "It is. It is le bon Jesu. It is
He who is there. He passed by us among them all, as we read He went
through the crowds of Jerusalem in the holy Gospel. And there was not one
He did not see, either," she added, with a little break in her voice.
Peter all but stopped in the road. It was absurd that so simple a thing
should have seemed to him new, but it is so with us all. We know in a
way, but we do not understand, and then there comes the moment of
illumination--sometimes.
"Jesus Himself!" he exclaimed, and broke off abruptly. He recalled a
fragment of speech: "Not a dead man, not a man on the right hand of the
throne of God." But "He can't be found," Langton had said. Was it so? He
walked on in silence. What if Louise, with her pitiful story and her
caged, earthy life, had after all found what the other had missed? He
pulled himself together; it was too good to be true.
One day Louise asked him abruptly if he had been to see the girl in
the house which he had visited with Pennell. He told her no, and she
said--they had met by chance in the town--"Well, go you immediately,
then, or you will not see her."
"What do you mean?" he asked. "Is she ill--dying?"
"Ah, non, not dying, but she is ill. They will take her to a 'ospital
to-morrow. But this afternoon she will be in bed. She like to see you,
I think."
Peter left her and made for the house. On his way he thought of
something, and took a turning which led to the market-place of flowers.
There, at a stall, he bought a big bunch of roses and some sprays of
asparagus fern, and set off again. Arriving, he found the door shut. It
was a dilemma, for he did not even know the girl's name, but he knocked.
A grim-faced woman opened the door and stared at him and his flowers. "I
think there is a girl sick here," said Peter. "May I see her?"
The woman stared still harder, and he thought she was going to refuse him
admission, but at length she gave way. "Entrez," she said. "Je pense que
vous savez le chambre. Mais, le bouquet--c'est incroyable."
Peter went up the stairs and knocked at the door. A voice asked who was
there, and he smiled because he could not say. The girl did not know his
name, either. "A friend," he said: "May I come in?"
A note of curiosity sounded in her voice. "Oui, certainement. Entrez,"
she called. Peter turned the handle and entered the remembered room.
The girl was sitting up in bed in her nightdress, her hair in disorder,
and the room felt hot and stuffy and looked more tawdry than ever. She
exclaimed at the sight of his flowers. He deposited the big bunch by the
side of her, and seated himself on the edge of the bed. She had been
reading a book, and he noticed it was the sort of book that Langton and
he had seen so prominently in the book-shop at Abbeville.
If he had expected to find her depressed or ashamed, he was entirely
mistaken. "Oh, you darling," she cried in clipped English. "Kiss me,
quick, or I will forget the orders of the doctor and jump out of bed and
catch you. Oh, that you should bring me the rose so beautiful! Hélas! I
may not wear one this night in the café! See, are they not beautiful
here?"
She pulled her nightdress open considerably more than the average evening
dress is cut away and put two or three of the blooms on her white bosom,
putting her head on one side to see the result. "Oui," she exclaimed, "je
suis exquise! To-night I 'ave so many boys I do not know what to do! But
I forget: I cannot go. Je suis malade, très malade. You knew? You are
angry with me--is it not so?"
He laughed; there was nothing else to do. "No," he said; "why should I
be? But I am very sorry."
She shrugged her shoulders. "It is nothing," she said. "C'est la guerre
for me. I shall not be long, and when I come out you will come to see me
again, will you not? And bring me more flowers? And you shall not let me
'ave the danger any more, and if I do wrong you shall smack me 'ard.
Per'aps you will like that. In the books men like it much. Would you like
to whip me?" she demanded, her eyes sparkling as she threw herself over
in the bed and looked up at him.
Peter got up and moved away to the window. "No," he said shortly, staring
out. He had a sensation of physical nausea, and it was as much as he
could do to restrain himself. He realised, suddenly, that he was in the
presence of the world, the flesh, and the devil's final handiwork. Only
his new knowledge kept him quiet. Even she might be little to blame. He
remembered all that she had said to him before, and suddenly his disgust
was turned into overwhelming pity. This child before him--for she was
little more than a child--had bottomed degradation. For the temporary
protection and favour of a man that she guessed to be kind there was
nothing in earth or in hell that she would not do. And in her already
were the seeds of the disease that was all but certain to slay her.
He turned again to the bed, and knelt beside it. "Poor little girl," he
said, and lightly brushed her hair. He certainly never expected the
result.
She pushed him from her. "Oh, go, go!" she cried. "Quick go! You pretend,
but you do not love me. Why you give me money, the flowers, if you do not
want me? Go quick. Come never to see me again!"
Peter did the only thing he could do; he went. "Good-bye," he said
cheerfully at the door. "I hope you will be better soon. I didn't mean to
be a beast to you. Give the flowers to Lucienne if you don't want them;
she will be able to wear them to-night. Cheerio. Good-bye-ee!"
"Good-bye-ee!" she echoed after him. And he closed the door on her life.
In front of the Hôtel de Ville he met Arnold, returning from the club,
and the two men walked off together. In a moment of impulse he related
the whole story to him. "Now," he said, "what do you make of all that?"
Arnold was very moved. It was not his way to say much, but he walked on
silently for a long time. Then he said: "The Potter makes many vessels,
but never one needlessly. I hold on to that. And He can remake the broken
clay."
"Are you sure?" asked Peter.
"I am," said Arnold. "It's not in the Westminster Confession, nor in the
Book of Common Prayer, nor, for all I know, in the Penny Catechism, but I
believe it. God Almighty must be stronger than the devil, Graham."
Peter considered this. Then he shook his head. "That won't wash, Arnold,"
he said. "If God is stronger than the devil, so that the devil is never
ultimately going to succeed, I can see no use in letting him have his
fling at all. And I've more respect for the devil than to think he'd take
it. It's childish to suppose the existence of two such forces at a
perpetual game of cheat. Either there is no devil and there is no
hell--in which case I reckon that there is no heaven either, for a heaven
would not be a heaven if it were not attained, and there would be no true
attainment if there were no possibility of failure--or else there are all
three. And if there are all three, the devil wins out, sometimes, in the
end."
"Then, God is not almighty?"
Peter shrugged his shoulders. "If I breed white mice, I don't lessen my
potential power if I choose to let some loose in the garden to see if the
cat will get them. Besides, in the end I could annihilate the cat if I
wanted to."
"You can't think of God so," cried Arnold sharply.
"Can't I?" demanded Peter. "Well, maybe not, Arnold; I don't know that I
can think of Him at all. But I can face the facts of life, and if I'm not
a coward, I shan't run away from them. That's what I've been doing these
days, and that's what I do not think even a man like yourself does
fairly. You think, I take it, that a girl like that is damned utterly by
all the canons of theology, and then, forced on by pity and tenderness,
you cry out against them all that she is God's making and He will not
throw her away. Is that it?"
Arnold slightly evaded an answer. "How can you save her, Graham?" he
asked.
"I can't. I don't pretend I can. I've nothing to say or do. I see only
one flicker of hope, and that lies in the fact that she doesn't
understand what love is. No shadow of the truth has ever come her way.
If now, by any chance, she could see for one instant--in _fact_, mind
you--the face of God.... If God is Love," he added. They walked a dozen
paces. "And even then she might refuse," he said.
"Whose fault would that be?" demanded the older man.
Peter answered quickly, "Whose fault? Why, all our faults--yours and
mine, and the fault of men like Pennell and Donovan, as well as her own,
too, as like as not. We've all helped build up the scheme of things as
they are, and we are all responsible. We curse the Germans for making
this damned war, and it is the war that has done most to make that girl;
but they didn't make it. No Kaiser made it, and no Nietzsche. The only
person who had no hand in it that I know of was Jesus Christ."
"And those who have left all and followed Him," said Arnold softly.
"Precious few," retorted Peter.
The other had nothing to say.
* * * * *
During these months Peter wrote often to Hilda, and with increasing
frankness. Her replies grew shorter as his letters grew longer. It was
strange, perhaps, that he should continue to write, but the explanation
was not far to seek. It was by her that he gauged the extent of his
separation from the old outlook, and in her that he still clung,
desperately, as it were, to the past. Against reason he elevated her
into a kind of test position, and if her replies gave him no
encouragement, they at least served to make him feel the inevitableness
and the reality of his present position. It would have been easy to get
into the swim and let it carry him carelessly on--moderately easy, at any
rate. But with Hilda to refer to he was forced to take notice, and it was
she, therefore, that hastened the end. Just after Christmas, in a fit of
temporary boldness, he told her about Louise, so that it was Louise again
who was the responsible person during these months. Hilda's reply was
delayed, nor had she written immediately. When he got it, it was brief
but to the point. She did not doubt, she said, but that what he had
written was strictly true, and she did not doubt his honour. But he must
see that their relationship was impossible. She couldn't marry the man
who appeared actually to like the company of such a woman, nor could she
do other than feel that the end would seem to him as plain as it did to
her, and that he would leave the Church, or at any rate such a ministry
in it as she could share. She had told her people that she was no longer
engaged in order that he should feel free, but she would ever remember
the man as she had known him, whom she had loved, and whom she loved
still.
It was in the afternoon that Peter got the letter, and he was just
setting off for the hospital. When he had read it, he put on his cap and
set off in the opposite direction. There was a walk along the sea-wall a
few feet wide, where the wind blew strongly laden with the Channel
breezes, and on the other side was a waste of sand and stone. In some
places water was on both sides of the wall, and here one could feel more
alone than anywhere else in the town.
Peter set off, his head in a mad whirl. He had felt that such a letter
would come for weeks, but that did not, in a way, lessen the blow when it
came. He had known, too, that Hilda was not to him what she had been, but
he had not altogether felt that she never could be so again. Now he knew
that he had gone too far to turn back. He felt, he could not help it,
released in a sense, with almost a sense of exhilaration behind it, for
the unknown lay before. And yet, since we are all so human, he was
intensely unhappy below all this. He called to mind little scenes and
bits of scenes: their first meeting; the sight of her in church as he
preached; how she had looked at the dining-table in Park Lane; her walk
as she came to meet him in the park. And he knew well enough how he had
hurt her, and the thought maddened him. He told himself that God was a
devil to treat him so; that he had tried to follow the right; and that
the way had led him down towards nothing but despair. He was no nearer
answering the problems that beset him. He might have been in a fool's
paradise before, but what was the use of coming out to see the devil as
he was and men and women as they were if he could see no more than that?
The throne of his heart was empty, and there was none to fill it.
Julie?