Simon Called Peter - Robert Keable (ready to read books .txt) 📗

would have their war-time apology for petit déjeuner in bed or alone. Peter, as a rule, was up early, and used to wander out a little and sometimes into church, coming back to coffee as good as ever, but war-time bread instead of rolls on a small table under a low balcony in the courtyard if it were fine. He would linger over it, and have chance conversation with passing strangers of all sorts, from clerical personages belonging to the Church Army or the Y.M.C.A. to officers who came and went usually on unrevealed affairs. Then Langton would come down, and they would stroll round to the newly-fitted-up office which had been prepared for the lecture campaign and glance at maps of districts, and exchange news with the officer in charge, who, having done all he could, had now nothing to do but stand by and wait for the next move from a War Office that had either forgotten his existence or discovered some hitch in its plans. They had a couple of lectures from people who were alleged to know all about such topics as the food shortage at home or the new plans for housing, but who invariably turned out to be waiting themselves for the precise information that was necessary for successful lectures. After such they would stroll out through the town into the fields, and Langton would criticise the thing in lurid but humorous language, and they would come back to the club and sit or read till lunch.

The club was one of the best in France, it was an old house with lovely furniture, and not too much of it, which stood well back from the street and boasted an old-fashioned garden of shady trees and spring flowers and green lawns. Peter could both read and write in its rooms, and it was there that he finally wrote to Hilda, but not until after much thought.

After his day with Julie at Caudebec one might have supposed that there was nothing left for him to do but break off his engagement to Hilda. But it did not strike him so. For one thing, he was not engaged to Julie or anything like it, and he could not imagine such a situation, even if Julie had not positively repudiated any desire to be either engaged or married. He had certainly declared, in a fit of enthusiasm, that he loved her, but he had not asked if she loved him. He had seen her since, but although they were very good friends, nothing more exciting had passed between them. Peter was conscious that when he was with Julie she fascinated him, but that when he was away—ah! that was it, when he was away? It certainly was not that Hilda came back and took her place; it was rather that the other things in his mind dominated him. It was a curious state of affairs. He was less like an orthodox parson than he had ever been, and yet he had never thought so much about religion. He agonised over it now. At times his thoughts were almost more than he could bear.

It came, then, to this, that he had not so much changed towards Hilda as changed towards life. Whether he had really fundamentally changed in such a way that a break with the old was inevitable he did not know. Till then Hilda was part of the old, and if he went back to it she naturally took her old place in it. If he did not—well, there he invariably came to the end of thought. Curiously enough, it was when faced with a mental blank that Julie's image began to rise in his mind. If he admitted her, he found himself abandoning himself to her. He felt sometimes that if he could but take her in his arms he could let the world go by, and God with it. Her kisses were at least a reality. There was neither convention nor subterfuge nor divided allegiance there. She was passion, naked and unashamed, and at least real.

And then he would remember that much of this was problematical after all, for they had never kissed as that passion demanded, or at least that he had never so kissed her. He was not sure of the first. He knew that he did not understand Julie, but he felt, if he did kiss her, it would be a kiss of surrender, of finality. He feared to look beyond that, and he could not if he would.

He wrote, then, to Hilda, and he told of the death of Jenks, and of their arrival in Abbeville, "You must understand, dear," he said, "that all this has had a tremendous effect upon me. In that train all that I had begun to feel about the uselessness of my old religion came to a head. I could do no more for that soul than light a cigarette…. Possibly no one could have done any more, but I cannot, I will not believe it. Jenks was not fundamentally evil, or at least I don't think so. He was rather a selfish fool who had no control, that is all. He did not serve the devil; it was much more that he had never seen any master to serve. And I could do nothing. I had no master to show him.

"You may say that that is absurd: that Christ is my Master, and I could have shown Him. Hilda, so He is: I cling passionately to that. But listen: I can't express Him, I don't understand Him. I no longer feel that He was animating and ordering the form of religion I administered. It is not that I feel Anglicanism to be untrue, and something else—say Wesleyanism—to be true; it is much more that I feel them all to be out of touch with reality. That's it. I don't think you can possibly see it, but that is the main trouble.

"That, too, brings me to my next point, and this I find harder still to express. I want you to realise that I feel as if I had never seen life before. I feel as if I had been shown all my days a certain number of pictures and told that they were the real thing, or given certain descriptions and told that they were true. I had always accepted that they were. But, Hilda, they are not. Wickedness is not wicked in the way that I was told it was wicked, and what I was told was salvation is not the salvation men and women want. I have been playing in a fool's paradise all these years, and I've got outside the gate. I am distressed and terrified, I think, but underneath it all I am very glad….

"You will say, 'What are you going to do?' and I can only reply, I don't know. I'm not going to make any vast change, if you mean that. A padre I am, and a padre I shall stay for the war at least, and none of us can see beyond that at present. But what I do mean to do is just this: I mean to try and get down to reality myself and try to weigh it up. I am going to eat and drink with publicans and sinners; maybe I shall find my Master still there."

Peter stopped and looked up. Langton was stretched out in a chair beside him, reading a novel, a pipe in his mouth. Moved by an impulse, he interrupted him.

"Old man," he said, "I want you to let me read you a bit of this letter.
It's to my girl, but there's nothing rotten in reading it. May I?"

Langton did not move. "Carry on," he said shortly.

Peter finished and put down the sheet. The other smoked placidly and said nothing. "Well?" demanded Peter impatiently.

"I should cut out that last sentence," pronounced the judge.

"Why? It's true."

"Maybe, but it isn't pretty."

"Langton," burst out Peter, "I'm sick of prettinesses! I've been stuffed up with them all my life, and so has she. I want to break with them."

"Very likely, and I don't say that it won't be the best thing for you to try for a little to do so, but she hasn't been where you've been or seen what you've seen. You can't expect her wholly to understand. And more than that, maybe she is meant for prettinesses. After all, they're pretty."

Peter stabbed the blotting-paper with his pen. "Then she isn't meant for me," he said.

"I'm not so sure," said Langton. "I don't know that you've stuff enough in you to get on without those same prettinesses yourself. Most of us haven't. And at any rate I wouldn't burn my boats yet awhile. You may want to escape yet."

Peter considered this in silence. Then he drew the sheets to him and added a few more words, folded the paper, put it in the envelope, and stuck it down. "Come on," he said, "let's go and post this and have a walk."

Langton got up and looked at him curiously, as he sometimes did. "Peter," he said, "you're a weird blighter, but there's something damned gritty in you. You take life too strenuously. Why can't you saunter through it like I do?"

Peter reached for this cap. "Come on," he said again, "and don't talk rot."

Out in the street, they strolled aimlessly on, more or less in silence. The big book-shop at the corner detained them for a little, and they regarded its variegated contents through the glass. It contained a few good prints, and many more poorly executed coloured pictures of ruined places in France and Belgium, of which a few, however, were not bad. Cheek by jowl with some religious works, a statue of Notre Dame d'Albert, and some more of Jeanne d'Arc, were a line of pornographic novels and beyond packets of picture post-cards entitled Théâtreuses, Le Bain de la Parisienne, Les Seins des Marbre, and so on. Then Langton drew Graham's attention to one or two other books, one of which had a gaudy cover representing a mistress with a birch-rod in her hands and a number of canes hung up beside her, while a girl of fifteen or so, with very red cheeks, was apparently about to be whipped. "Good Lord," said Langton, "the French are beyond me. This window is a study for you, Graham, in itself. I should take it that it means that there is nothing real in life. It is utterly cynical.

"'And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press,
End in what All begins and ends in—Yes;
Think then you are To-day what Yesterday
You were—To-morrow you shall not be less,'"

he quoted.

"Yes," said Peter. "Or else it means that there are only two realities, and that the excellent person who keeps this establishment regards both in a detached way, and conceives it her business to cater for each. Let's go on."

They turned the corner, and presently found themselves outside the famous carven door of the church. "Have you ever been round?" asked Peter.

"No," said Langton; "let's go in."

They passed through the door into the old church, which, in contrast to that at Le Havre, was bathed in the daylight that streamed through many clear windows. Together they wandered round it, saying little. They inspected an eighteenth-century statue of St. Roch, who was pulling up his robe to expose a wound and looking upwards at the same time seraphically—or, at least, after the manner that the artist of that age had regarded as seraphic. A number of white ribbons and some wax figures of feet and hands and other parts of the body were tied to him. They stood before a wonderful coloured alabaster reredos of the fourteenth century, in which shepherds and kings and beasts came to worship at the manger. They had a little conversation as to the architectural periods of the nave, choir, and transepts, and Langton was enthusiastic over a noble pillar and arch. Beyond they gazed in silence at a statue of Our Lady Immaculate in modern coloured plaster, so arranged that the daylight fell through an unseen opening upon her. Among the objects in front were a pair of Renaissance candlesticks of great beauty. A French officer came up and arranged and lit a votive candle as they watched, and then went back to stand in silence by a pillar. The church door banged and two peasants came in, one obviously from the market, with a huge basket of carrots and cabbages and some long, thin French loaves. She deposited this just inside the door, took holy water, clattered up towards the high altar, dropped a curtsy, and made