"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 G.o.d."
"Oui, oui," protested Louise vehemently, "It is. It is le bon Jesu. It is He who is there. He pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d." 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! Helas! I may not wear one this night in the cafe! 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, tres 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 h.e.l.l 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 Hotel 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. G.o.d Almighty must be stronger than the devil, Graham."
Peter considered this. Then he shook his head. "That won"t wash, Arnold,"
he said. "If G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l--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, G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 d.a.m.ned utterly by all the canons of theology, and then, forced on by pity and tenderness, you cry out against them all that she is G.o.d"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 G.o.d.... If G.o.d 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 d.a.m.ned 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 G.o.d 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?
CHAPTER V