Simon Called Peter Part 16

"Where's my powder-puff?" demanded Julie. "I believe you've bagged it, Captain Donovan. No, it's here. Skip out, Tommy. Is anyone about?"

"No," said the girl from the step. "But don't wait all night. We'd best run for it."

"Well, good-night," said Julie. "You have both been dears, but whether I'm steady enough to get in safely I don't know. Still, Tommy's a rock.

See you again soon. Good-bye-ee!"

She leaned forward. "_Now_, if you're good," she said to Donovan. He kissed her, laughing; and before he knew what she was doing, she reached over to Peter, kissed him twice on the lips, and leaped lightly out. "Be good," she said, "and if you can't, be careful."

CHAPTER VII

Following a delay of some days, there had been a fairly heavy mail, and Peter took his letters to the little terrace by the sea outside the mess, and sat in the sun to read them. While he was so occupied Arnold appeared with a pipe, but, seeing him engaged, went back for a novel and a deck-chair. It was all very peaceful and still, and beyond occasional hammering from, the leisurely construction of the outer harbour wall and once or twice the siren of a signalling steamer entering the docks, there was nothing to disturb them at all. Perhaps half an hour pa.s.sed, then Peter folded up some sheets, put them in his pocket, and walked moodily to the edge of the concrete, staring down, at the lazy slushing of the tide against: the wall below him.

He kicked a pebble discontentedly into the water, and turned to look, at Arnold. The older man was stretched out: in his chair smoking a pipe and regarding him. A slow smile pa.s.sed between them.

"No, hang it all," said Peter; "there's nothing to smile about, Arnold, I've pretty well got to the end of my tether."

"Meaning what exactly?" queried the other.

"Oh, well, you know enough already to guess the rest.... Look here, Arnold, you and. I are fairly good pals now, I'd just like to tell you exactly what I feel."

"Sit down then, man, and get it out. There's a chair yonder, and you've got the forenoon before ye. I'm a heretic and all that sort of thing, of course, but perhaps that'll make it easier. I take it it's a kind of heretic you're becoming yourself."

Peter pulled up a chair and got out his own pipe. "Arnold," he said, "I'm too serious to joke, and I don't know that I'm even a Christian heretic.

I don't know what I am and where I stand. I wish I did; I wish I even knew how much I disbelieved, for then I'd know what to do. But it's not that my dogmas have been attacked and weakened. I've no new light on the Apostles' Creed and no fresh doubts about it. I could still argue for the Virgin Birth of Christ and the Trinity, and so on. But it's worse than that. I feel ..." He broke off abruptly and pulled at his pipe. The other said nothing. They were friends enough by now to understand each other.

In a little while the younger man found the words he wanted.

"Look here, it's like this. I remember once, on the East Coast, coming across a stone breakwater high and dry in a field half a mile from the sea. There was nothing the matter with the breakwater, and it served admirably for certain purposes--a seat, for instance, or a shady place for a picnic. But it was no longer of any vital use in the world, for the sea had receded and left it there. Now, that's just what I feel. I had a religion; I suppose it had its weaknesses and its faults; but most of it was good sound stone, and it certainly had served. But it serves no longer, not because it's damaged, but because the need for it has changed its nature or is no longer there." He trailed off into silence and stopped.

Arnold stirred to get out his pouch. "The sea is shifty, though," he said. "If they keep the breakwater in decent repair, it'll come in handy again."

"Yes," burst out Peter. "But, of course, that's where ill.u.s.trations are so little good: you can't press them. And in any case no engineer worth his salt would sit down by his breakwater and smoke a pipe till the sea came in handy again. His job is to go after it."

"True for ye, boy. But if the old plan was so good, why not go down to the beach and get on with building operations of the same sort?"

"Arnold," said Peter, "you couldn't have put it better. That's exactly what I came here to do. I knew in London that the sea was receding to some extent, and I thought that there was a jolly good chance to get up with it again out here. But that leads straight to my second problem: I can't build on the old plan, and it doesn't seem any good. It's as if our engineer found quicksands that wouldn't hold his stone, and cross-currents that smashed up all his piles.... I mean, I thought I knew what would save souls. But I find that I can't because my methods are--I don't know, faulty perhaps, out of date maybe possibly worse; and, what is more, the souls don't want my saving. The Lord knows they want something; I can see that fast enough, but what it is I don't know.

Heavens! I remember preaching in the beginning of the war from the text 'Jesus had compa.s.sion on the mult.i.tude.' Well I don't feel that He has changed, and I'm quite sure He still has compa.s.sion, but the mult.i.tude doesn't want it. I was wrong about the crowd. It's nothing like what I imagined. The crowd isn't interested in Jesus any more. It doesn't believe in Him. It's a different sort of crowd altogether from the one He led."

"I wonder," said Arnold.

Peter moved impatiently. "Well, I don't see how you can," he said. "Do you think Tommy worries about his sins? Are the men in our mess miserable? Does the girl the good books talked about, who flirts and smokes and drinks and laughs, sit down by night on the edge of her little white bed and feel a blank in her life? Does she, Arnold?"

"I'm blest if I know; I haven't been there! You seem to know a precious lot about it," he added dryly.

"Oh, don't rag and don't be facetious. If you do, I shall clear. I'm trying to talk sense, and at any rate it's what I feel. And I believe you know I'm right too." Peter was plainly a bit annoyed.

The elder padre sat up straight at that, and his tone changed. He stared thoughtfully out to sea and did not smoke. But he did not speak all at once. Peter glanced at him, and then lay back in his chair and waited.

Arnold spoke at last: possibly the harbour works inspired him. "Look here, boy," he said, "let's get back to your ill.u.s.tration, which is no such a bad one. What do you suppose your engineer would do when he got down to the new sea-beach and found the conditions you described? It wouldn't do much good if he sat down and cursed the blessed sea and the sands and the currents, would it? It would be mighty little use if he blamed his good stone and sound timber, useless though they appeared.

I'm thinking he'd be no much of an engineer either if he chucked his job. What would he do, d'you think?"

"Go on," said Peter, interested.

"Well," said the speaker in parables, "unless I'm mighty mistaken, he'd get down first to studying the new conditions. He'd find they'd got laws governing them, same as the old--different laws maybe, but things you could perhaps reckon with if you knew them. And when he knew them, I reckon he'd have a look at his timber and stone and iron, and get out plans. Maybe, these days, he'd help out with a few tons of reinforced concrete, and get in a bit o' work with some high explosive. I'm no saying. But if he came from north of the Tweed, my lad," he added, with a twinkle in his eye and a touch of accent, "I should be verra surprised if that foresh.o.r.e hadn't a breakwater that would do its duty in none so long a while."

"And if he came from south of the Tweed, and found himself in France?"

queried Peter.

"I reckon he'd get down among the mult.i.tude and make a few inquiries,"

said Arnold, more gravely. "I reckon he wouldn't be in too great a hurry, and he wouldn't believe all he saw and heard without chewing on it a bit, as our Yankee friends say. And he'd know well enough that there was nothing wrong with his Master, and no change in His compa.s.sion, only, maybe, that he had perhaps misunderstood both a little."

A big steamer hooted as she came up the river, and the echoes of the siren died out slowly among the houses that climbed up the hill behind them.

Then Peter put his hand up and rested his head upon it, shading his face.

"That's difficult--and dangerous, Arnold" he said.

"It is that, laddie," the other answered quickly. "There was a time when I would have thought it too difficult and too dangerous for a boy of mine. But I've had a lesson or two to learn out here as well as other folks. Up the line men have learnt not to hesitate at things because they are difficult and dangerous. And I'll tell you something else we've learnt--that it is better for half a million to fail in the trying than for the thing not to be tried at all."

"Arnold," said Peter, "what about yourself? Do you mind my asking? Do you feel this sort of thing at all, and, if so, what's your solution?"

The padre from north of the Tweed knocked the ashes out of his pipe and got up, "Young man," he said, "I don't mind your asking, but I'm getting old, and my answering wouldn't do either of us any good, if I have a solution I don't suppose it would be yours. Besides, a man can't save his brother, and not even a father can save his son .... I've nothing to tell ye, except, maybe, this: don't fear and don't falter, and wherever you get to, remember that G.o.d is there. David is out of date these days, and very likely it wasn't David at all, but I don't know anything truer in the auld book than yon verse where it says: 'Though I go down into h.e.l.l, Thou art there also.'"

"I beg your pardon, padre," said a drawling voice behind them. "I caught a word just now which I understand no decent clergyman uses except in the pulpit. If, therefore, you are preaching, I will at once and discreetly withdraw, but if not, for his very morals' sake, I will withdraw your congregation--that is, if he hasn't forgotten his engagement."

Graham jumped up. "Good Heavens, Pennell!" he exclaimed, "I'm blest if I hadn't." He pushed his arm out and glanced at his watch. "Oh, there's plenty of time, anyway. I'm lunching with this blighter down town, padre, at some special restaurant of his," he explained, "and I take it the sum and substance of his unseemly remarks are that he thinks we ought to get a move on."

"Don't let me stand in the way of your youthful pleasures," said Arnold, smiling; "but take care of yourself, Graham. Eat and drink, for to-morrow you die; but don't eat and drink too much in case you live to the day after."

"I'll remember," said Peter, "but I hope it won't be necessary. However, you never know 'among the mult.i.tude,' do you?" he added.

Arnold caught up the light chair and lunged out at him. "Ye unseemly creature," he shouted, "get out of it and leave me in peace."

Pennell and Peter left the camp and crossed the swing bridge into the maze of docks. Threading their way along as men who knew it thoroughly they came at length to the main roadway, with its small, rather smelly shops, its narrow side-streets almost like Edinburgh closes, and its succession of sheds and offices between which one glimpsed the water.

Just here, the war had made a difference. There was less pleasure traffic up Seine and along Channel, though the Southampton packet ran as regularly as if no submarine had ever been built. Peter liked Pennell.

He was an observant creature of considerable decencies, and a good companion. He professed some religion, and although it was neither profound nor apparently particularly vital, it helped to link the two men. As they went on, the shops grew a little better, but no restaurant was visible that offered much expectation.

"Where in the world are you taking me?" demanded Peter. "I don't mind slums in the way of business, but I prefer not to go to lunch in them."

"Wait and see, my boy," returned his companion, "and don't protest till it's called for. Even then wait a bit longer, and your sorrow shall be turned into joy--and that's Scripture. Great Scott! see what comes of fraternising with padres! _Now._"

So saying he dived in to the right down a dark pa.s.sage, into which the amazed Peter followed him. He had already opened a door at the end of it by the time Peter got there, and was halfway up a flight of wood stairs that curved up in front of them out of what was, obviously, a kitchen.

A huge man turned his head as Peter came in, and surveyed him silently, his hands dexterously shaking a frying-pan over a fire as he did so.

"Bon jour, monsieur," said Peter politely.