Simon Called Peter Part 23

It was difficult, but between the louder explosions Peter concentrated his senses on listening. In a minute he heard something new, a faint buzz in the air.

"Aeroplanes," said Langton coolly. "I hope they don't spot us. Let me see. Maybe it's our planes." He craned out in Peter's place. "I can't see anything," he said, "and you can hear they're flying high."

Down the train everyone was staring upwards now. "Christ!" exclaimed Langton suddenly, "some fool's lighting a pipe! Put that match out there," he called.

Other voices took him up. "That's better," he said in a minute. "Forgive my swearing, padre, but a match might give us away."

Peter was silent, and, truth to tell, terrified. He tried hard not to feel it, and glanced at Jenks. He was still asleep, and breathing heavily. He pressed his face against the pane, and tried to stare up too.

"They're coming," said Langton suddenly and quickly. "There they are, too--Hun planes. They may not see us, of course, but they may...." He brought his head in again and sat down.

"Is there anything we can do?" said Peter.

"Nothing," said Langton, "unless you like to get under the seat. But that's no real good. It's on the knees of the G.o.ds, padre, whatever G.o.ds there be."

Just then Peter saw one. Sailing obliquely towards them and lit by the light of a flare, the plane looked serene and beautiful. He watched it, fascinated.

"It's very low--two hundred feet, I should say," said Langton behind him.

"Hope he's no pills left. I wonder whether there's another. Let's have a look the other side."

He had scarcely got up to cross the compartment when the rattle of a machine-gun very near broke out. "Our fellows, likely," he exclaimed excitedly, struggling with the sash, but they knew the truth almost as he spoke.

Langton ducked back. A plane on the other side was deliberately flying up the train, machine-gunning. "Down, padre, for G.o.d's sake!" he exclaimed, and threw himself on the floor.

Peter couldn't move. He heard the splintering of gla.s.s and a rending of woodwork, some oaths, and a sudden cry. The whirr of an engine filled his ears and seemed, as it were, on top of them. Then there was a crash all but at his side, and next instant a half-smothered groan and a dreadful gasp for breath.

He couldn't speak. He heard Langton say, "Hit, anyone?" and then Jenks'

"They've got me, skipper," in a m.u.f.fled whisper, and he noticed that the hard breathing had ceased. At that he found strength and voice and jumped up. He bent over Jenks. "Where have you got it, old man?" he said, and hardly realised that it was himself speaking.

The other was lying just as before, on his back, but he had pulled his knees up convulsively and a rug had slipped off. In a flare Peter saw beads of sweat on his forehead and a white, twisted face.

He choked back panic and knelt down. He had imagined it all before, and yet not quite like this. He knew what he ought to say, but for a minute he could not formulate it. "Where are you hit, Jenks?" was all he said.

The other turned his head a little and looked at him. "Body--lungs, I think," he whispered. "I'm done, padre; I've seen chaps before."

The words trailed off. Peter gripped himself mentally, and steadied his voice. "Jenks, old man," he said. "Just a minute. Think about G.o.d--you are going to Him, you know. Trust Him, will you? 'The blood of Jesus Christ, G.o.d's Son, saveth us from all sin.'"

The dying man, moved his hand convulsively. "Don't you worry, padre," he said faintly; "I've been--confirmed." The lips tightened a second with pain, and then: "Reckon I won't--shirk. Have you--got--a cigarette?"

Peter felt quickly for his case, fumbled and dropped one, then got another into his fingers. He hesitated a second, and then, put it to his own lips, struck a match, and puffed at it. He was in the act of holding it to the other when Langton spoke behind him:

"It's no good now, padre," he said quietly; "it's all over."

And Peter saw that it was.

The planes did not come back. The officer in charge of the train came down it with a lantern, and looked in. "That makes three," he said. "We can do nothing now, but we'll be in the station in a bit. Don't show any lights; they may come back. Where the h.e.l.l were our machines, I'd like to know?"

He went on, and Peter sat down in his corner. Langton picked up the rug, and covered up the body. Then he glanced at Peter. "Here," he said, holding out a flask, "have some of this."

Peter shook his head. Langton came over to him. "You must," he said; "it'll pull you together. Don't go under now, Graham. You kept your nerve just now--come on."

At that Peter took it, and drained the little cup the other poured out for him. Then he handed it back, without a word.

"Feel better?" queried the other, a trifle curiously, staring at him.

"Yes, thanks," said Peter--"a d.a.m.ned sight better! Poor old Jenks! What blasted luck that he should have got it!... Langton, I wish to G.o.d it had been me!"

PART II

"And the Lord turned and looked upon Peter."

ST. LUKE'S GOSPEL.

CHAPTER I

The charm of the little towns of Northern France is very difficult to imprison on paper. It is not exactly that they are old, although there is scarcely one which has not a church or a chateau or a quaint medieval street worth coming far to see; nor that they are particularly picturesque, for the ground is fairly flat, and they are all but always set among the fields, since it is by agriculture far more than by manufacture that they live. But they are clean and cheerful; one thinks of them under the sun; and they are very homely. In them the folk smile simply at you, but not inquisitively as in England, for each bustles gaily about his own affairs, and will let you do what you please, with a shrug of the shoulders. Abbeville is very typical of all this. It has its church, and from the bridge over the Somme the backs of ancient houses can be seen leaning half over the river, which has sung beneath them for five hundred years; and it is set in the midst of memories of stirring days. Yet it is not for these that one would revisit the little town, but rather that one might walk by the still ca.n.a.l under the high trees in spring, or loiter in the market-place round what the Hun has left of the statue of the famous Admiral with his attendant nymphs, or wander down the winding streets that skirt the ancient church and give glimpses of its unfinished tower.

Peter found it very good to be there in the days that followed the death of Jenks. True, it was now nearer to the seat of war than it had been for years, and air-raids began to be common, but in a sense the sound of the guns fitted in with his mood. So great a battle was being fought within him that the world could not in any case have seemed wholly at peace, and yet in the quiet fields, or sauntering of an afternoon by the river, he found it easier than at Havre to think. Langton was almost his sole companion, and a considerable intimacy had grown up between them. Peter found that his friend seemed to understand a great deal of his thoughts without explanation. He neither condoled nor exhorted; rather he watched with an almost shy interest the other's inward battle.

They lodged at the Hotel de l'Angleterre, that hostelry in the street that leads up and out of the town towards Saint Riquier, which you enter from a courtyard that opens on the road and has rooms that you reach by means of narrow, rickety flights of stairs and balconies overhanging the court. The big dining-room wore an air of gloomy festivity. Its chandeliers swathed in brown paper, its faded paint, and its covered upholstery, suggested that it awaited a day yet to be when it should blossom forth once more in glory as in the days of old. Till then it was as merry as it could be. Its little tables filled up of an evening with the new cosmopolitan population of the town, and old Jacques bustled round with the good wine, and dropped no hint that the choice brands were nearly at an end in the cellar.

Peter and Langton would have their war-time apology for _pet.i.t dejeuner_ 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d with it. Her kisses were at least a reality. There was neither convention nor subterfuge nor divided allegiance there. She was pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sionately 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.