Simon Called Peter, Robert Keable [read e books online free txt] 📗

So to speak, bowed out, Peter made his way home. In the Rue de Paris Julie passed him, sitting with a couple of other nurses in an ambulance motor-lorry, and she waved her hand to him. The incident served to depress him still more, and he was a bit petulant as he entered the mess. He flung his cap on the table, and threw himself into a chair.

"Well," said Pennell, who was there, "on the peg all right?"

"Don't be a fool!" said Peter sarcastically. "I'm wanted on the Staff.
Haig can't manage without me. I've got to leave this perishing suburb and
skip up to H.Q., and don't you forget it, old dear. I shall probably be a
Major-General before you get your third pip. Got that?"

Pennell took his pipe from his mouth. "What's in the wind now?" he demanded.

"Well, you might not have noticed it, but I'm a political and economic expert, and Haig's fed up that you boys don't tumble to the wisdom of the centuries as you ought. Consequently I've got to instruct you. I'm going to waltz around in a motor-car, probably with tabs up, and lecture. And there aren't to be any questions asked, for that's subversive of discipline."

"Good Lord, man, do talk sense! What in the world do you mean?"

"I mean jolly well what I say, if you want to know, or something precious like it. The blinking Army's got dry-rot and revolutionary fever, and we may all be murdered in our little beds unless I put a shoulder to the wheel. That's a bit mixed, but it'll stand. I shall be churning out this thing by the yard in a little."

"Any extra pay?" demanded Pennell anxiously. "I can lecture on engineering, and would do for an extra sixpence. Whisky's going up, and I haven't paid my last mess bill."

"You haven't, old son," said Arnold, coming in, "and you've jolly well got to. Here's a letter for you, Graham."

Peter glanced at the envelope and tore it open. Pennell knocked his pipe out with feigned dejection. "The fellow makes me sick, padre," he said. "He gets billets-doux every hour of the blessed day."

Peter jumped up excitedly. "This is better," he said. "It's a letter from Langton at Rouen, a chap I met there who writes occasionally. He's been hauled in for this stunt himself, and is to go to Abbeville as well. By Jove, I'll go up with him if I can. Give me some paper, somebody. I'll have to write to him at once, or we'll boss it."

"And make a will, and write to a dozen girls, I should think," said Pennell. "I don't know what the blooming Army's coming to. Might as well chuck it and have peace, I think. But meantime I've got to leave you blighted slackers to gad about the place, and go and do an honest day's work. I don't get Staff jobs and red tabs. No; I help win the ruddy war, that's all. See you before you go, Graham, I suppose? They'll likely run the show for a day or two more without you. There'll be time for you to stand a dinner on the strength of it yet."

A week later Peter met Langton by appointment in the Rouen club, the two of them being booked to travel that evening via Amiens to Abbeville. His tall friend was drinking a whisky-and-soda in the smoke-room and talking with a somewhat bored expression to no less a person than Jenks of the A.S.C.

Peter greeted them. "Hullo!" he said to the latter. "Fancy meeting you here again. Don't say you're going to lecture as well?"

"The good God preserve us!" exclaimed Jenks blasphemously. "But I am off in your train to Boulogne. Been transferred to our show there, and between ourselves, I'm not sorry to go. It's a decent hole in some ways, Boulogne, and it's time I got out of Rouen. You're a lucky man, padre, not to be led into temptation by every damned girl you meet. I don't know what they see in me," he continued mournfully, "and, at this hour of the afternoon, I don't know what I see in them."

"Nor do I," said Langton. "Have a drink, Graham? There'll be no getting anything on the ruddy train. We leave at six-thirty, and get in somewhere about four a.m. next morning, so far as I can make out."

"You don't sound over-cheerful," said Graham.

"I'm not. I'm fed up over this damned lecture stunt! The thing's condemned to failure from the start, and at any rate it's no time for it. Fritz means more by this push than the idiots about here allow. He may not get through; but, on the other hand, he may. If he does, it's UP with us all. And here we are to go lecturing on economics and industrial problems while the damned house is on fire!"

Peter took his drink and sat down. "What's your particular subject?" he asked.

"The Empire. Colonies. South Africa. Canada. And why? Because I took a degree in History in Cambridge, and have done surveying on the C.P.R. Lor'! Finish that drink and have another."

They went together to the station, and got a first to themselves, in which they were fortunate. They spread their kit about the place, suborned an official to warn everyone else off, and then Peter and Langton strolled up and down the platform for half an hour, as the train was not now to start till seven. Somebody told them there was a row on up the line, though it was not plain how that would affect them. Jenks departed on business of his own. A girl lived somewhere in the neighbourhood.

"How're you getting on now, padre?" asked Langton.

"I'm not getting on," said Peter. "I'm doing my job as best I can, and I'm seeing all there is to see, but I'm more in a fog than ever. I've got a hospital at Havre, and I distribute cigarettes and the news of the day. That's about all. I get on all right with the men socially, and now and again I meet a keen Nonconformist who wants me to pray with him, or an Anglican who wants Holy Communion, but not many. When I preach I rebuke vice, as the Apostle says, but I'm hanged if I really know why."

Langton laughed. "That's a little humorous, padre," he said. "What about the Ten Commandments?"

Peter thought of Julie. He kicked a stone viciously. "Commandments are no use," he said—"not out here."

"Nor anywhere," said Langton, "nor ever, I think, too. Why do you suppose I keep moderately moral? Chiefly because I fear natural consequences and have a wife and kiddies that I love. Why does Jenks do the opposite? Because he's more of a fool or less of a coward, and chiefly loves himself. That's all, and that's all there is in it for most of us."

"You don't fear God at all, then?" demanded Peter.

"Oh that I knew where I might find him!" quoted Langton. "I don't believe
He thundered on Sinai, at any rate."

"Nor spoke in the Sermon on the Mount?"

"Ah, I'm not so sure but it seems to me that He said too much or He said too little there, Graham. One can't help 'looking on' a woman occasionally. And in any case it doesn't seem to me that the Sermon is anything like the Commandments. Brotherly love is behind the first, fear of a tribal God behind the second. So far as I can see, Christ's creed was to love and to go on loving and never to despair of love. Love, according to Him, was stronger than hate, or commandments or preaching, or the devil himself. If He saved souls at all, He saved them by loving them whatever they were, and I reckon He meant us to do the same. What do you make of the woman taken in adultery, and the woman who wiped His feet with her hair? Or of Peter? or of Judas? He saved Peter by loving him when he thought he ought to have the Ten Commandments and hell fire thrown at his head and I reckon He'd have saved Judas by giving him that sop-token of love if he hadn't had a soul that could love nothing but himself."

"What is love, Langton?" asked Peter, after a pause.

The other looked at him curiously, and laughed. "Ask the Bishops," he said. "Don't ask me. I don't know. Living with the woman to whom you're married because you fear to leave her, or because you get on all right, is not love at any rate. I can't see that marriage has got much to do with it. It's a decent convention of society at this stage of development perhaps, and it may sign and seal love for some people. But I reckon love's love—a big positive thing that's bigger than sin, and bigger than the devil. I reckon that if God sees that anywhere, He's satisfied. I don't think Cranmer's marriage service affects Him much, nor the laws of the State. If a man cares to do without either, he runs a risk, of course. Society's hard on a woman, and man's meant to be a gregarious creature. But that's all there is in it."

"But how can you tell lust from love?" demanded Peter.

"You can't, I think," said Langton. "Most men can't, anyway. Women may do, but I don't know. I reckon that what they lust after mostly is babies and a home. I don't think they know it any more than men know that what they're after is the gratification of a passion; but there it is. We're sewer rats crawling up a damned long drain, if you ask me, padre! I don't know who said it, but it's true."

They turned in their walk, and Peter looked out over the old town. In the glow of sunset the thin iron modern spire of the cathedral had a grace not its own, and the roofs below it showed strong and almost sentient. One could imagine that the distant cathedral brooding over the city heard, saw, and spoke, if in another language than the language of men.

"If that were all, Langton," said Peter suddenly, "I'd shoot myself."

"You're a queer fellow, Graham," said Langton. "I almost think you might. I'd like to know what becomes of you, anyway. Forgive me—I don't mean to be rude—but you may make a parson yet. But don't found a new religion for Heaven's sake, and don't muddle up man-made laws and God-made instincts—if they are God-made," he added.

Peter said nothing, until they were waiting at the carriage-door for Jenks. Then he said: "Then you think out here men have simply abandoned conventions, and because there is no authority or fear or faith left to them, they do as they please?"

Langton settled himself in a corner. "Yes," he said, "that's right in a way. But that's negatively. I'd go farther than that. Of course, there are a lot of Judas Iscariots about for whom I shouldn't imagine the devil himself has much time, though I suppose we ought not to judge 'em, but there are also a lot of fine fellows—and fine women. They are men and women, if I understand it, who have sloughed off the conventions, that are conventions simply for convention's sake, and who are reaching out towards the realities. Most of them haven't an idea what those are, but dumbly they know. Tommy knows, for instance, who is a good chum and who isn't; that is, he knows that sincerity and unselfishness and pluck are realities. He doesn't care a damn if a chap drinks and swears and commits what the Statute-Book and the Prayer-Book call fornication. And he certainly doesn't think there is an ascending scale of sins, or at any rate that you parsons have got the scale right."

"I shouldn't be surprised if we haven't," said Peter. "The Bible lumps liars and drunkards and murderers and adulterers and dogs—whatever that may mean—into hell altogether."

"That's so," said Langton, sticking a candle on the window-sill; "but I reckon that's not so much because they lie or drink or murder or lust or—or grin about the city like our friend Jenks, who'll likely miss the boat for that very reason, but because of something else they all have in common."

"What's that?" demanded Peter.

"I haven't the faintest idea," said Langton.

At this moment the French guard, an R.T.O., and Jenks appeared in sight simultaneously, the two former urging the latter along. He caught sight of them, and waved.

"Help