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

there were terrible things, chez nous. My mother did not care, but I—I cared. I was mad. I spoke to my sister: it was no good. I spoke to my father, and, truly, I thought he would kill me. He beat me—ah, terrible—and I ran from the house. I wept under the hedges: I said I would no more go 'ome. I come to a big city. I found work in a big shop—much work, little money—ah, how little! Then I met a friend: he persuade me, at last he keep me—two months, three, or more; then comes the war. He is an officer, and he goes. We kiss, we part—oui, he love me, that officer. I pray for him: I think I nevair leave the church; but it is no good. He is dead. Then I curse le bon Dieu. They know me in that place: I can do nothing unless I will go to an 'otel—to be for the officers, you understand? I say, Non. I sell my things and I come here. Here I do well—you understand? I am careful; I have now my home. But this is what I tell you, Peterr: one does wrong to curse le bon Dieu. He is wise—ah, how wise!—it is not for me to say. And good—ah, Jesu! how good! You think I do not know; I, how should I know? But I know. I do not understand. For me, I am caught; I am like the bird in the cage. I cannot get out. So I smile, I laugh—and I wait."

She ceased. Peter was strangely moved, and he pressed the hand he held almost fiercely. The tragedy of her life seemed so great that he hardly dare speak of his own. But: "What has it to do with me?" he demanded.

She gave a little laugh. "'Ow should I say?" she said. "But you think God not remember you, and, Peterr, He remember all the time."

"And Julie?" quizzed Peter after a moment.

Louise shrugged her shoulders. "This love," she said, "it is one great thing. For us women it is perhaps the only great thing, though your English women are blind, are dead, they do not see. Julie, she is as us, I think. She is French inside. La pauvre petite, she is French in the heart."

"Well?" demanded Peter again.

"C'est tout, mon ami. But I am sorry for Julie."

"Louise," said Peter impulsively, "you're better than I—a thousand times. I don't know how to thank you." And he lifted her hand to his lips.

He hardly touched it. She sprang up, withdrawing it. "Ah, non, non," she cried. "You must not. You forget. It is easy for you, for you are good—yes, so good. You think I did not notice in the street, but I see. You treat me like a lady, and now you kiss my hand, the hand of the girl of the street…. Non, non!" she protested vehemently, her eyes alight. "I would kiss your feet!"

Outside, in the darkened street, Peter walked slowly home. At the gate of the camp he met Arnold, returning from a visit to another mess. "Hullo!" he called to Peter, "and where have you been?"

Peter looked at him for a moment without replying. "I'm not sure, but seeing for the first time a little of what Christ saw, Arnold, I think," he said at last, with a catch in his voice.

CHAPTER IV

Looking back on them afterwards, Peter saw the months that followed as a time of waiting between two periods of stress. Not, of course, that anyone can ever stand still, for even if one does but sit by a fire and warm one's hands, things happen, and one is imperceptibly led forward. It was so in this case, but, not unnaturally, Graham hardly noticed in what way his mind was moving. He had been through a period of storm, and he had to a certain extent emerged from it. The men he had met, and above all Julie, had been responsible for the opening of his eyes to facts that he had before passed over, and it was entirely to his credit that he would not refuse to accept them and act upon them. But once he had resolved to do so things, as it were, slowed down. He went about his work in a new spirit, the spirit not of the teacher, but of the learner, and ever since his talk with Louise he thought—or tried to think—more of what love might mean to Julie than to himself. The result was a curious change in their relations, of which the girl was more immediately and continually conscious than Peter. She puzzled over it, but could not get the clue, and her quest irritated her. Peter had always been the least little bit nervous in her presence. She had known that he never knew what she would do or say next, and her knowledge had amused and carried her away. But now he was so self-possessed. Very friendly they were, and they met often—in the ward for a few sentences that meant much to each of them; down town by arrangement in a cafe, or once or twice for dinner; and once for a day in the country, though not alone; and he was always the same. Sometimes, on night duty, she would grope for an adjective to fit him, and could only think of "tender." He was that. And she hated it, or all but hated it. She did not want tenderness from him, for it seemed to her that tenderness meant that he was, as it were, standing aloof from her, considering, helping when he could. She demanded the fierce rush of passion with which he would seize and shrine her in the centre of his heart, deaf to her entreaties, careless of her pain. She would love then, she thought, and sometimes, going to the window of the ward and staring out over the harbour at the twinkling lights, she would bite her lip with the pain of it. He had thought she dismissed love lightly when she called it animal passion. Good God, if he only knew!…

Peter, for his part, did not realise so completely the change that had come over him. For one thing, he saw himself all the time, and she did not. She did not see him when he lay on his bed in a tense agony of desire for her. She did not see him when life looked like a tumbled heap of ruins to him and she smiled beyond. She all but only saw him when he was staring at the images that had been presented to him during the past months, or hearing in imagination Louise's quaintly accepted English and her quick and vivid "La pauvre petite!"

For it was Louise, curiously enough, who affected him most in these days. A friendship sprang up between them of which no one knew. Pennell and Donovan, with whom he went everywhere, did not speak of it either to him or to one another, with that real chivalry that is in most men, but if they had they would have blundered, misunderstanding. Arnold, of whom Peter saw a good deal, did not know, or, if he knew, Peter never knew that he knew. Julie, who was well aware of his friendship with the two first men, knew that he saw French girls, and, indeed, openly chaffed him about it. But under her chaff was an anxiety, typical of her. She did not know how far he went in their company, and she would have given anything to know. She guessed that, despite everything, he had had no physical relationship with any one of them, and she almost wished it might be otherwise. She knew well that if he fell to them, he would the more readily turn to her. There was a strength about him now that she dreaded.

Whatever Louise thought she kept wonderfully hidden. He took her out to dinner in quiet places, and she would take him home to coffee, and they would chat, and there was an end. She was seemingly well content. She did her business, and they would even speak of it. "I cannot come to-night, mon ami," she would say; "I am busy." She would nod to him as she passed out of the restaurant with someone else, and he would smile back at her. Nor did he ever remonstrate or urge her to change her ways. And she knew why. He had no key with which to open her cage.

Once, truly, he attempted it, and it was she who refused the glittering thing. He rarely came uninvited to her flat, for obvious reasons; but one night she heard him on the stairs as she got ready for bed. He was walking unsteadily, and she thought at first that he had been drinking. She opened to him with the carelessness her life had taught her, her costume off, and her black hair all about her shoulders. "Go in and wait, Peterr," she said; "I come."

She had slipped on a coloured silk wrap, and gone in to the sitting-room to find him pacing up and down. She smiled. "Sit down, mon ami," she said; "I will make the coffee. See, it is ready. Mais vraiment, you shall drink café noir to-night. And one leetle glass of this—is it not so?" and she took a green bottle of peppermint liqueur from the cupboard.

"Coffee, Louise," he said, "but not the other. I don't want it."

She turned and looked more closely at him then. "Non," she said, "pardon. But sit you down. Am I to have the wild beast prowling up and down in my place?"

"That's just it, Louise," he cried; "I am a wild beast to-night. I can't stand it any longer. Kiss me."

He put his arms round her, and bent her head back, studying her French and rather inscrutable eyes, her dark lashes, her mobile mouth, her long white throat. He put his hand caressingly upon it, and slid his fingers beneath the loose lace that the open wrap exposed. "Dear," he said, "I want you to-night."

"To-night, chérie?" she questioned.

"Yes, now," he said hotly. "And why not? You give to other men—why not to me, Louise?"

She freed herself with a quick gesture, and, brave heart, she laughed merrily. The devil must have started at that laugh, and the angels of God sung for joy. "Ah, non," she cried, "It is the mistake you make. I sell myself to other men. But you—you are my friend; I cannot sell myself to you."

He did not understand altogether why she quibbled; how should he have done? But lie was ashamed. He slid into the familiar chair and ran his fingers through his hair. "Forgive me, dear," he muttered. "I think I am mad to-night, but I am not drunk, as you thought, except with worrying. I feel lost, unclean, body and soul, and I thought you would help me to forget—no, more than that, help me to feel a man. Can't you, won't you?" he demanded, looking up. "I am tired of play-acting. I've a body, like other men. Let me plunge down deep to-night, Louise. It will do me good, and it doesn't matter. That girl was right after all. Oh, what a fool I am!"

Then did the girl of the streets set out to play her chosen part. She did not preach at all—how could she? Besides, neither had she any use for the Ten Commandments. But if ever Magdalene broke an alabaster-box of very precious ointment, Louise did so that night. She was worldly wise, and she did not disdain to use her wisdom. And when he had gone she got calmly into bed, and slept—not all at once, it is true, but as resolutely as she had laughed and talked. It was only when she woke in the morning that she found her pillow wet with tears.

It was a few days later that Louise took Peter to church. His ignorance of her religion greatly amused her, or so at least she pretended, and when he asked her to come out of town to lunch one morning, and she refused because it was Corpus Christi, and she wanted to go to the sung Mass, it was he who suggested that he should go with her. She looked at him queerly a moment, and then agreed. They met outside the church and went in together, as strange a pair as ever the meshes of that ancient net which gathers of all kinds had ever drawn towards the shore.

Louise led him to a central seat, and