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

found the place for him in her Prayer-Book. The building was full, and Peter glanced about him curiously. The detachment of the worshippers impressed him immensely. There did not appear to be any proscribed procedure among them, and even when the Mass began he was one of the few who stood and knelt as the rubrics of the service directed. Louise made no attempt to do so. For the most part she knelt, and her beads trickled ceaselessly through her fingers.

Peter was, if anything, bored by the Mass, though he would not admit it to himself. It struck him as being a ratherly poorly played performance. True, the officiating ministers moved and spoke with a calm regularity which impressed him, familiar as he was with clergymen who gave out hymns and notices, and with his own solicitude at home that the singing should go well or that the choirboys should not fidget. But there was a terrible confusion with chairs, and a hideous kind of clapper that was used, apparently, to warn the boys to sit and rise. The service, moreover, as a reverential congregational act of worship such as he was used to hope for, was marred by innumerable collections, and especially by the old woman who came round even during the Sanctus to collect the rent of the chairs they occupied, and changed money or announced prices with all the zest of the market-place.

But at the close there was a procession which is worth considerable description. Six men with censers of silver lined up before the high altar, and stood there, slowly swinging the fragrant bowls at the end of their long chains. The music died down. One could hear the rhythmical, faint clangour of the metal. And then, intensely sudden, away in the west gallery, but almost as if from the battlements of heaven, pealed out silver trumpets in a fanfare. The censers flew high in time with it, and the sweet clouds of smoke, caught by the coloured sunlight of the rich painted windows, unfolded in the air of the sanctuary. Lights moved and danced, and the space before the altar filled with the white of the men and boys who should move in the procession. Again and again those trumpets rang out, and hardly had the last echoes died away than the organ thundered the Pange Lingua, as a priest in cloth of gold turned from the altar with the glittering monstrance in his hand. Even from where he stood Peter could see the white centre of the Host for Whom all this was enacted. Then the canopy, borne by four French laymen in frock-coats and white gloves, hid It from his sight; and the high gold cross, and its attendant tapers, swung round a great buttress into view.

Peter had never heard a hymn sung so before. First the organ would peal alone; then the men's voices unaided would take up the refrain; then the organ again; then the clear treble of the boys; then, like waves breaking on immemorial cliffs, organ, trumpets, boys, men, and congregation would thunder out together till the blood raced in his veins and his eyes were too dim to see.

Down the central aisle at last they came, and Peter knelt with the rest. He saw how the boys went before throwing flowers; how in pairs, as the censers were recharged, the thurifers walked backward before the three beneath the canopy, of whom one, white-haired and old, bore That in the monstrance which all adored. In music and light and colour and scent the Host went by, as It had gone for centuries in that ancient place, and Peter knew, all bewildered as he was, there, by the side of the girl, that a new vista was opening before his eyes.

It was not that he understood as yet, or scarcely so. In a few minutes all had passed them, and he rose and turned to see the end. He watched while, amid the splendour of that court, with singers and ministers and thurifers arranged before, the priest ascended to enthrone the Sacrament in the place prepared for It. With banks of flowers behind, and the glitter of electric as well as of candle light, the jewelled rays of the monstrance gleaming and the organ pealing note on note in a triumphant ecstasy, the old, bent priest placed That he carried there, and sank down before It. Then all sound of singing and of movement died away, and from that kneeling crowd one lone, thin voice, but all unshaken, cried to Heaven of the need of men. It was a short prayer and he could not understand it, but it seemed to Peter to voice his every need, and to go on and on till it reached the Throne. The "Amen" beat gently about him, and he sank his face in his hands.

But only for a second. The next he was lifted to his feet. All that had gone before was as nothing to this volume of praise that shook, it seemed to him, the very carven roof above and swept the ancient walls in waves of sound.

Adoremus in aeternum Sanctissimum Sacramentum, cried men on earth, and, as it seemed to him, the very angels of God.

But outside he collected his thoughts. "Well," he said. "I'm glad I've been, but I shan't go again."

"Why not?" demanded Louise. "It was most beautiful. I have never 'eard it better."

"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 God."

"Oui, oui," protested Louise vehemently, "It is. It is le bon Jesu. It is
He who is there. He passed 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 God." 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! Hélas! I may not wear one this night in the café! 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, très 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 hell 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 Hôtel 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