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

He dressed silently, and kept the bathroom door closed as he bathed and shaved. She was asleep again as he stole out, one arm flung loosely on the counterpane, her hair untidy on the pillow. He kissed a lock of it, and let himself quietly out of their suite.

It was still very early, and the Circus looked empty and strange. He walked down Piccadilly, and wondered at the clean, soft touch of the dawning day, and recalled another memorable Sunday morning walk. He passed very familiar places, and was conscious of feeling an exile, an inevitable one, but none the less an exile, for all that. And so he came into St. James's Park, still as aimlessly as he had left the hotel.

Before him, clear as a pointing finger in the morning sky, was the campanile of that stranger among the great cathedrals of England. It attracted him for the first time, and he made all but unconsciously towards it, Peter was not even in the spiritual street that leads to the gates of the Catholic Church, and it was no incipient Romanism that moved him. He was completely ignorant of the greater part of that faith, and, still more, had no idea of the gulf that separates it from all other religions. He would have supposed, if he had stopped to think, that, as with other sects, one considered its tenets, made up one's mind as to their truth or falsehood one by one, and if one believed a sufficient majority of them joined the Church. It was only, then, the mood of the moment, and when, he found himself really moving towards that finger-post he excused himself by thinking that as he was, by his own act, exiled, from, more familiar temples, he would visit this that would have about it a suggestion of France.

He wondered if it would be open as he turned into Ashley Gardens. He glanced at his watch; it was only just after seven. Perhaps an early Mass might be beginning. He went to the central doors and found them fast; then he saw little groups of people and individuals like himself making for the door in the great tower, and these he followed within.

He stood amazed for a few minutes. The vast soaring space, so austere in its bare brick, gripped his imagination. The white and red and gold of the painted Christ that hung so high and monstrous before the entrance to the marbles of the sanctuary almost troubled him. It dominated everything so completely that he felt he could not escape it. He sought one of the many chairs and knelt down.

A little bell tinkled, Peter glanced sideways towards the sound, and saw that a Mass was in progress in a side-chapel of gleaming mosaics, and that a soldier in uniform served. Hardly had he taken the details in, when another bell claimed his attention. It came from across the wide nave, and he perceived that another chapel had its Mass, and a considerable congregation. And then, his attention aroused, he began to spy about and to take in the thing.

The whole vast cathedral was, as it were, alive. Seven or eight Masses were in progress. One would scarcely finish before another priest, preceded by soldier in uniform or server in cassock and cotta, would appear from beyond the great pulpit and make his way to yet another altar. The small handbells rang out again and again and again, and still priest after priest was there to take his place. Peter began cautiously to move about. He became amazed at the size of the congregation. They had been lost in that great place, but every chapel had its people, and there were, in reality, hundreds scattered about in the nave alone.

He knelt for awhile and watched the giving of Communion in the guarded chapel to the north of the high altar. Its gold and emblazoned gates were not for him, but he could at least kneel and watch those who passed in and out. They were of all sorts and classes, of all ranks and ages; men, women, children, old and young, rich and poor, soldier and civilian, streamed in and out again. Peter sighed and left them. He found an altar at which Mass was about to begin, and he knelt at the back on a mosaic pavement in which fishes and strange beasts were set in a marble stream, and watched. And it was not one Mass that he watched, but two or three, and it was there that a vision grew on his inner understanding, as he knelt and could not pray.

It is hard and deceptive to write of those subconscious imaginings that convict the souls of most men some time or another. In that condition things are largely what we fashion them to be, and one may be thought to be asserting their ultimate truth in speaking of their influence. But there is no escaping from the fact that Peter Graham of a lost allegiance began that Sunday morning to be aware of another claimant. And this is what dawned upon him, and how.

A French memory gave him a starting-point. Here, at these Low Masses, it was more abundantly plain than ever that these priests did not conceive themselves to be serving a congregation, but an altar. One after the other they moved through a ritual, and spoke low sentences that hardly reached him, with their eyes holden by that which they did. At first he was only conscious of this, but then he perceived the essential change that came over each in his turn. The posturing and speaking was but introductory to the moment when they raised the Host and knelt before it. It was as if they were but functionaries ushering in a King, and then effacing themselves before Him.

Here, then, the Old Testament of Peter's past became to him a schoolmaster. He heard himself repeating again the comfortable words of the Prayer-Book service: "Come unto Me…." "God so loved…." "If any man sin…." Louise's hot declaration forced itself upon him: "It is He Who is there." And it was then that the eyes of his mind were enlightened and he saw a vision—not, indeed, of the truth of the Roman Mass (if it be true), and not of the place of the Sacrament in the Divine scheme of things, but the conception of a love so great that it shook him as if it were a storm, and bowed him before it as if he were a reed.

The silent, waiting Jesus…. All these centuries, in every land…. How He had been mocked, forgotten, spurned, derided, denied, cast out; and still He waited. Prostitutes of the streets, pardoned in a word, advanced towards Him, and He knew that so shortly again, within the secret place of their hearts, He would be crucified; but still He waited. Careless men, doubtless passion-mastered, came up to Him, and He knew the sort that came; but still He waited. He, Peter, who had not known He was here at all, and who had gone wandering off in search of any mistress, spent many days, turned in by chance, and found Him here. What did He wait for? Nothing; there was nothing that anyone could give, nothing but a load of shame, the offering of a body spent by passionate days, the kiss of traitor-lips; but still He waited. He did more than wait. He offered Himself to it all. He had bound Himself by an oath to be kissed if Judas planned to kiss Him, and He came through the trees to that bridal with the dawn of every day. He had foreseen the chalice, foreseen that it would be filled at every moon and every sun by the bitter gall of ingratitude and wantonness and hate, but He had pledged Himself—"Even so, Father"—and He was here to drink it. Small wonder, then, that the paving on which Peter Graham knelt seemed to swim before his eyes until it was in truth a moving ocean of love that streamed from the altar and enclosed of every kind, and even him.

The movement of chairs and the gathering of a bigger congregation than usual near a chapel that Peter perceived to be for the dead aroused him. He got up to go. He walked quickly up Victoria Street, and marvelled over the scene he had left. In sight of Big Ben he glanced up—twenty to nine! He had been, then, an hour and a half in the cathedral. He recalled having read that a Mass took half an hour, and he began to reckon how many persons had heard Mass even while he had been there. Not less than five hundred at every half-hour, and most probably more. Fifteen hundred to two thousand souls, of every sort and kind, then, had been drawn in to that all but silent ceremony, to that showing of Jesus crucified. A multitude—and what compassion!

Thus he walked home, thinking of many things, but the vision he had seen was uppermost and would not be displaced. It was still in his eyes as he entered their bedroom and found Julie looking at a magazine as she lay in bed, smoking a cigarette.

"Lor', Peter, are you back? I suppose I ought to be up, but I was so sleepy. What's the time? Why, what's the matter? Where have you been?"

Peter did not go over to her at once as she had expected. It was not that he felt he could not, or anything like that, but simply that he was only thinking of her in a secondary way. He walked to the dressing-table and lifted the flowers she had worn the night before and put there in a little glass.

"Where have you been, old Solomon?" demanded Julie again.

"Seeing wonders, Julie," said Peter, looking dreamily at the blossoms.

"No? Really? What? Do tell me. If it was anything I might have seen, you were a beast not to come back for me, d'you hear?"

Peter turned and stared at her, but she knew as he looked that he hardly saw her. Her tone changed, and she made a little movement with her hand, "Tell me, Peter," she said again.

"I've seen," said Peter slowly, "a bigger thing than I thought the world could hold, I've seen something so wonderful, Julie, that it hurt—oh, more than I can say. I've seen Love, Julie."

She could not help it. It was a foolish thing to say just then, she knew, but it came out. "Oh, Peter," she said, "did you have to leave me to see that?"

"Leave you?" he questioned, and for a moment so lost in his thought was he that he did not understand what she meant. Then it dawned on him, and he smiled. He did not see as he stood there, the clumsy Peter, how the two were related. So he smiled, and he came over to her, and took her hand, and sat on the bed, his eyes still full of light. "Oh, you've nothing to do with it," he said. "It's far bigger than you or I, Julie. Our love is like a candle held up to the sun beside it. Our love wants something, doesn't it? It burns, it—it intoxicates, Julie. But this love waits, waits, do you understand? It asks nothing; it gives, it suffices all. Year after year it just waits, Julie, waits for anyone, waits for everyone. And you can spurn it, spit on it, crucify it, and it is still there when you—need, Julie." And Peter leaned forward, and buried his face in her little hand.

Julie heard him through, and it was well that before the end he did not see her eyes. Then she moved her other hand which held the half-burnt cigarette and dropped the smoking end (so that it made a little hiss) into her teacup on the glass-topped table, and brought her hand back, and caressed his hair as he lay bent forward there. "Dear old Peter," she said tenderly, "how he thinks things! And when you saw this—this love, Peter, how did you feel?"

He did not answer for a minute, and when he did he did not raise his head. "Oh, I don't know, Julie," he said. "It went through and through me. It was like a big sea, and it flooded me away. It filled me. I seemed to drink it in at every pore. I felt satisfied just to be there."

"And then you came back to Julie, eh, Peter?" she questioned.

"Why, of course," he said, sitting up with a smile. "Why not?" He gave a little laugh. "Why, Julie," he said,