Simon Called Peter | Page 5

and contemplate with a fixed
and determined gaze the distant altar.

Peter, of course, wound in to solemn music with the procession of choir
boys and men, and, accorded the honour of a beadle with a silver mace,
since he was to preach, was finally installed in a suitably cushioned
seat within the altar-rails. He knelt to pray, but it was an effort to
formulate anything. He was intensely conscious that morning that a
meaning hitherto unfelt and unguessed lay behind his world, and even
behind all this pomp and ceremony that he knew so well. Rising, of
course, when the senior curate began to intone the opening sentence in
a manner which one felt was worthy even of St. John's, he allowed
himself to study his surroundings as never before.
The church had, indeed, an air of great beauty in the morning sunlight.
The Renaissance galleries and woodwork, mellowed by time, were
dusted by that soft warm glow, and the somewhat sparse congregation,
in its magnificently isolated groups, was humanised by it too. The stone
of the chancel, flecked with colour, had a quiet dignity, and even the
altar, ecclesiastically ludicrous, had a grace of its own. There was to be
a celebration after Matins. The historic gold plate was therefore
arranged on the retable with something of the effect of show pieces at
Mappin and Webb's. Peter noticed three flagons, and between them two
patens of great size. A smaller pair for use stood on the credence-table.
The gold chalice and paten, veiled, stood on the altar-table itself, and
above them, behind, rose the cross and two vases of hot-house lilies.
Suggesting one of the great shields of beaten gold that King Solomon
had made for the Temple of Jerusalem, an alms-dish stood on edge, and
leant against the retable to the right of the veiled chalice. Peter found
himself marvelling at its size, but was recalled to his position when it
became necessary to kneel for the Confession.
The service followed its accustomed course, and throughout the whole
of it Peter was conscious of his chaotic sermon. He glanced at his notes
occasionally, and then put them resolutely away, well aware that they
would be all but useless to him. Either he would, at the last, be able to
formulate the thoughts that raced through his head, or else he could do
no more than occupy the pulpit for the conventional twenty minutes
with a conventional sermon. At times he half thought he would follow
this easier course, but then the great letters of the newspaper poster

seemed to frame themselves before him, and he knew he could not.
And so, at last, there was the bowing beadle with the silver mace, and
he must set out on the little dignified procession to the great Jacobean
pulpit with its velvet cushion at the top.
Hilda's mind was a curious study during that sermon. At first, as her
lover's rather close-cropped, dark-haired head appeared in sight, she
had studied him with an odd mixture of pride and apprehension. She
held her hymn-book, but she did not need it, and she watched
surreptitiously while he opened the Bible, arranged some papers, and,
in accordance with custom, knelt to pray. She began to think
half-thoughts of the days that might be, when perhaps she would be the
wife of the Rector of some St. John's, and later, possibly, of a Bishop.
Peter had it in him to go far, she knew. She half glanced round with a
self-conscious feeling that people might be guessing at her thoughts,
and then back, wondering suddenly if she really knew the man, or only
the minister. And then there came the rustle of shutting books and of
people composing themselves to listen, the few coughs, the vague
suggestion of hassocks and cushions being made comfortable. And then,
in a moment, almost with the giving out of the text, the sudden stillness
and that tense sensation which told that the young orator had gripped
his congregation.
Thereafter she hardly heard him, as it were, and she certainly lost the
feeling of ownership that had been hers before. As he leaned over the
pulpit, and the words rang out almost harshly from their intensity, she
began to see, as the rest of the congregation began to see, the images
that the preacher conjured up before her. A sense of coming disaster
riveted her--the feeling that she was already watching the end of an age.
"Jesus had compassion on the multitude"--that had been the short and
simple text. Simple words, the preacher had said, but how when one
realised Who had had compassion, and on what? Almighty God
Himself, with His incarnate Mind set on the working out of immense
and agelong plans, had, as it were, paused for