SIMON CALLED PETER

CHAPTER I

London lay as if washed with water-colour that Sunday morning, light blue
sky and pale dancing sunlight wooing the begrimed stones of Westminster
like a young girl with an old lover. The empty streets, clean-swept, were
bathed in the light, and appeared to be transformed from the streets of
week-day life. Yet the half of Londoners lay late abed, perhaps because
six mornings a week of reality made them care little for one of magic.

Peter, nevertheless, saw little of this beauty. He walked swiftly as
always, and he looked about him, but he noticed none of these things.
True, a fluttering sheet of newspaper headlines impaled on the railings
of St. Margaret's held him for a second, but that was because its message
was the one that rang continually in his head, and had nothing at all to
do with the beauty of things that he passed by.

He was a perfectly dressed young man, in a frock coat and silk hat of the
London clergyman, and he was on his way to preach at St. John's at the
morning service. Walking always helped him to prepare his sermons, and
this sermon would ordinarily have struck him as one well worth preparing.
The pulpit of St. John's marked a rung up in the ladder for him. That
great fashionable church of mid-Victorian faith and manners held a
congregation on Sunday mornings for which the Rector catered with care.
It said a good deal for Peter that he had been invited to preach. He
ought to have had his determined scheme plain before him, and a few
sentences, carefully polished, at hand for the beginning and the end. He
could trust himself in the middle, and was perfectly conscious of that.
He frankly liked preaching, liked it not merely as an actor loves to sway
his audience, but liked it because he always knew what to say, and was
really keen that people should see his argument. And yet this morning,
when he should have been prepared for the best he could do, he was not
prepared at all.

Strictly, that is not quite true, for he had a text, and the text
absolutely focused his thought. But it was too big for him. Like some at
least in England that day, he was conscious of staring down a lane of
tragedy that appalled him. Fragments and sentences came and went in his
head. He groped for words, mentally, as he walked. Over and over again
he repeated his text. It amazed him by its simplicity; it horrified him
by its depth.

Hilda was waiting at the pillar-box as she had said she would be, and
little as she could guess it, she irritated him. He did not want her just
then. He could hardly tell why, except that, somehow, she ran counter to
his thoughts altogether that morning. She seemed, even in her excellent
brown costume that fitted her fine figure so well, out of place, and out
of place for the first time.

They were not openly engaged, these two, but there was an understanding
between them, and an understanding that her family was slowly
recognising. Mr. Lessing, at first, would never have accepted an
engagement, for he had other ideas for his daughter of the big house in
Park Lane. The rich city merchant, church-warden at St. John's, important
in his party, and a person of distinction when at his club, would have
been seriously annoyed that his daughter should consider a marriage with
a curate whose gifts had not yet made him an income. But he recognised
that the young man might go far. "Young Graham?" he would say, "Yes, a
clever young fellow, with quite remarkable gifts, sir. Bishop thinks a
lot of him, I believe. Preaches extraordinarily well. The Rector said he
would ask him to St. John's one morning...."

Peter Graham's parish ran down to the river, and included slums in which
some of the ladies of St. John's (whose congregation had seen to it that
in their immediate neighbourhood there were no such things) were
interested. So the two had met. She had found him admirable and likeable;
he found her highly respectable and seemingly unapproachable. From which
cold elements much more may come than one might suppose.

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SIMON CALLED PETER