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.