The shift trooped on – such an array of Powers, Honours, Glories, Toils, Patiences, Services, Faiths and Loves as no man may conceive even by favour of dreams. Death and St Peter followed them into a DICD Shed on the English side where, for the moment, work had slackened. Suddenly a name flashed on the telephone-indicator. ‘Mrs Arthur Bedott, 317, Portsmouth Avenue, Brondesbury. Husband badly wounded. One child.’ Her special weakness was appended.
A Seraph on the raised dais that overlooked the Volunteer Aids waiting at the entrance, nodded and crooked a finger. One of the new shift – a temporary Acting Glory – hurled himself from his place and vanished earthward.
‘You may take it,’ Death whispered to St Peter, ‘there will be a sustaining epic built up round Private Bedott’s wound for his wife and Baby Bedott to cling to. And here—’ they heard wings that flapped wearily – ‘here, I suspect, comes one of our failures.’
A Seraph entered and dropped, panting, on a form. His plumage was ragged, his sword splintered to the hilt; and his face still worked with the passions of the world he had left, as his soiled vesture reeked of alcohol.
‘Defeat,’ he reported hoarsely, when he had given in a woman’s name. ‘Utter defeat! Look!’ He held up the stump of his sword. ‘I broke this on her gin-bottle.’
‘So? We try again,’ said the impassive Chief Seraph. Again he beckoned, and there stepped forward that very Imp whom Death had transferred from the NCD.
‘Go you!’said the Seraph. ‘We must deal with a fool according to her folly. Have you pride enough?’
There was no need to ask. The messenger’s face glowed and his nostrils quivered with it. Scarcely pausing to salute, he poised and dived, and the papers on the desks spun beneath the draught of his furious vans.
St Peter nodded high approval. ‘I see!’ he said. ‘He’ll work on her pride to steady her. By all means – “if by all means,” as my good Paul used to say. Only it ought to read “by any manner of possible means.” Excellent!’
‘It’s difficult, though,’ a soft-eyed Patience whispered. ‘I fail again and again. I’m only fit for an old-maid’s tea-party.’
Once more the record flashed – a multiple-urgent appeal on behalf of a few thousand men, worn-out body and soul. The Patience was detailed.
‘Oh, me!’ she sighed, with a comic little shrug of despair, and took the void softly as a summer breeze at dawning.
‘But how does this come under the head of DomesticCasualties? Those men were in the trenches. I heard the mud squelch,’ said St Peter.
‘Something wrong with the installation – as usual. Waves are always jamming here,’ the Seraph replied.
‘So it seems,’ said St Peter as a wireless cut in with the muffled note of some one singing (sorely out of tune), to an accompaniment of desultory poppings:
‘Unless you can love as the Angels love With the breadth of Heaven be—’
‘Twickt!’It broke off. The record showed a name. The waiting Seraphs stiffened to attention with a click of tense quills.
‘As you were!’ said the Chief Seraph. ‘He’s met her.’
‘Who is she?’ said St Peter.
‘His mother. You never get over your weakness for romance,’ Death answered, and a covert smile spread through the Office.
‘Thank Heaven, I don’t. But I really ought to be going—’
‘Wait one minute. Here’s trouble coming through, I think,’ Death interposed.
A recorder had sparked furiously in a broken run of SOS’s that allowed no time for inquiry.
‘Name! Name!’ an impatient young Faith panted at last. ‘It can’t be blotted out.’ No name came up. Only the reiterated appeal.
‘False alarm!’ said a hard-featured Toil, well used to mankind. ‘Some fool has found out that he owns a soul. ‘Wants work. I’d cure him! …’
‘Hush!’ said a Love in Armour, stamping his mailed foot. The office listened.
‘’Bad case?’ Death demanded at last.
‘Rank bad, Sir. They are holding back the name,’ said the Chief Seraph. The SOS signals grew more desperate, and then ceased with an emphatic thump. The Love in Armour winced.
‘Firing-party,’ he whispered to St Peter. “Can’t mistake that noise!’
‘What is it?’ St Peter cried nervously.
‘Deserter; spy; murderer,’ was the Chief Seraph’s weighedanswer. ‘It’s out of my department – now. No – hold the line ! The name’s up at last.’
It showed for an instant, broken and faint as sparks on charred wadding, but in that instant a dozen pens had it written. St Peter with never a word gathered his robes about him and bundled through the door, headlong for The Gate.
‘No hurry,’ said Death at his elbow. ‘With the present rush your man won’t come up for ever so long.’
‘’Never can be sure these days. Anyhow, the Lower Establishment will be after him like sharks. He’s the very type they’d want for propaganda. Deserter – traitor – murderer. Out of my way, please, babies!’
A group of children round a red-headed man who was telling them stories, scattered laughing. The man turned to St Peter.
‘Deserter, traitor, murderer,’ he repeated. ‘Can I be of service?’
‘You can!’ St Peter gasped. ‘Double on ahead to The Gate and tell them to hold up all expulsions till I come. Then,’ he shouted as the man sped off at a long hound-like trot, ‘go and picket the outskirts of the Convoys. Don’t let any one break away on any account. Quick!’
But Death was right. They need not have hurried. The crowd at The Gate was far beyond the capacities of the Examining Board even though, as St Peter’s Deputy informed him, it had been enlarged twice in his absence.
‘We’re doing our best,’ the Seraph explained, ‘but delay is inevitable, Sir. The Lower Establishment are taking advantage of it, as usual, at the tail of the Convoys. I’ve doubled all pickets there, and I’m sending more. Here’s the extra list, Sir – Arc J., Bradlaugh C, Bunyan J., Calvin J., Iscariot J. reported to me just now, as under your orders, and took ’em with him. Also Shakespeare W. and—’
‘Never mind the rest,’ said St Peter. ‘I’m going there myself. Meantime, carry on with the passes – don’t fiddle over ’em – and give me a blank or two.’ He caught up a thick block of Free Passes, nodded to a group in khaki at a passport table, initialled their Commanding Officer’s personal pass as for‘Officer and Party,’ and left the numbers to be filled in by a quite competent-looking Quartermaster-Sergeant. Then, Death beside him, he breasted his way out of The Gate against the incoming multitude of all races, tongues, and creeds that stretched far across the plain.
An old lady, firmly clutching a mottle-nosed, middle-aged Major by the belt, pushed across a procession of keen-faced poilus, and blocked his path, her captive held in that terrible mother-grip no Power has yet been able to unlock.
‘I found him! I’ve got him! Pass him!’ she ordered.
St Peter’s jaw fell. Death politely looked elsewhere.
‘There are a few formalities,’ the Saint began.
‘With Jerry in this state? Nonsense! How like a man! My boy never gave me a moment’s anxiety in—’
‘Don’t, dear – don’t!’ The Major looked almost as uncomfortable as St Peter.
‘Well, nothing compared with what he would give me if he weren’t passed.’
‘Didn’t I hear you singing just now?’ Death asked, seeing that his companion needed a breathing-space.
‘Of course you did,’ the mother intervened. ‘He sings beautifully. And that’s another reason! You’re bass, aren’t you now, darling?’
St Peter glanced at the agonised Major and hastily initialled him a pass. Without a word of thanks the Mother hauled him away.
‘Now, under what conceivable Ruling do you justify that?’ said Death.
‘IW – the Importunate Widow, It’s scandalous!’ St Peter groaned. Then his face darkened as he looked across the great plain beyond The Gate. ‘I don’t lik
e this,’ he said. ‘The Lower Establishment is out in full force tonight. I hope our pickets are strong enough—’
The crowd here had thinned to a disorderly queue flanked on both sides by a multitude of busy, discreet emissaries from the Lower Establishment who continually edged in to do business with them, only to be edged off again by a line of watchful pickets. Thanks to the khaki everywhere, the scenewas not unlike that which one might have seen on earth, any evening of the old days outside the refreshment-room by the Arch at Victoria Station, when the Army trains started. St Peter’s appearance was greeted by the usual outburst of cock-crowing from the Lower Establishment.
‘Dirty work at the cross-roads,’ said Death dryly.
‘I deserve it! ‘St Peter grunted, ‘but think what it must mean for Judas.’
He shouldered into the thick of the confusion where the pickets coaxed, threatened, implored, and in extreme cases bodily shoved the wearied men and women past the voluble and insinuating spirits who strove to draw them aside.
A Shropshire Yeoman had just accepted, together with a forged pass, the assurance of a genial runner of the LowerEstablishment that Heaven lay round the corner, and was being stealthily steered thither, when a large hand jerked him back, another took the runner in the chest, and some one thundered: ‘Get out, you crimp!’ The situation was then vividly explained to the soldier in the language of the barrack-room.
‘Don’t blame me, Guv’nor,’ the man expostulated. ‘I ’aven’t seen a woman, let alone angels, for umpteen months. I’m from Joppa. Where ’you from?’
‘Northampton,’ was the answer. ‘Rein back and keep by me.’
‘What? You ain’t ever Charley B. that my dad used to tell about? I thought you always said—’
‘I shall say a deal more soon. Your Sergeant’s talking to that woman in red. Fetch him in – quick!’
Meantime, a sunken-eyed Scots officer, utterly lost to the riot around, was being button-holed by a person of reverend aspect who explained to him that, by the logic of his own ancestral creed, not only was the Highlander irrevocably damned, but that his damnation had been predetermined before Earth was made.
‘It’s unanswerable – just unanswerable,’ said the young man sorrowfully. ‘I’ll be with ye.’ He was moving off, when a smallish figure interposed, not without dignity.
‘Monsieur,’ it said, ‘would it be of any comfort to you to know that I am – I was – John Calvin?’ At this the reverend one cursed and swore like the lost Soul he was, while the Highlander turned to discuss with Calvin, pacing towards The Gate, some alterations in the fabric of a work of fiction called the Institutio.
Others were not so easily held. A certain Woman, with loosened hair, bare arms, flashing eyes and dancing feet, shepherded her knot of waverers, hoarse and exhausted. When the taunt broke out against her from the opposing line: ‘Tell ’em what you were! Tell ’em if you dare!’ she answered unflinchingly, as did Judas, who, worming through the crowd like an Armenian carpet-vendor, peddled his shame aloud that it might give strength to others.
‘Yes,’ he would cry, ‘I am everything they say, but if I’m here it must be a moral cert for you,gents. This way, please. Many mansions, gentlemen! Go-ood billets! Don’t you notice these low people, Sar. Plees keep hope, gentlemen!’
When there were cases that cried to him from the ground – poor souls who could not stick it but had found their way out with a rifle and a boot-lace, he would tell them of his own end, till he made them contemptuous enough to rise up and curse him. Here St Luke’s imperturbable bedside manner backed and strengthened the other’s almost too oriental flux of words.
In this fashion and step by step, all the day’s Convoy were piloted past that danger-point where the Lower Establishment are, for reasons not given us, allowed to ply their trade. The pickets dropped to the rear, relaxed, and compared notes.
‘What always impresses me most,’ said Death to St Peter, ‘is the sheeplike simplicity of the intellectual mind.’ He had been watching one of the pickets apparently overwhelmed by the arguments of an advanced atheist who – so hot in his argument that he was deaf to the offers of the Lower Establishment to make him a god – had stalked, talking hard – while the picket always gave ground before him – straight past the Broad Road.
‘He was plaiting of long-tagged epigrams,’ the sober-faced picket smiled. ‘Give that sort only an ear and they’ll follow ye gobbling like turkeys.’
‘And John held his peace through it all,’ a full fresh voice broke in. ‘“It may be so,” says John. “Doubtless, in your belief, it is so,” says John. “Your words move me mightily,”says John, and gorges his own beliefs like a pike going backwards. And that young fool, so busy spinning words – words – words – that he trips past Hell Mouth without seeing it! … Who’s yonder, Joan?’
‘One of your English. ’Always late. Look!’ A young girl with short-cropped hair pointed with her sword across the plain towards a single faltering figure which made at first as though to overtake the Convoy, but then turned left towards the Lower Establishment, who were enthusiastically cheering him as a leader of enterprise.
‘That’s my traitor,’ said St Peter. ‘He has no business to report to the Lower Establishment before reporting to Convoy.’
The figure’s pace slackened as he neared the applauding line. He looked over his shoulder once or twice, andthen fairly turned tail and fled again towards the still Convoy.
‘Nobody ever gave me credit for anything I did,’ he began, sobbing and gesticulating. ‘They were all against me from the first. I only wanted a little encouragement. It was a regular conspiracy, but I showed ’em what I could do! I showed ’em! And – and—’ he halted again. ‘Oh, God! What are you going to do with me?’
No one offered any suggestion. He ranged sideways like a doubtful dog, while across the plain the Lower Establishment murmured seductively. All eyes turned to St Peter.
‘At this moment,’ the Saint said half to himself, ‘I can’t recall any precise ruling under which—’
‘My own case?’ the ever-ready Judas suggested.
‘No-o! That’s making too much of it. And yet—’
‘Oh, hurry up and get it over,’ the man wailed, and told them all that he had done, ending with the cry that none had ever recognised his merits; neither his own narrow-minded people, his inefficient employers, nor the snobbish jumped-up officers of his battalion.
‘You see,’ said St Peter at the end. ‘It’s sheer vanity. It isn’t even as if we had a woman to fall back upon.’
‘Yet there was a woman or I’m mistaken,’ said the picket with the pleasing voice who had praised John.
‘Eh – what? When?’ St Peter turned swiftly on the speaker. ‘Who was the woman?’
‘The wise woman of Tekoah,’ came the smooth answer. ‘I remember, because that verse was the private heart of my plays – some of’em.’
But the Saint was not listening. ‘You have it!’ he cried. ‘Samuel Two, Double Fourteen. To think that I should have forgotten! “For we must needs die and are as water spilled on the ground which cannot be gathered up again. Neither doth God respect any person, yet—” Here you! Listen to this!’
The man stepped forward and stood to attention. Some one took his cap as Judas and the picket John closed up beside him.
‘“Yet doth He devise means (d’you understand that?) devise means that His banished be not excelled from Him!”This covers your case. I don’t know what the means will be. That’s for you to find out. They’ll tell you yonder.’ He nodded towards the now silent Lower Establishment as he scribbled on a pass. ‘Take this paper over to them and report for duty there. You’ll have a thin time of it; but they won’t keep you a day longer than I’ve put down. Escort!’
‘Does – does that mean there’s any hope?’ the man stammered.
‘Yes – I’ll show you the way,’ Judas whispered. ‘I’ve lived there – a very long time!’
‘I’ll bear you company
a piece,’ said John, on his left flank. ‘There’ll be Despair to deal with. Heart up, Mr Littlesoul!’
The three wheeled off, and the Convoy watched them grow smaller and smaller across the plain.
St Peter smiled benignantly and rubbed his hands.
‘And now we’re rested,’ said he, ‘I think we might make a push for billets this evening, gentlemen, eh?’
The pickets fell in, guardians no longer but friends and companions all down the line. There was a little burst ofcheering and the whole Convoy strode away towards the not so distant Gate.
The Saint and Death stayed behind to rest awhile. It was a heavenly evening. They could hear the whistle of the low-flighting Cherubim, clear and sharp, under the diviner note of some released Seraph’s wings, where, his errand accomplished, he plunged three or four stars deep into the cool Baths of Hercules; the steady dynamo-like hum of the nearer planets on their axes; and, as the hush deepened, the surprised little sigh of some new-born sun a universe of universes away. But their minds were with the Convoy that their eyes followed.
Said St Peter proudly at last: ‘If those people of mine had seen that fellow stripped of all hope in front of ’em, I doubt if they could have marched another yard tonight. Watch ’em stepping out now, though! Aren’t they human?’
‘To whom do you say it?’ Death answered, with something of a tired smile. ‘I’m more than human. I’ve got to the some time or other. But all other created Beings – afterwards …’
‘I know,’ said St Peter softly. ‘And that is why I love you, O Azrael!’
For now they were alone Death had, of course, returned to his true majestic shape – that only One of all created beings who is doomed to perish utterly, and knows it.
‘Well, that’s that – for me!’ Death concluded as he rose. ‘And yet—’ he glanced towards the empty plain where the Lower Establishment had withdrawn with their prisoner. ‘“Yet doth He devise means.”’
THE APPEAL
If I have given you delight
By aught that I have done,
Let me lie quiet in that night
The Mark of the Beast and Other Fantastical Tales Page 82