Читать книгу The Day, or The Passing of a Throne - Fred M. White - Страница 13

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The same City and yet not the same!

It was as if one had passed from a hideous nightmare into a sweet, and pleasant dream. Outside, London was swaying either in terror or with a fierce desire to be up and doing, but inside the great Cathedral was peace, complete and absolute.

A vast congregation had gathered there on that Sunday evening to hear a sermon preached by one of the great divines of the Free Church. A month or two ago such a thing would not have been dreamt of. But in the knitting up of the strands of Empire many things had happened lately, and the abnormal of yesterday was the commonplace of to-day. A country that had lived to see the Protestant North of Ireland shoulder to shoulder with the Roman Catholics of the South saw nothing strange in a Nonconformist preacher standing in the pulpit at St. Paul's.

For all the old schisms and quarrels were gone, and the day of broader Christianity had arrived. The change had been going on slowly and gradually wherever the English tongue was spoken and where the peril of the German theology was recognised. The menace to civilisation of a creed inspired by the sword had to be taken by the throat and strangled. What could one think of a dogma based upon an arrogant assumption of world-wide power gained at the point of the bayonet and ruthlessly carried over the dead bodies of women and children.

It was such thoughts as those that had brought people there and filled St. Paul's to overflowing.

The impressive service was finished, the great organ had ceased to peal, and all eyes were bent upon the slender figure of the white-haired man in the pulpit. Strife and trouble seemed a long way off just then. There was no traffic in the City streets, so that the silence was intense. And then the man holding his vast congregation in his hand began to speak to them in his own simple and eloquent way of the new Attilla who had chosen to plunge a continent into war for his own fleeting ambitions.

"It has pleased the Kaiser," he said, "to stand before Europe for twenty years as the greater Apostle of Peace. It is his claim that he will go down to posterity as William the Peaceful. It has been his claim too that his armed millions have been trained and armed with one pure ideal only, and that is to protect and fester civilisation and culture and Christianity.

"And Europe believed him. I believed him. The heads of all the Christian churches in Europe and America believed him. He preached this humane doctrine to me five years ago at Potsdam, and I came away happy in the knowledge that in our time I should never see two great nations locked in the grip of war.

"It was the same wherever I travelled in Germany, I heard the same shibboleths from great lawyers, great divines, and famous philosophers. I did not smile at the delusion that the twentieth century belonged to Germany as von Bernhardi had proudly boasted, for in this I could see nothing more harmful than an inflated patriotism. It seemed to me that the race that bred Martin Luther could not but be a factor for good in religious progress of the world.

"And all that has been swept away now, the mask has been torn away, and we see Germany as she really is. No, not as she really is, but as she thinks she is. We see now how for the last twenty years the great masters of theology and philosophy have been suborned to build up a wall of specious words around the soul of Germany and thus deluded her into the belief that she was destined to overrun the world at the point of the sword. Wholesale murder had been elevated into something, pure and holy, and an enlightened nation was content to applaud the Crown Prince's doctrine that the warlike virtues are the highest form of piety that a State can know. It is a strange creed, a strange evolution after two thousand years of Christianity! But is there any vestige of Christianity in it at all?"

The preacher paused and the vast congregation seemed to sway towards him. In the dim light of the shaded lamps the figure in the pulpit seemed to stand out above everything else. His clear voice rang to the roof, and then when he opened his lips again, there came from somewhere not far off a roar followed by a shock that seemed to shake the great building to its foundation. The congregation thrilled uneasily, but there was not a soul amongst them that showed the slightest sign of panic. And there was not a soul there who did not realise exactly what had happened.

"The terror of the night," the preacher said calmly. "The hand of the foe has reached us from the skies. We are safer here than if we were in the streets, safer by far than our friends in many a city of France. And therefore, if I go on with my simple sermon—"

The audience swayed again, and something like a murmur of admiration followed. The spiritual forces were touched so that there was no room for fear. Again came one of those shattering explosions, and the lights grew more dim. But there was no danger of the terror of the night there, for the church relied upon its own power of illumination. And nobody moved or stirred.

"But we know now," the preacher went on, "that William of Prussia is a firm believer in the Divine Right of Kings, we know now that it is one of his delusions that he has been placed where he is by the Almighty to lead the Germans as Moses lead the chosen people into the land of promise. That is the destiny of Germany and the destiny of her leader. The land of promise in this case is the whole of the civilised world, to be achieved and conquered, as the warrior priests achieved and conquered some four thousand years ago. And by this we know that the Kaisers God is not our God, not the God of mercy and pity, the Heavenly father who looks down upon us all with a kindly eye, but a great avenging deity and Lord of Battles speaking to the people of the earth through the lips of the Potsdam Assassin. The Kaiser's God is the same God who ordered the destruction of the Warrior Priest who had spared Agag and the best of the spoil—a god of rigid discipline, a military Jehovah. This is the Divinity that guides Potsdam on its way.

"And how do we know this? In the first place we know it because this is the ruthless creed that has brought fire and sword amongst us. But we know it all the more particularly because it is impossible to trace an illusion to our Christ in a single one of the Kaiser's speeches. The Christ as we know Him, the Christ and His teachings which have been our guiding star all these centuries does not appeal to the Supreme War Lord. He knows nothing of the spirit that has moved us Christians during the slow dragging of two thousand years. The Lord's Prayer; the Sermon on the Mount, the exquisite pathos of Gethsemane, all fall dully on the ears of William. The god of anger and wrath, the God of battles is his. The passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea, and the destruction of the Egyptian host, and the spoiling of them is a spectacle far more pleasing to the War Lord than the story of Christ stilling the waves or feeding the multitude. And because—"

The preacher suddenly paused. He had been interrupted more than once by the crashing of shells, and he had gone on coolly as if it had been no more than a passing tempest. But here was another interruption so startling and dramatic that he stopped altogether. It was one of those incidents which in normal times would have been flashed to the far ends of the earth, but which in these specious days was regarded with no more than curiosity.

For into the church there came the hunted, ragged figure of a man staggering along between the rows of chairs in the direction of the altar as if he expected to find sanctuary there. Behind him surged a motley mob blindly oblivious to the knowledge that they stood on holy ground and eager only for their prey. Right under the shadow of the pulpit the breathless German swayed and looked up pitifully for protection.

It took the preacher but five seconds to grasp the situation.

"Back, all of you," he commanded. "Recollect where you stand. Are you mad that you should come here into the House of God—"

It needed no further words, for the realisation of what they were doing struck the intruders like a blow. They fell back abashed, red with shame, and muttering to themselves. Then the organist, realising the situation, touched the keys of his instrument and the whole nave and transepts were filled with soft and soothing melody. There would be no further service now, indeed in the strange conditions such a thing would have been impossible. The vast audience rose to its feet and moved towards the doors. Just for the moment it looked as if the wretched German spy had been forgotten. He dropped into a chair sobbing for breath, his face buried in his hands. Just behind him stood Hallett and his friends watching for their opportunity. When the two vergers had hastened forward, but dropped back again after Hallett had shown them his card, the latter stooped down and laid his hand on the spy's shoulder.

"You can't stay here, you know," he said. "You had better come with us and we will do our best to smuggle you into a place of safety. Here take my overcoat. You must not be seen in the street wearing that tell-tale tunic."

The German looked up gratefully. His face was terribly pinched and drawn and the lines of his mouth suggested hunger.

"Ah, this is very good of you," he said in excellent English. "I am most grateful to you, Mr. Hallett."

Hallett shrugged his shoulders. In the ordinary way he would have been surprised to find that this hunted spy knew his name, but then nothing came as a surprise now.

"You are quite right," he said. "You shall tell me who you are all in good time. Meanwhile I am going to take you round to my rooms, together with my friends here, and give you the food that you evidently need. We shall have to walk, I expect—no chance of getting a cab with all this excitement going on."