Arnold stirred to get out his pouch.  “The sea is shifty, though,” he said.  “If they keep the breakwater in decent repair, it’ll come in handy again.”

“Yes,” burst out Peter.  “But, of course, that’s where illustrations are so little good:  you can’t press them.  And in any case no engineer worth his salt would sit down by his breakwater and smoke a pipe till the sea came in handy again.  His job is to go after it.”

“True for ye, boy.  But if the old plan was so good, why not go down to the beach and get on with building operations of the same sort?”

“Arnold,” said Peter, “you couldn’t have put it better.  That’s exactly what I came here to do.  I knew in London that the sea was receding to some extent, and I thought that there was a jolly good chance to get up with it again out here.  But that leads straight to my second problem:  I can’t build on the old plan, and it doesn’t seem any good.  It’s as if our engineer found quicksands that wouldn’t hold his stone, and cross-currents that smashed up all his piles....  I mean, I thought I knew what would save souls.  But I find that I can’t because my methods are—­I don’t know, faulty perhaps, out of date maybe possibly worse; and, what is more, the souls don’t want my saving.  The Lord knows they want something; I can see that fast enough, but what it is I don’t know.  Heavens!  I remember preaching in the beginning of the war from the text ‘Jesus had compassion on the multitude.’  Well I don’t feel that He has changed, and I’m quite sure He still has compassion, but the multitude doesn’t want it.  I was wrong about the crowd.  It’s nothing like what I imagined.  The crowd isn’t interested in Jesus any more.  It doesn’t believe in Him.  It’s a different sort of crowd altogether from the one He led.”

“I wonder,” said Arnold.

Peter moved impatiently.  “Well, I don’t see how you can,” he said.  “Do you think Tommy worries about his sins?  Are the men in our mess miserable?  Does the girl the good books talked about, who flirts and smokes and drinks and laughs, sit down by night on the edge of her little white bed and feel a blank in her life?  Does she, Arnold?”

“I’m blest if I know; I haven’t been there!  You seem to know a precious lot about it,” he added dryly.

“Oh, don’t rag and don’t be facetious.  If you do, I shall clear.  I’m trying to talk sense, and at any rate it’s what I feel.  And I believe you know I’m right too.”  Peter was plainly a bit annoyed.

The elder padre sat up straight at that, and his tone changed.  He stared thoughtfully out to sea and did not smoke.  But he did not speak all at once.  Peter glanced at him, and then lay back in his chair and waited.

Arnold spoke at last:  possibly the harbour works inspired him.  “Look here, boy,” he said, “let’s get back to your illustration, which is no such a bad one.  What do you suppose your engineer would do when he got down to the new sea-beach and found the conditions you described?  It wouldn’t do much good if he sat down and cursed the blessed sea and the sands and the currents, would it?  It would be mighty little use if he blamed his good stone and sound timber, useless though they appeared.  I’m thinking he’d be no much of an engineer either if he chucked his job.  What would he do, d’you think?”