Simon Called Peter by Robert Keable (read aloud .txt) 📕

Peter smoked in silence. Then he said: "Langton you're a bit different from what you were. In a way, it's you who have set me out on this racket, and it's you who encouraged me to try and get down to rock-bottom. You've always been a cautious old rotter, but you're more than cautious now. Why?"

Langton leaned over and touched the other's tunic pocket in which lay
Julie's note. Then he leaned back and went on with his cigarette.

Peter flushed. "It's too late," he said judicially, flicking off his ash.

"So? Well, I'm sorry, frankly—sorry for her and sorry for you. But if it is, I'll remember my own wisdom: it's no use meddling with such things. For all that, you're a fool, Peter, as I told you last night."

"Just so. And I asked what was a fool."

"And I didn't answer. I reckon fools can be of many sorts. Your sort of fool chucks the world over for the quest of an ideal."

"Thank you," said Peter quietly.

"You needn't. That fool is a real fool, and bigger than most. Ideals are ideals, and one can't realise them. It's waste of time to try."

"Is it?" said Peter. "Well, at any rate, I don't know that I'm out after them much. I don't see any. All I know is that I've looked in the likely places, and now I'll look in the unlikely."

Langton ground his cigarette-end in his coffee-cup. "You will," he said, "whatever I say…. Have another drink? After all, there's no need to 'turn down the empty glass' yet."

They did not see each other in the morning, and Peter made his way early to the hospital as arranged. The P.M.O. met him, and he was put in nominal charge of the three Red-Cross ambulance-cars. While he was talking to the doctor the three nurses came out and got in, Julie not looking in his direction; then he climbed up next the driver of the first car. "Cheerio," said the P.M.O., and they were off.

It was a dull day, and mists hung over the water-meadows by the Somme. For all that Peter enjoyed himself immensely. They ran swiftly through the little villages, under the sweeping trees all new-budded into green, and soon had vistas of the distant sea. The driver of Peter's car was an observant fellow, and he knew something of gardening. It was he who pointed out that the fruit-trees had been indifferently pruned or not pruned at all, and that there were fields no longer under the plough that had been plainly so not long before. In a word, the country bore its war scars, although it needed a clever eye to see them.

But Peter had little thought for this. Now and again, at a corner, he would glance back, his mind on Julie in the following car, while every church tower gave him pause for thought. He tried to draw the man beside him on religion, but without any success, though he talked freely enough of other things. He was for the Colonies after the war, he said. He'd knocked about a good deal in France, and the taste for travel had come to him. Canada appeared a land of promise; one could get a farm easily, and his motor knowledge would be useful on a farm these days. Yes, he had a pal out there, a Canadian who had done his bit and been invalided out of it. They corresponded, and he expected to get in with him, the one's local knowledge eking out the other's technical. No, he wasn't for marrying yet awhile; he'd wait till he'd got a place for the wife and kiddies. Then he would. The thought made him expand a bit, and Peter smiled to himself as he thought of his conversation with Langton over the family group. It struck him to test the man, and as they passed a wayside Calvary, rudely painted, he drew his attention to it. "What do you think of that?" he asked.

The man glanced at it, and then away. "It's all right for them as like it," he said. "Religion's best in a church, it seems to me. I've seen chaps mock at them crucifixes, sir, same as they wouldn't if they'd only been in church."

"Yes," said Peter; "but I suppose some men have been helped by them who never would have been if they had only been in church. But don't you think they're rather gaudy?"

"Gaudy, sir? Meanin' 'ighly painted? No, not as I knows on. They're more like what happened, I reckon, than them brass crosses we have in our churches."

They ran into Eu for lunch, and drew up in the market-square. Peter went round to the girls' car, greeted Julie, and was introduced. He led them to an old inn in the square, and they sat down to luncheon in very good humour. The other girls were ordinary enough, and Julie rather subdued for her. Afterwards they spent an hour in the church and a picture-postcard shop, and it was there that Julie whispered: "Go on in your own car. At Dieppe, go to the Hôtel Trois Poissons and wait for me. I found out yesterday that a woman I know is a doctor in Dieppe, and she lives there. I'll get leave easily to call. Then I can see you. If we travel together these girls'll talk; they're just the sort."

Peter nodded understanding, and they drifted apart. He went out to see if the cars were ready and returned to call the nurses, and in a few minutes they were off again.

The road now ran through forests nearly all the way, except where villages had cleared a space around them, as was plain to see. They crossed little streams, and finally came downhill through the forest into the river valley that leads to Dieppe. It was still early, and Peter stopped the cars to suggest that they might have a look at the castle of Arques-le-Bataille. The grand old pile kept them nearly an hour, and they wandered about the ruins to their hearts' content. Julie would climb a buttress of the ancient keep when their guide had gone on with the others, and Peter went up after her. She was as lissom as a boy and seemingly as strong, swinging up by roots of ivy and the branches of a near tree, in no wise impeded by her short skirts. From the top one had, indeed, a glorious view. The weather had cleared somewhat, and one could see every bit of the old castle below, the village at its feet, and the forest across the little stream out of which the Duke of Mayenne's infantry had debouched that day of battle from which the village took its name.

"They had some of the first guns in the castle, which was held for Henry of Navarre," explained Peter, "and they did great execution. I suppose they fired one stone shot in about every five minutes, and killed a man about every half-hour. The enemy were more frightened than hurt, I should think. Anyway, Henry won."

"Wasn't he the King who thought Paris worth more than a Mass?" she demanded.

"Yes," said Peter, watching her brown eyes as she stared out over the plain.

"I wonder what he thinks now," she said.

He laughed. "You're likely to wonder," he said.

"Funny old days," said Julie. "I suppose there were girls in this castle watching the fight. I expect they cared more for the one man each half-hour the cannon hit than for either Paris or the Mass. That's the way of women, Peter, and a damned silly way it is! Come on, let's go. I'll get down first, if you please."

On the short road remaining Peter asked his chauffeur if he knew the Trois Poissons, and, finding that he did, had the direction pointed out. They ran through the town to the hospital, and Peter handed his cars over. "I'll sleep in town," he said. "What time ought we to start in the morning?" He was told, and walked away. Julie had disappeared.

He found the Trois Poissons without difficulty, and made his way to the sitting-room, a queer room opening from the pavement direct on the one side, and from the hall of the hotel on the other. It had a table down the middle, a weird selection of chairs, and a piano. A small woman was sitting in a chair reading the Tatler and smoking. An empty glass stood beside her.

She looked up as he came in, and he noticed R.A.M.C. badges.
"Good-evening," he said cheerily.

"Good-evening, padre," she replied, plainly willing to talk. "Where have you sprung from?"

"Abbeville via Eu in a convoy of Red Cross cars," he said, "and I feel like a sun-downer. Won't you have another with me?"

"Sure thing," she said, and he ordered a couple from the French maid who came in answer to his ring. "Do you live here?" he asked.

"For my sins I do," she said. "I doctor Waac's, and I don't think much of it. A finer, heartier lot of women I never saw. Epsom salts is all they want. A child could do it."

Peter laughed. "Well, I don't see why you should grumble," he said.

"Don't you? Where's the practice? This business out here is the best chance for doctors in a lifetime, and I have to strip strapping girls hopelessly and endlessly."

"You do, do you?" said a voice in the doorway, and there stood Julie. "Well, at any rate you oughtn't to talk about it like that to my gentleman friends, especially padres. How do you do, my dear?"

"Julie, by all that's holy! Where have you sprung from?"

She glanced from one to the other. "From Abbeville via Eu in a convoy of
Red Cross cars, I dare bet," she said.

"Julie, you're beyond me. If you weren't so strong I'd smack you, but as it is, give me another kiss. And introduce us. There may as well be propriety somewhere."

They sorted themselves out and sat down. "What do you think of my rig?" demanded Dr. Melville (as Julie had introduced her).

"Toppin'," said Julie critically. "But what in the world is it? Chiefly Waac, with three pukka stars and an R.A.M.C. badge. Teanie, how dare you do it?"

"I dare do all that doth become a woman," she answered complacently. "And it doth, doth it not? Skirt's a trifle short, perhaps," she added, sticking out a leg and examining the effect critically, "but upper's eminently satisfactory."

Julie leaned over and prodded her. "No corsets?" she inquired innocently.

"Julie, you're positively indecent. You must have tamed your padre completely. You're not married by any chance?" she added suddenly.

Julie screamed with laughter. "Oh, Teanie, you'll be the death of me," she said at last. "Solomon, are we married? I don't think so, Teanie. There's never no telling these days, but I can't recollect it."

"Well, it strikes me you ought to be if you're jogging round the country together," said the other, her eyes twinkling. "But if you're not, take warning, padre. A girl that talks about corsets in public isn't respectable, especially as she doesn't wear them herself, except in the evening, for the sake of other things. Or she used not to. But perhaps you know?"

Peter tried to look comfortable, but he was completely out of his depth. He finished his drink with a happy inspiration, and ordered another. That down, he began to feel more capable of entering into the spirit of these two. They were the sort he wanted to know, both of them, women about as different from those he had met as they could possibly be.

Another man dropped in after a while, so the talk became general. The atmosphere was very free and easy, bantering, careless, jolly, and Peter expanded in it. Julie led them all. She was never at a loss, and apparently had no care in the world.

The two girls and Peter went together to dinner and sat at the same table. They talked a good deal together, and Peter gathered they had come to know each