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

It was with mixed feelings that he groped for his luggage. He was conscious of wanting a seat and a breakfast; he was also conscious of wanting to look at the station he was leaving, which he dimly felt he might never see again; and he was, above all, conscious that he looked a fool and would like not to. In such a turmoil he lugged at the gladstone and got it into a corner, and then turned to the window in the cleared space with a determination. In turning he caught the Captain's face stuck round the little door. It was withdrawn at once, but came out again, and he heard for the second time the unfamiliar title:

"Say, padre; come in here. There's room after all."

Peter felt cheered. He staggered to the door, and found the others busy making room. A subaltern of the A.S.C. gripped his small attaché case and swung it up on to the rack. The South African pulled a British warm off the vacant seat and reached out for the suit-case. And the third man, with the rank of a Major and the badge of a bursting bomb, struck a match and paused as he lit a cigarette to jerk out:

"Damned full train! We ought to have missed it, Donovan."

"It's a good stunt that, if too many blighters don't try it on," observed the subaltern, reaching for Peter's warm. "But they did my last leave, and I got the devil of a choking off from the brass-hat in charge. It's the Staff train, and they only take Prime Ministers, journalists, and trade-union officials in addition. How's that, padre?"

"Thanks," said Peter, subsiding. "It's jolly good of you to take me in. I thought I'd got to stand from here to Folkestone."

H.P. Jenks, Second-Lieutenant A.S.C., regarded him seriously. "It couldn't be done, padre," he said, "not at this hour of the morning. I left Ealing about midnight more or less, got sandwiched in the Metro with a Brigadier-General and his blooming wife and daughters, and had to wait God knows how long for the R.T.O. If I couldn't get a seat and a break after that, I'd be a casualty, sure thing."

"It's your own fault for going home last night," observed the Major judiciously. (Peter noticed that he was little older than Jenks on inspection.) "Gad, Donovan, you should have been with us at the Adelphi! It was some do, I can tell you. And afterwards…"

"Shut up, Major!" cut in Jenks. "Remember the padre."

"Oh, he's broad-minded I know, aren't you, padre? By the way, did you ever meet old Drennan who was up near Poperinghe with the Canadians? He was a sport, I can tell you. Mind you, a real good chap at his job, but a white man. Pluck! By jove! I don't think that chap had nerves. I saw him one day when they were dropping heavy stuff on the station, and he was getting some casualties out of a Red Cross train. A shell burst just down the embankment, and his two orderlies ducked for it under the carriage, but old Drennan never turned a hair. 'Better have a fag,' he said to the Scottie he was helping. 'It's no use letting Fritz put one off one's smoke.'"

Peter said he had not met him, but could not think of anything else to say at the moment, except that he was just going out for the first time.

"You don't say?" said Donovan dryly.

"Wish I was!" ejaculated Jenks.

"Good chap," replied the Major. "Pity more of your sort don't come over. When I was up at Loos, September last year, we didn't see a padre in three months. Then they put on a little chap—forget his name—who used to bike over when we were in rest billets. But he wasn't much use."

"I was in hospital seven weeks and never saw one," said Jenks.

"Good heavens!" said Graham. "But I've been trying to get out for all these years, and I was always told that every billet was taken and that there were hundreds on the waiting list. Last December the Chaplain-General himself showed me a list of over two hundred names."

"Don't know where they get to, then, do you, Bevan?" asked Jenks.

"No," said the Major, "unless they keep 'em at the base."

"Plenty down at Rouen, anyway," said Donovan. "A sporting little blighter
I met at the Brasserie Opera told me he hadn't anything to do, anyway."

"I shall be a padre in the next war," said Jenks, stretching out his legs. "A parade on Sunday, and you're finished for the week. No orderly dog, no night work, and plenty of time for your meals. Padres can always get leave too, and they always come and go by Paris."

Donovan laughed, and glanced sideways at Peter. "Stow it, Jenks," he said. "Where you for, padre?" he asked.

"I've got to report at Rouen," said Peter. "I was wondering if you were there."

"No such luck now," returned the other. "But it's a jolly place. Jenko's there. Get him to take you out to Duclair. You can get roast duck at a pub there that melts in your mouth. And what's that little hotel near the statue of Joan of Arc, Jenks, where they still have decent wine?"

Peter was not to learn yet awhile, for at that moment the little door opened and a waiter looked in. "Breakfast, gentlemen?" he asked.

"Oh, no," said Jenks. "Waiter, I always bring some rations with me; I'll just take a cup of coffee."

The man grinned. "Right-o, sir," he said. "Porridge, gentlemen?"

He disappeared, leaving the door open and, Donovan opening a newspaper, Graham stared out of window to wait. From the far corners came scraps of conversation, from which he gathered that Jenks and the Major were going over the doings of the night before. He caught a word or two, and stared the harder out of window.

Outside the English country was rushing by. Little villas, with back-gardens running down to the rail, would give way for a mile or two to fields, and then start afresh. The fog was thin there, and England looked extraordinarily homely and pleasant. It was the known; he was conscious of rushing at fifty miles an hour into the unknown. He turned over the scrappy conversation of the last few minutes, and found it savoured of the unknown. It was curious the difference uniform made. He felt that these men were treating him more like one of themselves than men in a railway-carriage had ever treated him before; that somehow even his badges made him welcome; and yet that, nevertheless, it was not he, Peter Graham, that they welcomed, or at least not his type. He wondered if padres in France were different from priests in England. He turned over the unknown Drennan in his mind. Was it because he was a good priest that the men liked him, or because they had discovered the man in the parson?

The waiter brought in the breakfast—porridge, fish, toast, and the rest—and they fell to, a running fire of comments going on all the time. Donovan had had Japanese marmalade somewhere, and thought it better than this. The Major wouldn't touch the beastly margarine, but Jenks thought it quite as good as butter if taken with marmalade, and put it on nearly as thickly as his toast. Peter expanded in the air of camaraderie, and when he leaned back with a cigarette, tunic unbuttoned and cap tossed up on the rack, he felt as if he had been in the Army for years. He reflected how curious that was. The last two or three years or so of Boy Scouts and hospitals and extra prayer-meetings, attended by the people who attended everything else, seemed to have faded away. There was hardly a gap between that first war evening which he remembered so clearly and this. It was a common experience enough, and probably due to the fact that, whereas everything else had made little impression, he had lived for this moment and been extraordinarily impressed by that Sunday. But he realised, also, that it was due as much to his present companions. They had, seemingly, accepted him as he had never been accepted before. They asked practically no questions. So far as he could see, he made no difference to them. He felt as if he were at last part of a great brotherhood, in which, chiefly, one worried about nothing more important than Japanese marmalade and margarine.

"We're almost there, boys," said Bevan, peering out of window.

"Curse!" ejaculated Jenks. "I hate getting my traps together in a train, and I loathe the mob on the boat."

"I don't see why you should," said Donovan. "I'm blest if I bother about anything. The R.T.O. and the red-caps do everything, and you needn't even worry about getting a Pullman ticket this way over. Hope it's not rough, though." He let a window down and leaned out. "Looks all right," he added.

Peter got up with the rest and began to hang things about him. His staringly new Sam Browne irritated him, but he forgot it as the train swung round the curve to the landing-stage.

"Get a porter and a truck, Donovan," said the Major, who was farthest from the door.

They got out nonchalantly, and Peter lit a cigarette, while the others threw remarks at the man as to luggage. Then they all trooped off together in a crowd that consisted of every variety of rank and regiment and section of the British Empire, plus some Waacs and nurses.

The Pride of Folkestone lay alongside, and when they got there she seemed already full. The four of them got jammed at the gangway and shoved on board, handing in and receiving papers from the official at the head as they passed him. Donovan was in front, and as he stepped on deck he swung his kit-bag back to Peter, crying:

"Lay hold of that, padre, and edge across the deck. Get up ahead of the funnel that side. I'll get chairs. Jenko, you rotter, get belts, and drop eyeing the girl!"

"Jolly nice bit of fluff," said Jenks meditatively, staring fixedly across the deck.

"Where?" queried the Major, fumbling for his eyeglass.

"Get on there, please, gentlemen," called a ship's official.

"Damn it! mind my leg!"

"Cheerio, old son, here we are again!"

"I say, Tommy, did you get to the Alhambra last night, after all? What?
Well, I couldn't see you, anyhow."

To which accompaniment, Peter pushed his way across the deck. "Sorry, padre," said a V.A.D. who blocked the way, bending herself back to let him pass, and smiling. "Catch hold," called out Donovan, swinging a couple of chairs at him. "No, sir, it's not my chair"—to a Colonel who was grabbing at one already set out against the rail.

The Colonel collected it and disappeared, Jenks appearing a moment later, red-faced, through the crush. "You blamed fool," he whispered, "it's that girl's. I saw her put one here and edged up on it, only some fool got in my way. Still (hopefully), perhaps she'll come back."

Between them they got four chairs into a line and sat down, all, that is, save Jenks, who stood up, in a bland and genial way, as if to survey the crowd impartially. How impartially soon appeared. "Damn!" he exploded. "She's met some other females, weird and woolly things, and she's sitting down there. No, by Jove! she's looking this way."

He made a half-start forward, and the Major kicked his shins. "Blast!" he exploded; "why did you do that, you fool?"

"Don't be an infant, Jenko, sit down. You can't start a flirtation across the blooming deck. Here, padre, can't you keep him in order?"

Peter half raised himself from his chair at this, and glanced the way the other was looking. Through the crush he saw, clearly enough for a minute, a girl of medium height in a nurse's uniform, sideways on to him. The next second she half-turned, obviously smiling some remark to her neighbour, and he caught sight of clear brown eyes and a little fringe of dark hair on the forehead of an almost childish face. The eyes met his. And then a sailor blundered across his field of vision.

"Topping, isn't she?" demanded Jenks, who had apparently been pulled down into his chair