Bromley, less externally occupied than Peter, grew very grave those days. It weighed on him to give up this weapon he had forged, to feel that other hands would carry it into action. To Bromley—not realizing his friend’s reticence in troubles—P.J. seemed positively heartless. He cursed about Locksley every now and then; avoided him at Mess or on the streets; drank rather more than usual; but gave no other sign of being harassed either about the loss of “B” Company or the loss of Nirvana.
It was P.J. who suggested applying to Torrington for some “books about this new gunnery game,” P.J. who insisted that they must study them together, “so as not to look bally idiots when our transfer does come through.”
And study they did—four hours an evening—for the whole two months.
It will be observed that the Weasel proved himself no mean judge of a man’s keenness when he picked out these two over a magnum of champagne!
§ 3
About this time, there arrived at the Stazione Centrale of Milan—one cold and foggy north Italian morning—an emaciated, unshaven priest, dressed in dusty soutane and a black shovel hat; a priest whose hands were dusty and bleeding, whose eyes shone glassy with sleeplessness, whose feet—as he limped down from the crowded third-class carriage—were shod in cracked boots, soles worn to the welt, uppers caked and terraced with layer on layer of drying mud.
Humbly, but in excellent Italian, the priest enquired of a surly facchino his way to the Via Rasori; and having been told in guttural Milanese to make for the Galleria, to take the “Via Dant’,” and then the “Via Boccacc’,” limped out into the fog. Had that fog been less dense, the facchino might have noticed a hole in the priest’s shovel hat, a hole possibly made for ventilation purposes—for it had been drilled clean through the black furry felt, in at one side and out the other.
The hole was two days old; and had not happened to the hat in its passage across the south frontier of Switzerland—but considerably further north, on one of those dark and rainy nights when sentries fire first and challenge afterwards.
Our priest limped out of the station, thanking God for the fog, through the dank gardens (from instinct he avoided main streets near railway stations), past the Hotel Cavour, and Finzi’s shuttered dress-making shop, past the dark bulk of the Scala Theatre, through the huge empty Arcade, and across the Piazza del Duomo into the Via Dante. . . .
He had no more money in his pockets, having calculated to report at Berne: but instructions as to compromising Consuls or Legations in neutral countries were particularly explicit: and in the Swiss Capital a gentleman with a turned-up moustache had evinced peculiar interest about his movements. At the Franco-Swiss frontier, other moustached gentlemen might be waiting. So the last of our priest’s notes—he experienced some difficulty in getting change for the five German “marks”—had paid for the journey from Chiasso to Milan.