Redemption - Leon Uris [163]
It was like this. He’d boarded a trainload of recruits in Auckland heading for Camp Hobson and found himself in a window seat.
“Seat open?” someone asked.
“Help yourself,” Rory said to the kid, who eased down next to him and appeared to be a scared schoolboy. More like a drummer boy in Kyber Pass than a decapitating horseman.
“Chester Goodwood,” the kid said.
“Rory Landers,” Rory answered, laying his head against the window to indicate he’d prefer sleep to conversation.
“I’m trying for the Light Horse,” the kid said.
“Yeah, good luck.”
The recruiting serjeant was barking as the train filled up. A big roughneck goon looked about, saw no empty seats on the car, and informed Chester Goodwood, “You’re in my seat.”
“I don’t think so,” Chester answered with a verve that caused Rory to crack open one eye and have a look.
“Out!” the goon explained, grabbing Chester by the lapels and lifting him up. Chester responded by stomping hard on the foot of the bully, who angrily released him.
“I’m going to make you into a mutton chop, you little son of a bitch!”
As he reached for Chester once again, Rory’s hands shot out and grabbed the goon’s wrists. “No, no,” Rory said, “this is my nephew, Chester Goodwood, and I promised his ma, me favorite auntie, that we’d sit together.”
“Bullshit,” the goon responded, freeing his wrists, balling his fists. “You got the seat I want,” he said to Rory.
“Look, we’re all in the old war together, right?” Rory said. “If I do get up, there’s going to be one less Kiwi when we arrive at Camp Hobson. Is my meaning clear? Now, think again. Do you want me to stand up or not?”
The goon’s cobber saved the moment. “Come on, Jed, there’s seats up in the next car.”
The altercation averted, the train soon oozed from the station for the three-hour jaunt to Camp Hobson, and Rory attempted to resume his nap.
“Thanks, awfully,” Chester said.
Rory found himself longing to return to the misery of thinking of Georgia. In all the hustle of enlistment and going here and going there for physical examinations and uniforms and inoculations and questionnaires, he longed for a few moments alone so he could think of Georgia, and each time he did he lived another moment of their voyage on the Taranaki, realizing that this had now become the most powerful memory of his entire life.
Chester Goodwood wouldn’t keep quiet. Rory was about to tell him to shut up, but the kid seemed very lost and particularly grateful for Rory’s intervention…so Rory let him talk.
Chester Goodwood, like himself, was underage, but much more so. He was sixteen. As his story unfolded, Rory became engaged, then taken by it…
Chester came from an aristocratic background. His father was a banker-businessman in Hong Kong. Everyone knew Sir Stanford Goodwood. He had connections in China that made him a power. Unfortunately, he also had four sons and Chester was the youngest. Following tradition, Chester grew up in English boarding schools, seeing his father perhaps a month each year.
Chester didn’t tell Rory in so many words, but it was easy to get the drift from his own experience, that the lad was unwanted and his family let him know it in a most cavalier manner.
So, Chester managed to do one thing after another at the likes of Eton and Harrow to get himself expelled, which was one sure way of getting his father’s attention.
Sir Stanford had brought the boy to Hong Kong a year earlier, as the boy’s mother lay dying. It was then that Chester learned that his mother had been a nuisance, like himself. Father’s keen interest centered on several nests of Chinese concubines…thus, all the trips into China.
At his mother’s death, Chester was faced with a return to England. When war was declared, he made a dash for freedom. Chester stowed on a New Zealand-bound freighter, where the captain and crew favored him and slipped him ashore.
Chester had befriended some of the clerks in his father’s bank, one of whom forged