Foe-Farrell Part 23

"Maybe you're right, Jimmy," said I as we lit our cigarettes.

"And if so, it's pretty ghastly. . . . He's had enough to put him off his hinge. But somehow I can't bring myself--No, hang it!

I've always looked on Jack as the sanest man I've ever known. If he has a failing it's for working everything out by cold reason."

"Just what he's doing at this moment," answered Jimmy dryly. "If you don't like the word 'mad' I'll take it back and subst.i.tute 'balmy,'

or anything you like. Madness is a relative term; and I should have thought that what you call working-everything-out-by-cold-reason was a form of it. I know jolly well that if I felt myself taken that way I should go to a doctor about it. And if _you're_ going to practise it on the subject just now before the committee, I shall leave the chair and this meeting breaks up in disorder."

"The point is," said I, "that the letter has gone."

"What address?" he asked pouring out the coffee.

"Biarritz, Grand Hotel--Why surely you read it?"--I stared at him, but he was looking down on the cups. Then of a sudden I understood.

"Jimmy," I said humbly, "I've been an a.s.s."

"Ah," said he, "I'm glad you see it in that light. . . . The afternoon mail has gone: but there's the night boat. You can't telegraph, unfortunately. In his state of mind you mustn't warn him.

You must catch him sitting."

"Look here," I proposed. "It will be a nuisance for you, Jimmy--it will probably bore you stiff. But if you'll only come along with me . . ."

"The implied compliment is noted and accepted," said Jimmy gravely.

"The invitation must be declined, with thanks, though. Your mind is working better already. A few hours holiday off the L.C.C., and you'll find yourself the man you were. But the gear wants oiling.

. . . Do you remember your betting me ten to one this morning, in a lucid interval, that Farrell would break for home? Well, I didn't take you up. I don't mind owning that, after you'd left, and after some thought, I told Jephson to pack _both_ suit-cases. But that lawyer, with his infernal notion of dispatch in business, will have put money in the Professor's pocket some hours before you reach Biarritz. Money's his means of pursuit: and it's well on the cards that you'll find both your birds flown. You are going to Biarritz, Otty, for your sins--like Napoleon III. and other eminent persons before you: and you'll have, unlike the historical character just named, to go alone for your sins. For on your ten-to-one odds that Farrell breaks for home it's obvious that I remain and keep goal.

Now what you have to do is to make for the bank and get out some money, while I take a swim in the tank here. After that," added Jimmy, relapsing into frivolity, "I'll look up the Trades Directory for a respectable firm dealing in strait-waistcoats."

Well, there is no need to tell of my chase to Biarritz; for I arrived there only to be baulked. The porter who entered my name in elegant script, with many flourishes, in the Hotel Visitors' Book, informed me that the English Doctor had departed--it was four hours ago--to catch the night express for Paris. Here was the entry-- "Dr. J. Foe, Chelsea, London." He had left no other address.

"Had he a companion?" No, none. He had pa.s.sed his time in solitary rambles: but on this, the last day, he had spent some time in writing furiously, up to the moment of departure.

The porter moved away to clear the letter-box, which stood pretty near the end of the table. I examined the register. Farrell's name was not among the entries.

They had a.s.signed me my room, and I was about to take the lift and inspect, when I heard the porter say to himself, "_Tiens, c'est drole, maintenant_." He had the bundle of cleared letters in his hand and held out one. It was addressed to me in Jack's handwriting.

I pounced for it. "_C'est a moi--Ceci s'expliquera, sans doute_."

The porter hesitated. "_Une lettre timbree--c'est contre les regies, sinon contre la loi . . . mais puisque c'est pour monsieur, apparement_--"

A ten-franc piece did the rest. I took the letter up to my chamber where I opened it and read--

[FOE to OTWAY]

"Grand Hotel, Biarritz.

"Dear Roddy,--I am obliged to you by receipt of your silly lawyer's letter enclosing 100 pounds; though what kind of salve it can spread on your conscience to commission a fellow called Norgate to do what you won't do at first hand I fail to perceive. However, have it your own way. I have an enemy who, with a little training, won't give me time to worry about my friends.

"Farrell is improving. It was difficult at first to get a move on a man of his stupidity, and I could only work on his one sensitive nerve, which is cowardice. He has imagination enough to be terrified of that which hides and doesn't declare itself whether for good or evil.

"My own early experiments have, I admit, been amateurish. But I shall acquire skill, and the appet.i.te shall learn refinements, to keep it in health. I don't think it was bad sport, on the whole, to open with low comedy. It tickled me, anyhow, to watch Farrell emerge from a sort of bathing-machine upon the _plage_, moderately nude and quite unsuspicious--having given me that artful slip in Paris--and, approaching the machine from the rear, to insert his s.h.i.+rt-collar, with my card, into his left-hand shoe.

"That was the first card I left on him. He was putting up at the _Albion_--I had no need to search; for the local paper, of course, prints a Visitors' List which it collects from the hotels, and there my gentleman was, under his own name.

(Oh, we're in the simple stages of the process, thus far, and he hasn't yet had recourse to so much as an _alias_.) But I didn't call on him at the _Albion_.

"I have since learnt from him that the discovery of my card in the bathing-machine shook him up--well, pretty much as the footprint on the sand shook up Robinson Crusoe. But there's a difference, as he'll learn, between being shaken and being scared into fits. At all events, he didn't bolt: for I kept out of sight and molested him no more that day. Next morning he took courage and started off for the golf-links, which lie out to the north, beyond the lighthouse. He was enjoying his liberty, you understand: for I had made him carry his clubs about and up and down the Riviera, but never allowed him to play. That was a part of our understanding. Also he may have had some hazy notion that, golf being to me as holy water to the Devil, he'd be safe out there, within a charmed circle.

"There's something in it, too, Roddy. And I've half a mind, if he doesn't wake up and improve, to offer him a handicap.

He shall be safe, all the world over, when he can find a golf-course for sanctuary, and shall play his little game while I wait for him and:"

Sit on a stile And continue to smile.

"I wonder what sort of a h.e.l.l it would be, going round and round on endless rounds of golf--with a real Colonel Bogey sitting on the stile and watching. . . . But I make no promises, no offers, just now.

"He tells me that at the Club House he found a Golf Major of sorts--or, as he puts it, 'a compatriot, a military gentleman, retired, with a remarkable knowledge of India'--and seduced him into playing a round. I should gather that Farrell plays an indifferent game. At all events, the Golf Major was averse from a second round, and retiring to a table in the Club veranda allowed Farrell to call for--catch hold of your French, Roddy-- '_Deux bieres, complet_.' The waiter understood it to mean liquid refreshment and not a double funeral. . . . Over the drink the Golf Major, who had known Biarritz for twenty years, explained the difference between its old and its new golf-course, and informed Farrell that in the old one there had used to be the most sporting hole anywhere--for a beginner.

You drove slap across a chasm of the sea: if you didn't land your ball neatly you were in the devil of a hole, and if you foozled you saw your ball dropping down, down, to the beach and the Atlantic. 'Too expensive for duffers altogether, especially when the price of b.a.l.l.s rose. Only the caddies thrived on it, at the risk of their necks. . . . After this tiffin we'll stroll over and have a look at it.'

"So thither they strolled, and by and by started to amuse themselves with pot-shot drives from the old tee. The Major whacked his ball across to a neat lie time after time.

Farrell m.u.f.fed and foozled, wasting his substance in riotous slogging. The height of the cliff, maybe, dizzied his head.

"In this way I suppose he expended all his ammunition. At any rate there came a pause, and a small Basque boy in a blue _beret_ began to descend the slope very cautiously, searching for lost b.a.l.l.s in the scree. At the foot of the gully, where it funnelled to a sheer drop, I stepped from under my shelter and met the youngster, holding out a golf-ball. 'Here is one more,'

said I--'Where are the two gentlemen gone?' He told me that they had gone back to the Club House. 'Then here is a franc for you,' said I, 'and here is a card which you will take with the ball and my compliments to the gentleman who cannot play golf so well as the other gentleman.'

"The lad grinned. We climbed the cliff together, and I saw him speed off to the Club House."

"I had thus left two cards on Farrell, and it was now his turn to call: which he duly did, and next day; not, however, at the Grand Hotel, but at a far more romantic place of entertainment.

"If you don't know this place--and I do not commend it to you for entertainment towards the close of the English season--let me tell you that, walking south from the town by paths that lead around the curves of the foresh.o.r.e, you quickly lose Biarritz and find yourself in a deserted and melancholy country,--a sort of blasted heath that belongs to a fairy-tale. The great military road for Spain runs hidden, pretty wide on your left, among the lower foothills of the Pyrenees: and from it these foothills undulate down and drop over little cliffs to form a moorland with patches of salt marish. In spring, they tell me, the ground is all gay with scarlet anemones in sheets; but, when I took the path, their glory was over and but a few late flowers lingered. I happen, however, to like flowers for their scent more than for their colour: and the whole of this moor was a spilth of scent from bushes of the purple Daphne--its full flowering time over, but its scent lingering ghostlily on the salt wind from the sea. And the sea was forlorn as it always is in this inner bight of the Bay of Biscay, where no s.h.i.+ps have any business and your whole traffic is a fis.h.i.+ng-boat or two, or a thread of smoke out on the horizon. You are alone between sea and mountains; and all along the strip that separates them, while the sky is spring, the land and the sense of it are autumn.

"Now I don't know the history of it, but can only guess that once on a time some enterprising speculator, fired by the sudden Third-Empire blaze of Biarritz, conceived the project of starting a rival watering place, here to the South, and that they were to make its beginning with a colossal Hotel. At any rate, here, rounding a desolate point of the foresh.o.r.e, I came upon a long desolate beach, and a long desolate building, magnificent of facade, new and yet ruinated, fronting the Bay with a hundred empty eye-sockets.

"It broke on the view with a shock. It made me glance over my shoulder to make sure of the real Biarritz not far behind.

But three or four spits of land shut off that human, if vulgar, resort. Between me and the Pyrenees this immense ghastly sarcophagus of misdirected enterprise possessed the landscape, and I approached it. Yes, Roddy:"

Dauntless the slughorn to my lips I set, And blew. _Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came_.

"The horrible place turned out to be a mask--as I hope the Dark Tower did, after all, for Childe Roland. But it was a horrible mask. It had been started on foundations of good stone, with true French lordliness: but it parodied--or, rather, it satirised--the ambitious French tendency to impose architecture upon nature. Behind the facade, through which the wind whistled, all was an unroofed ma.s.s of rusted girders and joists; a skeleton framework about which I climbed--the first and last guest--conning and guessing where suites of rooms had been planned, to be adorned with Louis Seize furniture, for a host of fellow-guests that had never come and now would never arrive to make merry. I clambered along a girder, off which my heels scaled the rust in long flakes, and thrust my head through one of the great empty windows to take in the view.

"--Which was indeed magnificent. But my eye switched from it to a mean little human figure, moving along the foresh.o.r.e with a gait which, even at a goodish distance, I recognised for Farrell's. It looked like a beetle creeping, nearing, across the flats and hummocks. But it was Farrell.

"He halted at some distance, as I had halted; arrested, as I had been arrested, at sight of the incongruous great structure, planted here. He drew close, cast a sort of questioning glance seaward, very deliberately drew a pair of field-gla.s.ses from a case slung over his shoulder, and focused them on the building, lifting them slowly.

"I had drawn back behind my window-jamb, yet so as to watch him.

As he tilted the gla.s.ses upward, I leaned out.

"He stood for a moment, or two motionless. Then his hands sank, with the gla.s.ses clutched in them. He walked slowly away.

When he judged himself hidden by a spit of the sh.o.r.e--but my window overlooked it--he broke into a run.

"I note that he is already beginning to reduce his figure.

"I returned the call that same evening. I dropped in on him as he took his seat to dine _solus_ at the _Albion_.

The dining-room, I should tell you, was fairly full. Usual ruck of people: sort of too-English; English you see at _tables-d'hote_ and nowhere else in the world, with an end-of-season preponderance of females who stay to look after the British chaplain a little longer than he needs, or to gratify some obscure puritan pride in seeing everybody out, or because there's a bargain to be squeezed with the management to the last ounce, or peradventure because they've planned a series of cheap visits at home for our beautiful summer and one or two of the Idle Rich have remembered to be less idle than they were last year, and more restive.