Foe-Farrell Part 26

"_Do you know, Roddy, that silly simple answer gave me half a fright for a moment, or a fright for half a moment--I forget which. . . . What I had to remember then was my discovery that I had my second keyboard in reserve and could pull certain stops out of him at will. . . . But seriously, I wouldn't, without that power, back myself in this experiment against a man who obstinately persisted in forgiving. It came on me with a flash--and I offer this tribute to the Christian religion_."

Foe's answer was, "Very kind of you. As a fact, I have been subsisting on hard biscuit and weak whisky-and-water: though I'm an excellent sailor, as they say. . . . It's a diet that suits me when I'm working hard."

"Working?" exclaimed Farrell. "What? Head-work, d'you mean? . . .

Doctor, this is the best news you could have told me. If only I could know that you were picking up your interests--getting back to yourself--"

Foe took him by the arm. "It's no good, unfortunately," he answered.

"Come up on deck, and I'll tell you."

On deck he repeated, "It's no good. I've been hard at it, working on my memory, trying to sketch out a kind of monograph--summary of conclusions--salvage from the wreck. But it won't do. It was an edifice to be built up on data, bit by bit, like an atoll. . . . Ever seen a coral reef, by the way? We'll inspect one--many perhaps--on our travels. . . . I'd burn in the pit rather than smatter out popular guess-work. Yes, all personal pride apart, I couldn't do it.

But however badly I set down conclusions, they've all rested on data, they've all grown up on data, and I haven't the data. . . . I wrote out half a dozen pages and then asked myself, 'What would _you_ say if a man came along professing to have made this discovery?

You'd demand his evidence, and you'd be right. Of course you'd be right. And if he didn't produce it, you'd call him a quack.

Right again.' . . . From this personal point of view, to be sure, I might take this sorry way out--print my conclusions, and antic.i.p.ate the demand for evidence by throwing myself overboard. . . . In the dim and distant future some fellow might strike the lost path, take the pains that I've taken, work out the theory, yes, and (it's even possible) be generous enough to add that, by some freak of guessing, in the year 1907, a certain Dr. John Foe, of whom nothing further is known, did, in unscientific fas.h.i.+on, hit on the truth, or a part of the truth. Oh, d.a.m.n! _Why_ should I burn in the pit, or throw myself overboard, or go down to the shades for a quack, because a thing like you has crawled out of the Tottenham Court Road. . . . Eh? Well, I won't, anyhow: and so you see how it is, and how it's going to be."

Farrell leaned against the rail, and held to a boat's davit, while his gaze wandered vaguely out over the Atlantic as if it would capture some wireless message. ("I knew how it would be," adds Foe in his letter reporting this talk. "He was going to try the forgive-and-forget with me: but by this time I was sure of myself.")

"Listen to me, Doctor," Farrell began. "Listen to me, for G.o.d's pity! I didn't get off at Queenstown, though I knew you were on board--"

"No use if you had," put in Foe. "You don't think I had overlooked that possibility, do you?"

"Well, I didn't, anyway," was the answer. "And I'll tell you why.

Honest I will. . . . We're both here and bound for America, ain't we?

And, from what I've heard, there's no such expensive, bright, up-to-date laboratories--if that's the way to p.r.o.nounce it--as you'll find in the States, in every walk of Science. Now, I never meant you an injury, Doctor; but I did you one--that I freely own. . . . What I say is, if money can make any amends, and if there's an outfit for science to be found in the States to your mind, why, I'll improve on it, sir. And I'm not saying it, as you might suppose, under any threat, but because I've been thinking it out and I mean it. I'm a childless man--"

Foe cut him short here. "My only trouble with you, Farrell,"

said he, "is that you may reach your grave without understanding.

If I thought that wasn't preventible somehow, it would save me trouble to wring your neck here and now and throw you overboard.

As it is--"

But, as it was, along the deck just then came Constantia Denistoun, with her mother leaning on her arm and a maid following. She recognised Foe and halted.

"Why, good Heavens! . . . and I'd no idea that you were on the _Emania_," said she. "Mother, this is Mr. Foe--Roddy's friend, you know. . . . Or ought I to call you Doctor, or Professor, or what? . . . You weren't anything of that sort anyhow, when we met-- how many years ago? at Cambridge."

--That, or to that effect. . . . Constantia told me afterwards that she didn't remember throwing more than a glance at Farrell, whom she took, very pardonably, to be a chance acquaintance from the smoking-room, picked up as such acquaintances are picked up on s.h.i.+p-board. And Farrell stood back a couple of paces. To do him justice, he was in no wise a thruster.

"It's odd," she went on, "that we haven't run across one another until this moment. What's your business, over yonder? if that's not a rude question."

"It's a natural one, anyhow," Foe answered. "My business? Well, it has been suggested to me that a trip in the States, to see what they're doing in the way of scientific outfit and, maybe, get hints for a new laboratory, might not be waste of time."

"Yes, I know; I've heard," she said softly. "It's splendid to find you taking it like this . . . picking up the pieces, eh? . . .

I wonder if"--she hesitated--"if I might ask you some questions?

. . . Just as much as you choose to tell: but something to put into a letter to our Roddy, you know. Any news of you will be honey to him. . . . You'll be writing from New York, of course. But one man doesn't tell another that he's looking brave and well; and yet that's often what the other may be most wanting to know."

Foe was touched (so he's told me). He said some ordinary thing that tried to show he was grateful, and Constantia and her mother pa.s.sed on. He had not introduced Farrell.

Constantia told me most of the rest, some months later, pouring tea for me in her flat. There is not much in it. She said that she had taken very little account of Jack's companion; had just reckoned him up for a chance idler in his company--"a sort of super-commercial traveller"; so she described him; "not at all bad-looking though."

She went on to tell that she had been mildly surprised to see them at dinner, seated together; further surprised and even intrigued, to see them at breakfast together, next morning.

"Later," said she, "I asked him, 'Who's your friend that you didn't introduce yesterday?' 'Well,' said Dr. Foe, 'I didn't introduce him because I thought you mightn't like it. He's rather an outsider.

His name's Farrell.' 'Farrell,' I said--'But isn't that--wasn't he--?' 'Yes, he is, and he was,' Dr. Foe told me very gravely.

'That's just it.' I couldn't help asking how, after what had happened, they came to be travelling in company. 'That's the funny part of it,' was the answer; 'he's trying to make some kind of--well, of a reparation.' I thought better of Dr. Foe, Roddy. . . . It seems so _mean_, somehow, that after what you've told me, Dr. Foe should be-what shall I say?--accepting this reparation from a man who happens to be rich!"

Constantia repeated this, in effect, some two or three nights later.

We had danced through a waltz together and agreed to sit out another.

We sat it out, under a palm. It was somewhere in the immediate neighbourhood of Queen's Gate, and a fas.h.i.+onable band, tired of modernist tunes, was throbbing out the old _Wiener Blatter_. . . .

If Constantia remembered that sacred tune, she gave no sign of it.

"I thought better--somehow--of your friend," said Constantia.

I gave her a sort of guessing look. "You may take it from me, Con,"

I said, "that the trouble's not there. I'm worried about Jack.

I haven't heard from him for months. But he's not of that make, whatever he is."

"Are you sure?" she asked. "I feel that I'd like to know. If you are right, why were he and this Mr. Farrell such close friends?"

"Farrell's pretty impossible, I agree," said I.

Constantia opened her fan and snapped it. "Impossible?" said she.

"Well, I don't know. . . . Dr. Foe introduced him, later on . . .

and what do you think Mamma said? She said that she had supposed them at first sight to be relatives. There was a trick about the eyes and the corner of the brow. . . . You are quite sure," she added irrelevantly, "that Dr.--that your friend--would be above--?"

"I swear to you, Con," I a.s.sured her. "I know Jack Foe inside and out."

She had opened her fan again very deliberately; and as deliberately she closed it.

"No man ever knew that of a man," she said; "nor no woman either.

. . . You're a rotter, Roddy--but you're rather a dear."

NIGHT THE THIRTEENTH.

ESCAPE.

Somewhere in the bustle of landing and scrimmage past the Customs, Miss Denistoun lost sight of the two travellers; and with that, for a time, she goes out of the story.

You may almost put it that for a time they do the same. At all events for the next few weeks the record keeps a very slight hold on them and their doings. Jack knew, you see, that--though not a disapproving sort, as a rule, and in those days (though you children will hardly believe it) inclined to like my friends the better for doing what they jolly well pleased--I barred this vendetta-game of his, and would have called him off if I could. Folk were a bit more squeamish, if you remember, in those dear old pre-War days.

But please note _this_, for it is a part of his story. Jack wrote seldom, having a sense that I didn't want to hear. When he did write, however, he was liable at any time to break away from the light, half-jesting, half-defiant tone which he had purposely chosen to cover our disagreement, and to give me a sentence or two, or even a page, of cold-blooded confession. It may have been that his purpose, at that point, suddenly absorbed him, sucked him under.

It may have been that his fixed idea had begun to spread like a disease over his other sensibilities, hardening and deadening the tissue, so that he did this kind of thing unconsciously. It may have been both. You shall judge before we have finished.

I will give you just one specimen. It occurs in the very first letter addressed from America. He and Farrell had spent five days in New York:

"I am going to ease the chain--to run it out several lengths, in fact. I shall still keep pretty close in attendance on the patient, but my professional visits will be rarer. A new and more strenuous course of treatment requires these holidays, if his nerves are not to break down under it.