Foe-Farrell Part 31

"Adumbrated, then," said I. "The Tottenham Court Road--"

"--_And_ two birds with one stone. No moors for me this year: I'm back on the simple life and the catapult. . . . You just wait."

There really is no resisting Jimmy, nor ever will be. He went up the Tottenham Court Road next day, walked into Farrell's late place of business and demanded to see the General Manager; and--if you'll believe it--that dignitary was fetched amid a hush of awe.

"I dropped in," explained Jimmy, "to see one of those cheap bedroom suites you advertise, in pickled walnut--or is it _marron glace?_-- suitable for a house-parlourmaid. The fact is, I'm going to get married--well, you've guessed that--otherwise, of course, I shouldn't be here. . . . My intended wife--she's a Devons.h.i.+re lady, by the way--from near Honiton. Anything wrong about Honiton? . . . No? I beg your pardon--I thought you smiled. . . . Well, as I was about to explain, my intended wife, coming as she does from near Honiton-- that's where they make the lace--likes her servants to be comfortable: at least, so she says. Your late Managing Director, had he lived--" Here Jimmy made a pause.

"You knew our Mr. Farrell, sir?" asked the present Managing Director, sympathetically.

"He honoured me with his acquaintance. If he had lived," said Jimmy . . . "But there! . . . By the way . . . that second marriage of his--wasn't it rather sudden? I understood him to be a confirmed widower."

"We know nothing about it, sir: nothing beyond what he conveyed in a letter to our Vice-Chairman. In fact, sir, during the last year or so of his life, when Mr. Farrell took his strange fancy for foreign parts, it seemed to us--well, it seemed to us that, in his strange condition of mind, anything might happen. To this day, sir, we haven't what you might call any cert.i.tude of his demise. It is not, up to this moment, legally proven--as they say. Our last letter from him was dated from far up the coast--from a place called San Ramon, which I understand to be in Peru. In it he announced that he was married again, and to a lady (as we gathered) of Peruvian descent.

He added that he had never, previously to the time of writing or thereabouts, known complete happiness."

Jimmy brought back this information, having, on top of it, acquired a bedroom suite of painted deal. "And there," said he, "the matter must rest. Foe's gone, and Farrell's gone. Both decent, in their way; and both, but for foolish temper, alive now and hearty."

So it seemed to be, and the book to be closed. I mourned for Jack, yet not as I should have mourned for him a year or two before.

Jimmy married and left me, and soon after I moved from our old quarters in the Temple to my present rooms in Jermyn Street.

Four years pa.s.sed: and then, one fine morning, my door opened, and John Foe called me by name.

"Hallo, Roddy! How goes it?"

I jumped up, in a pretty bad scare. It was the voice that did it: for, my door making an angle with the window, and the day being sunny, he stood there against a strong light--sort of silhouette effect, as you might put it. And there was a something about him, thus gloomed--but we'll talk of that by and by. The voice was Jack Foe's, and none other.

"It's all right," he went on easily. "Pull yourself together.

. . . It _is_ the Ancient Mariner come home, but you needn't imitate the Pilot and fall down in a fit. . . . Where's the Pilot's Boy, by the way--young Jimmy Collingwood? You still keep Jephson, I see. . . . I happened on Jephson at your street-door, just returned from posting a letter. Jephson performed the holy Hermit very creditably: he raised his eyes and almost sat down on the doorstep and prayed where he did sit. 'Doctor Foe!' said Jephson.

'Good Lord, send may I never--!'--which amounts to a prayer, eh? . . . He let me in with his latchkey, and I told him I'd run up unannounced. . . . Well?"

He came forward. In the old days Jack and I never shook hands; nor did we now. He set down hat, gloves, and umbrella carelessly on my knee-hole table and dropped into a chair with a long-drawn sigh.

"Reminds one--eh?--of the famous stage-direction in _The Rovers-- Several soldiers cross the stage wearily, as if returning from the Thirty Years' War_. . . . Well? What are you still staring at?

. . . Oh, I perceive! It's my clothes. . . . Yes; I should inform you that they are expensive, and the nearest compromise a Valparaiso tailor and I could reach in realising our several ideas of a Harley Street doctor. I am going to open a practice in that neighbourhood, and thought I would lose no time. The hat and umbrella over there are all right, if you'll give yourself the trouble to examine them.

I bought them on the way along."

He was right, in a way, about his clothes. (I believe I have already mentioned that Jack had always dressed himself carefully and in good form.) His frock-coat had a fullness of skirt, and his trousers a bluish aggressive tint, that I couldn't pa.s.s for metropolitan.

His boots were worse--of some wrong sort of patent leather. But they ought not to have altered the man as I felt that he was altered.

. . . Yes, cheapened and coa.r.s.ened, in some indefinable way.

His hair had thinned and showed a bald patch: not a large patch: still, there it was. His shape had been rather noticeably slim.

I won't say that it had grown pursy, but it had run to seed somehow.

Least of all I liked the change in his eyes, which bulged somewhat, showing an unhealthy white glitter. I set down this glitter as due to long weeks at sea: but the explanation couldn't quite satisfy me.

When a lost friend returns as it were from the grave--from s.h.i.+pwreck, at any rate, and uncharted travel--you look to find him gaunt, brown, leathery, hollow of cheek and eye, eh? Foe's appearance didn't answer to this conception . . . not one little bit.

"Then you didn't sail in the _Eurotas_, after all?" said I, finding speech. "We saw your name on the list."

"Oh, yes, I did," he interrupted. "And, by the way, we shall have to talk about her--or, rather, about what I ought to do. . . . Yes, I know what you'll be advising. 'Go straight to Lloyd's,' no doubt."

"Man alive," said I, "why not? If you were aboard of her--and if, as you tell me, you fetched somehow to Sydney--why in G.o.d's name hasn't Lloyd's heard of it months ago? There are such things as cables.

. . . Unless, to be sure, you have a reason?"

"I have and I haven't," said Jack. "My turning-up doesn't hurt anyone, does it? The _Eurotas_ went down, sure enough: and _I_ didn't scuttle her, if that's what you suspect."

"Please don't be an a.s.s, Jack," I pleaded.

"Well, I don't see," he continued, ruminating, "--I don't see any way but to go to Lloyd's and tell them about it. Yet equally I don't see what good it can do. The underwriters have paid up, eh?"

"More than three years ago," I told him.

"Well, then . . . I was perfectly well prepared to answer any questions at Valparaiso. I landed in my own name. I went back to the same hotel. And 'Foe' is not the most common of names, especially when you write 'Doctor' before it. . . . No, I'm wrong.

Farrell had entered our names on the register, and had entered mine as 'Professor.' On my return I wrote it 'John Foe, M.D.' But anyway, not a soul in the hotel recognised me. . . . I think my looks must have altered, somehow. . . . So I let it go. I dare say you won't understand, not knowing the kind of experiences I've been through, nor the number of 'em. But you may understand that after a goodish while as a castaway I was tired beyond the point of answering more questions than I should happen to be asked. . . . So I gave Valparaiso a silent blessing, and came home by the first s.h.i.+p, to consult you and Collingwood. What--let me repeat--have you done with Collingwood?"

"Jimmy?" said I. "He's married, a year since, and is already the father of a bouncing boy. I acted as his best man, by request.

He has a delightful and tiny wife who keeps him in order, which he pa.s.ses on to the County of Warwicks.h.i.+re as Justice of the Peace and Coram. . . . But about the _Eurotas_?" I persisted. "I don't think you quite realise. There were pa.s.sengers on board: and for months--"

"Of course there were pa.s.sengers," Foe agreed. "It won't help their relatives (will it?) to know for certain what they pretty well know already. As I hinted to Norgate in my last letter, there was a labour crisis on when we sailed. Some aggrieved blackguard on the dock, acting on his own or under command of his 'Union,' shovelled half a dozen bombs in with the coal. Simple process. Between seven hundred and a thousand miles out, this particular batch of coal was reached and shovelled into the forward furnaces. I counted four explosions. Two of them blew her bows to pieces, and she sank by the head and was gone in twenty minutes.

"Must I tell it, when I am home and dying to ask questions?--Oh, very well, then. . . . I shall be perfectly truthful so far as the history goes; but I warn you that at a certain point you won't like it, and you'll go on to like it less. You and I have been friends, Roddy, and you naturally suppose that I've come straight to you, as my first friend, to be welcomed and to ask for counsel. But you suppose wrong. I am come asking neither for advice, nor for a sympathy-- which I know I shan't get."

"My dear Jack--" I began to protest.

"Oh, be quiet," said he, "and let _me_ do the talking! I've had no one to talk to, these five months around the Horn, but a Norwegian skipper, a first mate of the same country, a fellow-pa.s.senger s.h.i.+pped off as a dipsomaniac for a cure (we lost him somewhere in the worst of it--I've an idea he let himself be swept overboard), and a mixed crew that I helped to cure of _beri-beri_ at St. Helena. So I want to do the talking, with your leave.

"--And I want to say this first, foremost, once and for all. I am come _simply to tell you_. I understand the devil of a lot about hatred by this time--more than you will ever begin to guess. But you taught me, anyhow, this much about friends.h.i.+p, that I couldn't bear to go along with you without your knowing every atom of the truth.

That means, we're going to be clean cuts, when I've done. . . .

You'll loathe the tale. But, d.a.m.n it, you shall respect me for this, that I cut clean, for old sake's sake, and wiped up the account, before we parted as strangers and I started life afresh."

"All this is pretty mysterious, Jack," said I. "You know that, for all the hurt he'd done you, I s.h.i.+ed out of helping your pursuit of Farrell. . . . Tell me, what happened to Farrell? Went down in the _Eurotas_, I guess, and so squared accounts. That's what you mean-- eh?--by your clean cut and starting life afresh? . . . If so, for your sake I'm glad of it."

"He didn't go down in the _Eurotas_," Foe answered gravely: "As a matter of fact I dragged him on board one of the boats with my own hands."

"What?" said I. "Farrell another survivor?"

"Upon my word," he answered, lighting a cigarette, "I can't swear to Farrell's being alive or dead. Probably he's dead; but anyway I've no further use for him, and that's where the clean cut comes in.

I had to quit hold of him because a woman beat me. . . . Now sit quiet and listen."

FOE'S NARRATIVE.

"Did you know that Farrell had married? . . . Yes, at San Ramon, a little portless place some way down the coast of Peru. The woman was a Peruvian and owned a banana-strip there, left to her by her first husband, a drunkard, in part-compensation for having ill-used and beaten her.

"When I ran Farrell to earth there, after he'd given me the slip for twelve months and more, this woman had married him and almost made a new man of him. In another month or so I don't doubt she'd have converted him into man enough to tell her all the truth, and let her deliver him.

"As it was, he pa.s.sed me off for his friend--the a.s.s! . . .

I s.h.i.+pped with them, and we worked down the coast, by fruit-s.h.i.+p and sloop, to Valparaiso, intending for Sydney. . . . Now at this point I might easily make myself out a calculating villain. Farrell was enamoured to feebleness, and to make love to his Santa was an opportunity cast into my lap by the G.o.ds. . . . But actually, before I could even meditate this simple villainy, I had fallen in love with her because I couldn't help it.

"Now I had never been in love before, and I took the disease pretty severely. And I should say that I took it rather curiously: but you shall judge, for I'll set out the credit side of the account just as plainly as the other.

"I hated the man, as you know: I loved the woman, as I've told you.