Foe-Farrell Part 38

"You see, I am shaking, even as I speak of it. I had this grievance, and it festered and raised the whole temperature of my hate. . . .

And this wasn't the worst, either. The worst was a sense that, lying somewhere with closed eyes under the ebb and flow of the tide, my beloved was working against me, watchfully, by unguessable ways, and weakening me. There was this dog, for example. . . . Yes, _that_ had been the first token. How had it pa.s.sed from me--this power over animals that had used to be exerted so easily?"

"But I had not lost my power over Farrell, although there were times when I mistrusted it. His eyes had given me the first warning, when I returned that morning and found myself tricked. They were half-timorous but also half-defiant, and wholly sly. It disconcerted him that I made no comment on his silence and asked no questions.

"On the fifth morning--by which time we had picked up enough strength to attempt a day's exploration of the west side of the island, and within an hour of the time fixed for our start, he found me fitting and nailing a short cross-plank to the boat's mast.

"'Hallo!' said he. 'What job are you spoiling there? I'm the carpenter of this party, or believed I was.'

"'And I'm the captain,' said I; 'and duly appointed--though I have no witness but you to the fact--if you choose to lie about it. . . .

I'm doing a job which you have neglected: fixing a Cross for Santa.

It will be a comfort, as we fare inland, to know she has a Christian mark over her grave. . . . You have the bearings accurate no doubt,'

said I, lifting the heavy cross and, as I stooped to shoulder it, picking up the s.h.i.+p's mallet, which lay at my feet. 'Will it be here--or here?' I asked, choosing the spot and prodding the sharpened foot of the cross into the sand. . . . His face blanched.

'You accursed fool!' said I, 'do you suppose I haven't, these four days, been watching you and the dog?'--and, as I said it, the point of the mast struck upon timber. 'Come and help me to drive it deep,'

I commanded. 'If we can work it down within reach of mallet, three taps will drive it so that it will stand firm above such tides as reach this anchorage of hers.'

"He came down the beach heavily and we heaved our strength together, driving the cross down by the coffin's head. 'The mallet is handy by you,' said I. 'Pick it up and use it while I hold steady.'

"This work done, without another word between us, we returned, picked up axe, saw, and a wallet to collect any specimens of fruit we might find on our way, and, still without a word, breasted the hill side by side, the dog running ahead of us.

"We got no farther that day than to the stream which ran between our hill and the second volcano, the edge of which--like that of our own broken and truncated one, ran down steeply to the western sh.o.r.e.

The wood beside the stream grew so thick, interlaced with tendrils of tropical plants, that we were forced to turn aside and make for the coast in hope to find a crossing.

"We descended into the sound of the beating surf before we found one: and there an impish fancy took me. I had been losing grip on Farrell, and despite my small triumph of that morning, I felt a sudden desire to test him. Pretending that my purpose was only to cross and report, I waded the stream and dodged upward through the undergrowth; recrossed it, about a hundred yards above, crawled another yard and again recrossed, all to baffle the hound's scent, since from Farrell I could have hidden by this time securely enough.

In a very few minutes I heard his voice hallooing to me, and then the dog's yelp began to chime in with it. By and by the beast, well baffled, was baying hard through the undergrowth between me and the surf.

"After a while of this play I crept out and strolled easily back to my first ford, my hands in my pockets.

"'What the devil's up with your beast?' I asked, wading across to the bank on which Farrell stood.

"His face was white. 'My G.o.d!' he said. 'I thought, for a while, we had lost you!'

"Then I knew that he dared not be alone, and that I had him, whatever happened."

NIGHT THE TWENTIETH.

ONE MAN ESCAPES.

Before continuing Foe's story, I should warn you not to be surprised that hereabouts it takes on a somewhat different tone. I am trying to give you the tale as he told it: and so much of it as related to Santa, he told bravely and frankly, here and there with a thrill somewhere deep beneath his voice, and exaltation on his face.

He was, in short, the Jack Foe of old days, opening out his heart to me; and all the more the same because he was different. By this I mean that never in life had I heard him speak in just that way, simply because never in life had he brought me this kind of emotion, to confess it; but, granted the woman and the love, here (I felt) was the old Jack opening his heart to me. It rejuvenated his whole figure, too, and, in a way, enn.o.bled it. I forgot--or rather, I no longer saw--the change in him which had given me that secondary shock when he walked into the room.

I cannot tell you the precise point at which his tone altered, and grew hard, defiant, careless and--now and then at its worst--even flippant. But it was here or hereabouts, and you will guess the reason towards the end.

Another thing I must mention. You have already guessed that the tale was not told at one sitting. Between the start and the point where I broke off last night, we had lunched, taken a stroll Piccadilly-wards, done some shopping, and chatted on the way about various friends and what had happened to them in this while--Jack questioning, of course, while I did almost all the talking. It was in the emptying Park, as we sat and watched the carriages go by, that he told me of Santa's burial and what followed it, so far as you have heard. I broke off last time at the point where he broke off, stood up, and said he would tell me the end of it all over dinner at the Cafe Royal, where we had called, on the way, to reserve our old table.

I saw afterwards why he had arranged it so: as you will see. But for the present it only needs remembering that what follows was told in a brilliant, rather noisy room--at an isolated table, but with a throng of diners all around us.

I had ordered wild duck as part of the dinner: and when it came to be served he looked hard at his plate, and, without lifting his eyes, slid from casual talk into his narrative again:

[Foe's Narrative Concluded]

"Wild duck--? good! Yes, we used to have wild duck on the island.

. . . There were lagoons on the east side, fairly teeming with them, and we fixed up a decoy. I don't pretend that we fixed up an orange salad like this, with curacao: but in the beginning we practised with limes, and later on I invented one of sliced bananas, with a sort of spirit I brewed from the fruit. Also we found bait in the pools, not so much unlike the whitebait we've been eating--I used to frizzle it in palm oil. And once I achieved turtle soup. . . . He was the only fellow that, in two years, we ever managed to collar and lay on his back; and the soup, after all was no great success. But turtle's eggs. . . . I can tell you all about turtle's eggs. That dog had a nose for them like a pig's for truffles.

"Don't be afraid, Roddy. In this sophisticated den of high living and moderate thinking I'm not going to give you the Swiss Family Robinson; though I could double no trumps and risk it on the author of that yarn--whoever he may have been--if he had only dealt from a single pack, which he didn't. Farrell and I didn't build a house in a tree, because we didn't need to; and we didn't ride on emus, because we didn't want to, and moreover there weren't any. But we did pretty well there for two years, Roddy: and could say as Gonzalo--was it Gonzalo?--said of another island, that here was everything advantageous to life. And we found the means to live, too.

"I may say that I took the role of Mrs. Beeton: hunted for fruits, fished, told Farrell (of my small botanical knowledge) what to eat, drink, and avoid, and attended to the high cuisine. Farrell, reverting to his old journeyman skill, sawed planks and knocked up a hut. When one hut became intolerable for the pair of us--for in all that time we never ceased hating--he knocked up a second and better one for my habitation. He was my hewer of wood and drawer of water.

Also it was he who--since I professed no eagerness to get away--did the conventional thing that castaways do: erected a flag-staff, and hauled piles of brushwood up to the topmost lip of our volcano, for a bonfire to be lit if any s.h.i.+p should be sighted, lest it might pa.s.s in the night. I had resigned the binoculars to him, but he never brought report of a sail.

"On two points--which served us again and again for furious quarrels--the fool was quite obstinate. He would not budge from our first encampment--that is to say, out of sight of Santa's grave; and he flatly refused to fit new planks to the ruinated boat which now lay, a thing of ribs, high and dry as we had hauled her close underneath the fern-brake beside the cascade. Again and again I pointed out to him that, patched up, she would serve me for fis.h.i.+ng.

To this he answered, truly enough, that we had a plenty of fish in the rock-pools and a plenty of oysters on the sh.o.r.e. Then I urged that, if we sighted a s.h.i.+p--though it didn't matter to me--we might need a boat to get out to her. He retorted that, though it mattered to him, he would never set foot again in that cursed craft or help me to set foot in her. Finally, one day when I was absent on an expedition after food, he broke her remains to shreds.

"Upon this we had an insane quarrel--the more insane because it all turned on my dwelling on the detriment to his chances of escape and his reminding me of my indifference. We argued like two babies.

But I had now another grievance: though it was the devil to me to be falling back on grievances.

"I still held the whip-hand over him in this--I could always thong him by a threat to part company and live by myself on the east side of the island. He mortally feared to be left, even with the dog for company.

"The dog remained a mystery. Although, as time went on, we explored the island pretty thoroughly, we never found his owner, nor any sign of human habitation. The conies which bred and multiplied on the hills were our only a.s.surance that man had ever landed here before us--that is, until we discovered the strange boat: and it was through the dog that we discovered it."

"During the first three months we made no lengthy excursions, being occupied in cutting and sawing timber for the two living-huts and a store-hut; in making a small net (this was my task), and in sun-drying the fish I caught in it--for, knowing little about these lat.i.tudes, I feared that at any moment the heavenly weather might break, and we be held prisoners by torrential rains, traces of which I read in some of the seaward-running gullies. Also Farrell refused to budge until he had built his bonfire. When this was done we had another pretty fierce quarrel because, tired of waiting, I took a humour to punish him by making him wait in his turn while I did some tailoring. . . . No: we didn't dress in goatskins. There were no goats. But I had visions of piecing up a rabbit-skin coat and, in the meantime, of cutting up the boat's sail into drawers and jumpers, our clothes by this time being worse than a disgrace. But I believe that I held out chiefly to annoy him; and, having annoyed him sufficiently, I gave way to his final argument--that our boots were wearing out fast and, if we didn't make the expedition at once, likely enough we never should.

"So we started on what proved to be a two days' tramp, and thereby came pretty near to wrecking ourselves.

"The third cone, which--in that clear atmosphere--seemed to stand close behind the second, turned out to be separated from it by a good five miles as the crow flies. But on the north-western sh.o.r.e the sea had breached the reefs and swept in to form a salt lagoon in the great hollow, so that we had to fetch a circuit of at least seven miles to the southward, avoiding a tangle of forest in which the lagoon ended, and clambering along a volcanic ridge with the sea often sheer on our right. It was in this lagoon, by the way, that we afterwards learned to take our wild duck, scores of which paddled about quite tamely on its surface, their tameness promising poorly for human hospitality on the farther side of the hill.

"We gained the side of the great cone at length and, rounding it, beheld all the northern part of the island spread at our feet--in form a narrow strip of land curving around a delicious bay and ending in a small pinnacle of high tumbled cliff and wood. Quite obviously this bay was the one anchorage in the island for any s.h.i.+p of burden; and no s.h.i.+p could have asked for a better: for it made almost three parts of a circle, and, while not completely land-locked, held recesses in which any gale might be ridden out.

"Here, if anywhere, as I told Farrell, we should come upon human life or the traces of it: here, if anywhere, if vessel ever made this island, to water, she would drop hook. 'Fools we have been, to waste months pitching camp on the other side, when this is the place of places, and this hill gives the citadel prospect of all!'

"Farrell sat down on a rock and broke into curses. 'd.a.m.n you,' he moaned, 'for bringing me so far! I wish I had never seen it.

Wasn't it comfortable enough where we were? . . . And now I can't go back!'

"I had taken the binoculars and, engaged with the view, for a moment paid no heed. I was accustomed to his explosions of fury, as he to mine. But, turning about for a while, I saw that he had unlaced his left boot and was holding it out. . . . The sole had broken loose in our scramble over the tufa rocks, and hung parted from its upper.

"'That's bad,' said I. 'Well, I stuck a s.h.i.+p's needle in the tool-bag here before we started--_you_ never think of anything!

When we get down to the sh.o.r.e we'll see what can be done: that is, if we don't find a cobbler.'

"'Cobbler? you funny a.s.s!--' he began.

"'Look here,'--I stopped him. 'If you won't attend to me, attend to Rover. What's up with that dog of yours?'--for the dog which had been following all day pretty obediently, except for a wild dash down to the lagoon to scatter the wild duck, had of a sudden picked up bearings and was running forward, halting, returning, wagging his tail, running forward again, turning, asking dumbly to be understood, in the way all dogs have who invite you to follow a trail.

"'Here's business,' said I, and hurried after him, leaving Farrell to limp down the hill-side in our wake. For once the dog recognised me as more intelligent or, at any rate, prompter than his master, and gave his whole attention to me. . . . I tumbled down the hill after him in a haste that fairly set my temples throbbing. Once sure of me, he played no more at backwards-and-forwards, but bounded down the slope towards the innermost southern corner of the bay, where a grove of coco-trees almost overhung the beach. A curtain of creepers bunched over the low cliff at their feet and into this he plunged and disappeared.

"But his barking still led me on; and presently, as I avoided the undergrowth and creepers to follow the foresh.o.r.e, sounded back to me across a low spit of rock. I climbed this and came all unexpectedly upon a diminutive creek.