Foe-Farrell | Page 5

play. Turn up the reference, Polky--Ecclesiastes something-or-other. It runs: 'We are become as a skittle-alley in a garden of cucumbers, forasmuch as our centurion will not come out to play with us.'"
Otway laughed. "And it goes on that the grasshopper is a burden. . . . But Y.-S. has given you the name, just now."
"I, sir?" Yarrell-Smith gazed, in the more astonishment to find that Otway, after his laugh, reaching up to trim the lamp, looked strangely serious. "I'm blest if I understand a word of all this. . . . What name, sir?"
"Hate," said Otway, dropping back into his chair and drawing at his pipe. "But you're warm; as they say in the nursery-game. Try 'Foe,' if you prefer it."
"Oh, I see," protested Yarrell-Smith, after a bewildered look around. "You've all agreed to be funny with a poor orphan that has just come in from the cold."
Barham paid no heed to this. "'Foe' might be the name of a man. It's unusual. . . . But what was the Johnny called who wrote Robinson Crusoe?"
"It was the name of a man," answered Otway.
"This man?" Barham tapped his finger on the newspaper.
Otway nodded.
"The man the inquest was held on?"
"That--or the other." Otway looked around at them queerly. "I think the other. But upon my soul I won't swear."
"The other? You mean the stranger--the man who interrupted--"
At this point Yarrell-Smith sank upon a locker. "I beg your pardon, all of you," he moaned helplessly; "but if there's such a thing about as First Aid--"
"Sammy had better read you this thing he's unearthed," said Polkinghorne kindly.
Barham picked up the newspaper.
"No, you don't," Otway commanded. "Put it down. . . . If you fellows don't mind listening, I'll tell you the story. It's about Hate; real Hate, too; not the Bosch variety."

NIGHT THE FIRST.
JOHN FOE.
John Foe and I entered Rugby together at fourteen, and shared a study for a year and a term. Pretty soon he climbed out of my reach and finally attained to the Sixth. I never got beyond the Lower Fifth, having no brains to mention. Cricket happened to be my strong point; and when you're in the Eleven you can keep on fairly level terms with a push man in the Sixth. So he and I were friends--"Jack" and "Roddy" to one another--all the way up. We went through the school together and went up to Cambridge together.
He was a whale at Chemistry (otherwise Stinks), and took a Tancred Scholarship at Caius. I had beaten the examiner in Little-go at second shot, and went up in the same term, to Trinity; where I played what is called the flannelled fool at cricket--an old-fashioned game which I will describe to you one of these days--
"Cricket? But I thought you rowed, sir?" put in Yarrell Smith. "Yes, surely--"
"Hush! tread softly," Barham interrupted. "Our Major won't mind your not knowing he was a double Blue--don't stare at him like that; it's rude. But he will not like it forgotten that he once knocked up a century for England v Australia. . . . You'll forgive our young friend, sir; he left school early, when the war broke out."
Otway looked across at Yarrell-Smith with a twinkle. "I took up rowing in my second year," he explained modestly, "to enlarge my mind. And this story, my good Sammy, is not about me--though I come into it incidentally because by a pure fluke I happened to set it going. All the autobiography that's wanted for our present purpose is that I went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in the footsteps (among others) of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, and--well, you see the result. May I go on?"
But although they were listening, Otway did not at once go on. Sammy had spoken in his usual light way and yet with something of a pang in his voice, and something of a transient cloud still rested on the boy's face. Otway noted it, and understood. When the war broke out, Sammy had been on the point of going up to Oxford. . . .
Before the cloudlet passed, Otway had a vision behind it, though the vision came from his own brain, out of his own memory--a vision of green turf and of boys in white on it, a small regiment set orderly against a background of English elms, and moving orderly, intent on the game of games.
O thou, that dear and happy Isle, The garden of the world erstwhile. . . . Unhappy! shall we nevermore That sweet militia restore?
Snatches of an old parody floated in his brain with the vision--a parody of Walt Whitman--
Far off a grey-brown thrush warbling in hedge or in marsh; Down there in the blossoming bushes, my brother, what is that you are saying? . . .
The perfect feel of a "fourer