Foe-Farrell | Page 6

"! . . .
The jubilant cry from the flowering thorn to the flowerless willow, "smite, smite, smite."
(Flowerless willow no more but every run a late-shed perfect bloom.)
The fierce chant of my demon brother issuing forth against the demon bowler, "hit him, hit him, hit him."
The thousand melodious cracks, delicious cracks, the responsive echoes of my comrades and the hundred thence-resulting runs, passionately yearned for, never, never again to be forgotten.
Overhead meanwhile the splendid silent sun, blending all, fusing all, bathing all in floods of soft ecstatic perspiration.
Otway lifted his stare from the rough table.
They have skinned the turf off Trinity cricket-ground . . . Such turf, too! I wonder who bought it, and what he paid for it. . . . They have turned the field into a big Base Hospital--all tin sheds, like a great kraal of scientific Kaffirs. Which reminds me . . .
Foe read medicine. Caius, you must know, is a great college for training doctors, and in the way of scholarships and prizes he annexed most of the mugs on the board. All the same I want you to understand that he wasn't a pot-hunter. I don't quite know how to explain. . . . His father had died while he was at Rugby, leaving him a competence; but he certainly was not over-burdened with money. Of that I am sure. . . . Can't say why. He never talked of his private affairs, even with me, though we were friends, "Jack" and "Roddy" to each other still, and inhabited lodgings together in Jesus Lane. He owed money to no one. Unsociable habit, I used to call it; destructive of confidence between man and man.
But he was no pot-hunter. I think--I am sure--that so long as he kept upsides with money he rather despised it. He had a handsome face--rather curiously like the pictures you see of Dante--and his mind answered to it, up to a point. Fastidious is the word, . . . gave you the impression he had attached himself to Natural Science much as an old Florentine attached himself to theology or anatomy or classics, with a kind of cold passion.
The queerest thing about him was that anything like "intellectual society," as they call it, bored him stiff. Now you may believe it or not, but I've always had a kind of crawling reverence for things of the mind, and for men who go in for 'em. You can't think the amount of poetry, for instance, I've read in my time, just wondering how the devil it was done. But it's no use; it never was any use, even in those days. No man of the kind I wanted to worship could ever take me seriously. I remember once being introduced to a poet whose stuff I knew by heart, almost every line of it, and when I blurted out some silly enthusiasm--sort of thing a well-meaning Philistine does say, don't you know?--he put the lid down on me with "Now, that's most interesting. I've often wondered if what I write appealed to one of your--er--interests, and if so, how."
Well that's where I always felt Foe could help. And yet he didn't help very much. He read a heap of poetry--on the sly, as it were; and one night I coaxed him off to a talk about Browning. His language on the way home was three-parts blasphemy.
Am I making him at all clear to you? He kept his intellect in a cage all to itself, so to speak. . . . What's more--and you'll see the point of this by and by--he liked to keep his few friends in separate cages. I won't say he was jealous: but if he liked A and B, it was odds he'd be uneasy at A's liking B, or at any rate getting to like him intimately.
This secretiveness had its value, to be sure. It gave you a sense of being privileged by his friendship. . . . Or, no; that's too priggish for my meaning. Foe wasn't a bit of a prig. It was only because he had, on his record already, so much brains that the ordinary man who met him in my rooms was disposed to wonder how he could be so good a fellow. Get into your minds, please, that he was a good fellow, and that no one doubted it; of the sort that listens and doesn't speak out of his turn.
He had a great capacity for silence; and it's queer to me--since I've thought over it--what a large share of our friendship consisted in just sitting up into the small hours and smoking, and saying next to nothing. I talked, no doubt: Foe didn't.
I shall go on calling him Foe. He was Jack to me, always; but Foe suits better with