"--I"ll tell you why," Yarrell-Smith went on as the tot was filled.
"First place, the Bosch has finished hating us for to-night and gone to bye-bye. Secondly, it"s starting to sleet--and that vicious, a man can"t see five yards in front of him."
"I love my love with a B because he"s Boschy," said Sammy lightly: "I"ll take him to Berlin--or say, Bapaume to begin with--and feed him on Subst.i.tutes. . . . Do you know that parlour-game, Yarrell dear?
Are you a performer at Musical Chairs? Were you by any chance brought up on a book called _What Shall We do Now?_ The fact is--"
Sammy, who could be irreverent, but so as never to offend, stole a look at Otway--"we"re a trifle hipped in the old log cabin.
I started a guessing-compet.i.tion just now, and our Commanding Officer won"t play. Turn up the reference, Polky--Ecclesiastes something-or-other. It runs: "We are become as a skittle-alley in a garden of cuc.u.mbers, forasmuch as our centurion will not come out to play with us.""
Otway laughed. "And it goes on that the gra.s.shopper 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 pa.s.sed, 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?
_s.n.a.t.c.hes 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 "! . . .
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, pa.s.sionately 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 cla.s.sics, with a kind of cold pa.s.sion.
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.