Foe-Farrell | Page 5

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 Substitutes. . . . 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-competition 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 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