Foe-Farrell | Page 6

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 "! . . .
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