Foe-Farrell | Page 9

in the least drunk,
either; but explained to me very lucidly, on my taxing him with his real
offence--cutting Oxford for a day when, the Eights being a short week
off, he should have been in strict training--that all the strength of the
B.N.C. boat that year lying on stroke side (he rowed at "six"), one
might look on a Peche Melba and a Corona almost in the light of a
prescription. "Friend of my youth," he added--addressing me,
"and"--addressing Foe--"prop, sole prop, of my declining years--as you
love me, be cruel to be kind and restrain me when I show a disposition
to kiss yon bearded guard."
As the tail of the train swung out of the station Foe said meditatively, "I
like that boy," . . . And so it was. That autumn, when Jimmy
Collingwood, having achieved a pass degree--"by means," as he put it,
"only known to myself"--came up to share my chambers and read for
the Bar, he and Foe struck up a warm affection. For once, moreover,
Foe broke his habit of keeping his friends in separate cages. He was too
busy a man to join us often; but when we met we were the Three
Musketeers.
My father died in the Autumn of 1906; and this kept me down in the
country until the New Year; although he had left his affairs as straight
as a balance-sheet. Death duties and other things. . . . His
account-books, note-books, filed references and dockets; his diaries
kept, for years back, with records of rents and tithe-charges, of farms
duly visited and crops examined field by field; appraisements of

growing timber, memoranda for new plantings, queer charitable
jottings about his tenants, their families, prospects, and ways to help
them; all this tally, kept under God's eye by one who had never suffered
man to interfere with him, gave my Radicalism a pretty severe jerk.
You see, here, worked out admirably in practice, was the rural side of
that very landlordism which I had been denouncing up and down the
East-End. The difference was plain enough, of course; but when you
worked down to principle, it became for me a pretty delicate difference
to explain. I was pledged, however, to return to London after Christmas
and run (as Jimmy Collingwood put it) for those Bethnal Green Stakes:
and in due time--that's to say, about the middle of January--up I came.
I won't bore you with my political campaign. One day in the middle of
it Jimmy said, "To-night's a night off and we're dining with Jack Foe
down in Chelsea. Eight o'clock: no theatre afterwards: 'no band, no
promenade, no nozzing.' We've arranged between us to give your poor
tired brain a rest."
"When you do happen to be thoughtful," said I "you might give me a
little longer warning. As it is, I made a half-promise yesterday, to speak
for that man of ours, Farrell, across the water."
"No, you don't," said Jimmy. "Who's Farrell? Friend of yours?"
"Tottenham Court Road," I said. "Only met him yesterday."
"What? Peter Farrell's Hire System? . . . And you met him there, in the
Tottenham Court Road--by appointment, I suppose, with a coy
carnation in your buttonhole. A bad young baronet, unmarried,
intellectual, with a craving for human sympathy, on the Hire System'--"
"Don't be an ass, Jimmy," said I. "He's a Progressive, and they tell me
his seat's dicky."
"They mostly are in the Tottenham Court Road," said Jimmy. "But if
you've made half a promise, I was a week ahead of you with a whole
one. We dine with Jack Foe."

The night was a beast. Foe's flat, high up on a block overlooking the
Chelsea embankment, fairly rocked under squalls of a cross-river wind.
He had moved into these new quarters while I was down in
Warwickshire, and the man who put in the windows had scamped his
job. The sashes rattled diabolically. Now that's just the sort of thing
he'd have asked me to see to before he installed himself, if I had been
up at the time: or, rather, I should have seen to it without being asked.
That kind of noise never affected him: he could just withdraw himself
into his work and forget it. But different noises get on different men's
nerves, and, next to the scratching of a slate-pencil, a window on the
rattle or the distant slam-slam of a door left ajar makes me craziest.
You'd think a man out here would get accustomed to anything in the
way of racket. Not a bit of it! Home on leave those particular sounds
rasp me as badly as ever. . . . Moreover I have rather an eye for
scamped carpentry: learned it off my father, going about the property
with him.