Arthur Quiller-Couch

The porter has the keys, with instructions to lend to nobody but you or the landlord.
"Address, for some little while, quite uncertain. I drew out a fair sum in circular notes and cash; enough to keep me solvent for some weeks. So you need not worry about the money.
"You needn't fash your consciences over the Plan, either. I'll tell you about it in my next, written from the first place when I find leisure. I'll unfold—no, the word insults its beautiful simplicity. Apologies to Jimmy. Tell him to buy a copy-book and write in it Experiment is better than Observation.
"So long! A great peace has fallen on me, Roddy. 'I am one with my kind,' like the convalescent gentleman in Maud. 'I embrace the purpose of—whatever Higher Power set Farrell going—'and the doom assigned.'
"Farrell is going strong. Yoicks!—Yours ever,"
"J.F."

I handed the letter across to Jimmy, and set myself to order, thoughtfully, something to eat.

"Well, what do you say to it?" I asked as Jimmy finished his perusal.

"I say," pronounced Jimmy in unfaltering voice, "that the crisis demands a gin-and-vermouth, at once, and that the vermouth should be of the Italian variety."

"Waiter!" I called.

"Nay," said Jimmy, "hear me out. I say further—did you mention a rump-steak underdone?"

"You did," said I.

"And with oysters on the top?"

"It's where they usually go," I pleaded. "I didn't specify. One takes a lot of these little things for granted."

"Then I say further that, this being one of those occasions on which no time should be lost, you will reach for that collection of hors d'oeuvre on the table behind you, and lift your voice for a bottle of Graves to follow the vermouth and quickly, but not so as to gall its kibe.… And I say last of all," he wound up reflectively, helping himself to two stuffed olives and a hareng sauer, "that the Professor is running a grave risk, and I wouldn't be in his shoes at this moment."

"You think—" I began nervously.

"Never did such a thing in my life," said Jimmy. "I know. He's in one of those beastly Restaurant Cars."

Silence descended on Foe for two months and more. Then I received this long letter:—

Grand Hotel, Paris,
May 27th.
"My dear Roddy,—The hunt is up. I took some time getting a move on it: but to-night Farrell has the real spirit of the chase upon him, and is in his room at this moment, packing surreptitiously with intent to give me the slip.
"You will have gathered from a glance at the above address that Farrell is with me; or rather, that I am with Farrell. I give him full scope with his tastes. It is part of the Plan. But to-night—knowing that he had gone to his room to pack surreptitiously, and that his berth in the Wagon-lit is booked for to-morrow night at the Gare d'Orleans—I gave myself what the housemaids call an evening-out. This is Paris, Roddy, in the time of the chestnut bloom. A full moon has been performing above the chestnuts. Beneath their boughs the municipality had hung a thousand reflections of it in the form of Chinese lanterns shaped and coloured like great oranges. The band at the Ambassadeurs—a band of artists and, as I should judge, conducted by somebody who couldn't forget that he had once been a gentleman—saw the moon rise and at once were stricken with Midsummer madness. It had been recklessly, defiantly, blatantly exploiting its collective shame on two-steps and coon song,—shouting its de profundis, each degenerate soul bucking up its lost fellow with a challenge to go one better and mock at its hell—when of a sudden, as I say, the moon rose, and the conductor caught up his stick, and the whole damned crew floated off on The Magic Flute.… It wasn't on the programme. It just happened, and no one paid them the smallest attention.… But there it was: ten minutes of ecstasy.
"They ceased upon the night: and the next news was that after five minutes' interval they were chained again and conscientiously throwing vim into Boum-Poump with the standardised five thumps of jollity on the kettledrum.
"So the champak odours failed—What is champak? Have the Germans synthetised it yet?—and I awoke from dreams of thee. I walked back by way of the Quais—by the river:"
Dissolute man!
Lave in it, drink of it
Then, if you can.

"But I have played for safety and am writing this with the aid of a whisky-and-Perrier to hope that it finds you well as it leaves me at present.
"I dare say it struck you as a poorish kind of trick—my inviting you to Prince's and leaving you to pay for the repast. The reason of my sudden bolt was a sudden report that Farrell intended to start at once for a holiday on the Continent of Europe—that he had been to Cook's and bought himself a circular ticket for the Riviera—Paris, Toulon, Cannes, Nice, etc.—on to Genoa, Paris by Mt. Cenis—that sort of thing. I should tell you that, being chin-deep in winding up my affairs, I had employed a man to watch his movements. Shadowing Farrell is a soft option, even now, when he's painfully learning the rudiments of flight: four months ago he had not even a nascent terror to make him suspicious. Oh, never fear but I'll educate him, dull as he is! Remember your Ancient Mariner, Roddy? Here are two passages purposely set wide apart by the author, that I'll put together for you to choose between 'em,—"
(1) As who, pursued with yell and blow,
Still treads the shadow of his—Foe,
And forward bends his head.…
(2) Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
"You may urge that Coleridge—a lazy man and a forgetful—is just repeating himself. But there's a shade of difference; and I'll undertake to deliver back Farrell in whichever condition you prefer; or even to split the shade. But you must give me time.
"As it was, I risked nothing in paying an ordinary professional. Farrell walked into the office, and my man followed him. Farrell took some time discussing his route with the clerk. My man borrowed the use of a telephone-box, left the door open and rang me up. By the time he was put through he had heard all he needed. So he closed the door, and reported. I instructed him, of course, to buy me a similar ticket. 'And,' said my man, 'he is inquiring which is the best hotel at Monte Carlo, and it seems he hardly knows any French." 'Right,' said I. 'Come along at once and collect your fee, for I haven't any time to spare.'
"I thought it possible that Farrell might break his journey to dally with the gaieties of Paris. But he didn't. I found out easily enough at Cook's Office there that he had booked a sleeper and gone straight through. So I went to the Opera, listened to Rigoletto, idled most of the next day in the old haunts, and took the usual Sud-Express, with a sleeper, from the Gare de Lyons.
"No: I lie. You can't call it idling when you sit—say in the Bois, on any chance bench anywhere—seeing nothing, letting the carriages go by like an idle show of phenomena, but with your whole soul thrilling to a new idea, drinking it in, pushing out new fibres which grow as they suck in more of it through small new ducts, with a ripple and again a choke and yet again a gurgle, which you orchestrate into a sound of deep waters combining as you draw them home.… Oh, yes—you may laugh: but I know now what conception is: what Shakespeare felt like when he sat one night, in a garden, and the great plot of Othello came teeming.…
"Please bear one thing in mind, my dear Roddy, You are never, now or hereafter, to pity me. Qualis artifex.… I used to smile to myself in a cocksure youthful way when great men hinted in great books that one had to make burnt-sacrifice of the eye's delight, the heart's desire; the lust of the flesh, the pride of the intellect; see them all consumed to a handful of dust, and trample out even the last spark of that, before the true phoenix sprang; that only when half-gods go the gods arrive. But it's true, Roddy! It's true!
"I won't grow dithyrambic—not just yet. I was so sure of my man that it seemed quite worth while to tumble out at Avignon—a place I had never inspected—and fool away another spell among Roman remains, and Petrarch and the rival Popes, and the opening scenes of the Revolution, and just thinking—thinking.
"So I reached Monte Carlo next day, a little after noon; took a bath and a siesta; sauntered into the Casino there, a good forty-eight hours behind time; and caught my man, sitting.
"Are you superstitious, Roddy? Of course you are: and so are all of us who pretend that we are not.… Monte Carlo is the hell of a hole. I had never seen it before: but as I went into the Casino, all of a sudden I had a queer recollection—of a breakfast-party at Cambridge in young La Touche's rooms, in King's (he was killed in the South African War), and of his saying solemnly as we lit cigarettes that he'd had a dream overnight. He dreamed that he walked into the Casino at Monte Carlo, went straight to the first table on the left, put down a five-franc piece on Number 17, and came out a winner of prodigious sums.
"Well, we are all humbugs about superstition. I don't believe there's a man existent—that's to say, a tolerable man, a fellow who isn't a prig—who doesn't touch posts, or count his steps on the pavement, or choose what tie he'll wear on certain days, or give way to some such human weakness when he's alone. We so-called 'men of science' are, I truly believe, the worst of the lot. You can't get rid of one fetish but you have instantly the impulse to kneel to another…
"Anyhow, there was my man sitting, and the number 17 almost straight before him, a little in front of his right arm; and this recollection came to me; and I leaned over his shoulder and laid a five-franc piece on the number.
"It won. I piled my winnings on the original stake, plus all my loose cash; and Number 17 won again.
"That's all. You know my old theory that every scientific man should have a sense of mystery—it's more useful to him than to most of his fellows. Anyway I'd tried my luck on Bob La Touche's long bygone dream.
"Several pairs of eyes began to regard me with interest: and the croupier, as he pushed my spoil across, spared me a glance inscrutable but scrutinising. I make no doubt that had I helped to make up the next game, quite a number of the punters would have backed my infant fortune. But I didn't. Farrell had slewed about in his chair for to look up at the newcomer: and at sight of his dropped jaw, as he recognised me, I smiled, gathered up my wealth and walked out.
"I took a seat in the Casino garden, overlooking the sea. 'Sort of thing,' I found myself murmuring, 'might happen once in a blue moon,' and with that was aware that a sort of blue moonlight was indeed bathing the garden, though the moon's reflection lay yellow enough across the still Mediterranean. [Here, for description, turn up Matt. Arnold's A Southern Night: possibly still copyrighted.]
"Farrell came out. He spotted me at once; for to help the moon, as well as to dispel the heavy scent of the gaming-room, I was lighting a cigar. He took a couple of turns on the terrace and halted in front of me. His manner was nervous.
"'Excuse me, Professor—' he began.
"'Excuse me, Mr. Farrell,' I corrected him; 'I am a Professor no longer. You may call me Doctor Foe, if you like.… Did Number 17 win a third time?'
"'I—I fancy not," he stammered. 'To tell the truth, your sudden appearance here, when I supposed you to be in London—and at Monte Carlo, of all places—But perhaps you are a devotee of the fickle goddess? Men of learning,' he floundered on, 'find relaxation—complete change of interest. Darwin—the great Darwin—used to read novels: the worse the novel, the better he liked it—or so I've heard.'
"'As it happens,' said I, 'this is my first visit to Monte Carlo.'
"'Indeed?' He brightened and became yet more fatuous. 'Then we may call it a coincidence, eh?—a veritable coincidence. When I saw you—But first of all, let me congratulate you on your luck.'
"'Thank you,' I said. 'I will make a note that your first impulse on encountering me was to congratulate me on my luck.'
"This seemed to puzzle him for a moment. Then, 'Oh, I see what you mean,' he said. 'But we're coming to that.… You gave me a fair turn just now, you did, turning up so unexpected. But (says I) this makes an opportunity that I ought to have made for myself before leaving London. Yes, I ought.… But I want to say to you now, Dr. Foe—as between man and man—that I made a mistake. I was misled—that's the long and short of it. I never stirred up that crowd, Doctor, to make the mess they did of your—your premises. But so far as any unguarded words of mine may have set things going in my absence—well, I'm sorry. A man can't say fairer than that, can he?… And I've suffered for it, too,' he added; 'if that's any consolation to you.'
"'Suffered, have you?' I asked.
"'What, haven't you heard?' He was surprised.—Yes, Roddy, genuinely. 'Well, now I won't say it was all owing to that little affair at the Silversmiths' College.… There were other—er—circumstances. In fact there was what-you-might-call a combination of circumstances. The upshot of which was that I had a safe seat and took a bad toss out of it. No, I don't harbour no feelings against you, Doctor Foe. I'm a sociable, easy-going sort of fellow, and not above owning up to a mistake when I've made one.… I stung you up again just now, wishing you joy of your luck: meaning no more than your winnings at the tables. Not being touchy myself, I dessay it comes easy to advise a man not to be touchy. But what I say is, we're both down on our luck for the time, and we're both here to forget it. So why not be sociable?'
"'Suppose on the contrary, Mr. Farrell,' I suggested, 'that I am here to remember. What then?'
"'Then I'd say—No, you interrupted me somewhere when I was going to make myself clear. You won't mind what I'm going to say? … Well, then, I gather those asses did some pretty considerable damage to your scientific 'plant'—is that so? … Well, again, feeling a sort of responsibility in this business, I want to say that if it'll set things on their legs again, five or six thousand pounds won't break Peter Farrell.'
"I didn't strangle him, Roddy. It was the perilous moment: but I sat it out like a statue, and then I knew myself a match for this business. I didn't strangle him, even though he provoked me by adding, 'Yes, and now we're met, out here, you can be useful to me in a lot of little ways. Know French, don't you? Well, I don't, and we'll throw that in.… What I mean is, What d'ye say to our joining forces? I'm fed up with these Cook's men. They do their best, I don't deny. But this business of the lingo is a stiffer fence than I bargained for. Now, with a fellow-countryman to swap talk; and a gentleman, and one that can patter to the waiters and at the railway stations—What do you say to it, Doctor? Shall we let bygones be bygones?'
"I did not strangle him, Roddy, even for that. I sat pretty still for a while, pretending to consider.
"'It's odd, Mr. Farrell,' said I after a bit, 'that you should invite me to be your companion. You'll always remember that you invited me?'
"''Course I shall,' said he. 'Let's be sociable—that's my offer.'
"I threw away my cigar. 'Provided you make no suggestion beyond it, I accept,' said I. 'We will take this trip together. Do you mean to stay long at Monte Carlo?'
"'Pretty place,' said Farrell. 'Been up to La Turbie? No, of course; you've only just arrived. Well, I can recommend it— funny little railway takes you up, and the view from the top is a knock-out. But I'm your man, wherever you'll do the personally-conducting. I'm not wedded to this place. Only came here because I understood it was fast, and I wanted to see.'
"'Where's your hotel?' I asked.
"'Grand Hotel, next door,' he answered. 'What' yours?'
"'The same,' said I. 'We'll meet at dejeuner—same table. Twelve noon, if that suits.'
"'I don't know if you're wedded to this place—' said he.
"'Not one little bit,' I answered.
"'Inside there, for instance?'
"'You saw,' said I. 'I came out because I disliked the smell.'
"'And there's that pigeon-shooting. Goes on all day. I hate taking life—even if I could—'
"'You've once before,' said I, 'suspected me of being careless about the sufferings of animals; and you've, apologised. Shall we call it off? I don't shoot pigeons anyway.'
"'Me either,' Farrell agreed heartily. 'I'm here for fresh air and exercise. Don't mind confessing to you I've no great fancy for this place. Man told me at dayjooney this morning he'd just come in from sitting under the palms before the Casino entrance. … All of a sudden a young fellow walked out and shot himself there, point-blank. Man who told me doesn't take any interest in play—over from Mentone for the day, just to see things.—Well, this young fellow, as I say, shot himself—put revolver to his forehead—there on the steps. And by George, sir, he was mopped up and into a sack within twenty seconds! One porter ready with sack, another to help, third with sponge to mop steps—stage clear almost before you could rub your eyes. … I just tell it to you as it was told to me, and by a man pretty far gone in consumption, so that you'd say he'd be cautious about lying.'
"I lit another cigar. 'With so priceless a fool as this,' I said to myself, 'you must not be in a hurry, John Foe.' Aloud I said, 'I've no passion either, for this place. I wanted to see it, and I've seen it. I'll knock in at your room at eight o'clock, if that will suit you, and we'll discuss plans. For my part, I had a mind to go back to Cannes and start for a ramble among the Esterel.'"
"To be brief, we struck the bargain and—incredible as you may find it—have been running in double harness ever since.… I couldn't have believed it myself, in prediction: but here it is—and until a few hours ago Farrell never guessed.
"No: that is wrong. He never guessed at all. I told him.
"It came to me, after the first week, as habitually as daily bread. We put in a couple of days at Mentone, another couple at Nice; then for a fortnight we made Cannes our centre, with a trip up to Grasse and several long tramps among the mountains. After that came St. Tropez, Costebello, Toulon, Marseilles, Montpellier—with excursions to Aigues-Mortes, the Pont du Gard and the rest of it. From Montpellier we turned right about on our tracks; took Cannes again, Antibes; drove along the whole Corniche in a two-horse barouche. There was a sort of compact that we'd do the whole Riviera—French and Italian—as thoroughly as tourists can do it; and we did—from Montpellier to Bordighera, from Bordighera to Genoa. And he never guessed.
"I had two bad moments; by which I mean moments of unscientific impatience, sudden unworthy impulses to kill him and get rid of the job. Unscientific, unworthy—unsportsmanlike—to kill your priceless fish before he has even felt the hook!
"The second bad moment I overcame (I am proud to report) of my own strength of will. It happened at a bend of the Corniche, when our driver pulled up on the edge of a really nasty precipice and invited us to admire the view. It being the hour for dejeuner, we haled our basket out of the carriage, and spread our meal on the parapet. Farrell sat perched there with his back to the sea, and made unpleasant noises, gnawing at a chicken-bone. I wanted to see how he'd fall backwards and watch him strike the beach.…
"Well, I was glad when the impulse was conquered and I had proved my self-control: because the previous temptation had been a close call, and I believe it would have bowled me out but for a special interposition of—Providence.
"We were following up a path in the Esterel: a little gorge of a path cut by some torrent long since dried. The track had steep sides—fifteen to twenty feet—right and left, and was so narrow that we took it single file. I was leading.
"Now, on our way westward out of Cannes, that morning, we had passed the golf-links, and Farrell had been talking golf ever since. I don't know why golf-talk should have such power to infuriate those who despise that game. But so it is, Roddy.
"I had the weapon in my pocket. I had my fingers on it as I trudged along, and was saying to myself, 'Why not here? In the name of common sense, why not here? Why not here and now?'— when a leveret, that had somehow bungled its footing on the high bank above, came tumbling down, not three yards ahead of us. The poor little brute picked itself up, half-stunned, caught sight of us, and made a bolt up the path ahead. From this side to that it darted, trying to climb and escape; but again and again the bank beat it, and from each spring it toppled back; and we followed relentlessly.
"At the end of two hundred yards it gave in. It just lay down in the path like a thing already dead and waited for what we should choose to do.
"I picked it up. I showed it to Farrell, keeping my fingers on the faint little heart.
"'They say,' said I, 'it's lucky when a hare pops out in your path. What do you think?'
"'Worth carrying home?' said Farrell. 'I'm partial to hare. But he's a bit undersized for Leadenhall Market'—and the fool laughed.
"'We'll let him go,' said I.
"'I guess he's too far scared to crawl,' he suggested doubtfully.
"'Turn about and watch,' said I. 'It may have escaped your memory that you once accused me of being cruel to animals. Turn about, and watch. Don't move.'
"I undid the three upper buttons of my waistcoat, stowed the little fellow down inside, against my shirt, leaving his head free, so that I could stroke his ears and brainpan. I let Farrell see this, stepped past him, and walked slowly back down the path. At the end of twenty paces I lifted the little beast out, set him on the ground, and walked on. He shook his ears twice, then lopped after me like a dog, at a slow canter. At the point where he had tumbled I collected him again by the ears, lifted him, climbed the bank and restored him to his thicket, into which he vanished with a flick of his white scut.
"Then I went back very slowly to Farrell. 'Curious things, animals,' said I. 'If you don't mind, we won't talk any more golf to-day.'"

NIGHT THE TENTH.

PILGRIMAGE OF HATE.

"A map scored with the zigzags of our route would suggest the wanderings of a couple of lunatics. But that was the way of it. I would turn up at breakfast any morning and propound some plan for a new divagation. Farrell never failed to fall in with it. For a time, of course, I had him in places whence, with his ignorance of France, he might have found it hard to escape back to his own form of civilisation. But even when he had picked up enough of the language to ask for a railway ticket and something to eat, his reliance on me continued to be pathetic, dog-like.
"I know something of dogs. I have no experience of marriage. But from time to time I put this question to myself: 'Here is a widower—free, as he tells me, after twenty-seven years of married life almost entirely spent at Wimbledon. It is inconceivable that he did not, during that considerable period, look at least once or twice across the table at the late Mrs. Farrell and ask himself if the business was to go on for ever.' I supposed, Roddy, that the two had been in love, as such creatures feel the emotion. 'Well then,' thought I, 'here are we two, the one hating and hiding his hate, thrown together in constant companionship. How long will it take the other, who has never cut an inch of the ice encasing that hatred, before he finds my society intolerable?'
"That was the question; and I had the answer to-day.
"From Genoa we actually harked back to Cahors, for an aimless two weeks among the upper waters of the Lot and the Tarn. I led him over the roof of France, as they call it. I sweated him down valleys to Ambialet, to Roc-Amadour, I threaded him through limestone caverns wherein I could have cut his throat and left him, never to be missed. We struck up for the provincial gaieties of Toulouse. We attended the Opera there— Il Trovatore—and Farrell wept in his seat. I can see the tears now—oozing out between the finger-stalls of a pair of white-kid gloves he had been inspired to buy at the Bon Marche. We also went to the theatre, where the company performed Les Vivacites du Capitaine Tic.
"At the conclusion of this harmless comedy, Farrell said a really good thing. He said it was funny enough and even instructive if you looked at it from the right point of view; but for his part (and I might call him advanced if I chose) he liked the sort of musical comedy in which you spice a chicken to make 'em all fall in love when they've eaten it; or at least, if it's to be legitimate comedy, one in which they take off their clothes and go to bed by mistake.
"So we came on to Paris, and here we are at the Grand Hotel. Farrell's notion of Paris, was of course, the Moulin Rouge, and the kind of place on Montmartre where they sing some kind of blasphemy while a squint-eyed waiter serves you cocktails on a coffin.
"We were solemnly giving way to this libidinous humbug last night when he leaned back and said to me, 'This is all very well, Doctor; and I'm glad to have had the experience. But do you know what I want at this moment?'
"'Say on,' said I, looking up to return the nod of an acquaintance—a young American, Caffyn by name—who had risen from a table not far from ours and was making his way out. On a sudden impulse I called after him, 'Hi! Caffyn!'
"'Hallo!' Caffyn turned about and came strolling back. He is a long lantern-jawed lad with a sardonic drawl of speech. He has spent two years in the ville lumiere, having come to it moth-like from somewhere afar in Texas. His ambition—no, wait!—the ambition of his father, a 'cattle king,' is that he should acquire the difficult art of painting in oils. 'Want me?' asked Caffyn, as I pushed a chair for him. 'What for? If it's to admire the 'rainbow' you've been mixing, I'm a connoisseur and I don't pass it. Your hand's steady enough, one or two lines admirably defined, but you've gotten the pink noyau and the parfait amour into their wrong billets. If, on the other hand, you want me to drink it, I'll see you to hell first."… Then, as I introduced him, "Good evening, Mr. Farrell. I am pleased to meet you in this meretricious haunt of gaiety. If I may be allowed to say so, you set it off, sir.'
"'Sit down a moment,' said I. 'We didn't intrude upon your solitary table, thinking—'
"'I know,' he caught me up. 'Natural delicacy of Britishers— 'Here's a fellow learning to take his pleasures sadly. We'll give him time.' And I, gentlemen, allowed that it was 'way down in Cupid's garden—Damon and Pythias discovered hand in hand—no gooseberries, by request.… If you'd like to be told how I was occupied, I was chewing—ay, marry and go to— I was one with my distant father's most fatted calf—fed up and chewing.'
"'And if you'd like to know how we were occupied,' said I, 'we were both wanting something—and the same thing. We haven't told one another what it is, and you are called in to guess.'
"'Oh, a thought-reading seance. Right.' He turned the chair about, sat on it straddle-wise and crossed his arms over the curved top bar. 'Let me see,' he mused, leaning forward, pulling at his cigar and bringing his eyes, after they had travelled over the crowd, back firmly to us. ''Two souls with but a single thought,'' he quoted, ''two hearts that beat as one.'… Well, now, if you were of my country and from my parts I'd string you like two jays on one perch—How say'st, prithee, and in sooth yes, sure! I'd sing you The Cowpuncher's Lament, sweet and low, with tears in my voice. As it is, I'll be getting the local colour a bit smudged, maybe: but I guess— I guess,' said Caffyn—and his gaze seemed to turn inward and become far withdrawn—'I guess—'O Hardy, kiss me ere I die!'— No, that's wrong: it isn't the cockpit of the Victory. It's the after-saloon of the Calais-Dover packet—shortest route—and I see you two there at table, eating cold roast beef, underdone, with plain boiled potatoes. With plain boiled potatoes—yes, and mixed pickles.' He passed a hand over his eyes. 'Excuse me, gentlemen; the vision is blurred just here— if someone would kindly shoot that lady on the stage and stop her—it's not much to ask, when she's exposing so much of her personality—How the devil can I tell the difference between mixed pickles and piccalilli while she's committing murder on the high C? Passez outre.… I see you eating like men who haven't seen Christian food for years; yet you are swallowing it in a hurry that almost defeats the blessed taste; because one of you has just shouted up, with his mouth full, a command to be informed as soon as ever the white shore of Albion can be spied from deck. It is a race with Time—Shakespeare's Cliff against a pickled onion.… Oh, have done! have done!'
"'Thank you, Caffyn,' said I. 'You may come out of your trance. You have done admirably.'
"'Wonderful,' breathed Farrell; and he breathed it heavily. 'I won't say I'd actually arrived at a plain-boiled potato—'
"'But it was floating in your brain,' I chimed him down. 'Such is the province of imaginative art, of poetry, as defined by that great Englishman, Samuel Johnson. It reproduces our common thoughts with a great increase of sensibility.'
"'Mr. Caffyn has put it rightways, anyhow,' Farrell insisted. 'Look here, Doctor'—he calls me by that title and none other— 'What's the programme for to-morrow.'
"'Versailles,' said I.
"'Then we'll make it so. But, the day after, I'm for England. … I don't mind telling you, Mr. Caffyn, that the Doctor and me hit it off first-class.'
"'I've noted it,' said Caffyn quietly.
"'And it's the rummier,' Farrell pursued, 'because him and me— or, as I should say, he and I—started this tour upon what you might call a mutual—what's the word? misunderstanding?—no, I have it—antipathy. Is that correct, Doctor?'
"'Perfectly,' I agreed.
"'T'tell the truth,' confessed Farrell, 'I've always been up against schoolmasters; yes, all my life. They've such a—such a—well, as this ain't Wimbledon, one may speak it out—such a bloody superior way of giving you information. Now if there's one thing in th' world I 'bominate, it's information.' Farrell threw a fierce glance around the dining tables as if defiantly making sure of his ground. 'But I'll say this for the Doctor; he never gives you any. That is, you have to pump for it.… But we've had, we two, a daisy of a time. The great thing about travel, Mr. Caffyn, is that it enlarges the mind. Yes, sir, and in Doctor Foe's company you positively can't help it.'
"'I'm sorry, Farrell,' said I.
"'Sorry?' he exclaimed. 'Why should you be sorry? I like having a—a wider outlook on things, provided it ain't banged in a man's eye. In fact, I don't mind confessing to you, Mr. Caffyn, here in the Doctor's presence, that this has been a great experience for me. I've had a good time, as I believe, sir, they say in your country. But I look around me'—here Farrell looked again and almost theatrically around the feast of Comus—'and I say that, be it never so homely, give me Wimbledon to wind up. You and me, Doctor—or, as I might say, you and I, are for home, after all—and the old cooking. Our ways henceforth may lie separate; but we've a bond in common and any time you care to look me up at Wimbledon I shall be most happy. We'll crack a bottle to our travels.'
"'Right,' I agreed. 'Caffyn, will you make a note of at too?'
"'And Mr. Caffyn—at any time—Goes without saying,' pursued Farrell.
"'Right,' agreed Caffyn."
"That was yesterday, Roddy. This morning, as ever is, Farrell and I started, according to programme, for Versailles. I could see that his mind had been running on Caffyn's words; that he was dying to get back to Wimbledon; yes, and almost dying to be quit of me.
"I had been waiting for this. I had known that the moment would come, and wondered a score of times that it took so long in coming. As unmarried men, Roddy, you and I are out of our depth here. But surely—I hark back to it—it must happen to one or other of every married couple to look across the table and realise the words Till death us do part. When it happens to both simultaneously I suppose murder follows; or, at least, divorce.
"Talking about murder, I've to confess that at Versailles I felt the impulse again. You know that infernal Galerie des Glaces? Well, of a sudden the multiplication of Farrell's face and the bald spot at the back of his head came near to overpowering me. We had escaped, too, from the wandering sightseers, and stood isolated at the end of the vast hall.… High sniffing dilettanti may say what they like, but Versailles is what Jimmy would call a 'knock-out.' The very first view of the Grand Avenue had knocked Farrell out, at all events, and he had stared at the great fountains, and followed me through courts and galleries in mere bedazement, speechless, with eyes like a fish's, round and bulging and glassy.… He looked so funny, standing there… so small… and yet actually, I suppose, taller than the late King Louis Quatorze by three inches. … Somewhere outside on a terrace a band was playing things from the Mariage de Figaro—Figaro, at Versailles of all places!… In short the world had gone pretty mad for a moment, and for that moment I felt that, in this bizarrerie of contrast it might dignify our quarrel if Farrell died amid such magnificent surroundings.… But I conquered the impulse all right: and this, the third time, was the easiest."
"I got him away to the Little Trianon: and there in its gardens— as you would lay in the shade a patient suffering from sunstroke—I conducted him to a seat under the spring boughs beside the little lake that reflects the Hameau. He stared on the green turf at our feet, and across at the grouped rustic buildings, all as pretty as paint, and came out of his stupor with a long sigh.
"'A-ah!' he murmured. 'That's better! That does me good.'
"Then I knew that it was coming: that I must break his fate to him. I even gave him the prompt-word.
"'Homelike,' I suggested.
"'You've hit it,' he said, and paused. 'No place like Home! I'm glad enough to have seen all that show yonder.' He waved a hand. 'But I wouldn't be one of these kings, not if you paid me.… Look here, we'll cross to-morrow, eh? Of course, if you prefer to stay behind—'
"'I'm not going to stay behind,' said I, throwing away my cigarette.
"'Capital! We'll wind up with a dinner at the Savoy—'
"'Cold roast beef and mixed pickles,' I put in.
"He chuckled. 'Clever fellow, that Caffyn—made my mouth water, he did. We'll wind up at the Savoy, and talk over another trip that we'll take together, one of these days. For I shall miss your company, Doctor.'
"'No, you won't,' said I, lighting a fresh cigarette.
"He stared at me for a moment as if slightly hurt in his feelings. Then: 'Don't contradict,' he said sharply, and laughed as I stared in my turn. 'Expression of yours,' he said. 'Sounds rude; but all depends how you say it. I reckon I've caught up the accent—eh?—by the quick way you looked up.… I hadn't much school and never went to College: but I've studied you, Doctor, and I'll improve.'
"'Well, then,' said I, nettled and less inclined to spare him,' I'm sorry to contradict you, Mr. Farrell, but you are never going to miss my company—never, until your life's end.'
"'What d'ye mean?' he blurted: and I suppose there was something in my look that made him edge off an inch or two on the rustic seat.
"'Simply this,' I answered. 'Ten or a dozen weeks ago you made yourself the instrument to destroy something twenty times more valuable than yourself. I am not speaking of what you killed in me, nor of the years of application, the records, measurements, analyses which you hoofed into nothing with no more thought than a splay coon's for an ant-heap. Nor will I trouble you with any tale of the personal hopes I had built on them, for you to murder. The gods suffer men of your calibre to exist, and they must know why. But I tell you this, though you may find it even harder to understand. Science has her altars, and her priests. I was one, serving an altar which you defiled. And by God, Peter Farrell, upholsterer, the priest will pursue!'
"He drew back to the end of the seat and fairly wilted. His terror had no more dignity than a sheep's. He cast an eye about for help. There was none. 'You're mad!' he quavered. 'If we were in England now—What is it you're threatening?'
"'Nothing that you could take hold of, to swear information against me,' I answered, 'even if you were in England now—now that April's here. Or is it May? I shall probably end by killing you; but I have tested my forbearance, and now know that it will happen at my own time, place, and convenient opportunity. That's a threat, eh? Well, there's no hurry about it, and you couldn't do anything with it, even at home in merry England. You couldn't put up a case that you go in bodily fear of me—as you're beginning to do—when I can call Caffyn ('Clever fellow, Caffyn!') to witness that only last night you desired no end to our acquaintance. Besides, my acquaintance is all I propose to inflict on you, just yet.'
"He jumped up, and faced me. He was thoroughly scared, and no less thoroughly puzzled. To do him justice, he had pluck enough, too, to be pretty angry.
"'I don't know what you mean!' he broke out. 'I don't know what you're driving at, mad or not.… The moment we crossed one another I hated you—Yes, damn you, first impressions are truest after all! Later, I was weak enough, thinking I'd injured you, to—to—' He broke down feebly. 'What sort of devil are you?' he demanded, mopping his forehead. 'You can't hurt me, I say. What is it you threaten?'
"'Only this,' said I. 'You have been a married man for a number of years, and therefore can probably appreciate better than I what it means. But you know my feeling for you, as I know yours towards me.… Well, I propose to be your companion in this world and until death do us part.… You may dodge, but I shall be faithful; you may slip, run, elude, but I shall quest. But your shadow I am going to be, Mr. Farrell; and ever, when you have hit a place in the sun, it shall be to start and find me—a faithful hound at your side. I have put the fear on you, I see. Waking or sleeping you shall never put that fear off. … And now,' said I, rising and tapping another cigarette on my case, 'let me steer you back to the railway-station. You will prefer to dine alone to-night and think out your plans. I shall be thinking out mine at the Ambassadeurs.'"
"So that's how it happened, Roddy. You might post me £100 to the Grand Hotel, Biarritz: for I'm running short. The hunt is up, and he's breaking for South."
"J. F."

NIGHT THE ELEVENTH.

SCIENCE OF THE CHASE.

I'm an imperfect Christian: but I read Jack's long letter three times over, and at each reading I liked it the less. Before posting an answer I handed the thing to Jimmy; who spent a morning over it, helping himself—a sure sign of a troubled spirit—to tobacco indifferently from his own jar and mine. When nothing troubled him— that is to say, as a rule—he invariably used mine. I left him ruminating; went out, did some business, and met him again at our usual luncheon-table at the Bath Club.

"I believe," said Jimmy reflectively at luncheon, "that my way with Farrell was the better, after all.… You'll admit that it did the trick, and without causing any offence to anybody. Well, if you ask me how to deal with the Professor, I'll be equally practical. Starve him off."

"No good," said I. "If I cut off supply, he'll only come back, demand his money and be off on the trail again. Indeed, he may turn up in these rooms to-morrow: for it's ten to one, on my reckoning, that Farrell will pretty soon break back for home."

"All the easier, then," said Jimmy. "Save you the trouble of writing a letter. When he comes for his money, tell him you're freezing on to it."

"But, man alive! it's Jack's money. You wouldn't have me thieve, would you?… As for the letter, I've written it; in fact you may say that I've written two, or, rather, assisted at their composition. Here is one of them, in copy. It explains the other, which is a half-sheet of instructions now in my lawyer's possession. I shall have to write a third presently, explaining to Jack—"

"I don't like letter-writing," interrupted Jimmy, "and I shun solicitors. Which is anticipatory vengeance: as soon as I'm called, and in practice, they'll be active enough in shunning me. Otty, you need a nurse. What the devil do you want with consulting solicitors, when you can have my advice, legal or illegal, gratis?"

"Listen to this," said I:—

"Thistleton Chambers,"
"29a Essex Street, Strand, W.C.,"
"May 12th, 1907."
"Dear Sir,—Our client, Sir Roderick Otway, Bart., has to-day transferred to our account the sum of £6,500(six thousand, five hundred pounds), representing a sum received by him from you, to be administered on conditions which, after reconsidering them, he finds himself unable to accept.
"Sir Roderick instructs us that you will draw on us at your convenience for any sum or sums under this cover. This, of course, pending notification of your wish that we should transfer the account elsewhere.
"Acting on our client's further instructions, we hereby enclose in registered envelope circular notes value £100. Kindly acknowledge receipt and oblige."
"Yours faithfully,
"B. NORGATE,
"for Wiseman and Norgate,
"Solicitors.
"To
"J. Foe, Esq., D.Sc.,
"Grand Hotel,
"Biarritz."

Jimmy looked me straight, and asked, "Is that letter posted?"

"It is," I answered. "I told Norgate that, as a matter of honour, Jack's letter ought to be answered promptly. That's why I lost no time this morning. Not being quite certain of the earliest post to France, he made sure by sending off the office-boy straight to St. Martin's-le-Grand."

"Then no taxi will avail us," groaned Jimmy, "and I must call for a liqueur brandy instead.… Oh, Otty—you must forgive the old feud: but why did your parents send you to Cambridge? Mine sent me to a place where I had at least to sweat up forty pages or so of a fellow called Plato. Not being able to translate him, I got him more or less by heart. Here's the argument, then.… Supposing a friend makes a deposit with you, that's a debt, eh? Of course it is. But suppose it's a deposit of arms, or of money to buy arms, and he comes to you and asks for it when he's not in his right senses, and you know he's not, and he'll—like as not—play the devil with that deposit, if you restore it. What then?"

"If I thought that Farrell was in danger," I mused; "that's to say, in any immediate danger—"

"Rats!" said Jimmy contemptuously. "Farrell's a third party. Why drag in a third party? The Professor's your friend; and he's made a deposit with you: and you don't need to think of anyone but him. For he's mad.… Now, come along to the smoking-room, where I've ordered them to take the coffee, and where I'll give you ten minutes to pull up your socks and do a bit of thinking."

"Maybe you're right, Jimmy," said I as we lit our cigarettes. "And if so, it's pretty ghastly.… He's had enough to put him off his hinge. But somehow I can't bring myself—No, hang it! I've always looked on Jack as the sanest man I've ever known. If he has a failing it's for working everything out by cold reason."

"Just what he's doing at this moment," answered Jimmy dryly. "If you don't like the word 'mad' I'll take it back and substitute 'balmy,' or anything you like. Madness is a relative term; and I should have thought that what you call working-everything-out-by-cold-reason was a form of it. I know jolly well that if I felt myself taken that way I should go to a doctor about it. And if you're going to practise it on the subject just now before the committee, I shall leave the chair and this meeting breaks up in disorder."

"The point is," said I, "that the letter has gone."

"What address?" he asked pouring out the coffee.

"Biarritz, Grand Hotel—Why surely you read it?"—I stared at him, but he was looking down on the cups. Then of a sudden I understood. "Jimmy," I said humbly, "I've been an ass."

"Ah," said he, "I'm glad you see it in that light.… The afternoon mail has gone: but there's the night boat. You can't telegraph, unfortunately. In his state of mind you mustn't warn him. You must catch him sitting."

"Look here," I proposed. "It will be a nuisance for you, Jimmy—it will probably bore you stiff. But if you'll only come along with me…"

"The implied compliment is noted and accepted," said Jimmy gravely. "The invitation must be declined, with thanks, though. Your mind is working better already. A few hours holiday off the L.C.C., and you'll find yourself the man you were. But the gear wants oiling. … Do you remember your betting me ten to one this morning, in a lucid interval, that Farrell would break for home? Well, I didn't take you up. I don't mind owning that, after you'd left, and after some thought, I told Jephson to pack both suit-cases. But that lawyer, with his infernal notion of dispatch in business, will have put money in the Professor's pocket some hours before you reach Biarritz. Money's his means of pursuit: and it's well on the cards that you'll find both your birds flown. You are going to Biarritz, Otty, for your sins—like Napoleon III. and other eminent persons before you: and you'll have, unlike the historical character just named, to go alone for your sins. For on your ten-to-one odds that Farrell breaks for home it's obvious that I remain and keep goal. Now what you have to do is to make for the bank and get out some money, while I take a swim in the tank here. After that," added Jimmy, relapsing into frivolity, "I'll look up the Trades Directory for a respectable firm dealing in strait-waistcoats."

Well, there is no need to tell of my chase to Biarritz; for I arrived there only to be baulked. The porter who entered my name in elegant script, with many flourishes, in the Hotel Visitors' Book, informed me that the English Doctor had departed—it was four hours ago—to catch the night express for Paris. Here was the entry— "Dr. J. Foe, Chelsea, London." He had left no other address. "Had he a companion?" No, none. He had passed his time in solitary rambles: but on this, the last day, he had spent some time in writing furiously, up to the moment of departure.

The porter moved away to clear the letter-box, which stood pretty near the end of the table. I examined the register. Farrell's name was not among the entries.

They had assigned me my room, and I was about to take the lift and inspect, when I heard the porter say to himself, "Tiens, c'est drole, maintenant." He had the bundle of cleared letters in his hand and held out one. It was addressed to me in Jack's handwriting.

I pounced for it. "C'est a moi—Ceci s'expliquera, sans doute." The porter hesitated. "Une lettre timbree—c'est contre les regies, sinon contre la loi… mais puisque c'est pour monsieur, apparement—"

A ten-franc piece did the rest. I took the letter up to my chamber where I opened it and read—

[FOE to OTWAY]
"Grand Hotel, Biarritz.
"Dear Roddy,—I am obliged to you by receipt of your silly lawyer's letter enclosing £100; though what kind of salve it can spread on your conscience to commission a fellow called Norgate to do what you won't do at first hand I fail to perceive. However, have it your own way. I have an enemy who, with a little training, won't give me time to worry about my friends.
"Farrell is improving. It was difficult at first to get a move on a man of his stupidity, and I could only work on his one sensitive nerve, which is cowardice. He has imagination enough to be terrified of that which hides and doesn't declare itself whether for good or evil.
"My own early experiments have, I admit, been amateurish. But I shall acquire skill, and the appetite shall learn refinements, to keep it in health. I don't think it was bad sport, on the whole, to open with low comedy. It tickled me, anyhow, to watch Farrell emerge from a sort of bathing-machine upon the plage, moderately nude and quite unsuspicious—having given me that artful slip in Paris—and, approaching the machine from the rear, to insert his shirt-collar, with my card, into his left-hand shoe.
"That was the first card I left on him. He was putting up at the Albion—I had no need to search; for the local paper, of course, prints a Visitors' List which it collects from the hotels, and there my gentleman was, under his own name. (Oh, we're in the simple stages of the process, thus far, and he hasn't yet had recourse to so much as an alias.) But I didn't call on him at the Albion.
"I have since learnt from him that the discovery of my card in the bathing-machine shook him up—well, pretty much as the footprint on the sand shook up Robinson Crusoe. But there's a difference, as he'll learn, between being shaken and being scared into fits. At all events, he didn't bolt: for I kept out of sight and molested him no more that day. Next morning he took courage and started off for the golf-links, which lie out to the north, beyond the lighthouse. He was enjoying his liberty, you understand: for I had made him carry his clubs about and up and down the Riviera, but never allowed him to play. That was a part of our understanding. Also he may have had some hazy notion that, golf being to me as holy water to the Devil, he'd be safe out there, within a charmed circle.
"There's something in it, too, Roddy. And I've half a mind, if he doesn't wake up and improve, to offer him a handicap. He shall be safe, all the world over, when he can find a golf-course for sanctuary, and shall play his little game while I wait for him and:"
Sit on a stile
And continue to smile.
"I wonder what sort of a hell it would be, going round and round on endless rounds of golf—with a real Colonel Bogey sitting on the stile and watching.… But I make no promises, no offers, just now.
"He tells me that at the Club House he found a Golf Major of sorts—or, as he puts it, 'a compatriot, a military gentleman, retired, with a remarkable knowledge of India'—and seduced him into playing a round. I should gather that Farrell plays an indifferent game. At all events, the Golf Major was averse from a second round, and retiring to a table in the Club veranda allowed Farrell to call for—catch hold of your French, Roddy— 'Deux bieres, complet.' The waiter understood it to mean liquid refreshment and not a double funeral.… Over the drink the Golf Major, who had known Biarritz for twenty years, explained the difference between its old and its new golf-course, and informed Farrell that in the old one there had used to be the most sporting hole anywhere—for a beginner. You drove slap across a chasm of the sea: if you didn't land your ball neatly you were in the devil of a hole, and if you foozled you saw your ball dropping down, down, to the beach and the Atlantic. 'Too expensive for duffers altogether, especially when the price of balls rose. Only the caddies thrived on it, at the risk of their necks.… After this tiffin we'll stroll over and have a look at it.'
"So thither they strolled, and by and by started to amuse themselves with pot-shot drives from the old tee. The Major whacked his ball across to a neat lie time after time. Farrell muffed and foozled, wasting his substance in riotous slogging. The height of the cliff, maybe, dizzied his head.
"In this way I suppose he expended all his ammunition. At any rate there came a pause, and a small Basque boy in a blue beret began to descend the slope very cautiously, searching for lost balls in the scree. At the foot of the gully, where it funnelled to a sheer drop, I stepped from under my shelter and met the youngster, holding out a golf-ball. 'Here is one more,' said I—'Where are the two gentlemen gone?' He told me that they had gone back to the Club House. 'Then here is a franc for you,' said I, 'and here is a card which you will take with the ball and my compliments to the gentleman who cannot play golf so well as the other gentleman.'
"The lad grinned. We climbed the cliff together, and I saw him speed off to the Club House."
"I had thus left two cards on Farrell, and it was now his turn to call: which he duly did, and next day; not, however, at the Grand Hotel, but at a far more romantic place of entertainment.
"If you don't know this place—and I do not commend it to you for entertainment towards the close of the English season—let me tell you that, walking south from the town by paths that lead around the curves of the foreshore, you quickly lose Biarritz and find yourself in a deserted and melancholy country,—a sort of blasted heath that belongs to a fairy-tale. The great military road for Spain runs hidden, pretty wide on your left, among the lower foothills of the Pyrenees: and from it these foothills undulate down and drop over little cliffs to form a moorland with patches of salt marish. In spring, they tell me, the ground is all gay with scarlet anemones in sheets; but, when I took the path, their glory was over and but a few late flowers lingered. I happen, however, to like flowers for their scent more than for their colour: and the whole of this moor was a spilth of scent from bushes of the purple Daphne—its full flowering time over, but its scent lingering ghostlily on the salt wind from the sea. And the sea was forlorn as it always is in this inner bight of the Bay of Biscay, where no ships have any business and your whole traffic is a fishing-boat or two, or a thread of smoke out on the horizon. You are alone between sea and mountains; and all along the strip that separates them, while the sky is spring, the land and the sense of it are autumn.
"Now I don't know the history of it, but can only guess that once on a time some enterprising speculator, fired by the sudden Third-Empire blaze of Biarritz, conceived the project of starting a rival watering place, here to the South, and that they were to make its beginning with a colossal Hotel. At any rate, here, rounding a desolate point of the foreshore, I came upon a long desolate beach, and a long desolate building, magnificent of facade, new and yet ruinated, fronting the Bay with a hundred empty eye-sockets.
"It broke on the view with a shock. It made me glance over my shoulder to make sure of the real Biarritz not far behind. But three or four spits of land shut off that human, if vulgar, resort. Between me and the Pyrenees this immense ghastly sarcophagus of misdirected enterprise possessed the landscape, and I approached it. Yes, Roddy:"
Dauntless the slughorn to my lips I set,
And blew. Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.
"The horrible place turned out to be a mask—as I hope the Dark Tower did, after all, for Childe Roland. But it was a horrible mask. It had been started on foundations of good stone, with true French lordliness: but it parodied—or, rather, it satirised—the ambitious French tendency to impose architecture upon nature. Behind the facade, through which the wind whistled, all was an unroofed mass of rusted girders and joists; a skeleton framework about which I climbed—the first and last guest—conning and guessing where suites of rooms had been planned, to be adorned with Louis Seize furniture, for a host of fellow-guests that had never come and now would never arrive to make merry. I clambered along a girder, off which my heels scaled the rust in long flakes, and thrust my head through one of the great empty windows to take in the view.
"—Which was indeed magnificent. But my eye switched from it to a mean little human figure, moving along the foreshore with a gait which, even at a goodish distance, I recognised for Farrell's. It looked like a beetle creeping, nearing, across the flats and hummocks. But it was Farrell.
"He halted at some distance, as I had halted; arrested, as I had been arrested, at sight of the incongruous great structure, planted here. He drew close, cast a sort of questioning glance seaward, very deliberately drew a pair of field-glasses from a case slung over his shoulder, and focused them on the building, lifting them slowly.
"I had drawn back behind my window-jamb, yet so as to watch him. As he tilted the glasses upward, I leaned out.
"He stood for a moment, or two motionless. Then his hands sank, with the glasses clutched in them. He walked slowly away. When he judged himself hidden by a spit of the shore—but my window overlooked it—he broke into a run.
"I note that he is already beginning to reduce his figure.
"I returned the call that same evening. I dropped in on him as he took his seat to dine solus at the Albion. The dining-room, I should tell you, was fairly full. Usual ruck of people: sort of too-English; English you see at tables-d'hote and nowhere else in the world, with an end-of-season preponderance of females who stay to look after the British chaplain a little longer than he needs, or to gratify some obscure puritan pride in seeing everybody out, or because there's a bargain to be squeezed with the management to the last ounce, or peradventure because they've planned a series of cheap visits at home for our beautiful summer and one or two of the Idle Rich have remembered to be less idle than they were last year, and more restive.
"To do him credit—and it makes me hopeful for him—Farrell has a certain instinct of self-preservation. Let us never forget that he is a widower. Amid these Amazons he had fenced a bachelor table. I walked up to it straight and said, with a glance around, 'Farrell, you're lonely.'
"He passed a hand over his forehead and murmured, 'Oh, for God's sake—don't drive me like this!…'
"'Nonsense,' said I. 'Forget it, man. Look around you and say if there's one of these spinsters you'd rather have for companion. Don't raise your voice. You started in admirable key.… Let's keep to it and understand one another. I'm dining with you. If you like, we'll toss up later for who pays: but I'm dining with you. I promise not to hurt you to-night, if that helps conviviality.'
"'It does,' said he in a queer way. 'Let's talk.'
"'Well then,' said I confidentially. 'You're a solid man. You've made your way in the world, and I suppose the sort of success you've won implies some grit.… What makes you afraid of me, Farrell?'
"He drank some wine and stared down on the table-cloth, knitting his brows. 'Well,' he answered, 'I might tell you it's because you're mad.'
"'That's nonsense,' I assured him.
"'Oh, is it?' said he. 'I'd like to be sure it is.'
"'My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time," I quoted. 'Feel it, Farrell.'
"I stretched out my wrist. He started back as though it had been a snake.
"'On the whole you're right,' said I, drawing back my hand slowly, watching his eyes. 'If they saw you feeling my pulse the ladies around us would at once solve the doubt they have discussed in the drawing-room. All table-d'hote ladies speculate concerning their fellow-guests in the hotel.… . Thirty pairs of eyes were on the point of detecting you for a fashionable physician, and by this time to-morrow thirty ladies travelling in search of health would have found means to make your acquaintance and pump you for medical advice on the cheap.… Yes, Farrell, you have a lively instinct of self-preservation. I will note it.… Now tell me.—When I walked in just now, that same instinct prompted you to get up and run; to run as you did along the foreshore this afternoon. What restrained you?'
"'Why, hang it all,' he blurted with a look around; 'a fellow couldn't very well show up like that before all these ladies!'
"He meant it too, Roddy. It came out with a flush, plump and honest.
"It makes the chase more interesting. But I am annoyed with myself over the miscalculation.… I could have sworn he was a coward in grain. I marked all the stigmata.… And behold he can show fight!—at any rate in presence of the other sex.… Can something have happened to him, think you, since our talk at Versailles? Is it possible that I am educating the man?
"On top of this complicating discovery I made a simplifying one.
"You know that I have a knack with animals, in the way of handling their passions. I've never tried it on humans: for I've never laid down any basis of knowledge, and I've always detested empiricism. That study, as you remember, was to come.
"Well, I'll write further about it some day.… But I believe I have something like this power over Farrell.… I put out a feeler or two—to change metaphors, I waved a hand gently over the lyre, scarcely touching the strings; and it certainly struck me that they responded. You will understand that a table-d'hote was no place for pushing the experiment. And there were one or two men in the smoking-room when we sought it.
"Farrell found himself; talked, after a while, quite well and easily. In the smoking-room he told me a good deal about his early life: all bourgeois stuff, of course, but recounted in the manner that belongs to it, and quite worth listening to.
"He never wilted once, until I got up to go and drank what remained of my whisky-and-seltzer 'to our next merry meeting.' He followed me out to the hotel doorway to say Good night. We did not shake hands.
"There are indications that he will travel back north to-night. He has left for Pau, to play golf. At Dax this evening—mark my words—a solitary traveller may be observed furtively stealing on board the night express for Paris. He will be observed: but he won't be a solitary traveller.
"Your lawyer's letter—as I started by remarking—has arrived opportunely. If Farrell, as I suspect, intends to go through to London, I may reach you almost as soon as this letter, and shall add a piece of my mind for a postscript.—Yours,"
"J. F."

I slept the night at Biarritz and started back early next morning for London.

I found Jimmy recumbent in what he called his Young Oxford Student's Reading Chair, alone with the racing news in the evening papers.

"Hallo!" he greeted me. "I rather expected you just now. Let's go and dine somewhere."

"Has Jack turned up here?" I asked.

"'Course he has: Farrell too—Farrell first by a short head. Rather a good idea, my stopping at home to keep goal. Hard lines on you, though; all that journey for nothing.… If it's any consolation, the Professor was much affected when I told him of all the trouble you were taking, out of pure friendship, to fit him with a strait-waistcoat. 'Good old Roddy!' he said."

"No, he didn't," I interrupted. "And if he did, we'll cut that out. Tell me what happened."

"He said he had posted a letter to you from Biarritz: that it ought to have arrived by this time. I told him it hadn't, and it hasn't. If it had, I warn you I should have opened it."

"That's all right," I said. "I extracted it from the post-box at Biarritz, and have it here. You shall read it by and by. Go on."

"Well, in my opinion, the Professor's pulling your leg—or he and Farrell between 'em. If either's mad, it's Farrell; or else—which I'm inclined to suspect—Farrell's a born actor."

"Now see here," I threatened, "I've travelled some thousands of miles: I've spent two nights in the train and one in a French bedstead haunted by mosquitoes: I've had the beast of a crossing, and I'm in the worst possible temper. Will you, please tell me exactly what has happened?"

"You shall have the details over dinner," he promised affably. "For you've omitted the one observation that's relevant—your stomach is crying aloud for a meal. The Cafe Royal is prescribed."

"Not until I've had a tub and dressed myself. The dust of coal-brick—"

"That's all right, again.… I admonished Jephson. You'll find the bath spread and your clothes laid out in your bedder, and in five minutes or so Jephson will bring hot water in a lordly can. I, too, will dress.… But meantime, here are the outlines:

"Farrell knocked in early this morning. He was agitated and he perspired. He wished to see you at once. I pointed out that it was impossible and, as they say in examinations, gave reasons for my answer. Hearing it, he showed a disposition to shake at the knees and cling to the furniture. When he went on to discover that I might do in your place, and the furniture's place, and started clinging to me—well, I struck. I pointed out that he was apparently sound in wind and limb, inquired if he owed money, and having his assurance to the contrary, suggested that he should pull himself together and copy the Village Blacksmith.

"While we were arguing it, the Professor butted in. I'll do him the justice to say he wasn't perspiring. But he, too, was in the devil of a hurry to interview you. So I had to play band as before.

"The position was really rather funny. There, by the door, was the Professor, asking questions hard, and seemingly unaware that Farrell was anywhere in the room. Here was I, playing faithful Gelert life-size, but pretty warily, covering Farrell—who, for aught I knew, had gone to earth under the sofa. I couldn't hear him breathing—and he's pretty stertorous, as a rule.

"I kept a pretty straight eye on the Professor, somehow, and told him the facts—that you had sent the money ('Yes, I know,' said he: 'I got it before leaving Biarritz'): that you had actually gone to that health-resort in search of him. ('Good God!' said he. 'That's like old Roddy'—or some words to that effect. You wouldn't let me repeat 'em, just now.) Then he started telling me about this letter he'd posted at Biarritz, and that it should have arrived, by rights. 'Well, it hasn't,' said I, feeling pretty inhospitable for not asking him to sit down and have a drink.… But, you see, I wasn't certain he wouldn't sit down somewhere on top of Farrell.… 'Think he'll be home tonight?' asked the Professor. 'That's what I'm allowing, in the circumstances,' said I. '—But you owe him some apology, you know, because you've led him the devil of a dance.' 'Don't I realise that!' says he, like a man worried and much affected. 'We'll call around to-night, on the chance of his turning up to forgive us. Come along, Farrell!' says he.

"I whipped about; and there was Farrell, seated in that chair of yours, bolt upright, smirking as foolish as a wet-nurse at a christening! I couldn't have believed my eyes.… But there it was—and after what I'd been listening to, five minutes before!

"As I'm describing it, it staggered me—and the more when the Professor, looking past me, said, 'If you're ready, Farrell?' and Farrell stood up, smiling and ready, and moved to join him. But I kept what face I could.

"'You're going to look in again, you two?' I asked. The Professor said 'Yes, on the chance that Roddy may turn up'; and he looked at Farrell; and Farrell blinked and said, 'Yes, we owe him an explanation, of course.'

"'Well,' said I,' you'll be lucky if he don't throw you both downstairs for a pair of knockabout artists astray. I've a sense of humour that can stretch some distance, and with the permission of our kind friends in front this matinee performance will be repeated to-night, when Otty's sense of humour will gape for it, no doubt, after being stretched to the Pyrenees and back.'

"The Professor motioned Farrell out to the staircase. Then he came forward to me and said, pretty low and serious, 'You're a good boy, Jimmy. You're so good a boy that I want you to keep out of this. If Roddy turns up to-night, tell him that my man's for Wimbledon, safe and sound. On second thoughts, we won't bother a tired man, to-night, with any excuses or apologies. By to-morrow he will probably have had my letter, and will understand. He may or may not decide to show it to you. I hope he won't. I hope you'll let us see him alone to-morrow. Good-bye.'

"—Now what do you make of that?" demanded Jimmy helplessly.

"I make it out to be no jest, but pretty serious," said I. "But luckily Farrell's located at Wimbledon. Where's Jack?" I asked.

"Don't know," answered Jimmy.

"I'm tired enough for this night, anyhow," said I. "And here's Jephson.—'Evening, Jephson."

Jephson came in with a can in one hand and in the other a tray with a telegram upon it.

"Good evening, Sir Roderick! Glad to see you safe home, sir," said Jephson. "Telegram just delivered at the Lodge for Mr. Collingwood."

"For me?" said Jimmy. "I've backed nothing to-day. Been too busy."

He tore upon the envelope, read the message, and after a pause handed it to me, whistling softly. It had been handed in at the Docks Station, Liverpool, and it ran—

"Tell O. that F. and I sail to-night New York S.S. Emania.

"Foe."

THE "EMANIA".

I am going to spin the next stretch of this yarn—and maybe the next after it—in my own way. You will wonder how I happened by certain scraps of information: but you will understand before we come to the end.

It comes mainly from later report, but partly from documents which I have been too busy, of late, to sift. Here they are, all mixed: and I choose one only out of the heap—and that a passage which doesn't help the actual story much, though it may help the understanding of it. It occurs in a letter of Foe's written at sea and posted from New York—

"She had been reading a magazine, borrowed from the ship's library, and when she left me, she left it lying beside her deck-chair. The wind ruffled its pages and threatened to tear them: so I picked the thing up, and was about to close it, and to stow it behind her cushion, when a story-title caught my eye and agreeably whetted my curiosity. It was 'The Head Hunter.'

"I don't care greatly for short stories. Fiction as a rule bores me in inverse proportion to its length—which seems a paradox and liable to be reduced to the absurd by any moderately expert logician. Yet you will find it experimentally true of five readers out of six.… Moreover the yarn had little or nothing to do with real head-hunting—except in its preamble. I soon glanced at the end, and had no further use for the story.

"But I turned my attention back to the preamble and reread it twice. The fellow, an American, has a queer cocky irregular style: but he can write when he chooses: and in one shot he so fairly hit me between wind and water that I had to steal the book, carry it down to my cabin and copy out the passage for your benefit.… Yes, for yours: because it conveys something I've been wanting you to understand about this chase of mine, something I couldn't have put into words though I'd tried for a month. I enclose it herewith.…

"When I had finished my copying, I took the thing back, meaning to slip it under Miss Denistoun's cushion. But she had returned to her chair, and so I was caught red-handed. 'So it was you?' said she. 'What have you been doing with my magazine?' 'Skimming it,' said I—which was true enough, literally, but I didn't manage it very well. 'Did you find anything to interest you specially?' she asked. 'Well, yes,' I admitted;' I picked it up and lit on something that promised well: but the story came to nothing.' She gave me a glance and I felt sure she had spotted my awkwardness and was going to pursue the catechism. But she didn't. To my relief she harked back to our previous talk. At tea-time, however, she remembered to take the magazine away with her.… It has not yet been returned to store.…"

(ENCLOSURE)

"'Particularly during my stay in Mindanao had I been fascinated and attracted by that delightfully original tribe of heathen known as the head-hunters. Those grim, flinty, relentless little men, never seen, but chilling the warmest noonday by the subtle terror of their concealed presence, paralleling the trail of their prey through unmapped forests, across perilous mountain-tops, adown bottomless chasms, into uninhabitable jungles, always near, with the inevitable hand of death uplifted, betraying their pursuits only by such signs as a beast or a bird or a gliding serpent might make—a twig crackling in the awful sweat-soaked night, a drench of dew showering from the screening foliage of a giant tree, a whisper at even from the rushes of a water-level—a hint of death for every mile and every hour—they amused me greatly, those little fellows of one idea.'"

You observe that a lady has come into the story at last, as she was bound to do. (You will hear of another and a very different one by and by.) It is not my fault that she enters it so late—I tell of things as they occurred—though a clever writer would have dragged her in long before this. I wish to God I hadn't to bring her into it at all. I slipped out her surname just now.…

It was through being a friend of mine that she comes into it. Constantia Denistoun and I had ridden ponies, tickled for trout, bird-nested, tumbled off trees, out of duck-punts, through forbidden ice, and into every form of juvenile disgrace, together as boy and girl. Her father and mine had been college friends, and (I believe) had both fallen in love with my mother, at a College ball, and my father won—but all on an understanding of honourable combat. Denistoun set out to travel, quite in the traditional way of the Rejected One. He was a Yorkshire squire with plenty of money, and could afford the prescribed cure. He travelled as far as to Virginia, U.S.A., where he halted, and wooed and won the heiress of a wide estate of cotton and tobacco and a great Palladian house, all devastated and ruined by the War, in which her father had fallen, one of Lee's pet leaders of cavalry.… Yes, I know it sounds like a tale out of Ouida: but such things happen, and this thing happened.… Denistoun scaled the twenty steps of the Ionic portico, cleft his way through the cobwebs and briers that were living and dying for Dixie, kicked over the grand piano that Dinah's duster still reverentially spared, and carried off the enchanted Princess across the seas to Yorkshire: where in due course she bore him a daughter, Constantia, and, some years later, a son who eventually came into the property but doesn't come into the story.

In the meantime it had happened that I saw the light.… My mother died, a year later: and after seven years of widowhood my father married again. My sister Sally—the recipient of those long letters you see me inditing o' nights—is my step-sister, and an adored one at that.

There you have the family history, or enough of it. The old friendship between my father and Squire Denistoun had never been broken; and now that death had taken away the last excuse for a rivalry which had been felt but to be renounced, Constantia and I— unconscious brats—shared holidays, as it chanced at my home or hers, in nefarious poaching beside Avon or in gallops between her northern moors and the sea.

That is all, or almost all. I have to add that, having fallen into most scrapes with her, I ended by proposing one in which she gently but decisively declined to share the risk.… I am inclined to think that, having been so frank with her, and so frequent, in confidences about others to whom my heart was lost, she may have missed the bloom on the recital.… But there it was; and that's that, as they say.

I accused her at the time of a priggish, unnatural craving for things of the intellect. All my excuse was that at a certain time of her life she took a sudden turn for reading and setting queer new values on things. But she was always a sportswoman, a woman of the open air, and—here's the point—always knowledgeable with animals and always beloved by them, but always (as it seemed to me) inclined to be severe and disciplinary. To a lean pack she was Diana; they fawned behind her for no pay but hope of her word to let slip. But she would beat them off the piled platter, and from a fed lap-dog she could scarcely restrain her hands. If you think this hasn't to do with the story, I can only assure you that it has.

One thing more—She had met Foe; for the first time at a luncheon-party in my rooms at Cambridge, in May Week; a second time, it may be, at a May Week ball—but that wouldn't count, for she danced divinely and Foe couldn't compete for nuts. She may have met him once or twice afterwards, in London. It's not likely.

Anyhow (as she has told me since) she recognised him at once when he turned up on the Emania.

She and her mother were bound out to visit some friends at Washington, thence to fare South and stay a while with a cousin who held the old homestead in which her mother retained some sort of dower share.

Thus she recognised Foe as soon as he appeared on deck.

But he did not appear on deck until the Emania was well out from Queenstown; having made sure that Farrell didn't bolt there. The two—need I tell it?—had not taken passage in collusion. Farrell was escaping, Foe on his trail. But Foe had no idea of any dramatic surprise on board. Having made sure of his man, he just took a remnant first-class berth at the last moment, turned in, and went to sleep.

In all their commerce (you will have begun to remark) Foe and Farrell were apt to yield, at intervals, to an abandonment of weariness, but so that they alternated, the exhaustion of one seeming ever to double the other's fever. Foe sought his bunk and lay there like a log. Farrell, after the first shock of reading his pursuer's name in the Passengers' Book—where it sprang to his eyes fair and square—fell to haunting the passage-way, low down in the vessel, on which one dreadful door refused to open. His terror of it so preoccupied him that he forgot to feel sea-sick. But the steward of those nether regions marked him, by the electric lamps, as a lurking passenger to be watched; and wondered who, at that depth in the ship, could be carrying valuables to tempt a middle-aged gentleman who (if looks were any guide) ought to be up and losing money to the regular card-sharpers.

It was not until the second day out, and pretty late in the afternoon, that Foe emerged from his cabin, neatly dressed and hale. (Unlike some Professors I have known, Jack kept his clothes brushed and his hair cut.) As he opened his door his ear caught a slight shuffling sound; whereupon he smiled and stepped quickly down the passage to the turn of the companion way.

"No hurry, Farrell!" he called; and Farrell, arrested, turned slowly about on the stair. "Man, you're like the swain in Thackeray:"

Although I enter not,
Yet round about the spot
Oft-times I hover—

"Solicitous, were you?—thought I might be sea-sick?"

"I was wondering," Farrell stammered. "Seeing that you didn't turn up at meals—"

(Here I must read you a queer remark from the letter in which Jack reported this encounter. Here's the extract:—)

"Do you know, Roddy, that silly simple answer gave me half a fright for a moment, or a fright for half a moment—I forget which.… What I had to remember then was my discovery that I had my second keyboard in reserve and could pull certain stops out of him at will.… But seriously, I wouldn't, without that power, back myself in this experiment against a man who obstinately persisted in forgiving. It came on me with a flash—and I offer this tribute to the Christian religion."

Foe's answer was, "Very kind of you. As a fact, I have been subsisting on hard biscuit and weak whisky-and-water: though I'm an excellent sailor, as they say.… It's a diet that suits me when I'm working hard."

"Working?" exclaimed Farrell. "What? Head-work, d'you mean?… Doctor, this is the best news you could have told me. If only I could know that you were picking up your interests—getting back to yourself—"

Foe took him by the arm. "It's no good, unfortunately," he answered. "Come up on deck, and I'll tell you."

On deck he repeated, "It's no good. I've been hard at it, working on my memory, trying to sketch out a kind of monograph—summary of conclusions—salvage from the wreck. But it won't do. It was an edifice to be built up on data, bit by bit, like an atoll.… Ever seen a coral reef, by the way? We'll inspect one—many perhaps—on our travels.… I'd burn in the pit rather than smatter out popular guess-work. Yes, all personal pride apart, I couldn't do it. But however badly I set down conclusions, they've all rested on data, they've all grown up on data, and I haven't the data.… I wrote out half a dozen pages and then asked myself, 'What would you say if a man came along professing to have made this discovery? You'd demand his evidence, and you'd be right. Of course you'd be right. And if he didn't produce it, you'd call him a quack. Right again.'… From this personal point of view, to be sure, I might take this sorry way out—print my conclusions, and anticipate the demand for evidence by throwing myself overboard.… In the dim and distant future some fellow might strike the lost path, take the pains that I've taken, work out the theory, yes, and (it's even possible) be generous enough to add that, by some freak of guessing, in the year 1907, a certain Dr. John Foe, of whom nothing further is known, did, in unscientific fashion, hit on the truth, or a part of the truth. Oh, damn! Why should I burn in the pit, or throw myself overboard, or go down to the shades for a quack, because a thing like you has crawled out of the Tottenham Court Road.… Eh? Well, I won't, anyhow: and so you see how it is, and how it's going to be."

Farrell leaned against the rail, and held to a boat's davit, while his gaze wandered vaguely out over the Atlantic as if it would capture some wireless message. ("I knew how it would be," adds Foe in his letter reporting this talk. "He was going to try the forgive-and-forget with me: but by this time I was sure of myself.")

"Listen to me, Doctor," Farrell began. "Listen to me, for God's pity! I didn't get off at Queenstown, though I knew you were on board—"

"No use if you had," put in Foe. "You don't think I had overlooked that possibility, do you?"

"Well, I didn't, anyway," was the answer. "And I'll tell you why. Honest I will.… We're both here and bound for America, ain't we? And, from what I've heard, there's no such expensive, bright, up-to-date laboratories—if that's the way to pronounce it—as you'll find in the States, in every walk of Science. Now, I never meant you an injury, Doctor; but I did you one—that I freely own.… What I say is, if money can make any amends, and if there's an outfit for science to be found in the States to your mind, why, I'll improve on it, sir. And I'm not saying it, as you might suppose, under any threat, but because I've been thinking it out and I mean it. I'm a childless man—"

Foe cut him short here. "My only trouble with you, Farrell," said he, "is that you may reach your grave without understanding. If I thought that wasn't preventible somehow, it would save me trouble to wring your neck here and now and throw you overboard. As it is—"

But, as it was, along the deck just then came Constantia Denistoun, with her mother leaning on her arm and a maid following. She recognised Foe and halted.

"Why, good Heavens!… and I'd no idea that you were on the Emania," said she. "Mother, this is Mr. Foe—Roddy's friend, you know.… Or ought I to call you Doctor, or Professor, or what?… You weren't anything of that sort anyhow, when we met— how many years ago? at Cambridge."

—That, or to that effect.… Constantia told me afterwards that she didn't remember throwing more than a glance at Farrell, whom she took, very pardonably, to be a chance acquaintance from the smoking-room, picked up as such acquaintances are picked up on ship-board. And Farrell stood back a couple of paces. To do him justice, he was in no wise a thruster.

"It's odd," she went on, "that we haven't run across one another until this moment. What's your business, over yonder? if that's not a rude question."

"It's a natural one, anyhow," Foe answered. "My business? Well, it has been suggested to me that a trip in the States, to see what they're doing in the way of scientific outfit and, maybe, get hints for a new laboratory, might not be waste of time."

"Yes, I know; I've heard," she said softly. "It's splendid to find you taking it like this… picking up the pieces, eh?… I wonder if"—she hesitated—"if I might ask you some questions? … Just as much as you choose to tell: but something to put into a letter to our Roddy, you know. Any news of you will be honey to him.… You'll be writing from New York, of course. But one man doesn't tell another that he's looking brave and well; and yet that's often what the other may be most wanting to know."

Foe was touched (so he's told me). He said some ordinary thing that tried to show he was grateful, and Constantia and her mother passed on. He had not introduced Farrell.

Constantia told me most of the rest, some months later, pouring tea for me in her flat. There is not much in it. She said that she had taken very little account of Jack's companion; had just reckoned him up for a chance idler in his company—"a sort of super-commercial traveller"; so she described him; "not at all bad-looking though."

She went on to tell that she had been mildly surprised to see them at dinner, seated together; further surprised and even intrigued, to see them at breakfast together, next morning.

"Later," said she, "I asked him, 'Who's your friend that you didn't introduce yesterday?' 'Well,' said Dr. Foe, 'I didn't introduce him because I thought you mightn't like it. He's rather an outsider. His name's Farrell.' 'Farrell,' I said—'But isn't that—wasn't he—?' 'Yes, he is, and he was,' Dr. Foe told me very gravely. 'That's just it.' I couldn't help asking how, after what had happened, they came to be travelling in company. 'That's the funny part of it,' was the answer; 'he's trying to make some kind of—well, of a reparation.' I thought better of Dr. Foe, Roddy.… It seems so mean, somehow, that after what you've told me, Dr. Foe should be-what shall I say?—accepting this reparation from a man who happens to be rich!"

Constantia repeated this, in effect, some two or three nights later. We had danced through a waltz together and agreed to sit out another. We sat it out, under a palm. It was somewhere in the immediate neighbourhood of Queen's Gate, and a fashionable band, tired of modernist tunes, was throbbing out the old Wiener Blatter.… If Constantia remembered that sacred tune, she gave no sign of it.

"I thought better—somehow—of your friend," said Constantia.

I gave her a sort of guessing look. "You may take it from me, Con," I said, "that the trouble's not there. I'm worried about Jack. I haven't heard from him for months. But he's not of that make, whatever he is."

"Are you sure?" she asked. "I feel that I'd like to know. If you are right, why were he and this Mr. Farrell such close friends?"

"Farrell's pretty impossible, I agree," said I.

Constantia opened her fan and snapped it. "Impossible?" said she. "Well, I don't know.… Dr. Foe introduced him, later on… and what do you think Mamma said? She said that she had supposed them at first sight to be relatives. There was a trick about the eyes and the corner of the brow.… You are quite sure," she added irrelevantly, "that Dr.—that your friend—would be above—?"

"I swear to you, Con," I assured her. "I know Jack Foe inside and out."

She had opened her fan again very deliberately; and as deliberately she closed it.

"No man ever knew that of a man," she said; "nor no woman either. … You're a rotter, Roddy—but you're rather a dear."

NIGHT THE THIRTEENTH.

ESCAPE.

Somewhere in the bustle of landing and scrimmage past the Customs, Miss Denistoun lost sight of the two travellers; and with that, for a time, she goes out of the story.

You may almost put it that for a time they do the same. At all events for the next few weeks the record keeps a very slight hold on them and their doings. Jack knew, you see, that—though not a disapproving sort, as a rule, and in those days (though you children will hardly believe it) inclined to like my friends the better for doing what they jolly well pleased—I barred this vendetta-game of his, and would have called him off if I could. Folk were a bit more squeamish, if you remember, in those dear old pre-War days.

But please note this, for it is a part of his story. Jack wrote seldom, having a sense that I didn't want to hear. When he did write, however, he was liable at any time to break away from the light, half-jesting, half-defiant tone which he had purposely chosen to cover our disagreement, and to give me a sentence or two, or even a page, of cold-blooded confession. It may have been that his purpose, at that point, suddenly absorbed him, sucked him under. It may have been that his fixed idea had begun to spread like a disease over his other sensibilities, hardening and deadening the tissue, so that he did this kind of thing unconsciously. It may have been both. You shall judge before we have finished.

I will give you just one specimen. It occurs in the very first letter addressed from America. He and Farrell had spent five days in New York:

"I am going to ease the chain—to run it out several lengths, in fact. I shall still keep pretty close in attendance on the patient, but my professional visits will be rarer. A new and more strenuous course of treatment requires these holidays, if his nerves are not to break down under it.

"The suggestion, after all, came from him, and I am merely improving on it.… This continent has started a small heat-wave—the first of the summer. Now Farrell, who perspires freely, tells me that he doesn't mind any amount of heat, so that it isn't accompanied by noise: but noise and heat combined drive him crazy. I had myself noted that while the tall buildings here excited no curiosity in him, he acted as the veriest rubberneck under the clang and roar of the overhead trains; and the din of Broadway, he confessed, gave him vertigo after the soft tide of traffic that moves broad and full— 'strong without rage, without o'erflowing full'—down Tottenham Court Road, embanked with antique furniture or colourable imitations.

"He made this confession to me in the entr'acte of a silly vaudeville, to witness which we had been carried by an elevator some sixteen storeys and landed on a roof crowded with palms and funny people behaving like millionaires. In the entr'acte the band sank its blare suddenly to a sort of 'Home, Sweet Home' adagio, and after a minute of it Farrell put up a hand, covering his eyes, and I saw the tears welling—yes, positively—between his fingers. He's sentimental, of course.

"I asked what was the matter? He turned me a face like poor Susan's when at the thrush's song she beheld:"

Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide
And a river flow on through the vale of Cheapside.

He said pitiably that he wanted—that he wanted very much—to go home; and gave as his reason that New York was too noisy for him.… A sudden notion took me at this. 'If that's the trouble,' I answered, 'one voice in this city shall cease its small contribution to the din.… We will try,' I said, 'the sedative of silence.'

"For three days now I have been applying this treatment. At breakfast, luncheon, dinner; in the street, at the theatre; I sit or walk with him, saying never a word, silent as a shadow. He desires nothing so little, I need not tell you. In the infernal din of this town he looks at me and would sell his soul for the sound of an English voice—even his worst enemy's. It is torture, and he will break down if I don't give him a holiday. The curious part of it is that, under this twist of the screw, he has apparently found some resource of pluck. He doesn't entreat, though it is killing him with quite curious rapidity. I must give him a holiday to-morrow."

I piece it out from later letters that from New York they harked out and harked back, to and from various excursions—quite ordinary ones. I might, if it were worth while, construct the itinerary; but it would take a lot of useless labour and yield nothing of importance. If Farrell, under this careful slackness of pursuit, had made a bolt for Texas or Alaska, the chronicle just here might be worth reciting. But he didn't, and it isn't. Buffalo—Long Island—Newport—and, in one of Jack's letters, Chicago for farthest West—occur in a miz-maze fashion. It is obvious to me that during these months Farrell, kept on the run, ran like a hare (and a pretty tame one); that twice or thrice he headed back for New York, and was headed off.

I passed over each letter, as it came, to Jimmy, It was over some later letter, pretty much like the one I've just read to you, that Jimmy, frowning thoughtfully, put the sudden question, "I say, Otty, are we fond enough of him to start on another wild-goose chase?—to America this time, and together?"

"Jack's my best friend, of course," I answered after a moment. "You don't tell me—" and here I broke off, for he was eyeing me queerly.

"The Professor is, or was, a pretty good friend of mine," said he. "But you hesitated a moment. Why?… Oh, you needn't answer: I'll tell you. When I asked, 'Are you so fond of him?' for a moment—just for a flash—you hadn't Jack Foe in your mind, but Farrell."

"Well, that's true," I owned. "I'm pretty angry with Jack: he's playing it outside the touch-line, in my opinion. Except that I detest cruelty, Farrell's nothing to me, of course."

"I wonder," Jimmy mused. "Sometimes, when I'm thinking over this affair—but let us confine ourselves to the Professor. He's in some danger, if you think that worth the journey. They shoot pretty quick in the States, and they don't value human life a bit as we value it in England: or so I've always heard. If it's true—and it would be rather interesting to run across and find this out for oneself—one of these days Farrell will be pushed outside his touch-line—outside the British conventions in which he lives and moves and has his poor being—and a second later the Professor will get six pellets of lead pumped into him."

"Oh, as for that," said I, "Jack must look after himself, as he's well able to. When a man takes to head-hunting, it's no job for his friends to save him risks."

"Glad you look at it so," said Jimmy. "Then, so far as the Professor's concerned, it's from himself we're not protecting him, just now?"

"Or from the self which is not himself," I suggested.

"That's better," Jimmy agreed, and again fell a-musing. "Sometimes I think we might get closer to it yet". . . But he did not supply the definition. After half-a-minute's brooding he woke up, as it were, with a start. "Could you sail this next week?" he asked.

Well, we sailed, five days later; and there is no need to say more of this trip than that it panned out a fiasco worse than my first. At New York we beat up the police; and, later on, worried Mulberry Street and the great detective service for which the city is famous. Police and detectives availed us nothing. I knew that by the same mail which brought his latest letter to me, Foe had drawn £600 on Norgate; and Norgate had dispatched the money without delay, five days ahead of us. The address was a hotel at the then fashionable end of Third Avenue. There we found their names on the register. Plain sailing enough. Farrell had left, as we calculated (the detectives helping us), on the day the money presumably arrived, and at about six in the evening; Foe some fifteen or sixteen hours later. And, with that, we were up against a wall. Not a trace could be discovered of either from the moment he had walked out of the hotel. Farrell, having paid his bill, had walked out, carrying a small handbag (or 'grip,' as the porter termed it), leaving a portmanteau behind, with word that he would return next day and fetch it. We were allowed to examine the portmanteau. It contained some shirts and collars and two suits of clothes, but no clue whatever—not a scrap of paper in any of the pockets. Foe had departed leisurably next morning, with his slight baggage.

Our detective (to do him justice) did his best to earn his money. He carefully traced out and documented the movements of the two travellers from one to another of the various addresses I was able to supply: and he handed in a report, which attested not only his calligraphy but a high degree of professional zeal. It corresponded with everything I knew already and decorated it with details which could only have been accumulated by conscientious research. They tallied with—they corroborated—they substantiated—they touched up—the bald facts we already knew. But they did not advance us one foot beyond the portals of the Flaxman Building Hotel, out of which Farrell and Foe had walked, at fifteen hours' interval, and walked straight into vacancy.

In short, Jimmy and I sailed for home, a fortnight later, utterly beaten.

Now I'm telling the story in my own way. A novelist, who knew how to work it, would (I'm pretty sure) keep up the mystery just about here. But I'm going to put in what happened, though I didn't hear about it until two years later.

What happened was that, one evening, Jack drove Farrell too far, and over a trifle. Without knowing it, too, he had been teaching Farrell to learn cunning. They were back in New York and (it seems almost too silly to repeat) seated in a restaurant, ordering dinner. Jack held the carte du jour: the waiter was at his elbow; Farrell sat opposite, waiting. For some twenty-four hours—that is, since their return to New York City—Jack had chosen to be talkative. Farrell was even encouraged to hope that he had broken the spell of his hatred, and that the next boat for England might carry them home in company and forgiving. Just then the devil put it into Jack to resume his torture. He laid down the card and sat silent, the waiter still at his elbow. "Well, what shall it be?" asked Farrell, a trifle faintly. Jack, like the Tar-Baby, kept on saying nothing. The waiter looked about him, and fetched back his attention politely. "What shall it be?" Farrell repeated. Then, as Jack stared quietly at the table, not answering, "Go and attend to the next table," said he to the man. "You can come back in three minutes." The waiter went. "Now," said Farrell, laying down the napkin he had unfolded, "are you going to speak?"

Foe picked up the card again and studied it.

"Yes or no, damn you?" demanded Farrell. "Here and now I'll have an end to this monkeying—Yes, or no?" he cried explosively.

Foe pointed a finger at the chair from which Farrell had sprung up.

"I won't!" protested Farrell, and wrenched himself away. "Here's the end of it, and I'm shut of you!"

He dragged himself to the door. Foe, still studying the card through his glasses, did not even trouble to throw a glance after him. Once in the street, Farrell felt his chain broken: he hailed a cab, and was driven off to his hotel. There he packed, paid his bill, and vanished with his grip into the night, leaving his portmanteau behind with a word that he would return for it.

Foe had taught him cunning.

He bethought him of Renton, an old foreman of his; a highly intelligent fellow, who had come out to New York, some years before, to better himself, and had so far succeeded that he now controlled and practically owned a mammoth furnishing emporium—The Home Circle Store—in Twenty-Third Street. Farrell was pretty sure of the address; because Renton, who had long since taken out his papers of naturalisation, regularly remembered his old employer on Thanksgiving Day and sent him a report of his prosperity, mixed up with no little sentiment. To this Farrell had for some years responded with a note of his good wishes, cordial, but brief and businesslike. Of late, however, this acknowledgment, though still punctual, had tended to express itself in the form of a Christmas-card.

Farrell confirmed his recollection of the address by checking it in the Telephone Book, and paid a call on the Home Circle Store next afternoon, while Foe was enjoying a siesta in that state of lassitude which (as I've told you) almost always in one or other of the men followed their crises of animosity.

Renton was unaffectedly glad to see Farrell. "Well, Mr. Farrell," he said, as they shook hands, "well, sir! If this isn't a sight for sore eyes! And—when I've been meaning, every fall, to step across home and see your luck—to think that it should be you first dropping in upon me!" He rushed Farrell up and down elevators, over floor after floor of his great establishment, perspiring (for the afternoon was hot), swelling with hospitality and pardonable pride. "And when we've done, sir, I must take you to my little place up town and make you acquainted with Mrs. Renton. She's not by any means the least part of my luck, sir. She'll be all over it when I present you, having so often heard tell—You've aged, Mr. Farrell! And yet, in a way, you haven't.… You were putting on waist when I saw you last, and now you're what-one-might-call in good condition—almost thin. Yes, sir, I heard about your poor lady… I wrote about it, if you remember. Sudden, as I understand?… But if you look at it in one way, that's often for the best: and in the midst of life— You'll be taking dinner with us. That's understood."

"Look here, Ned," Farrell interrupted. "It's done me good to shake you by the hand and see you so flourishing. But I've looked you up because—well, because I'm in a tight place, and I wonder if you could anyways help."

"Eh?" Renton pulled up and looked at him shrewdly. "What's wrong? Nothing to do with the old firm, now, surely?… I get the London Times sent over, and your last Shareholders' Meeting was a perfect Hallelujah Chorus. Why, you're quoted—"

Now you'll know Farrell, by this time, for a man of his class—and a pretty good class it is, in England, when all's said and done; for a man of the sort that resents a suspicion on his business about as quickly as he'd resent one on his private and domestic honour— perhaps even a trifle more smartly. His business, in short, is the first home and hearth of his honour. So Farrell cut in, very quick and hot,—

"If my business were only twice as solid as yours, Ned Renton, I might be worrying you about it.… There, don't take me amiss! … I've come to trouble you about myself. Fact is, I'm in a hole. There's a man after me; and I want you to get me out of this place pretty quick and without drawing any attention more than you can avoid."

"O-oh!" said Renton, rubbing his chin, and looking serious. "And what about the lady?"

"There's no woman in this," Farrell assured him. "No, Ned; nor the trace of one."

"That's curious," said Renton, still reflective. "You being a widower, I thought, maybe… But as between friends, you'll understand, I'm not asking."

"I'll tell you the gist of it later," said Farrell. "It started over politics."

"So?… We've a way with that trouble over here," said Renton. "Now you mention it, I'd read in the London Times that you were running for municipal government, and then somehow you seemed to fade out.… I wondered why.… Is that part of the story?"

Farrell answered that it was. They were seated in Renton's private office, and Renton picked up a small square block of wood from his desk. It looked like a paper-weight.

"I've a certain amount of—well, we'll call it influence—hereabouts, if any man happens to be troubling you," he suggested musingly, and glanced at Farrell. "But you're not taking it that way, I see."

Farrell nodded.

"You just want to be cleared out.… That's all right. You shall tell me all about it later, boss—any time that suits you." He handed the paperweight across to Farrell. "Ever come across that kind of wood?" he asked.

Farrell examined it. "Never," he answered. "It looks like mahogany—if 'tweren't for the colour. Dyed, is it?"

"Not a bit. I could show you with a chisel in two minutes.… But you're right. Mahogany it is, and cuts like mahogany.… I keep a high-class warehouse of stuff lower down-town, and there I'll show you a log of it, seven-by-four. It's from Costa Rica. Would you care to prospect?… I don't mind sharing secrets with the old firm, as you always dealt with me honourably and we're both growing old enough to remember old kindness."

"I'd make a holiday of it," said Farrell heartily, fingering the wood. "Comes from Costa Rica, eh?"

"There's not much of it going, even there," said Renton. "Not enough, I'm afraid, to start a fashionable craze. It was brought to me, as a sample, by an enterprising skipper from Puerto Limon, and I was going to send back a man with him, to prospect. … But it's not detracting from his character to say that he can't tell mahogany from walnut with his finger-tips in the dark—as you could, boss. If it's a holiday you want, with a trifle of high cabinet-science thrown in, what about taking his place?"

"It's the loveliest stuff," said Farrell, rapt, fingering the wood delicately.

"Well, now, that makes me feel good, having my old master's word for it, that taught me all I know. Look at it sideways and catch the tints under the light. 'Opaline mahogany' we'll call it. Come down-town with me, and I'll show you the baulk of it. It don't grow big.… What about cash?"

"I've a plenty for the present," Farrell assured him. "Clearing's my only difficulty."

"You trust to me, and I'll oblige," said his old employee.

Farrell went back to his hotel that evening, paid his bill and walked out with his grip. At Renton's warehouse in the lower town he changed his dress for a workman's; was conveyed to the Quay by Renton, who shipped him aboard the lime-tramp. She carried him down to Puerto Limon; where the skipper took a holiday, and the pair struck farther down the coast on mule-back for a hundred miles or so, and then inland for the Mosquito village hard by which they were to find the grove of this mysterious purple hardwood. They found it—as Farrell had agreed with Renton in expecting—to be no forest, scarcely even a grove, but a mere patch, and the timber a "sport" though an exceedingly beautiful one. On their return to Limon Farrell wrote out a careful report. The wood was priceless. It deserved a new genius to design a new style of inlay for it. Given that, with the very pink of artists among cabinet-makers and a knowledgeable man to put the furniture on the market, a reasonable fortune was to be made. With skill it could be propagated: but for two generations and longer it must depend on its rarity. He added some suggestions for propagating it and wound up, "Turn these over, for what they are worth, to someone who understands this climate and is botanist as well as nurseryman. It won't profit you or me, Ned; and we've no children. Mr. Weekes has, though"—Weekes was the skipper—"and his grandchildren ought to have something to inherit. I'd hate to die and think that such stuff was being lost to the trade. But for the standing timber, anyway, there's only one word. Buy. Yours gratefully, P. Farrell."

When his report was written and signed, he handed it to Weekes. "We can mail this, if you approve," he said.

Weekes read it over and approved the document. "But I don't approve mailing it," he assured Farrell. "No, sirree: your boss has a name for playing straight, but we won't give him all that time and temptation. We'll go back and hand him this together—for you come into it, I guess, on some floor or other."

"No," said Farrell. "The report's as good as it promises; but I'm out of this job. The only favour you can do me is to help me shift down this coast—as far as Colon, for instance. And I owe it to Renton, of course, to mail this letter. With your knowledge of the boats and trains, you can get to New York along with it or even ahead of it."

"That's all very well, so far as it goes," said Weekes, thoughtfully; "and I see your point. But again, what about you?"

"Ah, to be sure," answered Farrell, pondering in his turn. "There's the risk of leaving me behind to chip in on you both. Well… You don't run any whalers from this port, do you?"

"Whalers?" Captain Weekes opened his eyes.

"I understand," Farrell explained, "that they keep out at sea for a considerable time.… No, and it wouldn't help your confidence if I told you that there's a man in New York—an Englishman like myself—hunting me for my life.… But see here. Of your knowledge find me a southward bound vessel that, once out, certainly won't make port for a fortnight. We'll mail this report from the Quay, and you can put me on board at the last moment, watch me waving farewells from the offing, and then hurry north as soon as you please."

Well, this, or something like it, was agreed upon; and here Farrell sails out of the story for ten months, a passenger on the schooner Garcia, bound for Colon.