Knight Without Armour

Yet Fothergill enjoyed it. He liked Farington. He liked Farington’s type of mind—intellectual, sincere, interested in all kinds of matters outside the scope of religion, worldly to those who saw only the surface, spiritual to those who guessed deeper. He was emphatically not the kind of man to insist on rendering to God the things which were Caesar’s. During the meal Fothergill chanced to mention something about rubber plantations, and Farington said immediately: “I say, didn’t you tell me your name was Fothergill? I wonder, now you’re talking about rubber, whether you’re the Fothergill who used to be at Kuala Simur?”

“Yes, I am.”

“That’s odd. It means I know quite a lot about you—Father Richmond and I are great friends—we were at Ware together.”

“Really? Oh yes, I remember him very well. Where is he now?”

“Still at Kuala Simur. He had a great opinion of you—especially after that small-pox epidemic.”

“Oh, that wasn’t much.”

Farington laughed. “It’s too conventional to say that, surely? I wish you could sec some of Richmond’s letters about you, anyway—he almost hero-worshipped.”

“I hope not.”

“He did. His great dream, I think, was to convert you some day.”

“Well, he didn’t come far short of doing so.”

“Oh?”

“We used to argue a good deal about religion and so on—and I used to joke with him and say I should end by becoming a Catholic. At least, perhaps he thought I was joking, but all the time, in a sort of way, I meant it. Then my brother died and all the rubber estates fell to me, and I got suddenly fed up with everything and sold out. That just happened to be right at the top of the rubber boom in ’twenty-five, which is why I’m more or less a rich man now. I sold out to an Anglo-Dutch syndicate, packed up, and pottered about Europe from then till now. The syndicate, incidentally, paid me about five times what the place is worth to- day.”

“That must have been very good for your bank account.”

“Better than for my soul, perhaps, eh? To come back to that, the rather curious thing is that all the time I was at Kuala Simur I felt a sort of conversion going on—if you can call it that—I know of course that nothing really counts until you’re definitely over the line. Probably if I’d had much more to do with your friend Richmond, whom I liked exceedingly, he’d have pushed me over.”

“I wish that had happened.”

“Oh well, I pushed myself over a year later, so perhaps it didn’t matter.”

“So you are a Catholic?”

“I was received into the Church in Vienna three years ago. I’m not sure that I’m entitled to call myself a Catholic now, though. Slackness, I suppose. All very unsatisfactory from your point of view, I’m afraid.”

“And from yours too, surely?”

“Well, perhaps—perhaps.”

They talked on for some time, and Fothergill found it strangely and refreshingly easy to be intimate with the young man. Farington’s train was due to leave at midnight, and towards nine o’clock Fothergill suggested that they should adjourn to his hotel for a smoke. They walked along the crowded Strand to the Cecil and were soon snugly in the lounge. There and then conversation developed as if all barriers had suddenly been destroyed. Fothergill said: “You know, Farington, there was one thing I never told Richmond and that was the whole truth about my life.”

“I know. He used to grumble about that in his letters to me. He said he was sure you had some mysterious and grisly past which you never breathed a word about to anybody.”

“Really? He guessed that? How curious!”

“Well, we priests aren’t such simpletons, you know.”

Fothergill laughed. “I’ll bet he never guessed the sort of past it had been, though. I daresay I’d have told him if I hadn’t known him so well. As a matter of fact, I knew he liked me and I liked him to like me, and I didn’t want to see my stock going down with a bump…You see, I seem to have broken so many of the commandments.”

“Most of us have.”

“Yes, but I’ve gone rather the whole hog. I’ve killed men, for instance.”

“If you walked out now into the Strand you could find hundreds of middle-aged fellows who’ve done that.”

“Oh, the war—yes, but my affairs weren’t in the war—at least, hardly. One of them was pretty cold-blooded murder. And then there are other matters, too. I never married, but I lived with a woman—once.”

“That, again, is nothing very unusual.”

“I daresay not, but if my soul depended on it, I couldn’t say I was sorry. It’s the one thing in my life which I feel was fully and definitely right.”

“Of course, without knowing the circumstances—”

“If You’ve time, and if you think you wouldn’t be bored, I’ll tell You how it all happened.”

“I wish you would.”

“Splendid.” And he began at the day he left England twenty- three years before. About three-quarters of an hour later, when he came hoarsely to an end, Farington said: “Well, that’s really a most astonishing story. How relieved you must be to have told it to somebody!”