Читать книгу Angels' Shoes and other stories - Marjorie Lowry Christie Pickthall - Страница 3

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The Horado, huge, torpid vein of the back-country, after taking tribute of a thousand miles of jungle was suddenly released into the ocean, whose clear and fertile depths it stained with the earth’s rot and detritus. Where these two encountered there was war, of meeting and retreating waters; which only ceased when the slow pressure of the turning tide exactly balanced the slow outpouring of the vast stream. Then, for a little while, there was peace. In the midst of such a peace lay the barquentine, Dorotea Dixon, waiting for high-water on the bar.

She, the soiled little trader, was briefly an illusion, a dream, built of some substance of pearl-petal and rose-gold too lovely for a name. Grier said the wet deck looked so fragile, so irridescent, that he tapped it with his heel as he stood, for the assurance that he stood on something more solid than a very bubble of the foam. The crew were silent; for the most part gazing overside at the streaks of mud-brown coiling in the sapphire; for the scornful sea never entirely mingled with the current of the river. It was all glitteringly, insubstantially, clear and vivid and still you’d have thought, said Grier, that a great glass globe had been clapped down over everything. Islets of grass, logs, nameless jungle-drift the dark river brought down and left about them in that strange belt of no-man’s-water between the flood and the flood. In the very fulness of dawn it brought the dugout.

The dugout, along with the other drift, drew silently and very slowly towards them; touched at last on the port quarter with a distinct double knock. After a curious pause and hesitation, a man rose on the rail with a rope; there was a glint of faces along the rail as the others gazed at him. Grier warned: “Careful, Mac-Awe,” but less out of consideration for the dugout, he says, than for the spell of stillness they must break. His voice, or the voices of the triumphing tide, broke it; and it was amidst a commonplace clatter, on a commonplace deck, that they lifted and laid Brennan and the native girl.

The girl was all right; Brennan, the huge bull of a man, was in a bad way. He’d little on, Grier said, but a pair of burst canvas shoes much too small for him; his shirt he’d rigged as a sort of shelter for the girl. They carried them below and put them in a cabin, having first ascertained that the girl wore a brass ring on the third finger of her left hand; for the Old Man, as Grier said, was “uncommon correct.” Then, leaving them to the Old Man and his box of medicines, they went to the work of coaxing the Dorotea up stream. First, Grier took off the man’s shoes—cut them off in strips—for his feet were bruised to the bone.

Two hours later, the Dorotea being safely warped to a tree above the jetty, Grier went down to look at the waifs again. He met the Old Man coming out of the cabin, a blue bottle in one hand and Brennan’s shirt in the other; a gaudy garment of yellow stripes, indescribably fouled and torn. The Old Man, staring grimly over the huge steel spectacles he always assumed when he opened the medicine chest, held out the shirt to Grier; Grier gazed blankly. At last the Old Man condescended to explain, to point with the bottle.

“You don’t tell me, Mr. Grier,” he burst out, “that the fellow’s any right to it.”

Grier saw that there was a celluloid collar attached to the shirt with a brass safety pin: the orthodox straight band of white a parson wears. The Old Man went on, quivering with indignation; he was, as Grier said, “uncommon correct.” Grier looked into the cabin. The girl had curled up at the end of Brennan’s bunk, sound asleep nursing his wounded feet in her arms. Something in the sight hit Grier hard; he glanced from her to Brennan’s brutal, blue-black, upturned jaw, whistled thoughtfully, and went out.

Impossible even to imagine that jowl over the parson’s collar!

But it was Brennan’s jaw—or the quality it stood for—drove him that last thirty miles between Santa Luce and the Horado.

At Santa Luce—nothing but a river-crossing—he stopped and buried his last porter. He would have delayed for nothing living. Even Buck Brennan was obliged to delay awhile for that pitiful dead. He gave Rosario a few inches of earth; rested a little; took what he could of the double load, and went on. Thinking, as he told Grier, “Well, Rosario, hombre, your resurrection won’t take no three days”... A hard brute, Buck Brennan, with a heart like a baked brick; enclosing God-knew-what of fires of powers.... He had no choice but to die where he stood or a little farther on. He jutted out that great coarse jaw of his and chose to die farther on—as far as possible. And—as far as possible—he came on the house.

Imagine a great forest, bare of all life but one brown ant crawling in it; imagine in the very heart of that forest a tiny ant-heap, just a spoonful of honey-colored granules in the roots of a grass-tuft. Can you imagine the ant finding the ant-hill? Yet, in the vast jungles of the Horado, the creeping atomy that was Brennan, came on the house.

There was, in one window of the house, one little bit of glass, which caught the levelling light through some aisles of the unplumbed forest, and shone like a star. It drew Brennan, though he was then past thought. It was an automaton of mere muscle that he made towards it, mounted steps that sagged like hammocks, found a door, and set his shoulders to it. The door gave, groaning. Something tangled his feet and tripped him—a rope, or a vine of the myriad that veiled the very substance of the house. He fell as it seemed to him, very slowly; and the door sank before him like a mist. He heard a bell ring outside, far overhead—it rolled like the salute of a gun, a challenge, a war-cry flung hollow of night, all ringing and booming with bells.

Out of this deep sleep he woke in a dawn full of screaming clouds of little parakeets. They flashed past the doorway and vanished, but their green and gold lingered on the rim of every motionless leaf: the forest seemed to drip glory. But the splendid moment passed. A hot wind blew, and, somewhere overhead, set a cracked bell jangling. Brennan dragged himself to his feet and went to explore.

Food he must have; he had it there, in the load he’d let fall as he fell. But before that, before anything, he had to explore the house. Hunger was urgent. But there was something around him more urgent still. What?

He found no answer for a long time in the ghost of that little native-built house fading away into grass and green and mould—a visible sort of transubstantiation, going on, to go on, for how long? Who had built it? Who had deserted it? Why? He moved cat-footed on floors wrenched apart by writhing growths, where squares of solid mildew proclaimed that matting had been. He cleared the windows with his knife—it was like cutting snakes—and watched intently as the light fell on blotched and voiceless walls. There were glasses and warped frames here and there on the walls: from all but one the ants had eaten the pictures: this one had been backed with tin, and so the Madonna of the Chair still looked out, through the veiling of the damp, with her exquisite clear benevolence. Brennan tried another room.

Here were two little iron beds side by side, bare of anything but rust; a table, and a tin box. Brennan opened it. Books and papers rewarded him—several little gray-bound Gospels, an Imitation in Latin, a “Reading Without Tears,” and Miss Braddon’s “Vixen.” He was immensely bewildered and annoyed; he guessed a clue lay here, but was not sure of it. He tumbled the books about, and a shower of little cards fluttered out and lay gaudily on the floor. There was a picture and a text on every card. Brennan stooped and read “Suffer little children,” “He that speaketh truth sendeth forth righteousness,” “Charity suffereth long and is kind.”... He swore in pure astonishment and went on. On to the room at the back that ran the house’s width; of which the outer wall had fallen, leaving a drunken fringing of roof, a drift of greenery, dissolution and growth going on like a battlefield over—over what? Six benches in a row, a little raised platform, some coloured rags hanging from a roller that must have been a map, and a blackboard.

The place had been a school.

A school, a mission-school, in the jungles of the Horado! A picture-palace or a morgue would have appeared equally unnatural, equally out of drawing. Over the rotting roof, in a little cupola of split cane, hung the bell. As Brennan stood knee-deep in rubbish, staring at the blackboard, the bell moved in some unnoticeable air and clanged hoarsely. The school-bell!.... He turned to the blind doorway. And there were the scholars.

Native children. Three or four. One naked earth-coloured boy had a broken slate under his arm. One tallish girl wore the remains of a print gown, which she had washed clean. They stood gazing at Brennan in a wild, humble way, as if they also had lost their clue. Perhaps they could help him to his, though. But with his movement they fled, vanished, melted like shadows into the leaves. He had an impression of their eyes, bewildered, faithful, like the eyes of once-beloved ghosts. In the little cupola the bell was also faithful, calling to school.

Brennan ate and drank that day from his own small supplies. Then he stretched himself on one of those little iron beds and thought.

Food he must have—to go on with. Food, and perhaps he’d make the Horado; follow it down: find a boat.... But his mind persistently revolted from this balanced considering of days and ways, to a mere wonder, a curiosity. This school. Who had built it, kept it? Where had they come from, and why? Where had they gone, and why? That, not his journey, was what mattered—here. He went through everything with an intent method, but he found no more than a name in the Imitation—“Bonnie West,” and a date. Who on earth was Bonnie West? Sitting on the edge of the bed, he frowned from the book in his hand to the mould-haloed Madonna on the wall till his weight sent the legs through the floor and he slid off. He swore, but defiantly.... Grier said, “He always made me understand that the house still belonged. He never had any sense of ownership, or any right there. He was perpetually guilty, as if his hosts might return and find him there, unwelcome. He was apologetic when he renewed some of his badly worn clothes from a few he found put away under the books in the tin box—a coat and a pair of shoes I believe; he used to wake in the night, he told me, shaping excuses for making so free. Buck Brennan! D.D.’s clothes they were—Devil Dodgers—parson’s clothes.”

Perhaps it was with some idea of a vague repayment that Brennan began to clean out the schoolroom.... Llianas had climbed to the roof, burst it, lapped about the little belfry. Everything he touched, he told Grier, the bell rang. And he’d a notion that the scholars still haunted the place; he felt himself continually watched, followed—weighed, perhaps, and found wanting. Once he looked up quickly from his tidying, and there they were again in the door. But again they fled and the forest swallowed them as some say a mother-snake will swallow its young. It troubled him. He thought that if he had on the parson’s coat they might have stayed, and then he would have found out everything.... He always wore it after that. And as the strange empty, preoccupied house worked on him, he added one of the straight white collars he also found in the box. But they would not return for all the wool this innocent wolf stuck on his rough pelt.

He had no heart those first days for venturing into the jungle again, even to find out where the children hid, and where he might get fresh supplies, and perhaps porters for his further journey; his necessities all lapsed curiously into the background. But the morning came when he took his gun and went out, moved from his uncommon lethargy by the need of the next day’s dinner. He told himself he was after pig. But he followed the trodden path he found leading from—and to—the mission school. It must lead to the village. He had followed a thousand such corkscrew trails. But this one ended in nothing. Just that. It was as if a hand had come down and wiped everything out, as you wipe something you don’t want read off a slate. Bare, burnt earth was there, and a leprosy of ashes. Rain had fallen in the night; he saw, in the ashes, prints of children’s feet. And went back without his pig.

After that, he was continually on the watch. He shot and cured meat, as much as he could carry for any journey. He still lingered, confident that somewhere in the jungle was the clue, the answer to the riddle of emptiness of ashes, and of the fluttering ghosts of the children, that he had set himself to solve.... Who can say what held him there? One evening, an hour from the house, he parted branches and looked on a camp.

Of himself, nothing was clearly visible in the gloom of the leaves but the white linen collar about a throat that many would have preferred in a hempen one. Of the man who sat in the daylight and the firelight, nothing was hidden as he looked up, saying, thoughtfully, “Ah! So they have sent another already....”

“When Buck went back to the house,” said Grier, “Manuel Franca went along; and when he stood at the door, and looked into the emptiness, he smiled.”

“And the roof didn’t fall on him?”

“No-o-o, nothing so inadequate; it was only palm-thatch. What did happen was that he went into the inner room where the rusty beds were as if he knew the way, picked up that little Imitation, fluttered the leaves, and, when he came to the name written inside—‘Bonnie West,’ he smiled again.”

“What has that to do with—?”

“With Buck Brennan? O, a great deal.... You ought to have talked to Buck. You see, he’d done nothing but try and think things out, and wonder who Bonnie West was and what had happened to her, until he’d made a sort of picture of it—and her. She must have seemed quite real to him. It was in the jungle, you know, anyway.....”

“Well?”

“Well, when Franca smiled, Buck took a dislike to him. So you see, it was much worse than if the roof had fallen.... Thank God. And I never saw Bonnie’s name in a book.”

Now, she begins to come into it.

An excessively strange companionship must have ensued between those two in the empty mission-house; neither asked any questions of the other, in a situation that called for many; a betrayal in itself, if both had not so studiously avoided the veriest shadow of distrust. Certain things Buck never cleared up—for instance, if Franca took him for a bona-fide padre because of the collar! It sounds impossible; but “in there,” as Grier puts it, “the priests are just anything.” Perhaps Franca was too deep in his own affairs to notice Buck much; for it took no more than a day or two for Buck to realize that he also was waiting, watching, searching for something with an intensity that defied pretence. He believed Franca had come back—ah! come back?—to find something.

Brennan also began to look for it, though he was hampered by not knowing what it was! And by the necessity of keeping up appearances. He went on tidying the schoolroom; he told Franca that his porters had deserted on the way up with most of his goods, which was moderately true; he was expecting to get new men, only they seemed to have all run away from the vicinity.

“The scholars also, they have run away?” suggested the leisurely Franca politely.

“Yes, but—”

“But I will bring them back to you.”

Brennan said that what followed was like a nasty sort of adjectived miracle. Franca idled to the door—he was always idling about, peering in cracks, feeling walls, gazing into holes with a hunger of insatiable eyes—and called. The leaves of the forest shook, here and there, as if Fear moved them. He called again. And Fear crawled on its belly from the leaves to his feet, the boy with the slate, the girl who wore the remnants of the print wrapper. They did not even tremble; they waited, like ducks for the food to scatter.

“These are all that are left, I think.”

Franca stooped forward and took something from the girl’s neck. It was a dirty little bag on a string. He looked about, smiling; then hung it on the corner of the blackboard. “They will not run far now,” he nodded to Buck. The two crept away.

Buck Brennan was a bit taken in the wind, as he would have said. And that night he woke to a low moaning like the wind, a voice of grief so faint, so uncomprehending, it was not human. He took a light and went to the schoolroom. The girl was there, a bare thing of the night, her eyes luminous as its stars. She was squatting at the foot of the blackboard, making this sound of uncomplaining loss. Brennan knew what she wanted. She wanted her little lucky-bag, and was afraid to touch it. He took it down, looked into it; his clue was not there: unless a little bone collar stud with two or three hairs wrapped around the shank was a clue? The hairs gleamed in the light, reddish—fair.... He closed the little smelly thing, and gave it to the girl. Felt, the next instant, her hands, her tears, on his great bare feet! So she was a human being, not unattractive, and wildly grateful. He laid a hand like a lion’s paw on her: but she melted from him, and he did not follow. She was not his; like the house, she belonged... To what, to whom? To a ghost, a shadow, bringing bright hair and a halo of lilac print, that looked at Buck with the eyes of a fate he might never learn. He went back to the bedroom, looked long at Franca, asleep and smiling. And began to feel that here, perhaps, was all the clue he needed.

He spent a long time next day sitting over the little books, like a jury over so many little corpses; smoking heavily, and very uncomfortable in the mildewy coat, the stiff collar, and the parson’s shoes so much too tight for him. They were all part of position into which he had been drifted, to which he so strangely yielded himself; but he preferred to leave a certain veil of doubt and obscurity over it. Into that puddle of circumstances he would never look too closely, lest he should see reflected there a bad Buck Brennan he did not know and couldn’t have lived with—an avenger, a judge, grimly appointed by some vast mockery or vaster justice.

And there, as he sat, suddenly he had his clue in his hand.

It was the half-sheet of an unfinished letter, rolled into a little spill and thrust into the rounded back of the book. He unrolled it carefully, and the hand-writing, clear and rather childish, sprang out at him in the fading grayish ink.

“.... For I do think, Chubsie, Lewis is the very best man in the world. You’ll laugh; but he takes such beautiful care of me, and the work’s so interesting, and the babies are such dirty little ducks, all eyes and tummies. I don’t really feel fit to be a missionary’s wife, but I’m trying to be, and I know quite a lot of Spanish. And on Thursday, he said I was—what do you think?—an inspiration. Don’t laugh, you bad girl. Oh, Chubs, I wish I could hear you! And that brings me to the one thing—I wouldn’t tell him for the world, but I can tell you because I know you never breathe a word of what anyone tells you. This country frightens me. It’s not a bit like the winter I was in Ceylon. Just sometimes, you know; though I tell myself it’s only for two years, and I’m with Lewis, and I was willing. But it’s interesting too. Guess what he found that time he went up the Horado to the fifth tributary.—Fancy, it hasn’t even a name!—where the boys said no white man had been before. He found whole forests of rubber trees. I said, ‘Was it valuable?’ And he said, ‘Yes, immensely,’ but he’d never make use of it or tell anyone it was there, because he said rubber seemed to be one of the accursed products of the earth, and death and suffering always followed where it was. Of course I agreed. Isn’t he splendid? Then Mr. Franca came in. I must tell you about him. He’s quite splendid in a catty sort of way; but truly, I’m a little bit afraid of him too. He’s like the country...”

And that was all. But Brennan had his clue. Clue? It was a revelation, a whole dark landscape shown in one flash of leven-fire. He crushed the little spill in his fingers, and across the chasm of her fate cried to Bonnie West,—“Yes, I see, I see. But what did he do...?”

“You have it...”

Franca, just breathing the words, stood in the doorway; he leaned, not towards the paper in Buck’s hand, but away from it, as a man leans against the pull of a rope.

“You have it. You know it....”

“What do I know, I wonder?” said Buck, thoughtfully, his eyes never leaving Franca’s.

“Where he went.... What he found...”

“Yes.” Buck was more thoughtful than ever. With a single movement he took his pipe from his mouth and tilted the red-hot ash on the paper in his palm. The thin “foreign note” curled instantly in a fluff of little flame, ended in a square of fragile gray edged with dying scarlet. Buck sat watching it quietly. Franca had cried out once, no time for more. Now he stood grunting and sweating like an animal, one hand pulling and fumbling at his belt.

“No good.” Buck shook his head. “No good. You wouldn’t be such a fool.... I am—now—the only living soul that knows.”

The only living soul .... Franca went out.

That night the native girl, with her lucky-bag and her rags of faithfully guarded print, crouching in darkness, saw a great light. A lantern was held over her head, a hand hauled her mightily from her hiding place. She was dazed as by the coming of a god: she suffered a resurrection: she shook, and was still. But the god’s voice was kind.

“I like you,” said Buck Brennan, that uncommon thoughtfulness still upon him. “You’re my kind; and you’d be right pretty for a brown one if you was washed. I like you for sticking to her; the place where she was... I can’t leave you here, now them poor little fools is gone... Them poor little damn fools. You better come with me. I’ll be straight with you .... take care of you .... hand you over to the first missionary we meet, and may the Lord have mercy on my soul.” Buck was a bit confused; but neither this closing solemnity, nor the parson’s collar, nor the parson’s canvas shoes seemed quite enough .... Buck swallowed hard, suddenly dry of throat.

“Bonnie West,” he said, distinctly. “Bonnie West.... There, will that do you?”

Yes, it was the talisman of trust. The dark little wild thing rose and went with him, holding on to the tail of the parson’s coat.

“And after all,” said Grier, “how little Buck knew, how little he was able to tell! And yet enough—plenty. If the girl told him more, he kept it to himself; and I don’t know if he or anyone else but Franca knows the close of the story of the poor little good little Wests and their mission. The secure and comfortable organization that sent them out doesn’t know: I’ve asked it. They just went out: were swallowed up in the great dark land that was so unlike her winter in Ceylon, and frightened her sometimes. And Franca.... Why didn’t Buck shoot Franca and have it done with? I don’t pretend to know that either. It scarcely needs putting into words, the certainty that Franca killed, wiped out, abolished the Wests and their little mission because he didn’t want ’em to get that rubber: and then couldn’t find it himself.... Any good man would have shot the beast and thanked God for the chance. But Buck wasn’t good—only in spots. He had an erratic sense of humour, and he’d been in that house some time—with Bonnie West. The method he chose involved more risks to himself. But think of the devilish far-reaching completeness of it!

“The story of his escape with that girl from the jungles of the Horado would make a saga. But he can’t tell it. The rains came on, and it took them a month to find the river; Franca fighting on behind them—in case they were making for the blessed rubber! They stole a dugout somewhere and launched it for the sea; followed a long fever-dream of bars, and beasts, swimming trees, sunken islands, reversing currents, falls, impossible portages; and all the time the knowledge that Franca was dogging them behind or waiting in an agony for them in front. Afraid to let them out of his sight.... It probably brought Buck through; as I say, he had a peculiar sense of humour; and then he had the plucky girl.... I don’t know when the brass ring made its appearance, or what ingenious ceremony it celebrated. Once, I believe, she got fever and gave out; and Buck would tie her in the fork of a tree, drag the dugout overland, launch it, go back for her, and carry her to it. No wonder his feet were bad. Think of it! And all the weary way, Franca followed.

“I tell you, that villain began to pay then, as he’d never paid in his life, and it was only the beginning. He hated Buck, as, I suppose, few ever come to be hated; and he was mad with anxiety over the personal safety of the only living being who knew where to find that rubber. What a vengeance, eh? I tell you, I saw him crawling on the jetty, before I had heard anything about him, when Buck was very bad aboard the Dorotea, and he was the hot ghost of a man. Of a man? Of a devil. He looked like a devil dying of hunger, and that’s just what he was.

“He said to me, panting as he spoke, ‘Is it true that you have the Señor Brennan aboard there?’ ‘Yes,’ I says, ‘And is it true that the fever is heavy on him, and is he talking much in it?’ ‘No,’ I says, ‘he’s no fever, and does nothing but snore, and the fo’c’sle’s complaining.... And who may you be, so anxious to hear what he says in his sleep?’ But he crawled away with a sort of groan. Yes, Buck’s way was the best; Franca had begun to break then, torn as he must have been between his hate and his greed; but I doubt if my—well, my sense of humour!—would have been strong enough to let me take it! ... All for the knowledge of the direction that unlucky little saint of a missionary had taken when he found the rubber trees, and that knowledge in Buck’s head, and nowhere else in the world.

“Yes, it was masterly. How he must have thought, ‘Some day, he must betray it. Some day, he must go back to his rubber, some day, he must show—me—where it is...’ But Buck hasn’t!

“Queer, isn’t it? I told you he’d a fat sense of humour. He enjoys himself immensely over it. He starts suddenly on wild expeditions with a great air of secrecy over them; Franca drops everything, beats up a party too, and trails him. When he’s been led far enough, Buck turns round and comes back. It’s ruining Franca. He’s obsessed. He can do nothing but follow, follow, follow.... But the worry, and the travelling, and the hate on an empty stomach! He’s taken to drinking now, Buck tells me, and he can’t last long. What worries me is that he’ll realize the game’s up, and stick that itching knife into Buck at last.

“And the cause of it all, the rubber? I never speak of it to him. Perhaps when Franca’s beyond any chance of profiting by it.... Perhaps then.... But I don’t know, I’m not sure of Buck. He’s talked to me a good deal, of the house, and Bonnie West, and her letter in his hand. He remembered every word of that letter, wrote them down for me, but gave me no confidence, for he changed the directions.... It was not the fifth tributary; only he knows what it was, and I’ve an idea only he will ever know. I think not through Buck Brennan will the hell of the rubber trade come to the country where Bonnie West lived and died. It wouldn’t be the first sacrifice he’d made to that erratic sense of—humour.

“He hasn’t gone on any expedition this year. I think he’s inclined to domesticity. He’s been incredibly staunch to that little brown girl of Bonnie West’s. I often think of them in the cabin, and cutting the parson’s shoes off. They were far too small, those shoes for Buck Brennan.”