STORIES
Joyce was at his tenth story, the pipes were drawing well, and the birch logs singing softly, while Father John gazed at his entertainers with fascinated eyes.
“. . . . And so he fell into the car, and the grain poured in on him, and there he was, buried. That car wasn’t unloaded until spring, and then out he came like a board, and they buried him again, and no one knew he was heir to a million.”
Father John made a stunned, murmuring noise, and his hosts looked upon him fondly. Only Morris was discontented.
“I thought he’d have come out alive.”
“Alive?”
“Yes. Fed on the grain . . . .”
Royce turned his back on Morris, and Falconer began, hastily.
“But that’s not so queer as the man at Fort Duchesne. He was a scientific fellow, and he went mad, and ran after the shooting stars with a butterfly net. It was in the Fall, when the sky is generally fizzling with meteors. This fellow would run after them till he fell, exhausted, and they had to tell off a Siwash to retrieve him, which must have been very annoying. He’s in a private asylum in ’Frisco now, keeping copper-filings in a cage; thinks they’re larvæ and feeds them on lettuce leaves.”
“Poor soul, poor soul,” murmured Father John, helplessly, and for a few minutes there was silence.
“But that’s nothing to what happened to Ignatius O’Higgins up north.” Connor’s voice rolled as richly into the flat silence as a plum pudding on a table. “Out snaring rabbuts, he was, and put his foot in a bear trap. A while after, another trapper came by, and he wondering why the snow was all trod up with rabbut tracks, and they marching in squads like Ulstermen, bad luck to ’em. And then he went on a bit, and he knew; and the knowledge he had of the black, bitter heart of a rabbut gave him a turn, and he was a better Christian all his days, Father. All the buck-rabbuts east of the Rockies, fighting and kicking and straggling round that bear trap . . . .”
“Have another drink, Con,” said someone loudly, passing up the decanter. Connor helped himself, and drank, beaming, to the guest of the evening. “Here’s good luck and a fat living to you, Father Jack, and may you never want a bottle of the best to share with a friend.”
“A memorable night,” said Father John, looking very young and pink in the depths of his leather chair. “That’s what it’s been—a memorable night. It was very kind of you to ask me again, to take me in once more among you, to give me a share in this way of all the things you’ve seen and done and heard in all these years. And such things . . . . It’s a terrible world,” and he shuddered, slightly.
“Bless your heart,” said Royce, “but lots of queer things must have come your way since you took to—this,” and he leaned forward, and gently touched the shabby, black sleeve.
Father John looked at his cassock with some discontent. “Old women’s quarrels, and young folks’ love affairs, a mother to be comforted, or an old man ushered into Paradise. It’s God’s work,” finished Father John, wistfully, “but there’s no good denying it’s a bit dull.”
“The confessional?” suggested Royce, delicately.
Father John leaned forward, with a twinkle. “Shall I tell you? Well, it’s my belief all the bad, wild deeds are done by the Protestants, I hear so few of them.”
“But life and death—you must come closer to these than any of us. They’re not dull.”
“In the aggregate I find them so.”
“But surely, sometimes . . . .?”
“Well, I don’t know.” Father John brightened up a little. “There is something under my notice now. Not through the confessional, of course; it’s open, quite open. And it’s—well, curious. Yes,” he went on, judicially, “I should certainly call it curious.”
“Is it war, passion or revenge?” asked Royce, with a smile.
“Well,”—Father John did not smile,—“it is probably murder.”
“Probably murder? Don’t you know, then?”
“No. That’s the curious part of it. I don’t know, and the man who most likely did it, he doesn’t know.”
“O, come now, Father Jack . . . .”
“It’s a fact. He’d tell me if he knew, but he doesn’t.”
“Do you mean to tell us that a fellow could murder, not kill, murder—another fellow, and not know it?”
“Yes, I do,” said Father John, mildly, “that is just M’Cabe’s case.”
“Go on with his case,” said Connor, admiringly.
“Well, I only know it in bits, you understand—in flashes as he tells it to me—a flash of light so clear and vivid it’s painful, and then fog and darkness. I’m afraid it’s a pretty bad case, though I’ve grown fond of M’Cabe. It’s curious, too,” mused Father John, “how fond you do get of anyone or anything that looks to you for help. I ought to detest M’Cabe, he’s always sending one of his brats to call me up at night—thinking he’s going to remember . . . .”
“What was M’Cabe in his off hours?” asked Morris, with envy.
“M’Cabe? O, I’m afraid he was a seal-poacher. He tells me of fights with Japanese ships in the fog—bloody decks, and half-seen yellow faces. It’s all in a fog as he tells it—the ships and the men, the seals in the sea and the bull-walrus bellowing from the floes. I wish he could make it clearer to me, but he’s always down on the floor, groaning—afraid he’s going to remember.
“He must have seen some queer things, if you like, where Asia and America are still in the making, and no man can read the tides, and on the islands in the summer you walk waist-deep in flowers. M’Cabe says he’s gone ashore on one of these islands and picked harebells and fern till his arms could hold no more. And the next year the island’s gone, swallowed in the sea, and a new volcano spouting east-by-north in the offing. They’re very troublesome, those islands. And the natives are as strange as their own coasts; you see them, M’Cabe says, in their high-prowed boats, driving down the steel-grey channels, past the long promontories, out of the fog and into the fog again. They used to massacre the fur traders, and no one seems to know what they do now. They just go past, flying low, like birds, and the crews throw things at them . . . .
“Well, from what M’Cabe says, it wasn’t natives, but islands, that gave him his trouble. They seem to have been sailing very slowly up some coast in a fog, which lay thick on the sea like a layer of wool, but cleared so suddenly that the topsails were in golden day. On deck they could see nothing. They had a man at the top of the foremast, I think he said, and that man was absolutely cut off from them by the fog. They heard his voice as a voice from another world.
“They were just creeping along, only the topsails drawing. M’Cabe and another man were up in the bows, looking over the side. He says the sea came sliding out of the fog and curling alongside, pretty little gentle waves, as white as lambs. M’Cabe watched them for some time, he says, and then was going aft, when he heard the other man say, ‘Come back and look at this.’ He went and looked, and there were all the waves breaking black.
“Quite black, he says, like soot instead of foam. And then, as they stared, the fog grew pit-black ahead of them, as if a great mouth had opened. And it was all perfectly sudden and perfectly silent. They could see nothing, they could hear nothing, except that once the look-out man screamed. Then they looked up, out of their pit of fog . . .
“It was like a signal breaking out, M’Cabe says. I do not quite know what he means, but over the golden sky something deadly—smoke, ash, gas—was rushing and spreading. I can’t make out from him whether it looked red or black; but it was dark, and hot.
“Then they felt the sea tremble, and that blind ship fouled in fog was struck. Not tossed or struck by a wave, but by something that hit at her out of the fog. They’d all run aft like sheep, away from the blackness. And the next thing that M’Cabe knows is that he was in a small boat which had been trailing astern, alone with another man, drifting in the fog. The ship was gone as if that blow had smacked her out of existence—gone for ever. It is very curious how Time seemed to go wrong. The destruction or disappearance of the ship, in M’Cabe’s mind, happened instantaneously; as a matter of fact, it must have taken some moments, for the other man had had time to run and fetch a fur coat of which he was very proud. I know nothing of this man, except that he was, and that he had a fur coat; he was the first thing M’Cabe noticed with a clear mind, brushing his coat with black hands. They were as black as sweep’s, the boat was black, a black sea lopped after them oilily, and the fog rained black on them. ‘Is it snowing black?’ asked M’Cabe. And the other man, never looking up from the coat, grunted, ‘Nah, it’s ashes. There’s been an island blowed up, or something, and it’ll ruin my coat.’
“M’Cabe says he took a dislike to him and his coat, though he’d liked him well enough before; he was that unfriendly over it. Those are M’Cabe’s words—‘that unfriendly.’
“M’Cabe took the oars that were in the boat and paddled about in the fog to see if he could find the ship. He seems to have been a good deal shaken. He says he doesn’t remember anything else until the boat grated softly on a gravel beach and a great rush and screaming went past his head in the fog, and things black as bats which he took at first for devils, but they were only sooty gulls.
“They pulled the boat up and sat down on the beach waiting for the fog to lift, but it didn’t. It didn’t lift for days; the blackness went out of it and it grew lighter, but as thick, M’Cabe says, as milk. And all the time they had to stay on this little bit of an island, a few flat rocks and a little gravel huddled together in the sea. It was spring, the rocks were all glassy with ice every morning; but the gulls were laying about the beach tamer than poultry, and they gathered the rank eggs and ate them, and drank of the half-frozen sleet pools. Fire? They had nothing to burn but the seats of the boat; they tried to kindle these with their few matches, but the sea-soaked wood refused to catch, however fine they shaved it. They turned the boat over and dug little burrows in the sand to sleep in, lining them with dried weed. But it must have been cold beyond bearing. M’Cabe says he used to crawl out of his burrow in the morning, almost crying with cold. And the other man snoozing comfortably in the fur coat. I asked him why they didn’t sleep in one burrow and share the coat; he said he didn’t like to, the other man being ‘that unfriendly.’
“M’Cabe doesn’t know how long they were on the island. He says it was all fog, and sea-beasts bellowing, and great birds buffeting them, and cold; there was the other man, too, very careful not to tear his fur coat on the rocks. At last, M’Cabe says, what with the fog and the cold and the birds, he became so that he could not take his mind off that fur coat.
“He’d lie shaking in his burrow at night, thinking how warm he’d be with it on. He’d limp about the island by day, thinking what it would feel like if he could put his hands in the pockets. He’d cry, that great bull-headed raw-boned scamp, because the other man wouldn’t lend it to him. He would have blanks, gaps of thought or consciousness, when he didn’t know where he was or what he was doing. And he’d come out of them to find himself following the other man about and staring at the coat.
“I think the other man was frightened. M’Cabe has shown him to me—just a glimpse—stout, bearded, with pale eyes, running round and round the island. M’Cabe thinks he must have chased him; he’d come out of his blank fits to fear the man would fall in and get the coat wet. ‘And how to dry it then,’ said M’Cabe, ‘I didn’t see.’ The other man never left off the coat; he clung to those mangy old fox-skins literally as you’d cling to life. You see him always, furred to his pale eyes, running clumsily among a white flutter of birds, and M’Cabe pursuing him, a man in a dream—a dream of warmth. . . . .
“He came out of this dream one day to find himself knee-deep in surf, the day blown clear as grey glass, and a whaler’s boat putting in to the island. He splashed to meet it, and a man hauled him aboard by the collar. M’Cabe’s very confused about this. He says they were very kind to him and fed him with rum with biscuit crumbs in it. They said, ‘Are there any more on ye?’ And he said ‘Yes;’ so they hunted every creek on the island, and thought he was dreaming till they found the two burrows under the boat. It wasn’t any use looking any longer; there was the island, bare as a child’s slate lung on the sea, and nothing near it but the gulls. So they tied the boat on astern and went. ‘This pore feller’s the only one saved,’ says someone, and someone else says, ‘Yes, and he wouldn’t have lasted long without he was kept warm. He’s pretty far gone as it is.’ With that, M’Cabe says, in a wild way, ‘It’s the other man who’s saved, and pore Bill M’Cabe, he’s a-lying froze on the island,’ and falls forward in a faint. Because, you see, looking down at himself, he’d seen he was all wrapped up in that old fox-fur coat.
“For some days after he’d come to aboard the whaler, he doesn’t seem to have done much or thought of much; he just lay in his bunk and shivered. They were very good to him; gave him blankets and the best food they had, and let him lie, for his mind was all in a fog. They spread the fur coat atop of the blankets, and whenever he’d lift his head or stretch his hand, there it would be. It didn’t worry him much at first, but as his strength came back, the fog in his brain lifted, all but a few patches. And he’d lie fingering the greasy fur, and wonder—and wonder—how it came there . . . .
“I’ve known men, bolder or weaker than M’Cabe, who’d have let those patches rest. But he couldn’t. He kept trying to blow the fog clear. He’d lie there, shaking under the fur coat, and fighting for memory till he was as weak as a rag, and the cook, who was especially good to him, would bring him a tin of bitter brown coffee and a hot stove-lid for his feet. . . . Those blank patches in his mind were like lead, like iron; he might wreck himself against them like a prisoner against a stone wall; his own brain, his own memory, would yield him nothing.
“How did he get the fur coat? What he struggled for was the complete picture; and in the centre, it was smeared with a great black brush. He could not remember.
“He saw himself and the other man in the boat, landing on the island, digging their burrows in the icy sand; saw again all the monotony of that suffering; saw them gathering eggs, whirling arms like windmills in the fog as they fought the great gulls. He could taste again the salty frost on his lips. He could see the other man running round the icy rocks, and a shadow of himself following anxiously. He could see the rime on the fur coat, the pockets bulging with eggs, a button that was loose and worried him for fear it would be lost. And he could see himself being hauled into the boat by the collar of that coat. But between these two—blackness.
“How did he get it? What did he do?
“Did the other man die? They didn’t find him. Did he take off the coat, leave it behind him, and fall from the rocks while scrambling for eggs? Did M’Cabe push him off? Did he kill him first and then take off the coat and throw the body into the sea? ‘He didn’t feel his end near and will the coat to me,’ says M’Cabe, ‘he’d have wished to be buried with it on, he was that jealous of it.’ Many and many a time I’ve sat there with him and gone over every inch of that dirty old coat, hunting for a cut, a tear, a stain that might help him to remember, and he in a sweat of fear. ‘Father, it’ll come in another minute,’ he’d say, ‘in a minute I’ll know.’ But he never knew, he doesn’t know. The fog never lifted. The man in the fur coat running round the rocks in the mist—himself being hauled into the boat by the collar of that coat: whatever lay between of accident, of murder, of death—whatever lay between, is locked in the mysterious archives of the brain, like a book, the covers of which he may never be permitted to open. He goes about his world, as it were, looking at his hands; and he does not know if they are clean, or if there is on them—blood.”
Father John sat silent, staring at the fire, and his hosts were silent also; until at last Royce rose leisurely, opened a drawer, and took therefrom a bundle of cheroots. “I think you are all agreed,” he said, “as to whom these belong?”
A chorus of assent and admiration rose on the words, and Royce leaned over and clapped Father John on the shoulder. “I didn’t know you had it in you, Padre,” he said.
“But your mechanism was a little too apparent,” said Morris jealously, “and I know where you got your setting from. It’s in here—” He turned and groped in the bookcase.
“When I went fishing with you a few score years ago,” put in Connor, “we’d limit the righteous increase to fifty per cent. I’d like to know how much ye tacked on to that fur coat. How many perch do ye reckon to a salmon now? Far as we go, boys,” he said, looking sadly at the cheroots, “ye can trust Holy Church to go one further. And I thought Jack that innocent, I tried me rabbuts on him.”
Royce grinned into Father John’s entirely bewildered face. “I don’t want to know the percentage. I’ve enjoyed a good yarn so well told that it took me in at first until you made it a little bit too effective. A bundle of these,” he went on, flourishing the cheroots, “always goes to the most successful liar of the evening. And I don’t think,” he finished gracefully, “that we’ve any of us a doubt as to who that is to-night . . .”
A noise at the door made him turn—made Father John pause with his mouth open and his hand outstretched in denial or acceptance. They heard the servant’s voice raised indignantly, and a short scuffle in the hall. Then the door opened and a girl ran into the room; a rough girl from the river front, with a shawl over her shoulders and the rain lying like a net of pearls on her solid flaxen hair. She ran to the priest like a dog, and caught his cassock with her square tanned hands, and began to wail, strangely, softly.
“Father, Father,” she besought him, “come to M’Cabe. O, come quick to poor M’Cabe. He’s remembered. . . . .”