Angels' Shoes, and Other Stories

by Marjorie L. C. Pickthall

“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 . . . .