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.”