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. . . . .”