Angels' Shoes, and Other Stories. Marjorie L. C. Pickthall

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.