THE STUFF OF DREAMS
In July the hay was maturing, and by the middle of August it was
only a question of awaiting a few dry days to cut and store it. But
after many weeks of fine weather the frequent shifts of wind which
are usual in Quebec once more ruled the skies.
Every morning the men scanned the heavens and took counsel together.
"The wind is backing to the sou'east. Bad luck! Beyond question it
will rain again," said Edwige Legare with a gloomy face. Or it was
old Chapdelaine who followed the movement of the white clouds that
rose above the tree-tops, sailed in glad procession across the
clearing, and disappeared behind the dark spires on the other side.
"If the nor'west holds till to-morrow we shall begin," he announces.
But next day the wind had backed afresh, and the cheerful clouds of
yesterday, now torn and shapeless, straggling in disorderly rout,
seemed to be fleeing like the wreckage of a broken army.
Madame Chapdelaine foretold inevitable misfortune. "Mark my words,
we shall not have good hay-making weather. They say that down by the
end of the lake some people of the same parish have gone to law with
one another. Of a certainty the good God does not like that sort of
thing!"
Yet the Power at length was pleased to show indulgence, and the
north-west wind blew for three days on end, steady and strong,
promising a rainless week. The scythes were long since sharpened and
ready, and the five men set to work on the morning of the third day.
Legare, Esdras and the father cut; Da'Bé and Tit'Bé followed close
on their heels, raking the hay together. Toward evening all five
took their forks in hand and made it into cocks, high and carefully
built, lest a change of wind should bring rain. But the sunshine
lasted. For five days they carried on, swinging the scythe steadily
from right to left with that broad free movement that seems so easy
to the practised hand, and is in truth the hardest to learn and the
most fatiguing of all the labours known to husbandry.
Flies and mosquitos rose in swarms from the cut hay, stinging and
tormenting the workers; a blazing sun scorched their necks, and
smarting sweat ran into their eyes; when evening came, such was the
ache of backs continually bent, they could not straighten themselves
without making wry faces. Yet they toiled from dawn to nightfall
without loss of a second, hurrying their meals, feeling nothing but
gratitude and happiness that the weather stood fair.
Three or four times a day Maria or Telesphore brought them a bucket
of water which they stood in a shady spot to keep it cool; and when
throats became unbearably dry with heat, exertion and the dust of
the hay, they went by turns to swallow great draughts and deluge
wrists or head.
In five days all the hay was cut, and, the drought persisting, on
the morning of the sixth day they began to break and scatter the
cocks they intended lodging in the barn before night. The scythes
had done their work and the forks came into play. They threw down
the cocks, spread the hay in the sun, and toward the end of the
afternoon, when dry, heaped it anew in piles of such a size that a
man could just lift one with a single motion to the level of a
well-filled hay-cart.
Charles Eugene pulled gallantly between the shafts; the cart was
swallowed up in the barn, stopped beside the mow, and once again the
forks were plunged into the hard-packed hay, raised a thick mat of
it with strain of wrist and back, and unloaded it to one side. By
the end of the week the hay, well-dried and of excellent colour, was
all under cover; the men stretched themselves and took long breaths,
knowing the fight was over and won.
"It may rain now if it likes," said Chapdelaine. "It will be all
the same to us." But it appeared that the sunshine had not been
timed with exact relation to their peculiar needs, for the wind held
in the north-west and fine days followed one upon the other in
unbroken succession.
The women of the Chapdelaine household had no part in the work of
the fields. The father and his three tall sons, all strong and
skilled in farm labour, could have managed everything by themselves;
if they continued to employ Legare and to pay him wages it was
because he had entered their service eleven years before, when the
children were young, and they kept him now, partly through habit,
partly because they were loth to lose the help of so tremendous a
worker. During the hay-making then, Maria and her mother had only
their usual tasks: housework, cooking, washing and mending, the
milking of three cows and the care of the hens, and once a week the
baking which often lasted well into the night.
On the eve of a baking Telesphore was sent to hunt up the bread-pans
which habitually found their way into all corners of the house and
shed--being in daily use to measure oats for the horse or Indian corn
for the fowls, not to mention twenty other casual purposes they were
continually serving. By the time all were routed out and scrubbed
the dough was rising, and the women hastened to finish other work
that their evening watch might be shortened.
Telesphore made a blazing fire below the Oven with branches of gummy
cypress that smelled of resin, then fed it with tamarack logs,
giving a steady and continuous heat. When the oven was hot enough,
Maria slipped in the pans of dough; after which nothing remained but
to tend the fire and change the position of the pans as the baking
required.
Too small an oven had been built five years before, and ever since
then the family did not escape a weekly discussion about the new
oven it was imperative to construct, which unquestionably should
have been put in hand without delay; but on each trip to
the village, by one piece of bad luck and another, someone forgot
the necessary cement; and so it happened that the oven had to be
filled two or even three times to make weekly provision for the nine
mouths of the household.
Maria invariably took charge of the first baking; invariably too,
when the oven was ready for the second batch of bread and the
evening well advanced, her mother would say considerately:--"You
can go to bed, Maria, I will look after the second baking." And
Maria would reply never a word, knowing full well that the mother
would presently stretch herself on the bed for a little nap and not
awake till morning. She then would revive the smudge that smouldered
every evening in the damaged tin pail, install the second batch of
bread, and seat herself upon the door-step, her chin resting in her
hands, upheld through the long hours of the night by her
inexhaustible patience.
Twenty paces from the house the clay oven with its sheltering roof
of boards loomed dark, but the door of the fireplace fitted badly
and one red gleam escaped through the chink; the dusky border of the
forest stole a little closer in the night. Maria sat very still,
delighting in the quiet and the coolness, while a thousand vague
dreams circled about her like a flock of wheeling birds.
There was a time when this night-watch passed in drowsiness, as she
resignedly awaited the moment when the finished task would bring her
sleep; but since the coming of François Paradis the long weekly
vigil was very sweet to her, for she could think of him and of
herself with nothing to distract her dear imaginings. Simple they
were, these thoughts of hers, and never did they travel far afield.
In the springtime he will come back; this return of his, the joy of
seeing him again, the words he will say when they find themselves
once more alone, the first touch of hands and lips. Not easy was it
for Maria to make a picture for herself of how these things were to
come about.
Yet she essayed. First she repeated his full name two or three
times, formally, as others spoke it: François Paradis, from St. Michel de
Mistassini ... François Paradis ... Then suddenly, with sweet
intimacy,--François!
The evocation fails not. He stands before her tall and strong, bold
of eye, his face bronzed with sun and snow-glare. He is by her side,
rejoicing at the sight of her, rejoicing that he has kept his faith,
has lived the whole year discreetly, without drinking or swearing.
There are no blueberries yet to gather--it is only springtime--yet
some good reason they find for rambling off to the woods; he walks
beside her without word or joining of hands, through the massed
laurel flaming into blossom, and naught beyond does either need to
flush the cheek, to quicken the beating of the heart.
Now they are seated upon a fallen tree, and thus he speaks: "Were
you lonely without me, Maria?" Most surely it is the first question
he will put to her; but she is able to carry the dream no further
for the sudden pain stabbing her heart. Ah! dear God! how long will
she have been lonely for him before that moment comes! A summer to
be lived through, an autumn, and all the endless winter! She sighs,
but the steadfast patience of the race sustains her, and her
thoughts turn upon herself and what the future may be holding.
When she was at St. Prime, one of her cousins who was about to be
wedded spoke often to her of marriage. A young man from the village
and another from Normandin had both courted her; for long months
spending the Sunday evenings together at the house.
"I was fond of them both,"--thus she declared to Maria. "And I really
think I liked Zotique best; but he went off to the drive on the St.
Maurice, and he wasn't to be back till summer; then Romeo asked me
and I said, 'Yes.' I like him very well, too."
Maria made no answer, but even then her heart told her that all
marriages are not like that; now she is very sure. The love of
François Paradis for her, her love for him, is a thing apart--a thing
holy and inevitable--for she was unable to imagine that between
them it should have befallen otherwise; so must this love give
warmth and unfading colour to every day of the dullest life. Always
had she dim consciousness of such a presence--moving the spirit like
the solemn joy of chanted masses, the intoxication of a sunny windy
day, the happiness that some unlooked-for good fortune brings, the
certain promise of abundant harvest ...
In the stillness of the night the roar of the fall sounds loud and
near; the north-west wind sways the tops of spruce and fir with a
sweet cool sighing; again and again, farther away and yet farther,
an owl is hooting; the chill that ushers in the dawn is still
remote. And Maria, in perfect contentment, rests upon the step,
watching the ruddy beam from her fire-flickering, disappearing,
quickened again to birth.
She seems to remember someone long since whispering in her ear that
the world and life were cheerless and gray. The daily round,
brightened only by a few unsatisfying, fleeting pleasures; the slow
passage of unchanging years; the encounter with some young man, like
other young men, whose patient and hopeful courting ends by winning
affection; a marriage then, and afterwards a vista of days under
another roof, but scarce different from those that went before. So
does one live, the voice had told her. Naught very dreadful in the
prospect, and, even were it so, what possible but submission; yet
all level, dreary and chill as an autumn field.
It is not true! Alone there in the darkness Maria shakes her head, a
smile upon her lips, and knows how far from true it is. When she
thinks of Paradis, his look, his bearing, of what they are and will
be to one another, he and she, something within her bosom has
strange power to burn with the touch of fire, and yet to make her
shiver. All the strong youth of her, the long-suffering of her
sooth-fast heart find place in it; in the upspringing of hope and of
longing, this vision of her approaching miracle of happiness.
Below the oven the red gleam quivers and fails.
"The bread must be ready!" she murmurs to herself. But she cannot
bring herself at once to rise, loth as she is to end the fair dream
that seems only beginning.