THAT WE PERISH NOT
Ephrem Surprenant pushed open the door and stood upon the threshold.
"I have come." He found no other words, and waited there motionless
for a few seconds, tongue-tied, while his eyes travelled from
Chapdelaine to Maria, from Maria to the children who sat very still
and quiet by the table; then he plucked off his cap hastily, as if
in amends for his forgetfulness, shut the door behind him and moved
across to the bed where the dead woman lay.
They had altered its place, turning the head to the wall and the
foot toward the centre of the house, so that it might be approached
on both sides. Close to the wall two lighted candles stood on
chairs; one of them set in a large candlestick of white metal which
the visitors to the Chapdelaine home had never seen before, while
for holding the other Maria had found nothing better than a glass
bowl used in the summer time for blueberries and wild raspberries,
on days of ceremony.
The candlestick shone, the bowl sparkled in the flames which lighted
but feebly the face of the dead. The days of suffering through which
she had passed, or death's final chill had given the features a
strange pallor and delicacy, the refinement of a woman bred in the
city. Father and children were at first amazed, and then perceived
in this the tremendous consequence of her translation beyond and far
above them.
Ephrem Surprenant bent his eyes upon the face for a little, and
then kneeled. The prayers he began to murmur were inaudible, but
when Maria and Tit'Bé came and knelt beside him he drew from a
pocket his string of large beads and began to tell them in a low
voice. The chaplet ended, he sat himself in silence by the table,
shaking his head sadly from time to time as is seemly in the house
of mourning, and because his own grief was deep and sincere.
At last he discovered speech. "It is a heavy loss. You were
fortunate in your wife, Samuel; no one may question that. Truly you
were fortunate in your wife."
This said, he could go no further; he sought in vain for some words
of sympathy, and at the end stumbled into other talk. "The weather
is quite mild this evening; we soon shall have rain. Everyone is
saying that it is to be an early spring."
To the countryman, all things touching the soil which gives him
bread, and the alternate seasons which lull the earth to sleep and
awaken it to life, are of such moment that one may speak of them
even in the presence of death with no disrespect. Their eyes turned
quite naturally to the square of the little window, but the night
was black and they could discern nothing.
Ephrem Surprenant began anew to praise her who was departed. "In
all the parish there was not a braver-spirited woman than she, nor a
cleverer housewife. How friendly too, and what a kind welcome she
always gave a visitor! In the old parishes--yes! and even in the
towns on the railway, not many would be found to match her. It is
only the truth to say that you were rarely suited in your wife ...
Soon afterwards he rose, and, leaving the house, his face was dark
with sorrow.
A long silence followed, in which Samuel Chapdelaine's head nodded
slowly towards his breast and it seemed as though he were falling
asleep. Maria spoke quickly to him, in fear of his
offending:--"Father! Do not sleep!"
"No! No!" He sat up straight on his chair and squared his shoulders
but since his eyes were closing in spite of him, he stood up
hastily, saying:--"Let us recite another chaplet."
Kneeling together beside the bed, they told the chaplet bead by
bead. Rising from their knees they heard the rain patter against the
window and on the shingles. It was the first spring rain and
proclaimed their freedom: the winter ended, the soil soon to
reappear, rivers once more running their joyous course, the earth
again transformed like some lovely girl released at last from an
evil spell by touch of magic wand. But they did not allow themselves
to be glad in this house of death, nor indeed did they feel the
happiness of it in the midst of their hearts' deep affliction.
Opening the window they moved back to it and hearkened to the
tapping of the great drops upon the roof. Maria saw that her
father's head had fallen, and that he was very still; she thought
his evening drowsiness was mastering him again, but when about to
waken him with a word, he it was who sighed and began to speak.
"Ephrem Surprenant said no more than the truth. Your mother was a
good woman, Maria; you will not find her like."
Maria's head answered him "Yes," but her lips were pressed close.
"Full of courage and good counsel, that she has been throughout her
life; but it was chiefly in the early days after we were married,
and then again when Esdras and yourself were little, that she showed
herself the woman she was. The wife of a small farmer looks for no
easy life, but women who take to their work as well and as
cheerfully as she did in those days, Maria, are hard to find."
Maria faltered:--"I know, father; I know it well;" and she dried
her eyes for her heart was melting into tears.
"When we took up our first land at Normandin we had two cows and
very little pasture for them, as nearly all our lot was in standing
timber and hard to win for the plough. As for me, I picked up my ax
and I said to her:--'Laura, I am going to clear land for you.' And
from morning till night it was chop, chop, chop, without ever coming
back to the house except for dinner; and all that time she did the
work of the house and the cooking, she looked after the cattle,
mended the fences, cleaned the cow-shed, never rested from her
toiling; and then half-a-dozen times a day she would come outside
the door and stand for a minute looking at me, over there by the
fringe of the woods, where I was putting my back into felling the
birches and the spruce to make a patch of soil for her.
"Then in the month of July our well must needs dry up; the cows had
not a drop of water to slake their thirst and they almost stopped
giving milk. So when I was hard at it in the woods the mother went
off to the river with a pail in either hand, and climbed the steep
bluff eight or ten times together with these brimming, and her feet
that slipped back in the running sand, till she had filled a barrel;
and when the barrel was full she got it on a wheelbarrow, and
wheeled it off herself to empty it into the big tub in the
cow-pasture more than three hundred yards from the house, just below
the rocks. It was not a woman's work, and I told her often enough to
leave it to me, but she always spoke up briskly:--'Don't you think
about that--don't think about anything--clear a farm for me.' And
she would laugh to cheer me up, but I saw well enough this was too
much for her, and that she was all dark under the eyes with the
labour of it.
"Well, I caught up my ax and was off to the woods; and I laid into
the birches so lustily that chips flew as thick as your wrist, all
the time saying to myself that the wife I had was like no other, and
that if the good God only kept me in health I would make her the
best farm in the countryside."
The rain was ever sounding on the roof now and then a gust drove
against the window great drops which ran down the panes like
slow-falling tears. Yet a few hours of rain and the soil would be
bare, streams would dance down every slope; a few more days and they
would hear the thundering of the falls.
"When we took up other land above Mistassini," Samuel Chapdelaine
continued, "it was the same thing over again; heavy work and
hardship for both of us alike; but she was always full of courage
and in good heart ... We were in the midst of the forest, but as
there were some open spaces of rich grass among the rocks we took to
raising sheep. One evening ..." He was silent for a little, and when he
began speaking again his eyes were fixed intently upon Maria, as
though he wished to make very clear to her what he was about to say.
"It was in September; the time when all the great creatures of the
woods become dangerous. A man from Mistassini who was coming down
the river in a canoe landed near our place and spoke to us
thiswise:--'Look after your sheep; the bears came and killed a
heifer last week quite close to the houses.' So your mother and I
went off that evening to the pasture to drive the sheep into the pen
for the night so that the bears would not devour them.
"I took one side and she the other, as the sheep used to scatter
among the alders. It was growing dark, and suddenly I heard Laura
cry out: 'Oh, the scoundrels!' Some animals were moving in the
bushes, and it was plain to see they were not sheep, because in the
woods toward evening sheep are white patches. So, ax in hand, I
started off running as hard as I could. Later on, when we were on
the way back to the house, your mother told me all about it. She had
come across a sheep lying dead, and two bears that were just going
to eat it. Now it takes a pretty good man, one not easily frightened
and with a gun in his hand, to face a bear in September; as for a
woman empty-handed, the best thing she can do is to run for it and
not a soul will blame her. But your mother snatched a stick from the
ground and made straight for the bears, screaming at them:--'Our
beautiful fat sheep! Be off with you, you ugly thieves, or I will do
for you!' I got there at my best speed, leaping over the stumps;
but by that time the bears had cleared off into the woods without
showing fight, scared as could be, because she had put the fear of
death into them."
Maria listened breathlessly; asking herself if it was really her
mother who had done this thing--the mother whom she had always known
so gentle and tender-hearted; who had never given Telesphore a
little rap on the head without afterwards taking him on her knees to
comfort him, adding her own tears to his, and declaring that to slap
a child was something to break one's heart.
The brief spring shower was already spent; through the clouds the
moon was showing her face--eager to discover what was left of the
winter's snow after this earliest rain. As yet the ground was
everywhere white; the night's deep silence told them that many days
must pass before they would hear again the dull roaring of the
cataract; but the tempered breeze whispered of consolation and
promise.
Samuel Chapdelaine lapsed into silence for a while, his head bowed,
his hands resting upon his knees, dreaming of the past with its
toilsome years that were yet so full of brave hopes. When he took up
his tale it was in a voice that halted, melancholy with
self-reproach.
"At Normandin, at Mistassini and the other places we have lived I
always worked hard; no one can say nay to that. Many an acre of
forest have I cleared and I have built houses and barns, always
saying to myself that one day we should have a comfortable farm
where your mother would live as do the women in the old parishes,
with fine smooth fields all about the house as far as the eye could
see, a kitchen garden, handsome well-fed cattle in the farm-yard ...
And, after it all, here is she dead in this half-savage spot,
leagues from other houses and churches, and so near the bush that
some nights one can hear the foxes bark. And it is my fault that she
has died so ... My fault ... My fault." Remorse seized him; he
shook his head at the pity of it, his eyes upon the floor.
"Many times it happened, after we had spent five or six years in
one place and all had gone well, that we were beginning to get
together a nice property--good pasturage, broad fields ready for
sowing, a house lined inside with pictures from the papers ...
Then people came and settled about us; we had but to wait a little,
working on quietly, and soon we should have been in the midst of a
well-to-do settlement where Laura could have passed the rest of her
days in happiness ... And then all of a sudden I lost heart; I
grew sick and tired of my work and of the countryside; I began to
hate the very faces of those who had taken up land near-by and used
to come to see us, thinking that we should be pleased to have a
visitor after being so long out of the way of them. I heard people
saying that farther off toward the head of the Lake there was good
land in the forest; that some folk from St. Gedeon spoke of settling
over on that side; and forthwith I began to hunger and thirst for
this spot they were talking about, that I had never seen in my life
and where not a soul lived, as for the place of my birth ...
"Well, in those days, when the work was done, instead of smoking
beside the stove I would go out to the door-step and sit there
without moving, like a man homesick and lonely; and everything I saw
in front of me--the place I had made with these two hands after so
much of labour and sweat--the fields, the fences, over to the rocky
knoll that shut us in--I detested them all till I seemed ready to go
out of my mind at the very sight of them.
"And then your mother would come quietly up behind me. She also
would look out across our place, and I knew that she was pleased
with it to the bottom of her heart because it was beginning to look
like the old parish where she had grown up, and where she would so
gladly have spent her days. But instead of telling me that I was no
better than a silly old fool for wishing to leave--as most women
would have done--and finding hard things to say about my folly, she
only sighed a little as she thought of the drudgery that was to
begin all over again somewhere back in the woods, and kindly and
softly she would say to me:--'Well, Samuel! Are we soon to be on the
move once more?' When she said that I could not answer, for I was
speechless with very shame at thinking of the wretched life I had
given her; but I knew well enough that it would end in our moving
again and pushing on to the north, deeper into the woods, and that
she would be with me and take her share in this hard business of
beginning anew--as cheerful and capable and good-humoured as ever,
without one single word of reproach or spitefulness."
He was silent after that, and seemed to ponder long his sorrow and
the things which might have been. Maria, sighing, passed a hand
across her face as though she would brush away a disquieting vision;
but in very truth there was nothing she wished to forget. What she
heard had moved her profoundly, and she felt in a dim and troubled
way that this story of a hard life so bravely lived had for her a
deep and timely significance and held some lesson if only she might
understand it.
"How little do we know people!" was the thought that filled her
mind. Since her mother had crossed the threshold of death she seemed
to wear a new aspect, not of this world; and now all the homely and
familiar traits endearing her to them were being overshadowed by
other virtues well-nigh heroic in their quality.
To pass her days in these lonely places when she would have dearly
loved the society of other human beings and the unbroken peace of
village life; to strive from dawn till nightfall, spending all her
strength in a thousand heavy tasks, and yet from dawn till nightfall
never losing patience nor her happy tranquillity; continually to see
about her only the wilderness, the great pitiless forest, and to
hold in the midst of it all an ordered way of life, the gentleness
and the joyousness which are the fruits of many a century sheltered
from such rudeness--was it not surely a hard thing and a worthy? And
the recompense? After death, a little word of praise.
Was it worth the cost? The question scarcely framed itself with such
clearness in her mind, but so her thoughts were tending. Thus to
live, as hardly, as courageously, and to be so sorely missed when
she departed, few women were fit for this. As for herself ...
The sky, flooded with moonlight, was of a wonderful lambency and
depth; across the whole arch of heaven a band of cloud, fashioned
strangely into carven shapes, defiled in solemn march. The white
ground no longer spoke of chill and desolateness, for the air was
soft; and by some magic of the approaching spring the snow appeared
to be only a mask covering the earth's face, in nowise terrifying--a
mask one knew must soon be lifted.
Maria seated by the little window fixed her unconscious eyes upon
the sky and the fields stretching away whitely to the environing
woods, and of a sudden it was borne to her that the question she was
asking herself had just received its answer. To dwell in this land
as her mother had dwelt, and, dying thus, to leave behind her a
sorrowing husband and a record of the virtues of her race, she knew
in her heart she was fit for that. In reckoning with herself there
was no trace of vanity; rather did the response seem from without.
Yes, she was able; and she was filled with wonderment as though at
the shining of some unlooked-for light.
Thus she too could live; but ... it was not as yet in her heart so
to do ... In a little while, this season of mourning at an end,
Lorenzo Surprenant would come back from the States for the third
time and would bear her away to the unknown delights of the
city--away from the great forest she hated--away from that cruel
land where men who go astray perish helplessly, where women endure
endless torment the while ineffectual aid is sought for them over
the long roads buried in snow. Why should she stay here to toil and
suffer when she might escape to the lands of the south and a happier
life.
The soft breeze telling of spring came against the window, bringing
a confusion of gentle sounds; the swish and sigh of branches swaying
and touching one another, the distant hooting of an owl. Then the
great silence reigned once more. Samuel Chapdelaine was sleeping;
but in this repose beside the dead was nothing unseemly or wanting
in respect; chin fallen on his breast, hands lying open on his
knees, he seemed to be plunged into the very depths of sorrow or
striving to relinquish life that he might follow the departed a
little way into the shades.
Again Maria asked herself:--"Why stay here, to toil and suffer
thus? Why? ..." And when she found no answer, it befell at length
that out of the silence and the night voices arose.
No miraculous voices were these; each of us hears them when he goes
apart and withdraws himself far enough to escape from the petty
turmoil of his daily life. But they speak more loudly and with
plainer accents to the simple-hearted, to those who dwell among the
great northern woods and in the empty places of the earth. While yet
Maria was dreaming of the city's distant wonders the first voice
brought murmuringly to her memory a hundred forgotten charms of the
land she wished to flee.
The marvel of the reappearing earth in the springtime after the long
months of winter ... The dreaded snow stealing away in prankish
rivulets down every slope; the tree-roots first resurgent, then the
mosses drenched with wet, soon the ground freed from its burden
whereon one treads with delighted glances and sighs of happiness
like the sick man who feels glad life returning to his veins ...
Later yet, the birches, alders, aspens swelling into bud; the laurel
clothing itself in rosy bloom ... The rough battle with the soil a
seeming holiday to men no longer condemned to idleness; to draw the
hard breath of toil from morn till eve a gracious favour ...
--The cattle, at last set free from their shed, gallop to the
pasture and glut themselves with the fresh grass. All the new-born
creatures--the calves, the fowls, the lambs, gambol in the sun and
add daily to their stature like the hay and the barley. The poorest
farmer sometimes halts in yard or field, hands in pockets, and
tastes the great happiness of knowing that the sun's heat, the warm
rain, the earth's unstinted alchemy--every mighty force of
nature--is working as a humble slave for him ... for him.
--And then, the summertide; the glory of sunny noons, the heated
quivering air that blurs the horizon and the outline of the forest,
the flies swarming and circling in the sun's rays, and but three
hundred paces from the house the rapids and the fall--white foam
against dark water--the mere sight of it filling one with a
delicious coolness. In its due time the harvest; the grain that
gives life heaped into the barns; then autumn and soon the returning
winter ... But here was the marvel of it, that the winter seemed
no longer abhorrent or terrifying; it brought in its train the sweet
intimacies of a house shut fast, and beyond the door, with the
sameness and the soundlessness of deep-drifted snow, peace, a great
peace . .
In the cities were the strange and wonderful things whereof Lorenzo
Surprenant had told, with others that she pictured to herself
confusedly: wide streets suffused with light, gorgeous shops, an
easy life of little toil with a round of small pleasures and
distractions. Perhaps, though, one would come to tire of this
restlessness, and, yearning some evening only for repose and quiet,
where would one discover the tranquillity of field and wood, the
soft touch of that cooler air that draws from the north-west after
set of sun, the wide-spreading peacefulness that settles on the
earth sinking to untroubled sleep.
"And yet they must be beautiful!" thought she, still dreaming of
those vast American cities ... As though in answer, a second voice
was raised.
--Over there was it not a stranger land where people of an alien
race spoke of unfamiliar things in another tongue, sang other songs?
Here ...
--The very names of this her country, those she listened to every
day, those heard but once, came crowding to memory: a thousand names
piously bestowed by peasants from France on lakes, on rivers, on
the settlements of the new country they were discovering and
peopling as they went--lac à l'Eau-Claire--la
Famine--Saint-Coeur-de-Marie--Trois-Pistoles--Sainte
Rose-du-Dégel--Pointe-aux-Outardes--Saint-André-de-l'Epouvante ...
An uncle of Eutrope Gagnon's lived at Saint-André-de-l'Epouvante;
Racicot of Honfleur spoke often of his son who was a stoker on a
Gulf coaster, and every time new names were added to the old;
names of fishing villages and little harbours on the St. Lawrence,
scattered here and there along those shores between which the ships
of the old days had boldly sailed toward an unknown
land--Pointe-Mille-Vaches--les Escoumins--Notre-Dame-du-Portage--les
Grandes-Bergeronnes--Gaspé.
--How sweet to hear these names where one was talking of distant
acquaintance and kinsfolk, or telling of far journeys! How dear and
neighbourly was the sound of them, with a heart-warming friendly
ring that made one feel as he spoke them:--"Throughout all this
land we are at home ... at home ..."
--Westward, beyond the borders of the Province; southward, across
the line were everywhere none but English names. In time one might
learn to speak them, even might they at last come familiarly to the
ear; but where should one find again the happy music of the French
names?
--Words of a foreign speech from every lip, on every street, in
every shop ... Little girls taking hands to dance a round and
singing a song one could not understand ... Here ...
Maria turned toward her father who still slept with his chin sunk on
his breast, looking like a man stricken down by grief whose
meditation is of death; and the look brought her swift memory of the
hymns and country songs he was wont to teach his children in the
evenings.
A la claire fontaine
M'en allant promener ...
In those cities of the States, even if one taught the children how
to sing them would they not straightway forget!
The clouds a little while ago drifting singly across a moonlit sky
were now spread over the heavens in a vast filmy curtain, and the
dim light passing through it was caught by the earth's pale coverlet
of melting snow; between the two wan expanses the ranks of the
forest darkly stretched their long battle-front.
Maria shuddered; the emotion which had glowed in her heart was
dying; once again she said to herself: "And yet it is a harsh
land, this land of ours ... Why should I linger here?"
Then it was that a third voice, mightier than the others, lifted
itself up in the silence: the voice of Quebec--now the song of a
woman, now the exhortation of a priest. It came to her with the
sound of a church bell, with the majesty of an organ's tones, like a
plaintive love-song, like the long high call of woodsmen in the
forest. For verily there was in it all that makes the soul of the
Province: the loved solemnities of the ancestral faith; the lilt of
that old speech guarded with jealous care; the grandeur and the
barbaric strength of this new land where an ancient race has again
found its youth.
Thus spake the voice:--"Three hundred years ago we came, and we
have remained ... They who led us hither might return among us
without knowing shame or sorrow, for if it be true that we have
little learned, most surely nothing is forgot.
"We bore oversea our prayers and our songs; they are ever the same.
We carried in our bosoms the hearts of the men of our fatherland,
brave and merry, easily moved to pity as to laughter, of all human
hearts the most human; nor have they changed. We traced the
boundaries of a new continent, from Gaspé to Montreal, from St. Jean
d'Iberville to Ungava, saying as we did it:--Within these limits
all we brought with us, our faith, our tongue, our virtues, our very
weaknesses are henceforth hallowed things which no hand may touch,
which shall endure to the end.
"Strangers have surrounded us whom it is our pleasure to call
foreigners; they have taken into their hands most of the rule, they
have gathered to themselves much of the wealth; but in this land of
Quebec nothing has changed. Nor shall anything change, for we are
the pledge of it. Concerning ourselves and our destiny but one duty
have we clearly understood: that we should hold fast--should endure.
And we have held fast, so that, it may be, many centuries hence the
world will look upon us and say:--These people are of a race that
knows not how to perish ... We are a testimony.
"For this is it that we must abide in that Province where our
fathers dwelt, living as they have lived, so to obey the unwritten
command that once shaped itself in their hearts, that passed to
ours, which we in turn must hand on to descendants innumerable:--In
this land of Quebec naught shall die and naught shall suffer
change ..."
The veil of gray cloud which hid the whole heavens had become
heavier and more louring, and suddenly the rain began afresh,
bringing yet a little nearer that joyous hour when the earth would
lie bare and the rivers be freed. Samuel Chapdelaine slept
profoundly, his head sunk upon his breast, an old man yielding at
last to the long fatigues of his lifetime of toil. Above the
candlestick of metal and the glass bowl the candle flames wavered
under gentle breaths from the window, and shadows flitting across
the face of the dead woman made her lips seem to be moving in prayer
or softly telling secrets.
Maria Chapdelaine awaked from her dream to the thought:--"So I
shall stay--shall stay here after all!" For the voices had spoken
commandingly and she knew she could not choose but obey. It was only
then that the recollection of other duties came, after she had
submitted, and a sigh had passed her lips. Alma Rose was still a
child; her mother dead, there must be a woman in the house. But in
truth it was the voices which had told her the way.
The rain was pattering on the roof, and nature, rejoicing that
winter was past, sent soft little wandering airs through the
casement as though she were sighing in content. Throughout the hours
of the night Maria moved not; with hands folded in her lap, patient
of spirit and without bitterness, yet dreaming a little wistfully of
the far-off wonders her eyes would never behold and of the land
wherein she was bidden to live with its store of sorrowful memories;
of the living flame which her heart had known awhile and lost
forever, and the deep snowy woods whence too daring youths shall no
more return.