I
When the good priest of St. Gerome christened Patrick Mullarkey, he lent
himself unconsciously to an innocent deception. To look at the name, you
would think, of course, it belonged to an Irishman; the very appearance
of it was equal to a certificate of membership in a Fenian society.
But in effect, from the turned-up toes of his bottes sauvages to
the ends of his black mustache, the proprietor of this name was a
Frenchman--Canadian French, you understand, and therefore even more
proud and tenacious of his race than if he had been born in Normandy.
Somewhere in his family tree there must have been a graft from the
Green Isle. A wandering lumberman from County Kerry had drifted up the
Saguenay into the Lake St. John region, and married the daughter of a
habitant, and settled down to forget his own country and his father's
house. But every visible trace of this infusion of new blood had
vanished long ago, except the name; and the name itself was transformed
on the lips of the St. Geromians. If you had heard them speak it in
their pleasant droning accent,--“Patrique Moullarque,”--you would have
supposed that it was made in France. To have a guide with such a name as
that was as good as being abroad.
Even when they cut it short and called him “Patte,” as they usually did,
it had a very foreign sound. Everything about him was in harmony with
it; he spoke and laughed and sang and thought and felt in French--the
French of two hundred years ago, the language of Samuel de Champlain and
the Sieur de Monts, touched with a strong woodland flavour. In short,
my guide, philosopher, and friend, Pat, did not have a drop of Irish
in him, unless, perhaps, it was a certain--well, you shall judge for
yourself, when you have heard this story of his virtue, and the way it
was rewarded.
It was on the shore of the Lac a la Belle Riviere, fifteen miles back
from St. Gerome, that I came into the story, and found myself, as
commonly happens in the real stories which life is always bringing out
in periodical form, somewhere about the middle of the plot. But Patrick
readily made me acquainted with what had gone before. Indeed, it is
one of life's greatest charms as a story-teller that there is never
any trouble about getting a brief resume of the argument, and even a
listener who arrives late is soon put into touch with the course of the
narrative.
We had hauled our canoes and camp-stuff over the terrible road that
leads to the lake, with much creaking and groaning of wagons, and
complaining of men, who declared that the mud grew deeper and the hills
steeper every year, and vowed their customary vow never to come that way
again. At last our tents were pitched in a green copse of balsam trees,
close beside the water. The delightful sense of peace and freedom
descended upon our souls. Prosper and Ovide were cutting wood for the
camp-fire; Francois was getting ready a brace of partridges for supper;
Patrick and I were unpacking the provisions, arranging them conveniently
for present use and future transportation.
“Here, Pat,” said I, as my hand fell on a large square parcel--“here is
some superfine tobacco that I got in Quebec for you and the other men on
this trip. Not like the damp stuff you had last year--a little bad
smoke and too many bad words. This is tobacco to burn--something quite
particular, you understand. How does that please you?”
He had been rolling up a piece of salt pork in a cloth as I spoke, and
courteously wiped his fingers on the outside of the bundle before he
stretched out his hand to take the package of tobacco. Then he answered,
with his unfailing politeness, but more solemnly than usual:
“A thousand thanks to m'sieu'. But this year I shall not have need of
the good tobacco. It shall be for the others.”
The reply was so unexpected that it almost took my breath away. For Pat,
the steady smoker, whose pipes were as invariable as the precession of
the equinoxes, to refuse his regular rations of the soothing weed was a
thing unheard of. Could he be growing proud in his old age? Had he some
secret supply of cigars concealed in his kit, which made him scorn the
golden Virginia leaf? I demanded an explanation.
“But no, m'sieu',” he replied; “it is not that, most assuredly. It
is something entirely different--something very serious. It is a
reformation that I commence. Does m'sieu' permit that I should inform
him of it?”
Of course I permitted, or rather, warmly encouraged, the fullest
possible unfolding of the tale; and while we sat among the bags and
boxes, and the sun settled gently down behind the sharp-pointed firs
across the lake, and the evening sky and the waveless lake glowed with a
thousand tints of deepening rose and amber, Patrick put me in possession
of the facts which had led to a moral revolution in his life.
“It was the Ma'm'selle Meelair, that young lady,--not very young, but
active like the youngest,--the one that I conducted down the Grande
Decharge to Chicoutimi last year, after you had gone away. She said that
she knew m'sieu' intimately. No doubt you have a good remembrance of
her?”
I admitted an acquaintance with the lady. She was the president of
several societies for ethical agitation--a long woman, with short hair
and eyeglasses and a great thirst for tea; not very good in a canoe, but
always wanting to run the rapids and go into the dangerous places, and
talking all the time. Yes; that must have been the one. She was not a
bosom friend of mine, to speak accurately, but I remembered her well.
“Well, then, m'sieu',” continued Patrick, “it was this demoiselle who
changed my mind about the smoking. But not in a moment, you understand;
it was a work of four days, and she spoke much.
“The first day it was at the Island House; we were trolling for
ouananiche, and she was not pleased, for she lost many of the fish. I
was smoking at the stern of the canoe, and she said that the tobacco was
a filthy weed, that it grew in the devil's garden, and that it smelled
bad, terribly bad, and that it made the air sick, and that even the pig
would not eat it.”
I could imagine Patrick's dismay as he listened to this dissertation;
for in his way he was as sensitive as a woman, and he would rather have
been upset in his canoe than have exposed himself to the reproach of
offending any one of his patrons by unpleasant or unseemly conduct.
“What did you do then, Pat?” I asked.
“Certainly I put out the pipe--what could I do otherwise? But I thought
that what the demoiselle Meelair has said was very strange, and not
true--exactly; for I have often seen the tobacco grow, and it springs
up out of the ground like the wheat or the beans, and it has beautiful
leaves, broad and green, with sometimes a red flower at the top. Does
the good God cause the filthy weeds to grow like that? Are they not all
clean that He has made? The potato--it is not filthy. And the onion?
It has a strong smell; but the demoiselle Meelair she ate much of the
onion--when we were not at the Island House, but in the camp.
“And the smell of the tobacco--this is an affair of the taste. For me,
I love it much; it is like a spice. When I come home at night to the
camp-fire, where the boys are smoking, the smell of the pipes runs far
out into the woods to salute me. It says, 'Here we are, Patrique; come
in near to the fire.' The smell of the tobacco is more sweet than the
smell of the fish. The pig loves it not, assuredly; but what then? I am
not a pig. To me it is good, good, good. Don't you find it like that,
m'sieu'?”
I had to confess that in the affair of taste I sided with Patrick rather
than with the pig. “Continue,” I said--“continue, my boy. Miss Miller
must have said more than that to reform you.”
“Truly,” replied Pat. “On the second day we were making the lunch at
midday on the island below the first rapids. I smoked the pipe on a
rock apart, after the collation. Mees Meelair comes to me, and says:
'Patrique, my man, do you comprehend that the tobacco is a poison?
You are committing the murder of yourself.' Then she tells me many
things--about the nicoline, I think she calls him; how he goes into the
blood and into the bones and into the hair, and how quickly he will kill
the cat. And she says, very strong, 'The men who smoke the tobacco shall
die!'”
“That must have frightened you well, Pat. I suppose you threw away your
pipe at once.”
“But no, m'sieu'; this time I continue to smoke, for now it is Mees
Meelair who comes near the pipe voluntarily, and it is not my offence.
And I remember, while she is talking, the old bonhomme Michaud St.
Gerome. He is a capable man; when he was young he could carry a barrel
of flour a mile without rest, and now that he has seventy-three years he
yet keeps his force. And he smokes--it is astonishing how that old man
smokes! All the day, except when he sleeps. If the tobacco is a poison,
it is a poison of the slowest--like the tea or the coffee. For the cat
it is quick--yes; but for the man it is long; and I am still young--only
thirty-one.
“But the third day, m'sieu'--the third day was the worst. It was a day
of sadness, a day of the bad chance. The demoiselle Meelair was not
content but that we should leap the Rapide des Cedres in canoe. It was
rough, rough--all feather-white, and the big rock at the corner boiling
like a kettle. But it is the ignorant who have the most of boldness. The
demoiselle Meelair she was not solid in the canoe. She made a jump and a
loud scream. I did my possible, but the sea was too high. We took in of
the water about five buckets. We were very wet. After that we make the
camp; and while I sit by the fire to dry my clothes I smoke for comfort.
“Mees Meelair she comes to me once more. 'Patrique,' she says with a sad
voice, 'I am sorry that a nice man, so good, so brave, is married to a
thing so bad, so sinful!' At first I am mad when I hear this, because
I think she means Angelique, my wife; but immediately she goes on:
'You are married to the smoking. That is sinful; it is a wicked thing.
Christians do not smoke. There is none of the tobacco in heaven. The men
who use it cannot go there. Ah, Patrique, do you wish to go to the hell
with your pipe?'”
“That was a close question,” I commented; “your Miss Miller is a plain
speaker. But what did you say when she asked you that?”
“I said, m'sieu',” replied Patrick, lifting his hand to his forehead,
“that I must go where the good God pleased to send me, and that I would
have much joy to go to the same place with our cure, the Pere Morel, who
is a great smoker. I am sure that the pipe of comfort is no sin to that
holy man when he returns, some cold night, from the visiting of the
sick--it is not sin, not more than the soft chair and the warm fire. It
harms no one, and it makes quietness of mind. For me, when I see m'sieu'
the cure sitting at the door of the presbytere, in the evening coolness,
smoking the tobacco, very peaceful, and when he says to me, 'Good day,
Patrique; will you have a pipeful?' I cannot think that is wicked--no!”
There was a warmth of sincerity in the honest fellow's utterance that
spoke well for the character of the cure of St. Gerome. The good word
of a plain fisherman or hunter is worth more than a degree of doctor of
divinity from a learned university.
I too had grateful memories of good men, faithful, charitable, wise,
devout,--men before whose virtues my heart stood uncovered and reverent,
men whose lives were sweet with self-sacrifice, and whose words were
like stars of guidance to many souls,--and I had often seen these men
solacing their toils and inviting pleasant, kindly thoughts with the
pipe of peace. I wondered whether Miss Miller ever had the good fortune
to meet any of these men. They were not members of the societies for
ethical agitation, but they were profitable men to know. Their very
presence was medicinal. It breathed patience and fidelity to duty, and a
large, quiet friendliness.
“Well, then,” I asked, “what did she say finally to turn you? What was
her last argument? Come, Pat, you must make it a little shorter than she
did.”
“In five words, m'sieu', it was this: 'The tobacco causes the poverty.'
The fourth day--you remind yourself of the long dead-water below the
Rapide Gervais? It was there. All the day she spoke to me of the money
that goes to the smoke. Two piastres the month. Twenty-four the year.
Three hundred--yes, with the interest, more than three hundred in ten
years! Two thousand piastres in the life of the man! But she comprehends
well the arithmetic, that demoiselle Meelair; it was enormous! The big
farmer Tremblay has not more money at the bank than that. Then she asks
me if I have been at Quebec? No. If I would love to go? Of course,
yes. For two years of the smoking we could go, the goodwife and me, to
Quebec, and see the grand city, and the shops, and the many people, and
the cathedral, and perhaps the theatre. And at the asylum of the orphans
we could seek one of the little found children to bring home with us, to
be our own; for m'sieu knows it is the sadness of our house that we have
no child. But it was not Mees Meelair who said that--no, she would not
understand that thought.”
Patrick paused for a moment, and rubbed his chin reflectively. Then he
continued:
“And perhaps it seems strange to you also, m'sieu', that a poor man
should be so hungry for children. It is not so everywhere: not in
America, I hear. But it is so with us in Canada. I know not a man so
poor that he would not feel richer for a child. I know not a man so
happy that he would not feel happier with a child in the house. It is
the best thing that the good God gives to us; something to work for;
something to play with. It makes a man more gentle and more strong. And
a woman,--her heart is like an empty nest, if she has not a child. It
was the darkest day that ever came to Angelique and me when our little
baby flew away, four years ago. But perhaps if we have not one of our
own, there is another somewhere, a little child of nobody, that belongs
to us, for the sake of the love of children. Jean Boucher, my wife's
cousin, at St. Joseph d'Alma, has taken two from the asylum. Two,
m'sieu', I assure you for as soon as one was twelve years old, he said
he wanted a baby, and so he went back again and got another. That is
what I should like to do.”
“But, Pat,” said I, “it is an expensive business, this raising of
children. You should think twice about it.”
“Pardon, m'sieu',” answered Patrick; “I think a hundred times and always
the same way. It costs little more for three, or four, or five, in the
house than for two. The only thing is the money for the journey to the
city, the choice, the arrangement with the nuns. For that one must save.
And so I have thrown away the pipe. I smoke no more. The money of the
tobacco is for Quebec and for the little found child. I have already
eighteen piastres and twenty sous in the old box of cigars on the
chimney-piece at the house. This year will bring more. The winter after
the next, if we have the good chance, we go to the city, the goodwife
and me, and we come home with the little boy--or maybe the little girl.
Does m'sieu' approve?”
“You are a man of virtue, Pat,” said I; “and since you will not take
your share of the tobacco on this trip, it shall go to the other men;
but you shall have the money instead, to put into your box on the
mantel-piece.”
After supper that evening I watched him with some curiosity to see what
he would do without his pipe. He seemed restless and uneasy. The other
men sat around the fire, smoking; but Patrick was down at the landing,
fussing over one of the canoes, which had been somewhat roughly handled
on the road coming in. Then he began to tighten the tent-ropes, and
hauled at them so vigorously that he loosened two of the stakes. Then
he whittled the blade of his paddle for a while, and cut it an inch too
short. Then he went into the men's tent, and in a few minutes the sound
of snoring told that he had sought refuge in sleep at eight o'clock,
without telling a single caribou story, or making any plans for the next
day's sport.