JANUARY the twenty-second was a great day in the county. It was the date
of the “Tea Meeting,” given under the auspices of the English Church, for
the benefit of the destitute Belgians. It was also a great day for me,
being the first and the last time that I shall appear in Many Islands’
society, when society meets at night. To drive seven miles in the bitter
cold, to return to a stone cold house in the middle of the night,
requires a love of foregathering with one’s fellows that I do not
possess. So not until I have trained the rabbit to keep up the fire
shall I venture out at night again. I had been invited to the festivity
by Mrs. Jackson weeks before. Having very little notion of the proper
dress for such an occasion, I ventured to ask counsel of a young visitor
who dropped in opportunely.
“What do the women wear to the Tea Meetings here?” I inquired.
She surveyed me with an appraising eye. “Well now,” she said, kindly,
“haven’t you a nice, dark waist here with you? A lady of your age would
naturally wear something dark and plain.”
At once I cast away all idea of a serviceably plain attire and determined
to array myself in all the finery I had with me here; chiffon gown, long
gloves and velvet hat with plumes. “Lady of my age, indeed!”
And when I arrived at the entertainment every soul was in her best, and
my attire entirely appropriate. I waited with some pleasant anticipation
for the moment when my little friend should spy me and was not
disappointed in the expression that swept across her pretty face. As a
plain dresser I was evidently not a success.
The start was to be an early one. In the middle of the afternoon I raked
out the fire, fed the animals, hid the key under the woodpile and started
down the lake to the Jackson farm, following a fresh-cut sleigh track
that glittered like a silver ribbon flung down on the blue ice. Now and
again the solid floor under me would give a groan and a heave and I would
spring aside, my heart in my throat despite my knowledge of the two feet
of solid ice beneath me. Then I would assure my quaking spirit that
where the woodsleds could drive I could surely walk, and would travel on.
At Jackson’s there was a pot of bean soup on the stove, and, as a
comforting repast on a cold day, I know of nothing that approaches hot
bean soup—it stays by one. We drove off in the big farm sleigh, seven
miles to the town of Fallen Timber, passing through Sark with its five
houses and the Cheese Factory, and by farms each of which contributed its
heavily laden sleigh to the long line of vehicles bound for the meeting.
The town hall of Fallen Timber stands on a bleak hillside. It is a room,
about thirty by forty feet in size, with a six-foot wide stage at the end
and a box stove in the middle. The stovepipe goes straight to the
ceiling, across, and out by a hole in the wall at the back of the stage.
The walls are of a dirty, leprous-looking plaster, with here and there a
small bunch of ground pine tacked on by way of decoration. At the back
of the stage a strip of once white muslin bore the inscription: “Welcome
To All” in letters a foot high.
The seats are planks laid on the stumps of trees, the stage curtain is of
red and green calico.
Now and again this curtain was pushed aside, disclosing the preparations
for supper, and such piles of cookies, cakes, and sandwiches I never
expect to see again. In the phrase of this neighborhood there were
certainly “plenty of cookings.”
The great folk of the evening were late—the rector and his wife, the
member of Parliament, who was to preside for us, and the orator, who was
to address us. But we did not mind the delay. We had come to meet each
other, and the time passed pleasantly enough. I was seated almost
exactly on the stove, ventilation there was none, and the hall was
packed, but what of that? It was good to feel thoroughly warm, at no
expense to oneself, and there’s too much fuss made about fresh air
anyway—at least in the opinion of many of my neighbors.
The orator was the typical political speaker—portly, bland, slightly
humorous and very approachable. He made an excellent speech, outlining
the causes that led to the Great War, and telling of Germany’s policy and
her hopes. He explained the part that Belgium had played, in holding
back the tide of invasion until France had had time to mobilize, and it
was all very clear and convincing. He laid stress on the spontaneous
outpouring of loyalty in the colonies, and quoted one of the first
messages received from India—the telegram from a Rajah that read: “My
Emperor, what work has he for ME and for my-people?”
As he went on to enumerate them—Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand and
all the islands of the seas—I forgot the little hall, the crowd, the
heat, and caught something of Isaiah’s vision of the Great House of God,
that shall be exalted high above the hills, and of the time when all
nations shall flow unto it.
After the speech came supper, huge plates of sandwiches and many kinds of
cake, with pitchers of steaming tea. The men ate three and four of these
platefuls with as careless an air as who should say: “What are five
pounds or so of food washed down with quarts of strong, boiled tea? A
mere nothing.”
What was worse, the children ate quite as much as their elders, but I
have long since ceased to forebode anything for the youth of this favored
land. Apparently, they cannot be harmed.
After supper, at about eleven-thirty, came the real object of the
meeting—the entertainment by “local talent.” It began with the chorus:
“Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching.” Followed then a
recitation, “My Aunt Somebody’s Custard Pie.”
This was delivered in a coquettish, not to say soubrettish manner by a
little miss in a short white frock, and with a coral ribbon wound round
her curly, dark hair. Her assured manner struck me and not pleasantly.
Later I understood it. She was “Teacher” in charge of Number Six, better
known as the Woodchuck School. I am told that the Boards of Education
cannot keep these rural schools supplied, the girls marry off so fast;
and I can well believe it, judging by this one. She was evidently the
belle of the neighborhood. In the comments that the boys were making all
round me the other girls were all very well, but “Teacher” was easily the
favorite.
“She’s a good teacher,” I heard one declare, hoarsely fervent. “She’s
did well by Number Six. I could make out every word them children
spoke”—a fact that really seemed to give him cause for satisfaction.
The night wore on with drill after drill, song after song, recitation
after recitation. Despite my fatigue, I was interested. As I watched
the audience something took me by the throat. It was somehow so
pathetic. Those heavy men, those work-worn women were not interested
because their children were being shown off. No indeed. They liked the
performance because it was just at their level, and that fact threw a
searchlight on the bare monotony of their lives. We finished at about
two o’clock with “Tipperary,” and “God Save the King,” and, as every
national anthem is an assault on the feelings and makes me cry, I sang
and wiped my eyes with the rest.
The night skies here are seldom black, like the skies of the south, they
are more often a soft, misty gray. The stars, instead of being sharp
little points of light, are big and indistinct and furry. It is always
light enough to see the road, even at the dark of the moon. We drove
along through the bitter cold, Big John Beaulac’s hired boy, Reginald,
standing in the back of the sleigh, by way of getting a lift home. He
was regretting, all the way, that some people had not eaten all their
“cookings” and that so much good food had been wasted on the floor. I
fancied that Reginald Bean would fain have eaten even more than he did.
At the shore we dropped Mrs. Jackson and the three little sleeping
Jacksons, and drove on down the lake. At the narrows I, being almost
frozen to the seat of the sleigh, insisted on being set down to walk, and
took my way along the side of the island, treading in the footprints that
I had left in the snow when I had set out—was it the day or the week
before?
I groped my way among the trees and along the trail to the house, lighted
a fire and looked at the clock. I had been walking through the woods at
four o’clock in the morning, and with as little concern as though it had
been that hour of a summer afternoon.
Then, as though to rebuke my temerity, I was frightened on the lake the
very next day.
I was walking briskly along on the ice, singing at the top of my lungs,
because just to be alive on a day when the air was so cold and clean, the
sky so blue and the snow crystals so brilliant, was happiness, when I
came full on a figure that robbed the morning of its joy.
It was Ishmael Beaulac, the imbecile, shambling heavily along. He spoke,
then turned and followed me some distance, his air half menacing, half
cringing, and I was frightened, for I realized that for miles around
there was no one to come to my aid, if Ishmael should take it into his
poor, crazed brain to do me harm. But he wandered off again, and, as I
watched his bent figure shuffling away in the snow, I was shaken with a
great compassion. I have never seen a face so marked with evil. Lined,
swollen, and inflamed with some loathsome eruption, the low, receding
forehead, with coarse, black hair growing almost to the line of the
eyebrows, a wide, loose-lipped mouth, and cunning shifty eyes—it is a
face that has haunted my dreams.
I asked Rose Beaulac about him.
“John and I was a sayin’ that we’d ought to tell you about Ish,” she
said. “Now that the ice is come, likely he’ll walk over to the island.
But don’t you be afeared of him. Just make out like you’re goin’ to
throw hot water on him an’ he’ll run.”
“Oh, poor creature!” I cried. “I couldn’t hurt him.”
“It ain’t needful to scald him,” said Rose, with an air of great cunning.
“I always holds my finger in the water to see if it’s cool enough afore I
throws it. He’s awful ’fraid of water, Ish is,” she observed, and
remembering Ishmael’s appearance I could well believe it.
“But don’t you ever make over him,” Rose went on, “and don’t you ever
feed him or you’ll have him there all the time. Don’t leave any knives
or old boots around where he can git them. Ish don’t know nothin’ about
money; he’ll walk right past your purse to steal a pair of old boots.
But he won’t hurt you—at least we don’t think he will.”
“I have heard that his father, Old John, was cruel to him,” I ventured,
with some diffidence, for Old John or Devil Beaulac was Little John’s own
Uncle.
A look of distress flitted across Rose’s face.
“Old John was a very severe man, very severe,” she said. “He treated
Ishmael awful bad. He must have hurted him very hard, for now when the
men is teasin’ him if one of them lifts an ax or a spade, and makes to
run at him, Ish goes perfectly wild. They say Old John used to hit him
on the head. That would make him so crazy-like, wouldn’t it? Yes, poor
Ish has had it awful hard, there’s none but will tell you that,” she
sighed.
The neighbors are less reticent about old John. By their account he was
a man outside all law, a giant in strength and of a fiendish cruelty.
Finally his tyrannies grew intolerable, and his sons set on him, beating
him until he died. Then they threw his body into an old mica pit, filled
the pit with stones and went their way. No one interfered. The old man
was thought to have earned his doom and the sons were never brought to
trial. But even now, when poor Ishmael’s fits of madness come upon him
they say he goes to that pit and throws great rocks into it, cursing the
memory of his father.
Much of this may be untrue, but the story haunts me. In the figure of
this poor maniac, hurling his stones and shouting impotent curses to the
unheeding sky, I see a time when the earth was young, when men dragged
the offender out from the great congregation and stoned him to death
before the face of an angry God. I marvel that in this place so near to
civilization such stories can still be told.