HOW do we know when the turn of the year has come? The calendar gives
March twenty-first as the official birthday of spring, but that has
nothing to do with it. One February day will be all winter, hard frozen
and dreary, and on the next, quite suddenly, through some spirit line of
sense, a message will reach us that spring, her very self, is on the way.
After that, no matter how many days of sleet and snow may follow, we know
that for us the winter is past.
So it was yesterday, here on the island. With a mind adjusted to the
thought of weeks of snow and ice to come, I stepped out of doors and into
the spring. The air was balmy as May, the sky a turquoise and the lake a
pearl. The furry gray buds of the poplars had puffed out in the night.
The three little fingers of the birches were swelling and lengthening.
Suddenly my eyes were dazzled by a flash of bright blue light, and a
magnificent jay darted through the air and perched on the bare branch of
a basswood. After the small, drab-hued chickadees and nuthatches, that
jay looked as large as an eagle. Then I looked at little Peter, and lo!
he was turning brown. The white hairs of his winter coat were falling
off, his spring jacket was showing through.
The ground under the trees is dusted over with myriads of brown scales,
chief among them the bird-shaped pods of the birches, that carry two wee
seeds under their pinions. In the open the snow is gray with patches of
briskly hopping snow fleas that move along over the meadows at a lively
rate. The nature books tell me that these are insects that live in the
mosses and lichens, and that they come out on warm days for exercise.
They are exercising for dear life to-day.
Here and there on the white carpet are the fairy writings left by the
wind last night. It bent down the dry tips of the sedges, and traced
circles, bows, triangles, mystic runes that look as though they meant
great news, if one could only read them.
But the snow still covers the ground. Rufus still tunnels under it,
shaking the crust violently when he goes in for some hidden store of
food. The rabbit roads, pressed hard by hundreds of small, skurrying
feet, still run crisscross under the cedars, and the heavy woodsleds
still travel down the middle of the lake, like giant caterpillars,
crawling along.
[Picture: The heavy woodsleds still travel down the lakes]
Behind the opposite island the men are cutting ice. Uncle Dan stands at
the side of a dark pool of open water, and works away with a saw as tall
as himself. The rectangular blocks, two feet thick, slide up the
inclined boards to the sleds and are driven off to the icehouses in
preparation for the summer’s shipment of fish to the towns. They are
beautiful, those blocks of ice, so clear and clean and blue.
With the fine weather has come the news that the Rector of the English
Church and Mrs. Rector are coming to the island for a visit. The island
is in much excitement. Salt bacon and potatoes do not seem just the
right fare to offer guests so important and who are coming from afar. My
mind is set on chicken, and the word has gone forth round the lake that
“the English minister is coming and the woman on the island wants a
fowl.”
Now, all our turkeys, ducks, and chickens are fattened for the fowl fair,
held at Queensport in December, when the poultry dealers from Toronto and
Montreal, and even from “The States,” go through the country buying up
the stock. The greater part of the yearly income of some of us depends
on the prices paid for the fowl. My only chance of having chickens
through the winter was to engage a neighbor to save me a dozen young
cockerels and to pay him for their feed, having them killed as needed. I
had long ago eaten all these chickens and the prospect of getting any
more was slight. Even Rose Beaulac, fertile in resource, could give me
no hope.
I never found the chicken, but I had a visit from Rose the day before the
party. She told me that she had given John his gun and had sent him up
Loon Bay to shoot me some grouse. Then the conversation languished.
Rose is a very shy little woman; it took her nearly an hour to come to
the real point of her call. She would not lay aside her coonskin coat,
she would not remove her dingy tuque; there she sat, struggling with her
errand.
At last it came out:
“Might she bring the baby to be christened when the Rector came?”
Then for another half hour she rambled on about people who never had
their babies christened and what a sin that was, and of those who never
registered their children’s births, and how those children could never
inherit property. Once in a while she said something about things “not
being legal,” until I was quite bewildered and do not know to this day
whether, in her opinion, the unbaptized or the unregistered infant is not
legal. But the upshot of it all was that the youngest Beaulac was to be
christened next day.
The hour set for service was two o’clock, but such was Mrs. Beaulac’s
determination not to be late that she and the baby’s eldest sister
arrived at eleven. There was no sign of the father, John Beaulac. There
I had made my mistake. I had let him know that a sponsor would be needed
and that he was expected to stand. So when the godfather was demanded
none could be found.
“Where was John?”
“Gone to Queensport with a load of wood.”
“Andy Drapeau, the baby’s uncle?”
“Gone to Glen Avon.”
The other uncles were off hunting at Loon Lake; Louis, the eldest
brother, had disappeared entirely. So when the time came for sponsors,
the Rector’s wife and I had to stand, and for this poor baby, whose
father owns not one rod of ground, and who is sheltered in a hovel built
for the cattle, we gravely renounced “the vain pomp and glory of the
world.” And because, in my hurry, I had forgotten to temper the water in
the improvised font, the new little soldier and servant of Christ yelled
valiantly when the ice water touched him.
It was a scene I shall not forget: the cabin, with its bunk in one
corner, its big stove at one end, the pots and pans on the wall behind
it; the tools; the fishing tackle and the stores. The Rector, wearing
white surplice and embroidered stole, stood in the center of the room
beside the white-covered table that held the bowl of water and the Prayer
Book.
Old Mrs. Drapeau, the baby’s grandmother, had crept across the ice to
witness the baptism, the first she had seen, she said, in twenty years.
The meeting closed with tea and cake; then the christening party
withdrew, the little new Christian sleeping peacefully in the wooden box
in which his mother dragged him away over the ice.
We three who were left settled to dinner and a long afternoon’s talk. At
teatime the Rector observed that the Woodchuck School was a mere seven
miles away, and that he might as well have a service there while he was
so near. So we dashed away across the lake, used telephones freely to
collect a congregation, opened the school house, and, by the light of two
guttering candles, said our prayers, sang our hymns, and listened to a
simple, direct, and practical sermon. Back across the ice I drove in the
flare of the northern lights, that made the night almost as bright as
day.
The Rector is a young man and an energetic one—and he has need to be—for
his parish covers much ground. It extends from the church at Queensport,
out to Godfrey’s Mills, fifteen miles away to the south, and back to
Fallen Timber, twelve miles to the north. Besides these three churches
he has four or five irregular stations in the schoolhouses dotted about
within the radius of his activities. On Sunday mornings he teaches the
Sunday school at Queensport and holds service there; in the afternoon he
drives to the Mills, and has Sunday school and Evening Prayer, at night
there is service at Fallen Timber. Up and down the roads he drives, day
after day, visiting the sick, baptizing the children, burying the dead.
He consoles, admonishes, encourages; he reproves our negligences, bears
with our foolishnesses, and somehow contrives to have patience with our
ignorance.
Being a churchman to whom the decency and orthodoxy of services are dear,
it is hard for him to excuse our lax ways. It gives him genuine distress
when we know no better than to drape our flags over the cross, and his
face is set against the to us very pleasing decoration furnished by house
plants growing in tin cans and set upon the altar. When he marches up
the aisle and removes these attempts at ornament, replaces the vases and
the cross where they belong, we say nothing. It is evident that we have
made a mistake in our zeal. We don’t try that again, but something else
that proves just as reprehensible. But we are learning—the Rector sees
to that. If only the Bishop will let him stay, we shall be good
churchmen after awhile. But we say proudly and sorrowfully: “He’s too
good for a small parish like this. He’ll be moved to the city soon.”
The only way the Rector spares himself is in the matter of writing
sermons. He confessed to me that he did not write three new ones a week,
but preached the same one at all three churches, thereby reserving, I
suppose, a few hours for sleep.
And with all this unceasing effort—and the clergy of all denominations
work just as hard—there are families living here round Many Islands that
have never entered a church. They are as veritable heathen as any on the
far frontier. There was a death at a farm on the road to Loon Lake
station last week. The body was put into a rough box, thrust into a
shallow grave, and the work of the farm went straight on. And the
English rector, the Roman Catholic priest, the Methodist preacher and the
Presbyterian minister all live within a radius of twenty miles.
Strange country, so civilized and so primitive, so close to cities and so
inaccessible. Strange people, at once so old and so young, so instructed
in vice and sorrow, and so ignorant of the simplest teachings of life.
Grown men and women in body but children in mind, with children’s virtues
and with adults’ sins.