Le Petit Nord Part 3

_August 28_

You already know the worst about my leanings to Papacy; but to-day I propose to set your mind at rest on an idea with which you have hypnotized yourself--namely, that I am going to die of malnutrition during what you are pleased to term the "long Arctic winter." I have no intention of starving, and as for the "long Arctic winter," I do not believe there is any such beast, as the farmer said when he looked at the kangaroo in the circus.

I was sitting by my window quietly sewing the other day (that sentence alone should reveal to you how many miles I have travelled from your tutelage) when I overheard one of the children stoutly defending what I took at first to be my character. The next sentence disabused me--it was my figure under discussion.

"She's not fat!" averred Topsy. "I'll smack you if you says it again."

"Well," muttered David, the light of reason being thus forcibly borne in upon him, "she may not be 'zactly fat, but she's fine and hearty."

[Ill.u.s.tration: NOT FAT, BUT FINE AND HEARTY]

If this is the case, and my mirror all too plainly confirms the verdict, and the summer has not waned, what will the "last estate of that woman be," after the winter has pa.s.sed over her? They tell me that every one here puts on fat in the cold weather as a kind of windproof jacket. I enclose a photograph of me on landing, so you may remember me as I was.

No, you need not worry either over communications in the winter. You really ought to have an intimate acquaintance with our telegraph service, after you have, so to speak, subsidized it during the past three months. It runs in winter as well as summer; and I see no prospect of its closing if you keep it on such a sound financial basis. Moreover, the building is devoted to the administration of the law in all its branches. One half of it is the post and telegraph office, while the other serves as the jail. The whole structure is within a stone's throw of the church and school, as if the corrective inst.i.tutions of the place believed in intensive cultivation. But to return to the jail. The walls are very thin, and every sound from it can be plainly heard in the telegraph office adjoining. Friday morning the operator, a capable and long-suffering young woman, came over to complain to the doctor that she really found it impossible to carry out the duties of her office, if the feeble-minded Delilah Freak was to be incarcerated only six inches distant from her ear. It seems that Delilah spends her days yelling at the top of her lungs, and Miss Dennis states that she prefers to take telegraphic messages down in compet.i.tion with the mail steamer's winch rather than with Delilah's "bawling."

[Ill.u.s.tration: DELILAH BAWLING]

I know all about compet.i.tion in noises after trying to write in this house. The ceilings are low and thin, and the walls are near and thin, and the children are omnipresent and not thin, and their wants and their joys and their quarrels are as numerous as the fishes in the sea, and there you have the problem in a nutsh.e.l.l.

Now I must "hapse the door," and hie me to bed. As a matter of fact the people here are far too honest for us to lock the doors. Such a thing as theft is unheard of. Some may call it uncivilized. I call it the millennium!

_August 31_

I believe that the writer who described the climate of this country as being "nine months snow and three months winter" was not far from the truth. In June the temperature of our rooms registered just above freezing point, in July we were enveloped in continuous fog, and in August we are having snow.

Such a tragic event has occurred. Our lettuce has been eaten by the Mission cow! You know how hard it is to get anything to grow here.

Well, after having nearly killed ourselves in making a square inch of ground into something resembling a bed, we had watched this lettuce grow from day to day as the little green shoots struggled bravely against the frost and cold. Then a few nights ago I was awakened by the tinkle of a bell beneath my window. Hastily flinging on wrapper and shoes I fled to save our one and only ewe lamb. But all the morning light revealed was a desperate cold in the head, and an empty bed from which the glory had departed.

Topsy has just been amusing herself by turning on the corridor taps to watch the water run downstairs! Oh! Topsy,

"'Tis thine to teach us what dull hearts forget How near of kin we are to springing flowers."

News has just reached us that the mail boat from St. Barbe to St.

Antoine has gone ash.o.r.e on the rocks and is a total wreck. Happily no lives were lost, but unhappily wrecks are of such frequent occurrence on this dangerous coast as to excite little comment.

Drusilla, aged five, has been to my door to enquire if the children may play with their dolls in the house. I believe in open-air treatment, so I replied with kindness, but firmly withal, that "out of doors" was the order of the day. I was a little electrified to hear her return to the playroom and announce that "Teacher says you are to go out, every darned one of you!" I was equally electrified the other day to overhear Drusilla enquiring of her fellow philosophers which they liked the best, "Teacher, the Doctor, or the Lord Jesus Christ."

In the midst of writing to you I was called away to interview a young man from the other side of the harbour. He wanted me to give him some of the milk used in the Home, for his baby, as at the hospital they could only furnish him with canned milk, guaranteed by the label, he claimed, to give "typhoid, diphtheria, and scarlet fever"!

_September 7_

It is a windy, rainy night, and I have told Topsy, who has a cold, that she cannot come with us to church. After a wild outburst of anger she was heard to mutter that "Teacher wouldn't let her go to church because she was afraid she would get too good."

The fall of the year is coming on and the evenings are made wonderful by two phenomena--the departure of the cannibalistic flies, and the Northern lights. Twice at home I remember seeing an attenuated aurora and thinking it wonderful. No words can describe this display on these crisp and lovely nights. There is a tang and snap in the air, and the earth beneath and the heavens above seem vibrating with unearthly life. The Eskimos say that the Northern lights are the spirits of the dead at play, but I like to think of them, too, as the translated souls of the icebergs which have gone south and met a too warm and watery death in the Gulf Stream. Certainly all the colours of those lovely monarchs of the North are reflected dimly in the heavens. The lights move about so constantly that one fancies that the soul of the berg, freed at last from its long prison, is showing the astonished worlds of what it is capable. The odd thing was that when I first saw them on a clear night, the stars shone through them, only they looked like Coleridge's "wan stars which danced between."

I can vouch for the truth of another "sidelight," though from only one experience. One night last week, clear and frosty, I had just gone to my room at about eleven o'clock when the doctor called me to come out and "hear the lights." I thought surely I must have misunderstood, but on reaching the balcony and listening, I could distinctly hear the swish of the "spirits" as they rushed across the sky. It sounds like a diminished silk petticoat which has lost its blatancy, but retains its personality.

Little did I realize at the time my good fortune in arriving here in daylight. It seems that it is the invariable habit of all coastal steamers to reach here at night, and dump the dumbly resenting pa.s.sengers in the darkness into the tiny punts which cl.u.s.ter around the ship's side. Since my arrival every single boat has appeared shortly before midnight, or shortly after. In either case it means that the men of the Mission must work all night landing patients and freight, and the next day there is a chastened and sleepy community to meet the forthcoming tasks. It is especially hard on the hospital folk, for the steamer only takes about twenty hours to go to the end of her run and return, and they try and send those cases which do not have to be admitted back by the same boat on her southern journey.

This means an all-night clinic. But I can say to the credit of the patients and staff that I have never heard one word of complaint.

That is certainly a charming feature about this life. There are plenty of things to growl about, but one is so reduced to essentials that the ones selected are of more importance than those which afford such fruitful topics in civilization.

I have just overheard Gabriel informing the other children that "Satan was once an angel, but he got real saucy, so G.o.d turned him out of heaven." Paradise Lost in a sentence!

The night after the audible lights a furious rain and wind storm broke over us. No wonder the trees have such a struggle for existence, if these storms are frequent. They do not last long, but they are the real thing while they are in progress. I used to smile when I was told that the Home was riveted with iron bolts to the solid bedrock, but that night when I lay wide awake, combating an incipient feeling of _mal de mer_ as my bed rocked with the force of the gale, I thanked the fates for the foresight of the builders. Never before had I believed in the tale of the church having been blown bodily into the harbour; but during those wild hours of darkness I was certain at each succeeding gust that we were going to follow its example.

Dawn--a pale affair looking out suspiciously on the chastened world--broke at last, and I "histed" my window (to quote the estimable 'Senath). The rain had stopped. The cheated wind was whistling around the corners of the old wooden buildings, and taking out its spite on any pa.s.sers-by who must venture forth to work. The harbour, usually so peaceful and so sheltered, was lashed into a cauldron of boiling white foam, and the rocks were swept so clean that they at least had "shining morning faces."

I dressed quickly and ran down to the wharf to enquire as to the health of the Northern Light. The first person I met was the Prophet.

He was positively elate. If I were a pantheist I should think him a relative of the northeast wind. The storm of the previous night had been exactly to his liking. All his worst prognostications had been fulfilled, and quite a bit thrown in _par dessus le marche_. He told me that a tiny, rickety house across the harbour had first been unroofed, and then one of the walls blown in. It is a real disaster for the family, for they are poor enough without having Kismet thus descend upon them.

The hospital boat had held on safely, but several little craft were driven ash.o.r.e. Naturally the children love the aftermath of such an event, for the world is turned for them into one large, entrancing puddle, bordered with embryo mud pies.

Topsy again! I am informed that she has tried to convert her Sunday best into a hobble skirt, reducing it in the process to something hopelessly ludicrous. It can never, never be worn again.

My arm aches and I cannot decide whether it is from much orphan scrubbing or from much writing, but in either case I must bid you _au revoir_.

_September 25_

Last night I was awakened by a terrific noise proceeding from the lower regions. Armed with my umbrella, the only semblance of a stick within reach, I descended on a tour of investigation. Opening the larder door I beheld six huge dogs, and devastation reigning supreme.

These dogs are half wolf in breed, and very destructive, as I can testify. When I wildly brandished my umbrella, which could not possibly have harmed them, they jumped through the closed window leaving not a pane of gla.s.s behind. This, I suppose, is merely a nocturnal interlude to break the monotony of life in a country which boasts no burglars.

The children attend the Mission school, and yesterday Topsy was sent home in dire disgrace for lying and cheating. She is not to be permitted to return until she is willing to confess and apologize. She thereupon tried to commit suicide by swallowing paper pellets, and in the night the doctor had to be called in to prescribe. She is white and wan to-day, but when I went in to bid her good-night I found her thrilling over a new prayer which she had learned, and which she repeated to me with deep emotion:

"Little children, be ye wise, Speak the truth and tell no lies.

The LORD'S portion is to dwell Forever in the flames of h.e.l.l."

I want to tell you something about our babies. They are four in number. David, aged five, considers himself quite a big boy, and a leader of the others. His father was frozen to death in Eskimo Bay some years ago whilst hunting food for his family. Although David is always boasting of his strength and the superior wisdom of his years, yet he is really very tiny for his age. He is a delightful little optimist, who announces cheerfully after each failure to do right that he is "going to be good all the time now," to which we add the mental reservation, "until next time." He is the proud possessor of a Teddy bear. This long-suffering animal was a source of great pleasure until a short time ago when David started making a first-hand investigation to find out where the "squeak" came from--an investigation which ended disastrously for the bear, however it may have furthered the cause of science.

Last month I went to Nameless Cove to fetch to the Home a little boy of three, of whom I have already written you. Nameless Cove is about twelve miles west of St. Antoine. I have never seen such a wretched hovel--a one-roomed log hut, completely dest.i.tute of furniture. The door was so low I had to bend almost double to enter. A rough shelf did duty for a bed, upon which lay an old bedridden man, while at the other end lay a sick woman with a child beside her, and crouched below was an idiot daughter. Altogether nine persons lived in this hut, eight adults and this one boy. Ananias is an illegitimate child, and has lived with these grandparents since his mother lost her reason and was removed to the asylum at St. John's. The child was almost dest.i.tute of clothing, and covered with vermin. He has the face of a seraph, and a voice that lisps out curses with the fluency of a veteran trooper. Ananias is David's shadow; he follows him everywhere, and echoes all his words as if they were gems of wisdom, far above rubies. Indeed, when David has ceased speaking, one waits involuntarily for Ananias to begin in his shrill treble tones. He is a hopeless child to correct, for when you imagine you are scolding him very severely, and you look for the tears of penitence to flow, he puts up his little face with an angelic smile, and lisps, "Tiss me."

Drusilla, whose slight acquaintance you have already made, is three and comes from Savage Cove. The father has gradually become blind and the mother is crippled. Drusilla keeps us all on the alert, for we never know what she will be doing next. On Sunday mornings she is put to rest with the other little ones while we are at church. On returning last Sunday I found that she had secured a box of white ointment (thought to be quite beyond her reach), and with her toothbrush painted one side of the baby's face white, which with her other rosy cheek gave her the appearance of a clown. Not content with portrait painting, Drusilla then turned her energies to house decoration, the result attained on the wall being entirely to the satisfaction of the artist, as was evidenced by the proud smile with which our outcry was greeted.