Le Petit Nord Part 8

When I wrote you that there was ice about, I did not refer to the field ice through which we travelled on my way north. This is the real thing this time--icebergs, and lots of them. They call the little ones "growlers," and big and little alike are cla.s.sed as "pieces of ice"!

They are not my idea of a "piece" of anything. I know now what the Ancient Mariner meant when he said:

"And ice mast high came floating by As green as emerald."

It exactly describes them, only it doesn't wholly describe them, for no one could. They loom up in every shape and size and variation of form, pinnacles and towers and battlements, stately palaces of glittering crystal, triumphal archways more gorgeous than ever welcomed a conqueror home. Sometimes they are shining white, too dazzling to look at; and sometimes they are streaked with great vivid bands of green and azure which are so unearthly and brilliant that I feel certain some fairy has dipped his brush in the solar spectrum and dabbed the colours on this gigantic palette.

A sea without these jewels of the Arctic will forever look barren and unfinished to me after this. Even the sailors, who know too well what a menace they are to their craft, yield to their beauty a mute and grudging homage. To sit in the sun or the moonlight, and watch a heavy sea hurling mountains of water and foam over one of these ocean monarchs is a never-to-be-forgotten experience. So too it is to listen to the thunder of one of them "foundering"; for their equilibrium is very unstable, and the action of the sea, as they travel southwards to their death in the Gulf Stream, cuts them away at the surface of the water. Blocks weighing unbelievable tons crash off them, or they will suddenly, without a second's warning, break into a million pieces. I can never conquer a creepiness of the spine as I listen to one of these tragedies. It is a startling, new sensation such as we never expect to meet again after childhood has shut its doors on us. In the quiet that follows the gigantic disintegration one half expects to see a new heaven and a new earth emerge out of the chaos of ice quivering in the water.

You often warned me in the course of the past year how dull life would be. You knew how I loved a city. I still do. But the last word on earth one could apply to the life here is "dull." Nature takes care of that. I defy you to walk along any street in London and see six porpoises and a whale! That is what I saw this morning. Oh! of course you may counter by telling me that neither can I see an automobile or a fire engine, but I have you, because I can answer that I have seen them already. How are you going to get out of that corner, except by saying that you do not want to see the old porpoises and whales and bergs?--and I know your "Scotch" conscience forbids such distortion of facts.

I have come to believe in the personality of porpoises. They swam beside the ship, playing about in the water all the while, rolling over and diving, and chasing each other just as if they knew they had a "gallery." We did not reward them very well either, for the Prophet shot one, and we ate bits of him for lunch--the porpoise, I mean, not the Prophet. I thought he would make a good companion-piece for the polar bear, and he was quite edible. He only needed a rasher of bacon to make you believe he was calf's liver.

So you see that between puffins and porpoises and whales, and "growlers" and lost dories, I crowded enough into one day to give me dreams that Alice in Wonderland might covet.

In your secret heart don't you wish that you too were

"Where the squat-legged Eskimo Waddles in the ice and snow, And the playful polar bear Nips the hunter unaware; Where the air is kind o' pure, And the snow crop's pretty sure"?

_July 22_

It has been days since I wrote you, and they have slipped by so stealthily I must have missed half they held.

Since coming aboard I have taken to rising promptly. It is a necessary measure if I am to be able to rise at all. One morning I stuck my head out just in time to see my favourite sweater, which I had counted on for service on the homeward voyage, disappearing over the rail--legitimately, so far as concerned the wearer. Last week, by the merest fluke, I rescued my best boots from a similar fate. The doctor explained lamely on each occasion that they got mixed with the clothing sent for distribution to the poor. This may be a literal statement of fact, but I doubt the manner of the mixing.

We celebrated to-day by running aground on the flats. You can "squeak"

over them if you happen to strike the channel. The difficulty is, however, that the sandy bottom shifts. To-day it is, and to-morrow it is not. I was eating one of those large, hearty breakfasts which the combination of a dead flat calm and a sunshiny brisk air make such a desideratum. I was, moreover, perched on the top of the wheel house, and reflecting on the poor taste of the author of the Book of Revelation when he said that in heaven "there shall be no more sea."

At this moment I came to with a lurch. "She's stuck!" yelled, or as he himself would put it, "bawled," the Prophet. For once he was undeniably right. Fortunately the tide was on the flood, and we floated off a short while after.

In the afternoon we visited an Eskimo Moravian station. They--the Eskimos, not the Moravians--are a jolly little people, and picturesque as possible. Not that any aspersions on the Moravians are intended, for I have the greatest respect for them. My shining leather coat made a great hit. They fondled it and stroked it, and coo-ed at it as if it were a new baby. All the women past their very first youth seemed toothless. I wondered if it could be a characteristic of the tribe--sort of Manx Eskimo. I asked the Prophet what was the cause of the universal shortage, and was told that the Eskimo women all chew the sealskin to soften it for making into boots. You can take this statement for what it may be worth.

Speaking of which I have just finished reading a ludicrously furious attack on the Mission in a St. John's paper, for its alleged misrepresentations. It seems that last year the former superintendent took down a boy from the Children's Home to give him a chance at further education. He had a wooden leg, his own having been removed by an operation for tuberculosis. On his arrival in Montreal the omnivorous reporter saw in him excellent copy, and forthwith printed the following purely fict.i.tious account of the cause of his disability. Little Kommak, so the story ran (the boy is of pure Irish extraction, and is named Michael Flynn), was one day sitting with his mother in his igloo when he saw a large polar bear approaching. Having no weapon, and not desiring the presence of the bear in any capacity at their midday meal, he stuck his leg out through the small aperture of the igloo. The bear bit it off on the principle of half a loaf being better than no bread. The whole thing was a fabric of lies from beginning to end. The St. John's papers discovered the article, pounced upon it, and printed the article "_que je viens de finir_."

Of course, if the local editor lacked humour enough to credit the doctor with such a fairy tale, one could pity the poor soul, but his diatribe has rather the earmarks of jealousy.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BEAR BIT HIS LEG OFF]

A lovely sunset is lighting up the sea and sky and hills, and turning the plain little settlement, in the harbour of which we are anch.o.r.ed, into the Never, Never Land. The scene is so bewitching that I find my soul purged by it of the bad taste of the attack. I'll leave you to digest the mixed metaphor undisturbed while I go below and help with the patients who have begun pouring aboard.

_Same evening_

An old chap has just climbed over the rail, who looks like an early patriarch, but his dignity is impaired by the moth-eaten high silk hat which surmounts his white hair. The people regard him with apparent deference, due either to the hat or his inherent character. Looking at his fine old face, one is inclined to believe it is the latter.

The expressions these people use are so nautical and so apt! Every patient who comes aboard expressed the wish to be "sounded" in some portion of his or her anatomy for the suspected ailment which has brought him. One burly fisherman solemnly took off his huge oily sea-boot, placed a grimy forefinger on his heel, and remarked sententiously that the doctor "must sound him right there." The prescription was soap and water--a diagnosis in which I entirely concurred. The next case was a young girl with a "kink in her glutch."

It has the sound of all too familiar motor trouble, but was dismissed as psychopathic. I wish that a similarly simple diagnosis accounted for the mysterious ailments of automobiles. My meditations on modern science were interrupted by an insistent voice proclaiming that "my head is like to burst abroad."

If I were a woman on this coast my temper would "burst abroad" to see the men--some of them--spitting all over the floors of the cottages: disgusting and particularly dangerous in a country where the arch-enemy, tuberculosis, is ever on the watch for victims. But the new era is slowly dawning. Now, instead of hooking "Welcome Home" into the fireside mat, you find "DONT SPIT" worked in letters of flame. It is the harbinger of the feminist movement in the land.

Speaking of the feminist movement makes me think of a woman at Aquaforte Harbour. She deserves a book written about her. In the first place, Elmira had the courage of her convictions, and did not marry.

Her convictions were that marriage was desirable if you get the right man who can support you properly, and not otherwise. This is generations in advance of the local att.i.tude to the holy estate. She has lived a life of single blessedness to the coast. In every trouble along her section of the sh.o.r.e it is "routine" to send for "Aunt"

'Mira. She has more sense and unselfishness and native wit than you would meet in ten products of civilization. For a year she acted as nurse to the little boy of one of the staff, and never was child better cared for. They once told 'Mira she really must make baby take his bottle. (He had the habit of profound slumber at that time.) "Oh!

I does, ma'm," 'Mira replied. "If he dwalls off, I gives him a scattered jolt." The family took her to England with them, and her remarks on the trains showed where her ancestry lay. When they backed she exclaimed, "My happy day! We're goin' astern!" She requested to be allowed to "open the port"; and at a certain junction where there was a long delay she asked to go "ash.o.r.e for a spell."

That "h.e.l.l is paved with good intentions" is no longer a glib phrase to me; it is a conviction born of seeing some of the suffering of this country. The doctor has just been ash.o.r.e to see a woman with a five-days old baby. No attempt whatever had been made to get her or her bed clean or comfortable. She had developed a violent fever, and the local midwives, with their congenital terror of the use of water--internal or external--had larded the miserable creature over from head to foot with b.u.t.ter, and finished off with a liberal coating of oak.u.m. The doctor said, by the time he had himself sc.r.a.ped and bathed her, put her in a fresh cool bed with a jug of spring water beside her to drink, she looked as if she thought the gates of Paradise had opened.

Mails reached us at the Moravian station, and your most welcome letters loomed large on the postal horizon. You ask if I have not found the year long. I will answer by telling you the accepted derivation of the name "Labrador." It comes from the Portuguese, and means "the labourer," because those early voyagers intended to send slaves back to His Majesty. Well-filled time, so the psychologists tell us, is short in pa.s.sing, and "down North," before you are half into the day's tasks, you look up to find that "the embers of the day are red." You must have guessed, too, that I should not have evinced such contentment during these months if my fellow workers had not been congenial. I shall always remember their devotion, and readiness to serve both one another and the people; and I know that the years to come will only deepen my appreciation of what their friendship has meant to me.

How glad I was when the winter came, and I was no longer cla.s.sed as a newcomer! I had heard so much about dog driving that I remember thinking the resultant sensations must be akin to those Elijah experienced in his chariot. But now I have driven with dogs in summer, and that is more than most of the older stagers can boast. In a prosperous little village in the Straits lives the rural dean. He is a devoted and practical example of what a shepherd and bishop of souls can be. There is not a good work for the benefit of his flock--and he is not bound by the conventional and unchristian denominational prejudices--which does not find in him a leader. His interests range from cooperation to a skin-boot industry. But the problem of getting about when you have no Aladdin's carpet is acute. He goes by dog sled and shanks' pony in winter, and used to go by boat and shanks' pony in summer. Then one day he had the inspiration of building a two-wheeled shay, and harnessing in his l.u.s.ty and idle dog team. Now he drives about at a rate that "Jehu the son of Nimshi would approve," and is independent of winds and weather.

Sunday to-morrow. We are running south for the Ragged Islands. If I were not on the hospital ship, and therefore an involuntary example to the people, I would fall into my bunk at night with my clothes on, I am so weary.

_Ragged Islands Sunday night_

Just aboard again after Prayers at the little church. It is a quaint and crude little edifice, and the people were so kindly and the service so hearty that one feels "wonderfu' lifted up." To be sure, during the sermon I was suddenly brought up "all standing" by the amazing statement that the "Harch Hangels go Hup, Hup, Hup." One felt in one's bones that this was a misapprehension. The very earnest clergyman may have noticed my obvious disagreement, for at the close he announced, "We will now sing the 398th hymn"--

"Day of Wrath, oh! Day of Mourning, See fulfilled the Prophet's warning, Heaven and earth in ashes burning."

This goes off into the blue on the chance of its reaching you before I come myself and share a secret with you; for to-morrow we are due at the Iron Bound Islands, and there I leave the Northern Light, and end the chapter of my life as a member of the Mission staff. The appropriateness of the closing hymn in the little church last night is borne more than ever forcibly in upon me with the chill light of early morning, for I verily feel as though my world were tottering about my ears.

I am still optimist enough to know that life will hold many experiences which will enrich it, but in my secret heart I cherish the conviction that this year will always stand out as a keynote, and a touchstone by which to judge those which succeed it. My greatest solace in the ache which I feel in taking so long a farewell of a people and country that I love is that I shall always possess them in memory--a treasure which no one can take from me. As I look back over the quickly speeding year I find that I have forgotten those trivial incidents of discomfort which p.r.i.c.ked my hurrying feet. All I can recall is the rugged beauty of the land, the brave and simple people with their hardy manhood and more than generous hospitality, and most of all my little bairns who hold in their tiny hands the future of Le Pet.i.t Nord.

[Ill.u.s.tration: P.S.]