Books: Maria Chapdelaine
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Louis Hemon >> Maria Chapdelaine
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On this occasion when the mass was ended, instead of paying visits
they went to the curees house. It was already thronged with members
of the congregation from remote farms, for the Canadian priest not
only has the consciences of his flock in charge, but is their
counsellor in all affairs, and the composer of their disputes; the
solitary individual of different station to whom they can resort for
the solving of their difficulties.
The cure of St. Henri sent none away empty who asked his advice;
some he dealt with in a few swift words amidst a general
conversation where he bore his cheerful part; others at greater
length in the privacy of an adjoining room. When the turn of the
Chapdelaines came he looked at his watch.
"We shall. have dinner first. What say you, my good friends? You
must have found an appetite on the road. As for myself, singing mass
makes me hungry beyond anything you could believe."
He laughed heartily, more tickled than anyone at his own joke, and
led his guests into the dining-room. Another priest was there from a
neighbouring parish, and two or three farmers. The meal was one long
discussion about husbandry, with a few amusing stories and bits of
harmless gossip thrown in; now and then one of the farmers, suddenly
remembering where he was, would labour some pious remark which the
priests acknowledged with a nod or an absent-minded "Yes! Yes!"
The dinner over at last, some of the guests departed after lighting
their pipes. The cure, catching a glance from Chapdelaine, seemed to
recall something; arising, he motioned to Maria, and went before her
into the next room which served him both for visitors and as his
office.
A small harmonium stood against the wall; on the other side was a
table with agricultural journals, a Civil Code and a few books bound
in black leather; on the walls hung a portrait of Pius X., an
engraving of the Holy Family, the coloured broadside of a Quebec
merchant with sleighs and threshing-machines side by side, and a
number of official notices as to precautions against forest fires
and epidemics amongst cattle.
Turning to Maria, the cure said kindly enough;--"So it appears that
you are distressing yourself beyond what is reasonable and right?"
She looked at him humbly, not far from believing that the priest's
supernatural power had divined her trouble without need of telling.
He inclined his tall figure, and bent toward her his thin peasant
face; for beneath the robe was still the tiller of the soil: the
gaunt and yellow visage, the cautious eyes, the huge bony shoulders.
Even his hands--hands wont to dispense the favours of Heaven-were
those of the husbandman, with swollen veins beneath the dark skin.
But Maria saw in him only the priest, the cure of the parish,
appointed of God to interpret life to her and show her the path of
duty.
"Be seated there," he said, pointing to a chair. She sat down
somewhat like a schoolgirl who is to have a scolding, somewhat like
a woman in a sorcerer's den who awaits in mingled hope and dread the
working of his unearthly spells... ... ...
An hour later the sleigh was speeding over the hard snow.
Chapdelaine drowsed, and the reins were slipping from his open
hands. Rousing himself and lifting his head, he sang again in
full-voiced fervour the hymn he was singing as they left the
village:--
... Adorons-le dans le ciel.
Adorons-le sur l'autel ...
Then he fell silent, his chin dropping slowly toward his breast, and
the only sound upon the road was the tinkle of sleigh-bells.
Maria was thinking of the priest's words: "If there was affection
between you it is very proper that you should know regret. But you
were not pledged to one another, because neither you nor he had
spoken to your parents; therefore it is not befitting or right that
you should sorrow thus, nor feel so deep a grief for a young man
who, after all is said, was nothing to you..."
And again: "That masses should be sung, that you should pray for
him, such things are useful and good, you could do no better. Three
high masses with music, and three more when the boys return from the
woods, as your father has asked me, most assuredly these will help
him, and also you may be certain they will delight him more than
your lamentations, since they will shorten by so much his time of
expiation. But to grieve like this, and to go about casting gloom
over the household is not well, nor is it pleasing in the sight of
God."
He did not appear in the guise of a comforter, nor of one who gives
counsel in the secret affairs of the heart, but rather as a man of
the law or a chemist who enunciates his bald formulas, invariable
and unfailing.
"The duty of a girl like you--good-looking, healthy, active withal
and a clever housewife--is in the first place to help her old
parents, and in good time to marry and bring up a Christian family
of her own. You have no call to the religious life? No. Then you
must give up torturing yourself in this fashion, because it is a
sacrilegious thing and unseemly, seeing that the young man was
nothing whatever to you. The good God knows what is best for us; we
should neither rebel nor complain ..."
In all this, but one phrase left Maria a little doubting, it was the
priest's assurance that Francois Paradis, in the place where now he
was, cared only for masses to repose his soul, and never at all for
the deep and tender regrets lingering behind him. This she could not
constrain herself to believe. Unable to think of him otherwise in
death than in life, she felt it must bring him something of
happiness and consolation that her sorrow was keeping alive their
ineffectual love for a little space beyond death. Yet, since the
priest had said it ...
The road wound its way among the trees rising sombrely from the
snow. Here and there a squirrel, alarmed by the swiftly passing
sleigh and the tinkling bells, sprang upon a trunk and scrambled
upward, clinging to the bark. From the gray sky a biting cold was
falling and the wind stung the cheek, for this was February, with
two long months of winter yet to come.
As Charles Eugene trotted along the beaten road, bearing the
travellers to their lonely house, Maria, in obedience to the words
of the cure at St. Henri, strove to drive away gloom and put
mourning from her; as simple-mindedly as she would have fought the
temptation of a dance, of a doubtful amusement or anything that was
plainly wrong and hence forbidden.
They reached home as night was falling. The coming of evening was
only a slow fading of the light, for, since morning, the heavens had
been overcast, the sun obscured. A sadness rested upon the pallid
earth; the firs and cypresses did not wear the aspect of living
trees and the naked birches seemed to doubt of the springtime. Maria
shivered as she left the sleigh, and hardly noticed Chien, barking
and gambolling a welcome, or the children who called to her from the
door-step. The world seemed strangely empty, for this evening at
least. Love was snatched away, and they forbade remembrance. She
went swiftly into the house without looking about her, conscious of
a new dread and hatred for the bleak land, the forest's eternal
shade, the snow and the cold,--for all those things she had lived her
life amongst, which now had wounded her.
CHAPTER XII
LOVE BEARING GIFTS
MARCH came, and one day Tit'Be brought the news from Honfleur that
there would be a large gathering in the evening at Ephrem
Surprenant's to which everyone was invited.
But someone must stay to look after the house, and as Madame
Chapdelaine had set her heart on this little diversion after being
cooped up for all these months, it was Tit'Be himself who was left
at home. Honfleur, the nearest village to their house, was eight
miles away; but what were eight miles over the snow and through the
woods compared with the delight of hearing songs and stories, and of
talk with people from afar?
A numerous company was assembled under the Surprenant roof: several
of the villagers, the three Frenchmen who had bought his nephew
Lorenzo's farm, and also, to the Chapdelaines' great surprise,
Lorenzo himself, back once more from the States upon business that
related to the sale and the settling of his father's affairs. He
greeted Maria very warmly, and seated himself beside her.
The men lit their pipes; they chatted about the weather, the
condition of the roads, the country news; but the conversation
lagged, as though all were looking for it to take some unusual turn.
Their glances sought Lorenzo and the three Frenchmen, expecting
strange and marvellous tales of distant lands and unfamiliar manners
from an assembly so far out of the common. The Frenchmen, only a few
months in the country, apparently felt a like curiosity, for they
listened, and spoke but little.
Samuel Chapdelaine, who was meeting them for the first time, deemed
himself called upon to put them through a catechism in the ingenuous
Canadian fashion.
"So you have come here to till the land. How do you like Canada?"
"It is a beautiful country, new and so vast ... In the
summer-time there are many flies, and the winters are trying; but I
suppose that one gets used to these things in time."
The father it was who made reply, his sons only nodding their heads
in assent with eyes glued to the floor. Their appearance alone would
have served to distinguish them from the other dwellers in the
village, but as they spoke the gap widened, and the words that fell
from their lips had a foreign ring. There was none of the slowness
of the Canadian speech, nor of that indefinable accent found in no
comer of France, which is only a peasant blend of the different
pronunciations of former emigrants. They used words and turns of
phrase one never hears in Quebec, even in the towns, and which to
these simple men seemed fastidious and wonderfully refined.
"Before coming to these parts were you farmers in your own country?"
"No."
"What trade then did you follow?"
The Frenchman hesitated a moment before. replying; possibly thinking
that what he was about to say would be novel, and hard for them to
understand. "I was a tuner myself, a piano-tuner; my two sons here
were clerks, Edmond in an office, Pierre in a shop."
Clerks--that was plain enough for anyone; but their minds were a
little hazy as to the father's business.
However Ephrem Surprenant chimed in with.--" Piano-tuner; that was
it, just so!" And his glance at Conrad Neron his neighbour was a
trifle superior and challenging, as though intimating.--" You would
not believe me, and maybe you don't know what it means, but now you
see ..."
"Piano-tuner," Samuel Chapdelaine echoed in turn, slowly grasping
the meaning of the words. "And is that a good trade? Do you earn
handsome wages? Not too handsome, eh! ... At any rate you are well
educated, you and your sons; you can read and write and cipher? And
here am I, not able even to read!"
"Nor I!" struck in Ephrem Surprenant, and Conrad Neron and Egide
Racicot added: "Nor I!" "Nor I!" in chorus, whereupon the whole of
them broke out laughing.
A motion of the Frenchman's hand told them indulgently that they
could very well dispense with these accomplishments; to himself of
little enough use at the moment.
"You were not able to make a decent living out of your trades over
there. That is so, is it not? And therefore you came here?"
The question was put simply, without thought of offence, for he was
amazed that anyone should abandon callings that seemed so easy and
so pleasant for this arduous life on the land.
Why indeed had they come? ... A few months earlier they would have
discovered a thousand reasons and clothed them in words straight
from the heart: weariness of the footway and the pavement, of the
town's sullied air; revolt against the prospect of lifelong slavery;
some chance stirring word of an irresponsible speaker preaching the
gospel of vigour and enterprise, of a free and healthy life upon a
fruitful soil. But a few months ago they could have found glowing
sentences to tell it all ... Now their best was a sorry effort to
evade the question, as they groped for any of the illusions that
remained to them.
"People are not always happy in the cities," said the father.
"Everything is dear, and one is confined."
In their narrow Parisian lodging it had seemed so wonderful a thing
to them, the notion that in Canada they would spend their days out
of doors, breathing the taintless air of a new country, close beside
the mighty forest. The black-flies they had not foreseen, nor
comprehended the depth of the winter's cold; the countless ill turns
of a land that has no pity were undivined.
"Did you picture it to yourselves as you have found it," Chapdelaine
persisted, "the country here, the life?"
"Not exactly," replied the Frenchman in a low voice. "No, not
exactly ..." And a shadow crossed his face which brought from
Ephrem. Surprenant:--"It is rough here, rough and hard!"
Their heads assented, and their eyes fell: three narrow-shouldered
men, their faces with the pallor of the town still upon them after
six months on the land; three men whom a fancy had torn from
counter, office, piano-stool-from the only lives for which they were
bred. For it is not the peasant alone who suffers by uprooting from
his native soil. They were seeing their mistake, and knew they were
too unlike in grain to copy those about them; lacking the strength,
the rude health, the toughened fibre, that training for every task
which fits the Canadian to be farmer, woodsman or carpenter,
according to season and need.
The father was dreamily shaking his head, lost in thought; one of
the sons, elbows on knees, gazed wonderingly at the palms of his
delicate hands, calloused by the rough work of the fields. All three
seemed to be turning over and over in their minds the melancholy
balance-sheet of a failure. Those about them were thinking--
"Lorenzo sold his place for more than it was worth; they have but
little money left and are in hard case; men like these are not built
for living on the land."
Madame Chapdelaine, partly in pity and partly for the honour of
farming, let fall a few encouraging words:--" It is something of a
struggle at the beginning-if you are not used to it; but when your
land is in better order you will see that life becomes easier."
"It is a queer thing," said Conrad Neron, "how every man finds it
equally hard to rest content. Here are three who left their homes
and came this long way to settle and farm, and here am I always
saying to myself that nothing would be so pleasant as to sit quietly
in an office all the day, a pen behind my ear, sheltered from cold
wind and hot sun."
"Everyone to his own notion," declared Lorenzo Surprenant, with
unbiassed mind.
"And your notion is not to stick in Hon-fleur sweating over the
stumps," added Racicot with a loud laugh.
"You are quite right there, and I make no bones about it; that sort
of thing would never have suited me. These men here bought my land-a
good farm, and no one can gainsay it. They wanted to buy a farm and
I sold them mine. But as for myself, I am well enough where I am,
and have no wish to return."
Madame Chapdelaine shook her head. "There is no better life than the
life of a farmer who has good health and owes no debts. He is a free
man, has no boss, owns his beasts, works for his own profit ...
The finest life there is!"
"I hear them all say that," Lorenzo retorted, one is free, his own
master. And you seem to pity those who work in factories because
they have a boss, and must do as they are told. Free-on the
land-come now!" He spoke defiantly, with more and more animation.
"There is no man in the world less free than a farmer ... When you
tell of those who have succeeded, who are well provided with
everything needful on a farm, who have had better luck than others,
you say.--'Ah, what a fine life they lead! They are comfortably off,
own good cattle.' That is not how to put it. The truth is that their
cattle own them. In all the world there is no 'boss' who behaves as
stupidly as the beasts you favour. Pretty nearly every day they give
you trouble or do you some mischief. Now it is a skittish horse that
runs away or lashes out with his heels; then it is a cow, however
good-tempered, that won't keep still to be milked and tramples on
your toes when the flies annoy her. And even if by good fortune they
don't harm you, they are forever finding a way to destroy your
comfort and to vex you..."
"I know how it is; I was brought up on a farm. And you, most of you
farmers, know how it is too. All the morning you have worked hard,
and go to your house for dinner and a little rest. Then, before you
are well seated at table, a child is yelling:--'The cows are over
the fence;' or 'The sheep are in the crop,' and everyone jumps up
and runs, thinking of the oats or the barley it has been such a
trouble to raise, that these miserable fools are ruining. The men
dash about brandishing sticks till they are out of breath; the women
stand screaming in the farm-yard. And when you have managed to drive
the cows or the sheep into their paddock and put up the rails, you
get back to the house nicely 'rested' to find the pea-soup cold and
full of flies, the pork under the table gnawed by dogs and cats, and
you eat what you can lay your hands on, watching for the next trick
the wretched animals are getting ready to play on you."
"You are their slaves; that's what you are. You tend them, you
clean them, you gather up their dung as the poor do the rich man's
crumbs. It is you who must keep them alive by hard work, because the
earth is miserly and the summer so short. That is the way of it, and
there is no help, as you cannot get on without them; but for cattle
there would be no living on the land. But even if you could ...
even if you could ... still would you have other masters: the
summer, beginning too late and ending too soon; the winter, eating
up seven long months of the year and bringing in nothing; drought
and rain which always come just at the wrong moment..."
"In the towns these things do not matter; but here you have no
defence against them and they do you hurt; and I have not taken into
account the extreme cold, the badness of the roads, the loneliness
of being far away from everything, with no amusements. Life is one
kind of hardship on top of another from beginning to end. It is
often said that only those make a real success who are born and
brought up on the land, and of course that is true; as for the
people in the cities, small danger that they would ever be foolish
enough to put up with such a way of living."
He spoke with heat and volubly--a man of the town who talks every
day with his equals, reads the papers, hears public speakers. The
listeners, of a race easily moved by words, were carried away by his
plaints and criticisms; the very real harshness of their lives was
presented in such a new and startling light as to surprise even
themselves.
However Madame Chapdelaine again shook her head. "Do not say such
things as that; there is no happier life in the world than the life
of a farmer who owns good land."
"Not in these parts, Madame Chapdelaine. You are too far north; the
summer is too short; the grain is hardly up before the frosts come.
Each time that I return from the States, and see the tiny wooden
houses lost in this wilderness-so far from one another that they
seem frightened at being alone-and the woods hemming you in on every
side ... By Heaven! I lose heart for you, I who live here no
longer, and I ask myself how it comes about that all you folk did
not long ago seek a kinder climate where you would find everything
that makes for comfort, where you could go out for a walk in the
winter-time without being in fear of death ..."
Without being in fear of death! Maria shuddered as the thought
swiftly awoke of those dark secrets hidden beneath the ever-lasting
green and white of the forest. Lorenzo Surprenant was right in what
he had been saying; it was a pitiless ungentle land. The menace
lurking just outside the door-the cold-the shrouding snows-the blank
solitude-forced a sudden entrance and crowded about the stove, an
evil swarm sneering presages of ill or hovering in a yet more
dreadful silence:--"Do you remember, my sister, the men, brave and
well-beloved, whom we have stain and hidden in the woods? Their
souls have known how to escape us; but their bodies, their-bodies,
their bodies, none shall ever snatch them from our hands ..."
The voice of the wind at the comers of the house was loud with
hollow laughter, and to Maria it seemed that all gathered within the
wooden walls huddled and spoke low, like men whose lives are under a
threat and who go in dread.
A burden of sadness was upon the rest of the evening, at least for
her. Racicot told stories of the chase: of trapped bears struggling
and growling so fiercely at the sight of the trapper that he loses
courage and falls a-trembling; and then, giving up suddenly when the
hunters come in force and the deadly guns are aimed--giving up,
covering their heads with their paws and whimpering with groans and
outcries almost human, very heart-rending and pitiful.
After these tales came others of ghosts and apparitions; of
blood-curdling visitations or solemn warnings to men who had
blasphemed or spoken ill of the priests. Then, as no one could be
persuaded to sing, they played at cards and the conversation dropped
to more commonplace themes. The only memory that Maria carried away
of the later talk, as the sleigh bore them homeward through the
midnight woods, was of Lorenzo Surprenant extolling the United
States and the magnificence of its great cities, the easy and
pleasant life, the never-ending spectacle of the fine straight
streets flooded with light at evening.
Before she departed Lorenzo said in quiet tones, almost in her
ear.--"To-morrow is Sunday; I shall be over to see you in the
afternoon."
A few short hours of night, a morning of sunlight on the snow, and
again he is by her side renewing his tale of wonders, his
interrupted plea. For it was to her he had been speaking the evening
before; Maria knew it well. The scorn he showed for a country life,
his praises of the town, these were but a preface to the allurements
he was about to offer in all their varied forms, as one shows the
pictures in a book, turning page by page.
"Maria," he began, "you have not the faintest idea! As yet, the most
wonderful things you ever saw were the shops in Roberval, a high
mass, an evening entertainment at the convent with acting. City
people would laugh to think of it! You simply cannot imagine ...
Just to stroll through the big streets in the evening--not on little
plank-walks like those of Roberval, but on fine broad asphalt
pavements as level as a table--just that and no more, what with the
lights, the electric cars coming and going continually, the shops
and the crowds, you would find enough there to amaze you for weeks
together. And then all the amusements one has: theatres, circusses,
illustrated papers, and places everywhere that you can go into for a
nickel--five cents--and pass two hours laughing and crying. To
think, Maria, you do not even know what the moving pictures are!"
He stopped for a little, reviewing in his mind the marvels of the
cinematograph, asking himself whether he could hope to describe
convincingly the fare it provided:--those thrilling stories of young
girls, deserted or astray, which crowd the screen with twelve
minutes of heart-rending misery and three of amends and heavenly
reward in surroundings of incredible luxury;--the frenzied galloping
of cowboys in pursuit of Indian ravishers; the tremendous fusillade;
the rescue at the last conceivable second by soldiers arriving in a
whirlwind, waving triumphantly the star-spangled banner ... after
pausing in doubt he shook his head, conscious that he had no words
to paint such glories.
They walked on snow-shoes side by side over the snow, through the
burnt lands that lie on the Peribonka's high bank above the fall.
Lorenzo had used no wile to secure Maria's company, he simply
invited her before them all, and now he told of his love, in the
same straightforward practical way.
"The first day I saw you, Maria, the very first day ... that is
only the truth! For a long time I had not been back in this country,
and I was thinking what a miserable place it was to live in, that
the men were a lot of simpletons who had never seen anything and the
girls not nearly so quick and clever as they are in the States ...
And then, the moment I set eyes on you, there was I saying to myself
that I was the simpleton, for neither at Lowell nor Boston had I
ever met a girl like yourself. When I returned I used to be thinking
a dozen times a day that some wretched farmer would make love to you
and carry you off, and every time my heart sank. It was on your
account that I came back, Maria, came up here from near Boston,
three days' journey! The business I had, I could have done it all by
letter; it was you I wished to see, to tell you what was in my heart
to say and to hear the answer you would give me."
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