Maria Chapdelaine: A Tale of the Lake St. John Country

by Louis Hémon

  CHAPTER VI

  THE STUFF OF DREAMS

  IN July the hay was maturing, and by the middle of August it wasonly a question of awaiting a few dry days to cut and-store it. Butafter many weeks of fine weather the frequent shifts of wind whichare usual in Quebec once more ruled the skies.

  Every morning the men scanned the heavens and took counsel together."The wind is backing to the sou'east. Bad luck! Beyond question itwill rain again," said Edwige Legare with a gloomy face. Or it wasold Chapdelaine who followed the movement of the white clouds thatrose above the tree-tops, sailed in glad procession across theclearing, and disappeared behind the dark spires on the other side.

  "If the nor'west holds till to-morrow we shall begin," he announces.But next day the wind had backed afresh, and the cheerful clouds ofyesterday, now torn and shapeless, straggling in disorderly rout,seemed to be fleeing like the wreckage of a broken army.

  Madame Chapdelaine foretold inevitable misfortune. "Mark my words,we shall not have good hay-making weather. They say that down by theend of the lake some people of the same parish have gone to law withone another. Of a certainty the good God does not like that sort ofthing!"

  Yet the Power at length was pleased to show indulgence, and thenorth-west wind blew for three days on end, steady and strong,promising a rainless week. The scythes were long since sharpened andready, and the five men set to work on the morning of the third day.Legare, Esdras and the father cut; Da'Be and Tit'B? followed closeon their heels, raking the hay together. Toward evening all fivetook their forks in hand and made it into cocks, high and carefullybuilt, lest a change of wind should bring rain. But the sunshinelasted. For five days they carried on, swinging the scythe steadilyfrom right to left with that broad free movement that seems so easyto the practised hand, and is in truth the hardest to learn and themost fatiguing of all the labours known to husbandry.

  Flies and mosquitos rose in swarms from the cut hay, stinging andtormenting the workers; a blazing sun scorched their necks, andsmarting sweat ran into their eyes; when evening came, such was theache of backs continually bent, they could not straighten themselveswithout making wry faces. Yet they toiled from dawn to nightfallwithout loss of a second, hurrying their meals, feeling nothing butgratitude and happiness that the weather stood fair.

  Three or four times a day Maria or Telesphore brought them a bucketof water which they stood in a shady spot to keep it cool; and whenthroats became unbearably dry with heat, exertion and the dust ofthe hay, they went by turns to swallow great-draughts and delugewrists or head.

  In five days all the hay was cut, and, the drought persisting, onthe morning of the sixth day they began to break and scatter thecocks they intended lodging in the barn before night. The scytheshad done their work and the forks came into play. They threw downthe cocks, spread the hay in the sun, and toward the end of theafternoon, when dry, heaped it anew in piles of such a size that aman could just lift one with a single motion to the level of awell-filled hay-cart.

  Charles Eugene pulled gallantly between the shafts; the cart wasswallowed up in the barn, stopped beside the mow, and once again theforks were plunged into the hard-packed hay, raised a thick mat ofit with strain of wrist and back, and unloaded it to one side. Bythe end of the week the hay, well-dried and of excellent colour, wasall under cover; the men stretched themselves and took long breaths,knowing the fight was over and won.

  "It may rain now if it likes," said Chapdelaine. "It will be allthe same to us." But it appeared that the sunshine had not beentimed with exact relation to their peculiar needs, for the wind heldin the north-west and fine days followed one upon the other inunbroken succession.

  The women of the Chapdelaine household had no part in the work ofthe fields. The father and his three tall sons, all strong andskilled in farm labour, could have managed everything by themselves;if they continued to employ Legare and to pay him wages it wasbecause he had entered their service eleven years before, when thechildren were young, and they kept him now, partly through habit,partly because they were loth to lose the help of so tremendous aworker. During the hay-making then, Maria and her mother had onlytheir usual tasks: housework, cooking, washing and mending, themilking of three cows and the care of the hens, and once a week thebaking which often lasted well into the night.

  On the eve of a baking Telesphore was sent to hunt up the bread-panswhich habitually found their way into all corners of the house andshed-being in daily use to measure oats for the horse or Indian cornfor the fowls, not to mention twenty other casual purposes they werecontinually serving. By the time all were routed out and scrubbedthe dough was rising, and the women hastened to finish other workthat their evening watch might be shortened.

  Telesphore made a blazing fire below the Oven with branches of gummycypress that smelled of resin, then fed it with tamarack logs,giving a steady and continuous heat. When the oven was hot enough,Maria slipped in the pans of dough; after which nothing remained butto tend the fire and change the position of the pans as the bakingrequired.

  Too small an oven had been built five years before, and ever sincethen the family did not escape a weekly discussion about the newoven it was imperative to construct, which unquestionably shouldhave been put in hand without delay; but on each trip tothe-village, by one piece of bad luck and another, someone forgotthe necessary cement; and so it happened that the oven had to befilled two or even three times to make weekly provision for the ninemouths of the household.

  Maria invariably took charge of the first baking; invariably too,when the oven was ready for the second batch of bread and theevening well advanced, her mother would say considerately:--"Youcan go to bed, Maria, I will look after the second baking." AndMaria would reply never a word, knowing full well that the motherwould presently stretch herself on the bed for a little nap and notawake till morning. She then would revive the smudge that smoulderedevery evening in the damaged tin pail, install the second batch ofbread, and seat herself upon the door-step, her chin resting in herhands, upheld through the long hours of the night by herinexhaustible patience.

  Twenty paces from the house the clay oven with its sheltering roofof boards loomed dark, but the door of the fireplace fitted badlyand one red gleam escaped through the chink; the dusky border of theforest stole a little closer in the night. Maria sat very still,delighting in the quiet and the coolness, while a thousand vaguedreams circled about her like a flock of wheeling birds.

  There was a time when this night-watch passed in drowsiness, as sheresignedly awaited the moment when the finished task would bring hersleep; but since the coming of Fran?ois Paradis the long weeklyvigil was very sweet to her, for she could think of him and ofherself with nothing to distract her dear imaginings. Simple theywere, these thoughts of hers, and never did they travel far afield.In the springtime he will come back; this return of his, the joy ofseeing him again, the words he will say when they find themselvesonce more alone, the first touch of hands and lips. Not easy was itfor Maria to make a picture for herself of how these things were tocome about.

  Yet she essayed. First she repeated his full name two or threetimes, formally, as others spoke it: Fran?ois Paradis, from St. Michel deMistassini ... Fran?ois Paradis ... Then suddenly, with sweetintimacy,--Fran?ois!

  The evocation fails not. He stands before her tall and strong, boldof eye, his face bronzed with sun and snow-glare. He is by her side,rejoicing at the sight of her, rejoicing that he has kept his faith,has lived the whole year discreetly, without drinking or swearing.There are no blueberries yet to gather-it is only springtime-yetsome good reason they find for rambling off to the woods; he walksbeside her without word or joining of hands, through the massedlaurel flaming into blossom, and naught beyond does either need toflush the cheek, to quicken the beating of the heart.

  Now they are seated upon a fallen tree, and thus he speaks: "Wereyou lonely without me, Maria?" Most surely it is the first questionhe will put to her; but she is able to carry the dream no furtherfor the sudden pain
stabbing her heart. Ah! dear God! how long willshe have been lonely for him before that moment comes! A summer tobe lived through, an autumn, and all the endless winter! She sighs,but the steadfast patience of the race sustains her, and herthoughts turn upon herself and what the future may be holding.

  When she was at St. Prime, one of her cousins who was about to bewedded spoke often to her of marriage. A young man from the villageand another from Normandin had both courted her; for long monthsspending the Sunday evenings together at the house.

  "I was fond of them both,"--thus she declared to Maria. "And I reallythink I liked Zotique best; but he went off to the drive on the St.Maurice, and he wasn't to be back till summer; then Romeo asked meand I said, 'Yes.' I like him very well, too."

  Maria made no answer, but even then her heart told her that allmarriages are not like that; now she is very sure. The love ofFran?ois Paradis for her, her love for him, is a thing apart-a thingholy and inevitable--for she was unable to imagine that betweenthem it should have befallen otherwise; so must this love givewarmth and unfading colour to every day of the dullest life. Alwayshad she dim consciousness of such a presence-moving the spirit likethe solemn joy of chanted masses, the intoxication of a sunny windyday, the happiness that some unlooked-for good fortune brings, thecertain promise of abundant harvest ...

  In the stillness of the night the roar of the fall sounds loud andnear; the north-west wind sways the tops of spruce and fir with asweet cool sighing; again and again, farther away and yet farther,an owl is hooting; the chill that ushers in the dawn is stillremote. And Maria, in perfect contentment, rests upon the step,watching the ruddy beam from her fire-flickering, disappearing,quickened again to birth.

  She seems to remember someone long since whispering in her ear thatthe world and life were cheerless and gray. The daily round,brightened only by a few unsatisfying, fleeting pleasures; the slowpassage of unchanging years; the encounter with some young man, likeother young men, whose patient and hopeful courting ends by winningaffection; a marriage then, and afterwards a vista of days underanother roof, but scarce different from those that went before. Sodoes one live, the voice had told her. Naught very dreadful in theprospect, and, even were it so, what possible but submission; yetall level, dreary and chill as an autumn field.

  It is not true! Alone there in the darkness Maria shakes her head, asmile upon her lips, and knows how far from true it is. When shethinks of Paradis, his look, his bearing, of what they are and willbe to one another, he and she, something within her bosom hasstrange power to burn with the touch of fire, and yet to make hershiver. All the strong youth of her, the long-suffering of hersooth-fast heart find place in it; in the upspringing of hope and oflonging, this vision of her approaching miracle of happiness.

  Below the oven the red gleam quivers and fails.

  "The bread must be ready!" she murmurs to herself. But she cannotbring herself at once to rise, loth as she is to end the fair dreamthat seems only beginning.