Part 1

Chapter 14,080 wordsPublic domain

CAPE BRETON TALES

HARRY JAMES SMITH

AUTHOR OF

_Amédée's Son, Enchanted Ground, Mrs. Bumpstead Leigh, Tailor Made Man, etc._

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY

OLIVER M. WIARD

_The_ ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS

_Printed in the United States of America_

CONTENTS

ON THE FRENCH SHORE OF CAPE BRETON (1908) 1

LA ROSE WITNESSETH (1908) 17

OF THE BUCHERONS 19

OF LA BELLE MÉLANIE 32

OF SIMÉON'S SON 44

AT A BRETON CALVAIRE (1903) 57

THE PRIVILEGE (1910) 61

THEIR TRUE LOVE (1910) 77

GARLANDS FOR PETTIPAW (1915) 99

FLY, MY HEART (1915) 119

ILLUSTRATIONS

By OLIVER M. WIARD

THE INNER HARBOR _Frontispiece_

ARICHAT 17

A CALVAIRE 56

FOUGÈRE'S COVE 76

A FISHERMAN'S HOUSE 118

_"On the French Shore of Cape Breton" and "The Privilege" were first published in The Atlantic Monthly, while "La Rose Witnesseth of La Belle Mélanie" is reprinted from "Amédée's Son" (Chapters VIII and IX) with the kind permission of the publishers, Houghton Mifflin Company._

_"At a Breton Calvaire" was first published in The Williams Literary Monthly during undergraduate days, and was rewritten several times during the next few years. The final form is the one used here, except for the last stanza, which is a combination of the two versions now extant._

_The illustrations are from sketches made during Oliver Wiard's visits in Arichat. It is an especial pleasure to include them, not only because of their fidelity and beauty, but also because of my brother's enthusiastic interest and delight in them._

EDITH SMITH.

ON THE FRENCH SHORE OF CAPE BRETON

Summer comes late along the Cape Breton shore; and even while it stays there is something a little diffident and ticklish about it, as if each clear warm day might perhaps be the last. Though by early June the fields are in their first emerald, there are no flowers yet. The little convent girls who carry the banners at the head of the Corpus Christi procession at Arichat wear wreaths of artificial lilies of the valley and marguerites over their white veils, and often enough their teeth chatter with cold before the completion of the long march--out from the church portals westward by the populous street, then up through the steep open fields to the old Calvary on top of the hill, then back to the church along the grass-grown upper road, far above the roofs, in full view of the wide bay.

Despite some discomforts, the procession is a very great event; every house along the route is decked out with bunting or flags or a bright home-made carpet, hung from a window. Pots of tall geraniums in scarlet bloom have been set out on the steps; and numbers of little evergreen trees, or birches newly in leaf, have been brought in from the country and bound to the fences. Along the roadside are gathered all the Acadians from the neighboring parishes, devoutly gay, enchanted with the pious spectacle. The choir, following after the richly canopied Sacrament and swinging censers, are chanting psalms of benediction and thanksgiving; banners and flags and veils flutter in the wind; the harbor, ice-bound so many months, is flecked with dancing white-caps and purple shadows: surely summer cannot be far off.

"When once the ice has done passing _down there_," they say--"which may happen any time now--you will see! Perhaps all in a day the change will come. The fog that creeps in so cold at night--it will all be sucked up; the sky will be clear as glass down to the very edge of the water. Ah, the fine season it will be!"

That is the way summer arrives on the Acadian shore: everything bursting pell-mell into bloom; daisies and buttercups and August flowers rioting in the fields, lilacs and roses shedding their fragrance in sheltered gardens; and over all the world a drench of unspeakable sunlight.

You could never forget your first sight of Arichat if you entered its narrow harbor at this divine moment. Steep, low hills, destitute of trees, set a singularly definite sky-line just behind; and the town runs--dawdles, rather--in a thin, wavering band for some miles sheer on the edge of the water. Eight or ten wharves, some of them fallen into dilapidation, jut out at intervals from clumps of weatherbeaten storehouses; and a few small vessels, it may be, are lying up alongside or anchored idly off shore. Only the occasional sound of a creaking block or of a wagon rattling by on the hard roadway breaks the silence.

Along the street the houses elbow one another in neighborly groups, or straggle out in single file, separated by bits of declivitous white-fenced yard; and to the westward, a little distance up the hill, sits the square church, far outvying every other edifice in size and dignity, glistening white, with a tall bronze Virgin on the peak of the roof--Our Lady of the Assumption, the special patron of the Acadians.

But what impresses you above all is the incredible vividness of color in this landscape: the dazzling gold-green of the fields, heightened here and there by luminous patches of foam-white where the daisies are in full carnival, or subdued to duller tones where, on uncultivated ground, moss-hummocks and patches of rock break through the investiture of grass. The sky has so much room here too: the whole world seems to be adrift in azure; the thin strip of land hangs poised between, claimed equally by firmament and the waters under it.

In the old days, they tell us, Arichat was a very different place from now. Famous among the seaports of the Dominion, it saw a continual coming and going of brigs and ships and barquentines in the South American fish trade.

"But if you had known it then!" they say. "The wharves were as thick all the length of the harbor as the teeth of a comb; and in winter, when the vessels were laid up--eh, mon Dieu! you would have called it a forest, for all the masts and spars you saw there. No indeed, it was not dreamed of in those days that Arichat would ever come to this!"

So passes the world's glory! An air of tender, almost jealous reminiscence hangs about the town; and in its gentle decline into obscurity it has kept a sort of dignity, a self-possession, a certain look of wisdom and experience, which in a sense make it proof against all arrows of outrageous Fortune.

Back from the other shore of the harbor, jutting out for some miles into Chedabucto Bay, lies the Cape. You get a view of it if you climb to the crest of the hill--a broad reach of barrens, fretted all day by the sea. Out there it is what the Acadians call a bad country. About the sluice-like coves that have been eaten into its rocky shore are scrambling groups of fishermen's houses; but aside from these and the lighthouse on the spit of rocks to southward, the region is uninhabited--a waste of rock and swamp-alder and scrub-balsam, across which a single thread of a road takes its circuitous way, dipping over steep low hills, turning out for gnarls of rock and patches of gleaming marsh, losing itself amid dense thickets of alder, then emerging upon some bare hilltop, where the whole measureless sweep of sea and sky fills the vision.

When the dusk begins to fall of an autumn afternoon--between dog and wolf, as the saying goes--you could almost believe in the strange noises--the rumblings, clankings, shrill voices--that are to be heard above the dull roar of the sea by belated passers on the barrens. Some people have seen death-fires too, and a headless creature, much like a horse, galloping through the darkness; and over there at Fougère's Cove, the most remote settlement of the Cape, there were knockings at doors through all one winter from hands not human. The Fougères--they were mostly of one tribe there--were driven to desperation; they consulted a priest; they protected themselves with blessed images, with prayers and holy water; and no harm came to them, though poor Marcelle, who was a _jeune fille_ of marriageable age, was prostrated for a year with the fright of it.

This barren territory, where nothing grows above the height of a man's shoulder, still goes by the name of "the woods"--_les bois_--among the Acadians. "Once the forest was magnificent here," they tell you--"trees as tall as the church tower; but the great fire swept it all away; and never has there been a good growth since. For one thing, you see, we must get our firewood from it somehow."

This fact accounts for a curious look in the ubiquitous stubby evergreens: their lower branches spread flat and wide close on the ground,--that is where the snow in winter protects them,--and above reaches a thin, spire-like stem, trimmed close, except for new growth at the top, of all its branches. It gives suggestion of a harsh, misshapen, all but defeated existence; the adverse forces are so tyrannical out here on the Cape, the material of life so sparse.

I remember once meeting a little funeral train crossing the barrens. They were bearing the body of a young girl, Anna Béjean, to its last rest, five miles away by the road, in the yard of the parish church amongst the wooden crosses. The long box of pine lay on the bottom of a country wagon, and a wreath of artificial flowers and another of home-dyed immortelles were fastened to the cover. A young fisherman, sunburned and muscular, was leading the horse along the rough road, and behind followed three or four carts, carrying persons in black, all of middle age or beyond, and silent.

Yet in the full tide of summer the barrens have a beauty in which this characteristic melancholy is only a persistent undertone. Then the marshes flush rose-pink with lovely multitudes of calopogons that cluster like poising butterflies amongst the dark grasses; here too the canary-yellow bladderwort flecks the black pools, and the red, leathery pitcher-plant springs in sturdy clumps from the moss-hummocks. And the wealth of color over all the country!--gray rock touched into life with sky-reflections; rusty green of alder thickets, glistening silver-green of balsam and juniper; and to the sky-line, wherever it can keep its hold, the thin, variegated carpet of close-cropped grass, where creeping berries of many kinds grow in profusion. Flocks of sheep scamper untended over the barrens all day, and groups of horses, turned out to shift for themselves while the fishing season keeps their owners occupied, look for a moment, nose in the air, at the passer, kick up their heels, and race off.

As you turn back again toward Arichat you catch a glimpse of its glistening white church, miles distant in reality, but looking curiously near, across a landscape where none of the familiar standards of measure exist. You lose it on the next decline; then it flashes in sight again, and the blue, sun-burnished expanse of water between. It occurs to you that the whole life of the country finds its focus there: christenings and first communions, marriages and burials--how wonderfully the church holds them all in her keeping; how she sends out her comfort and her exhortation, her reproach and her eternal hope across even this bad country, where the circumstances of human life are so ungracious.

But it is on a Sunday morning, when, in response to the quavering summons of the chapel bell, the whole countryside gives up its population, that you get the clearest notion of what religion means in the life of the Acadians. From the doorway of our house, which was close to the road at the upper end of the harbor, we could see the whole church-going procession from the outlying districts. The passing would be almost unbroken from eight o'clock on for more than an hour and a half: a varied, vivacious, friendly human stream. They came in hundreds from the scattered villages and hamlets of the parish--from Petit de Grat and Little Anse and Pig Cove and Gros Nez and Point Rouge and Cap au Guet, eight or nine miles often enough.

First, those who went afoot and must allow plenty of time on account of age: bent old fishermen, whose yellowed and shiny coats had been made for more robust shoulders; old women, invariably in short black capes, and black bonnets tied tight under the chin, and in their hands a rosary and perhaps a thumb-worn missal. Then troops of children, much _endimanché_,--one would like to say "Sundayfied,"--trotting along noisily, stopping to examine every object of interest by the way, extracting all the excitement possible out of the weekly pilgrimage.

A little later the procession became more general: young and old and middle-aged together. In Sunday boots that creaked loudly passed numbers of men and boys, sometimes five or six abreast, reaching from side to side of the street, sometimes singly attendant upon a conscious young person of the other sex. The wagons are beginning to appear now, scattering the pedestrians right and left as they rattle by, bearing whole families packed in little space; and away across the harbor, you see a small fleet of brown sails putting off from the Cape for the nearer shore.

Outside the church, in the open space before the steps, is gathered a constantly growing multitude, a dense, restless swarm of humanity, full of gossip and prognostic, until suddenly the bell stops its clangor overhead; then there is a surging up the steps and through the wide doors of the sanctuary; and outside all is quiet once more.

The Acadians do not appear greatly to relish the more solemn things of religion. They like better a religion demurely gay, pervaded by light and color.

"Elle est très chic, notre petite église, n'est-ce pas?" was a comment made by a pious soul of my acquaintance, eager to uphold the honor of her parish.

Proper, mild-featured saints and smiling Virgins in painted robes and gilt haloes abound in the Acadian churches; on the altars are lavish decorations of artificial flowers--silver lilies, paper roses, red and purple immortelles; and the ceilings and pillars and wall-spaces are often done in blue and pink, with gold stars; such a style, one imagines, as might appeal to our modern St. Valentine. The piety that expresses itself in this inoffensive gayety of embellishment is more akin to that which moves universal humanity to don its finery o' Sundays,--to the greater glory of God,--than to the sombre, death-remembering zeal of some other communities. A kind religion this, one not without its coquetries, gracious, tactful, irresistible, interweaving itself throughout the very texture of the common life.

Last summer, out at Petit de Grat, three miles from Arichat, where the people have just built a little church of their own, they held a "Grand Picnic and Ball" for the raising of funds with which to erect a glebe house. The priest authorized the affair, but stipulated that sunset should end each day's festivities, so that all decencies might be respected. This parish picnic started on a Monday and continued daily for the rest of the week--that is to say, until all that there was to sell was sold, and until all the youth of the vicinity had danced their legs to exhaustion.

An unoccupied shop was given over to the sale of cakes, tartines, doughnuts, imported fruits, syrup drinks (unauthorized beverages being obtainable elsewhere), to the vending of chances on wheels of fortune, target-shooting, dice-throwing, hooked rugs, shawls, couvertures, knitted hoods, and the like; and above all the hubbub and excitement twanged the ceaseless, inevitable voice of a graphophone, reviving long-forgotten rag-time.

Outside, most conspicuous on the treeless slope of hill, was a "pavilion" of boards, bunting-decked, on which, from morn till eve, rained the incessant clump-clump of happy feet. For music there was a succession of performers and of instruments: a mouth-organ, a fiddle, a concertina, each lending its particular quality of gayety to the dance; the mouth-organ, shrill, extravagant, whimsical, failing in richness; the concertina, rich, noisy, impetuous, failing in fine shades; the fiddle, wheedling, provocative, but a little thin. And besides--the fiddle is not what it used to be in the hands of old Fortune.

Fortune died a year ago, and he was never appreciated till death snatched him from us: the skinniest, most ramshackle of mankind, tall, loose-jointed, shuffling in gait; at all other times than those that called his art into play, a shiftless, hang-dog sort of personage, who would always be begging a coat of you, or asking the gift of ten cents to buy him some tobacco. But at a dance he was a despot unchallenged. Only to hear him jig off the Irish Washerwoman was to acknowledge his preëminence. His bleary eyes and tobacco-stained lips took on a radiance, his body rocked to and fro, vibrated to the devil-may-care rhythm of the thing, while his left foot emphatically rapped out the measure.

Until another genius shall be raised up amongst us, Fortune's name will be held in cherished memory. For that matter, it is not likely to die out, since, on the day of his death, the old reprobate was married to the mother of his seven children--baptized, married, administered, and shuffled off in a day.

It had never occurred to any of us, somehow, that Fortune might be as transitory and impermanent as his patron goddess herself. We had always accepted him as a sort of ageless thing, a living symbol, a peripatetic mortal, coming out of Petit de Grat, and going about, tobacco in cheek, fiddle under arm, as irresponsible as mirth itself among the sons of men. God rest him! Another landmark gone.

And old Maximen Forêt, too, from whom one used to take weather-wisdom every day--his bench out there in the sun is empty. Maximen's shop was just across the street from our house--a long, darkish, tunnel-like place under a steep roof. Tinware of all descriptions hung in dully shining array from the ceiling; barrels and a rusty stove and two broad low counters occupied most of the floor space, and the atmosphere was charged with a curious sharp odor in which you could distinguish oil and tobacco and molasses. The floor was all dented full of little holes, like a honeycomb, where Maximen had walked over it with his iron-pointed crutch; for he was something of a cripple. But you rarely had any occasion to enter the smelly little shop, for no one ever bought much of anything there nowadays.

Instead, you sat down on the sunny bench beside the old man--Acadian of the Acadians--and listened to his tireless, genial babble--now French, now English, as the humor struck him.

"It go mak' a leetle weat'er, m'sieu," he would say. "I t'ink you better not go fur in the p'tit caneau t'is day. Dere is squall--là-bas--see, dark--may be t'unner. Dat is not so unlike, dis mont'. Oh, w'at a hell time for de hays!"

For everybody who passed he had a greeting, even for those who had hastened his business troubles through never paying their accounts. To the last he never lost his faith in their good intentions.

"Dose poor devil fishermen," he would say, "however dey mak' leeve, God know. You t'ink I mak' 'em go wid notting? It ain't lak dat wit' me here yet, m'sieu. Dey pay some day, when le bon Dieu, he send dem some feesh; dat's sure sure."

If it happened that anybody stopped on business, old Maximen would hobble to the door and tug violently at a bell-rope.

"Cr-r-r-line! Cr-r-r-line!" he would call.

"Tout d' suite!" answered a shrill voice from some remoter portion of the edifice; and a moment later an old woman with straggling white hair, toothless gums, and penetrating, humorous eyes, deepset under a forehead of infinite wrinkles, would come shuffling up the pebble walk from the basement.

"Me voila!" she would ejaculate, panting. "Me ol' man, he always know how to git me in a leetle minute, hé?"

On Sundays Caroline and Maximen would drive to chapel in a queer, heavy, antiquated road-cart that had been built especially for his use, hung almost as low between the axles as a chariot.

"We go mak' our respec' to the bon Dieu," he would laugh, as he took the reins in hand and waited for Célestine, the chunky little mare, to start--which she did when the mood took her.

The small shop is closed and beginning to fall to pieces. Maximen has been making his respects amid other surroundings for some four or five years, and Caroline, at the end of a twelvemonth of lonely waiting, followed after.

"It seem lak I need t'e ol' man to look out for," she used to say. "All t'e day I listen to hear t'at bell again. 'Tout d' suite! I used to call, no matter what I do--maybe over the stove or pounding my bread; and den, 'Me voila, mon homme!' I would be at t'e shop, ready to help."

I suppose that wherever a man looks in the world, if he but have the eyes to see, he finds as much of gayety and pathos, of failure and courage, as in any particular section of it; yet so much at least is true: that in a little community like this, so removed from the larger, more spectacular conflicts of life, so face to face, all the year, with the inveterate and domineering forces of nature, one seems to discover a more poignant relief in all the homely, familiar, universal episodes of the human comedy.

LA ROSE WITNESSETH

OF THE BUCHERONS OF LA BELLE MÉLANIE OF SIMÉON'S SON

LA ROSE WITNESSETH

_Of How the Bucherons Were Punished for Their Hard Hearts_

It was a boy of ten who listened to La Rose, and while he listened, the sun stood still in the sky, there was an enchantment on all the world. Whatever La Rose said you had to believe, somehow. Oh, I assure you, no one could be more exacting than she in the matter of proofs. For persons who would give an ear to any absurd story tattled abroad she had nothing but contempt.

"Before you believe a thing," said La Rose, sagely, "you must know whether it is true or not. That is the most important part of a story."

She would give a decisive nod to her small head and shut her lips together almost defiantly. Yet always, somewhere in the corner of her alert gray eye, there seemed to be lurking the ghost of a twinkle. La Rose had no age. She was both very young and very old. For all she had never traveled more than ten miles from the little Cape Breton town of Port l'Évêque, you had the feeling that she had seen a good deal of the world, and it is certain that her life had not been easy; yet she would laugh as quickly and abundantly as a young girl just home from the convent.

These two were the best of comrades. La Rose had been the boy's nurse when he was little, and as he had no mother she had kept a feeling of special affection and responsibility for him. Thus it happened that whenever she was making some little expedition out across the harbor--say for blueberries on the barrens, or white moorberries, or ginseng--she would get permission from the captain for Michel to go with her; and this was the happiest privilege in the boy's life. Most of all because of the stories La Rose would tell him.

La Rose had a story to tell about every spot they visited, about every person they passed. She had been brought up, herself, out here on the Cape; and not an inch of its territory but was familiar to her.

"Now that is where those Bucherons lived," she observed one day, as they were walking homeward from Pig Cove by the Calvaire road. "They are all gone now, and the house is almost fallen to pieces; but once things were lively enough there--mon Dieu, oui!--quite lively enough for comfort."

She gave a sagacious nod to her head, with the look of one who could say more, and would, if you urged her a little.

"Was it at the Bucherons' that all the chairs stood on one leg?" asked Michel, thrilling mysteriously.