Chapter 3

One girl I have christened "Topsy," and I only wish you could see her when she is in one of her tantrums, which she has at frequent intervals. With her flashing black eyes, straight, jet-black hair, square, squat shoulders, she looks the very embodiment of the Evil One. She is twelve, but shows neither ability nor desire to learn. Her habits are disgusting, and unless closely watched she will be found filling her pockets with the contents of the garbage pail--and this in spite of the fact that we are no longer dining off one herring. She says that her ambition in life is to become like a fat pig! Last night, when the children were safely tucked in bed and I had sat down to write to you, piercing shrieks were heard resounding through the stillness of the house. A tour of investigation revealed Topsy creeping from bed to bed in the darkness, pretending to cut the throats of the girls with a large carving-knife which she had stolen for this purpose. To-day Topsy is going around with her hands tied behind her back as a punishment, and in the hope that without the use of her hands we may have one day of peace at least. Poor Topsy, kindness and severity alike seem unavailing. She steals and lies with the greatest readiness, and one wonders what life holds in store for her.

We have just admitted three children, so we now number more than the three dozen. One little mite of five was found last winter in a Labrador hut, deserted, half-starved, and nearly frozen to death. She was kept by a kindly neighbour until the ice conditions allowed of her being brought here. The other two, brother and sister, were found, the girl clothed in a sack, her one and only garment, and the boy in bed, minus even that covering. This is the type of child who comes to us.

The doctor in charge has just paid me a visit. He says there is an epidemic of smallpox in the island, and he wants all the children to be vaccinated. The number of cases of smallpox this year in this "insignificant little island" is greater _pro rata_ than in any other country of the world. So two o'clock this afternoon is the time set apart for the massacre of the innocents.

The laugh is against me! Two of our boys fell ill with a mysterious sickness, and tenderly and carefully were they nursed by me and fed with delicate portions from the king's table. I later learned with much chagrin that "chewing tobacco" (strictly forbidden) was the cause of this sudden onset. My sense of humour alone saved the situation for them!

_The Children's Home August 19_

In response to my frantic cables your box reached here safely, but it has not reached me. Picture if you can my amazed incredulity yesterday to see an exact replica of myself as I once was, walking on the dock. I rubbed my eyes and stared. Yes, it _was_ my purple gown. My first impulse was to jerk it off the culprit, but I decided on more diplomatic tactics. A very little detective work elucidated the mystery. You had addressed the box in care of the Mission, thinking doubtless, in your far-sighted, Scotch way, that if sent to an individual, the said individual would have duty to pay. Knowing all too well the chronic state of my pocket-book, you anticipated untoward complications. Now, none of the Mission staff pay duties. The contents of the box were mistaken for reinforcements for the charity clothing store, and to-day my purple chambray gown, "to memory dear," walks the street on another. _Sic transit_. I should add that one of the modernists of our harbour has chosen it. The old conservatives regard our collarless necks and abbreviated skirts with horror. What with the loss _en route_ of several necessary articles of apparel, and the discovery of this further depletion of my wardrobe, I regard the oncoming winter with some misgivings.

One of the crew on the Northern Light, _alias_ the Prophet, so-called because he is spirit brother to the Prophet of Doom, took a keen relish in my discomfiture, or I fancied he did. He it was who put the question in the doctor's Bible class, "Is it religious to wear overalls to church?" The house officer had carefully saved a pair of clean khaki trousers to honour the Sunday services, but in the local judgment they were no fit garment for the Lord's house. Local judgment, I may add, was not so drastic in its strictures on boudoir caps. Some very pretty ones came to service on the heads of the choir, but the verdict was a unanimously favourable one. A nomadic _Ladies' Home Journal_ was responsible for their origin.

"Out of the mouths of babes," etc. I have been trying to teach the little ones the thirteenth chapter of Corinthians. Whilst undressing Solomon the other night I had occasion, or it seemed to me that I had, to speak somewhat sharply to one of the others. When I turned my attention again to Solomon, he enunciated solemnly in his baby tones, "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love, I am become as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal."

You complain most unjustly that I do not give a chronological account of events. I give you the incidents which punctuate my days, and as for the background, nothing could be simpler than to fill it in.

To divert your mind from such adverse criticism, let me tell you that there is a strong suspicion abroad that I am a devout adherent of the Roman Church. Rumours of this have been coming to me from time to time, but I determined to withhold the news till its source was less in question. Now I have it on the undeniable authority of the Prophet. I have candles, lighted ones, on the dining-room table at dinner. _Post hoc, propter hoc_--and what further proof is needed!

Ananias has broken yet another window. When I questioned him as to when the deed had been committed, he replied politely, but mournfully, that he really could not tell me how many YEARS ago it was, as if I were seeking to unearth some long undiscovered crime.

_August 25_

The other day Topsy had the misfortune to fall out of bed and hit her two front teeth such a violent blow on the iron bar of the cot beside hers that bits of ivory flew about the dormitory. This necessitated a prompt matutinal visit to Dr. B., the dentist. As we waited our turn in the Convalescent Room, I overheard one patient-to-be remark to his neighbour, "They do be shockin' hard on us poor sailors. They says I've got to take a bath when I comes into hospital. Why, B'y, I hasn't had a bath since my mother washed me!"

The ethics of dentistry here are so mixed that one needs a Solomon to disentangle them. Mrs. "Uncle Life"--her husband is Uncle Eliphalet--recently had all her teeth pulled out, or, to be more accurate, all her remaining teeth. As the operation involved considerable time, labour, and novocaine, she was charged for the benefit of the hospital. When two shining sets, uppers and lowers, were ready for her, she was as pleased as a boy with his first jack-knife; but not so Uncle Life. He considered it a work of supererogation that not only must one pay to have the old teeth removed, but for the new ones to replace them.

Did I ever write you about our chambermaid's feet--the new one? Her name is Asenath, and she is so perfectly spherical that if you were to start her rolling down a plank she could no more stop than can those humpty-dumpty weighted dolls. 'Senath's temper is exemplary, and her intentions of the best; in fact, she will turn into a model maid.

But the process of turning is in progress at the moment. It began with our cook, a pattern of neatness and all the virtues, coming into my office and complaining, "One of us'll have to go, miss."

"What? Which?" I enquired, dazed by the abruptness of this decision, and wondering whether she were referring to me.

"This morning, miss, you know how hot it was? Well, 'Senath comes into the kitchen and says to me, 'Tryphena, I finds my feet something wonderful.' 'Wash them, and change your stockings,' I says. 'Wash them! Why, Tryphena, I'se feared to do that. I might get a chill as would strike in.'"

In a few well-chosen sentences I have explained to 'Senath the basic rules of hygiene and of this house regarding water and its uses. She has decided to stay and accept the inevitable weekly bath, but she warns me fairly that if she goes "into a decline," I must take the responsibility with her parents!

With your zeal for gardens, and your attachment to angle-worms--which you will recall I do not share--you would be interested in our efforts along these lines--the gardens, not the worms. In this climate a garden is a lottery, and in ten seasons to one a spiteful summer frost will fall upon the promising potatoes and kill the lot just as they are ripening. The Eskimos at the Moravian stations put their vegetal charges to bed each night with long covers over the rows. The other day, in an old journal about the country, I came upon this passage, and it struck me "How history does repeat itself." It runs: "The soyle along the coast is not deep of earth, but bringing forth abundantly peason small, peason which our countrymen have sowen have come up faire, of which our Generall had a present acceptable for the rarenesse, being the first fruits coming up by art and industrie in that desolate and dishabited land." I can assure you that the sight of a "peason," however small, if it did not come out of a tin can, would be an acceptable offering to your friend. Even in summer we get no fresh vegetables or fruits with the exception of occasional lettuce or local berries. The epitome of this spot is a tin! In the same old journal Whitbourne goes on to say that "Nature had recompensed that only defect and incommoditie of some sharpe cold by many benefits--with incredible quantitie and no less varietie of kindes of fish in the sea and fresh water, of trouts and salmons and other fish to us unknowen."

I have eaten fish (interspersed liberally with tinned stuff) and drunken fish and thought and spoken and dreamt fish ever since I arrived. But don't pity me for imaginary hardships. I like fish better than I do meat, and for that matter our winter meat supply is walking past my window this minute. He goes by the name of "Billy the Ox"; and I am informed that as soon as it begins to freeze, he is to be killed and frozen _in toto_, for the winter consumption of the staff, patients, and children. So our winter is not to consist of one long Friday.

_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."

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 passed 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 institutions 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 competition with the mail steamer's winch rather than with Delilah's "bawling."

I know all about competition 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 nutshell.

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 ashore 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 passengers in the darkness into the tiny punts which cluster 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 God 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 passers-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 marché_. 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 ashore. 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 glass 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 hell."