Read Ebook: Cape Breton Tales by Smith Harry James Smith Edith Contributor Wiard Oliver M Illustrator

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Ebook has 535 lines and 32122 words, and 11 pages

ecame 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 tr?s chic, notre petite ?glise, 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 , 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 pre?minence. 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 For?t, 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--l?-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, h??"

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 C?lestine, 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 M?LANIE OF SIM?ON'S SON

LA ROSE WITNESSETH

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'?v?que, 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.

"Oui, c'est ?a," answered La Rose, in a voice of the most sepulchral, "right there in that house, the chairs stood on one leg and went rap--rap--against the floor. And more than once a table with dishes and other things on it fell over, and there were strange sounds in the cupboard. Oh, it is certain those Bucherons were tormented; but for that matter they had brought it on themselves because of their greediness and their hard hearts. It came for a punishment; and when they repented themselves, it went away."

"I haven't ever heard all the story about the Bucherons," said Michel--"or at least, not since I was big. I am almost sure I would like it."

"Well, I daresay," agreed La Rose. "It is an interesting story in some ways; and the best of it is, it is not one of those stories that are only to make you laugh, and then you go right away and forget them. And another thing: this story about the Bucherons really happened. It was when my poor stepmother was a girl. She lived at Pig Cove then, and that is only two miles from Gros Nez. And one of those Bucherons was once wanting to marry her; but do you think she would have anything to do with a man like that?

"'No,' she said. 'I will have nothing to do with you. I would sooner not ever be married, me, than to have you for my man.'

"And the reason she spoke that way was because of the cruelty they had shown toward that poor widow of a No?mi, which everybody on the Cape knew about, and it was a great scandal. And if you want me to tell you about it, that is what I am going to do now."

La Rose seated herself on a flat rock by the road, and Michel found another for himself close by. Below them lay a deep rocky cove, with shores as steep as a sluice, and close above its inner margin stood the shell of a small house. The chimney had fallen in, the windows were all gone--only vacant holes now, through which you saw the daylight from the other side, and the roof had begun to sag.

"Yes," said La Rose, "it will soon be gone to pieces entirely, and then there will be nothing to remind anyone of those Bucherons and what torments they had. You see there were four of them, an old woman and two sons, and one of the sons was married, but there were not any children; and all those four must have had stones instead of hearts. They were only thinking how they could get the better of other people, and so become rich.

"And before that there had been three sons at home; but one of them--Beno?t his name was--had married a certain No?mi Boudrot; and she was as sweet and beautiful as a lily, and he too was different from the others; and so they had not lived here, but had got a little house at Pig Cove, where they were very happy; and the good God sent them two children, of a beauty and gentleness indescribable; and they called them ?vang?line and little Beno?t, but you do not need to remember that, because it is not a part of the story.

"So things went on that way for quite a while; and all the time those four Bucherons were growing more and more hard-hearted, like four serpents in a pile together.

"Well, one day in October that Beno?t Bucheron who lived in Pig Cove was going alone in a small cart to Port l'?v?que to buy some provisions for winter--flour, I suppose, and meal, and perhaps some clothes and some tobacco; and instead of going direct by the Gros Nez road, he came around this way by the Calvaire so as to stop in and speak to his relatives; and to see them welcoming him, you would never have suspected their stone hearts. But Beno?t was solemn for all that, as if troubled by some idea. Then that sly old mother, she said:

"'Dear Beno?t,' she said, 'what troubles you? Can you not put trust in your own mother, who loves you better than her eyes and nose?'--and she smiled at him just like a fat wicked old spider that is waiting for a fly to come and get tangled up in her net.

"But Beno?t only remembered then that she was his mother; so he said:

"Now you may depend that when he showed them all that money, their eyes stuck out like the eyes of crabs; but of course they did not say anything only some words of the most comforting. And finally he said, getting ready to go:

"'If anything should happen,' he said, 'will you promise me to be good to that poor No?mi and those two poor little innocent lambs?'--and those serpents said, certainly, they would do all that was possible; and with that Beno?t gets into his cart, and starts down the hill; and suddenly the horse takes a fright of something and runs away, and the cart tips over, and Beno?t is thrown out; and when his brothers get to him he is quite quite dead--and that shows what it means to see one of those little blue fires at night in the woods.

"Well, you can believe that No?mi was not very happy when they brought back that poor Beno?t to Pig Cove. Her eyes were like two brooks, and for a long time she could not say anything, and then finally, summoning a little voice of courage:

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