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<h2>CHAPTER XIII</h2> Since the first of December we have not seen the ground—only a great field of white so dazzling that one understands the Indian’s name for the March moon.  Verily, my own eyes tell me why it is the Moon of Snowblindness. The ice is still thick and clear, but the sun on its surface and the moving water beneath are both wearing it away, slowly, surely.  There are clear pools on the lake at noon, and then the crows come down and drink, marching to and fro, like files of small, black-clad soldiers.  They meet, and bow politely, speak to each other singly or in groups, then line up and off they go with hoarse caws.  They look so important that they might be plotting all sorts of villainies. “Look out fer yerself,” laughs Uncle Dan.  “I’ll put the curse of the crows on yer.” A dire threat!  What use to break one’s back planting the corn if one’s evilly disposed neighbor can call winged battalions of those black thieves to undo all a man’s work and bring him to penury? The snow is still thick in the woods, but on the hilltops and in the open, bare patches of earth are beginning to show.  Peter’s coat matches the ground exactly, being a sharply mottled brown and white.  Indeed, he never did turn entirely white, like the wild hares in the woods.  Even when his fur was its snowiest there was always a brown, diamond-shaped patch on his forehead, and, so far as I know, he was the only hare so decorated.  No matter how far from home he strayed, I could always recognize him by his brown brand. This simple life has its inconveniences.  I was eating a belated breakfast the other morning, when bells on the lake and later a sleigh at the door announced a visitor.  It was a perfectly unknown man who informed me that he had been sent by Mrs. Swanson to bring me to her house to spend the day.  He had to wait outside, in the piercing wind, until a hasty glance round the combined sleeping, cooking, and reception room reassured me as to its condition for the entrance of a stranger.  Then he sat beside the stove, pipe in hand, and inspected me gravely while I prepared for the long drive down the lake. The day was bright and blue and snapping cold.  A point of light flashed from every facet of the roughened ice.  The horse was fresh, the wind at our backs, and we fairly flew past Jackson’s, over the bare roads and out again on beautiful Blue Bay, lying like a sapphire in its setting of silvered shores. The pony was a broncho, my companion told me, calling my attention to a brand to prove it.  He was all that, and a tree-climbing broncho to boot, for soon we came to a perpendicular bank as high as the side of a barn, and I was given to understand that the pony was going to clamber straight up, with the sleigh dangling at his heels.  I left the vehicle and scrambled up on my own feet, but the animal went up the side of that hill like a cat at a wall, and without one second’s hesitation. Arrived at the house I inquired of my hostess if my escort was her son. “Oh, no,” she answered.  “It was only Clarence Nutting, the hired man.” Evidently, “hired man” means something very different here from what it has hitherto meant to me.  It means friend, protector, helper, and member of the family.  Mrs. Swanson, Susie Dove, the hired girl, Clarence Nutting, and I all dined together; after dinner we played dominoes.  When Clarence brought in the fresh eggs from the barn he suggested: “Better give Miss X some to take home with her.”  Later he invited me to come back, and soon, to spend several days. Through the long, sunny afternoon, we sat round the stove in the pleasant best room, with its well-starched lace curtains, each with a bunch of artificial roses sewed on its folds, its oak sideboard decorated with rose-bordered crêpe paper napkins, its crayon portraits and wonderful, hand-made hooked rugs.  We women had our crocheting, but little Susie sat very upright, her small, work-roughened hands clasped on her plaid-covered knees, her toes, in their shiny best shoes, just reaching the floor, while Clarence played for us on his new graphophone. Clarence, in his high boots, patched trousers, and flannel shirt, handled his music box with the tenderness of a lover.  He dusted each record after using it, as carefully as a mother powders a baby.  As he played tune after tune, I saw in that instrument, God knows what of pleasures foregone, and temptations put aside while he saved out of his meager wages the price of that graphophone.  He had discovered a way to use the thorns from a hawthorn tree instead of wooden needles.  They gave a very soft and lovely tone.  His records were the usual collection sold with the machine—a few dances, a few Negro dialects and songs, some good marches and some hymns.  After nearly a year of hearing no tunes at all, I enjoyed them, every one.  When the concert was over, Clarence played: “God be with you till we meet again.” After tea came the sleigh and we drove home to the island, this time in a blinding snowstorm.  Conversation was not so lively as in the morning.  I was thinking of all the evidences I see here of man’s unquenchable thirst for beauty and music and the pleasant things of life, that not the most incessant toil nor hardest privation can ever wholly destroy.  I was remembering how I had gone over to the Blakes’ to use the telephone one afternoon and had had to wait for an hour because Clarence Nutting’s new instrument had come, and all the receivers on the line were down while he played it for the neighborhood.  I thought of poor Harry Spriggins’s delight in a magazine, of Mary Blake’s habit of keeping a glass of fresh flowers in the center of her table, of the time when Mrs. Drapeau, having no white tablecloth, had spread a clean sheet over her table for company, and of the Beaulacs’ joy in the blossoming of their lilac bush. Then I began dreaming of a big, comfortable shack somewhere on the shore, to which the people could come, as to a common meeting ground, social differences and local feuds forgotten.  I saw it furnished with a cupboard full of cups and plates, a piano or victrola.  There should be a circulating library there and games, I decided, and I saw the boys and girls dancing, singing, cooking popcorn, candy and fudge, in the evenings.  I imagined a group of women drinking tea and sewing while “teacher” played. A few days later I went with the Rector and Mrs. Rector to drink tea with the wife of the owner of a big lumber mill, and there I saw what one woman has done amid just such conditions as are here at Many Islands. There were the pretty little church, the parish house, the Sunday school room, all built by Mrs. Baring, and I heard of the reading circles, the concerts, the cooking classes that she has organized for the people among whom she has had to live. There too I saw the Canadian mother in war times and marveled at her.  Mrs. Baring has sent the light of her eyes, the pride of her heart, the son who was winning honors at his university and had a great future before him, overseas to the trenches.  I saw picture after picture of him—Harold as a baby, as a child, as a boy, as a man.  He was shown in his little knickers, his first long trousers, his khaki. “Yes, he is in France now, but of course we do not know where,” the mother said.  “I send him two pairs of socks, some handkerchiefs and shirts every week.  The boys like that better than one large box occasionally—they lose their clothes so.  We hope that things reach him, but we do not know.  We have not heard from him for two months now.” All this without a tremor of the firm lips, with not the shadow of a cloud over the serene blue eyes. The Rector told me afterward that not once has that mother alluded to the possibility of her son’s return.  She gave her supreme gift without hope of any reward.  Withal her interest in affairs is as keen, her charities as wide, her hospitality as gracious, as though she had never a care in the world and her boy were safe at her side. After supper we climbed over the slippery hillside to the church for Evensong.  Our hostess sat at the organ at the side of the chancel and in full view of the congregation.  During the service I watched her calm, clear profile.  She went through the intolerably pathetic petitions of the Litany without wavering, as we prayed for those who are fighting by land and sea and air; for the prisoners, the wounded and the dying, and her sweet, steady voice led our responses.  Only once did I see her falter.  It was during the singing of the hymn.  Her pretty ringed fingers went on pressing the keys; she played, but she could not sing. “The Son of God goes forth to war,    A kingly crown to gain, His blood-red banner streams afar,    Who follows in his train?” Her eyes looked past us, straight across the world.  Her lips were parted in a smile sadder than tears.  She was shedding her heart’s blood, drop by drop, for the safety of the empire. We do not talk much about the Great War here at Many Islands.  Indeed, it is only when I go to the towns that I realize that Canada is at war.  Once in a while one of our boys speaks of going to the front, and only the other day Andy Drapeau was saying, “Ef it comes to drafting, I’ll volunteer.  I’ll fight of me own free will.  No man shall make me go.” But at that, Andy was merely talking.  He had no idea of enlisting. No, as always, it is the men of the cities who will go first, and the reason is not far to seek.  It lies in the fact that the bucolic mind is almost totally devoid of imagination—it cannot picture what it has never seen.  It can form no vision of an empire.  It can think of this county as part of the Province and the Province as part of the Dominion, but of Canada as part of a great federation it cannot conceive—the thought is too big.  Our vision is bounded by the limits of our own p. 148experience.  We know that Britain, France, and Russia are fighting Germany and Austria, but the fields of Europe lie very far away, while our own fields are very near. We all know Germans.  We have worked beside them in the hayfields and the mines.  They seem good fellows enough, not companionable because they speak an outlandish sort of lingo that we doubt their being able to understand themselves.  But why should we fight them?  Of the Hun we can form no idea, thank God.  He is outside our experience. We have a patriotism, but it is local, parochial.  If this war were a baseball game between the rival teams of Sark and Fallen Timber, we could understand it fast enough.  We would “root” for our side and, if need be, fight for it.  But the far-off struggle of nation with nation leaves us cold.  We cannot picture it. But when the first wounded came back from the trenches, and when the stories of Saint Julien and Festhubert were told at the firesides, then went the men of rural Canada forward gladly to fill the places of those heroes whose deaths are Canada’s undying glory. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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