I did not see any more of the races because I was summoned to the Government House box and invited to tea with the occupants thereof. They must have heard what an excellent dairywoman I am, and things like that, but how they heard I cannot surmise unless John has been telling.
"I'd like to live in your Province," said the Governor, "living is mercilessly high there, but money keeps moving; money keeps moving, and a fellow like me need never go to work without his breakfast."
In the Directors' room, we refreshed ourselves with little sweet cakes and tea from a delicious brew. And in this room, I talked with the handsome, well-mannered women from Kentucky, Virginia, and Hamilton who have brought thither their horses—about six hundred in all—for this autumn meet.
I have made up my mind that John shall not argue me into going home, not if I have to fall ill from discomposure of spirit, and, as for Toronto, ever hereafter it shall be to me a new city of Beucephala in honour of its horses and because of the immutable game-loving disposition of its people.
Away from the beaten tracks there are still by-paths where hyacinths grow in the springtime.—ARTHUR EDWARD WAITE.
Far off in the Southland, it is in the habit of Spring to come lagging over the land. She is a princess. You can tell it by her manner of moving, and her fine lady ways. Often, she is greatly bored.
Under the north star it is different. Spring is a wilding horsewoman, sweet and graceless, pirouetting a-tiptoe and waving to us kisses.
Hush! and hold you still, my merry Gentlemen. You may catch them if you try, and they are not in the least sinful.
Goldilocks, I call her.
"A young mother," you say, "and no Columbine."
Pray thee have it so, for when this season of seven sweet suns has begun, she is all things to all men.
What an ado there is when she calls to her flower-children and chides them to arise and put on their dresses.
Sleepy heads! Sleepy heads!
The vi'lets peer out of their green bed and complain of the cold, and as for the ferns, instead of expanding into fans of green, they curl themselves into foolish fiddle heads and beg to finish their dream.
The shy anemone, with flushed face, gets her up first that she may be with her mother. She is Spring's favourite child, but mark you, the maiden wears a ruff of fur about her neck, and snuggles into it, just as the pussy-willow does into his coat of grey.
Those flowers that have butter-pats to heads come on apace. Some there are who call them dandelions but we shall call them children's gold.
Ah! if flowers would only sing.
How terribly long has been the winter with its tiresome monochrome of white. Every vestige of colour has been bleached out of the earth like one would bleach a tablecloth.
By way of solace, our northern Indian paints his face and wears a scarlet sash as, by the same token, you and I wear poster coats and purple plumes.
It was recorded a day ago that when our dogs run away from us they always travel southward. There is no doubt in the world they are seeking colour.
Over the way from my study-window there is a glass-house where a man who, aforetime, taught school now grows flowers. The transition is surely a natural one.
His is the last conservatory on this hemisphere—at least I've heard tell it is.
He lets me walk up and down its long blossom-bordered aisles whenever I am so minded. Here, in his floral sanctuary, one may take deep draughts from the warm subtly-scented air till, someway or other, it is transmuted into the alembic of the soul.
May no blight fall on his roses or his heart! May God love him and let him live long!
This man's roses are of ivory and pink, but a few are red as if they might be the blood of some great wounded queen.
Nearly all the roses are long-winged and heavy-headed. They could not be otherwise when they come and go from the land where dreams are born. Once, a poet told that the soul of a rose went into his blood. This was how he came to write theIdylls of the King.
One of the gardeners ties the red roses to stakes and he will not have it that the habit is cruel. "You may have noticed, Lady"—and here he tightly draws the cord—"that most folk are hung by their sweethearts." I almost hate this man.
Hath not a rose-tree organs, passions, senses? If you prick it does it not bleed? Verily I say unto you that it hath and it does.
It is near to April before the lilies are at flood-tide. You must needs see them before Passion Week when the gardeners cut and send them to a large hungry place called down the line, where, in prairie churches of tin and pine and sod, the Eastertide worshippers consider the lily and sing songs about death and life.
Not an inch of space is lost in the long lines where, tall and lissome, the stalks bend and curtsy to the passer-by. The glory of the lily is short-lived, for always they are cut off in maturity. The message they give is not one of prophecy and resurrection as the writers have ever taught. You may hear the message if you are still enough. "There is no second flowering time" they whisper. "Love while life doth last."
But, after all, the lilies are white like the snow outside, so that I esteem the big purple hyacinths better, and the bobbing daffodils.
There is an osier chair in one room wherein I often sit and watch the buyers flit from plant to plant. The women who come from the British Isles choose primroses, while those of Ontario and the other provinces to the south, prefer a lilac in bloom, marguerites, or carnations—anything they knew and loved at home.
The Fraus, Madames, and Senoritas from Europe (every one must have a blossom for Easter, else where is luck to hail from?) are better satisfied with heliotropes, azaleas, and claret-coloured cyclamens.
Our erstwhile teacher places the Norway pines close under the palms; the tree of shade and the tree of sun that sigh vainly for each other. I like him for this. He knows that Titiana loved Bottom. He must know it.
Very few care for my favourite flower—the narcissus. I always buy it, and a fern. There are folk who despise ferns because they are nothing but leaves but I like them for their history. They are the survival of the fittest; types which Nature, in her great printing-press, never breaks up. They are the old-timers of the vegetable world.
Also, I walk down the tomato avenue and take my pick—that is I do if I have enough money, for, here, at the edge of the world, they are as expensive as Jacob's mess of pottage. One does not dream of robbing banks so much as stripping tomato-vines.
Tomatoes do not ripen out of doors (but you must not tell the Board of Trade I said so) unless on a sunny slope, or by reason of some other special dispensation.
Other vegetables thrive, and the cauliflowers attain a size and perfection elsewhere undreamed of.
Never were there such toothsome red radishes as are grown here in the north, large, firm, and flavorous. They are not so big, though, as the radishes the Jews used to raise long ago of which it was said a fox and her cubs could burrow in the hollow of one. I have, however, seen a pumpkin large enough for a fox-warren, but candour compels the confession that the gardener fed it daily with milk by means of an incision which he made in its stalk.
Our strawberries are not the equal of those grown on the Pacific slope, but are larger, sweeter and firmer than Ontario berries.
We do not sit under our own fig-tree (nor, alas, our apple-tree), but why should we sigh when each summer the sunflower springs up to a height of twelve or fifteen feet? It is the palm-tree of the north, only more beautiful.
The Mormons on their exodus from Illinois to Salt Lake City sowed sunflower seeds along the trail, and ever since it has been marked by sunflowers. In the province of Saskatchewan, the Russian refugees sometimes divide their fields by rows of poppies. In Manitoba, their hedges are of sweet-peas; in British Columbia, of broom.
After awhile, when all our real-estate has been sold, and all our companies have been promoted, we of Alberta shall have time and inclination to consider our provincial plant.
Grant us then that it may be the sunflower!
I hear the tale of the divine life and the bloody death of the beautiful God, the Christ.—WALT WHITMAN.
This is my first visit to Mundare, on the Canadian Northern Railway, and to the Ruthenian Church—the church with glittering domes, the foundation stone of which was laid by the great Laurier himself. "Who is this Sir Laurier?" I ask. "Ach! I cannot tell you. He a great man is," says Michael Veranki, "his hair is like to the wild cotton in August, and his face is beautiful, even like the face of the great Archbishop Syptikyi, who is a soldier and a prince, and the like of whom there never was. Believe me, Messus, he has seven feet high and has seven tongues wherein to speak."
"About this Laurier? Ya! Ya! almost I forget. He the stone of the church placed in the corner, and we drew him in a wagon with six bullocks. He the King's man is, and a smile in his eyes there comes, quick, quick, like the wind comes on the wheat. Ya! Ya! we much like this King's man."
Nearly all the people are gone into the church and I follow. There are no seats, so all of us stand, the sexes separated like the sheep from the goats.
One's eyes become riveted on the large globe of cut crystals that hangs from the ceiling near the centre of the church, and the hard white lights from it strike sharply on my eyeballs like dagger points. All the people are making reverences and placing something on their foreheads like oil, but it may be holy water. Know all men by these presents that I, even I, am the poor ignorant wife of a Protestant person, and understand not the meaning of these obeisances, nor of this beautiful fête to which all the Austrian folk of the countryside have come with not so much as one mouthful of bread to break their fast. Neither shall one drop of liquid moisten their parched lips for these three hours unless—Holy Mother and all the Blessed Saints, pray for our presumption—unless indeed, it might fall to the lot of a woman to take into her lips the sacred blood from the golden spoon which the priest dips into the chalice, the holy chalice that is surmounted with something dazzling like a star, so that no woman may even look thereon.
Feeling all the while like wild oats amid the wheat, I take my stand by a pillar close to the door and pretend not to stare. Ere long, a young girl touches me and tells me she is inquested to bring me to the sisters. I follow her through the church and into the vestry where a little nun presses my hands and calls me by name. Once, she was my escort through the Monastery at St. Albert, over by the Sturgeon River. Of course I remember her. She is the china shepherdess in black who says "Please" instead of "What?" and who comes from Mon'real. Also she lisps, but what odds? Plutarch tells us that Alcibiades lisped and that it gave a grace and persuasiveness to his discourse.
She presents me to the other sisters, none of whom speak English, and invites me out to the monastery to visit. All of the sisters look middling healthy, not having the parchment-like pallor of the city nuns.
The service, she explains, is the Finding of the Holy Cross. I must not think it idolatry when they do veneration, indeed, I must not. "Eet is what you call—Ah, Madame! I cannot find the word—eet is what you call—" "A Symbol," I ask. "Oui, Oui, a symbol!"
With many gesticulations and no small difficulty she tells me how the Empress Helena, mother of the great Constantine, once had a heavenly dream which enabled her to discover the very piece of ground wherein the holy cross was hidden away. It lay under two temples where heathens prayed to Jupiter and Venus instead of to Jehovah. She caused these temples to be torn down so as not one stone was left, and underneath were found three crosses. Being doubtful as to which was the cross of the Lord Christ, the Empress had all three applied to the body of a dying woman. The first two crosses had no effect (it was the good Bishop Macarius, you must know, who helped her), but, at the touch of the third, the dying woman rose up perfectly whole.
This is a story worth lingering on, and the little nun would tell me more about it, only the celebrant priest has come into the vestry and talks with us before he goes to the basement to change his vestments.
They are impressive garments which he wears, but one might imagine their proving correspondingly oppressive. Kryzanowski is the wretched name of him. He is a large, fair man, this priest, in the full force of life, with an unmistakable air of distinction. On a snap judgment, I should place to his credit the ability to deal with a supreme situation. He is a priest of the Uniat Church, which church, so far as I may understand, is a compromise between the Greek Orthodox and the Roman Catholic, the compromise consisting of a prayer for the Pope instead of for the Czar.
In our White Alberta much antipathy exists between the Orthodox Greek Church and the Uniats, and several years ago they had a lawsuit which they took to the Privy Council in England, and which drove to insanity one of our cleverest barristers. They are bonny fighters, these Ruthenians from Galicia, and if they cannot "have the law" on one another, they may always have the consolation of fisticuffs. And what, pray, are muscles hard for and skulls thick, except to fight? Riddle me that!
Presently, when we shall have tied down and diverted their tremendous fighting energy into what is usually described as civilization, we shall, of a surety, find a human voltage here which will send these Slavic peasants high up the scale where well-conceived and successful endeavour is weighed and appraised. At present, ah, well! they are young and positive and he is the best man who survives.
The little sister brings me back into the church, where she places a chair for me close beside the altar facing the congregation, an act and fact which cause me not a little amazement and considerable trepidation. Will the priest permit an unhallowed woman of lean and meagre accomplishments—and she a Protestant—to sit so close to the holy of holies? Will he?
He does not even appear to see me and swings the censor close, close to my head, over and over again, with the same free-handed gesture of Millet's sower. He swings it out and about, hither and yon, till all my garments smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia; until, like Solomon's spouse, my hands dropped myrrh.
Sometimes it is a rude Slavic peasant who swings the censer or lays the spice on the live coals—a rough-necked man with red-brown hands and face. He wears a caftan, or long cloak of skin, upon which red leather is cunningly appliqued in pleasing designs. I doubt not he is from Bukowina, or "the beech-woods," for the women of that province are skilled craftswomen. He swings the censer with such deftness, that were I not benumbed by the languourous odour of the smoke-thick air, I would be wondering how this queer shock-headed acolyte with his bovine stolidity came to acquire the revolver wrist in such a high state of development. Surely it is well I am stupefied, for it might be irreverent so to wonder.
But for that matter, all this service belongs to the people and not to any stilted crucifers or superior choristers smacking of professional piety. As occasion may demand, an older woman comes forward and snuffs a candle with her fingers and replaces it with a fresh one. The women even carry the candles through the church when the ritual so requires it. They do not appear to have any self-consciousness, but perform their part gladly and naturally. This may arise from the fact that they have been accustomed in Austria to taking part in religious dramas such as The Nativity, which drama they once staged at Edmonton. I did not see it, but Sister Josephat at the Ruthenian Monastery gave me a picture of thedramatis personætaken during a rehearsal.
"See! See! Madame Lady. See! See!" said Sister Josephat. "Et ees ver' fonny.De tree wise men are womens, womens I tell you. Yes! the black one too! She is Alma Knapf."
This drama was vastly appreciated, especially by the younger fry of the community, who enjoyed seeing the devil carry a Jew off the scene with a pitchfork and cast him into hell with certitude and great vigour. The older folk considered this treatment unduly drastic and an unwarranted loss of useful material. Here in the North, we do not believe in killing Jews—no, nor even bank-managers—where we are not infrequently pared to the quick to provide money for real-estate payments or to margin up against the bad news the ticker-tape has spelled out. Yes! it would be highly unreasonable to allow the Ruthenian folk to kill off the Jews and bankers and it would make us uncommonly sorry.
... I like to watch these farmer-women carry the tall, white candles under the dome. It seems like a vision picture or some sense memory that has filtered down to me through the ages, but what the memory is I cannot say. Indeed, once I read of a strange country where men used to run races with lighted candles, and the victor was he whose flame was found burning at the goal.
I think the memory which troubles me must be of Jacob's rods which he made into "white strakes." He performed his rite under thelibneh, or white poplar-tree, even as we perform them under the white poplars of Alberta.
And while the women march, they chant a weird harmony, the men's voices coming in at intervals like pedal points. There is no organ, or any tyrannous baton, but only, "They sang one to another," as the Jews did at the building of their temple.
I am strangely, inexpressibly moved by this tone-sweetness. Sometimes it is massive, triumphal, and inspiring as though the singers carried naked swords in their upraised hands; or again, it seems to be the sullen angry diapason of distant thunder in the hills.
But mostly they sing a pæan or lamentation of the cross, heavy with unspeakable weariness and the ache of unshed tears. Surely this is the strangest story ever told. It is as though they sing to a dead god in a dead world.
And, sometimes, sight and sound become blended into one, and the sound is the sobbing urge of the pines ... the people as they rise and fall to the floor are the trees swayed by the wind. The cross they are lifting is wondrous heavy, so that it takes four strong fellows. It is built of oak beams and the figure of the Nazarene is of bronze. As the lights fall from the windows on the outstretched body, with its pierced hands and thorn-stung brow, it seems as though the tragedy of Golgotha is being re-enacted before my very eyes, here on this far-away edge of the world. The thing is ghastly in its awful realism, so that I am crushed and confounded. It falls like flakes of fire on my brain, till my mind's ear catches again and again that most horrifying cry of the ages, "My God! My God! why hast Thou forsaken me?"
But I cannot tell you more of this story of the Lord Christ who was crucified, except that in some way it has become a personal thing to these worshippers, and, maybe, a joyful one. It must be joyful, for, at last, they hang a garland of flowers over the upright beams of the cross and from it draw long, long ribbons of scarlet and white and blue; which the women carry to the ends of the church like floating streams of light, and between which the men and children stand to singAlleluiaandAlleluia.
I know not why the priest stoops to the ground and touches it with fingers or his lips. Sometime the little sister from Mon'real will tell me.
Henry Ryecroft, in hisSecret Papers, recounts how he used to do this same thing. "Amid things eternal," he says, "I touch the familiar and kindly earth." It was in the silent solitude of the night when he walked through the heart of the land he loved.
I have always desired to see the mysterious sacrifice known as the elevation of the host, but, now that I am an arm's stretch from the altar, I do not look but cover my face with my hands. Only I see that a dull red flames behind the man's ear when he takes the white wafer, and the veins of his neck swell as if they hurt.
But I look into the faces of the women and the men in the front line who receive the sacred essence from the golden cup and golden spoon, and almost I can hear what their eyes are saying. What odds about low foreheads, thick lips, and necks brown like the brown earth when each has the god within? The Ruthenians—or Galicians, if you like the name better—may be a sullen folk of unstable and misanthropical temper; they may be uncouth of manner, and uncleanly of morals, but I shall always think of them, as on this day, when I saw the strange glamour on their faces that cannot be described except that it came from a marvellous song hidden in their hearts.
There are no seats in the church, and while the sermon is being preached the people stand—all except the mothers with babies, who sit on the floor. These babies have pressed their mouths to the sacred ikon the same as the older folk, and, doubtless, some gracious kindly angel will guard them ever hereafter. Indeed, I hope so, and that she will give unto them those things I most crave for myself.
Father Kryzanowski delivers the sermon in the Ruthenian language. I am glad, for I am tired of hearing I should be a different person. I don't want to be, except to have hands of healing and a heart that is always young. Yes! these are the things I most crave for myself.
.... Good gentlefolk! will you be pleased to stay and eat brown bread with us at the wagons, and cheese and hard-cooked eggs? We shall not give you meat, for we would discourage the beef-trust, and, besides, this is fast day.... But you shall eat your food off flaxen towels which we spun and wove with our own hands. Yes! and we have wrought northern flowers and prairie roses into them.
And further, believe us, Sirs and Mesdames, we sent five towels like unto these to Mary, the English Queen, that she might know that we are now Canadians and no Ruthenians.
And Michael Laskowicz shall take your picture, Lady, with his picture box, and you may have Hanka's necklace like as if you belonged to us, and Anna's head'kerchief which is always in this year's style.... and we shall clap our hands and laugh and say, "There! There! she belongs to us, this Mees Janey Canuck, now and without end." ... They are engaging, these beechwood folk from Austria, and their loving kindness is like honey to my mouth.
If it were more genteel, I would like to speak them fair, and to write books about them, but I have set my face against authorship. I will not go into the writing business, for I do greatly prefer wealth and honour, and to have my picture taken on a verandah with my arm around a pillar as an exampler of a three years of successful life in Alberta the Sunny.
It was my harassing duty to act as death-watch to the man who wrote the appended diary. On the day before his execution he made no entry, although he opened the book several times and once asked me to sharpen his pencil. I was not present at his execution, but was informed that he bore himself with dignity and calmness. The crime which he expiated with his life was the murder of his wife who had left him to live with another man. He had still one year to complete before obtaining his degree as a medical practitioner. At his trial, he refused to take refuge behind his wife's misdemeanour, nor would he permit his counsel to urge this plea on his behalf.
I have held this unique diary for over a year, not feeling at liberty to give it to the public while in 'the service of the Mounted Police.—E. F. M.
There are yet six days till I die.
The words the judge said were "hanged by the neck till dead." Ever since, they have haunted me like a song that fastens itself on one and will not be forgotten. The words drag out their ghastly length to the sound of the Fort bell as it rings the hours. They drawl to the tread of the sentinel who walks back and forth outside my cell—hanged—by—the—neck—till—dead.
Does it take a man long to hang? I inquired of my guard, and although we are not supposed to talk, he laughed nervously and said he had once read of a doctor who cut down to a murderer's heart three minutes after the drop fell. There was still enough force in the heart to ring an electric bell.
Five days more!
They are a tireless breed, the red-police of Canada, and they have an eye in the centre of their foreheads that never sleeps. I once heard there was such an eye, but I forget about it.
This boy who watches me is nearly my own age, and I can see he is sorry for me. I will not whimper and wince, but will hedge myself about with a fence of laughter and bravado. It is the last kindness I can do to any one.
I like him better than the priest who visits me. I look at the priest with curious eyes, this man who in five days will wish me a pleasant journey into eternity. He it is who will read aloud my burial service while I yet live. They have no sense of propriety, these men.
May a murderer talk of propriety? No! but he may think on it, and write on it, and no one may contradict him.
This ecclesiastic has never loved a woman and so has never hated one, nor killed her in his hate.
Her mouth was like a red wound, but it was evenly pale with her face before I gave myself to the police.
God! I did not mean to strike her down; I did not mean to, but I did. Once, I read that no one was responsible for alienating a woman's affections but her own husband. If this be true, I murdered her twice.
I stooped to her as she lay at my feet and straightened her collar, also I pinned back a strand of hair that had come loose. Margaret is the best name of all. I like to say it often—Margaret.
There are yet four days.
It is not given to any living being, man or beast, to know the hour of his death, else the monstrous horror would drive him mad. Yet, I know it and am not mad. It must be that I cannot believe it; that nature protects me with a density through which I may not penetrate, or that there are yet four days—ninety-six hours!
When I was at school, I kept a calendar on the wall and struck off the days till Christmas or Easter, when I would be home again. Most boys did.
The guards in the hallways talk of horses and women and, sometimes, they forget me and laugh aloud. I know they have forgotten me, for when they remember their voices drop suddenly to a whisper. I heard one of them tell of a half-Cree he shot through the heart at the time of the Rebellion. There was, he said, no doubt of its being in the heart, for the fellow drew up his right leg.
The tragedy of my approaching death is its impossibility. How can one realize his execution when the homely smell of hot wheaten bread sifts into his cell? There is the odour, too, of horse-sweat on the guards as they come into my cell. They are the Royal North-West Mounted Police.
I do not know why they are royal and I am criminal, for, after all, the distinction between us is of slight consequence. They do by law what I did contrary to law. The results are the same. On the whole I think they are the worse: their killing by rule is so monstrously premeditated. And yet, this side of the subject has never occurred to me till now that I am the prisoner of the police.
But why should I carp and gird at these fine fellows? They are only the instruments of the state, that is to say of the citizens. I myself, by taxation, have contributed to the expenses of the scaffold whereon I shall be executed.
The priest pleads with me that I may not die in my sin. He does not understand, and I may not tell him, that Margaret died in hers, and that I must do likewise if I would spend eternity with her.
He carries the whole dogma of the Church in his face and shoulders, this old priest, but he is a good man and sincere. His endeavour is to help and comfort me, but his words are short-armed to relieve my agony. Surely my soul has descended into hell.
To-day, he spoke of my mother, but I would not have it. One need not die a hundred deaths....
"Oh! little did my mother thinkThe day she cradled meO' the lands I was to travel in,Or the death I was to dee."
My dread is not from fear of the physical pain of hanging, for, after all, the life of every man and every woman ends in a strangle. It is that these men will lay their hands on me and bind me with a rope and that I may not forbid them. The indignity of it is unbearable. The prison stripes, the handcuffs, the black cap—these are from the devil's wardrobe.
It fills me with mute stupefaction, the mental picture I draw of myself when I am swung out on a rope, a grisly limp nothing of humanity; I who this minute am young and full of sap and sinew. I cannot endure that men should look upon my countenance twisted into an inhuman grimace; on my horribly bulging eyes, and on my tongue hanging out like the purple petal of the wild flag. It is not decent so to mutilate a man.
And when they have thus distorted my face, then will they blot out its hideousness with quick-lime like one would rub an ugly picture off a slate.
This malign system of burying murderers in lime, and refusing the body to friends, doubtless has its origin in the Roman custom whereby the remains of the Christians were burned to ashes and cast into the river so that not a vestige would remain. The Romans thought in this way they would deprive their victims of all hope of the resurrection.
The guard keeps a light burning at night that he may watch me the better. It is his duty to deliver me alive to the executioner. If I were so minded, I could sever the radial arteries in my wrists with my teeth and he would not know. This is why I laugh out loud and will not tell why I laugh.
The wind blows bleak across the prairies and the brittle snow-flakes that beat on the glass outside the iron-bars have a sound like the whirr of swords. I wish the wind would blow always, for it lays a salve on my soul.
On the third day.
My muscles ache for use in this two-by-nothing cell, and, now and then, a close-shut but invisible fist hits me under the heart so that I feel I must fall from numbness. It is stupid and super-brutal to refuse me space wherein to walk. To-day, I went through some gymnastic exercises and forgot long enough to hum an air that Margaret and I danced to at the military-ball at Edmonton less than a year ago. I am not sure of the words, but they concern "an old grey bonnet with a blue-ribbon on it."
My God! but I have been a bungler at living. I have wagered with life and lost. I know it while I wait here to pay the reckoning and the knowledge confounds me.
I keep sifting this question over and over—why is it that men are hanged by the neck till dead?
I asked the priest and he quoted the verse about an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, yet it seems to me people sin more in the observance of this law than they would in its abrogation. It used to be said by the Jews there was a time to act for Jehovah by breaking His commandments.
There should come to me some severe punishment for the life I have taken, but it should be remedial in character rather than revengeful. Innately, I am not a criminal, and for thirty or forty years could be made to serve my race with the labour of my body and the sweat of my brain. It does not seem a good policy, nor economic, to kill a man in order to kill the evil that is in him.
Two days.
This morning, a silent, fat-faced man with inimical eyes came in and looked at me, as if appraising my weight. He dared not put his hands on me for I have yet two days.
I saw him once before, over two thousand miles from here, in a drug store in Toronto. The chemist told me this was Radcliffe and that he liked to play with children. He also said Radcliffe claimed to have adopted the profession out of purely charitable motives, there having been so many bunglings by amateur hangmen.
It is quite true what some one wrote that in waiting for the executioner to let him drop, society is revenged on the murderer.
As I sit here writing, there comes sharply to me on the frosty air the sound of hard hammering. There are two men working on my scaffold. I can tell from the recurring beats of the metal on metal.
It is appalling that the monstrous lesson these hammers are thudding out in the barracks yard has found me too late. It must always be late, for no man ever dreams that he will mount the scaffold.
No! I will not whine. I will not be a coward and gag at the gall, but, oh! I want to live so much. I want to live!
There is a woman and she was wise,Wofully wise was she.—ROBERT SERVICE.
Now Judea was a Province too, only smaller than Canada, and it was subject to Rome. In Judea, there was a town called Bethlehem, which means a house of bread. It must have been that wheat was plentiful.
But this Bethlehem was a small, small place, and the Romans cared not so much as one finger's fillip that a strange white star waited there for a little while to light up a birth-bed.
I do not know if the star did wait, but it should have, for this was the most momentous birth which history has recorded in that, for all time, it changed the world's ideals. Its influence could only be weighed with planets in the balances. The baby's name was to be Dayspring, and Wonderful, and Emmanuel.
... It is well the baby lay in a manger else a bullock might have crushed him with its hoof...
And having for its central symbols a mother and a baby, this cult of the Christ can never perish. Its ethics may change; its authority may wane; its history be impugned, but its symbols are eternal.
Our idea of gift-giving at the Christ-mass-tide has grown up from the offering made at the manger by the three wise men who came out from the East, Casper, Melchior, and Balthasar. The myrrh they offered to a mortal; the gold to a king, the frankincense to God.
Whether to God, the king, or the child, all our gifts should first be brought to the manger, which is only another way of saying that without love they avail nothing.
I know a story about these magi, and I will relate it to the children of the North. It was told to me by Maryam, the ninth girl-child of Michaelovitch, a Russo-Canadian, in the Province of Saskatchewan. It is about three wise men and a foolish woman. The woman is called Baboushka and her heart has become as water. Once, when she was working in her home, the three wise men passed on their journey to find the Christ-child and they gave her greeting. "Come with us, grandmother," they said, "for we have seen His star in the East and we go to worship Him."
"Surely I will come," said the old woman, "but the oven is heated for my bread and I must even now bake it. After awhile, I will follow and find where this star leads."
But she never saw the Christ-child because, when her bread was baked, the star no longer shone in the sky. Ever since she has been searching, but has never found Him. She it is who fills the children's stockings on Christmas Eve, and decks the fir-tree on Christmas morn, because she hopes to find in some poor child she has fed or clothed the little Lord Jesus whom she neglected hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Long before dawn on Christmas Day the children in Russia are awakened by the cry, "Behold the Baboushka!" and they spring out of bed on the instant hoping to see her vanish out of the window, but no child has seen aught save only the gifts she has left behind.
Maryam thinks—indeed, she tells it to the four winds—that the Christ-child has left Russia and has come to Canada in a big ship with a shipmaster.
And so Maryam is full of employment, almost every day, knitting mittens and long white scarves for babies and poor children. You never can tell, He may be even here on the prairie, the Christ-child whom the unwise old Baboushka disesteemed hundreds and hundreds of years ago. You can never tell.
This they all with a joyful mindBear thro' life like a torch in flame,And falling, fling to the host behind,'Play up! Play up! and play the game!'—NEWBOLT.
"For long years," said a Toronto editor the other day, "this country has produced few outstanding personalities except politicians."
Here spoke the little Canadian. By this country he meant the provinces to the south of the Great Lakes. Think of that! Think of that!
Why, man dear, north of the lakes we have outstanding personalities to burn—and we burn them. And, here and now, let me say that under the northern lights, politicians must, perforce, take a third or even a fourth estate, for always we have to reckon with the missionary priest, the business man, and the real-estate agent, before we begin to consider the politician. Even then, I am not so sure but the editor and the railway boss take precedence of the politician. In this large, airy land, politicians are truly but small fry from small places—inconsequential ephemera, who age in a heart-beat and die.
If I had realized at the start this was to be a chapter on the outstanding personalities among the missionary priests, I would have begun differently. I would have said that the Anglo-Saxon hungers for heroes, but that the heroes were rare—that this was why the raw, ragged wolf-land lying about the Hudson Bay and along the stretches of the Mackenzie River was of deep and peculiar interest, in that it had the distinction of producing crops of heroes and that the breed never seemed to run out.
I would have said that the story of the northern priest is the story of a man with an ideal, or, if you will have it so, with a dream; that the dream is one that disturbs his ease and leads him in perils often.
I would have gone further and shown this boy o' dreams to be at the same time a supreme realist and, without question, one of the highest types of human excellence in the last half-century; that he has the dauntless spirit of the soldier, the enthusiasm of the explorer, the enterprise of the merchant, and the patriotism of the statesman, and all for the sole object of helping humanity. In a word, that he is a special soul and must not be judged as general.
It is to be regretted I did not begin this way, but, to quote the Roman governor who gave judgment concerning the Nazarene: "What I have written, I have written."
... Among the missionary priests of the North there is, to-day, no greater outstanding personality than Bishop Stringer of the diocese of the Mackenzie River.
I used to know him years agone when he was Isaac Stringer, divinity student, a lusty young fellow, lean and clean and strong of wind, who could carry a ball down the field past all antagonists and send it spinning through the goal. When I say he has grown stout since those days, you must not make the deduction that he is under-worked and overfed like other bishops of whom we have heard tell. On the contrary part, north of 53° it is our profligate custom to starve all dignitaries. Indeed, it was only last winter that Bishop Stringer, on his way across the divide from the Mackenzie River to the Yukon, nearly lost his life from starvation. He and his companion, Charles F. Johnson, were lost in a mountain fog and missed the trail. Southern folk who sit in offices and parlours do not grasp the full meaning of this, and I cannot very well explain except to say that Dante had an exceedingly fine insight when he made the Inferno foggy.
For a week, in deep snow and deeper fog, they wandered in and out of Fool's River, the irony of which could not fail to rub them sore. Returning to the Fool's mouth, they spent three days making snow-shoes and cutting up moccasins for webbing. From here they ascended the height of land and crossed three divides before finding an east-flowing river. But again the fog descended and now came the fight for life. On and on they wandered, day after day, scarcely able to see a foot ahead and more than once treading on the verge of a precipice.
They had been living on a daily ration of a spoonful of flour and rice and the half of a red squirrel each. But even this gave out, and the sorely beset men tried eating moccasin leather, and ended on muckalucks or messinke boots. For the benefit of the uninitiated, I would explain that muckalucks are contrived out of raw sealskin. Bishop Stringer has since told me that when he had divided the food, his companion assigned the portions, andvice versa. This is one of the trail's lessons. At last, after eleven days of blind stumbling, they came out at an Indian camp on the Peel River. Twenty miles further down, at the Hudson's Bay Fort, the factor weighed the much-emaciated men and found that each had lost fifty pounds.
In his letter to his wife, who was visiting in Kincardine, Ontario, the Bishop says of his experiences: "The one thing that made us unhappy was that you and the others might worry about us when we did not turn up. But this feeling wore off when it meant a matter of life or death, and day after day we wondered how long we would last—whether you would ever hear from us. You can imagine we were much in prayer, and over and over again reconsecrated ourselves to the Master's service."
This Bishop of Mackenzie River is surely an outstanding personality, and reminds me of what Robert Louis Stevenson said of the late John Chalmers, a missionary of New Guinea: "You can't weary me of that fellow," he asserted; "he is as big as a house and far bigger than any church."
Bishop Stringer's predecessor in the diocese was William Carpenter Bompas, the Apostle of the North, the man who has been classified by the Church Missionary Society as "indisputably the most self-sacrificing bishop in the world."
His diocese, too, was the largest in the world, consisting of one million square miles. It had the same peculiarity as Bobbie Burns's "cauld, cauld kirk"—-there were "in't but few."
William Bompas went North in 1865 and stayed there forty years, coming out only twice. On the first of these occasions he returned to England to be elevated to the episcopate.
The only medical training the Bishop had under gone was a short course in the treatment of snowblindness, and this when he went to England for his consecration. This is a form of blindness that causes great suffering among the Indians, and the Bishop had himself been stricken with it on several occasions. On one of these, stumbling painfully at every step, he was led by an Eskimo boy for seventy-five miles. Writing of his agonies, he says: "They are delights. The first foot-prints on earth made by our risen Saviour were the nail-marks of suffering, and for the spread of the gospel, too, am prepared to suffer."
Like Stringer, Bompas also endured frequent starvation, but seldom spoke of it as a personal happening, but rather as applying to others—a virtue most hard and difficult to be practised. Writing about it to a friend in England, he said: "Horses were killed for food and furs eaten at several of the posts. The Indians had to eat a good many of their beaver skins."
Another man who endured the privations of the pioneer in this district is the present Bishop of Keewatin, Joseph Lofthouse.
The most interesting, and certainly the most romantic story of his career, is that of his marriage. His sweetheart, a young English girl, was due to arrive on the yearly vessel of the Hudson's Bay Company. Lofthouse travelled several hundred miles to meet her, but found she had not come, being unavoidably detained in England. The following summer he made the same journey, but this time as the vessel pulled up the harbour, he was able to single out the lassie's face on the deck. Yes, sir! if you had lived among Eskimos and Indians all these years, you, too, would tremble and choke in the throat at the ship's rope hit the mooring-post.
But now the young couple found themselves in as trying a predicament as the Israelites with the sea in front, Pharaoh's army behind, and unscalable rocks on either side. In a word, there was no minister to marry them. Things looked badly for them, and the lassie was thinking of returning home, when it suddenly occurred to the captain that, on the open sea, according to law, he was entitled to act as a magistrate. It was not long till the good ship slipped her moorings and stood out into the sweep of the Atlantic, where to a time-honoured form, the minister and the girl plighted their troth, symbolized it by the gift of a ring, and ratified it by the authority of the state, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
This is a good enough story to end with, but there are other outstanding personalities I must mention.
There is Bishop Holmes,[1] who resides at Athabasca Landing, and who has had many interesting experiences among the redskins. Like all true northmen, the Bishop speaks in a quiet, low tone, admirably adapted to the art of narrative. Once for weeks, he took charge of a Weetigo or Weendigo Indian, in order to protect him from relatives who sought to take his life. The man believed himself to be a cannibal, for in some strange way the idea had been suggested to him. After a time, the hallucination passed away, and the man returned to the camp.
Until comparatively recent years, the untutored redmen believed that people who were insane or in delirium were either obsessed or possessed of an evil spirit, and that it was necessary to kill them in order to prevent this spirit from entering into others. The plight of the relatives in these cases was pitiable; they could not allow a violently insane man or woman at large, and the killing was usually performed with great grief. This custom has fallen into desuetude, for, since the advent of the Mounted Police, the perpetrators are treated as murderers and accordingly hanged. The most arduous duty of the police is the bringing in of demented Indians or white prospectors from the North. It is a task that has, in turn, driven a stalwart redcoat insane. One's nerves are apt to snap when, for weeks, you sleep o' nights in the snow roped to a maniac.
And there was Rev. Henry Irwin, better known as Father Pat. He was a railroad priest on the Canadian Pacific, and, because of his unselfish work among them, became the idol of men. There are some misguided folk who think of a priest as a feeble, microcephalous body with a black coat, a shovel hat, and a superb ignorance of the ways of the world. There are, we own, some priests like this, but Father Pat was not one of them. Indeed, his dress and deportment were such as to often cause scandal to good church folk who were not so conversant with his noble deeds and self-abnegation as were the railroad navvies and gold-miners. Father Pat had only been married a year when his wife and baby died, and, not so long after, he was found almost frozen to death in a snow-bank, from the results of which he died. Here was an elementary man fighting the elements. The North stands at salute.
Nor were the Roman Catholic missionaries less self-denying, or in any way smaller men than their Protestant co-workers. There was Bishop Breynat who froze his feet and amputated his toes with a penknife. "Sirs, it's bitter beneath the Bear."
In 1869-70, at St. Albert, the ecclesiastical head-quarters of the Catholic Church in Alberta, Father Leduc, a complete Christian, nursed the Indians who were sick with the small-pox until he contracted it himself. Then the other priests in turn fell in line as nurses until every man was a victim of the disease.
It is a scene that reminds one of Sir Walter Scott's romance where the clansman and his seven sons all fell for the chieftain, stepping forth gladly into the gap and crying: "One more for Eachim."
While the priests lay ill an Indian came for one of them to administer the last rites of the Church to his mother. What was done? You never could guess unless you lived in the North, so I may as well tell you. A young priest rolled his blankets closer about, gave orders to his attendants to carry him to the waiting sleigh, and, in this condition, made the painful journey. Mattress and all, he was borne into the sick-room, where he administered the viaticum to the dying woman.
Father Lacombe, whose good grey head all men know, is the pioneer missionary of Alberta. He is eighty-three years of age, and sixty-one of these years have been spent in the service of the North. The story of his life sounds like a new Acts of the Apostles. In the science-ridden centuries to come, when these first white wanderers in boreal regions will be almost mythical characters, tradition will love to weave about them stories of romance and mystery—dramatic, preternatural stories such as we frame to-day about SS. Patrick, Augustine and Albanus.
Perhaps the most interesting event in Lord Strathcona's visit last year to Alberta was his meeting again with Père Lacombe. It was in the Government House gardens at Edmonton, overlooking the Saskatchewan River. All the guests fell back out of earshot while the aged men clasped hands and talked over other days and of the boys who had long since crossed the height of land to the ultimate sea.
At the present time Père Lacombe is living at Midnapore, near Calgary, in a home for poor old folk and children, the money to build which he collected himself.
... And there is the story of Father Goiffon who was frozen near Emerson on the eve of All Saints' Day, 1860. It was told to me by Father Lestanc,[2] who, eighty years ago, was born at Brest in Brittany. Father Lestanc has been fifty-five years in the West and North, nineteen of which were spent at St. Boniface under Bishop Taché. In spite of his extreme age, Lestanc has a hardy-moulded figure, and a strong, clear voice. One cannot listen to him for long without being impressed by his affectional force and broad reach of humanity. He is not clear about things of yesterday, but take him back over the decades and his memory rings true as a bell.
Goiffon had been at St. Paul, Minneapolis, making the yearly purchases for his mission. Among other things he bought a city-bred horse to carry him home. Fifty years ago St. Paul was seventeen days' journey from Emerson, on the border-line, and folk travelled in caravans.
One day's journey from Emerson, Father Goiffon left the party that he might push on the more rapidly and reach his mission post to say Mass on All Saints' Day. To use a northern colloquialism, he travelled light, carrying with him but one meal and no blanket. Neither had he matches or an axe, for, bear in mind, he was only a young priest, and he hoped to be in his shack by fall of night.
Soon after noonday there blew up a blinding snow-storm that made progress impossible. A usurping, all-invading sheet of snow settled down over the plains and turned the air into a white darkness. The man tied his horse to a willow shrub and lay down in the snow. The hours passed painfully on, but the youth kept his head buried in his saddle that his face might not freeze. When at last he looked up, he found his horse dead by his side. I told you a bit ago, it was a city-bred horse and no trailer.
And now came the fight for life. The boy priest had no shelter but the flaccid, unstrung body of his horse, already cold in death. I do not know about the pain of the night, except that at the edge of day, one foot and leg were frozen and the toes of the other, so that he could not stand upright. I wonder if he heard the bell from his home in France as he lay in the snow! They say men do. Something must have been sounding in his ears, for he did not hear the caravan as it passed him in the morning.
At midday he cut a piece of flesh off the horse and ate it.
"A crude diet, Mon Père," I remark.
"Oui, oui," replies the old Breton. "What you Anglais call a 'sleepshod' dinnaire! What would you, Madame? One must browse where he is tethered."
The rescue party from Emerson met a man and boy hauling in the stricken priest on a sledge. They had heard him sobbing in the snow.
The Indians doctored him for six weeks until his limbs threatened to drop off, and then sent a runner to St. Boniface to ask Father Lestanc what they would do with him. This happened fifty years ago, but Father Lestanc must walk to the window and look out into the garden for a while before he can trust his voice.
For men and dogs it was a round run of one hundred and forty miles from St. Boniface to Emerson, but in twenty-four hours Goiffon lay in Bishop Taché's palace at St. Boniface, on the banks of the Red River. Dr. Bunn, the physician at the Hudson's Bay post across at Fort Garry, awaited his arrival and amputated the already putrefied members. The next morning Goiffon was found to be bleeding to death; the stitches would not hold and the veins were open. Nothing could be done but to calmly await the end.
Father Lestanc broke the news to the household, whereupon the sorrowing but withal practical sister in charge of the kitchen placed a caldron of buffalo tallow on the stove, for, explains my narrator, "a priest's wake requires many, many candles."
The little serving-maids under the sister, doubtless whispering over the sad happenings upstairs, forgot to watch the pot, so that it "swelled much, Madame," over the red-hot stove till all the house was on fire.
Do not scold the girls, but wait till I tell you. Such a thing was never heard of. It was really Le Bon Dieu who permitted the house and cathedral to burn. There is no doubt of it, for, when the priest carried the dying youth out and laid him on the snow, the frost congealed the blood so that his veins ceased to empty themselves.
This was fifty years ago, and last summer, Father Goiffon came up from Petit Canada, near St. Paul, to attend a cathedral service at Winnipeg, on the site of Old Fort Garry.
"Oui, Madame, oui, I comprehend when you saysimilia similibus curcantur. Literally, eet ees a frost kills, a frost cures. Eet ees a well thing the body ees so adaptive."
... And once Bishop Grandin was lost in the snow. It was in 1863, near Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake.
With one Indian boy he was crossing the lake on the ice, following in the wake of a party of Hudson's Bay Company men. The Bishop's dogs were tired and fell behind. When a storm blew up he lost the trail. The thermometer was at forty degrees below zero, and the storm was what Father Lestanc calls a "poudrerie"—that is to say, a storm where the snow blows up like fine powder. This does not sound unpleasant, but as an actuality it is, in the extreme North, a sinister snow that bites your face like driven needles.
The Bishop had no guide but the wind, and when a storm rises the wind veers. He gave the dogs their head, but even their homing instinct failed them in the storm and night, so that they crouched on the ice and howled in unison with the little Indian boy.
At dawn the boy said he smelled smoke, for he was an Indian, and smoke travels far in the clear, winnowed air of the North.
On looking to the west they sighted land, and after a painful journey met a dog-train coming toward them with men—the boy's father and uncle. The priest was celebrating a Mass for the repose of the Bishop's soul when he arrived, for "Les sauvages," says my informant, "had declared the Bishop would be frozen to the middle of hees heart. Ah, leetle Madam! Whom Le Bon Dieu guards are well guarded."
I did not know about this Father Lestanc before. I thought he was merely an old Oblate Brother passing from the sixth to the seventh stage of man's little day. Now I know him for one of the outstanding personalities of the North, and, as such, would do him honour, even I who am of the world, worldly. I know things about him that happened years and years ago when this was no man's land. I know how once he nursed and buried a young man whose companions had abandoned him to die at Rat Creek, near Portage la Prairie.
The man had gone into the Indian camps against the wishes of his fellow-teamsters who were travelling from Fort Garry to Fort Charlton. But he was a gamester, and he went. This was how he contracted small-pox, and the reason his companions were forced to leave him to fight death for himself with a little supply of pemmican and some bannocks as his sole backers. You may not have noticed that the life of a gamester and the race-horse are short ones in the north-west, but it is, nevertheless, indubitably true, and this case was no exception to the rule. His name? I do not know. One forgets names in the oblivious West.
Father Lestanc rolled the loathsome body in a blanket and decently buried it, for the buffalo hunters had learned that in cases of small-pox the healthiest thing a traveller can do is to mind his own special business.
"Did any one else catch the disease?" I ask.
"Non, non, no one else."
The old man muses a little, for he is growing tired, and this was fifty years ago. Suddenly memory floods in on him and he shows distress: "Pardon, Madam, pardon! I took eet. Oui, I took eet."