But that wasn't enough to make up for my whooping cough. From Winnipeg Papa had brought something else, which he unwrapped before my eyes. And then, although I was still so very weak, I laughed a little . . . with happiness. It was—do you remember them? I don't yet know their proper name: mine I called my "glass song"—an object made of thin strips of colored glass, loosely attached by their upper ends; and when 38 Street of Riches
they moved, gently striking each other at the least breath of air, they made a strange and charming tinkling sound. I had heard its fascinating music I know not where, perhaps in the home of some of our friends; probably the tiny chime had been placed above a door; anyway, ever since, I had longed for one with all my soul. Yes, my soul aspired to listen to this soft music for children, without complex notes, without the least melody, but which I remembered as whimsical, silvery, exotic, too; with it in your ears, unknown forests spread before you, forests of bamboo, perhaps, while natives slipped between the noded trees. Was it an expensive thing, hard to find? I had long begged for one; then, at the uselessness of my prayers, I had ceased speaking of it.
My eyes watched my father's every movement; he stood on a stepladder, attached the small glass chime to the porch ceiling, just above me, so that as I lay in my hammock, I had only to raise my glance to watch the thin slivers flutter. How many hours, how many weeks did I spend seeking to understand how the delicate music was produced? Would that particular strip begin trembling? Would the red one give the purer sound? What made the harmony ? ...
Was all this lost time ? Then why is it that the time of futile questions, of minute problems probed to no effect, is the time that recurs and recurs to the soul as the time it has used the best?
I must have spent the whole summer, almost all the summer, in the depths of my hammock ... and yet it comes back to me as all one single warm and quiet moment, a moment fixed in a tinkling of music as bright as the sun.
At first there were times, as I grew a trifle better, when perhaps I wanted to leave the hammock and, hanging onto each column in turn, work my way to the end of the porch. This row of brilliant white columns, tacked on the front of our otherwise very ordinary house, gave it what I recall as a certain air of grandness; indeed, it was its only redeeming trait. Or is it, rather, an enhancement created by my memory which makes me see it today as a sort of Greek temple on our modest Rue Deschambault ? However that may be, from column to column I dragged myself to see what games the children were playing, how far they had progressed in erecting a tent village; andj still worried a bit as to whether perhaps they missed me.
Then it seems to me that I drew far away from all such things, that at a bound I outgrew what people call a stage in
one's life. All alone in my hammock, rocked only by the wind, I discovered other play how vastly more rare and fascinating! The wind's play, for instance. For here indeed was the musician! Had he as instrument only the telephone wires or the branches of the trees or a few stalks of grass or the clothesline pulley, he produced upon them lovely sounds, sounds wholly distinguishable one from the other. It was on the telephone wires, I think, that he was at his most joyful; one could almost make out the sung words of a long conversation, rustling and vague, perhaps come along the wires from a distant city. During that interval I discovered almost all the things in nature I have never since ceased to hold dear: the motion of the leaves of a tree when you watch them from below, under their shelter; their nether sides, like the bellies of small animals, softer, paler, shyer than their faces. And basically all my life's voyages ever since have merely been going back to try to recapture what I had possessed in that hammock—and without seeking it.
Indeed, within myself, where I could plunge any time I wished, so close to me that I might never have perceived them -there were the pure marvels! Why does one not learn sooner that one is, oneself, one's best, one's dearest companion ? Why this great fear of solitude, which is merely an intimate commerce with the sole true companion ? Without him, would not the whole of life be a wilderness ?
And why had no one told me that running, skipping rope, walking on stilts, climbing about in barns were merely vulgar games, soon stale and outworn? But to behold in the sky a white castle, see ride up toward it a knight mounted on a white horse, whose mane and legs come apart as he approaches . . . and now the horse is larger than the castle . . . then suddenly both castle and knight melt away in the sun. ... Or then again, in the hammock as in some towering caravel, sailing into the waters of the south . . . and already you hear the island tom-toms; the queen is preparing to feed you tiny turtles and fruits; high into a palm tree a tiny naked Negro has clambered, now swinging in the wind like a feather. . . . Oh, such are games worth playing with all your heart!
But sometimes, too, I played at making myself sad. I pretended that we, everyone in the house, was dead; a crepe bow hung at our door, and people were saying the rosary around our coffins; sometimes I even flinched at a drop of the holy water being sprinkled on my lifeless face. Then I played at being revived; I sent home the friends and stricken relatives; I 40 Street of Riches
brought the dead back to life; in their honor I gave a banquet, and we ate nothing but blue plums.
I dozed from one dream to another; sometimes I carried into my unconscious dream the light, delicate web of the waking dreams, and in the same way the dream of ocean depths followed me when I wakened, and mingled with the fresh voyages I was to take. The swaying of my hammock helped the thread of my tales. Is it not curious? A slow, soft motion and the imagination is on its way! Docile, docile to the least impetus, a tiny swaying is all it needs. There is an anxiety, it would seem, which leaves us the moment we are in a motion that costs us no effort. Perhaps this surcease is known only to those who have learned how to rock gently to and fro!
Then occasionally the rope slipped from my outstretched hand. The wind grew still; a hot breath passed over me; it was as though I were in the Sargasso Sea, where sails fall slack. . . . During my whooping cough time, I effortlessly rediscovered what I had learned at school or read in books and thought forgotten—at least the things that had pleased me—the Cape of Good Hope, Drake, Elizabeth's Captain ... Sir Walter Raleigh! . . . Very often only the names kept me company. There must have been some of them of whose meaning I could not possibly have known anything, which I probably loved for their sound alone, and which I kept repeating all summer; one of these names was Eldorado.
But at times the hammock no longer rocked me; my sails went limp; unconsciously, maybe, I whimpered at having come back to land.
Then someone, as he passed by me, gently gave a little shove to the hammock. Was he, then, aware that, like an opium eater in his trance, I was the slave of motion, and that a flat calm awakened me from my dream world? A hand gave the hammock a tiny push. Sometimes even a face leaned over mine buried in the hammock's deepest depths, and so hollow, so thin, so deeply hidden, said they, that only my eyes were there. But if the eyes were to close, then what would remain ? They also said that I weighed no more at eight than formerly I had when I was four. Such retrogression terrified them. As for me, I found this backward movement an interesting business. Moving in reverse, would I not return to whence I came? I was free, so light, forever on my travels!
Yes, they often bent down over me. I kept my eyes closed, for I always knew who was looking at me—perhaps by the
person's breathing—and by I know not what mysterious emanation of tenderness which finds no obstacle in closed eyelids. ... It was Alicia, or Agnhs, sometimes both together. ... I did not open my eyes because what I had once beheld in those bent faces was too beautiful, was more than I could bear.
For—and did I not know it from the beginning?—the hammock in the wind, the glass music, the hand that pushed the hammock—had I even a right to survive all this happiness ?
The Titanic
a;
great ship had been lost at sea, and for a long time, for years even, people talked about it at 1 Vnight gatherings
in our Manitoba homes, A mere nothing, perhaps no more than a sharp gust of wind, would bring it back to mind. The raging gale—so vicious that particular night—probably recalled the disaster to us more vividly than usual.
First of all, out on the porch, there was that sound of footsteps none of us recognized. Someone was knocking the snow off his boots and walking toward the kitchen door. That was where we sat of an evening when it was very cold; and at such times, rather than trying the front door, people came straight to the back of the house, the only illuminated part, and therefore the most attractive. Moreover—it must be admitted—when a lot of snow had fallen in a short time, we did not clear off the whole porch; we did the easiest thing; we made a single path leading directly to the kitchen. The sound of the footsteps, then, by the time we were able to hear it over the wind, was already very close. Maman was visibly startled. She said, as though this night could bring forth nothing except danger, "Lord, what can that be!"
When the door opened, we beheld, surrounded by flurries of snow, a man wholly swathed in fur, his raccoon cap pushed down to his eyes, the collar of his greatcoat turned up; what little of his face we could see was red with cold, yet laughing; the eyes shone, the small mustache was stiff with frost.
"For Heaven's sake! ... Majorique!" cried Maman, recognizing her youngest brother, who had come from the country to attend to some business in town. "Come in! What weather for you to be making us a visit! Do come in, come in quickly and A r arm yourself!"
Then she remembered to introduce him, for that evening we had with us a Monsieur Elie and his wife, Clementine, both from the village of Lasalle, and when they came to town, they also, it seems to me, would end up at our home. Thereupon, even though we had several times in the last hour opened the door just to check on the strength of the gale, Maman asked
about the weather. After all, during a Manitoba winter, was there any subject more fascinating to us than the current weather—at once our most mysterious and our most palpable enemy ?
"Awful! Raging like a wild beast !" said my uncle Majorique.
Once he had slipped off his coat, he looked young, slight, and delighted to be alive, the part in his thick black hair cutting as deep as a path through meadow grass. "It wouldn't be much fun to be out at sea tonight" said he to Maman. Far-fetched remarks and comments in this vein he seemed to prefer to address to her.
For why was it that our own glacial plains, our poor frozen plains, did not suffice to give us an adequate idea of solitude, that to deal with the subject properly, we, people buried in the very depths of continental land, had to conjure up the ocean ? Was it because we were specially gifted with imagination and a fellow feeling for others who suffered? . . . Monsieur Elie, stooping a bit in the shadow, spoke our thoughts for us: "It must have been on a night like this that the Titanic perished."
His wife almost never expressed an opinion in her husband's presence; tonight, however, it was as though she did have some will of her own: "Wasn't it rather on a foggy night that that fine ship was lost, lock, stock, and barrel ?"
I noticed that she said "Lock, stock, and barrel" just as you might say "body and soul" about a man, but I wondered what fog was.
One of them replied that it is like cotton wool pervading the whole atmosphere; another described it as a very thin steam, like that exhaled by our kettle on the stove, but thicker than that, of course, and cold into the bargain. My uncle told me of a current of warm water which was loath to mingle with the nearby icy water, and so the two struggled together. . . . Was it, then, their breathing that prevented you from seeing? I became aware how difficult it is to describe real things. Maman, however, said that fog is a little like what happens in our unhappy dreams, when a sixth sense warns us of a danger we can neither touch nor see; it lies in wait in dead-white invisibility. . . . And then I had a fairly clear idea of the great ship's torment, not far off Newfoundland.
"The sturdiest ship ever built!" exclaimed Monsieur Elie. "None the less it hastened to its downfall, for God always punishes pride."
In our kitchen, right about mother's sewing machine, you 44 Street of Riches
could indeed look at God—God the Father, I mean. In the picture's lower portion was depicted the Holy Family; Jesus was young; Mary and Joseph were sitting there; they seemed to be people like ourselves, happy all three to be together; and occasionally I thought that the warmth from our big stove rejoiced them, too. But God the Father held Himself aloof in a Cloud. Was it His frowning brows that gave Him that look of always wanting to catch us in some wrongdoing ?
"They were dancing," Monsieur Elie continued, "on board the ship. Dancing," he marveled, "in mid-ocean!"
"Do they have music to dance to on a boat ?" My uncle Majorique smiled a little at my question, but not to make fun of me. Quite the opposite; my uncle Majorique liked to explain things, and he was good at it, for he had at home a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. And on Manitoba farms in winter there remains little work to do; so my uncle would learn from his volumes how the telephone worked, or the principles of wireless telegraphy and radio. When he came to see us, he explained these things to us, with the help of very astute comparisons, and he would make diagrams that we might understand more clearly. So he began telling me about ocean liners: they were equipped with kitchens, pots and pans, libraries, parlors with chandeliers, fresh flowers, games of all sorts for the passengers' recreation, counters at which to settle bills, a small shipboard newspaper, a barber, a masseur, stewards; in short here was a town venturing forth upon the seas. ... At night it was alive with lights that spilled out over the waves, and there were moments, maybe, when the black water seemed gladdened by them.
And—I know not why—as he kept listing what there was on board the ship, my heart was ill at ease, though I was eager to learn more. When my uncle added that certain completely up-to-date ships even boasted swimming pools, I got a picture at once curious and funny, but one that certainly did not make me laugh; on the contrary, I felt an unknown and terrifying sadness at the thought of people plunging into the water of a swimming pool contained within a vessel itself afloat upon infinite water. My uncle Majorique was answering Monsieur Elie: "True enough, they were dancing, but we must not forget the couples aboard the Titanic were almost all newlyweds, Monsieur ... on their honeymoons! ..."
Then Uncle Majorique saw the question in my eyes; he told
me what a honeymoon is: "The time of love, at the beginning of a marriage, when all is beautiful. . . ."
"Later on does it become less beautiful ?" Everyone laughed a bit, but sheepishly, and exchanged glances that were none too open. Monsieur Elie seemed annoyed and in ill humor. Only my uncle Majorique did not appreciably change expression. And he told me that it was the time when married people could scarcely do without each other; when they were forever kissing and making much of one another.... Maman then made Uncle Majorique a sign. He hummed a snatch of song. I was thinking of those poor people so happy to be together on the ship. Abruptly Monsieur Elie began to scold. He said of them, the folk on the Titanic, "Hammerstein! . . . Vanderbilt! ... Big bankers from New York! . . . Those were the people on the Titanic! Millionaires!" So in fact those poor people were rich!
"Yes," my uncle Majorique agreed, "wealthy couples, handsome, young, happy! ..."
"And they thought their boat proof against all danger," said Monsieur Elie.
"Is there something wrong," I asked them, "about building a sturdy ship?"
Even Monsieur Elie seemed taken aback at my question. He granted that there was nothing wrong about it, probably nothing at all, but it most certainly was wrong to imagine oneself out of the reach of God's wrath. Yet why did he seem so pleased about God's wrath ?
"Alas," said my uncle, "the captain had been warned of the presence of icebergs in the neighborhood. They might still have been saved had only the captain given orders to reduce the vessel's speed. But no; the Titanic was cutting through the waves at its normal speed—very fast for thos
e days "
"An iceberg?" I asked. "What's that?" and I was afraid of the answer.
My uncle Majorique told me how mountains of ice break off from the Labrador ice masses; how unfortunate, even how cruel is our country, since these mountains drift down into the navigation routes . . . and under water they are seven or eight times larger than what appears on the surface.
So then I had a vivid picture of the graceful, sturdy white ship. With all its portholes brightly aglow, it slipped along our kitchen wall. Then, from Monsieur Elie's side, there moved straight toward the ship the monstrous mountain that had 46 Street of Riches
severed itself from Labrador. And they would meet at a point where the sea was at its worst. . . . Was there no way to warn them once again ? ... For surely the ocean is a vast expanse! ...
"The Titanic's foghorn," said my uncle, "resounded in this opaque silence . . . and then the time came when the echo that returned to the boat was close... very close "
We had half closed our eyes.
"The spur of ice," my uncle said, "had pierced the Titanic to its heart."
In a very low tone, as was usual with her when sorrow beset us, Maman asked, "Majorique, do you recall how much time elapsed between the moment of collision and the Titanic's final disappearance?"
"Not much ... maybe twenty minutes ..." I looked at the clock, watching its hands.
"Was it not then," Maman inquired, "that they began to sing 'Nearer My God to Thee' ?"
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