I could barely follow what he was saying. I was so tired that instead of stimulating me the coffee had made me drowsier. "Papa, it's past midnight!"
"Midnight," he exclaimed, and added—he who found the years interminable—"Heavens! How time flies! ..."
"Tomorrow I have a class I haven't yet prepared for ... in contemporary history."
"Oh yes! Contemporary history," he repeated somberly. "Of course. You're still going to school!"
He seemed fearfully unhappy to have to cede so simple a fact, maybe to be reminded of his own age.
"One shouldn't have children when one is old," he said to 148 Street ol Riches
me, his head bowed. "One can quit this world without knowing them, without knowing much about them, and that's a heartbreaking loss...."
Suddenly he asked me, "Could you not stay with me another hour?"
At the moment, I grasped but the bare meaning of his rather unreasonable request. Only later did the precise words recur to me.... And the exams soon to be taken, the scholastic success to be won, the good grades, my future, if you like—I had one to prepare for, as people say—yes, it must have been my future which intervened at that moment between my father and me. I told him, "Papa, it would be more sensible for you to go to bed rather than sit up all night. You can't do anything useful during the day if you've not slept well." "You talk just like your mother," was his reply.
But he took pity on me: "Poor child! You're asleep on your feet! ... Oh well, go; get your rest." Yet in the same breath he accused me with a sort of bitterness: "You're all like her, down deep. Even you. She has you all to herself . . . that Maman of yours! ..."
Moved by loyalty to Maman, I replied, "Surely you wouldn't have us behave the way you do!" "Oh no!" he at once agreed. "Certainly not!"
And I saw him accept, his eyes wide open, his madness of solitude.
He poured himself another cup of black coffee. Like Maman, I thought, "There's nothing for it; he's resolved to be his own undoing." I went up to bed. Perhaps he wandered about the whole night long. For thus it was when we left him; he would pace the downstairs hall, then to and fro in the kitchen. His peregrinations would even make him forget to mend the fire. Sometimes, waking in the night, I would hear that regular, monotonous tread, the tread of a man too actively engaged in his mind, perhaps launched upon one of those illusions which make men take themselves off into the desert.
The next day he was unable to quit his bed. He was completely worn out. He would not speak much of the great pain he was beginning to suffer; perhaps he had already been having these attacks a long time. Uncomplaining, but with his usual stubbornness, he would say, "It's true. I can't stand it any longer. Give me something to lessen the pain a bit. I'm too old to be able to put up with it any longer. ..." They had to give him morphine.
His liver was completely used up. Once or twice more he asked for coffee, at about the hour when it had been his habit to drink some, and the doctor said to Maman, "What difference can it make now?"
But in the end coffee also betrayed his faith and brought him only nausea.
At night Maman sat up with him. But she was so contrary to the hours of darkness that, despite her worry, despite her distress over my father's inert form, she would bend her head a little and, like a child, slip briefly into the haven of sleep . . . until pain once more claimed her.
My father died at the hour that was the most cruel for him, when the sun rises over the earth.
To Earn My Living..
Oi
ne evening in my tiny attic room, which I | had whitewashed and which was austere in color, but crazy, too—stuffed with incongruous baggage—and just the way I wanted it, in this my refuge, Ma-man appeared, out of breath from her rapid ascent of two flights of stairs. She glanced about, seeking a place to sit, for I insisted that chairs were dull and would have only cushions scattered over the floor. I played the artist, still unaware that a writer is the most self-sufficient of beings—or the most lonely!—and that he could just as readily write in a desert, if in a desert he should still feel the need to communicate with his fellows. Be this as it may, I sought to create an "atmosphere" for myself, and Maman was abashed every time she penetrated into what she called my "mumbo jumbo." Yet was this surprising ? In those days I was forever abashed at myself. Maman, very uncomfortable upon a narrow bench, at once broached the subject that had brought her. "Christine," she asked me, "have you considered what you're going to do with your life? Here you are in your last year of school. Have you given it any thought?"
"But I've told you, Maman. I should like to write "
"I'm talking seriously, Christine. You're going to have to choose an occupation." Her lips trembled slightly. "Earn your living..."
Of course I had already often heard this phrase, but it had never seemed that it might some day fully apply to me. It was upon this evening that its words dedicated me to solitude. To earn one's living! How mean, it seemed to me, how selfish, how grasping! Must life be earned? Was it not better to make a gift of it once for all, in some beautiful impulse? ... Or even to lose it? Or—again—to stake it, to gamble it . . . Oh, anything ! But to earn it, pettily, day by day! . . . That evening it was exactly as though someone had told me, "For the mere fact that you live, you must pay."
I think I never made a more disconsolate discovery: all life subject to money, every dream appraised in terms of its yield.
"Oh, maybe I'll earn my living by writing ... a little later
... before too long "
"You poor girl!" said my mother; and after a silence, after a sigh, she continued, "Wait first until you have lived! You've plenty of time. But in the meantime, in order to live, what do you expect to do ? ..."
Then she confessed to me, "Almost all the former earnings left by your father are gone, now. I was very careful with them; but we'll soon be at their end."
Then I saw clearly the endless piecing together, the hard role that had been Maman's; a thousand memories seized me by the throat: Maman mending clothes of an evening under an inadequate light, absorbed in trying to save money, sending us to bed early so that the fire need not be kept up. "Under the covers, you don't feel the cold. . . ." And I recalled a hundred occasions when I might have helped her, whereas she packed me off to study a sonata. And how she would tell me: "You give me a great deal more pleasure, you know, by being the first in your class than by helping with the dishes." And once, when I insisted upon taking her place at the hand-operated washing machine, she had said to me, "If you really want to lighten my work, go play the "Moment Musical" while I go about my business. It's strange how that piece affects me; so gay, so airy, it drives all my weariness out the window!"
Yes, so it had been. But this evening I jumped from one extreme to the other. Now I ardently wanted to earn money. For Maman's sake, I think I even decided that I'd make a lot of it.
"Right off tomorrow," I declared to her, "I'll go look for work. No matter what! In a store, an office ..."
"You in a store!" she exclaimed. "Besides, it requires some experience to sell things. No, there's no question of your earning a living at once, starting tomorrow, nor yet at haphazard. I can still keep you at your studies for another year."
And she told me what she wanted for me with all her heart: "If only you were willing, Christine, to become a teacher! . . . There is no finer profession, none more worthy, it seems to me, for a woman "
Maman had wanted to make all her daughters schoolteachers—perhaps because she carried within herself, among so many shattered dreams, this lost vocation.
"It doesn't pay very well!" 152 Street 0/ Riches
"Oh! Don't talk like that. Should we value our lives by what we earn?"
"Since we must earn our livings, it's just as well to bargain for the highest price "
"Earn it, but not sell it," said Maman; "two very different things. Think it over, Christine. Nothing would please me more than to see you a teacher. And you would do wonderfully at it! Do think
it over."
When as yet you scarcely know yourself, why should you not strive to realize the dream that those who love you have dreamed on your behalf? I finished my year at normal school, and then I went off to take my first school in one of our little prairie villages. It was a tiny little village, flat on its back, by which I mean really set flat upon the flatness, and almost entirely red in color, of that dark, dull redness you see on western railway stations. Probably the C.N.R. had sent paint to cover the station and its small dependent buildings—the tool shed, the water tower, the handful of retired railway cars which served as lodging for the section foreman ^nd his men. Some must have been left over, which the villagers had bought at a cut rate, or even got for nothing, and they had put it on all their walls—or at least that was what I had pictured to myself upon my first arrival. Even the grain elevator was red, even the house where I was to live, sheathed in sheets of tin several of which flapped in the breeze. Only the school had any individuality; it was all white. And that red village was called, still is called, Cardinal!
When she saw me, the lady with whom I was to board exclaimed, "Come, come! You're not the schoolteacher! Oh no; it's impossible!"
She adjusted her glasses to get a better look at me. "Why, they'll gobble you up in one mouthful!"
All through that first night I spent in Cardinal, the wind kept shaking the sheet metal that had come loose from this home, set off by itself on the outskirts of the village . . . but -it's true—escorted by two sad small trees, themselves, like it, shaken by the wind. They were almost the village's only trees; they became very precious to me, and later on I was most saddened when one of them was killed by the frost.
That first night, though, the wind spoke cruelly to me. Why was the village so atrociously red? Was it the color of its
dreadful boredom? Certain people had warned me, "It's a village full of hatred; everyone hates some person or some object. . . ." Yes, but every village in our parts, even if it is red, even if it stands alone on the nakedness of the plain, always contains something more than hatred! ...
The next day I crossed the whole village; truth to tell, there was but one long street, and it, in fact, was the public highway, a broad dirt road; and the village was so tiny a thing, so silent, that the highway passed through it at the same pace as it did the open country. I think that at every window someone stood to spy at me. Behind their curtains, could they have known what it is to set forth one morning along a wooden sidewalk that echoes your every step, in order, at the very opposite end of the suspicious village, to earn your living ?
But since I had accepted the bargain, I wanted to live up to my end of it. "You give me so much in salary, I give you so many hours of work. . . ." No, it was not in that spirit that I wanted to do business with the village. I should give it all I could. And what would it give me in return ? I did not know, but I gave it all my trust.
II
There were not many children that first day of school, and almost all of them very young. Everything went well. I began with geography; here was the subject I myself had liked best during my years as a student. It seems to me that geography is something that requires no effort, that you can't go wrong in. teaching it, since it so captures your interest—perhaps because of the lovely big maps, each country indicated by a different color. And then it's not like history. In geography you don't have to judge peoples; no wars are involved, no sides need be taken. I spoke of the various crops raised in the different portions of the globe, in which regions grew sorghum, tapioca, bananas, oranges, sugar, molasses. . . . The children seemed delighted to learn whence came the things they liked best of all to eat. And I told them that they, too, in a sense labored for the happiness of others, since our Canadian wheat was known almost everywhere in the world and was very needful to sustain life.
When I returned, toward noon, to the house of red tin ] plate, Madame Toupin questioned me avidly. "Well ? Did they eat you alive?"
Later on, Madame Tonpin became my friend; since it was the one thing at which she best excelled, she was constantly reading my fortune in the cards. She foretold that I should
travel a great deal, meet blond men, dark men
And indeed this is precisely what happened in very short order; on the Sunday following, a number of young men appeared at the sheet-metal house, in groups of four or five, who could not possibly all have come from nearby farms; some were from fairly distant villages. As the weather was fine, they sat themselves down upon a bench in front of the house. The spectacle of these boys in their Sunday best, sitting like bumps on a log, greatly astonished me, but, nothing daunted, I proceeded to take my walk, following the railroad right of way toward the little hills near Babcock. When I returned, rather late in the afternoon, the bench in front of the door was empty. Madame Toupin took me aside. "You're a strange girl," said she, "to leave your suitors flat like that. You are well liked for the moment, obviously enough; but if you continue to show your independence this way, it won't last; mark my words."
"What do you mean? Are those lads suitors of mine?" I asked Madame Toupin. "I never laid eyes on one of them before today, and why on earth did they all come in a group ?"
"It gets around quickly in these parts," said Madame Toupin, "when a new schoolteacher comes to town, but I'm afraid that your distant manner has put your boy friends off for a long time. You'll certainly regret it this winter, for you'll have no one to take you to the parties. The boys have long memories around here." "But what should I have done?"
"Sit down beside the boy who pleased you the most," replied Madame Toupin, "and thus make known your choice. Now I'm afraid it's too late to recover lost ground."
Other Sundays, being a little at loose ends, I began to cultivate the acquaintance, in one or another of the village houses, of its so shadowy people. The greater part of them became my friends, and practically everywhere the women got out their cards to tell my fortune. Ever since then I have clearly understood how much people stand in need of the novel, especially^ in a village like Cardinal, where new things almost never happen. Everything there was predictable: the preparations for sowing at certain set seasons, at others pure tedium. Then, too, the wind which sighed endlessly; even the monotonous pattern of dreams which the cards revealed.
Meanwhile, Madame Toupin had warned me, "Your trouble will begin when the older boys come to school. For the moment they are helping their parents with the threshing and fall plowing, but sometime in October you'll see the tough ones beginning to appear. I'm sorry for you, poor girl ?"
Luckily they came one by one, which gave me the time to win them one by one ... and in my heart I wonder whether these hard characters were not the more interesting. They forced me to be skillful, and to be just; they forced me to do many difficult things, true enough; they made me mount a tightrope, and once there, they never let me down. Everything had to be absorbing—arithmetic, catechism, grammar. A school without its rebels would be boresome indeed.
Thus the red village and myself were coming to know one another. Somehow I furnished it with a touch of that novelty which it loved above everything in the world, and it—I shall always remember—showed me the nobility of having to earn your living. And then winter fell upon us!
Ill
How well I recall its brutal coming, along our highway! November was about to begin. The deep frost, the snow, all the pain of winter came in a single night along that shallow road. The wind urged them on with cries and ugly gusts. The next day we were snowbound. I had a very hard time beating my way through the drifts, often sinking above my knees. But I thought it fun to see the immense tracks I left behind me.
Of course there weren't many scholars in attendance that morning; in fact, by ten o'clock only the village children had put in an appearance. I imagine they had watched me going by their windows, and then that a number of them had thought of taking advantage of the trail I had opened. They had hastened to do so, for the wind quickly obliterated it.
But the
farm children were nowhere to be seen. Used to thirty-five youngsters, I thought the dozen that now confronted me excessively well behaved, almost too docile. And when they had recited their lessons, when they had shown me their homework, what else was there left for me to do but tell them stories? For I knew I could have no illusions: often again would there be storms to keep the farm children from school. Were I to push the village pupils ahead, they would leave the
others too far behind, and that could lead only to discouragement. In a way it was bitter to take advantage of the country children's absence and tell the others stories. But this, all the same, is what I did.
That day—so well do I remember it—we were as though cut off from the rest of the world in our warm little school-house. In the cellar we had a big stove, and a register in the classroom floor. From time to time, one of my eldest students, lanky Eloi, would look at me, asking me a kind of silent question. I would nod at him. Then he would raise a trap door and climb down into the cellar to toss a few logs on the fire; shortly afterward the warmth would increase, while outdoors the driving snow seemed to fly even more violently. I toyed with the thought: "What fun to be shut up here with the children two or three days at a stretch, maybe even the whole winter! ..."
I began, however, to miss those who were absent. I walked over to a window and tried to see in the distance, through the high whirling of the snow, the bit of path I had left behind in my passage; but at only a few feet from the building you could distinguish nothing.
Then, through the spirals of snow which seemed to climb in towers toward the sky, I suddenly descried something red -yes, two long scarves, their ends tossed in the wind, just as was the snow. It must be little Lucien and his sister Lucienne—by now I was well acquainted with the children's mufflers, and theirs were red. Their parents were from Brittany, having been at Cardinal for only five or six years, and they did not know how to read or write.
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