The sun dipped toward the horizon, disappeared; the sky took on softer hues above the forest’s dark edge, and the hour of supper brought to the house five men of the colour of the soil.
While waiting upon them Madame Chapdelaine asked a hundred questions about the day’s work, and when the vision arose before her of this patch of land they had cleared, superbly bare, lying ready for the Plough, her spirit was possessed with something of a mystic’s rapture.
With hands upon her hips, refusing to seat herself at table, she extolled the beauty of the world as it existed for her: not the beauty wherein human beings have no hand, which the townsman makes such an ado about with his unreal ecstasies—mountains, lofty and bare, wild seas—but the quiet unaffected loveliness of the level champaign, finding its charm in the regularity of the long furrow and the sweetly-flowing stream—the naked champaign courting with willing abandon the fervent embraces of the sun.
She sang the great deeds of the four Chapdelaines and Edwige Légaré, their struggle against the savagery of nature, their triumph of the day. She awarded praises and displayed her own proper pride, albeit the five men smoked their wooden or clay pipes in silence, motionless as images after their long task; images of earthy hue, hollow-eyed with fatigue.
“The stumps are hard to get out,” at length said the elder Chapdelaine, “the roots have not rotted in the earth so much as I should have imagined. I calculate that we shall not be through for three weeks.” He glanced questioningly at Legare who gravely confirmed him.
“Three weeks … Yes, confound it! That is what I think too.”
They fell silent again, patient and determined, like men who face a long war.
The Canadian spring had but known a few weeks of life when, by calendar, the summer was already come; it seemed as if the local weather god had incontinently pushed the season forward with august finger to bring it again into accord with more favoured lands to the south. For torrid heat fell suddenly upon them, heat well-nigh as unmeasured as was the winter’s cold. The tops of the spruces and cypresses, forgotten by the wind, were utterly still, and above the frowning outline stretched a sky bare of cloud which likewise seemed fixed and motionless. From dawn till nightfall a merciless sun calcined the ground.
The five men worked on unceasingly, while from day to day the clearing extended its borders by a little; deep wounds in the uncovered soil showed the richness of it.
Maria went forth one morning to carry them water. The father and Tit’Bé were cutting alders, Da’Bé and Esdras piled the cut trees. Edwige Légaré was attacking a stump by himself; a hand against the trunk, he had grasped a root with the other as one seizes the leg of some gigantic adversary in a struggle, and he was fighting the combined forces of wood and earth like a man furious at the resistance of an enemy. Suddenly the stump yielded and lay upon the ground; he passed a hand over his forehead and sat down upon a root, running with sweat, overcome by the exertion. When Maria came near him with her pail half full of water, the others having drunk, he was still seated, breathing deeply and saying in a bewildered way:—“I am done for … Ah! I am done for.” But he pulled himself together on seeing her, and roared out—“Cold water! Perdition! Give me cold water.”
Seizing the bucket he drank half its contents and poured the rest over his head and neck; still dripping, he threw himself afresh upon the vanquished stump and began to roll it toward a pile as one carries off a prize.
Maria stayed for a few moments looking at the work of the men and the progress they had made, each day more evident, then hied her back to the house swinging the empty bucket, happy to feel herself alive and well under the bright sun, dreaming of all the joys that were to be hers, nor could be long delayed if only she were earnest and patient enough in her prayers. Even at a distance the voices of the men came to her across the surface of the ground baked by the heat; Esdras, his hands beneath a young jack pine, was saying in his quiet tones:—“Gently … together now!”
Legare was wrestling with some new inert foe, and swearing in his half-stifled way:—“Perdition! I’ll make you stir, so I will.” His gasps were nearly as audible as the words. Taking breath for a second he rushed once more into the fray, arms straining, wrenching with his great back. And yet again his voice was raised in oaths and lamentations:—“I tell you that I’ll have you … Oh you rascal! Isn’t it hot? … I’m pretty nearly finished …” His complaints ripened into one mighty cry:—“Boss! We are going to kill ourselves making land.”
Old Chapdelaine’s voice was husky but still cheerful as he answered: “Tough! Edwige, tough! The pea-soup will soon be ready.”
And in truth it was not long before Maria, once more on the doorstep, shaping her hands to carry the sound, sent forth the ringing call to dinner.
Toward evening a breeze arose and a delicious coolness fell upon the earth like a pardon. But the sky remained cloudless.
“If the fine weather lasts,” said mother Chapdelaine, “the blueberries will be ripe for the feast of Ste. Anne.”
V
The Vows
The fine weather continued, and early in July the blueberries were ripe.
Where the fire had passed, on rocky slopes, wherever the woods were thin and the sun could penetrate, the ground had been clad in almost unbroken pink by the laurel’s myriad tufts of bloom; at first the reddening blueberries contended with them in glowing colour, but under the constant sun
