“No.”
“It is true that I used to drink a bit, when I got back from the shanties and the drive; but that is all over now. You see when a young fellow has been working in the woods for six months, with every kind of hardship and no amusement, and gets out to La Tuque or Jonquieres with all the winter’s wages in his pocket, pretty often he loses his head; he throws his money about and sometimes takes too much … But that is all over.”
“And it is also true that I used to swear. When one lives all the time with rough men in the woods or on the rivers one gets the habit. Once I swore a good deal, and the curé, Mr. Tremblay, took me to task because I said before him that I wasn’t afraid of the devil. But there is an end of that too, Maria. All the summer I am to be working for two dollars and a half a day and you may be sure that I shall save money. And in the autumn there will be no trouble finding a job as foreman in a shanty, with big wages. Next spring I shall have more than five hundred dollars saved, clear, and I shall come back. …”
Again he hesitated, and the question he was about to put took another form upon his lips. “You will be here still … next spring?”
“Yes.”
And after the simple question and simpler answer they fell silent and so long remained, wordless and grave, for they had exchanged their vows.
VI
The Stuff of Dreams
In July the hay was maturing, and by the middle of August it was only a question of awaiting a few dry days to cut and-store it. But after many weeks of fine weather the frequent shifts of wind which are usual in Quebec once more ruled the skies.
Every morning the men scanned the heavens and took counsel together. “The wind is backing to the sou’east. Bad luck! Beyond question it will rain again,” said Edwige Légaré with a gloomy face. Or it was old Chapdelaine who followed the movement of the white clouds that rose above the treetops, sailed in glad procession across the clearing, and disappeared behind the dark spires on the other side.
“If the nor’west holds till tomorrow we shall begin,” he announces. But next day the wind had backed afresh, and the cheerful clouds of yesterday, now torn and shapeless, straggling in disorderly rout, seemed to be fleeing like the wreckage of a broken army.
Madame Chapdelaine foretold inevitable misfortune. “Mark my words, we shall not have good haymaking weather. They say that down by the end of the lake some people of the same parish have gone to law with one another. Of a certainty the good God does not like that sort of thing!”
Yet the Power at length was pleased to show indulgence, and the northwest wind blew for three days on end, steady and strong, promising a rainless week. The scythes were long since sharpened and ready, and the five men set to work on the morning of the third day. Legare, Esdras and the father cut; Da’Bé and Tit’Bé followed close on their heels, raking the hay together. Toward evening all five took their forks in hand and made it into cocks, high and carefully built, lest a change of wind should bring rain. But the sunshine lasted. For five days they carried on, swinging the scythe steadily from right to left with that broad free movement that seems so easy to the practised hand, and is in truth the hardest to learn and the most fatiguing of all the labours known to husbandry.
Flies and mosquitos rose in swarms from the cut hay, stinging and tormenting the workers; a blazing sun scorched their necks, and smarting sweat ran into their eyes; when evening came, such was the ache of backs continually bent, they could not straighten themselves without making wry faces. Yet they toiled from dawn to nightfall without loss of a second, hurrying their meals, feeling nothing but gratitude and happiness that the weather stood fair.
Three or four times a day Maria or Telesphore brought them a bucket of water which they stood in a shady spot to keep it cool; and when throats became unbearably dry with heat, exertion and the dust of the hay, they went by turns to swallow great-draughts and deluge wrists or head.
In five days all the hay was cut, and, the drought persisting, on the morning of the sixth day they began to break and scatter the cocks they intended lodging in the barn before night. The scythes had done their work and the forks came into play. They threw down the cocks, spread the hay in the sun, and toward the end of the afternoon, when dry, heaped it anew in piles of such a size that a man could just lift one with a single motion to the level of a well-filled hay-cart.
Charles Eugene pulled gallantly between the shafts; the cart was swallowed up in the barn, stopped beside the mow, and once again the forks were plunged into the hard-packed hay, raised a thick mat of it with strain of wrist and back, and unloaded it to one side. By the end of the week the hay, well-dried and of excellent colour, was all under cover; the men stretched themselves and took long breaths, knowing the fight was over and won.
“It may rain now if it likes,” said Chapdelaine. “It will be all the same to us.” But it appeared that the sunshine had not been timed with exact relation to their peculiar needs, for the wind held in the northwest and fine days
