“You are their slaves; that’s what you are. You tend them, you clean them, you gather up their dung as the poor do the rich man’s crumbs. It is you who must keep them alive by hard work, because the earth is miserly and the summer so short. That is the way of it, and there is no help, as you cannot get on without them; but for cattle there would be no living on the land. But even if you could … even if you could … still would you have other masters: the summer, beginning too late and ending too soon; the winter, eating up seven long months of the year and bringing in nothing; drought and rain which always come just at the wrong moment …”
“In the towns these things do not matter; but here you have no defence against them and they do you hurt; and I have not taken into account the extreme cold, the badness of the roads, the loneliness of being far away from everything, with no amusements. Life is one kind of hardship on top of another from beginning to end. It is often said that only those make a real success who are born and brought up on the land, and of course that is true; as for the people in the cities, small danger that they would ever be foolish enough to put up with such a way of living.”
He spoke with heat and volubly—a man of the town who talks every day with his equals, reads the papers, hears public speakers. The listeners, of a race easily moved by words, were carried away by his plaints and criticisms; the very real harshness of their lives was presented in such a new and startling light as to surprise even themselves.
However Madame Chapdelaine again shook her head. “Do not say such things as that; there is no happier life in the world than the life of a farmer who owns good land.”
“Not in these parts, Madame Chapdelaine. You are too far north; the summer is too short; the grain is hardly up before the frosts come. Each time that I return from the States, and see the tiny wooden houses lost in this wilderness—so far from one another that they seem frightened at being alone—and the woods hemming you in on every side … By Heaven! I lose heart for you, I who live here no longer, and I ask myself how it comes about that all you folk did not long ago seek a kinder climate where you would find everything that makes for comfort, where you could go out for a walk in the wintertime without being in fear of death …”
Without being in fear of death! Maria shuddered as the thought swiftly awoke of those dark secrets hidden beneath the everlasting green and white of the forest. Lorenzo Surprenant was right in what he had been saying; it was a pitiless ungentle land. The menace lurking just outside the door—the cold—the shrouding snows—the blank solitude—forced a sudden entrance and crowded about the stove, an evil swarm sneering presages of ill or hovering in a yet more dreadful silence:—“Do you remember, my sister, the men, brave and well-beloved, whom we have slain and hidden in the woods? Their souls have known how to escape us; but their bodies, their-bodies, their bodies, none shall ever snatch them from our hands …”
The voice of the wind at the corners of the house was loud with hollow laughter, and to Maria it seemed that all gathered within the wooden walls huddled and spoke low, like men whose lives are under a threat and who go in dread.
A burden of sadness was upon the rest of the evening, at least for her. Racicot told stories of the chase: of trapped bears struggling and growling so fiercely at the sight of the trapper that he loses courage and falls a-trembling; and then, giving up suddenly when the hunters come in force and the deadly guns are aimed—giving up, covering their heads with their paws and whimpering with groans and outcries almost human, very heartrending and pitiful.
After these tales came others of ghosts and apparitions; of bloodcurdling visitations or solemn warnings to men who had blasphemed or spoken ill of the priests. Then, as no one could be persuaded to sing, they played at cards and the conversation dropped to more commonplace themes. The only memory that Maria carried away of the later talk, as the sleigh bore them homeward through the midnight woods, was of Lorenzo Surprenant extolling the United States and the magnificence of its great cities, the easy and pleasant life, the never-ending spectacle of the fine straight streets flooded with light at evening.
Before she departed Lorenzo said in quiet tones, almost in her ear.—“Tomorrow is Sunday; I shall be over to see you in the afternoon.”
A few short hours of night, a morning of sunlight on the snow, and again he is by her side renewing his tale of wonders, his interrupted plea. For it was to her he had been speaking the evening before; Maria knew it well. The scorn he showed for a country life, his praises of the town, these were but a preface to the allurements he was about to offer in all their varied forms, as one shows the pictures in a book, turning page by page.
“Maria,” he began, “you have not the faintest idea! As yet, the most wonderful things you ever saw were the shops in Roberval, a high mass, an evening entertainment at the convent with acting. City people would laugh to think of it! You simply cannot imagine … Just to stroll through the big streets in the evening—not on little plank-walks like those of Roberval, but on fine broad asphalt pavements as level as a table—just that and no more, what with the lights, the electric cars coming and going continually, the shops and the crowds, you would find enough there to amaze you for
