Mother Chapdelaine took up her questioning:—“And so you sold the farm when your father died?”
“Yes, I sold everything. I was never a very good hand at farming, you know. Working in the shanties, trapping, making a little money from time to time as a guide or in trade with the Indians, that is the life for me; but to scratch away at the same fields from one year’s end to another, and stay there forever, I would not have been able to stick to that all my life; I would have felt like a cow tethered to a stake.”
“That is so, some men are made that way. Samuel, for example, and you, and many another. It seems as if the woods had some magic for you …” She shook her head and looked at him in wonderment. “Frozen in winter, devoured by flies in summer; living in a tent on the snow, or in a log cabin full of chinks that the wind blows through, you like that better than spending your life on a good farm, near shops and houses. Just think of it; a nice bit of level land without a stump or a hollow, a good warm house all papered inside, fat cattle pasturing or in the stable; for people well stocked with implements and who keep their health, could there be anything better or happier?”
Paradis, looked at the floor without making answer, perhaps a trifle ashamed of these wrongheaded tastes of his. “A fine life for those who are fond of the land,” he said at last, “but I should never have been content.”
It was the everlasting conflict between the types: pioneer and farmer, the peasant from France who brought to new lands his ideals of ordered life and contented immobility, and that other in whom the vast wilderness awakened distant atavistic instincts for wandering and adventure.
Accustomed for fifteen years to hear her mother vaunting the idyllic happiness of the farmer in the older settlements, Maria had very naturally come to believe that she was of the same mind; now she was no longer certain about it. But whoever was right she well knew that not one of the well-to-do young fellows at St. Prime, with his Sunday coat of fine cloth and his fur collar, was the equal of Paradis in muddy boots and faded woollen jersey.
Replying to further questions he spoke of his journeys on the North Shore and to the headwaters of the rivers—of it all very naturally and with a shade of hesitation, scarcely knowing what to tell and what to leave out, for the people he was speaking to lived in much the same kind of country and their manner of life was little different.
“Up there the winters are harder yet than here, and still longer. We have only dogs to draw our sleds, fine strong dogs, but bad-tempered and often half wild, and we feed them but once a day, in the evening, on frozen fish. … Yes, there are settlements, but almost no farming; the men live by trapping and fishing … No, I never had any difficulty with the Indians; I always got on very well with them. I know nearly all those on the Mistassini and this river, for they used to come to our place before my father died. You see he often went trapping in winter when he was not in the shanties, and one season when he was at the head of the Riviere aux Foins, quite alone, a tree that he was cutting for firewood slipped in falling, and it was the Indians who found him by chance next day, crushed and half-frozen though the weather was mild. He was in their game preserve, and they might very well have pretended not to see him and have left him to die there; but they put him on their toboggan, brought him to their camp, and looked after him. You knew my father: a rough man who often took a glass, but just in his dealings, and with a good name for doing that sort of thing himself. So when he parted with these Indians he told them to stop and see him in the spring when they would be coming down to Pointe Bleue with their furs:—François Paradis of Mistassini,’ said he to them, will not forget what you have done … François Paradis.’ And when they came in spring while running the river he looked after them well and everyone carried away a new ax, a fine woollen blanket and tobacco for six months. Always after that they used to pay us a visit in the spring, and father had the pick of their best skins for less than the companies’ buyers had to pay. When he died they treated me in the same way because I was his son and bore the same name, François Paradis. With more capital I could have made a good bit of money in this trade—a good bit of money.”
He seemed a little uncomfortable at having talked so much, and arose to go. “We shall be coming down in a few weeks and I will try to stay a little longer,” he said as he departed. “It is good to see you again.”
On the doorstep his keen eyes sought in Maria’s for something that he might carry into the depth of the green woods whither he was bent; but they found no message. In her maidenly simplicity she feared to show herself too bold, and very resolutely she kept her glance lowered, like the young girls with richer parents who return from the convents in Chicoutimi trained to look on the world with a superhuman demureness.
Scarcely was François gone when the two women and Tit’Bé knelt for the evening
