2 I discover my birthplace

I have no further recollection of that journey to Winnipeg, nor any clear memory of our arrival in that muddy village. I do remember, however, that we went to live in a row of houses, all built alike, all having bay windows; floors where the frost gathered around the doors and baseboards; and facing upon a street where two planks represented the last word in a civic improvement.

In wet weather, the road, like an angry sea-serpent looping along, dripped a red, gummy spume, through which horses and men slithered and slipped, and often enough, to my vast amusement, sank half-way to their knees. Rubbers were sucked off with a hungry, smacking sound, and the feet of the horses glug-glug-glugged endlessly. In winter patches of ice formed in the low spots, and the little ridges of dirty snow made the sleighs jolt and screech as they flew by to the sound of singing bells.

Winter, I discovered, had compensations. It was bad to have your feet always cold, and disagreeable to run into the kitchen only to find every chair spread with frozen clothes off the line, but it was pleasant to make a clear spot on the snowy windowpane and watch the hurrying world go by. No one ever got stuck in the winter time. Horses were never beaten to make them strain and struggle in a sickening manner. No angry shouts and rumble of ugly words rent the air. In the winter, all sorts of queer contraptions and funny people came to see papa. There was a sleigh, with a top like a house, where a stove-pipe gave off feathers of smoke, and out of which men and women tumbled like the animals out of the Ark. They came from Icelandic River, and sometimes they brought a gift of fish, deer meat, or mutton, and now and then a bag of wool. Most of the men had whiskers and smoked short pipes, which made me think they were all grandfathers. For papa neither smoked nor wore a beard, but only now and then dipped snuff from a pretty silver box; and his moustache was short and carefully trimmed. His hair, too, was sleek and black as the fur on my new tomcat, whereas these visiting grandfathers, for the most part, were thatched with sandy-coloured straw.

The women either brought babies, or, when they left after a stay in Winnipeg, took babies back with them. It was a little tiresome, to be sure, and yet there was a certain thrill in seeing the door fly open, and bundles of people rolling in, with whiffs of frosty air circling them in clouds. There was always a lot of laughter, mysterious headshakes, and once the visit got under way, pots and pots of coffee, with plates of mamma’s famous pancakes. Sometimes, too, there was singing, and a queer kind of chanting, which papa called Kveda, and told me I should listen, for the verses were full of ancient wisdom. It was a dignified sort of noise, so I usually listened willingly enough, especially if papa let me sip from his saucer when mamma was not looking.

There came a time, however, when papa failed to come home. He had been taken sick, and carried to the hospital. It was a little colder in the house thereafter and the pancakes had a flat taste, and mamma drank her coffee black.

Not long after that, mother dressed me in my little coat, and said we must make a visit to Great-Uncle Jonathan. She had work to do, she said, and I must be a good child and stay with uncle until she fetched me. It was fun following the crack in the plank sidewalk, and speculating upon where we were going. When we got there I saw before us a small white house, with two trees in front of the low veranda. There was a little hall, where mother took off my coat and hung it on a nail. It was queer, I thought, that no one met us. But a moment later, when we stepped into the room giving off the hall, I understood, and was struck dumb.

In the middle of the room was a strange sort of chair, with big yellow wheels and a high yellow back. In the chair sat a man dressed in a purple gown, his legs covered with a plaid shawl. His eyes, deep, brown, and luminous, turned on us out of a serious face that looked parchment pale in contrast with the long, flowing, curly brown beard that rippled down his bosom.

It was an awesome moment! Made doubly so when I heard my mother say, quite calmly: ‘Kondu saell godi min.’

I clutched her skirt. Surely even a mother ought not to say to the Lord, careless-like, ‘How do you do, my dear!’ But no thunderclap followed. Just a very human rumble, replying, ‘So-so-so-so—what have you got there behind your skirts!’

I decided to risk a peep. The bearded monarch was smiling—actually smiling. Oh, thought I, with boundless relief. It was not the Lord God Almighty after all. God was not the smiling sort. It must be Moses …

Even that was not quite accurate, I learned to my astonishment. The venerable gentleman was very like a patriarch, and, as I was many years later to see, actually resembled Michelangelo’s Moses, but he was just my Great-Uncle Jonathan, an old, old sea captain, many years home from the sea.

That was the beginning of the happiest months of my entire childhood. Great-uncle was confined to an invalid’s chair, having suffered a stoke which left his legs paralysed. It was a secret between us that I took care of uncle, and not uncle of me. He was a beautiful old man of impressive dignity, and full of quiet humour. His little, plainly furnished room, which we very shortly turned into a lively universe, round which we shipped from port to port, lives unspoiled in my memory.

There were shelves with books, and shells and stones, and dried sea-urchins. Sometimes uncle secreted raisins on these shelves, for which we cruised under full sail. The raisins I disliked, as all sweets, but I ate them in the same reckless spirit in which Mother Eve ate of the forbidden fruit. Raisins came from Spain, great-uncle said, and in Spain the señoritas were a joy to behold.

Ah, there were pretty girls for you!’ said my uncle, stroking his beard, and twinkling at me with his warm brown eyes. ‘Little devils, too. They danced the heart from your breast, wore it for a posy a day or two, and tossed it away with a laugh.’

In Barcelona there was a girl he still remembered. A slip of a black-eyed thing with a rose in her midnight hair, and laughter on her scarlet lips. Ah, she made a merry fool of more than one poor sailor, said my uncle, sighing. But it was all so long ago, he remembered nothing very clearly, except the sound of her twinkling feet—he sometimes heard them now, on the windowpane, when the hard, bright prairie rain was falling.

I, too, heard her after that. When the dusk came down on a wet and windy day I loved to sit at my uncle’s feet, listening for the tiny castanets, and the swish of invisible, silken garments. For her sake I would have eaten a pound of raisins and never turned a hair!

There were other reminiscences, less appealing, but full of thrilling marvels. Great-uncle had been a deep-sea sailor, and visited many ‘foreign parts.’ For instance, he had been to Scotland, where the gentlemen wore petticoats; to England, too, in the days when the good queen, now so pious and severe, was a little young thing with lively grace in her eye.

Grace of heart, too, she had, said my uncle, ‘God save her Majesty!’ Why, when the Queen learned that little boys no bigger than myself were poked up the chimneys of rich people’s houses—and, possibly, the palace—to clean away the soot, she put her foot down instantly. It had to stop, she said—or the chimneys widened to admit bigger boys.

What was more, the little queen put an end to gibbets, said my uncle. Gibbets were something bad people dangled from, and blew about in the wind like socks on a line. It spoiled the landscape, and hurt the feelings of any nice young lady who came upon such a sight at the cross-roads. So all the gibbets were instantly chopped down. There were other things which the young queen did not like: women crawling about in mines, when they ought to be home raising babies for the nation; riots in Ireland, where the people were always short of potatoes, and just as short of temper, so uncle said. And much more of which I have no recollection, because it was entirely outside my infant ken.

When he spoke of the sea, and the flying ships, with the winds of the world at their backs, I did not have to understand. I could feel the wet spray in my face, and see the dolphin dancing in the sun. I shivered when the storms blew up, and knew beyond doubt what trials lay ahead for crew and cargo when a red ring lay around the moon. It did not frighten me when ‘another poor devil went overboard,’ nor seem at all strange that his poor, grey ghost should be seen aimlessly flitting up and down the rigging. Ghosts held no more terror for me than the make-believe spirit inside myself, the irrepressible creature that played in the puddles by the corner pump, thought nothing at all of climbing the roof to touch the stars, and even said, in its heart, a hundred times: I won’t be a girl to sew a fine seam and rock a little cradle!

Sometimes we kept off the sea, and pillaged about on the land. ‘Now, let me think,’ great-uncle would begin, as soon as the door dosed behind mamma. ‘Where should we go faring to-day, little one?’

‘Not on the seas, uncle dear, the good ship needs repairing after the gale yesterday.’

‘True, true, so she does,’ he replies. ‘Well then, we shut our eyes and fly to Iceland, where the Hidden People found a lasting refuge when the Lord God cast them off.’

How was that, I wanted to know, suspecting that the Lord God had started another flood, or burned another Tyre for the fun of it.

‘It was like this,’ my uncle began. ‘Mother Eve had spent a busy day setting her new house to rights. A very tiresome business for a body straight from Eden, where work was quite unknown. It was coming on evening, with a nice wind blowing from the coco-nut groves. Adam was daudling down by the well, most likely admiring his beard. There was no help to be had from him, and the children were all unwashed and dirty. All but Cain and Abel, that is. They, to be sure, had their faces scrubbed, and sat on a bright new stool, swinging their legs. At that moment, poor Eve looks towards the palms, and sees where the Lord is walking, taking the air, communing with himself. What’s to be done, thinks Eve, terrified to be found as bad a mother as she was once found a mischievous maid. The Lord God was coming to call. Oh, she knew that in her bones. And here were all the little wretches, except Cain and Abel, covered with bramble scratches, berry stains, and plain dirt to boot.

‘”Quick, my little ones!” Mother Eve spoke sharply and waved her broom. “Run and hide, and for goodness’ sake keep quiet!”

‘So the Lord God finds a tidy house, a tidy woman, and, very politely, Cain and Abel leap down to let Him have the stool.

‘”How goes the struggle, Mother Eve?” the Lord asks, very kindly.

‘”Not too badly,” says Eve, “not badly at all, except that Adam leans too long on his hoe, to my thinking.”

‘”Hmm,” says the Lord, a bit of a twinkle in his eye. “And how are the children?”

‘”They could be worse,” says Eve, making a sign to Cain to stop digging up the dust with his toe. “They do very well on the earth, if I may say so.”

‘”Hmm,” says the Lord, surprised-like, but still very gentle. “And are these all the children, Mother Eve?”

‘Eve hung her head. How could she bring those little wretches into the presence of the Lord God, who was dressed in purple and gold with the power of life and death in His hands?

‘”Lord, these are all,” she said.

‘”Yea, only these,” poor Eve forswore.

‘Then the Lord rose, and His robes made a sweeping sound, as of many winds, and His voice was terrible as thunder.

”Hear me, then, Eve. What thou hast hidden, let be for ever hidden!”

‘That my little lamb, is how the Hidden People came to be,’ uncle finished. ‘And I’m not sure they got the worst of the bargain.’

Nor was I, when he had told me a tale or two. They had no souls of course—neither heaven nor hell was open to them. But it was very jolly to flit about, lightly as shadows, to live in little knolls, and build homesteads and churches in the heart of a mountain. It was worth doing without a soul, when you could disappear through walls, walk on water as easily as on dry land, and enter a rock as readily as a mortal entered a doorway! What was more, the Hidden People had magic powers against which mere mortals were helpless. If they chose to build a house in a nice green knoll in the bishop’s field, his lordship knew better than to have the grass cut. Once, a foolish fellow attempted such a trick, and all his hay flew away in a wind that swooped out of a calm sky, like a hawk a-hunting. Oh, it wasn’t safe at all to disturb the peace of fairy dwellings! Indeed, if you were wise, you kept the larder unlocked, just in case it was a hard year below, and the hidden tenants needed a bit of meal or slice of smoked mutton. When they were treated with kindness, the Hidden People watched your cattle, and saw to it that no evil befell them.

They were kindly baggages, on the whole, said my uncle—a little too given to vain attire, perhaps, and to the light fantastic, but for that he could not seriously blame them. A wench in homespun, with lead in her feet, was a sad sight anywhere. No, if they had any real fault, it was the passion for stealing human babies. Poor things, they could not forswear the hope of somehow obtaining an immortal soul.

These tales were a perpetual joy. They absorbed me so completely that sometimes I wondered if I were not a changeling myself. It might very well be, for my thoughts were very foolish, I knew, and, moreover, I had overheard mamma telling a visitor I had been the smallest baby. In fact, a funny little thing, only four pounds, and with black hair to my shoulders! That was odd, when you came to think of it. The last two babies—whom God had given and taken away, as seemed to be His habit – were much bigger than that, and with very little hair on their little round heads.

But, if uncle’s stories absorbed me, the day arrived when another obsession obscured every common fact. That was when I mounted an empty apple box, and started telling tales myself. Time flew, thereafter, and if mamma was late in coming for me, I scarcely noticed. Indeed, I sometimes forgot I was her little girl at all, and bound to go home to a chilly house and a dish of porridge. And not until the day when mamma was much later than usual, had it ever occurred to me that uncle might have a family.

He had always been alone in his quiet kingdom of dreams when we arrived in mid morning, and we had left him in similar, cheerful peace, at five in the afternoon. On this occasion, however, a tall, angular lady, in a long black dress that poked out at the back, like the hump on the kitty when something scared him, swept in on a gust of cold wind.

‘Skotan’s vedur!’ cried she, kicking the door shut with her heel, for there was a big bag in one hand and an umbrella in the other. The autumn wind was cold, but she was colder, I thought, watching her put away the umbrella, the bag, and the stiff black hat from the top of her head, and hang up her jacket, that had a thousand buttons from chin to stomach. The wind was dreadful, the streets were dreadful, the dressmaking shop where she worked was dreadful—in fact, everything in this dreadful place worse than dreadful, she said, in a running-river voice that raised the goose-flesh on my skin.

Striding to my dignified uncle, she kissed the top of his head, yanked the pillow he liked under the small of his back up under his shoulder-blades, and, with a crack of a smile in her thin, sallow face, said smartly:

‘That’s better! How are the feet? Were you cold? Did you eat the sole I fixed for your lunch?’

Then, as if seeing me for the first time, she exclaimed, eyeing me severely: ‘So that is Lala! Goodness, child, what makes your face so red? I hope you aren’t getting a nasty fever!’

‘The little thing is shy, Bella,’ uncle defended me.

‘Nonsense! Don’t put ideas in her head,’ Bella retorted. ‘Here, child, you need not be shy with me. Come, I’ll fix you a nice drink to cool your blood.’

I did not want anything to drink, but when she reached out a strong, lean hand for me, I went along to the pantry. I remember the rites of that drink to the last detail. She took a glass, into which she poured a little vinegar, added a spoonful of sugar, some water, and a pinch of soda to make it fizz.

It had a dreadful taste, but I knew better than not to drink it, and said, besides, ‘Thank you,’ as bravely as I could.

On the way home, that evening, I plucked up courage to question mamma. ‘Who is Bella?’ I wanted to know.

‘Bella is your uncle’s wife,’ mamma astonished me by saying. And then I saw that she was laughing in a silent way, that she always had when greatly amused. So I dared to add:

‘But, mamma—uncle is awfully old!’

‘That was the trouble,’ she said. ‘Yes—that was the trouble.’

There the matter rested. Years later, I was to hear a common version of that belated marriage. Uncle Jonathan had been caught in a weak moment, while he was ill! Too old for adventure, and retired from the sea, Bella’s practical ministrations were doubtless a welcome panacea for his loneliness. A good wife she proved, at that! So my mother always declaimed, a bit militantly. A good, sensible wife, who cared for him in sickness and health. But I, who remembered the twinkling castanets, that danced for him in the prairie rain, sometimes wondered—for what had a bed, and a fire, and a piece of fried sole, to do with happiness?