3 Introducing Job’s cycle
These happy days came to an end. My father was home from the hospital, and, although far from well, was soon at work again. There was no one now to whom I could tell my thoughts. Mamma was for ever busy. She had a passion for keeping things scoured and scrubbed. Even the stove had its face rubbed until it shone like a mirror. When you carried water from a pump half a block away, or melted snow after the winter had set in, all this washing and cleaning consumed a lot of time. Moreover, these household activities were only the beginning of mamma’s labours. There were endless socks and stockings and mitts to knit, besides clothes to be mended and made for others.
The knitting had compensations. It was generally dusk before she got round to it, and then she would pull up the high-backed rocking-chair to the side of the shiny black stove, where the kettle hummed its own little tune and the cat purred under the fire-box. It was fun to draw up my little chair, too, and watch the glinting needles fly in mamma’s small, pretty hands. She was proud of those hands, and proud of her beautiful, chestnut hair, coiled in heavy braids at the back of her head. She had other pride, as well, which I could not then understand. And yet, when she sat there, small, and straight, and still, in her highbacked chair, I always half expected she might wave her hand, like the good queen who put down gibbets, and, in a trice, transform the sad old house. And quite often something not unlike that did happen.
For mamma would tell me a story. Not the saucy sort of yarn that great-uncle loved to unfold with lavish detail, and laughter in his eye. There were no twinkling toes and fleeting gallantries in mamma’s sagas. While the cat purred and the kettle sang, I was made to feel how seldom the high-hearted pursued the pleasant paths of common happiness. Heroes fell upon their swords, forsworn to honour, and their ladies, equally stern, shunned such ignoble weaknesses as tears and lamentation.
There was Brynhild, the gleaming warrior maid; Isolde the Unlucky; and Gudrid the Fair—though what was fair about a maid so full of vengeance, I never could see. Her wilful story cast a chill on my child heart, and yet, when mamma recited the famous confession Gudrid made to her son, when she was old, and become a holy recluse, tears choked me: ‘Now will I tell thee this: to him was I worst whom best I loved!’
There was something grandly tragic beyond my ken in those sagas. I heard them with interest, not unmixed with awesome fear. What I liked much better were the times when mamma brought out the spinning-wheel, and I sat at her feet, carding tufts of wool, listening to the fascinating histories of Snow White and Rose Red and the Seven Dwarfs, Kitty, the King’s Daughter, and the pretty tale of Laufey and Lineik.
There came a morning, however, that put an end to these lovely pleasures for quite some time. I awakened with a horrible, choking sensation, that rapidly increased. My body was on fire, my head spun with queer noises, and nothing that any one could do eased the growing misery. The old doctor who had dosed us for simple ailments wrung his hands in despair. He had thought this a case of aggravated croup, he said, but now he surmised that the ‘infant-killer’ had picked me for its victim. It was diphtheria!
My poor parents looked at each other in fear. If he had said it was the bubonic plague their hearts would have suffered no greater chill. For, in those not so distant days, diphtheria was almost as fatal a scourge. If only we were nearer the centres of civilization, the old doctor moaned. He had read of an anti-toxin just discovered, that was being used with miraculous effects. But we were not on the highroads of civilization. We were in an isolated frontier town, far from all such blessings.
That I am still alive to tell the tale is certainly due to a singular circumstance. A friend of my mother who lived at a considerable distance, was suddenly obsessed by the feeling that she should visit us. It was very cold, and, so far as she knew, there was no particular reason for the nagging urgency that oppressed her. By all the rules of common sense, she should have waited for decent weather. But neither common sense, nor the prospect of a long, tiresome walk in sub-zero weather, was strong enough to obliterate that odd feeling of urgent need calling her. At twilight, she could resist the pull no longer, and started out, feeling a little foolish but determined to act on the driving impulse.
Once inside our stricken house, this wonderful woman took matters into her own hands. She sent for her own physician, Dr. Chown, at that time one of Winnipeg’s outstanding medical men. Neither prestige nor poverty affected his zeal. He fought for life as grimly and tirelessly as a soldier fights for the shining thing he calls honour, on whatever battle-front. Dr. Chown literally leaped at the case, because the odds were all against him—if there were even one chance in a thousand, he meant to fight for that chance. And so the long struggle began.
What frantic measures were attempted are of no particular consequence now. But I remember, with ineradicable vividness, the first of many evils. I remember the insufferable tent, made of heavy blankets, where my father was to hold me over a tub of boiling water, kept at white steam heat with hot stones. I remember it so well because, in my choking agony, I clutched at papa and moaned: ‘Take me out, papa—I’m gone any way!’ Yes, I remember it, for suddenly my father’s tears were a cooling rain on my burning face, and the smothering walls fell away …
Dr. Chown eventually called in a young surgeon whose reputation was already enviable. What his exact theory was, in regard to this particular case, only heaven knows. But he decided that the most feasible way of saving me was by the insertion of some sort of tube into my throat—presumably to act as a repository for the phlegm and poisonous secretions. It was to remain not more than twelve hours. Thereafter, the pressure would be too great.
The brilliant surgeon may have been overly busy—those were days of an under-staffed hospital—or he may simply have forgotten that an immigrant’s child was battling for life in an obscure corner of the town. At any rate, he failed to return in the twelve hours. But when Dr. Chown made his call, that awful morning, he took just one glimpse of the purple, squirming bundle that fought for breath, bleeding at the nostrils, mouth, and even the finger nails, and out he flew to his rig, and across town, in a mad chase that was to become history in our slice of the world.
A chastened surgeon returned with him. Somehow, that frightfully entangled device was literally torn up from my tortured throat. How, I mercifully never knew, for nature had done what medicine dared not do—I was unconscious.
The point of all this came much later. One morning, awakening from a foggy sleep, I overheard voices: ‘She will live,’ some one said, ‘but I’m afraid her voice may be lost—that she may not speak —’
Terror, such as only a helpless child can know, almost stopped my heart. Oh, I knew the meaning of those whispered words. Never to sing at the top of my voice when I was alone in the house and mamma busy elsewhere. Never to speak, even to myself, the crowding thoughts that flocked to my head. I opened my mouth to scream, only to find how right the whisperers were. No sound came out! Frozen with fear, I lay there, my little body too weak to move, and the voices going on and on just beyond the doorway. It was then, all at once, that something fierce, something stronger than fear, rushed to my aid. I remembered those stories told on an empty apple box. I would not lose my voice. No, no, I would not! I had to have a voice to go on telling Uncle Jonathan my little stories …
When my mother came in, I was crying soundlessly. That was another thing I must not do, I was told. It would hinder my getting strong again. I must be quiet, and very, very still. I must go on patiently taking the endless broths, fed with a spoon, and swallow without complaint the syrupy stuff, bitter sweet, from the big brown bottle the doctor had left.
Days and nights dragged out their endless length. Except for the visits of the doctor who each morning left something in my numb little hands: a yellow orange; a bright red apple; and sometimes a silver shiny coin; nothing relieved the pain-filled monotony. The nights were the worst, however, for then, so often, I broke into a sweat, reliving the choking horror, and all that went with it. Those nights would have been an unrelieved nightmare, but for my faithful, black cat, who so often crept into my bed, and, quite as though he understood my misery, snuggled, warm and loving, close to my troubled heart.
My father had lost many days’ work while I was so desperately ill, and now was compelled to work overtime, late into the night, in the futile hope that somehow or other he could thereby meet the cost of this protracted illness. His worry must have communicated itself to Dr. Chown, who, perhaps, understood that one may be poor with honour, and that the handicap of language does not necessarily condemn one to insensitive ignorance. At any rate, one Sunday Dr. Chown simulated the greatest interest in a chest of drawers papa had made from an old oak bed. It was marvellously done, he said. Papa’s bookshelves were another wonder—although made from nothing better than cheap pine boards. Now, if only he could get flower-boxes made as well as that, said the doctor, sighing. But, of course, skilled craftsmen in any line were not to be picked up for odd jobs like that. Naturally, my father understood what genuine human goodness prompted these reflections. Very gladly he made the doctor’s flower-boxes, and what else the generous physician invented as his need. But papa was not prepared to receive, for these inadequate tasks, a cancelled bill! Such kindness had not been our experience in Canada. It was a miracle that melted some of mamma’s bitterness against what had always been little better than humiliating exile. There were tears in papa’s eyes when he told her of it, and I remember the white look of her face when she answered:
‘So then—there are gentlefolk in this country!’
No doubt, she was thinking back to her old home at Reygholt, in the famous deanery, where life moved with dignity, and charity was something more than a pious word. To that ancient, historic estate, where a noble Norse chieftain had raised his booths and written his famous laws, and where, in later times, dignitaries of the Church pursued their homely ways, cherishing many admirable customs. Kindly customs, such as the housereadings, of which mamma so often spoke, when all the household assembled in the badstoffa, and the old dean read from the ancient sagas, from poetry, or holy writ. And, always, at the close, in that quaint household, the mistress and her daughters waited on the servants, for this was their hour of respite, and the little courtesy an unspoken reminder of the Greatest Servant, who came, not to be served, but to serve others.
That way of life, almost feudal in its dignity, and fixed, substantial habits, my mother never forgot—and, perhaps, never forgave herself for leaving, as she had done on a romantic impulse, and against her people’s wishes. But of that, I as yet knew nothing, nor could then have understood. I only knew that Dr. Chown softened her attitude toward the new country, and perhaps raised a hope that one day her children might redeem themselves from the bitter bondage of straitened circumstances. For never, like my incurably idealistic father, could she console herself with poetic fancies—believe any but concrete deeds were of any particular value. One kindly, quiet deed eclipsed a million easy sympathies, in her estimation. And good impulses froze in the human heart when one’s circumstances prevented their natural expression. So she believed, and, neither then nor at any future time, was she ever to modify that opinion.
The doctor’s generosity had relieved my parents of a financial burden, but the anxiety over my voice still remained. Six weeks had passed, and not a sound came from my stricken throat. I was able to be up a few hours daily, and in all other respects was well on the way to recovery, although the doctor predicted bronchial difficulties, and urged the most stringent care. Kind friends came and patted me on the head, and said what a good child I was. Certainly, I was passive enough, and quiet enough, for there was nothing left of the lively spirit that had spun such enchanting vagaries in uncle’s fairy kingdom. I was no longer so frightened at being mute, for I had acquired a sort of infant stoicism, and by some instinctive reasoning accepted the futility of expecting any one to understand what really troubled me. But I so often wept furtively, when left to myself, thinking of those happy days in the little house that held an entire world.
There came a day, however, which has a place by itself in memory. Mamma had dressed me in the red cashmere frock she had made to celebrate my recovery. Round my neck was a string of white beads from papa, and on my feet little patent-leather slippers he had made after working hours. My long, yellow hair was tied back from my forehead with a fine new ribbon, and once again the time had come to take a special medicine and try my voice. Mamma drew up my little chair to her knees, and, when I was seated, poured out the sticky substance for me to swallow.
‘Now try to say something, child,’ she urged, as she had gently urged a hundred times before. Suddenly, I was afraid—terribly afraid. I had tried so often. Without much hope, my lips parted. I don’t know what I meant to say. I only remember the shock of amazed delight, when a thin, wavering squeak sounded in my ears. And then, all at once, I was in mamma’s lap, crying and crying, her arms tight, tight about me.
—
In a really smart chronicle, any struggle ends at a prescribed climax, preferably with a happy recompense for all concerned, save the wilful sinner. But, unfortunately for the artistry of this tale, life is not smart. Life is a colossus too great for smart declensions, and as indifferent to human vanities as to individual destiny. It cares nothing for the canons of art, and pursues its ironic rhythm, piling up anticlimaxes as a tidal wave piles up the wreckage it has made of some once seaworthy ship.
It would certainly be more agreeable, and, in the happy convention, to end the vicissitudes of my childhood with the recovery of my voice, and some divinely ordered recompense. But, as a matter of fact, that unforgettable illness was only the beginning of a prolonged Job’s cycle—a sort of melodramatic introduction to years of intermittent suffering. And the only compensation, truth compels me to acknowledge, was a gradual deadening of the acute sensitivity which had registered so many earlier impressions. Each illness seemed to thrust me deeper and deeper into a kind of mental stupor, which rendered the greater part of those years a blank.
