Читать книгу Chez Nous (Our Old Quebec Home) - Adjutor Rivard - Страница 9

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Our double-decked stove is of solid build and stands low on its feet. The massive sides are cast in a fanciful design where fabulous creatures are seen disporting themselves, their outlines worn to indistinctness. The great fire-box will take a three-foot log of unsplit maple, and in the day when bees were common the oven easily cooked a meal for twenty threshers.

In summer-time, when the sun tans faces and ripens the grain, the stove is idle; yet it holds the accustomed place full in the centre of the kitchen floor, and still makes itself useful as a pantry cupboard.

But no sooner does autumn bring the crisp and chilly days than the stove wakes from sleep; and all winter long its breath curls from the roof into the windless air, or whirls away, torn and ragged, on the blast. Through the months of cold, now loud, now low, it murmurs an unfailing tune; in those still nights which summon the spirits out to dance across the serene northern sky, the stove’s voice is even and regular and reassuring; but when the nor’easter rages, shrieking as it battles with the leafless trees, the stove roars angry defiance. It shields the dwelling from the fierce cold, and the comforting warmth rises to the dark rafters and spreads to every corner of the house, even to the best room which no one enters except on days of feasting or mourning. It thaws the powdery snow sifting unkindly beneath the door that cannot shut it out, toasts little red toes, warms the good soup to steaming.

The very soul of the house is it. Should the fire die within, and the plume of smoke vanish from the chimney, and the purr of its draught suddenly fall silent, the house would swiftly be lifeless. ‘Dead hearths, dead households.’ And the Canadian stove is as trusty a custodian of old tradition as ever was the hearth.

The smoke rises ... white into the windless starlight.

To him who has skill to light his pipe with a coal and who loves to smoke and meditate by a stove’s door, this guardian deity of the place affords as good counsel as the open fire.

Seated in a chimney-corner, one sets forthwith to dreaming, to the building of his castles in the air; and sadly watches them dissolve away with the dying embers, the mounting blue, the perishing spark. In front of your stove door a man must think; his mind runs to things of weightier consequence.

For the stove is serious-minded and full of wisdom, nor has it sympathy with idle unprofitable fancies. The airy visions which the song of the hearth conjures up are displeasing to this sober old fellow, and he stifles all the trivial and frivolous voices which rise from the fire-dogs in a chorus of whistlings and purrings and cracklings, and blends the wayward whimsical medley into a deep solemn drone.

Fearing, likewise, for those he loves, the allurement of dancing sparks, the shifting show of flames, the phantasies born of their fleeting shapes, he hides from the eyes of men his bed of glowing coals. The labour of the fire accomplishes itself privily in the secret inferno which his sides contain, and only the red eye that stares unwinking through the door tells the radiant martyrdom of the wood chanting a death-song within.

At dusk the neighbours drop in for a pipe; they arrive plastered with snow, and the stove is welcome to their hands stiffened with the cold. When they are grouped about its door, and the light has circled till all the pipes are going, this stove of the habitant likes to be entertained with talk of the land hard-gripped by the autumn frosts, of outbuildings in course of repair, of routine work on the farm and the monotonous labours of winter, of beasts cared for, wheat in barn, the sugar-bush that is to be tapped, the chances of the future crop. ‘On Christmas Eve it was almost as bright as day in the hay-mow, and that means a light stand of wheat next summer ... Last year the presage was the other way about, and, sure enough, we had a heavy yield to the very fences ... In the spring we shall hire Pierre the son of Grégoire; he ploughs a sight better than the rest of them and takes more sod ... We are going to clear to the sou’west of the rocky bit, on the other side of the big burning ... François’ Joseph is off to town to-morrow for advice; he wants to swap horses, for his notion is that the one he had from the dealer is not handy enough ... The lads snared a couple of hares yesterday; it is pretty early for them yet ... This evening’s snow-fall has nearly hidden the little trees marking the winter road; we shall have to be up to-morrow with the first streak of dawn to break a way through before the roadmaster comes along, for if he takes a fancy to go by early there will surely be a fine to pay ... He is not over-considerate, is the roadmaster; he puts you to no end of trouble for a trifle of a drift; and there are pitch-holes opposite his own place, too. Just as if when the good God sends the snow we-folks could hinder it drifting! ...’

The stove has strict views, but it allows one to amuse one’s self. Many a dance has it seen, soberly accompanied many a song, and hearkened to the best fiddlers of the parish. Feet now still have cut pigeon-wings before it in a style the young folks of to-day have clean forgotten. Winter gatherings take place of an evening in the room which the stove inhabits, and the best story-tellers bring out their yarns in turn—striving to show the nimblest wit, and best to carry the point of the joke to the very last word of the tale. The talk that you hear around the stove has nothing in it of the finikin and corrupted speech of the town; it is the plain and forthright tongue of the fathers and every word of it means precisely what it says.

And the stove remembers. It likes to hear the old folks often talked about; they who used to sit there once upon a time, and, pipe withdrawn, to puff the cloud that emphasizes a remark, with the same ruddy beam lighting their honest faces. The present master of the house, a son of the line, whose hair begins to whiten at the temples, bears their traits. Even as they, when night has fallen and the neighbours have gone homeward across the snow, will he kneel with wife and children in the cheerful warmth before the old figure of the Christ hanging on the wall; then the stove will not forget to add its familiar voice to the evening prayer.

The youngsters flock to their canopied beds and the lamp is quenched. Yet a little longer there is whispering before the stove in the gloom; the father as he smokes a last pipe and the mother with her beads still in her hands chat in a slow undertone of those things they like to keep just to their two selves, which are not for little ears: of memories and hopes, common to them and intimate, of anxieties which they must share. The wind has died, and out of doors all is still. Sole confidant in what is passing between its master and mistress, the stove murmurs very softly. Their heads incline to one another as this hour of close and tender converse carries them on into the night ...

The voices cease and everyone sleeps. Only the stove talks quietly to itself, and a gleam from its half-closed eye plays upon the wall and gives a shadowy life to this and to that. The smoke rises from the roof, white into the windless starlight. The stove is watching over the sleeping house.