Читать книгу The Stream Runs Fast - Nellie Letitia McClung - Страница 5
ОглавлениеManitou—1896
When I wrote the last sentence of "Clearing in the West" in 1935, I had every intention of continuing the story, as soon as we were settled in our new home at Lantern Lane, six miles from Victoria. But the new life, in this quiet neighborhood, with its delights of field and flower, its mellow climate, and the long season for sowing and reaping, its new trees and flowers, and the easy pace of living fascinated me, so instead of writing about the past, I wrote two books about this pleasant habitation of the blessed. I knew I had a story to tell of other days, a story of Canada and its march of progress, but the days were golden with sunshine and full of lark song, and the drone of bees. The lotus flower had cast its spell upon me, and I was sure that there would always be time to write. I was like the beauty parlor operator, at whose hands I once received a check-over, lasting two or three hours, during which time we discussed many problems of this world and the next. She had given me a fascinating picture of her matrimonial adventures, three all told, with another one pending, with interesting pictures of the many jobs she had held in between. When I was leaving she asked me if I would mind telling her how I made my living—if it was a fair question. I considered it was a fair question and told her I was a writer. She expressed an eager interest, and said she wished she had known, "for you know", she said wistfully, "that's what I've always planned on doing myself, when I am incapacitated for everything else".
"Clearing in the West" ended in the approved manner. The two young people stood on the rear platform of a "mixed" train and saw the sun break through the dark shoulder of a rain-cloud and knew that "tomorrow would be fine".
One hundred and one miles southwest from Winnipeg, Manitoba, lay the little town of Manitou, set in the hollow of the rolling grove-dotted prairie and there we lived for the first fifteen years of our married life. It had first been called "Manitoba City", by some unimaginative person, but this was changed to "Manitou" long before our arrival. Five grain elevators, painted red, along the track, bore evidence to the fertility of the soil. The railway station, also painted red, stood at the bottom of the long Front Street, whose slope was sufficient for sleigh riding when the street was covered with snow; but the youngsters had better and safer hills and so left Front Street to its legitimate sober traffic.
We had the one drug store in Manitou and our living quarters were four rooms up the long stairway at the south side of the grim grey building. They were hot in summer and cold in winter, but we did not know that and it would not have mattered if we had known, for to us they were everything the heart could desire. The parlor and dining room, divided by an archway, hung with golden brown chenille curtains on an oak pole were in front, and from their windows we looked down on the street, a wide dirt road, with tying posts for the farmers' teams when they and their wives went into the store to do their "trading"; and that was not entirely a word left over from the posts of the Hudson's Bay, where Indians traded skins for flour and blankets. Our people brought in eggs and butter, and sides of bacon home-cured, and sometimes dressed chickens to the butcher shop.
Immediately beside our store was the Farmer's Store, some sort of a loose co-operative, whose proprietor worked in his shirt sleeves, protected by brown paper cuffs, but on Sunday wore striped trousers, and a Prince Albert coat and took up the collection in the Methodist Church, with a flower in his button-hole all the year round; (geraniums covered the bleak stretch from November till May).
I bought my first set of "good" dishes from him, blue willow pattern. We bargained a bit first, according to custom, but on my third visit he wrote the price on a piece of paper, shading it with his hand, as he would a match on a windy night, and let me see the magic figures. I had a feeling that this was a special price to me only, and for this moment only, and that was surely good salesmanship. I thought of it today, when wiping the last vegetable dish, complete with lid, the other fifty-four pieces having taken the unreturning way.
The suave proprietor had many good stories to his credit. One of these concerned the mean woman of the district who sold him a four pound stone in the middle of a crock of butter, receiving twenty-five cents a pound for it, and received it back the same day in a caddy of tea at sixty cents a pound. The story is a legend now and has been told in many forms, and no doubt has happened in many places.
Wes and I had about four dollars between us when our trip was over, but the rent was paid for the month and the down payment was made on the furniture. The local furniture dealer charged us 2 per cent a month interest, just to make us hurry with the payments, and no doubt kept a watchful eye on the furniture. We felt rich and secure in our four little square rooms above the drug store and have many happy memories of their kindly walls. I loved every dish and every pan and thought nothing could be more beautiful than the satin-striped wallpaper on the parlor and dining rooms, one stripe plain and one flowered. The centre table had a cover of Irish crochet, with raised pink roses, given to me by Minnie Smith, one of my pupils whom I taught in Treherne. The boys around town had given us a parlor suite, upholstered in Turkish design, each piece a different color. A hanging lamp was suspended from the high ceiling and was raised and lowered by manipulation of two chains ending in gold acorns; the shade, of frosted glass, was patterned in wild roses and morning glories and was finished with glass fringe which jingled when Adam McBeth's dray passed below on the street.
We had two pictures framed in oak, lovely sepia pictures of farm houses set in hilly country that ran to the sea, with cows on the meadows and curving roads leading to their rustic gates. We have them yet and they are still beautiful. The long windows had Nottingham lace curtains in a fern pattern, hanging from oak poles. We had two Brussels rugs and a fine oak dining table and chairs, which are still serving at a cottage at Matlock on Lake Winnipeg. They may burn, but they will never wear out. In the kitchen we had a good, square, black stove (a grim-faced bit of furniture compared with the painted ladies of today), but it had a good deep firebox and a fine oven and gave us assurance, and so did the drug store boxes and a good pile of wood in the back yard. Lumber was plentiful and there was no such thing as fuel conservation, so we burned the boxes light-heartedly, just as the farmers burned their straw piles—this was in 1896.
Some of my cooking experiments took queer turns, and on Wesley's suggestion I went to see Mrs. Cassin to find out how to cook an apple pie so the lower paste would be as light as the upper. He had boarded at the hotel before we were married, and liked Mrs. Cassin's cooking; her instructions improved my technique, but there were still lapses—such as lumpy gravy and the taste of soda in my biscuits.
One day a book agent came to see me about buying a cook book. The price was $3.00 and that was real money, but I must have been hitting an all-time low, for when Wes came in he cast his vote in favor of the purchase and produced the money. I thought he was just a bit too enthusiastic, but I did not analyze his motives too closely. I had no intention of being an apologetic cook so I welcomed the book and have leaned heavily on it all these years. It is called "Breakfast, Dinner and Supper" and now in its second binding is as good as ever, though some of its pages show definite traces of struggle. The Preserving section and the Home Made Candy are as full of history as an old tree. Cook books come and go; they are endorsed and guaranteed and "tested in our own laboratories", but when I want to know the whole truth on Pickling or how to stuff a Hubbard squash, I go to my fine old book with its blue oil cloth binding. I have never found it wanting. In its pages there are many interesting annotations, and it has long served as a loose-leaf scrap book, revealing much of the intimate life of our family. The first page bears an inscription in a widespread, wiggly hand, containing the information that this book was "presented to Mrs. R. W. McClung by her daughter, Florence McClung, in the year 1907" (which was the first year Miss McClung was at school). A yellowed sheet torn from a scribbler, bearing the nail mark where it was hung on the kitchen wall, contains the record of how the four eldest McClung children raised money for the Fresh Air Fund. Jack has fifty cents to his credit for making the highest marks in Grade Seven; Paul evidently contributed the same amount, but earned in a different way. His was the gilded coin of worldliness, earned by carrying wires from the station to the Cassin house, on the occasion of the Johnson-Jeffreys fight. Whether this contribution was made at the dictates of Paul's conscience or not I cannot remember; it may have been. For at that time Paul had the worthy desire to be a missionary. However, his zeal for the foreign field weakened after he had ridden around for a couple of days on Adam McBeth's dray. He said missionaries might not always have horses, and besides, they wouldn't be meeting trains every day. However, Paul came through with another contribution, which was good, honest, sweat-of-the-brow money, ten cents for weeding Willie Wyley's garden. Florence sacrificed ice-cream cones to the amount of twenty cents, and earned another five cents—so the record states—for going to the Baptist picnic. This item is a bit puzzling, for let no one think that the Baptist picnic was not a joyous affair. It is believed that there was a denominational feud between Florence and her friend, Margaret Chalmers, on the subject of sprinkling vs. immersion, and this five cents was paid in an effort to heal the breach between these two militant defenders of the faith.
Now I see I am getting ahead of my story. That's what comes of looking backward. Memory telescopes the past. The distant hills are seeming nigh. My hope is that the readers of this book have the same fine disregard for chronology that I have, and will be content to go in and out and find pasture.
