Wonderful Patience Forbes, taking me to task for the frivolity of my world, sitting on the back verandah, her spectacles on the end of her nose, her knitting on her lap, her heelless slippers comfortably crossed, her little modest volume tucked away on a shelf in the Bibliothèque Nationale. She seemed to me very remarkable, and she seems even more so now. Time for most of us is just a process of disintegration, old age is often pitiful and ugly, but at the age of sixty-five Patience Forbes had the heart of a child and the robust enthusiasm of a student. She had been persuaded by the State Board of Education to write a series of text-books on birds, and in the evenings she would work in the room she called the museum, and I would sit watching her while she chewed her pen, rapped irritably with her hard old fingers on the desk, or went down on her knees before a shelf of books to look up some reference. Sometimes she would walk the floor and grumble—“Gracious, how difficult it is to write a decent sentence. English certainly isn’t my strong point. I write like a clucking hen. Style never was in my line.” And then she would laugh, her young, vigorous, chuckling laugh.
When I compared my life with hers, how could I not feel that there was justice in all that young American condemnation. Patience Forbes was old, she was poor, she went about in tram-cars, she worked for her living, and she was happy. There was no doubt that she was happy. She envied no man and no woman, and asked nothing of any one. She would not even let me help her. She said that she had everything she wanted and I was bound to believe her.
Early in August we went up to my Uncle Bradford’s camp in the woods at the head of the lake. He had written urging us to come and saying that if we didn’t he would come down to St. Mary’s Plains as he wanted particularly to see me.
A white steam-boat, with side paddles churning peacefully through the water, carried us for a long day and night and part of another day west by north-west, past little white straggling towns, calling at long piers to deliver mails and provisions, moving on and on, farther and farther across the wide shining expanse of water, away from the world of men. Timber schooners passed us, square-rigged, coming down from the great forest lands. The skies were boundless and light and high above the water. We moved in marvellous translucent space. The air was new as if the world had been created yesterday.
Uncle Bradford and his sons with their wives and children had built themselves log houses on the shore of the lake. The forest stretched away behind them as far as the Canadian border, and a great tract of it belonged to them, with its rivers, its game and its timber. Some of them were in the lumber business, others came there merely for the summer holidays. I found my Aunt Minnie there, and an even greater crowd of youngsters than in St. Mary’s Plains. Uncle Bradford, dressed in a red flannel shirt and a sombrero, ruled his camp like a Russian patriarch, and again I found every one interested in things that I had forgotten were interesting. There in that glorious pagan world surrounded by virgin forests they worshipped a stern and exacting God, read the Bible, and argued in the evening before the blazing log fire as to whether the mind were separate from the soul, or evolution incompatible with the principles of Christianity. And I wondered at them, for they were not afraid of their puritan God, nor weary of endless argument. Their consciences were clear. They could look God in the face, and their brains, if rather empty, were admirably keen.
I watched the women. They all seemed to have devoted husbands who assumed the sanctity of marriage to be the basis of life and took the beauty of their women for granted. Extravagant youngsters, how I envied them. Husbands who remained faithful lovers, wives who remained innocent girls, all contented and unafraid, and with their outspokenness, shy people keeping secret the sacred intimacy of love.
The children were splendid animals. They liked me and included me in their games. We used to go swimming before breakfast when the heavenly morning was crystal pale. I would slip from my cabin and join those little bronze figures, run through the clearing to the shore and down the wooden pier, stand an instant with them all about me breathing in the sweet air, then with a shout all together we would dive. I swam as well as any of those boys. It pleases me now to remember their respect for my prowess. And I could paddle a canoe and throw a ball like a man, and I caught the largest fish of all, a fine big salmon trout weighing fifteen pounds. My thought was—“I want a boy like one of these to become a man for Jinny. I want her to have a husband from my people.”
It was a delicious life. The air was fine and dry and sharply scented with the scent of pine woods drenched in sunlight. Each morning was a miracle as clear as the first morning of creation. Swift rollicking streams tumbled over rocks, fat salmon jumped in deep pools. Mild-eyed Indians came travelling down from the depths of the vast forest, paddling their lovely canoes of birch bark, laden with grass baskets and soft moccasins embroidered in beads. The nights were cold. One was lifted up into sleep, one floated up and away into sleep under sparkling stars, hearing the waves lapping the shore and the wind murmuring through the branches of the innumerable pines of the forest that spread away, further and further away, endlessly, countless trees murmuring a strong chant under the wide sky, stretching beyond the edge of the mind’s compass, as far as one could think, as far as one’s soul could reach out, the forest, the sky, the water, calm, untroubled, eternal.
Then suddenly something crashed into that crystal space.