Philomene

’Elle est avec les anges.’ —
Thus wrote the Mother Superior, on the death of our old French-Canadian servant in the convent that had received her after twenty years in our employ.

‘ Philomène is dead ' I whisper it to myself, staring at the letter through a mist of tears — old pictures beckoning from a single sentence, in which a parcel of life is tied up and dispatched.

Philomène! Unique now among angels, as on earth among women! Confederate of my childhood to whom I was always ‘la petite,’ and she to me both changeless and immortal — who never picked up a word of English, or kept it secret if she did; and whose aim was to pass unnoticed, but not unobservant, and through loyalty and the favor of the saints to secure a comfortable berth in heaven.

She came to us when I was a baby in the town of Xin northern Quebec. My mother found her while on a summer visit to the Lower St. Lawrence. In one of those wild little villages named after some saint or other, which, like beads on a sagging thread, dot the winding road around the capes and bays of the north shore above Jadousac. Here promontories, like recumbent emperors, lean back upon the forest-crowned mountains, with the mighty river rippling to their knees. There are no half-lights; no mists to link up earth with heaven. The sun showers in triumphant splendor from a vault of matchless blue. Hundreds of feet below the Homeric headlands, the river stretches, glittering like a bowl of diamonds, to its purple rim on the horizon. It is a landscape designed by Titans and filled with intoxicating air. Storm tiaras hang flashing above the imperial hills, till they crush down, with frightful violence, on their brows.

The more inaccessible the district, where a village dwindles to a handful of log dwellings on the outskirts of virgin bush, the greater simplicity is found, embellished only by an oldworld courtesy now unhappily all but extinguished with the advent of rail and motor. Children, barelegged, would fly to meet the stranger’s wheeled approach. Raspberry-stained palms lurched them over the snake-fences, all in a row, to bob and cry, ‘ Bonjour, madame; bonjour, mademoiselle,' as your high calèehe, like a swung cradle, careened and hurtled past them down the stony road to the ravine, with white handkerchiefs and hair curlers at every window, for a glimpse of ‘ les Étrangers.’

Every French-Canadian village is dominated by an imposing church, with a glittering tin steeple and an imperative bell. It determines the duties and diversions of the parish, its fast days and festivals. The flock are devoted, and their cure has the largest house, with a carved porch and blinds, and a wooden statue of the Virgin on the grassplot, and in the rear a grove of sugar maples, to distinguish him from the frame shacks by which he is surrounded. His gig sparkles on Sundays, as his amazing pony tackles the precipitous hills with the gusto of its breed. He is usually more shrewd and hearty than æsthetic; affairs parochial occupy his thought, so that he does not notice the wind-swept buckwheat on its garnet stem, nor where the marguerites have turned the fields to foam. They are taken as a matter of course, and the scarlet mountains in October and the silver cascade in the deep ravine. But he will look up and shake his head at an abrupt hill confronting him, like a vast stark pincushion, punctured only by starveling stems that shiver in remembrance of the forest fire. And when the rock heaves a naked shoulder through the road, and precipitates his soliloquy to the ditch, pulling his brave horse from its knees, with a chuckle and a ‘Ho! marche done!' he expresses his philosophy of things.

And some dark night, through rain and tempest, you ’ll hear his buckboard tearing by, — a lantern flashing and a bell ringing on the wind, — and all who hear kneel down and pray for the departing soul to whom he is flying with the Holy Eucharist.

Little wooden farmhouses, here far scattered among desolate hills, could tell of incredible temperature in the long icy winter, when visits are infrequent and familiar roads forsaken for white tracks dimpling over fields and fences, and sleigh-bells jingle in the frosty air.

But, in summer, calèches are lively with good-humored folk, who rattle in through one another’s gateways with a grinding flourish, and tie their horses to the woodpile. If it is Sunday, they sway volubly upon varnished rockers set out along the narrow back verandahs, and smoke the home-grown weed. And the young women, when they are not in mourning, wear bright pink and sky-blue cashmere, with a rhinestone cross on a neck ribbon.

Should building funds run out before the house is finished, front steps are dispensed with, as a luxury, and you enter through the kitchen, leaving the front door, often of mustard with a blue sill, looking down in a depressed fashion to where its feet should be. Flowering geraniums block the seldomopened windows on either hand, and gaze enviously at the magenta dahlias that fringe the cabbages outside. Behind the house are the pig, the woodpile, and the clothesline, with dozens of infinitesimal garments stretched upon the breeze that comes over a field of blackened tree-stumps and wild raspberry, odorous with pine and sawn timber, from the forest edge.

The lot of the French-Canadian woman in the backwoods is an unenviable one. Her life passes between stove and washtub, in an unaired kitchen, pulled hither and thither by her swarming progeny. Her duties are as the sands of the sea, and vary from the weaving of homespun blanket and rag-silk carpet in winter, to the vegetables in summer, the pig, and the milking and baking of bread in outside ovens. In spring sucre d’arable must be made, and wildberry jams in September. And, all seasons through, there is ironing, and water to draw, and a cradle to croon to slumber. The prevalence of consumption keeps her in mourning for a vanished relative; she is sallow7 and stunted, with shadows beneath her eyes. But with hospitable hands and honest smile she greets you and refers all catastrophes to the Will of God.

Of such stock came Philomène. One of nineteen children, most of whom had petered out before the age of twelve, she struggled hard, working to maturity, ignorant of her precise age — one of those who, between thirty and fifty, register no material alteration.

She was not beautiful, and framed her quaintness in a staid severity of attire — fortunately for us, in that it precluded followers, men not being perceivers of spiritual grace beneath a plain exterior, in women. There was not much, however, in her small unshaded eyes that could distract them. Her hair receded from her forehead, taut and shiny, lest a stray lock describe an alluring curve above the ears, which stood out like doors ajar.

Yet something humorous and elusive clung about her ways, —an elfin quality, — intensely feminine in her small vanities. Her walk was a combination of stump and shuffle, due to wearing shoes immeasurably too small. Standing the greater part of the day, starting with Mass at five in the morning, her resultant sufferings were at times intense.

But her smile — who shall describe it? Who do justice to that momentary distortion of the features where goodhumor, incredulity, and cynicism strove for superiority, and joined issue in a quaint grimace. Starting with suppressed twinkles at the eyelids, it somehow got out of hand on the perpendicular lines between the nose and mouth, twitching nervously lest, in their broad departure, the teeth slip out and be lost. Something peeped at you and hid, and popped out again delightfully; and when you thought you had it, it was gone; and if the joke was irresistible, it set her face on fire, and nimble tears ran down to quench the glow.

‘Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!’ she would cry, wiping her eyes with a dish rag, ‘mais — c’est amusant! ’

She ate little and slowly, with due deference to the teeth that were but guests in their abode. Outside the kitchen window waved the green boughs that she loved, and in winter the wild snowflakes quivered on the pane. Squash she mixed with sweet potato, and poured molasses upon both. Pain doré made a supper, with a cob of steaming buttered corn. Tea was stewed till it was black and bitter, then sweetened well, and boiled again! And hot maple syrup over buckwheat pancakes almost made her wish to slip a fast-day.

When dawn pressed its ice-gray face against the rigid pane, she lifted the eider down and went to Mass. Crunch, crunch, crunch, — the creepers on her goloshes, — hail nor snow prevailing, she crept solitary along the marble streets in the black, semi-arctic weather, clutching a woolen cloud tightly round her neck, and a wee fat devotional book to her bosom.

Once only she missed, in fifteen years. It was the sole occasion we heard of when the other sex was in her pursuit! She gave him her purse, — to avoid unmaidenly disputes, — and bent homeward from the corner of the street, sobbing, startled, and forlorn!

’L’église,' she would murmur, with her head on one side, deprecatingly, as if it were the name of a lover, a kind of bridling whisper on her reverential tongue. It was her solace in grief, the source of all her joy, the spring of secret emotional excitement, a harbor in shipwreck, and frequented, as often as health, strength, and duty permitted; and that a great part of this time was spent in intercession for us heretics, we were well aware, and quite comfortable about it. Her earnings had given a brother a theological career, and, later, a handsome funeral. But he continued being expensive after he was dead, for, though she paid for innumerable Masses to lift his soul from Purgatory, yet the consummation seemed eternally protracted!

She never thought for herself, because there were saints for every difficulty! And should they not measure up to requirements, she could fall back on the priest. The first claimed her unremitting service, the last her pence. The Virgin guarded her umbrella in the church porch, and St. Anthony would find her thimble. And though solitary, she was not lonely, as those who have no God. Some spirit kept her company. You may be sure of that.

This propinquity of saints, however, had a certain awkwardness, in that she would not wash herself en bloc, as it were, though scrupulously clean in her attire and person, but only en morceaux — it being her proud boast that the good God had never seen her undressed!

When my mother, initiating her into household ways, flung open the bathroom door with, ‘Now, Philomène, you can have a bath as often as you please,’ — ‘ Jamais, madame, jamais,’ came the scandalized reply.

Though she was godliness itself, yet her ideas of truthtelling were rudimentary, and her prevarication saved me often a predestined spanking.

‘Good old Philomene, excellent creature’—I nearly clapped my hands, doubled up in the pantry cupboard, — my ear gummed to the hinge, — on her earnest asseveration that I had never even been seen there; whereon my mother’s light footsteps searching for yesterday’s macaroons would turn and melt away unconvinced!

It should be stated, in extenuation of this reprehensible characteristic, that I was her ‘ petite,’ and oftener ‘pauvre petite’ the superfluous adjective evoked merely an excuse for the adroitness which had saved me from disgrace. The exercise of wit, however dubious, was a matter of self-congratulation to her; and should she consider herself in mortal sin upon occasion there was ‘l’église,' to which she repaired for absolution in not exceeding twenty minutes. O consummate, selfless, and commiserating liar! How often since, I have bewailed the want of your good offices. Perhaps now you are prevaricating with the saints. Forbear, lest they discover me and I am undone!

She had a habit — an exasperating one. And that was sniffing — not because of a cold, but as an all-comprehensive mode of expression: the most recondite feelings found an outlet here, failing mobility of gesture or fluency of tongue.

It was a short intake of breath through the nostrils, which represented a variety of emotions. She sniffed when pleased, very airily and trippingly; twice heavily, with eyes fastened on you, when she was impressed. It became a snort for disapprobation, and rapid and regular on the scent of some excitement. They were light and dainty sniffs when she was sentimental, and profound and slow at prayers, when meditation glued her lips.

In short, a most invaluable barometer for her mental weather.

Of course there were the ordinary, everyday, what we children designated as ‘corn-broom’ sniffs, indicative of nothing but her physical whereabouts and natural dislike of her arch-enemy, dust.

On evenings too cold to venture out, she sat in the kitchen, her back against the hot-water coils, and her stumpy slippers drawn up on the chair rungs from the razor-like draught that trickled in under double doors and turned the felt bordering white. Her little rough hands would catch on the coarse wool, as she bent like a black insect over interminable knitting for small nephews, with her sleek hair swirled into a tight button on top of her head.

Then, straightening her aching back, she would pull out a rosary and begin her prayers.

But at this juncture, rising softly with a surreptitious sniff, she would set the door ajar that led into the diningroom. This latter opened into the drawing-room, separated only by portières. Here I would be found, whipping ragtime from a banjo. It seemed to stimulate the bead-telling in some obscure fashion, for her monotonous droning continued unabated, if not accelerated, in the kitchen, by the negro melodies in the parlor!

Both found distraction along different ways. But the coon songs were irresistible.

Something in the thunderstorms that broke up the stifling heat of our short summers drew out a latent grisliness in her disposition. Superstition clothed her in deadly fears — yet she did not dislike being terrified, or to terrify!

When the sun had slunk through a chink in heaven, and closed the gates with thunder, her step was heard upon the kitchen stair. There was unwonted vigor and forgetfulness of corns in the stumping shuffle that ascended to close the shutters of the house, bringing them to with ominous claps, her green eyes glinting with excitement scarce suppressed, which made me hold on to her and follow her about imploringly. A sense of importance obliged her to gaze like a Delphic oracle upon the sky, conscious of my awe-struck dependence.

‘Ça va mal!' she would snap, with a furtive gleam, sniffing the coming storm. If my mother was out, she took me on her lap in the darkened room, and between one sky-explosion and the next, when the blinding rain was shot with sudden flares reminding her of the cloud-bursts in her mountain home, told me terrible tales of lonely happenings and village tragedies. It was to divert my attention, I suppose, from the immediate present; for I would sit, paralyzed with fear, watching her lips and holding tightly to her hand.

Something almost of admiration in my fascinated gaze provoked her, upon one occasion, to eclipse her former stories. For when I had begged God to spare us both after all the ironmongery of heaven had fallen on the roof, she nursed me and dried my eyes; and, when I was quieter, told me of a young girl who, being struck dead in a week of unnatural heat, had been buried too quickly. When they exhumed her, she was found to have — here Philomène dropped to an appalling whisper — ‘mangé son epau!'

Never shall I forget the thrill of horror evoked by this gloating elf, the shriek in the chimney, and the blinds rimmed with viperish light.

She did not like children or animals. She liked snow-shoveling. It was her passion and delight, as it was mine.

At night our hearts beat in unison, though in separate chambers, when a voracious blizzard suddenly swooped down upon the city, roaring for admittance and hurling clouds of foaming snow above the housetops. The frenzied onslaught on the pane spelled hours of happy snowr-shoveling, and scarcely could I sleep for excitement, waiting for the day. On rare occasions, I was allowed out in the backyard with Philomène at night. There we would dig for an hour, and start a roofless tunnel to the fence, to admit the milkman in the morning. Oh! the rapture of it, the savage joy in battling with the elements! Furred to the nose-tip, ears tied down with lappets, and feet padded into moccasins with newspaper. A frightened moon, glimpsed

through a blinding snow-curtain, went spinning down the icy sky. We would bend in unison, and straightening, stamp and leap into the air and groan delightedly.

‘ Mais-c’est-fret,’ from Philomène (she meant froid), with a tremendous sniff from a nose, a mere sliver of scarlet in the scrouging wind that snatched her words and flung them on the night.

It sent a dagger through our furry backs, and turning vengefully, we would hurl a shovelful of snow upon it. It died shrieking in derision, to return surreptitiously when we were weak with exercise, and putting steel fingers between our chattering teeth, shake us into tissue paper. Breath came short and fast; the skin cracked as by the lash of whips; eyes gummed into a fringe of ice-balls, and the jaw became immovable.

Then the whole universe was turned to snow, peopled only by two bearlike grotesques still active under a frozen moon.

Now the snow-shovel is rusted and the rosary laid aside; and the needles still that her chapped fingers plied through the rough wool which dried her secret tears.

Was she happy? No one knows, for the retiring soul was well served by its enigmatical mask.

But now, perhaps, the Blessed Virgin, to whom so many prayers for my heretical soul ascended, will keep her comfortingly near, sitting on a bit of her blue robe, with her Pain doré.