Leaves from Lantern Lane E-Book

Nellie Letitia McClung

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

January 19th, 1935 was a perfect day to look at a house with the intention of buying. None of your beguiling, sunshiny, wheedling days that lowers one's sales resistance and makes almost any place in the country appear inviting. No, it was a rough, gray day, with razor blades in the wind and white caps on the sea. Not only that, but in spite of the cold, there had been down-pours of rain from the iron-gray clouds that had obscured the sun for weeks. Indeed I had a sinking feeling sometimes that the sun might never shine again. There was a finality about it all, a thick, settled, stubborn grayness.
We were not enthusiastic when we heard of another country place. No one could be enthusiastic about anything. The whole country, east and west, was in the grip of the worst winter since '79; but we had come to Vancouver Island to buy and we drove out the six miles to see the place. Nobody spoke. It was better to do anything than sit in the lounge of the hotel and look out at the slanting rain between us and Elbethel Chapel, or watch the motionless old ladies in their purple and gray nightingales, just sitting watching the fire, with no sound in the room but the ticking of a clock on the mantle. The hotel advertising mentioned that it was "a quiet place," and we found it had not exaggerated.

Leseprobe

LEAVES FROM LANTERN LANE

by

Nellie L. McClung

1936

© 2023 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782383839293

CONTENTS

Lantern LaneYou Can't Make it PayThe Onion-GrowerThe Threat of ThripsThe Tyranny of TriflesPlanting TimeNeighborhood TalkThe Purple LilyMore Neighborhood TalkA Day in VancouverA Tour of the IslandsDoes the Small Farm Pay?Handicraft RevivalThe Wealth in WordsConfessions of an Onion GrowerAn Onion Scrap-BookCan We Take It?Beach MeditationsThe Call of the WildOnions and OlivesFashion in FlowersThe Minister's WifeRoughageIn Praise of Green PeasWhere Can Safety be Found?On Leaving HomeThe HomemakersOutdoor ReligionSaturday Afternoon on the BeachDefensive Common-SenseThe Little DrifterThe ExpertLife's BalanceLearn to ForgetHappy EndingsLady Tweedsmuir Helps the PoetsThe Spirit of the GardenThanksgivingThe World of Trade and BarterThe Old ReaderWe Went to HollywoodThe Little Church

LEAVES FROM LANTERN LANE

LANTERN LANE

January 19th, 1935 was a perfect day to look at a house with the intention of buying. None of your beguiling, sunshiny, wheedling days that lowers one's sales resistance and makes almost any place in the country appear inviting. No, it was a rough, gray day, with razor blades in the wind and white caps on the sea. Not only that, but in spite of the cold, there had been down-pours of rain from the iron-gray clouds that had obscured the sun for weeks. Indeed I had a sinking feeling sometimes that the sun might never shine again. There was a finality about it all, a thick, settled, stubborn grayness.

We were not enthusiastic when we heard of another country place. No one could be enthusiastic about anything. The whole country, east and west, was in the grip of the worst winter since '79; but we had come to Vancouver Island to buy and we drove out the six miles to see the place. Nobody spoke. It was better to do anything than sit in the lounge of the hotel and look out at the slanting rain between us and Elbethel Chapel, or watch the motionless old ladies in their purple and gray nightingales, just sitting watching the fire, with no sound in the room but the ticking of a clock on the mantle. The hotel advertising mentioned that it was "a quiet place," and we found it had not exaggerated.

We drove out the six miles to Ferndale Road and saw the house, standing well back from the gate. "For Sale" signs leaned against the fence. We turned off the road and drove between two rows of cherry trees up the lane. The land sloped to the east and south, and even in the cobwebby light, it had a certain beauty. The house, a dark green, shingled semi-bungalow, looked old and comfortless, but any empty house on a dull day of drizzling rain looks like a woman who has just washed her hair.

We got out of the car, and went to the front of the house, and up the steps to the veranda, and then something happened which seemed like fate.

The sun came out! A sudden, unexpected flood of light ran over the fields and down to the sea. It lingered on the bright red roof of a white house on the right, almost hidden in the trees; it caught the wings of a wind-mill on a water tower below us; it lighted up the wall of evergreens across Ferndale Road to the north; it glittered on a white sail out on the sea. And then it was gone, and the woolly grayness rolled back. But we had seen the beauty of Gordon Head in that one bright, revealing flash.

The house had been empty for several months. Rain had filled the chimney and soaked through the plaster, pools of water stood on the floors, and the smell of wet lime added a touch of desolation. But we could see that the floors were straight, the windows opened easily on pulleys, and there were plenty of them; there were three fireplaces, and upstairs off one of the bedrooms was a sunporch, looking out to sea. Its windows were broken—old torn blinds hung crookedly, water stood on the floor, but none of these things mattered. The little place had the right feel. It was friendly and welcomed me in. Windows can be made whole, old blinds can be changed to new ones. I knew I would have bright draw curtains on the windows and the ceiling would be painted white, and I would put a light on the south wall, and my desk and filing cabinets would fit in, and I'd have a long hanging shelf for a few books above my desk—and when I looked up from my work I would see the sea! I would look out on a world of great waters!

Downstairs in the den there was a cobble-stone fireplace, and on the mantle I found a name "John Fullerton," and then I was sure this was the house for me, for was not my grandmother one of the Fullerton girls away back in Dundee?

*****

And now we have been here a year, and the little sunporch is mine. I have the draw curtains and the light over my desk. Above the garage door we have a ship's lantern, which throws a welcoming beam of light on a dark night, down the lane between the cherry trees, and gave us the name "Lantern Lane." There are no street lights out this far, of course, but no one minds that. When we visit the neighbors in the evening we carry a homemade light made by sticking a candle in the curving side of a jam-tin and carry it by a wire handle fastened to the two sides, which lets the light stream out in a circle on the road ahead of us. At first we used a flash-light, but it was a feckless thing that went out one real dark night we were out, and left us to come home by the Braille method. But there was something pleasant in that too, for it made us think of the times we found our way home over Manitoba trails on moonless nights, with the wolves howling.

Across Ferndale Road there is a woody path called "Banshee Lane" which leads to the sea, and when I first turned in at this dark green archway and walked on its carpet of leaves below the trees, breathing the clean earthy odors of moss and fallen trees, and saw the path ahead of me stippled with sunshine, and heard the myriad sounds of the little wild creatures, and knew this bit of wild wood was mine by right of an ancient inheritance, I had all the exaltation of one who has come into a fortune. "Banshee Lane" is a public path, by the generosity of one of the old inhabitants, and it can never be widened into a motor road. Great arbutus trees with their smooth red boles that make one want to stroke them, symmetrical maples, and evergreens so high that looking at them becomes a good exercise for the neck, the kind that must be taken carefully, make up the woods, with hard old yews, descended probably from the trees from which Robin Hood and his men made their bows. The shiny-leafed Oregon grape carpets the ground, and in their season, white and pink mayflowers abound, with the glorious crimson of the flowering currant. There are flat logs to sit on beside the path, and open grassy places, whose brightness smites the eye after the dim greenness of the thick woods.

The welcoming feel of the house on Lantern Lane has been sustained and confirmed by the whole neighborhood. Not once have we rued the haste with which we bought it. Our neighbor to the east, whose wind-mill caught the rays of that first flash of sunshine, is a bulb-grower from the Scilly Islands, who came here twenty-five years ago, with a wagon-box full of bulbs. Now his fields of daffodils and tulips often appear in pictures, and the blooms go far and wide. But the commercial side of it fails to interest him. He is a grower and a lover of flowers for their own sakes, and is not disposed to bargain as to their disposal. When a new neighbor comes in, he is ever ready to give assistance and practical help. When he says he'll send you over a few bulbs—you may get five thousand. The men and women in this neighborhood who spent their youth here, owe him a debt, for he made it his business to see that they all learned to swim, and they will tell you now how Mr. Edwards would leave his team standing at the head-land at any hour of the day, to go down to the sea and give a lesson to anyone who came. His "Sea Cadets" are men and women now and they are imparting the love of the sea, learned from him, to their own children. So his good deeds go on, an unfading entry on the right side of life's ledger.

Then we have for our neighbors, on the other side, two retired Hudson's Bay people who spent many years in the North, and from them we hear fascinating tales of Indians and missionaries; of the uncanny intelligence of the wild things; and of how the beaver families separate at the end of the first year, by some inexorable eugenic law, all the males going upstream and the females downstream.

There are three Irish sisters, belonging to an old and aristocratic family in the County Dublin, who live in a house hidden in trees, but who would no more think of cutting one down than of bobbing their hair. From them I get Irish newspapers and we talk of Don Byrnne and the horse races at the Curragh.

There is another neighbor who makes it her care to see that the sick are visited and the needy clothed. She has a quilt in the frames perpetually (not the same quilt) for some poor family. She is the Good Angel of Gordon Head, whose "light goeth not out at night."

The house, whose red roof almost hidden in trees, gleamed its welcome that first day, belongs to a Winnipeg friend, whose fine old black cat, "Major", ended his glorious career just before we came. "Major" was raffled at a Red Cross meeting in Paris, as soon as his eyes were opened, in the first days of the war, and was won by a Canadian war-bride who lived in hotels and who carried him past hotel clerks in her muff. "Major" came to Victoria when the war ended; when his people moved back to England he was brought to the red-roofed house in Gordon Head and lived the life of a country gentleman, and died full of years and honors. He had killed many mice and rats in his day, but always buried them decently.

At the corner of Tyndal and Ferndale Roads there is a lovely garden whose beautifully wrought iron gates are always open, and over its green lawns we are all welcome to wander, by the generosity of the owners, who are also prairie people. In the spring there are flower beds of red tulips, shaped like baskets, and little crocuses in yellow, white and purple, star the grass. Over the low stone wall runs a lacy green creeper that changes to pink and red as the season advances. And near the house are stately maples and cypress and among them a deodar, (which to me existed only in Kipling stories), a deodar with its spreading lower branches resting on the ground and quite at home in Canadian soil.

There are two men in our neighborhood who came in to Vancouver on the first transcontinental train, fifty years ago, and from them we hear stories of the romance of railway building and of the rugged men who planned the conquest of the mountains. There is a pianist from one of the prairie cities, who plays for us every Friday night in the winter, Chopin and Mendelssohn and Bach, in her huge living room. The log fire burns down into coals, then into embers, and the last bus changes gears on the hill, and we know very well that it is twenty minutes to twelve, but, under the magic of her fingers, all sense of time has gone.

We see on fine days, to the south, the snow-capped Olympics over in Washington. The snowy top of Mount Baker looks down on us, over the shoulder of San Juan Island across the Strait of Haro, and the lights of the city six miles away form a pale illumination on the southern sky.

Surely, I said to myself, here is a place to dig in, and be at peace, where no harsh sounds break into one's reverie. The day breaks gently over the sea; the dogs bark softly, or not at all. Life comes on like distant organ music. Vancouver Island takes you as you are, without comment, because it knows what you are does not really matter. So you can go ahead and say what you like. Write to the papers if you wish. No one will be disturbed or bothered, for the real business of life will go on anyway. The salmon will run and spawn and die; the purple and white and yellow aubretia will cover the rocks; the broom will pour out its gold in May; and the Olympics across the straits will glow at sunset with cool radiant fire.

It was my intention to write a continuation of "Clearing in the West" as soon as we were settled here. I had seen the beginning of so many things; women's struggle for political equality, the rise of women's clubs, the heroic struggle to eliminate the liquor traffic and its disastrous sequel. I had been at so many "first" meetings, and had known the women who had shaped opinion in Canada, many of them gone now, too soon. I wanted to put into words what I knew of these women who had been too busy making history to write it.

But I couldn't write it. I was too comfortable. I had not grown accustomed to a spring that comes in February, with snowdrops and violets and wallflowers. The anaesthesia of beauty had me in its clutches.

I had laughed at the story of the two rival editors from the prairie, who had come to this Island and happened to settle quite near to each other. In the little town in which they had lived in Manitoba, they had fought each other in the gallant red-blooded way that belongs to that exhilarating climate. They had never missed a chance of reviling each other and they did it with a tartness of invective that delighted their readers. Now, they live side by side, amicably sharing a party line telephone. They talk across the fence about tent-caterpillars and sprays and fertilizers, and exchange confidences on how their arteries are hardening. They send each other gifts of roses, and violets wet with dew, new potatoes and Swiss chard. When I heard about the Swiss chard I could have wept, remembering what bonnie fighters they once were. If any gift from the vegetable kingdom had passed between them then, it would have been a sheaf of poison ivy, tied with barbed wire.

Now something like this has come over me, and I want to talk about the lavender bed, from which I cut the old stalks to make way for the new ones; or the wallflowers that are making a golden brown glow against the new stucco on the house; and the daphne, with its faintly fragrant berries; and the laburnum tree at the gate that will soon swing its golden lanterns in the wind.

YOU CAN'T MAKE IT PAY

Life in this lovely corner of the world is so full of beautiful, generous and kindly things, that I cannot keep from telling about them. From the time the dawn rolls down the day like a golden scroll until the sun sets in a saffron glow behind the tall evergreens, powdered here and there with whitened cherry trees, the whole day is full of interest, and beauty, and surprises.

Just at first, when we moved in, all eager and radiant over our good fortune in having at last a parcel of good land, near a city, with a view of the sea, our enthusiasm was dampened a little by what we heard from the neighbors about the economic conditions in the basic industry of agriculture in this Province.

"You cannot possibly make any money on a farm in B.C.", they said, "not even here in the finest part of the Island; you can work long hours, hoe and rake, pull weeds and fertilize, but you won't make any money. It's a long time since the farmer could even make wages. Now he loses on every crop."

Then followed stories of actual cases with names and dates,—loganberries that only paid the pickers, gooseberries for which the owners got one-half cent a pound, pears left rotting on the ground.

The stories had a familiar sound. We came from a Province where stories like this abound, authenticated and documented. We knew people who owed a bill to the railway company that carried their grain, which the price of the grain would not cover. We knew a woman who could prove to you that she lost money every time she milked the cow. We knew—we knew plenty!

But we had come to a place now, with a more diversified list of products, a longer season, a milder climate, where, it seemed, honest toil must bring a reward. But from all we could hear, these smiling fields, if we let them, might lure us on to financial disintegration. The only safe thing to do, it seemed, was to do nothing. It would cost thirty-five dollars to spray the cherry trees, and the robins would eat the cherries just the same, and even if they left any, there would be no sale for them. Life suddenly sank into a mire of negation, as complete as the schoolboy's definition of pins, when he wrote—"Pins are things which save people's lives by not swallowing them!"

One ray of comfort and hope lightened these depressing bulletins and that was the genial, friendly, well-favored faces of the people who brought them. Not one person in this neighborhood have I seen, who appeared to be in want, nor have I heard anyone say he would like to live elsewhere.

There was another ameliorating factor, too, in the hearing of so much grief concerning economic conditions. The information was often accompanied by gifts of flowers, and shrubs and seeds, and generous invitations to help ourselves to anything else we wanted. It is impossible to keep one's spirits from rising, when presented with a basket of forget-me-nots ready for planting and all knotted to blossom, even if you do hear, at the same time, that someone is digging out his cherry trees and will rent his land at seven dollars per acre.

Still, one wonders what these friendly, genial, good-humored people are using for money. How do they run their cars, and paint their houses, and go to picture shows? Are they all pensioners or beneficiaries under the wills of old estates? Some of them are, I know, but surely not all!

Yesterday afternoon I went down the woodland path to the beach, thinking heavily of these things, and wondering why the economic prospects of this delightful place were not brighter. "Surely," I thought, "it is an ill world and needs to be made over!" But though my mind was clogged with perplexities, my feet soon began to feel the comfort of the soft, springing soil of the deep woods, and the trees above me whispered happily in the sunshine. I sat on a fallen log, covered with moss, a great giant of a log that had fallen maybe fifty years ago, and listened to the muted voices of the woods, the syncopated notes of an axe and its echo, the rustle of leaves, and the wash of the waves frilling on the gravelly beach below.

Beside me, infinitely cheerful and heartening, a cricket with his tiny castanets seemed to snap his fingers at every kind of problem. I looked through a dappled tangle of green branches, out to sea, and saw the Vancouver boat noiselessly treading the water on its way to the big city; and over the jutting rocks, the sea-gulls circled and screamed, dropping clam shells, then swept down to get the meat set free by the fall, letting gravitation solve their problem. Sometimes another gull was there ahead of the lawful owner, but the process went on.

Gulls are a low form of bird life, with few admirers, atrocious manners and fallen arches, but they have a core of good hard sense, and know enough to work with nature. I wondered if there were any gulls who kept books, and so knew that the percentage of failure was heavy from three causes—(1) the intervention of other gulls—(2) some clam shells not breaking—(3) some clams being poor, ill-nourished things. I wonder if any of the hunters, after making a careful survey, become convinced that there is nothing in clam-fishing, for a self-respecting young gull, anxious to get along.

And as I sat there on the fallen tree, looking out to sea, with the sunlight falling around me and the cool, green, free essence of the wild coming to me in the tang of the forest, I began to feel that the centre of gravity in my life was shifting and very pleasantly too.

Here were riches—beauty, silence, peace so deep it was entering into the very marrow of my soul. How very little, after all, we need to make us happy—a woody path to the sea, the scent of wild flowers, the flash of a bluebird's wing, a few friends, books by the fire on a winter's night and a plate of apples, a good conscience, space in which to work—going tired to bed—and then another day, rolling down like a scroll!

Money! Enough to keep stamps in the house and the milkman coming! I could see how people can be very happy, even with small profits. I began to see what Emerson meant when someone told him the world was coming to an end and he replied that that was all right with him; he could get along without it!

THE ONION-GROWER

For years I have cherished a secret ambition, buried deeply in my heart, and only thought of in my wildest moments of imagination. It seemed so far away and unlikely of fulfilment.

But today, March 1, I have made a start. I am 18 rows nearer to my goal than I was this morning and having definitely embarked on this career, I feel free to speak of it.

I would grow onions! Acres of onions!

My heart has always inclined toward onions since the days back in Manitoba, when I had to weed the garden before I went to school, and the onion rows gave some return for my labors. Young carrots, beets, turnips, while great in promise, made no immediate contribution, but a dozen young onions, when washed in the creek and wrapped in a bit of the Brandon Times, and put in the dinner pail, helped to season the noon-hour.

You are perhaps wondering about their effect socially, remembering the old saying about "an apple a day keeps the doctor away, but an onion a day will keep everyone away." Was there any danger of onion ostracism? Not at all. At Northfield school we all ate onions when we had them, most of us from choice, and the others in self-defence.

In addition to the part they played in my diet, I liked onions for their own sake. They were such a sure crop, and having hidden fires in their own stout hearts, they did not fear the early frosts like some other garden plants. And I liked their perky little top-knots, and the whole circle of their growth. And who has not made onion curls from the long green stocks?

And then their place in cooking and the incense they add to so many dishes! Try to make a meat pie, or a stew, or fry hamburger without an onion, or make potato, or celery, or tomato soup, and see how it is missed!

Onions are really one of the ameliorations of life, like tea and coffee. They make flat food savoury, and all foods better. They are the cook's best friends.

And they are good to look at—the big ivory Spanish onions, so firm and solid and accurately grained like a section of hardwood that has taken a century to grow; and the green onions with their pearly white tips. The aesthetic value of an onion has not been appreciated at its full value.

But onions are climbing the social ladder. They are advancing like liver, which used to be thrown in by the butcher "for your cat," and now sells for as much as beefsteak; or like the humble prune that once came in barrels, but now is wrapped in cellophane and served with whipped cream.

Onions are getting on! I heard a conversation not long ago between two women at a lecture, and while we waited for the great man to appear, one told the other of being at a bride's reception, and "there was just a trace of onion in the sandwiches." The other one expressed surprise, but she was put in her place when the lady who had the floor informed her that "the very nicest people are using onions now, in sandwiches and salads."

And wasn't that good news to me!