Mary MacLane

I WROTE the day before yesterday this letter to my friend Annabel Lee:

Dear Fair Lady:

Since I have come to stay in Montreal for a time, and you still in Boston, I have seen you, times, even more vividly than when I was there. You come into my dreams at dead of night.

Can you imagine what you are in my dreams?

I look forward impatiently to the end of my time here, so that I may go to find you again;—but my impatience grows someway less when I think that if I am with you this vision may vanish from my dreams.——

I will write you of some of the things I have found here.

There is much in Montreal that takes me back into the dim mists—the wonderful days when I had lived only three years. It was not here, but farther west—still what is in Canada is Canadian and does not change nor vary. This Canadian land and water and air awakens shadow-things in my memory and visions and voices of the world as it was when I was three.

It is all exceeding fair to look upon about here. The fields are green, not as they are in Massachusetts, but as they might be in the south of France. There is a beautiful, broad, blue river that can be seen from far off, and it sends out a haze and then all is gray French country, and gray French villages. When you come near you see the French peasants working in the fields—old men and maidens, and very old, strange-looking women, all with no English words in their mouths and no English thing in their lives if they can avoid it. They wear brass rings on their hands and in their ears, and the women wear gay-colored fish-wife petticoats, and in all their faces and eyes is that look that comes from working always among vegetables in the sun, the look of a piteous, useless brain.

And there is the strange, long, tree-covered hill that they call Mount Royal. I have in my mind a picture of it in a bygone century, when an adventurous, brave Frenchman and a few Indians of the wild stood high at its summit—he with the French flag unfurled in the wind, and the Indians shading their eyes and looking off and down into the valley. And there was not one sign of human life in the valley, and all was wild growth and tangled underbrush, and death-like silence, except maybe for the far-off sound of flying wild hoofs in the forest. And now this hill is the lodging-place of many things hidden among the trees—convents set about with tall, thick, solid stone walls, and inside the walls are heavy-swathed nuns who have said their farewell to all things without. And there are hospitals founded and endowed in the name of the Virgin, and Jesuit colleges, and the lodges of priests and brotherhoods.

And in the midst of the St.Lawrence valley where the Indians looked down is this old gray-stone city, and in the Place d’Armes square is a fine triumphant statue of Maisonneuve with his French flag.

This gray-stone city is builded thick with gray-stone cathedrals, and some of them are very fine, and some of them are parti-colored as rainbows inside, and all of them are Roman Catholic and French.

The Protestant churches are but churches.

And the Notre Dame cathedral, when the setting sun touches its great, tall, gray, twin towers with red, is even more than French and Roman Catholic. The white-faced women in the nunnery at the side of it must need have a likeness of those eternal towers graven on their narrow devout hearts. Within, the Notre Dame is most gorgeous with brilliant-colored saints and Virgins and a passion of wealth and Romanism.

And is it not wonderful to think that many of these gray-stone buildings and dwellings were here in the sixteen hundreds, and that gray nuns walked in these same green gardens two centuries ago? And the same country was about here, and the same blue water.

And when all is said, the country and the blue water have been here always, and are the most wonderful things of all. If the gray-stone buildings were of yellow gold and of emeralds and brilliants, the green country would be no fairer and no less exquisitely fair, and the blue of the water would go no deeper into the heart and no less deep, and the pale clouds would float high and gently with the same old-time mystery. And the centuries they know are countless.

The natural things are the same in Massachusetts—but here they seem someway even older. You feel the breath of the very long-ago among the wildness of green—as if only human beings had come and gone, but it had never changed its smallest twig or grass-blade. It seems but waiting, and its patience in the waiting is without end.

Away on the other side of the tree-covered mountain I have seen a flat, gently-curved, country road with the sunshine upon it and a few little English sparrows alighting and flying along it and picking at grains. And the grass by the road-side was tall and rank and sweet to the senses, and the road led to farms and the river and the wildwood. Cows were feeding by a shallow brook, and there were sumach bushes, thick and dark, near by.

For several minutes when my eyes rested upon this I felt absolutely content with all of life.

While I’m telling you this, Annabel Lee, I am not quite sure you are listening—and for myself, I see you much more than anything I have talked about. I am wondering how it is possible that you have lived only fourteen years—even the fourteen years of a Japanese woman. And I see again in my mind—your red lips, and your dead-black hair, and your purple eyes, and your wonderful hands, and your forehead with the widow’s peak, and the two short side-locks that curve around, and your slimness in the scarlet and gold-embroidered gown.

And most of all I see your eyes when they are full of soft purple shadows, and your lips when they are tender—and your heart, as I have seen it before, and its depths which are of the white purity.

Last night there was the vision of you with your purple eyes wide and gazing down at me with the white lids still. And I was horror-struck at the look of world-weariness in them—how that it is terrible, how that it follows one into the darkness and light, how that it is grief and rage and madness, how that it makes the heart ache until all the life-nerves ache with it—and there is no end; how that it is life and death, and one can not escape!—a world of tears and entreating and vows; but no, there is no escape.

And then again I looked up at your purple eyes gazing down at me full of strong, high scorn and triumph. “Do you think we have not conquered life?” they said. “Do you think we can not crush out all the little demons that presume to torture? Do you think we can not conquer everything? Who is there that we have not known? Where is there that we have not been? Are there any still, still shadows that we have cringed before? Are there any brilliant lights upon the sky that we have not faced boldly and put aside? And the stones and the stars and the mists on the sea are less—less than we,—we are the greatest things of all.”

Thus your two eyes when I slept, and when I woke I saw you again as you have looked so many times—the expression of your red lips, and your voice with vague bitterness, and your lily face inscrutable.

I shall see you so again many times, my friend Annabel Lee.—

The fact remains that I am in Montreal and Canada. And as the days run along I am reminded that I have in me the old Canadian instincts. The word “Canadian” has always called up in my mind a confused throng of things, like—porridge for tea, and SirHugh MacDonald, and Dominion Day, and my aunt Elizabeth MacLane, and old-fashioned pictures of her majesty the queen, and Orangemen’s Day, and “good-night” for good-evening, and “reel of cotton” for spool of thread, and “tin” instead of can, and Canadian cheese, and rawsberries in a patent pail, and the Queen’s Own in Toronto, and soldiers in red coats, and children in Scotch kilts, and jam-tarts, and barley-sugar, and whitefish from Lake Winnipeg, and the C.P.R., and the Parliament at Ottawa, and coasting in toboggans, and LordAberdeen, and everything-coming-over-from-England-so-much-better-and-cheaper-than-American-ware,—and all that sort of thing. And my mind has always had a color for Canada—a shade of mingled deep green and golden brown.

Even in Montreal, where so much is French, there is enough to stamp it as beyond question Canadian. One still sees marks of her majesty the queen—but shop-keepers assert confidently that “Edward is going to make a good king,” and Canadian men are made up as nearly as possible after his pattern, stout and with that short pointed beard.

In the greenness of Dominion Square is the most beautiful piece of sculpture I have seen. All the statues that stand about in Montreal are finer than most of their kind, and there are no such hideous creations as are set up in Boston and NewYork. The Dominion Square statue is a bronze figure of a SirJohnA. MacDonald. The face of the figure is all that is serene and benign, and the lines of the body and of the hands are made with strength and beauty. Whether it is like SirJohnA. MacDonald, one does not know—’tis enough that it’s an exquisite piece of workmanship with which to adorn a city. And the Maisonneuve statue is a fine, handsome thing, and is altogether alive. The bronze is no bronze, but has seventeenth-century red blood in its veins, and the arm that is held high and the hand with the flag mean conquest and victory.

I shall see Quebec and the length of the blue river before I see you again, and they, like Montreal, will be mingled with a many-tinted looking-forward to being with you again.

High upon the tower of a gray-stone building that I see from my window is a carved gorgon’s head, a likeness of Medusa with snaky locks. She is hundreds of feet above me as I sit here, but I see the expression of her face plainly—it is desolate and discouraging. It says, Do you think you will see that fair lily Annabel Lee again? Well, then, how foolish are you in your day and generation! I in my years have seen the passing of many fair lilies. Always they pass.—

Tell me, Annabel Lee,—always do they pass? But no—I shall find you again. You will make all things many-tinted for a thousand thousands of gold days. And are we not good friends in way and manner? And do we not go the foot-pathway together?

But I wonder always why the gorgon seems so fearfully knowing.—

Always my love to you.