The Uncollected Prose of Pauline Johnson

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The Unfailing Lamp

At the great transatlantic cable station of Hearts' Content, in Newfoundland, I had idled away the afternoon. It was amazing to watch the news that touched the world's heartstrings being flashed from hemisphere to hemisphere. As I stood beside the dispatching operator, I heard him give a smothered exclamation, an odd thing for one who must necessarily handle the sudden news that daily assails these stations. Then, from long custom his fingers tapped the key steadily. The news was flashing underneath the ocean to England.

“What is it?” asked the superintendent, on his rounds. He knew through years of experience the signs of agitation in one of his employees.

“President McKinley of the United States assassinated at Buffalo,” responded the operator, his fingers still tapping the key. “This message is official; going to the American ambassador at the court of St. James.”

I turned away weakly. What a horrible shadow to fall across the vast world to the south of us; all that wonderful country that divides Canada and this ancient British colony of Newfoundland from the tropics.

Outside on the steps of the great offices I met a woman, sweet-faced, benevolent, sympathetic. I knew her to be the wife of a missionary to the deep sea fishermen along the Labrador coast.

“Poor Mrs. McKinley,” I added, when I had told her the news.

“Yes,” she replied, somewhat absently, I thought. “Poor Mrs. McKinley; that is the exact remark I made last spring.”

I looked at her curiously. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“It was about another Mrs. McKinley I know. She is a woman of the fisher folk; a grief worse than this one came to her, but no mourning nation helped her live it through.”

“Will you tell me of her?” I questioned, simply.

“Do you know the Magdalene Islands, on the Labrador coast?” she asked.

“Only geographically,” I replied.

“Then you may be gratified,” she answered, “for I have lived there through many years and experiences. It is no velvet drawing-room life even for us missionaries, let alone the fisher folk.”

“And your Mrs. McKinley?” I urged.

“A woman amongst unwomanly surroundings,” she replied, seating herself beside me on the cable station steps. “Yes, a woman and a mother,” she continued.

“Ah!” I remarked. “A woman means much—but a mother is something more, something greater.”

“And this woman was a mother,” she asserted, “with the peculiar sense of ‘mothering’ that comes amid the harsh environment of these remote fastnesses, of these edges of civilization—it was all so pitiful.”

Silence then, and I coaxed: “Won't you tell me the entire story; I love these heroic frontier mothers.”

“Then you shall hear,” she began, “for her name should be emblazoned upon the arms of Canada beside that of Cabot, Wolfe, Champlain; but it won't be; they will all forget this mother, all but the hardy fisher folk. The mariners, the sea captains of the Labrador coast, and these will remember her always—when they pray.

“There is nothing in all the British possessions quite as desolate, as forbidding, as isolated as the Labrador coast in winter. Ice nine months of the year, solitude for ever and ever, it seemed to us. At one remote point, even beyond the reaches of the Hudson's Bay trading posts, there was a lighthouse reaching out into the northern seas like a finger of flame set in a gauntlet of granite; around and about it looms jaws of invincible rock. Lonely, desolate, menacing, and woe to the ship that loses her bearings in fog or storm or stress of weather, those shores are deadly and uncompromising as fate.

“There were three of them who kept that light burning, Mrs. McKinley and her two stalwart sons, splendid specimens of hardy, vigorous northern manhood, these young giants of the Labrador coast. The lighthouse was warm and snug and homelike for the good mother's loving hand watched and cared for their comfort with the world shut outside and the warmth of home within.

“Twice only within each year did the government supply boat call with provisions of flour, lard, bacon and vegetables, clothing and oil for the immense lamps. These brief visits—one in June and one late in September—were the only means these isolated three had of communicating with the outside world, and apart from this the Labrador mother and her two sons lived their little but vitally necessary lives, cut off from all other human life and its mainspring of doings and sayings.

“It was in March, when the seals came thronging shoreward across the miles of ice floes, and the boys, after all needful attention to the lamps, would take their sealing clubs and start forth to secure some little seals, whose ‘flippers’ made such a welcome change to the salt and tinned foods, and whose skins and oil were traded for such excellent prices when the warm weather brought open water and coast merchantment. And this day the mother watched her sons go far afield, from the topmost windows of the frozen-in lighthouse. She could see them making for a dark line that lay against the far horizon, a line of moving, wild-eyed seals, fat, nutritious and profitable. She could even discern the ‘kill,’ the piling up of the ‘game,’ animal upon animal, ready to pack home, for comfort and warmth and food against these hardest of late winter months. As she watched, something seemed to be happening, not only the animals but the whole horizon itself seemed to begin moving. She felt dizzy, blinked her eyes, and looked again. The white world before her moved a little towards her, then swung away, and then a narrow blue ribbon of water yawned between the land and the vast ice floes which began to move seaward, loosened and thawed by the unusual suns of an unusual mild March. The woman stood for a second paralyzed with horror—the mass of ice was moving away. She flung open the heavy glass window, her strangling voice shrieking, breaking in her throat, her cries wildly flinging across the icy air. She might as well have crooned a cradle song, for all they heard, for two miles stretched their hopeless length between.

“And all the time the blue ribbon of water widened, widened, widened. Then her terrified eyes saw at last the two figures running. They had felt the floe drifting beneath their feet, but oh! the uselessness of it. By the time they reached the edge, a half mile of Arctic water lay between them and the shore. Their ice-raft was caught in an irresistible current, a stinging wind blew off shore. The compact mass drifted, began to ebb, ebb, ebb further and further away. From the very first it was hopeless.”

The woman on the first step beside me ceased speaking. After a time she continued: “The last she saw of them was but a speck against the southern horizon; they were standing close together, waving their hands back to her, bravely, bravely, and she—well, she too waved good-bye bravely, until the distance swallowed them up. It would have been so much easier to see them die, not to know that for days, perhaps weeks, they would drift, drift, into the ocean, their ice-raft melting hourly smaller, smaller, their seal food growing less, their despair and suffering greater, and then—the inevitable end—the pitiful, horrible end.

“In June the supply boat came. The sailors could not understand why the lighthouse looked so deserted. There was not a sign of a human being anywhere. They entered, and climbed the long flight of spiral stairs. When they reached the lamp room they found her, a shrivelled, white-haired mumbling woman; her thin hands were polishing the windows, the globes, levelling the wicks, cleaning the brass work. She screamed as she saw them, and pointing to the lamps, said over and over: ‘I kept the lights burning: they never went out. I kept them burning, burning, just as the boys would have done.’

“For a week she spoke but those words, again and again; it was on her brain, it was in her poor mother heart. That the honor of her lost boys lay in her hands, she had lived absolutely alone for three months, with only the ice floes and tempests and sea birds as her companions, and an eating tragedy, a ghastly solitude in her heart, but through it all, the mother triumphed. The trust placed in her sons was her trust, too. She had kept the lights burning.”

As the missionary's wife ceased speaking, the door of the cable station opened behind us, and the superintendent came out. “There is no hope for the president now. We have just got a message that he cannot live,” he said solemnly. Then pointing to the harbor, he called our attention to two big British battleships, and further out a French man-of-war, anchored in the roads. He continued: “These ships will be flying flags at half-mast in a day or two out of respect and sympathy to the bereft American people.”

I glanced at the missionary's wife.

“What a tragedy!” she murmured.

“Yes, what a tragedy!” I echoed. But the battleships and the bay, on the great mourning nation to the south of us, were not then within my range of vision. I saw only a tempestuous isolated shore, a lonely lighthouse tower and a lamp that burned unfailingly, fed by a heroic mother's hand.

[Author's Note—This entire story is taken in every detail from fact, and is only one of the many brave incidents known to the fishermen of the Labrador coast.—E.P.J.]