On the ninth of November, at three o’clock in the afternoon, Baptiste went into the tower to see that the clockwork was in order for the night. He set the dial on the machine, put a few drops of oil on the bearings of the cylinder, and started to wind up the weight.
It rose a few inches, gave a dull click, and then stopped dead. He tugged a little harder, but it would not move. Then he tried to let it down. He pushed at the lever that set the clockwork in motion.
He might as well have tried to make the island turn around by pushing at one of the little spruce trees that clung to the rock.
Then it dawned fearfully upon him that something must be wrong. Trembling with anxiety, he climbed up and peered in among the wheels.
The escapement wheel was cracked clean through, as if some one had struck it with the head of an axe, and one of the pallets of the spindle was stuck fast in the crack. He could knock it out easily enough, but when the crack came around again, the pallet would catch and the clock would stop once more. It was a fatal injury.
Baptiste turned white, then red, gripped his head in his hands, and ran down the steps, out of the door, straight toward his canoe, which was pulled up on the western side of the island.
“DAME!” he cried, “who has done this? Let me catch him! If that old Thibault—”
As he leaped down the rocky slope the setting sun gleamed straight in his eyes. It was poised like a ball of fire on the very edge of the mountains. Five minutes more and it would be gone. Fifteen minutes more and darkness would close in. Then the giant’s eye must begin to glow, and to wink precisely once a minute all night long. If not, what became of the keeper’s word, his faith, his honour?
No matter how the injury to the clockwork was done. No matter who was to be blamed or punished for it. That could wait. The question now was whether the light would fail or not. And it must be answered within a quarter of an hour.
That red ray of the vanishing sun was like a blow in the face to Baptiste. It stopped him short, dazed and bewildered. Then he came to himself, wheeled, and ran up the rocks faster than he had come down.
“Marie-Anne! Alma!” he shouted, as he dashed past the door of the house, “all of you! To me, in the tower!”
He was up in the lantern when they came running in, full of curiosity, excited, asking twenty questions at once. Nataline climbed up the ladder and put her head through the trap-door.
“What is it?” she panted. “What has hap—”
“Go down,” answered her father, “go down all at once. Wait for me. I am coming. I will explain.”
The explanation was not altogether lucid and scientific. There were some bad words mixed up with it.
Baptiste was still hot with anger and the unsatisfied desire to whip somebody, he did not know whom, for something, he did not know what. But angry as he was, he was still sane enough to hold his mind hard and close to the main point. The crank must be adjusted; the machine must be ready to turn before dark. While he worked he hastily made the situation clear to his listeners.
That crank must be turned by hand, round and round all night, not too slow, not too fast. The dial on the machine must mark time with the clock on the wall. The light must flash once every minute until daybreak. He would do as much of the labour as he could, but the wife and the two older girls must help him. Nataline could go to bed.
At this Nataline’s short upper lip trembled. She rubbed her eyes with the sleeve of her dress, and began to weep silently.
“What is the matter with you?” said her mother, “bad child, have you fear to sleep alone? A big girl like you!”
“No,” she sobbed, “I have no fear, but I want some of the fun.”
“Fun!” growled her father. “What fun? NOM D’UN CHIEN! She calls this fun!” He looked at her for a moment, as she stood there, half defiant, half despondent, with her red mouth quivering and her big brown eyes sparkling fire; then he burst into a hearty laugh.
“Come here, my little wild-cat,” he said, drawing her to him and kissing her; “you are a good girl after all. I suppose you think this light is part yours, eh?”
The girl nodded.
“B’EN! You shall have your share, fun and all. You shall make the tea for us and bring us something to eat. Perhaps when Alma and ‘Zilda fatigue themselves they will permit a few turns of the crank to you. Are you content? Run now and boil the kettle.”
It was a very long night. No matter how easily a handle turns, after a certain number of revolutions there is a stiffness about it. The stiffness is not in the handle, but in the hand that pushes it.
Round and round, evenly, steadily, minute after minute, hour after hour, shoving out, drawing in, circle after circle, no swerving, no stopping, no varying the motion, turn after turn—fifty-five, fifty-six, fifty-seven—what’s the use of counting? Watch the dial; go to sleep—no! for God’s sake, no sleep! But how hard it is to keep awake! How heavy the arm grows, how stiffly the muscles move, how the will creaks and groans. BATISCAN! It is not easy for a human being to become part of a machine.
Fortin himself took the longest spell at the crank, of course. He went at his work with a rigid courage. His red-hot anger had cooled down into a shape that was like a bar of forged steel. He meant to make that light revolve if it killed him to do it. He was the captain of a company that had run into an ambuscade. He was going to fight his way through if he had to fight alone.
The wife and the two older girls followed him blindly and bravely, in the habit of sheer obedience. They did not quite understand the meaning of the task, the honour of victory, the shame of defeat. But Fortin said it must be done, and he knew best. So they took their places in turn, as he grew weary, and kept the light flashing.
And Nataline—well, there is no way of describing what Nataline did, except to say that she played the fife.
She felt the contest just as her father did, not as deeply, perhaps, but in the same spirit. She went into the fight with darkness like a little soldier. And she played the fife.
When she came up from the kitchen with the smoking pail of tea, she rapped on the door and called out to know whether the Windigo was at home to-night.
She ran in and out of the place like a squirrel. She looked up at the light and laughed. Then she ran in and reported. “He winks,” she said, “old one-eye winks beautifully. Keep him going. My turn now!”
She refused to be put off with a shorter spell than the other girls. “No,” she cried, “I can do it as well as you. You think you are so much older. Well, what of that? The light is part mine; father said so. Let me turn, va-t-en.”
When the first glimmer of the little day came shivering along the eastern horizon, Nataline was at the crank. The mother and the two older girls were half asleep. Baptiste stepped out to look at the sky. “Come,” he cried, returning. “We can stop now, it is growing gray in the east, almost morning.”
“But not yet,” said Nataline; “we must wait for the first red. A few more turns. Let’s finish it up with a song.”
She shook her head and piped up the refrain of the old Canadian chanson:
“En roulant ma boule-le roulant
En roulant ma bou-le.”
And to that cheerful music the first night’s battle was carried through to victory.
The next day Fortin spent two hours in trying to repair the clockwork. It was of no use. The broken part was indispensable and could not be replaced.
At noon he went over to the mainland to tell of the disaster, and perhaps to find out if any hostile hand was responsible for it. He found out nothing. Every one denied all knowledge of the accident. Perhaps there was a flaw in the wheel; perhaps it had broken itself. That was possible. Fortin could not deny it; but the thing that hurt him most was that he got so little sympathy. Nobody seemed to care whether the light was kept burning or not. When he told them how the machine had been turned all night by hand, they were astonished. “CRE-IE!” they cried, “you must have had a great misery to do that.” But that he proposed to go on doing it for a month longer, until December tenth, and to begin again on April first, and go on turning the light by hand for three or four weeks more until the supply-boat came down and brought the necessary tools to repair the machine—such an idea as this went beyond their horizon.
“But you are crazy, Baptiste,” they said, “you can never do it; you are not capable.”
“I would be crazy,” he answered, “if I did not see what I must do. That light is my charge. In all the world there is nothing else so great as that for me and for my family—you understand? For us it is the chief thing. It is my Ten Commandments. I shall keep it or be damned.”
There was a silence after this remark. They were not very particular about the use of language at Dead Men’s Point, but this shocked them a little. They thought that Fortin was swearing a shade too hard. In reality he was never more reverent, never more soberly in earnest.
After a while he continued, “I want some one to help me with the work on the island. We must be up all the nights now. By day we must get some sleep. I want another man or a strong boy. Is there any who will come? The Government will pay. Or if not, I will pay, moi-meme.”
There was no response. All the men hung back. The lighthouse was still unpopular, or at least it was on trial. Fortin’s pluck and resolution had undoubtedly impressed them a little. But they still hesitated to commit themselves to his side.
“B’en,” he said, “there is no one. Then we shall manage the affair en famille. Bon soir, messieurs!”
He walked down to the beach with his head in the air, without looking back. But before he had his canoe in the water he heard some one running down behind him. It was Thibault’s youngest son, Marcel, a well-grown boy of sixteen, very much out of breath with running and shyness.
“Monsieur Fortin,” he stammered, “will you—do you think—am I big enough?”
Baptiste looked him in the face for a moment. Then his eyes twinkled.
“Certain,” he answered, “you are bigger than your father. But what will he say to this?”
“He says,” blurted out Marcel—“well, he says that he will say nothing if I do not ask him.”
So the little Marcel was enlisted in the crew on the island. For thirty nights those six people—a man, and a boy, and four women (Nataline was not going to submit to any distinctions on the score of age, you may be sure)—for a full month they turned their flashing lantern by hand from dusk to day-break.
The fog, the frost, the hail, the snow beleaguered their tower. Hunger and cold, sleeplessness and weariness, pain and discouragement, held rendezvous in that dismal, cramped little room. Many a night Nataline’s fife of fun played a feeble, wheezy note. But it played. And the crank went round. And every bit of glass in the lantern was as clear as polished crystal. And the big lamp was full of oil. And the great eye of the friendly giant winked without ceasing, through fierce storm and placid moonlight.
When the tenth of December came, the light went to sleep for the winter, and the keepers took their way across the ice to the mainland. They had won the battle, not only on the island, fighting against the elements, but also at Dead Men’s Point, against public opinion. The inhabitants began to understand that the lighthouse meant something—a law, an order, a principle.
Men cannot help feeling respect for a thing when they see others willing to fight or to suffer for it.
When the time arrived to kindle the light again in the spring, Fortin could have had any one that he wanted to help him. But no; he chose the little Marcel again; the boy wanted to go, and he had earned the right. Besides, he and Nataline had struck up a close friendship on the island, cemented during the winter by various hunting excursions after hares and ptarmigan. Marcel was a skilful setter of snares. But Nataline was not content until she had won consent to borrow her father’s CARABINE. They hunted in partnership. One day they had shot a fox. That is, Nataline had shot it, though Marcel had seen it first and tracked it. Now they wanted to try for a seal on the point of the island when the ice went out. It was quite essential that Marcel should go.
“Besides,” said Baptiste to his wife, confidentially, “a boy costs less than a man. Why should we waste money? Marcel is best.”
A peasant-hero is seldom averse to economy in small things, like money.
But there was not much play in the spring session with the light on the island. It was a bitter job. December had been lamb-like compared with April. First, the southeast wind kept the ice driving in along the shore. Then the northwest wind came hurtling down from the Arctic wilderness like a pack of wolves. There was a snow-storm of four days and nights that made the whole world—earth and sky and sea—look like a crazy white chaos. And through it all, that weary, dogged crank must be kept turning—turning from dark to daylight.
It seemed as if the supply-boat would never come. At last they saw it, one fair afternoon, April the twenty-ninth, creeping slowly down the coast. They were just getting ready for another night’s work.
Fortin ran out of the tower, took off his hat, and began to say his prayers. The wife and the two elder girls stood in the kitchen door, crossing themselves, with tears in their eyes. Marcel and Nataline were coming up from the point of the island, where they had been watching for their seal. She was singing
“Mon pere n’avait fille que moi,
Encore sur la mer il m’envoi-e-eh!”
When she saw the boat she stopped short for a minute.
“Well,” she said, “they find us awake, n’est-c’pas? And if they don’t come faster than that we’ll have another chance to show them how we make the light wink, eh?”
Then she went on with her song—
“Sautez, mignonne, Cecilia.
Ah, ah, ah, ah, Cecilia!”
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