A Sudden Sun (25 page)

“I’m sorry, Grace. But you don’t know—you can’t know what it’s been like for me, all these months.”

“Of course I can’t know! You never tell me. You act as if nothing’s wrong, and then you disappear for days at a time with no explanation except that you’re sick, only you’re not really sick. Do you ever think about what it’s like for me?”

She never raised her voice in public like this; the thought that she and Jack might be a couple shouting at each other on a street corner would have shamed her half an hour ago. He looked like he might shout back, but then he took a long breath and said, “I do think about it. All the time.”

“That day in New York—on the bench in the park? I’d give anything to go back to that day, awful as it was. At least then you were truthful with me.”

He walked ahead, quick steps slapping the road, hands shoved deep into his pockets—Jack, who would no more forget to offer her his arm than he would leave the house without putting on his hat. He strode four or five paces ahead, and she did not quicken her pace to meet him but kept on, sure that no matter how angry or upset he was he would not walk far enough ahead to leave her unprotected on the street.

She was right about that. When he got to the bottom of Garrison Hill he stopped, hands still in pockets, and looked not back at her but out the harbour and the Narrows. “I want to get away, is all,” he said when Grace stopped beside him.

“Away from what? From me?”

“Good Lord, no. From this city, from people with their polite questions about whether I’m going to finish medical school. From myself.” He kicked a loose stone savagely with his toe. “And yes, I suppose from you too. Look, I love you—you know that, don’t you? But I’m not myself. I haven’t been for a long time. What do I have to offer you?”

“You still think I care? About being the doctor’s wife? I wouldn’t care if you were splitting fish down on the flake in Catalina! It wouldn’t change a thing about how I felt about you!”

He smiled. “I doubt you really mean that. Haven’t you passed up a chance to marry a fisherman before?”

“Yes, but that was Harry Gullage, not you! Don’t you see the difference? I wasn’t in love with Harry Gullage!”

“And love is all that matters, right? I used to believe that too. Now I wake up in the night screaming from dreams I can’t remember, and when dawn finally comes I hate the fact that it’s another day I have to live through. Is that the life you want, Grace?”

She had asked him to be honest; now she didn’t know what to say. He sat down heavily on the stone wall in front of the Benevolent Irish Society, ran both hands through his hair.

“I wish I knew what to say.”

“There’s nothing you can say.”

She did not see him or hear from him again the rest of that week. She started several times to write him a note, but tore it up each time. He was right. There was nothing she could say.

Jack was waiting for her outside the church the next Sunday afternoon when her Sunday School class was over. He stood straight with hands in his pockets, a half-smile on his face; there was something different about the way he carried himself and she knew at once that he had made a decision.

“I’m going,” he said. “To Labrador. I mean, at least, I’m going to apply to go, and hope they take me. I met with Dr. Shelby a few times. He thinks I’d fit in well up there.”

“I’m sure you would. And—it’s what you want, is it?”

“I think so.” He offered her his arm. It was a cold March day but the sun was shining and the wind was not strong. “Do you want to go straight home, or walk about a bit, or do you have calls to make?”

“No calls today. Let’s walk down Water Street and see what ships are in.”

The cobblestoned expanse of Water Street was hushed with Sunday silence. Shops and offices were closed, and there was no clamour of ships being unloaded at the docks. The whitewashed words in the window of W.J. Allison announced parsnips were five cents a pound and potatoes were fifteen cents a gallon, but none could be bought ’til Monday morning. “I’ll miss you,” Grace said, as they crossed the cobbled street.

He sighed. “And I’ll miss you. You’ve never had frostbite, have you?”

“What? No, have you?”

“Only the once, when I was about thirteen. Pop took me and Earl back to a tilt in the woods cutting wood one January, and we got stranded out in a blizzard—couldn’t find our way back to the tilt for hours. Got frostbite in two toes. It’s the strangest thing. It hurts and hurts ’til you’d think it can’t hurt anymore and then—it doesn’t. It doesn’t hurt, but you know in spite of the relief it’s not a good thing. Am I making any sense at all?”

“I suppose you are.” When he came to her in New York and told her he had left college, he had been in such pain; most of the time this year in St. John’s he had seemed numb. A sort of frostbite of the soul, perhaps, though not having experienced either kind of frostbite Grace wasn’t sure she really understood.

“I don’t know if you ever get back all the feeling once you’ve lost it—in toes or anywhere else. But at least if I go to Labrador I can get rid of this damned—sorry—this blasted feeling that I’m wasting my life. I don’t want to hold you to a lot of promises—that wouldn’t be fair.”

“I don’t mind. We’ve made promises before.”

“We’ve been apart so much,” Jack said. It was true: he had been overseas, then he had come and gone to Montreal while she had gone to New York, and when he returned from Montreal, thinking himself a failure, she had gone back to college. Now they were both in St. John’s, but it was no good; she knew it as well as he did. “I can’t make plans, can’t think about what’s next,” he went on. “What if I go to Labrador and find I want to stay? Or worse yet, what if I’m no good there either? What if all I find out is that I’m no good anywhere?”

Grace untucked her hand from the crook of his arm and held his hand. They walked along the cold quiet street, hand in hand.

J
ACK LEFT TOWN six weeks later. He had applied for work with the Grenfell Mission in Labrador and been accepted, and sailed down to Labrador on the
Kyle
. Grace was not sure what kind of good-bye to say. “God go with you,” she said finally, as he kissed her cheek and turned towards the gangplank.

“I was going to suggest He should stay here and look after you,” Jack said with a grin, so that her last picture was of him smiling and making a joke.

She walked back to her grandfather’s house from the steamer dock; it was a warm day for this early in the spring. In her room she looked at her reflection in the mirror and thought:
A spinster. A maiden lady
. She had not thought of herself in those terms before. During the war she had been a young girl with a special friend overseas. Now Jack was gone and he had said they should not make or keep promises. Grace was twenty-two years old, with a diploma in Social Work, a post as lady assistant with the Methodist church, and, she supposed, a more or less broken engagement.

She thought of the room upstairs that had once been Lily’s, of
her mother looking at her own reflection in that mirror up there. Lily had been married at twenty-one. Grace didn’t know if her parents’ engagement had been short or long: she knew so little about her mother’s life before marriage. Had Lily ever looked at herself in the mirror and thought of herself as a maiden lady, a spinster?

Over dinner that evening, while spreading butter on a thick slice of her own home-made bread, Daisy said to Grace, “Do you ever think of going back to teaching? I mean, not in some little outport school, but with your college education I’m sure you could get a decent position at a nice school here in town—maybe even teach at the Methodist College. Wouldn’t you like that?”

Grace laughed. “No, I don’t think I’m cut out for teaching,” she said. “I only ever did it for those two years when I was young, and I don’t have the patience for it. Or the interest, really.”

“That’s a pity,” Daisy said. She didn’t need to explain that if poor Grace was going to be jilted and condemned to a spinster’s life, she ought to get herself back into the one profession deemed wholly respectable for a single woman. It was clear she thought that any potential Jack had as a suitor was erased by his decision to take off for the Labrador, but to her credit, Daisy didn’t harp on things.

“Going off to another meeting tonight, dear?” she asked as Grace left the table. “Must be the suffrage ladies, is it?” If it were Ladies’ Aid or the Women’s Missionary Society, Daisy would have kept her company, but she drew the line at the Women’s Franchise League. Not that she disapproved of the cause. “It’s time women had the vote, but it’s for young girls like yourself—educated girls, not a simple housewife like myself,” was the sort of thing Daisy would say. “I think it’s grand for you—go, get involved in all these things, Grace.”

Grace darted a look at her grandfather, who sat at the head of the table paying more attention to his roast than to the conversation of his wife and granddaughter. He had snorted under his breath a few times when she’d mentioned going to meetings of the Franchise
League, and she wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about the suffrage cause. But he made no fuss about it.

Grace herself had only recently started attending the meetings when one of the ladies at church had invited her to come. At the franchise meetings she felt, more than at the Ladies’ Aid or the Missionary Society, that she was in the midst of a group of like-minded women. Women like Mrs. Gosling, Mrs. McNeil, and Miss Kennedy all believed in improving society by reforming the liquor laws, educating the poor, and cleaning up the slums. Above all, they believed that for real change to occur women had to have a vote and a voice in how the country was run. Sitting in their meetings, Grace felt a strange sense of kinship with her mother’s younger self, even though she had never heard Lily speak of women’s votes with anything other than disdain.

“Oh yes, I remember Lily Hunt from back in the WCTU,” Fannie McNeil told Grace. “I was a few years younger so I didn’t go to the meetings, but I was always interested in the cause. I think your mother wrote for their paper too—it had some good pieces in it, all written by women. That was Mrs. Ohman’s project, of course.”

“I met Mrs. Ohman in Montreal.” Grace had kept in touch by letter with the older lady since her visit two years before. She didn’t know if Mrs. Ohman and Lily had ever corresponded, other than the time Mrs. Ohman wrote to Lily inviting Grace to stay with her in Montreal.

“You don’t remember Grace’s mother, do you, Miss Kennedy?” Mrs. McNeil turned to May Kennedy.

“No, but if she was in the WCTU that’s hardly surprising—there was no place for Catholic girls in that. Nearly all Methodists and Presbyterians. It’s the one thing we’ve done right so far here in the Franchise League—cut across the denominational lines and got women from all walks of society.”

“Though only the well-off,” Grace pointed out. “I mean, we
don’t see any poor women here, fishermen’s wives or factory girls, do we? They stand to benefit from the vote, but we don’t include them.”

“Ah, you need to talk to Mrs. Earle—pardon me, Mrs.
Salter
Earle,” May Kennedy said, with an arched eyebrow.

“Salter is her husband’s name?”

“No, Salter is her maiden name. She didn’t want to lose it entirely when she got married so she uses both. Now, the urge to hang onto one’s own name is something a spinster lady like myself can well appreciate, but only Julia Earle would be headstrong enough to think she could have it both ways—keep her name
and
get a husband.” Miss Kennedy laughed. “But you must have met her, she’s one of your Wesleyan crowd.”

“I think I have seen her at Cochrane Street Church,” Grace said; her grandfather and Daisy attended there and she had a vague memory of being introduced to a formidable woman who was secretary of the Women’s Missionary Society there.

“You would have, surely. She’s a big wheel among the Methodists, and she’s hung onto another thing a lady usually loses when she marries. No, don’t look shocked, I mean her job! She’s a secretary in the House of Assembly, and goes to business every day along with looking after her home and raising her children. Though truth to be told, the word on the street is that looking after the house is fairly low on her agenda—she’s not much of a homemaker. I suppose she must have a maid, at least.”

“She sounds formidable,” Grace agreed, trying to remember what she’d heard about the woman, “but why do you recommend her to me?”

“Why, she started up the ladies’ branch of the NIWA—you know, the factory girls’ union. She shows up here once in every blue moon to lecture us all on how women’s rights mean nothing if we don’t include the rights of the working woman. She’s quite the character.”

By chance Grace heard a second mention of Mrs. Salter Earle and the NIWA that same week, from Effie Butler who announced that she was having Aunt Loll look in on the children on Thursday evening so she could attend the union ladies’ meeting. “Oh, we have a lovely time,” Effie said, “they always gives us tea and biscuits, and after the business part there’s recitations and sometimes music, and Mrs. Earle always haves something to say—you should come sometime, Miss Collins, you’d love it.”

With recommendations from two such different sources, Grace thought she ought to go, so on Thursday evening she left Aunt Daisy to attend the Ladies’ Aid on her own while Grace went off to the old Temperance Hall to attend the NIWA meeting. She didn’t see Effie Butler there, but she did see Julia Salter Earle, who crossed the floor to greet her before the meeting started.

“Ah Miss Collins,” she said, gripping Grace’s hand in a handshake as firm as any man’s, “I’ve been wanting to invite you here for a while. You’re doing good work there at Gower Street I hear. Or at least as good as one can do under the present circumstances. I always feel charity work is a bit like putting bandages on people who are bleeding to death, yet we can’t seem to get by without it, can we? Sit here with Miss Foster, we’re about to begin.”

Julia Salter Earle, it seemed, knew all about Grace Collins. In fact, she seemed to know all about everyone. Grace sat and listened as Mrs. Salter Earle chaired the meeting, tabling resolutions about regular lunch breaks and restroom breaks for factory employees. “We’ve made good progress these last three years,” she reminded the assembled women, “but with businesses facing hard times and factories closing, the owners think they can take back the rights we’ve fought for. I’ve had men who call themselves Christian businessmen tell me to my face that if the girls on a factory floor—I won’t say which one, but I’m sure some of you can guess—if the
girls go on strike, they can fire the lot of them, replace them the next day with unemployed girls, and never have to give an inch. You know it’s true. If we don’t stand together, they’ll pick away at your rights, one by one, ’til you’re worse off than you were before the war! Solidarity forever!”

“Hear, hear!” shouted the women around Grace. Mrs. Salter Earle referred to them as “girls” and they were, on average, several years younger than Grace herself, since so many girls worked for a few years and then gave up outside employment when they got married. Girls of sixteen and seventeen, some, like Effie, even younger, in threadbare blouses and home-sewn skirts, sat ramrod-straight hanging onto every word their leader uttered, and joined together to sing the union anthem “Solidarity Forever.” Grace had heard it sung at meetings in New York, but never here in St. John’s.

Grace was stirred by the sight: she wasn’t sure what to make of Mrs. Salter Earle’s strident, abrasive manner, but the young women she had collected around her were inspiring. And her vision was like that of the settlement workers—not just handing out charity, as Grace was doing, but working among the poor themselves, enlisting their own efforts to raise them out of poverty. It was strange to sing “Solidarity Forever” and applaud the suggestion of a strike, when at home that evening Grace had listened to Grandfather fuming about how the printers’ strike, which had dragged on for months, made it impossible to run his business. Yet she couldn’t help agreeing with much of what she heard. She already knew that girls were exploited in factories, and united effort was necessary to improve their lot.

After the business part of the meeting there was, as Effie had said, tea and biscuits, and some of the girls got up to do songs and recitations. Mrs. Salter Earle settled herself and her teacup into the seat next to Grace as a slim girl of about seventeen stepped up
to the front of the room and cleared her throat. “I read this poem in a magazine,” the girl said, “and the paper said a crew of women out in the States carried it on their signs when they went on strike, and I think it’s the best thing I ever heard.” She cleared her throat, clasped her hands before in school-recitation posture, and raised her voice.

As the recitation continued, tears sprang to Grace’s eyes. Mrs. Earle listened dry eyed, nodding slightly at the end of each stanza, but Grace was lost in the poignant beauty of the words, and of hearing them recited by a working girl who must surely have known from experience what they meant.

As the room full of women burst into applause, Mrs. Earle leaned over to say in Grace’s ear, “Seamstress at the Royal Stores. Mother was a seamstress too, ’til the arthritis crippled up her hands so she couldn’t work. Father’s a drunkard, good for nothing. Young Theresa there did well at the convent school—family’s Catholic, of course—up ’til she was ten and had to leave to go to work. Fine reciting voice, fine mind. Shame she couldn’t stay in school.”

When the recitations and songs were done and the women sat around chatting, Grace turned to Sylvia Pearcey, another of the young women she knew from her church work. Sylvia worked in the same factory as Effie Butler and Grace asked her, “Do you know where Effie is? It was she who invited me to come this evening; I
thought she’d be here.”

“Oh, didn’t you hear what happened today at the factory?” said Sylvia. “There was an accident with one of the machines and Effie got her hand caught in the works. She’s in awful bad shape.”

“Is she at home? Did anyone take her to a doctor?”

The girl shrugged. “Don’t know. We had to shut down an hour early today because they couldn’t get that machine running again, that’s the only reason I had time to get me tea and get here for this meeting.”

“Oh dear—I ought to go look in on her and the children, see if she’s all right,” Grace said.

Mrs. Earle, who was engaged in lively conversation nearby, turned and said, “Is that the young girl who was in the accident at the boot factory? I heard she’s been taken to hospital.”

“Yes—Effie Butler,” Grace said. “I was just going to go by the house.”

“I’ll come with you,” Julia Salter Earle announced. She clearly knew who Effie Butler was and where she lived. Remembering her thumbnail life sketch of Theresa McGrath, Grace wondered if she knew every factory girl in St. John’s by name and address.