Leaves from Lantern Lane

LANTERN LANE

LANTERN LANEJanuary 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.