A Sudden Sun Page 26

  “Sir Richard says he will bring it in as a government bill,” Mrs. Gosling said, “and that will be much better than having Mr. Coaker sponsor it. If it’s a government measure it’s sure to pass.” Armine Gosling certainly knew the value of having the ear of the man in power: her husband had been mayor of St. John’s, and while he was in power, council had made it legal for women to vote in city elections—as long as they were property-owners. It was a step toward the franchise, but only a small one. The government of Newfoundland still needed to be roused to the suffrage cause.

  “I don’t know what to make of Sir Richard,” sighed Edna Bulley. “He claims to support the cause when we talk to him in private, but then you read things like this article in the Gazette—and we all know that paper has Squires’s money behind it.”

  The women around the table rolled their eyes—they had all read the article—but May Kennedy put her hand over her heart and recited a line from it all the same: “‘It would be interesting to know whether any of these true-hearted, honest Newfoundland women from Fortune Bay or Bonavista support the franchise cause.’”

  “It just makes my blood boil, how the papers—the Gazette, anyway—try to make us out to be nothing but a bunch of rich townie socialites instead of ‘honest Newfoundland women,’” Mrs. McNeil said.

  “Well, anyway, these petitions should answer that accusation,” Grace said—it was the first time she’d spoken up without being asked a direct question. As the other ladies passed her the petitions she had been copying down a list of the communities they came from. She began reading off the list of communities—“Bonavista, Baie de Verde, Cormack, English Harbour, Heart’s Content…. How can anyone say now that the outport women aren’t in favour of the vote?”

  The next day, after making a call to the Methodist orphanage, Grace was off to another meeting—this time to the Ladies’ Branch of the NIWA. At tea-time afterward the imposing Mrs. Salter Earle pulled her aside. “What went on at yesterday’s Franchise League meeting, Miss Collins? I do rely on you to keep me up to date on their gatherings.” She snorted at the news that Sir Richard was going to bring in the franchise bill.

  “Government measure, my foot! When are those fools going to stop believing everything that sleveen Squires tells them?” Unlike Mrs. Bulley, Mrs. Earle had no difficulty deciding what to make of Sir Richard. Since she worked at the House of Assembly she knew the ins and outs of what went on there. “Squires makes promises to put people off, then makes excuses about why he can’t keep his promises. That’s just the way the man works. The way his government works. I don’t know why anyone trusts him further than they can throw him.”

  “I suppose he’s the man in power, people have to work with him if they want to get anything done.”

  “Nothing will get done as long as he’s the prime minister. Including women getting the franchise—you mark my words. Those women are barking up the wrong tree if they think anything is going to change as long as Squires and his crowd are in power.”

  Grace admired Mrs. Earle but found her exhausting. She was a tireless worker but also a tireless agitator: you couldn’t fault her for saying the world, or Newfoundland, was an unjust place because she certainly was doing all she could to make it better, but her energy was fuelled by a kind of anger that Grace found hard to take. It was an anger harsh and powerful as lye soap, useful for getting things done. Still, Grace wanted to believe the world was essentially a good place and could be made still better with prayer, dedication, and a little kindness.

  But Julia Salter Earle was rarely wrong. Weeks slipped by and the franchise bill had still not been introduced. “I’m afraid the session will go by and nothing will get done ’til the fall—if then,” May Kennedy said one evening in February, as their small committee sat down around the table to talk after the next Franchise League meeting was done. “I had so hoped that when I went to the congress I could report that the women of Newfoundland have finally joined the rest of the English-speaking world. Now that even the Americans have the vote, any country that hasn’t given women the franchise looks more and more backward.”

  After working with these women throughout the fall and winter, Grace was becoming a little bolder about speaking up. “You’ll have to tell them instead that our government is dragging its heels,” she said now. “Maybe you can get the ladies in other countries to write letters to the government of Newfoundland, shame them publicly in the papers for being so slow to give us the vote.”

  “That is exactly what we ought to do!” Mrs. McNeil said. “Do you know, we asked the government, and the international alliance petitioned them too, to send a delegation of Newfoundland women to the Rome congress. But Sir Richard said there wouldn’t be a penny to send suffragists off to Europe for any such thing.”

  “Thank goodness I’ve the means to go at my own expense,” May Kennedy said. She was a well-off spinster who lived with her aging mother; their needs were provided for by a generous inheritance that allowed for plenty of household help and left May free to devote herself to good works. “Are we done here for tonight? Mother will be in bed by now, but my cats will think I’ve abandoned them. Miss Collins, do you have a ride home? It’s far too cold to walk.”

  Grace rode to her grandfather’s house in the comfort of Miss Kennedy’s side-sleigh; it was every bit as cold as walking in the knife-sharp winter air, but the journey was much faster. Miss Kennedy leaned her fur-hatted head close to Grace’s ear and said, “There are a few months to go ’til the congress. It may be possible to collect enough donations from our wealthier members so that we can send a second delegate to Rome. If we can do that, I think it ought to be you.”

  “Me? By rights it should be Mrs. McNeil or Mrs. Gosling, or someone else with more experience.”

  “Not all the older ladies enjoy travel as I do. And we all agree we need a younger woman, someone who can represent the voice of the next generation. You’re articulate, Miss Collins, and it’s quite stirring to think that your mother marched with our first woman suffragists way back in ’93. You can talk about that, and say that here we are, her daughter’s generation, and we still don’t have the vote.”

  They were turning onto Queen’s Road, almost at Grandfather’s house. The bells on the horse’s bridle jingled merrily. Grace was used to the fact that Lily’s suffragist past was an open secret to a certain generation of women in St. John’s. But what a lie it would be, to go all the way to Rome carrying the banner of a second-generation suffragist.

  After leaving the house that day back in October, Grace had written no letters home until she wrote her father to say she was not coming for Christmas. She got a Christmas card from both her parents with a five-dollar banknote inside and, in her mother’s handwriting, the note, “May the Lord bless you in 1923. Your loving mother and father.”

  Grace had wondered for a while if her mother would write again—and if she even wanted to hear from Lily. Perhaps the business of the burned petitions had severed things between them forever. She felt oddly relieved, now, to see a letter in her mother’s handwriting on the hall table. It was full of the usual: Catalina news, church doings, and advice for Grace. She made no mention of the petition nor of the months of silence between them.

  That night, Grace sat down to compose a short but newsy response. She rewrote it several times before she was able to match her mother’s neutral tone, devoid of the anger and regret she felt. She could not forgive what Lily had done, but she could not leave the letter unanswered. Cutting off all ties to home was unthinkable.

  After that, Lily’s letters once again arrived weekly, as they had always done, and Grace replied to each one. But among all the letters she received that winter, from her mother and other relatives and her college friends, she missed Jack’s familiar handwriting. His last letter had come before Christmas, when ships were still leaving Battle Harbour. They had agreed to keep writing to each other in instalments over the winter, keeping their letters in a journal they would send each oth
er in spring. It was April before the Labrador steamer arrived and the next day Grace found a parcel on the hall table with a black leather-bound notebook inside.

  “Oh, a package from your friend, you must be so pleased,” said Daisy. But the usual bubbly trill was missing from Daisy’s voice, along with the phrase “your young man” that she used to use as if it were Jack’s name. His months-long absence had clearly demoted him in Daisy’s eyes. She had hoped Grace would begin courting someone else; several times she asked if Grace would be willing to meet the nephew or grandson of some friend of hers. Grace declined all such offers. Once during the winter an earnest gentleman who attended Gower Street Church and was articling at a law firm had invited Grace to a concert with him. The evening had been pleasant enough but she had felt no more desire to spend more time with the young lawyer than she would with any other casual acquaintance of any age or gender. She busied herself with work, with reading, and with the activities of the Women’s Franchise League, and thought it possible that her interests, taken together, did not add up to a whole that made young men particularly anxious to court her.

  Grace waited ’til she was alone in her room in front of a small fire with a cup of hot cocoa, before she opened the notebook to read what Jack had written through the long months of winter. Even when she was settled in her chair, she found herself strangely reluctant to open the cover. She hadn’t heard from Jack since the last steamer sailed in the fall. Busy as she had been, she had never stopped wondering how he was faring.

  Just his tidy, close-written script on the first page—“My dear Grace”—made her heart race. So many months had passed since his last letter and she had spent more nights than she would ever admit to anyone lying awake, trying to imagine what Jack’s life was like in Labrador. She had imagined terrible things—that the work, the loneliness, those long cold winter nights had driven him to despair. That he really had taken to drink, or worse. She knew of men who had been overseas who were so tormented in their minds that they had been driven to take their own lives. What if work on the Labrador coast, which Jack had hoped would be his salvation, had been his undoing instead?

  She had tried to comfort herself with the thought that if anything truly terrible had happened, some news would have come back—a cable to his family, perhaps. And then in the winter silence she imagined other things—that he was well, and happy in his work, and had forgotten about her. Perhaps he was contented because he had fallen in love with some fresh-faced English nurse or even an Esquimo woman. The jealous thoughts were petty and Grace tried not to dwell on them, but stranger things had happened, and he had said, after all, that no promises should bind them. One promise he had kept—the promise to write. He had written a great deal. She supposed he had little else to do except for work. As she read the first page she found, as always with Jack’s letters, that it was as if he were in the room with her, his voice filling the empty spaces both outside and within.

  November 23

  My dear Grace—I was right to come here. I know that already, and if in later months I write you to say that I’m discouraged, that the work is hard, that it all feels hopeless—for those who’ve worked here longer have warned me I will feel all those things, and that the winter months are particularly hard here—still believe me, that I have done the right thing by coming here. Only I fear the winter, not just for the cold and dark but because no mail boat will come with letters from you. Only in this journal, writing words that you won’t read ’til spring, can I confess how much I depend on those letters.

  Grace read the first entry in the journal over twice before she turned the page. Just to see on paper Jack’s admission that he relied on her letters made her feel like a key had turned in her heart, unlocking something she hadn’t known was locked. He had still felt that way in November. Would he have sent the journal, after all, if he hadn’t still felt that way when spring came?

  December 15

  I don’t know why it should be that the very thing that froze and terrified me when it occurred at medical school—the sight of an injured person—should have such a different effect here. In this case it was a trapper who had half-severed his foot while chopping wood—and of course it took far too long for him to come to the clinic, the wound was deeply infected and the foot far past saving. It was every bit as gruesome as things I saw in the trenches.

  But I felt exactly as it did back on the battlefields of France and entirely unlike the clean and antiseptic hospital in Montreal. I thought only of the suffering man, and the injured limb, and what might be done to save him. In the end it meant amputating the foot—a hard blow, but he’s a brave fellow and was already learning to get around well on a crutch when I saw him last. I suppose I am much in the same situation—not having lost a foot, I mean, but having lost a piece of myself. Since coming here I have begun to see two things: that what I have lost will never be wholly regained, and that I may be able to go on without it.

  In mid-January he wrote about the early dark and late dawn of the northern winter.

  It’s dark by four in the evening and not light again ’til nine in the morning. I know it’s worse farther north, the land of the midnight sun in summer and the long dark winter. But it’s more than dark enough here… I go to the clinic in the morning darkness and return home, if I don’t work late, in afternoon darkness. And sit in my room looking out at the dark night, which seems endless. I was never afraid of the dark as a child but I’m beginning to fear it now—how foolish is that? The worst things, the deepest fears and doubts, seem to surface at night, and at this time of year up here it seems to be nearly always night.

  I write to you that I’m happy here, happier than I was in St. John’s, and then I lie awake these nights and can think only dark thoughts. But it’s better, I’ve come to believe, to feel the horrible things than to feel nothing at all. You can’t imagine—I know you can’t, because you are so much alive, always glowing like a flame just lit—you cannot imagine feeling so dead that it would be a relief, almost, to be back in the trenches in France, braced for the whine of shells, if only to feel something again.

  Grace did not want to picture Jack like that, sitting alone by a dark window, thinking what he described as “dark thoughts” and glad to be feeling anything at all, even if it was something terrible. She read on: it was not the only entry like that. His dark thoughts were all there on paper for her to see. All the things he had kept hidden during that year in St. John’s when she had wished he would talk to her were committed to writing now, as if he had to be hundreds of miles away before he could tell her the truth.

  Yet through it all, as he wrote about the hardship and the loneliness, his terrifying dreams and the chasm of self-doubt that yawned before him on the darkest nights, he wrote, too, about loving his work and realizing he could still do it, and the joy that gave him. Grace’s eyes burned—sometimes with tears, sometimes just with the strain of reading so late at night when she ought to be asleep. But the same words that chronicled Jack’s despair also carried more hope than she’d heard from him in years.

  March 12

  I am leaving Battle Harbour for now; I’ve been sent down the coast to the clinic at Forteau, where there’s no doctor at the moment and a greater need for the services of an almost-doctor. The clinic, and the community there, is even smaller than at Battle Harbour, so, I imagine, even lonelier.

  I wish you were here. And yet that’s not right because you seem so very much in your place in town that I can’t imagine transplanting you to Labrador. I think the only people who make it up here are the ones who do feel called to it—and I think, for now at least, that I am one such.

  When Grace closed the black notebook her eyes ached with the effort of reading forty pages of handwriting by lamplight. She blinked at the clock: it was two in the morning. She had read Jack’s stories of gruesome injuries, long hours, endless nights, an epidemic of flu that wiped out two entire families in a tiny village. He had written about his work, what he was l
earning, about his own pain and anguish and the glimmers of hope he saw. He had spoken to her more freely in his winter journal than in all the long months before he went away. He had written of missing her, and wishing she were there. But he had not written that he loved her, or said anything about marriage or the future.

  She closed the book with the feeling that Jack had just been in the room, that she could still hear the echo of his voice. He was so close and yet he was far away, much further than the distance between St. John’s and the Labrador coast. As to when, or whether, she would see him again, Grace had no idea.

  Grace

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “IT HAS BEEN thirty years since my mother joined a group of women who marched to our Colonial Building and presented a bill asking for the right to vote,” Grace said, her voice shaking a little. She paused for translators to repeat her statement in French, in Spanish, in Italian. “And still the women of Newfoundland do not have the right to vote!”

  “Shame! Shame!” cried some voices from the crowd. It was a crowd indeed, the largest Grace had ever spoken in front of—women from England and America and Europe as well as other parts of the world, brown and black faces mingled with the white ones at this ninth Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. The women of Newfoundland properly belonged among the brown and black faces, Grace thought, for the fact that they still didn’t have the vote put them among the backward countries of the world, like that poor woman from Egypt who had spoken with such passion the day before. Italy, the host country, had still not given women the vote, though the country’s new leader had promised it would come soon. Among the British Dominions, only the women of South Africa stood along with Newfoundland on the side of those who had not yet been given the franchise.