The North Star is Nearer

By Evelyn Eaton

Best-selling author Evelyn Eaton (Quietly My Captain Waits, 1940) wrote a series of light-hearted stories about her life in England, France, and Canada in the years between the wars. Those stories, published in The New Yorker, form the basis for two autobiographical volumes, Every Month was May and The North Star is Nearer. Although the stories were written and published a lifetime ago, their appeal is timeless.

Logan Books is proud to re-release Evelyn Eaton's books, to delight a new audience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marte Brengle
• Release date: Sep 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9780982928066

Book preview

The North Star is Nearer

by

EVELYN EATON

Copyright 1949 by Evelyn Sybil Mary Eaton

Copyright 2011 by Logan Books LLC

ISBN: 978-0-9829280-6-6

All Rights Reserved

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The stories Del Onore, Here One Is Serious, Under Saint Mary's Chimes, and At His Age originally appeared in The New Yorker.

Preface to the electronic edition

Best-selling author Evelyn Eaton (Quietly My Captain Waits, 1940) wrote a series of light-hearted stories about her life in England, France, and Canada in the years between the wars. Those stories, published in The New Yorker, form the basis for two autobiographical volumes, Every Month was May and The North Star is Nearer. Although the stories were written and published a lifetime ago, their appeal is timeless.

Evelyn Eaton was bilingual, and shifted back and forth between English and French seamlessly. Where the meaning of a French word of phrase might not be apparent to the non-French-speaker in context, translations have been supplied. Thanks to Blinkie for her fluent French vernacular.

The North Star is Nearer was illustrated by Ann and John Groth. Since we have been unable to determine who owns the copyright for those illustrations, they have been omitted from the electronic edition. Interested readers are encouraged to check the book out of a public library to see these drawings in original form.

This book is a product of its times, and in some cases the stories contain words which would not be acceptable today. We have chosen not to alter the stories to reflect modern sensibilities, but please be assured that no offense was intended nor should be inferred.

~*~

You are gone. The river is high at my door.

Cicadas are mute on dew-laden boughs.

This is a moment when thoughts enter deep.

I stand alone for a long while.

…the North Star is nearer to me now than spring,

And couriers from your southland never arrive—

Yet I doubt my dream on the far horizon

That you have found another friend.

Li Shang-Yin

A.D. 813-858

~*~

Chapter 1 - Hellbent

I was seven when I decided that I wanted to go to hell, if not immediately, ultimately, and that I would do my best to be sure of getting there. My father was responsible for this decision. He was, at that time, 1910, Director of Military Training in Canada. I was his youngest daughter. We lived in a town near Ottawa, with my mother, my sister, our English governess, the maid, the cook, the handyman, two dogs, three cats, a canary and some goldfish. Though I saw him least, Father was the most important of the group to me. I hung on all his words.

It was a hot Sunday in June when I first heard his opinion of hell. We were walking home from church. Father objected to turning out the horses on a Sunday, especially all our house was only six blocks from the Cathedral of Saint Simon and Saint Jude, where we had our pew. It gratified Miss Hillman, our governess, that we were C. of E.—Church of England. It made her feel more at home, If she had to make her home among colonials, to have them worship in the proper way, by which she meant the English way. In England it would never have done for people of our station to be nonconformist.

This particular Sunday was interesting because the new canon preached his first sermon. He was a pugnacious man who had evidently decided that the congregation of Saint Simon and Saint Jude needed rousing. His sermon was a blood-and-thunder denunciation of the complacency of respectable people. Their hearts are fat, he cried, their eyes holden. They shall be mowed down utterly in the day of destruction. The bolts of the Lord shall smite them! He smote on the pulpit in illustration, and the congregation sat up, startled. Father disapproved.

The church has no business to encourage a man to misappropriate military terms that he knows nothing of, he grumbled to my mother on the way home. The proper place for a canon is in the artillery—and on the field of Waterloo at that."

Oh but it isn't that kind of canon, Miss Hillman said, with her passion for exactitude and for enlightening the colonial mind.

I don't care what kind it is, Father roared, it's obsolete.

My mother listened absently as he continued his tirade, 'until he said something about the loud mouth of the canon, then she made a familiar, fluttering gesture signifying Not before the children, dear.

Why shouldn't I quote poetry? Father demanded.

I wish I could remember how it goes. ‘From the fearsome jaws of the canon, there issued—tumty—smoke…’

Verne! Mother said warningly.

Fearsome jaws, Father said, is an example of the accurate and beautiful phrasing common to our more notable poets. I can't remember which one wrote it, but Miss Hillman no doubt knows. I thought you didn't like bogey men, he continued, catching my mother's frown. Do you want our children to be frightened every Sunday morning by a son of a gun…

Verne!

Well, by this canon, then.

Mother went into one of Her Silences. Father continued stubbornly. Do you want their innocent minds filled with the wrong ideas of hell? Hell, he said, turning to me, isn't the way you heard it described this morning. The canon's out of date. It may have been that way a hundred years ago, but since Napoleon got there it's been reorganized.

My sister, who was eleven, had reached Napoleon in her history. Since we shared the same classroom, and Miss Hillman, I had perforce reached him too, though officially I was only at William of Orange

Did Napoleon go to hell? I asked intrigued.

Certainly, Father said. He was a wicked man. Miss Hillman would say he was wicked because he attacked and wanted to conquer England. Some people, and I'm one of them, think it was more wicked to make himself an emperor. But whatever we think of him, we have to admit that he was a great military genius who wouldn't tolerate waste and inefficiency. As soon as he arrived, he installed a good up-to-date central heating system. Nowadays the place is kept agreeably warm with an even temperature, and the demons work in proper shifts, instead of shoveling coal haphazardly when they felt like it, so that one moment you roasted and the next were too cold. Then it was Napoleon who trained them to mix iced drinks and carry them on their tails…

On their tails?

On trays balanced on their tails, which they hold straight up, with a coil at the tip and the tray on top of the coil… I'll draw it for you when we get home, Father said.

My mother walked ahead in stiff disapproval. Miss Hillman, her lips primly pursed, walked beside her. Helen walked between them. My father and I followed happily hand in hand, engrossed in our subject.

People sit about ordering iced drinks, he said, then they go to the races. As another poet put it—and I do know his name, it was Robert Service: ‘I don't want no harpin' nor singin’, Such things with my style don't agree. Where the hoofs of the horses are ringin’ Is music sufficient for me.’ What a racetrack, Eve, and how those demons ride! You may prefer to wear a gown and lug a harp about, getting chilblains in the draughts of heaven, but for me…

That settled it. I hated gowns and chilblains. I wanted to be comfortable and go to the races. Most of all I wanted the companionship of my father, wherever he might be.

Are you really going there? I whispered.

Your mother thinks so. Father shot an amused glance at her back. Your mother is always right.

We reached home. The conversation dropped. I was preoccupied all that week. It was one thing to elect to go to hell, and another to qualify for admission. I wanted to get the thing settled and so be free to forget about it until time and the demons came for me, but I had no idea how to go about this. Nor did the canon's sermon next Sunday help. Some of the roads he pointed out, leading straight below, were hard for a seven-year-old to travel. Father leaned forward. He pressed a nailhead on the rack holding the hymnbooks. Iced drinks for two! he murmured. Next day he went into camp for a month of maneuvers, and there was no one whom I could consult. The subject fascinated me. I thought of nothing else.

When the milkman died, I overheard McKinnon, our Irish cook, fresh from the funeral, telling the parlor-maid what an old rip he had been.

Did he go to hell? I asked at once.

Glory be to God! McKinnon said. Do you hear the like? She looked at me disapprovingly over her spectacles. I'll thank you not to be saying such things in my kitchen. The poor man got his punishment in this world, make no mistake!

This was a new twist, adding to the difficulties of qualification. That morning I had come upon a promising passage in the New Testament lesson for the day, which Miss Hillman made us read. It went: Whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, that is to say, vain fellow, shall be in danger of the council; but whosoever shall say thou fool, shall be in danger of hell-fire. It sounded an easier way of getting there than some of the canon's. I had no brother, but I was perfectly prepared to call my sister a vain fool, only I knew what would happen. She would report me to Miss Hillman, who would tell my mother, and I would quickly get-my punishment-in-this-world, and be no nearer hell, besides going through a lot of unpleasantness. It was the same with the Ten Commandments. Nobody could break a commandment with Miss Hillman in the house and not be discovered and punished in this world. I decided to postpone qualifying until my father got back from camp and could show me how.

He came at last. We met on the stairs.

I've been thinking about hell, I blurted out. He looked surprised. I saw with a dreadful clarity that he had forgotten everything.

There's no such place, he said, don't be afraid. Hell's a state of mind.

But the demons, I pleaded, bereavement in my heart.

They're just a myth, a fairy tale like Santa Claus. Who's been frightening you? he asked.

I shook my head.

Miss Hillman, I bet. Don't listen to her.

He gave my hair a tweak, tossed me a quarter, and ran on downstairs. I sat on the step where I was and began to cry. Losing Napoleon and the demons hurt worse than losing Santa Claus. And now I had lost my father. He was just a grownup like the other grownups in the house. As I rocked back and forth in this new misery, my eyes caught the gleam of a nailhead in the step above. I pressed it savagely.

"Iced drinks for one!" I said. I kicked the stair rail. Then I slid down the banisters and bumped into Miss Hillman at the bottom.

You naughty girl, she said, wearing out your drawers like that.

Oh go to hell! I shouted.

Miss Hillman took my temperature and put me to bed. She said I must have a fever.

Chapter 2 – Catching Up with the Dear Queen

I was always in two minds when the time came for the annual summer visit to my grandmother. It was delightful to take the train from Kingston, Ontario, where my father's regiment was stationed, to Fredericton, New Brunswick, where my grandmother lived. The changes and stopovers spelled excitement and strange meals, and sometimes a tea party with cousins in Montreal between two trains. But the arrival was always a nightmare of fatigue and irritation, through which I was conscious of the suppressed rebellion of my elders, and their exasperation at my grandmother's autocracy, especially her attitude toward trains.

She had sold some land to the railroad at the turn of the century. It was part of the bargain that if the daily train carried any passengers bound for her house, it should stop at the foot of the property to discharge them there. This cost the railroad company about three hundred dollars a stop, and was inconvenient for the guests, since Grandmother made no provision for the transit between the tracks and the house. We had to stagger down steep cinder banks, climb a picket fence and plough our way through a field, dragging our suitcases with us, while my grandmother, placidly waving a square inch of cambric, observed our difficult progress from her porch.

She never took a train herself and she saw no reason for her guests' preferring to ride ten minutes farther to the station, where there would be porters and from which they could be comfortably driven round in a carry-all. Trains to her were plebeian and vaguely blasphemous. The fact that in Canada they never ran on Sundays confirmed her in this view. She could be tolerant toward the people who might use them, to the extent of closing her eyes to the mode of our arrival, but such a definite recognition and acceptance of it as to order out the horses to meet us at the station would not do.

Whatever she might think of trains, Grandmother admired boats. Every few years she went to England, first by sail and later by steamer, to catch up, as she put it, with the dear Queen. Queen Victoria was so much a part of our family life that when she died it required a major adjustment. My grandmother, swathed in crapier crape than she wore for my grandfather, informed the assembled family in the drawing room that they must, no matter how great the effort, and here she cried into her black-bordered handkerchief, learn to sing God save the King, instead of God save the Queen.

And I suppose, Grannie, an awestruck grandson piped, we must also learn to sing ‘Send him Edwardious,’ instead of ‘Send her Victorious’?

Next to Mr. Handel’s Oratorios, which she heard at the Crystal Palace when she was checking on the dear Queen, my grandmother liked hymns. Every evening we gathered round the piano, which she played in a peck and dash style, for what, anticipating the radio by some thirty years, she called the Hour of Music. Before