Lady of the Ice (2 page)

In his conversation there was usually a tinge of the satirical. While he was doubtless a sincere Christian, and occasionally occupied the pulpit very acceptably, he took delight in ridiculing every thing like cant, and even the ordinary words and actions of the ‘pious' sort of people often brought to his keen eye and thin curling lip that peculiar sarcastic smile of his.
15

Realizing that he had to make money, De Mille turned to fiction, and as early as 1858 he may have begun a tale for children about early Christians in Rome, The Martyr of the Catacombs (1864). He next wrote a novel about early Christians, Helena's Household (1867), and both were published anonymously by New York houses. He was about to enter the most stressful and productive years of his life.

In 1865, De Mille was appointed professor of Rhetoric and History at Dalhousie College in Halifax at a salary of $800. Even though Halifax (population 60,000) was more compact than it would become throughout the twentieth century, it was livelier and more sophisticated than the rural village of Wolfville in the Annapolis Valley. Halifax was the provincial capital, famous throughout the British Empire for its strategic harbour, garrison and naval dockyard. Dalhousie, with about 100 students, was situated in the heart of Halifax at the north end of the Grand Parade, where the City Hall now stands, and opposite St. Paul's Church at the south end of the Parade. De Mille energetically threw himself into teaching and Dalhousie affairs in those troubled years before the college moved to the new Studley campus in the 1880s. He studied languages from Sanskrit to Gaelic, and read widely in literature and church history. He worked diligently on The Elements of Rhetoric, published by Harper's in 1878. At his twenty-fifth class reunion at Brown in 1879 he read his Phi Beta Kappa poem. He was in demand as a lecturer and contributor to newspapers.

Memoirs of De Mille note the contradictory warmth and coolness that are often associated with humorists and satirists. J. Macdonald Oxley, who became a novelist himself, remembered that De Mille's popular classes were “presented with such literary charm and infectious sprightliness they were simply irresistible .... we were proud of his fame in fiction, but we thought still more of him as the students' friend.”
16
Among friends he was witty and satiric. De Mille often enjoyed a game of whist with the Roman Catholic Archbishop Thomas Connolly, George Munro Grant, then minister at St. Matthew's Church, and his close friend Charles Macdonald, the Professor of Classics and Mathematics. De Mille and Macdonald would speak in Latin on their fishing trips. Grant's son, Principal William Lawson Grant, had an early memory of his father, Macdonald and De Mille, swimming in the North West Arm, where they “laughed and shouted and ran about the rocks to dry themselves like school boys.”
17
One colleague called him a “common-place looking Dalhousie Professor,” but another saw him as the “dark, handsome show man of the staff,”
18
and aspects of both appear in the only photograph we have of De Mille. In larger social gatherings the short-sighted De Mille was distant and cool. Possibly his reserve was a protective mask, particularly after a scandal caused unhappiness and upheaval in the De Mille household. In 1867, his father-in-law John Pryor was accused of a connection with a woman of questionable repute and of financial mismanagement. Pryor lost his post as minister of the Granville Street Baptist Church. Having supported Pryor, and hurt by this scandal, James and Annie De Mille left their Baptist congregation and joined St. Luke's Church of England. In the midst of these pressures, De Mille's publishing career took off when Harper Brothers of New York in 1869 published The Dodge Club; or, Italy in MDCCCLIX.

The Harpers were successful purveyors of magazines and books for the mass market that emerged in the United States and Great Britain after the Civil War. While they relied on British giants, such as Dickens and George Eliot, Harpers' also developed a stable of writers like James De Mille, who fed the seasonal appetite for “sentiment and sensation,” as Frank Luther Mott characterized the fiction of the 1860s and 1870s.
19
De Mille dependably turned out high society satiric romances in the style of Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne, melodramatic thrillers in the manner of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White and the posthumously issued fantasy-satire A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888). Although his books for children were issued by Lee and Shepard of Boston, and The Lady of the Ice by Harper's distinguished competitor D. Appleton & Company of New York, De Mille's strongest ties were with the elderly Harper brothers — he even stayed at one of their homes when he visited New York — and they paid him well for his efforts. He did not deal with Canadian houses, which were for the most part reprint publishers for the modest Canadian market that could not match New York for generous payments and large sales. Moreover, the long depression in Canada throughout the 1870s and 1880s was not financially encouraging for Canadian authors. Approving of De Mille's success in the United States, the Saint John editor George Stewart, Jr., complained in his Stewart's Quarterly about the apathy of the Canadian public towards its own authors.
20
For these reasons, De Mille aimed his books at American readers.

De Mille sometimes prepared his manuscripts in double columns, and although there is no evidence that The Lady of the Ice was serialized, as a book it was set in two columns per page, a format common to magazines. The illustrations were by Charles Green Bush, a well-known cartoonist in the period. The reprints of 1871, 1874 and 1876 came from the same stereotype plates, and attest to the popularity of the novel, which De Mille claimed was also dramatized.
21
The Atlantic Monthly (September 1870, 381) enjoyed this “pleasant study of manners” and although the heroine is a “bit shadowy and intangible; all the rest are like the delightful young ladies of actual life, allowing for a difference between Canadian and American girls.” Harper's Magazine (September 1870, 622) observed that the novel has “rollicking humor” and “uproarious fun,” and that De Mille “gives you a double laugh — one at the folly of the book, another at your own folly in being interested in it.” In De Mille's novels, then, we are aware of an ironic and intelligent mind at work.

Some of his colleagues and critics found his intelligence and literary gifts at variance with what he produced and he was supposed — erroneously, in fact — to have called his books “trash” and “pot-boilers.”
22
But no one disputed his powers as a storyteller and his affirmations about human nature in The Lady of the Ice. His is a gentle satire that accepts and forgives human foibles. His comic view recognizes the civility of his characters. They are not heroic in the style of the characters in his melodramas, but they can rise to noble action when called on. Above all, he offers an inclusive society, in which all members have a role and significance in spite of their politics or religion. De Mille's people emerge from a world we can recognize.

In January of 1880, De Mille was in Saint John to lecture on satire. He returned home with a cold that developed into pneumonia and died on 28 January. When Charles Macdonald was called out of class to hear the news, the class immediately turned to high jinks. They quieted down when he returned and said, “I cannot go on, gentlemen; my beloved colleague Professor De Mille is dead.”
23

George L. Parker

ENDNOTES

1. “Dallusiensia,” Dalhousie College Gazette (5 January 1871), 30.

2. Archibald MacMechan, “De Mille, the Man and the Writer,” Canadian Magazine (27 September 1906), 405.

3. Patricia Monk, The Gilded Beaver: An Introduction to the Life and Work of James De Mille (Toronto: ECW Press, 1991), 27, 28. This is the fullest account of De Mille's life.

4. According to a Halifax acquaintance, H. P. Scott, “James De Mille,” Dalhousie Gazette (10 April 1885), 13.

5. Monk, 43.

6. Both brothers kept journals of the trip. In 1906, MacMechan quoted from James' journal, which has since disappeared. Patricia Monk used Elisha Budd De Mill's journal, which is in the Dalhousie University Archives and Special Collections, MS 2.21, James De Mille Fonds.

7. Patricia Monk, “James De Mille's ‘Class Poem 1854',” Canadian Poetry 15 (1984), 61–75.

8. Barry M. Moody, “Edmund Albern Crawley,” DCB 11 (1881–1890).

9. Serialized in the Boston Commercial Bulletin (1 January–28 May 1870) and the Saint John New Dominion and True Humorist (8 January–2 June 1870).

10. Advertisement, Christian Messenger (Halifax), 17 June 1857, 170.

11. MacMechan, 412.

12. As claimed in Scott, 136.

13. Barry M. Moody, “John Pryor,” DCB 11 (1881–1890).

14. A. R. Bevan, “James De Mille and Archibald MacMechan,” Dalhousie Review 35 (Autumn 1955), 206. As told by a former student of De Mille, Herbert C. Creed, whose father-in-law was a friend of Budd De Mill.

15. Bevan, 205.

16. J. Macdonald Oxley, “Some Reminiscences of the Men of '76,” Dalhousie Gazette (12 January 1903), 160–1.

17. Dalhousie University Archives and Special Collections, MS 2-175, File 1.5, Lawrence J. Burpee Fonds, Letter from William Lawson Grant to Burpee, 14 March 1924.

18. Bevan, 201.

19. Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1947). Chapter 22 is entitled “Sentiment and Sensation in the Sixties and Seventies.”

20. “Canadian Literature,” Stewart's Quarterly Magazine 3 (January 1870), 403–7.

21. Monk, 203.

22. Ibid., 220.

23. George Patterson, “Concerning James De Mille, M.A. II — As Teacher,” More Studies in Nova Scotian History (Halifax: Imperial Publishing, 1941), 145.

This
is a story of Quebec. Quebec is a wonderful city.

I am given to understand that the ridge on which the city is built is Laurentian; and the river that flows past it is the same. On this (not the river, you know) are strata of schist, shale, old red sand-stone, trap, granite, clay, and mud. The upper stratum is ligneous, and is found to be very convenient for pavements.

It must not be supposed from this introduction that I am a geologist. I am not. I am a lieutenant in her Majesty's 129th Bobtails. We Bobtails are a gay and gallant set, and I have reason to know that we are well remembered in every place we have been quartered.

Into the vortex of Quebeccian society I threw myself with all the generous ardor of youth, and was keenly alive to those charms which the Canadian ladies possess and use so fatally. It is a singular fact, for which I will not attempt to account, that in Quebeccian society one comes in contact with ladies only. Where the male element is I never could imagine. I never saw a civilian. There are no young men in Quebec; if there are any, we officers are not aware of it. I've often been anxious to see one, but never could make it out. Now, of these Canadian ladies I cannot trust myself to speak with calmness. An allusion to them will of itself be eloquent to every brother officer. I will simply remark that, at a time when the tendencies of the Canadians generally are a subject of interest both in England and America, and when it is a matter of doubt whether they lean to annexation or British connection, their fair young daughters show an unmistakable tendency not to one, but to both, and make two apparently incompatible principles really inseparable.

You must understand that this is my roundabout way of hinting that the unmarried British officer who goes to Canada generally finds his destiny tenderly folding itself around a Canadian bride. It is the common lot. Some of these take their wives with them around the world, but many more retire from the service, buy farms, and practise love in a cottage. Thus the fair and loyal Canadiennes are responsible for the loss of many and many a gallant officer to her Majesty's service. Throughout these colonial stations there has been, and there will be, a fearful depletion among the numbers of these brave but too impressible men. I make this statement solemnly, as a mournful fact. I have nothing to say against it; and it is not for one who has had an experience like mine to hint at a remedy. But to my story:

Every one who was in Quebec during the winter of 18 — , if he went into society at all, must have been struck by the appearance of a young Bobtail officer, who was a joyous and a welcome guest at every house where it was desirable to be. Tall, straight as an arrow, and singularly well-proportioned, the picturesque costume of the 129th Bobtails could add but little to the effect already produced by so martial a figure. His face was whiskerless; his eyes gray; his cheek-bones a little higher than the average; his hair auburn; his nose not Grecian — or Roman — but still impressive: his air one of quiet dignity, mingled with youthful joyance and mirthfulness. Try — O reader! — to bring before you such a figure. Well — that's me.

Such was my exterior; what was my character? A few words will suffice to explain: — bold, yet cautious; brave, yet tender; constant, yet highly impressible; tenacious of affection, yet quick to kindle into admiration at every new form of beauty; many times smitten, yet surviving the wound; vanquished, yet rescued by that very impressibility of temper — such was the man over whose singular adventures you will shortly be called to smile or to weep.

Here is my card:

Lieut. Alexander Macrorie

129th Bobtails.

And now, my friend, having introduced you to myself, having shown you my photograph, having explained my character, and handed you my card, allow me to lead you to

I'll
never forget the time. It was a day in April.

But an April day in Canada is a very different thing from an April day in England. In England all Nature is robed in vivid green, the air is balmy; and all those beauties abound which usually set poets rhapsodizing, and young men sentimentalizing, and young girls tantalizing. Now, in Canada there is nothing of the kind. No Canadian poet, for instance, would ever affirm that in the spring a livelier iris blooms upon the burnished dove; in the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. No. For that sort of thing — the thoughts of love I mean — winter is the time of day in Canada. The fact is, the Canadians haven't any spring. The months which Englishmen include under that pleasant name are here partly taken up with prolonging the winter, and partly with the formation of a new and nondescript season. In that period Nature, instead of being darkly, deeply, beautifully green, has rather the shade of a dingy, dirty, melancholy gray. Snow covers the ground — not by any means the glistening white robe of Winter — but a rugged substitute, damp, and discolored. It is snow, but snow far gone into decay and decrepitude — snow that seems ashamed of itself for lingering so long after wearing out its welcome, and presenting itself in so revolting a dress — snow, in fact, which is like a man sinking into irremediable ruin, and changing its former glorious state for that condition which is expressed by the unpleasant word “slush.” There is not an object, not a circumstance, in visible Nature which does not heighten the contrast. In England there is the luxuriant foliage, the fragrant blossom, the gay flower; in Canada, black twigs — bare, scraggy, and altogether wretched — thrust their repulsive forms forth into the bleak air — there, the soft rain-shower falls; here, the fierce snow-squall, or maddening sleet! — there, the field is traversed by the cheerful plough; here, it is covered with ice-heaps or thawing snow; there, the rivers run babbling onward under the green trees; here, they groan and chafe under heaps of dingy and slowly-disintegrating ice-hummocks; there, one's only weapon against the rigor of the season is the peaceful umbrella; here, one must defend one's self with caps and coats of fur and india-rubber, with clumsy leggings, ponderous boots, steel-creepers, gauntlets of skin, iron-pointed alpenstocks, and forty or fifty other articles which the exigencies of space and time will not permit me to mention. On one of the darkest and most dismal of these April days, I was trying to kill time in my quarters, when Jack Randolph burst in upon my meditations. Jack Randolph was one of Ours — an intimate friend of mine, and of everybody else who had the pleasure of his acquaintance. Jack was in every respect a remarkable man — physically, intellectually, and morally. Present company excepted, he was certainly by all odds the finest-looking fellow in a regiment notoriously filled with handsome men; and to this rare advantage he added all the accomplishments of life, and the most genial nature in the world. It was difficult to say whether he was a greater favorite with men or with women. He was noisy, rattling, reckless, good-hearted, generous, mirthful, witty, jovial, daring, open-handed, irrepressible, enthusiastic, and confoundedly clever. He was good at every thing, from tracking a moose or caribou, on through all the gamut of rinking, skating, ice-boating, and tobogganing, up to the lightest accomplishments of the drawing-room. He was one of those lucky dogs who are able to break horses or hearts with equal buoyancy of soul. And it was this twofold capacity which made him equally dear to either sex.

A lucky dog? Yea, verily, that is what he was. He was welcomed at every mess, and he had the entrée of every House in Quebec. He could drink harder than any man in the regiment, and dance down a whole regiment of drawing-room knights. He could sing better than any amateur I ever heard; and was the best judge of a meerschaum-pipe I ever saw. Lucky? Yes, he was — and especially so, and more than all else — on account of the joyousness of his soul. There was a contagious and a godlike hilarity in his broad, open brow, his frank, laughing eyes, and his mobile lips. He seemed to carry about with him a bracing moral atmosphere. The sight of him had the same effect on the dull man of ordinary life that the Himalayan air has on an Indian invalid; and yet Jack was head-over-heels in debt. Not a tradesman would trust him. Shoals of little bills were sent him every day. Duns without number plagued him from morning to night. The Quebec attorneys were sharpening their bills, and preparing, like birds of prey, to swoop down upon him. In fact, taking it altogether, Jack had full before him the sure and certain prospect of some dismal explosion.

On this occasion, Jack — for the first time in our acquaintance — seemed to have not a vestige of his ordinary flow of spirits. He entered without a word, took up a pipe, crammed some tobacco into the bowl, flung himself into an easy-chair, and began — with fixed eyes and set lips — to pour forth enormous volumes of smoke.

My own pipe was very well under way, and I sat opposite, watching him in wonder. I studied his face, and marked there what I had never before seen upon it — a preoccupied and troubled expression. Now, Jack's features, by long indulgence in the gayer emotions, had immovably moulded themselves into an expression of joyousness and hilarity. Unnatural was it for the merry twinkle to be extinguished in his eyes; for the corners of the mouth, which usually curled upward, to settle downward; for the general shape of feature, out-line of muscle, set of lips, to undertake to become the exponents of feelings to which they were totally unaccustomed. On this occasion, therefore, Jack's face did not appear so much mournful as dismal; and, where another face might have elicited sympathy, Jack's face had such a grewsomeness, such an utter incongruity between feature and expression, that it seemed only droll.

I bore this inexplicable conduct as long as I could, but at length I could stand it no longer.

“My dear Jack,” said I, “would it be too much to ask, in the mildest manner in the world, and with all possible regard for your feelings, what, in the name of the Old Boy, happens to be up just now?”

Jack took the pipe from his mouth, sent a long cloud of smoke forward in a straight line, then looked at me, then heaved a deep sigh, and then — replaced the pipe, and began smoking once more.

Under such circumstances I did not know what to do next, so I took up again the study of his face.

“Heard no bad news, I hope,” I said at length, making another venture between the puffs of my pipe.

A shake of the head.

Silence again.

“Duns?”

Another shake.

Silence.

“Writs?”

Another shake.

Silence.

“Liver?”

Another shake, together with a contemptuous smile.

“Then I give it up,” said I, and betook myself once more to my pipe.

After a time, Jack gave a long sigh, and regarded me fixedly for some minutes, with a very doleful face. Then he slowly ejaculated:

“Macrorie!”

“Well?”

“It's a woman!”

“A woman? Well. What's that? Why need that make any particular difference to you, my boy?”

He sighed again, more dolefully than before.

“I'm in for it, old chap,” said he.

“How's that?”

“It's all over.”

“What do you mean?”

“Done up, sir — dead and gone!”

“I'll be hanged if I understand you.”

“Hic jacet Johannes Randolph.”

“You're taking to Latin by way of making yourself more intelligible, I suppose.”

“Macrorie, my boy — ”

“Well?”

“Will you be going anywhere near Anderson's today — the stone-cutter, I mean?”

“Why?”

“If you should, let me ask you to do a particular favor for me. Will you?”

“Why, of course. What is it?”

“Well — it's only to order a tombstone for me — plain, neat — four feet by sixteen inches — with nothing on it but my name and date. The sale of my effects will bring enough to pay for it. Don't you fellows go and put up a tablet about me. I tell you plainly, I don't want it, and, what's more, I won't stand it.”

“By Jove!” I cried; “my dear fellow, one would think you were raving. Are you thinking of shuffling off the mortal coil? Are you going to blow your precious brains out for a woman? Is it because some fair one is cruel that you are thinking of your latter end? Will you, wasting with despair, die because a woman's fair?”

“No, old chap. I'm going to do some thing worse.”

“Some thing worse than suicide! What's that? A clean breast, my boy.”

“A species of moral suicide.”

“What's that? Your style of expression today is a kind of secret cipher. I haven't the key. Please explain.”

Jack resumed his pipe, and bent down his head; then he rubbed his broad brow with his unoccupied hand; then he raised himself up, and looked at me for a few moments in solemn silence; then he said, in a low voice, speaking each word separately and with thrilling emphasis: