Books: Letters from America
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Rupert Brooke >> Letters from America
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It is noteworthy that Icelanders are found to be far the readiest to
mingle and become Canadian. After them, Norwegians and Swedes. With
other immigrant nationalities, hope lies with the younger generation;
but these acclimatise immediately.
Our train was boarded by a crowd of Ruthenians or Galicians, brown-eyed
and beautiful people, not yet wholly civilised out of their own costume.
The girls chatted together in a swift, lovely language, and the children
danced about, tossing their queer brown mops of hair. They clattered out
at a little village that seemed to belong to them, and stood waving and
laughing us out of sight. I pondered on their feelings, and looked for
the name of the little Utopia these aliens had found in a new world. It
was called (for the railway companies name towns in this country)
'Milner.'
We wandered into rougher country, where the rocks begin to show through
the surface, and scrub pine abounds. At the end of our side-line was
another, and at the end of that a village, the ultimate outpost of
civilisation. Here, on the way back, some weeks later, we had to spend
the night in a little hotel which 'accommodated transients.' It was a
rough affair of planks, inhabited by whatever wandering workman from
construction-camps or other labour in the region wanted shelter for the
night. You slept in a sort of dormitory, each bed partitioned off from
the rest by walls that were some feet short of the ceiling. Swedes,
Germans, Welsh, Italians, and Poles occupied the other partitions, each
blaspheming the works of the Lord in his own tongue. About midnight two
pairs of feet crashed into the cell opposite mine; and a high, sleepless
voice, with an accent I knew, continued an interminable argument on
theology. "I' beginning wash word," it proclaimed with all the
melancholy of drunkenness. The other disputant was German or Norwegian,
and uninterested, though very kindly. "Right-o!" he said. "Let's go
sleep!"
"_What_ word?" pondered the Englishman. The Norwegian suggested
several, sleepily. "Logos," wailed the other, "_What_ Logos?" and
wept. They persisted, hour by hour, disconnected voices in the void and
darkness, lonely and chance companions in the back-blocks of Canada, the
one who couldn't, and the one who didn't want to, understand. A little
before dawn I woke again. That thin voice, in patient soliloquy, was
discussing Female Suffrage, going very far down into the roots of the
matter. I met its owner next morning. He was tall and dark and
lachrymose, with bloodshot eyes, and breath that stank of gin. He had
played scrum-half for --- College in '98; and had prepared for
ordination. "You'll understand, old man," he said, "how out of place I
am amongst this scum--hoi polloi--we're not of the hoi polloi, are we?"
It seemed nicer to agree. "Oh, I know Greek!"--he was too eagerly the
gentleman--"ho cosmos tes adikias--the last thing I learnt for
ordination--this world of injustice--that's right, isn't it?" He
laughed sickly. "I say as one 'Varsity man to another--we're not hoi
polloi--could you lend me some money?"
We had to press on thirty miles up a 'light railway' to a power-station,
a settlement by a waterfall in the wild. An engine and an ancient
luggage-van conveyed us. The van held us, three crates, and some sacks,
four half-breeds in black slouch hats, who curled up on the floor like
dogs and slept, and an aged Italian. This last knew no word of English.
He had travelled all the way from Naples, Heaven knows how, to find his
two sons, supposed to be working in the power-station. So much was
written on a piece of paper. We gave him chocolate, and at intervals I
repeated to him my only Italian, the first line of the _Divina
Commedia_. He seemed cheered. The van jolted on through the fading
light. Once a man stepped out on to the track, stopped us, and clambered
silently up. We went on. It was the doctor, who had been visiting some
lonely hut in the woods. Later, another figure was seen staggering
between the rails. We slowed up, shouted, and finally stopped, butting
him gently on the back with our buffers, and causing him to fall. He was
very drunk. The driver and the doctor helped him into the van. There he
stood, and looking round, said very distinctly, "I do not wish to travel
on your --- --- train." So we put him off again, and proceeded. Such is
the West.
We rattled interminably through the darkness. The unpeopled woods closed
about us, snatched with lean branches, and opened out again to a windy
space. Once or twice the ground fell away, and there was, for a moment,
the mysterious gleam and stir of water. Canadian stars are remote and
virginal. Everyone slumbered. Arrival at the great concrete building and
the little shacks of the power-station shook us to our feet. The Italian
vanished into the darkness. Whether he found his sons or fell into the
river no one knew, and no one seemed to care.
An Indian, taciturn and Mongolian, led us on next day, by boat and on
foot, to the lonely log-house we aimed at. It stood on high rocks, above
a lake six miles by two. There was an Indian somewhere, by a river three
miles west, and a trapper to the east, and a family encamped on an
island in the lake. Else nobody.
It is that feeling of fresh loneliness that impresses itself before any
detail of the wild. The soul--or the personality--seems to have
indefinite room to expand. There is no one else within reach, there
never has been anyone; no one else is _thinking_ of the lakes and
hills you see before you. They have no tradition, no names even; they
are only pools of water and lumps of earth, some day, perhaps, to be
clothed with loves and memories and the comings and goings of men, but
now dumbly waiting their Wordsworth or their Acropolis to give them
individuality, and a soul. In such country as this there is a rarefied
clean sweetness. The air is unbreathed, and the earth untrodden. All
things share this childlike loveliness, the grey whispering reeds, the
pure blue of the sky, the birches and thin fir-trees that make up these
forests, even the brisk touch of the clear water as you dive.
That last sensation, indeed, and none of sight or hearing, has impressed
itself as the token of Canada, the land. Every swimmer knows it. It is
not languorous, like bathing in a warm Southern sea; nor grateful, like
a river in a hot climate; nor strange, as the ocean always is; nor
startling, like very cold water. But it touches the body continually
with freshness, and it seems to be charged with a subtle and unexhausted
energy. It is colourless, faintly stinging, hard and grey, like the
rocks around, full of vitality, and sweet. It has the tint and sensation
of a pale dawn before the sun is up. Such is the wild of Canada. It
awaits the sun, the end for which Heaven made it, the blessing of
civilisation. Some day it will be sold in large portions, and the timber
given to a friend of ---'s, and cut down and made into paper, on which
shall be printed the praise of prosperity; and the land itself shall be
divided into town-lots and sold, and sub-divided and sold again, and
boomed and resold, and boosted and distributed to fishy young men who
will vend it in distant parts of the country; and then such portions as
can never be built upon shall be given in exchange for great sums of
money to old ladies in the quieter parts of England, but the central
parts of towns shall remain in the hands of the wise. And on these shall
churches, hotels, and a great many ugly skyscrapers be built, and hovels
for the poor, and houses for the rich, none beautiful, and there shall
ugly objects be manufactured, rather hurriedly, and sold to the people
at more than they are worth, because similar and cheaper objects made in
other countries are kept out by a tariff....
But at present there are only the wrinkled, grey-blue lake, sliding ever
sideways, and the grey rocks, and the cliffs and hills, covered with
birch-trees, and the fresh wind among the birches, and quiet, and that
unseizable virginity. Dawn is always a lost pearly glow in the ashen
skies, and sunset a multitude of softly-tinted mists sliding before a
remotely golden West. They follow one another with an infinite
loneliness. And there is a far and solitary beach of dark, golden sand,
close by a deserted Indian camp, where, if you drift quietly round the
corner in a canoe, you may see a bear stumbling along, or a great
caribou, or a little red deer coming down to the water to drink,
treading the wild edge of lake and forest with a light, secret, and
melancholy grace.
XI
THE PRAIRIES
I passed the last few hours of the westward journey from Winnipeg
to Regina in daylight, the daylight of a wet and cheerless Sunday.
The car was half-empty, in possession of a family of small children
and some theatrical ladies and gentlemen from the United States,
travelling on 'one night stands,' who were collectively called
'The World-Renowned Barbary Pirates.' We jogged limply from little
village to little village, each composed of little brown log-shacks,
with a few buildings of tin and corrugated iron, and even of brick, and
several grain-elevators. Each village--I beg your pardon, 'town'--seems
to be exactly like the next. They differ a little in size, from
populations of 100 to nearly 2000, and in age, for some have buildings
dating almost back to the nineteenth century, and a few are still mostly
tents. They seemed all to be emptied of their folk this Sabbath morn;
though whether the inhabitants were at work, or in church, or had shot
themselves from depression induced by the weather, it was impossible to
tell. These little towns do not look to the passer-by comfortable as
homes. Partly, there is the difficulty of distinguishing your village
from the others. It would be as bad as being married to a Jap. And then
towns should be on hills or in valleys, however small. A town dumped
down, apparently by chance, on a flat expanse, wears the same air of
discomfort as a man trying to make his bed on a level, unyielding
surface such as a lawn or pavement. He feels hopelessly incidental to
the superficies of the earth. He is aware that the human race has thigh-
bones....
Yet this country is not quite flat, as I had been led to expect. It does
not give you that feeling of a plain you have in parts of Lombardy and
Holland and Belgium. This may have been due to the grey mist and drizzle
which curtained off the horizon. But the land was always very slightly
rolling, and sometimes almost as uneven as a Surrey common. At first it
seemed to be given to mixed farming a good deal; afterwards to wheat,
oats, and barley. But a great part is uncultivated prairie-land, grass,
with sparse bushes and patches of brushwood and a few rare trees, and
continual clumps of large golden daisies. Occasional rough black roads
wind through the brush and into the towns, and die into grass tracks
along the wire fences. The day I went through, the interminable,
oblique, thin rain took the gold out of the wheat and the brown from the
distant fields and bushes, and drabbed all the colours in the grass. The
children in the car cried to each other with the shrill, sick
persistency of tired childhood, "How many inches to Regina?" "A
Billion." "A Trillion." "A Shillion." The Barbary Pirates laughed
incessantly. It seemed to me that the prairie would be a lonely place to
live in, especially if it rained. But the people who have lived there
for years tell me they get very homesick if they go away for a time.
Valleys and hills seem to them petty, fretful, unlovable. The magic of
the plains has them in thrall.
Certainly there is a little more democracy in the west of Canada than
the east; the communities seem a little less incapable of looking after
themselves. Out in the west they are erecting not despicable public
buildings, founding universities, running a few public services. That
'politics' has a voice in these undertakings does not make them
valueless. There are perceptible in the prairies, among all the
corruption, irresponsibility, and disastrous individualism, some faint
signs of the sense of the community. Take a very good test, the public
libraries. As you traverse Canada from east to west they steadily
improve. You begin in the city of Montreal, which is unable to support
one, and pass through the dingy rooms and inadequate intellectual
provision of Toronto and Winnipeg. After that the libraries and reading-
rooms, small for the smaller cities, are cleaner and better kept, show
signs of care and intelligence; until at last, in Calgary, you find a
very neat and carefully kept building, stocked with an immense variety
of periodicals, and an admirably chosen store of books, ranging from the
classics to the most utterly modern literature. Few large English towns
could show anything as good. Cross the Rockies to Vancouver, and you're
back among dirty walls, grubby furniture, and inadequate literature
again. There's nothing in Canada to compare with the magnificent
libraries little New Zealand can show. But Calgary is hopeful.
These cities grow in population with unimaginable velocity. From thirty
to thirty thousand in fifteen years is the usual rate. Pavements are
laid down, stores and bigger stores and still bigger stores spring up.
Trams buzz along the streets towards the unregarded horizon that lies
across the end of most roads in these flat, geometrically planned,
prairie-towns. Probably a Chinese quarter appears, and the beginnings of
slums. Expensive and pleasant small dwelling-houses fringe the
outskirts; and rents being so high, great edifices of residential flats
rival the great stores. In other streets, or even sandwiched between the
finer buildings, are dingy and decaying saloons, and innumerable little
booths and hovels where adventurers deal dishonestly in Real Estate, and
Employment Bureaux. And there are the vast erections of the great
corporations, Hudson's Bay Company, and the banks and the railways, and,
sometimes almost equally impressive, the public buildings. There are the
beginnings of very costly Universities; and Regina has built a superb
great House of Parliament, with a wide sheet of water in front of it, a
noble building.
The inhabitants of these cities are proud of them, and envious of each
other with a bitter rivalry. They do not love their cities as a
Manchester man loves Manchester or a Münchener Munich, for they have
probably lately arrived in them, and will surely pass on soon. But while
they are there they love them, and with no silent love. They boost. To
boost is to commend outrageously. And each cries up his own city, both
from pride, it would appear, and for profit. For the fortunes of
Newville are very really the fortunes of its inhabitants. From the
successful speculator, owner of whole blocks, to the waiter bringing you
a Martini, who has paid up a fraction of the cost of a quarter-share in
a town-lot--all are the richer, as well as the prouder, if Newville
grows. It is imperative to praise Edmonton in Edmonton. But it is sudden
death to praise it in Calgary. The partisans of each city proclaim its
superiority to all the others in swiftness of growth, future population,
size of buildings, price of land--by all recognised standards of
excellence. I travelled from Edmonton to Calgary in the company of a
citizen of Edmonton and a citizen of Calgary. Hour after hour they
disputed. Land in Calgary had risen from five dollars to three hundred;
but in Edmonton from three to five hundred. Edmonton had grown from
thirty persons to forty thousand in twenty years; but Calgary from
twenty to thirty thousand in twelve.... "Where"--as a respite--"did I
come from?" I had to tell them, not without shame, that my own town of
Grantchester, having numbered three hundred at the time of Julius
Caesar's landing, had risen rapidly to nearly four by Doomsday Book, but
was now declined to three-fifty. They seemed perplexed and angry.
Sentimental people in the East will talk of the romance of the West, and
of these simple, brave pioneers who have wrung a living from the soil,
and are properly proud of the rude little towns that mark their conquest
over nature. That may apply to the frontiers of civilisation up North,
but the prairie-towns have progressed beyond all that. A few of the old
pioneers of the West survive to watch with startled eyes the wonderful
fruits of the seed they sowed. Such are among the finest people in
Canada, very different from the younger generation, with wider
interests, good talkers, the best of company. From them, and from
records, one can learn of the early settlers and the beginnings of the
North-West Mounted Police. The Police seem to have been superb. For no
great reward, but the love of the thing, they imposed order and
fairness upon half a continent. The Indians trusted them utterly; they
were without fear. A store stands now in Calgary where forty years ago a
policeman was shot to death by a murderer, followed over a thousand
miles. He knew that the criminal would shoot; but it was the rule of the
Mounted Police not to fire first. Wounded, he killed his man, then died.
And there was the case of the desperado who crossed the border, and was
eventually captured and held by an immense force of American police and
military. They awaited a regiment of the Police to conduct the villain
back to trial. Two appeared, and being asked, "Where is the escort?"
replied, "We are the escort," and started back their five hundred miles
ride with the murderer in tow. And there were the two who pursued a
horse-thief from Dawson down to Minneapolis, caught him, and took him
back to Dawson to be hanged. And there was the settler, who....
The tragedy of the West is that these men have passed, and that what
they lived and died to secure for their race is now the foundation for a
gigantic national gambling of a most unprofitable and disastrous kind.
Hordes of people--who mostly seem to come from the great neighbouring
Commonwealth, and are inspired with the national hunger for getting
rich quickly without deserving it--prey on the community by their
dealings in what is humorously called 'Real Estate.' For them our
fathers died. What a sowing, and what a harvest! And where good men
worked or perished is now a row of little shops, all devoted to the sale
of town-lots in some distant spot that must infallibly become a great
city in the next two years, and in the doorway of each lounges a thin-
chested, much-spitting youth, with a flabby face, shifty eyes, and an
inhuman mouth, who invites you continually, with the most raucous of
American accents, to "step inside and ex-amine our Praposition."
XII
THE INDIANS
When I was in the East, I got to know a man who had spent many years
of his life living among the Indians. He showed me his photographs.
He explained one, of an old woman. He said, "They told me there was
an old woman in the camp called Laughing Earth. When I heard the name,
I just said, 'Take me to her!' She wouldn't be photographed. She
kept turning her back to me. I just picked up a clod and plugged it
at her, and said, 'Turn round, Laughing Earth!' She turned half round,
and grinned. She _was_ a game old bird! I joshed all the boys here
Laughing Earth was my girl--till they saw her photo!"
There stands Laughing Earth, in brightly-coloured petticoat and blouse,
her grey hair blowing about her. Her back is towards you, but her face
is turned, and scarcely hidden by a hand that is raised with all the
coyness of seventy years. Laughter shines from the infinitely lined,
round, brown cheeks, and from the mouth, and from the dancing eyes, and
floods and spills over from each of the innumerable wrinkles. Laughing
Earth--there is endless vitality in that laughter. The hand and face
and the old body laugh. No skinny, intellectual mirth, affecting but the
lips! It was the merriment of an apple bobbing on the bough, or a brown
stream running over rocks, or any other gay creature of earth. And with
all was a great dignity, invulnerable to clods, and a kindly and noble
beauty. By the light of that laughter much becomes clear--the right
place of man upon earth, the entire suitability in life of very
brightly-coloured petticoats, and the fact that old age is only a
different kind of a merriment from youth, and a wiser.
And by that light the fragments of this pathetic race become more
comprehensible, and, perhaps, less pathetic. The wanderer in Canada sees
them from time to time, the more the further west he goes, irrelevant
and inscrutable figures. In the east, French and Scotch half-breeds
frequent the borders of civilisation. In any western town you may chance
on a brave and his wife and a baby, resplendent in gay blankets and
trappings, sliding gravely through the hideousness of the new order
that has supplanted them. And there will be a few half-breeds loitering
at the corners of the streets. These people of mixed race generally seem
unfortunate in the first generation. A few of the older ones, the 'old-
timers', have 'made good,' and hold positions in the society for which
they pioneered. But most appear to inherit the weaknesses of both sides.
Drink does its work. And the nobler ones, like the tragic figure of that
poetess who died recently, Pauline Johnson, seem fated to be at odds
with the world. The happiest, whether Indian or half-breed, are those
who live beyond the ever-advancing edges of cultivation and order, and
force a livelihood from nature by hunting and fishing. Go anywhere into
the wild, and you will find in little clearings, by lake or river, a
dilapidated hut with a family of these solitaries, friendly with the
pioneers or trappers around, ready to act as guide on hunt or trail. The
Government, extraordinarily painstaking and well-intentioned, has
established Indian schools, and trains some of them to take their places
in the civilisation we have built. Not the best Indians these, say
lovers of the race. I have met them, as clerks or stenographers, only
distinguishable from their neighbours by a darker skin and a sweeter
voice and manner. And in a generation or two, I suppose, the strain
mingles and is lost. So we finish with kindness what our fathers began
with war.
The Government, and others, have scientifically studied the history and
characteristics of the Indians, and written them down in books, lest it
be forgotten that human beings could be so extraordinary. They were a
wandering race, it appears, of many tribes and, even, languages. Not apt
to arts or crafts, they had, and have, an unrefined delight in bright
colours. They enjoyed a 'Nature-Worship,' believed rather dimly in a
presiding Power, and very definitely in certain ethical and moral rules.
One of their incomprehensible customs was that at certain intervals the
tribe divided itself into two factitious divisions, each headed by
various chiefs, and gambled furiously for many days, one party against
the other. They were pugnacious, and in their uncivilised way fought
frequent wars. They were remarkably loyal to each other, and treacherous
to the foe; brave, and very stoical. "Monogamy was very prevalent." It
is remarked that husbands and wives were very fond of each other, and
the great body of scientific opinion favours the theory that mothers
were much attached to their children. Most tribes were very healthy, and
some fine-looking. Such were the remarkable people who hunted, fought,
feasted, and lived here until the light came, and all was changed. Other
qualities they had even more remarkable to a European, such as utter
honesty, and complete devotion to the truth among themselves.
Civilisation, disease, alcohol, and vice have reduced them to a few
scattered communities and some stragglers, and a legend, the admiration
of boyhood. Boys they were, pugnacious, hunters, loyal, and cruel, older
than the merrier children of the South Seas, younger and simpler than
the weedy, furtive, acquisitive youth who may figure our age and type.
"We must be a Morally Higher race than the Indians," said an earnest
American businessman to me in Saskatoon, "because we have Survived them.
The Great Darwin has proved it." I visited, later, a community of our
Moral Inferiors, an Indian 'reservation' under the shade of the Rockies.
The Government has put aside various tracts of land where the Indians
may conduct their lives in something of their old way, and stationed in
each an agent to protect their interests. For every white man, as an
agent told me, "thinks an Indian legitimate prey for all forms of
cheating and robbery."
The reservations are the better in proportion as they are further from
the towns and cities. The one I saw was peopled by a few hundred
Stonies, one of the finest and most untouched of the tribes. Of these
Laughing Earth had made one, but alas! a few years before she had become
"a portion of the mirthfulness
That once she made more mirthful."
The Indians occupy themselves with a little farming and hunting, and
with expeditions, and live in two or three small scattered villages of
huts and tents. But the centre of the community is the little white-
washed house where the agent has his office. Here we sat, he and I, and
talked, behind the counter. The agent is father, mother, clergyman,
tutor, physician, solicitor, and banker to the Indians. They wandered in
and out of the place with their various requests. The most part of them
could not talk English, but there was generally some young Indian to
interpret. An old chief entered. His grey hair curled down to his broad
shoulders. He had a noble forehead, brown, steady eyes, a thin, humorous
mouth. His cow had been run over by the C.P.R. What was to be done? and
how much would he get? The affair was discussed through an interpreter,
a Canadianised young Indian in trousers, who spat. Some of the men,
especially the older ones, have wonderful dignity and beauty of face and
body. Their physique is superb; their features shaped and lined by
weather and experience into a Roman nobility that demands respect.
Several such passed through. Then came an old woman, wizened and
loquacious, bent double by the sack of her weekly provision of meat and
flour. She required oil, was given it, secreted it in some cranny of the
many-coloured bundle that she was, and staggered creakily off again.
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