He saw the home of Lincoln,
He saw the court of Lincoln,
He saw the streets he trod.
“Now show me,” quoth the Hindu,
Show me your poet Lindsay,
Show me your prophet Lindsay,
Who sings to-day to God._
_The guide to Fifth Street therefore led
And showed the house where Lindsay fed.
And the Hindu much rejoiced and said:
“I know that Springfield is not dead.”_
[Illustration: GOOD-DAY MR PRESIDENT]
XXXIII. FLAT TOP MOUNTAIN
THE fire burned sulkily at dawn, and the grass around it was white
with frost. We had lain awake for an hour, silently meditating on the
joys of coffee to be. We knew it was no use getting up before sunrise,
for fuel was scarce and hard to find. It was a wonderful dreamy dawn,
rising above the mists of an autumnal night. We looked to see antelopes
perched on the crags above us, and mountain-goats. But the scene was
bare on all hands. Our eyes lighted on the rusty foliage of some
uprooted trees. Walking in our unlaced boots, we brought this dead wood
in, made a fine blaze, and had breakfast, and then curled ourselves up
by the fire and slept till the sun stood higher. If I woke first it was
to sit with a blanket about my shoulders and pen an article for Kit
Morley. It commonly happened that I sat by the fire and scribbled my
letters to the Post in the morning whilst the poet had an extra hour
asleep.
When we resumed our climb the poet got talking of the Indians.
Curiously enough Flat Top Mountain marks the entrance to the country of
the Flat-Heads, the Flat-Heads being so called because they press their
babies’ heads to obtain a flat-headed type of beauty. The mountain has
imitated the Indians and grown up flat-headed too. We were presently
to meet, when we crossed the Canadian line, a considerable number
of Indians of various tribes. Vachel facetiously observed that he
wouldn’t mind taking an Indian bride if he could find one that walked
thirty-five miles a day and took a bath every morning. I held that
it was very snobbish on his part. The disqualifying point, however,
proved to be the chewing of tobacco. When the poet saw these young
Amazons rolling their quids he was confirmed in bachelordom.
“Great people, the Indians,” said Vachel. “I was brought up on their
orations. So was mother, I believe. Did you ever see M’Gaffey’s reader
with Black Hawk’s ‘Oration’ and the ‘Defence of Spartacus,’ and other
wonderful studies in popular oratory? I wouldn’t mind voting for an
Indian to be President of the United States.”
“What! A red Indian? I should have thought America was too prejudiced
against colour.”
“Not against the Indians. Against the Negroes. You and I don’t think a
Negro could rise to Presidency. But an Indian is different. There is a
great romance connected with the Indians; there are the traditions of
the battles with them; there is the personal grandeur of the braves.
Every American boy has longed to be an Indian chief. And then there is
the strain of Pocahontas, the Indian princess, married into the pride
of Virginia. I believe an Indian President is just what we want to
root us in America and give us a genuine American inspiration. It would
bring poetry into politics. It would bring all the glamour of the West.”
“But it is not a practical possibility,” I urged.
“I believe it could be put over,” said the poet. “You see, the Indians
are a hunting people, a sporting people. They’ve refused to bow the
knee to the sordid side of life.”
We agreed that they were such good hunters that it was in vain the
United States Government protected game in these parts. The Flat-Heads
seemed to have swept off everything. You may go for days and see
nothing more edible than marmots and porcupines. On the other hand, I
have heard it said that the animals know the difference between the
reservations of the Indians and the preserved regions of the Rockies,
and at sight of an Indian on the horizon they rush to safety.
Lindsay recounted to me the story of the political campaigns of
“Tippecanoe and Tyler too!” and how the wild tokens of Western life
invaded the East and moved the imagination of America. Every American
politician is aware of this motive force. Even Roosevelt, a pure New
Yorker, played the Western game--as Colonel of the Rough Riders.
We had a wonderful walk along the Flat Top, which was a prolonged
mountain meadow full of flowers. Vachel began to repine because he
foresaw that, like everything else, our tramp must end, and that in
a few weeks we should be back in Springfield and the mere town. I
told him a story of how one summer day in Petrograd I paused at a
fruiterer’s shop to buy some strawberries which looked very inviting.
They were very dear, but the shopkeeper said, “I have some very
good second quality strawberries inside the shop, and I strongly
recommend them.” “Thanks,” said I. “But I never buy second quality
strawberries.” “So in life, eh Vachel, let us never accept second
quality strawberries.”
The poet laughed, and began talking of grades of eggs, new-laid eggs,
State eggs, selected eggs, political eggs. So walking gently we reached
the north-western extremity of the tableland and came upon a grandiose
diversified scene of shadows and gloomy greens and barren scarps, and
of crowned monarchs of ice and snow. The pines of the Canadian approach
were posted like companies of soldiers and disposed in beleaguering
armies as if the line, unguarded by men, was guarded by trees, the
forest wardens of the Empire and the Republic. The poet saw in the
scene another Turner engraving.
We plunged then downward through thick masses of alder and hazel, a
whole mountain-side solid with low growth. Here also were thousands of
raspberry bushes all agleam with rosy fruits. Vachel called the descent
a “raspberry epic.” Down, down we plunged to the dark valley of the
rushing Kootenai, only finding a camping-ground after dark.
We came to an aged river in a steep vale of years with old shaggy
firs on its very water-edge, and with the ruins of the uncontrollable
ever-encroaching forest piled up like walls. We lighted a fire on a
humpy-bumpy bit of shore where it was hard either to walk or sit, but
easy to find wood to burn. We each cleared ourselves a cradle in the
brown needles of the infringing firs.
It was a magnificent enclosure which the old river was a-running
through, like a cypress-walled garden of an Asiatic mountain-castle.
The trees stood like gigantic janissaries or guardsmen with their
cloaks on. The night-stars were exalted by the climbing forest and
peeped but faintly into the depths, and like a mighty black bastion the
sheer rock of the mountain cut off the view northward.
The fire flared, the hot stones cracked and burst. We put our hot
blankets around us and sprawled on them whilst the poet cooked the ham
and the beans, and I tended the coffee-pot or stripped the last wisps
of grease-paper from the butter.
We slept in our cradles and wakened in the morning to see the beavers
jumping among the fallen timber and diving in the river.
[Illustration]
_A prairie resident,
A dweller in a tent,
A White House resident,
A good man for President!
To White House from white tent.
O excellent precedent!
A precedent for a President.
An unprecedented President!_
[Illustration: We’ve seen your line of difference and viewed it with
indifference.]
XXXIV. CROSSING THE CANADIAN LINE
“AS we approach the British Empire,” says Vachel facetiously, “the
huckleberries grow more plentiful, the raspberry bushes larger, the
trees loftier, the air purer.” In the poet’s mind politics and hymns
gave way to desire of huckleberries. I luxuriated in raspberries. He
was Huckleberry Finn. I was a character in Russian folk-lore--the hare
with the raspberry-coloured whiskers. “When we get to a Canadian hotel
let us register as H. Finn and R. C. W. Hare,” said the poet.
We had slept on the hoar-frosted grass of mountain meadows near the
sky; we had slept among the beavers on the banks of the Kootenai; we
tramped in the radiant upper air; we tramped in the gloom of ancient
forests. Mount Cleveland lifted its dome of snow high o’er the lesser
mountains. Trapper Mountain receded. We listened one night to the
coyotes caterwauling in their loneliness. Their superfluous lugubrious
laments reminded me of modern West of Ireland poetry. Vachel laughed
at the comparison. We came to a deserted cabin, once the habitation of
a ranger, now littered with Alberta whisky bottles, and here we read
a pencilled remark written years ago: “Slept here last night. Visited
by a bare who came into cabin and et two sides of bacon.” Another
pencilled notice, apparently by the same hand, said: “Don’t leave
garbig lying about but put it in the Garbig Holl.” An Indian came and
offered to lead us to a boat on Lake Waterton and give us a ferry to
Canada. We preferred to walk, but it occurred to me afterwards that he
was not so much interested in boating as in bottles. I don’t doubt he
could have got us a drink. Then a grand mounted party came past us
with guides and pack-horses, coming from over Brown Pass, going over
Indian Pass. This was a rich American family on holiday: here were
father and mother, grown children, young children, cousins, and in
the midst of them Aunt Jemima, looking very proud and stiff, with an
expression on her face which signified “_Never again!_” They had been
twenty-eight days in the mountains, camping out all the time.
* * * * *
VACHEL’S ankle was rather weak, and he much preferred sitting to
walking. He called himself “the slow train through Arkansas.” We
stopped at stations, half-stations, and halts. “All I lack, Stephen, is
steam,” said he. But every now and then he would take courage and say,
“Lots of walk in me to-day--Canada to-night!”
The excitement of finding the “Canadian Line” cheered my companion. The
face which in the morning had looked contrite and penitent as that of
one just released from jail, lighted up with new mirth and facetious
intent. He began to get steam. The slow train from Arkansas began to
approach Kentucky, and the sign of steam was a return to political
conversation. He began to chaff me mercilessly on the subject of the
Empire and King George and the British lion. I chaffed him about “God’s
own country.” The poet identified America with all that was best in
America’s traditions and in the visions of her poets, the
All I could never be,
All men ignored in me,
of his native country. I was critical, for I bore in my mind the
growth of materialism, the corruption of the law, the lynchings of
the Negroes, and the rest. He wanted me to dissociate America from
the dollar, from the noisy business rampage, and from all that was
unworthy, and instead identify America with the dreams of her idealists.
“That is what I did with Russia,” said I. “If I tell England of the
ideal America they’ll only call me a mystic. But you, Vachel,” I
continued, “try and think of the Empire that way.”
He found it difficult. He could think creatively about his own country,
but where others were concerned he reverted to the normal critical
mind.
* * * * *
IT is almost a recognised convention in literature. If you are writing
about a foreign country you take the general average of what you
observe and describe that. You can attack lustily without fear that the
magazine will lose “advertising.” The writer on Russia was supposed to
bring home a report that the police, and indeed every one else, took
bribes, the Jews were persecuted, the prisoners in Siberia were chained
together. Most American writers on Russia have done it. Kennan is a
characteristic case, who obtained fame identifying Russia with prison
horrors without recalling to the minds of his readers that there are
dreadful prisons also in the United States, and that the silence of his
own Georgia is sometimes desecrated by the melancholy clank-clank of
the chain-gang.
I was besought in 1917, by a leading magazine of America, to write an
account of Rasputin, and although I had many interesting stories of
that evil genius of Russia I refused to write what I considered would
at that time be damaging to Russia. On the other hand, I wrote in 1919
a realistic vision of America in perhaps her saddest post-war moment,
when Wilson was down and no one knew what America was going to do next,
and offered it to the same journal. But the editor was quite hurt that
I did not then see America in roseate hues. How characteristic of this
sprightly world, which, as Latimer said, “was begotten of Envy and put
out at Discord for nurse!”
Not that the poet was critical of England. He idealised England.
He was not as critical of England as I was of America. Whilst he
idealised America creatively he idealised England romantically. To him
America was something to be; to him England was something that forever
was--beautiful, the substance of poetry, the evidence of things not
seen. He did not sympathise with the Irish. He did not think England
was so well organised, commercially, as America. But then to him that
was a point in our favour. Only one point was registered against us--he
did not think that as a nation we could make coffee; and we lagged
behind on Prohibition. But then he had to admit that the Americans for
their part did not know how to make tea.
“Except for the King,” said Vachel, “we are much the same people.”
He loathed kings. “There’s not much difference between Canada and the
United States,” he went on.
“We’ll see,” I answered. “Canadians are subjects of a monarch;
Americans are citizens of a Republic. Canadians look to the King. More
than a mere line divides the two halves of North America. You’ll see.”
So we tramped on. We had a last lunch and finished the ham, the
apricots, and the coffee. As one remarkable fact, we met no Canadians
on the American side; we met no Americans going to Canada either. Yet
there were no restrictions whatever. Out in the Rockies the unguarded
line is literally unguarded; no patrols, no excise or passport
officers. You can come and go as you please. The United States would
encourage Canada to a communion of perfect freedom. Whilst America puts
nothing in Canada’s way, Canada for her part could not afford to police
a 4000-mile line. All is therefore free.
Still, it is clearly the wild animals that take advantage of freedom,
and they abound and are happy in the region about the line. It is a
very strange line, straight and absolute on the map, the essence of
political division, an absurdity in geography. There is no river, no
main mountain-range, no change of the colour of the soil, but only the
invisible hypothesis called 54.40--the “Fifty-four Forty or fight” of
the boundary dispute. It would have been difficult to find the line but
for the fact that a sixteen-foot swathe has been cut in the forest. We
had been told to look out for that. We found it at last, and it was
afternoon, and we stood in No-man’s land together.
It was a curious cut, a rough glade, an alley through the tall pines.
We walked along it a short way; we discerned where it stretched far
over a mountain-side, a mere marking in the uniform green of the
forest-roof. We came down to where the lake water was lapping on the
shore, and the great mountains in their fastnesses stood about us. We
found frontier-post No. 276, and then I stood on the Canada side and
Vachel Lindsay stood on the America side, and we put our wrists on
the top of the post. As we two had become friends and learned to live
together without quarrelling, so might our nations! It was a happy
moment in our tramping.
Then, as it was four in the afternoon, I proposed having tea, much to
the mirth of the poet. For had we not finished the last of our coffee
at our last American resting-place? Fittingly we began on tea when we
entered the Empire.
There was a change of scenery; fresher air, aspen groves, red hips on
many briars. A beautiful mountain lifted its citadelled peak into a
grey unearthly radiance. We climbed Mount Bertha, and the hillsides
were massed with young slender pines that never grow hoary or old, but
die whilst they are young, and are supplanted by the ever-new--forests
of everlasting youth. The grandeur of the mountains increased upon us
till all was in the sublimity of the Book of Job and of the Chaldean
stars. There was nothing petty anywhere--but an eternal witness and an
eternal silence.
[Illustration]
_A Yank and a Britisher walked to the line,
One was a citizen, the other an alien.
“You alien!” said the Yank._
_The Yank and the Britisher crossed o’er the line,
One was a subject, the other an alien.
“You alien!” said the Britisher._
_But when Yank and Briton elapsed hands on the line,
Then neither the Yank nor the Briton was alien._
_Hail, Uncle Sam!
Hail, John Bull!_
_We’ve found your line of difference
And viewed it with indifference._
_You don’t need to guard it,
Nor yet to regard it
With doubt or with fret.
Six weeks we’ve tramped together
In every sort of weather,
And haven’t quarrelled yet._
_We toe the line, we toe it,
The old tramp and the poet.
If we can do it.
And not rue it,
All can--says the poet._
[Illustration: WASHINGTONIA WELLINGTONIA HINDENBURGER]
XXXV. THE DIFFERENCE
SO we entered the Dominion National Park of Waterton Lakes. We climbed
the next mountain after Mount Bertha and saw on every hand the
pinnacled and pillared tops of the Canadian mountains, crags surmounted
by mighty teeth of stone blackly silhouetted against a radiant sky.
Some Dominion officials came into these parts last year, cancelled the
old names of the mountains, and gave them a new set--Mount Joffre,
Mount Foch, and the rest, as if they were No. 1 and No. 2 of Great War
villas. I see by old maps that Mount Cleveland used to be called Kaiser
Peak. How war changes the names of places! It changed St. Petersburg to
Petrograd, Pressburg to Bratislavl; it has even changed the names of
the Rocky Mountains.
“Luckily the Germans did not win,” I said to Vachel, “or New York might
have become ‘Zeppelindorf.’”
We were walking down a slope which Nature had planted out with pompous
trees called “Wellingtonias.”
“What do you call them?” asked the poet.
“Wellingtonias.”
“Not in America. We call them ‘Washingtonias.’”
“You forget you’ve crossed the line--Washingtonias this morning, but
Wellingtonias this afternoon.”
The poet submitted.
“But what would the Germans have called them?”
“Perhaps they’d call them ‘Bluchers’ or ‘Hindenburgers.’”
Apropos of Bluchers--in the first Canadian village we visited the
cobbler for repairs. He was an old man, and explained to us just
exactly what “Blucher shoes” were. He pronounced the name to rhyme with
“butcher,” and he called them shoes in the American fashion. In America
boots are shoes, and shoes are boots.
“They call them Bluchers,” said the cobbler in a quavering voice,
“because Blucher came up on both sides, and Bony did not know on which
side he’d turn up. So the upper of the Bluchers are equally high on
both sides of the shoe.”
* * * * *
THAT is, however, to go some days ahead. We are in the Rockies still,
and beside a wonderful stretch of water blown by mountain winds into
myriads of running waves. We bathed on its shallow shores; we did not
venture far from the bank. For Waterton is a mysterious lake. It has
often been sounded, but there are parts of it where no bottom has been
found. It is the hole out of which these Rocky Mountains have been
scooped, and it goes down, down, down, to the very depths of the earth.
At last we came to a Canadian camping-ground and a group of people
clustered around a Ford touring car. A Ford car used for touring.
Here there happened to be on holiday a professor of English, and he
recognised Lindsay at first sight--such is the fame of the poet in
American universities and schools.
This camping-group told us we were in a land predominantly inhabited
by Mennonites, Mormons, and Dukhobors, and they whetted our curiosity
considerably regarding our new neighbours. We had arrived in a part of
Canada which was rather obscure and certainly little visited by either
Americans or Englishmen.
We came to a ramshackle inn and a village and a dance-hall, and it was
the last dance of the season. The Mormon, German, and Russian belles
checked in their corsets at the cloakroom, and prepared for fun. It
was a log-cabin hall, but the floor was waxed, and from the beams hung
coloured-paper lanterns. There were a score or so of black bear-skins
hung on the walls all the way round. On the bear-skins were white
sashes with these words printed on them: _I DO LOVE TO CUDDLE_; and on
the main beam of the ceiling was written: _Patrons are respectfully
requested to park their gum outside_. The whole front of the piano was
taken out so that there should be more noise. Splotches on the floor
showed how in the past, patrons had surreptitiously brought in their
gum and had accidents. Many couples assembled, and we saw the human
species, though not at its best.
* * * * *
WE issued from the mountains on to the southern Alberta plain, and then
looking back, saw every great mountain we had ever crossed. “We’ve
found the real sky-scrapers,” said Vachel. “Instead of the Times
Building, Heaven’s Peak; instead of the Flatiron, Flat Top Mountain;
instead of the World Building, Going-to-the-Sun; and instead of the
building raised by dimes, the temple not made by hands. The way to
these wonders is not by Broadway, but by primitive trails.” The poet
conducted the orchestra of the universe with the long blossoming stem
of a basket-flower--“instead of the Stock Exchange, the Star Granary
over Waterton Lake,” he murmured. We named the beautiful grouping of
mountains about the lake as the Star Granary. For at night, with stars
above and star-reflections below, it was as if the barns were full of
Heaven’s harvest.
We tramped away northward toward the Crow’s Nest, where a great forest
fire was raging, and we came to the “cow-town” of Pincer Creek.
The Canadian Wild West seemed much wilder than the Wild West south
of the line--or rather, the population seemed wilder. One missed
the gentleness and playfulness of the United States. The men were
harder than down south, and they looked at us with a contempt only
modified by the thought that we might be potential harvest hands. The
Canadian-English looked more askance at Vachel than they did at me.
He looked poetical. They couldn’t have put a name to it, but that is
what it was. But whatever it was, I could feel their aversion. They
disapproved of tramps, but preferred them to poets. I could see also
they didn’t care for Vachel’s accent, but they rejoiced in mine and
spoke to me just to get me to reply so that they could hear once more
the voice of the Old Country. We were clearly in the Empire and not in
the Republic. The Union Jacks in the little log-cabins were wreathed
with flowers. The Stars and Stripes had disappeared. We were so struck
with the change of feeling in the air that we bought ourselves a
school-history of Canada and read it assiduously. The very way of man
looking to man was different. Then the first popular song which sounded
in our ears was:
We never get up until the sergeant
Brings our breakfast up to bed.
O it’s a lovely war!
which is a purely British army song. The Englishman in Alberta is an
overman in the midst of a miscellaneous foreign under-population. The
Englishman’s word is law. He is stronger, rougher in his language and
his ways--not educated. But this sort of fibre is best suited for the
outposts of Empire.
“We Americans are just a bunch of playful kittens,” said Vachel.
There was nothing very playful about the Alberta pioneers.
“Did you light that fire on the side of the road a mile back? Well, you
dam well go back and put it out.”
“We did put it out.”
“I tell ye, ye didn’t. I won’t waste my breath talking to you. If you
set the prairie afire I’ll have you both in jail by sundown.”
“All right, we’ll go back.”
[Illustration]
_We’re on the same continent.
Well, I don’t know. Smells different somehow.
Same air; people speak the same language.
But I don’t see that bird about,
That old eagle of yours.
Smells as if a lion had been here.
You don’t know the lion’s smell?
Well, smell that Union Jack!
That’s it._
[Illustration: BURN YOUR RIFLES AND RETURN TO WORK]
XXXVI. DUKHOBORS