night through new scenery, you must carefully secure a lower berth.
And when you are secret and separate in your little oblong world, safe
between sheets, pull up the blinds on the great window a few inches and
leave them so. Thus, as you lie, you can view the dark procession of
woods and hills, and mingle the broken hours of railway slumber with
glimpses of a wild starlit landscape. The country retains individuality,
and yet puts on romance, especially the rough, shaggy region between
Port Arthur and Winnipeg. For four hundred miles there is hardly a sign
that humanity exists on the earth's face, only rocks and endless woods
of scrubby pine, and the occasional strange gleam of water, and night
and the wind. Night-long, dream and reality mingle. You may wake from
sleep to find yourself flying through a region where a forest fire has
passed, a place of grey pine-trunks, stripped of foliage, occasionally
waving a naked bough. They appear stricken by calamity, intolerably bare
and lonely, gaunt, perpetually protesting, amazed and tragic creatures.
We saw no actual fire the night I passed. But a little while after dawn
we noticed on the horizon, fifteen miles away, an immense column of
smoke. There was little wind, and it hung, as if sculptured, against
the grey of the morning; nor did we lose sight of it till just before we
boomed over a wide, swift, muddy river, into the flat city of Winnipeg.
Winnipeg is the West. It is important and obvious that in Canada there
are two or three (some say five) distinct Canadas. Even if you lump the
French and English together as one community in the East, there remains
the gulf of the Great Lakes. The difference between East and West
is possibly no greater than that between North and South England, or
Bavaria and Prussia; but in this country, yet unconscious of itself,
there is so much less to hold them together. The character of the land
and the people differs; their interests, as it appears to them, are not
the same. Winnipeg is a new city. In the archives at Ottawa is a picture
of Winnipeg in 1870--Main street, with a few shacks, and the prairie
either end. Now her population is a hundred thousand, and she has the
biggest this, that, and the other west of Toronto. A new city; a little
more American than the other Canadian cities, but not unpleasantly so.
The streets are wider, and full of a bustle which keeps clear of hustle.
The people have something of the free swing of Americans, without
the bumptiousness; a tempered democracy, a mitigated independence of
bearing. The manners of Winnipeg, of the West, impress the stranger as
better than those of the East, more friendly, more hearty, more
certain to achieve graciousness, if not grace. There is, even, in
the architecture of Winnipeg, a sort of _gauche_ pride visible. It is
hideous, of course, even more hideous than Toronto or Montreal; but
cheerily and windily so. There is no scheme in the city, and no beauty,
but it is at least preferable to Birmingham, less dingy, less directly
depressing. It has no real slums, even though there is poverty and
destitution.
But there seems to be a trifle more public spirit in the West than the
East. Perhaps it is that in the greater eagerness and confidence of this
newer country men have a superfluity of energy and interest, even after
attending to their own affairs, to give to the community. Perhaps it
is that the West is so young that one has a suspicion money-making has
still some element of a child's game in it--its only excuse. At any
rate, whether because the state of affairs is yet unsettled, or because
of the invisible subtle spirit of optimism that blows through the
heavily clustering telephone-wires and past the neat little modern
villas and down the solidly pretentious streets, one can't help finding
a tiny hope that Winnipeg, the city of buildings and the city of human
beings, may yet come to something. It is a slender hope, not to be
compared to that of the true Winnipeg man, who, gazing on his city, is
fired with the proud and secret ambition that it will soon be twice as
big, and after that four times, and then ten times....
"Wider still and wider
Shall thy bounds be set,"
says that hymn which is the noblest expression of modern ambition.
_That_ hope is sure to be fulfilled. But the other timid prayer, that
something different, something more worth having, may come out of
Winnipeg, exists, and not quite unreasonably. That cannot be said of
Toronto.
Winnipeg is of the West, new, vigorous in its way, of unknown
potentialities. Already the West has been a nuisance to the East, in the
fight of 1911 over Reciprocity with the United States. When she gets
a larger representation in Parliament, she will be still more of a
nuisance. A casual traveller cannot venture to investigate the beliefs
and opinions of the inhabitants of a country, but he can record them all
the better, perhaps, for his foreign-ness. It is generally believed in
the West that the East runs Canada, and runs it for its own advantage.
And the East means a very few rich men, who control the big railways,
the banks, and the Manufacturers' Association, subscribe to both
political parties, and are generally credited with complete control
over the Tariff and most other Canadian affairs. Whether or no the
Manufacturers' Association does arrange the Tariff and control the
commerce of Canada, it is generally believed to do so. The only thing is
that its friends say that it acts in the best interests of Canada,
its enemies that it acts in the best interests of the Manufacturers'
Association. Among its enemies are many in the West. The normal Western
life is a lonely and individual one; and a large part of the population
has crossed from the United States, or belongs to that great mass
of European immigration that Canada is letting so blindly in. So,
naturally, the Westerner does not feel the same affection for the Empire
or for England as the British Canadians of the East, whose forefathers
fought to stay within the Empire. Nor is his affection increased by the
suspicion that the Imperial cry has been used for party purposes. He has
no use for politics at Ottawa. The naval question is nothing to him. He
wants neither to subscribe money nor to build ships. Europe is very far
away; and he is too ignorant to realise his close connection with her.
He has strong views, however, on a Tariff which only affects him by
perpetually raising the cost of living and farming. The ideas of even a
Conservative in the West about reducing the Tariff would make an Eastern
'Liberal' die of heart-failure. And the Westerner also hates the Banks.
The banking system of Canada is peculiar, and throws the control of the
banks into the hands of a few people in the East, who were felt, by the
ever optimistic West, to have shut down credit too completely during the
recent money stringency.
The most interesting expression of the new Western point of view, and
in many ways the most hopeful movement in Canada, is the Co-operative
movement among the grain-growers of the three prairie provinces. Only
started a few years ago, it has grown rapidly in numbers, wealth, power,
and extent of operations. So far it has confined itself politically
to influencing provincial legislatures. But it has gradually attached
itself to an advanced Radical programme of a Chartist description. And
it is becoming powerful. Whether the outcome will be a very desirable
rejuvenation of the Liberal Party, or the creation of a third--perhaps
Radical-Labour--party, it is hard to tell. At any rate, the change
will come. And, just to start with, there will very shortly come to the
Eastern Powers, who threw out Reciprocity with the States for the sake
of the Empire, a demand from the West that the preference to British
goods be increased rapidly till they be allowed to come in free, also
for the Empire's sake. Then the fun will begin.
X
OUTSIDE
I had visited New York, Boston, Quebec, Montreal, and Toronto. In
Winnipeg I found a friend, who was tired of cities. So was I. In Canada
the remedy lies close at hand. We took ancient clothes--and I, Ben
Jonson and Jane Austen to keep me English--and departed northward for a
lodge, reported to exist in a region of lakes and hills and forests
and caribou and Indians and a few people. At first the train sauntered
through a smiling plain, intermittently cultivated, and dotted with
little new villages. Over this country are thrown little pools of that
flood of European immigration that pours through Winnipeg, to remain
separate or be absorbed, as destiny wills. The problem of immigration
here reveals that purposelessness that exists in the affairs of Canada
even more than those of other nations. The multitude from South or East
Europe flocks in. Some make money and return. The most remain, often in
inassimilable lumps. There is every sign that these lumps may poison the
health of Canada as dangerously as they have that of the United States.
For Canada there is the peril of too large an element of foreign blood
and traditions in a small nation already little more than half composed
of British blood and descent. Nationalities seem to teach one another
only their worst. If the Italians gave the Canadians of their good
manners, and the Doukhobors or Poles inoculated them with idealism and
the love of beauty, and received from them British romanticism and sense
of responsibility!.... But they only seem to increase the anarchy, these
'foreigners,' and to learn the American twang and method of spitting.
And there is the peril of politics. Upon these scattered exotic
communities, ignorant of the problems of their adopted land, ignorant
even of its language, swoop the agents of political parties, with their
one effectual argument--bad whisky. This baptism is the immigrants' only
organised welcome into their new liberties. Occasionally some Church
raises a thin protest. But the 'Anglo-Saxon' continues to take up his
burden; and the floods from Europe pour in. Canadians regard this influx
with that queer fatalism which men adopt under plutocracy. "How could
they stop it? It pays the steamship and railway companies. It may, or
may not, be good for Canada. Who knows? In any case, it will go on. Our
masters wish it...."
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.