ONE of the memorable and pitiable sights of the West, as the traveller
journeys across the prairies, is the little group of Indians hanging
round the lonely railway station. They are not dangerous now, nor are
they dignified; they are harmless, poor, abject, shiftless, ready to
beg or ready to steal, or to do anything else except work, and the one
possession of the past which they still retain is the inventive and
instinctive cunning of the savage, who can read the faintest sign like
a written language, and knows the surest way of capturing his prey. One
never forgets the squalid figure with some remains of former grandeur
in his dress, and the gulf between us and this being of another race,
unchanged amid the modern civilization. And then one comes home and
suddenly recognizes our savages at our own doors.
Our savage tramps along our country roads, and loafs along our busy
streets, he stops us with his whine when no policeman is near, and
presents himself upon our doorstep, and when he is a master of his
business he will make his way into our house. He has his own dress,
combining many styles and various periods, though reduced to a
harmony by his vagabond personality. He has his own language, which is
unintelligible to strangers, and a complete system of communication by
pictures. He marries and lives and dies outside civilization, sharing
neither our habits nor our ideas, nor our labours, nor our religion, and
the one infallible and universal badge of his tribe is that our savage
will not work. He will hunger and thirst, he will sweat and suffer, he
will go without shelter and without comfort, he will starve and die, but
one thing he will not do, not even to get bread, and that is work; not
even for tobacco, his dearest treasure and kindliest support, will he do
fifteen minutes' honest labour. The first and last article in his creed,
for which he is prepared to be a martyr and which makes him part of
a community, is “I believe in idleness.” He has in him the blood of
generations of nomads, and if taken off the roads, and compelled to earn
his living would likely die. A general law of compulsory industry would
bring the race to an end.
Besides his idleness he has many faults, for he is a liar to the bone,
he is a drunkard whenever he can get the chance, he steals in small ways
when it is safe, he bullies women if they are alone in a country house,
he has not a speaking acquaintance with soap and water, and if he
has any virtue it is not of a domestic character. He is ungrateful,
treacherous, uncleanly, and vicious, to whom it is really wrong to give
food, far more money, and to whom it is barely safe to give the shelter
of an outhouse, far less one's roof. And yet he is an adroit, shrewd,
clever, entertaining rascal. He carries the geography of counties in his
head down to the minutest details which you can find on no map, knowing
every mountain track, and forgotten footpath, every spring where he can
get water, and the warmest corner in a wood where he can sleep. He has
also another map in his memory of the houses with the people that dwell
therein; which he ought to pass by, which it were a sin to neglect,
which are worth trying, and which have changed hands. And he is ever
carrying on his ordnance survey, and bringing information up to date;
and as he and his fellows make a note of their experiences for those who
follow after, it may be safely said that no one knows better either
a country-side or its inhabitants from his own point of view than our
friend the vagrant.
Perhaps the struggle for existence has quickened his wits beyond those
of his race, but at any rate our vagabond is not fettered by that solid
and conventional English intellect which persists in doing things as
our fathers used to do them, and will not accommodate itself to changing
conditions. Our vagabond has certain old lines which he has long
practised and which he is always willing to use, in suitable
circumstances, such as the workman out of employment and tramping to
another city to get a job because he has not money enough to pay his
railway fare, or a convalescent just discharged from hospital and making
his way home to his wife and children, or a high-spirited man too proud
to beg, and only anxious for a day's work (in some employment which
cannot be found within twenty miles). And when he plays any of these
rôles he is able to assume an air of interesting weariness as if he
could not drag one leg after the other, and on occasion will cough with
such skill as to suggest galloping consumption. And poor (but proud) he
only allows the truth to be dragged from him after much hesitation. But
when those lines fail and new inventions are needed for new times he
rises to the occasion. If there be a great miner's strike he goes
from town to town begging money for his wife and children at home, and
explaining the hardships of a miner's life, which he has diligently,
although superficially, learned; and after a war he is a reservist who
threw up a profitable job at his country's call, and is now penniless
and starving, but still unwaveringly patriotic; and if there be any
interest in the sea through recent storm and shipwrecks, he also, this
man of many trials and many journeys, has been saved with difficulty
from the waves and lost his little all. If he calls upon a priest, he is
careful to call him “Father,” and to pose as a faithful Catholic; and if
he be an Irishman, his brogue then becomes a fortune, but if he drops
in upon a Minister of the Kirk he recalls the good which he got when
sitting in the West Kirk of Paisley; and if he be so fortunate as to be
really Scots in blood, and therefore acquainted with theology, he will
not only deceive that minister, but even the elect themselves, I mean
the Caledonian Society. When the vagabond comes upon a home of simple
lay piety, he allows it to be understood that he has led a life of
fearful wickedness but is now a genuine penitent, asking only for the
means of gaining an honest livelihood. He is fertile in devices and
brilliant in execution, without any prejudices against the past
or present, but ever bringing forth from his treasury of unabashed
falsehood and ingenious impudence things new and old.
Our savage has also got, what I believe the Red Indians have not,
an agreeable sense of humour, which no doubt is limited by practical
details, but is in its way very captivating. What a stroke of delightful
irony it was for a pair of our savages to take a long street between
them, the man begging down the right-hand side, and the woman the left,
while the man told a mournful tale of his wife's death, and asked money
to get her a coffin that she might be respectably buried--he being poor
(but proud) and a broken-hearted widower--as well as to clothe their two
mourning little ones in black for the funerals, and for the woman to tell
exactly the same story as she went down the opposite side of the street,
except that it was her husband she was burying, and she poor (but proud)
and a broken-hearted widow. They took no notice of one another across
the street, and none when they completed their work at the further
end, but a few minutes later they were sitting in the same public-house
together, both wonderfully comforted and affording a remarkable
illustration of the dead burying their dead.
Our vagabond is a superb actor within his own province, and greatly
enjoys a triumph in any conflict with the enemy. He was one day singing
the “Sweet By-and-By” with such a voice and so much unctuous emotion
that I lost patience, and broke out on him for his laziness and
profanity. For a moment he was almost confounded, and then he assumed an
air of meek martyrdom suggestive of a good man who had been trying to do
his little best for the salvation of his fellow-creatures, and was
being persecuted for righteousness sake. This was for the benefit of a
simple-minded old gentleman who had been greatly shocked at my remarks,
and now, as a rebuke to an ungodly and unsympathetic clergyman and an
encouragement to humble piety, gave the vagabond a shilling. “God bless
you,” he said with much feeling to the philanthropist, and started again
the “Sweet By-and-By”! but before we parted he tipped me a wink over his
victory, charged with inexpressible humour.
When one of the savages honoured our humble home by calling one day
as an incapacitated member of the Mercantile Marine and obtained
half-a-crown from my tender-hearted wife, partly through sympathy, but
also through alarm, because the suffering sailor proposed to exhibit the
sores upon his legs, I knew that the tidings would be carried far and
wide throughout the nearest tribe, our local Black-feet as it were, and
that we would be much favoured in days to come. So we were, by other
sailors, also with sores, by persons who had been greatly helped by my
preaching in the years of long ago, by widow women full of sorrow and
gin, by countrymen stranded helpless in a big unsympathetic city, till
our house was little better than a casual ward. Then I took the matter
in hand and interviewed the next caller, who had been long out of
employment, but had now obtained a job and only wanted the means of
living till Monday when he would be independent of everybody. He had
spent his last penny the day before on a piece of bread, and had tasted
nothing since. “Not even drink,” I ventured to inquire, for by this time
the air round me was charged with alcohol, when he replied with severe
dignity that he had been a teetotaller since his boyhood. Then I
addressed him briefly but clearly, explaining that the half-crown had
been given by mistake, that we were greatly obliged for the visit of his
friends, that I had enjoyed his own call, but that it would save a
great deal of trouble to both sides if he would only intimate to his
fellow-tribesmen and women when they gathered round the camp fire in
the evening that there was no more spoil to be obtained at our house. He
looked at me, and I looked at him, and a smile came over his face. “I'm
fly,” he said. And then as he went out at the door he turned for a last
shot, “Look here, sir, if you give me a bob, I'll join your church, and
be an elder in a month.” A fellow of infinite jest, and I gave him a
shilling, but without conditions.
The humour of our nomad is always practical, and when it masters him
it sweeps all professional hypocrisy before it like a water-flood,
and reveals the real man. Certainly quite unclothed, but also quite
unashamed. He had told his story so artfully, with such care in detail
and such conviction in tone, that I did believe for the moment that he
was a poor Scot trying to get home by sea to Glasgow, together with his
wife and four children, that he had obtained his passage-money from the
Caledonian Society, and that he only needed a little money for food and
such like expenses. This money I gave him somewhat lavishly, and yet
not quite without suspicion, and he left full of gratitude and national
enthusiasm. Three years later a man got entrance to my study on the
grounds of Christianity and nationality, and before he addressed me
directly I thought that I knew his voice. When he explained that he had
got his passage to Glasgow from that noble institution, the Caledonian
Society, but that as he had a wife and four children... I was sure we
had met before, and I offered to do the rest of the story myself,
which I did with such an accurate memory that he listened with keen
appreciation like a composer to the playing of his own piece, and only
added when I had finished, “So I did it here afore. Well, sir, ye may
take my word for it, it's the first mistake I've made in my business.”
And he departed with the self-conceit of the Scots only slightly
chastened.