SUPERFICIAL REFLECTIONS AT SUDBURY
Coming away from the French River, we spent a night at Sudbury, which
lies in the midst of 'rich deposits of nickeliferous pyrrhotite.'
Had I a brain capable of appreciating nickeliferous pyrrhotite, I
should have got more pleasure out of this prosperous mining town than
I did. My chief recollections of it are that it was unattractive,
that everybody looked prosperous in it, that trucks were shunted
under my bedroom window all night long, and that the hotel proprietor
forgot to wake us at the time we had requested, with the result that
we got to the station breakfastless, about half an hour after the
train was due to start. Luckily it was late. I do not care for
missing trains at any time, but to have missed that train at Sudbury
would have been singularly annoying. There was, in effect, nothing
of interest in Sudbury if you were not interested in nickeliferous
pyrrhotite. I know that I should not {103} make such a remark.
_Humani nihil a me alienum_ should be every writer's motto. But it
is one thing to possess a motto, another to act upon it after trucks
have been shunted under one's window all night, and one stands
breakfastless on a dull station very early in the morning, waiting
for a train that will not come.
Let me recall what sort of humanity was about. There was a stout,
middle-aged Indian guide, who told us the finest trout fishing in
Canada was to be had a few miles from Sudbury. He was the most
cheerful Indian I saw in Canada--really a cheerful man--creased with
smiles. There were miners looking out for jobs or leaving
them--mostly spitting. They were all young men. I only saw about
four old men in the whole Dominion. I do not know if Canadians are
shut up after a certain age, or do not grow to it, or retire like
butterflies to end their days far from the ken of man. So that there
was nothing surprising in there being only young men at the station.
More surprising was the amount of nationalities that seemed to be
represented among them. They seemed of every race and yet very
alike. I suppose a miner is a miner, whatever his nationality, just
as a mahout is a mahout. In the strange worlds both these kinds of
experts {104} live in, the one sort in the bowels of the earth, the
other on the necks of elephants, our little international
distinctions would tend to become of less importance. If a man is a
miner, he may also be a Belgian or a German or a Yorkshireman--but
his real country is subterranean: he is before all things a citizen
of the underworld. I do not know if one would get to recognise a
miner in Canada quite so easily as one gets to recognise a miner at
home--for miners there shift about more than in England, and spend
more time, therefore, in the upper world; which stamps men
differently. Still, though tales of new finds in new countries,
where wages will be almost incredibly high, constantly reach them,
and tempt them forth, after all they emerge from one part of the dark
earth only to plunge into another--passing the between-time
above-ground magnificently; but less magnificently than their wives.
The prices paid by miners' wives for their hats at some of the big
stores would startle the more extravagant of our own smart set. I
believe there were some lumbermen in the station too, taking their
ease, but I had not then grown to know the look of a lumberjack as I
did later. The chief thing about him is his magnificent
complexion--enviable of women. Canada {105} is not generous in the
matter of complexions, and one usually hears that the dry winds of
the winter time are accountable for making them poor, especially on
the plains. The hot stoves of the shacks are a still more likely
cause. Why then should the lumbermen have such incomparable skins?
Partly because they are men in 'the pink of condition'--so long as
they work (their condition out of it is best realised by a perusal of
_Woodsmen of the West_, one of the few fine local studies of a real
type of Canadian life that have yet been written); partly because
their work is in the woods which are windless and not dry.
Tokens of the lumbering life--besides the complexion--are jollity, a
freedom from care amounting to something even more delightful than
irresponsibility, an air of equality with something of superiority in
it--indeed, with a good deal of superiority in it--and a childlike
loquaciousness or an equally childlike dislike of talk. These last
two qualities are both, I fancy, Canadian in general. One is
generally told that the Canadians are ready talkers, will always
address a stranger in the train, will be inquisitive and
self-revealing to an extent unimagined by the Englishman. Mr.
Kipling remarked, I remember, in his Canadian {106} letters that you
will learn from an Englishman in two years less than you will learn
from a Canadian in two minutes. Mr. Kipling is perhaps the best
boaster Canada ever drew to herself. My own experience in the matter
of Canadian conversation is that a lot depends upon the individual.
Introductions are certainly not waited for, and on a journey one may
chat with strangers to one's heart's content. But it must be borne
in mind that the traveller _par excellence_ in Canada is the
commercial traveller whose business it is to talk. Off the line--and
on it, where other travellers are concerned--one finds men with a
gift of silence that can at times be disheartening. It is natural
that this should be so. Men in remote places lose the use of their
tongues. All men are not talkers, indeed I think the great majority
of men in any country are not talkers. When Canadians do talk, it
must be admitted that they excel us, or their working-men do. Their
working-men are not only ready, but also, superficially at any rate,
remarkably well-informed about things outside their own particular
job. They know what is being talked of, the prices of things, the
value of land, astonishingly well. All Canadians know something
about land; and about what he knows, {107} the Canadian is not
deprecating. Precisely for this reason, perhaps, the more educated
men among them are at times considerably less interesting than ours.
It is not that their conversational topics are few, but that they are
circumscribed. The personal and dogmatic element enters into them,
with the result that the subject discussed seems incapable of
extension, and tends to become circular. I have met quite young men
who were bores, and bores not only in essence, but in manner, like
the clergymen of our comic papers. I do not know why it is, but I do
know that it is sad. It may be that there are not enough women in
Canada to prevent it. Men are so patient they will stand
anything--even a bore. But where women abound, a man may not be
tiresome either in his clothes or his conversation....
I believe the train at Sudbury was almost an hour late, which is why
I have gone on so long noting trifles at large. When it did come in,
somewhere about 8 A.M., we discovered that it was full up, and people
had been standing in the first-class carriages all night. They had
mostly breakfasted since, and the first-class carriage we got into
was littered from end to end with bun-bags and sandwich-papers and
orange peel, and all the refuse that results {108} from picnics in
trains. Tired parents and sleepy children were piled above this
flotsam in an atmosphere hard to endure. Yet everybody was cheerful,
and though we both wished in our hearts that we could have got
'sleepers' entitling us to Pullman accommodation, we were both
grateful--or ought to have been grateful--that we were privileged to
witness the contented spirit with which these representatives of the
great Dominion bore their trials. Not a grumble--oh, my brother
Englishman, not a grumble! Think of it.
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