"I say, Elizabeth, you're not going to sit out there all day, and get
your death of cold? Why don't you come in and read a novel like a
sensible woman?"
"Because I can read a novel at home--and I can't see Canada."
"See Canada! What is there to see?" The youth with the scornful voice
came to lean against the doorway beside her. "A patch of corn--miles and
miles of some withered stuff that calls itself grass, all of it as flat
as your hand--oh! and, by Jove! a little brown fellow--gopher, is that
their silly name?--scootling along the line. Go it, young 'un!" Philip
shied the round end of a biscuit tin after the disappearing brown thing.
"A boggy lake with a kind of salt fringe--unhealthy and horrid and
beastly--a wretched farm building--et cetera, et cetera!"
"Oh! look there, Philip--here is a school!"
Elizabeth bent forward eagerly. On the bare prairie stood a small white
house, like the house that children draw on their slates: a chimney in
the middle, a door, a window on either side. Outside, about twenty
children playing and dancing. Inside, through the wide-open doorway a
vision of desks and a few bending heads.
Philip's patience was put to it. Had she supposed that children went
without schools in Canada?
But she took no heed of him.
"Look how lovely the children are, and how happy! What'll Canada be when
they are old? And not another sign of habitation anywhere--nothing--but
the little house--on the bare wide earth! And there they dance, as
though the world belonged to them. So it does!"
"And my sister to a lunatic asylum!" said Philip, exasperated. "I say,
why doesn't that man Anderson come and see us?"
"He promised to come in and lunch."
"He's an awfully decent kind of fellow," said the boy warmly.
Elizabeth opened her eyes.
"I didn't know you had taken any notice of him, Philip."
"No more I did," was the candid reply. "But did you see what he brought
me this morning?" He pointed to the seat behind him, littered with
novels, which Elizabeth recognized as new additions to their travelling
store. "He begged or borrowed them somewhere from his friends or people
in the hotel; told me frankly he knew I should be bored to-day, and
might want them. Rather 'cute of him, wasn't it?"
Elizabeth was touched. Philip had certainly shown rather scant civility
to Mr. Anderson, and this trait of thoughtfulness for a sickly and
capricious traveller appealed to her.
"I suppose Delaine will be here directly?" Philip went on.
"I suppose so."
Philip let himself down into the seat beside her.
"Look here, Elizabeth," lowering his voice; "I don't think Delaine is
any more excited about Canada than I am. He told me last night he
thought the country about Winnipeg perfectly hideous."
"_Oh_!" cried Elizabeth, as though someone had flipped her.
"You'll have to pay him for this journey, Elizabeth. Why did you ask him
to come?"
"I _didn't_ ask him, Philip. He asked himself."
"Ah! but you let him come," said the youth shrewdly. "I think,
Elizabeth, you're not behaving quite nicely."
"How am I not behaving nicely?"
"Well, you don't pay any attention to him. Do you know what he was doing
while you were looking at the cows yesterday?"
Elizabeth reluctantly confessed that she had no idea.
"Well, he was sitting by a lake--a kind of swamp--at the back of the
house, reading a book." Philip went off into a fit of laughter.
"Poor Mr. Delaine!" cried Elizabeth, though she too laughed. "It was
probably Greek," she added pensively.
"Well, that's funnier still. You know, Elizabeth, he could read Greek at
home. It's because you were neglecting him."
"Don't rub it in, Philip," said Elizabeth, flushing. Then she moved up
to him and laid a coaxing hand on his arm. "Do you know that I have been
awake half the night?"
"All along of Delaine? Shall I tell him?"
"Philip, I just want you to be a dear, and hold your tongue," said Lady
Merton entreatingly. "When there's anything to tell, I'll tell you. And
if I have--"
"Have what?"
"Behaved like a fool, you'll have to stand by me." An expression of pain
passed over her face.
"Oh, I'll stand by you. I don't know that I want Mr. Arthur for an extra
bear-leader, if that's what you mean. You and mother are quite enough.
Hullo! Here he is."
A little later Delaine and Elizabeth were sitting side by side on the
garden chairs, four of which could just be fitted into the little railed
platform at the rear of the car. Elizabeth was making herself agreeable,
and doing it, for a time, with energy. Nothing also could have been more
energetic than Delaine's attempts to meet her. He had been studying
Baedeker, and he made intelligent travellers' remarks on the subject of
Southern Saskatchewan. He discussed the American "trek" into the
province from the adjoining States. He understood the new public
buildings of Regina were to be really fine, only to be surpassed by
those at Edmonton. He admired the effects of light and shadow on the
wide expanse; and noticed the peculiarities of the alkaline lakes.
Meanwhile, as he became more expansive, Elizabeth contracted. One would
have thought soon that Canada had ceased to interest her at all. She led
him slyly on to other topics, and presently the real Arthur Delaine
emerged. Had she heard of the most recent Etruscan excavations at
Grosseto? Wonderful! A whole host of new clues! Boni--Lanciani--the
whole learned world in commotion. A fragment of what might very possibly
turn out to be a bi-lingual inscription was the last find. Were we at
last on the brink of solving the old, the eternal enigma?
He threw himself back in his chair, transformed once more into the
talkative, agreeable person that Europe knew. His black and grizzled
hair, falling perpetually forward in strong waves, made a fine frame for
his grey eyes and large, well-cut features. He had a slight stammer,
which increased when he was animated, and a trick of forever pushing
back the troublesome front locks of hair.
Elizabeth listened for a long, long time, and at last--could have cried
like a baby because she was missing so much! There was a chance, she
knew, all along this portion of the line, of seeing antelope and
coyotes, if only one kept one's eyes open; not to speak of the
gophers--enchanting little fellows, quite new to such travellers as
she--who seemed to choose the very railway line itself, by preference,
for their burrowings and their social gatherings. Then, as she saw, the
wheat country was nearly done; a great change was in progress; her
curiosity sprang to meet it. Droves of horses and cattle began to appear
at rare intervals on the vast expanse. No white, tree-sheltered farms
here, like the farms in Manitoba; but scattered at long distances, near
the railway or on the horizon, the first primitive dwellings of the new
settlers--the rude "shack" of the first year--beginnings of
villages--sketches of towns.
"I have always thought the Etruscan problem the most fascinating in the
whole world," cried Delaine, with pleasant enthusiasm. "When you
consider all its bearings, linguistic and historical--"
"Oh! _do_ you see," exclaimed Elizabeth, pointing--"_do_ you see all
those lines and posts, far out to the horizon? Do you know that all
these lonely farms are connected with each other and the railway by
_telephones_? Mr. Anderson told me so; that some farmers actually make
their fences into telephone lines, and that from that little hut over
there you can speak to Montreal when you please? And just before I left
London I was staying in a big country house, thirty miles from Hyde Park
Corner, and you couldn't telephone to London except by driving five
miles to the nearest town!"
"I wonder why that should strike you so much--the telephones, I mean?"
Delaine's tone was stiff. He had thrown himself back in his chair with
folded arms, and a slight look of patience. "After all, you know, it may
only be one dull person telephoning to another dull person--on subjects
that don't matter!"
Elizabeth laughed and coloured.
"Oh! it isn't telephones in themselves. It's--" She hesitated, and
began again, trying to express herself. "When one thinks of all the
haphazard of history--how nations have tumbled up, or been dragged up,
through centuries of blind horror and mistake, how wonderful to see a
nation made consciously!--before your eyes--by science and
intelligence--everything thought of, everything foreseen! First of all,
this wonderful railway, driven across these deserts, against opposition,
against unbelief, by a handful of men, who risked everything, and
have--perhaps--changed the face of the world!"
She stopped smiling. In truth, her new capacity for dithyramb was no
less surprising to herself than to Delaine.
"I return to my point"--he made it not without tartness--"will the new
men be adequate to the new state?"
"Won't they?" He fancied a certain pride in her bearing. "They explained
to me the other day at Winnipeg what the Government do for the
emigrants--how they guide and help them--take care of them in sickness
and in trouble, through the first years--protect them, really, even from
themselves. And one thinks how Governments have taxed, and tortured, and
robbed, and fleeced--Oh, surely, surely, the world improves!" She
clasped her hands tightly on her knee, as though trying by the physical
action to restrain the feeling within. "And to see here the actual
foundations of a great state laid under your eyes, deep and strong, by
men who know what it is they are doing--to see history begun on a blank
page, by men who know what they are writing--isn't it wonderful,
_wonderful_!"
"Dear lady!" said Delaine, smiling, "America has been dealing with
emigrants for generations; and there are people who say that corruption
is rife in Canada."
But Elizabeth would not be quenched.
"We come after America--we climb on her great shoulders to see the way.
But is there anything in America to equal the suddenness of this? Twelve
years ago even--in all this Northwest--practically nothing. And then God
said: 'Let there be a nation!'--and there was a nation--in a night and a
morning." She waved her hand towards the great expanse of prairie. "And
as for corruption--"
"Well?" He waited maliciously.
"There is no great brew without a scum," she said laughing. "But find me
a brew anywhere in the world, of such power, with so little."
"Mr. Anderson would, I think, be pleased with you," said Delaine, drily.
Elizabeth frowned a little.
"Do you think I learnt it from him? I assure you he never rhapsodises."
"No; but he gives you the material for rhapsodies."
"And why not?" said Elizabeth indignantly. "If he didn't love the
country and believe in it he wouldn't be going into its public life. You
can feel that he is Canadian through and through."
"A farmer's son, I think, from Manitoba?"
"Yes." Elizabeth's tone was a little defensive.
"Will you not sometimes--if you watch his career--regret that, with his
ability, he has not the environment--and the audience--of the
Old World?"
"No, never! He will be one of the shapers of the new."
Delaine looked at her with a certain passion.
"All very well, but _you_ don't belong to it. We can't spare you from
the old."
"Oh, as for me, I'm full of vicious and corrupt habits!" put in
Elizabeth hurriedly. "I am not nearly good enough for the new!"
"Thank goodness for that!" said Delaine fervently, and, bending forward,
he tried to see her face. But Elizabeth did not allow it. She could not
help flushing; but as she bent over the side of the platform looking
ahead, she announced in her gayest voice that there was a town to be
seen, and it was probably Regina.
The station at Regina, when they steamed into it, was crowded with folk,
and gay with flags. Anderson, after a conversation with the
station-master, came to the car to say that the Governor-General, Lord
Wrekin, who had been addressing a meeting at Regina, was expected
immediately, to take the East-bound train; which was indeed already
lying, with its steam up, on the further side of the station, the
Viceregal car in its rear.
"But there are complications. Look there!"
He pointed to a procession coming along the platform. Six men bore a
coffin covered with white flowers. Behind it came persons in black, a
group of men, and one woman; then others, mostly young men, also in
mourning, and bare-headed.
As the procession passed the car, Anderson and Delaine uncovered.
Elizabeth turned a questioning look on Anderson.
"A young man from Ontario," he explained, "quite a lad. He had come here
out West to a farm--to work his way--a good, harmless little fellow--the
son of a widow. A week ago a vicious horse kicked him in the stable. He
died yesterday morning. They are taking him back to Ontario to be
buried. The friends of his chapel subscribed to do it, and they brought
his mother here to nurse him. She arrived just in time. That is she."
He pointed to the bowed figure, hidden in a long crape veil. Elizabeth's
eyes filled.
"But it comes awkwardly," Anderson went on, looking back along the
platform--"for the Governor-General is expected this very moment. The
funeral ought to have been here half an hour ago. They seem to have been
delayed. Ah! here he is!"
"Elizabeth!--his Excellency!" cried Philip, emerging from the car.
"Hush!" Elizabeth put her finger to her lip. The young man looked at the
funeral procession in astonishment, which was just reaching the side of
the empty van on the East-bound train which was waiting, with wide-open
doors, to receive the body. The bearers let down the coffin gently to
the ground, and stood waiting in hesitation. But there were no railway
employés to help them. A flurried station-master and his staff were
receiving the official party. Suddenly someone started the revival hymn,
"Shall We Gather at the River?" It was taken up vigorously by the thirty
or forty young men who had followed the coffin, and their voices,
rising and falling in a familiar lilting melody, filled the station:
Yes, we'll gather at the river,
The beautiful, beautiful river--
Gather with the saints at the river,
That flows by the throne of God!
Elizabeth looked towards the entrance of the station. A tall and slender
man had just stepped on to the platform. It was the Governor-General,
with a small staff behind him. The staff and the station officials stood
hat in hand. A few English tourists from the West-bound train hurried
up; the men uncovered, the ladies curtsied. A group of settlers' wives
newly arrived from Minnesota, who were standing near the entrance,
watched the arrival with curiosity. Lord Wrekin, seeing women in his
path, saluted them; and they replied with a friendly and democratic nod.
Then suddenly the Governor-General heard the singing, and perceived the
black distant crowd. He inquired of the persons near him, and then
passed on through the groups which had begun to gather round himself,
raising his hand for silence. The passengers of the West-bound train had
by now mostly descended, and pressed after him. Bare-headed, he stood
behind the mourners while the hymn proceeded, and the coffin was lifted
and placed in the car with the wreaths round it. The mother clung a
moment to the side of the door, unconsciously resisting those who tried
to lead her away. The kind grey eyes of the Governor-General rested upon
her, but he made no effort to approach or speak to her. Only his
stillness kept the crowd still.
Elizabeth at her window watched the scene--the tall figure of his
Excellency--the bowed woman--the throng of officials and of mourners.
Over the head of the Governor-General a couple of flags swelled in a
light breeze--the Union Jack and the Maple Leaf; beyond the heads of the
crowd there was a distant glimpse of the barracks of the Mounted Police;
and then boundless prairie and floating cloud.
At last the mother yielded, and was led to the carriage behind the
coffin. Gently, with bent head, Lord Wrekin made his way to her. But no
one heard what passed between them. Then, silently, the funeral crowd
dispersed, and another crowd--of officials and business men--claimed the
Governor-General. Standing in its midst, he turned for a moment to scan
the West-bound train.
"Ah, Lady Merton!" He had perceived the car and Elizabeth's face at the
window, and he hastened across to speak to her. They were old friends in
England, and they had already met in Ottawa.
"So I find you on your travels! Well?"
His look, gay and vivacious as a boy's, interrogated hers. Elizabeth
stammered a few words in praise of Canada. But her eyes were still wet,
and the Governor-General perceived it.
"That was touching?" he said. "To die in your teens in this
country!--just as the curtain is up and the play begins--hard! Hullo,
Anderson!"
The great man extended a cordial hand, chaffed Philip a little, gave
Lady Merton some hurried but very precise directions as to what she was
to see--and whom--at Vancouver and Pretoria. "You must see So-and-so and
So-and-so--great friends of mine. D----'ll tell you all about the
lumbering. Get somebody to show you the Chinese quarter. And there's a
splendid old fellow--a C.P.R. man--did some of the prospecting for the
railway up North, toward the Yellowhead. Never heard such tales; I could
have sat up all night." He hastily scribbled a name on a card and gave
it to Elizabeth. "Good-bye--good-bye!"
He hastened off, but they saw him standing a few moments longer on the
platform, the centre of a group of provincial politicians, farmers,
railway superintendents, and others--his hat on the back of his head,
his pleasant laugh ringing every now and then above the clatter of
talk. Then came departure, and at the last moment he jumped into his
carriage, talking and talked to, almost till it had left the platform.
Anderson hailed a farming acquaintance.
"Well? What has the Governor-General been doing?"
"Speaking at a Farmers' Conference. Awful shindy yesterday!--between the
farmers and the millers. Row about the elevators. The farmers want the
Dominion to own 'em--vow they're cheated and bullied, and all the rest
of it. Row about the railway, too. Shortage of cars; you know the old
story. A regular wasp's nest, the whole thing! Well, the
Governor-General came this morning, and everything's blown over! Can't
remember what he said, but we're all sure somebody's going to do
something. Hope you know how he does it!--I don't."
Anderson laughed as he sat down beside Elizabeth, and the train began to
move.
"We seem to send you the right men!" she said, smiling--with a little
English conceit that became her.
The train left the station. As it did so, an old man in the first
emigrant car, who, during the wait at Regina, had appeared to be asleep
in a corner, with a battered slouch hat drawn down over his eyes and
face, stealthily moved to the window, and looked back upon the now
empty platform.
Some hours later Anderson was still sitting beside Elizabeth. They were
in Southern Alberta. The June day had darkened. And for the first time
Elizabeth felt the chill and loneliness of the prairies, where as yet
she had only felt their exhilaration. A fierce wind was sweeping over
the boundless land, with showers in its train. The signs of habitation
became scantier, the farms fewer. Bunches of horses and herds of cattle
widely scattered over the endless grassy plains--the brown lines of the
ploughed fire-guards running beside the railway--the bents of winter
grass, white in the storm-light, bleaching the rolling surface of the
ground, till the darkness of some cloud-shadow absorbed them; these
things breathed--of a sudden--wildness and desolation. It seemed as
though man could no longer cope with the mere vastness of the earth--an
earth without rivers or trees, too visibly naked and measureless.
"At last I am afraid of it!" said Elizabeth, shivering in her fur coat,
with a little motion of her hand toward the plain. "And what must it be
in winter!"
Anderson laughed.
"The winter is much milder here than in Manitoba! Radiant sunshine day
after day--and the warm chinook-wind. And it is precisely here that the
railway lands are selling at a higher price for the moment than anywhere
else, and that settlers are rushing in. Look there!"
Elizabeth peered through the gloom, and saw the gleam of water. The
train ran along beside it for a minute or two, then the gathering
darkness seemed to swallow it up.
"A river?"
"No, a canal, fed from the Bow River--far ahead of us. We are in the
irrigation belt--and in the next few years thousands of people will
settle here. Give the land water--the wheat follows! South and North,
even now, the wheat is spreading and driving out the ranchers.
Irrigation is the secret. We are mastering it! And you thought"--he
looked at her with amusement and a kind of triumph--"that the country
had mastered us?"
There was something in his voice and eyes, as though not he spoke, but a
nation through him. "Splendid!" was the word that rose in Elizabeth's
mind; and a thrill ran with it.
The gloom of the afternoon deepened. The showers increased. But
Elizabeth could not be prevailed upon to go in. In the car Delaine and
Philip were playing dominoes, in despair of anything more amusing.
Yerkes was giving his great mind to the dinner which was to be the
consolation of Philip's day.
Meanwhile Elizabeth kept Anderson talking. That was her great gift. She
was the best of listeners. Thus led on he could not help himself, any
more than he had been able to help himself on the afternoon of the
sink-hole. He had meant to hold himself strictly in hand with this too
attractive Englishwoman. On the contrary, he had never yet poured out so
frankly to mortal ear the inmost dreams and hopes which fill the ablest
minds of Canada--dreams half imagination, half science; and hopes which,
yesterday romance, become reality to-morrow.
He showed her, for instance, the great Government farms as they passed
them, standing white and trim upon the prairie, and bade her think of
the busy brains at work there--magicians conjuring new wheats that will
ripen before the earliest frosts, and so draw onward the warm tide of
human life over vast regions now desolate; or trees that will stand firm
against the prairie winds, and in the centuries to come turn this bare
and boundless earth, this sea-floor of a primeval ocean, which is now
Western Canada, into a garden of the Lord. Or from the epic of the soil,
he would slip on to the human epic bound up with it--tale after tale of
life in the ranching country, and of the emigration now pouring into
Alberta--witched out of him by this delicately eager face, these lovely
listening eyes. And here, in spite of his blunt, simple speech, came out
the deeper notes of feeling, feeling richly steeped in those "mortal
things"--earthy, tender, humorous, or terrible--which make up
human fate.
Had he talked like this to the Catholic girl in Quebec? And yet she had
renounced him? She had never loved him, of course! To love this man
would be to cleave to him.
Once, in a lifting of the shadows of the prairie, Elizabeth saw a group
of antelope standing only a few hundred yards from the train, tranquilly
indifferent, their branching horns clear in a pallid ray of light; and
once a prairie-wolf, solitary and motionless; and once, as the train
moved off after a stoppage, an old badger leisurely shambling off the
line itself. And once, too, amid a driving storm-shower, and what seemed
to her unbroken formless solitudes, suddenly, a tent by the railway
side, and the blaze of a fire; and as the train slowly passed, three
men--lads rather--emerging to laugh and beckon to it. The tent, the
fire, the gay challenge of the young faces and the English voices,
ringed by darkness and wild weather, brought the tears back to
Elizabeth's eyes, she scarcely knew why.
"Settlers, in their first year," said Anderson, smiling, as he waved
back again.
But, to Elizabeth, it seemed a parable of the new Canada.
An hour later, amid a lightening of the clouds over the West, that
spread a watery gold over the prairie, Anderson sprang to his feet.
"The Rockies!"
And there, a hundred miles away, peering over the edge of the land, ran
from north to south a vast chain of snow peaks, and Elizabeth saw at
last that even the prairies have an end.
The car was shunted at Calgary, in order that its occupants might enjoy
a peaceful night. When she found herself alone in her tiny room,
Elizabeth stood for a while before her reflection in the glass. Her eyes
were frowning and distressed; her cheeks glowed. Arthur Delaine, her old
friend, had bade her a cold good night, and she knew well enough
that--from him--she deserved it. "Yet I gave him the whole morning," she
pleaded with herself. "I did my best. But oh, why, why did I ever let
him come!"
And even in the comparative quiet of the car at rest, she could not
sleep; so quickened were all her pulses, and so vivid the memories
of the day.