smoke-coloured lake was weakly plashing. There was no sign of the past
sunset in the west, and smoke seemed to be rising from the darkness of
the horizon. The one light on the city pier had its stab of reflection
in the water below. Near me, still trees leant over the water. The
branches and leaves of the willow under which I slept were delicately
figured against the sky as I looked upward, and far away over the
lake the faint stars glimmered. The moon stood high in the south, and
illumined the surface of the waters and the long coast line of the bay.
When I awoke next morning what a sight! The blue-grey lake so placid,
just breathing, that's all, and crimson ripples stealing over it from
the illuminated smoky east. It was clear that the smokiness of the
horizon came from real smoke--from all the chimneys and stacks of
Huron. I saw massed volumes of it hurrying away from the docks and the
works, and standing out on the lake like a great wall. As I lay on my
spread on the sand, looking out idly with my cheek on my hand, I saw
the sun come sailing through the smoke like a red balloon. No celestial
sunrise this, but Nature beautifully thwarted.
I made a fire and cooked my breakfast, and sat on a log enjoying it;
and all the while the sun strove to be himself and shine in splendour
over the new world, whose beauties he himself had called into being.
For a whole hour, though there was not a cloud in the sky or a mist on
the lake, he made no more progress than on a foggy January morning in
London. He gave no warmth to speak of; he was an immaterial, luminous
moon.
But at last he got free, and began to rise indeed, exchanging the
ragged crimson reflection in the water for a broad-bladed flashing
silver dagger. A great glory grew about him; all the wavelets of the
far lake knew him and looked up to him with their tiny faces. His
messengers searched the horizon for the shadows of night, for all
lingering wraiths and mists, and banished them. The smoky door by which
the sun had come out of the east was shut after him. But he shed so
much light that you could not see the door any longer.
I went in for a swim, and as I was playing about in the sunlit water
the first human messenger of the morning came past me--a fisherman in
a tooting, panting motor-boat, dragging fishing-nets after him. He gave
me greeting in the water.
Fishing is good here--as a trade. Every day many tons of carp are
unloaded. The fish are caught in gill-nets--nets with a mesh from which
the fishes are unable to extricate themselves, their gills getting
caught. The nets are framed on stakes, floated by corks and steadied by
leads. The fishermen leave them standing two or three days, and when
the fish are wearied out or dead they haul them in.
This very hot day I marched to an accompaniment of the thunder of the
dock-works, and reached Sandusky,--a very large industrial port, the
junction of three railways, not a place of much wealth, its population
at least half foreign.
I had a shave at a negro barber's, and chatted with the darkie as he
brandished the razor.
After the war he and his folks had come north and settled in Michigan.
He sent all his children to college. One was earning a hundred and
twenty-five dollars a month as music-mistress in Washington.
"They treat you better up here than in the south?" said I.
"Why, yes!"
"And in London better still."
"Oh, I know. My father went to London. He stayed at a big hotel, and
there turned up three Southerners. They went up to the hotel-keeper
and said, 'Look hyar, that coloured feller 'll have to go; we cahn stay
here with him!' And the hotel-keeper said, 'If he don't please you,
_you_ go; we won't keep you back.'"
"Very affecting," said I.
"There was a fellah came hyar to play the organ for the Episcopal
Church," the negro went on. "He was called Street. The other fellah was
only fit to turn the music for him. He had the goods, b'God he had.
Tha's what I told them."
With that I got away. Outside the shop a hawker cried out to me:
"Kahm'ere!"
"What d'you want?" said I.
"I've a good safety razor."
"Don't use them."
"A fountain pen to write home to your wife...."
The hawker had many wares.
I spent the night in a saloon at Venice, and watched the rate at which
German fishermen can drink beer.
Next morning I walked across Sandusky Bay by the Lake Shore
railway-bridge, a mile and a half long--an unpleasant business,
watching for the express trains and avoiding being run over. At last I
got to Danbury, and could escape from the rails to the cinder-path at
the side. The engine-drivers and firemen of the freight trains greeted
me as they passed me, and now and then I was able to offer "Casey
Jones" a cup of coffee and exchange gossip.
[Illustration: ERIE SHORE.
"Amidst old logs, under a stooping willow tree, I made my bed."]
The enormous freight trains told their tale of the internal trade of
America; on no other lines of railway in the world could you witness
such processions of produce. All sorts of things flew past on these
lumberous trains--cars full of hogs with hundreds of motionless black
snouts poking between the bars; refrigerator cars full of ham--dead
hogs, dripping and slopping water as they went along in the heat, and
the sun melted the ice; cars of coal; open cars of bright glistening
tin-scraps going to be molten a second time; cars of agricultural
machinery; cars laden with gangs of immigrant men being taken to work
on a big job by labour contractors; closed cars full of all manner of
unrevealed merchandise and machinery. On the cars, the names of the
railways of America--Illinois Central, Wabash, Big Four, Lake Shore....
At Gypsum I returned to the highroad, and there once more had an offer
of a job from a gang. I was surprised to see boys of thirteen or
fourteen hard at work with spade and shovel.
"I see you're working for your living," said I.
"What's the matter with you?"
"I said 'You're working for your living.'"
"Wahn a jahb?"
"No; I'm not looking for one. I'm walking to Chicago."
A contractor came forward, a short Frenchman in waistcoat and
shirt-sleeves. His bowler hat was pushed to the back of his head, and
his hair poked out from under it over his scarred, perspiring brow. He
was not working--only directing.
"What would _you_ be? A sort of tramp?" said he. "I used to have a
hobo-station at Toledo. I've seen the shiner[3] line up sixty or
seventy of them and send them to work with car fare paid. They'd work
half a day and then disappear mysteriously. We have pay-day once in two
weeks; but these tramps, many of them educated fellers too, would never
work the time through or wait for their pay. Thousands of dollars have
been lost by hoboes who gave up their jobs before pay-day."
There was an Englishman from Northampton in the gang, and he testified
that America had "England licked ten times over."
There were fat Germans in blouses, moustachioed Italians with black
felt hats pulled down over sunburnt, furrowed brows. All the men and
the boys were suffering from a sort of "tar blaze" in the face. They
were glad to ease up a little to talk to me; but they had a watchful
eye on the face of the boss, who besides being contractor was a sort of
timekeeper.
The contractor was vexed that I wouldn't take a job. Labour was scarce.
He averred that before I reached Chicago the farmers would come on to
the road and compel me to work on their fields. Trains had been held up
before now.
"I thought slavery was abolished?" said I.
The next town on my route was Port Clinton, a bright little city, and
in the eyes of at least one of its citizens a very important one.
I had a long talk with a chance-met journalist and the keeper of a
fruit-shop. The journalist, by way of interviewing me, told me all I
wanted to know about the district. Fruit-growing was far in advance
here. Perry Camp, the greatest shooting-butts in the world, was near
by. The Lake Shore railway was going to spend a million dollars in
order to shorten the track a quarter of a mile. The greengrocer told
me I had the face of a Scotsman, but spoke English like a Swede--which
just shows how badly Americans speak our tongue, and hear it as a rule.
In the course of my interview I confessed that for roadside literature
I read the Gospel of St. John and the Book of Revelation, a chapter a
day, and when I came to the end of either book I started again. The
greengrocer interrupted the journalist, and said:
"When you're tired, you just take out the Bible and read a little,
eh, and you get strength and go on? I knew you were that sort when I
saw you first coming up the other side of the road, and I said to my
friend, 'He reads his Bible.'"
The greengrocer was much edified, and told me that he was the agent
for the district of Billy Sunday, the revivalist. Wouldn't I stay and
address a mass meeting?
I fought shy of this offer. The journalist looked somewhat sourly at
the greengrocer for breaking into his interrogatory. But then a third
interrupter appeared, a little boy, who had come to purchase bananas,
and he addressed me thus:
"On which side did your family fight in the year 1745? On the side of
Prince Charlie? That's the side I'm on."
No descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers he.
On the way out to Lacarne two old fishermen in a cart offered me a
ride, and I stepped up.
"What are you, German?" I asked, always on the look-out for the
immigrant.
"We are Yankees."
"Your father or grandfather came from Germany?"
"No; we're both Yankees, I tell yer."
"I suppose your ancestors came from England then."
"No; we've always bin 'ere."
They had been out three nights seine-fishing on the lake, were very
tired, and rewarded themselves with swigs of rum every now and then,
passing the bottle from one to the other and then to me with real but
suspicious hospitality. Their families had always been in America. The
fact that they came originally from England meant no more to them than
Hengist and Horsa does to some of us.
By the way, Hengist and Horsa were a couple of savages, were they not?
The fishermen put me down beside a plantation, which they said was
just the place in which to sleep the night. I wasn't sorry to get on
to my feet again, and I watched them out of sight,--fat, old, sleepy,
hospitable ruffians.
The plantation was a mosquito-infested swamp, and I did not take the
fishermen's advice. Myriads of "husky" mosquitoes were in the air, the
unpleasanter sort, with feathered antennæ, and whenever I stood still
on the road scores of "Canadian soldiers" settled on me, a loathsome
but innocuous species of diptera.
I sought shelter of man that night, and through the hospitality of a
Slav workman found a place in a freight train--a strange bed that not
only allows you to sleep, but takes you a dozen miles farther on in the
morning. The engine-driver told me that there was a "whole bunch of
tramps" on the train, but that no one ever turned tramps off an empty
freight train,--not on the Lake Shore railway at any rate.
When I "dropped" from the freighter I found myself at Elliston, and
commenced there a day of delicious tramping. The opal dawn gave birth
to a great white horse of cloud, and out of the cloud came a strong
fresh breeze, having health and happiness on its wings. A quiet Sunday.
I reached Toledo this day--and parted company with Erie Shore--great,
busy, happy, prosperous Toledo. It was strange to exchange the country
for the town; to come out of the green, fresh, silent landscape into
the close, stifling, bustling town, full of promenaders talking and
laughing among themselves vociferously.
As I came into the city the day-excursion boat was just about to start
on the return journey to Detroit. Excursionists were flocking together
to the quay, a great spectacle to a Briton. All the men were carrying
their coats in their arms, many had their collars off and the neckbands
of their shirts turned down, bunches of carnations on their naked
chests; many were without waistcoats, and had tickets with the name of
their town pinned to their fancy-coloured shirts; the red, perspiring,
glistening faces of many of them suggested an over-confidence in beer
as a quencher of thirst. The women carried parasols of coloured paper.
They were all in white, and were so thinly clad that you asked yourself
why they were so thin. But despite all precautions the sun had marked
everybody, but marked them kindly.
Suddenly a bell was rung on the steamer, and a little man came forward
and announced in broken English:
"Somebody wan' to come on the boat; the time is supp."
FOOTNOTE:
[3] Policemen.
XIV
THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE
Even Americans of the highest culture and of Boston families speak
English differently from any people in the old country. The difference
may not be obvious to all, but it is there, and it is a thing to
rejoice in, not to be sorry for. The American nation is different
from the British, has different history and a different hope; it has
a different soul, therefore its expression should be different. The
American face as a type is different; it would be folly to correct the
words of the mouth by Oxford, or Eton, or Granville Barker's theatre,
or the cultured Aberdonian, or any other criterion. The use of American
expressions of quite moderate tone amounts to a breach of good taste in
many British drawing-rooms; and if you tell a story in which American
conversation is repeated with the accent imitated, you can feel the
temperature going down as you proceed; that is, if you are not merely
making fun of the Americans. Making fun of any foreign people is always
tolerable to the British; a truly national and insular trait. The
literary world and the working men and women of Britain can enter into
the American spirit, and even imitate it upon occasion; but that is
only the misfortune of our populace, who ought to be finding national
expression in journalism and music-hall songs and dancing, and who are
merely going off the lines by imitating a foreign country. It is loss
to Britain that the Americans speak a comprehensible dialect of our
tongue, and that the journalist of Fleet Street, when he is hard-up for
wit, should take scissors and paste and snip out stories from American
papers; or that commercial _entrepreneurs_ should bring to the British
public things thought to be sure of success because they have succeeded
in America--"Within the Law," "I Should Worry," "Hullo Ragtime!" and
the rest. The people who are surest in instinct, though they are
sympathetic to a brother-people, hate the importation of foreign
uglinesses, and the substitution of foreign for local talent.
The American language is chiefly distinguished from the British by
its emphatic expressive character. Britain, as I have said, lives
in a tradition; America in a passion. We are laconic, accidental,
inarticulate; our duty is plain, and we do it without words. But the
American is affirmative, emphatic, striving; he has to find out what
he's going to do next, and he has got to use strong words. Britain also
is the place of an acknowledged Caste system; but America is the place
of equal citizens, and many American expressions are watchdogs of
freedom and instruments of mockery, which reduce to a common dimension
any people who may give themselves airs.
The subtler difference is that of rhythm. American blood flows in a
different _tempo_, and her hopes keep different measure.
* * * * * * *
Americans commonly tell us that theirs is the language of Shakespeare
and Shakespearian England, and that they have in America the "well
of English undefiled." But if they have any purely European English
in that country it must be a curiosity. Shakespeare was a lingual
junction, but we've both gone on a long way since then, and in our
triangle the line subtending the Shakespearian angle gets longer
and longer. O. Henry makes a character in one of his stories write
a telegram in American phraseology, so that it shall be quite
unintelligible to people who only know English:
His nibs skedaddled yesterday per jack-rabbit line with all the
coin in the kitty and the bundle of muslin he's spoony about. The
boodle is six figures short. Our crowd in good shape, but we need
the spondulicks. You collar it. The main guy and the dry goods are
headed for the briny. You know what to do.--BOB.
This is not Shakespearian English, but of course it is not
Shakespearian American. The worst of the contemporary language of
America is that it is in the act of changing its skin. It is difficult
to say what is permanent and what is merely eruptive and dropping. Such
expressions as those italicised in the following examples are hardly
permanent:
"One, two, three, _cut it out_ and work for Socialism."
"_I should worry_ and get thin as a lamp-post so that tramps
should come and lean against me."
"_Him with the polished dome._"
"She hadn't been here two days before I saw her kissing the boss.
Well, said I, _that's going some_."
"This is Number Nine of the Ibsen, _highbrow_ series."
"_Do you get me?_"
"I'll _put you wise_."
"And how is your _yoke-mate_?"
"He thinks too much of himself: _too much breathed on by girls_."
"A low lot of _wops and hunkies_: _white trash_."
"Poor negroes; _coloured trash_."
"She is _one good-looker_."
"She is _one sweetie_."
"My! You have _a flossy hat_."
But I suppose "He is a white man" is permanent, and "Buy a
postcard, it'll _only set you back a nickel_."
"She began to lay down the law: _thus and so_."
"Now _beat it_!"
"Roosevelt went ranching, that's how he got so _husky_."
"Is it far? It is only _a little ways_."
"Did they _feed that to you_?"
"When he started he was in a poor way, and carried in his hay in
his arms, but now he is quite _healed_."
But the difference in speech is too widespread and too subtle to be
truly indicated by this collection of examples, and the real vital
growth of the language is independent of the flaming reds and yellows
of falling leaves. In the course of conversation with Americans you
hear plenty of turns of expression that are unfamiliar, and that are
not merely the originality of the person talking. Thus in:
"How do they get on now they are married?"
"Oh, she has him feeding out of her hand,"
though the answer is clear it owes its form to the American atmosphere.
Or, again in:
"I suppose she's sad now he's gone?"
"Oh! He wasn't a pile of beans to her, believe me,"
you feel the manner of speech belongs to the new American language.
The following parody of President Wilson's way of speaking is also an
example of the atmosphere of the American language:
So far as the prognosticationary and symptomatic problemaciousness
of your inquiry is concerned it appears to me that while the
trusts should be regulated with the most unrelentful and
absquatulatory rigorosity, yet on the other hand their feelings
should not be lacerated by rambunktions and obfusticationary
harshness. Do you bite that off?
_Punch_ would have no stomach for such Rabelaisian vigour.
But wherever you go, not only in the cities, but in the little towns,
you hear things never heard in Britain. I go into a country bakery, and
whilst I ask for bread at one counter I hear behind me at the other:
"Kendy, ma-ma, kendy!"
"Cut it out, Kenneth."
"Kendy, kendy, kendy!"
"Oh, Kenneth, cut it out!" Or, as I sit on a bank, a girl of twelve and
her little baby sister come toddling up the road. The little one loses
her slipper, and the elder cries out:
"Slipper off again! Ethel, perish!"
America must necessarily develop away from us at an ever-increasing
rate. Influenced as she is by Jews, Negroes, Germans, Slavs, more and
more foreign constructions will creep into the language,--such things
as "I should worry," derived from Russian-Jewish girl strikers. "She
ast me for a nickel," said a Jew-girl to me of a passing beggar. "_I
should give her a nickel_, let her work for it same as other people!"
The _I shoulds_ of the Jew can pass into the language of the Americans,
and be understood from New York to San Francisco; but such expressions
make no progress in Great Britain, though brought over there, just
because we have not the big Jewish factor that the Americans have.
To-day the influence that has come to most fruition is that of the
negro. The negro's way of speaking has become the way of most ordinary
Americans, but that influence is passing, and in ten or twenty years
the Americans will be speaking very differently from what they are
now. The foreigner will have modified much of the language and many
of the rhythms of speech. America will have less self-consciousness
then. She will not be exploiting the immigrant, but will be subject to
a very powerful influence from the immigrants. No one will then be so
cheap as the poor immigrant is to-day. Much mean nomenclature will have
disappeared from the language, many cheap expressions, much mockery; on
the other hand, there will be a great gain in dignity, in richness, in
tenderness.
XV
THROUGH THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
I have come to that portion of my journeying and of my story where all
day, every evening, and all night long I was conscious of the odour of
mown clover, of fields of ambrosia.
I was tramping along the border of Northern Ohio and Southern Michigan,
from Toledo to Angola, Indiana. I was entering the rich West. The
fields were vast and square, the road was long and flat, and straight
and quiet, the June haze hung over luxuriant meadows, and there was a
wonderful silence and ripening peace over the country.
One evening, as the red sun sank into night-darkened mist, I talked
with an old farmer, who was smoking his pipe at his gate.
"I came along this same road like you, with a bundle on my back, forty
years ago," said he, "and I took work on a farm; then I rented a farm.
Many's the lad I've seen go past of an evening. And one or two have
stopped here and worked some days, for the matter of that."
[Illustration: THE SOWER.]
The farmer had left England when he was a stripling, and I tried to
talk to him of the old country, but he was not really interested. He
did not want to go back.
That is the Colonial feeling.
Strange to plough all day, or sow or reap, and in the evening to return
to the quiet, solitary house of wood beside the great red-painted barn
and not want England or Europe, not be interested in it, not want
anything more than you've got; to have the sun go down red and whisper
nought, and the stars come up and the moon, and yet not yearn; to work,
to eat, to market; to have children growing about you ripening in so
many years, and corn springing up in the fields ripening in so many
weeks; births, marriages, deaths, sowings, harvests....
There is all the pathos of man's life in it.
I slept that night in the dry wayside hay, under the broad sky and the
misty golden moon. It was a quiet night, warm and gentle. Earth held
the wanderer in her cradle and rocked him to sleep.
They are kind people about here. Next morning as I sat by my fire a
woman sent her son out to me with a quart of milk and a bag of cookies.
And milk is a much commercialised business on this western road,--the
electric freight train carries nearly all the milk away in churns to
Toledo. It was a very welcome talkative boy who brought out the milk.
His father rented one-third of a section (213 acres), but was now laid
up with pneumonia. As a consequence of the father's illness the young
children had to work very hard in the fields. And there was a sick cow
on the farm--sick through eating rank clover. And the boy himself had
had scarlet fever in the spring. The serving-girl had had to go away
"to have her little baby," and the one that came in her place brought
the fever.
"What's your name?" said I.
"Charles."
Cheerful little Charles. He had much responsibility on his shoulders.
There were some big farms along the road, and near Metamora I had the
privilege of seeing a dozen cows milked simultaneously by a petrol
engine, rubber tubes being fixed to their teats and the milk pumped
out. It was astonishing, the matter-of-fact way in which the latest
invention was applied to farm life.
"It's rather ugly," said I.
"Well, what are you to do when labour is so scarce?" was the reply.