Читать книгу Seeds of Pine - Emily F. Murphy - Страница 6

The new world which is the old.—TENNYSON.

Have I told you about Edson and its prospects? No! ah, well, never mind, I shall do so by and by, when I have talked to the citizens.

While biding my time for a seat at the lunch-counter, I will walk up and down the station platform. Every minute men are arriving to await the out-going train to the city. They come and come, apparently from nowhere, till there are quite a hundred of them. Of course, they really come from up the street (I should have said from the streets, for there are two, or, perhaps, three streets), having recently arrived from the grading camps somewhere up in the mountains. We are going there to-morrow, or maybe the next day, and then we shall see the habitat of these battling, brown-throated fellows who nose the stream of flesh-pots and feed on hunks of brawn.

The men philander about, or sit on the platform planks, and loll lazily against the sun-warmed wall. They count their money, smoke, and talk, but on the whole they are quiet. Also they stare at me like they were gargoyles and whisper the one to the other. This is not because of rudeness—not at all! Even the white armoured Sir Galahad would find it difficult to be knightly in the circumstances. For months they have done naught save stake out and measure up, shovel gravel, dig ditches, set transits, sweat and swear, for a railway, you may have heard, is built with heavier implements than batons, pens, or golfsticks. No woman has come near them except certain will-o'-the wisps whom the Mounted Police did straightway turn back to town. Their lives have been filled full of contest, hardship, and loneliness, so that every mother's son desires, above all else, that some woman (she may be either saint or sinner) put her hands upon him and tell him he is a truly fine fellow and worthy to be greatly loved. This is why they will give her all their money and not because they are of the earth very earthy.

Do you waggle your head at me! Do you? Then I care not a straw. It only means you do not comprehend the ways of men at our frontier posts.

Some men are here preparing to take the wagon trail to Grand Prairie in the Peace River District. This trail, they tell me, is one hundred and fifty miles long, and may be traversed in six days, a journey which from other points formerly took as many weeks. Hitherto, it has seemed the faraway edge of the world, a place for none save the adventurous blooded and sturdy, but in this day it seems to lie at our very door, for, in the North, one hundred and fifty miles is merely a stone's cast. In the spring, fifteen thousand homesteads will be thrown open for entry, so that presently it will seem that all creation is trekking this way.

And why not? It requires no fore-vision to know that the land has a future above anxiety. Up this trail there is a new world to be possessed, an unequalled empire, in which men may go hither and yon as they please. It gives my feet a staccato movement to think of it. Some city folk there are who might fear the trail, but this were foolish. It is good to ride on a long trail and laugh out loud for sheer joy. On the trail, the ear of Society is closed and there are smoked goggles on her eyes.

I have been talking to a stripling from Nova Scotia, who has been here these four months. When first he came, there were but three girls in the village; now, there are eighteen. As a result of this increased immigration, the weekly dance is better attended and is more amicable.

Besides his outfit, this Nova Scotian is taking in a year's provision to his homestead, and so has been working to secure a sufficiency of money. He hopes to get a steading that will one day become a town site. This is the dream of every northern farmer: it is the gold at the foot of the rainbow. Perhaps, my Boy o' Dreams may find it. Who can say? Providence keeps a closer eye on farmers than we imagine. As yet, the boy has not persuaded any girl to accompany him to Grand Prairie. I would go myself only (I had the reason a minute ago but it has escaped me); what was it? Oh yes! I remember now, I am already married. The Land of Cockaigne could not have been situate in the North, for in that most blessed land every Jack has his Jill and found no difficulty in keeping her. No! it was never in this latitude.

I went to two hotels before I could find a room. I should have registered at once instead of loitering at the station. In the first hotel they could eat me, but to sleep me was out of the question. In the second, a stout well-looking German—or, as I prefer to call him, a coming Canadian—took possession of me, remarking in one breath, but with an air of great punctilio, "You would in my house put up? Der conductor-man he so told me you to me might come. This my wife is. You should become to each other known. She a bed for you will get—water!—towels!—whatsoever Madam she may desire."

"Urbanity" is the one word that fits the German, my host. His Frau, who is of the pure Teutonic type, has a heart of great goodness, with emotions that lie close under the exterior.

All might have been well with me at this hotel, but, unfortunately, in descending the closed-in stairway, I stepped on a sleeping cat and plunged headforemost to the bottom. … "Der drouble mit you," says my host, "a crick in der back is." The cat's "drouble" seems to be paralysis.

Some one has said that reserve is a sign of great things behind. Sweet Christians! this is entirely true; I realized it to the full while holding back the tears and assuring the assembled household I was not even jarred. I am proud of the way I behaved, and sorry my own folk were not there to see. Now, they will never believe it.

One of the maids brought me brandy which I did not drink, but after awhile, my hostess fed it to me in what she called canards. You dip a lump of sugar into the cognac and transfer the lump to your mouth—that is all. You could never believe how nice they taste, or how curative they are for "crick" in the back.

Before long I am able to limp down the street and call on the doctor. I used to know him in days when we both lived farther south. But any way, a previous acquaintanceship would have made no difference. We do not need introductions at a frontier post like this, for there is an undercurrent of good fellowship which understands that the stranger who talks to you is not necessarily a scalawag, with subtle designs on your purse or your person. Any one who fails to grasp this plainly obvious fact is either a newcomer or a solemn humbug.

This doctor has charge of the hospital car that lies in the station yard, and most of his time is spent travelling from camp to camp down the line of construction. I saw the car to-day, or rather I nosed it, for the smell of iodoform came siftingly through like dry cold. It is owned and operated by the railway company for the benefit of their employees. At certain stations along the line, the company have placed cottage hospitals where emergency cases are treated. Those who have fevers or require major operations, are usually taken to the city.

Long ago, when the earlier railroads were being constructed it was not possible to supply such life-saving appurtenances, so that nothing remained for the wretched fellows but to drag themselves away and die like hurt dogs. There is a current aberration that the golden age was "once upon a time," but, in my opinion, it is here and now, or at least it will be when every municipality has instituted classes to teach policemen the difference between drunkenness and a fit. I will say a prayer about this some of these days. One must be business-like.

As he builds up and smokes a cigarette, the doctor tells me that the navvies and teamsters have a singularly critical taste in the matter of medicine. They do not like tablets or medicine with an innocent flavour. Unless it be distinctly pungent, they feel cheated.

"Do you accede to their demand?" ask I.

"I do, Good Lady," says he. "It is modesty that prevents my describing to you the excellency of my flavours" (and here he assumed a truly sagacious air): "my medicines have 'nip' to them and a body that is really desirable. They are indescribable, but most they approach the little girl's definition of salt—'that which makes potatoes taste bad when you do not eat it with.'

"I see, Dear Lady, you are still of inquisitive mind," says this Man of Medicine. "Yes! I can see that and I dare say you will put me in a book, so I shall not rise to your questions—not I! Let us prefer to talk of how we shall invest our money when we sell our lots, and things like that."

"Real-estate is a valuable asset in this place," continues he, "if you buy it 'near in' on the original town site, but three miles out of the subdivisions, it is equal in value to a pop-corn prize. And yet who can say? Who knows? In these new places, the bread we cast on the sub-divisions has a way of returning to us in meat and pie and cake. It is often the height of wisdom to be foolish. That singularly unattractive person on the doorstep across the way—the shrunken, hollow-stomached one—has made much money in buying and selling."

"Do you believe me?" he asks with some trace of heat; "then pray heaven speak!" For I have fallen into silence. But I will not speak—not one word—but only smile in an enigmatical way, for the stop I am pulling out is one of intended indifference. It is about the navvies and teamsters I would talk and not of hollow-stomached men who gather much money.

The doctor rolls up two cigarettes and offers me one.

"You will smoke?" asks he.

"No!" says I, "not till I am sixty."

"Let me see your palm and your nails. Humph! Lady, you had better start now as a mere matter of expediency. Why not try this one? Where's the use of a mouth and an index finger if you do not smoke?"

Now, I cannot say why I do not smoke, except that there are so many reasons why I should, and so I return to our first topic and ask, "Does your medicine make the men well again?"

"No, no, decidedly no!" he replies—"they allow me to hold no such illusion. The talismans they carry, work the cure—a bear's tooth, a lucky penny, or the image of a calendar saint. A snake's rattle is a panacea for anything but a broken heart. Time was when men only choked on grape seeds as did the old poet chap, Anacreon, but in these days, the navvies get appendicitis from them. It would be offensive to suggest other causes, in spite of the fact that most of them never taste grapes. No! it would not be right for me to put my patients in the wrong and shockingly poor policy."

"Have you much trouble with drunkenness?" I query.

"Not a great deal!" he makes answer, "for the Mounted Police have a disconcerting habit of probing into bales of hay and of finding false floors in wagons. They have fifty-fox power, these police fellows, although I have heard tell that a gallon or more of whisky has been within roping distance of them and escaped. A bottle that gets by them is worth ten dollars, but the navvies declare whatever it costs it is worth it. But, dear me, there are other liquids for inordinate and uncritical thirsts, such as——"

"Your medicine?" I suggest, whereupon our conversation abruptly ends, for he will be no longer beset by me; and he will not give me a bottle of liniment for "crick" in the back; no, not if I die in Edson, without even a graveyard started wherein to bury me. He supposes Providence knows his business, but how ever woman came to be made is a mystery far beyond his wit's end.

Huh! Huh! I am tingling to scratch this man's eyes out, but I only call him a brown pirate.

Do you think I care so much as a snap of the fingers for the medicine of this spiteful doctor of the countryside? Not a bit of it! One of the navvies will give me a talisman if I cannot find the cordial tree for which I search. It grows in the North, and the fruit gives life to strong people and faintness to the weak. It was Théophile Tremblay who told me about it. He lives always in the woods. Once, he found the tree but he was afraid to eat of it, for how could he know whether he was strong or weak? He has heard tell that, in the tree, there is a wood's-woman and that sometimes she laughs aloud, but he thinks it may be a soul or something like that.

The only drawback to happiness is the peculiar impermanence of its character. Happiness is a large, comely person, but, withal, as elusive as the smallest sprite. Such hours of pain as I spent last night on this wretched sagging bed—I who was so happy only yesterday—with nothing to look at save a little lamp with a flame like a bleary red eye. Truth to tell, it was the eye that looked at me. It stared till I became hypnotized, when by the blessing of God, I fell asleep.

This morning, I am consumed between a desire to get up and one to lie still. In all such crises of the will, it is better to follow the line of least resistance, and so I lie in bed. My hostess brings me an amazingly pungent liniment which she calls "Herr the Doctor's medisome." It came last night, but Daisy, who is a waitress, neglected to deliver it. Perhaps the sarcastic advice which the doctor set down for me under the word "Poison," may have frightened Daisy.

"She a lump is, that Daisy!" says the Frau. "Believe me, Madam, for I know. I tell her a thing to do and she doing it keeps on, till I to stop tell her. Then I to her explain that she is not for ever to stop, nor for ever on to go, and all the time, about everything, I have her so to tell."

The Frau pours on the liniment with generous measure and rubs me till I prickle with it, and feel for all the world like a wet newspaper caught in a wire fence. She rubs me with a used-to-things way until I beg her to desist. I should not be surprised if Herr the Doctor took this means of venting his spitefulness on me.

The Frau tells me she had a vision once. I wish to experience a vision, or a miracle, but nothing comes to me save presentments which have their terrible plain origin on the basis of cause and effect. Her vision was about heaven. She saw heaven quite distinctly and the streets were really made of gold. There were no children there, but only men and women, so that there must be a special Paradise for boys and girls. The Frau believes heaven will be a failure because there is no division of the sexes provided for. How, she would like to know, could a woman enjoy heaven with men there all the time looking at everything she does. It would be an impossible situation.

After awhile, Daisy brings me a meal. There is a tremendous finality about the way she sets down a tray. Daisy, in spite of her name, is not so much a housemaid as what they used to call a stout serving wench. She is courtly neither in figure nor manners. Her hair is puffed out over her ears and drawn down low, till her head looks like the husk of a hazel nut. But what odds? Daisy is splendidly plebeian and really of more value to the community than a writing person who falls downstairs. She cannot see for the life of her how I happened to come out here, and so I am apologetic and find it necessary to explain. She asks permission to try on my hat and tells me she has ordered a new one from Edmonton. It is to have three "ostridge" feathers.

To assure me that the cat I stepped upon is not dead, she descends to the kitchen and returns with it. The cat seems all right except that it sags in the middle, but Daisy says this is because it has just been fed. I am glad I did not kill it, in that I always associate a cat with Diana Bubastis, the Egyptian goddess who presided over childbirth, and who was represented with a feline head. Indeed, Bubastis is said to have transformed herself into a cat when the gods fled from Egypt—a play of gods and women and cats that has continued even to this very day.

After dinner, I am able to go down to the sidewalk where I fribble away the hours agreeably enough. It is a sun-shot afternoon, but the air is cool to one's skin, and grateful after the scorching heat of yesterday.

Some civil engineers who came in on the train with me are playing baseball on the road. These are no æsthetic feeblings, these merry gentlemen, but a sturdy breed, upstanding and handsome, with skin like the colour of well-seasoned saddles and a smell of burnt poplar in their hair. I think the rough clothes they wear throw their good looks into relief. Or it may be that the people are better looking in the North and have better physiques. It must be so, for the South has in all ages drawn upon the northern blood for rejuvenation just as, in these days, they need hard wheat to tone up their softer varieties.

I write of them as merry gentlemen because this fornight agone I had been watching them make ducks and drakes of their savings. When they come to Town, which they do once or twice a year, they cannot be accused of nearness. Each mother's son holds to the amended maxim of this country, "Hard come, easy go." "Jack ashore," I called one the other day. "Possibly so! Possibly," answered the delicious boy, "but I prefer to think of myself as March—in like a lion and out like a lamb."

The whole Town is a foraging pasture for the engineers on vacation. They buy everything they do not need, from gramaphone records and swearing parrots to Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. They yell into the telephones as if it were a lung tester, and it makes their hearts dance like daffodils to hire taxicabs for the day, boxes at the theatre, and to give suppers and dances to all and sundry of their acquaintances. Neither are they laggards in love. They are vastly appreciative of the girls, and I am told go sweethearting with a directness there is no possibility of misunderstanding. It is well the girls do not take them too seriously, for they are roving bachelors all, and would seem to be as faithful as the poet who vows his love for Kate, and Margaret and Betty and Sweet Marie.

Yet, once in a blue moon, an engineer and a girl make decision "to be man and wife together," and to live in a shack on the Residency, much to the annoyance of the townsmen, who dislike the engineers, being inordinately jealous of them.

The game of baseball which the engineers carry forward on the highway is strenuous rather than scientific. Things that are considered important in the league matches have no significance here. As I watch the pitch and toss of the ball, it occurs to me that this game has filtered down the ages from the primeval woods where orang-outangs threw nuts from tree to tree. They pitch them that the young lady 'rangs might admire their cleverness and good form. You may credit me this was the way of it.

A Chinaman and some Indians are also watching the game. The Indians think it fine fun, and fetch and carry the lost balls like spaniels retrieving sticks. I like the Indian men for several reasons, but chiefly because they are shrewd riders; have a sovereign indifference to appearance, and never quarrel over theology.

The game of ball was not completed, the interest of the players being diverted by a blindly vindictive fight between a staghound and a bulldog. I did not see the conclusion of the fight, but the honours lay with the bulldog. "For you must know, Dear Lady," explains one of the engineers, "that all things considered, the grip on the throat is an eminently practical one."