Читать книгу Wild Honey - Frederick John Niven - Страница 3

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By definite aim, guided by what seemed to me obvious fitness, in writing this narrative I devoted a great deal more attention to the other two men in it than to myself. I had no desire whatever that it should be looked upon as a portion of autobiography. I am not the protagonist, but the onlooker, the reporter. I wrote it in the first person just as I would tell it to you if you were sitting here and wanted to know the story. I wrote it to get these other two men, unusual men—I think I may say extraordinary men (mark you, I don't say super-men; it is highly probable some may consider them morons)—into black and white, into print, to record them for those who do feel that one proper study of mankind is man.

I came to Penny's Pit, high in the Dry Belt of British Columbia, where I met them, simply because I was young and wanted to see the West, and did not want to see it only from a car window. I was not, in the accepted sense, an immigrant. I was not a "prospective settler." I was just a wanderer, curiously looking at the world and encountering men I could never have met in my decorous home. As I had no trade, when I had to replenish my pocketbook (being also not a remittance man) I had to join the ranks of the unskilled laborers. Many mixed accents have I heard when employed upon unskilled labor in the old West, that of the born navvy on one side of me and of an English public school on the other, for in an English public school they do not teach any trades.

A young man who would not go to a city and get a job indoors, yet without a trade and without money, and needing some to have for use when I wandered on further, I took the job at Penny's Pit because it was in the open air, and because I wanted money to buy undervests and socks, and to pay my way somewhere else, and for my food when looking at that somewhere else, wherever it might be. Also, I was entirely pleased to be at Penny's Pit itself for a spell, so as to see Penny's Pit, so as to know it instead of just having a glimpse of it in passing by. That explains me at Penny's Pit.

There was what was called an Extra Gang there, employed upon shoveling gravel out of a hillside into dump-cars that took it away to fill in gulches under trestle bridges. The place, for those who like to know where one is on a map, was about half-way between Ashcroft and Kamloops on the main line of the C.P.R.

There and thus it was that I met Hank and Slim, the two queer men of this book—one of whom thought me queer. To those readers who may feel that I am relatively a ghost, a mere sketch, "blocked in" as painters say, and no more, I trust my explanation for that ghostliness is valid. It is of them—Hank and Slim—not of myself, I would write. You can meet the like of me any day, but you cannot so easily meet them. You have to do as I did, discard fine linen, take your home on your back like a snail, and go into the grim and beautiful world for that. I think it is in a way a duty of mine to record them. There is something documentary, I think, about this narrative of railroads in sand, and whiskey, and wild honeysuckle, and untamed wanderers.

If there be such a thing as degrees of truth, then might I say that the truest parts of this true narrative are those that might most easily be considered as flights of imagination. Or otherwise I might say that my aim has been to tell the truth in all, and in these parts that have the quality that one associates with the novel (where one might say, not: "This is true to life," but "This is true to fiction!") I have been especially careful to be accurate and restrained. I have been so careful that perhaps, without departure from fact, I could have made them seem more like fiction still!

Once upon a time novelists used to append a footnote to some amazing part of their novels to say that it was not, like the rest, out of their imagination, but taken from life. Now, in an era of novel readers, one writing of facts has to make assurance that he is not drawing on his imagination or borrowing from fiction!

I did truly hear Hank chanting Shirley's lyric; we did truly have that grimly pathetic, that pathetically humorous scene in the barroom at North Bend; Hank did truly decide one night, in the interests of my happiness, to slay me, leave my body to the coyotes and set my spirit free from a social system that he saw as not for me, and did verily tramp many a mile in pursuit of me afterwards to express regret for that. I did truly, some years later, see his mother and his early home, just as I describe.

I made a great number of notes at the time and from these was able to check my memory. I wrote the book with the notes at my elbow. Raising my eyes, I looked into the past. It was as if I relived it all. Looking down I had these notes on the old sheets of paper, keeping tab on me. And these, I may say, I took at the time with no intention of writing a book about it later, but because it all interested me and I knew the experience would soon be over, all past, only to be remembered. I wanted more than memory. Hank's occasional prophetic jests to me regarding the book I would write did not seem to me then more than chaff.

I think that is enough to explain how I came into circumstances and places into which I summarily invite my readers, and to give assurance that the story I tell is not a hybrid of fact and fiction but a narration of actual experience.

So we can now get on to Hank and Slim, their lives, and the divulging of what lay under their skins, just in the way, by degrees, I got to know inside them, walking along with them.