Читать книгу A Search for America - Frederick Philip Grove - Страница 5

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At Montreal, when at last I stood in the huge hall of the pier at which the steamer had docked, I felt incongruous and out of place. I felt forlorn, helpless, depressed when I stood there, in front of my fourteen pieces of luggage, with half a dozen overcoats on my arm and a camera in my hand. In thinking of him now, I cannot but smile, I cannot but pity the slim youth in his immaculate clothes, the mere boy I was.

I shall try to describe how I must have looked.

I was six feet three inches tall, with a waist-measure of twenty-six inches. Hands and feet were narrow and long; my shoulders had begun to stoop. My hair was exceedingly fair--of that ancestral Scandinavian fairness that makes me to this day appear like a much younger man than I am. My eyes were blue, arched over by bushy, yellow brows, and set rather deeply in a long, narrow face with a somewhat receding chin.

Add to that a certain diffidence in demeanour--the diffidence of him who is on unfamiliar ground--and the considerate politeness of the man who is used to look upon most of the people he deals with as socially his inferiors--as to be treated with kindliness because they must suffer from the mere fact that they are what they happen to be--none of their fault, of course; they did not mean to be born as such; I was quite tolerant about it: add that, and you will be able to judge what was in store for him in the matter of wounded susceptibilities and mental jolts. Fortunately for the young man, he had also been trained from his earliest days never to betray an emotion, to keep his mask intact.

He was young; and though of a serious cast of mind, he nevertheless looked upon his undertaking--for the moment at least--as something of an adventure, as something that could not help but satisfy, in part at least, his great curiosity as to life, and, after all, as something, too, that might not be so utterly irretrievable as it would seem. At last the customs-official reached my pile. I remember distinctly the difficulties I had in convincing this man that I was not bringing all these clothes into the country in order to open a haberdasher's shop, but for personal wear. I had to show him the sleeve-holes of every suit as a proof that it had been worn. I also remember that what convinced him at last was my hat-box which contained a silk hat, two derbies, a sailor, and three or four caps. He seemed to accept the silk-hat as conclusive evidence of my good faith.

"Going to tour the country, sir?" he enquired; and I thought it best to let it go at that. "Thank you, sir." And, his manner changed, he touched his cap and walked away.

Two porters stood waiting with a truck. "Cab, sir?"

"No. Toronto Express. Grand Trunk, if you please."

I must, at the risk of seeming tedious, point out the significance of this answer. I have since gone back to Montreal and studied the city. At that time it did not occur to me that there might be something to interest me in Canada's metropolis. As far as cities were concerned, I knew only three in the world that had ever appeared to me worthy of a visit for their own sakes: London, Paris, and Rome. What I saw in them was the setting they gave to their treasures of Art and their jewels of Architecture. It is true, the boulevards of Paris had a further significance for me as the drawing-room, if I may say so, which a great nation had set up for itself to receive its guests in, or as the screen which it had raised before peering eyes to disguise its real mentality, made up of thrift and common sense. I considered Naples, Stockholm, Constantinople as beautiful spots in nature, not as beautiful cities; for me they had been placed where they stood like stagepieces to add a touch of colour which was missing in the landscape. To look upon them, to be interested in them primarily as the abodes of human beings, had never entered my mind.

Nature, Science, and Art--these three were the great realities; what here, in the western hemisphere, forms the first and most essential problem of every citizen--his own success in life, his place in the community--that was for me at the time a mere detail, a trifle to be attended to in due time, but which did not need to engross my thoughts too much. Art and Science I did not expect to find in this new world. Remained nature. Nature, I am sorry to say, meant to me then what it emphatically does not mean to me now; in America I might have summarized it under the headings Niagara, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and maybe the Yosemite and the Big Trees. Everything else was negligible in my estimation.

Now the reader may seem to see in this a certain contradiction to what would seem the natural attitude of the immigrant towards the country of his adoption. He must not forget that reasoning in an abstract way is one thing, and overcoming instincts and leanings that are born and bred into one's innermost being, quite another. I might even go a step further in order unmistakably to define where I stood at the time. As for America, without ever reasoning about it, it would have occurred to me as soon to look for Apollos of Belvedere in Toronto, as to read an American book for anything beyond a certain amount of information. Nor had I learnt as yet to stand transfixed when looking at the Titan frescoes of light effects on clouds of smoke from iron-furnace or railroad-yard. I had not even begun to look for, much less to find, in such things, beauty.

And as for the problems which absorb the best thinking of the western world--the great questions of the social adjustments, the ethnological difficulties as between Frenchman and Anglo-Saxon, Indian and Whiteface, Negro and Caucasian--I should have dismissed them with a shrug of my shoulders as trifles not worthy to occupy such an exalted intelligence as my own. And yet I had come to this country in order to win my daily bread! Whatever there was in me of humility was a reasoned acquisition of my intellect; it had not penetrated within my skin. In spite of my very distinct determination not to form a little island of Europe in the American environment I needed only to let myself go, and I was a hot-house plant, used to artificial atmospheres. Rude draughts of the fresh air of a newer world were required to awaken me fully.

I missed, then, in this opportunity to see, and to get the flair of, a city which to-day holds for me the strongest and strangest fascination. Why I had chosen Toronto as the place to make my first stand in, I do not remember; no doubt I had some reason which seemed compelling at the time.

One of the first impressions I had, coming as I did from crowded Europe, was that of spaciousness. The big station, the roominess of the waiting-hall, the height of the train-shed, and--as I walked along the platform to my car--the length and apparent solidity of the railway-carriages themselves did not fail to awe me a little though I did not show it in the impenetrable mask of my face. I forbore Parlor-car and Sleeper--my train left about midnight--which may and may not have argued for a certain sense of proportion.

When I first entered the smoker of the train, I experienced my first distinct shock. I had, while crossing the Atlantic, studied a guide-book for tourists on the American continent. I knew that most trains carried only first-class coaches. Still, I had--unreasonably enough, of course--expected something of the genteel exclusiveness of an English or Continental first-class coach. I was shocked when instead I saw shirt-sleeved elbows, overalled knees, tramping boots, and collarless necks as the only things which protruded above the rattan-covered backs of the seats. The evidences of proficiency gained in the art of squeezing your body, no matter in what seemingly impossible position, into a reclining posture on a seat which was evidently meant as a mute reproof for all those who ventured to travel at night in a "day-coach" were no less amazing to me. I believe that, with a sinking feeling in my heart, I feared that, after all, I might not fit in with a civilization which apparently lavished its wealth on the "navvy". But, of course, since I was accompanied by what I had already learned to call a red-cap, no feature of my face betrayed the least unfamiliarity with what to me was truly a revelation.

The red-cap reversed the back of a seat in the centre of the car, dropped my suit-case into the space, thus created between two backs, held out his hand, and departed upon receiving a half-dollar which I had in readiness.

I sat down and tried desperately to seem at ease. The large expanses of costly woods, which were left without the elaborate carvings of European de-luxe trains--meant to disguise the inferior materials used--delighted my eye, which at the same time was scandalized by the cowardly indulgence in puny decorativeness displayed in the brasswork of the lamps. Since I could not reconcile the two things--which is always the case where bad taste is obtruded--the former ended by impressing me with a sense of braggadocio. The whole aspect of the car jarred upon me; for a few moments I felt very uncomfortable. I felt that what I saw was typical for my new environment; it made me afraid. During these first minutes in the train I resolved, no matter what might happen, to hold on to enough of my money to pay my fare back to Europe. The reader will see by and by whether this resolution was kept.

Another surprise, this time an agreeable one, was in store when the train started on its gliding motion out of the shed; it went off without the shouting and excitement which I was accustomed to from overland trains in Europe. "Here is sound sense," I said to myself; "this vehicle starts as if that was its business in the world, not as if it were doing something against the laws of Nature." In Europe it had always seemed to me as if people were highly indignant and full of anxious protests when we dared to depart.

To others also I must have looked incongruous in that scantily occupied smoker. A glance convinced me that, although I had four seats to myself, without careful preliminary schooling any attempt to stretch out and to sleep would have proved disastrous to my dignity. And so far I was not prepared to let go of that precious possession of the new arrival. If any one remotely or closely resembling myself should ever read this record before he starts out on a similar enterprise, I have an advice for him: Let him travel steerage--he will learn a great many useful things and at the same time get rid of the cumbersome impediment of his dignity before he reaches the blessed shores; but, of course, if he really resembles me, he will certainly not be thus advised.

I sat, then, stiffly on my sat, next the window, looking out into the dark and feeling suddenly embarked upon things desperate and suicidal. The empty space at my side was taken up by the stack of my overcoats; the opposite seat was vacant.

By and by I ventured again to look about in the car. On the other side of the aisle there sat in a seat, whose back was also reversed, a smallish, middle-aged man with a clean-shaven, puckered face and in the apparel of a poorly-paid clerk, as I judged at the time; I should know better to-day. He had propped his shoulder-blades against the window-frame, rested his right foot on the arm-rail of the seat, and had flung his right hand over its back. His left hand--the elbow digging into the very edge of the seat--held a pipe at which he sucked in a reflective and disengaged way while staring at me. The very relaxation of his attitude somehow prejudiced me against this man, whom nevertheless I envied for being at ease. I tried to look out of the window again; but soon my eye returned to the stranger. Apparently he had not moved; he was still engaged in what impressed me as staring. Without looking directly at him, I began to study his appearance. In spite of my irritation at being so openly appraised and weighed, I was fair enough to admit to myself that very likely he was quite a good-natured fellow who did not mean any harm. In fact, at last I arrived at the conclusion that he was not really staring at all, that he did not even see me; that his gaze had absent-mindedly taken the direction it held by mere blind chance.

I was on the point of dismissing all thought of him when he suddenly started an amazing series of motions--screwing himself up, as it were, till he stood on his feet; and then he lounged in a dangling, disjointed way across the aisle.

He dropped into the vacant seat opposite myself and remarked, "Fine night."

"Beautiful," I assented with a reserve that hardly fitted the occasion.

Five minutes passed in silence, with myself staring out of the window. I felt expectant, no longer hostile.

"Green here?" he asked in a casual way.

I had been ready to confide in him, to get as much information out of him as I could; but the word "green" shot me back into my shell.

"Beg your pardon?" I countered stiffly.

"Been in this country long?" And this time there was so much understanding sympathy in his voice that I looked straight into his eye.

"Well . . . no," I faltered; "not exactly, sir. . . . Fact is. . . . Well, I arrived to-night."

He blew a thread of smoke through his teeth. "Thought as much," he said.

I believe my pulse went at one hundred and twenty beats to the minute. I was afraid he might hear the sledgehammer knock in my heart.

Now I want to say a word in praise of the young man that I was. Three weeks before, I should not have spoken to this stranger at all. If, by any chance, he had done something to oblige me--if he had, let me say, helped me with my baggage in a crowded station building where it was impossible to secure a porter--I should have slipped him a handsome tip and dismissed him with "Obliged, my man!" Had he, on the other hand, by mere reprehensible ostentation, spent the savings of his labour on a first-class railway-ticket, in order to pry upon his "betters", and had he, in addition, by mere giddiness or unaccountable failure to realize his "place in life", ventured to address me in a public conveyance--I should have frozen him, annihilated him with one of those glassy stares for which I had been famous among my former friends, one of whom used to say, "Phil can put more opprobrium into one of his fish-eyes than you can cull out of an unemasculated Shakespeare in a day." And here, after only an hour or so on Canadian soil, I was actually answering this man's questions--yes, I had already irrevocably committed myself to his tender mercies by confessing to that most heinous of all crimes--a crime which also involves the most humiliating admission of abject inferiority: "greenness"! . . . I believe that was the first step in my Americanization.

Very likely the look of the criminal betrayed me; and that in spite of the fact that I did my utmost to preserve my mask in impeccable perfection. But it cost me an effort, and the effort involved self-consciousness. Nobody who is self-conscious can get away with the pretence that he is at ease when he confronts a man who by gift or training is used to read human nature at a glance.

That this man read me, appeared from his next remark. "Hm," he drawled reflectively, "I shouldn't feel badly about it, me boy."

Imagine him calling me "boy"--me who had been rubbing elbows with dukes and lords. But more than in anything else, the rapid progress of my Americanization showed in the fact that I yielded myself to the simple good-will with which this stranger stooped from his superior status to one apparently so raw in the ways of the country as I was.

"Good many of us have been there," he went on. "I've been just there meself." He sucked at his pipe.

"Have you?" I asked politely.

He nodded in a pensive sort of way, still absent-mindedly sucking his cold pipe. "Yea," he said, "sure. Twenty-seven years ago."

That remark startled me into sudden admiration. The casual way in which he made it placed him high, very high indeed, in my esteem. I had been in this country an hour and a half maybe; he, twenty-seven years! I was nearly tempted, I think, to figure out what multiple twenty-seven years might be of an hour and a half. It was overwhelming. I had been under the impression that this was a young country. Young indeed! The man had been here before I was born!

"Great country," he continued after a while, "great country! Want to go on the land?"

I had not thought of that as a possibility; but I said, "I might."

"Want to look around first, eh? . . . Good thing to do." And again he sucked his pipe for some time. "Hardly seem the type," he drawled, "hardly the build. . . . Better try the city, I'd say. Know a trade?"

"No," I confessed. Somehow I did not like to tell him that I was a linguist, that I had been deep in studies of classical archeology. I was afraid I might sink too low in his estimation by admitting scholarly propensities.

"Have a stake, I suppose?"

I did not know what a stake was; but the tone of his words seemed to imply that not to have what he meant might be a serious handicap or even a disgrace. So I answered precipitously, "Oh yes, of course."

"That's good," he said in the most indifferent manner possible; "will enable you to look around."

And from that I guessed at the meaning of the word.

He seemed lost in thought. He had resumed his former attitude on the seat, only, of course, with the sides reversed. Now he lifted his right foot high up and put it negligently but accurately on top of the stack of my overcoats. I suffered pangs, for I was exceedingly particular about my clothes; but not by the slightest flicker of an eyelash did I betray my agony. I was too much afraid of losing this only link which so far connected me with that human world in which I meant to strike root.

The train went rickety, rackety, rumble, rumble, wheel on rail. Like ghosts huge trees shot by in the dark. Hills loomed, lakes gleamed, towns slipped silently back into the behind; distance was devoured. Half an hour passed in silence.

"Great country," my fellow-traveller drawled again. "Crossed over from Liverpool?"

"Yes," I replied, glad to hear his voice once more.

And after a while he went on. "My home-town, that. Foul with poverty. Won't see much poverty here."

I felt glad of it. I was fleeing from the very threat of poverty.

"Most anybody makes a living here. . . . Me boy there--only fifteen--that's him, over there--he's sleeping--learns jeweller's trade--gets ten a week . . ."

Ten a week? Surely he did not mean dollars! Ten dollars a week! A boy of fifteen! When I should have gladly used the whole of my education and worked every hour of my waking day for one hundred and fifty pounds a year? He could not mean shillings either, could he? I tried to find out without betraying my ignorance.

"How much do you have to pay for board?" I asked.

"Well-l," he drawled, rolling the l like a quid in his mouth. "I'm boarding meself, me and the boy. We pay five dollars a week. Can get it for four, mebbe. But when a man works, he needs the grub."

I wondered. Had he no home? But my question was answered. The boy did get ten dollars a week. A week!

My fellow-traveller relapsed into silence. Then he proceeded; and it took me quite a while to make out what the connection was; so much was I startled by the visions of possible wealth that arose.

"Can pay six. More, I've heard."

I mustered all my courage. I felt that, even though I might be encroaching on dangerous ground, even though I might be "prying", much was to be forgiven to a raw arrival like myself.

"Pretty good for the boy," I said, "saving five a week."

"Oh, he ain't saving," he replied; and his tone held a note of contempt. "Doesn't even buy his own clothes. Money's got a knack of dribbling away in this country. A dime here, a nickel there. Soda-fountain, show, Sundaes,--they're the curse of the nation--leastways, unless ye're a drinking man. Then, it's treating."

What could he mean? Sundays? I did not enquire, however, for fear of betraying too great an ignorance for his patience.

"Save!" he went on contemptuously. "Of course, I don't say no. Been a saving man meself all me life. But then it had taken me and me wife five years to lay by sufficient to pay my passage across. The old lady stayed behind till I should have got a foothold."

Who might the old lady be? His wife?

"That's how ye learn to be careful. And when the old lady died--I brought her over, y'know. Took me three months here to save Her passage--longest three months in me life--was young then, y'know. . . . Well-l as I was saying, when she died, I kept right on, don't just rightly know why. Sold the house, of course. And the only thing I ever treated myself to, was a trip back home, all over the old country, in state--cost me five hundred, mind ye--But then, I didn't need to earn it--was just a year's rent on some property I own. Didn't like it, though--back over yonder. I mean . . ." And he relapsed into silence again.

Five hundred dollars the rent on some property? Twenty-seven years in this country? The man must be wealthy! And surely, he did not have much of an education.

"What . . ." I began diffidently and stopped. "May I . . . I do not want to be inquisitive, you know.--Might I ask you what your profession is?" I blurted out at last.

"Me? I?" he asked. "Perfession? That's a good one, me boy. Used to heave coal in the docks over yonder. I? I'm foreman in the packing-room at Simpson's, T'ronto. . . . I'm making thirty-five a week, and extra for overtime, because that's what ye really want to know."

"I'm sorry," I started apologetically, for I felt that I must have offended him.

But he interrupted me in his drawling, indifferent way. "Not at all," he said; "if ye have any more questions, shoot. Glad to be of help--if it helps . . ."

I was impressed. My clothing, I counted, would last me for years without renewing. This man, to all intents and purposes a labourer, was making thirty-five dollars a week. His board cost him five dollars. Thirty dollars a week would amount to fifteen hundred dollars a year in savings. If I laid by, let me say, a thousand a year, my goal would seem within reach. I felt quite elated. I, with my education, my knowledge of the world, of languages, countries--with my appearance! A subtle change, I suppose, crept over me. I believe my fellow-traveller noticed something of the sort.

He sat up. Not suddenly, nor in one continuous motion. I could see by the slow, successive stages in which he lifted himself to his feet that age had him in its grip. Not that he was really old--past fifty, maybe; nor did he suffer from any very pronounced infirmity. But somehow I could not imagine myself ever getting up that way--unless life in this country used human bodies up to a greater extent, at a faster rate than it did in Europe.

"You look around for a while," he said when at last he was standing. "Steer clear of bars and soda-fountains and shows. It doesn't much matter what ye do. Read the ads in the papers. . . . Clerking seems to be y'r line. Not much in that, though. But mind, whatever ye do, stick! Nothing in drifting. One thing's about as bad as the next one. Might just as well stick--Well-l, I guess I want to doze a little. Look me up if ye want to. Simpson's. Ask for Bennett."

With a nod of his head and a push of his arms he propelled his body so that it landed in his former seat across the aisle.

I had risen to my feet; but he did not offer his hand; nor did he give me a chance to thank him for so much kindness shown to a young man as green as I must have appeared to him. I sat down again.

"One thing is about as bad as the next one," he had said. "As good," he had meant. I read him in a kindly spirit.

Rickety, rackety, went the train; rumble, rumble, wheel on rail. I looked out through the window again, into the dark. The vastness of it all! It was disquieting! Sleep was impossible, I had food for thought.