Читать книгу The Stream Runs Fast - Nellie Letitia McClung - Страница 6
ОглавлениеHumble Beginnings
A couple of weeks after our marriage a first-class salesman came to town carrying an impressive attaché bag, in which reposed the prospectus of a new magazine. He was a pleasant, engaging young fellow who would have done for a Charles Dana Gibson model. The new magazine about to break over our quiet lives was called Town and Country, and it would carry each month pictures and sketches of the leading people in one of the more important country towns. Manitou had been chosen for Volume 1, Number 1, and the young man had been advised to see me and enlist my services; the company, he said, was anxious to use native writers. . . .
I liked the sound of that. I never had been called a native writer before. It had a patriotic appeal, and I even subscribed for the magazine. Someone must show faith in the venture. Five dollars was the subscription price. The young man was apologetic about taking a subscription from me, though he told me everyone taking part must subscribe. It was a pure formality, he said. There would be expenses to be met . . . He was glad I was willing to undertake the assignment—that's what he called it. He said writers were the great interpreters of a country. What Dickens did for London, and Scott for Scotland, he believed I could do for southern Manitoba. "We want you to hold a mirror up to this country; or perhaps a microscope", he said, "and you must feel free to write as you please. No one wants bare facts; no one is satisfied with bare facts; we want to light candles of imagination in the minds of our people". . . .
I did not tell all this to Wes. He had a blunt way of puncturing some of my beautiful balloons, and the worst of it was he was generally right. Very rarely have I had the satisfaction of saying to him: "I told you so". Many years after, Robert E. Knowles defined Wes in a brief sentence: "That man of yours", he said, "can do a lot of washing in a very few suds." So I held my peace but worked hard. I interviewed people, walked miles, dug into the newspaper files in the office of the Manitou Mercury, making elaborate notes and dreaming great dreams of what a native writer can do for a community.
I had no difficulty in getting the old-timers to talk. They blossomed out under my rapt listening, and I soon saw that every house had a story. I got the low-down on the family rows, hot off the griddle. Many of the people in Manitou had come from the same part of Ontario, and I found out that they had long memories for old sins and old sorrows. One thing bothered me. I had to do indirect advertising for the business firms, for of course, like all up-to-date magazines, we had to depend on advertising for our revenue. Our expenses would naturally be heavy, for we were going to use the best of everything. We were going to make our province known far beyond our boundaries.
It was not so easy, for example, to make the Ice Cream Parlor and Confectionery, sound attractive, where the fly-paper hung from the ceiling far into the autumn, and the proprietor, big, fat, lazy Bill Summers, had to be sent for by the Post Master to empty his box. Bill had an excellent excuse for this. He said he knew that all his letters were bills, and he never did like bills, and besides he knew what he owed the wholesale as well as they did, and he knew when he could pay them a —— sight better, so they could save their stamps. Bill's ad in the paper ran on and on from one season to the next. Behind the shop he lived with his cat and dog and a boxful of paper-bound books, which he read over and over again. Dirty, happy, unmolested. He had what he wanted. Ease, romance, and his own thoughts.
Of course, that would not do for Town and Country, but I found a keen enjoyment in tracing the evolution of the indolent, leisure-loving fellow who ate his own candies and let the world pass him by. He came from a family of hustlers, who worked the clock around, stark, prosaic, grim-faced, hard-handed people. Bill was the youngest of the family and the others had no respect for him at all, and said he would die in the poor house; but they were wrong about that. I quoted a verse of "The Lotus Eaters" when I went into his store once to buy canned salmon, and he welcomed it like an old friend. Then he told me about his mother, who died when he was four years old. He remembered how tired she always was, and how she longed for time to read. "The Summers were all slave drivers", he said, "and drove her to death. Perhaps you've heard of people being 'born tired'. Well, that's the way I was born, and when I got the money left to my mother by an uncle, I bought this business and settled down. In fact, I flopped down, and spread out my feet. I'm only sorry Uncle Bill didn't peg out in time for my mother to use the money. She and I could have had a good time here. I suppose you've heard that I'm lazy. I am. Lazy but happy".
The day I went to interview him he did not answer the store bell, but I could see the back of his head over the top of his barrel-chair in the room behind, so I went in. He was sound asleep and gently snoring with the big black and white cat on his knee, and a brown spaniel asleep on his feet, and in his hand a copy of Marie Corelli's Romance of Two Worlds. I tip-toed out. I was afraid that Mr. Summer's story would not do for Town and Country. Something told me that I was not on the right track, but the going was pleasant and I went on.
I got many a good story about the "younger sons" who were sent out of England to be out of the way. One of these I wrote later under the title "Permission" in the volume of short stories called The Next of Kin, which was published during the First World War.
We were fortunate in having in that neighborhood many English and Scotch families, whose resolute determination to succeed in this new country against all the hardships of isolation and the severities of our winter climate called forth our admiration. They brought a great contribution to our lives; something more beautiful than even their Chelsea potteries and highboys, tapestries and crested silver. From them we heard much of the Royal family and their influence on the people of Britain. To us, so far away, hard working and unromantic people as we were, the Royal family with its numerous dependents seemed like a heavy financial load, but in our British people, steeped in the traditions of the past, we saw something of the coherence and strength of the British form of government.
The new magazine never saw the light of day, and the young man with the bright vision faded away, and I did not see him again for many years. But I never regretted the time I had spent getting material for Town and Country, for I felt it was not wasted. I really did learn something about the people of the community, and got a glimpse of their hopes and fears and their ambitions for their children. Being a young country, most of the people were young, even these tired farm-women who pleated their aprons as they talked to me. Hope and ambition kept them on the rails; the hope of a new house or even a pump in the kitchen, if only the rain would come at the right time and the frost keep off. I found out that the women who were making a quilt or making a rug had a brighter outlook than the women who had no hobbies. Something that they could work on from day to day, something that they could be proud of, lightened their burdens. I remember one good sentence which had a whole story behind it. One woman told me quite frankly about a quarrel she had with her husband, which, fortunately, did not come to an open break. "I would have left him that time", she said, "but I had two hens setting and I knew he would never think to feed them!" Even though the young man with the bright smile was gone and my five dollars gone with him, I kept watching for stories and began keeping a record, not exactly a diary, but a book which I find very useful now. I began to pay more attention to my reading, even trying to analyze short stories, in an attempt to discover the technique. I remember how diligently I pored over Bret Harte's Luck of Roaring Camp, trying to see how he produced the effect on his readers. I even dug out the books we used at the Collegiate. I studied again an excellent book on English Composition. It gave examples of good prose with explanatory notes; somewhat in the style of Arthur Quiller-Couch's Art of Writing. The book has disappeared long ago, but some of these literary gems remain with me.
One, from The Mill on the Floss:
"The boat reappeared, but brother and sister had gone down in an embrace never to be parted, living over again in that brief moment all their lives, since first they joined their little hands in love, and roamed the daisy fields together."
That, and the oft-quoted and sometimes ridiculed passage from Dombey and Son about the "golden water on the wall" carried me to Heaven's gate. Neither of these passages would be accepted by a modern short story group, but their place in Literature is safe for all that.
