Читать книгу Life is an Adventure - R. J. Manion - Страница 4

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That life is an adventure is obvious to any man who has attained the age of fifty, and who has had opportunity of touching life at a few diverse points. Whether the adventure be glorious or tragic depends not only on the events themselves, but on the character and mental outlook of the individual. There probably occur in the lives of the majority of people events sufficiently interesting to provide material for a novel; but the tales remain unwritten, because the lights and shadows of life are so difficult to paint. In my twoscore years and ten of a somewhat varied career, I have met many men whose life story would make the most entrancing reading if they could but put it into readable form—men who have no realization that their history is so uncommon or so interesting. The difficulty seems to be, at least partially, that those who have a story to tell have not the gift of telling it, and those who have the gift have not the story.

Canada possesses large numbers of “self-made men” who started their lives in the humblest of surroundings, but who have risen to the top rungs of the ladder of business or statesmanship, during the years of attaining which they encountered most exciting adventures. It is indeed a pity that more of these leaders have not told their story. In a few brief sentences in the following pages a little of the romance of some of Canada’s lesser leaders will be told, all of the incidents being drawn from my own contacts with men and events. My boyhood days were spent in a pioneer Canadian town under fairly rough conditions. During those eighteen years I left school early and tried my boyish hand at numerous jobs. Six years of college life in Canada and Europe followed. Then came ten years of busy medical practice, that phase ending with service in two armies during the war—the whole being capped by nearly twenty years in the Parliament of Canada, during which time I have been a Minister in three Cabinets. Some of the interesting incidents of these changing scenes will form the warp and woof of the tale that is told.

In the early days of Canada as a Dominion, which it became on July 1st, 1867, the fulfilment of a pledge to link up East and West with the centre by railways brought about the construction of the Canadian Pacific system. From Montreal it ran for a distance of over 2,700 miles, across prairies which had more buffalo than people; then through the gorgeous grandeur of the Rocky Mountains into the Province of British Columbia, where barely ten thousand white people lived at that time. The vision and the courage of the men who conceived and carried to completion this transportation system by 1885 are indeed to be marvelled at. That task in itself placed a number of courageous railway adventurers in Canada’s “Hall of Fame.” Their daring enterprise and their conquest of almost insurmountable difficulties make an entrancing tale. It has been told by others, and it is mentioned here because, during the building of that railway, opportunities were afforded many young Canadians to leave the old homestead in Eastern Canada and try conclusions with life on a wider and more interesting scale. My father was one of these pioneers; a member of a large family, living on a farm in the Ottawa valley, he decided that farming was too drab for his somewhat adventurous spirit. So he left the farm, with the meagre education of those days, and followed the building of the Canadian Pacific. Playing the part of a general merchant at various stopping-places of construction, he supplied the needs of thousands of rough-and-ready workmen; and made his final stop at Chapleau, where he was joined by my mother and their four young children in 1886. The next year a serious outbreak of diphtheria wiped out most of the children in this new settlement—as this was the period before the discovery of diphtheria anti-toxin—and my father, to save his little family, threw up his business there, which consisted of a fairly large general store, and moved to the head of lake navigation, opposite Duluth, on the world’s greatest body of fresh water.

It is at this period that my memory begins to stir. The point at which our flight stopped, Fort William, is to-day a city of nearly thirty thousand population, but in 1887 it was a village of only a few hundred residents; and during the next twelve years, with all the intense curiosity of youth, I saw it develop from a border town into a modern city. During those twelve years one beheld much of that primitive pioneer life of civilization’s expanding fringe, and had intimate contacts with rough but interesting characters. In our early years we lived in hotels, not of the modern type with electric and sanitary conveniences of every kind, but rude, hastily-constructed frame buildings, none too well protected from the rigours of the cold northern climate. They were heated by big “box stoves,” illuminated by oil lamps or lanterns, and possessed only the roughest of furniture in the large dining-room, “sitting-room,” bedrooms and card-rooms. The bar, since it was the real money-maker of the institution, was the brightest, gayest (and roughest) section of the hostelry. How well I recall the bar’s long polished counter; the brass rail for the uplifted foot; the shining mirrors, glasses and bottles behind the bartender’s shoulders; the pails of water in which the glasses were rinsed, then turned upside down to drip themselves in readiness for the next customer; and the ringing “till,” opened by an easy-working combination, into which went far too much of the money which ought to have been used for family necessities.

Looking back upon those early days one is astounded by the wonderful conveniences supplied us by the scientific progress of the past threescore years—modern plumbing, the telephone and radio, electric illumination and refrigeration, automatic furnaces which maintain almost perfectly regulated temperature and humidity even in the Arctic climate of the northern Canadian winter—and all the other advantages of the modern well-to-do home, which make a tout ensemble of artistic luxury and abundance far surpassing that enjoyed by any monarch up to the middle of the nineteenth century.

How little these modern conveniences meant to our pioneer lives is well illustrated by an experience of my own when I was about nine years old. The Canadian Pacific decided to build a small but reasonably good stop-over hotel for its boat passengers, and the comparatively intricate construction work was a source of interest to us youngsters, certain absolutely new, and to us unknown, fandangles being put into the building. One of these particularly intrigued us, as we had never before encountered anything like it. We watched it being built into a small room, and as it neared completion the builders still further confused our childish minds by attaching a long chain to a lever which protruded from what appeared to be some sort of reservoir, and at the end of the chain was a porcelain handle with the word “Pull” burnt into the white surface. We finally decided that on the following Sunday, when the workmen took the day off, we should investigate this strange contrivance. True to our determination, and careful to avoid observation, we pried up the window of the small chamber, propped it open, and entered. After a thorough inspection which did not enlighten us, we decided to obey the injunction on the porcelain, and see what would happen. We pulled, and to our horror a noisy rush of water tore through the whole infernal machine. Convinced by the unexpected noise that we had started something which no one could stop, we clambered through the window and took off into the woods, fully expecting that the whole town would shortly be on our trail. A few hours later we sneaked back to the scene of our crime, and to our great astonishment the building still stood; so we struck on toward our homes to appease the hunger pangs that told us it was long past mealtime. It was our first contact with a modern sanitary convenience!

Living in a hotel in those far-off frontier-of-civilization days was not the quiet, easy existence enjoyed by the occupants of some wayside inn back in the old settled communities of Eastern Canada or in the villages of England or France. The hotel in these newer settlements was the only meeting-place of the rough, hardy frontiersmen, the bushmen, and the workers on construction gangs—an uncultured assortment of good and bad who knew little of the finer sides of life, but who, on the whole, were honest and reasonably decent—good friends, bad enemies, “straight shooters,” ready at all times for a test of strength or skill, or for a wager on anything that happened along.

The men who kept these hotels were, broadly speaking, of an excellent type of straightforward, frank, honorable citizen. Rarely did anyone, after spending his money in riotous dissipation, receive anything but the most charitable treatment from these men. And scores of times do I recall, with considerable sadness at the recollection, seeing some poor neglected wife, perhaps the mother of children lacking some of life’s necessities, sneaking a little fearfully in through the rear door of one of these hotels, and whispering into the sympathetic ear of the hotelkeeper that her Jim or Tom had not arrived home with the much-needed week’s wages. Shortly thereafter Jim or Tom would be quietly called by “the boss” from among his boon companions, and persuaded, if at all possible, to go back to his neglected loved ones. If he refused to go, the bartenders were usually instructed to “serve him no more drink.” And on all occasions where generous giving was in order these “liquor men,” as they were often called, contributed more freely than others, whether the contribution was for some poor waif, for the Salvation Army, for the Jesuit priest, or as a prize for a horse-race. In the House of Commons during my last Parliament were two members who, thirty or more years ago, carried on this business in other sections of that pioneer fringe. C. H. Dickie and David Beaubier held the respect of the whole Chamber because of their good common sense and their humanitarian outlook on all problems. Neither was a great speaker, but “Dick” had a natural eloquence and a genial, humorous philosophy which held the House intensely interested whenever he cared to express his opinions.

The life in the hotels was not an attractive one, at least there was something in my nature that made it repellent to me from my earliest memories. Away back somewhere in my subconscious childish soul I longed wistfully—probably without in any way analysing the longing—for the quiet peacefulness of a little home, instead of living as we did in the midst of rough, uncouth men, who too often cursed recklessly, laughed uproariously, or sang their unending “chanteys” in a monotone far removed from harmony. The “chantey” (the word being derived from the French, chanter, “to sing”) is a rhyme of very many verses, telling some tale of the seaman’s or the bushman’s life, sung in a monotonous voice, often to the accompaniment of a squealing fiddle. Next to the human voice a well-played violin is the medium of the most harmonious music, but I hark back with horror to the screeching noise of those frontier fiddles, and the associated unmusical songs and “hoe-down” dances in the barrooms of my childhood days. Often in the midst of these unholy noises I would slip away into the quiet solitude of the forest. Later, when the little wooden church was built, one thanked God in his childish words that the door of it was never locked, so that one could glide inside and sit on a crude rear bench to fill his soul with the peace and quiet found there. How still one sat, and how grateful one was to catch no strain of that noisy medley of raucous voices, scraping fiddle, and heavy-shod feet!

One of the periods most detested was the early springtime, when the lumber camps in the neighbourhood broke up and into the town came hundreds of men who had, for the past six months or more, been playing the part of “lumber-jacks.” In many cases they had no one depending on them, and therefore, having saved up quite a “stake” in cash, were ready to squander it on gay living, or what went for gay living in those early days—whiskey, women and gambling. In each of these camps there was as a rule a “bad man”—someone, in other words, who had made the reputation of being the “toughest” or ablest man in the camp by conquering physically any of his fellow workers who dared to face him. These men looked upon themselves as champions, and when two of them from different camps met it often meant a rough-and-tumble fight of the most brutal kind, unless, as sometimes occurred, each was a little fearful of the other man’s reputation, when both would veer off with nothing more dangerous than savage looks.

My youthful hunger for new experiences gave me some strange acquaintances in those early days—“card sharks,” tough men, dope fiends, and others of that motley crowd. One card shark, Harvey by name, was among the most interesting. He was handsome, suave and well educated, yet he was a crook who could “stack” the cards, “load” the dice, “pull” a gun, or face with a smile any man, be he ever so much bigger and stronger, who chose to “call” any of his crookedness. He took a strange fancy to me, and showed me in a spirit of bravado his methods of marking the cards and loading the dice. He also gave me lessons in punching the bag and boxing, which served me well in after years. Later, as a student in Toronto, I took boxing lessons from old Jim Popp, who, although about sixty, could, I verily believe, have taken on two of my size and weight and given us the worst of it. Harvey stayed about a year in town, gathering in the shekels from the unsuspecting transient population, who were high livers, good spenders, and big earners. So he lived on the fat of the land until his too consistent winnings warned off even the unwary from his so-called games of “chance,” in which his opponents took most of the chance, and he took most of the money. He could fairly make the cards talk to him, and could take from the middle of the deck, in apparently honest dealing, good hands for everyone at the table, his own usually being just good enough when the pot was large to take it in. In a “show-off” spirit he would deal the cards in play with me, while he was blindfolded, and lay on the table as many hands as I called, but always give himself a just-sufficiently-good layout to win, had we been playing for money. In the same way he could “palm” his own loaded dice into the box, and “clean up” the unsuspecting gang at the bar.

On one occasion he paid for his friendship with me when I saw him using his crooked methods to take the winter earnings from a recent arrival who was foolish enough to gamble with a stranger. Not wishing to see barefaced robbery carried on, I, in a fifteen-year-old spirit of fair play, laid a note before him telling him that if he went on I would expose him. At the end of a couple of hands he threw down the cards, and said that he had had enough. When we were alone he looked at me with a good-natured smile.

“What a damn fool I was,” he said, “to tell a boy like you my tricks!” And that was the only resentment he showed.

At the end of a year, when others began avoiding games with him, he left for other fields, and I have never seen him since. But ten years later in Ottawa I met his sister, a trained nurse, and his sweet old mother, who assured me that whatever might be said of her son Harvey—and she “knew that tales were told”—so far as she was concerned, “no mother ever had a better son.” Quite believable, so strange is human nature!

When saying good-bye to me—rather affectionately, for I admired him in spite of his questionable way of earning a living—he expressed regret that he had been so frank in boasting of his expert methods with cards and dice, and in drawing attention to himself in boxing and singing, “for I might have gone on another year here in this land of milk and honey”; but he accepted the verdict quite philosophically. Anyhow,

There’s so much good in the worst of us,

And so much bad in the best of us,

That it hardly behoves any of us

To talk about the rest of us.

Another lovable companion of those days was one with whom I grew up, though he was three or four years my senior. He remained one of my closest and wisest friends until his death, thirty years later. Throughout all those years I profited frequently from his sane counsel and his brotherly affection for me. This was Joe Brown, bartender; then hotelkeeper; and later mining man; in all of which occupations he unassumingly and unconsciously came closer to practising the Golden Rule than has almost any other man of my acquaintance in all the intervening years. When I first really knew him Joe was nineteen or twenty years of age, though quite full grown to manhood. He stood nearly six feet in height, and was, as so many in that rough life were, splendidly formed, with a pair of square, powerful shoulders and a handsome face. He had outstanding ability in many ways, but was impeded by an extreme shyness which prevented him throughout life from attaining the success which his real ability would otherwise have assured, though in later years, while prospecting and mining, he made a couple of small fortunes. He was a popular member of the community with everyone who had the privilege of knowing him, but unfortunately, because of his shyness, few had that privilege. Harvey, of whom I have just written, had brought a punching-bag and boxing gloves with him, and had taught some of us the art of boxing, at which he was an adept, but Joe could never be coaxed to put on the gloves. In spite of this, however, he was one of the bonniest fighters one could meet, and as a bartender his prowess was often called for. His broad shoulders and exceptionally powerful frame made him dangerous to meet at any time, yet, like most good men physically, he never picked a quarrel and was difficult to draw into one, but when in he followed Shakespeare’s advice,—“Beware of entering into a quarrel, but being in bear it that the opposed may beware of thee.”

As a young fellow around the hotel he was forced into fights on numerous occasions by some quarrelsome customer who insisted on breaking things, and never but once did I see a fight last more than one blow—his—for his left arm had “dynamite in it.”

Joe had all the qualities of a good man, in addition to which he was generous almost to a fault. Even until he “went West,” as they expressed it at the front, he kept himself poor by his generous actions toward friends and relations. Nothing was too good for anyone he loved, and he loved me as a younger brother. When we went into the woods (as we often did, for he loved their solitude and peace very deeply, and he knew every tree and bird and animal as if he were a trained naturalist), he always managed the work at the portage so that he would carry the heavy end of the canoe; or if there was an extra bag to carry on our shoulders it was he who took it automatically. Later in life when I became a successful physician, army surgeon, or parliamentarian, his quiet pleasure at my success did not prevent his shyness showing through when he met me, for he seemed reluctant at times to show the old freedom when he met one whom he had come to look upon as much more worthy of the world’s respect than he. He would have preferred to sit back and enjoy his affectionate admiration in silence; in fact, it was a real effort at times to keep him on the old friendly footing, and if others came into the office he always slipped out very quickly, pretending he had other affairs to attend to—probably to go back to his reading, for he read widely.

While keeping his deep love of the simple and clean joys of the woodlands and the streams, he was full of fun in the real sense, and no one enjoyed better than he a bit of innocent “horse-play.” On those rare occasions when he took a glass or two of grog, his shyness became somewhat masked, permitting him even to take part in some innocent mischief. On one occasion when he was in this mood we were sitting in the public room of the hotel when a stranger entered, who, after glancing for some minutes at the headlines of the newspapers which were there for public reading, turned to us and suggested that if a war took place between Japan and Russia he hoped that Japan would be the winner.

“Well, I am not so sure that I agree with that,” said Joe, turning toward him. “After all, Russia has been a very good colony of Japan’s, and, since Russia refuses to co-operate with the Japanese, it might be as well for Russia to defeat Japan.”

“Russia a colony of Japan?” said the stranger, staring; “When did Russia take that position?”

“My friend,” said Joe laughing, “surely you know enough about the East to be aware that Russia has been a colony of Japan for a century. Isn’t that so, Bob?” he said, turning toward me for confirmation, which was given, seeing that he was up to some mischief. “Are you not aware,” he continued, “that nearly a century ago the Czars were removed and the Japanese Emperor has been in control of Russia ever since?” Again the stranger showed his surprise and contradicted Joe.

“I suppose,” Joe then added, “that you are not aware of the other events that have been happening in the last half-century. I suppose you would deny that France has become a possession of Italy?” Again the surprise and blank stare.

“For Heaven’s sake, my friend, where have you been?” Joe continued. “Do you know who is President of the United States?”

“Certainly I do,” replied the stranger; “McKinley is President of the United States.”

“McKinley President of the United States!” said Joe with a roar of surprised laughter. “Why, the man does not even know that Abraham Lincoln is President.”

The stranger at this turned away in absolute disgust, picked one of the papers off the table, and sat down at the other side of the room to read it, apparently deciding that he wanted no more such conversation. Joe noticed that he had the paper upside down, and turning to me he said with a gay laugh, “Why, he is reading the paper upside down!”

“Well,” the man replied, “any damn fool can read it the other way.”

The three of us joined in the laughter, and no one enjoyed the manner in which the stranger had got back at him more than did Joe himself.