Читать книгу My Remarkable Uncle and other Sketches - Stephen Leacock - Страница 4

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When I left the old farm of my childhood which I described in talking about my remarkable uncle, I never saw it again for years and years. I don't think I wanted to. Most people who come off farms never go back. They talk about it, cry about it--but they don't really go. They know better.

If they did go back, they would find, as I did, the old place all changed, the old world all gone, in fact no 'farms' any more, no cross-road stores, no villages--nothing in the old sense. A new world has replaced it all.

I went back the other day in a motor car to have a look round the locality that I hadn't seen since I left it by means of a horse and buggy more than half a century before. I came to do this because I happened to have been looking at one of those typical 'motor ads' that you see in the coloured illustrations, motors glistening to an impossible effulgence, a gravelled drive, impossibly neat, beside wide lawns of inconceivable grass and unachievable flower beds. In and beside the motor car were super-world beings as impossible as the grass and flowers around them; youths as square in the shoulders as Greek gods, girls as golden as guineas, and even old age, in the persons of the senior generation, smoothed and beautified to a pink and white as immaculate as youth itself. And as I looked at the picture of this transformed world not yet achieved, but at least existing in the creative mind of the artist, I fell to thinking of all the actual transformation that new invention has brought into our lives.

I thought particularly of how it has changed the aspect of what we used to call the country--the country of the horse and buggy days that I so easily recall. So I went back.

Our farm was up in a lost corner of Ontario, but the locality doesn't particularly matter. They're all the same from Ontario to Ohio.

We lived four and a half miles from 'the village.' To get to it from our farm you went down a lane--heavy going--up to the hubs in bad weather, then on to a road and up a hill, the same hill really you had just come down only on a different angle; then along a splendid 'spin' of at least three hundred yards where you 'let the mare out,' that is, made her go like blazes (eight miles an hour); then, whoa! steady! another hill, a mighty steep one, to go down. You had to take it pretty easy. In fact, for the hills you had far better get out and walk, as we generally did; it eased the mare to have us walk up the first hill and it eased the buggy to have us walk down the second.

After the second hill, a fine spin of about four hundred yards, good road and 'room to pass.' You couldn't 'let the mare out' all along this, as it might 'wind' her; but she could keep going at a pretty smart clip Just the same. Then came the 'big swamp,' about three-quarters of a mile or more; in fact, I never knew a road from Maine to the Mississippi that didn't have a swamp in it. A lot of the big swamp was 'corduroy' road. The word means corde du roi, or king's rope, but the thing meant logs laid side by side with dirt shovelled over them. In the swamp there was no room to pass except by a feat of engineering in chosen spots.

After the swamp you went on over a succession of 'spins' and 'hills,' the mare alternately 'eased' and 'winded' and 'let out'--and at last, there you were, in the village street--yes, sir, right in the village, under an hour, pretty good going, eh? Cover the mare up with a blanket while we go into the tavern or she may get the 'heaves'--or the 'humps'--or I forget what; anyway it was what a mare got if you stayed too long in the tavern.

And the village street, how well I remember it. Romantic--well, I don't know; I suppose it was. But it was just a street; stores on each side with a square sign over each. Trees here and there. Horses hitched to posts asleep; a grist mill at the end where the river hit the village or the village hit the river, I forget which. There were no fancy signs, no fancy stores. The sole place of entertainment was the tavern--beer 5 cents, whisky 5 cents, mixed drinks (that means beer with whisky or whisky mixed with beer) 5 cents. Food, only at meal times at a York shilling a meal, later raised to a quarter.

Such was the typical farm road and village of fifty years ago--a 'social cell' as I believe the sociologists would call us.

Now look at the change. I visited it, as I say, the other day in a large smooth-running motor car--this 'social cell' from which I emerged fifty years ago. Changed? The word isn't adequate. It just wasn't there any more. In the first place, some one had changed our old farmhouse into a 'farmstead.' You see, you can't live any longer on a farm if you are going to have people coming to see you in motor cars--golden girls, Apollo boys and Joan-and-Darby elders. You must turn the place into a 'farmstead'--with big shingles all over it in all directions--with a 'loggia' in front and a 'pergola' at the side.

And the road? All gone, all changed. A great highway swept by in its course and sheared lane and hills into one broad, flat curve; threw aside the second hill into a mere nothing of a 'grade,' with a row of white posts; and the swamp, it has passed out of existence to become a broad flat with a boulevard two-way road, set with new shingled bungalows with loggias and pergolas, overgrown with wistaria and perugia, and all trying to live up to the passing motor cars. There's a tearoom now where the spring used to be, in the centre of the swamp, the place where we watered the mare to prevent her blowing.

But you hardly see all this--the whole transit from farmstead to village by the sweeping, shortened concrete road is just three minutes. You are in the village before you know it.

And the village itself! Why, it's another place. What charm is this, what magic this transformation? I hardly know the place; in fact, I don't know it. The whole length of it now is neat with clipped grass and the next-to-impossible flowers, copies from the motor-car advertisements; there are trim little cedars and box hedges, trees clipped to a Versailles perfection and house fronts all aglow with variegated paint and hanging flowers...And the signs, what a multitude of them; it's like a mediaeval fair! 'Old English Tea Room'! I didn't know this was England! And no, it isn't; see the next sign, 'Old Dutch Tea Room,' and 'Old Colony Rest House,' and 'Normandy Post House'! No, it's not England; I don't know where it is.

But those signs are only a fraction of the total, each one vying with the last in the art of its decoration of the angle of its suspension. 'Joe's Garage.' Look at it--built like a little Tudor house, half-timbered in black and white. Joe's grandfather was the village blacksmith, I remember him well, and his 'blacksmith shop' was a crazy sort of wooden shed, out of slope, with no front side in particular and a forge in it. If they had it now they would label it 'Ye Olde Forge' and make it an out-of-town eating place.

But these new signs mean that, for the people who ride from the city in the motor cars, the village and its little river has become a 'fishing resort.' You see, it's only fifty-six miles from the city; you run out in an hour or so. You can rent a punt for $1 and a man to go with you and row for another $1--or he'll fish for you, if you like. Bait only costs about 50 cents, and you can get a fine chicken dinner, wine and all, for about $2. In short, you have a have a wonderful time and only spend $10; yet when I was young if you had $10 in the village no one would change it, and $10 would board you for a month.

And the people too! A new kind of people seems to have come into--or no, grown up in--the village. I find on examination that they're really the grandsons and granddaughters of the people who were there. But the new world has taken hold of them and turned them into a new and different sort of people--into super people as it were. Joe Hayes, for example--you remember his grandfather, the blacksmith--has turned into a 'garage-man,' handy, efficient, knowing more than a science college, a friend in distress. What a horse-and-buggy doctor of the countryside was to the sick of fifty years ago, such is now the garage man to the disabled motor car and its occupants towed into his orbit. People talk now of their mimic roadside adventures and tell how there 'wasn't a garage man within five miles,' as people used to tell of having to fetch the doctor at night over five miles of mud and corduroy.

And Joe's brothers and cousins have somehow turned into motor men of all sorts: taximen, and even that higher race, the truckmen. What the draymen of Old London were--admired for their bulk and strength even by the fairest of the ladies--so to-day are the 'truckmen' who have stepped into their place in evolution...

Nor is it one sex only that the motor has transformed. People who live in a village where motors come and go must needs take thought for their appearance. See that sign, beauty parlour! You'd hardly think that that means Phoebe Crawford, whose great-aunt was the village seamstress. Or that other sign, Georgette: Lingerie, that's Mary Ann Crowder. Her grandfather was Old Man Crowder up the river.

Changed, isn't it? Wonderfully changed, into a sort of prettier and brighter world. And if a little 'social cell' has changed like this, it's only part of the transformation that has redecorated all our world.

The only trouble is to live up to it--to be as neat and beautiful as a beauty-parlour girl, as friendly as a garage man, as bold and brave as a truck driver and as fit a guest to sit down to a frogs' legs dinner in an Old Mill chop house.

Alas! This happy world that might have been, that seemed about to be! The transformation from the grim and sombre countryside to all this light and colour, had it only just begun to be overwhelmed and lost in the shadow of War?

Perhaps the old farm had something to it after all.