CHAPTER VIII

AMONG THE DUKHOBORS

To watch the development of North America is to see Nature performing an endless conjuring trick with the human race. At New York, Quebec, and the other ocean ports there is that interminable procession of arriving liners, crowded in the steerage with persons who, in face, speech, clothes, ideas, and demeanour, are foreigners—foreigners obviously, and, as would seem, unalterably—yet when you travel about the country you make the bewildering discovery that they are not there. A family of newly landed foreigners, it is true, you may chance to fall in with, but the accumulated mass, the avalanche of emigrants who have been arriving in daily thousands for tens of years past—they have mysteriously vanished. And in their place you see millions of Yankees and Canadians who have dropped, apparently, from the skies.

The process of absorption, of adaptation, of transmogrification, is rapid, as two personal incidents may serve to show. Crossing the Atlantic recently, I happened to be standing in the between-decks promenade of the steerage, with my attention engaged by a group of inert Scandinavians, who—because of their strange attire and talk, their clumsy movements, and their wondering eyes looking out helplessly from flabby countenances—seemed creatures from another planet. By way of contrast, there stood at my side a dapper little elderly man in a cowboy hat, and having alert and penetrating eyes and a neatly trimmed tuft of hair on his otherwise clean-shaven face—in a word, the typical smart Yankee as one sees him on the stage.

“I suppose,” said I, a trifle dubiously, “those people will somehow settle into shape out in the West?”

“I guess they will,” murmured the calm little Yankee.

“They certainly look a most unpromising lot,” I blundered on.

“Perhaps they might improve,” drawled my companion in the same even tone, and still looking straight ahead of him.

“They appear to be so uncouth,” my evil genius prompted me to add, “so dull, so lacking in brains and breeding. In fact, they almost seem like——”

“Look here,” said the little Yankee, as he turned to confront me, not indeed with any show of resentment, yet with a suggestion of mild protest in his keen gaze. “Some o’ your ideas on this subject might not be just exactly what I should think. I’m Scandinavian born myself, having come over—a boy of fourteen—in a party as like as two peas to that one.”

There remained for me, of course, nothing but a hurried confession that I should not have thought it, since, to my eyes, he looked the walking incarnation of everything that was bright, quick and admirable in the American character: which did something to patch up our relationship; but I am not likely to forget the lesson that, in talking to a Yankee or a Canadian, one is very likely confronting a dual nationality, with half of it hidden from view.

My other experience concerns a little girl named Dolly. As I knew her before she and her people went to Canada, Dolly was a timid, clinging, winsome mite who, as the saying goes, could not say boo to a goose. Before the family had been a year in the new country I had the pleasure of visiting them in their home on the prairie. All were the same as I had known them before, and yet all, in some subtle way, were different. They had become infected by a spirit I can only describe as Canadian—by something that showed itself in a sort of hearty self-reliance—by something that Dolly illustrated for me in a very definite and memorable manner. Entering the parlour one afternoon, I found her a-perch the music stool, industriously playing the piano. “That doesn’t sound much like a piece, Dolly,” I happened to remark; “it’s an exercise, isn’t it?” “You bet your life it is,” replied the complacent child, without turning her head or desisting from her performance.

A rapid assimilation of peoples is, in fact, a law of social development in North America. But the working of that law has, in the case of the Dukhobors, been suspended; and I have been laying emphasis on the rule only that my readers may be able more clearly to appreciate the exception.

I went to Verigin, the headquarters of the Quaker-like Russian vegetarians—the strange sect who were assisted to Canada by Count Tolstoy and a committee of European well-wishers, and who have since given some trouble to the Dominion authorities by declining to take the oath of citizenship and by perambulating the country naked in search of a Messiah.

I found a few Dukhobors living in ordinary Canadian houses at Verigin proper, where the community has a range of offices, a warehouse, a brick-yard, a wheat elevator, and a flour-mill fitted with up-to-date machinery. Also there I found a handful of other nationalities (notably a Scotch family and a Roumanian family, who have both become Canadian), and they testified with two voices concerning the peculiar people in the midst of whom they dwell. But before referring to lines of cleavage in local opinion, I will briefly give my own superficial impressions of a community whose main principles have always engaged my sympathy.

They decline, on grounds of conscience, to serve as soldiers, and I happen to regard warfare between civilised nations as a hateful folly, admitting the peaceful and rational alternative of arbitration. They also object to slay animals for food, or for any other purpose, and, being myself inclined to a non-flesh diet, I was not likely to quarrel with that item of their humanitarian creed, even though I personally am unable to rise to the ethical height of sparing the lives of vermin. Thus such things as I shall say about these non-Canadians will at least issue from a mind unpolluted by prejudice.

The local section of the community (for other sections exist elsewhere in Canada) is distributed among several villages established within a short radius of Verigin. To one of those villages—Varnoe—I went on foot—or, rather, I went part of the way on foot; for a wagon overtook me on the road, and, addressing its two occupants (men who, by reason of their unanimated expressions and a Russian suggestion in the cut of their clothes, were easy to recognise as Dukhobors), I asked if they would kindly give me a lift. That my English was, however, thrown away upon them their expressionless faces clearly showed, so by pantomime I indicated the way by which I desired to profit by their indulgence. They vouchsafed no smile of acquiescence and no frown of refusal; so, without more ado, I scrambled into the vehicle, which promptly resumed its journey.

Now, had those two Dukhobors been possessed of even a moderate sense of humour, not to mention the gift of human sympathy, they must, I think, have betrayed some passing appreciation of the predicament in which I had all unwittingly involved myself. For the wagon had no springs, and I was having the time of my life in the matter of jolting and jarring, with stirring sensations as of the dislocation of one’s bones and the loosening of one’s teeth, as that awful conveyance went blundering along the rough road. Nor did occasion arise for any compassionate concern on behalf of my companions, since the seat they occupied was fixed to pliable steel supports that must have ensured for them a reasonable measure of physical comfort. And when—having had about enough of it—I called a halt and dismounted from that unsympathetic vehicle, there was still no sign of fraternity from either of those two self-centred and apparently depressed Dukhobors.

The village—when I presently arrived at it—proved a surprising place, with strange, foreign-looking and picturesque houses having walls plastered with mud, but with a note of distinction in the disposition of the timbering, in the shaping of the windows, and in the gable ends of the heavy vegetating roofs. Moreover, the eye was grateful for variations of detail in the several structures, no two being exactly alike, though all were affected by common principles of structure and design—all, at least, save a central meeting-place in prim brickwork, which was a civilised eyesore in that setting of primitive architecture.

But if the aspect of those Dukhobor dwellings could not fail to please an artist, their contiguity was calculated to horrify a social reformer. Here on the Canadian prairie, where one human habitation to 160 acres is the rule, there seemed something grotesquely gratuitous in a street of crowded houses, each with a little backyard that scarce afforded latitude for a pig, a wash-tub, and three gooseberry-bushes.

The men were either afield or indoors. But I saw a number of women. Some were applying mud to the walls, using their hands as trowels, and being copiously bemired from head to foot; others appeared and disappeared in their little gardens as they went sluggishly about their household affairs. Indeed, a sense of the sluggishness of those fat-faced, broad-bodied, heavily-clothed and big-booted women is the main impression they left on my mind. There were some children about, and they also seemed overburdened with clothes and deficient in vitality.

The stranger excited no curiosity, and prompted no spontaneous greetings. My friendly overtures to the adults were rewarded with dull nods and a muttered syllable or two. Those people were all quite happy, I suppose, but they were living their lives in a minor key. If one of the boys (not readily to be distinguished, by the by, from the girls) had only called out or whistled, or even set up a hullabaloo of blubbering, it would, I felt, have relieved the tension.

After walking twice from end to end of the village, I determined to see if it were not possible, by hook or by crook, to make a Dukhobor smile. Squatting on a seat in front of one of the houses, I laid myself out to secure the companionship of a little child who stood a few feet away, eyeing me with solemn misgiving. Not until I had produced my watch, fountain pen, bunch of keys and penknife, and spread them out before her, could the dubious youngster be coaxed forward. Yet her interest in these glittering valuables proved still-born; all my laborious attempts to show off their jingling and snappy parts being looked upon with a coldness bordering on boredom. However, that stumpy little Dukhobor toddler did at last manifest a spark of personality by earnestly pointing towards the grass at my feet; whereupon I plucked a bunch and held it out to her. The offering was accepted with alacrity and in a spirit of appreciation; hers being apparently the well-balanced type of mind which, content with things familiar and of established worth, is proof against the glamour of mere novelty. I gathered another handful of herbage and made a show of also surrendering that; but this time the chubby little fist stretched forth only to find the gift denied. Ten minutes later we were still doing that—attempts at surreptitious seizure sometimes prevailing against treacherous withdrawal, and the proceedings being frankly accepted by my tiny opponent as a legitimate and sporting way of passing the time. But all this time she did not smile. Nay, I had already begun to regard my aspiration as hopeless when, chancing to look round, I perceived that a Dukhobor woman—presumably the child’s mother—was overlooking our contest with much the air of a referee; and when I caught the eye of that Dukhobor woman she gave me a most gracious and unmistakable smile.

Soon afterwards, I retraced my steps along the road, and, calling at headquarters, sought an audience of the Dukhobor leader. But Peter M. Verigin, “Representative of the Dukhobor Society in Canada” (to give him the modest title which, on his visiting card, he gives himself), happened to be away on a journey. However, I was received by Mr. M. W. Cazakoff, the manager, who, in answer to my inquiries, made the following statement:—

“This is the Dukhobor Society’s trading store, where we have wholesale and retail departments for the sale of dry goods, hardware, leather, boots and shoes, groceries, crockery, farm implements, etc. We have seven grist mills, including one of 400 horse-power; three brickyards, where over seven million bricks have been made; about 800 horses; 800 head of cattle; twenty-five threshing machines; a number of barns and stables, and a fine assortment of ploughs, harrows, and other agricultural machinery. We have 13,000 acres in Saskatchewan, it being worth at least thirty dollars an acre, and the Society has now bought 15,000 acres in British Columbia—at Castlegar, about thirty miles south of Nelson—where a beginning has been made with fruit-farming. So you will see that our community, which numbers between seven and eight thousand persons, has become rich. The people who have made trouble for us are not many—not quite a hundred—and they do not belong to us, and we do not like what they do. Their Russian name would be called in English: The Men Without Any Clothes. We hope they will not make any more bother.”

Said the jovial Scotch miller, when I afterwards sat chatting with him in his cosy parlour: “I have a lot to do with the Dukhobors, and you may take it from me they are very nice people. As for the wild, fanatical set that sometimes go about with no clothes on, well, they are just the eccentric ones, and they don’t belong to the regular Society. One day I found a long-haired individual in the mill among those that work for me, a-whispering and talking away at ’em fit to beat the band. I saw what his game was—getting up one of those naked-crusade outfits to make a lot more bother. So I took and ran him out of the mill. They are normally as quiet, harmless, and industrious a people as you could meet anywhere. And such simple tastes they’ve got, too! Did you see that little patch of sunflowers along the road? Well, they grow them for their own food, and they munch away at the ripe seed as contentedly as possible. I tried those seeds once—but never again. A cut from the joint with some nice gravy is more in my line. All the same, you can’t help respecting them for their principles, especially when they are always so nicely behaved. And as for Mr. Verigin and the other heads of the Society, you couldn’t want to do business with nicer and more straightforward gentlemen.”

Said the highly intelligent and much travelled Roumanian storekeeper: “Nobody finds any fault with the Dukhobors themselves; but the system under which they live doesn’t give them a fair chance. They oughtn’t to be kept in their present uneducated state, and allowed to live in a superstitious belief that Peter Verigin is their heavenly ruler. The Society make a boast of the property they have amassed; but what an infinitely greater amount so many thousand families would have produced by this time if each man had been allowed to take up his quarter-section and been a free and independent citizen, bringing up his children to be properly educated and to speak the language of the country, instead of carrying on traditions of ignorance and superstition. As for their objection to bloodshed, and their preference for a non-meat diet—well, obviously those ideals can be preserved just as well by people who are mentally emancipated as by people living in a state of mediæval darkness. I am happy to say that, in spite of the measures taken to preserve the _status quo_, a little light is beginning to enter the community from without, and already many of the men have struck for independence, and withdrawn from the community. Some are living hereabouts on their own homesteads, and very fine and prosperous settlers they are proving.”

And with what my Roumanian friend said I found myself in hearty agreement. Having escaped from the yoke of autocracy to the political freedom of Canada, the least the Dukhobors can do, it seems to me, is to shed the mental fetters of an ignorant Russian peasantry and become enlightened Canadian citizens.