CHAPTER XVIII

INTO THE ROCKIES WITH A DEFENDER OF THE FAITH

For several days I had seen the Rockies far off--a black and jagged coil of mountains, that seemed at times almost to be moving like some prehistoric great scaly beast on its endless crawl across the plains. Now I was to see them near by--some part of them at least. What has any man seen in that ocean of mountains but a few drops?

At the unpleasing hour of 3.30 A.M. I disengaged myself from one of the three double beds with which my room in the hotel was furnished, washed slightly, dressed completely, and walked to the station. Calgary was quiet at last. There had been a sound of revelry by night. A man with a tenor voice had been singing songs in some adjacent room to the hotel up to 3.30. But his songs and the vamped accompaniment to them had ceased now, and peace prevailed. I don't {171} remember to have passed any one on the way to the station. There were two or three sleepy-eyed people lounging about there; there always seem to be a few in Canadian stations, no matter what the hour. I think they must be out-of-works who keep their spirits up by listening to the squeaking and clash of shunting trucks, and the letting off of steam, and the great clang of the bells that are sounded from the engines as a trans-continental train comes in--all those sounds of life and hustle that are dear to the Canadian soul.

The train I was waiting for entered slowly with the usual peal of bells. All the blinds were drawn in the sleeping-carriages; and the only sign of life from them was the protruded woolly head, here and there, of a negro car conductor. I think I was the only person who got in.

'What a lot of people,' I said to myself as I sat down in an empty smoking compartment, and shivering lit a pipe, 'would envy the prospects of a man about to spend days and perhaps weeks in the heart of the Rockies.' 'What a lot of people,' myself replied to me, 'would see the Rockies further before they got out of bed at this unholy hour.'

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My pipe held the balance between us and gradually soothed the rebellious part of me. It was still too dark to see anything, and there was nothing to be done but wait patiently for the dawn. I could not but regret that I was missing the scenery of the foothills, for which those who have lived among them seem to have a peculiar affection. But I was consoled by the entry a little later of two fellow-passengers, who had evidently been disturbed in their sleep and wanted smoke and conversation. Strange and various types one sees in a Westbound train. The West is still--even to the Canadian born--the Unknown and the Happy Hunting-grounds and Eldorado and Ultima Thule and the Blessed Isles. West is where the farmer's son of spirit goes to seek fresh lands, where the prospector goes to find gold, where successful men go because they want to be more successful, or maybe because they want to retire and enjoy themselves, and they have heard that West there is a climate which hardly includes winter, and has none at all of that fierce break-up of winter which makes the plains in parts trying to the toughest constitution; where the failures go because they have tried all other places, and the last is {173} West. All sorts of other men may be seen going West too--bank clerks and lumbermen, commercial travellers and engineers, tourists and politicians, trappers and amateurs of sport. But I never saw a more strangely assorted pair than these two men who came into the smoking compartment where I sat as the train mounted the foothills.

One was a very old man. I do not know what his profession was, but his clothes and himself were equally weather-stained and dirty. He had the coarsest snow-white hair hanging in cords about his neck and cheeks and mouth, which gave him the appearance of a vicious old billy-goat. He was, I discovered, a moderately vicious old man. The other was a lumberjack--hardly more than a boy, sturdy, and strikingly handsome, with the clearest blue eyes and a complexion that a woman would give a fortune for. The old man--as they came in together--was already engaged in telling the young one what you might call a backwoods smoking-room story, and he went on with others even thicker, over which the young one betrayed the hugest amusement. What particularly won his laughter and admiration was the fact that so elderly a person should enter into such topics with {174} so much zest. I can still hear him repeating, 'There ain't many fellows as old as you, Daddy, that 'ud be such sports. No, sir.'

And the old man would grin and chuckle at the compliment, and become more highly improper in the warmth of the boy's praise. He became indeed so elevated by it--especially after the boy had got up once or twice and executed a brief step-dance to mark the exuberance of his delight--that, thinking to gain even more glory by being still more startling, he dropped the subject of women and took up that of religion. It seemed he was an atheist of the old three-shots-a-penny variety, and he went for Christianity hot and strong. He had, it must be admitted, a perfectly skilled command of the old cheap arguments, and marshalled them in good order. Only, the unexpected happened. The boy, who had not minded being boyishly wicked, was plainly shocked by this new thing, and he said so in language so warm that a minister of the faith he was defending would have felt positively faint to hear it. The old man, surprised and still more annoyed, brought out further iconoclastic arguments, excellently directed. It is true any theologian could have warded them off easily enough. Any {175} debater could have. But it was clear that the boy had never argued in his life. That didn't matter. He was not going to sit there and listen to that sort of thing. He got indeed quite hopelessly confused; intellectually he was tripped time and again; he deferred with a lamb's innocence to the old man's boasts of having perused Persian literature, Hebrew literature, all the books that have to do with Buddhism and Zoroastrianism (I am afraid I did not believe any of this); he allowed that so much learning and thought must be a fine thing, but not an inch did he yield of his creed. And the more the old man got at him with arguments the more sulphurous grew the boy's language. I have never known so queer a Defender of the Faith as that lumberjack--or in a way a more successful one. His manner was childlike, his words unprintable; he made a muddle whenever he attempted to follow the simplest of the old villain's inferences. Yet never the least shake could his opponent give him, and his dogged reiteration of the statement that 'A man by ---- could only stick to the ---- faith that he had, and Daddy was a ---- fool to think his that ---- arguments made any difference'--wore the old free-thinker out in {176} the end. He did not give in, but he gave up: a wiser but, it is to be feared, not a better old man.

Meanwhile we were getting into the hills, and my first impressions were rather of great rocks than of mountains. Most people, I suppose, come upon the Rockies first from the east, and they seem tremendous if only for the reason that one has come upon them after days spent in those plains which, even while they rise, rise imperceptibly. But tremendous as they seem from the east, they must be far more so from the north, and far more beautiful from the west. On the east the mountains have less height than on the north. Their timber is poor by comparison with the trees that grow further west; their valleys have little of the luxuriance of the Pacific valleys. One feels a certain coldness and hardness about them, and after a little while there seems almost a monotony of corrugated peaks, all thrown together and slanting eastward. They are striking enough even so, and the view from the train, especially when one considers that railways are run through mountains by the easiest route not by the finest, and that grades have to be counted before landscapes, cannot disappoint anybody.

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Comparisons with the Alps and the Himalayas should be kept till the Rockies have been seen at closer quarters. The finest view I ever had of the Rockies was from a mountain in the Selkirks, at a height of over ten thousand feet, and over a hundred miles from the nearest railway. There I forgot to make comparisons, which after all are somewhat useless. It is easy to say that the Alps are softer and more pictorial--showing that deep blue sky above their snows, which is rarely if ever to be seen in the Rockies. The Canadian skies are too lofty and distant ever to seem to be resting even on the topmost snowfields. The Himalayas again have giants unparalleled. Kinchinjunga, leaning out of the clouds, cannot be matched among the Rockies. But the Rockies--well, the Rockies are different. As yet we are only just getting to Banff.

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