Part 10

“Except for the King,” said Vachel, “we are much the same people.” He loathed kings. “There’s not much difference between Canada and the United States,” he went on.

“We’ll see,” I answered. “Canadians are subjects of a monarch; Americans are citizens of a Republic. Canadians look to the King. More than a mere line divides the two halves of North America. You’ll see.”

So we tramped on. We had a last lunch and finished the ham, the apricots, and the coffee. As one remarkable fact, we met no Canadians on the American side; we met no Americans going to Canada either. Yet there were no restrictions whatever. Out in the Rockies the unguarded line is literally unguarded; no patrols, no excise or passport officers. You can come and go as you please. The United States would encourage Canada to a communion of perfect freedom. Whilst America puts nothing in Canada’s way, Canada for her part could not afford to police a 4000-mile line. All is therefore free.

Still, it is clearly the wild animals that take advantage of freedom, and they abound and are happy in the region about the line. It is a very strange line, straight and absolute on the map, the essence of political division, an absurdity in geography. There is no river, no main mountain-range, no change of the colour of the soil, but only the invisible hypothesis called 54.40--the “Fifty-four Forty or fight” of the boundary dispute. It would have been difficult to find the line but for the fact that a sixteen-foot swathe has been cut in the forest. We had been told to look out for that. We found it at last, and it was afternoon, and we stood in No-man’s land together.

It was a curious cut, a rough glade, an alley through the tall pines. We walked along it a short way; we discerned where it stretched far over a mountain-side, a mere marking in the uniform green of the forest-roof. We came down to where the lake water was lapping on the shore, and the great mountains in their fastnesses stood about us. We found frontier-post No. 276, and then I stood on the Canada side and Vachel Lindsay stood on the America side, and we put our wrists on the top of the post. As we two had become friends and learned to live together without quarrelling, so might our nations! It was a happy moment in our tramping.

Then, as it was four in the afternoon, I proposed having tea, much to the mirth of the poet. For had we not finished the last of our coffee at our last American resting-place? Fittingly we began on tea when we entered the Empire.

There was a change of scenery; fresher air, aspen groves, red hips on many briars. A beautiful mountain lifted its citadelled peak into a grey unearthly radiance. We climbed Mount Bertha, and the hillsides were massed with young slender pines that never grow hoary or old, but die whilst they are young, and are supplanted by the ever-new--forests of everlasting youth. The grandeur of the mountains increased upon us till all was in the sublimity of the Book of Job and of the Chaldean stars. There was nothing petty anywhere--but an eternal witness and an eternal silence.

_A Yank and a Britisher walked to the line, One was a citizen, the other an alien. “You alien!” said the Yank._

_The Yank and the Britisher crossed o’er the line, One was a subject, the other an alien. “You alien!” said the Britisher._

_But when Yank and Briton elapsed hands on the line, Then neither the Yank nor the Briton was alien._

_Hail, Uncle Sam! Hail, John Bull!_

_We’ve found your line of difference And viewed it with indifference._

_You don’t need to guard it, Nor yet to regard it With doubt or with fret. Six weeks we’ve tramped together In every sort of weather, And haven’t quarrelled yet._

_We toe the line, we toe it, The old tramp and the poet. If we can do it. And not rue it, All can--says the poet._

XXXV. THE DIFFERENCE

SO we entered the Dominion National Park of Waterton Lakes. We climbed the next mountain after Mount Bertha and saw on every hand the pinnacled and pillared tops of the Canadian mountains, crags surmounted by mighty teeth of stone blackly silhouetted against a radiant sky. Some Dominion officials came into these parts last year, cancelled the old names of the mountains, and gave them a new set--Mount Joffre, Mount Foch, and the rest, as if they were No. 1 and No. 2 of Great War villas. I see by old maps that Mount Cleveland used to be called Kaiser Peak. How war changes the names of places! It changed St. Petersburg to Petrograd, Pressburg to Bratislavl; it has even changed the names of the Rocky Mountains.

“Luckily the Germans did not win,” I said to Vachel, “or New York might have become ‘Zeppelindorf.’”

We were walking down a slope which Nature had planted out with pompous trees called “Wellingtonias.”

“What do you call them?” asked the poet.

“Wellingtonias.”

“Not in America. We call them ‘Washingtonias.’”

“You forget you’ve crossed the line--Washingtonias this morning, but Wellingtonias this afternoon.”

The poet submitted.

“But what would the Germans have called them?”

“Perhaps they’d call them ‘Bluchers’ or ‘Hindenburgers.’”

Apropos of Bluchers--in the first Canadian village we visited the cobbler for repairs. He was an old man, and explained to us just exactly what “Blucher shoes” were. He pronounced the name to rhyme with “butcher,” and he called them shoes in the American fashion. In America boots are shoes, and shoes are boots.

“They call them Bluchers,” said the cobbler in a quavering voice, “because Blucher came up on both sides, and Bony did not know on which side he’d turn up. So the upper of the Bluchers are equally high on both sides of the shoe.”

* * * * *

THAT is, however, to go some days ahead. We are in the Rockies still, and beside a wonderful stretch of water blown by mountain winds into myriads of running waves. We bathed on its shallow shores; we did not venture far from the bank. For Waterton is a mysterious lake. It has often been sounded, but there are parts of it where no bottom has been found. It is the hole out of which these Rocky Mountains have been scooped, and it goes down, down, down, to the very depths of the earth.

At last we came to a Canadian camping-ground and a group of people clustered around a Ford touring car. A Ford car used for touring. Here there happened to be on holiday a professor of English, and he recognised Lindsay at first sight--such is the fame of the poet in American universities and schools.

This camping-group told us we were in a land predominantly inhabited by Mennonites, Mormons, and Dukhobors, and they whetted our curiosity considerably regarding our new neighbours. We had arrived in a part of Canada which was rather obscure and certainly little visited by either Americans or Englishmen.

We came to a ramshackle inn and a village and a dance-hall, and it was the last dance of the season. The Mormon, German, and Russian belles checked in their corsets at the cloakroom, and prepared for fun. It was a log-cabin hall, but the floor was waxed, and from the beams hung coloured-paper lanterns. There were a score or so of black bear-skins hung on the walls all the way round. On the bear-skins were white sashes with these words printed on them: _I DO LOVE TO CUDDLE_; and on the main beam of the ceiling was written: _Patrons are respectfully requested to park their gum outside_. The whole front of the piano was taken out so that there should be more noise. Splotches on the floor showed how in the past, patrons had surreptitiously brought in their gum and had accidents. Many couples assembled, and we saw the human species, though not at its best.

* * * * *

WE issued from the mountains on to the southern Alberta plain, and then looking back, saw every great mountain we had ever crossed. “We’ve found the real sky-scrapers,” said Vachel. “Instead of the Times Building, Heaven’s Peak; instead of the Flatiron, Flat Top Mountain; instead of the World Building, Going-to-the-Sun; and instead of the building raised by dimes, the temple not made by hands. The way to these wonders is not by Broadway, but by primitive trails.” The poet conducted the orchestra of the universe with the long blossoming stem of a basket-flower--“instead of the Stock Exchange, the Star Granary over Waterton Lake,” he murmured. We named the beautiful grouping of mountains about the lake as the Star Granary. For at night, with stars above and star-reflections below, it was as if the barns were full of Heaven’s harvest.

We tramped away northward toward the Crow’s Nest, where a great forest fire was raging, and we came to the “cow-town” of Pincer Creek. The Canadian Wild West seemed much wilder than the Wild West south of the line--or rather, the population seemed wilder. One missed the gentleness and playfulness of the United States. The men were harder than down south, and they looked at us with a contempt only modified by the thought that we might be potential harvest hands. The Canadian-English looked more askance at Vachel than they did at me. He looked poetical. They couldn’t have put a name to it, but that is what it was. But whatever it was, I could feel their aversion. They disapproved of tramps, but preferred them to poets. I could see also they didn’t care for Vachel’s accent, but they rejoiced in mine and spoke to me just to get me to reply so that they could hear once more the voice of the Old Country. We were clearly in the Empire and not in the Republic. The Union Jacks in the little log-cabins were wreathed with flowers. The Stars and Stripes had disappeared. We were so struck with the change of feeling in the air that we bought ourselves a school-history of Canada and read it assiduously. The very way of man looking to man was different. Then the first popular song which sounded in our ears was:

We never get up until the sergeant Brings our breakfast up to bed. O it’s a lovely war!

which is a purely British army song. The Englishman in Alberta is an overman in the midst of a miscellaneous foreign under-population. The Englishman’s word is law. He is stronger, rougher in his language and his ways--not educated. But this sort of fibre is best suited for the outposts of Empire.

“We Americans are just a bunch of playful kittens,” said Vachel.

There was nothing very playful about the Alberta pioneers.

“Did you light that fire on the side of the road a mile back? Well, you dam well go back and put it out.”

“We did put it out.”

“I tell ye, ye didn’t. I won’t waste my breath talking to you. If you set the prairie afire I’ll have you both in jail by sundown.”

“All right, we’ll go back.”

_We’re on the same continent. Well, I don’t know. Smells different somehow. Same air; people speak the same language. But I don’t see that bird about, That old eagle of yours. Smells as if a lion had been here. You don’t know the lion’s smell? Well, smell that Union Jack! That’s it._

XXXVI. DUKHOBORS

WE had not anticipated coming into the neighbourhood of the Dukhobors. It was an interesting surprise. I had promised myself I would make a special pilgrimage some day to Western Canada just to find out what the Dukhobors thought about life, and how they were getting on now. And then to come on them accidentally.

The Dukhobors, or “Spirit wrestlers,” are a Russian religious community brought to Canada in 1898. They claim to have been in existence in Russia for over three hundred years. They are primitive Christians akin to Quakers, but more uncompromising. They are Communists, pacifists, anti-state, anti-church, anti-law. Theologically they consider Christ as a good man and teacher, but not divine. Tolstoy’s teachings show him very close to the Dukhobors in theory. He greatly sympathised with them in the persecution which they suffered at the hands of the Russian Government, and it was in part due to him, and more largely to the Society of Friends in England, that the expatriation of the Dukhobors was accomplished. Tolstoy is said to have put aside the profits of his novel _Resurrection_ to defray in part the expenses of transporting the Russians. There are several thousand of them, and first they were taken to Cyprus where at least the British Navy got acquainted with them, as they were naturally a curiosity. Cyprus was not suitable, and so Canada was chosen for a habitat. The community was taken to Saskatchewan, and later migrated in large part to British Columbia. They did not find their path strewn with roses in Canada, and have had a hard time. But despite persecution they have prospered. They are notorious for a naked procession they once made “in quest of the Messiah” some forty miles in bitter winter weather, displaying “the naked truth” to the Canadians--the pilgrimage to Yorktown which has been described with much gusto in the American and Canadian Press. They have refused to take steps to relinquish their Russian nationality, refused to fight, refused to pay taxes. So naturally they have been a thorn in the side of the Canadian.

The Rocky Mountains stretching away in their majesty must remind some Russians of the grand array of the Caucasus as seen from the north--and the prairie is the steppe. Far away you discern the white and brown buildings of a settlement, and then, ten times as large as anything else, pale-blue grain-elevators. The circumambient moor is many coloured, and a dove-coloured sky is flecked with softest cloud. There are snow fences at many points of the road to protect from drifts in winter. A neverceasing wind which brings no rain is driving over the corn-fields. As you approach the village you begin to see Russian peasant men and women working on the fields hoisting the wheat-sheaves to the harvesting carts, hoisting the sheaves to the top of the stacks. A stalwart peasant-wife in cottons stands on top of the stack, pitchfork in her hand, and she catches the sheaves as they come up to her. The grain-elevators rise mightily into vision, and then the words printed on them in large black letters--=THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY OF UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD=.

I soon met Pavel Potapof, the local headman, and I talked in Russian with a number of men and women who spoke no other language. They were raising wheat for themselves and for their wheatless brethren who live in the lumbering camps and villages of British Columbia, but represent a sort of a half-way colony between the original Verigin, Saskatchewan, and the main settlement of Brilliant, British Columbia.

Potapof was a boy at Cyprus, where his father enjoyed some authority. He is now a man in his thirties with brown moustache and close-clipped chin. If you are a Dukhobor you may not shave but you may clip with the shears. He remembered touching a Mr. St. John at Cyprus, who used to call him Pavlushka.

Potapof spoke Russian with a soft Little-Russian accent, all g’s being h’s. He came from Tiflis province, and I talked first of the Caucasus, comparing them with the Rockies. Then naturally we discussed Russia, and a curious crowd gathered about us. Scarcely any spoke English--all were Russian subjects, and I much wondered what they thought of the Bolshevik revolution. For they also are Communists. I soon learned that an appeal had been made to them on behalf of the Bolsheviks to help to stem the famine in Russia. Some of the Dukhobors were for sending grain, some not. They blamed the Bolsheviks for their “two million men under arms.”

Most of them said: “Let those who are richer in Russia give to those who are poorer; there’ll be enough to go round.” Imagination did not show them the ghastly ruin of contemporary Russia, where, except for a handful of Soviet commissaries, there are no rich, no “better-off” people. Most of them also said: “Let them lay down their arms, and then we’ll think of feeding them.” But their deliberations crystallised in the following way. They decided on a symbolic act. They visited all their Ruthenian and Galician neighbours and any one who had a war-trophy to spare, and they made thus a collection of rifles, shotguns, pistols--some three hundred or more weapons. These they burned in a heap. Then they sent a wireless message to the Russian people describing this act, and added further the monition: “Do likewise; burn your rifles, and return to work!”

“They murdered Nikolai (rubili Nikolai) and his family for liberty,” said Potapof. “But now clearly there is much less liberty than ever there was before.”

Nevertheless I thought I detected a curious home-sickness among many of them. The violent rumours and persistent bad news of Russia comes to a primitive community that cannot read in a more disturbing and dramatic way than through newspapers. They complained sadly of conditions in Canada; of droughts, of plagues of grasshoppers, of bygone hardships and persecutions in Saskatchewan.

“Here there will be a Bolshevik revolution too,” said one. “We shall not take part in it. But we know it is preparing. There is much discontent in the neighbouring settlements and in the mines. Oh yes, there is trouble brewing here too.”

This Dukhobor had been talking to brother Poles and Ruthenians, but he was quite out of perspective. I asked how the Dukhobors had faced under the Conscription Act. Apparently they did not suffer much; Canada did not trouble the Dukhobors. They had an easier time than their brothers the Mennonites in the United States. They told me there had been a considerable influx of Mennonites by way of the unguarded line: they also are pacifists and utterly oppose to personal service in war. So struck are they by what happened to them in America through the war that there is much talk of their deserting both Canada and the States and seeking a refuge in Mexico.

The Dukhobors, however, have a strong hold in Canada, and as long as Peter Verigin, their unofficial patriarch and leader, lives, they will most probably hold on to their settlements in British Columbia and Saskatchewan. Perhaps in a new era, a new Russia may again take the Dukhobors to herself. Canada does not assimilate them. They do not assimilate Canada. And they are, and they feel, as Dostoievsky said, like “a slice cut out of a loaf.”

_Fancy meeting the Dukhobors Up in the Rockies: A bit of old Russia Planted up there to meet me! Sure next time when I go to the Caucasus I’ll look to find a batch of English there, Trying to live their unmolested lives Under the free institutions Of old Russia._

_Tolstoy, in his story of the old pilgrim, Taught you could find Jerusalem in your native village, And did not need to pilgrimage afar. But he did not say you could find freedom In your own village--in your own heart. O no, that’s political, You must go a long way to find that._

XXXVII. A VISIT TO THE MORMONS

WE tramped from ranch to ranch by the rutty roads that skirt the sections, walked away from the mountain-walls, and ever as we went the terrain extended. The sky had become wider; no rocky walls closed us in. The backs of our necks became swollen from the unusual heat of the sun on them. We kicked up dust as we walked, dust again! Our eyes traversed the scene to light, not on cascades or possible camping-grounds, but on far-away farmhouses. We met the oats and wheat and barley fields striving over the moors, and walked till all moor disappeared, till there was nothing in front of us but gold. Made dream-like by the forest fires, the long range of the Rockies seemed unreal--the mountains which we had climbed became remote and shadowy--and not part of our destiny. Our only reality was golden Alberta, which seemed to extend to infinitude, the plateau only gradually losing its altitude, unfolding and undulating downward--one vast resplendent area of golden harvest fields.

The sun gleamed on numberless shocks on the right, on the left, and ahead, and the whole horizon was massed with newly mobilised golden armies. We walked the rutty roads and were exhilarated, and counted the wheatfields which we passed, knowing that each, being a whole section, was a whole mile long.

We discussed a tragical line in one of Lindsay’s poems:

Election night at midnight Boy Bryan’s defeat. Defeat of Western silver, Defeat of the wheat ... Defeat of the aspen groves of Colorado valleys, The blue-bells of the Rockies, And blue bonnets of old Texas By the Pittsburg alleys.

Defeat of the wheat! How tragical that sounds in the soul, how calamitous and appalling! It is like the cutting off of golden youth, the extinction of all our dreams.

* * * * *

WE boiled our pot by the side of the road; we sought milk and bread at farmhouses; we slept at night in the wheat with shocks piled on three sides of us to keep out the wind, and a broken shock underneath us to keep us soft--and the night sky above us was of swans’ plumage, and all the golden stalks and stubble about us and above us were exaggerated among the stars.

Night was very different on the plains from night in the mountains. No sound of waters, no castellated peaks rising in the moonlight, no sense of vast unevenness and disjected rocks; but instead, a feeling of being in a great encampment where the swarming shocks of wheat were tents, the tents of such a host that the numbers took away one’s breath. The poet rejoiced. He loved it. The odour of the yellow stalks was a new breath of life to him--for he was a prairie boy.

The dawn-twilight was long and quiet, and the mornings were serene. No workers were in sight. The disparity in numbers between men and wheat was remarkable to my eyes. In Russia, the whole plain would have been alive with the gay cottons of peasant lads and lasses. But here, harvesting machinery displaces whole populations of men and women.

Indians began to be numerous on the road as we approached the Blood Reservation, Indian farm-wagons with women and children sprawling on the hay at the bottom, and then Indians on horseback, all one piece with their horses. We left the golden grain behind and crossed the Reserve. Vachel explained what a squaw-man is--a white who marries an Indian girl in order to get hold of her portion of land, the Indians of to-day being almost all of them endowed with land by the Government. We found again the Kootenai, now brawling through the plains, and bathed again, and reverted in spirit to those mountains. Then we tramped from tent to tent across the green wilderness where the Indians lived. Indian boys in many-coloured garments pranced on their horses, chased lines of cattle and horses, and kept the lines straight by galloping incessantly between them from left to right to one end of the line, and then right to left to the other end.

We met Indians in voluminous seedy clothes, walking with a stoop; men with gloomy ruminating faces who tried to avoid contact with a white man. We talked to them; they raised their red romantic faces and glared at us like owls startled by light. They could not speak English, so they answered nothing, but just turned out of our way and slouched on. Or the livelier ones made signs to us. The stout squaws stared at us. The slender girls on their horses were almost indistinguishable from boys.

* * * * *