Part 15

"What are you, German?" I asked, always on the look-out for the immigrant.

"We are Yankees."

"Your father or grandfather came from Germany?"

"No; we're both Yankees, I tell yer."

"I suppose your ancestors came from England then."

"No; we've always bin 'ere."

They had been out three nights seine-fishing on the lake, were very tired, and rewarded themselves with swigs of rum every now and then, passing the bottle from one to the other and then to me with real but suspicious hospitality. Their families had always been in America. The fact that they came originally from England meant no more to them than Hengist and Horsa does to some of us.

By the way, Hengist and Horsa were a couple of savages, were they not?

The fishermen put me down beside a plantation, which they said was just the place in which to sleep the night. I wasn't sorry to get on to my feet again, and I watched them out of sight,--fat, old, sleepy, hospitable ruffians.

The plantation was a mosquito-infested swamp, and I did not take the fishermen's advice. Myriads of "husky" mosquitoes were in the air, the unpleasanter sort, with feathered antennæ, and whenever I stood still on the road scores of "Canadian soldiers" settled on me, a loathsome but innocuous species of diptera.

I sought shelter of man that night, and through the hospitality of a Slav workman found a place in a freight train--a strange bed that not only allows you to sleep, but takes you a dozen miles farther on in the morning. The engine-driver told me that there was a "whole bunch of tramps" on the train, but that no one ever turned tramps off an empty freight train,--not on the Lake Shore railway at any rate.

When I "dropped" from the freighter I found myself at Elliston, and commenced there a day of delicious tramping. The opal dawn gave birth to a great white horse of cloud, and out of the cloud came a strong fresh breeze, having health and happiness on its wings. A quiet Sunday. I reached Toledo this day--and parted company with Erie Shore--great, busy, happy, prosperous Toledo. It was strange to exchange the country for the town; to come out of the green, fresh, silent landscape into the close, stifling, bustling town, full of promenaders talking and laughing among themselves vociferously.

As I came into the city the day-excursion boat was just about to start on the return journey to Detroit. Excursionists were flocking together to the quay, a great spectacle to a Briton. All the men were carrying their coats in their arms, many had their collars off and the neckbands of their shirts turned down, bunches of carnations on their naked chests; many were without waistcoats, and had tickets with the name of their town pinned to their fancy-coloured shirts; the red, perspiring, glistening faces of many of them suggested an over-confidence in beer as a quencher of thirst. The women carried parasols of coloured paper. They were all in white, and were so thinly clad that you asked yourself why they were so thin. But despite all precautions the sun had marked everybody, but marked them kindly.

Suddenly a bell was rung on the steamer, and a little man came forward and announced in broken English:

"Somebody wan' to come on the boat; the time is supp."

FOOTNOTE:

[3] Policemen.

XIV

THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE

Even Americans of the highest culture and of Boston families speak English differently from any people in the old country. The difference may not be obvious to all, but it is there, and it is a thing to rejoice in, not to be sorry for. The American nation is different from the British, has different history and a different hope; it has a different soul, therefore its expression should be different. The American face as a type is different; it would be folly to correct the words of the mouth by Oxford, or Eton, or Granville Barker's theatre, or the cultured Aberdonian, or any other criterion. The use of American expressions of quite moderate tone amounts to a breach of good taste in many British drawing-rooms; and if you tell a story in which American conversation is repeated with the accent imitated, you can feel the temperature going down as you proceed; that is, if you are not merely making fun of the Americans. Making fun of any foreign people is always tolerable to the British; a truly national and insular trait. The literary world and the working men and women of Britain can enter into the American spirit, and even imitate it upon occasion; but that is only the misfortune of our populace, who ought to be finding national expression in journalism and music-hall songs and dancing, and who are merely going off the lines by imitating a foreign country. It is loss to Britain that the Americans speak a comprehensible dialect of our tongue, and that the journalist of Fleet Street, when he is hard-up for wit, should take scissors and paste and snip out stories from American papers; or that commercial _entrepreneurs_ should bring to the British public things thought to be sure of success because they have succeeded in America--"Within the Law," "I Should Worry," "Hullo Ragtime!" and the rest. The people who are surest in instinct, though they are sympathetic to a brother-people, hate the importation of foreign uglinesses, and the substitution of foreign for local talent.

The American language is chiefly distinguished from the British by its emphatic expressive character. Britain, as I have said, lives in a tradition; America in a passion. We are laconic, accidental, inarticulate; our duty is plain, and we do it without words. But the American is affirmative, emphatic, striving; he has to find out what he's going to do next, and he has got to use strong words. Britain also is the place of an acknowledged Caste system; but America is the place of equal citizens, and many American expressions are watchdogs of freedom and instruments of mockery, which reduce to a common dimension any people who may give themselves airs.

The subtler difference is that of rhythm. American blood flows in a different _tempo_, and her hopes keep different measure.

* * * * * * *

Americans commonly tell us that theirs is the language of Shakespeare and Shakespearian England, and that they have in America the "well of English undefiled." But if they have any purely European English in that country it must be a curiosity. Shakespeare was a lingual junction, but we've both gone on a long way since then, and in our triangle the line subtending the Shakespearian angle gets longer and longer. O. Henry makes a character in one of his stories write a telegram in American phraseology, so that it shall be quite unintelligible to people who only know English:

His nibs skedaddled yesterday per jack-rabbit line with all the coin in the kitty and the bundle of muslin he's spoony about. The boodle is six figures short. Our crowd in good shape, but we need the spondulicks. You collar it. The main guy and the dry goods are headed for the briny. You know what to do.--BOB.

This is not Shakespearian English, but of course it is not Shakespearian American. The worst of the contemporary language of America is that it is in the act of changing its skin. It is difficult to say what is permanent and what is merely eruptive and dropping. Such expressions as those italicised in the following examples are hardly permanent:

"One, two, three, _cut it out_ and work for Socialism."

"_I should worry_ and get thin as a lamp-post so that tramps should come and lean against me."

"_Him with the polished dome._"

"She hadn't been here two days before I saw her kissing the boss. Well, said I, _that's going some_."

"This is Number Nine of the Ibsen, _highbrow_ series."

"_Do you get me?_"

"I'll _put you wise_."

"And how is your _yoke-mate_?"

"He thinks too much of himself: _too much breathed on by girls_."

"A low lot of _wops and hunkies_: _white trash_."

"Poor negroes; _coloured trash_."

"She is _one good-looker_."

"She is _one sweetie_."

"My! You have _a flossy hat_."

But I suppose "He is a white man" is permanent, and "Buy a postcard, it'll _only set you back a nickel_."

"She began to lay down the law: _thus and so_."

"Now _beat it_!"

"Roosevelt went ranching, that's how he got so _husky_."

"Is it far? It is only _a little ways_."

"Did they _feed that to you_?"

"When he started he was in a poor way, and carried in his hay in his arms, but now he is quite _healed_."

But the difference in speech is too widespread and too subtle to be truly indicated by this collection of examples, and the real vital growth of the language is independent of the flaming reds and yellows of falling leaves. In the course of conversation with Americans you hear plenty of turns of expression that are unfamiliar, and that are not merely the originality of the person talking. Thus in:

"How do they get on now they are married?"

"Oh, she has him feeding out of her hand,"

though the answer is clear it owes its form to the American atmosphere.

Or, again in:

"I suppose she's sad now he's gone?"

"Oh! He wasn't a pile of beans to her, believe me,"

you feel the manner of speech belongs to the new American language. The following parody of President Wilson's way of speaking is also an example of the atmosphere of the American language:

So far as the prognosticationary and symptomatic problemaciousness of your inquiry is concerned it appears to me that while the trusts should be regulated with the most unrelentful and absquatulatory rigorosity, yet on the other hand their feelings should not be lacerated by rambunktions and obfusticationary harshness. Do you bite that off?

_Punch_ would have no stomach for such Rabelaisian vigour.

But wherever you go, not only in the cities, but in the little towns, you hear things never heard in Britain. I go into a country bakery, and whilst I ask for bread at one counter I hear behind me at the other:

"Kendy, ma-ma, kendy!"

"Cut it out, Kenneth."

"Kendy, kendy, kendy!"

"Oh, Kenneth, cut it out!" Or, as I sit on a bank, a girl of twelve and her little baby sister come toddling up the road. The little one loses her slipper, and the elder cries out:

"Slipper off again! Ethel, perish!"

America must necessarily develop away from us at an ever-increasing rate. Influenced as she is by Jews, Negroes, Germans, Slavs, more and more foreign constructions will creep into the language,--such things as "I should worry," derived from Russian-Jewish girl strikers. "She ast me for a nickel," said a Jew-girl to me of a passing beggar. "_I should give her a nickel_, let her work for it same as other people!" The _I shoulds_ of the Jew can pass into the language of the Americans, and be understood from New York to San Francisco; but such expressions make no progress in Great Britain, though brought over there, just because we have not the big Jewish factor that the Americans have.

To-day the influence that has come to most fruition is that of the negro. The negro's way of speaking has become the way of most ordinary Americans, but that influence is passing, and in ten or twenty years the Americans will be speaking very differently from what they are now. The foreigner will have modified much of the language and many of the rhythms of speech. America will have less self-consciousness then. She will not be exploiting the immigrant, but will be subject to a very powerful influence from the immigrants. No one will then be so cheap as the poor immigrant is to-day. Much mean nomenclature will have disappeared from the language, many cheap expressions, much mockery; on the other hand, there will be a great gain in dignity, in richness, in tenderness.

XV

THROUGH THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY

I have come to that portion of my journeying and of my story where all day, every evening, and all night long I was conscious of the odour of mown clover, of fields of ambrosia.

I was tramping along the border of Northern Ohio and Southern Michigan, from Toledo to Angola, Indiana. I was entering the rich West. The fields were vast and square, the road was long and flat, and straight and quiet, the June haze hung over luxuriant meadows, and there was a wonderful silence and ripening peace over the country.

One evening, as the red sun sank into night-darkened mist, I talked with an old farmer, who was smoking his pipe at his gate.

"I came along this same road like you, with a bundle on my back, forty years ago," said he, "and I took work on a farm; then I rented a farm. Many's the lad I've seen go past of an evening. And one or two have stopped here and worked some days, for the matter of that."

The farmer had left England when he was a stripling, and I tried to talk to him of the old country, but he was not really interested. He did not want to go back.

That is the Colonial feeling.

Strange to plough all day, or sow or reap, and in the evening to return to the quiet, solitary house of wood beside the great red-painted barn and not want England or Europe, not be interested in it, not want anything more than you've got; to have the sun go down red and whisper nought, and the stars come up and the moon, and yet not yearn; to work, to eat, to market; to have children growing about you ripening in so many years, and corn springing up in the fields ripening in so many weeks; births, marriages, deaths, sowings, harvests....

There is all the pathos of man's life in it.

I slept that night in the dry wayside hay, under the broad sky and the misty golden moon. It was a quiet night, warm and gentle. Earth held the wanderer in her cradle and rocked him to sleep.

They are kind people about here. Next morning as I sat by my fire a woman sent her son out to me with a quart of milk and a bag of cookies. And milk is a much commercialised business on this western road,--the electric freight train carries nearly all the milk away in churns to Toledo. It was a very welcome talkative boy who brought out the milk. His father rented one-third of a section (213 acres), but was now laid up with pneumonia. As a consequence of the father's illness the young children had to work very hard in the fields. And there was a sick cow on the farm--sick through eating rank clover. And the boy himself had had scarlet fever in the spring. The serving-girl had had to go away "to have her little baby," and the one that came in her place brought the fever.

"What's your name?" said I.

"Charles."

Cheerful little Charles. He had much responsibility on his shoulders.

There were some big farms along the road, and near Metamora I had the privilege of seeing a dozen cows milked simultaneously by a petrol engine, rubber tubes being fixed to their teats and the milk pumped out. It was astonishing, the matter-of-fact way in which the latest invention was applied to farm life.

"It's rather ugly," said I.

"Well, what are you to do when labour is so scarce?" was the reply.

Land is rich here, but labour is scarce. I fell in with a garrulous farmer who told me that land now sold at 150 dollars (£30) the acre, and that in a few years it would rise to 250 dollars. The days of large farmers were over. All the big ranches were being sold up, and the farmers were taking holdings that they could farm themselves without help. Labour was expensive, owing to the high wages paid in the towns for industrial work; even at two and a half dollars (ten shillings) a day it was difficult to get a decent gang to do the work in the harvest season. You could do better with a small piece of land. Fields here were forty and fifty acres, and the steam plough was not used. In the old days land was dirt cheap, and you could buy vast tracts of it; there were no taxes, no extra expenses, and you just went in to raise tremendous crops and make a big scoop. To-day things were different. To work on a large scale a horde of labourers was necessary. But now the Socialists were stopping the flow of immigrants into the country. Socialists said that it was too difficult to organise newcomers. The newcomers behaved like blacklegs, strike-breakers, all the first year of their stay in America. They didn't know the language, were very poor, suspected their brother workmen of jealousy, and just took any wage offered them. The Socialists wanted to keep the price of labour up, and my farmer friend bore them a grudge because it was difficult to develop the land unless the price was reduced.

A little later, outside Fred M'Gurer's farm, the jovial farmer himself came and squatted beside the fire and chatted of affairs. He had insured his house for 1000 dollars, but it would take 1800 dollars to rebuild it. "I think it's only fair to take some of the risk myself," said he; "and if the place burns down the company will know I didn't set it alight o' purpose."

Fifty-eight years old is Fred M'Gurer, and his son is now coming to live and work with him altogether, after seven years spent wintering in the city and summering in the country. Irish once, and of an Irish family--but they go to no church. The old man feels that he is a Christian all the same, and will get to heaven at last, because he "deals square with his fellow-men."

Fred and his son work the farm all by themselves, outside labour is so expensive. The beet-fields take all the immigrants. Did I see the red waggons as I came along, full of Flemish and Russians living by beet-picking on the beetroot farms near by?

I saw them.

"America is a high hill for them that don't speak the language," said Fred. But he said that because he likes talking himself, and can't imagine himself in a land where he could not hold converse. The immigrants manage very well without the language, and scale the hill, and rake in the dollars easily. Perhaps they do not glean much of the American ideal, and the hope of the American nation. But I suppose Fred did not mean that.

I had a pleasant talk with a successful German farmer, who took me in a cart from Pioneer to Grizier, through comparatively poor country. He had possessed a farm of five acres in Germany, but there each acre had been worth between 450 and 500 dollars. When he came to Grizier land was selling at 25 dollars an acre, and he was able to buy fifty acres of it and to bring up his family in health and plenty. His farm was now worth more than 5000 dollars.

I slept on an old waggon in a wheat-field near Grizier; but about midnight it began to rain, and I was obliged to seek shelter in a crazy, doorless, windowless cottage, and there I sat all next day and slept all the next night whilst the elements raged. In the cottage were two chairs, a home-made table, and a broken bedstead. I cooked my meals on the rainy threshold. The refuge was shared by a great big bumble bee, two red-admirals, a brown squirrel, and two robins.

The second morning was Sunday, radiant, fresh, and green. The road was soft but clean, with yielding cakes of mud; the grass was fresh, for every blade had been washed on Saturday; the wild strawberry was a brighter ruby; on spread bushes the wild rose was in bloom; there were sun-browned country girls upon the road, who were shy but might be spoken to; the odour of clover was purer, the hay-fields had round shoulders after the storm, and you'd think cows had been lying down where the wind had laid the tussocks low. The sun shone as if it had forgotten it had shone before, and was doing it for the first time. To-day it became evident that the grain was ripening; the apple trees in fantastic shapes were knee-deep in yellowing corn. The little oak trees by the side of the road presented foliage, every leaf of which looked as if it had been carefully polished.

In America wild strawberries are three on a stalk, which causes a pleasant profusion....

I got a whole loaf of home-made bread given me at Cooney ..., and a quart of milk at "Fertile Valley Farm." ...

Only at sunset did I strike the main Angola Road, and off that road I made my bed in a wheat-field and fell asleep, watching the bearded ears disproportionately magnified and black in the flame of the crimson sky. Next day, when I awoke, life was just creeping into the blue-green night, a soft radiance as of rose petals was in the East, and a breeze was wandering like a rat among the stalks of the wheat. I fell asleep again, and when I reopened my eyes it was bright morning.

The Sunday gave way to the week-day. There is nothing happening on the roads on the Sunday; the tramp is left with Nature, but directly Monday comes the work and life of the people reveal themselves, and adventures are more frequent.

My first visitor this Monday was a man of business. As I was making my tea he came up towards me driving two lean horses and a great black oblong box on wheels. At the farm where I had drawn water for my kettle he pulled up and dismounted. A girl who had seen him from a window of the farmhouse came tripping to meet him. He exchanged some words with her, and then from the far side of his hearse-like cart he produced a black chest, out of which he pulled a pair of boots. The young lady then hopped back to the house to try them on. Satisfied as to her purchase she took in addition a pound of tea and a packet of sugar. The cart was a moving store: here were all manner of things for sale. But the storekeeper received no money; all his debts were paid in eggs. One side of the hearse was full of merchandise, the other contained nested boxes and crates for the accommodation of hundreds of dozens of eggs.

The storeman gave me a lift and explained to me his business. He possessed a cold-storage establishment in the city; he credited the farm people with sixteen cents (eightpence) for every dozen eggs they gave him, then he stored them in his freezing-house till autumn, when they could be thrown on the market at twenty-five to thirty cents the dozen.

He was a great believer in cold storage. "Meat," said he, "is tenderer when it has been frozen some weeks."

Business in eggs used to be better. Now the State set a limit on the time you could keep them in cold storage. Sometimes he had to sell out at a loss. The hope was to keep all the farm produce till there was a real scarcity and prices went high. Then it would be possible to make a small fortune.

"But I'm tired of this business," said the storeman, "I'd like to give it up and buy land."

We lumbered along the road and stopped at each farmhouse. Sometimes we sold articles, but whether we sold anything or not we always took a few dozen eggs; every farmer was in business with my man and used him as a sort of egg-bank. Even if they were not in debt to him they were glad to hand over their eggs and be credited with the corresponding amount of money. We took four or five dozen eggs at least at every farm, and sometimes as many as twenty and thirty dozen. The storeman left behind an empty crate at each farm, so that it might be filled for him next time he came along, and he took aboard the crate already filled. In exchange he sold kerchiefs, boots, corsets, cloth, brooms, brushes, coffee, corn-flake, wire-gauze to keep out mosquitoes, etc. At the end of his round he would have got rid of almost all his merchandise and have filled both sides of the hearse with eggs. He took home upon occasion as many as five hundred dozen eggs!

A cheerful American with a word of news, a titbit of gossip, and the top of the morning for all the country women. He was eagerly awaited, and children at farm-gates descried him a long way off and ran in to tell their mothers. Even the babies were excited at his approach, for they knew he carried a supply of candy. At each farm where there was a baby the storeman left a little bag of candy. He knew the value of good-will.