CHAPTER V
THE END OF STEEL.
I love the hills and the hills love me
As mates love one another.—MACCATHMHAOIL.
It is over a year since, in the last chapter, I was turned back from the End of Steel because of a wash-out on construction, and now I am come back, but this time, through the kindness of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, on a through service, electric-lighted, fast-scheduled, no-fare excursion. And on this occasion, I am not the only woman on the train but merely one among a hundred, for this, you must know, is the triennial excursion of the women journalists and authors of Canada. The men present may be counted on one hand. The engineers who travelled with me last time have gone on further to new outposts.
"What are they doing?" you ask. I'll tell you.
"They are busy building railways on
The map's deserted spot,
Or staking out an empire in
The land that God forgot."
Doers of deeds are these men and the world has salted them with curious and stern experiences. To my way of thinking, Dinny Hogan, boss contractor, with his blue eyes that are the blue of steel, is a bigger man than the First Lord of the Admiralty and his work is of more permanent value to the Empire. It was only the other day that Dinny made an arch of "coyotes"—that is to say, of round holes—in one of the mountains, and into them he packed fifty carloads of gunpowder. The reader may find it difficult to follow this idea, but no doubt he could if he saw where Dinny removed the mountain in one shot. This would seem to be a kind of big game shooting which has all others vanquished into nothingness. This is a wonderful trail through the mountains—the pass called the Yellowhead—a level ribbon of land along which the steels are laid for most of the way. But in some places, a road has been blasted out just to show how the mountains can be beaten. These lords of earth and sky, when called upon, must bow their unwilling necks to the yoke of steel. And no proper-spirited person can stand in this pass without feeling the challenge of the hills and without an immutable desire to conquer them. This I take it is the spirit of the buccaneer.
The highest mountain in these Rockies is Robson, called Yu-hai-has-kun by the Indians, meaning thereby a high, winding road. The Alpine Club of Canada intend, one of these times, to erect a châlet at Mount Robson so that they may attempt to scale it often. Three men succeeded in making the ascent this very summer. They were roped together for thirty hours, and when they had come down again, their faces were seen to be cut and greatly marred. These men spoke fine and glorious things concerning the hilltop, and of how they looked down upon five hundred other peaks, but, in strait and narrow minds like ours, these climbs may be accounted only as strange follies. I have talked to Clausen Otto about these things, for he has been a guide hereabout these ten years or more, and is a notable man of affairs. He said I was only a terribly lame dog in front of a terribly high stile, and then, fearing that his comment was truthful rather than polite, Otto proceeded to salve my feelings by explaining how the desire to climb glaciers was an ill-regulated one, and that what the Bible said about sucking honey out of a rock was "plumb foolishness."
Once, he was climbing with a hunter of goats when a bear came swiftly over the glacier-clad peak of the mountain. They were greatly puzzled to know why the bear had climbed so high, and why it dashed across the summit. Surely there was something remarkable on the other side of the peak. After climbing several hours they made the ascent and looked over. "What do you think we saw?" asked Otto.
"Give it up," said I.
"I wish we had too," said Otto; "there was nothing on the far side but another glacier."
Perhaps, the literary critics will help me decide if Otto meant this for the parable of the climber or whether he was only singularly adept in the art of suggestion.
You do not see Mount Robson till you have passed by. Our train stops to let us look aright, but cloud curtains obscure the turrets of this great temple of stone. Like a sorrowful Caryatid it stands erect under the burden of the sky. But, after awhile, the veil is rent asunder and a tingling flood of light spills itself on the snow in blurs of garnet and blue and gold which scintillate and blend like the colours of a shell: Of a surety, the North has the alchemy that transmutes base metals into gold.
What else may one see at Robson in this dream of summer Canada? Come near till I whisper! You may see white horses—and roan—and chariots of fire, but not every one can. This is one of the mountain's secrets.
And if you listen you may hear what the hills talk about, but you must listen. One mountain who is not so solemn as you might imagine wishes to deny that he is of the earth, earthy.
"Bosh!" he said, and "Stuff! Any one who hasn't moss on his eyes can see I am of the rocks, rocky!"
"Mark me and be astonished!" boasts a stupendous fellow near by whose face is furrowed by snow-slides. "I am a western mountain. Beat me if you can!"
"I used to be a fish plantation," remarks a chalky-looking individual. "It was in the cretaceous period and I lay underneath the sea."
"Lobster plantation?" queries the western one.
"No, you froward ignoramus," replies the fossiliferous fellow, "I consist of Inoceramus problematicus, Faseiolaria buccinoides, and other aristocratic mollusks of the which you have never even heard."
... Overhead, an aweless eagle, rising wing above wing says to his sweetheart, "It is my opinion God made these mountains for no other reason than that you and I might build our nest in them....."
There is, in this region, a body of water called Maligne Lake, and Jules DuBois, a trapper, whose son is married to 'Toinette, the niece of the second cousin of Pierre, whose mother-in-law was the third wife of Black Moccasin, the chieftain, once told me that this lake is dreaded by the Indians because there are no fish in it. This is why it is called "maligne." It frets Jules at the heart to go near it, for he has heard how the fish have been frightened away by a dead man who lives there. This man can see without eyes and his face is like a fungus with white teeth. When he laughs there is a noise in his throat like the crackle of tamarack twigs, freshly lighted.
Because of the glaciers on these hills and the warmth of the summer in the valleys, this atmosphere seems like that of an eternal spring. Just to breathe it is a delight. Here the air strokes you into quietness till you forget the tearing hurry of life; the fretting uneasiness that rasps, and the hurt that comes of the fight. This is a sating of one's desire for the spiritual. And should you wish for a token you may stay awhile and drink of the water that cascades over the rocks. This is living water. This is the good wine of the hills. You may drink it in remembrance.
I am very sorry I must die some day and miss these wilding joys and the odour of the trees and flowers, but it is my comfortable hope that when I return to Claeg, the Round One, who is called the earth, I shall be evolved into a pine-tree and grow happily in this mountain pass. Then will other people come to, even as I come to these trees, and say, "Good morning, my friend! I have been lonely for you."
The pines are our fellow-creatures and more closely related to us than anything that has roots in the earth. They speak to our inmost being. A group of pines will restore sanity to the disdistracted and sorrowful mind, for they are cordial trees, and in quietness and confidence is their strength. The pines are never tremulous or trivial, neither do they fade or die. Other trees are green for awhile, but these all the while.
... Pippa, the little maid who sang for the world's hurt, came out of the woods, as likewise the Nazarene who died for it.
Upland growths are the pines as befitteth the gods of the arboreal world. They are northern trees, "the chief things of the ancient mountains, the precious things of the lasting hills." Their history is writ far back in the black strata of the carboniferous age, and that they will be the last trees to disappear off the earth, who can gainsay? As for me I shall not be persuaded otherwise though a man rise from the dead to tell me.
And now we have come to Jasper, where we have two hours to rest off and talk to the men of a construction camp who have struck work for the day in order to see the train come in. Of course, it does not take all their day for this, but there were the preliminary toilet preparations to make and the walk in and out. Such newly shaven chins; such freshly brushed clothes; such irreproachable boots! Who could have expected it!
Like the ascetics who of old-time went into the wilderness and found themselves dreaming of scarlet lips and white arms, so these fine fellows are ever fancying a comely woman gliding across their trail; a distressed damsel who needs to be fed and carried for long, long distances and sheltered in a low-built house of logs that is well-warmed and well-provisioned, with no other bachelor nearer than a hundred miles.
The bachelors will doubtless deny this sweet dalliance with a vehement fervour, but it has the matter of fact virtue of being true, and is no whimsey of mine. A year ago it was, in a prize competition, I was called upon to read over a hundred short stories, or more properly speaking, human nature studies. An amazingly large proportion of these came from northern camps, and in nearly every case the afore-mentioned situation was the theme. The variation from this concerned a young Englishman of education who is notified that he has inherited wealth at home but prefers to stay with his woodland wife—a beautiful Indian girl—rather than return to the granitic conventions of the old world, and to the busy idleness that goes by the name of society.
And why deny that their hearts are a-brim with dreams, for these are beautiful reveries and worthy the most chivalrous of knights. Since it was given me to look into the recesses of their minds I have liked them better than ever and am many times heartily glad. Any woman who is a gentleman would.
And here Opportunity has spilled a whole trainload of women before them—old and young, wise and otherwise. It would be tempting the patience of Providence if they didn't meet the train, these bachelors who would gladly lose a rib.
"Such a waste of excellent material," says a poetess who looks over the bachelors with an appraising eye. "How big they are! Someway or other, they make me think of steel girders."
"Ragingly handsome, I call them," says a petite miss who edits a page on a big eastern daily. "Do you think it possible, Lady Jane, that they—could—have—holes—in—their—socks?"
"Not only possible, My Dear, but highly probable," I reply.
"What odds?" asks Cy Warman, the poet. "It is recorded that President Taft was noticed to have a hole in his sock when he took off his boots in a Tokyo tea-room."
"I am persuaded," remarks an historian who has been listening, "that it is the duty of the Prime Minister of Canada to import wives for the bachelors who live on the frontiers. He has most excellent precedent in the case of Talon, the Intendant, who in 1670, because of the disparity of the sexes in this country, imported one hundred and sixty-five young women. Moreover, Talon specified that in sending out these girls from France, the King should see that they had good looks and were strong and healthy."
"My fellow-women!" interrupts a society reporter, who is an incarnation of frankness, "lend me your ears; I won't need your money. I intend coming here to live. No longer will I remain a martyr to good form. I am weary to death of musicales and other entertainments of an objectionable character. I intend to quit the 'best circles,' the 'local coteries,' and the 'haut noblesse in favour of a man with a bungalow at Jasper, and for these delectable mountains with the glories thereof. Now, what do you say to that?"
"Taken," replies a distinctly masculine voice in the rear—a voice that might come from a steel girder—whereupon the rest of us discreetly retire to allow for the arrangement of preliminaries. Love is born through effrontery more often than we think.
When we have achieved the sights of Jasper we entrain for Tete Jaune Cache, a beautiful moping place on the Fraser River. All the way along we pass through the fastnesses of the hills, places of glamour and mystery, and perhaps of fear. Here our eyes are pleasured with an illusive perspective or an uncertain silhouette; a fantastic rock-form cut out by the cruel chisels of the ice; a precipitous gorge up which the adventurous trees have stormed in darkened files; a welt of green where the moss has healed the hurt of the avalanche; a snow-born river with its white-toothed angry waters, a splash of ice called a glacier—a steady, long-living splash obedient only to the sun.
The artists with us talk of values, vistas, truth of space, chiaroscuro, mellowness of effect, and transparence of air. Perhaps they are right, but it seems to me that when Nature stretched her stone canvas in the Rockies she did not trouble with the trivialities of pleasing prettiness or technical nicety. She brushed in her colours with a boldness of mass and outline, with an energy and expression that stagger. There is no ambiguity about them. She used primary colours and never hesitated. Royal purple, the orange light of fire, and the sickening red in which Tintoretto has painted the wounds of his martyrs, she here emphasized by the "cold virgin snow" on the peaks.
For uncounted centuries, silence has brooded over the beauty of these imperturbable hills and over their unpathed, desolate places which only the eyes of the gods have seen. It is well with me this day that I journey through them, for here, as in Eden, the terrestrial and celestial may be one. It is well, too, that in passing I may shut my eyes and mentally sing the song of the land as it came hot from the heart of a poet in his home at the foot of these hills—
"Oh, could ye see, and could ye see
The great gold skies so clear,
The rivers that race the pine shade dark,
The mountainous snows that take no mark,
Sunlit and high on the Rockies stark
So far they seem as near.
But could ye know, and forever know
The word of the young Northwest;
A word she breathes to the true and bold,
A word misknown to the false and cold,
A word that never was broken or sold,
But the one who knows is best."
At Tete Jaune Cache, they are preparing to "strike camp" and move on to Mile 149. This has been the supply station for all the outposts, which means more than you may think, for the Railway Company furnishes an amazingly generous and varied bill-of-fare to its employees.
Don't ask me what you can get here, for I won't tell lest the urban epicures whose jaded palates need tickling should start out in a body for this lodge at Tete Jaune.
And the leading man in the kitchen has the most substantial merit and can roast a sirloin of beef or bake a cake of prodigious bigness for the men's supper just as he can cunningly and designedly contrive a pimento bisque, an omelette espanol, or shrimps à la créole for the boss and his company. I'll not tell another word about the fare, but, believe me it is "with such cookery a monkey might eat his own father."
Te' Jaune, as it is familiarly called in the North, is situated on the Fraser River. Because of the snow melting on the mountains, the Fraser is swollen as if the waters surged from underneath. While we wait, swart, husky-looking men are putting off to Fort George in primitive craft built of squared logs. These boats are called scows. They are carried along by the current which is from six to eight miles an hour, and are guided by means of a paddle with a vast yellow blade.
As the men pass on and wave their hands to us, a fret falls on me to go with them along this river-road to its very end, and if you are of my kin you would want it too. We would live sturdily; we would be sopped in sunshine, and God would give us joy.
At Te' Jaune there are many tongues spoken, for the workmen hail from all over the universe. Of late, we have heard much about these foreigners and of "those nations which we, so full-mouthed, call barbarous." Certain Canadians are enwrathed and utterly discomfited because of them. It is their desire to tidy up the country by sending the "alien offscourings" to where they belong. They tell us that our manners will become corrupted and our institutions imperilled by them.
This fear of strangers is not peculiar to our country and age. Strangers have, in all lands, been looked upon as enemies to the commonwealth, and consequently to be avoided or extinguished. According to Flavius Josephus, when Moses came to die he said, "Oh you Israelites and fellow-soldiers.... I would advise you to preserve these laws to leave none of your enemies alive when you have conquered them, but to look upon it as for your advantage to destroy them all, lest if you permit them to live, you taste of their manners and thereby corrupt your own proper institutions. I do farther exhort you to overthrow their altars and their groves and whatsoever temples they have among them, and burn all such, their nation and their very memory with fire; for by this means alone the safety of your own happy constitution can be secured to you."
The Jewish constitution was not worth the price asked; neither is ours. This should be far from the spirit of Canada—"the manless land that is crying out for the landless man." Canada is the child of the nations and our husky provinces have need of these husky peoples. Not only must we open wide our doors and bid them a good welcome, but having entered, it must be our endeavour to weld them into a seemly and coherent whole.
This is a task which is half accomplished e'er it is begun, for the Russian, the Italian, the Scandinavian and all our immigrants are eager to be like the Canadians, to speak our language, to wear our clothes, and to think, talk and walk like us. Their differentiation is a burden to them and they desire to drop it as quickly as possible.
These Coming Canadians from Europe are of a fine advantage to this country where thousands of miles of roads and railways are to be built, in that they perform the more onerous tasks of digging and drainage which the Canadian, British, and American turns from as menial and unworthy. It would be a wide mistake for us to turn back from our sea-ports these unlearned and common peoples who seek entrance—as foolish as the farmer who would fear a large yield of wheat lest he could not thresh it, or a banker who dreaded an inrush of gold lest he could not count it.
It was Michael Gowda, a Ruthenian living at Edmonton, who expressed for his people their feelings of loyalty towards the land of their adoption in a poem entitled "O Free and Fresh-home Canada"—
"And are you not, O Canada, our own?
Nay, we are still but holders of thy soil,—
We have not earned by sacrifice and groan
The right to boast the country where we toil.
But, Canada, our hearts are thine till death,
Our children shall be free to call thee theirs,
Their own dear land where, gladly drawing breath,
Their parents found safe homes, and left strong heirs.
Of homes, and native freedom, and the heart
To live and strive and die, if need be,
In standing manfully by honour's part
To guard the country that has made us free."