“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.