CHAPTER XI
SUPERFICIAL REFLECTIONS AT SUDBURY
Coming away from the French River, we spent a night at Sudbury, which lies in the midst of 'rich deposits of nickeliferous pyrrhotite.' Had I a brain capable of appreciating nickeliferous pyrrhotite, I should have got more pleasure out of this prosperous mining town than I did. My chief recollections of it are that it was unattractive, that everybody looked prosperous in it, that trucks were shunted under my bedroom window all night long, and that the hotel proprietor forgot to wake us at the time we had requested, with the result that we got to the station breakfastless, about half an hour after the train was due to start. Luckily it was late. I do not care for missing trains at any time, but to have missed that train at Sudbury would have been singularly annoying. There was, in effect, nothing of interest in Sudbury if you were not interested in nickeliferous pyrrhotite. I know that I should not make such a remark. Humani nihil a me alienum should be every writer's motto. But it is one thing to possess a motto, another to act upon it after trucks have been shunted under one's window all night, and one stands breakfastless on a dull station very early in the morning, waiting for a train that will not come.
Let me recall what sort of humanity was about. There was a stout, middle-aged Indian guide, who told us the finest trout fishing in Canada was to be had a few miles from Sudbury. He was the most cheerful Indian I saw in Canada—really a cheerful man—creased with smiles. There were miners looking out for jobs or leaving them—mostly spitting. They were all young men. I only saw about four old men in the whole Dominion. I do not know if Canadians are shut up after a certain age, or do not grow to it, or retire like butterflies to end their days far from the ken of man. So that there was nothing surprising in there being only young men at the station. More surprising was the amount of nationalities that seemed to be represented among them. They seemed of every race and yet very alike. I suppose a miner is a miner, whatever his nationality, just as a mahout is a mahout. In the strange worlds both these kinds of experts live in, the one sort in the bowels of the earth, the other on the necks of elephants, our little international distinctions would tend to become of less importance. If a man is a miner, he may also be a Belgian or a German or a Yorkshireman—but his real country is subterranean: he is before all things a citizen of the underworld. I do not know if one would get to recognise a miner in Canada quite so easily as one gets to recognise a miner at home—for miners there shift about more than in England, and spend more time, therefore, in the upper world; which stamps men differently. Still, though tales of new finds in new countries, where wages will be almost incredibly high, constantly reach them, and tempt them forth, after all they emerge from one part of the dark earth only to plunge into another—passing the between-time above-ground magnificently; but less magnificently than their wives. The prices paid by miners' wives for their hats at some of the big stores would startle the more extravagant of our own smart set. I believe there were some lumbermen in the station too, taking their ease, but I had not then grown to know the look of a lumberjack as I did later. The chief thing about him is his magnificent complexion—enviable of women. Canada is not generous in the matter of complexions, and one usually hears that the dry winds of the winter time are accountable for making them poor, especially on the plains. The hot stoves of the shacks are a still more likely cause. Why then should the lumbermen have such incomparable skins? Partly because they are men in 'the pink of condition'—so long as they work (their condition out of it is best realised by a perusal of Woodsmen of the West, one of the few fine local studies of a real type of Canadian life that have yet been written); partly because their work is in the woods which are windless and not dry.
Tokens of the lumbering life—besides the complexion—are jollity, a freedom from care amounting to something even more delightful than irresponsibility, an air of equality with something of superiority in it—indeed, with a good deal of superiority in it—and a childlike loquaciousness or an equally childlike dislike of talk. These last two qualities are both, I fancy, Canadian in general. One is generally told that the Canadians are ready talkers, will always address a stranger in the train, will be inquisitive and self-revealing to an extent unimagined by the Englishman. Mr. Kipling remarked, I remember, in his Canadian letters that you will learn from an Englishman in two years less than you will learn from a Canadian in two minutes. Mr. Kipling is perhaps the best boaster Canada ever drew to herself. My own experience in the matter of Canadian conversation is that a lot depends upon the individual. Introductions are certainly not waited for, and on a journey one may chat with strangers to one's heart's content. But it must be borne in mind that the traveller par excellence in Canada is the commercial traveller whose business it is to talk. Off the line—and on it, where other travellers are concerned—one finds men with a gift of silence that can at times be disheartening. It is natural that this should be so. Men in remote places lose the use of their tongues. All men are not talkers, indeed I think the great majority of men in any country are not talkers. When Canadians do talk, it must be admitted that they excel us, or their working-men do. Their working-men are not only ready, but also, superficially at any rate, remarkably well-informed about things outside their own particular job. They know what is being talked of, the prices of things, the value of land, astonishingly well. All Canadians know something about land; and about what he knows, the Canadian is not deprecating. Precisely for this reason, perhaps, the more educated men among them are at times considerably less interesting than ours. It is not that their conversational topics are few, but that they are circumscribed. The personal and dogmatic element enters into them, with the result that the subject discussed seems incapable of extension, and tends to become circular. I have met quite young men who were bores, and bores not only in essence, but in manner, like the clergymen of our comic papers. I do not know why it is, but I do know that it is sad. It may be that there are not enough women in Canada to prevent it. Men are so patient they will stand anything—even a bore. But where women abound, a man may not be tiresome either in his clothes or his conversation....
I believe the train at Sudbury was almost an hour late, which is why I have gone on so long noting trifles at large. When it did come in, somewhere about 8 A.M., we discovered that it was full up, and people had been standing in the first-class carriages all night. They had mostly breakfasted since, and the first-class carriage we got into was littered from end to end with bun-bags and sandwich-papers and orange peel, and all the refuse that results from picnics in trains. Tired parents and sleepy children were piled above this flotsam in an atmosphere hard to endure. Yet everybody was cheerful, and though we both wished in our hearts that we could have got 'sleepers' entitling us to Pullman accommodation, we were both grateful—or ought to have been grateful—that we were privileged to witness the contented spirit with which these representatives of the great Dominion bore their trials. Not a grumble—oh, my brother Englishman, not a grumble! Think of it.
CHAPTER XII
THROUGH THE HIGHLANDS OF ONTARIO
I sat in the tail of the train smoking, while Ontario dropped behind, league after league of thin trees growing out of the rock, of rock growing out of bog or lake, of bog or lake covering all solid things. Sometimes the trees were green and dark; sometimes green and light; sometimes nothing but scorched trunks—black skeletons of trees left by a forest fire which had killed everything within reach like a beast of prey, but consumed only the tender parts.
Somebody, as we swung over a typical piece of muskeg country—black and juicy bogland covered with a foot maybe of clear water—began to tell a story of a train that had run off the rails and plunged head first into just such a place. It had been a long train, he said; a goods train, and it had gone down and down. When he saw it, the last truck only stuck out of the muskeg. We listened respectfully. It was at least a well-found story, illustrating the difficulties the engineers had had in laying the lines across a treacherous ooze that nothing seemed to fill or make firm.