'I'll—I'll see what can be done,' he said, and I heard him go to the young lady who vouchsafed to wait at table occasionally in a superior way. 'My God!' I heard him say in an extremely humble voice to her, 'I'm most awfully sorry to ask such a thing of you, but these chaps want to go out and take some sandwiches. I say, do you suppose it could be managed?'
We got two sandwiches each as a result of his intercession, and in that mountain air we could have done with six times the number. But we realised from the manager's face when he brought them to us that the goddess who had provided them might, instead of doing so, have stalked straight out of the hotel for good.
CHAPTER XX
CANADA AND WOMAN
Few books are complete nowadays without a chapter on the woman question. Man can be treated of in between; one would not as yet care to write a book without mentioning man in it. As a subsidiary agent for keeping the world going man is still not without his importance. But woman, as I have said, must have a chapter to herself. And since I unwittingly arrived on the last page at the subject of woman's work in Canada, I will pause—even on the threshold of the mountains—and go further into the matter.
The most noticeable thing about woman in Western Canada is that she has not yet arrived there. If any one wished to get an idea of how the world would arrange itself supposing there were no women in it at all, they would have to go a little further north and west, into some of the British Columbian valleys or into the Yukon country, and look around.
What a simple world it seems. No clothes question, no washing, the simplest cookery, one man one plate (and that plate never washed), one knife for eating with or for skinning a grizzly bear, no carpets or curtains in the houses, no dustings or spring-cleanings, no knick-knacks to knock over or break, no flowers without or within except such as grow wild, no luxuries, in short, either to enjoy or to pay for, and a terrible amount of dirt. That is the physical aspect of the world without women.
The spiritual side of it is less easy to arrive at. These bachelors you see in the backwoods are a silent people, lacking in self-consciousness, and, I daresay, in manners, but law-abiding and amiable and peculiarly handy. All men are handy who have not women to steal that talent from them; and most womenless men are silent too. One knows, of course, that bores may be found among men at times, but never chatterboxes. There is something to be said for the view that speech arose by women putting questions so often that men were driven, in sheer weariness, to make answers.