The trail hath no languorous longing;It leads to no Lotus land;On its way dead Hopes come throngingTo take you by the hand;He who treads the trail undaunted, thereafter shall command.—KATE SIMPSON HAYES.
Half a century ago Bishop Taché wrote a letter to France, in which he asked for some missionaries. In response to this appeal a certain young Grouard was sent to Fort Garry. When Bishop Taché looked over the slender stripling he said: "I asked for a man; they sent me a boy." But a year later he wrote again: "Please send me more boys." This was fifty years ago, and from that day to this the northern world has had but one opinion of Grouard—he makes good. He is a worker who sticks to his text. To-day, he is the head of the Catholic missions in the far north, and his diocese, until lately, included the very Yukon.
He is seventy-seven years old (but we don't believe it), with a leonine head, an unrazored face and a chest like a draught horse; an erect man who commands the instant attention of whatever company he enters. Assuredly, he is the type of the sound mind in the sound body. It is not to be wondered that his attractive personality made him the cynosure of all eyes, and that his name was on every tongue when, several years ago, he went to England, there to attend a great conference of his Church.
Bishop Grouard is alert in manner and has a kindly consideration for the poorest person. Attend you, sirs and madams, to observe the Old World courtesy in its highest perfection, you must see it in the person of a French gentleman who holds a position of honor in the far, far north, it is an absolutely truthful courtesy, that has its roots in a big warm heart, so that it becomes the very bone and fibre of the man. By way of placating our more southerly dignitaries in what may seem an invidious comparison, it may be urged that Bishop Grouard's urbanity has never suffered such cross-currents as the municipal watering cart, speed-limit fines, or the bill collectors, for, as yet, these well-conceived but ill-approved institutions are entirely unknown in the strangely blissful regions north of 55°.
It is for the fiftieth anniversary of Bishop Grouard's consecration as a priest that all of us have gathered from Edmonton to Hudson's Hope to celebrate. We are assembled at Grouard on Lesser Slave Lake, the missionary post that was built here forty-nine years ago and named after the hero of this day. Our assembly is what smart society reporters would describe as "mixed," and the word would be correctly used; nevertheless, the interest and colour of this occasion are in no inconsiderable measure due to this very fact. Besides, ours is a goodly fellowship.
Here we have Father Orcolan from Rome, who has written books on astronomy; Jake Gaudette, who was born in the Arctic Circle; Indian Chiefs from near and far, with their wives and children; big Jim Cornwall, the Cecil Rhodes of the north; Bishop Joussard, the coadjutor, a short man with a hard-bitten sun-scorched face; factors and traders from outlying posts (believe me, right merry gentlemen); Judge Noel and his legal company, who have been dispensing justice in the regions beyond; lean-hipped, muscular trappers who toe-in from walking on the trails; equally lean-hipped river men who toe-out from keeping their balance on a log; children from the mission schools; black-robed nuns, doctors, government officials, and stalwart ranchers in homespun and leather—even bankers. This short gentleman, who looks as if he had just heard a good idea, is George Fraser, wit and journalist. The tall man in khaki with the positive shoulders is Fred Lawrence, pioneer and trader, likewise Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society; these and other interesting folk, the pictures of whom even my newly cut quill stops short at delineating. In truth, they are all here—the world and his wife—excepting only white girls. "It would seem too much like a special miracle," explains an Irish rancher, "to find half a dozen colleens set down here in Grouard—something like finding posies in the snow of December."
And the good Bishop Grouard is overcome because he doesn't deserve the homage of these people. "Truly, madame, I did not think to receive all this honour. I am only an old voyageur, a poor old fellow who gets near the end of the river."
"Does the paddle grow heavy, monseigneur?" I ask, "or is it that the journey is long?"
"Non, non, madame; it is the thought of home at the end, and the loved ones."
"But surely, monseigneur, the end is yet a long way off. Your eyes are not dimmed, neither is your natural force abated. And did we not this very day hear you speak to the tribes in six tongues?"
"Six was it?" queries the bishop. "Six! Ah, well! they seem to come to me easily. I feel like the man who had only to open his mouth to have roast ducklings fly therein."
Now this old northman has a close grip on twelve languages—it was Father Fahler who gave me the list—so that his modesty is truly disconcerting in an age wherein vanity seems to vary inversely with talent. He is a master in the use of Greek, Latin, French, English, Cree, Eskimo, Rabbitskin, Chippewaian, Beaver, Slavis, Dog Rib, and Loucheux.
Bishop Grouard is an exegete and printer of no mean order, having translated the service book of the Catholic Church into seven languages and printed them himself. I do not know if the printing press he brought into these northern fastnesses was the very first, but if not, it was assuredly the second, for there is only one other.
What these books have meant to the tribes it is not for mere terrestrial folk to say, but if the Catholic doctrine of supererogatory works be a reasonable and true one, of a surety it is a splendid balance that is laid up to the good bishop's account. In the more southerly provinces, where people like books, it is an easy matter for messieurs the publishers to roll out scores of editions to the greedy public, but up here in the north publishing a book becomes both a joke and a tragedy. In the first place, people do not care for books; in the second, the people do not know the alphabet.
This was how Bishop Grouard came to build schools for the children. He had to teach the Indians to read. If you care to you may go to the school across the bishop's driveway and see the children. There are hundreds of them, or even more, but if you wait awhile we will go together, for they are giving a play to-night, and at this moment are rehearsing their parts. It was Sister Egbert and Sister Ignatius who wrote the play; the theme, I have heard, is an incident in the life of the bishop.
But it takes a long time to learn reading; besides, there are many distractions. And then the older folk whose eyes are smoke-dimmed by the tepee fires may never hope to con the letters. It were ill reasoning to suppose so. For these people who are less literate the kind bishop painted pictures of angels on the walls and on the ceiling of the church, and he made one of the Crucifixion, over the altar, a glowing canvas instinct with living reality. The onlooker may truly say of this what Ruskin said of Raphael's "Transfiguration": "It goes directly to the heart. It seems almost to call you by name."
If you have lived long in the north you will have been wondering this while back how our workaday ecclesiastic got his materials into Grouard. How came his printing press, his type, his canvass, and his paints? Where did this man get the furniture for his schools, his hospitals, his church? Where did he get the boards for all these buildings?
The boards, curious person, were cut at his own saw-mill, from which boards he fashioned the furniture with his hands. "But how," you persist, "did he bring the machinery for his sawmill?"
That was easy; he brought it here in a steamboat. Any one could tell you that.
"But where did he get the steamboat?"
Oh! he built the boat himself—the first steamboat on the Lesser Slave Lake. In it, if he cared, he could carry his printing press and his canvases also.
It will not be surprising if the historians of the future appraise Bishop Grouard's combination of wisdom and action as something keenly akin to genius. Indeed, they are almost sure to.
I cannot tell you what the anniversary services meant—it cannot be expected of any one who is versed in the Thirty-nine Articles of the English Church instead of the Rosary of the Blessed Virgin—but I came away from them with languorous impressions of golden robes, silver censers, and wavering lights, the odour of lilies and lilacs that wilted in the heat; a suspended cross with an agonized Christ, wan and attenuated; of purple and scarlet cloths, of dark-haired young priests, husky and brown-skinned. There were other things like a shepherd's crook, and smoke of incense, but, most of all, there was a music that mothered you and stayed with you. In some way or other these old plaintive songs of Egypt seem fitted to the boreal regions, but why I cannot explain.
In the city we must perforce set a stage for a drama, but here Nature has made a setting for us high on a hill overlooking a wide meadow that slopes to the bay. You have read something like this in classic myths, or maybe it was in Shakespeare, but it doesn't greatly matter; the play is the thing. For myself, I made believe that is the slope of Parnassus—for the Pythian hero was also a promoter of colonization, a founder of cities, a healer of the sick, an institutor of games, a patron of arts.
It is on this outdoor stage in its June-tide glory that we banquet; that we sing; that we play our parts. And it is here that Keenosew the Fish, chief of the Crees, with rapid rush of speech and voice of military sharpness, presents the homage of his tribe. In like manner do also the other representatives of other northerly tribes. Each chief wears a Treaty medal as a pledge from her Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria.
It is here also that a fair-faced woman of our company expresses the reverence of her sisters of the diocese for Monseigneur the Bishop, and, as a token of the same, presents to him a plate heaped high with coins of gold.
And from this hill it is that we ride through the newly cut road, a thousand men and women of us in stately procession, but withal gaily caparisoned. Observe, if you will, our ribbons and fringes of gold; the little flags in our bridles; our lynx-skin saddle clothes, and the wreaths of purple vetch that hang from the pommels. Look well at our black soutanes, scarlet coats, grey homespuns, and yellow moose hides, for we are proud this day and wear our finest feathers. It is not well to be disturbed by the untamable naughtiness of our horses, for the northern trailer, you must have heard, has no stomach for glitter of trappings, neither does he like the feel of neighbours. As we ramble down a white aisle of birch and poplar, the feet of our horses tread out for us the odour of leaf mould, which odour is the panacea of the world.
We do not ride with any preconceived plans, or because of any propaganda. Neither are we knights who sally forth to right wrongs, albeit we have the truest knights of all with us—he who has snow on his head but fire in his heart; he who has taught these tribes by doing.....
This day we ride without review or forecast. We ride because we are glad. All we ask of life is room to rove adown this long white pathway in this young world. It is the best that life can give—room to ride.
My name is Ojib-Charlie,I like to sing and dance.—CY WARMAN.
The reader will excuse my chronicling the Jubilee before telling about Grouard. I have no excuse other than caprice, nor any precedent other than the fact that Chinese authors write their stories backward. To resume then:
You will remember the medical doctor on the boat was telling me how, one day, Grouard would be a large city. I wish to go further and declare it one now in spite of its small population, that is if you will accept with me the definition laid down by an ancient Jewish writer who defined a large city as a place in which "there are ten leisure men; if less than so, lo! it is a village."
No one seems to be working unless it be the Indians who are training their horses for the sports that are to take place the day after to-morrow, which sports will last for a week. This might be the leisurely land of the hyperboreans where there is everlasting spring and the inhabitants never toil or grow old—
"A land in the sun-light deepWhere golden gardens glow,Where the winds of the north, becalmed in sleep,Their conch-shells never blow."
The first men we meet are the civil-engineers. Nearly every one surveys here, and even the wild geese run lines along the sky. These engineers are pleasant-spoken men of proper spirit, who have been hammered into hardihood by work and weather. Nearly all of them invite you to eat in their camps: "Come over to my stamping-grounds," says a youth who looks like a walking pine-tree. There is no doubt in the world he is lonely for his women-folk whom we happen to know "down home," for when we accept he smiles and says "Heaven bless you endlessly!" He gave us a good supper, too, of hot and savoury food, and the coffee, though served in cups of unbelievable thickness, was undeniably nectar.
Afterwards, we walk into the village to get acquainted with the people thereof, and to secure lodgings. Over the doors of some of the shops there are signboards written in Cree, that is to say in syllabic symbols which look like the footprints of a huge bird.
We are accosted by a gentleman of the Bible Society who wishes to sell us copies of the New Testament, which book, he says, is lightly esteemed in the North. He asks me if I belong to my Creator, but I dissemble in that I have never been able to say God created me without distinct reservations. There are certain ugly and reproachful traits in my make up which it seems sacrilegious to attribute to the Deity. This colporteur has a keen, clean mind—any one can see that—and I like him for his childlike straightness of soul.
He is carrying copies of the gospels in the different Indian languages, but, so far, has sold but few. Doubtless the Indians think with that Mendizabel, the Prime Minister of Spain, who once said to George Borrow, "My good sir, it is not Bibles we want but rather guns and gunpowder."
The knowledge one picks up on a walk down the street is varied in character and throws a light on village life several hundred miles from a railway.
There are three churches here, also a pool-room and a moving picture show. It costs fifty cents to see the latter.
When a trapper is not working he is whittling. This is a bad year for the trappers: two summers came together.
Eggs are a dollar a dozen and four loaves of bread may be had for the same price. Beef sells for twenty-five cents a pound and butter for sixty-five.
There is an outcropping of coal on a mountainside twelve miles away. A sample of the coal has been sent to Edmonton for analysis.
The main café is built of logs and a notice in English advises the wayfarer to "Stick to our pies. Never mind the looks of the house," it further enjoins. "It's the oysters we eat, not the shell."
The village boasts of a brass-band with twenty instruments. Although instructed by wire to meet us at the boat to-day, they failed to assemble, the members of the company having quarrelled over the selections to be played.
Lots on main street sell as high as two thousand dollars each.
A gentleman in tweed suit with capacious pockets and tan leggings which he has brought with him across the Atlantic, has decided to stand for the legislature at the next election. "The electors will say," he assures us, "that I have been drunk. They will say that I have been in jail, but I shall reply with repartee. You see I've always been deucedly clever at repartee."
The Mounted Police Barracks, the Indian Agency, the Hudson's Bay Post and the Catholic Mission are on the hill above the village. The Church of England Mission lies out and beyond, on a further hill. The bankers ride out to the further hill to play tennis with the pretty English girls who teach in the school.
When an elderly jocose Irishman so far forgets himself as to say "darlint" to a breed-girl, he must not be surprised if she draws a wry face and calls himmuchemina; that is to say, "bad berries."
I might write a book on the news to be picked up on this main street, if a tide of sleep did not threaten to submerge me. In this dry crystalline atmosphere, one must sleep an hour or two sometimes, however unwilling the spirit or unique and alluring the things present.
My room at the lodging-house is the best the place affords in that it has a cotton curtain for a door, and as yet doors are only used in the outside walls of the houses. The curtain is not, however, of much account in that the green lumber of the walls has warped to such narrow dimensions that the occupier of the adjoining room would have to shut his or her eyes to keep from seeing you. On the contrary part, you must of necessity go to bed in the dark unless you wish to fall a victim to the crafts and assaults of the mosquitoes who are attracted by the lamp. In a fortnight or so, they will have completely disappeared, but, in the meanwhile, if you would escape their nasty niggling ways you must neglect your hair, teeth, and sun-scalded nose. A real-estate agent was telling me to-day how the mosquitoes often disappeared in a night, and, to illustrate this fact, related a story of a Tipperary Orator, who said, "My fellow-countrymen, the round towers of Ireland have so completely disappeared that it is doubtful if they have ever existed."
.... A wagon is leaving this morning for St. Bernard's Mission on the hill, and by some felicity I am invited to go with it. Bill, who is the driver, received a bullet wound in a Mexican rebellion; had his leg broken by a fall from "a terrible mean cayuse"; lost an eye and part of his nose in a mine explosion, and says, by these same tokens, he will live to be a hundred unless he loses his head to the government. Bill was married once down Oregon, way, but his wife divorced him. His wife was very short-sighted, but, contrawise, her tongue was long. Besides, she was appallingly like her mother.
This trail to St. Bernard's, passing as it does through a trail of lanky poplars and birch in green lacy gowns, is a right pleasant one, and fills you with the great joy of growing things.
And also it is very pleasant this morning to shut your eyes that you may the better inhale the fine brew of the conifers, the reek of the wild roses, the pungent wafture of the mint from the meadows, and above all, the subtle incense of the warm spawning soil. This is to have a happiness as large as your wishes. This is to think thoughts that are very secret and only half-way wise.
At St. Bernard's the nuns take me to see their finely manicured garden with its rows of cabbages, leeks, turnips, radishes and its many herbs such as parsley, mint and sage. Their potatoes are coming on well and so are the posy beds. This sweet-breathed garden is tilled by voluntary labour and held in common, but it must be remembered the nun's occupation does not afford her any special opportunities for knowledge of the world at large and its shrewder ways.
I can easily discern that the pride of this garden are the cabbages, probably because more care has gone into their culture. Indeed, this vegetable seems to be peculiarly favoured by all gardeners of all classes, for even the haughty Diocletian, when asked to resume his crown, said to the ambassadors, "If you would come and see the cabbages I have planted, you would never again mention to me the name of empire." In this garden-plot the sisters have erected a pedestal upon which stands a fair shining woman, even she who is the mother to their Lord and wonderful God.
In order that her labour may become an offering to her tutelary spirit, every woman should have a statue in her garden embodying her highest ideal, whether it be of Isis, Mrs. Eddy, or Diana, the "Goddess excellently bright." Such a statue would tend also to keep her religion a divine intimacy rather than a creed or an institutional observance.
Sister Marie-des-Anges shows me the hospital, and pleasures me with a delicious cordial which is made out of wild berries and which tastes better than champagne.
Those who have an eye for esoteric apartments with etchings and faint-coloured prints on toned-down walls, would not be impressed with the wards and offices of this hospital where all the furniture is home-made. It is, however, cleverly contrived and has the prestige of being literally the original "mission furniture"—no one can gainsay it. In this connection, give me leave to transcribe here a passage which I have met with in the book of Thoreau, the naturalist. "Why should not our furniture be as simple as the Arab's or the Indian's?" he asks. "When I think of the benefactors of the race whom we have apotheosized as messengers from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, I do not see in my mind any retinue at their heels, any car-load of fashionable furniture."
I know not the answer of this question unless it be that we of Canada need practice in the excellencies of those graces which have respect to personal simplicity and disrespect to communal opinion. I have a mind to make a trial of this.
It was in this hospital that "Twelve-Foot" Davis (now in heaven) gave his instructions to his partner, Jim Cornwall, to take his body on a sled to the Peace River and bury it on the height of land.
People in the cities are too busily absorbed in the transactions of peers and politicians to know northern philanthropists like "Twelve-Foot" Davis, the first man to introduce steel-traps into this country and to thus dare the wrath of the omnipotent and indomitable "Company of Gentlemen Adventurers." You may not know it, but the steel trap has done as much for the Indian as the self-binder has for the white man.
But down here every one knows that "Twelve-Foot" Davis was held in high esteem, and any man will tell you, as Bill the driver told me, how it was a full hand this fine frontiersman laid on the Lord's table and that none of the cards were lacking.
Twelve-Foot Davis was so called because, in the days of the Caribou rush, he staked a claim of twelve feet. Each prospector was allowed one hundred feet and there was no claim left when Twelve-Foot appeared on the scene. But to be assured in his mind he was not outdone, he measured the claims and found that two of the prospectors were holding two hundred and twelve feet. Davis wanted those extra twelve feet and the prospectors decided to give him a place directly in the centre of their claims on a spot where a basin of shale lay. From this narrow claim, Twelve-Foot dug up a large quantity of gold, and this was the only spot on the entire creek where the least trace of ore was found, even his neighbours being unable to pan out a grain. It was from this happening that he derived the name which, because of the question it carries on its face, would, as a nom-de-plume, be worth a corresponding amount of gold to an obscure author.
Bill, who is fairly amenable to bribes, takes me over to the further hill where the Church of England Mission stands, which Mission was the spiritual husbandry of the late Bishop Holmes.
It would be pleasant to tell of this place and of the school, but Bill is in haste and will not tarry my leisure. It may be that his swaying motive is another bribe.
It was only three months ago that the Bishop and his family started for England, and soon afterwards came the news that he had died in a London hospital. The teachers tell me the family who went out together on this holiday are never coming back, in that they cannot afford to take the journey now that the bread-winner is gone. The furniture is to be sold and the house will be done-over for another bishop.
As I walk through the home which for many years has been the most hospitable one in the north, it is with a mist in my eyes and a painful tightness in my throat. I touch the chords of Auld Lang Syne on the piano in honour of Madam, the mother; I kiss the house-flowers for the love of the young girls who carried them safely over the long, long winter; I finger the books in the library with affection in memory of the good Bishop who once told me kindly tales of these Indians who were his friends.
And when I, too, have gone, may it happen that some one who understands will touch my books in like manner, and say good-bye to them for me. I could not so endure it of myself....
... It was six days later at the sports that I received a proposal of marriage from Prosper, an Indian who is a trainer of horses. It was not wholly a surprise, in that he had already approached the master of our party with an overture to buy me. The master had hesitated to tell me of this for fear I might be offended. "You see, Lady Jane," he explained, "it is like that case inPatiencewhere the magnet wished to attract the silver churn."
"Yes?" asked I, "and what did you say to him?"
"Oh! I told him he was a master-fool; that you were nothing but a great cross-examiner who had the misfortune to be born a woman."
And his reply.
"He said he did not understand me but he saw you laughed a great deal and showed your teeth. He says he would not beat you, but would be very mild and agreeable with you."
Now, I was not offended, for the proposal from this young Apollo of the forest only meant I was no longer regarded as a mysterious invader from another and strange land.
Why should he not propose? In this northern world distinctions fall away and all are equal. As a usual thing, the Indian regards a white woman impersonally or with a half-contemptuous indifference. To him, we are frail, die-away creatures deplorably deficient in energy, yet, strange to relate, wholly lacking in the spirit of obedience. Scores of ill-instructed novelists to the contrary, no Indian has ever assaulted a white woman. This is an amazing fact when one considers how, for nearly two centuries, the Indian has guided our women through the forests; piloted them down the rivers; and has cared for them in isolated outposts. The Indian has lived rough and lived hard, but, in this particular, he is morally the most immutable of all God's estimable menfolk.
When Prosper pleaded his case personally, he broke ice by requesting me to accept a pair of doe-skin gauntlets more beautiful than ordinary. In spite of my declining the gift, he asked "Will you marry with me?" assuring me, at the same time, that I was hissaky hagen, or "one beloved." I would not have to travel far. He is one day from here if there be wind, but two days with no wind. He likes the noise I make in my throat when I laugh. The master explained to Prosper, "This is only a way she has of gargling her throat beautifully," a wicked cynicism which was lost on the bronze-faced tamer of horses in that gargling is, to him, an unknown and hence an incomprehensible practice. The master also advised Prosper to keep the gloves for, if I listened, he would indubitably need them later.
Prosper is a hardily-built man with admirable shoulders and a bearing like Thunder Cloud, the American Indian who was the model for Mr. G. A. Reid's picture entitled "The Coming of the White Man." Also, Prosper is daringly ugly. When I tell him I am already married, he says, "You need not go back. Your man can find many women by the great Saskatchewan River."
It may interest the curious to know that Prosper ultimately sold me the gauntlets for my man, and put away the money with an imperturbable serenity worthy the receiving-teller of a western bank.
... The sports were inaugurated by the slaughter of an ox for the benefit of the treaty Indians. It is foolish to shudder when we see the throat of a bullock cut. When a bird dips its long bill into the chalice of a flower it is doing precisely the same act.
The heart of this bullock was fat, so that good fortune abides with the tribe. A lean heart is always unlucky. Once Ba'tiste killed an animal that had hairs on its heart, and Holy Mother! Holy Mother! that winter he trapped a silver-fox.
The white men played a game of baseball which would have given cause for thought to those impersonal pawns known as professionals; it was so very original. But, after all, baseball is only cricket gone hysterical, and perhaps the game may be further evolved under the aurora. Some one must take the onus of initiative. Originally the game was very primitive and I have heard tell, or I may have read, that it was really a baseball club which Samson used to kill the Philistines.
The results of the horse races are not posted, a fact which tends to a democratic spirit. If you want to see the start or the finish you must bunch with the crowd at the post. This also enables you to learn how wonderfully an excited Cree can vociferate: there is no other place in the world where a more efficient instruction can be had. And when words fail him, Sir Hotspur says: "Uh-huh!" and makes other sounds in his teeth like a flame when it leaps through dry rushes.
The mysteries of straight, place, and show are not probed here and no Indian throws a race. The best horse always wins. The Cree jockey rides bareback and beats his horse from the start. This, they tell me, is necessary because there is no best strain in Indian ponies. They are as native and unimproved as the horses of Diomedes that roamed the hills of Arcadia.
The tents, booths, and dining-rooms skirt the track, and so the squaws can leave their cooking to engage in their own contests without any unnecessary loss of time. These include a tug-o'-war, a horse race and foot races. The men engage in canoe and tub races, boxing bouts, swimming and smoking contests, bucking-broncho exhibits and other physical tests for which they have a fondness and natural aptitude. Gambling is in full swing and no one thinks it necessary to apologize. Several men squat side by side on the ground and pass a jack-knife from one to the other under a blanket which covers their knees. The gambler has to guess in which hand the knife is to be found. It is the same game as "Button! Button! Who has the button?"
The drum-song, that rude rough song of the suitor, does not start till after nightfall. As a general thing, the man sings it in a tent lying on his back, his face flushed and his eyes suffused. "Hai! Hai!" he cries with a blurred staccato that is without response, "otato-otooto-oha-o."
After awhile, he seems to become hypnotized by the recurrence of this measured rhythm which is without melody and without gaiety. These drum-songs are indubitably the survivals of earlier days when the man-animal roamed through the land and made love-calls in the trees.
The drum-man has one pronounced characteristic; you can never mistake him for a Christian. On one of the drums, there was a sun-symbol marked in blue, but this may have been an accidental ornamentation. Or it may be the drum-suitor is a Christian who merely claims the masculine prerogative of changing his principles with his opportunities. You can never tell.
But on the whole, the discordancy of the drum is no worse than that of the fiddle which supplies the music for the dance. Why people say "fit as a fiddle" I can never surmise, for a fiddle is always becoming unfit.
One hears much complaint in our province over oak floors well waxed, but here is a dancing floor that is laid while you wait. Cross-beams are placed on the ground and over them are put planks of uneven thickness. When in use, the floor seems almost as active as the feet of the dancers.
The crowd is made up of dusky belles from the tribes of the Athabasca, Slave, and Mackenzie Rivers; many braves, and some few white men whom I pretend not to recognize. I am like the man Herrick writes about, "One of the crowd; not of the company."
The dancing is of a primitive order not unlike the natural movement which street children make to the strains of the hurdy-gurdy.
In higher circles, it is known by the name of the turkey-trot. Scientists classify it under the more dignified appellation of "neuromuscular co-ordination."
As compared with a ball, say at Government House, this one has some marked peculiarities. There are no chaperones, no refreshments, many sitting-out places, and it is wholly in the dark save for the light of a tolerant and somewhat remote moon.
A white woman who watches it is considered by the men of her own race to be one of five things—stupid, innocent, mean, obstinate, or unduly curious, whereas to be accurate she may only be a conscientious scribe.
Still do our jaded pulses boundRemembering that eager race.—R. W. GILBERT.
This favour would never have come to me if I had not found a two-eyed peacock feather in the paddock. It isn't reasonable to suppose that a simple, country-bred person from back Alberta-way could have such story-book luck on her first wager. La-la-la!
All the way down I kept praying, "Lead not Janey into temptation," knowing right well I would slay any one who kept me out. I take off my hat to myself.
"Dear me!" says John. "One would think you cut your teeth on a bit instead of a pen." Some people like the idea of betting: some don't.
At this Woodbine race-course in Toronto, they no longer have turf accountants. Their days were numbered when careless people started to call them bookies. They have been succeeded by steel slot affairs called pari-mutuel machines. The words pari and mutuel would seem to be almost synonymous, one meaning equal, the other reciprocal. The reciprocal arrangements are like this; the party of the first part gets the money; the party of the second part, the experience. "And the machine?" you ask. (I asked that too.) The machine, which is only an impersonal way of saying the Jockey Club, gets as its commission five per centum of all wagers, and I am told it makes as high as eight thousand dollars the day. There are as many ways of fixing the races as there are of making bannocks on the Mackenzie River, but you can't fix the machine. It never gets tired of being good. This being the case, people must study the science of betting just as politicians study the ways of the electorate.
A shrewd-spoken gentleman with ruddy features and fierce white moustachioes to whom I was introduced in the paddock, told me some of these rules he had learned. He said "My Good Lady, I can see you have an honest face, although you come from Western Canada where the people are exceedingly singular. I will therefore proceed to tell you in confidence what I know concerning the canons of betting."
"A tip, so far as I can make out"—and here he flicked a butterfly off my shoulder—"is a secret told to the whole betting ring."
"Unless you have money to lose you should bet small till you are using money which you have won."
He told me many other rules about gambling, with much eagerness, for he seemed to conceive a liking for me, but it avails nothing that I tell them to you, in that no man gives heed to another man's method of plying the art, thinking his own a vastly greater superiority, in which respect gamblers do closely approach to the fraternity of the pen known as authors.
This Woodbine race-course is a fair tarrying place, and I enjoy its beauty with luxurious wonder. Outside its high palings, there are thickly peopled, fusty streets, for this is the very heart of the city. Why any place should be called the heart of the city I cannot conjecture, except that both the civic and human heart are places of huge trafficking and, above all things, desperately wicked.
The near foreground is a finely brushed lawn that, here and there, has burst into flame-red flowers. In the centre of the ring where the hunters take the hedges, two beautiful elms hold themselves proudly erect as if to say, "Look at us, O woman of little wit! look at us; we are finer creations than man, or even than horses."
Off in the background, with nothing intervening save the elms, little sailing yachts like white birds, rock and dip in the sapphire blue of the bay. Strong-built motor-boats scud across the horizon in so terrific a hurry one can hardly follow their wake for dust. (The editor will kindly permit me to say "dust.") We watch them, from our box, three women of us, with a field-glass which we use in turn for all the world like the three hoary witches who had only one eye between them.
I like this landscape better than our prairie. The trouble with the prairie is that you always seem to be in the middle of it. The garden of Time and Chance, it has no parts or passions unless, indeed, its spaces seem unfriendly. It has no mystery, no changeability, no complexity.... But all this is digressing from the races and from the beautifully dressed women who look like tall-stemmed flowers. I heard a man in the next box compute that the feathers worn in the enclosure had cost a hundred thousand dollars, but no matter what they cost they were worth it—willow plumes, fish-spines, aigettes, birds-of-paradise, ostrich mounts, ospreys, and other things I cannot name. Indeed, my own hat has two bright scarlet wings which cause me no small satisfaction, in spite of the fact that John says they are not so much wings as a challenge to combat. Moreover, he says when I am better civilized, I will know that feathers of any kind are an atavism and no fit dress for Christian people. It is trying to have a near relative with such views. The younger men of the enclosure affect Newmarket coats, or Burberry's, and cloth spats, also field-glasses swung across their shoulders. They express horse-language emphatically without a word. The older men who have attained to the dignity of the Bench or the Cabinet, run to silk hats and frock coats.
The enclosure is occupied by the favoured few who have boxes and who are designed by the Grand Stand as "the society bunch." I would like to write about this distinction, and sometime I will, but just now the three-year olds are cavorting down the great white-way, for the autumn cup which has $2500.00 tucked away in its inside. It is on Star Charter that I have my hard-earned western dollars—egg and butter money, mind you—and I must pay strict attention to this race. I think he'll win. The Lord never gave him those legs and that frictionless gait for nothing. I'm sure of that.
The horses do not mind their manners at the starting bar, but pick objections, prance, and kick each other with the most admirable precision. I have read that when the Otaheitans first saw a horse they called it "a man-carrying pig." It is not possible to improve on the definition.
But, after awhile, the horses make a clean break from the bar and are off in a spume of dust. Gallant-goers they are, and this is sure to be a tight race. Their necks are strained like teal on the wing, and almost you expect to hear a sharp shot and see one tumble. Indeed, they might be birds in autumn flight, in that they run in a wedge and seem to obey a collective consciousness.
The jockeys ride high on the horses' shoulders and they ride for a fall. The purple and blue jockey holds the lead and he's going some. The enclosure says he is.
But the blue and silver jockey is fighting him for every inch and he's gaining. The enclosure says he is.
The orange and black jockey is third. He's carrying my egg and butter money. He'll win though, for the jockey who stays second or third must get the advantage of the leading horses as a wind-shield. Presently he will slip the bunch; he's sure to. The enclosure says he is. John tells me to stop adjuring the jockey, that he will never hear me.
They've only a little way to go now—only a little way—and the orange and black is coming steadily to the front. Even John gets excited and keeps saying, "Good l'il ol' cayuse," and things like that, which are bad form down East. Steadily on—steadily past the blue and silver—steadily upon the haunches of the red and blue—now on his shoulder—now on his neck—and now a neck ahead. This was how the orange and black won, but you should have been there to see it.
And to think it all came from finding a two-eyed peacock feather in the paddock!
Between races, we visit the paddock, insinuating our way through the crowd in order to get near the ring where the horses show their paces to the racegoers who make believe they are judges of speed, condition and stamina. As a matter of fact, the horses are all very much alike—wiry, wispy things like lean greyhounds with rippling veins that stand out in relief, muscles of rawhide, and bell nostrils. There is little difference in their speed either—a second, two seconds, or mayhap three—but these seconds are, in their results, so vastly different to the turfmen that all other contrarieties become as nothing. The jockeys who know the horses from their hoofs up, and who ride with instinct, are perhaps the only men who can fairly hazard what the results will be—or should be.
They tell me that most of these jockeys die of consumption. This is probably owing to the fact that they must rigidly train the flesh off their bones. Napoleon said that Providence always favoured the heaviest battalions. The dictum has no application to jockeys. Our Western maxim that a cowboy is only as good as his nerves would be of more general applicability.
But while, in the horses themselves, there seems to be little of marked individuality, think of what volumes could be written on their names. Here we have Ringmaster, Gun Cotton, Froglegs, Song of the Rocks, Tankard, Scarlet Pimpernel, Porcupine, Pons Asinorum and other names which hold a lure. So exactly co-natural are they to our extended acquaintanceship among the humans back in the Province of Alberta, that our homesickness vanishes into the sunny blue.
There were nine horses in the autumn steeplechase and Young Morpheus would have beat handily had he not fallen on the last jump. The jockey rocketed over his head and lay still, but Young Morpheus, being a thoroughbred and no welcher, ran on and came slashing in to the finish. That horse has a soul like John's and mine, only better than John's. The prize was carried off by Highbridge, who seemed to be the favourite, for the enclosure turned itself into a pandemonium. Men and woman who before were separate entities, became merged into a mass of frantic arms and white faces that with a pleading voice coaxed the winner down the homestretch to victory. It is the steeplechase that probes to the depths mankind's capacity for physical enjoyment.
"But the jockey was thrown," you say, "and lay still?" Think you we wear the willow because of it? Not so, Honourable Gentleman. We are consoled by the well-turned and doubtless truthful reflection that—
"Bright Lucifer into darkness hurled,Was happier than angels quiet-eyed."