Part 6 (1/2)

Not so very long ago only a few wise people kept holiday in that part of the world, and they did not give away their discoveries. Now it has become a summer playground where people hunt and camp at large. The names of its further rivers are known in England, and men, otherwise sane, slip away from London into the birches, and come out again bearded and smoke-stained, when the ice is thick enough to cut a canoe.

Sometimes they go to look for game; sometimes for minerals--perhaps, even, oil. No one can prophesy. 'We are only at the beginning of things.'

Said an Afrite of the Railway as we pa.s.sed in our magic carpet: 'You've no notion of the size of our tourist-traffic. It has all grown up since the early 'Nineties. The trolley car teaches people in the towns to go for little picnics. When they get more money they go for long ones. All this Continent will want playgrounds soon. We're getting them ready.'

The girl from Winnipeg saw the morning frost lie white on the long gra.s.s at the lake edges, and watched the haze of mellow golden birch leaves as they dropped. 'Now that's the way trees ought to turn,' she said. 'Don't you think our Eastern maple is a little violent in colour?' Then we pa.s.sed through a country where for many hours the talk in the cars was of mines and the treatment of ores. Men told one tales--prospectors'

yarns of the sort one used to hear vaguely before Klondike or Nome were public property. They did not care whether one believed or doubted.

They, too, were only at the beginning of things--silver perhaps, gold perhaps, nickel perhaps. If a great city did not arise at such a place--the very name was new since my day--it would a.s.suredly be born within a few miles of it. The silent men boarded the cars, and dropped off, and disappeared beyond thickets and hills precisely as the first widely s.p.a.ced line of skirmishers fans out and vanishes along the front of the day's battle.

One old man sat before me like avenging Time itself, and talked of prophecies of evil, that had been falsified. '_They_ said there wasn't nothing here excep' rocks an' snow. _They_ said there never _wouldn't_ be nothing here excep' the railroad. There's them that can't see _yit_,'

and he gimleted me with a fierce eye. 'An' all the while, fortunes is made--piles is made--right under our noses.'

'Have you made your pile?' I asked.

He smiled as the artist smiles--all true prospectors have that lofty smile--'Me? No. I've been a prospector most o' my time, but I haven't lost anything. I've had my fun out of the game. By G.o.d, I've had my fun out of it!

I told him how I had once come through when land and timber grants could have been picked up for half less than nothing.

'Yes,' he said placidly. 'I reckon if you'd had any kind of an education you could ha' made a quarter of a million dollars easy in those days.

And it's to be made now if you could see where. How? Can you tell me what the capital of the Hudson Bay district's goin' to be? You can't.

Nor I. Nor yet where the six next new cities is going to arise, I get off here, but if I have my health I'll be out next summer again--prospectin' North.'

Imagine a country where men prospect till they are seventy, with no fear of fever, fly, horse-sickness, or trouble from the natives--a country where food and water always taste good! He told me curious things about some fabled gold--the Eternal Mother-lode--out in the North, which is to humble the pride of Nome. And yet, so vast is the Empire, he had never heard the name of Johannesburg!

As the train swung round the sh.o.r.es of Lake Superior the talk swung over to Wheat. Oh yes, men said, there were mines in the country--they were only at the beginning of mines--but that part of the world existed to clean and grade and handle and deliver the Wheat by rail and steamer.

The track was being duplicated by a few hundred miles to keep abreast of the floods of it. By and by it might be a four-track road. They were only at the beginning. Meantime here was the Wheat sprouting, tender green, a foot high, among a hundred sidings where it had spilled from the cars; there were the high-shouldered, tea-caddy grain-elevators to clean, and the hospitals to doctor the Wheat; here was new, gaily painted machinery going forward to reap and bind and thresh the Wheat, and all those car-loads of workmen had been slapping down more sidings against the year's delivery of the Wheat.

Two towns stand on the sh.o.r.es of the lake less than a mile apart. What Lloyd's is to s.h.i.+pping, or the College of Surgeons to medicine, that they are to the Wheat. Its honour and integrity are in their hands; and they hate each other with the pure, poisonous, pa.s.sionate hatred which makes towns grow. If Providence wiped out one of them, the survivor would pine away and die--a mateless hate-bird. Some day they must unite, and the question of the composite name they shall then carry already vexes them. A man there told me that Lake Superior was 'a useful piece of water,' in that it lay so handy to the C.P.R. tracks. There is a quiet horror about the Great Lakes which grows as one revisits them.

Fresh water has no right or call to dip over the horizon, pulling down and pus.h.i.+ng up the hulls of big steamers; no right to tread the slow, deep-sea dance-step between wrinkled cliffs; nor to roar in on weed and sand beaches between vast headlands that run out for leagues into haze and sea-fog. Lake Superior is all the same stuff as what towns pay taxes for, but it engulfs and wrecks and drives ash.o.r.e, like a fully accredited ocean--a hideous thing to find in the heart of a continent.

Some people go sailing on it for pleasure, and it has produced a breed of sailors who bear the same relation to the salt-water variety as a snake-charmer does to a lion-tamer.

Yet it is undoubtedly a useful piece of water.

NEWSPAPERS AND DEMOCRACY

Let it be granted that, as the loud-voiced herald hired by the Eolithic tribe to cry the news of the coming day along the caves, preceded the chosen Tribal Bard who sang the more picturesque history of the tribe, so is Journalism senior to Literature, in that Journalism meets the first tribal need after warmth, food, and women.

In new countries it shows clear trace of its descent from the Tribal Herald. A tribe thinly occupying large s.p.a.ces feels lonely. It desires to hear the roll-call of its members cried often and loudly; to comfort itself with the knowledge that there are companions just below the horizon. It employs, therefore, heralds to name and describe all who pa.s.s. That is why newspapers of new countries seem often so outrageously personal. The tribe, moreover, needs quick and sure knowledge of everything that touches on its daily life in the big s.p.a.ces--earth, air, and water news which the Older Peoples have put behind them. That is why its newspapers so often seem so laboriously trivial.

For example, a red-nosed member of the tribe, Pete O'Halloran, comes in thirty miles to have his horse shod, and incidentally smashes the king-bolt of his buckboard at a bad place in the road. The Tribal Herald--a thin weekly, with a patent inside--connects the red nose and the breakdown with an innuendo which, to the outsider, is clumsy libel.

But the Tribal Herald understands that two-and-seventy families of the tribe may use that road weekly. It concerns them to discover whether the accident was due to Pete being drunk or, as Pete protests, to the neglected state of the road. Fifteen men happen to know that Pete's nose is an affliction, not an indication. One of them loafs across and explains to the Tribal Herald, who, next week, cries aloud that the road ought to be mended. Meantime Pete, warmed to the marrow at having focussed the attention of his tribe for a few moments, retires thirty miles up-stage, pursued by advertis.e.m.e.nts of buckboards guaranteed not to break their king-bolts, and later (which is what the tribe were after all the time) some tribal authority or other mends the road.

This is only a big-scale diagram, but with a little attention you can see the tribal instinct of self-preservation quite logically underrunning all sorts of queer modern developments.

As the tribe grows, and men do not behold the horizon from edge to unbroken edge, their desire to know all about the next man weakens a little--but not much. Outside the cities are still the long distances, the 'vast, unoccupied areas' of the advertis.e.m.e.nts; and the men who come and go yearn to keep touch with and report themselves as of old to their lodges. A man stepping out of the dark into the circle of the fires naturally, if he be a true man, holds up his hands and says, 'I, So-and-So, am here.' You can watch the ritual in full swing at any hotel when the reporter (_pro_ Tribal Herald) runs his eyes down the list of arrivals, and before he can turn from the register is met by the newcomer, who, without special desire for notoriety, explains his business and intentions. Observe, it is always at evening that the reporter concerns himself with strangers. By day he follows the activities of his own city and the doings of nearby chiefs; but when it is time to close the stockade, to laager the wagons, to draw the thorn-bush back into the gap, then in all lands he reverts to the Tribal Herald, who is also the tribal Outer Guard.