Delphi complete works of.., p.384
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 384
Alldone had barely finished his chops and followed them with apple pie and doughnuts, more to conserve his strength than because they were included in the price of the chops, when a messenger boy entered with a special news cable bulletin for the proprietor.
“Read it, read it,” called several of the men.
The proprietor looked at it, turned a trifle pale and shook his head. “You read it,” he said to Mr. Alldone.
Alldone stood up and read the dispatch:
“London, Friday, 3 p.m., Queen Victoria stricken with attack of gout. Royal Physician, Sir Magnus Alhell in attendance.”
There was a gasp from the listeners.
“Sir Magnus has prescribed a complete rest for Her Majesty, urging that she must not open Parliament today; he insists on her taking a pint of burgundy every half hour. If she won’t, he will.”
There was a chorus of approval. “He will, eh? That’s the stuff,” they said. Men recognize the true British spirit when they see it.
“Wait a minute,” said Alldone, “there’s more on the back . . . He will not be responsible. That’s it.”
Well, — there was nothing to do but wait, — wait and hope. But meantime, to all of them must occur the thought, what is Canada doing? Will Canada give no help? Where is Ottawa? Some didn’t know.
For Alldone, the afternoon wore away with the same listless waiting. He was glad when the day drew to its end, glad to walk back home without waiting for the horse car, though he could see it not far behind him, glad even to find himself back in his own home.
Then came the first break in the clouds.
His wife was standing in the doorway, waving an afternoon paper. “Look — look!” she called. “Isn’t it splendid?”
A moment later, Alldone, his eyes almost dazzled with joy, was sitting reading the latest bulletin from Glasgow:
“LORD KELVIN EXPLAINS. LONGER PERIOD ASSIGNED TO EARTH’S DURATION.
“Lord Kelvin drove to the office of the Glasgow Times to-day to explain his statement of yesterday and said that his estimate of the earth’s duration is not five thousand years but five billion. The error was solely due to a shortage of type in the printing office, only three naughts being available for this item. The proprietors of the newspaper at fault have apologized very handsomely to Lord Kelvin and paid his cab fare both ways.”
They both sighed with relief! It was good to be back in the happy old world, with five billion years all their own.
But there were bigger and brighter and happier things still to come.
They had hardly risen from their simple dinner — a joint and a fowl — when they heard the newsboy outside in the gathering dusk calling, “Special, Extra! — War News Extra!”
Alldone rushed out for the paper — money didn’t matter now — and when he brought it in, read out to his wife in a voice half choked with emotion but ringing with pride:
Canada to Britain’s Aid: Dominion will send contingent up the Brahmapootra . . . Then followed all the glad news that was making many a home proud that evening: —
“It is announced from Ottawa that a Canadian War Contingent will be at once sent up the Brahmapootra. The force will consist of a hundred men, eighty of them trained voyageurs, and the rest on snow-shoes. The Prime Minister has assured the country that none of the expense will fall on Canada. He is not prepared to say where it will fall, but it won’t be here.”
“Isn’t it simply wonderful?” said Ella, as she bent over her husband and kissed him. Then as she did so, her eye caught a final stop-press news item along the foot of the paper.
“QUEEN VICTORIA OPENS PARLIAMENT ON ONE LEG.”
“Oh, Edward!” — and with that she crossed over to the piano (she was a trained musician), struck the opening chords, and said, “Come, Edward, sing . . . ‘God . . . save . . . our gracious . . . Queen’.”
ANGEL POND, LURE OF THE NORTH
(“NORTH, I THINK it is, they call it, where the Sons of Women are Men. . . .” One of those Poets.)
Who should I meet the other evening in the rotunda of the Big Hotel but Charlie Blunt. I knew he’d been “up north” for a year or more; in fact it was the first thing he said. But I could have told it anyway — so could you. You can always tell the fellows just “down from the north” at a glance; that look of perfect physical condition, brown and tanned — well, not exactly tanned — dirty? No, I wouldn’t just say dirty — but, you know — dark looking — the Indians get it themselves; neatly shaved — I mean, neatly three-quarters shaved — they don’t go further in the north; standing square and stocky as if he were on snow-shoes. When Charlie stepped he lifted his feet well up — not to trip over branches.
“Yes,” he said, “I’m just down from Angel Pond — that’s where our new mine is — down here to buy machinery, and hang it, it’s all held up, everything’s held up these days — I’ll be kicking round six weeks waiting for it.”
I saw at once that Charlie was like all the rest of them; no use for any place but the North. You’d think a fellow would be glad to get away from a place like Angel Pond in winter. But, oh no!
“Where is Angel Pond anyway, Charlie?” I asked.
“Angel Pond?” he answered, “well — do you know where God’s Lake is?”
“No—”
“Well, it’s a long way east of that, anyway. You know Little Jesus River?”
“No—”
“. . . where you portage to All Saints Creek . . .”
“A pretty religious set of names you have up there, Charlie,” I said.
“They are,” he assented with a laugh. “It was the French who first went through that country in the early days. They’re a devout people and they like to give all the rivers and portages their religious names. The idea was that it helped them to get through . . .”
“Is that so?”
“I like it,” Charlie went on. “We’ve tried to imitate it in English on our side of the divide round Angel Pond — we’ve got Lower Devil River and All Hell Elbow and Beelzebub Rapids. It’s a good idea, isn’t it? But say,” he continued, “come on with me upstairs. There’s a bunch of fellers up there in a room that I was just going to join. I guess you know some of them . . .”
There is always a “bunch of fellers upstairs in a room” at the Big Hotel. I think they keep roomfuls of them on purpose. I knew what they would look like before we even started up — a big sitting-room, filled with blue tobacco smoke, a lot of bottles on the tables — a bowl of ice — some lemons (the fellers never use the lemons; they just order them) — anyway, lemons, matches, cigars, all those things that go nicely round a whiskey bottle . . .
We got into the elevator, Charlie stepping well over the loose branches as he got in, and up we went, and there the fellers were, just like that. They’re always the same; you don’t exactly remember their faces, and you don’t quite recall their names, but you don’t need to . . .
Even if you didn’t know them you’d recognize them by their talk. Just as we came in one was saying, “I paid three cents and then like a damn fool I let it go at seven cents.” Some one else murmured, “I let it go at eight . . .” and another said, “It was nineteen cents today.” People not used to high finance get dazzled with figures like these . . .
But the talk broke off into loud greetings of “Hullo, Charlie . . . Have a Scotch, Charlie! Say When! . . . Here try this one—” and so on.
“How did you come out, Charlie?” asked one of the “fellers.” “Is it easy?”
Anyone who knows the speech of the north, understands that doesn’t mean how did you succeed. It means how did you make your way out of the hundreds of miles of tangled wilderness . . .
“Oh, it’s easy,” Charlie said. “There’s no difficulty with Angel Pond. You can either go by rail to Sioux Lookout and then canoe and portage from there . . . or round from God’s Lake to Old Shoes . . . It’s only a hundred and fifty to two hundred miles either way. You can do it in a week.”
“Are the flies bad in summer?” asked someone.
“Oh, the flies are nothing to us . . . you just smear your face thick with any kind of fat, groundhog fat, skunk’s fat — and wrap a heavy veil over your face and slip a leather coat over everything else. They never get you that way . . .”
“Can’t you get in by plane?” someone asked.
“Not exactly. The Pond, Angel Pond, itself is too small to land on and the trees are too thick for landing anywhere near. There’s Paradise Lake, quite big enough, but it’s twenty miles away and some people don’t like it . . . they don’t care to come that way.”
“Don’t like it?”
“No, there’s a good many wolves through there. Of course, people have the craziest idea about the wolves up north. As a matter of fact a timber wolf has to be mighty hungry before he’ll attack anyone — I mean in daytime.”
“He would at night?”
“Yes, he might, especially if there’s a bunch of them running in the woods together . . . but you can always hear the howls in time . . .”
“Hear the howls?”
“Yes, and get up a tree . . . there’s lots of jack pine there, you know, and once you get up in a jack pine, well, there you are.”
“Up in the jack pine!” said a fellow.
“Exactly,” said Charlie; he took everything literally, “and in the morning they’re gone.”
Charlie paused a minute and a shadow passed across his face. Perhaps he was hearing the howl of the wolves on a frozen lake in the bush country.
“Have another Scotch, Charlie.”
“Thanks,” he said, and drank it in that plain straightforward way they have in the north. That is to say he drank it. Then it was gone.
“People have got,” he said, as he put down the glass, “the craziest ideas about the north country.”
“It’s not really cold, is it?” someone asked. There is always a smart Aleck in a group of “fellers.”
“Not as a rule,” Charlie said. (He never distinguished jest from earnest; they don’t up there; either you mean a thing or it’s an insult.) “Not as a rule, certainly not at the Pond. I’ve known it, even in January, that the thermometer will get up to fifteen and stay there day after day, never colder.”
“Fifteen above zero?”
“Fifteen below . . . of course, I don’t say that’s usual. More likely you get that for a day or two and then it turns really cold.”
“What’s the place like anyway, Charlie?” asked a man who this time really wanted to know. “Is there a town? Are there shops? and churches and places?”
“Why, of course,” said Charlie, “just like any other place, or pretty nearly. You see, there’s the mine — of course we’re not producing yet, but we’re getting pretty well developed — there’s the mine — and, of course, there’s the men’s quarters — they’re all right, the men — most of them. They’re Polacks, mostly, but they’re all right. They don’t speak much English, but that’s all right. Well, there’s the mine, and quite a few houses, like Dan Clough’s, the machine superintendent’s, he’s down here with me getting machinery. Well there’s his house, and quite a few like that . . .”
“A church?”
“Yes, certainly, what do you think we are? There’s a church, or at least we’ve put a building up, a dandy, that we can use for a church — jack pine and tamarack — with open fireplaces and lockers for bottles — we’re using it as a sort of club just now because we’ve no one to preach in it yet . . . the boys play poker in it. We’ve got electric light and all kinds of modern comforts like, well — electric light and those sort of things . . .”
“Well, what kind of fellers are up there?” persisted the questioner.
“What kind of fellers?” Charlie answered almost angrily. “Why, first class! What would you expect? Some of the fellers are working for the company, and others come through surveying and prospecting. Now you take Freddie de Vere, — he came out from England. Freddie had been at Oxford but he was all right. You’d never notice the difference. Freddie was with us for months and months last year. He brought out money to invest but he lost it.”
“In mines?”
“No — just with the boys. He’s gone back for more. He has an uncle who is a big English financier — I don’t mean a crook, I mean an English financier — Freddie may get him to invest in Angel Pond but this uncle wants to make sure. He wants to be assured first about the question of its being crooked. If he wasn’t sure of that he wouldn’t put in a cent. The boys are looking forward to Freddie coming back. He was popular . . .”
Then someone asked the question we all had in mind.
“Any women?”
“Women! Why, of course, women, and some mighty nice cultivated women too. Take Mrs. Clough — that’s Dan Clough’s wife, the machine superintendent; he’s down with me now — the Senora, we call her . . . she’s from Mexico. Her first husband was hanged down there. But that’s nothing against her. And her present husband, Dan, is A1. So was her second husband, too. Dan knew him in Mexico. He was shot. Then Dan brought her up here. She’s a mighty fine woman, cultivated — experienced.”
“She must be,” remarked a feller. But it went past.
“Then there is Mrs. Macdonough, Sandy Macdonough’s wife. He’s the government surveyor.”
“Scotch?” asked someone.
“He is,” said Charlie, “he’s from New Brunswick. She’s a MicMac. That’s why he brought her up. There’s quite a little group of women . . . they’re all right, too, better than a lot of your darned . . .”
He paused and the shadow fell. It hadn’t occurred to him to doubt the merit of those whom they called the “girls” up at Angel Pond.
“Have another Scotch, Charlie,” someone said. He drank it.
What was the good of trying to explain the North to a bunch of flats in the city, who had no idea what it’s really like . . . it all seems to come out wrong. Charlie Blunt’s good-tempered face took on a saddened look.
Charlie, I say, seemed a little discouraged. The shadow had fallen across his face. He took his drink and there was a moment’s silence. Then one of the “fellers” just to put him in countenance again, said gently:
“And you hope to get a clergyman there at Angel Pond, presently?”
“Oh, yes,” Charlie said, “in fact we have our eye on the very man, if he’s not too big for us to swing. You’ve probably heard of Reverend Irwin?”
No one had.
“We had him, Irwin, down to see us last winter. He’s the Bishop of Belcher Islands, they call him the ‘Apostle of the North.’ Ever heard of him?”
It stuck in my mind that I’d heard of about twenty “Apostles of the North,” more than the original crowd, but I couldn’t remember this one.
“He’s a great feller,” said Charlie. “He’s a huge, husky-looking man, so big he’d throw any two of us all round. He’d do it, too, mind you in a minute. He’s the real thing, that man — no religious stuff, you know what I mean — takes a drink any time, takes a cigar, takes anything. What do you think that man did? He went the year before last right up among the Eskimos along the north of the Bay, lived right among them — just shared everything they had; just took what they’d got and never asked for anything else . . .”
“Yes. It was their special seal season when they catch the young seal and have the blubber feasts. The Bishop just sat right in and ate blubber — more than they could.”
“He did, eh?”
“And the year before that he went right across the plains — You know where the Athabascan Indians have their big annual cariboo hunt east of Lake Athabasca? Well, the Bishop went and lived with them — just like one of themselves, shared everything with them, just what they had, food, tobacco — just one of themselves. That’s the season you know, of the cariboo meat feast. He was in that.”
“And what did the Bishop come to you for, Charlie?” asked the smart Aleck.
“He’d run out of chewing tobacco,” Charlie answered, “but he never complained, just started out for three hundred miles on snowshoes. He’d been with the Mounted Police, near God’s Lake.”
“Preaching to them?” someone asked.
“No, helping them to find whiskey . . . often and often he finds it when no one else can. ‘Let me get it,’ he says, and goes out all alone. Well, anyway he ran out of chewing tobacco and he came all the way down to get some at Angel Pond.”
“Did he preach to you at Angel Pond?” we asked.
“He was going to,” Charlie said, “he was all set to, but the way it was — that very Sunday, not knowing he was coming, they’d arranged to use the church for a big euchre game, so the Bishop joined in that instead. But he carried out a baptism there right after the game—”
“One of the children?”
“No, there weren’t any. It was an old Indian, Musquash Joe — they say he’s a hundred and ten years old. The Bishop found he’d never been baptised and baptised him right there . . .”
“In a font?”
“No, with a teaspoon with a little whiskey. He’s like that — always finds a way to do a thing. He’s a great fellow—” Charlie repeated— “more good than all these high-toned city clergymen put together. He left us to strike right across to Lake Mistassini. The Indians over there — they’re Montagnais, you know, and haven’t changed since Champlain — hold their dog feast once a year. The Bishop was timing himself for that. You know,” said Charlie, “I think a man like that spreads Christianity, gets people to know it, better than all the darned . . .”
But just at that moment another man shoved the door of the room open and appeared in the doorway with a bag in each hand.
“Say, Charlie,” he called, “you’ll have to hurry. The train goes in fifteen minutes and we can only just make it. I’ve got the reservations and everything . . .”
“All right,” said Charlie, as he rose in a chorus of good-byes and good wishes.
I walked out into the corridor to say good-bye.
