39 Back to the Canadian scene
It was early in September when I stepped off the train at the Canadian Pacific depot in Winnipeg. There was no one to meet me, so I was free to experience what I always experience on coming back to the golden west: a quite irrational thrill, as though something in the air itself is a missing part of me, and that now I am complete. A queer sense of coming home that has nothing to do with houses or people, or any tangible thing acceptable to reason.
I did not recognize a single thing, except the crook in Main Street, but I recognized the old heart-beat under the fine new habit. With my case in my hand, I walked up the old dog-trail, now so proudly paved and builded, and I was glad that no one had met me: that the old city that was, and the little girl that was, had this moment together. Then I boarded the River Park car, and, in a manner of speaking, put behind me one lifetime, to begin another.
A very patchy interlude followed: a queer series of conglomerate experiences that had no particular meaning, leaving behind them nothing more significant than provocative memories. To begin With, uncertain health made me more introspective than ever, more inclined to sit in the side-lines, watching the parade go by.
I had some difficulty in adjusting myself to Icelandic society, which seemed to me alien from anything I remembered. Something distinctive and treasurable had given place to Canadian commonplaces. Having suffered ostracism and condescension because of their foreignness, it seemed as though all the national energy of the people had been expanded to acquire a blameless Canadian skin, Canadian habits, and Canadian houses.
This struck me as a little ironic, considering how contemptuous the general run of Canadian was of his own country. The deprecating manner towards everything Canadian was something else that struck me very forcibly, coming, as I had, from a country that believed in its own destiny, and took pride in American endeavour.
I should have been utterly lost without the friendship of my cousin, Gudrun Johnson, who took me under her wing, as she took any stray creature, and in addition provided me with odd jobs, sewing in her shop. She introduced me to many amiable families, and finally anchored me to the Young People’s Society of our old Lutheran Church. That particular attachment had not the best effect, however. I met several young intellectuals who, while they fired my own desire to amount to something, made me painfully aware of my own ignorance—an ignorance that I then stubbornly refused to believe could be mitigated except in schools.
I used to listen to these youthful orators flinging borrowed phrases at the audience, and feel myself shrivel inside with helpless shame. And if these bright beings employed a word that was strange, I seized on it like a dying soul. And the same with the subject matter. Some one mentions Sophocles, and I rush to the library and bed myself down with Antigone, only to find, to my horror, that the yarn affects me like any other melodrama.
Creon behaves like the typical stage heavy; Antigone, like every other doomed demoiselle, hangs herself just a second before the rescuer arrives; all of it exactly what Mr Mack would have called ‘good theatre,’ but, so far as I could make out, not particularly profound, in the ethical sense, at least. But, of course, I am convinced that something is wrong with my head. I desperately pursue the incestuous descendants of Laius, and come to no better conclusion than that it still smells of melodrama.
What a crazy lot of reading I did that winter, and all of it out of respect for a plain young man who worshipped Schiller and Goethe as inimitable masters, and George Eliot for her approachability. Some day, when his education was completed, he meant to translate The Mill On the Floss into Icelandic. Some day, he meant to write.
Well, there it was. Overflowing now with all sorts of wisdom, he still thought it impertinence to attempt any original writing. So, what of my secret—my most impertinent dream of doing that very thing myself? Obviously, it was shameful to harbour such a crazy notion. It was then I made an abortive effort to try again for that tempting Normal Course.
After an interview with the principal, I suggested to mamma that I should borrow the necessary money. Heavens above! Had I lost my mind? How would I, always sick and ailing, ever discharge such an obligation? And so on and so forth? No doubt a more enterprising mortal would have gone ahead, in spite of any such opposition, but I had lived all my life under the foolish fear mamma nursed of my supposed frailty. No matter how many ailments I threw off, or whatever drudgery I performed, she still insisted on believing that heaven was my rightful home.
But in the meanwhile I had to work. I put in some agreeable months at Eaton’s, in the Mail Order Department, copying orders. During the Christmas rush I worked as a cashier.
A siege of pleurisy put an end to that, but introduced me to the country and the fine old settlers of Gimli and Icelandic River. All lame ducks were sent to my Aunt Oline to fatten and rehabilitate; and all such derelicts she welcomed with cheerful hospitality. If I have reason to be proud of anything, it is of my three remarkable aunts, for braver women never faced the world. The essence of their service became the theme and the fibre of my first novel, The Viking Heart.
I made other visits to these settlements, and in my own fashion, tabulated the gossip to which I idly listened. I also spent a happy summer with my sister Anna, in Saskatchewan, where, for the first time, I saw with adult eyes the grand prairie, in all its original wild beauty. Sister’s little house was a humble log dwelling then, shining with cheer and shouting hospitality. It was a magnet for endless visitors, many of whom were extremely interesting, professionals in the making, working their pre-emptions, or teachers.
But whether they were interesting or dull, Anna had the priceless gift, peculiar to my father’s people, and completely lacking in me, of knowing how to conduct a fluent conversation out of nothing at all. It used to waken all my former infant awe, to hear her break into spell-binding repartee with any chance traveller. She could have held concourse with a rabbit, and left the little fellow gloating with pride in his social graces.
I found in my brother-in-law, Svein, a quiet dignity and forbearance that deeply impressed me—the spiritual fortitude which I, so many years later, tried to interpret through the character of Bjorn, in The Viking Heart. It was Svein who drove me from Wadena through twenty miles of Virgin prairie on my first visit to the farm. In company less in keeping with the spirit of the land, perhaps I should not have had so vivid a recollection of ageless beauty to remember.
Perhaps I should not have seen, in the long, tawny grass of the sweeping plain, that gleaming skull which the rays of a westering sun illumined with unearthly light. Poor, bleaching thing! How swiftly the ghost of the noble past sprang from the dust! All the vanished host of the adventurous days now done! An age reincarnated in the twilight smile of the reticent plain; in this deeply silent land, that kept the peace of centuries; in a soft amber light, and a silence unbroken, save by the creak of a solitary buckboard and the muffled trot of ponies’ hooves.
It seemed to me then, and seems so still, that anything destined to endure, whether art or other creation, must do so by virtue of elemental strength. Let it be crude, let it be faulty, yet if it have, for its foundation, the decent, fearless strength of natural things, the bare bones of the skeleton will endure to give direction to the genius of New Times.
Something else that old skull brought home to me, and the spirit of the unpeopled plain confirmed it: as the leaves of grass, so are the generations; as a dream within a dream, so is our comprehension.
The prairie has become a living book to me, every mood a page, each intimately associated with some deeply moving human experience, my own, or some other. There is a sunset never seen beyond the confines of Saskatchewan and Alberta, a conflagration of golden flames, that sets the whole heaven afire—a sort of jubilee of light, that cannot be confined to one small horizon, and flings its lambent banners across the entire sky. The whole heavens on fire, and the earth, sweet as a young bride in early summer greenery, exalted, yet humble, and so softly still: that is a page that brings me back a proud young face, a-hungered with long, long thoughts. Whenever I see this rarest sight, a dear day comes back to me, and a voice, silenced for ever at Passchendaele, speaks in my ear.
For that, I love the prairie. In that, I place my faith. Dreams never die. There is another mood of the great plains that invades the heart with tender melancholy. Grey rain, falling obliquely, refracting pale sunlight in shards of delicate hue, and all the tangled meadow touched with misty colours, aquamarine, mauve, blue. That, too, belongs to the voice: to the memory of two foolish young people walking bareheaded through the rain, over the tender spring grass, lamenting the golden age when deeds of daring were to do. Life was so barren now. So safe! Sold to prosperity and commercialism. A man should be the master of his own fate, the captain of his own soul. Grey rain, and a quiet field, and somewhere, in the misty dawn, the clear voice lingers.
