Fruits of the Earth (21 page)

But had such a traveller chosen to go from north to south, he would have been arrested at regular intervals by those enormous ditches, all running parallel to each other and sloping, at the rate of four feet in a mile, towards the river which bounds this steppe of the prairie in the east. To those who lived here, these ditches were of importance not only because they were the only means which enabled them to grow their crops by carrying away the water which once flooded the prairie for months at a stretch; but also because they determined the distances which the settler had to travel when going from one point to another not in exactly the same latitude. They could be crossed only where bridges were provided, which was once in four miles. People might be neighbours, their yards separated by nothing but a ditch; yet they might have to travel four miles to get from one farm to the other.

Even at the time these man-made diggings impressed the beholder who came from a distance, with perceptions undulled by familiarity–and it was less than twenty years since they had been dug–like the prehistoric remains of a system devised by some mightier race gone to its accountings; so completely had the prairie grass obliterated the traces of the tools used in their excavation.

Altogether it is even to-day a landscape which in spite of the ever encroaching settlements of man, seems best to be
appreciated by a low, soaring flight, as by that of the marsh-hawk so commonly seen in the open season. Wild life is little abundant. Gophers–even they are rare–field mice, an occasional rabbit, meadow-larks, blackbirds–especially the redwing–and ground sparrows, in addition to hawks and burrowing owls, pretty well exhaust the native share of the vertebrate orders. Insects are represented by a few butterflies and enormous numbers of beetles and crickets–subterranean kinds–with clouds upon clouds of mosquitoes in spring and early summer. Birds that are recent immigrants congregate about towns and farms surrounded by wind-breaks.

Owing to the peculiar difficulties of drainage with which the farmer has to contend, man remains distinctly an interloper; the floods, though tamed, have not been done away with by the ditches; and in places these ditches have furnished the soil for willow-thickets which are choking them up. True, where the water once used to stand for months, it now stood only for weeks, at least in those elusive seasons which farmers call normal; but these weeks came toward the end of April and often the beginning of May when seeding was in full swing elsewhere; and the land, being the lowest, except in the far north, of the prairie provinces, seems to attract early frosts which hinder the due maturing of the grains when seeding was delayed by the flood in spring.

Such as live here, brought by those accidents of choice which commonly determine location in a new country: the nearness to the western metropolis, the possibility of breaking large tracts without the previous labour of clearing away stumps or stones, the vicinity of friends or relations, or lastly a predilection for this peculiar, melancholy landscape, bred into the blood by some atavism of sentimental tendency, are developing what is so far exceedingly rare on this
cosmopolitan continent, namely, a distinct local character and mentality.

If they have lived here for some time, a decade or longer, and have stayed on in the face of all the inevitable and unforeseen discouragements and difficulties, so that the landscape has had time to enforce in them a reaction to its own character, they seem slow, deliberate, earthbound. In their features lingers something wistful; in their speech, something hesitating, groping, almost deprecatory and apologetic; in their silences, something almost eloquent.

It is a landscape in which, to him who surrenders himself, the sense of one's life as a whole seems always present, birth and death being mere scansions in the flow of a somewhat debilitated stream of vitality. It is not surprising, then, that, physical facts notwithstanding, the difference in the mood produced by day or night, or by summer or winter, seems less pronounced than elsewhere. True, the average day is hot in summer; and the night is cold. But the discomfort caused by the heat does not seem essentially different from the discomfort caused by the cold; the effect of both partakes of the effect of a lid placed over slow ebullition. Perhaps the time best fitted to bring out the characteristic impression of the landscape is neither noon nor midnight but the first grey dawn of day, especially a dull day; or the first dim dusk of night, that dusk in which horizons become blurred and the height of human buildings seems diminished. And similarly the time of year most in harmony with the scene is neither summer nor winter; but rather the first few days of spring while the snow still lies in dirty patches and, from the heights in the west, the floods send down their first invading trickles which follow the imperceptible hollows of the ground; or the first drear approach of November days, with indurating winds and desolate flurries of snow in the air.

The prevailing silence–for, apart from man's dwellings, not even the wind finds anything to play its tunes on–is accentuated rather than disturbed by the sibilant hum, in early summer, of the myriads of mosquitoes that haunt the air, bred in stagnant pools, and the shrill notes, in the early autumn, of the swarm of black crickets that literally cover the soil. That silence, like the flat landscape itself, has something haunted about it, something almost furtive….

Abe, now that he was becoming conscious of this landscape at last, and of its significance, could at first hardly understand that he, of all men, should have chosen this district to settle in, though it suited him well enough now. But even that became clear. He had looked down at his feet; had seen nothing but the furrow; had considered the prairie only as a page to write the story of his life upon. His vision had been bounded by the lines of his farm; his farm had been floated on that prairie as the shipwright floats a vessel on the sea, looking not so much at the waves which are to batter it as at the fittings which secure the comfort of those within. But such a vessel may be engulfed by such a sea.

When, these days, he approached his place, the place built to dominate the prairie, he succumbed to the illusion that he who had built it was essentially different from him who had to live in it. More and more the wind-break surrounding his yard seemed to be a rampart which, without knowing it, he had erected to keep out a hostile world. Occasionally the great house seemed nothing less than a mausoleum to enshrine the memory of a child.

Abe felt defeated; at least in so far as he was what he had been; perhaps that defeat would slowly become apparent to the outside world. But the world defeats only him who has already been defeated in his heart. And was it a defeat? He was changing
his aim; that aim was now to live on, not in a material sense, through his economic achievement, but in what he did for district and municipality. No rural school of the west had ever been guided like his; no municipality had weathered the war like that of Somerville. As far as his economic ambitions went, he had reached his goal. He might go on making money; what for? Material aspirations meant nothing. He had the house; and he found no pleasure in it. For fifteen years he had dreamed of what he would do when he had it; now it seemed useless.

Economically, the war had been hard on him. The price of wheat had been fixed for the farmer; for nobody else had the price of anything been fixed; by legislation, the farmer had been the prey of all preying interests. Everybody else in the district felt the same way; nobody was surprised at the fact that Abe had arrested progress. He was biding his time. For outwardly he had changed little. He had replaced his ageing bronchos by another driving team, still more magnificent. When he drove to town, he sat as straight in buggy or sleigh as ever. He spoke as little; whatever he had to say was always concerned with business; and it was always said to the point.

Abe was well-to-do. Did he not show it by the way in which his children were dressed? Was not Marion, at Somerville, paying thirty dollars a month for her board? Abe might be a little heavier and older. He was as headstrong as ever. Was he not running school and district?

How was it, then, that he was more and more discussed? That it was necessary for his friends to contradict such assertions as that he was “land poor,” that he had sunk his wealth in the soil which, sooner or later, he would find himself unable to till? That the time was coming when he would have to withdraw from the offices which he held? That others would shortly take hold?

THE CHANGING DISTRICT

T
he fact was there was unrest in the district; and that unrest was greatly increased by the coming of another settler. The story of John Elliot's coming was that of the rise in the price of flax.

Throughout the years of the war, flax had shown erratic tendencies; now its price was soaring towards a peak. John Elliot had repeatedly appeared in the district to look things over. He was a short, stout, round-shouldered man of thirty, with a round, full face, tanned brick-red from his eyebrows down; above that line, his bulging forehead was white, protected by a wide-brimmed sombrero. He had been farming in the short-grass country of Saskatchewan, a wheat district pure and simple. He seemed to have money and an equipment superior to that of any one but Abe; and he was what Abe was not, a “mixer.” Though he was ugly–his mouth was large, and his nether lip shovel-shaped and pendent–he made friends at once. He was always laughing and joking, displaying gold-filled teeth. Even while travelling, he wore a white-and-blue checked shirt and a pair of cotton trousers; and somehow he conveyed the impression that he was too well off to need the appearance of prosperity.

He wanted land; and flax land at that. Nearly the whole district was flax land; and plenty of it was available. The trouble was that a man could homestead only a hundred and sixty acres. “Do you think I'd be satisfied with a measly quarter? I want a half at the least. Any of you fellows willing to sell? Good night, boys. Nothing doing. Not for me. What's that? Hudson's Bay land? Where?”

The south half and north-west quarter of section twenty-six, opposite Hilmer's Corner, were vacant; and these three quarters, like Abe's north section, were part of that twentieth of land which was left to the Company when they surrendered their sovereignty.

“Ye-es,” John Elliot said. That might suit him.

But land values had gone up since the war. Abe had bought his section for three thousand six hundred dollars. Now the price was four thousand dollars a quarter section. Time to pay in? Pay ten per cent down; the balance within thirty years.

One day somebody picked up the news at Somerville that a deal had been struck. Rumour, always willing to believe what flatters the interests of the many, had it that Elliot had paid spot cash for the land; but a private loan company registered a mortgage on the land which amounted to three thousand dollars more than the purchase price.

Still, it was staggering. Twenty years ago the site of a farm had not been worth taking; right now a quarter section could be had for the asking. And just because one quarter section was not enough for this man, he bought three quarters for twelve thousand dollars. As always in a boom so called, a temporary, disproportionate, and unjustified rise in price was taken for permanent; a condition that was bound to produce the corresponding slump.

“By gosh!” Wheeldon said at Nicoll's Corner. “What's the bright idea?”

“High finance,” Henry Topp replied.

“The idea is flax,” said Stanley.

Henry's brother Dave, invalided home during the previous winter, nodded in that peculiar way which he had brought back from overseas and which made people say that “he was not all there” any longer.

Nicoll, too, rarely smiled these days; his eldest boy Tom had been killed in action. “I suppose the man knows what he's doing.”

And Stanley shrugged his armless shoulder. “If the war lasts–”

At which more than one head nodded; and everybody resolved that next year he, too, was going to “take a shot at flax.”

“Look here,” Wheeldon said into the silence. “The fellow's got children. We should have him on the school board.”

The silence of the others remained unbroken. Everybody knew what Wheeldon was driving at. As soon as the war was over, consolidation was going to be an issue throughout the ward. More and more children in Spalding District had reached or were about to reach high-school age. As elsewhere in the Canadian west it was an ever-present problem what to do with or for adolescent children. There was land a-plenty; but it takes money to start a boy. Hiring out on the farm did not pay, though Horanski was drawing fifty dollars a month and had land for garden and potato patch, milk, and fuel besides. In the city and in construction camps a man could earn three or four dollars a day. Shilloe's and Nawosad's eldest boys had gone. Bill Stanley and the third Nicoll boy, Stan, made no secret of it that, if they returned from the wars, they had no intention of going back to the farm. And
it was worse for the girls; for opportunities to get married were lacking: with half the youth of the country dead in Flanders or disabled at home, it seemed imperative that parents should train their daughters to make a living of their own. If a high-school education were within reach, girls could be nurses or teachers. Teachers' salaries were rising; and it was easy to become a teacher. A hundred dollars a month was being paid!

Years ago Abe had put in a good word for the plan of consolidating half a dozen rural districts into one educational centre at Morley; but incomprehensibly he had turned against the scheme, without volunteering reasons for his change of front. It took Nicoll's stubborn loyalty not to abandon an allegiance thus sorely tried.

Ever since Spalding District had been formed Abe had sat in the chair; and Nicoll had been secretary-treasurer. The third position on the board had been successively filled by Hartley, Stanley, and Wheeldon. As soon as Wheeldon was naturalized he had tried to have himself elected; but there had been a feeling that it was best not to embarrass Abe. At last, however, Abe himself had said, “Put him in office. Let him air his complaints at the meetings of the board. If he can convince one of us, he will have his way.” Since his election, business had been conducted in a more formal manner. Thus, in the spring of 1917, Nicoll had been in need of a small sum of money due to him for having taken the census of the district; and Abe had simply signed the cheque. Wheeldon had kicked up a row. Such accounts must be passed at a regular meeting of the board. “Not,” he said to Nicoll, “that I grudge you the cheque. You'd have got it anyway. But it isn't business; and it isn't legal.” He was right; but in the rush of seeding it was inconvenient to hold a meeting. Most ratepayers considered
the matter a trifle not worth the ado that was being made about it. Yet Wheeldon was beginning to have a following: Hartley, Henry Topp, and others.