Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (918 page)

The senior partner was regarding the rebel with grave-eyed reproach.

“I thought you did,” said I. “I don’t suppose American girls are much different from English ones in instinct.”

“Isn’t it Théophile Gautier who says that the only differences between country and country lie in the slang and the uniform of the police?”

Now in the name of all the Gods at once, what is one to say to a young lady (who in England would be a Person) who earns her own bread, and very naturally hates the employ, and slings out-of-the-way quotations at your head? That one falls in love with her goes without saying; but that is not enough.

A mission should be established.

No. XXVI

TAKES ME THROUGH BRET HARTE’S COUNTRY, AND TO PORTLAND WITH “OLD MAN CALIFORNIA.” EXPLAINS HOW TWO VAGABONDS BECAME HOMESICK THROUGH LOOKING AT OTHER PEOPLE’S HOUSES.

“I walked in the lonesome even, And who so sad as I, As I saw the young men and maidens Merrily passing by?”

San Francisco has only one drawback. ‘Tis hard to leave. When like the pious Hans Breitmann I “cut that city by the sea” it was with regrets for the pleasant places left behind, for the men who were so clever, and the women who were so witty, for the “dives,” the beer-halls, the bucket-shops, and the poker-hells where humanity was going to the Devil with shouting and laughter and song and the rattle of dice-boxes. I would fain have stayed, but I feared that an evil end would come to me when my money was all spent and I descended to the street corner. A voice inside me said: “Get out of this. Go north. Strike for Victoria and Vancouver. Bask for a day under the shadow of the old flag.” So I set forth from San Francisco to Portland in Oregon, and that was a railroad run of thirty-six hours.

The Oakland railway terminus, whence all the main lines start, does not own anything approaching to a platform. A yard with a dozen or more tracks is roughly asphalted, and the traveller laden with hand-bags skips merrily across the metals in search of his own particular train. The bells of half a dozen shunting engines are tolling suggestively in his ears. If he is run down, so much the worse for him. “When the bell rings, look out for the locomotive.” Long use has made the nation familiar and even contemptuous towards trains to an extent which God never intended. Women who in England would gather up their skirts and scud timorously over a level crossing in the country, here talk dress and babies under the very nose of the cow-catcher, and little children dally with the moving car in a manner horrible to behold. We pulled out at the wholly insignificant speed of twenty-five miles an hour through the streets of a suburb of fifty thousand, and in our progress among the carts and the children and the shop fronts slew nobody; at which I was not a little disappointed.

When the negro porter bedded me up for the night and I had solved the problem of undressing while lying down, — I was much cheered by the thought that if anything happened I should have to stay where I was and wait till the kerosene lamps set the overturned car alight and burned me to death. It is easier to get out of a full theatre than to leave a Pullman in haste.

By the time I had discovered that a profusion of nickel-plating, plush, and damask does not compensate for closeness and dust, the train ran into the daylight on the banks of the Sacramento River. A few windows were gingerly opened after the bunks had been reconverted into seats, but that long coffin-car was by no means ventilated, and we were a gummy, grimy crew who sat there. At six in the morning the heat was distinctly unpleasant, but seeing with the eye of the flesh that I was in Bret Harte’s own country, I rejoiced. There were the pines and madrone-clad hills his miners lived and fought among; there was the heated red earth that showed whence the gold had been washed; the dry gulch, the red, dusty road where Hamblin was used to stop the stage in the intervals of his elegant leisure and superior card-play; there was the timber felled and sweating resin in the sunshine; and, above all, there was the quivering pungent heat that Bret Harte drives into your dull brain with the magic of his pen. When we stopped at a collection of packing-cases dignified by the name of a town, my felicity was complete. The name of the place was something offensive, — Amberville or Jacksonburgh, — but it owned a cast-iron fountain worthy of a town of thirty thousand. Next to the fountain was a “hotel,” at least seventeen feet high including the chimney, and next to the hotel was the forest — the pine, the oak, and the untrammelled undergrowth of the hillside. A cinnamon-bear cub — Baby Sylvester in the very fur — was tied to the stump of a tree opposite the fountain; a pack-mule dozed in the dust-haze, a red-shirted miner in a slouch hat supported the hotel, a blue-shirted miner swung round the corner, and the two went indoors for a drink. A girl came out of the only other house but one, and shading her eyes with a brown hand stared at the panting train. She didn’t recognise me, but I knew her — had known her for years. She was M’liss. She never married the schoolmaster, after all, but stayed, always young and always fair, among the pines. I knew Red-Shirt too. He was one of the bearded men who stood back when Tennessee claimed his partner from the hands of the Law. The Sacramento River, a few yards away, shouted that all these things were true. The train went on while Baby Sylvester stood on his downy head, and M’liss swung her sun-bonnet by the strings.

“What do you think?” said a lawyer who was travelling with me. “It’s a new world to you; isn’t it?”

“No. It’s quite familiar. I was never out of England; it’s as if I saw it all.”

Quick as light came the answer: “‘Yes, they lived once thus at Venice when the miners were the kings.’”

I loved that lawyer on the spot. We drank to Bret Harte who, you remember, “claimed California, but California never claimed him. He’s turned English.”

Lying back in state, I waited for the flying miles to turn over the pages of the book I knew. They brought me all I desired — from the Man of no Account sitting on a stump and playing with a dog, to “that most sarcastic man, the quiet Mister Brown.” He boarded the train from out of the woods, and there was venom and sulphur on his tongue. He had just lost a lawsuit. Only Yuba Bill failed to appear. The train had taken his employment from him. A nameless ruffian backed me into a corner and began telling me about the resources of the country, and what it would eventually become. All I remember of his lecture was that you could catch trout in the Sacramento River — the stream that we followed so faithfully.

Then rose a tough and wiry old man with grizzled hair and made inquiries about the trout. To him was added the secretary of a life-insurance company. I fancy he was travelling to rake in the dead that the train killed. But he, too, was a fisherman, and the two turned to meward. The frankness of a Westerner is delightful. They tell me that in the Eastern States I shall meet another type of man and a more reserved. The Californian always speaks of the man from the New England States as a different breed. It is our Punjab and Madras over again, but more so. The old man was on a holiday in search of fish. When he discovered a brother-loafer he proposed a confederation of rods. Quoth the insurance-agent, “I’m not staying any time in Portland, but I will introduce you to a man there who’ll tell you about fishing.” The two told strange tales as we slid through the forests and saw afar off the snowy head of a great mountain. There were vineyards, fruit orchards, and wheat fields where the land opened out, and every ten miles or so, twenty or thirty wooden houses and at least three churches. A large town would have a population of two thousand and an infinite belief in its own capacities. Sometimes a flaring advertisement flanked the line, calling for men to settle down, take up the ground, and make their home there. At a big town we could pick up the local newspaper, narrow as the cutting edge of a chisel and twice as keen — a journal filled with the prices of stock, notices of improved reaping and binding machines, movements of eminent citizens — ”whose fame beyond their own abode extends — for miles along the Harlem road.” There was not much grace about these papers, but all breathed the same need for good men, steady men who would plough, and till, and build schools for their children, and make a township in the hills. Once only I found a sharp change in the note and a very pathetic one. I think it was a young soul in trouble who was writing poetry. The editor had jammed the verses between the flamboyant advertisement of a real-estate agent — a man who sells you land and lies about it — and that of a Jew tailor who disposed of “nobby” suits at “cut-throat prices.” Here are two verses; I think they tell their own story: —

“God made the pine with its root in the earth, Its top in the sky; They have burned the pine to increase the worth Of the wheat and the silver rye.

“Go weigh the cost of the soul of the pine Cut off from the sky; And the price of the wheat that grows so fine And the worth of the silver rye!”

The thin-lipped, keen-eyed men who boarded the train would not read that poetry, or, if they did, would not understand. Heaven guard that poor pine in the desert and keep “its top in the sky”!

When the train took to itself an extra engine and began to breathe heavily, some one said that we were ascending the Siskiyou Mountains. We had been climbing steadily from San Francisco, and at last won to over four thousand feet above sea-level, always running through forest. Then, naturally enough, we came down, but we dropped two thousand two hundred feet in about thirteen miles. It was not so much the grinding of the brakes along the train, or the sight of three curves of track apparently miles below us, or even the vision of a goods-train apparently just under our wheels, or even the tunnels, that made me reflect; it was the trestles over which we crawled, — trestles something over a hundred feet high and looking like a collection of match-sticks.

“I guess our timber is as much a curse as a blessing,” said the old man from Southern California. “These trestles last very well for five or six years; then they get out of repair, and a train goes through ‘em, or else a forest fire burns ‘em up.”

This was said in the middle of a groaning, shivering trestle. An occasional plate-layer took a look at us as we went down, but that railway didn’t waste men on inspection duty. Very often there were cattle on the track, against which the engine used a diabolical form of whistling. The old man had been a driver in his youth, and beguiled the way with cheery anecdotes of what might be expected if we fouled a young calf.

“You see, they get their legs under the cow-catcher and that’ll put an engine off the line. I remember when a hog wrecked an excursion-train and killed sixty people. ‘Guess the engineer will look out, though.”

There is considerably too much guessing about this large nation. As one of them put it rather forcibly: “We guess a trestle will stand for ever, and we guess that we can patch up a washout on the track, and we guess the road’s clear, and sometimes we guess ourselves into the
deepot
, and sometimes we guess ourselves into Hell.”

The descent brought us far into Oregon and a timber and wheat country. We drove through wheat and pine in alternate slices, but pine chiefly, till we reached Portland, which is a city of fifty thousand, possessing the electric light of course, equally, of course, devoid of pavements, and a port of entry about a hundred miles from the sea at which big steamers can load. It is a poor city that cannot say it has no equal on the Pacific coast. Portland shouts this to the pines which run down from a thousand-foot ridge clear up to the city. You may sit in a bedizened bar-room furnished with telephone and clicker, and in half an hour be in the woods.

Portland produces lumber and jig-saw fittings for houses, and beer and buggies, and bricks and biscuit; and, in case you should miss the fact, there are glorified views of the town hung up in public places with the value of the products set down in dollars. All this is excellent and exactly suitable to the opening of a new country; but when a man tells you it is civilisation, you object. The first thing that the civilised man learns to do is to keep the dollars in the background, because they are only the oil of the machine that makes life go smoothly.

Portland is so busy that it can’t attend to its own sewage or paving, and the four-storey brick blocks front cobble-stones and plank sidewalks and other things much worse. I saw a foundation being dug out. The sewage of perhaps twenty years ago, had thoroughly soaked into the soil, and there was a familiar and Oriental look about the compost that flew up with each shovel-load. Yet the local papers, as was just and proper, swore there was no place like Portland, Oregon, U.S.A., chronicled the performances of Oregonians, “claimed” prominent citizens elsewhere as Oregonians, and fought tooth and nail for dock, rail, and wharfage projects. And you could find men who had thrown in their lives with the city, who were bound up in it, and worked their life out for what they conceived to be its material prosperity. Pity it is to record that in this strenuous, labouring town there had been, a week before, a shooting-case. One well-known man had shot another on the street, and was now pleading self-defence because the other man had, or the murderer thought he had, a pistol about him. Not content with shooting him dead, he squibbed off his revolver into him as he lay. I read the pleadings, and they made me ill. So far as I could judge, if the dead man’s body had been found with a pistol on it, the shooter would have gone free. Apart from the mere murder, cowardly enough in itself, there was a refinement of cowardice in the plea. Here in this civilised city the surviving brute was afraid he would be shot — fancied he saw the other man make a motion to his hip-pocket, and so on. Eventually the jury disagreed. And the degrading thing was that the trial was reported by men who evidently understood all about the pistol, was tried before a jury who were versed in the etiquette of the hip-pocket, and was discussed on the streets by men equally initiate.