The Forest | Page 7

poles for when you come back
up-stream," interprets your friend. "I guess that's right. I ain't got none,
but th' blacksmith'll fit you out all right. You'll find him just
below--never mind, don't you bother, I'll see to all that for you."
The next morning he saunters into view at the river-bank. "Thought I'd
see you off," he replies to your expression of surprise at his early rising.
"Take care of yourself." And so the last hand-clasp of civilization is
extended to you from the little Aromatic Shop.
Occasionally, however, though very rarely, you step to the Long Trail
from the streets of a raw modern town. The chance presence of some
local industry demanding a large population of workmen, combined
with first-class railroad transportation, may plant an electric-lighted,
saloon-lined, brick-hoteled city in the middle of the wilderness.
Lumber, mines--especially of the baser metals or commercial
minerals--fisheries, a terminus of water freightage, may one or all call
into existence a community a hundred years in advance of its
environment. Then you lose the savour of the jump-off. Nothing can
quite take the place of the instant plunge into the wilderness, for you
must travel three or four days from such a place before you sense the
forest in its vastness, even though deer may eat the cabbages at the
edge of town. Occasionally, however, by force of crude contrast to the
brick-heated atmosphere, the breath of the woods reaches your cheek,
and always you own a very tender feeling for the cause of it.
Dick and myself were caught in such a place. It was an unfinished little
town, with brick-fronted stores, arc-lights swaying over fathomless

mud, big superintendent's and millowner's houses of bastard
architecture in a blatant superiority of hill location, a hotel whose office
chairs supported a variety of cheap drummers, and stores screeching in
an attempt at metropolitan smartness. We inspected the standpipe and
the docks, walked a careless mile of board walk, kicked a dozen
pugnacious dogs from our setter, Deuce, and found ourselves at the end
of our resources. As a crowd seemed to be gathering about the wooden
railway station, we joined it in sheer idleness.
It seemed that an election had taken place the day before, that one
Smith had been chosen to the Assembly, and that, though this district
had gone anti-Smith, the candidate was expected to stop off an hour on
his way to a more westerly point. Consequently the town was on hand
to receive him.
The crowd, we soon discovered, was bourgeois in the extreme. Young
men from the mill escorted young women from the shops. The young
men wore flaring collars three sizes too large; the young women white
cotton mitts three sizes too small. The older men spat, and talked
through their noses; the women drawled out a monotonous flow of
speech concerning the annoyances of domestic life. A gang of uncouth
practical jokers, exploding in horse-laughter, skylarked about, jostling
rudely. A village band, uniformed solely with cheap carriage-cloth caps,
brayed excruciatingly. The reception committee had decorated, with
red and white silesia streamers and rosettes, an ordinary side-bar buggy,
to which a long rope had been attached, that the great man might be
dragged by his fellow-citizens to the public square.
Nobody seemed to be taking the affair too seriously. It was evidently
more than half a joke. Anti-Smith was more good-humouredly in
evidence than the winning party. Just this touch of buffoonery
completed our sense of the farce-comedy character of the situation. The
town was tawdry in its preparations--and knew it; but half sincere in its
enthusiasm--and knew it. If the crowd had been composed of
Americans, we should have anticipated an unhappy time for Smith; but
good, loyal Canadians, by the limitations of temperament, could get no
further than a spirit of manifest irreverence.
In the shifting of the groups Dick and I became separated, but shortly I
made him out worming his way excitedly toward me, his sketch-book
open in his hand.

"Come here," he whispered. "There's going to be fun. They're going to
open up on old Smith after all."
I followed. The decorated side-bar buggy might be well meant; the
village band need not have been interpreted as an ironical compliment;
the rest of the celebration might indicate paucity of resource rather than
facetious intent; but surely the figure of fun before us could not be
otherwise construed than as a deliberate advertising in the face of
success of the town's real attitude toward the celebration.
The man was short. He wore a felt hat, so big that it rested on his ears.
A gray wool shirt hung below his neck. A cutaway coat miles too large
depended below his knees and to the first joints of his fingers. By way
of official uniform