Fruits of the Earth
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THE NEW CANADIAN LIBRARY
General Editor: David Staines
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ADVISORY BOARD
Alice Munro
W.H. New
Guy Vanderhaeghe
CONTENTS
AUTHOR'S NOTE
W
hen Joseph Conrad in 1917 reissued
Nostromo
, he accompanied it by an author's note the first two paragraphs of which so exactly fit the case of the present book that I cannot refrain from reprinting them here, substituting the present title for
Nostromo
and
Jane Atkinson
for
Typhoon
.
Jane Atkinson
is an unpublished novel which, at the time of its completion, I considered the last volume of what I have come to call my (still largely unpublished) Prairie Series.
“
Fruits of the Earth
is the most anxiously meditated of the longer novels which belong to the period following upon the completion [Conrad says âpublication'] of
Jane Atkinson
.
“I don't mean to say that I became then conscious of any impending change in my mentality and in my attitude towards the tasks of my writing life. And perhaps there was never any change, except in that mysterious, extraneous thing which has nothing to do with the theories of art; a phenomenon for which I cannot in any way be held responsible. What, however, did cause me some concern was that
after finishing the last story of the Prairie Series it seemed somehow that there was nothing more in the world to write about.
“This so strangely negative but disturbing mood lasted some little time; and then, as with many of my longer stories, the first hint for
Fruits of the Earth
came to me in the shape” [here I leave Conrad's text] of certain hints dropped by a real-estate dealer with whom I was driving along over the prairie, regarding the history of a certain farm which we were passing.
This farm was such as to suggest a race of giants who had founded it; but on inquiry I found that it was held by tenants who tilled a bare ten per cent of its acreage. In a barn built for half a hundred horses they kept a team of two sorry nags; and they inhabited no more than two or three rooms of the outwardly palatial house.
I have since found many more farms like that in Manitoba; and in every case I have investigated their history. Slowly, the composite impression gained grew into a compelling urge; and the result was the present story.
F.P.G.
PART ONE
ABE SPALDING
THE HOMESTEAD
W
hen, in the summer of 1900, Abe Spalding arrived in the village of Morley, in the municipality of Somerville, Manitoba, he had been travelling in the caboose of a freight train containing a car with four horses and sundry implements and household goods which belonged to him. He came from the old Spalding homestead in Brant County, Ontario.
He had visited the open prairie a year before and, after careful investigation, filed a claim on the south-west quarter of section five in the township beginning four miles north of Morley. He had had good and valid reasons for choosing that particular location. The neighbourhood as such he had fixed on because his twin sister Mary, who a few years ago had married a doctor by name of Vanbruik, and who up to 1897 had lived in the county seat, was at present, for somewhat obscure reasons, domiciled in this very village of Morley, where her husband, having sold his practice, was conducting the business of a general merchant. The particular quarter section on which Abe Spalding had filed seemed, to the casual observer, to offer no advantage over any other that was available; but he had found
that, while the water which covered the district in the spring of the year stood for months on other parts, this quarter, and the whole section to which it belonged, as well as the sections north and south of it, dried several weeks in advance of the rest of the prairie. Further, he had been informed that the province was on the point of drawing two gigantic ditches through the district, one of them being surveyed to pass exactly along the south line of section five. These ditches were not primarily designed to drain a seemingly irreclaimable swamp, but rather to relieve an older settlement farther west, around the town of Torquay; but, while they were not meant to drain the land which he had chosen, he had shrewdly seen that they could not help improving matters. With his mind's eye he looked upon the district from a point in time twenty years later; and he seemed to see a prosperous settlement there. The soil was excellent, and there was no fundamental farming problem except that of drainage. Lastly, he was not the first settler to make the venture; the two quarters composing the north half of the section had been taken up a decade ago. The men who owned them, it was true, had not been able to make a success; they had left after having wasted their substance and energy, but not before they had received their patents, which they held on the chance that the land might in time become worth a few dollars per acre. A third settler, a bachelor by name of Hall, was actually in residence on the quarter adjoining Abe's claim to the west.
Abe came from a small Ontario farm of eighty acres, half of which, on account of rock and sharp declivities in its formation, could not be tilled. He was possessed by “land hunger” and he dreamt of a time when he would buy up the abandoned farms from which all buildings had been removed; and, who knows, perhaps even the quarter where Hall was squatting in his sod-hut. In his boldest moments he saw
himself prosperous on so great a holding and even reaching out north; for the section there adjoining was No. 8, held, as part of the purchase price paid by the Dominion for the rights of sovereignty in the west, by that ancient institution, the Hudson's Bay Company. In any other place, where his land would have been surrounded by crown land, any one might have limited Abe's expansion by settling next to him; for no settler could acquire more than a hundred and sixty acres by “homesteading.” Here, all things going well, Abe might hope one day to possess two square miles; for the Hudson's Bay Company held its lands only in order to sell them. Abe was a man of economic vision.
As the lumbering freight train banged and clattered to a stop near the little station, in what was euphemistically called “the yard”âdistinguished by nothing but a spur of the track running past a loading platform to the three grain elevators along its southern edgeâAbe alighted from the caboose and stood for a moment irresolutely by its side. The conductor had told him that the car containing his chattels was going to be shunted to the loading platform, where it would be ready in an hour or so. Abe was not anxious to go to his sister's house; but his impulsive and impatient temperament made him desirous, above all, to get over that interval of waiting without being too conscious of his wasting time.
He swung about and strode swiftly across to the station, where a few idlers were lounging. Emerging on the east-west road, he found himself at the west end of the village, which had nothing in its aspect that could be called urban. The buildings of Main Street were aligned on one side of this road into which three short by-streets debouched from the north; to the south, the growth of the settlement was arrested by the right-of-way, no buildings but the grain elevators having been
erected beyond it. Like the whole landscape, Main Street was treeless; and only the side-streets were shaded by tall cottonwoods which seemed to lose themselves, to the north, in what resembled a natural bluffâa deceptive semblance, for all trees had been planted. Main Street, with its single row of buildings, hardly deserved the name of a street, just as the agglomeration of houses hardly deserved the name of a village; it formed a mere node in the road running, in a straight line, from Somerville in the east to Ivy in the west, a distance of twenty-two miles.
Just beyond the first side-street rose the one building which gave the street a measure of distinction: a store unusual for a small prairie town by reason of its dimensions as well as of the solidity of its red-brick structure; it might have stood in the streets of any small city. The whole of its long, two-storied façade consisted of large show-windows filled with a miscellaneous and effectively arranged exhibit of what could be bought inside, the assortment including everything from farm implements and furniture to groceries and tobacco.
Behind the store, facing west, on the first side-street, stood the one residence which, like the store, had an air approaching dignity. That was where Abe's sister lived; and the store was the Vanbruik Department Store, owned by her husband and managed by a high-salaried young man, Mr. Diamond.
Abe was very fond of his sister Mary; he wished he had sent her a wire message announcing his arrival so that she might have met him. A frown settled on his large round face, under the peak of the grey tweed cap which he wore. If he hesitated about calling at the house, it was on account of his brother-in-law, the mysterious doctor who a few years ago had suddenly given up his large flourishing practice at Somerville
to turn merchant. Coming as Abe did from a small Ontario farm, inherited five years ago from his father who had died a sudden death, and now advantageously sold to an industrial concern, Abe had the prejudice of the man who made his living by what he called “work” against the merchant who made “money” by calculation. Besides, Dr. Vanbruik was in everything Abe's antipode, physically as well as temperamentally. The mere fact that the doctor was a professional man had seemed to place Abe at a disadvantage in what little intercourse they had had. The doctor was a graduate of Queen's; and Kingston stood, to Abe, for all that was provincial in the spirit of Ontario; it seemed strangely eastern; it represented all that Abe had abandoned in coming west. Abe had deliberately chosen the material world for the arena of his struggles; the doctor, though he had turned merchant, seemed to live in a world of the spirit. Mary had, with Abe's own early consent, received a high-school and college education as the equivalent of her equity in the farm, there being only two children. The cost of her education had been defrayed by placing a mortgage of five thousand dollars on the parental place. Mary, too, therefore, was in a sense Abe's superior, though Abe was fully aware of the difference between an informational education and native intelligence, in which latter he did not feel himself to be deficient. Yet he could not help begrudging his sister that refinement of manners and forms which is imparted by the association with cultured men and women; he begrudged it while secretly admiring and imitating it. This was all the more the case with his brother-in-law, who had a way of quietly listening to an argument and then settling it by a display of superior information.