Prisoners of the North (35 page)

He answered an ad on a blackboard offering two dollars a day for labourers. He took it without knowing what it entailed and found himself shipped by train to a contractor who put him into a gang driving a half-mile tunnel through the wall of San Gabriel Canyon to the Sacramento Valley. In the dank and murky bowels of the earth he toiled ten hours a day until, happily, he was transferred to another dawn-to-dusk job shovelling gravel. When at last he quit he was given a pay-cheque for twenty dollars, which he found he could not cash. He discounted it to a stage driver for half its value and slept that night in a chicken house.

In Los Angeles he secured a room for a dollar a week and managed to keep alive on fifteen cents a day. On First Street, he found he could get a five-course meal for ten cents. The portions were small but included four grey slices of bread. Service would select a spot opposite a customer who was just finishing his meal, and if there was any bread left he would ask for it. Each evening he would hang around the fruit market looking for an apple or orange that had fallen into the gutter. After seven, the agnostic poet would head for the Pacific Coast Gospel Saloon, where, to obtain a piece of dry bread and coffee, he would join in prayers for an hour. “The bread was cut in fair-sized chunks,” he remembered, “and some of us grabbed two. I was a ‘twofer.’ ” Later he offered to wash the coffee cups and was given an extra piece of bread for the task.

Surprisingly, in spite of such vicissitudes, these were days of serenity for Service. “I knew now that brute toil was not for such as I,” he wrote. “Was I not free and without responsibilities? No duties, no grinding toil, no authority over me.” Occasionally, in an introspective moment, he would ask himself if he was fitted for anything. “I had moments in which I saw disaster in front of me; but for the most part I was buoyant and enchanted with my surroundings.… If I was heading for disaster, I was doing it very cheerfully.”

In the public library, “that sanctuary of books,” he felt at peace with all mankind. San Francisco had made him want to write stories, “but this city made me want to make poetry … newspaper poetry, the kind that simple folks clip out and paste in scrap books.” He sent some samples to a local paper, which promptly published them. One, called “The Hobo’s Lullaby,” carried the line: “My belly’s got a bulge with Christmas cheer”—“typical,” Service remembered “of my tendency to the coarse and the concrete.” In this way, he discovered that he “would rather win the approval of a barman than the praise of a professor.”

The library provided food for the soul, but in his straitened circumstances not enough for the body. He thought constantly of food and was often light-headed because of the lack of it. He would lurk for hours before restaurant doors just to imbibe the smells of cooking, and then he would return to his room to munch on stale bread and imagine it was roast beef. Once, “I actually found myself scraping with my teeth on a banana skin a man threw on the sidewalk. He turned and caught me at it, but I pretended I had picked it up to prevent someone slipping on it. He looked hard at me and tendered me a dime, which I proudly refused.”

He could not bring himself to write home for help: “I would have died rather than confess my humiliating plight.” At the age of twenty-four he saw nothing but hard work and poverty in his future. There were times when he suffered a sense of panic as the prospect of starvation stared him in the face. When an acquaintance told him the season for orange picking was just beginning, he went to work for a Mexican contractor scrubbing the fruit clean in a tub and later—a promotion!—actually picking it from the trees. For Service that was heaven itself. “As I plucked the golden fruit, often I paused to look around with something like rapture. About me, the grove billowed like a green sea, while above me was a blue sky of perfect serenity. I was so happy up there in my leafy world, I hated to descend.” He sang gaily as he worked. This was a job for a poet! “How I wished it would last forever.” But, of course, it didn’t. As a last resort, Service decided to take out a classified ad in a local paper:

Stone-broke in a strange city. Young man, University non-graduate, desires employment of any kind. Understands Latin, and Greek. Speaks French, German, and Chinook. Knowledge of book-keeping and shorthand; also of Art and Literature. Accept any job, but secretarial work preferred.

To this published plea he received but one reply, from a shabby man in a shabby room in a suspiciously shabby building. His job, he was told, would be to tutor three young girls in San Diego “who want to learn how to talk about books and art stuff.” Service took the job, bargained the agent down to a two-dollar fee, and bought a train ticket for another six, leaving himself with three dollars. He proceeded, as directed, to a San Diego suburb. There he located the remote Villa Lilla, with a cupola from which dangled a red lantern. He was greeted by a Madame Ambrose, “a capacious lady draped in a Spanish shawl,” who told him he was the seventh sucker the commission agent had sent down on an errand. “He’ll get hisself into trouble one of these days,” she said, darkly.

The villa was, of course, a high-class bordello, a truth that slowly dawned on the naive poet only after several days. The Madame and her three “daughters” liked him, especially when he sang and accompanied himself on a guitar that they lent him. Madame Ambrose gave him a job as a handyman, and in return Service showed them respect and “a humble desire to please.”

He was shy and diffident, for it was some time since he had spoken to a woman. When he finally made his farewells they all insisted on kissing him on both cheeks, to his embarrassment, and presenting him with the guitar. As he walked off down the path they waved to him cheerfully from the porch. “In that Mission setting,” he remarked, “they might have been a Mother Superior and three Sisters.”

Service now decided to walk to Mexico “because it would be a pity not to visit that romantic land.” He travelled gypsy-fashion, sleeping on the mesa or on a beach, for he “had the arrogance of wide spaces and the disdain for folks who sleep in beds.” In ten days of wandering he found he had only spent a dollar. “I was in rare walking fettle and could reel off my thirty miles between dawn and dusk.” Only one thing bothered him: he could not afford to buy a new pair of shoes and did his best to save leather by taking them off and trudging along the highway barefoot.

He slept one night in a dry ditch on the outskirts of Santa Ana. The following day he suddenly felt forlorn. He hadn’t shaved for days, his trousers and jumper were stained and torn, and people were staring at him “as they would at a half-crazy man.” Even the guitar failed to bring him solace. “When one is gloomy one does not make gay music.” He returned to Los Angeles early one morning “like a whipped dog,” rented a small cubicle in a Salvation Army hostel, “the headquarters of the hobo fraternity,” and the next day sat in a public square trying to figure out his future. He managed to get a job burrowing into a hill to make a tramway tunnel until two of his fellow workers were injured. He quit, went back to the derelicts in the square, and wrote some verses called “The Wage Slave,” which he says he never submitted to any newspaper. However, years later he saw them included in an anthology by Upton Sinclair.

He took a job as a dishwasher but was no good at that. Back on a park bench, he saw a newspaper with a headline about a ton of gold arriving from the frozen North. “It did not interest me a bit.
The Klondike?
Bah! Let others seek their fortune in that icy land. Give me the sunshine and the South.” He would hit the gypsy trail again: Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, “magic names that appealed to the imagination.” While others struggled up the frozen passes, Service sauntered idly through the American southwest.

“Among my cherished souvenirs,” he wrote many years later, “is a worn dime. I think I must have tendered it a hundred times with a hollow smile, saying: ‘Excuse me, Ma’am, but I’m so hungry I’m willing to give my last ten cents for a bit of dry bread and a glass of water. I’m not a bum, ma’am. Please let me pay.’ ” They never did, but in the majority of cases Service got a free meal.

As the result of a narrow escape from a locomotive while crossing a wooden trestle, Service lost his zest for wandering. He returned to Los Angeles, briefly toyed with the idea of joining Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War, but instead decided to return to the Cowichan Valley. His days there as a cowboy came to an end when a big Holstein bull knocked him over, cracking two ribs. Fate then intervened when the local storekeeper departed and Service replaced him, exchanging the bunkhouse for a bedroom.

“I have had great moments in my life,” Service was to write, “when it seemed the gates of Heaven opened wide and I stepped through them from the depths of hell.” Now, suddenly, he was transformed into a middle-class storekeeper with a starched collar and a blue serge suit, a welcome guest at his employer’s dinner table.

His euphoria did not last and his job began to pall. “I hated the buying and selling, and I loathed the arid forms of the Post Office.” He began to imagine himself as a pedagogue. “I saw myself in a frock coat with a gold Albert across a rounded waistcoat.” Why not? He would go to college and become a Master of Arts. No sooner had he reached that decision than he stopped reading novels and concentrated on textbooks. But it was hard to keep his mind on his studies. “Often I wanted to throw the hated things out of the window and write mad sonnets to the moon.” Algebra had defeated him.

When he was writing
Ploughman of the Moon
, Service was always conscious of the title; the work is studded with references to the moon and moonlight. Now, he says, at this point in his career, the moon came to his aid: “Its serene light seemed to solace me. It said, ‘Don’t worry. All will come out right, but you’re on the wrong track. It’s writing you should be, not bothering your brain with bloodless abstractions.’ ” According to Service, “the moon whispered a poem in my ear.” He sent it to
Munsey’s Magazine
. Two months later it was printed and he received a cheque for five dollars. He had already quit his job in Cowichan and moved into a friend’s shack to cram for his exams. Having saved two hundred dollars, he thought he had enough to carry him through his college term. There were problems: he passed his exams in Victoria with high marks except for algebra and French. That meant supplementary exams; to keep up with his well-dressed and younger classmates he would need a new suit and accessories. The clothes cost one hundred dollars and by the time he paid for his textbooks, he was down to sixty. It just wasn’t enough. “I was indeed a failure. I had tried to storm the citadel of decent society, and been thrown into the ditch.… To what shabby fate was I drifting?”

What else could he do? During his long nocturnal walks he tried to figure out a future for himself. Ragtime kid in a honky-tonk? Parisian apache? Rose gardener? Herring fisherman? He was at the end of his tether. “Where now was that guardian angel who always interposed to save me in my extremities?”

No angel appeared. But on Service’s wall there reposed a dog-eared scrap of paper that, magically, would be the means by which he changed his life. It was a testimonial that he had obtained from his Scottish bank manager seven years before. It was this that got him a job with the Canadian Bank of Commerce, even though he was older than most applicants. The bank took him on trial for fifty dollars a month. To Service that figure was so astonishing that he actually tried to bargain the bank down to half the amount. “I’m Scotch,” he told the inspector. “I could get along on that.” He was finally persuaded to accept the offer and went to work in the winter of 1903–4 at the Victoria branch at the corner of Government and Fort streets.

This marked a major turning point in Service’s peripatetic career. Now he could afford to rent a piano and a ready-made dinner jacket. In July 1904, he was transferred to the bank’s branch in Kamloops where he immediately bought a pony and tried to take up polo. He hated the game but loved the costume and had himself photographed in it to send to his family. He bought himself a banjo and strummed away at it happily during his leisure hours.

At this time literature ceased to exist for Service. He scarcely bothered to read a book. “My sense of poetry, so strong in my poverty and my desert wanderings, now seemed to have deserted me. My whole ambition was to get on in the bank, and I was prepared to give it my lifelong loyalty. I knew I was not suited for the job, yet I had no hope in any other direction, and I was intensely grateful for the safety and social standing it offered.”

He was well settled when the bank told him they were transferring him to the Yukon and presented him with a two-hundred-dollar cheque to buy a coonskin coat. He bought the coat for one hundred dollars, pocketed the profit, and left for the North where, unlike the stampeders of 1898, he had no intention of making his fortune. But he did so in a manner putting the Kings of Eldorado to shame.

—TWO—

Service was given his first introduction to the Yukon from a passenger coach on the White Pass and Yukon Railway during its one-day transit through the Coastal Mountains from Skagway to Whitehorse. Weaving along beside the track was a worn pathway still bearing the visible marks of thousands of boots—the famous Trail of ’98. Bursting from a dark tunnel and onto a dizzy trestle, the train passed over the notorious Dead Horse Gulch where three thousand pack animals had perished during the great stampede. On the far side of the summit, the train rattled past the green headwater lakes—sinuous glacial fingers that led to the Yukon River. After that came the gloomy gorge of Miles Canyon and the frothing waters of the Whitehorse Rapids. At the end of the line Service could see a huddle of frame buildings, log cabins, and wooden sidewalks, nestling beneath the low hills on the banks of the mighty Yukon.

This was Whitehorse, the gateway to the North, but hardly the rough-and-tumble community of legend. Here Service would find himself passing the plate in the Anglican Church. “Though I may not believe in religion,” he was to write, “I believe in churches. They give me a sense of social stability.”