The Foreigner

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THE FOREIGNER
A TALE OF SASKATCHEWAN

Ralph Connor




PREFACE


In Western Canada there is to be seen to-day that most fascinating
of all human phenomena, the making of a nation. Out of breeds
diverse in traditions, in ideals, in speech, and in manner of life,
Saxon and Slav, Teuton, Celt and Gaul, one people is being made.
The blood strains of great races will mingle in the blood of a race
greater than the greatest of them all.

It would be our wisdom to grip these peoples to us with living hooks
of justice and charity till all lines of national cleavage disappear,
and in the Entity of our Canadian national life, and in the Unity of
our world-wide Empire, we fuse into a people whose strength will
endure the slow shock of time for the honour of our name, for the
good of mankind, and for the glory of Almighty God.

C.W.G. Winnipeg, Canada, 1909.




CONTENTS


I The City on the Plain
II Where East meets West
III The Marriage of Anka
IV The Unbidden Guest
V The Patriot's Heart
VI The Grip of British Law
VII Condemned
VIII The Price of Vengeance
IX Brother and Sister
X Jack French of the Night Hawk Ranch
XI The Edmonton Trail
XII The Making of a Man
XIII Brown
XIV The Break
XV The Maiden of the Brown Hair
XVI How Kalman found His Mine
XVII The Fight for the Mine
XVIII For Freedom and for Love
XIX My Foreigner




CHAPTER I

THE CITY ON THE PLAIN



Not far from the centre of the American Continent, midway between
the oceans east and west, midway between the Gulf and the Arctic Sea,
on the rim of a plain, snow swept in winter, flower decked in summer,
but, whether in winter or in summer, beautiful in its sunlit glory,
stands Winnipeg, the cosmopolitan capital of the last of the Anglo-Saxon
Empires,--Winnipeg, City of the Plain, which from the eyes of the world
cannot be hid. Miles away, secure in her sea-girt isle, is old London,
port of all seas; miles away, breasting the beat of the Atlantic,
sits New York, capital of the New World, and mart of the world,
Old and New; far away to the west lie the mighty cities of the Orient,
Peking and Hong Kong, Tokio and Yokohama; and fair across the highway
of the world's commerce sits Winnipeg, Empress of the Prairies.
Her Trans-Continental railways thrust themselves in every direction,
--south into the American Republic, east to the ports of the Atlantic,
west to the Pacific, and north to the Great Inland Sea.

To her gates and to her deep-soiled tributary prairies she draws from
all lands peoples of all tribes and tongues, smitten with two great
race passions, the lust for liberty, and the lust for land.

By hundreds and tens of hundreds they stream in and through this
hospitable city, Saxon and Celt and Slav, each eager on his own quest,
each paying his toll to the new land as he comes and goes, for good
or for ill, but whether more for good than for ill only God knows.

A hundred years ago, where now stands the thronging city, stood
the lonely trading-post of The Honourable, The Hudson's Bay Company.
To this post in their birch bark canoes came the half-breed trapper
and the Indian hunter, with their priceless bales of furs to be
bartered for blankets and beads, for pemmican and bacon, for powder
and ball, and for the thousand and one articles of commerce that
piled the store shelves from cellar to roof.

Fifty years ago, about the lonely post a little settlement had
gathered--a band of sturdy Scots. Those dour and doughty pioneers
of peoples had planted on the Red River their homes upon their
little "strip" farms--a rampart of civilization against the wide,
wild prairie, the home of the buffalo, and camp ground of the
hunters of the plain.

Twenty-five years ago, in the early eighties, a little city had
fairly dug its roots into the black soil, refusing to be swept away
by that cyclone of financial frenzy known over the Continent as the
"boom of '81," and holding on with abundant courage and invincible
hope, had gathered to itself what of strength it could, until by 1884
it had come to assume an appearance of enduring solidity. Hitherto
accessible from the world by the river and the railroad from the south,
in this year the city began to cast eager eyes eastward, and to listen
for the rumble of the first trans-continental train, which was to bind
the Provinces of Canada into a Dominion, and make Winnipeg into one of
the cities of the world. Trade by the river died, but meantime the
railway from the south kept pouring in a steady stream of immigration,
which distributed itself according to its character and in obedience
to the laws of affinity, the French Canadian finding a congenial home
across the Red River in old St. Boniface, while his English-speaking
fellow-citizen, careless of the limits of nationality, ranged whither
his fancy called him. With these, at first in small and then in larger
groups, from Central and South Eastern Europe, came people strange in
costume and in speech; and holding close by one another as if in terror
of the perils and the loneliness of the unknown land, they segregated
into colonies tight knit by ties of blood and common tongue.

Already, close to the railway tracks and in the more unfashionable
northern section of the little city, a huddling cluster of little
black shacks gave such a colony shelter. With a sprinkling of
Germans, Italians and Swiss, it was almost solidly Slav. Slavs of
all varieties from all provinces and speaking all dialects were
there to be found: Slavs from Little Russia and from Great Russia,
the alert Polak, the heavy Croatian, the haughty Magyar, and
occasionally the stalwart Dalmatian from the Adriatic, in speech
mostly Ruthenian, in religion orthodox Greek Catholic or Uniat
and Roman Catholic. By their non-discriminating Anglo-Saxon
fellow-citizens they are called Galicians, or by the unlearned,
with an echo of Paul's Epistle in their minds, "Galatians." There
they pack together in their little shacks of boards and tar-paper,
with pent roofs of old tobacco tins or of slabs or of that same
useful but unsightly tar-paper, crowding each other in close
irregular groups as if the whole wide prairie were not there
inviting them. From the number of their huts they seem a colony of
no great size, but the census taker, counting ten or twenty to a hut,
is surprised to find them run up into hundreds. During the summer
months they are found far away in the colonies of their kinsfolk,
here and there planted upon the prairie, or out in gangs where new
lines of railway are in construction, the joy of the contractor's
heart, glad to exchange their steady, uncomplaining toil for the
uncertain, spasmodic labour of their English-speaking rivals. But
winter finds them once more crowding back into the little black
shacks in the foreign quarter of the city, drawn thither by their
traditionary social instincts, or driven by economic necessities.
All they ask is bed space on the floor or, for a higher price, on
the home-made bunks that line the walls, and a woman to cook the
food they bring to her; or, failing such a happy arrangement, a
stove on which they may boil their varied stews of beans or barley,
beets or rice or cabbage, with such scraps of pork or beef from the
neck or flank as they can beg or buy at low price from the slaughter
houses, but ever with the inevitable seasoning of garlic, lacking
which no Galician dish is palatable. Fortunate indeed is the owner
of a shack, who, devoid of hygienic scruples and disdainful of city
sanitary laws, reaps a rich harvest from his fellow-countrymen,
who herd together under his pent roof. Here and there a house
surrendered by its former Anglo-Saxon owner to the "Polak" invasion,
falls into the hands of an enterprising foreigner, and becomes to
the happy possessor a veritable gold mine.

Such a house had come into the possession of Paulina Koval. Three
years ago, with two children she had come to the city, and to the
surprise of her neighbours who had travelled with her from Hungary,
had purchased this house, which the owner was only too glad to sell.
How the slow-witted Paulina had managed so clever a transaction no
one quite understood, but every one knew that in the deal Rosenblatt,
financial agent to the foreign colony, had lent his shrewd assistance.
Rosenblatt had known Paulina in the home land, and on her arrival in
the new country had hastened to proffer his good offices, arranging the
purchase of her house and guiding her, not only in financial matters,
but in things domestic as well. It was due to Rosenblatt that the
little cottage became the most populous dwelling in the colony.
It was his genius that had turned the cellar, with its mud floor,
into a dormitory capable of giving bed space to twenty or twenty-five
Galicians, and still left room for the tin stove on which to cook
their stews. Upon his advice, too, the partitions by which the cottage
had been divided into kitchen, parlour, and bed rooms, were with one
exception removed as unnecessary and interfering unduly with the most
economic use of valuable floor space. Upon the floor of the main room,
some sixteen feet by twelve, under Rosenblatt's manipulation,
twenty boarders regularly spread their blankets, and were it not
for the space demanded by the stove and the door, whose presence
he deeply regretted, this ingenious manipulator could have provided
for some fifteen additional beds. Beyond the partition, which as a
concession to Rosenblatt's finer sensibilities was allowed to remain,
was Paulina's boudoir, eight feet by twelve, where she and her two
children occupied a roomy bed in one corner. In the original plan
of the cottage four feet had been taken from this boudoir for
closet purposes, which closet now served as a store room for
Paulina's superfluous and altogether wonderful wardrobe.

After a few weeks' experiment, Rosenblatt, under pressure of an
exuberant hospitality, sought to persuade Paulina that, at the
sacrifice of some comfort and at the expense of a certain degree of
privacy, the unoccupied floor space of her boudoir might be placed
at the disposal of a selected number of her countrymen, who for the
additional comfort thus secured, this room being less exposed to the
biting wind from the door, would not object to pay a higher price.
Against this arrangement poor Paulina made feeble protest,
not so much on her own account as for the sake of the children.

"Children!" cried Rosenblatt. "What are they to you?
They are not your children."

"No, they are not my children, but they are my man's,
and I must keep them for him. He would not like men to
sleep in the same room with us."

"What can harm them here? I will come myself and be their protector,"
cried the chivalrous Rosenblatt. "And see, here is the very thing!
We will make for them a bed in this snug little closet. It is most
fortunate, and they will be quite comfortable."

Still in Paulina's slow-moving mind lingered some doubt as to the
propriety of the suggested arrangement. "But why should men come in
here? I do not need the money. My man will send money every month."

"Ah!" cried the alert and startled Rosenblatt, "every month! Ah!
very good! But this house, you will remember, is not all paid for,
and those English people are terrible with their laws. Oh, truly
terrible!" continued the solicitous agent. "They would turn you
and your children out into the snow. Ah, what a struggle I had
only last month with them!"

The mere memory of that experience sent a shudder of horror through
Rosenblatt's substantial frame, so that Paulina hastened to surrender,
and soon Rosenblatt with three of his patrons, selected for their more
gentle manners and for their ability to pay, were installed as night
lodgers in the inner room at the rate of five dollars per month. This
rate he considered as extremely reasonable, considering that those of
the outer room paid three dollars, while for the luxury of the cellar
accommodation two dollars was the rate.




CHAPTER II

WHERE EAST MEETS WEST



The considerate thoughtfulness of Rosenblatt relieved Paulina of
the necessity of collecting these monthly dues, to her great joy,
for it was far beyond her mental capacity to compute, first in
Galician and then in Canadian money, the amount that each should pay;
and besides, as Rosenblatt was careful to point out, how could she
deal with defaulters, who, after accumulating a serious indebtedness,
might roll up their blankets and without a word of warning fade away
into the winter night? Indeed, with all her agent's care, it not
unfrequently happened that a lodger, securing a job in one of the
cordwood camps, would disappear, leaving behind him only his empty
space upon the floor and his debt upon the books, which Rosenblatt
kept with scrupulous care. Occasionally it happened, however, that,
as in all bookkeeping, a mistake would creep in. This was unfortunately
the case with young Jacob Wassyl's account, of whose perfidy Paulina
made loud complaints to his friends, who straightway remonstrated
with Jacob upon his return from the camp. It was then that Jacob's
indignant protestations caused an examination of Rosenblatt's books,
whereupon that gentleman laboured with great diligence to make
abundantly clear to all how the obliteration of a single letter had
led to the mistake. It was a striking testimony to his fine sense of
honour that Rosenblatt insisted that Jacob, Paulina, and indeed the
whole company, should make the fullest investigation of his books and
satisfy themselves of his unimpeachable integrity. In a private
interview with Paulina, however, his rage passed all bounds, and it
was only Paulina's tearful entreaties that induced him to continue to
act as her agent, and not even her tears had moved him had not Paulina
solemnly sworn that never again would she allow her blundering crudity
to insert itself into the delicate finesse of Rosenblatt's financial
operations. Thenceforward all went harmoniously enough, Paulina toiling
with unremitting diligence at her daily tasks, so that she might make
the monthly payments upon her house, and meet the rapacious demands of
those terrible English people, with their taxes and interest and legal
exactions, which Rosenblatt, with meritorious meekness, sought to satisfy.
So engrossed, indeed, was that excellent gentleman in this service that
he could hardly find time to give suitable over-sight to his own building
operations, in which, by the erection of shack after shack, he sought to
meet the ever growing demands of the foreign colony.

Before a year had gone it caused Rosenblatt no small annoyance that
while he was thus struggling to keep pace with the demands upon his
time and energy, Paulina, with lamentable lack of consideration,
should find it necessary to pause in her scrubbing, washing, and
baking, long enough to give birth to a fine healthy boy. Paulina's
need brought her help and a friend in the person of Mrs. Fitzpatrick,
who lived a few doors away in the only house that had been able to
resist the Galician invasion. It had not escaped Mrs. Fitzpatrick's
eye nor her kindly heart, as Paulina moved in and out about her duties,
that she would ere long pass into that mysterious valley of life and
death where a woman needs a woman's help; and so when the hour came,
Mrs. Fitzpatrick, with fine contempt of "haythen" skill and efficiency,
came upon the scene and took command. It took her only a few moments
to clear from the house the men who with stolid indifference to the
sacred rights of privacy due to the event were lounging about. Swinging
the broom which she had brought with her, she almost literally swept them
forth, flinging their belongings out into the snow. Not even Rosenblatt,
who lingered about, did she suffer to remain.

"Y're wife will not be nadin' ye, I'm thinkin', for a while.
Ye can just wait till I can bring ye wurrd av y're babby,"
she said, pushing him, not unkindly, from the room.

Rosenblatt, whose knowledge of English was sufficient to
enable him to catch her meaning, began a vigorous protest:

"Eet ees not my woman," he exclaimed.

"Eat, is it!" replied Mrs. Fitzpatrick, taking him up sharply.
"Indade ye can eat where ye can get it. Faith, it's a man ye are,
sure enough, that can niver forget y're stomach! An' y're wife
comin' till her sorrow!"

"Eet ees not my--" stormily began Rosenblatt.

"Out wid ye," cried Mrs. Fitzpatrick, impatiently waving her
big red hands before his face. "Howly Mother! It's the wurrld's
wonder how a dacent woman cud put up wid ye!"

And leaving him in sputtering rage, she turned to her duty,
aiding, with gentle touch and tender though meaningless words,
her sister woman through her hour of anguish.

In three days Paulina was again in her place and at her work,
and within a week her household was re-established in its normal
condition. The baby, rolled up in an old quilt and laid upon her
bed, received little attention except when the pangs of hunger
wrung lusty protests from his vigorous lungs, and had it not been
for Mrs. Fitzpatrick's frequent visits, the unwelcome little human
atom would have fared badly enough. For the first two weeks of its
life the motherly-hearted Irish woman gave an hour every day to the
bathing and dressing of the babe, while Irma, the little girl of
Paulina's household, watched in wide-eyed wonder and delight;
watched to such purpose, indeed, that before the two weeks had gone
Mrs. Fitzpatrick felt that to the little girl's eager and capable
hands the baby might safely be entrusted.

"It's the ould-fashioned little thing she is," she confided to her
husband, Timothy. "Tin years, an' she has more sinse in the hair outside
av her head than that woman has in the brains inside av hers. It's aisy
seen she's no mother of hers--ye can niver get canary burrds from owls'
eggs. And the strength of her," she continued, to the admiring and
sympathetic Timothy, "wid her white face and her burnin' brown eyes!"

And so it came that every day, no matter to what depths the
thermometer might fall, the little white-faced, white-haired
Russian girl with the "burnin'" brown eyes brought Paulina's
baby to be inspected by Mrs. Fitzpatrick's critical eye.
Before a year had passed Irma had won an assured place in
the admiration and affection of not only Mrs. Fitzpatrick,
but of her husband, Timothy, as well.

But of Paulina the same could not be said, for with the passing months
she steadily descended in the scale of Mrs. Fitzpatrick's regard.
Paulina was undoubtedly slovenly. Her attempts at housekeeping--if
housekeeping it could be called--were utterly contemptible in the eyes
of Mrs. Fitzpatrick. These defects, however, might have been pardoned,
and with patience and perseverance might have been removed, but there
were conditions in Paulina's domestic relations that Mrs. Fitzpatrick
could not forgive. The economic arrangements which turned Paulina's
room into a public dormitory were abhorrent to the Irish woman's sense
of decency. Often had she turned the full tide of her voluble invective
upon Paulina, who, though conscious that all was not well--for no one
could mistake the flash of Mrs. Fitzpatrick's eye nor the stridency of
her voice--received Mrs. Fitzpatrick's indignant criticism with a
patient smile. Mrs. Fitzpatrick, despairing of success in her
efforts with Paulina, called in the aid of Anka Kusmuk, who, as
domestic in the New West Hotel where Mrs. Fitzpatrick served as
charwoman two days in the week, had become more or less expert in the
colloquial English of her environment. Together they laboured with
Paulina, but with little effect. She was quite unmoved, because quite
unconscious, of moral shock. It disturbed Mrs. Fitzpatrick not a
little to discover during the progress of her missionary labours that
even Anka, of whose goodness she was thoroughly assured, did not
appear to share her horror of Paulina's moral condition. It was the
East meeting the West, the Slav facing the Anglo-Saxon. Between their
points of view stretched generations of moral development. It was not
a question of absolute moral character so much as a question of moral
standards. The vastness of this distinction in standards was beginning
to dawn upon Mrs. Fitzpatrick, and she was prepared to view Paulina's
insensibility to moral distinctions in a more lenient light, when a
new idea suddenly struck her:

"But y're man; how does he stand it? Tell me that."

The two Galician women gazed at each other in silence.
At length Anka replied with manifest reluctance:

"She got no man here. Her man in Russia."

"What!" exclaimed Mrs. Fitzpatrick in a terrible voice.
"An' do ye mane to say! An' that Rosenblatt--is he not her husband?
Howly Mother of God," she continued in an awed tone of voice,
"an' is this the woman I've been havin' to do wid!"

The wrath, the scorn, the repulsion in her eyes, her face, her
whole attitude, revealed to the unhappy Paulina what no words
could have conveyed. Under her sallow skin the red blood of shame
slowly mounted. At that moment she saw herself and her life as
never before. The wrathful scorn of this indignant woman pierced
like a lightning bolt to the depths of her sluggish moral sense
and awakened it to new vitality. For a few moments she stood silent
and with face aflame, and then, turning slowly, passed into her
house. It was the beginning of Paulina's redemption.




CHAPTER III

THE MARRIAGE OF ANKA



The withdrawing of Mrs. Fitzpatrick from Paulina's life meant a
serious diminution in interest for the unhappy Paulina, but with
the characteristic uncomplaining patience of her race she plodded
on with the daily routine at washing, baking, cleaning, mending,
that filled up her days. There was no break in the unvarying
monotony of her existence. She gave what care she could to the two
children that had been entrusted to her keeping, and to her baby.
It was well for her that Irma, whose devotion to the infant became
an absorbing passion, developed a rare skill in the care of the
child, and it was well for them all that the ban placed by Mrs.
Fitzpatrick upon Paulina's house was withdrawn as far as Irma and
the baby were concerned, for every day the little maid presented
her charge to the wise and watchful scrutiny of Mrs. Fitzpatrick.

The last days of 1884, however, brought an event that cast a glow
of colour over the life of Paulina and the whole foreign colony.
This event was none other than the marriage of Anka Kusmuk and
Jacob Wassyl, Paulina's most popular lodger. A wedding is a great
human event. To the principals the event becomes the pivot of
existence; to the relatives and friends it is at once the
consummation of a series of happenings that have absorbed their
anxious and amused attention, and the point of departure for a new
phase of existence offering infinite possibilities in the way of
speculation. But even for the casual onlooker a wedding furnishes a
pleasant arrest of the ordinary course of life, and lets in upon
the dull grey of the commonplace certain gleams of glory from the
golden days of glowing youth, or from beyond the mysterious planes
of experience yet to be.

All this and more Anka's wedding was to Paulina and her people.
It added greatly to Paulina's joy and to her sense of importance
that her house was selected to be the scene of the momentous event.
For long weeks Paulina's house became the life centre of the
colony, and as the day drew nigh every boarder was conscious of
a certain reflected glory. It is no wonder that the selecting of
Paulina's house for the wedding feast gave offence to Anka's tried
friend and patron, Mrs. Fitzpatrick. To that lady it seemed that
in selecting Paulina's house for her wedding Anka was accepting
Paulina's standard of morals and condoning her offences, and it
only added to her grief that Anka took the matter so lightly.

"I'm just affronted at ye, Anka," she complained,
"that ye can step inside the woman's dure."

"Ah, cut it out!" cried Anka, rejoicing in her command of the
vernacular. "Sure, Paulina is no good, you bet; but see, look
at her house--dere is no Rutenian house like dat, so beeg. Ah!"
she continued rapturously, "you come an' see me and Jacob dance de
'czardas,' wit Arnud on de cymbal. Dat Arnud he's come from de old
country, an' he's de whole show, de whole brass band on de park."

To Anka it seemed an unnecessary and foolish sacrifice to the
demands of decency that she should forego the joy of a real
czardas to the music of Arnud accompanying the usual violins.

"Ye can have it," sniffed Mrs. Fitzpatrick with emphatic disdain;
all the more emphatic that she was conscious, distinctly conscious,
of a strong desire to witness this special feature of the festivities.
"I've nothing agin you, Anka, for it's a good gurrl ye are, but me and
me family is respectable, an' that Father Mulligan can tell ye, for his
own mother's cousin was married till the brother of me father's uncle,
an' niver a fut of me will go beyant the dure of that scut, Paulina."
And Mrs. Fitzpatrick, resting her hands upon her hips, stood the living
embodiment of hostility to any suggested compromise with sin.