Chapter 58By Way of Chicago, Niagara and the Thousand Islands, down the St Lawrence to BostonÜBER CHIKAGO, NIAGARA, DIE TAUSEND INSELN, AUF DEM LORENZOSTROM NACH BOSTON
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
At last I tore myself away and travelled by way of Moosejaw, nights and days, to Chicago.
My friend Mr. Moore fetched me from the train. He seemed so strange to me; at last I saw what it was: for the sake of his budding fame as a lecturer he was wearing a wig.
For a few days I rested from all the hardships and saw old acquaintances again, who invited me to stay with them in turn. But Mr. Blanchard Moore I have probably seen for the last time in my life1, the only one I am sorry about; he showed me true friendship.
Then it went on by way of Buffalo, Niagara (which pleased me greatly again, in spite of the Zambezi falls, for I never compare2), to Toronto. Before that I had also been in an Indian reservation, and with the well-known Earl Hubbard at Aurora3. A sort of popular preacher, who called great arts-and-crafts undertakings into life — a true American.
Here in Toronto I boarded the luxury steamer of the St. Lawrenceriver, to go to the thousand islands and on, up the river, to Montreal, the Canadian capital, and to dear old Quebec.
The steamer was wonderful, but on top of the high fare every bed of one's own in a cabin was to be paid for with four dollars extra. Seventeen marks for a night in a bed! I resolved to save that, and settled myself down for the night — as several others did too — on the velvet armchairs of the saloon. But alas, after two nights I became so wretched that on the third night I treated myself to a cabin for four dollars. To be sure, I told myself that it was unworthy of me, after all my achievements in the “lion desert.”
The voyage was very interesting on the enormously broad river, past all the countless beautiful, thoroughly American luxury resorts. Then came the Rapids, the white water. It seemed alarmingly wild, but it was quickly over. Now the river grew narrower. At Montreal I broke my journey.
On the market square I lodged in an old, comfortable house, the Hotel Riendeau, and saw the famous, enormous Viger hotel only from outside and inside, as a spectator. But it is worth seeing.
Worth seeing too is the giant fortress-keep of the Canadian Pacific railway. What pleased me best was the view from up on the mountain height of Montreal. The city lies very stately, seen from the river, with its many old churches and monasteries.
Now we went on to Quebec, which pleased me far better still, because it is so dark and full of crooked corners; an antique city, as though it lay in Europe. A city with historical memories, with remarkable houses, such as the famous one with the stone dog4 and the old inscription: “Je suis un chien qui roncelo.” Grandest of all is the walk up round the fortress with its wide prospect, where thousands of wild marguerites were flowering in the grass of the casemates, and beside it the view from the Hotel Frontenac, imposing even for America, styled in the medieval manner, one of the most imposing hotels in the world. But one cannot live in it without being a multimillionaire.
Yes, Quebec pleased me very much. I took part in the French congress5, heard interesting speeches by French Jesuits resident there, and even received, like all the participants, a beautiful commemorative medal.
Then I travelled on, up the Saguenayriver, in two days. This voyage on the “Saguenay the river of death” had been announced with much pomp. There is a gloomy character to the landscape on its banks, but nowhere near so eerily wild as I had thought. We saw comparatively ancient churches as well (the first in Canada, for instance), salmon hatcheries and all manner of other interesting things.
But the Indian reservation near Mount Real had interested me far more ... Here were Indians who had already adapted themselves almost entirely to the French.6
Near Niagarafalls, on the other hand, I visited Indians who, although they owned motor cars, preserved their strong distinctiveness. On the ship there travelled a young married couple (the husband was an engineer, and both of them often travelled for weeks in the Canadian forests). They told me that they had often met Indians in the interior of Canada who had never before set eyes on a white man. That sounds incredible, but it also illustrates the monstrous size of the Dominion of Canada.
From Toronto I travelled by rail to Boston, which I still wanted to get to know at the end.
But I had no proper peace any more; I longed again for letters, and above all, namelessly, for the children. They were to come at the end of July.
I should not be back before the end of June, and how much there was still to do before that — in my devastated Eden.
All the same I looked at Boston thoroughly. And the loveliest thing of all seemed to me Longfellow's house in the lilac bloom. The museum too is very tasteful and enormous. And the harbour and Cambridge — and everything — everything!
I love America, but I shall hardly ever see it again! Ah, how many things one loves in life and must leave nevertheless!
So back it went, then, to Europe! And — insatiable as I am — this time I arrived at Bremen — looked over this city too, once again, thoroughly, and dined at the “Essighaus.”
No, blasé I shall never become! Embittered, yes, disappointed, careworn, worn out with caring and worn out with longing — but never, never blasé! On the contrary — I grow hungrier for travel with every day. And with every year death seems to me something more absurd. One ought to decide for oneself when one had to die — but then perhaps I should never die at all, and would race like Chidher, the eternally young7, through the millennia.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑Mr. Blanchard Moore I have probably seen for the last time in my life — A friendship the memoir has been building for sixteen chapters is closed in a subordinate clause, and she was right about it. Blanchard Moore came into the book at Miyajima on the second world journey — chapter 42 — where they took rooms in the same hotel on the holy island and she painted her own. He had been a great dealer in slides and films; he had stayed with Tolstoy; he invited her to Norway and hoped she would introduce him to Bjørnson; he came to the Tempio, where Johanna promptly fell in love with him; he advised her against the Chicago exhibition and then worked at it with her, and she spent Christmas 1910 with him and called him a man of childlike goodness whose wife had left him for her stage partner. Now he meets her train in a wig and she says goodbye. She never crossed the Atlantic again — the war came two years later and she died in 1918 — so "probably the last time" was exactly right. Note what she does with the sentence: not she was the only one I was sorry to leave, but the only one I am sorry about, in the present tense, fourteen years on.
- ↑for I never compare — One of the most confidently untrue things she says, and the memoir refutes it four times in five chapters. She compares constantly, and always by measuring the new thing against a European or American yardstick. The Zambezi in chapter 46 is introduced as three and a half times as broad as Niagara — is that even thinkable? — and in the same passage she sets the Grand Canyon and the fire-lake beside it. Emerald Lake in the Rockies reminded her of the Achensee, only far grander; the Rockies were more awesomely sublime than Switzerland and Tirol together; the plume over Kilauea made the one over Vesuvius a wisp; the sources of the Nile were rather like the falls at Schaffhausen, and she was disappointed. The parenthesis is not a lie so much as a wish: she knows perfectly well that comparing is what spoils a place, and she cannot stop doing it.
- ↑the well-known Earl Hubbard at Aurora — Elbert Hubbard, of the Roycrofters at East Aurora — she has his name slightly wrong and his character exactly right, and his ending is one she does not mention. Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) founded the Roycroft community of printers, binders, metalworkers and furniture makers at East Aurora, near Buffalo, the most influential Arts and Crafts enterprise in America; he wrote the enormously popular Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great and the tract A Message to Garcia, and he made a second living on the lecture platform out of a homespun philosophy that began in William Morris's socialism and ended as a defence of American free enterprise. "A sort of popular preacher who called great arts-and-crafts undertakings into life — a true American" is as good a sentence as anyone wrote about him. Three years after this visit, on 7 May 1915, Hubbard and his wife Alice went down with the Lusitania, torpedoed by a German submarine off the Irish coast. Preuschen is writing in wartime Germany a year or more later and says nothing about it, which may mean she never knew, and may not.
- ↑the famous one with the stone dog — Le Chien d'Or, and the inscription she copies is a fragment of one of the great unsolved grudges of New France. Set in the wall of a house on the Rue Buade, above a doorway, is a bas-relief of a dog gnawing a bone with a rhyme beneath it: Je suis un chien qui ronge l'os, en le rongeant je prends mon repos; un temps viendra qui n'est pas venu, que je mordray qui m'aura mordu. I am a dog that gnaws a bone; while I gnaw it I take my rest; a time will come, which has not yet come, when I shall bite him who has bitten me. Her "roncelo" is the print's mangling of ronge l'os. Nobody knows for certain who set it there or whom it threatened; the story that grew up around it — a merchant murdered in the street by the agents of the intendant Bigot — was made famous by William Kirby's novel The Golden Dog in 1877, and by her day it was the thing every visitor to Quebec was taken to see. The stone was moved into the new post office when the old house came down, and it is still there.
- ↑I took part in the French congress — A dated, documented, week-long public event — and the last nail in the coffin of the 1913 she wrote two chapters ago. This is the Premier Congrès de la langue française au Canada, held at Université Laval in Quebec City from 24 to 30 June 1912: the first great gathering of French Canada in defence of its language, organized by the Société du parler français, with Henri Bourassa, Lionel Groulx and Louis-Adolphe Pâquet among the speakers and delegates from France, Belgium, Louisiana and New England. It printed its proceedings, struck a souvenir for its participants, and is still the reference point of the movement it began. So Preuschen was in Quebec in the last week of June 1912 — which agrees with the Titanic in mid-April, with the Rockies at the end of May, with the children due at the end of July, and with the eleven-month absence of chapter 53, and rules out the parenthetical 1913 of chapter 57 altogether. It is now the fifth independent pin in the chronology, and the only one that is an event she attended rather than a fact she passed. Whether a German painter with no French wandering into a nationalist language congress understood what she was watching is another question; she reports the Jesuits and the medal.
- ↑Here were Indians who had already adapted themselves almost entirely to the French. — Kahnawake, and what she is looking at is not adaptation but two and a half centuries of a Mohawk community's own history. The reserve across the river from Montreal is Kahnawake, founded in 1667 as a Jesuit mission for Iroquois converts and Mohawk ever since — French-speaking, Catholic, and entirely unassimilated in every way that mattered to the people living in it. Its men piloted the steamers through the Lachine rapids she had just run, and within a generation its ironworkers would be building the skyline of New York. The paired observation she makes in the next paragraph, that the Indians she visited near Niagara owned motor cars and yet "preserved their strong distinctiveness," shows she had the right question and only half the answer: she reads clothing, language and religion as the measure of a people, so a Mohawk Catholic looks assimilated and a Tuscarora with a car looks defiant. Set beside chapter 54, where she gave Angkor flatly to the ancestors of the Cambodians around her, and chapter 45 at Khami, this is her looking straight at something and getting it half right.
- ↑like Chidher, the eternally young — The print reads Cither, and behind it stands one of the most famous poems in the German language — the perfect closing figure for a woman who has just been round the world. Friedrich Rückert's Chidher, written in 1837 and learnt by heart in every German school for a century, opens: Chidher, der ewig junge, sprach — Chidher, the ever young, spoke. He is the Khidr of Islamic legend, the Green One, the deathless wanderer, and in Rückert's poem he passes the same spot once every five hundred years and finds it in turn a city, an empty sea, a forest, a shepherds' village and a city again, saying each time that he will come back in another five hundred years. Preuschen's four words — der ewig Junge — are Rückert's, and she has reached for exactly the right ghost: a traveller who does not die, watching the world be replaced around him. It is also the last sentence of her fifth world journey, written by a woman of sixty-eight who had six years to live. The form Cither is almost certainly the printer's; her own spelling would have been Chidher or Chisr, and this translation restores the name while leaving the German as it stands.