Chapter 12

CITIES AND SPACES

What would you do with a magic carpet if one were lent you? I ask
because for a month we had a private car of our very own--a trifling
affair less than seventy foot long and thirty ton weight. 'You may find
her useful,' said the donor casually, 'to knock about the country. Hitch
on to any train you choose and stop off where you choose.'

So she bore us over the C.P.R. from the Atlantic to the Pacific and
back, and when we had no more need of her, vanished like the mango tree
after the trick.

A private car, though many books have been written in it, is hardly the
best place from which to study a country, unless it happen that you have
kept house and seen the seasons round under normal conditions on the
same continent. Then you know how the cars look from the houses; which
is not in the least as the houses look from the cars. Then, the very
porter's brush in its nickel clip, the long cathedral-like aisle between
the well-known green seats, the toll of the bell and the deep organ-like
note of the engine wake up memories; and every sight, smell, and sound
outside are like old friends remembering old days together. A piano-top
buggy on a muddy, board-sidewalked street, all cut up by the narrow
tires; the shingling at the corner of a veranda on a new-built house; a
broken snake-fence girdling an old pasture of mulleins and skull-headed
boulders; a wisp of Virginia creeper dying splendidly on the edge of a
patch of corn; half a dozen panels of snow-fence above a cutting, or
even a shameless patent-medicine advertisement, yellow on the black of a
tobacco-barn, can make the heart thump and the eyes fill if the beholder
have only touched the life of which they are part. What must they mean
to the native-born? There was a prairie-bred girl on the train, coming
back after a year on the Continent, for whom the pine-belted hills, with
real mountains behind, the solemn loops of the river, and the intimate
friendly farm had nothing to tell.

'You can do these landscapes better in Italy,' she explained, and, with
the indescribable gesture of plains folk stifled in broken ground, 'I
want to push these hills away and get into the open again! I'm
Winnipeg.'

She would have understood that Hanover Road schoolmistress, back from a
visit to Cape Town, whom I once saw drive off into thirty miles of
mirage almost shouting, 'Thank God, here's something like home at last.'

Other people ricochetted from side to side of the car, reviving this,
rediscovering that, anticipating t'other thing, which, sure enough, slid
round the next curve to meet them, caring nothing if all the world knew
they were home again; and the newly arrived Englishman with his large
wooden packing-cases marked