Prisoners of the North

by Berton, Pierre

  For twelve hours a day he was harnessed to a tow line that was attached to a rope laid out along the bank. Most of that time he was slogging, sometimes knee-deep, in the water. One day they entered a canyon with the river waist-deep. Suddenly the first mate (whom Service called Jake Skilly) lost control of the barge and it swung back downstream. Service, at the end of the line, was jerked off his feet and dragged behind it, his back bumping over the boulders. Fortunately, the scow struck a rock at the end of the canyon and was held up until Jake could bring it under control. McTosh fished Service out, hauled him to a gravel bar, and worked over him. “My back felt broken, my bones too, but a slug of brandy brought me round. ‘What a great headline in the papers you’ve gone and spoiled: “yukon bard meets watery doom.” ’ ” McTosh’s levity, Service thought, was ill-timed.

  Service in his canoe Coquette when he had decided to return to Dawson the hard way, over the Edmonton Trail. At the end of the trip he felt like a true sourdough.

  Day after day they struggled up the Rat. McTosh’s wife lashed herself to the rope, pulling like a man. Some days it took a dozen hours to make half a mile. At times, all of them would have to get under the big scow and haul her, foot by heartbreaking foot, over the rocky stream bed. The mountain peaks closed in about them as the river narrowed to a single channel. Suddenly they realized they were no longer climbing: they had reached the height of the divide. In the distance they could see a small lake, “shining like a jewel under the cold blue sky.” They knew they were on the right track, for beyond the lake was the pass, “wild and savage, the stark mountains looking as if they were cast of iron.”

  They unloaded the scow, and using the mast and their four poles as rails and skis, they pushed her forward, a foot at a time. It took them ten hours to reach the lake. They then had to retrace their steps, often up to their waists in mud, and shuttle the supplies, including Service’s canoe, down to the limpid water.

  At the far end of the lake, hidden in a deep gully fringed with willows, they found the gushing headwaters of the river that would take them down to the Yukon. Once again they got under the scow, hefted her up, and tried to let her down by rope. Service did not hang on very hard, and “it was with vicious joy I saw her break away and crash through embattled willows to the foaming water.”

  His descent by canoe through a series of rapids and cascades was “a bit of hell.” The water seemed to seize Coquette with a giant hand and “shake her like a terrier does a rat.” Waist-deep in foam, he had to haul his frail craft downstream. At times he thought she would be smashed like an eggshell. At others she would be gripped by fang-like boulders and held clear out of the water. He was alone and knew what it would mean if he lost the flour and bacon he had bought in Fort McPherson.

  He joined Ophelia and her crew on a sandbar on the Bell River. The scow’s boards had been sprung and she was half full of water. “I felt no desire to give them a hand. McTosh loved her like a father but I hated her with the venom of the bitter days I had spent heaving her over the Summit.” He bade them all goodbye and launched his canoe on the placid surface of the Bell, moving from turbulence into tranquility. This was “an idyllic stream worthy of Arcadia,” the woods alive with ptarmigan and the river crowded with more fish than he had ever seen. “In placid peace … I drifted down my river of dreams.” In his mind now he could see ballads in the making and could hardly wait to reach Dawson to put them on paper.

  The Bell took him to the Porcupine and the Porcupine took him to the broad Yukon. He made the final lap of his journey aboard the Tanana, a small sternwheeler whose crew were astonished and impressed to learn that he had come all the way from Edmonton. The hard struggle had paid off; Robert Service was now being treated as a sourdough.

  He taught the crew a song he had written some time before but never published, “When the Iceworms Nest Again.” They took it with them to Dawson and sang it on their steamboat’s journeys until the verses were spread across the territory, and it became easily the best-known Yukon folk song. I remember learning it in my mining-camp days in the thirties. It turned up in several anthologies uncredited. Nobody in the Yukon knew that Service had written the words and music until it found a place in his Twenty Bath-Tub Ballads.

  Back in his beloved Dawson cabin in the late summer of 1911, the bard commenced work on a new collection of verses, inspired by his journey over the Edmonton Trail. Songs of a Sourdough, he claimed, had taken him a month to put together and Ballads of a Cheechako four months. Rhymes of a Rolling Stone occupied the best part of a year. The book was finished in the late spring of 1912, but Service lingered in Dawson. He was loath to go, for he felt he was leaving part of himself behind and did not depart until the last boat of the season left the dock.

  As the sternwheeler moved out into the middle of the grey Yukon and steamed slowly past the town, Service looked up and his eyes rested on the little log cabin on the hill. “The door seemed to open and I saw a solitary figure waving his pipe in farewell—the ghost of my dead youth.… I felt I was not only quitting Dawson but the North itself. Nine years of my life I had given it and it was in my blood.” He swore he would come back but, of course, he never did. Yet he could not escape it, then or ever, as long as Dan McGrew and Sam McGee lived on.

  —THREE—

  Service’s plan was to take a long trip to the South Seas and laze under the sheltering palms. Captivated by the prospect of never having to work again, thanks to his mounting royalties, he dreamed of “starry-eyed sirens strumming ukuleles on coral strands.” He postponed that idyll when the Toronto Star offered to send him to Europe to cover the first Balkan War, which had begun in October 1912 when Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro opened hostilities against Turkey. Service could not resist the challenge. By mid-November he was in Istanbul, dressed for his newest role in khaki breeches and tunic, lounging on a café terrace, “a fez cocked over one eye, a gilt-tipped cigarette between my lips and a gorgeous concoction called a Susanna at my elbow—marvelously happy and delightfully lit up.”

  He joined the Turkish Red Crescent to get nearer the action and was sent to the cholera camp at San Stefano, west of Istanbul, where one of his jobs was to carry out the corpses of the victims. With the war over in December, he donned civilian clothes and began six months of wandering through Europe. That included a month living in a nondescript hotel in Budapest. In all that time, he tells us with considerable satisfaction, he did not speak to a single soul except for a few words to satisfy his needs. “How I enjoyed my silence! I glutted my hunger for obscurity.…”

  After this lengthy walkabout he ended in Paris on a lovely spring morning. “I felt as if I were coming home and my heart sang. Here, I thought, is where I fit in.” He decided to stay for at least two months; he remained for fifteen years before moving to Nice.

  In Paris, Service met a Canadian couple both of whom were painters. Through them he met other artists and at once plunged into a new role. Now he was an art student, dressed in a broad-brimmed hat and a velveteen jacket with a butterfly tie. He took sketching lessons and life classes, watched a model undress—the first time, he claimed, he’d ever seen a nude female. (In Lousetown, Dawson’s red-light district, you paid extra if your partner removed all her clothes.) “I dramatized myself in my new role,” he wrote, “for, like an actor, I was never happy unless I was playing a part. Most people play one character in their lives; I enacted a dozen, and always with my whole heart.”

  Service in uniform. He served in both the Red Crescent and the Red Cross during the Balkan and Great Wars.

  He now found himself on the fringes of the artistic and literary community, basking in the light of the famous, including the noted poet and critic Edmund Gosse. At a dinner party for Gosse, Service went so far as to wear evening clothes and to present a book of his verse to his new hero. “Rather a pretty binding,” Gosse remarked patronizingly, but he did not open the book and totally ignored its author. “In those days,” Service recalled, “I took contum
ely meekly.… I was inclined to agree with the dispraise of the mandarins of letters.”

  In the second volume of his autobiography, Harper of Heaven, he writes that he became fed up with Paris and so set off to tour Normandy and Brittany. He had written a series of articles for the Toronto Star titled “Zig-Zags of a Vagabond,” and the paper wanted more. During his ramblings he spotted “a little red-roofed house that stood on a sea-jutting rock.” Was it for sale? He asked his hotel landlord, who told him that it belonged to the local mayor and “is the apple of his eye … he is a hard man and wants too much—twenty-five thousand francs.…”

  “Would he not come down a bit?” Service asked.

  “Not if you begged him with your derriere sticking out of your pants,” was the answer. “He will never take a franc less.”

  Service had fallen in love with this house on the Channel coast; he called it his Dream Haven. He immediately adopted the role of a poverty-stricken traveller. He went to his hotel, dressed himself in stained pants, a ragged shirt, and a broken straw hat and returned to offer the mayor seventeen thousand francs. “My poor monsieur, you mock me,” the owner replied, whereupon Service jumped in. “Wait a moment. I do not know if I will be able to pay you even that sum.” He offered a down payment of seven thousand and, with the owner’s agreement, said he’d try to beg, borrow, or steal the rest. If he failed, he promised he would forfeit the money. He returned next day with the ten thousand, togged out in flannels crafted by a Paris tailor. He would never forget, Service wrote, the look of disgust on the owner’s face.

  He needed a wife, he decided, and found one when he rescued two sisters from a jostling crowd that had gathered to view a passing military parade. This led to an invitation to tea and further visits. “I visioned the younger sister in the frame of Dream Haven, and thought I could not do better.” After a brief friendship, he said to her, “Let’s get hitched. I’m only a poet and, as you know, poets don’t make money but I guess we can manage to rub along.”

  She accepted, and they were married in June 1913—a happy and content partnership that lasted forty-four years until his death (she lived to be 101). They moved into a tiny two-room apartment on the Boulevard Montparnasse, and there he plunged into his second novel, The Pretender, based on his experiences in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Once the book was finished he took his wife to London on a belated honeymoon, followed by a bicycle tour through France.

  On the way, Service claims, they arrived at the little Breton fishing village, Lancieux, where he had bought Dream Haven. When he suggested they go over and have a look at the place, his new wife, Germaine, protested. “The owner might not like it if we go in. Perhaps they might set a dog on us.” Service persisted, tried the door handle, found it wasn’t locked, and beckoned her inside. She was nervous, fearing they might be taken for burglars; he replied that they could pretend they wanted to buy the house. “We haven’t any money,” she said, trembling.

  At that moment she gave a scream as a smiling peasant woman greeted them. “Welcome, Monsieur,” she said. “I’ve been expecting you.” At that, Service wrote, knowing that the jig was up, he turned to his bride and confessed, “I’m a miserable deceiver.”

  Service was in his mid-seventies when he wrote Harper of Heaven, and much of the confusion in that romantic tale can be laid to his memory of events that had taken place some thirty-five years before. One cannot discount, however, his long practice of mingling fact with fiction in the interest of getting a better story. His account of dealing with the mayor of Lancieux for his Dream Haven is pure invention. He did not buy the house until some time after his marriage, and he bought it with the help of his wife, who was accompanying him on a boat trip. They spotted it by examining the houses on the heights above the shoreline. The actual negotiations were carried out through a real estate agent.

  Germaine, the young woman Service picked out of a crowd during a parade in Paris. He decided she was the wife he “needed.” She lived to be 101 years old.

  Germaine certainly knew her husband could afford the purchase. During their courtship he did not tell her that he was an impoverished poet but that he was a journalist in the pay of a Toronto newspaper, which was true enough. Later, a girlfriend revealed to Germaine’s mother that he was a famous poet who had written about the incineration of Sam McGee. Service even got the details of his honeymoon wrong. It did not take place weeks or months after his marriage but the very next day. In telling the story of Dream Haven, Service was doing what he always did: giving the public what it wanted.

  The Services spent a romantic summer at Dream Haven in 1914, the year his novel The Pretender was published. He thought it his best work to date but was disappointed when it did not achieve the success of his earlier books. The Great War ended their idyll in August. Service tried to enlist but was rejected because of varicose veins in his legs. He was probably more valuable to the Allied cause as a war correspondent, but the implacable Canadian censor, Lieutenant Colonel Ernest J. Chambers, didn’t see it that way. Service, who had volunteered for the Red Cross in order to get closer to the action, was dispatching on-the-spot reports to the Ottawa Journal, the Toronto Star, and other papers, which irked Chambers.

  “I cannot turn the car in that narrow road with the wounded lying under my wheels,” Service wrote in 1916 from France. “Two mangled heaps are lifted in. One has been wounded by a bursting gun. There seems to be no part of him that is not burned.… The skin of his breast is of a bluish colour and cracked open in ridges—I’m sorry I saw him.”

  That would never do. The authorities were doing their best to present the war as a kind of manly picnic, an adventure for young men who wanted to prove their mettle in combat. Horrified by Service’s plain speaking, Chambers forced the Journal’s editor, P. D. Ross, to pledge that the poet’s material would be expurgated or at the very least sanitized. “The more I see of Robert Service’s matter from the front,” Chambers wrote, “the more impressed I become that it is of a character to seriously interfere with recruiting in Canada.”

  The home in the little Breton fishing village that Service called his “dream haven.”

  A severe attack of boils put Service out of business as an ambulance driver but gave him time to produce another volume of verse during his convalescence. Rhymes of a Red Cross Man was a smashing success. It was, as a writer in The New Yorker later noted, “by far the most popular book of poetry published in this country.” In 1917 and 1918 it headed the non-fiction lists. In The Dial, Service was praised as “a poetic phenomenon. More or less ignored by the critics,” Whitter Brynner declared, “he has won a vast following. And it seems to me time for a fellow craftsman to protest that in this case the public is right.… We have been inquiring for the poetry of war. In my judgment, here it is.…”

  Service’s war poems differ radically from those of such English war poets as Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. He was not interested in tactics or strategy or the philosophy of war. There are no officers in Rhymes; the ordinary soldier holds the spotlight.

  Jim as lies there in the dug-out wiv ’is blanket round ’is ’ead,

  To keep his brains from mixin’ wiv the mud;

  And ’is face as white as putty, and his overcoat all red,

  Like ‘e’s spilt a bloomin’ paint-pot—but it’s blood.

  After the book was translated into Norwegian, Carl J. Hambro, a literary critic who was to become president of the League of Nations, took issue with a colleague who had translated a collection of war poems but had not included any by Service: “This in spite of the fact that the note is one of the most unusual and the voice one of the most masculine in the entire orchestra of war.” In one literary quarterly, the Texas Review, an academic made clear his belief that the Canadian Kipling was a genius in his own right. “Kipling failed utterly to contribute anything of poetic value to the literary output of the Great War,” he pointed out.

  After the United States entered the war, the ambulance corps was disban
ded. In February 1918 Service’s life lost its radiance. Germaine had given birth to twin girls, Doris and Iris, the previous year. Now, while the little family was visiting the Riviera, Doris, aged thirteen months, died of scarlet fever. It was a blow to the poet, who marked the tragedy with a tender poem, a cry of anguish that was never published.

  My little girl, whose smile so right

  I’ll see while sight endures

  This life of mine I’d give tonight

  Could I but ransom yours.

  Five months later, as he confessed to a friend, he could not think of her without bursting into tears.

  The Canadian government, meanwhile, offered him a dream job: to tour the war front, reporting on the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He travelled about with a Cadillac, a driver, and an officer guide with freedom to go anywhere he wished, inspecting field kitchens, forestry camps, airfields and hospitals. Back in Paris, with the war winding down, he embarked on a new book that he planned to call “War Winners,” all about unsung heroes. He was pounding away on his Remington one morning when he heard the clanging of hundreds of church bells and realized the war was over. That night he took the manuscript and tore it into tatters. “No more war. Not in my lifetime. Curse the memory of it. Now I will rest and forget. Now will I enjoy the peace and sweetness of Dream Haven.”

  Paris was suffering from a housing shortage, but Service managed to secure a two-story, five-bedroom flat on the Place de Pantheon by bribing the concierge. He equipped the large upper studio as a library to contain the one thousand books he had purchased on his most recent trip to London. Now the man who had once walked barefoot down the highways of California to save shoe leather took on the persona of a “plutocratic poet,” complete with tailored suit and monocle. “People in Paris accepted it without derision and I made an effort to live up to it. Behind it I concealed my inferiority complex. Screwing it in my eye I looked superciliously at the world.”