United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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ENbARKER b ' Ann Phelps I admit, that in order to do and to act we have to forget our dreams. But none of us, and you’ll have to gree with this, would have accom¬ plished anything if he hadn’t come down to the world as it is, to the way of life as it exists. It seems that about all a man can do is to hold his own, let alone try to drag humanity along on his shoulders.” li “That’s very true, Dave, and very sad,” Robert returned. We always liked listening to Robert Victor talk. He had a way of putting things. “But I think the great pity of it all is that in order to get any place in this world we have to sacrifice, almost wholly, all the fine and worthy principles of which this world seems to he so very much in need. It’s a con¬ tradiction. But that contradiction comes only when we think of success and accomplishment in terms of ourselves alone. If we were to think and act in the interests of all people, we would never lose those principles—in fact, they would become necessary touchstones, the only motivating forces of our lives. And we lose our sense of appreciation. Appreciation of little things, of just the delicate way that Lois is holding her cigarette just now. We forget, in our mad rush through space and time, to even stop to enjoy ordinary, simple bits of loveliness. Just look at her—now don’t move your hand, Lois,—look at that cigarette and how beauti¬ fully she’s holding it. And watch that thin smoke gracing its way upward. Lovely! How many of us ever stop to notice such things. Very few. We haven’t the time, I guess. We lose our appreciation for that sort of thing be¬ cause we stop cultivating it. I don’t know the Bible very well, but isn’t there something, somewhere about being born again? That’s the way it is when we enter this world of practi¬ cal. We are born again, only this time it’s a far sorrier birth.” Janet interrupted. “Look, Bob, in spite of everything high and fine and all the good ends towards which we might want to strive, in¬ tellectually, I mean, it seems that we soon be¬ come checked by a little incident in that very humanism you’re speaking of. We become checked by human nature. People want to get ahead personally. They want to express them¬ selves. They’s afraid that unless they have some solid references of accomplishment such as a bank account, a good home, a substantial way of living, their lives will have been wasted. It’s man’s apology to himself and his sacrifices to fear. And much as we may dislike it, or say that we dislike it, there it is.” “Bob,” Lois began, “I think what you’ve been saying, when you bring it down to people, people we know, it becomes just so much talk. After all, men just don’t live by principles. People aren’t satisfied with living the good life and going around just appreciating and en¬ joying the little, and, I admit, lovely things in life. Can you, offhand, think of any man who was content to go about wrapped in a cello- phanic idealism, simply for the sake of his ideals and the quaint pleasures of enjoying other people and other things. Now don’t throw Christ up in our faces. I mean some little man, unheard of, unknown. Bring it right down to earth. Well, can you?” Her voice was almost a challenge. Robert paused and thought a moment. “Yes,” he mused, “yes, I can. And if you have the patience and a little time, I think I’d like to tell you about him. He was one of the few men I knew who went about, obscurely, sifting humanity for its little gems.” “When we were very young,” Robert be¬ gan, “our family had a summer cottage on a little island in Lake Ontario. A fair-sized town had grown up there over a period of years, composed, in the main, of city people who liked to idle away the green months in the quiet contentment of just such a community. By 1910, when I was seven years old and my sister Marilyn only five, there must have been about a hundred homes on the island with about four hundred people spending July and August there. The island itself was beautiful, and for children it was Paradise. Tall pines every-

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J T WAS December and a cold night—the kind of night for a fireplace, low, mellowed lights, a few friends and the easy luxury of deep, leathered chairs. I knew it would be a night of reminiscence and good talk and had prepared for it by placing an extra supply of logs near the fireplace and mixing the drinks to a smooth finish. Fairy MORTEM), That was the setting then, five of us in all— old comrades of our crackling and spirited college days—gathered in a comfortable, in¬ timate arc around the fire. The men, hands in pockets and slouching deep in their chairs, were stretched out long across the carpet. The women, fingering cigarettes, were curled up cozily in their places. It had been a long time since the five of us had been together. We had finished with initial pleasantries. Each of us, in the retelling, had condensed a year of living into five or six minutes of con¬ versational time. We had mentioned current topics, deplored the outcome of the recent civic elections, touched upon the casual events of our day-to-day life. Easy, gentle conversation, preliminary to the deeper pleasures of talk about younger days. Inevitably we eased into the theme. Tales about professors and students and the char¬ acters we knew; little, insignificant details, which made one wonder at memory, came out. Warm anecdotes about college drama nights, about dances, about all night crammings for English exams. Melancholy rememberings of the idealism of our youth. It was a close, a real and a personal world we were in that night, soft and cherished, like all gone and half for¬ gotten things. We talked, it seemed, without care or notice of time, for hours. It was while we were recalling and musing about those great, abandoned principles with which each of us had at one time been fired, that we really became aware for the first time that night, of one another; and each of us sud¬ denly became aware of himself. David Hal- land: Visions of furious brown hair, and hand thumping out the rights of the common man to a just share in the world’s goods. The giant voice of Everyman. The great liberator return¬ ed to save the world from a different type of slavery. There he sat, cool, deliberate, im¬ maculate leg over immaculate leg, crossed in luxury. Vice-president of Apex Steel. “Heart Illustrated of Steel” on the banners of the striking workers. There was his wife Lois, cohort of his youth¬ ful battles. Mother of three boys. Undisputed head of the better Winnipeg women. My wife, Janet, and I, both glowing vision¬ aries of a brave, new world—what had hap¬ pened to us? We had settled into comfort with the years. We were listed with the well-to-do. Socially prominent, good citizens, and the edi¬ torial pages of the local dailies would speak well of us at our death. Nothing more. And there was Robert Victor. At college he had found his life in the delicate pages of familiar and obscure poetry. He was the one among us who used to say that he not only saw humanity but felt it. He had made his com¬ promise with life, perhaps not as fully and as successfully as the others, but the compromise had nevertheless been made. He was the man¬ ager of the Winnipeg branch of Manner Ad¬ vertising Agency. But he was the only one of us who had never given up his resentment, had never quite accepted, was never quite resigned to his place in the scheme of things. He had a look about him which comes from a long, inner smoldering—a look of defiance not yet con¬ quered. We always used to say, back in those days, that Robert had the saddest eyes in the whole world. David was the first to articulate the apology that we all felt had somehow become necessary. “It’s all very well to talk about ‘idealism’ and ‘values,’ ” he punctuated the words with a slight scorn, “but the hard and real fact of it is that this happens to be a pretty practical world.” His voice rose a little and lingered on this last phrase, as though he were speaking in meditation. “And while we may want to go around dreaming and living on clouds, we soon enough find out that if we want to get any¬ where, we have to start doing. It’s unfortunate, K 5

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where and little paths through the woods that would suddenly break into lush clearings filled with the greenest grass and sparkling with wild flowers. With each summer we could hardly wait to go back to Meland, as the island was called, to search out again the little re¬ membrances of shining pebbles and strange, exotic twistings of wood that are so important and lovely in the lives of little children and that we had hidden away secretly; and each year we would take inventory and notice the relaxed signs of a raging winter’s toll. That same year an hotel had been built and the previous year the summer visitors had con¬ tributed towards the construction of a little theatre, to which small circuits of vaudeville performers would come to entertain the com¬ munity. It was an evening in August that year, and I remember the circumstances as clearly as if it had all happened only yesterday. We had finished our dinner and Dad was sitting on the verandah smoking and reading his magazine. Mother was clearing the table and Aunt Helen, my father’s sister who was visiting with us at the time, was in the kitchen washing the dishes. It couldn’t have been later than 6.30 o’clock, and while Marilyn and I were gener¬ ally expected in bed early, we still had almost two hours to ourselves. Children, it seems, are the really great searchers in this world, and we were of these. It was our greatest joy in those days to explore new paths, little turns. I think, when there were no new paths left for us on the island, we used to invent them, or find them where a foot had rested only once. That afternoon, on the southern shore of the island, we had noticed a little road on which we had never been. We had immediately resolved that, dinner over, it would be explored. The spirit of the old French explorers reborn, I suppose. Earlier in the summer, as was the tradition, almost a rite with us every year, we had scurried about in search of substantial walking sticks, and we went on no expedition without them. Taking them up then, this summer even¬ ing, we hurried eagerly to the shore front so that we might start all the earlier on our ex¬ ploration; for to children every new road is a new adventure and entered upon with all the excitement and expectation of the old, peering sailors in search of new lands. The sun was leaning westward when we started along the path. Everything was gold and green and warm, and we were flushed, I suppose, with an unexplainable awareness of the controlled pulsing of the earth and its fruits. It was a lone and lovely path. The trees stood tall on either si de and you could look straight up and see the sheer blueness of the sky. Here and there we stopped to pick up little things and I stuffed them into my pockets. Nevertheless, we must have been walking rather quickly because we were soon deep in the forest and the path had taken several turns. It was with the sudden rounding of one of these turns that we saw, directly ahead of us and walking slowly on, a tall, thin man. He was dressed in a black suit with a short cape flung round his shoulders. He walked with a slight forward stoop, as though he felt he were too tall. He must have heard us coming because he turned around and faced us. Our first impulse was to run for home as quickly as possible; he was such a strange look¬ ing man for children to be meeting in the mid¬ dle of a forest. His dark clothes and particu¬ larly the black cape he wore were so completely foreign to a warm setting of evening in the summertime. And then again, although in our hearts we knew that we were bold adventurers, still, it was getting a little darker out. However, even as we hesitated, our little legs ready to run at the slightest movement of even a leaf, he raised his hand in a friendly gesture and smiled at us. I remember to this day what a wonderful smile he had. It was kindness and you could never mistake it for politeness or any other such trained expres¬ sion. Somehow with it, all sense of fear left us and since he seemed to be waiting for us to approach, we walked, with a very slight cau¬ tion, towards him. I remember examining him well, as chil¬ dren do, when we got nearer to him. He was, as I have said, very tall and very thin. His face was long and in his cheeks were two deep fur¬ rows—from smiling, I like to think. When we were almost at his side he said: “And where are you two little children go¬ ing all by yourselves?” “We’re exploring, I guess,” Marilyn hesi¬ tated. (Continued on page 36) 6