Winter had now come on in earnest; and the days and the weeks went heavy-heartedly by. I believe no month in my wife's life had ever seemed so long.
     But my hours fled; for I was feverishly at work.
     My day was as follows: I rose at half-past five and lit my fire. Often the temperature in the room was zero. Sometimes, when a winter storm was sweeping down from the western mountains, it was the faint rustling of papers floating about in the room which woke me; for the pressure of the wind on ill-fitting windows and rattling doors created fierce draughts. Then, for two hours, I sat at my desk, writing, forgetting the world, or anxiously watching the minute hand of the clock moving far too fast.
     Next, with the fire roaring in the heater, I prepared breakfast; and only when it was ready did I wake the

little girl to dress her. After breakfast it was my daily task to brush out her golden hair and to braid it in two long plaits which I wound round her head. That done, it was time to go to school; and I took her to Mrs. Cannon's.
     At noon, I ate my hurried lunch, hardly ever sitting down for the purpose, and pacing the room instead. When I had no noon supervision to do at school, I even snatched a few minutes to write again, for what I was putting down on paper had become so vivid and urgent a vision that I should have liked to project it by one single, concentrated effort of the will. Often, when I had to tear myself away, I was in open revolt, damning the world and all its irrelevant exigencies.
     At four I went for May; and together we crossed the street to the post office to fetch the mail. When there was a letter from May's mother, I read her the most cheerful passages, sometimes on our way home, sometimes after I had relit the fire in the chilly room.
     Then I sat down at my desk. In addition to Over Prairie Trails, much of The Turn of the Year was written during those months; for to me these two books have always formed a unit. In fact, they were originally conceived as a single book; and what distinguishes them in their printed version was the result of later recastings of the second volume.
     Meanwhile the little girl played about, sometimes, in her hours of forgetfulness, noisily. In her unhappy moments she would come to my elbow, pull at my sleeve, and demand my attention; and in order to distract her, I interrupted myself and played with her for a while.
     At six o'clock, I made supper; and soon after I put her to bed.

IN SEARCH OF MYSELF -- Page 338

     And then there followed four, five hours of the most strenuous and concentrated effort. Perhaps a blizzard was blowing outside; ice-cold draughts would give me alarming shivers; and, in my absorption, I would allow the fire to die down till the frost invaded my limbs. Impatiently, I replenished it.
     I learned much about myself during that fall.
     Thus, in the attempt to set down my vision, I realized that I had at bottom no language which was peculiarly my own. In a way this was an advantage to me; I had half a dozen of them instead. But in another way, it was a disadvantage and even a misfortune: I lacked that limitation which is best for the profound penetration of the soul of a language. I ground my teeth in my struggles; and, for the moment, all my struggles were with words.
     Another thing had an almost shattering effect on me. When listening to what I had read her of those books, my wife had formed a new plan. I was to devote myself entirely to writing. She knew by this time that my material was next to inexhaustible. When we were together, I was now pouring out the contents of my old writings and adding to them new plans upon plans. Even if my health did not give out, she would permanently make the living; soon she would have her life-certificate.
     What troubled me in all this was a profound suspicion. She expected that our ultimate financial salvation was to come from my books. In other words, what mattered to her was that my books should meet with success. But to me that did not matter in the least any longer; what mattered to me was only one thing: that those books should be written .
     In that opposition lay the germs of the tragedy to come; and, with profound misgivings, I began to foresee it.

     Often, during the later stretches of this quarter-century of our married life, the plan has come to me of writing the whole story of that life from her point of view; and whenever I thought of such a plan, an inevitable title attached itself to the unwritten book: The Life Heroic . It is most unlikely that I shall ever write that book; even if time and occasion served, I don't think I could do it; and time and occasion will no longer serve; I have given up and resigned myself. But I feel very poignantly that the world is the poorer without it. There are many kinds of heroism; and it is not those that become spectacular which are the most inspiring.
     Meanwhile, in this interval of the month of four weeks before I went to the city, four things happened, two auspicious, two sinister.
     About the middle of the month a man came to town for some purpose or other who had himself written and published books. In my official capacity I had some dealings with him; and these dealings led to a confidential talk. I told him something of my writing career. He asked me to let him see a manuscript or two. I showed him the bulky volumes of A Search for America and the just completed clean copy of Over Prairie Trails. There was no time for him to do more than browse about in them for an hour or so. When he handed them back, he laughed.
     "No wonder," he said, "that you've never been able to interest a publisher. Your books have never been read. Don't you know that these days manuscripts must be typewritten and on one side of the page only?"
     I did not know; but I considered it hopeful news. Perhaps it was this technical lack of my manuscripts only which had prevented their being printed long ago.

     Next, I received an unexpected remittance; a sum which I had loaned to a settler in Ferguson district and which I had written off as a loss; it had been overdue for some time, and I had no intention of suing for it. That money, then, would buy the typewriter which I needed.
     These were the auspicious events.
     Then, one day at school, when, during hours, I was called downstairs, my legs went numb at the precise moment when, at the top of the wide straight stairway, I was reaching for the hand-rail to descend. The thing came on with a sharp pain as though my spine had been struck with the point of a knife; but it was a purely momentary attack. It is true, I slipped down the fifteen or twenty steps, hitting each of them with a bump; but, arriving at the bottom, I rose to my feet without a moment's delay and was able to go about whatever business had called me from my class-room. It was as though a warning had been given.
     Then, one Friday morning, we woke into a world whirling with the worst blizzard of the year. The moment I opened the door to take May to Mrs. Cannon's, I realized that she could not possibly face the shrieking blast. She had shrunk back, and was clinging to me in that way which had by now become familiar and which meant that she could not bear the thought of being separated from me for the day. Turning back into the room which was not even yet fully thawed from the night's freezing, I lifted her to a chair, opened my old, ragged fur coat, told her to put her arms about my neck, and closed the coat over her thin little body. I was going to take her with me to school.
     Over the bulky coat, I was clasping her with my arms, bending my head down into the collar, partly in order

to protect chin and throat, partly in order to reassure her by the nearness of my face. At the gate, we turned into the school-yard and made for the school.
     That day, only one high-school pupil and half a dozen public-school children arrived. Every last one of the vans had been either overturned or blown off the road. But the law required school to be kept open even for one single pupil; and so the day dragged wearily out.
     The mail train was due at four o'clock; but it did not arrive. When May and I had returned to the shack, I kept listening for the whistle which was invariably blown for a nearby crossing. Since this was not a through train coming from any great distance - it was made up at Winnipeg - it seemed unlikely that it should be delayed for more than a few hours; no doubt it had started its run on time.
     The whistle blew about seven o'clock; and May was not yet in bed. I hesitated; I did not like to leave her alone before she was sound asleep; but I was impatient to get a letter from my wife who had not written for two days. Outside, the wind was howling and hissing with unabated fury.
     So I told the little girl that I was going to the post office to fetch news from her mother; she would have to play by herself for a while. She was exceptionally mature for her age; and I felt sure that she would touch neither stove nor lamp. I weighted down the papers on the desk at which I had been working and put on my coat. In half an hour, I told May, I should be back.
     I fought my way to the post office through the utter darkness and against a gale opaque with snow. In the deserted and sleepy office, I received my letter, read it, felt reassured, and started on my way home. The town

was abandoned; apart from myself, nobody had allowed himself to be lured out even by the prospect of receiving longed-for letters. In the streets, the elements ruled supreme. So I kept to the middle of the road where the drifts were lowest. Thence, not even a light could be seen in house or store.
     I had covered about half the distance when, in the middle of a drift, the very thing happened again which, a few days ago, had happened in school, at the top of the stairs; but it did not subside so quickly this time; there were no steps to jerk back into place whatever had moved in my spine.
     My head was perfectly clear. I simply sat down, half supported by the snow about me; but I was unable to move my legs.
     For an hour or longer I worked with my arms, trying to cover some ground by lifting myself forward, with legs and feet dragging behind. The trouble was that the snow offered no firm support; and I lost my bearings in the utter darkness that tore past me, driven by the fury of the wind which was the only thing that indicated direction.
     It was not long before exhaustion was added to my other difficulties; I had to be content to rest while defending myself as best I could against the stinging cold; I might have to wait for daylight before I was rescued. Two years ago I had defied the snow, the cold, and the wind in the wilderness between Gladstone and Falmouth; and here I was in town, more helpless, yes, in greater danger than I had been at that time. To the west of me there stood scattered houses: the manse, the dwelling of a thresherman, the cottage of a sempstress; to the east,

 a store and a shop. But to my eyes the world was a blank of blackness.
     I tried shouting; but the fierce tug of the wind snatched the voice from my lips and threw it aloft. Could a man freeze to death in the centre of this village street, within less than a hundred feet of human habitations? I thought of the little girl in the shack; no doubt carrying her in the morning had brought on this attack. I renewed my struggles till exhaustion overtook me again. Hours went by. I thought of my wife, only twenty-seven years old!
     And suddenly I heard the faint tinkle of sleigh-bells borne on the wind from behind. In a panic for in addition to all else there was the imminent danger of being run over - I raised myself on my hips, shouting and waving my arms. Then, by the faint and fitful radiance of a hurricane lantern dangling from the, dashboard of a sleigh, I saw two horses rearing above my head, in the air which was horizontally streaked by the flying snow. They swerved, tugging at their lines as their driver became aware of what was in the road. They knocked me over with weaving feet; but somehow their hoofs failed to hit my limbs. A moment later the man was bending over me.
     Shouting, I made myself heard and explained to him what had happened; and he hoisted me like a flour-bag to the seat of his cutter.
     At the house, the door would not open; something was in the way. But when my rescuer had lowered me to the ground in order better to apply his strength, the door yielded; and by the light of the lamp which was still burning though it flickered smokily in the draught, I saw

my little girl lying across the opening, fast asleep, her face streaked with the dried channels of her tears.
     By some miracle a remnant of warmth still lingered in the room; and I remembered having used two or three of the hardwood sticks I had for the fire; they had yielded a bed of embers.
     My rescuer propped me against the desk, turning the chair in front of it, closed the door, and lifted May to the bed. Then, having helped me to undress and, under my direction, replenished the fire, he went for the doctor.
     Meanwhile, half sitting, and propped by my pillows, I somehow managed to undress the little girl and to put her night-clothes on her. She never woke; and soon she was snug and warm again.
     When the doctor came, I explained to him what, in my opinion, the trouble was. He insisted that it was purely muscular. But he massaged my back, replenished the stove, and left me.
     Even while he had been at work I had seemed to feel it in my bones that a different sort of manipulation might be effective. The moment he was gone, I slowly worked myself over on my side and began to pound away with my fist at that spine, till, accompanied by unbearable pain, there was a sudden click - a sound that, in years to come, grew quite familiar to me and my wife.
     The consequence of my thus taking matters into my own hands was that, before daylight came in the morning, I was on my feet, moving about with the help of two chairs which I used like canes, pushing them about. Though every movement was painful and seemed precarious, I soon had the fire going once more and some sort of breakfast prepared.
     Outside, the storm blew with unabated violence.

     It was Saturday; and, the little girl playing about, glad to be with me, I did a modicum of work at my desk. But above all I used the day for the purpose of threshing the whole situation out with myself.
     I did not mention anything of all this to my wife; for I was going to see her in a week's time. But I knew what had to be done. For a while at any rate, she would have to make the living; after that we should see.
     Seven years ago I had come north to find a hermitage for myself in the Pembina Mountains, determined to renounce all material comfort and human relationship. From that plan I had allowed myself to be side-tracked, first by a task, then by marriage. Where the hermitage was did not matter; nor, so I argued, did it matter, for the purpose of my work, whether I was alone or with wife and child; so long as I could concentrate on this one thing, my work.
     Incidentally, the moment I had a typewriter, I should once more have to open the campaign against the publishers, if only to test the validity of my wife's confidence in my powers.
     A week later, on Friday night, May and I went to Neepawa to board the night train for Winnipeg:
     It proved quite impossible to awaken the little girl in the back seat of the car. Once or twice she opened bewildered eyes; but she at once fell back, inert and overcome with sleep.
     Then the train was approaching. With one arm I picked her up in her wraps and, the suitcase hanging from the other hand, I staggered across the platform. The moment I left the car, the driver put the engine in gear; and the vehicle clattered away to the thunder of its exhausts.

     I had not intended to take a berth in the sleeper, thinking that, even though I might have to sit up, I could somehow arrange for May to continue her sleep. But when the train came to a stop, a single glance showed me that every last seat was taken in the day coach.
     I staggered on to the Pullman. The porter relieved me of the suitcase; and I climbed the steps with May in my arms. In the vestibule I met the conductor.
     "Any berth vacant?" I asked.
     ''I have one."
     So, with the porter bringing my suitcase, I lifted my human burden into the berth and climbed after. I did not undress but half sat, half reclined through the remainder of the night. The little girl never woke till we were in Winnipeg.
     That Saturday was crowded with business. I bought the typewriter and many other, smaller things, for our needs were desperate. The prices of all things were nearing their peak.
     There was one other thing I wished to attend to. Even with regard to my new book, Over Prairie Trails, I felt by this time so little confidence - not with regard to its value, but with regard to its appeal to a possible public -that I had, in my mind, looked about for a confirmation of my wife's estimate. I read her the book, of course; and she was enthusiastic; but she might be prejudiced. In Winnipeg, I knew one man, a high-school teacher, whom, for some reason or other, I credited with a modicum of judgment in matters literary; so I rang him up over the telephone and told him of my difficulty. He promised to meet me at a stated hour in the lobby of the Y.M.C.A. building in the city. But, though I waited there for several hours, he failed to appear. Weeks later, he wrote

me to apologize. I had, after all, to depend on my own judgment.
     My wife had the offer of a school not far from the city, in the bush-country east of Selkirk, in a Ukrainian district under the administration of the official trustee. Her salary would be nine hundred and fifty dollars; and we decided that she had better accept. She needed a school with a cottage; and apart from those administered from Winnipeg, there were very few of them.
     Then, all things being settled for 1920, I returned to Eden for another four weeks. On December 1st I asked to be relieved of my duties at Christmas.
     And now there followed two almost lurid weeks of desperate work. I made a typescript with five carbon copies of Over Prairie Trails; it was the shortest of all my books. As before, I worked for two hours before breakfast; I did one page at noon; and I typed again at night, sitting up into the small hours of the following day. Typing, as I did, with one finger of each hand, I was slow, of course; and I made many mistakes. In my ignorance of common usage, I single-spaced my lines and used so-called onion-skin paper. But by the first week of December I had my usual six copies ready.
     During my brief stay at Winnipeg I had made it a point to get, from the leading bookseller, the present addresses of all Canadian publishers; for I considered it useless to send this book to any others, in the United States or in England. My manuscripts were promptly sent out.
     Then I began to pack up. Since there was the constant danger of again dislocating vertebrae, this was a difficult task. I unscrewed all the parts of my desk, manoeuvred the crates into place, and, slowly, slowly, slipped, first the top, then the chests of drawers into

them. Thus the little girl and I lived for the last two weeks in a chaos of crates and boxes. Only the bed remained to the last.
     It was my intention to leave in the morning of the day after school had closed. Fortunately, the parents of a pupil of mine who lived in town, seeing my predicament, invited May and me to spend the last night at their house; and that enabled me to finish the crating and packing in the afternoon. By night we were ready to leave.
***
I had, however, barely arrived at Winnipeg where, at the boarding-house, I occupied a room adjacent to my wife's, when, probably in consequence of my recent severe exertions, there was another attack of my trouble. In one respect it was not as bad as the last had been; it did not totally disable me. In return it did not yield as quickly, either, to treatment by rest or by violence.
     The Normal Session closed; and at last my wife had her life certificate; in that respect, at least, we were safe.
     We were ready to go; and the sooner we went, the better; for life in the city was expensive. There was a single fifty-dollar Victory Bond left in reserve. At last my wife was told at the office of the official trustee that all was in readiness; the cottage awaiting her occupancy.
     The name of the district was Ashfleld; and it lay six miles east of the station of Little Britain on the electric car line from Winnipeg to Selkirk.
     Our removal was begun under the most inauspicious circumstances. We left Winnipeg on New Year's Eve. I was barely able to crawl along, and we had to take a

taxicab to reach the terminal of the car line. At Little Britain, whence we were to reach the school, we were met by a team of bob-sleighs. It was an hour's run through beautiful, mild winter weather in the aspen country of eastern Manitoba - a landscape of which I was especially fond.
     But at the cottage we found my wife's predecessor still in residence and the whole place in a condition which made it impossible for us to take possession. The dirt was indescribable; and most of the furniture was broken by rough usage. We had our own furniture; but it was not there; at the best it might be waiting for us at the railway station, four or five miles away. For several days we might have to make shift with what we found; and, to mention only one thing, the bed was in a state which precluded any possibility of our using it. We were willing to rough it and to get along with a minimum of comfort; but cleanliness was an indispensable requisite.
     Our driver, having deposited our personal baggage -trunk, suitcase, and a bundle of bedding - on the snow at the gate, had promptly departed; and my wife, leaving me in the distasteful company of the woman we had found in possession, had to find another team to take us back. When she had succeeded, it took me ten minutes to cover the distance of perhaps a hundred and fifty feet from the door of the cottage to the gate of the yard. The worst of it was that I handled myself under a feeling of profound humiliation.
     It was nine o'clock at night when we arrived once more at the boarding-house in the city where, fortunately, our rooms remained vacant.
     On January second, my wife went to see the official trustee. Most obligingly he hastened to send a man out

to Ashfield to investigate. When the report came in, it entirely justified my wife.
     Characteristically, the official trustee professed that he had known for some time that my wife's predecessor was not a woman to be trusted with a school removed from local control; he had kept her in charge, he said, for the very reason that the ratepayers of the district had sent in complaint after complaint; he had to show them that they had no say in the matter of deciding who should or should not teach their children; as a representative of the provincial government, he would brook no meddling. He anticipated the Fascist methods of central Europe
     As far as my wife was concerned, he was fair enough; he offered to have the place thoroughly overhauled by painter and paperhanger; to replace the broken furniture and the bed; and to see to it that the lady in question left at once. As a matter of fact, he merely transferred her to a neighbouring district. He further agreed to pay our expenses for the duration of the delay caused by the circumstances - the bill, of course, to be footed by the ratepayers of the district. These expenses we were at great pains to keep as low as possible.
     Being assured at last that our grievances had been redressed, we moved out again; and we found the cottage and everything in it spick-and-span. I was still unable to move with any degree of freedom; and so, on the day after our arrival, school having opened in the morning, my wife walked the five miles through the bush, after four, to the station of Gonor, where she identified our furniture standing unprotected on the snow of the platform and arranged to have it brought out.
     We settled down. My wife entered upon her quadruple task of housekeeping, raising a child, nursing an invalid

husband, and teaching a neglected school. Every morning, before leaving the cottage, she helped me to my desk where I sat propped by pillows till she returned at noon.
     We had been there for no more than a week when the entirely unexpected or unhoped-for happened.
     Messrs. McClelland & Stewart, of Toronto, one of the six firms to which Over Prairie Trails had been offered, accepted it for publication in the fall of 1920. This was one of the cases in which a Canadian house, without any anticipation of profit, accepted a book because, in their opinion, it deserved to be published.
     I was exultant, of course. In the first place it seemed as though, after all, I should be able to keep faith with my wife's expectations; in the second, the fact seemed to confirm what the literary man had said to me at Eden. This was the first typescript I had ever sent out; and it promptly found a publisher; perhaps there would actually never have been any difficulty in the past if my manuscripts had not been written by hand.
     Success was a stimulant. I felt so buoyed up that I set to work with a tremendous enthusiasm. The prospect seemed to have its effect even on my health; I began to move about more freely.
     There followed a few months of amazing fertility.
     First of all I attacked A Search for America which still comprised some three hundred thousand words, in spite of the fact that it had, in the past, been rewritten six times. I did not yet type it; but by severe surgery I reduced its bulk to about a hundred and fifty thousand words.
     Simultaneously I resketched and largely rewrote, during that spring, four other books: the little volume which was to appear in 1923 under the title The Turn

of the Year - though, so far, the title essay remained unwritten; the book which I called Adolescence and which, in 1930, appeared under the title The Yoke of Life; Our Daily Bread; and that terrible, three-volume novel which I called Pioneers and of which a garbled extract was to appear in 1925, under the title of one of its parts, Settlers of the Marsh.
     In addition, I took abundant notes for a book which still remains unpublished because I am not yet satisfied with it: I called it the Ant Book. Whether it will ever be published will depend on whether I shall still find the necessary leisure.*
     It was work from morning till night. The little girl, four years old, played about.
     Meanwhile we were more or less prisoners in the schoolyard; we had no means of getting about; and so it was only natural that we should begin to make plans for buying a horse once more.
     Yet my health seemed to improve; and by and by we resumed our old habit of taking daily walks after four. All about us stood the thin, chill poplar woods, crowded in places with underbrush consisting of juneberry, wild plum, and hazel.
     Only to the south there was a sort of village formed by the farmsteads of the Ukrainian settlers. Here, the land was still divided in long strips running east-west; for it had once abutted on the Red River, cut up into "river-lots"; decades ago these had been shortened by subdivision; yet the dwellings continued to be ranged close to each other along the road.

     Our chief entertainment consisted in planning a house of our own, set in these woods, to be built when success had come. By this time, my wife had infected me with her optimism; once more, even for me, life lay ahead. We searched for, and found, a place where trees and shrubs - hazel, in this case - were, by nature, arranged in such a way as to mark off front and back yard as well as building site. Already I had begun to feel, I being now forty-eight years old, that, if ever we were to have a place of our own, be it ever so modest, we could not wait for trees of our planting to grow; our grounds must be devised in such a way as to make use of growth already established. To do so, we brought an immense amount of ingenuity into play.
     This amusement was to remain our chief entertainment for another twelve years; and when possession became a fact, the place, from which I am writing this moment, was far from bodying forth our dreams.
     The difficulty of securing supplies at last forced us to face the problem of buying a horse. We were six miles from the town of Selkirk; and for the greater part of the distance there was only a trail. The settlers were willing enough to bring what we needed; but they did not go out of their way to enquire. Once or twice, after I had recovered, I walked; but it was not easy to carry provisions home; they were often bulky and sometimes heavy.
     Spring was on its way; and summer lay ahead. There was pasture aplenty in the glades of the woods and even in the school-yard. So, an opportunity offering, we bought pony, buggy, and sleigh, a complete outfit, for one hundred dollars.
     Against the winter, of course, some sort of stable would be needed. Our walks, henceforth, became logging expe-

ditions. Armed with a hatchet, for I dared not swing an axe, we went into the bush, to select boles with a diameter of not more than six inches at the butt. I squatted down, if possible with my back against a stump or a tree, and hacked away with my weapon till my wife, or, more often, the little girl gave warning that the tree was about to fall. Finally we dragged these poles, stripped of their branches, to the yard, where we leaned them with their tops against each other, wiring them together. Slowly, thus, in the course of months of labour, we built a pole-stable in the form of an inverted V. In the fall, we meant to have a few loads of straw thrown over the structure to make it wind-proof and warm; and to make it, ultimately, when the hay gave out, edible as well. When completed, this stable fitted our pony as a glove fits the hand.
     Another difficulty had to be solved. The pony, left to roam the countryside in search of pasture, became wild and hard to catch when wanted. A regular routine established itself. With or without the help of the schoolchildren, we manoeuvred till we had the little horse inside the school-yard. Then May stood and played her mouth-organ. Instantly the shaggy little beast would come and stand over her, touching her shoulder with hanging lip. When we first discovered this musical propensity, or this friendship between horse and child, we were afraid to make use of it, for the pony was a fierce kicker; but we soon convinced ourselves that he would never hurt the little girl. When he was standing thus, May, still playing and holding the mouth-organ witch one hand, reached up with the other and took the pony by the mane. Then anyone could walk up and slip his bridle on.
     Thus our lives, for the moment, resembled an idyll.

     The summer holidays coming around again, my wife re-engaged for the following year; in the fall a book of mine was to appear; we were full of hope.
     From day to day, during that summer, I expected to receive the proof sheets of Over Prairie Trails; but they did not come. At last I wrote to the publishers.
     In their answer they stated briefly that economic conditions forced them to postpone publication indefinitely. Meanwhile I was to consider myself at liberty to offer the book elsewhere.
     The old story was beginning over again. I had already offered the book to every Canadian publisher.
     At once the trouble with my spine made itself felt again. For seven weeks I had to remain in bed; and, since we were so near Winnipeg, my wife began to urge me once more to seek medical or surgical help. I did as she wanted me to; but my choice of a practitioner was necessarily blind. I happened to hit upon one who specialized in fallen stomachs; and he promptly diagnosed a fallen stomach in my case. For months on end I was bandied about from one physician to another; and all of them had abundant X-ray photographs taken. Out of the nine hundred and fifty dollars of my wife's income, we spent over six hundred on doctor's bills.
     Which was not the worst. The worst was that all our hopes with regard to the book were dashed to the ground; and that was serious for several reasons. My wife kept repeating that she did not mind being no matter how poor, so long as our poverty was borne for the sake of some sort of achievement. I knew that achievement meant publication to her, if not financial success. She never

put it that way. What she said was that she was willing to go on indefinitely provided I went on writing. But I knew only too well that the other thing stood behind it at least as a hope.
     I myself was growing weary. I had been writing for thirty years; there was nothing to show for it except stacks of manuscripts encumbering my desk.
     I was thinking along new lines. In all my writing I had, so far, followed an inner urge which I had never questioned. My theoretical or critical thinking I had done in the abstract, as it were. Or it had been applied to the work of others, chiefly the dead. I had evolved certain aesthetic theories which sometimes did and sometimes did not agree with those of others - of Benedetto Croce, for instance.
     Whether a book was successful or not meant nothing to me; what mattered was whether it was a work of art. But what was art?
     Hamsun's Growth of the Soil had recently appeared. Perhaps no other book has had a more decisive influence on the formulation of my theories. For the moment its effect on me was so great that I shelved my own book, Pioneers, unfinished. It seemed to me that Hamsun had done what I had attempted. It is characteristic of my whole attitude towards what I came to define to myself as art, that I considered it entirely unnecessary to finish a book the subject of which had been successfully dealt with by another. This attitude is not invalidated by the fact that I resumed the book at a later stage. I came to the conclusion that my aim had, after all, been fundamentally different from Hamsun's. In Hamsun's book I came to see a thing I abhorred, namely, romanticism; which means essentially a view of life in which circum-

stance is conquered by endeavour only if endeavour is aided by the deus ex machina . In other words, as I expressed it to myself, if man is justified by faith instead of by works; or if faith persists in the face of the strongest disproof and is ultimately upheld by an external intervention, natural or supernatural. This intervention is personified, in Hamsun's book, by the figure of Geissler. That has never been my view. Incidentally, speaking for once in self-defence, this fact alone should have protected me against Lorne Pierce's assertion that The Yoke of Life is a "pale imitation of Jude the Obscure ". The Yoke of Life may be an artistic failure; and, personally, I consider Jude the Obscure a very great book, artistically one of the greatest novels ever written; but it is a pessimistic book; whereas The Yoke, whatever it may be worth, stands beyond pessimism and optimism. It was, by the way, conceived before Jude was written; it was written before Jude came to my hand. I was then, as I am today, handicapped by my inability to buy books; and libraries have always cold-shouldered me, at least in this country. I found it easier to get books from Berlin or Paris than from Winnipeg.
     But to return to that fall of 1920. Roughly speaking, this was the position at which I had arrived in my thinking.
     Art has its being, not in the activity of the artist -which is only its occasion - but in the mental and emotional reaction of him to whom it is addressed: there is its true and only material; what is commonly called its material should properly be called its tools.
     Just as a tree, falling in virgin forest, out of earshot of man or beast, does not produce sound but merely a wave-like disturbance of the air, thus writing which finds

no reader does not produce art, which is in its very nature a reaction. I likened my work to such a tree falling; its sound arises merely in the nerve-centres of him who hears. I remained unheard; there was no sound; there was no art. My work was futile. So long as I remained my sole reader, whatever of cunning there may have been in my writing - and, naturally, I thought there was a good deal - was a sort of spiritual self-abuse. There was, of course, the usual explanation of my lack of success in which the majority of unsuccessful writers indulge; namely, that the fault lay with others not with themselves. In my own case, I have always dismissed that explanation as too facile. It did not seem to fit the facts. From the facts, however, I suffered. Today I know that nobody finds in art what he does not bring to it, if only potentially.
     Years later, in the prologue to this book, I have dealt with this same question from a different point of view.
     When school had re-opened in the fall, I wasted a good deal of time by surrendering to my despondency. I did not mind being poor; I did not mind remaining obscure. What I did mind was that all my past and present endeavour echoed away in a void, ineffectual, useless. I was a burden pressing the earth; I was a drag on my wife. There was only one way in which I could redeem myself in her eyes: by making money; and it will be seen, by those who read between the lines, that here, indeed, there was a fall. For the present year, however, it was too late.
     In this mood, one of despair, just to be doing something, I sat down to write at last one of the two books which I had now been planning for thirty years. From the beginning I knew I was spoiling it; just as later I was to spoil The Master of the Mill, because a publisher took

it upon himself to advance me a considerable part of the possible royalties. In order to write the Ant Book in a way which would satisfy me, I had to write it out of an exuberance of triumph, sitting, as it were, on top of the world. As it was, it became harsh and bitter; it became a grumbling protest against the insanity of human institutions; it became a preachment. What it should have been was a laughing comment on all life, which, from moment to moment is always in error; while, through the ages, it slowly creeps up, up, up. It was an axiom with me that human evolution has not yet freed itself from its animal trammels. So far, the book has withstood all endeavour to remedy its fundamental defect; for, as I have said, I was never again to free myself of economic bondage; and with me, too, as someone has said of somebody else, the kind of success I wanted would have acted as a tonic, whereas failure acted as a specific poison.
     Suddenly a ray of hope blazed like a meteor through our firmament.
     A copy of the current issue of the Saturday Evening Post having strayed into our cottage, my wife, browsing in it, said that here was the natural outlet for A Search for America.
     I wrote to the fiction editor, giving him a fairly accurate idea of what the book was.
     To my surprise I received a prompt answer saying that the editor was extraordinarily interested in books of the type I described. Could I let him have a copy of the manuscript by such-and-such a date? If so, it would have his personal attention. After the date named, it would be dealt with by others; for he was going to leave on his holiday.
     There was no typescript!

     Allowing for the time the manuscript would have to spend in transit, the date gave me ten days.
     I made a careful count; even the recently abridged version was of a hundred and fifty thousand words. Fifteen thousand words a day?
     What was worse, I had no typewriter ribbon fit to use. The one which I had bought with the machine was worn to shreds; another which the banker at Eden had given me after it had been discarded for office use proved to be so dry that it would not yield a legible line. I thought of writing through a sheet of carbon; but my carbons were also exhausted. I had no money with which to buy carbon or ribbon; we shall see in a moment just how poor we were.
     And then I had an inspiration. Using the second ribbon, I typed a line over twice, in the same space; it became faintly legible; repeating the process for a third time, I produced a good line.
     I set to work. Rising at five in the morning, I settled down at the typewriter; and after a hurried breakfast at eight, I returned to it; and again after dinner. By four o'clock I was completely exhausted.
     But at that hour my wife came home; and she promptly took the typewriter over. She was slower than I; for, in spite of my one-finger technique, I had by this time developed a considerable speed. Yet even she, while I rested and later laid the fire for supper, bringing in, with May's help, wood and water for the night and the next day, managed to type out some five or six pages, single-spaced, of seven hundred and fifty words each. After supper, I resumed my seat at the machine and hammered away at the keys, sometimes long after my wife had given

up watching me and gone to bed; she and the little girl had, in this cottage, a separate bedroom.
     Thus, writing every line over three times, we did, after all, manage to produce a legible typescript of the book within the ten days.
     As it turned out, we might have taken our time about it; for the Saturday Evening Post very promptly returned the book with a printed rejection slip. I am firmly convinced that the manuscript never reached that fiction editor.
     In fact, we might have taken seven years for the task; for it was not till 1927 that the book was at last printed from that very typescript. But when it appeared, it did some extraordinary things for us; it made an instant success which has since run into tens of thousands of copies.
     Before the end of the year I was to have one more attack of my spine trouble. A local teachers' convention was to be held in the city; and my wife had agreed to give an address on the teaching of foreign-born children.
     Early in the morning I drove her, in our cutter, for the snow lay deep by that time, to Little Britain on the electric car line. The little girl, of course, came along for the ride. We arranged that I should meet my wife again at four o'clock. Then May and I returned to Ashfield.
     It was a bright, cold winter day; and all went well till, on our return home, May and I had alighted in the yard. The little girl ran into the house which we never thought of locking.
     Just as, having unbuckled the pony's back-band, I was reaching up to strip the harness over his rump, preparatory to stabling him, I sat down in the snow. The pony, with his harness on his back, walked off to his diminutive stable.

     It was close to the road; and as I lay there, a pair of bob-sleighs passed, with two men on the flat rack. They saw me; and one of them said to the other, plainly audible to me, "Drunk as usual." The strange thing was that I did not believe that either of them had ever seen me before; certainly neither had ever seen me drunk. The only intoxicant I used was my work.
     I lay still for a while, exploring the possibilities by tentative, very slight movements. Then, carefully, I worked my way to the steps and at last called for the little girl, now five years old.
     When she opened the door and saw me, she became frightened and ran away, calling, "Don't do that, daddy! Don't do that!" She thought I was trying to scare her in jest. But I spoke to her and succeeded in quieting her down. Then, with her help, and with a chair to lean on, I got to my bed. At noon, under my directions, it was she who got us our lunch.
     By three o'clock I was so far recovered that I somehow made my way back to the sleigh. I was on the point of sending May for help when a farmer happened to pass. He put the horse between the shafts.
     I fetched my wife from the station; but when we got home, I had to be helped into the cottage and to bed where I remained for several weeks.
     This attack made me very despondent, for I was already planning a way out of our troubles. Strange to say, when I got up again I could handle myself better than I had been able to do for years; and as it turned out, six years were to go by before I had another attack. As if to make up for the respite, however, it seemed as if the seriousness of every successive attack stood in direct proportion to the time elapsed since the previous one.

     As I have mentioned, out of an income of nine hundred and fifty dollars for the year, over six hundred dollars went for doctor's bills, X-ray examinations, and treatments prescribed. Nothing seemed to do me the slightest good. Now this was the year when prices of the post-war period reached their highest points. Sugar was twenty-eight dollars a hundred pounds; butter, which we went without, was a dollar; flour, in this wheat country, was twelve dollars the bag. There was no abundance of anything in our cottage. The little girl was excessively fond of jams, which we could not afford. I personally have always considered it as the nadir of our fortunes when, at Christmas, we found that all we could spend on the little girl was thirty-five cents.
     Early in the new year I went to Selkirk to lay in a scanty stock of necessary supplies. For the second time in my life I found money; a five-dollar bill this time. I laid the whole of this princely sum out in strawberry jam. At home, the rejoicing was great.
     But the central fact determining our outlook was that the book had failed to appear.
     My wife had done what to almost any other woman would have seemed the impossible; and I was in revolt. Once more I broached the plan of returning to high-school teaching. My wife did not believe I could or would do it; but she saw my despondency and humoured me.
     It seemed a hint of providence which decided the issue. Eden was advertising for a principal and an entrance-to-high-school teacher. Playfully, my wife and I laid a wager. If we were both accepted, so that we could teach together in the same school, and at a joint salary of not less than three thousand dollars, we should go; if only one of us was accepted, we should decline.

     But I felt confident that Eden would jump at the chance of having me back; and so it turned out. Since they could not have me without my wife - we had made that abundantly clear - they engaged both of us.
     When school closed, we had nothing in reserve, not even enough to pay for the removal; and besides, my clothes were in rags. But we sold horse, buggy, and sleigh for what they had cost us; and - a curious windfall - my wife received a bonus of one hundred dollars for having stayed out her full year at Ashfield.