Dumb Talkies

In the Editor’s Confidence

From MacLean’s Magazine, 15 July 1934

Dumbness of the Talkies!

LACEY AMY is a Canadian novelist who, generally speaking, is content with life. In the summer he dwelleth at Colborne by the side of the cool waters of Lake Ontario. In the winter he basks in the warmly advertised sunshine of Florida or Algiers or Italy or Spain or the South of France. He is a mellow, gentle soul.

Until one subject is mentioned. Then he breathes fire. That subject is the Talking Picture industry of Hollywood. So far as the Great Shining Stars are concerned, if you can picture a press agent gone suddenly into reverse, converting every superlative into a masterpiece of derogation, you have but a pale image of Lacey Amy. And as for directors!

On page seven we have Mr. Amy’s answer to our invitation to express his views in print. Our personal opinion is that there is a great deal of truth in what he says in “The Dumbness of the Talkies.” You may be inclined to disagree. If you are a rabid movie fan you may be seized with the urge to heave a slab of pavement at Mr. Amy. We’ll be glad to hear from you.

(and they did hear from the readers!!!/drf)

Dumb Talkies

LACEY AMY

INHERENTLY—and financially—I’m a talkie fan. Factually, I yawn at the talkies and then go home to brood over the pulp value of my stock certificates.

If you ask me what is wrong with the talkies I counter with the query: What, beyond the mechanics of photography, is right with them?

As wearisome film follows film, I count the cost in time and money of sitting through the puerile efforts of empty-headed actors to interpret entertainingly and convincingly the dull output of parochial scenarists put on by stupid or blind producers. Productions of picture studios that never learn, extravagant organizations that have a camera for a heart, an emotion chart for their lifeblood, and a close-up for a tongue; a soulless, brainless machine that in time will destroy itself.

The camera, by this time, does its work almost automatically. But consider its field.

It was Lillian Gish, I believe, who introduced the emotion chart, with a switchboard of buttons at the producer’s elbow to assure a standard expression for every emotion, whether for George Arliss or for, say, Ruby Keeler. Press button sixteen and you have fear, press button eleven for joy, eighteen for grief, and so on—a performance of stage robots but with a less amusing display of intelligence.

And for fear the wires cross, the robot’s face is blasted across the footlights, screen-wide, like a charge of gunpowder. They call it, euphoniously, a close-up.

It was close-ups that spelled the doom of movies. Closeups are impoverishing the lifeblood of talkies. Do producers admit a histrionic weakness in their expensively publicized stars that requires interrupting the continuity of the scene to fill the stage with a facial expression? Must Greta Garbo brood all over the theatre, and Ginger Rogers swallow the screen in a cavernous and unsightly mouth, and Constance Bennett sidetrack the play in a futile endeavor to look superior twelve feet square? What would happen to an actor who, after drawing the curtain, advanced to the audience to weep on its shirt-front?

Nothing makes me despair of the future of the talkies so much as the clumsy, inartistic vision of parallel curves of scarlet lipstick, topped by a pair of flaming nostrils, two staring eyes, and a broken line of expressionless mascara. What matter that a double row of preposterous glycerine tears rolls over pits that, on reflection, must be skin-pores, or that those glaring ovals are the eyes of fear?

It would be useless, I suppose, to ask a producer which is more important, the scene or the star’s make-up. He’s that kind of a man.

To continue contributing one’s forty or sixty cents for feeble entertainment, one must beware of analyzing the essentials of the average picture. When I see Clark Gable don and doff his coat a dozen times as a vital feature of a single film, or William Powell flirt his cigar and his eyes until I reel with dizziness, or Ruth Chatterton light enough cigarettes to poison her, or Norma Shearer audibly draw a tragic breath and wheel broken-heartedly away so often that her suffering becomes merely ludicrous, or Kay Francis weep oily globules on my cravat until I raise my collar in self-protection, I realize that something radical must alter in the talkies or my dividends won’t.

Bored to Somnolence

THE UTTER monotony of recent films bores me to somnolence. Mae West is so wearisomely Mae West that I know in advance every sway of her hips and every wisecrack. When I see Greta Garbo’s name before a theatre and the deepest impression she makes on me is that she seems to succeed in putting it over some of my friends I know exactly what the producer is going to do with her and the number of pores in her chin. And it’s as certain as election slander that Katharine Hepburn will bare her teeth in precisely the same way for sorrow or for amusement—the one breach in the emotion chart. I have even reached the point where I can sit through a George Arliss film with closed eyes and see him wearily repeating himself through “Disraeli” and “Voltaire” and “Rothschild.”

The monotony extends even to scenes. “Fashions of 1934,” for instance, is so reminiscent that my wife and I sat through several scenes convinced that we had seen it before—the dead telephone, the seized furniture, the incurable crook as the hero.

The casting is often a disaster. Who but a director would imagine that Norma Shearer, at her age, could play the sweet sixteen of “Smilin' Through”? Who else would sacrifice Dorothea Wieck in such a weak story as "Miss Fane’s Baby is Stolen”? But then it appeared in a national magazine. Why waste what ability and looks Jessie Matthews has on a trifling medium like “Friday the 13th”? Did it not expose the true Greta Garbo that she insisted on John Gilbert playing opposite her in “Queen Christina?” And some of us were unfortunate enough to pay real money to see Mary Pickford in “The Taming of the Shrew” and in “Secrets.”

How dreary those endless undressing scenes! Filth condemns itself, though only through the box-office. But it seems that when a producer suspects flagging grip in a story he inserts a girl or two parading in her lingerie, until one sees it as stage property. Miss Wieck in the “Miss Fane” story prepares for a bath that has no bearing on the plot, and Miss Matthews bares her legs so determinedly and unnecessarily in “Friday the 13th” and in “The Good Companions” that one can only conclude she considers her figure her fortune.

Too often a feature picture is ruined by being harnessed to fill-ups that should never have been taken. These so-called comedies may amuse a child here and there and the odd half-wit, but children grow up and have to pay full price, and talkies will be dead before they create enough half-wits to be worth considering as box-office assets. The only excuse for the average “comedy” is to help the Hollywood unemployed. It would help the entire country if the films were used as fuel. A totally unemployed Hollywood, as it is at present, is the one hope for the talkies.

Hollywood Doesn’t Learn

I KNOW good films are possible, for I have lived in Europe for several years. If the better Russian and German films were given a chance in America, done as efficiently in English, Hollywood would be a great “To Let” sign in a month. With judicious cutting, even the better English films would worry the West Coast producer.

What stars has Hollywood produced in all its career, with the possible exception of Lon Chaney of the movies and Lionel Barrymore who is only being standardized by the studios, to compare with Conrad Veidt or Charles Laughton or Herbert Marshall or Emil Jannings? Place beside them Jimmy Durante and Eddie Cantor and Lee Tracy and Max Baer and Douglas Fairbanks and Robert Montgomery, also Ruby Keeler and Constance Bennett and Joan Blondell and Ginger Rogers and Myrna Loy and Jean Harlow and Clara Bow and—well, go right through the list. The gift of Veidt and Marshall is their submergence in the scene, a talent not only anathema to Hollywood stars but infinitely beyond them.

The moment they begin projecting Marshall to the circumference of the screen he will strike the slippery slope to oblivion.

Did Hollywood ever produce a film to equal “Two Hearts in ¾ Time”?(Zwei Herzen im Dreiviertel-Takt) Though in German, it ran two years in London and one in New York, and Toronto flocked to see it. But did Hollywood learn? Not what you’d notice. There, indeed, was acting that melted into the story so completely that Hollywood stars look like what they are—parasites. There was music that pigeonholed Bing Crosby correctly—a wearisome midnight feline serenader. There was photography that, for art, made Hollywood pictures look like cartoons. And the cost of it was probably as little as a Hollywood fill-up. “Be Mine Tonight,” a more recent foreign film in English, should make Hollywood hang what head it has.

Hollywood is not so much a studio as a disease sucking the lifeblood from an industry that should be profitable and entertaining.

The reason for all this is as simple as the remedy. The Hollywood producer possesses no artistic background, instinct or training, no sense of fineness, no profitable flexibility of judgment, no submission to reason.

He hires a director whose conception of the path to success is via pretty girls—and often, pretty men—and a grotesque opinion of the publicity value of waste. He turns a blind eye to the public grin when he blathers of cost, and his mind is hermetically sealed against the encircling proof that little is sealed inside.

That’s the sort of man who selects the story to be filmed. For these stories he sees only two sources—the professional scenarist and the widely discussed page. It never endangers his mental catalepsy.

Has anything more ludicrously exposed the futility of Hollywood than the scramble for Dickens’s “The Life of our Lord,” when the story is to be found more completely and reliably told in any hotel bedroom? But probably Hollywood never heard of the Bible.

The professional scenarist’s job is to conceal his incapacity by warring against intrusion. Working and reworking old plots, stealing what he can, he snarls at the professional writer and, failing now and then to keep him out, rewrites him to unrecognizable form to justify his position. In the process, it must be admitted nothing is beyond him and the producer. Between them, they can make heaven more real and attractive on the screen than the original.

Authors have been imported to Hollywood —to sit with their feet on a mahogany desk and try to justify in their own minds a huge salary for their inactivity and their name.

Stars Thrust on Public

TALKIE STARS are what they are because of what goes before. They are not made by the public but thrust on them. The female star is the product of beauty contests or of the producer’s cosmopolitan and transitory affections. It accounts for their emptiness above the eyes. Once on the screen, her position, her longevity, in her own eyes and her manager’s, depends on her flair for publicity. How can one respect a system that is founded on Jimmy Durante’s nose, Joe Brown’s mouth, Jean Harlow’s platinum hair, Max Baer’s fists, Joan Crawford's eyes, Mae West’s hips, Richard Dix’s jaw, Chevalier’s lower lip, Clara Bow’s legs; or Marlene Dietrich’s pants, Greta Garbo’s pseudo-exclusiveness, Lee Tracy’s crudeness, Bing Crosby’s whine, John Boles’s prettiness; on a series of scandals and divorces and publicity agents’ fancies? Fatty Arbuckle and Clara Bow went just too far. Not for Hollywood, oh, no! but for an unsuspected fastidiousness in the dear gullible public.

If a census were taken of the educational attainments of these stars, a one-armed man, I suspect, could count on his fingers the number who know the significance of “x” or the place of the plural verb.

In every way the responsibility, in the final test, is the public’s—including the elaborate official welcome of great cities with motor-cycle policemen shrieking a path through the streets. Little wonder the screen star acquires a totally false idea of her importance.

At intervals Hollywood, driven to experiment, imports a foreign star, its task thereafter being to spoil his art.

And so we have the impossible combination of the uncouth director, the mechanical producer, the unimaginative scenarist and the brainless star. Result: yawns and more yawns in half a million theatres.

The remedy, I have said, is simple. Here it is: Fire the director, the producer, the scenarist, the star, and build from the bottom. No lengthy investigation there, no selection. Nothing less than a clean sweep.

Impossible? Can you believe that and recall what happened the movies? It is because the change was not radical enough then that we suffer now. Sooner or later the public is going to act. And in that day it will be as ruthless as the talkie managements are blind. As a shareholder, I’ll be left holding the bag, but better financial loss with real entertainment than loss of everything, including self-respect.

Introduction to The Fourth Dagger

In the Editor’s Confidence

From Maclean’s Magazine, September 15 1932

THE STORY is being told of an American tourist who, on visiting Abbey Craig in Scotland, enquired of his guide the significance of the national monument that stands there. The guide drew himself up proudly and said, “It’s in honor of Wallace, who drove the English out of Scotland.” “Good old Edgar,” said the tourist.

Nine out of ten readers will smile at this without prodding. Which demonstrates how widely known the late Edgar Wallace was. And now the book reviewers are offering their opinions as to who will succeed him as Master of Thrillers. We have before us several British reviews which favor Luke Allan for the title. At this point mysterious music is heard, the lights go out, a woman shrieks, a wild laugh curdles our blood and the curtain rises, revealing, on page seven, the first installment of "The Fourth Dagger,” Mr. Allan’s latest detective hair-raiser.

Mark you, this isn't all. Snatching the false whiskers off Luke Allan’s chin, you are literally dumbfounded to learn that he is really Lacey Amy, a Canadian, who was born at Sydenham, a village north of Kingston, Ontario, and who at this very moment is hidden away in Toronto working on his umpteenth novel. Being the son of a Methodist minister, Amy was educated all over the province, ending up at Guelph Collegiate Institute and Victoria College, his leading honor course being athletics. His first writing venture was with the MacLean Publishing Company, as editor of Dry Goods Review (Adv.) but there is nothing dry about “The Fourth Dagger.” Later he bought a newspaper in Medicine Hat. There he absorbed the atmosphere for his earlier western stories, and returned to the East to write them. In 1916 he went to London to do special correspondence for Canadian dailies. His next move was to France as Canadian war correspondent, the only correspondent permitted to search for "color" with the British Army. At the close of the war he returned to fiction. Since then he has produced fifteen books under the name of “Luke Allan,” in addition to several bearing his own name and a third name known only to his agent. With his wife he is a chronic traveller. Since 1923 they have lived in twenty different countries, with regular spells back home.

As for “The Fourth Dagger," knowing who killed Aaron Netherwood and how he was killed, we can go off on our vacation with a self-complacent air that is going to be very annoying to people who for some weeks must be absolutely baffled. Mr. Dinsmore, who illustrated the story, shares the secret, of course. But we’ve got him on an island.

Kelwood

Kelwood: an English Estate in Canada

W. Lacey Amy

From MacLean’s Magazine, November 1912.

With photos by the Author.

More on Kelwood—http://vitacollections.ca/cramahelibrary/299/Exhibit/3

http://images.ourontario.ca/Partners/CTPL/CTPL003084249pf_0003p.pdf

http://vitacollections.ca/cramahelibrary/2671204/data?n=3

~~~

The remarkable country home described in this article has many points of exceptional interest. Twenty years were occupied in the selection of the lumber used in its construction, walls two feet thick divide its rooms from basement to attic, and every inch of its woodwork is solid oak or bird’s eye maple. Built in 1863, it still stands “a repudiation of the decay of age.” Overlooking the village of Colborne, in the province of Ontario, “Kelwood” is in every sense a fine old English estate, such as is rarely found in Canada.

~~~

Frantic orators to the contrary it is not such a long step from the man with the hoe to the man with the estate. The coexistence of two conditions that sound so discordant is largely a matter of ambition in these democratic days of home-spun opulence. The possession of an estate is not a formidable aim, nor the dream of an uncontrolled brain in Canada. To his suburban lot the street-car landed proprietor hurries home at six o’clock, swallows his lunch from one hand while he changes his shoes with the other, and shoulders the immortal hoe to revel in the soil of his twenty-five foot lot—his soil. An hour earlier a fellow land-owner, more fortunate in his half-acre and shorter hours, has tightened his belt for the solving of the problems of garden and lawn and park in space confined past his ambitions. Still earlier in the afternoon an auto has broken the speed laws in a cloud of dust to reach further out the estate of five or ten acres; and in white flannels the owner is giving directions to the landscape gardener and the shovel men, ever with the storied English estate in his mind.

But to Canada there is little opportunity for the broad estates that have maintained in England not only a beauty of landscape, but also a distinct class of independent gentlemen, honest to themselves, their dependents and their country, historic for the staunch integrity that is bred of centuries of proud dictatorship and dignity. The growth of such an estate occupies too many years and demands too much ready money for Canada to have attained to that luxury in a general way.

It is only when the native forest has been seized and trained before the hum of commerce and rush began its modifying assaults that this country has been able to mould a genuine old squire’s home for the ambitious Canadian. And perhaps the only instance of that in Ontario, at least, exists to-day within ninety miles of Toronto.

Kelwood is honored only in its own district. But by age, by location, by its grand old trees and roadways it lays silent claim to wider distinction. For almost half a century it has held watch over the village of Colborne. From the brow of a hundred-foot hill rising abruptly behind the village it looks out beyond the houses half hidden in the trees, over the flashing waters of Lake Ontario, and on a clear day away to the smoke of Rochester. And behind the house it hides its sixty acres of park and drive and pond, a fairyland of shadow and brightness, of grove and clearing, of woodland paths and graded driveways, of hill and hollow, of rustling bower and trickling spring. The forty acres of farmland complete the requirements of the most ambitious squire.

Far back in Canadian history when the taint of commerce was relieved by government grants of land and other favours, when the pioneer with faith to spend for the future was rewarded in the present, the grandfather of Joseph Keeler built three sawmills. The risk brought the gift of several thousand acres of land, covering the present sites of Colborne, Lakeport and Warkworth. Incidentally the slow-growing seed of Colborne was planted at that time.

Joseph Keeler, the grandson, was a man of feelings and ambitions. One of these was to represent his district at Ottawa. In this he succeeded three times. Early in life he felt the spur of the estate ambition and commenced its fulfilment in his daily duties. At that time he was the master of Cat Hollow, now Lakeport, from which the shipments of the district in lumber and produce were made. Quietly he made it a practice for twenty years of selecting the best of the lumber that passed through his hands and storing it in his large storeroom, called the Marmora. In 1863 he commenced the structure that satisfied him for his life and will gratify a few more generations to come.

In those days of few contractors, fewer brickyards, a man with ideas like Keeler’s had to possess the hands to back his brains; he must work out his own dreams. Keeler made his own bricks, which will stand a monument to his ability. In walls that even fifty years afterwards stand solid he welded them together with lime burnt in a kiln, now fallen in grass-covered ruins. And inside he fitted the timber that had been drying for twenty years—drying so well that to-day not a crack breaks the surface.

The house stands a repudiation of the decay of age. Its builder was twenty years ahead of his age in design, so that it is yet more modern in appearance than structures that, born since, are ready to pass away. When Keeler built he had in mind his descendants—many generations of them. Walls two feet thick divide the rooms from basement to attic, making the cellar a formidable dungeon, and of the upper stories a heart-rending waste of space. Between the walls a four inch air space tempers the extremes without. Every inch of woodwork (there is enough of it to build half a dozen modern houses) is solid oak or bird’s eye maple, the doors running nine feet up in rooms of thirteen feet ceiling.

Each of the sixteen rooms opens on both stories into a circular rotunda divided by a floor largely of glass. The floor of the lower is made up of one hundred shaped boards radiating out to make the complete circle from a point in the centre. One of Keeler’s successors, possessing several traits more prominent than taste, has endeavored to make these rotundas the showrooms of the house. In every space on the walls between the many doors has been painted scenes that for imagination and execution would give pointers to the first love story of the boarding school girl. These paintings, ‘covering the walls up the stairs, as well, are supposed to represent hunting and pastoral scenes. Wonderfully colored cattle, huge, frisky horses, fish that no line would bear, deer in beautiful poses—they’re all there, with embellishments none but that painter could have imagined. And to leave no doubt of his ability to improve the original this later owner painted the hardwood floor of the lower rotunda with its hundred pointed boards—painted it, and in that useful kitchen color, grey, at that. He also added a verandah of the style of twenty years ago. that frills-and-furbelows style, that goes with Keeler’s effort about as well as a lace collar on the neck of Venus de Milo.

In every room a massive marble grate, black or white, tells of the provision for comfort. China closets, clothes closets, window and corner seats reveal the hand of a woman in the planning. The basement was built as the servants’ quarters, with kitchens, bake ovens, grates, dumb waiters, ventilators and closets. And that the duties of the squire weighed on Keeler is shown by the large west wing set apart as an immense ballroom.

From the massive, handless, oak front door, with its iron knocker, through a two-story covered driveway one looks into the real dreamland of the estate. Only ten yards north the park commences abruptly in stately pine trees. For a quarter of a mile it wanders in a dignified way to the crest of a slope. In trees of smaller size it climbs down the hillside, jumps a well graded driveway, and drops slowly away again to a rippling stream and the remains of a pond to which the muskrats took a disastrous fancy. A tiny ribbon of water winds through evergreen trees that give way to nothing else until they reach the dam. And there still remains a spring bubbling up in an iron pipe, approached by a grass-covered road and a crude bridge.

All through the sixty acres of trees gravel roads have been built, now hidden a little with moss and years of dead pine needles. The driveway half way down the slope was intended for the main road from the back country to Lakeport. But unsentimental government surveyors interfered. The farmlands at the back of the park were selected for the site of Colborne. But with the independence of things too small to train, that village walked away and planted itself on the lower levels on the other side of the hill. Unwittingly it took a stand where it would not break in on the quaintness of old-land Kelwood.

A monied owner with taste and no reverence for those paintings, a little underbrushing in the parklands, a new dam indigestible for muskrats, a not-too-assidous regarding of the driveways, a servants’ staff to brighten the house, an old English gardener with his hands untied—these are the needs to assure the integrity of the dreamland of Kelwood as an estate fit for any squire.

The Women of The Magdalens

The Women of The Magdalens

W. Lacey Amy

MacLean’s, JULY 1 1911

Photos by the Author

 MANLIKE I concluded that I thoroughly understood the women of those lonely islands in the centre of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, right after my first experience with one of them. I had promised a frankly-requesting Frenchman to take a picture of his new house, with his wife and family in front of it, in order that he might be able to show his wandering brother on the mainland that things were prospering with him. It was, of course, no surprise to me that the wife should not be ready when I called; so that, after I had arranged the husband and one child with all the solemnity of a gallery effort, I waited patiently for the woman to appear. Finally I asked for her.

“She’s not coming,” he replied in his broken English.

“That’s too bad,” I answered indefinitely.

“She hasn’t her best dress on.”

“Oh, I’ll wait for her,” I offered, stooping down to pick the wild strawberries, just then ripe, a month after they had disappeared from Ontario tables.

“But it is not finished yet,” he protested.

That ended it. Nothing short of her best dress, which was not yet finished, was going to appear in the picture he would send to his brother on the mainland. But just then she hurried from the back door and I snapped the shutter.

Later another side of the Magdalen feminine was revealed.

“Follow the beach road,” was the direction I had received from the woman who served me with milk, cream and buttermilk, in large jugs at each meal. The direction was to lead me to the captain of the Government tug, which plies around the islands.

The injunction was specific enough, so I followed the first road that led to the beach. In fact, I followed, but with waning zeal, half a dozen of those uncertain tracks that ended in the sea. At last I discovered two women, and an uncounted number of children pulling weeds in a small garden patch, and, remembering the shyness of the first woman, I approached with most reassuring manner, and asked for something sufficiently definite in directions to prevent my covering the whole island like a census-taker.

These women did not shrink. Instead, they looked up, rose to their feet, ignored my question, and turned to each other to discuss in French the latest gossip. I thought I saw my mistake, and tried French, but after a moment’s splutter I found myself staring idiotically into eyes which looked me up and down with the calmness of women at a costume exhibition. My coat collar was turned down, that I knew—for I had parted from the Woman-who-worries in the best of feeling; and my tie was of that loose, summery kind, which is most effective when misplaced. Yet I felt, however, as if I should turn myself around, as the owner does in selling a horse.

A few yards further a woman attempted to give me directions in English. I had still a quarter of a mile to go, she said. A mile further another woman made the same estimate. By the time I had reached the captain three miles further along I had come to the conclusion that I had been too hasty in forming my conclusions when a Magdalen Islands woman kept me waiting until she was dressed in her best. To be sure, she was shy and proud, but she was also frankly interested and bold, garrulous, critical and able to make the other sex feel like mere men; and there was nothing under the sun she could not guess at if she did not know it. And as I pulled the peg from the captain’s gate it came to me with a great burst of radiance, that the woman of the Magdalens was just a woman, after all. There was some relief in understanding that one could never understand her.

The only fact about the Magdalen women which is certain of support on all occasions is the size of her family. Le Bourdais, the legless telegraph operator on the Islands, turned up his nose at the size of families; but then he was prejudiced. “Pooh!” he sneered between puffs. “Seventeen is the largest family we have, and” —he reflected a moment to add the weight of thoughtful consideration—“there are not very many of them more than fifteen. I took off my hat surreptitiously to the fifteen. Le Bourdais had come from the mainland of Quebec. “Friend of mine over there,” he resumed, by way of explanation of his contempt for seventeen, “one of a family of twenty-two, married a woman from a family of twenty-seven. They have nineteen themselves already.” Then he came hastily to the defence of his friend: “And he’s a young man, yet.”

I went out humbly and counted a nearby pile of lobster traps to get an idea of twenty-seven in one group.

What they do in the families of respectable size I can not see. The parents of the seventeens and fifteens on the Magdalens are now overtaxed for names. So there may happen to be a trifle like a score of youngsters of the same name in the one village, and to make sure of washing the faces of the right ones at night, distinction is made by throwing in the father’s name somewhere with the son’s. Joe Anizim Burke is Joe Burke, the son of Anizim Burke. Joe Burke P. is the tag attached to Joe, the son of Peter; and he was not Joe Peter Burke, nor even Joe Burke Peter. But the mothers are too busy raising them to stop to think of new names—and if it were left to the father he would be working in “Cod,” or “Mackerel,” or “Haddock,” or “Herring,” or some such name descriptive of the limits of his imagination.

With all these family cares, the women find time to attend to their work—which means more than washing dishes, hunting bargains and studying the hair-dressers’ windows. They do not know what bargains and hairdressers are. It is an unwritten law that man was made to fish, and woman to do the rest. Coming in from the sea in the fish boat—the man’s home—the woman clutches the sides, fixes her eyes on the cross-bar in front of her, and prays quietly until the bottom grates on the pebbles. Then she goes to the farm, plows, reaps, gardens, does the housework, spanks those of the fifteen who are not away fishing, and in her spare time hitches up the little French pony to the “charette” and digs clams for the next day’s fishing. At night she walks down to the fish-house on the sandbar, where her lord lives through the summer, and has the meal prepared for him on his return from the fishing grounds.

These fish-houses are a sort of two-storey stable. In the ground apartment is a miscellaneous collection of bait, decaying fish heads, lobster traps, nets, salt, and other odoriferous necessities of the profession. Above the single board ceiling is the drawing-room, which is also kitchen, diningroom and bedroom. The sitting-room is the steps leading on the outside to this second story. Sometimes it serves as the bathroom as well, as I discovered when batches of the fifteen, unembarassed, were lined up for cleansing operations.

Even the turning of the cod on the flakes is the work of the women. Groups of men delight to stand around these flakes on a day too stormy to fish, and watch the girls and women staggering under the heaped carriers. They even allow their wives to dig the bait while they smoke and lazily clean up their boats.

But some of the younger women retain the feminine instinct. With the Woman-who-worries I had walked to Etang du Nord, on the north side of Grindstone Island, to secure some fishing scenes. In that village there was no striking inducement for a woman who was not broken in, to wander further along the shore than the edge of the houses. The Norder has the uncomfortable habit of cleaning his fish on the shore and trusting to the tide to scavenge. But its scavenger corps evidently lacks organization and system, judging from the two-foot bank of fish cleanings that maintains a permanent division between the high and the low-tide driveways.

To the Woman-who-worries, remaining alone beyond the fish-cleaning lines, there came tripping down with feminine pride a young woman, conspicuously arrayed for the occasion in striking waist and huge lace collar. Only a few minutes previously she had been visible at a door in typical fish-wife garb. But now she approached with all the confidence of her distinctive attire, and calmly surveyed the mainland costume. A young man rose from the steps of a bait-house and walked briskly across to the two women.

“That your man?” he asked, pointing along the shore to me.

The Woman-who-worries was forced under the circumstances to acknowledge me.

“That’s my girl!” he said proudly, nodding at the gay waist. And the girl preened herself and turned to expose a new elevation.

But there are other women on the Islands. Over at Amherst live four sisters, the only English women on that Island. For years unknown in number to ordinary knowledge, they and their parents have dwelt on the same point of land—Shea’s Point, it is called, after them. All around the Point the four sisters can look down upon the remnants of wrecks that have blown ashore before their eyes for many years, in the wild storms of the Gulf. For forty years, and more, they and their mother have provided the only accommodation for visitors; and in token of it they show with pride an ancient, velvet-backed autograph album that has been the only register of kind words left them. They are not young, but their hospitality remains fresher than their faces. It never grows stiff, or weak, or weary, as their old bones shall some day.

Their father was a fish merchant, the squire of the Island, but at his death, his daughters could not continue the fish business, and so the eldest has taken for her special care the old store, where she makes her share of the expenses by dealing out candy, spools and groceries. Her stock is not large, but the other stores see that she never runs out of supplies.

When the ill-fated Lunenburg, the predecessor of the present steamship, left Amherst on the trip that was unwillingly changed from the second last one of the season to its last for all time, Mary Shea enquired anxiously of the owner of the boat what she would do if the boat was unable to get back from the mainland before winter.

“Rest assured, we’ll get back,” he answered lightly.

But Mary was not satisfied. She had seen many Magdalen winters.

And Leslie, to relieve her anxiety, turned to the manager of his store. “If we should not get back, give Mary all she wants,” he ordered. Thus the old store was not closed that winter.

“And,” concluded Mary, as she told me of that terrible wreck off West Point lighthouse, “you could travel the four globes and not find a nicer man.”

The sisters have erected a new three storey house just above the old one, but nothing would induce them to tear down the squatty old affair their father built and their mother adorned. In imitation of the prints they have seen of modern summer hotels, the new one has a verandah across the entire front, approached by imposing steps and backed by a glass surrounded door. It is the largest house on the Islands, as befits the dignity of its use; and within its parlor is one of the two or three organs that have been the marvel of the Islanders. Even before I looked at the titles of the sheets of music on the rack, I knew what I would find: “Sweet Marie,” “He Never Smiled Again,” “Break the News to Mother,” “My Sweetheart Went Down With the Maine,” “After the Ball,” “In the Gloaming,” “Kathleen Mavourneen,” and the “Maiden’s Prayer.” The organ was never heard during my visit, but the tone it gave the surroundings was considered sufficient to justify its presence.

On every piece of furniture was a “tidy,” on the floors were thick, variegated, hooked rugs, on the rugs were handworked foot-stools, and on the wall a design of roses worked out in sea shells. One of the sisters attended to the wants of her few guests; the others cooked in a small detached shanty, weeded vegetables and carried the water from the old pump in the older house.

It was a pleasant place to rest, from the eight o’clock breakfast bell to the golden sunset, and on into the gleaming moonlight. Just before the sun set behind the low sandbar far away across Pleasant Bay, one of the sisters would scurry around after a few gadabout turkeys, reluctant to leave the evening peace. A lamb bleated plaintively from its rope fastening near the edge of the cliff, and another sister ran to calm it with a tin of water. That lamb was destined to supply the winter’s meat, and its inmortant position in the household economy could not be neglected. A cow stood hopelessly gazing from the only unfenced side of its field, down, down, sixty feet to the ocean’s edge, where the ugly ribs of the wrecked hulls lay waiting for the storm to tear away a few more planks.

Later, we sat on the verandah, in a moonlight that rivalled the day. The large, yellow orb looked down on the sleeping Island from the southeast, casting a lonesome radiance full of shadows over the anchored fishing fleet. Below us the fishhouses were wrapped in early slumber. A charette rattled clumsily down the road, the little pony lazily responding to the woman returning over-late from the farm work. One of the Shea sisters crept quietly out of the shadows by the gate on her way back from the Catholic church where she had been preparing for the next day’s services; her “nice, fine evening,” and “good night” were what we had been waiting for before retiring.

A wind blew, strong, through the bedroom window, but its mildness enticed to one last look over Pleasant Bay in the wonderful moonlight. Just a stone’s throw distant two old masts protruded from the water, silent reminders of other conditions, when the moon did not shine, and the water was rippling to more than a summer breeze. Out there, a dark shadow glided slowly along in the moonlight and stopped. For a moment it swung; and then the side-lights of an anchored boat told of the fisherman who had wandered to over-distant fishing grounds, and was willing to risk his boat under the cliffs to save the time of tacking into the fishing harbor further over.

Four hours later, at one in the morning, the fish-houses would be alive again with fishermen preparing for the day’s fishing. And the women would hurriedly clean up the breakfast dishes, hitch the ponies and hasten to their tasks on the farms.

The Credit System in the West

The Credit System in the West

W. Lacey Amy

Busy Man’s Magazine 1 October 1909

This magazine is presumably the parent of MacLean’s Magazine.
It is also the background to the "Luke Allan" novel The Westerner, 1923/drf

TO the query as to what had been the foundation for the great progress in the Canadian West, a student of the country would unhesitatingly answer: “the credit system.” And yet when questioned as to what was now doing as much as anything else to retard the growth of the country, the same man would answer in the same way. The business system that has been and is the all-prevailing feature of exchange in that country is credit.

It was not the trust of one man in another that made credit a success. It was the knowledge that the creditor was debtor to some other person and that barter was only possible under such a condition. It is not trust and confidence that makes credit still reckless, but the force of habit and the apparent inability to break it. Credit between man and man is almost as great as ever, although now everyone sees its disadvantages.

Until a couple of years ago all business was done on paper or on trust. Transactions involving thousands of dollars were carried on without the exchange of a cent or of only a few dollars. The country was new, settlers had little available cash, men had to live and supplies had to be procured. From crop to crop or for the first couple of years of a settler’s life there the merchants carried the people, the seller put the buyer in possession on paper payment. Credit was an absolute necessity. Bills would run for three or four years and yet be just as good at the end of that time as when incurred. Year after year the same farmer would buy his provisions without even explaining that he couldn’t pay the last bill. Then when he got the money from a good crop he would usually pay up and proceed to keep his credit good by running another bill. Without this accommodation the country could never have been settled.

But conditions have changed. Credit is not much more a necessity to the west than it is to the east. Still in the ordinary business it continues almost as strong as ever, the banks being the only ones to curtail reckless lending. Up to the winter of 1906 the banks were as free and easy credit-givers as were private individuals. Money was offered to every man with a fairly straight eye and any proposition short of a tram-car line to the moon. Men secured money when they didn’t need it, bought real estate in order to find a place for it, made their profits and returned the money—with a request for another loan. In 1906 the profits were irregular and after a few losses the banks began to use judgement. However, credit had got such a firm hold of the people that in many towns they seemed to know of no other way of doing business. Thus it continues to the present time, only a few of the smaller towns and villages having seen the inauguration of a cash system.

The extent of credit varies according to the district. In agricultural districts fed by small towns the merchants carry the farmers from crop to crop with non-payment in bad crop years. In ranching districts it is much worse. Ranchers may not visit their supply town more than once a year and often not that often. I know of several ranchers who “come in” only once in two years. As one old two year-variety rancher said to me, “its terrible the money you spend when you get to town.” In such a town ranchers will run bills for years. One rancher will cart out the supplies for a half dozen and the merchant may never see his debtor for several years. The result is that the amount in a merchant’s books will run to incredible amounts. In one city in Alberta, the proprietor of what would be called a small hardware store in the east had $40,000 on his books, and another store of the same kind in the same city was carrying $30,000. The slump of 1907 and 1908 forced them to a closer inspection of “charges” and the amounts were materially decreased.

Accounts are sent out only quarterly by many merchants and often at greater intervals, although this is rapidly changing. What I discovered in the fall of 1906 upon landing in the west was the quarterly account system prevailing in my line of business (newspaper). I started right in on monthly accounts and was met for the first few months by angry merchants wanting to know if I didn’t think them good for the money or was I so hard up that I had to collect every month. Fortunately I persisted and had the satisfaction of convincing them of the wisdom of monthly collections, many of them being displeased when their bills were not collected monthly.

Therein comes another feature of the credit business—that you can bill nine out of ten business men till you eat up the bill without getting any recognition. You have to make a personal call to collect. And the majority of those who owe you will have to figure from their bank book to see if there are enough funds to meet their checks. It is not an uncommon thing to have checks returned marked “no funds,” the maker merely saving in answer that he didn't think the bank would cash it, but he thought he'd risk it.”

Several attempts have been made to start a cash system in western towns but only a few have succeeded. Sometimes the jealousy of the merchants interfered, sometimes they will not trust each other, and sometimes the public itself rises in protest. A railway town is sure to be a strong credit town. Railwaymen are paid by check on the 15th of each month. Bills are always sent out in consideration of this date and more payments are made at the stores in the four days following pay day than during all the rest of the month. A railway man never pays cash. Invariably he pays for last month’s purchases out of this month's check. As a rule he sets aside so much to deposit in the bank, and the remainder is spread around in payment, the deposit never being touched however small a part of his indebtedness the remainder may cover. Thus a merchant may be omitted on pay day while the bank account grows, or while investments in real estate continue. It was a knowledge of the manner in which they were being held off while the banks or investments were receiving the money that banded many merchants together last year to demand quicker payments.

One of the schemes adopted to encourage cash buying was the offering of a ten per cent, discount for cash. And yet this had surprisingly little effect, the majority of the people preferring credit even for a month to a discount for cash.

When the discount was first spoken of in one city some of the merchants thought it was impossible to give that much. In spite of the high prices asked they claimed they would be losing money on such a discount. A man interested in bringing in the cash system visited a certain store in a city and was met by that argument given in all honesty. The man did not show the merchant, as he could have done, where he was making a profit as high as 200 per cent, and even more on some of his stock.

He argued, “What is the average length of time your accounts run—average in amount?” (for the large accounts run much longer than the smaller ones, as a rule).

“Oh, about a year,” answered the merchant.

“And what is money worth here?”

“Eight per cent.”

“At what do you figure your percentage of loss?”

“About three per cent or maybe more.”

“Now,” said the advocate of cash, “you argue that you would lose money on allowing a ten per cent, discount, whereas on your own figures credit is costing you eight per cent, for interest, and three per cent for loss, with all the extra cost of billing, a higher-paid bookkeeper, inability to take advantage of cash discount at all times, to say nothing of the worry. In all, fifteen per cent, would scarcely cover your credit system.” And the merchant had been so brought up to credit that he had never thought of it in that way.

Scarcely any man in the west knows what he is really worth nor within a wide margin. He may estimate himself as worth a hundred thousand, and he might have to borrow to buy a new hat—but the chances are he would run a bill for it. To do business in the west a man must have a large bank account or buy on credit. People expect him to give credit, and many a good business received mention in Dun’s bankrupt list during the past two years, only because the ready cash was not available. A man worth fifty thousand dollars can be forced into bankrupcy for as many cents.

In real estate deals the credit system or something similar is in force, although to a limited extent since the slump. Up to 1907 men were most reckless with their real estate speculations. A man bought with a five dollar bill and sold for another bill, the transaction being repeated a dozen times on a five-dollar bill. And yet each seller would probably be making a few thousand dollars. A speculator would buy an option for a week or a month. In the meantime he would sell, and sometimes two or three sales took place on options before the first option had expired. Or perhaps a man’s last cent might be expended entirely upon a re-sale before the second payment was due. In fact four-fifths of the real estate purchases were made with no prospect of a second payment being available unless another sale was made. Thus, it often happened that a man might make his first payment on property, the title to which was in the hands of a man who figured in a half dozen sales before. The last buyer might make all his payments in due course, and yet never secure the title to the land because some one of the previous half dozen buyers had failed in his payments. The credit system as carried out in this, led to some roguery, of which little was heard outside the west.

Small payments, and even notes only, would buy most valuable property. A company of eight young men purchased a quarter-section close to a town, by giving their notes only to the owner. It cost them $50 apiece to have the company formed and the land divided into lots. Not another cent did those men put up. The property was immediately put on the market and double the price of the land was realized in a month. And, strange to say, the title was handed over when the notes were given. Scores of instances of a similar transactions took place on a basis that would never be entertained in the east. At the present time hundreds of acres of British Columbia fruit lands are being sold from options only, the middleman being willing to stake all his money on his ability to dispose of the land, and the owner freely allowing the middleman to try it.

The hard times of 1907 is working a great change in the business of the west, and one that is already proving a fine thing for the country. Directly it has curtailed credit on account of the inability of the merchants to collect the bills they had allowed to run so long a time. The banks closed down on promiscuous money lending, and the merchant must pay his bills from his receipts. It was not the experience of others who attempted to do a credit business, it was not the arguments against credit, but the chilling knowledge that thousands of dollars were uncollected, that forced him to use the cash register instead of the day-book. Honesty in the speculator did not pay his store accounts. When his real estate deals did not pan out, he left town and all his debts; he would have paid if he could, and that was all the merchant got for his leniency.

But still the credit system abounds to an extent that should be understood by the Easterner who contemplates entering business in the west. More is required than sufficient capital to purchase a business. It is some time before the cash receipts will pay the expenses. He must remember that while he may have five thousand dollars of good debts on his books, there may not be five dollars in the till to pay the wages.

But then it is probable when that time arrives that he has fallen into the system in his own transactions. He will simply pay by running a bill.