liberty of exposing not only the deeds but the motivations of my companions as far as I am able to discern them. It is an incomplete, perhaps a never to be completed task. I know that I will never plumb the depths of Professor Reginald Aubrey Fessenden’s extraordinary scientific mind, nor will I ever feel the intensity of the love between the poet, Archibald Lampman, whose ghostly presence I felt at all times despite the fact that I had not nor would I ever have the pleasure of his acquaintance, and Miss Katherine Waddell. Of the three, she is the one I think about most often.
The tsar had recently improved the Georgian Road connecting Europe and Asia, and it was my intention to follow it and to be open to any adventure that might befall me along its dark, winding path across the Caucasus Mountains. Although I am and will remain a pacifist, I can appreciate the effort with which Russia, having only the blunted Urals to call mountains, chose to fight so ruthlessly to secure this region. No doubt to control this most strategic and easily blocked route to the Orient, the Russians had established strict rules governing the use of the road.
When I arrived at the tariff office in Vladikavkaz that morning, they were there ahead of me, he in his mid-thirties, imposing, impatient, indignant; and she, younger, sitting as if she were going to have her photograph taken. In the little Russian he knew, he was trying to make himself understood to the officer on duty. The tariff, as much as I could make out, was excessive. He and his companion, who was seated on a bench against the wall and looked more than mildly amused, would not pay the toll, he said. They could not do so and still afford food and accommodation along the way. The officer assumed that the woman was his wife; I could tell by the way he ignored her, an insulting failing of these outpost bureaucrats who had long ago lost their courtly St. Petersburg manners. I could also tell from the traveller’s accent that he was not European, and his lack of aplomb in the situation proved that he was most definitely not British.
I did not hesitate to introduce myself and to put at their disposal the services of Sergei Borshelnikov, my guide and interpreter. Fessenden introduced himself as a professor of physics and electrical engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. Miss Waddell was from Ottawa, Dominion of Canada. The levy in dispute was four kopecks per horse per verst for the entire journey, a distance of 201 versts. We agreed to share a four-seated carriage, the cost of which worked out to be about £12, and since my publisher had allowed me that much and more for this particular expense, I offered to cover the tariff myself. Fessenden protested, although weakly. I could see that he was as tired as his companion, and that he was distracted, as if persecuted by an inner voice. The last leg of their journey, by train and steamer from Vienna to Odessa and thence to Vladikavkaz, had been a long, exhausting one with many delays. They had found accommodation for the evening in a modest inn in town but had been kept awake most of the night by a raucous wedding celebration that seemed to involve every room but their two. I, on the other hand, had sailed from Piraeus, where I had been vacationing for a month, to Istanbul, and from there across the Black Sea to Varna, Kustendje, and Sebastopol, and thence to Novorossik, where I boarded the overnight train that runs eastward across the isthmus, arriving refreshed that morning. It was the least I could do to provide some assistance to two fellow Argonauts.
We inspected photographs of the available types of vehicle and selected a carriage that looked to be a cross between a Landau and a Brougham, with a folding top and a longer and sturdier yoke shaft than normal. It was built for four horses, with an extra horse tied on either side of the carriage, an especial arrangement meant to address the dangers of the Dariel Pass. Motor cars were not yet allowed for fear that the noise of their engines would cause rock slides and snow avalanches.
Covering our laps with thick blankets, we seated ourselves comfortably and tucked the lighter of our bags around us. The driver put the bulkier luggage into the boot at the rear of the carriage. We began with the top down. Sergei and I sat with our backs to the driver, affording the professor and Miss Waddell a view of the landscape as it unfolded. In truth, for the first part of the journey, I was content to see the vista reflected in the faces of my new acquaintances.
Reginald Fessenden and Archibald Lampman were friends at Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario, Canada, and they maintained a correspondence until Lampman’s death in 1899. After taking a degree at the University of Toronto, Lampman taught school in Orangeville, Ontario, for two years and then accepted a position in the Post Office Department in Ottawa. Predictably he found the desk job to be dull and repetitive but not altogether taxing and a fair sight better than school teaching. Anything was better than that for a man with poetic aspirations.
The schoolroom, he wrote, placed a man exposed as a freak of culture and knowledge and longing. The little “homunculi,” as he called his charges, citizens in embryo, could not for the life of them understand why they or anyone should be excited about words and numbers and ideas. He tried to infect them with his passion. He read to them from his messy notebooks and ink-smudged manuscripts all tattered at the edges and bound with string. He recited William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, even slipped them Walt Whitman when he was sure no one in authority was listening, and still the little savages remained impervious, ignorant of what to tell their parents about singing the body electric. Doubtless they would not have remembered the song, the singer, the point, the day, the time, the place or the weather. He felt that if he were a spring, his water might well have been pouring into a room full of sieves. Such was the character of the town, a place of stout, industrious, practical men who wanted their children to fear God, do right, accept the sanctity and redemptive quality of work, and spurn frivolity. To them a forest was uncut lumber, a stream a source of mill power, frogs overly noisy in summer, dragonflies evil-looking, and faeries not to be believed in.
For Lampman frogs were the voice boxes of the gods, while faeries pushed and pulled on every lever of wilderness. To speak and write in a way that made words dance to their own inner music was divine. And from the wellspring of idleness came peace, abiding joy, and the very reason for being alive.
In their defence, his students believed that the schoolhouse was prison, that action, regardless of how rash or ill-planned, outweighed expression, and that he was the source of their frustrations. On the same day that he caned a boy, not so much for his insolence as for his evident contempt for the contemplative life, Lampman wrote his letter of resignation to the school board.
A month later he was in Ottawa. What had his friend Duncan Campbell Scott told him about the capital city? Bundle up, even in summer, he had warned, for this was a town without time to have grown a radiant heart. They would gradually help her find her soul, but it would take some time. She needed music, theatre, poetry, and scientific enquiry. Bytown, as it was originally named, was a veritable vacuum awaiting such nourishing society as they could supply. They vowed to change that rough lumber town from one of the dark places of Earth to one of light.
I turned to the professor, remembering the location of his tenure. “Pittsburgh! Surely there is nothing in Pittsburgh but slag heaps and Vulcan stithies,” I teased, trying with my quip to catch the young woman’s eye. I was unsuccessful, for she sat gazing dreamily into the rugged streets of the town, her arms folded protectively across her breast.
Fessenden assured me that Pittsburgh balanced the bustle of its steel industry with a refined community of educated sophisticates who valued art, music, theatre, science, and moral enquiry. At the last item listed Miss Waddell emitted a short, explosive “Ha!” although it could just as easily have been an expression of shock or pain at the roughness of the road. She moved her body perceptibly away from her seatmate, and I wondered as to the nature of their relationship. She seemed barely able to tolerate him, but she was no captive of the journey, surely, for she held herself upright, her chin thrust forward in a resolute fashion, her eyes actively seeking the road and the passing sights. She was here of her own accord, I was certain, as much the controller of her destiny as was the esteemed inventor
