"Greg and Jim"

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, May 4, 1935.

“Don’t,” said Jimmis Frise, “let us make the same mistake we made last year.”

“We made so many?” I inquired.

“I mean about arriving up in Algoma in such rotten condition. We spent half our fishing trip trying to get into condition to fish. Let’s this year get into good shape before we go, so we can enjoy the full week,”

“You’re right,” I admitted. “Holidays are so few and far between for us city people, we ought to go into training before entering the wilds. I remember that third day. The day we waded up the Agawa. I thought I was going to die about four o’clock.”

“We were in awful shape,” said Jim. “We had no right to go into the bush in such a helpless condition. Actually, you had to be carried by the guide.”

“I was not,” I protested. “He just lifted me over a few fallen trees now and then.”

“Anyway, you lay down at last and told us to abandon you to your fate; you remember that?” said Jim.

“You were pretty far gone yourself,” I accused.

“Don’t let us argue,” suggested Jim. “We both admit we were in poor shape. This year, we take a couple of weeks before we go to harden ourselves.”

“Walking is all we need,” I said. “Let us make a pact to start walking every night after supper, either for a short walk or a long walk, until we leave for Algoma.”

“Agreed,” Jim said.

So for a week, we walked, rain or shine. These last few rainy nights, we took short walks, briskly around three or four blocks, near home. On fine nights, we drove in the car out to the suburbs, and strode along the earth roads past the radish farms and amidst the little patched-up cottages of the market gardeners.

And the effect was wonderful. Our legs hardened. We lost a little of the pud-wud¹. Our lungs flowed easier.

“Walking is wonderful,” said Jim, as we got in the car to seek out a new neighborhood. “I wish we could write something that would inspire people to walk. Why, I feel ten years younger as the result of this past week.”

“What’s more,” I pointed out, “we are seeing something of our own city. These market garden districts we have been tramping through. I have driven through them scores of times and never saw them. You can’t see anything from a motor car. Walking is the pace to which our eyes and minds are naturally attuned.”

“We could make these walking exercises both instructive and healthful,” said Jim. “Where will we go to-night?”

“Let’s go up to Forest Hill Village and see the beautiful homes,” I suggested.

“I say we go down town,” disagreed Jim. “Down in some of the foreign sections. I haven’t been through them for years and years. I wonder if they still call it St. John’s Ward?²“

“By jove, there’s an idea,” I applauded. “When I was a young police reporter, I used to know every nook and cranny of St. John’s Ward. Back in the days of Inspector Geddes and his merry men. They were cleaning up ‘the Ward’, as we called it then. They were raiding and busting in doors and hauling in wagon loads of screaming and kicking foreigners at all hours of the day and night. Those were the gay old days. But they cleaned it up.”

Music in the Old Ward

“You wouldn’t recognize it now,” said Jim. “It is all ladies’ dress shops.”

“I remember, when I was at Varsity,” I said, “no student would think of taking a short cut down town or home through the Ward after dark. He’d be slugged.”

“It’s a choice residential suburb now,” said Jim. “There are already down-town apartments rising in it. Fashionable people will soon be having apartments in the Ward and homes in the country, out by Brampton or Oakville.”

“Let’s go down and walk around there,” I said. “We want a walk. Let make it informative. Let’s walk through the Ward.”

So we parked on Bay St. and went for a smart walk up through a Chinese quarter and past new modern factories and mills, and bright newly renovated apartments where thirty years ago was a slum. We went through sections filled with crowds of foreigners, with hundreds of children romping in the evening; but all was happy and cheerful, and the foreigners sat on their front steps as if it were under their vine and fig tree.

“Thirty years ago,” I pointed out, “these people would not have been so secure and happy.”

“Every other house was a joint of some kind or another,” agreed Jim, who, as a young artist, used to have to come into the Ward to draw diagrams showing an X where the body was found.

It grew dark, and still we walked, with limbs now springy and tireless. We passed from district to district, where all was crowded but all was clean and orderly.

“I could walk up Algoma’s tallest mountain to-night,” said Jim. “How long have we been walking?”

“Forty minutes,” I said. “Let’s go for one hour. I feel like a young horse. I could whinny.”

Down dark streets, and up streets we never knew were in Toronto we strode.

“Psst,” said Jim, laying hold of my arm. “Music. Dance music.”

A bright, gay and mellow music smote the air.

“Jim,” I cried, do you know what that instrument is?”

“I hear fiddles,” said Jim.

“And a chimbalom³,” I cried. “Hear that mellow music like a very soft piano? That’s a chimbalom. It is a Hungarian or Bulgarian musical instrument. Like a xylophone, only with wires. The player uses two little round-headed hammers and plays on the wires. It’s lovely.”

We stood in the dark little street, listening.

“That’s some music,”, admitted Jim.

“It’s a Hungarian or Russian dance. Like a Polonaise,” I breathed. “And can that boy play the chimbalom!”

We walked slowly until we were abreast of the old house from which the music came. Violins, a mandolin or two, a concertina and the chimbalom throbbed a wild, thrilling dance melody onto the air. Men were going into the house. Other men were resting on the porch, smoking. Past the window shades, shadows came and went.

“Sounds to me like a country dance,” said Jim, kicking his feet in that funny little itchy way the farmers do when the dance first starts.

“There’s the thing to put us in condition,” I said. “I wish I knew how to do square dances.”

“They’re easy,” said Jim. “You just join a set and do what the others do. You could catch onto a square dance in about one try. Get a girl for a partner who knows the dance, and she’ll signal you what to do.”

Jim by now was taking little steps this way and little steps that way, raising his feet in a curious jerky way at the end of each run.

Queen of the Dance

“Now, you take this music,” said Jim. “It sounds foreign of course, but you could do a dance to it as perfectly as you could to ‘Little Brown Jug.’ For example.”

And there in the quiet street, to the music from the house, Jim began skipping forward and skipping back, balancing all, wheeling and turning, with a little bow at the end of the forward steps and a little kick at the end of the backward steps.

“See?” he cried. “Isn’t that swell?”

Suddenly, he made a grab at me and started swinging me around.

“Wheeeee!” he yelled.

Two of the men on the dark porch where the cigarettes glowed, came down and watched us.

When the music stopped, Jim, breathing heavily, stood back and laughed.

“Some music,” he said to the strangers.

“Why you no come in?” asked one of the men. He was a big good-looking foreigner. He had a fine gray suit on.

“You come in dance?” he asked. “She free. You no pay. You dance good. You come be my friend?”

“How about it?” asked Jim.

“O.K. with me,” I agreed.

“You be my friend,” said the foreigner, leading us up the walk.

The big old parlor and dining room had been thrown into a single dancing chamber. The halls and walls were crowded with hearty-looking people. I don’t know what nationality they were, but they were large and blondish, with broad faces and bright glittering eyes. And their big white teeth gleamed at us with friendship, when the gentleman who brought us in introduced us.

They made way for us along the wall. On the far end of the dining room, a platform had been rigged up and a sort of throne made of a chair with a bright striped drape over it. On this throne sat a rather magnificent young woman. She wore a white party dress. Her bright brass-colored hair was tied up strangely with ribbons. She had great competent hands resting on her large lap, and her brilliant light gray eyes surveyed the crowd eagerly, above brightly flushed cheeks.

“Queen of the May, I suppose,” I murmured to Jim.

The musicians were grouped below the throne, and the chimbalom, half the size of a piano, was presided over by a fierce moustached gentleman with a wild shock of hair, who appeared to be about to blow up. He waved his two little padded drum sticks. He gave a preliminary flourish across the strings. The loveliest mellow notes rang out and melted together in the air. Into the middle of the room leaped everybody.

“Just get in circle,” said our host.

“I don’t dance,” I said, abashed.

Jim got into the circle.

The music rang out. The fiddles sang, the chimbalom gave its wild haunting melody. The concertina whanged. And the room became a sea of bobbing, whirling figures.

The dance was really very simple. You took three steps forward, three steps back, whirled on your own axis, three times, with the middle finger of your right hand touching the crown of your head. That little gesture, with the hand held over your head and the finger lightly touching your crown, gave a strange element of grace to a dance that was otherwise very childish.

Three forward, three back, they went, then three times spinning, with the hand aloft. Then, each grabbing a partner, either lady or gentleman, it didn’t matter, they whirled three times in a tight embrace.

“That’s easy,” I said to myself.

After two minutes of it, I decided to act. Jim was getting far more exercise than I. Those hills of Algoma would not daunt me. Neither would this simple country dance from somewhere far over the sea.

I watched my chance and leaped into the circle. There was a little cry and murmur of applause as I leaped in. Many of them gave me perspiring smiles. Old Jim was opposite me.

“I’ll show him up,” I muttered.

I was fresh. I was full of pep. The three steps forward I took were not the shuffling steps they were taking. I pranced like a young bull. The three steps back, I stamped with every step. When I whirled, I went four times around, and my right hand was flexed with infinite grace over my head.

When the time came to whirl a partner, I whirled Jimmie, and he was dizzy when I let him go.

Wilder grew the music. Gayer and more bullish and masculine grew my dancing. So this was dancing? So this gay, leaping and light-footed stamping, this whirling and swinging, was dancing!

When with a final whoosh the music ended, I was the centre of an enthusiastic crowd, who shook my hands and patted me on the back. And the lady on the throne threw me a bunch of flowers she had been holding.

“You great dancer,” said our host, as we rested against the wall. “You have what we call ‘It’ in my language.”

Jimmie was breathless and delighted, “Boy,” he said, “we’re coming down here every Tuesday night. And can you dance! Say, you’re a revelation. Why didn’t you show this side of you before? You’d be a sensation up in the country.”

“Oh,” I said off-handed, “it’s just a case of letting yourself go.”

Again the chimbalom sang out its sweet warning. Again we danced, and again. Three dances we did, and with each dance, fewer dancers took the floor. The dances grew wilder and faster. After the second, Jim dropped out and stood along the wall with his friend, our host, chatting.

The third dance, only eight people were left on the floor; all men, and I was one of them. If I may say so, I was one of them in a very special sense. In fact, they were all watching me, even while they danced. With excited eyes, they observed my foot work, the height of my jumps, the crash of my feet landing flatly, yet muscularly, on the floor.

And swollen up in white splendor sat the young lady on the throne, with eyes for no other dancer but me.

“If she’s the judge,” I said to myself, “I get the prize.”

But as this last dance came to an end, the chimbalom player shouted something, and with one accord, the entire room suddenly leaped forward, and like in a grand chorus, they started dancing a last, final and hectic ecstasy.

I saw Jim whirling nearer and nearer.

And then he drew alongside of me, and delivered me a short, vicious and savage kick in the shins.

With a howl I fell to the floor, grabbing my ankle.

But the dancers never stopped. In a kind of triumph, they went right on dancing ignoring me except to look down on me with laughter and white flashing teeth and flushed faces.

I crawled to the side lines.

I started to crawl out the door. Jim came and took me under the arms and helped me up. We hobbled out on the porch.

“Jimmie,” I gasped, “of all the filthy, unforgivable things!”

“Listen,” said Jim, quickly. “This was a kind of May Day celebration. They call this the marriage dance. That girl on the throne is looking for husband. The best man gets her. The man that dances the best and the longest.”

“Jimmie!”

“When I heard that from our friend,” said Jim, “I just waded in and disqualified you. If you fall, you’re out.”

“Let’s,” I said, “get the heck out of here.”

“Shouldn’t we pay our respects to the company?” Jim asked.

“Let’s,” I said, “get the heck out of here!”

So with Jim holding my arm, we got the heck out of there.

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. I’m guessing this means pudge or fat. ↩︎
2. The Ward (formally St. John’s Ward) was a neighbourhood in central Toronto in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Many new immigrants first settled in the neighbourhood. ↩︎
3. The cimbalom is a type of chordophone composed of a large, trapezoidal box on legs with metal strings stretched across its top and a damping pedal underneath. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, April 18, 1942.

“Air,” said Jimmie Frise, “is about the only thing they can’t ration.”

“And water,” I suggested.

“Even water is rationed, indirectly,” asserted Jim, “through the rationing of the things you put in water, like sugar, tea, coffee, soap. But air is free. It is the one thing they can never control.”

“How about poisoning it with poison gas?” I inquired.

“Purely incidental, and purely temporary,” said Jim lightly. “They have rationed what we eat, what we drink, what we wear. They have controlled our roof and shelter. How we live, what we can buy, where we can go – all these things are under control. The only thing we can count upon in unlimited quantity is air.”

“Let us breathe deep,” I said devoutly.

“Sometimes,” mused Jimmie thoughtfully, “when I look upon the civilized world of Europe and America in their present condition, I have to smile even in the face of all the tragedy. For in this vast, storm-tossed scene, the only person who is free or happy is the person who has nothing.”

“Nothing?” I questioned.

“Those who are suffering the most, right now,” stated Jim, “are those who possess the most. The rich. The prosperous. It goes for countries as well as for individuals. Compare the freedom today of a hobo and a great industrialist.”

“Most great industrialists are in the war up to their necks,” I asserted. “It is only the would-be industrialists, the ones who couldn’t quite make the grade, who are yelping.”

“I am speaking,” said Jimmie, “of freedom and happiness. If the rich man is a good man, he is working as never before in his career; a prisoner of his great possessions, all of which must now bear fruit as never before. If he is a bad man, think how he must be agonized by the taxes, the restrictions, the controls.”

“A hobo is a happy man,” I agreed.

“The nations that are suffering the most,” went on Jim, “are those that have been accustomed to the most. And is true not only of possessions like money or property. It is true of men with sons. The man with the most sons today, whether they are in the war or not, is the unhappiest. And it is true of education and other spiritual possessions. The man with the most brains, the man with the greatest intelligence, is today the least happy and the least free. He is a prisoner of his thoughts, the way the wealthy man is prisoner of his possessions.”

“A hobo,” I agreed, “sitting on the side of the road, not even thinking, is the happiest man in the world today.”

“And the freest,” pointed out Jim.

Small Farm Best

“What makes you smile, then,” I inquired “when you look upon a world in such a mess?”

“Just the thought,” explained Jim, “that all over the western world of Europe and America we have been so desperate to gain the very things that would steal our freedom. The more you own and the more you know, the less free you are. And in the golden age of the past century, we have, like maniacs, been fighting to get into prison. We have invented and manufactured and amassed every conceivable thing. We have pursued knowledge and education like madmen. And having got it all, we now know that a small house, in the midst of a few acres of land, with a well and a rope to lower a bucket, and a plow and a horse and a haystack, are all that the human spirit can possess without going nuts.”

“Why, Jim,” I protested, “that’s worse than communism.”

“It’s the next thing after communism,” agreed Jimmie. “Communism is old stuff. It’s over and done with. It’s here. Now we’ve got to look beyond, to the next stage.”

“You’d have us all peasants,” I snorted.

“Several thousand years ago,” declared Jim, “the Chinese tried civilization, as we know it, and discarded it as silly. By painful experiment, they discovered that possessions are merely a burden. Only the fools submit to possessing things, beyond the merest essentials. A cup, plate, knife. That’s about all a man needs. And usually he can borrow them, from some fool who has two.”

“Have you gone Oriental?” I demanded.

“We’re all going Oriental,” said Jimmie. “We are all wishing we didn’t have half what we’ve got. Already, we are giving things away. And the first things we are giving away are our most cherished beliefs. The next thing will be our property. It’s too much trouble.”

“What started this?” I muttered unhappily.

“It started,” remembered Jimmie, “with me saying that the only thing they couldn’t control was air.”

“And a fine remark that was,” I submitted.

“What I had in mind,” said Jim, shifting his feet from the office window sill to his desk, “was a boat.”

“A boat?” I protested, since most of these casual ideas of Jim’s are tied up to a stump somewhere.

“A sail boat,” said Jim. “There’s nothing like a sail boat. A dinghy. Or a little sloop of some kind. With a sail boat and air, you are the nearest thing to being free there is in all the world.”

“Aha,” said I, seeing light.

“We thought when we invented engines for boats,” said Jim, “that we had made a great step forward towards freedom. But a boat sails the sea today at its peril. And you can’t get fuel to run even a little launch.”

“I can still paddle a canoe,” I asserted.

“If you are well and strong,” countered Jim. “But you can be as weak as a cat and still go places in a sail boat. The wind takes you. And they can’t control wind. Or ration it. That is why the Chinese still like sail boats. We call them junks. Were we ever wrong!”

“What could we do with a sail boat?” I inquired.

“We could go to work in a sail boat,” said Jim calmly. “We could keep it tied up to a wharf out at Sunnyside. And in the morning, we could come down the street, get in the boat and sail down to the foot of Yonge St. There, we could get permission to tie it up at one of the company piers. And at the end of the business day, we could walk down to the lakefront; get in the boat and sail home westward to Sunnyside again.”

“If the wind was right,” I interposed.

“We can always tack,” asserted Jim, the sailor.

“And take half the morning,” I scoffed.

“We could get up early,” retorted Jim. “And besides, business life isn’t going to be half as strenuous as it was. With gas rationing and crowded street cars and everything, business just isn’t going to be in a position to expect people to be at work on time. Anyway, it will be the bosses who will be latest.”

“I suppose we are going to take life a lot easier,” I admitted, “now that the means of speed are being taken from us.”

“Would you go shares in a sail boat with me?” demanded Jim.

“Are you serious?” I retorted.

“Perfectly serious,” declared Jim. “We can’t go touring in the country because of the gas rationing. So we will go sailing on the lake. We have no means of taking a load of anything from here to Hamilton. But if we have a sail boat, and a fair wind, we can get to Hamilton in five hours. A boat with sails is, in view of the circumstances in which we find ourselves, the most practical possession in the whole world.”

“We’d look ridiculous coming to work in a sail boat,” I scoffed. “In Toronto.””

“Let us hope we will never look more ridiculous,” said Jimmie. “In Toronto.”

So I said I would go halves on a small, cheap sail boat with him. Whereupon Jimmie picked up the telephone very business-like and called a man.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I protested; because you don’t agree to a philosophical proposition like a sail boat as if it were an ordinary business deal.

But Jim had, it seems, already done quite a bit of snooping for a sail boat and had located just what we wanted from a man down near the foot of Cherry St., towards Ashbridge’s Bay.

A Home-Made Dinghy

“We’ll be out to get her,” said Jimmie over the phone, “at about 2 p.m. We’ll sail her to a boathouse I know up at Sunnyside.”

“Hah,” said Jim, hanging up.

“How much?” I inquired grimly.

“Fifteen bucks, each,¹” said Jim. “Sail and all,”

“It can’t be much of a boat at that price,” I submitted. “I’ll bet anything you like that boats are more in demand now than ever.”

“Thirty bucks,” said Jim. “Hull, sail, mast, boom, rudder and gear, all in first-class shape.”

“It doesn’t sound reasonable to me,” I muttered.

And when we arrived at the old tumble-down boathouse on Toronto Bay down beside the coal piles, and were led through a sort of Davy Jones’ junk shop of boats and the carcasses of old boats picked clean long ago, and were shown our dinghy, it was obvious I was right.

It was a home-made dinghy about 10 feet long. It was old. It was warped. Its mildewed sail, when we unrolled it, was patched and patched over the patches. The ropes looked rotten to me. But Jim was undismayed.

“What do you expect for $30?” he demanded haughtily when I attempted to point out some of the deficiencies.

“I’ll put a pail in,” said the tired old boy who closed the deal with us. “She’ll probably leak a little at first.”

“Naturally,” said Jim. “They always leak at first.”

The three of us hauled and lifted the dinghy out of the old boathouse and down to some decaying wooden piles in the water which used to be a dock in the great old days of sail. We lowered her, and the water spurted through all the seams.

“Let her fill up for a little while,” sighed the old boy wearily, “while we step the mast and rig the sail.”

The mast had a bend in it. Two of the rings that hold the sail to the mast had broken away from the sail, and the old man had to go and slowly find a cigar box with sail needle, thread and a sailor’s palm². And he sewed the rings back on.

Then we stepped the mast, and wedged it into place with some wooden chips. The rope broke twice while hoisting the sail, but the old boy went slowly away again, into the staggering boat house, and brought some marlin twine with which to splice the rope.

“You can bail now,” he gusted heavily. “See if she leaks faster than you can bail.”

I got down and bailed. It took 17 full pails and 20 short dips to reach the floor boards. An invisible slow trickle was still coming in which you could see if you sat and watched one special spot on the floor boards.

“Aye, ye, Sir!”

“Let her soak overnight, Jim,” I suggested, “and we’ll come down tomorrow and take her away.”

“When I buy a boat,” said Jimmie, “I’ve got a boat. I’ll sail and you bail. It’s a swell southwest wind. We’ll be at Sunnyside in less than one hour.”

I dipped a few more part pailfuls out. I glanced across the bay. Toronto Bay is not exactly a noble body of water. But it is an expansive, dirty and cold one from over the deck of a small, wet, leaky dinghy.

“Okay?” cried Jim.

“Aye, aye, sir,” I said with a feeble effort.

Jim in his young days, before the old war, used to be quite a sailor on Toronto Bay. Personally, I like prairies. Or, better, mountains.

The old man took hold of the mast and headed her into the breeze. Jim got set at the tiller and close hauled her. Then the old man gave us a shove and we were off.

“Bail,” said Jim, calmly; and the boat heeled slightly over in the breeze, causing the little water in her to slosh down to the low side, wetting my feet and legs clammily.

“Head straight for the Western Gap,” I warned, as Jim with a fixed grin only to be seen on the faces of amateur sailors, hauled hard and headed our craft for Hanlan’s Point.

“We’ll beat up, a little,” hailed Jimmie, “and then run down on the gap.”

I bailed. The dinghy’s heeling over had discovered new and larger cracks in the hull, and I suddenly found the water was coming in at least as fast as I could bail if I bailed all the time.

“Hey, Jim,” I warned. “Don’t waste any time. Don’t get too far from shore.”

“She’ll tighten up,” halloed Jim, “in no time.”

The mast creaked. The sail, which had more creases in it than any sail I had ever noticed, slatted; small things popped and rattled; something groaned; and the water slapping the hull seemed just outside. It seemed, I should say, almost in.

“Jim, steer closer to shore,” I commanded. “This water is getting ahead of me.”

“Bail,” ordered Jim cheerfully, hauling the sheet tighter.

Suddenly a hoarse whistle roared almost in my ear, I straightened to behold a tug bearing square down on us.

“Jim!” I roared.

“Sail has the right of way over steam,” said Jim, with a confident and dreamy smile on his face. And he never even shifted muscle.

The tug, with another fierce toot, swerved slightly and passed behind us so close that the captain could have spit aboard us if he had had a spit ready. But he heaved a few big, loose cusses aboard us instead.

Shipwrecked

The swell from the tug came rushing high and crested straight for our stern.

“Jim, look out,” I shouted.

But Jim just leaned farther out and took another haul on the sheet. The big wave lifted us the way a lady lifts a rug to shake it. It gave us a shake and a snap.

The mast cracked, right across, like a stick of macaroni. The sail, with a calm slow bulge, folded quietly down on the heaving water. The dinghy, with Jim crouched beside me, remained flat.

Slowly the tug made a large circle and came back to us at quarter speed.

“What’s the big idea,” said the master hoarsely, “sailing an old hencoop like that around at this time of year? Don’t you know the frost ain’t out of spars yet?”

“Can you tow us?” demanded Jim coldly, a man of sail to a man of steam.

“To Hanlan’s Point, and no further,” said the master. “I’m tyin’ up there for the night.”

“Very good,” said Jim.

So they took us aboard and we hand-reefed the sail back aboard the dinghy and laid it, mast and all, inboard and Jim lashed her down.

“If she fills,” warned the tug master, “I don’t stop.”

“Go ahead,” said Jimmie.

And the tug, which was full of rumble and roar and power, leaped to life and surged and plunged across the bay to Hanlan’s Point, dragging the dinghy close behind, nose uplifted, in the churn and wake.

At Hanlan’s we paid the skipper $2 for his consideration and then found a local man who said we could haul our dinghy up on his lawn until we could make arrangements to sail her on the next leg of her journey westward. Then we took the last ferry home.

But there was a high gale of wind last night.

And I have hopes that when we go back tomorrow, the dinghy will have washed away.

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. $30 in 1942 would be $572 in 2026. ↩︎
2. A sailmaker’s palm is a specialized leather tool worn over the hand, featuring a metal thimble plate with divots to safely push thick sewing needles through canvas, leather, or heavy fabrics. ↩︎