Westward with the Prince of Wales

by W. Douglas Newton

CHAPTER II

ST. JOHN, NEW BRUNSWICK

I

When one talks to a citizen of St. John, New Brunswick, one has an impression that his city is burnt down every half century or so in order that he and his neighbours might build it up very much better.

This is no doubt an inaccurate impression, but when I had listened to various brisk people telling me about the fires—the devastating one of 1877, and the minor ones of a variety of dates—and the improvements St. John has been able to accomplish after them; and when I had seen the city itself, I must confess I had a sneaking feeling that Providence had deliberately managed these things so that a lively, vigorous and up-to-date folk should have every opportunity of reconstructing their city according to the modernity of their minds and status.

The vigorousness of St. John is so definite that it got into our bones though our visit was but one of hours. St. John, for us, represented an extraordinary hustle. We arrived on the morning of Friday, August 15, after the one night when the sea had not been altogether our friend; when the going had been "awfully kinky" (as the seasick one of our party put it), and the spiral motif in the Dauntless' wardroom had been disturbing at meals.

We arrived, moreover, on a wet day, were whisked by launch to the quayside and plunged at once into the company of the Governor-General, Prime Minister, Canadian legislators, Guards of Honour, brigades of "movie" men, crowds of singing children and Canada in the mass determined to make the most of the moment. From this we were hurled headlong in the Canadian manner, in cars through streets of more people and more children to functions where the whole breezy business was repeated again with infinite zest.

It was the day of our first impact with the novelty and bigness of Canada, and it was a trifle dizzying. It was a day on which we encountered so much that was new, and yet it was a day done in the "movie" manner, with all the sensations definite but digested in a hurry.

It was the day on which we first encountered the big Canadian crowd; that hearty, democratic crowd, so scornful of routine and policemen and methods of decorum, yet so generous in its feeling, so good-natured and so entirely reliable in its sense of self-discipline.

It was the day when we gathered our first impressions of Canadian city life, saw (and perhaps we found them a little unexpected) Canada's fine shops and the beautiful things in them, saw Canada's beautiful women and the smart clothes they wore, saw the evidence of the modernity of Canada's business methods, and the comeliness of the suburbs in which Canada lived.

It was the day when we first encountered a Canadian meal, glanced with awe at those marble mosaic temples of the head, the barbers' shops, looked into our first Shoe Shine Parlour, fell under the seduction of our first Canadian ice, and finally surrendered ourselves to the infinite and efficient comfort of a Canadian Railway.

All this was accomplished allegro di molto. We had to assimilate it all in a bunch of hurried hours between our first landing and the collecting and stowing of our suitcases in the sleeping car of the National Railway Special that had been placed at the service of the newspaper men. It was a crowded day, but it was thrilling and it remains unforgettable.

II

St. John, New Brunswick, is many things. It is the historic spot where that splendid figure in Canada's story, the great Champlain, and De Monts, came in the dim days of the West's beginning, to rear a new city in a new wild continent, and called it after the saint on whose day they first made their landing.

It is commerce if that is the way you look at things; an ice-free port, tingling with every modern activity, where lumber and grain and fruit and all the riches of Canada are swung to Europe and the West Indies, and scores of ports about the world, and where, when winter grips the immense St. Lawrence, passengers can slip, free of the ice, to the ocean tracts.

It is the gate of pleasure. The entry port where the sportsman and the holiday maker from America or Europe can start for the fine fishing streams, where salmon and trout are kings; for the spruce forests, where moose and caribou, deer and even bear can be shot, and where wild duck and the Canadian partridge—which is really grouse—are commonplace; or to the many fine holiday towns of the maritime provinces, where golf and good scenery go hand in hand.

It is romance. Here was one of the wrestling-points where France fought Britain for the supremacy of the Americas; where, even, France fought France, as one adventurer strove to wrest the riches of the fur trade from another. Somewhere on one of the ridgy shoulders of its grey-rock peninsula the wife of De Monts, in his absence, held the fort against Charnisay, only to have her garrison massacred before her eyes, when on promise of honourable terms, she opened her gates. Somewhere on another gruff shoulder of the rock was the fort that Charnisay built from the ruins of the first, and where De Monts ultimately came into his own again by marrying his conqueror's widow.

At the wharves of St. John to-day lie the ships that are heirs to the Boston clippers, links in a past of tragedy and trade, when New England men did business or battle across the waters of Fundy Bay, first as Englishmen with the French and then as independent Americans with the English.

It was these English, the United Loyalists, who came out of America in 1783, during the War of Independence, or who were forced to come out later, who really founded St. John as it stands to-day. And it was the Loyalists with their courage, tenacity, and virility who, with the sturdy French settlers of the old regime, built up the fortune and the spirit of St. John as it exists now.

It is a city of quality. It has a vivid air of attractiveness and prosperity. It is history and romance rounded off with the grain elevator.

III

St. John, on August 15, was perfectly aware of the office it had to fulfil. It was on its quays that the Prince was first to set foot on Canadian soil, and St. John had made up its mind that that occasion should be handled in a befitting manner.

True, it did not manage its weather quite so neatly as St. John's, Newfoundland, but on the other hand it refused to allow the rain to interfere with its plans or with its warmth of welcome.

The entrance of the two light cruisers from the drenched, brown-grey Bay of Fundy, past the rather militaristic looking Partridge Island, was the signal for immediate attention.

The inevitable motor launches came out by scores, and with them high-backed tugs; launches and tugs were covered with flags and people bearing flags, both flags and people being damp but enthusiastic.

The long harbour itself gives a sense of pit-like depth. Not only are the black quay walls extremely high, to accommodate a tide that has a drop of twenty-five feet, but on the quays themselves are piled immense grain elevators, with "Welcome" written in giant letters on their towering sides, coal-loading sheds with their lattice derrick arms that always seem to have been constructed by Mr. Wells's Martians, and great freight buildings.

Round this huge, black amphitheatre of welcome, on whose sea-floor was the Dragon and ourselves, people collected thickly, and everywhere there was the glint of flags through the rain.

But even the crowds about the harbour did not give a hint of the vast throng waiting on the landing-stage. Hidden away from the water by sheds, this very cheery crush filled the wide, free space of the harbour approach. Their numbers and eagerness had already proved the mutability of the police force, and volunteers in khaki were enrolled by the score in order to keep them back.

Almost as imposing as the throng were the photographers; not a few photographers, but a battalion of them, running about with that feverish energy Press-photographers alone possess, and climbing on to walls and roofs as though impelled by some divine, inner instinct towards positions from which the Prince of Wales could be shown to the world at unique and astounding angles.

Movie men and "stills" men, the former the real workers of the world, for they carry their heavy machines with all the energy of Lewis gunners, nipped about, formed in groups ready to shoot notabilities, mixed themselves up in the guard of honour until chased away by sergeants, and in the end forming up in a solid phalanx that almost obliterated Canada, to snap His Royal Highness as he came up the covered way from the wharf.

He had been received on the wharf by the Governor-General of Canada, the Duke of Devonshire, a heavy figure, whose very top hat seemed to have an air of brooding meditation in keeping with his personality; the Premier of Canada, Sir Robert Borden, an individuality of almost active reticence, a man who somehow seemed to get all the mass and weight of Canada into a mere "How d'y' do?" And with these were many of the leaders, political, commercial and social, of the Dominion, come together to join in Canada's first greeting.

It was raining, but there was no dampening that magnificent welcome. The meeting with Dominion leaders down by the waterside had been formal. The meeting between the Prince and the mass of people in the big, open space was the real welcome. Here, as in every other town in the Dominion, the formal side of the visit was entirely swamped by the human. The people themselves made this welcome splendid and overwhelming, elevating it to that plane of intimacy and affection that made the tour different from anything that had been conceived before.

After facing this superb welcome, which obviously moved him a great deal, the Prince passed to another side of the square, to where St. John had added a touch of youth, prettiness and novelty to the loyalty of her greeting.

In a big stand there were massed several thousand school children, all of them in white, all of them carrying small flags, all of them thoroughly wet, and all of them enthusiastic beyond discipline.

They had carried the first outburst of cheering well beyond the capacity of mere adult lungs and endurance, and as they cheered without break, they waved their flags, so that the whole stand seemed a big fire, over which a multitude of tiny red, white and blue flames unceasingly played. This mass flag-wagging is a great feature of Western welcomes, and a most effective one. It enables the hands to join in an enthusiasm which the Canadian does not seem to be sufficiently able to express by his cheering and whistling. Really ardent Canadians put a rattle into their empty left hands, and express their joy of welcome with the maximum of noise as well as activity.

Only on the approach of His Royal Highness did these delightful children staunch their cheering, and that merely because they wanted their lungs to sing.

They transferred their enthusiasm into their songs. Their sharp, high singing, with a touch of the nasal in it, and a Canadian accenting of "r's," introduced us to the splendid and inevitable hymns—beginning with "O Canada" and ending with "God Bless the Prince of Wales"—that we were to hear across the breadth of the Dominion and back again.

On the stage below this great flower-box of infants was a number of girls; each of them, it seemed, a princess of her race, having the wonderful poise, the fine skin, and the bright comeliness that make Canadian women so individual in their beauty.

These girls wore bright, symbolical dresses, and each carried a shield bearing the arms and the name of the province of the Dominion of Canada she represented. It was a pageant of greeting in which, advancing in pairs, all the provinces the Prince was to visit in the next few months came forward to bid him welcome at the moment he set foot in the Dominion.

Curtsying to the Prince, the girls fell back and formed a most attractive tableau. It was a delightful picture, delightfully carried out, and there was no doubt about the Prince's pleasure.

While His Royal Highness witnessed this spectacle and listened to the singing of the kiddies, the crowd, vanquishing police and boy scouts and khaki, flooded over the open space and gathered about him. It was a scene we were to see repeated almost daily during the trip.

Without police protection, and, what is more, without needing it, the Prince stood in the centre of a homely crowd, rubbing shoulders with it, becoming an almost indistinguishable part of it, save for the fact that its various members found it an opportunity to shake hands with him.

It was a state of things a trifle strange to Britons. It would probably have seemed little less than anarchy to a chief of British police, yet one was immensely impressed by it. It had all the intimacy of a gathering of friends. And the Prince was as natural a part of that genial and informal crowd as any Canadian.

The crowd shared his amusement at the strenuous work of the camera men, who wormed their way through the masses of people with their terrible earnestness, dogged his steps whenever he ventured to move a yard, and who seemed to feel that the reason he stopped to make speeches was that they should be able to get a steady, three-quarter face snap of him at a distance of two feet.

When the Prince slyly hinted to a photographer that, really, the most important and newsy part of the function was the massed battalion of camera men, and that actually they were the people who should be photographed and not him, the crowd shared the joke with him.

Prince and people were all part of one democracy, the real democracy that never thinks about democracy, but simply acts humanly and naturally in human and natural affairs.

"He'll do," said one man. "Why—he's just a Canadian after all."

IV

The city had made itself attractive for the coming of the Prince. In the fine and broad King Street up which he drove to fulfil the many functions of the day, the handsome commercial buildings were bright with flags and hung with the spruce branches that individualize Canadian decorations. Turreted arches of spruce, and banners of welcome strung right across the street, entered into the scheme.

King Street is a brave avenue sweeping up hill from the very edge of the harbour water. Here the Market Slip, the old landing-place of the Loyalists, thrusts into the very heart of the city and brings the shipping to the front doors of the houses. In the big triangular space about it gather the carters with their "slovens," curious square carts, hung so low that their floor boards are but a few inches from the ground.

In King Street one can see the life and novelty of the town. In it are the hotels, in the vast windows of which people, involved in the ritual of chewing gum, sit as though on a verandah, and contemplate the passing world—it is a solemn moment, that first encounter through plate glass, of a row of Buddhas, with gently-moving jaws. Although most Canadian cities boast big hotels of modern type, the old type, with the big windows, are everywhere, to lend a peculiar individuality to the streets.

In King Street are the smart shops, showing jewellery, furs, millinery and the rest, of a design and quality equal to anything in London and New York. The Canadians have a particular passion for silver of good design, and the display in the shops is a thing that impresses.

Here, too, are the Boot-Shine Parlours, the Candy Stores, the temples of the Barbers, and those wondrous purveyors of universal trivia, the Drug Stores.

In America, boot (only it is called a shoe) shining is a special rite, and it is performed outside the home in a "Parlour." These Parlours are often elaborate affairs, attached to a tobacconist, or to the vendor of American magazines, who is also a tobacconist; but quite frequently they exist alone on their own profits. In these Parlours, and in an armchair on a raised throne, one sits while an expert with brushes, polish, rags and secret varnishes, performs miracles on one's shoes. It is an art that justifies itself, but the fact that so many Canadian roads off the main streets are mere strips of dusty unmetalled nature explains the necessity of so many shops devoted to this business; that, and the dearth and independence of servants.

The Candy Stores are bright and elaborate places also. There are so many of them, and their wares are so ingenious and varied, that one almost fancies that eating candy is one of the national industries. All candy stores have an ice cream soda section, where cream ices of an amazing virtuosity and number, and called, for some reason I have not discovered, "Sundaes," can be had.

The Drug Stores have an ice cream section, always; small and pretty ante-rooms, with a chintz air and chintz chairs, where these delightful ices, compounded of cream and all kinds of fruits or syrups, and dubbed with romantic names, such as "Angel's Sigh," and "Over the Top," are absorbed by citizens with a regularity that seems to point to a definite racial impulse.

One expects to find an ice cream counter in a drug store, because one comes to realize that there is little within the range of human possibility that the drug store does not sell. It sells soap and toothpaste and drugs, as one would expect; it sells magazines and fountain-pens and ink, cameras and clocks. It sells sweets and walking-sticks and postage stamps and stationery. It sells everything. It even sells whiskey. It is, indeed, the only place in the Continent of the Dry where spirits of any sort can be obtained, not freely, of course, but through the full ceremonial of the law, and by means of a doctor's certificate.

And then the Barbers' Temples. When I talk of barbers' shops as temples, I speak with the feeling of awe these austere and airy places of whiteness and marble, glass and mosaic, silver and electricity impressed me. There seems to be something measured and profound in the way the Canadian goes to these conventicles, in the frequency of his going, and in the solemnity of the act that he undergoes when there.

There are so many of these shops, and they are always so crowded that it seems to me the Canadian makes his attendance on the barber, not an accident, but a solemn habit; an occasion with not a little ritual in it. And the barber has the same air.

When a Canadian puts the top of himself into the hands of the barber, he gets, not a hair-cutting, but a process. He is placed in a chair of leather and electro-plate, standing well out to the middle of a pure white floor. As a chair it is the kindlier brother of the one the dentist uses; it has all the tips, tilts and abrupt upheavals, but none of the other's exactions.

It is tipped and tilted and swung hither and thither by a white-vested priest as he goes austerely step by step through a definite service of the head. It is an intricate formulary that includes the close cropping of the temples, shaving behind the ears, shaving the back of the neck (unless you show you belong to a feebler stock, and protest), swathing the head in hot towels, oil shampooing, massaging, "violet raying" and an entire orchestration of other methods of making the hair worthy.

And the barber is not a mere human being with clippers. He is a hierophant with a touch of dogmatic infallibility. He does not suggest, "Would you like a scalping massage, sir? I recommend it..." and so on; he tells you out of the calm cloud of his reticence: "I'm going to give you a Marshwort Electrolysis, and after that Yellow Cross Douch for that nasty nap in your hair."

It takes a strong-willed fellow to say "No" to that attack of assertion, especially as you feel that you are shattering the entire tradition of Canada, where the whole elaborate process is just an ordinary hair-cut.

The barber does not stop at the head, either. At the slightest weakness on your part, he beckons from one of his—well—side chapels, a brisk and imperturbable manicurist. There are manicurists in all barbers' shops. Like the barbers, they are artists in their cult, and while he works on the head the manicurist accomplishes miracles of perfection on the nails, with scented baths, hot swathings, unguents, steel weapons and orange sticks.

And while these things are occurring to you, you can have a Shoe Shine pundit from another corner, and I daresay you can have a chiropodist at the same time, so that for twenty minutes there is going on about your body a feverish concentration of activity that makes even Henry Ford's assembling department look spiritless.

King Street sweeps broadly uphill to King Square, which is a large and pleasant garden, merging imperceptibly into the old graveyard, the grey old headstones of which add serenity to the charm of the park.

The Square itself seems to be the Harley Street of St. John, for among the big buildings, and the "apartment" blocks, which are really flats, I came upon the plates of many doctors, who, in the unexpected American manner, add their special qualifications under their name, so that I read:

"Dr. John X——,
Throat, Ear and Nose."

The streets of St. John lead out at right-angles from this central group of square and street, for this is the West, where the parallel road-making of efficient town-planning reigns. Some of these streets are carved out of the grim, grey, slaty rock, that even now crops out in the midst of the stone and brick and wood of human effort, to show upon what stubborn stuff the first founders had to build.

In the residential streets, and particularly in the suburbs, the homes are planned charmingly. The houses are of brick or wood, most of them built in the Colonial style, and all pleasantly gabled, and of a bright and attractive colour, while every one has the deep and comely porch, upon which are scattered rocking and easy chairs, and even settees.

The houses are surrounded by the greenest lawns, and these lawns are not marred by walls or fences, but run right down to the curb, with but a strip of sidewalk for pedestrians. This elimination of railings is a thing that might well be imitated in our country; it gives the residential districts a pretty and park-like air that is altogether delightful.

We passed through miles of such homes in a journey round the deep bay of the harbour to the place where the Dauntless, dwarfed by the high lock walls, lay alongside the quay. There is a steam ferry connecting the two peninsulas that landlock the harbour, but our automobile driver, no doubt, had the civic spirit and wanted to show us both the beauties of suburban St. John, the great cantilever bridge across the St. John river and the famous Reversible Falls.

The Reversible Falls are at the mouth of the St. John river, where it pushes through the high limestone cliffs into the harbour. At low tide there is the authentic fall, as the river cascades over the rock in a drop of fifteen feet, but the extraordinarily tide of the Bay of Fundy, rising ten feet above the river level, actually reverses things, and forces back the flood along the channel with some turbulence.

Our journey to the Dauntless was for the melancholy business of collecting our luggage. It was here we left the cheery comfort of the ward room for the definite adventure by railway across the Continent. Our miraculously erected cabins, the one amidships, and the two that sat snugly in the aeroplane hangar beneath the bridge, and kept company with the song of the siren on foggy nights, were needed to accommodate the Canadians who were to accompany the Prince by sea to Halifax, then on to Prince Edward Island, and finally up the St. Lawrence to Quebec.

It was a reluctant farewell to a ship we had found so companionable and keen. But there was a ray of comfort when the baggage master at the Canadian Railway "Dee-po" handed us a little bundle of luggage checks for the mixed assortment of trunks and bags we had dumped into his room.

It had been an endless pile of luggage, and we apologized for it, and continued to say, "There's another piece, or two, or more, outside on the sloven...."

But the length of that luggage queue did not dismay the baggage master. He counted the big pieces calmly, fixed a little tag on each piece, tore off half of each tag and presented it to us.

"Through to Halifax," he said dispassionately.

"We'll be along this evening, when the special comes in, to look after it——"

"Look after it in the baggage-room at Halifax," he said, without excitement.

"It'll be all right?" we asked, in our English way.

"It's checked through to Halifax," he insisted evenly, as though that explained everything, which, of course, it did.

"And our suit-cases over there? We want them on the train."

"They'll be on the train," he told us, with his splendid calm. "Your car porter will take them on the train."

"We'll want them for tonight, so we don't want anything to go astray, you know."

"They'll be under the seats of your section, waiting for you tonight. The porter will see to that."

It was only then that we realized that we had been taken under control by Canadian Railways, and that the business of Canadian Railways is to make that control thorough, and to eliminate all worries, of which baggage is the worst, for their passengers from the outset to the end of the journey.

Our baggage being checked through to Halifax, awaited our arrival serenely at Halifax. If it had been checked through to Vancouver or Japan, it would have awaited our arrival with equal certainty. Our suit-cases were under our seats when we arrived at the car.

Canadian railways do not let passengers down on little everyday details like that.