Westward with the Prince of Wales

by W. Douglas Newton

CHAPTER VI

QUEBEC

I

Quebec is not merely historic: it suggests history. It has the grand manner. One feels in one's bones that it is a city of a splendid past. The first sight of Quebec piled up on its opposite bluff where the waters of the St. Charles swell the mighty volume of the St. Lawrence convinces one that this grave city is the cradle of civilization in the West, the overlord of the river road to the sea and the heart of history and romance for Canada.

One does not require prompting to recognize that history has to go back centuries to reach the day when Cartier first landed here; or that Champlain figured bravely in its story in a brave and romantic era of the world, and that it was he who saw its importance as a commanding point of the great waterway that struck deep into the heart of the rich dominion—though he did think that dominion was a fragment of the fabulous Indies with a door into the rich realms of China.

Instinct seems to tell one that on the lifting plain behind the bulldog Citadel, Montcalm lost and died, and Wolfe died and won.

One knows, too, that from this city thick with spires, streams of Christianity and civilization flowed west and north and south to quicken the whole barbaric continent; that it was the nucleus that concentrated all the energy of the vast New World.

II

From the decks of the three war vessels, the Renown and the escorting cruisers, Quebec must have seemed like a city of a dream hanging against the quiet sky of a glorious evening.

The piled-up mass of the city on its abrupt cape is romantic, and suggests the drama of a Rhine castle with a grace and a significance that is French. On that evening of August 21st, when the strings and blobs of colour from a multitude of flags picked out the clustering of houses that climbed Cape Diamond to the grey walls of the Citadel, the city from the St. Lawrence had an appearance glowing and fantastic.

From Quebec the three fine ships steaming in line up the blue waters of the river were a sight dramatic and beautiful, though from the heights and against the wall of cliffs on the Levis side, a mile across stream, the cruisers were strangely dwarfed, and even Renown appeared a small but desirable toy.

In keeping with the general atmosphere of the town and toy-like ships, Quebec herself put a touch of the fantastic into the charm of her greeting.

As the cruisers dressed ship, and joined with the guns of the Citadel in the salute, there soared from the city itself scores of maroons. From the flash and smoke of their bursts there fluttered down many coloured things. Caught by the wind, these things opened out into parachutes, from which were suspended large silk flags. Soon the sky was flecked with the bright, tricoloured bubbles of parachutes, bearing Jacks and Navy Ensigns, Tricolours and Royal Standards down the wind.

The official landing at King's Wharf was full of characteristic colour also. It was in a wide, open space right under the grey rock upon which the Citadel is reared. In this square, tapestried with flags, and in a little canvas pavilion of bright red and white, the Prince met the leading sons of Quebec, the French-Canadian and the English-Canadian; the Bishop of the English cathedral in gaiters and apron, the Bishops of the Catholics in corded hats, scarlet gloves and long cassocks. Sailors and soldiers, women in bright and smart gowns gave the reception a glow and vivacity that had a quality true to Quebec.

From this short ceremony the Prince drove through the quaint streets to the Citadel. In the lower town under the rock his way led through a quarter that might well stage a Stanley Weyman romance. It is a quarter where, between high-shouldered, straight-faced houses, run the narrowest of streets, some of them, like Sous le Cap, so cramped that it is merely practical to use windows as the supports for clothes-lines, and to hang the alleys with banners of drying washing.

In these cramped streets named with the names of saints, are sudden little squares, streets that are mere staircases up to the cliff-top, and others that deserve the name of one of them, The Mountain. In these narrow canyons, through which the single-decked electric trams thunder like mammoths who have lost their way, are most of the commercial houses and nearly all the mud of the city.

At the end of this olden quarter, merging from the very air of antiquity in the streets, Quebec, with a characteristic Canadian gesture, adopts modernity. That is the vivid thing about the city. It is not merely historical: it is up-to-date. It is not merely the past, but it is the future also. At the end of the old, cramped streets stands Quebec's future—its docks.

These great dockyards at the very toe of the cape are the latest things of their kind. They have been built to take the traffic of tomorrow as well as today. Greater ships than those yet built can lie in safe water alongside the huge new concrete quays. Great ships can go into dry dock here, or across the water in the shipyards of Levis. They even build or put together ships of large tonnage, and while we were there, there were ships in half sections; by themselves too big to be floated down from the lakes through the locks, they had come down from the building slips in floatable halves to be riveted together in Quebec.

A web of railways serves these great harbour basins, and the latest mechanical loading gear can whip cargo out of ships or into them at record speed and with infinite ease. Huge elevators—one concrete monster that had been reared in a Canadian hustle of seven days—can stream grain by the million tons into holds, while troops, passengers and the whole mechanics of human transport can be handled with the greatest facility.

The Prince went up the steep cobbled street of The Mountain under the grey, solid old masonry of the Battery that hangs over the town in front of Laval University, that with the Archbishop's palace looks like a piece of old France translated bodily to Canada.

So he came to the big, green Place des Armes, not now a place of arms, and at that particular moment not green, but as thick as a gigantic flower-bed with the pretty dresses of pretty women—and there is all the French charm in the beauty of the women of Quebec—and with the khaki and commonplace of soldiers and civilians. A mighty and enthusiastic crowd that did not allow its French accent to hinder the shout of welcome it had caught up from the throng that lined the slopes of The Mountain.

From this point the route twisted to the right along the Grande Allée, going first between tall and upright houses, jalousied and severe faced, to where a strip of side road swung it left again, and up hill to the Citadel, where His Royal Highness lived during his stay.

From the Place des Armes the profile of the town pushes back along the heights to the peak on which is the Citadel, a squat and massive structure that seems to have grown rather than to have been built from the living rock upon which it is based.

Between the Citadel and the Place des Armes there is a long, grey stone wall above the green glacis of the cliff. It has the look of a military wall, and it is not a military wall. It supports merely a superb promenade, Dufferin Terrace, a great plank walk poised sheer above the river, the like of which would be hard to equal anywhere. On this the homely people of Quebec take the air in a manner more sumptuous than many of the most aristocratic resorts in Europe.

At the eastern end of this terrace, and forming the wing of the Place des Armes, is the medieval structure of the Château Frontenac, a building not really more antique than the area of hotels de luxe, of which it is an extremely fine example, but so planned by its designers as to fit delightfully into the antique texture of the town.

Below and shelving away eastward again is the congested old town, through which the Prince had come, and behind Citadel and promenade, and stretching over the plateau of the cape, is a town of broad and comely streets, many trees and great parks as modern as anything in Canada.

That night the big Dufferin Terrace was thronged by people out to see the firework display from the Citadel, and to watch the illuminations of the city and of the ships down on the calm surface of the water. It was rather an unexpected crowd. There were the sexes by the thousands packed together on that big esplanade, listening to the band, looking at the fireworks and lights, the whole town was there in a holiday mood, and there was not the slightest hint of horseplay or disorder.

The crowd enjoyed itself calmly and gracefully; there were none of those syncopated sounds or movements which in an English crowd show that youth is being served with pleasure. The quiet enjoyment of this good-tempered and vivacious throng is the marked attitude of such Canadian gatherings. I saw in other towns big crowds gathered at the dances held in the street to celebrate the Prince's visit. Although thousands of people of all grades and tempers came together to dance or to watch the dancing, there was never the slightest sign of rowdyism or disorder.

On this and the next two nights Quebec added to its beauty. All the public buildings were outlined in electric light, so that it looked more than ever a fairy city hanging in the air. The cruisers in the stream were outlined, deck and spar and stack, in light, and Renown had poised between her masts a bright set of the Prince of Wales's feathers, the lights of the whole group of ships being mirrored in the river. On Friday Renown gave a display of fireworks and searchlights, the beauty of which was doubled by the reflections in the water.

III

Friday and Saturday (August 22 and 23) were strenuous days for the Prince. He visited every notable spot in the brilliant and curious town where one spoke first in French, and English only as an afterthought; where even the blind beggar appeals to the charitable in two languages; where the citizens ride in up-to-date motor-cars and the visitors in the high-slung, swing-shaped horse calache; where the traffic takes the French side of the road; where the shovel hats and cassocks of priests are as commonplace as everyday; where the vivacity of France is fused into the homely good-fellowship of the Colonial in a manner quite irresistible.

He began Friday in a wonderful crimson room in the Provincial Parliament building, where he received addresses in French, and answered them in the same tongue.

It was a remarkable room, this glowing chamber set in the handsome Parliament house that looks down over a sweep of grass, the hipped roofs and the pinnacles of the town to the St. Lawrence. It was a great room with a floor of crimson and walls of crimson and white. Over the mellow oak that made a backing to the Prince's daïs was a striking picture of Champlain looking out from the deck of his tiny sloop The Gift of God to the shore upon which Quebec was to rise.

The people in that chamber were not less colourful than the room itself. Bright dresses, the antique robes of Les Membres du Conseil Exécutif, the violet and red of clerics, with the blue, red and khaki of fighting men were on the floor and in the mellow oak gallery.

Two addresses were read to His Royal Highness, twice, first in French and then in English, and each address in each language was prefaced by his list of titles—a long list, sonorous enough in French, but with an air of thirdly and lastly when oft repeated. One could imagine his relief when the fourth Earl of Carrick had been negotiated, and he was steering safely for the Lord of the Isles. A strain on any man, especially when one of the readers' pince-nez began to contract some of the deep feeling of its master, and to slide off at every comma, to be thrust back with his ever-deepening emotion.

The Prince answered in one language, and that French, and the surprise and delight of his hearers was profound. They felt that he had paid them the most graceful of compliments, and his fluency as well as his happiness of expression filled them with enthusiasm. He showed, too, that he recognized what French Canada had done in the war by his reference to the Vingtdeuxième Battalion, whose "conduite intrépide" he had witnessed in France. It was a touch of knowledge that was certainly well chosen, for the province of Quebec, which sent forty thousand men by direct enlistment to the war, has, thanks to the obscurantism of politics, received rather less than its due.

From the atmosphere of governance the Prince passed to the atmosphere of the seminary, driving down the broad Grand Allée to the University of Laval, called after the first Bishop of Quebec and Canada. It has been since its foundation not merely the fountain head of Christianity on the American continent, but the armoury of science, in which all the arts of forestry, agriculture, medicine and the like were put at the service of the settler in his fight against the primitive wilds.

In the bleached and severe corridors of this great building the Prince examined many historic pictures of Canada's past, including a set of photographs of his own father's visit to the city and university. He also went from Laval to the Archbishop's Palace, where the Cardinal, a humorous, wise, virile old prelate in scarlet, showed him pictures of Queen Victoria and others of his ancestors, and stood by his side in the Grand Saloon while he held a reception of many clerics, professors and visitors.

The afternoon was given to the battlefield, where he unfurled a Union Jack to inaugurate the beautiful park that extends over the whole area.

The beauty of this park is a very real thing. It hangs over the St. Lawrence with a sumptuous air of spaciousness. Leaning over the granite balustrade, one can look down on the tiny Wolfe's cove, where three thousand British crept up in the blackness of the night to disconcert the French commander.

It is not a very imposing slope, and a modern army might take it in its stride. Across the formal grass of the park itself the learned trace the lines of England and of France.

At the town end there is a slight hill above a dip. The British were in the dip, France was on the hill. That hill lost the battle. It placed the French between the British and the guns of the Citadel in days when there was neither aerial observation nor indirect fire.

A wind, as on the day of the battle, was blowing while the Prince was on the field. The British fired one volley, and the smoke from their black powder was blown into the faces of the French. Bewildered by the dense cloud, uncertain of what was in the heart of it, the French broke and fled. In twenty minutes Canada was won.

There is a plain monument to mark the exact spot where Wolfe fell; the Prince placed a wreath upon it, as he had placed wreaths on the monuments of Champlain and Montcalm earlier, and as he did later at the monument Aux Braves on the field of Foye, which commemorates the dead of both races who fell in the battle when Murray, a year after Wolfe's victory, endeavoured to loosen the grip the French besiegers were tightening round Quebec, and was defeated, though he held the city.

On the Plains of Abraham—it has no romantic significance, Abraham was merely a farmer who owned the land at the time of the battle—French and English were again gathered in force, but in a different manner.

It was a bright and friendly gathering of Canadians, who no longer permitted a difference of tongue to interfere with their amity. It was also a gathering of men and women and children (Quebec is the province of the quiverful), notably vigorous, well-dressed and prosperous.

The thing to remark here, as well as in all the gatherings of the people of this city, was the absence of dinginess and dowdiness that goes with poverty. In the great mass of stone houses, pretty brick and wood villas, and apartment "houses," the upper flats of which are reached by curving iron Jacob stairways, that make habitable Quebec there are patches of cramped wooden houses, each built under the architectural stimulus of the packing-case, though rococo little porches and scalloped roofs add a wedding-cake charm to the poverty of size and design. But though there are these small but not mean houses, there appear to be no poor people.

All those on the Plains had an independent and self-supporting air (as, indeed, every person has in Canada), and they gave the Prince a reception of a hearty and affable kind, as he declared this fine park the property of the city, and made the citizens free of its historic acreage for all time.

From the Plains His Royal Highness went by car to the huge new railway bridge that spans the St. Lawrence a few miles above the town. It was a long ride through comely lanes, by quiet farmsteads and small habitant villages. At all places where there was a nucleus of human life, men and women, but particularly the children, came out to their fences with flags to shout and wave a greeting.

At the bridge station were two open cars, and on to the raised platform of one of these the Prince mounted, while "movie" men stormed the other car, and a number of ordinary human beings joined them. This special train was then passed slowly under the giant steel girders and over the central span, which is longer than any span the Forth Bridge can boast. As the train travelled forward the Prince showed his eagerness for technical detail, and kept the engineers by his side busy with a stream of questions.

The bridge is not only a superb example of the art of the engineer, perhaps the greatest example the twentieth century can yet show, but it is a monument to the courage and tenacity of man. Twice the great central span was floated up-stream from the building yards, only to collapse and sink into the St. Lawrence at the moment it was being lifted into place. Though these failures caused loss of life, the designers persisted, and the third attempt brought success.

There was, one supposes, a ceremonial idea connected with this function. His Royal Highness certainly unveiled two tablets at either end of the bridge by jerking cords that released the covering Union Jack. But this ritual was second to the ceremonial of the "movies."

The "movies" went over the top in a grand attack. They put down a box barrage close up against the Prince's platform, and at a distance of two feet, not an inflection of his face, nor a movement of his head, escaped the unwinking and merciless eye of the camera.

The "movie" men declare that the Prince is the best "fil-lm" actor living, since he is absolutely unstudied in manner; but it would have taken a Douglas Fairbanks of a super-breed to remain unembarrassed in the face of that cold line of lenses thrust close up to his medal ribbons. And in the film he shows his feelings in characteristic movements of lips and hands.

The men who did not take movies, the men with plain cameras, the "still" men, were also active. Not to be outdone by their comrades with the machine-gun action, they sprang from the car at intervals, ran along the footway, and snapped the party as the train drew level with them.

It was a field day for cameras, but enthusiastic people also counted. Men and women had clambered up the hard, stratified rock of the cuttings that carry the line to the bridge, and they were also standing under the bridge on the slopes, and on the flats by the river. They were cheering, and—yes, they were busy with their cameras also—cameras cannot be evaded in Canada, even in the wilds.

One had the impression, from the difficult perches on which people were to be found, that wherever the Prince would go in Canada, to whatever lonely or difficult spot his travels would lead him, he would always find a Canadian man, and possibly a Canadian woman standing waiting or clinging to precarious holds, glad to be there, so long as he (or she) had breath to cheer and a free hand to wave a flag. And this impression was confirmed by the story of the next months.

IV

Saturday, August 23, was supposed to give His Royal Highness the half-day holiday which is the due of any worker. That half day was peculiarly Canadian.

The business of the morning was one of singular charm. The Prince visited the Convent of the Ursulines, to which in the old days wounded Montcalm was taken, and in whose quiet chapel his body lies.

The nuns are cloistered and do not open their doors to visitors, but on this day they welcomed the Prince with an eagerness that was altogether delightful. They showed him through their serene yet bare reception rooms, and with pride placed before him the skull of Montcalm, which they keep in their recreation room, together with a host of historic documents dealing with the struggles of those distant days.

The party was taken through the nuns' chapel, and sent on with smiles to the public chapel to look on Montcalm's tomb, originally a hole in the chapel fabric torn by British shells. The nuns could not go into that chapel. "We are cloistered," they told us.

These child-like nuns, with their serene and smiling faces, were overjoyed to receive His Royal Highness and anxious to convey to him their good will.

"We cannot go to England—we cannot leave our house—but our hearts are always with you, and there are none more loyal than us, and none more earnest in teaching loyalty to all the girls who come to us to study. Yes, we teach it in French, but what does that matter? We can express the Canadian spirit just as well in that language." So said a very vivid and practical little nun to me, and she was anxious that England should realize how dear they felt the bond.

The Prince's afternoon "off" was spent out of Quebec at the beautiful village of St. Anne's Beaupré, where, set in lovely surroundings, there is a miraculous shrine to St. Anne. The Prince visited the beautiful basilica, and saw the forest of sticks and crutches left behind as tokens of their cure by generations of sufferers.

News of his visit had got abroad, and when he left the shrine in company of the clergy, he was surrounded by a big crowd who restricted all movement by their cheerful importunity. A local photographer, rising to the occasion, refused to let His Royal Highness escape until he had taken an historic snap. Not merely a snap of the Prince and the priests with him, but of as many of the citizens of Beaupré as he could get into a wide angle lense. This was a tremendous occasion, and he yelled at the top of his voice to the people to:

"Come and be photographed with the Prince. Come and be taken with your future King."

Taken with their future King, the people of Beaupré were entirely disinclined to let him go. They crowded round him so that it was only force that enabled his entourage to clear a tactful way to his car. Even in the car the driver found himself faced with all the opportunities of the chauffeur of the Juggernaut with none of his convictions. The car was hemmed in by the crowd, and the crowd would not give way.

It is possible that at this jolly crisis somebody mentioned the Prince's need for tea, and at the mention of this solemn and inexplicable British rite the crowd gave way, and the car got free.