By the Good Sainte Anne: A Story of Modern Quebec

by Anna Chapin Ray

Mr. Cecil Barth was unfeignedly low in his mind, that morning. The causes were various and sundry.

First of all, Quebec was a bore. In the second place, the only people to whom he had brought letters of introduction had most inconsiderately migrated to Vancouver, and, fresh from his English university, he was facing the prospect of a solitary winter before he could go out into ranch life in the spring. A Britisher of sorts, it had not appeared to him to be necessary to inform himself in advance regarding the conditions, climatic and social, of the new country to which he was going. Now, too late, he recognized his mistake. A third grievance lay in the non-arrival of the English mail, that morning; and the fourth and most fatal of all lurked in the kindly efforts of his table companion to draw him into the conversation. To his mind, there was no reason that the swarthy, black-browed little Frenchman at his elbow should offer him any comments upon the state of the weather. The Frenchman had promptly retired from the talk; but his dark eyes had lighted mirthfully, as they had met the asphalt-like stare of his neighbor’s eyeglasses. Adolphe St. Jacques possessed his own fair share of a sense of humor; and Cecil Barth was a new element in his experience.

“Monsieur has swallowed something stiff that does not agree with him,” he observed blandly to his fellow student across the table; and Barth, whose French was of Paris, not of Canada, was totally at a loss to account for their merriment.

For the past week, the group of students and the chatter of their Canadian patois had been anathema to him. He understood not a word of their talk, and consequently, with the extreme sensitiveness which too often accompanies extreme egotism, he imagined that it related solely to himself. In vain he tried to avoid their hours for meals. Rising betimes, he met them at the hurried early breakfast which betokened an eight o’clock lecture. The next morning, dreary loitering in his room only brought him into the midst of the deliberate meal which was the joyous prerogative of their more leisurely days. Barth liked The Maple Leaf absolutely; but he hated the students of his own table with a cordial and perfect hatred.

Dropped from the Allan Line steamer, one bright September morning, as a matter of course he had been driven up through the gray old town to the Chateau Frontenac. A week at the Chateau had been quite enough for him. To his mind, its luxurious rooms had been altogether too American. Too American, also, were its inhabitants. He shrank from the obvious brides in their new tailor gowns and their evident absorption in their companions. He resented those others who, more elderly or more detached, roused themselves from their absorption to bestow a friendly word on the solitary young Englishman. Their clothes, their accent, and, worst of all, their manners betrayed their alien birth. No self-respecting woman, bride or no bride, ever wore such dainty shoes. No man of education ever stigmatized an innocent babe as cunning. And there was no, absolutely no, excuse for the familiar greetings bestowed upon himself by complete strangers.

“Americans!” quoth Mr. Cecil Barth. “Oh, rather!”

And, next morning, he went in search of another hostelry.

He found it at The Maple Leaf, just across the Place d’Armes. Fate denied to him the privilege of sleeping in the quaint little pension whose roof was sanctified by having once sheltered his compatriot, Dickens; he could only take his meals there, and hunt for a room outside. At noon, he came to dinner, too exhausted by his fruitless search to care whether or not the students were at the table, or on it, or even under it. Go back to the Chateau he would not; but he began to fear lest the only alternative lay in a tent pitched on the terrace in the lee of the Citadel and, in that wilderness, he questioned whether anything so modern as a tent could be bought.

After dinner, the Lady of The Maple Leaf took his affairs in hand. She possessed the two essentials, a kindly heart and a sense of humor. She had seen stray Britishers before; she had a keen perception of the artistic fitness of things and, by twilight, Mr. Cecil Barth was sitting impotently upon his boxes in the third-floor front room of the town house of the Duke of Kent. He had very little notion of the way to proceed about unpacking himself. Nevertheless, as he put on his glasses and stared at the panelled shutters of his ducal casement, he felt more at peace with the world than he had done for two long weeks.

In after years, he never saw fit to divulge the details of his unpacking. It accomplished itself chiefly by the simple method of his tossing out on the floor whatever things lay above any desired object, of leaving those things on the floor until he became weary of tangling his feet in them, then of stowing them away in any convenient corner that offered itself. By this simple method, however, he had contrived to gain space enough to permit of his tramping up and down the floor, and it was there that he had been taking petulant exercise, that bright October morning.