21
WHERE FRENCH AND ENGLISH MEET
Our hotel faces a little open square and in the springtime of the year, when the trees are barely budding, we can still see the sober gray-stone houses on the far side of the square, each with its brightly colored green blinds. At one is the "Dentiste," at another the "Avocat," a third has descended to a pension with its "Chamber d'Louer." There are shiny brass signs on the front of each of these three old houses, and every morning at seven-thirty o'clock three trim little French Canadian maids attack the signs vigorously with their wiping cloths. Then we know that it is time to get up. By the same fashion we should be shaved and ready for our marmalade and bacon and eggs as the regal carrier of the King's mail trots down the steps of the French consulate and rings at the area door of the neighboring "Conservatoire Musicale." In a very little time that row of houses across the Place Viger Gardens has become a factor in our very lives. It is the starting-point of our days.
In the morning, when the marmalade and the bacon and eggs are finished, we step out into the Gardens for the first breath of crisp fresh air of the north. There is a line of wonderful cabs waiting at its edge, and a prompt driver steps forward from each to solicit our patronage. The cab system of Montreal is indeed wonderful—it first shows to the stranger within that city's gates its remarkable continental character. For you seemingly can ride and ride and ride—and then some more—and the cabby tips his hat at a quarter or a half a dollar. He has an engaging way of smiling at you at the end of the trip, and leaving it to you as to what he gets. You can trust to the Montreal cabby's sense of fairness and he seems to feel that he can trust to yours. But that is not all quite as altruistic as it may seem at first glance. Back of the cabby's smile is the unsmiling, sober sense of justice always existent in a British city, and it is that which really keeps the Montreal cab service as efficient as it really is, as cheap and as accessible. For at every one of the almost innumerable open squares of the city, are the cab-stands, the long line of patiently waiting carriages, and the little kiosk from which they can be summoned. It is all quite simple and complete and an ideal toward which metropolitan New York may be aspiring but has never reached.
*****
On sunny mornings we scorn the cabs and stroll across the Gardens. Sometimes we drop for a moment on one of the clumsily comfortable benches under the shade of the Canadian maples, and glance at the morning paper—a ponderous sheet much given to the news of Ottawa and London, discoursing upon the work of two Parliaments, but only granting grudging paragraphs to the news of a home-land, scarce sixty miles distant. That is British policy, the straining policy of trying to make a unified nation of lands separated from one another by broad seas. That England has done it so well is the marvel of strangers who enter her dominions. Montreal is loyal to her mother land, despite some local influences which we shall see in a moment. A surprising number of her citizens go back and forth to the little island that governs her, once or twice or three times a year. There are thousands of business men in the metropolis of Canada who know Pall Mall or Piccadilly far more intimately than either Wall street or Times square—and New York is but a night's ride from Montreal. So much can carefully directed sentiment accomplish.
The paths that lead from the Gardens are varied and fascinating. One stretches up a broad and sober street to Ste. Catherine's, the great shopping promenade of the town, where the girls are all bound west toward the big shops that stretch from Phillips to Dominion squares—another at the opposite direction three blocks to the south and the harbor-front, a wonderful place now in a chaos of transformation that is going to make Montreal the most efficient port in the world. We can remember the water-front of the old town as it first confronted us a quarter of a century ago, after a long all-day trip down the rapids of the upper St. Lawrence—back of the gay shipping a long stretch of sober gray limestone buildings, accented by numerous domes, the joy of every British architect, the long straight front of Bonsecours market, the little spire of Bonsecours church, and the two great towers of Notre Dame rising above it all. There was a curving wall of stone along the quay street and it all seemed quite like the geography pictures of Liverpool, or was it Marseilles?
A church parade in the streets of Montreal
Nowadays that quiet prospect is gone. A great waterside elevator of concrete rises almost two hundred and fifty feet into the air from the quay street; there are other elevators nearly as large and nearly as sky-scraping, a variety of grim and covered piers and the man from a boat amidstream hardly catches even a glimpse of Notre Dame or Bonsecours. And Montreal gave up her glimpses of the river that she loves so passionately, not without a note of regret; the market-men gently protested that they could no longer sit on the portico of the Bonsecours and see the brisk activity of the harbor. But Montreal realizes the importance of her harbor to her. She is a thousand miles inland from "blue water" and for five months of the year her great strength giving river is tightly frozen; despite these obstacles she has come within the past year to be the most efficient port in the world, and among twelve or fourteen of the greatest. And commercial power is a laurel branch to any British city.