The New England country, which she saw on a motor-trip to Concord and Lexington, and again on a visit which she paid to Mr. and Mrs. Henry Holt at their beautiful house overlooking Lake Champlain, fascinated her, “with its miles and miles of young woods sprung up on the soil of the slain forests of the past—its pools and lakes, its hills and dales, its glorious Connecticut river, and its myriads of white, small wooden houses, all on a nice Georgian pattern, with shady verandahs, scattered fenceless over the open fields. There were no flowers to be seen—only the scarlet blossom of the maples in the woods.”
Nor could she get away, in such an atmosphere, from the old, old problem of the separation.
“I have been reading Bancroft this morning, and shall read G. O. T. to-night. We were fools!—but really, I rather agree with H. G. Wells that they make too much fuss about it! and with Mr. Bryce that it was a great pity, for them and us, that the link was broken. So they needn’t be so tremendously dithyrambic!”
It was, however, with a heart full of gratitude for the unnumbered kindnesses of her hosts that Mrs. Ward quitted American soil at the end of April and crossed over into Canada. Here her peregrinations were to be mainly under the auspices of Lord Grey, then Governor-General, and of Sir William van Horne, lord of the Canadian Pacific Railway, at whose house in Montreal she planned the details of her great journey to the West. These two revealed themselves to Mrs. Ward in characteristic fashion while she was still the guest of Sir William, at Montreal, for the Governor-General, coming over from Ottawa for the great Horse Show, stopped during his progress round the arena at the Van Horne’s box, spoke to Mrs. Ward with the greatest cordiality, and there and then insisted that she must go to see the great new Agricultural College at St. Anne’s, near Montreal, on their way to Ottawa the next day.
“He declared that M. could not possibly leave Canada without having seen it,” wrote D. M. W., “and then said, with a laugh and a wave of his hand to Sir William, ‘Ask him—he’ll arrange it all for you!’—and passed on, leaving M. and me somewhat scared, for we had not wanted to bother Sir William about this journey at any rate! I could see that even he, who is never perturbed, was a little taken aback, but he said, in his quiet way, ‘It can certainly be arranged,’ and it has been!” Then, en revanche, the Governor-General, “being on the loose, so to speak, in Montreal, with only one and the least vigilant of his A.D.C.’s,” came unexpectedly to the big evening party that the Van Hornes were giving that night—“because, as he said, ‘I like Van Horne, and I wanted to see Mrs. Ward!’” But, once back in Ottawa, “his family and all his other A.D.C.’s, are scolding him and wringing their hands, because he never ought to have done it! It creates a precedent and offends 500 people, while it pleases one. Such are the joys of his position.”
When the “command” journey to the Agricultural College had been safely preformed, the students duly presented Mrs. Ward with a bouquet and sang “For she’s a jolly good fellow.” “The G.G. was delighted,” wrote Dorothy, “and led her out to smile her thanks, but there was fortunately no time for her to be called upon for five minutes of uplift, as His Excellency was, the last time he went there! That has now become a household word in Government House.” Mrs. Ward must, I think, almost have been in at the birth of that hard-worked phrase.
Mr. Ward had been obliged to return to England for his work on The Times, so that his wife’s Canadian experiences are recorded in letters to him:
“GOVERNMENT HOUSE, OTTAWA,
“May 14, 1908.
...“Well, we have had a very pleasant time. Lord Grey is never tired of doing kind things, and she also is charming. He has asked everybody to meet us who he thought would be interesting—Government and Opposition—Civil servants, journalists, clergy—but no priests! The fact is that there is a certain amount of anxiety about these plotting Catholics, and always will be. They accept the status quo because they must, and because it would not help them as Catholics to fall into the hands of either the United States or of France. But there is plenty of almost seditious feeling about. And the ingratitude of it! I sat last night at the Lauriers’ between Sir Wilfrid and M. Lemieux, Minister of Labour—both Catholics. Sir Wilfrid said to me, ‘I am a Roman Catholic, but all my life I have fought the priests—le cléricalisme, voilà l’ennemi. Their power in Quebec is unbounded, but Modernism will come some day—with a rush—in a violent reaction.‘ On my left M. Lemieux described his meeting last week in Quebec with fourteen bishops, one of whom said to him—’Le Canada, c’est le Paradis terrestre du Catholicisme!’ But as for the educated Catholics, M. Lemieux went on, ‘We are all Modernists!’ Both of them denounced the Pope and spoke with longing of Leo XIII.”
“TORONTO,
”May 18.