CHAPTER III
LANDING IN CANADA
It was while we were still out to sea that I first realised what Canada might be like, and how different from England. We had been steaming for five days, and hitherto the Atlantic had seemed a familiar and still English sea. The sky above, the air around, even the vast slowly heaving waters and the set of the sun one might see from an English cliff. But on this last day but one, which was a day of hot sun, the sky seemed to have risen immeasurably higher than in England and to have become incredibly clearer, except where little white rugged clouds were set. Snow clouds in a perfect winter's sky, I should have said, if I had known myself to be at home; yet the air round the ship was of the very balmiest summer. We should never get such a sky and such an air together in England, and we were all stimulated by it and began to forget England and think more of Canada. We wondered when we were going to see the lights of Belle Isle, and somebody said we should pass an island called Anticosti, and we began to look out for Anticosti, and anybody who knew anything about Anticosti was listened to like an oracle. Not that anybody did know much—even those who had crossed to and fro several times. After all there was no reason why they should, for Atlantic liners do not stop there, and there is not much to be seen in passing. Still we weighed the words of those who had passed it carefully, and decided to see what we could of it so that we might also be regarded as oracles next time we came that way.
Though we had not seen Canada, yet we had received a favourable impression of it, which was lucky, because the next day, when we had got into the St. Lawrence, it came on to sleet and vapour. We of the steerage, who had brought up our boxes and babies almost before breakfast, so as to be ready to land at the earliest moment, had to content ourselves with sitting on them between decks (on the boxes, for choice, but the babies would get in the way too), and watch the little white villages and tinned church spires and dark woods of French Canada drive past the portholes in the mist. We should like to have been on deck seeing more of our new home, breathing some of its bracing air; but the rain was incessant. Heavens, but it got stuffy too on that lower deck. Nine hundred of us in our best clothes and our overcoats—holding on to bundles and kids, and sweating. It got so stuffy, that I took the opportunity of crossing in the rain to the first-class, and hunting out two people to whom I had introductions. One was the Canadian Minister for Emigration, who had already been over to inspect us in a paternal sort of way and declared that we were 'a particularly good lot'—very different, he hinted, from the sort of English emigrants who used to be shipped over, and got Englishmen a bad name in the new country for years. His gratification at our general excellence was so natural that I did not broach the question of whether Canada's gain was England's loss. I hope it was not. I suppose we can afford to lose even good men, provided we are not going to lose them really, but only station them at a different spot along the great road of the Empire.
The other person I was anxious to see was Archbishop Bourne, who was going out to the Eucharistic Congress at Montreal. We discussed that extraordinarily lucid book of Monsieur André Siegfried, which deals with the race question in Canada. The archbishop admitted its value, though he thought it unfair in parts. He was assured, for example, that the unsocial attitude of the Irish and French Canadian Catholics towards one another as well as towards those of another religion was fast disappearing, nor did he seem to think that the Church any longer tended to frustrate enterprise by keeping its members under its wing in the East. Many Catholics were going West nowadays, and after the Congress he himself was going West in the spirit of the times. Perhaps he was right about the rapprochement of the Irish and French Catholics, though men on the spot maintain that their unsociability is largely due to the fact that both have a singular yearning for State employment and the employment will not always go round.
It was still raining when I recrossed to the steerage, and it was still raining when we got into the Canadian Pacific Railway dock at about 5 P.M. I was standing beside the horse-breaker at the time, and the first thing that caught his eye in Quebec was the shape of the telegraph poles.
'Why, look at them,' he said, 'they're all crooked!'
A little later, he commented on the slowness with which the French-Canadian porters were getting the baggage off the boat. 'They may have this here hustle on them that they talk of,' he said, 'but I've seen that done a lot quicker in London.'
It was more loyalty to the old country than disloyalty to the new that prompted the remark, in which there was perhaps some justification. A Canadian who was standing by seemed to think so at any rate.