The Fair Dominion: A Record of Canadian Impressions

by R. E. Vernède

'This is only French Canada,' he said, 'wait till you get West.'

Still we all of us had to wait a bit in French Canada anyhow. We did not get through the emigration sheds till 9.30 P.M., and then there was one's baggage to be got through the Customs after. Not that there was much in that, the officials being most amiable. But we none of us much enjoyed the emigrant inspection. It is necessary and desirable no doubt, but we felt that we had been inspected pretty often already on board the boat, and we had been up since daylight, and we were hungry and miserable, and hot in the sheds and cold out of them, and the babies fractious, and everybody shoving and pushing, and we felt like some sheep at sheep-dog trials which have to be driven through pen after pen, and would go so much faster if they only knew how, and the dogs didn't press them. However it was all accomplished at last, and then the emigrants got into the westbound train that was waiting for them. First and second-class passengers had long since vanished in carriages to such abodes of luxury as the Cháteau Frontenac and the rest of the leading hotels. Now there were no carriages left. And we heard that a hundred people at least had been turned away from the Château Frontenac, so full was it; and since in any case we wished to start our Canadian impressions from a humbler standpoint, we set out in the rain for a Quebec inn which some of the Canadians returning in the steerage had told us of. I suppose we had a good deal more than a mile to go through the rain carrying bags, along those awful roads from the docks. I know something about those roads, because I not only walked along them that night, but next morning I drove a dray along them. I had gone back to the docks to get my trunk which I had had to leave there, and the dray was the only thing I could get to drive up in. Soon after we had started I said to the driver—a merry-faced French Canadian—'Il trotte bien,' referring to the horse, and he was so pleased with the compliment, or the French perhaps, that he handed me the reins and let me drive the rest of the way through the stone piles and mud that appeared to form the roads in lower Quebec. In return for the reins I had lent him my tobacco pouch; and when the horse leapt an extra deep hole, he would stop filling his pipe and hold me in round the waist.

To go back to the inn—I suppose it was ten o'clock before we got there. A few men sat smoking, with their feet against the wall in the entrance room where the office was; and after we had waited about for ten minutes or so, one of them told us if we wanted to see the clerk we'd better ring a bell. We did so, and presently a youth turned up and patronisingly accorded us rooms for the night.

'Is there any chance of getting a meal to-night?' we inquired, somewhat damped by his unenthusiastic reception. (I may say that I never met an office clerk in a Canadian hotel who did seem keen on welcoming guests. That is one of the differences between the old world and the new.)

'Yup, there's a café downstairs,' said the youth, as he lit a cigar and sat down to read a newspaper.

We went downstairs, and there in a narrow little room behind a long counter which had plates of sausage rolls, under meat covers to keep them from the flies, upon it, and little high stools upon which you sit in discomfort to eat the sausage rolls quickly in front of it, we found a small pale-faced boy who said 'Sure!' in the cheeriest way when we repeated our question about food. Five minutes later he had produced from a stove which he was almost too small to reach fried bacon and eggs and coffee, and while we sat and ate these good things, he gave us advice about the future. He evidently knew without asking that we were emigrants from the old country, and he supposed we wanted jobs. He recommended waiting as a start—waiting in a hotel. Waiting was not, he said, much of a thing to stick at; but there was pretty good money to be made at it in the season. Lots of tourists gave good tips—especially in Quebec—and you could save money as a waiter if you tried. He himself was from the States, but he liked Quebec well enough. Of course it was not as hustling as further west, and not to be compared to the States. If a man had ideas, the States was the place for him. There were more opportunities for a man with ideas in the States than there were in Canada. We asked him how much a man with ideas could reckon upon making in the States, and he said such a man could reckon upon making as much as five dollars a day. It did not seem an overwhelming amount to my aspiring mind—not for a man with ideas. Perhaps that is because one has heard of so many millionaires down in the States, beginning with Mr. Rockefeller. But then again, perhaps millionaires are not men with ideas themselves so much as men who know how to use the ideas of others.

Having started on money, the boy gave us a lecture on the Canadian coinage, the advantages of the decimal system, where copper money held good and why—all in a way that would have done credit to a financial expert. We thought him an amazing boy to be frying eggs and bacon behind a counter in a small café: only you don't just stick to one groove in Canada. At least you ought not to, as the boy himself told us. Englishmen were like that, but it didn't do in the States or Canada. A man should have several strings to his bow, and be ready to turn his hand to anything.

Refreshed by our supper and his advice, we adjourned to the bar which was handy, and got further enlightenment from the barman there. He was a French Canadian, very dapper in a stiff white shirt and patent leather boots. Money was also his theme. He told us he made forty cents an hour, and meant to get up to seventy-five cents pretty soon. That was good money to get, but he was worth it, and if the boss didn't think so he would try some other boss who did. It was no good a man's sitting down and taking less money than he was worth. A man would not get anywhere if he did that sort of thing. He certainly mixed cocktails at a lightning pace, and all the time he chatted he strode up and down behind the bar like a caged jackal. He gave me my first idea of that un-English restlessness—American, I suppose, in its origin—which is beginning to spread so rapidly through Canada. In America I fancy they are beginning to distrust it a little. Too much enterprise may lead to an unsettled condition that is not much better than stagnation. Farm hands tend to leave their employers at critical moments, just for the sake of novelty. Farmers themselves are so anxious to get on that they take what they can out of the land, and move to new farms, leaving the old ruined. It may be that in a newer country like Canada enterprise is less perilous. That remains to be seen. We retired to bed at midnight, sleepier even than men from the old country are reputed to be.