CHAPTER IV
A FAIRLY LONG DAY IN QUEBEC
Quebec city is full of charms and memories. I am no lover of cities when they have grown so great that no one knows any longer what site they were built on, or what sort of a country is buried beneath them. Their streets may teem with people and their buildings be very splendid, but if they have shut off the landscape altogether I cannot admire them. Quebec will never be one of those cities, however great she may grow. Quebec stands on a hill, and just as a city on a hill cannot be hid, so too it cannot hide from those who live in it the country round, nor even the country it stands on. Always there will be in Quebec a sense of steepness. The cliffs still climb even where they are crowded with houses. And the air that reaches Quebec is the air of the hills. Always too—from Dufferin Terrace at least—there will be visible the sweep of the St. Lawrence, the dark crawl to the north-east of the Laurentian Mountains, and the clear and immensely lofty Canadian skies.
I spent the whole of my first day in Quebec on Dufferin Terrace, except for that journey down to the docks. Once I was on the terrace, I forgot how bad the roads had been. You might drive a thousand miles through stones and mud, and forget them all the moment you set foot on Dufferin Terrace. Everything you see from it is beautiful, from the Château Frontenac behind—surely the most picturesque and most picturesquely situated hotel in the world—to the wind on the river below. Most beautiful of all the things I saw was the moon starting to rise behind Port Levis. It started in the trees, and at first I thought it was a forest fire. There was nothing but red flame that spread and spread among the trees at first. Suddenly it shot up into a round ball of glowing orange, so that I knew it was the moon long before it turned silver, high up, and made a glimmering pathway across the river.
During this moonrise the band was playing on the terrace, and all Quebec was strolling up and down or standing listening to the music, as is its custom on summer evenings. The scene on the terrace has often enough been described—with its mingling of many types, American tourists and Dominican friars, habitants from far villages, and business men from the centre of things, archbishops and Members of Parliament, and ships' stewards and commercial travellers, and freshly arrived immigrants and old market women. The fair Quebeckers love the terrace as much as their men folk, and I saw several pretty faces among them and many pretty figures. They know how to walk, these French Canadian ladies, and also how to dress—the latter an art which has still to be achieved by the women of the West.
CHÂTEAU FRONTENAC, QUEBEC, FROM THE OLD RAMPARTS.
The terrace besides being gay is very friendly too. My two companions of the voyage had gone on that morning, being in a hurry to reach the prairie; but I found several new friends on the terrace in the course of the day. One was a young working man from England, who had brought his child on to the terrace to play when I first met him. He was so well-dressed and prosperous looking that I should never have guessed he was only a shoe-leather cutter, as he told me he was. But then he had been out in Quebec for five years, and he was making twenty-five dollars a week instead of the thirty-two shillings a week he used to make in Nottingham at the same trade. He said he had been sorry to leave England, but you were more of a man in Canada. There were not twenty men after one job—that was the difference. Consequently, if your boss offered to give you any dirt, you could tell him to go to Hell. I suppose we should have counted him a wicked and dangerous Socialist in England, but there is no doubt that he is a typical Canadian citizen, and the kind of man they want there. Another acquaintance I picked up was a commercial traveller from Toronto—a stout tubby energetic man, who asked me, almost with tears in his eyes, why England would not give up Free Trade and study Canadian needs? He was particularly keen on English manufacturers studying Canadian needs, and he put the matter in quite a novel light as far as I was concerned. His argument was that we made things in England too well. What was the use, he demanded, of making good durable things when Canadians did not want them? It only meant that the States jumped in with inferior goods more suited to the moment. He assured me that Canada was a new country, and Canadians did not want to buy things that would last hundreds of years. Take furniture, machinery, anything—Canadians only wanted stuff that would last them a year or two, after which they could scrap it and get something new. That kept the money in circulation. Anyway, he insisted, a thing was no good if it was better than what a customer required. I had not thought of things in that way before, and it was interesting to hear him.
My third acquaintance was a member of the Quebec Parliament, who started to chat quite informally, and having ascertained that I was fresh from the old country took me to his house, that I might drink Scotch whisky, and be informed that French Canadians loved the King and hated the Boer War. I think when a French Canadian does not know you well, he will always make these two admissions—but not any more—lest you should be unsympathetic or he should give himself away.