CHAPTER V
THE ATTRACTION OF THE SAGUENAY
Almost directly one lands in Canada, one feels the desire to move west. It is not that the east fails to attract and interest, or that a man might not spend many years in Quebec province alone, and still have seen little of its vast, wild, northern parts. Again there is the Evangeline country, little known for all that it is 'storied.' But the tide is west just at present. Everybody asks everybody else—Have you been West, or Are you going West? And every one who has been West or is going feels himself to be in the movement. Some day no doubt the tide will set back again, or flow both ways equally. To-day it flows westward.
I should have been sorry, however, if I had not gone eastward at least as far as the Saguenay, and I am duly grateful to the American who, so to speak, irritated me into going there. He was a thin, pale youth, somewhat bald from clutching at his hair, who sat next to me at dinner my third day at Quebec. He announced to the table at large that he was travelling for his pleasure, but to judge from his strained face, travelling for his pleasure was one of the hardest jobs he had tried. He had been doing Quebec, and he gave all Canadians present to understand that Quebec had made him very very tired. Look at the trips around too. Look at the Montmorency Falls. Had anybody present seen Niagara? Well, if anybody had seen Niagara, the Montmorency Falls could only make him tired. One or two Canadians present bent lower to their food. But on the whole Canadians do not readily enter into argument, and half Niagara Falls is Canadian too, so that finding no opponents the youth proceeded triumphantly to give the relative proportions in figures of the two falls. As he directed them chiefly at me, I felt bound to say that I had seen falls about a tenth the size of either which had struck me as worth going to see. He then said that he guessed I was from England. I said this was so. Thereupon he told me that everybody in England was asleep. I suggested that sleep was better than insomnia, and shocked by my soporific levity, he advised me to go and have a look at New York if I wanted to know how things could hum. I said I supposed that New York was a fairly busy place. A silly remark—only he happened to be a New Yorker, and all that tiredness left him. I learnt so much about the busyness of New York that I have hardly forgotten it all yet.
Afterwards, but some time afterwards, when the American had left the table, a Scottish Canadian asked me if I had done the Saguenay trip, and when I said that I had not done it, he strongly advised me not to miss it.
'It's the finest trip in Canada. Yes, sir.'
I decided to go. It takes just two days from the start at Quebec to Chicoutimi and back, and you go in a spacious sort of houseboat which paddles along at just the right pace, first on one side of the river then on the other, stopping to load and unload at the little villages along the St. Lawrence. There to the left—a great sheet of silver hung from the cliff—were the Montmorency Falls, which had made that young American tired. A hundred and twenty years ago Queen Victoria's father occupied the Kent house, hard by the Falls, now a hotel. Wolfe lay ill for two weeks in a farm close by; probably on no other sick-bed in the world were plans so big with fate conceived. Then the Ile d'Orléans floats by—that fertile island which Cartier named after the Grape God four hundred years ago, because of the vines that grew there. All this waterway is history, French-Canadian history mostly. With a fine mist hung over the river, concealing the few modern spires and roofs, you can see the country to-day just as Cartier saw it when he came sailing up. Neither four hundred nor four thousand years will serve to modernise the banks of the St. Lawrence. Take that thirty-mile stretch where the Laurentides climb sheer from the water. That is what Cartier saw—nothing different. No houses, no people; only the grey rock growing out of the green trees, and the grey sky overhead. Lower down, with the sun shining as it did for us, Cartier would see, if he came sailing up to-day, all those picturesque French-Canadian villages which have sprung up along the shore—Baie St. Paul, St. Irénée, Murray Bay, Tadousac, with the white farms of the Habitants, and the summer homes of the Quebeckers and Montrealers, and the shining spires of the churches, and the wooden piers jutting far out into the river. Those piers are particularly cheerful places. There are always gangs of porters waiting to run out freight from the hold, and a gathering of ladies in gay frocks who want to greet friends on board, and heaps of little habitants playing about or smoking their pipes. The habitant appears to start his pipe at the age of eight or nine years, judging from those who frequent the piers.
I think I was the only Englishman on board that boat. Most of the passengers were Americans, but cheerful ones—not like that young man at the hotel—and we were all very keen on seeing everything, so that it became dusk much too soon for most of us. We got to Tadousac just about dusk, which I was particularly sorry for, since of all the places we passed, it held the most memories. In 1600 the whole fur trade of Canada centred round this benighted little spot, and the men of St. Malo were the rivals of the Basques for the black foxes trapped by the Indians of that date. I should like to have seen this queer little port by daylight, but I suppose for most purposes Parkman's description holds good, and cannot easily be beaten:—
'A desolation of barren mountain closes round it, betwixt whose ribs of rugged granite, bristling with savins, birches, and firs, the Saguenay rolls its gloomy waters from the northern wilderness. Centuries of civilisation have not tamed the wildness of the place; and still, in grim repose, the mountains hold their guard around the waveless lake that glistens in their shadow, and doubles, in its sullen mirror, crag, precipice and forest.'
I know that Parkman goes on to say that when Champlain landed here in April 1608 he found the lodges of an Indian camp, which he marked in his plan of Tadousac. When we landed, there were also a few shacks in much the same spot, and in one of the best lighted of them hung a placard to this effect:—
THE ONLY REAL INDIAN
BUY WORK FROM HIM.