III
After reviewing the Great War Veterans on the quay-side, the Prince left Vancouver just before lunch time on Tuesday, September 23rd, for Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, which lies across the water on Vancouver Island.
It was a short run of five hours in one of the most comfortable boats I have ever been in—the Princess Alice, which is on the regular C.P.R. service, taking in the fjords and towns of the British Columbian coast.
Leaving Vancouver, where the towering buildings give an authentic air of modern romance to the skyline, a sense of glamour went with us across the sea. The air was still tinged with "smoke" and the fabled blue of the Pacific was not apparent, but we could see curiously close at hand the white cowl of Mount Baker, which is America, and we passed on a zig-zag course through the scattered St. Juan Islands, each of which seemed to be charming and lonely enough to stage a Jack London story.
On the headlands or beaches of these islands there were always men and women and children to wave flags and handkerchiefs, and to send a cheer across the water to the Prince. One is surprised, so much is the romantic spell upon one, that the people on these islets of loneliness should know that the Prince was coming, that is, one is surprised until one realizes that this is Canada, and that telegraphs and telephones and up-to-date means of communication are commonplaces here as everywhere.
Romance certainly invades one on entering Victoria. It seems a city out of a kingdom of Anthony Hope's, taken in hand by a modern Canadian administration. Steaming up James Bay to the harbour landing one feels that it is a sparkling city where the brightest things in thrilling fiction might easily happen.
The bay goes squarely up to a promenade. Behind the stone balustrade is a great lawn, and beyond that, amid trees, is a finely decorative building, a fitted back-ground to any romance, though it is actually an hôtel de luxe. To the left of the square head of the water is a distinguished pile; it is the Customs House, but it might be a temple of dark machinations. To the right is a rambling building, ornate and attractive, with low, decorated domes and outflung and rococo wings. That could easily be the palace of at least a sub-rosa royalty, though it is the House of Parliament. The whole of this square grouping of green grass and white buildings, in the particularly gracious air of Victoria gives a glamorous quality to the scene.
Victoria's welcome to the Prince was modern enough. Boat sirens and factory hooters loosed a loud welcome as the steamer came in. A huge derrick arm that stretched a giant legend of Welcome out into the harbour, swung that sign to face the Princess Alice all the time she was passing, and then kept pace on its rail track so that Welcome should always be abreast of the Prince.
The welcome, too, of the crowds on that day when he landed, and on the next when he attended functions at the Parliament buildings, was as Canadian and up-to-date as anywhere else in the Dominion. The crowds were immense, and, at one time, when little girls stood on the edge of a path to strew roses in front of him as he walked, there was some danger of the eager throngs submerging both the little girls and the charming ceremony in anxiety to get close to him.
The crowd in Parliament Square during the ceremonies of Wednesday, September 24th, was prodigious. From the hotel windows the whole of the great green space before the Parliament buildings was seen black with people who stayed for hours in the hope of catching sight of the Prince as he went from one ceremony to another.